Democracy, Dialogue, Memory: Expression and Affect Beyond Consensus 9781138564251, 9781315122311

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations and tables
List of contributors
Introduction: Revising the political value of culturally versatile
everyday expressions of democracy, dialogue, memory
Context
Chapters
Notes
References
PART I: Democracy and memory at the crossroads of dialogue and tolerance in everyday life
1. Everyday dialogue, memory, and democracy
Everyday life, dialogue, and two kinds of critique
Politics, the political, and emancipation in everyday life
Poland from totalitarianism to non-liberal democracy
Coda: toward non-party non-consensual democracy?
References
2. The idea of tolerance and social dialogue in the democratic state: Remarks on Jacques Derrida’s and Jürgen Habermas’s views on the idea of tolerance in the modern liberal-democratic state
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
References
3. Exception, metaphor, and political action: Arendt contra Schmitt
Notes
References
4. Radical politics: “We the People” or “we mortals”
Notes
References
5. Dialogue as a tool enhancing the effectiveness of the activities of NGOs in modern societies
Foot-in-the-mouth, or asking about people’s well-being
Dialogue involvement
Conclusion
Note
References
PART II: Art and literature as custodians of traumatic memory, resistance and forgiveness in democracy
6. Community at the table
Dialogues around the table
Exclusion and identity
Community in the making
Impossible community
Filling in the gaps
Notes
References
7. The thought from outside: Memory, truth and the repetition of faith
References
8. You have to write your own life: Storytelling as the modern piece of resistance
The liminoid subject
Before the law
The Sheherazade strategy
Notes
References
9. Duras vs. Duras: Traumatic memory and the question of deferred retroaction
Freud’s mechanism of deferred retroaction
Duras (1): Hiroshima mon amour
Duras (2): The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein
Notes
References
10. The shifting landscape of Jewishness in contemporary Kafka criticism
Introduction
Between national particularism and abstract universalism
A post-ethnic Kafka
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
11. Forgiveness and resentment are heterogeneous to politics: W.G. Sebald’s “Max Ferber”
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Democracy, Dialogue, Memory

Arguing that the politics of democracy is inseparable from a notion of dialogue that emerges from conflicting and often traumatic memories, Democracy, Dialogue, Memory examines the importance of dialogue for the achievement of understanding in civil society rather than consensus, so that democratic participation and inclusion can be strengthened. With attention to the importance for marginalized communities of the ability to disclose fundamental ethnic, religious, gendered, racial, or personal and affective characteristics born of trauma, and so cease to represent “otherness,” this book brings together studies from Europe, Israel and the United States of literary and visual attempts to expand dialogue with “the other,” particularly where democracies are prone to vacillating between the desire to endorse otherness, and political dread of the other. A critique of the practices of forced inclusion and forced consensual negotiation, that seeks to advance dialogue as a crucial safeguard against the twin dangers of exclusion and enforced assimilation, Democracy, Dialogue, Memory will appeal to scholars with interests in political theory, political sociology, collective and contested memory and civil society at the same time as allowing scholars from the humanities and the arts to examine seminal chapters that pivot on psychoanalytical approaches to literature, film and philosophy at the borderline of political thinking. Idit Alphandary is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and the Interdisciplinary Program of the Arts at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and the editor of Consciousness Between Crisis and Empowerment: Interdisciplinary Writing on Women and Gender (2017). She is the author of numerous essays and book chapters on literature, film and visual studies seen through psychoanalysis and philosophy at the crossroads of political thought. Leszek Koczanowicz is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at Wroclaw Faculty of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. He is the author and editor of twelve books and numerous articles in Polish and English, including Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland; Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community; Discussing Modernity: A Dialogue with Martin Jay and Beauty, Responsibility, and Power: Ethical and Political Consequences of Pragmatist Aesthetics.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought Critical Theories and the Budapest School Politics, Culture, Modernity Edited by John Rundell and Jonathan Pickle Social and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media Higher Diversities David Toews Towards a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices Between Existential Analytic and Social Theory Dimitri Ginev Experiencing Multiple Realities Alfred Schutz’s Sociology of the Finite Provinces of Meaning Marius I. Bent¸a Human Flourishing, Liberal Theory and the Arts Menachem Mautner Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century The Skeptical Radicalism of Judith Shklar Giunia Gatta Norbert Elias and the Analysis of History and Sport Systematizing Figurational Sociology Joannes Van Gestel Progressive Violence Theorizing the War on Terror Michael Blain and Angeline Kearns-Blain Democracy, Dialogue, Memory Expression and Affect Beyond Consensus Edited by Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz Common Sense as a Paradigm of Thought An Analysis of Social Interaction Tim Delaney For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/ RSSPT

Democracy, Dialogue, Memory Expression and Affect Beyond Consensus

Edited by Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Alphandary, Idit, editor. | Koczanowicz, Leszek, editor. Title: Democracy, dialogue, memory : expression and affect beyond consensus / edited by Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018024461| ISBN 9781138564251 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315122311 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Democracy--Citizen participation. | Dialogue. | Memory. Classification: LCC JC423 .D381245 2019 | DDC 321.8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024461 ISBN: 978-1-138-56425-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-12231-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of illustrations and tables List of contributors Introduction: Revising the political value of culturally versatile everyday expressions of democracy, dialogue, memory

vii viii

1

IDIT ALPHANDARY AND LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ

PART I

Democracy and memory at the crossroads of dialogue and tolerance in everyday life 1 Everyday dialogue, memory, and democracy

23 25

LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ

2 The idea of tolerance and social dialogue in the democratic state: Remarks on Jacques Derrida’s and Jürgen Habermas’s views on the idea of tolerance in the modern liberal-democratic state

40

PAWEŁ DYBEL

3 Exception, metaphor, and political action: Arendt contra Schmitt

53

EWA PŁONOWSKA ZIAREK

4 Radical politics: “We the People” or “we mortals”

70

KRZYSZTOF ZIAREK

5 Dialogue as a tool enhancing the effectiveness of the activities of NGOs in modern societies ´ SKI TOMASZ GRZYB, KATARZYNA BYRKA AND DARIUSZ DOLIN

83

vi

Contents

PART II

Art and literature as custodians of traumatic memory, resistance and forgiveness in democracy 6 Community at the table

95 97

DOROTA KOCZANOWICZ

7 The thought from outside: Memory, truth and the repetition of faith

111

RAMONA FOTIADE

8 You have to write your own life: Storytelling as the modern piece of resistance

125

AGATA BIELIK-ROBSON

9 Duras vs. Duras: Traumatic memory and the question of deferred retroaction

140

ERAN DORFMAN

10 The shifting landscape of Jewishness in contemporary Kafka criticism

153

ABRAHAM RUBIN

11 Forgiveness and resentment are heterogeneous to politics: W.G. Sebald’s “Max Ferber”

168

IDIT ALPHANDARY

Index

184

Illustrations and tables

Figures 5.1 5.2 11.1

Percentage of individuals who agreed to grant the request The number of questions the subjects were willing to answer “[Ferber] passed through a painted tromp-l’oeil door into a gallery …” (Sebald 1996, 176)

91 92 177

Tables 5.1 5.2

Fields of activity of NGOs in Poland in 2015 The percentage of donators and their donation amounts across experimental groups

84 90

Contributors

Idit Alphandary (Ph.D., Yale University, 2001), is a Senior Lecturer of Comparative Literature and the Interdisciplinary Program of the Arts at Tel Aviv University. She is the editor of a book collection of articles titled Consciousness Between Crysis and Empowerment: Interdisciplinary Writing on Women and Gender (Hakibutz Hameuchad Press, 2017). Her articles on the novel, film, aesthetics and psychoanalysis have appeared in leading American, European and Chinese journals, as well as in the edited volume Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image (Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2016) and in the edited volume, Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva (SUNY Press, 2009). She is completing a book manuscript, Love, Forgiveness, and Resentment. Her interdisciplinary research includes the British, French and American novel of the nineteenth century and German contemporary literature, Hollywood film and film theory, psychoanalysis and ethics in poststructuralism. Agata Bielik-Robson is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and a Professor of Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her most recent publications include: Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (Routledge, 2014); “Religion of the Finite Life? Messianicity and the Right to Live in Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminar,” Political Theology, 19/2 (2018); and “Love Strong as Death: Jews against Heidegger (On the Issue of Finitude),” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology, ed. Jayne Svengunson and Mattias Björk (Palgrave, 2017). Katarzyna Byrka is Assistant Professor in the Social Psychology Department at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, in Wroclaw, Poland. Her research primarily focuses on the application of socio-psychological conceptions that foster change in conservation, health and pro-social behaviors. She has co-authored papers in journals such as Personality and Social Psychology Review, Journal of Social Psychology and International Journal of Psychology.

List of contributors

ix

Dariusz Dolin´ski (Ph.D., Warsaw University) is Full Professor at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Wroclaw Faculty, working in the area of social influence. His research program has investigated social influence techniques (e.g., fear-then-relief procedure (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Social Influence); foot-in-the-door phenomenon (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Applied Psychology); dialogue involvement technique (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Journal of Applied Social Psychology); touch and compliance (Journal of Nonverbal Behavior)). Eran Dorfman (Ph.D., University of Paris XII, 2005) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Literature, Tel Aviv University, specializing in Continental philosophy, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He is the author of Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral, Repetition (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014), Learning to See the World Anew: Merleau-Ponty Facing the Lacanian Mirror (Phaenomenologica series, Springer, 2007, in French) and the co-editor of Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms (Leuven University Press, 2010). Paweł Dybel is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN Warsaw. His main areas of interest are modern philosophy (hermeneutics, phenomenology, poststructuralism), psychoanalytic theories, theory of art, history of Polish psychoanalysis. He is the author of books on these topics (among others, The Riddle of “Second Sex” (Kraków 2006), Crumbs of Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Theory between Hermeneutics and Poststructuralism (Kraków 2009), Psychoanalytische Brocken. Philosophische Essays (Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2016)). He has published numerous articles in German and English (including “Modernity versus Postmodernity: Various Aspects of the Problem of Periodization,” in Discussing Modernity: A Dialogue with Martin Jay, ed. L. Koczanowicz and D. Schauffler (Rodopi, 2013), pp. 115–125; “Bemerkungen zu Gadamers Konzept des Kunstwerkes als Spiel,” in Spiel: Facetten seiner Ideengeschichte, ed. M.H. Kowalewicz, G. Scholtz and K. Acham (Mentis Verlag Münster, 2013), pp. 73–89; “Die Psychoanalyse – ein gelobtes Land? Zur Kulturgeschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung in Polen,” in Psyche. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen, März 2014 Stuttgart S. 216–247. He is also a visiting scholar at Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, DAAD, DFG, the British Academy, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. Ramona Fotiade is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, working on existential philosophy and visual arts. She is Principal Investigator of the RSE-funded Existential Philosophy and Literature Research Network (2017–2019), president of the Lev Shestov Studies Society and general editor of the Lev Shestov Journal. She is currently co-ordinating the new critical editions of Lev Shestov’s works in both French and English (with Le Bruit du Temps and Ohio University Press, respectively). Her book

x

List of contributors publications include Pictures of the Mind: Surrealist Photography and Film (Peter Lang, 2018); À Bout de Souffle (Cine-files: the French film guides series) (I.B. Tauris, 2013); Conceptions of the Absurd: From Surrealism to the Existential Thought of Chestov and Fondane (Legenda/EHRC, 2001).

Tomasz Grzyb, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, in Wroclaw, Poland and Visiting Lecturer in NATO School in Germany. His main area of interest is social influence and manipulation techniques. He is also a supporter of courses concerning the basics of social influence studies organized for military officers engaged in PSYOPS. He has published a number of articles about marketing, social psychology, advertising and education. Dorota Koczanowicz is Assistant Professor at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, where she teaches visual arts. She authored Dos´wiadczenie sztuki, . sztuka zycia. Wymiary estetyki pragmatycznej [Experience of Art, Art of Living: Dimensions of Pragmatist Aesthetics] (2008) and co-edited Mie˛ dzy estetyzacja˛ a emancypacja˛. Praktyki artystyczne w przestrzeni publicznej [Between Aestheticization and Emancipation: Art Practices in the Public Space] (2010), Between Literature and Somaesthetics: On Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatism (Rodopi, 2012) and Discussing Modernity: A Dialogue with Martin Jay (Rodopi, 2013). She publishes on aesthetics, arts and culture, but also collaborates with journals and magazines (e.g., Format and Odra), writing exhibition reviews. She did research at John F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin and the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB), Norway. Leszek Koczanowicz is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at Wroclaw Faculty of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. He specializes in political philosophy, social theory, philosophical psychology and cultural aspects of politics. His previous appointments include Wroclaw University, SUNY/Buffalo (1998–1999 and 2000–2001), Columbia University (2004–2005) and SUNY/Geneseo (2013). He is the author and editor of twelve books and numerous articles in Polish and English, including Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (Berghahn Books, 2008), and Le˛ k nowoczesny. Eseje o demokracji i jej adwersarzach [Modern Fear: Essays on Democracy and its Adversaries] (2011). Recently he has published Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Ewa Płonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Buffalo; a Senior Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Continental Philosophy at the College of Fellows at Western Sydney University, Australia; and, since 2007, a Visiting Faculty in the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, University of Maine. She is the author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (Columbia, 2012); An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical

List of contributors

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Democracy (Stanford, 2001); The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995); the co-editor, among others, of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (SUNY, 2005); Time for the Humanities (Fordam, 2008) and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Her co-authored book (with Rosalyn Diprose), Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Towards Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. Abraham Rubin is a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt. Between 2014 and 2016 he was a Jewish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence University. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center. Krzysztof Ziarek is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness (SUNY), The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Northwestern), The Force of Art (Stanford) and Language After Heidegger (Indiana). He co-edited two collection of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Northwestern) and Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford). He also published two books of poetry in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sa˛ d dostateczny.

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Introduction Revising the political value of culturally versatile everyday expressions of democracy, dialogue, memory Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz Context The current volume argues that the politics of democracy is inseparable from a difficult but fundamental theoretical and political notion of dialogue emerging from conflicting and often traumatic memories. Such a dialogue, as the chapters in this book attest, is crucial to safeguarding democracies in Europe, the United States, and Israel from the twin dangers of exclusion or enforced assimilation. The transnational configuration of contributors whose work is included in this volume invites the lesser-heard voices of Eastern Europe and Israel into an important conversation. While in principle, each and every individual may demand the right to participate in democracy, the reality is such that ambivalence, fear, and hostility toward disempowered groups in Europe, America, and Israel render the participation of minority and female voices in democratic life difficult. The recent bloody attacks in France and at the Jewish synagogue in Copenhagen demonstrate that freedom of speech, in Europe, is seen as inextricable from the right to parody the religion of the other (in this case, the Prophet Muhammad) and to limit the other’s right to exercise her own freedom (as in the French law prohibiting Muslim women from wearing the burka in the public sphere). Muslims living in Europe thus feel that they are the targets of anti-Muslim racism. When the French magazine Charlie Hebdo published mocking satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the disempowered Muslim population in France took offense, although the magazine insisted that it was simply exercising freedom of the press. The perceived insult has led some in the Muslim community to resort to antiSemitism, which is on the rise in France as is evident in recent armed attacks against Jewish institutions and individuals, and in the appeal of the French comedian Dieudonné, whose performances are infused with antiSemitic propaganda.1 Conservative political parties across Europe have been winning elections, while marching under the banners of exclusion and intolerance. It seems that the consensus acted on by socialist parties in Europe that became a cornerstone of democracy after World War II has collapsed. The situation is particularly

2

Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz

dire in Poland and other Eastern European countries including Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, for these countries continue to turn a blind eye to the refugee crisis, prioritizing the preservation of their own cultural integrity over saving the lives of the others. Repeatedly, the governing parties of these countries point to the crisis in the West, insisting that they do not want to repeat the mistakes of multiculturalism, which they see as responsible for the current crisis. These countries refuse to cooperate in finding an appropriate solution to the refugee crisis in the name of preserving intact the integrity of their cultures. The common argument that these countries express is that they do not want to repeat Western European mistakes in building the multicultural society. It is important to highlight Brexit in this context where an old, conservative regime imposes fear of the other, on an entire government, and determines the outcome of a referendum based on feelings of animosity toward those refugees whose interests are different from those of the naturalized citizens of the UK. Islamophobia, sometimes oddly combined with antiSemitism, has become the official ideology of the state. Thus, for example, the new nationalistic Polish government formed by the Law and Justice Party has turned down the European Union policy on the question of refugees’ relocation, arguing that this could threaten “state security” and endanger Poland’s cultural integrity. Such cultural integrity is, of course, an illusion promoted by the nationalistic state which tries to monopolize all systems of cultural production and transmission: arts, education, film industry, and the media. In this way, the government seeks to impose traditional national and religious values, especially on the younger generation, which is already the most conservative segment of Polish society. This nationalistic attitude, coupled with an anti-refugee stance, would seem astonishing given the history of Poland and its people. Indeed, Polish literature written after the collapse of the Polish state in 1795 is full of moving descriptions of the fate of refugees pleading for help in a hostile environment. This experience has been repeated again and again after 1939, 1945 and, more recently, in 1981 after Martial Law was put in place. Now, according to some estimates, approximately two million Poles work abroad. But for mysterious reasons the link between collective memory and the attitude to the refugee crisis has been abruptly severed. The rising wave of nationalism that we observe serves to curtail any possibility of dialogue, which itself necessarily presupposes an ability to adopt the perspective of the Other. Of course, the way dialogue is understood in democracies varies significantly, while the notion of dialogue itself highly contested. The chapters collected in this volume highlight not only similarities but also crucial differences in how America, Europe, and Israel relate to and use or prevent/resist such dialogue. One central objective of the volume is to understand how these mechanisms work and to determine how it may be possible to recover the link between collective memory and the present situation of the refugees in Europe. Dialogue is fundamentally connected to storytelling, truth telling, and moral commitment in societies that wrestle with traumatic memories. In America, the police brutality against African-Americans leads to country-wide protests and

Introduction

3

demonstrations against anti-black racism and persistence of white supremacy. In Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resists a genuine two-state solution between Israel and Palestine and his government refuses to admit into the country refugees who escape death in African countries. The recent mortal attacks against Palestinian terrorists in Israel generates anti-Israeli hostility in Europe. Europe seeks to define the difference between legitimate political hostility toward Israel for its refusal to end the occupation and hostility that is thinly disguised anti-Semitism. Despite a proliferation of political theories of democracy, Europe, America, and Israel have yet to find a way to enhance democracy and to cease infringing on the rights of disempowered political groups. The task at hand requires a thorough reconsideration of the basic tenets of democracy, which is too easily defined in terms of procedures and institutions (Schumpeter 1994, 269–283), a “procedural approach,” which, while convenient, is flawed. Indeed, according to Cornelius Castoriadis, as Klooger makes clear, in order for democracy to promote the autonomy of the individual it must be conceptualized not only as a system of institutions but also through the categories of ethical commitment and communal responsibility (Klooger 2009, 11–27). The chapters in this volume thus seek to examine democracy as a “form of life.” To use Wittgenstein’s language: “‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’ – It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life” (Wittgenstein 1999, § 241). If democratic agreement is a form of life then in order to understand it we need to account for factors which allow us to find a common ground with others. The American pragmatists John Dewey and George Herbert Mead convincingly demonstrate that democracy is the most effective political system for developing an undamaged communication within community (Koczanowicz 2015, 32–40). The pair established a link between democracy as a political system and community on the one hand, and the formation of the self, on the other hand. From their point of view democracy is thus a “system of habits” that is formed primarily through communal life.2 Institutions in a democratic state should promote full and equal participation of its citizens. A necessary condition for the full participation the citizens is the state of the law (Rechtsstaat) where all citizens are subordinate to the same legal rules of fairness and justice. This idea, which originated in Great Britain with Locke and in Germany with Immanuel Kant, has various contemporary incarnations (Höffe 2012), which point to its relevance to the democratic state of the twenty-first century. Although the idea of Rechtsstaat has been crucial for the development of the modern democratic state it is now obvious that it needs supplementation that would take into account the real possibility of establishing the state of law and the cultural context of institutions. From this perspective one of the most interesting proposals for how to resolve problems related to the state of law is articulated in Avishai Margalit’s book The Decent Society (Margalit 1996). As Margalit puts it:

4

Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people. I distinguish between a decent society and a civilized one. A civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another, while a decent society is one in which the institutions do not humiliate people. (Margalit 1996, 23)

In his book Margalit demonstrates the complicated relations between the ideal of the decent society and John Rawls’s notion of the just society showing that each situation calls for a different political strategy. As the chapters in this book seek to establish, the concept of decency is crucial for connecting the institutions with the community in a democratic state. Indeed, democratic state institutions are often hostile to a segment of the community, typically the opposition or others viewed as somehow having minority status. Such hostility inevitably leads to alienation and to the disenfranchisement of citizens who cease to identify with the state, thus undermining the democratic nature of the state. Indeed, alienation poses a serious threat to democracy since those who feel alienated are more easily susceptible to the temptation of authoritarianism and even totalitarianism. Claude Lefort shows that such temptation emerges from the very nature of democracy, its uniqueness. Democracy is a unique system because it is organized around an “empty space.” Bernard Flynn defines these relations in Lefort as follows: Within a democracy the source of legitimate power is “the people” but who is to speak in the name of the people? According to Lefort, political life in a modern democracy is a continual debate on just this question. No one claims to be authorized a priori to speak in the people’s name; each person’s claim must be discursively validated and every claim is always subject to challenge. The legitimate spokesperson for the people cannot be established with certainty; it is always “up for grabs” and as such it engenders an anxiety. The political anxiety which is endemic to democracy is experienced most intensely in times of crisis; it has as its “object” the possibility that the symbolically empty space will become really empty, which is to say, no one will be able to establish legitimacy and this would mean that the symbolic place of power would fall into the real. (Flynn 2005, xxv) Thus, democracy is particularly vulnerable to potential disturbances that can undermine or destroy the democratic equilibrium. What we observe now is a situation in which this equilibrium is seriously damaged. In order to analyze the unstable political landscape outlined and offer some possible solutions, the chapters collected in this volume urge for a careful reconsideration of issues of democracy, dialogue, and traumatic memories. Although much has been said on the importance of dialogue for democracy, dialogue itself has hardly been scrutinized. Our purpose is to explain the

Introduction

5

variety of dialogical approaches in the context of the particular traditions that each one of the chapters examines. Different forms of democracy treat, engage, and restrict dialogue in various manners that bear similarity to one another but that are also very different from one another for dialogue is inherently related to traumatic memory and to the attempts to either recognize or repress it. The authors show that dialogue is not a transparent means of communication but is heavily dependent on the strata of memories deposited in a particular society. For this reason, dialogue occurs within the bounds of civil society between engaged agents in the public sphere, not just between elected officials and the public. Dialogues in some sense exist between the artwork and the public as well. Oftentimes such dialogues deterritorialize the very language that underpins the exclusion or appropriation of alterity in a given culture. This form of engagement has been valuable to democratic practices and to the intellectual study of democracy by thinkers as divergent as Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Dialogue within the bounds of a civil society may influence democratic political conduct because it inserts personal emotions and traumatic memories into the public sphere and transforms theses into valuable information that must be taken into account by the democratic state. The practice of dialogue and disclosure of traumatic memories turn the public sphere into a net of interpersonal connections in which decisions are made with a genuine intention to adapt to the needs of diverse peoples. Such a public sphere does not function merely in order to satisfy legal demands and arrive at an a priori, justice-based solution to ethical problems. The statebased solutions and policy-based solutions are insufficient. In a public sphere rife with dialogues in which people share their traumatic memories with others both knowledge about the other person and her/his origins and emotions come to the fore. The ability to tell the story of one’s traditions, origins, and emotional relations to the regime and to one’s neighbor enhances the bond between people. In Carol Gilligan’s (Gilligan 1993) writings about how we may learn to hear women’s voice when we think about ethical conflicts she argues that life is not a-historical but develops along historical practices and narratives. History is the product of how we act and speak about our lives and history thus can and will change if and when women’s voices are integrated in democratic practice and dialogue. According to Gilligan, women favor ethical decisions that enhance intersubjective bonds, bonds which in turn augment responsibility toward disempowered individuals and disadvantaged groups. Strong bonds may also make these disempowered groups feel safer in society for they would be both known and accepted as they are. If dialogue and memory are used properly they become a safeguard against both exclusion and enforced assimilation. More important, when dialogue and the articulation of traumatic memories are practiced in the public sphere, diversity becomes an asset to the democratic society. Diversity enables intersubjective interactions in society and promotes the likelihood that agents will seek to interact with others, include those with whom they may

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have little in common. Such intersubjective and inter-group connections can thus widen the scope of ideas and actions in both the private and the public spheres. While each of the contributors draws on the particular political conflicts of her or his home country, these discussions all employ the interdisciplinary languages of political philosophy, religion, literature, art, and psychology to examine the intersection of the personal and the political. We stress that democracy, dialogue, and traumatic memory have multiple meanings that can be articulated only when the relevance of these terms to each other is fleshed out within the interdisciplinary context that allows these practices to come to the fore. By stressing the mutual relationships between these concepts, the chapters expand the horizons of cultural theory and philosophical understanding of democracy and they extend the reach of dialogue and the discernibility of traumatic memories. The main question that arises is: what kinds of dialogues and public discussions enable the participation of marginalized groups? When and how does dialogue include and when does it instead serve to exclude? In what follows we summarize a classic exploration of the importance of dialogue to the philosophy of the everyday by philosophers such as Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, who show that disempowered populations trust in the power of dialogue when they belong to cultures that resent the Other who resides among them. An inhospitable culture is one that chooses to deny the significance of the language, tradition, and social and political aspirations of the Other. Dana Hollander’s study of Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida opens up a vast field that bears directly on these difficulties. Hollander suggests that in the 1920s dialogical philosophy was used by German-Jewish philosophers because it enabled them “to rescue concrete human individuality or facticity from philosophical generalization or abstraction” (Hollander 2008, 13). A good example of particular and mythic aspects inhering in dialogue is found in the writings of Martin Buber. Buber described both an I-It and an I-Thou relationship between people, and argued that dialogue can occur in speech or in silence. When one person opens up to the other person, says Buber, He releases in himself a reserve over which only he, himself, has power. Unreservedly communication streams from him, and the silence bears it to his neighbor. Indeed, it was intended for him, and he receives it unreservedly as he receives all genuine destiny that meets him … No more knowing is needed. For where unreserve has ruled, even wordlessly, between men, the word of dialogue has happened sacramentally. (Buber 2002 [1932], 190) Buber acknowledges that dialogue lives in signs and spoken words that are objectively comprehensible but he finds that dialogical communication encompasses a certain inwardness. Hence dialogue breaks free of the bounds of statements even when their contents are extremely personal.3 People in

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dialogue are seen not just as pragmatically solving practical problems, they “have turned to one another” (Buber 2002 [1932], 191). Buber states, “In genuine dialogue the turning … to the partner takes the place of all truth, that is, it is a turning of the being. Every speaker ‘means’ the partner or partners to whom he turns as this personal existence” (Buber 2002 [1954], 214). In this way the dialogue serves to confirm the other person’s being and hence the being of the couple, I-You. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida intriguingly echoes and subverts the ideas that Buber articulates when he characterizes the sacred aspects of an everyday encounter between the same and the Other in the works of Levinas.4 Derrida points out that turning to the Other must not lead to a mere return to the self. If to turn to the Other is to belong to the realm of responsibility, then the dialogue has to be “ordered according to the absolute anteriority of the Other” (Derrida 1999, 4). An encounter with the other is ethical only if ethics precedes utilitarian conditions and goes beyond the conditions that ontology, the State, and politics articulate and require: “yes, ethics before and beyond ontology, the State or politics, but also ethics beyond ethics” (Derrida 1999, 4). These expressions are more aware of the fact that dialogue is designed to administer certain contents, acknowledge responsibility, and participate in a response.5 Yet Derrida goes on to say that the face of the Other is not only an interdiction on violence against this Other. It is also an imperative of hospitality. Traditional ontology has to give way and subordinate itself, “to an ethics of hospitality, to a phenomenological analysis of the welcome, to the height of the face?” (quoted in Derrida 1999, 58).6 Derrida suggests that in acute need of hospitality and welcome, “‘real’ qualities, attributes, or properties (everything that makes a living person into something other than a phantom) slowed down, mediatized, or compromised the purity of this welcome” (Derrida 1999, 111). Although Derrida portrays Levinas as the philosopher of the encounter, not dialogue, it is within the bounds of hospitality that listening to the Other can occur and that addressing the host lends to the welcome human guest a real content so that the guest’s words may be addressed and her or his pain may be nursed. In addition to the arguments above, the editors of this volume offer a very different response to the questions how could dialogue enable the participation of marginalized groups or when does public discussion lead to the inclusion of the other rather than to the other’s exclusion? The editors analyze the dialogue that artworks propel, articulate, and intimate within a given culture and society. In their study of Kafka’s literature Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggest that there “is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 26). According to Deleuze and Guattari, the characteristics of minor literature are such that (1) the language of the text is the one that a minority “construes within a major language” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 16). A minor language causes deterritorialization when it introduces impossibility to the continued unproblematic usage of the major language. (2) The minority can write neither in minor nor in major forms of the language. Hence whenever the

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minority deterritorializes a major language everything in this minor language is political. (3) Minor literature speaks about everything from the point of view of a “collective value” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17).7 This means that if one speaker breaks out and addresses society, then her/his speech is already used as an action on behalf of the community he or she emerges from. These traits that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Kafka’s minor literature written in the heart of the major, German language also apply to current French-speaking Muslims in France, English-speaking blacks in America, or Hebrew-speaking Arabs in Israel. Through artworks such as literature, music, theater, and film these ethnic and racial others deterritorialize a major language, their statements are always political, and their speech is an action even if members of the same ethnicity or race disagree with the speaker’s contentions. The cluster of effects that emerge in the use of a minor language is most fit to delivering pain, a cry, and to elucidating solitude precisely because an individual speaker is locked inside an expression that has become “a machine of expression” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 19). Specifically, in Kafka’s literature when language ceases to be representative and becomes a tool with which to plumb the limits of language, “the connotation of pain accompanies this metamorphosis, as in the words that become a painful warbling with Gregor, or in Franz’s cry ‘single and irrevocable’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 23). Thus, the work of art contributes to the dialogue between minorities and the hegemonic culture by acting on the culture’s language from within so that the major language is deterritorialized, politicized, and is exposed to the power of the minor collective outbursts of pain and loneliness which appear already as actions, not as statements. In The Truth of Democracy, Jean-Luc Nancy further argues that the more democracy deserts signs and leaves behind established significations the more art explores new ideas and unknown possibilities of signification. Nancy refers to minor arts and genres that become powerful and influential, such as “rock, or rap, electronic music, videos, computer generated images, tagging, art installations or performance art, or else new interpretations of older forms (such as drawing or epic poetry), everything bears witness to a feverish anticipation, to a need to seize anew an existence in full transformation” (Nancy 2010, 27–28). Nancy suggests that art in crisis responds to individual, historical, and social radical changes so that “if there is body art—to the point of blood, to the point of suffering—it is because our bodies desire to understand themselves differently” (Nancy 2010, 28). In democracy these exigencies are a motor for personal and social change, “One must learn how to listen” (Nancy 2010, 28). Mikhail Bakhtin’s extensive analysis of dialogue is close to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s study of minor literature. Bakhtin is preoccupied with the emancipatory power of language embodied in dialogue understood as a life activity. This concept of language and linguistics as dialogue situated Bakhtin on the opposite pole of the formalist position (McNally 2000). For Bakhtin, dialogue is in and of itself not only an outcome of the internal structure of language but also a value in its own right which should be sought after and cultivated. In other words, dialogue may be viewed as a property of language or, more precisely, of the verbal utterance, and of

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communication. In the first sense, each utterance is more or less implicitly dialogical. In his last works, Bakhtin highlights the dialectics between this whole and the utterance: This finalized wholeness of the utterance, guaranteeing the possibility of a response (or of responsive understanding), is determined by three aspects (or factors) that are inseparably linked in the organic whole of the utterance: 1. Semantic exhaustiveness of the theme; 2. The speaker’s plan or speech will; 3. Typical compositional and generic forms of finalization. (Bakhtin 1994, 76–77) The utterance is thus dialogical by nature; the moment we make a statement, we immediately enter a dialogical relation. This means that dialogue is ubiquitous to society, depending on the social, cultural, and political organization of a society. Democracy is a political universalization of everyday dialogue. If we try to understand the political significance of dialogue for a democratic society the key question that remains is: how does dialogue produce agreement, which leads to consensus? To clarify, is consensus inscribed in the very structure of dialogue or is it external to such dialogue, depending, perhaps, on the goodwill of the participants, among other factors? At this point, we open a discussion around the ethical dimension of dialogue, touched on earlier. Besides being a prerequisite to understanding, dialogue is also an ethical ideal. Dialogue thus cannot be fully actualized without the parties’ genuine engagement. Such an engagement in and with dialogue may be construed as social solidarity. In this sense, solidarity is not synonymous with unanimity; on the contrary, solidarity is predicated on significant differences in worldviews. The essence of the mysterious force of solidarity is that we are able to cooperate despite the differences. If we transplant this principle to politics, we can legitimately identify democracy with solidarity—solidarity comprehended as a wish to engage in dialogue in order to understand other people better and, consequently, to be ready to launch common action with them. If, instead of being a vehicle for consensus, dialogue engenders mutual understanding between people, it has certain implications for democracy. Arriving at an agreement would, in this case, be merely one possible product of dialogue and not its primary end. Moreover, if we adopt Bakhtin’s idea that dialogue—or at least dialogic relations—permeates the entire social structure and provides a foundation upon which social existence rests, we must show the continuity between dialogue in everyday life and dialogue sustained within political and social institutions that facilitate “melioration through understanding.” And yet in order to explain how dialogue is made welcome and enables the participation and inclusion of marginalized groups, we need to clarify the relations between dialogue and memory. Memory constitutes one of the main mechanisms of exclusion as it targets some groups as not worthy of being engaged with in real dialogue. The only way to remove such obstacles to dialogue is to initiate a critical dialogue with a targeted group but also inside a

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group suffering traumatic memory. Such dialogue is a prerequisite of intra- and inter-subjective forgiveness and reconciliation, which in turn make dialogue on national and international levels possible. Buber, Levinas, and Derrida have World War II and the Shoah in mind when they examine the relation of memory and dialogue to the everyday. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur undertakes to explain why it is legitimate to speak about the traumatic memories of a collective in therapeutic terms such as “wounded, even of sick memory” (Ricoeur 2004, 69). First, Ricoeur uses Freud to show that remembering is opposed to the compulsion to repeat and hence remembering emerges in language as work whereas the compulsion to repeat belongs to an unconscious economy of pleasure (Freud 1958, 152–155). Ricoeur further suggests that the work of remembering poses an end to the work of mourning and enables the subject to look for new objects to substitute for the dead objects. According to Ricoeur, memory thus “requires time—a time of mourning” (Ricoeur 2004, 74). Remembering should occur not just in the presence of an analyst but in everyday encounters for, “the public space of discussion constitutes the equivalent of … the ‘playground’ [the analytic session] as the intermediary region between the therapist and the analysand” (Ricoeur 2004, 78). On this “playground” the analysand is able to cathect new objects, to leave behind the dead object. Ricoeur asserts that expressions of collective wounded memory and of collective healing from mourning appear in rites and rituals such as collective funeral celebrations as well as in organized processes of reconciliation between enemies. Both individuals and groups who harbor wounded memories need to feel secure enough to address their pain to the representatives of the hegemony for this address itself amounts to “submission to reality testing, constituting the true work of mourning, is also an integral part of the work of recollection” (Ricoeur 2004, 80). This address of the other shows that our identity is not too fragile to acknowledge that the other has a lifestory and history that differ from our own. As Ricoeur demonstrates, this address of the other opens up a space for the kind of narrative that Arendt calls the “who of action” (cited in Ricoeur 2004, 85). In this space of address the story becomes a political device and a strategy for the securing of private and public goals and it brings together worldliness with a psychoanalytical approach to emotions as valuable to advancing social goals (Alphandary 2015). Also important is the fact that memory is affiliated with justice and debt because we owe remembering to the generations that preceded us and to the dead. Remembering is a form of accepting the otherness that germinates in us and it is a commitment that we undertake to respect the dead. The victims are the ones that we are obligated to remember most pressingly for in this case memory functions as a response to the victim’s untold story, unfulfilled dream. In Ricoeur’s text justice and response correspond with those who died in the death camps but today these ideas correspond with the dead in Syria and on the refugee boats, which disintegrate in the Mediterranean Sea. In Michael Taussig’s book, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, he tries to relate Benjamin’s “profane illumination” to memory because Benjamin understands

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“profane illumination” as a form of memory that belongs to the everyday even though it has ritualistic aspects that are not sacred. It follows that remembering refers both to the past and the future for it is an intimation of knowledge. Clearly memory alone cannot prevent the repetition of past crimes and it is only in dialogue, in the present, that remembering becomes a political act capable of preventing the recurrence of atrocities in different parts of the globe, and particularly in Europe. In order to make memory part of a lively contemporary dialogue Taussig points to the fact that Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou8 has never been located because his remains had been disinterred from the initial resting place and moved into a common grave, “fosa común” (Taussig 2006, 4). What are the social and political ramifications of wars that keep generating fosa común around the world? This discussion is related to Benjamin’s understanding of memory as a faculty that introduces redemption to the present. Taussig’s decision to open up a dialogue with those who were close with Benjamin and with scholars of his work, rather than offering his own closed study of the work in itself, is not arbitrary. The memorial monument for Benjamin built by the Israeli architect Dani Karavan includes a citation from Benjamin’s writings that reads: “It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless” (cited in Taussig 2006, 16). Benjamin’s insistence on the nameless is relevant to Port Bou, this border town in which the fosa común are full of bodies from the concentration camps that Franco built and in French territories more fosa común contain bodies from Vichy’s concentration camps and from Gurs in the Pyrenees where both Hannah Arendt and Benjamin were incarcerated. Writing about “sudden illumination,” and “image” as concepts that affect memory and hence our relation to the present, Benjamin says: It is we ourselves, however, who are always standing at the center of these rare images. Nor is this very mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we separated from ourselves, and while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock … It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images. (Benjamin 1999, 633) The past and the present can be relevant to each other only when they are very remote from each other. Under such circumstances the past can be “touched” by the present and “jump-start the process of redemption, wrenching history onto a new track” (Taussig 2006, 19). A visual faculty, memory enables one to see how a past injury can be seen and treated differently in the present because the time that has elapsed between the event and the memory of the event introduces precisely the space of transformation. Taussig cites Benjamin, who points out that “Language shows clearly that

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memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experiences, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred” (cited in Taussig 2006, 23). The idea here is that language renders a past experience present. This experience is, according to Taussig, precisely what Benjamin refers to by “profane illumination” (cited in Taussig 2006, 24) because it exposes the nameless bodies buried in the fosa común to the space of the present. If, instead of searching in vain for Benjamin’s missing grave, we focus on the spirit of his writings we can effect positive change, opening up dialogues with those who are rendered nameless through policies of exclusion aimed at the other. Taussig suggests that Benjamin is “more spirit than body” (Taussig 2006, 26). The spirit of Benjamin compels us to hold onto the past as a “flitting image” which “flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (cited in Taussig 2006, 28). This is the instant of danger and the images are dialectical for they are aimed both at recalling the catastrophe and at keeping it in abeyance. Benjamin’s writing calls onto the reader to hold onto these images and make them relevant to the present moment in order to ensure that history does not repeat itself. This form of remembering can be reconciled with Nietzsche’s demand that remembering becomes an action, not nostalgia, not ressentiment. Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment is attached to pain, cannot forget past wounds, and is thus swayed by a need to avenge the past, rather than act in the present. The master treats memory as an impetus for taking new action and hence the master is reactive for he turns memories into opportunities for creative action in the present. In Gilles Deleuze’s book, Nietzsche and Philosophy, he claims that repression is very valuable to the master for it enables him to retain an unconscious memory of pain without contaminating consciousness’s ability to be attached to action in the present. These repressed memories amount to healthy forgetting in the master. Deleuze insists that Nietzsche affirms memory when it generates a response to the present, “The second kind of reactive forces show us in what form and under what conditions reaction can be acted: when reactive forces take conscious excitation as their object, then the corresponding reaction is itself acted” (Deleuze 2006, 113). Thus, Deleuze, like Benjamin, sees the present in dialogue with the past, and it is through this dialogue that a transformation can take place in the present moment redeeming the wounds of the past while opening up new possible modes of relation to subjects and objects alike. Despite their importance, these interconnections so vital for democracy have not been sufficiently investigated. The reason for this negligence was that research on democracy has focused mainly on institutions and procedures. The approach to democracy offered by the chapters collected here is much broader and includes culturally based attitudes, habits of everyday life, and beliefs. The ideal of democracy we prefer is total inclusion within society where all important social and political issues are subjected to critical but non-consensual dialogue which leads to better understanding of the other, rather than to a consensus.

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We stress the interdisciplinary character of the volume. The key theoretical political concepts of democracy, dialogue, and traumatic memory are discussed in this volume by engaging philosophy, literature, psychology, art, and politics. From the fact that memory is immanent to traumatic events it emerges that memory could be expressed and altered in different disciplines that range from religion to the arts but include politics and law. The fact that both individuals and collectives appeal to religious values and institutions when they seek redress of the damages they suffer also makes the study of the role that religion plays in dialogue and democracy valuable to us. Law is at stake whenever disempowered groups impart traumatic memories in order to establish the terms of transitional justice, or to bring about reconciliation or even forgiveness. Art plays an important role in this volume because it is the forerunner of free speech and of egalitarian practices of performance and self-fashioning that individuals and groups undertake when they seek to make themselves heard and known in the public sphere. Art could advocate a particular political position or it could generate fellow-feelings, knowledge, and forge intersubjective bonds. Art is not an end in itself, but is, rather, a means for bringing together diverse ideas, cultural practices, and audiences. The content of art is legitimate because it promotes a public discussion and critique of society in a given time and space. Art does not simply release emotions, it also gives structure to emotions and renders emotional exchanges meaningful, sharable, and comprehensible. From this perspective, art is an indispensable part of any democratic society as it enables people to depict the social world in such a way that all social groups become socially visible. The concept of visibility, which is crucial for Jacques Rancière’s work, means that in order to acknowledge a social event we must first perceive it as an event (Ross 2009, 29). This perception of social events is to a great extent predetermined by what Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2004). This category allows us to understand how our perception of the social world predetermines our social interactions and our acceptance and non-acceptance of social divisions. The distribution of the sensible is similar to Kant’s a priori categorical order, which determines the modes of our thoughts and actions. The distribution of the sensible is fundamental to the social order for which Rancière uses the name “police order.” The police is, essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share or lack of it. But to define this, you first must define the configuration of the perceptible in which one or the other is inscribed. The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood and another as noise. (Rancière 1999, 24)

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Politics is, for Rancière, precisely opposed to police order, an activity directed at breaking the “configuration of the perceptible.” This opposition between policing and politics establishes the field of political activity. Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise. (Rancière 1999, 29) This idea of political activity means that art is always per se political. Literature, fine arts, visual arts have a potential for the re-configuration of the visual field and in consequence for changing the police order that is obligatory in society. Art and dialogue are the media through which emotional intelligence becomes a positive force for critique and change. Even those who do not master abstract philosophical traditions of thinking or the objective relevance of mathematics and logic to political and ethical questions can still influence the democratic discussion. On the one hand, these participants need to properly formulate their feelings in words and on the other hand they should be able to carefully imagine themselves in the place of the others when these others are exposed to articulations of feelings that are foreign to them. Emotional intelligence turns a society of foreigners into a society in which individuals and groups are bound together because they matter to one another (Goleman 1995). Emotional intelligence enables people to mirror the emotions of others and hence defuse tensions and enhance goodwill. People with genuine emotional intelligence are capable of acting according to their deepest feelings and beliefs in the public sphere regardless of political pressures and social consequences. These people would be willing to provoke conflict in order to expose political fraud and social duplicity (Brady 2013, 2–3). Such emotional intelligence breeds responsibility toward one’s neighbor because she or he is not alien. The other’s circumstances and her or his memories and narratives become endearing. Hence people feel responsibility toward others, not uniquely self-concern (Salovey and Rosenhan 1989). This book addresses the relations of the individual to social structures, political institutions, and arts like literature and films in order to show that in a democratic regime the individual can access and influence political formations through dialogue. The micropolitics that individuals engage is inevitably related to traumatic memory and dialogue therefore enables the Other to come to the fore. We want to show that contemporary society in America, Europe, and Israel can check the administration and force it to be more democratic than it currently is using dialogues that address traumatic memory in addition to everyday criticism and demands. In order to achieve these goals we divided the book to two sections, one is philosophical and the second is related to psychology and the arts. The writers in the first section undertake to elucidate how political philosophy explains and enables dialogue between micro- and macro-politics. The writers give historical examples that show the influence that

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micropolitics has on macropolitics when dialogue is practiced in the democratic society. The writers in the second section explain how sophisticated artistic expressions of trust in, and dissent in relation to democratic private and public living becomes a device that can alter communications within society and by extension force society to be more heterogeneous, and more attuned to private, social, and national trauma that hinder recognition of the Other.

Chapters The first part of the book, titled “Democracy and Memory at the Crossroads of Dialogue and Tolerance in Everyday Life,” shows that the main idea endorsed by the writers in this volume is that democratic politics must beware of states of exception, as philosophically described by Schmitt and Agamben, and promote instead speech and engagement in the public sphere (Ewa Ziarek). This part asks how we might further articulate the tensions between political dialogue and dialogue in everyday life. Dialogue in everyday life is much more inclusive than political dialogue, but the two are intimately connected as political dialogue always emerges from everyday dialogue. Leszek Koczanowicz, in his chapter “Everyday Dialogue, Memory, and Democracy,” argues that dialogue is considered to be at the core of any democratic society. However, dialogue seems so obvious that the theoreticians of democracy hardly ever attend to its features, and even if they do, they focus on the political, institutionalized dialogue, neglecting almost entirely everyday dialogue. To theorize dialogue, Koczanowicz draws on the Bakhtinian notion of polyphony, and shows its relevance to democratic politics. He depicts the conditions under which ordinary interactions in a society morph into political exchanges, and shows that the emancipatory potential of everyday dialogue can be transformed into a political emancipatory strategy. Of course, one of the conditions of political emancipation is social memory, which instrumentally impacts the shape and substance of social exchanges. Koczanowicz’s empirical example is the post-1989 political transition in Poland. He explains how changes in everyday interactions affected the institutionalized political relations. The neoliberal government’s neglect of everyday claims had disastrous ramifications, including the rise of nationalistic sentiments. Now, the right-wing ruling party Law and Justice seeks to colonize social memory by extending state power in culture and education. This colonization, in turn, undermines the possibility of political dialogue between the government and the oppositional movements. In the chapter “The Idea of Tolerance and Social Dialogue in the Democratic State,” Paweł Dybel addresses the limits to dialogue and discusses how the concept of tolerance functions in the democratic state, which is based on the ideas of social dialogue and equality. The main problem he tackles is to what extent the democratic state can tolerate minority groups’ customs and actions that contravene the principles of the democratic order. His argument starts from Jacques Derrida’s and Jurgen Habermas’s insights that represent two different models of tolerance. Derrida observes that in the political practice of modern democracies tolerance manifests itself in acts of

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charity by dominant political groups toward the subordinated ones, and he insists that such model should be replaced by tolerance based on unconditioned hospitality. Habermas endorses the model of tolerance which is closely linked to consensual dialogue as a vehicle for the democratic regime. Dybel prefers the Habermasian notion of tolerance, but he criticizes its naive belief that all issues can be resolved in dialogue. There are situations, he claims, when the state is obliged to exert its authority over political actions that threaten to violate the democratic order. In “Exception, Metaphor, and Political Action,” Ewa Ziarek explores the issue of the novelty of political action, a topic of key importance in the wake of the rise of new political and social movements. In doing this, Ziarek refers to two opposite figures in political philosophy: Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt, and examines descriptions of exception in their theories. Ziarek’s analysis of Arendt’s and Schmitt’s seminal texts raises the question whether exception can be reinterpreted as an unexpected, unpredictable element of political action and as a possibility of a new beginning. Ultimately, Ziarek claims that the debate on the role of exception is crucial not only to Arendt’s theory of action, but also to all non-foundational politics of difference, which can open new roads to political activism. In Chapter 4, “Radical Politics,” Krzysztof Ziarek proposes reorienting our political thought by taking into account Heidegger’s notion of human mortality as a constitutive feature of humanity. Ziarek contrasts this concept with the standard political description of democracy’s political subject, that is, the people. He explains how the category of the people functions in various democratic constitutions, and shows that it does not exhaust the existential and political dimension of communality. Heidegger’s concept of death as the fundamental and unique human experience opens up a space for another kind of community and another kind of politics, which, instead of prioritizing manipulation and instrumentality, emphasizes the ways of human belonging to the world. In Chapter 5, “Dialogue as a Tool Enhancing the Effectiveness of the Activities of NGOs in Modern Societies,” Tomasz Grzyb, Katarzyna Byrka, and Dariusz Dolin´ski discuss NGO fundraising strategies to analyze the psychological foundations of dialogue. Viewed in conjunction with emotional intelligence, dialogue depends not only on cultural and social contexts as it must also appeal to human cognitive abilities as well as to emotions. The authors, who are recognized social psychologists, draw on empirical research findings to expose the pitfalls of using dialogue for manipulation. At the same time, however, they demonstrate that dialogical involvement can be an important tool for strengthening civil society. The second part of the book is titled, “Art and Literature as Custodians of Traumatic Memory, Resistance and Forgiveness in Democracy.” The exploration of these concepts helps to bring about dialogue in highly contentious political situations. The chapters included in this section show how art legitimizes individual expression over established authority and how aesthetics brings to the fore stylistic and ethical pluralism. As the various chapters

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demonstrate, artistic works signify different speakers in a dialogue and thus practice heteroglossia in the cultural sphere. Put differently, art seeks to be responsive to the impulses of individuals and groups in society while also creating a bridge between different individuals and groups so that they can better understand each other. Art thus brings to the fore the unknown or repressed thoughts and emotions of the other, and enables separateness and distinction at the same time that it illuminates otherness and makes it accessible. Hence art also facilitates inclusion and enhances fellow-feelings within the audience and between the artist and her/his audience. In “Community at the Table,” Dorota Koczanowicz shows that the domestication of fire and eating cooked food enable humans to gather together at the table and have conversations that disseminate dietary information as well as religious rites, and information about the house and the province the diners live in. Thereby eating becomes a social event, not uniquely an act of the satisfaction of needs, and yet the bodily aspects of eating allow us to share sensual experiences with one another. The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose work she examines, cooks together with the visitors at the exhibition. He cooks in office spaces and uses foreign ingredients and spices that are not indigenous to the place so that a Thai dish with curry appears in Berlin or New York with both original and local ingredients. The clash of tastes is an opportunity for dialogue focused on the differences between the foreign and the domestic communities. This dialogue opens the way to alterity and transgresses fixed notions of identity. Partaking of food is related to childhood memories and to everyday life and thereby eating together brings democracy to the most basic interactions that people share and endows these interactions with aesthetic and emotional meanings. As we mentioned in the first part to this introduction Nancy suggests that art can shape democracy if we listen to the meanings that the art object articulates. When eating together requires that the visitors engage in a dialogue about the making and unmaking of their cultural conditioning and identity then art has the potential to truly introduce and domesticate social changes. Chapter 7, “The Thought from Outside,” is a chapter in which Ramona Fotiade examines alternative conceptual and artistic approaches to lived temporality, as related to memory, trauma, and repetition by combining the psychoanalytical interpretative framework and the deconstructive theory of spectrality in order to arrive at an existential overcoming of temporal irreversibility and the possibility of breaking free from the circle of “eternal repetition of the same.” She conducts a comparative analysis of films such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), Alan Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (2012), and postmodern philosophical notions including the “outside” and “nomadism” as theorized first by Foucault, and then by Deleuze and Guattari (in relation to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) for the possibility of outlining a different conception of temporality in its relationship to memory, testimonial, and prayer. She suggests that democracy inheres in art and philosophy when these practices stress the transition of meaning from the emotional interiority to an exteriority that includes moral responsibility.

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Transitions from the inside to the outside or from the everyday to transcendence occur when ghostly unconscious memories appear in art, as does the ghost of Hamlet’s father, for example. The appearance of the ghost has immense personal and political value. In this and other examples transformation is grounded in our ability to introduce change through dialoguing with the dead or with radical otherness through repetition with difference in relation to traumatic unconscious knowledge. Fotiade articulates how repetition is represented in art and how difference emerges from the images and narratives that repeat the depicted traumas. In the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari the chapter shows that when repetition occurs the subject receives an opportunity to choose, think, and act differently so that difference is tied up with the subject’s ability to believe in the fact that the world is rife with diversity and multiplicity of possibilities for movement and thinking that give birth to new forms and modes of existence. In Chapter 8, “You Have to Write Your Own Life,” Agata Bielik-Robson seeks to deconstruct Hans Jaeger’s phrase you have to write your own life. Jaeger, a Norwegian, fin-de-siècle bohemian, famously supported a code of nine anti-laws, each one of them antinomically subverting the rules of behavior of the nineteenth-century petty bourgeois society. Bielik-Robson construes a political philosophy of literary narrative as a piece of resistance of modern democracy: a liminoid, antinomian, agonistic, and adversarial practice absolutely necessary for the maintenance of a democratic life. She also refers to Walter Benjamin for whom the very act of storytelling was antinomian in that it opposes the general nature of the law and brings a singularity of the subject to the fore. The arguments in this chapter are closer to the Deleuzean notions of deterritorialization than to Freudian notions of neuroses and yet Benjamin’s description of storytelling as an act of righteousness and of remembering brings together the notions of democracy, dialogue, and memory with the notion of singularity, playing, and the capacity that language has to signify interiority. In Chapter 9, “Duras vs. Duras,” Eran Dorfman examines how traumatic memory can be accessed through Freud’s mechanism of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) in regard to two literary works by Marguerite Duras. This chapter takes into consideration notions of memory developed by Freud and Ricoeur yet Dorfman argues that Duras’s work demonstrates that one cannot access the original event through memory but rather through repetition, and that this repetition creates and enables its origin no less than it is enabled by it. Repetition occurs in dialogue—either with a psychoanalyst or with a friend or a lover—which enables a traumatic memory to function simultaneously in relation to the past and the present. Dorfman accepts the premise that an active psychoanalytic attempt to enable self-expression within the bounds of repetition and acting-out or deferred retroaction belongs to dialogue but he questions if dialogue and the democratic focus on the value of a single psyche can help the traumatized protagonists in Duras’s works to acknowledge the world and be free of the compulsive repetitions that make their life stories captivating, different, and Other to the readers. Dorfman’s chapter shows that only within the realm of democracy dialogue is an invaluable tool with which

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to disclose singularity because democracy depends on the meanings that singularity brings to fore in the form of both a structural and a historical traumatic repetition and difference. Singularity can bring about political transitions too, not just psychic alterations. The perfect example of this transformation of identity and ethnicity can be found in Chapter 10 by Abraham Rubin, “The Shifting Landscape of Jewishness in Contemporary Kafka Criticism.” For Deleuze and Guattari Kafka is a Jewish writer who produces minor literature that outlines the very limits of the German natural language. Rubin is interested in how Kafka’s Jewishness is no longer defined in terms of a circumscribed or exclusionary cultural identity, but is instead celebrated for its transnational, translinguistic, transcultural character. He argues that the recent scholarly trend of associating Kafka’s Jewishness with the cross-cultural and transnational character of his literature reflects a broader shift in the identity politics of Jewish Studies programs, which in recent years have sought to broaden their relevance in the humanities by moving away from the margins of “ethnic” and “area” studies and trying to appeal to the contemporary discourse on cosmopolitanism and global citizenship. Kafka’s reception over the past two decades proves to be a highly pertinent example for the recent disciplinary efforts to reinvent “Jewish literature” as “world literature.” The final chapter, Chapter 11 by Idit Alphandary, is titled “Forgiveness and Resentment are Heterogeneous to Politics.” Arendt used the term radical evil to connote crimes against humanity yet this notion hovers over current political conflict and disagreement. Dialogue, in turn, frees individuals from superstitions about other people and enables the hostile parties to rethink national identity. Forgiveness is grounded in the Abrahamic, religious tradition but in modern times it refers to the possible encounter of perpetrators and victims of crimes against humanity. At the same time, reconciliation occurs within the bounds of dialogue. Oftentimes the perpetrator feels a need to repent in the public sphere while the victim wants to freely express her or his resentments toward the perpetrator in the public sphere and explain what it means for her/him to forgive. These speech-acts are seen as necessary if repentance, forgiveness, and resentment are to have political significance. The example of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa shows that forms of dialogue that appear in practices of reconciliation alleviate the pain that inheres in traumatic memory, and help people transition from passive victims to survivors (Grunebaum 2002, 308). This volume considers both testimonies and fictional histories in its study of trauma, as part of an attempt to try and disclose the “truth” the survivors want to establish in the public sphere (Améry 1980, 63). Forgiveness and resentment are examined as modes of bringing to the fore the tension between different outlooks on the conversation in the public sphere that emerges from trauma. According to Alphandary, traumatic memory emerges in the implementation of an impossible commitment to forgive the unforgiveable crimes of the Holocaust that is undertaken by individual survivors. The commitment to

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resentment belongs to a personal, pure process of remembering that does not disable forgiveness for the sake of a different future between the perpetrator and the victim. By the same token individual perpetrators express their remorse despite and irrespective of the political and judicial processes of reconciliation and reparations. In this context, the personal need to articulate traumatic memories that defy expression presides in the interconnections between exemplary texts by W.G. Sebald, Bruno Schulz, and Jean Améry, and is central, also, to Derrida’s work.

Notes 1 Dieudonné has close connections with the contemporary Iranian regime and he appeals to the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. 2 The concept of the “great community,” as developed by John Dewey, refers to a community in which communication is coupled with the ethical involvement of its members. As Dewey explains: “We have the physical tools of communication as never before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance. Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community” (Dewey 1984, 324). If Dewey’s intuition is valid we need to consider the reciprocal relations between community and the democratic system as crucial for the formation of a democratic society. 3 The dialogical attitude toward the other is “completed not in some ‘mystical’ event but in one that is in the precise sense factual, thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the concrete time sequence” (Buber 2002 [1932], 190). Buber shows that the basic words “I-It” announce the subject-object relation. The relation “I-Thou” causes the “I” to become “I” and the “You” to become “You.” Sanctity presides over every interaction when the contents of the dialogue do not exhaust the encounter and when the speakers seek out a higher order—a sacred order—of communication. Genuine religious dialogue is, precisely, “speech from certainty to certainty but also from one openhearted person to another openhearted person” (Buber 2002 [1932], 191). 4 When Derrida undertakes to meditate on his friend Levinas he acknowledges that in order to be in dialogue with the Other he has to accept radical nakedness, “And I would like to do so with unadorned, naked words, words as childlike and disarmed as my sorrow” (Derrida 1999, 1). 5 Thus, by way of example, Israelis who seek to create a Palestinian State follow in the footsteps of Levinas for they know that the Other person is “more holy than a land, even when that land is a Holy Land. Next to a person who has been affronted, this land—holy and promised—is but nakedness and desert, a heap of wood and stone” (quoted in Derrida 1999, 4). 6 Derrida’s ideas, like those of Levinas, are particularly relevant to the current refugee crisis that has brought to Europe’s shores millions of people seeking asylum from Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Zaire, and all across the subcontinent. The Israelites received asylum in Egypt even if this entailed their enslavement but currently refugees are transported from one camp to the next and borders keep closing up in their faces. At the same time a third intifada of the young is raging in Israel and talk of the “peace process” seems more distant than ever. Drawing on Levinas, it seems reasonable to suggest that peace will only be achieved in Israel when Israeli

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Jews learn to practice real hospitality toward the Other and when justice is extended to the Other. Similarly, the Other will only feel at home in Europe when Europeans are ready to, on the one hand, overlook specific characteristic of an individual refugee and, on the other hand, locate the face of the Other in each refugee, and reach out to him or her as an individual human deserving of life and access to livable conditions. 7 See Janet Bergstrom analysing “splitting” in the films of Chantal Akerman according to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s understanding of the functions of minor language (Bergstrom 1999, 277–288). 8 Benjamin committed suicide there in September 1940.

References Alphandary, Idit, “Love and Worldliness in Psychoanalysis and in the Work of Hannah Arendt,” Philosophy Today, 59, 2(2015): 227–255. Améry, Jean, “Resentments,” in At the Mind’s Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 62–81. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Benjamin, Walter, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Selected Writings Vol 2. 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Jephcott Edmund (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999 [1932]), 595–635. Bergstrom, Janet, “Chantal Akerman: Splitting,” in Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis Parallel Histories, ed. Janet Bergstrom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 273–290. Brady, Michael S., Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Insight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Buber, Martin, “From Dialogue,” in The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. Asher D. Biemann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 [1932]), 189–205. Buber, Martin, “Genuine Dialogue,” in The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. Asher D. Biemann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 [1954]), 214–215. Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Michael Hardt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Derrida, Jacques, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Dewey, John, “The Public and Its Problems,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–27, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). Flynn, Bernard, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005). Freud, Sigmund, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1911–1913, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), 147–156. Gilligan, Carol, In A Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Goleman, Daniele, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995).

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Grunebaum, Heidi, “Talking to Ourselves ‘among the Innocent Dead’: On Reconciliation, Forgiveness, and Mourning,” PMLA, 117, 2(2002): 306–310. Höffe, Otfried, Categorical Principles of Law: A Counterpoint to Modernity, trans. Mark Migotti (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Hollander, Dana, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Klooger, Jeff, Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). Koczanowicz, Leszek, Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). McNally, David, Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and Liberation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Margalit, Avishai, The Decent Society, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Rancière, Jacques, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Ross, Kristin, “Historicizing Untimeliness,” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Philip Watts and Gabriel Rockhill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 15–29. Salovey, Peter and David L. Rosenhan, “Mood States and Prosocial Behavior,” in Handbook of Social Psychophysiology, ed. Hugh Wagner and Antony Manstead (Chichester and New York: University of Manchester, 1989), 371–391. Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Taussig, Michael, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).

Part I

Democracy and memory at the crossroads of dialogue and tolerance in everyday life

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Everyday dialogue, memory, and democracy Leszek Koczanowicz

Everyday life, dialogue, and two kinds of critique Everyday life is one of the most important discoveries of modernity. Henri Lefebvre (2014), one of the founders of modern thinking about the everyday, emphasizes the link between everyday life and modernity. Modernity, marked by lively art movements, social changes and cultural transformations, developed its own, distinct ways of life. Modernity finds its counterpoint in everyday life, and, in turn, everyday life is shown to be a contrast to modernity. Everyday life is an important site where society is consolidated, a site that can be approached in three ways: 1 2 3

as a site of reproduction, either social (Heller 1984) or cultural (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990); as a space in which discourses of micro-power are at work (Foucault 1995); and as a site of resistance to domination (de Certeau 1984).

Thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s provided a conceptual framework to understand categories such as anti-politics and civil society, which were later picked up and developed by dissidents in communist countries (Konrad 1984; Konrad 1987). Several questions arise concerning the nature of interrelations between the everyday and politics: How can the relationship between politics and everyday life be described? Are politics and the everyday radically opposed (as the public is to the private), or are they more intimately connected? Is their relationship always the same, or does it vary historically, especially between totalitarian and democratic polities? Does the relationship between politics and the everyday involve harmony between microcosm and macrocosm, or does it rather involve a tacit contradiction – an interplay of reinforcement and resistance, or a more paradoxical interaction – between the two spheres? How can we access and make sense of the experience of the everyday? Lefebvre answers these question by showing that everyday life is interconnected with politics in a very particular way:

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Leszek Koczanowicz Everyday life includes political life: the public consciousness, the consciousness of belonging to a society and a nation, the consciousness of class. It enters into permanent contact with the State and the State apparatus thanks to administration and bureaucracy. But on the other hand political life detaches itself from everyday life by concentrating itself in privileged moments (elections, for example), and by fostering specialized activities. Thus the critique of everyday life involves a critique of political life, in that everyday life already contains and constitutes such a critique: in that it is that critique. (Lefebvre 2014, 114; original italics)

This passage shows that Lefebvre was aware of the complicated relationships between everyday life and politics. At the same time, he followed the Marxist tradition, which focuses mainly on the critique of everyday life as a site where dehumanizing powers of economic and political capitalism openly reveal themselves. This line of reasoning can be traced back to the early works of Marx, who in his famous Manuscripts (Marx 1959) showed how capitalism’s oppressive forces produced human alienation. Engels in his The Condition of the Working Class in England (1993) provided a near-sociological account of the inhuman situation of workers in the early stages of capitalism. Such critique has since been carried on by many Marxist-oriented thinkers who have offered sophisticated analyses of capitalist society, proving that capitalism reproduces its social and economic relationships at the level of everyday life. The most famous example of such critique is Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work, detailing the ways in which various aspects of capitalist society, from education to eating habits, are reproduced. Bourdieu broadened Marxism’s notional lexicon by introducing new categories, such as symbolic capital, symbolic power, and habitus. These concepts helped Bourdieu to depict the entire complexity of modern capitalism, where the symbolic relationships become more and more important, eclipsing the economic ones. Although originating in Marxist thought, the critique of everyday life is by no means limited to Marxism only. The most important example of a nonMarxist critique of everyday life is, of course, Michel Foucault’s theory of power. Foucault was aware that his ideas were different from the Marxist ones when he wrote that Marxism’s flaw was “assuming that the human subject, the subject of knowledge, and forms of knowledge themselves are somehow given beforehand and definitely, and that economic and social, and political conditions of existence are merely laid or imprinted on this definitely given subject” (Foucault 1994, 2). Instead, Foucault intended to show how a certain knowledge of man was formed in the nineteenth century, a knowledge of individuality, of the normal and abnormal, conforming or nonconforming individual, a knowledge that actually originated in social practices of control and supervision. And how, in a certain way, this knowledge was not

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imposed on, proposed to, or imprinted on an existing human subject of knowledge; rather, it engendered an utterly new type of subject of knowledge. (Foucault 1994, 2) In his impressive work, Foucault shows that forms of oppression are not just linked to the distorted social relations, but rather permeate all human interactions. Moreover, he argues that those “microphysical” relations of power can engender new forms of subjectivation. For all its usefulness, Foucault’s notion of power relations has nevertheless two important drawbacks. First, power relations politicize all human interactions so that everyday life is almost entirely identified with politics. To disentangle this problem, it is helpful to refine Foucault’s thought by differentiating division between power relations and political relations, which is what Hans Sluga does: There exist among power relations a particular subset of strategic relations that coordinate and direct force relations in society. Political relations are relations of power whose objects are other power relations. We may speak of them as supervenient on other power relations which they establish, coordinate, and control. (Sluga 2014, 190) The second drawback of Foucault’s analysis of power relations is that it offers no perspective of liberation. Consequently, oppression seems to be so overwhelming that any effort to overcome it can be merely temporary and local. This bleak image of modern society has been informed and reinforced by modern experiences of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism, which can be viewed as an accumulation of the worst features of the modern state, has consistently served as a point of reference for many theories of modernity. This theoretical position is justified insofar as it concerns the state apparatus with its all-controlling institutions. However, the experience of living under a totalitarian system has made me highly skeptical about theories of totalitarianism which posit the system as a space in which the state exercises absolute control over individuals. This viewpoint is most fully exemplified in Hannah Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism (Arendt 1977). Theories of totalitarianism, however, fail to capture the fact that every totalitarian power needs an opposite pole, that is, a hidden society of bonds, dialogue, everyday communication, spontaneous solidarity, and support. Such a hidden society evades the gaze of the despot precisely because it is so evident that it becomes transparent, and, as such, eludes the regime’s conceptualization and control efforts. This hidden society of dialogue and bonds becomes visible only occasionally, in the moments of anger and rebellion, and then recedes into the penumbra of abstract ideologies again. This hidden society is first and foremost a society of dialogue – dialogue which is important in totalitarian countries and absolutely vital to the democratic state. This society of dialogue is, in my view, a society that is able to put forward claims against the existing social order. What these claims amount to is not so

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much a critique of everyday life as rather a critique from everyday life. This type of critique has been proposed by the French sociologist Luc Boltanski. Boltanski criticizes the sociology of domination as developed, for instance, by Pierre Bourdieu for outlining a distorted image of the agents of social and political life. Boltanski contrasts Bourdieu’s agents with the actors that his sociology of critique presupposes: The actors whom these works have made visible were very different from the agents who feature in the critical sociology of domination. They were always active, not passive. They were frankly critical, even critical rather in the manner of critical sociologists, forever unmasking the hidden intentions and biases of their opponents – often related to their social position – mobilizing to this end various schemas taken from critical sociology, diffused by education or the media. They made their demands, denounced injustices, produced evidence in support of their complaints, or constructed arguments to justify themselves in the face of the critiques to which they were themselves subjected. Envisaged thus, the social world does not appear to be the site of domination endured passively and unconsciously, but instead as a space shot through by a multiplicity of disputes, critiques, disagreements and attempts to re-establish locally agreements that are always fragile. (Boltanski 2011, 27–28) In Boltanski’s numerous books and articles, he describes in detail the ways of constructing social critique from everyday life experience. He notices that: “Description of the social can in fact be undertaken from two different positions. The first consists in starting from an already made social world … The second position consists in starting from the social world in the process of being made” (Boltanski 2011, 43–44). However, he sees clear limits to using the critique from within everyday life for the totalizing critique of the exiting social order. According to Boltanski, for this purpose we need what he calls metacritique: when we speak of critique, it is to these socially rooted, contextual forms of criticism that we shall be referring, while reserving the term metacritique to refer to theoretical constructions that aim to unmask, in their most general dimensions, oppression, exploitation or domination, whatever the forms in which they occur. (Boltanski 2011, 6) Boltanski is certainly right to claim that critique from everyday life has a limited range, but he is also right to notice that without such a critique any ideological construction is futile in its attempts to overcome the maladies of the existing social order. In my own work (Koczanowicz 2015), I stress the dialogical dimension of everyday life. My research draws on two theoretical

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frameworks: American pragmatism, which has asserted that democracy is a universalization of everyday interactions that make up the texture of social life (Dewey 1984; Mead 1959); and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue, which foregrounds mutual understanding (Bakhtin 1994). In my work, I show that the two perspectives are reciprocally complementary, and can usefully provide a theoretical framework for analyzing relationships between everyday life and politics (Koczanowicz 2015). My starting point is that dialogue is ubiquitous in all dimensions of everyday life, but a perennial challenge is to make a transition from everyday dialogue, which pervades all human bonds and relationships, to political dialogue, which could establish the rules of political struggle. As my observations and analyses of the transition period suggest, democracy is not simply a system of institutions and rules, but primarily a certain form of life – an ensemble of habits which must necessarily ensue from everyday life if democracy is to be effective in the first place. My research on the communist past has shown that everyday life-habits and the political sphere are interrelated, and has revealed which forms of this relationship foster a dialogical democratic society (Koczanowicz 2008).

Politics, the political, and emancipation in everyday life How does everyday life translate into, affect, and, most importantly, shape politics? Scholars tend to argue that politics as a struggle for power is unrelated to everyday life. In this view, politics is constituted beyond the reach of everyday interactions of common people. This severance is conceptually reflected in the separate notions of “the political” and “politics” (or, le politique and la politique). Interestingly, the distinction is endorsed and justified by thinkers who represent divergent political orientations, such as Carl Schmitt (1996), on the one hand, and Hannah Arendt (1977), Claude Lefort (1989), and Chantal Mouffe (2005) on the other hand. Paul Ricoeur expressed this division in the most interesting way when he defined it as an anthropological lacuna: I believe it must be maintained, against Marx and Lenin, that political alienation is not reducible to another but is constitutive of human existence and, in this sense, that the political mode of existence entails the breach between the citizen’s abstract life and the concrete life of the family and of work. (Ricoeur 2007, 260) Discussions on “the political division” are complicated and convoluted, but I agree with Oliver Marchart, who states that the consequences of this division between politics and the political are not properly acknowledged. To exemplify this, he observes that if it is assumed that the political acts as a grounding supplement to all social relations, it will not be possible to restrain its effects – and even the

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Leszek Koczanowicz effects of its absence – to the traditional field of politics. All dimensions of society (including the fields of “love”, “art”, and “science”) will consequently be subjected to the constant play of grounding/ungrounding as it is conceptually captured by the political difference. (Marchart 2007, 9)

If we examine “the political” from this point of view, it is clear that the boundaries between the private sphere and the public sphere undergo constant modifications, and are dependent on historical and cultural circumstances. Therefore, I think that everyday life decisions have an important potential for making changes to the political landscape. The problem for the researchers is that such changes are not directly visible. As such, they are very often overlooked as irrelevant to political struggles even though they constitute the “microphysics of emancipations,” to paraphrase Michel Foucault’s famous notion of the “microphysics of power” (Foucault 1995). Such an approach, however, demands re-thinking the concept of emancipation itself. Emancipation is one of the crucial concepts in contemporary philosophy. Historically speaking, since the Enlightenment, the notion of emancipation has been central to the two most important trends in social philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Marxism and Liberalism. It is, of course, easy to see that emancipation was comprehended differently by each movement. For Liberals, emancipation meant overcoming political enslavement and constituting a society of free and autonomous individuals whereas for Marxists, it entailed abolishing the estrangement of labor relations. Yet I suggest that these two trends, different though they are, have much in common. Both Liberalism and Marxism proposed a radical vision of society, stressing the urgency of a fundamental change in the existing social order. Both endorsed the same philosophical scheme of emancipation as a return to true human nature. In Liberalism, this true nature is depicted as an autonomous free individual while in Marxism, it is an individual unfettered from the bonds of alienated labor. These common foundational assumptions suggest that the very idea of emancipation belongs to a secular world free from religious soteriology. The proponents of Liberalism and Marxism sought a possibility of emancipation on earth through a radical change of society, not in the afterlife. Therefore, Marxism as well as Liberalism had a common enemy, that is, the traditional, pre-modern society with its communal values that put serious constraints on people’s capacity to transcend limits. Marxism and Liberalism were the dominant tendencies in political philosophy, and they provided theoretical foundations for powerful social movements. At the same time, however, Marxism and Liberalism were hostile to each other despite their formal affinities. Modernity can be understood as a struggle between these two views of society and between two radically different values: freedom and equality. Yet I believe that the dichotomy is simplistic. Modernity can be viewed as a patchwork of various attempts at emancipation which build on the grand

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narratives of Marxism and Liberalism, but focus on concrete cases and targets. A classic example is the feminist movement oriented toward the emancipation of women, which drew on Marxism and Liberalism, but had quite distinct objectives in view. Emancipatory movements justified their causes using argumentation from various sources, not only from Marxism and Liberalism. For instance, Christianity understood that the idea of human equality could be more useful for the abolitionists than Liberalism was. I suggest that, when thinking about emancipation, we do not confine ourselves to sweeping ideologies only, but rather consider also particular actions and involvements which help to achieve emancipation in narrower areas of social life. If we examine emancipation from this perspective, we can find a more balanced image that takes into consideration various nuanced elements of the process of emancipation. On this model, emancipation is not only a general movement toward greater freedom and/or equality, but also a set of everyday life activities that enable people to obtain more autonomy in their actual social relations. The original understanding of emancipation is connected with the grand narratives of Marxism and Liberalism. But we have grown suspicious of the validity of these grand narratives, for we have seen them crumble. Marxism embodied in political forms turned out to be an instrument of oppression, and Liberalism, triumphant after 1989, proved futile in solving social problems in the financial crisis of 2008. Therefore, there is a growing tendency to shift attention from grand narratives to “the politics of small things,” to use the title of Jeffrey Goldfarb’s (2006) book, in which he shows how actions on the micro level of social life can result in radical social changes. Drawing on his research in communist Poland, Goldfarb demonstrates how such apparently inconsequential events and pursuits, such as meetings of friends, cultural festivals, and publishing books clandestinely, changed the way in which people thought of the totalitarian regime: When people talk to each other, defining a situation on their own terms and developing a capacity to act in concert, they constitute a democratic alternative to terror and hegemonic force. We know too well how the powers use the electronic media, making it seem that they are the only game in town, and we are learning all too clearly how the dramatic gestures of terrorism are amplified by global media. In this inquiry I will highlight the ways democratic actions have constituted free spaces in the global networks of the twentieth century and consider the prospects for this continuing in the twenty-first, and I will present a guide for appreciating and cultivating such prospects. Both critics and partisans of the prevailing order of things have overlooked this potential, with very dangerous results in the grand game of the terrorists and the antiterrorists. This inquiry will be an exploration of the alternatives. (Goldfarb 2006, 8)

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Goldfarb describes unexpected places of freedom, such as the kitchen in a small Polish apartment: Our first picture is of a general but significant location: the kitchen table in Poland and elsewhere in the old bloc. During the Soviet period, small circles of intimate friends were able to talk to each other without concern for the present party line around the kitchen table … Any denigration of private space was viewed with suspicion. Any attempt to make private questions political seemed exactly wrong. (Goldfarb 2006, 10) Goldfarb convincingly argues that such islands of freedom created a climate of unofficial opinion, which, in turn, resulted in founding Solidarity in 1980, which became the first independent organization in a communist country since the October Revolution. This aspect of social and political life which I call the “microphysics of emancipation” is largely overlooked by the pundits on politics. They tend to concentrate on “big” issues connected with the struggle for power. At the same time, people working on everyday life history and/or culture are usually interested in the influence of politics on everyday life, and not vice versa. This situation in social theory reinforces the popularity of the “political division” between politics and the political. While this division helps to highlight the conflictual nature of the public and private spheres, it also precludes understanding the potential inherent in dialogue and cooperation, without which society cannot exist.

Poland from totalitarianism to non-liberal democracy The fall of communism in 1989 was a natural experiment that offers an insight into relationships between everyday life and politics. Although addressed in historical and sociological studies (Verdery 1996), the period has not been thoroughly explored yet in ways which could promote a broader philosophical and political-scientific reflection. Some of its interesting examinations are largely speculative (Lefort 2007). The communist period can be viewed as a game played after the 1956 breakthrough between the communist regime and self-organizing society, a game in which the government sought to maintain the status quo, and citizens pursued gradually expanding freedom. The game was played out on the battlefield formed by everyday interactions and cultural events. The politics of small things, to use Goldfarb’s coinage (2006), resulted in a wave of strikes in 1980 and the founding of Solidarity. The martial law imposed in 1981 was another test the precarious texture of the everyday was put to. It was necessary to salvage everyday life and thereby safeguard the ideals of freedom and solidarity. The victory of Solidarity and the fall of communism initiated radical political and economic changes. It seemed that Poland was on the road to becoming a modern, democratic state

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and leaving behind the problems that had haunted the Polish memory for more than two hundred years ever since the loss of independence in the late eighteenth century. That lack of independence (with a short interwar interval in 1918–1939) made Polish culture and politics obsessively preoccupied with national issues. The year 1989 was supposed to be a turning point at which Poland was to abandon its idiom of national identity as the main signifier of all political discourses and actions. Twenty-five years after this transition, however, Poland seems to be at the crossroads again. Having acceded to power after its victory in the 2015 presidential and parliamentary elections, the Law and Order (PiS) party put forward and has ever since consistently implemented a program of systemic changes in state and social institutions. The program heads toward constructing an illiberal democracy, referred to by the party’s ideologues as a “republican democracy,” which means democracy based on the local traditions rather than on the universal rule of law. The PiS’s electoral victory was largely due to the party’s successful self-presentation as an anti-systemic force voicing the beliefs of and advocating for “common people,” disappointed with the previous political elites (Koczanowicz 2016). This winning electoral strategy was made possible by a confluence and amassment of economic, social, and, importantly, cultural factors. In a broader sense, it was possible because of the mistakes made in the transition period, when transformations were launched and effected under the banners of neoliberalism. The neoliberal policies produced large groups of the excluded, and fueled their disaffection with the post-1989 shape of society. The groups have become deeply amenable to national and religious ideologies, for these ideologies seemed the only alternative to the neoliberal perspective, endorsed also by the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (Ost 2005). In a narrower sense, the PiS success was due to social and economic policies of the Civic Platform, which governed from 2007 to 2015. These policies, as another iteration of neoliberalism in Poland, helped to avoid drastic effects of the global financial crisis, but that happened at the price of an abrupt “precarization” of workforce, in particular of the groups which were just entering the labor market. It has been argued that precarization is, in many senses, opposed to liberal democracy as it breeds utter individualism and wrecks trust-based social bonds (Näsström and Kalm 2014). The resulting social vacuum has been filled by the nationalist ideology, at the core of which lies an abstractly conceived notion of the nation constructed around a predominantly religious system of values. Having come to power, the PiS stands a real chance to effect a comprehensive social change aimed to build a system of political, cultural, and educational institutions that will implement the vision of a nation-state. This entails a radical reduction of political and social dialogue, which can ultimately lead to the domination of an authoritarian monologue that touts the necessity to rebuild national community corrupted by the long period of communist power, but also by the liberal transition. Therefore, after the presidential and parliamentary elections, there was a proliferation of voices saying that those developments would put an end to

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the imitative politics prevalent in Poland after the transition, the politics which relied on and adopted various solutions developed in the “old” West European democracies. Yet, the opposite is, as a matter of fact, the case as we have recently been observing a shift in Polish politics that closely mirrors the changes in Western democratic societies, which have been moving to the political right in the last decades. The most striking development among these changes is a crisis in party politics, which the prematurely deceased political scientist Peter Mair described in Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (2013). The book is preoccupied with a crisis of party-based democracy, which is, in fact, a crisis of parties as political institutions. Parties cease to serve as connectors between the government and society, for they are turning, essentially, into governmental institutions. Mair writes: The last decades of the 20th century witnessed a gradual but also inexorable withdrawal of the parties from the realm of civil society towards the realm of government and the state, and together, these two processes have led to a situation in which each party tends to become more distant from the voters that it purports to represent while at the same time tending to become more closely associated with alternative protagonists against which it purports to compete. (Mair 2013, 82) Parties, thus, work toward governing or preparing for governing rather than toward organizing their members for political action. Mair discusses the manifold consequences of this process, but I will address only those that seem most relevant to Polish politics. First, the engagement in party politics is steadily declining, which translates into two major sources of alienation: alienation of the voters and alienation of the elites. The former entails a diminishing interest in electoral participation and in other “classic” varieties of political action. The latter involves the migration of the party elites to “safe” places from which they can act, i.e., to governmental posts or positions in supra-national organizations: “while the exiting citizens are often headed towards more privatized or individualized worlds, the exiting political elites are retreating into an official world – a world of public offices,” as Mair describes the process (Mair 2013, 97). Second, the double process of withdrawal from politics – to the private world in the case of citizens and to the realm of governmental institutions in the case of the elites – produces a significant gap between the governed and the governing. The gap, in turn, intensifies distrust that no longer targets this or that political orientation, but concerns all the entire political class. As a result, movements that negate the entire political order are mushrooming in Europe. These movements usually organize around a single idea. In Western Europe, their slogans center usually on immigration and, to a degree, also on the European integration. These movements are extremely appealing because

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it is not difficult either to demonstrate that the elites, out of touch with everyday life, have no idea about the very real problems which rocketing immigration rates produce for the common citizens, or to show that these elites are the exclusive beneficiaries of the European integration. These trends in contemporary politics, as described by Mair, have surfaced in Poland as well. The Civic Platform, the party which made the liberal modernization its main purpose, took on the role of the ruling party, lock, stock, and barrel, in the belief that people would appreciate their competent handling of administration and economy (i.e., the running hot water policy, as the famed phrase went). Simply put, they thought people would applaud the fact that they were making the political institutions efficient. This approach, however, proved only partly successful. One of the reasons why this approach did not work was the widespread conviction that the spheres pivotal to the citizens’ quality of life were progressively collapsing and that the state was wrong to abdicate its obligations. Another reason for the failure was that the running hot water policy crashed in confrontation with the young generation, who fell victim to Poland’s growth policies. The growth of GDP was at the center of the Civic Platform’s electoral propaganda, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with parading the GDP growth, political experience of many countries – most notably in the United States – teaches that the language of economy does not sway the voters. The language of values, on the other hand, certainly influences voters. The Civic Platform’s campaign was not haphazard, but it resulted directly from the party’s political style – a mode of governance which grew ever more technocratic over the eight years the party remained in power. Contrary to what some public relations experts contend, the field of maneuver in electoral propaganda is circumscribed by the political realities, and the governing party must seriously reckon with these limits. It is simply impossible forget what has been done and trumpeted as a success for so many years. In the sphere of values, the Civic Platform suffered a sweeping defeat, partly because of its campaign style and partly because of an unfortunate coincidence that came to be known as “a tape-gate” or “a recordings scandal.” The scandal had a double impact: first, it strengthened the anyway intensifying anti-system sentiments and distrust of the entire political class; and, second, it helped channel these sentiments against one party, which became a synecdoche – a pars pro toto – of the political class as a whole. The “recordings scandal” confirmed the suspicions that politics in Poland after the transition was not genuinely democratic, but oligarchic. It was thus easy to connect the extravagancies of the Civic Platform elites to a comprehensive ensemble of discontents with the fact that the elites of the previous regime had failed to complete the political transfer and left the systemic changes unfinished. The discursive model described by David Ost in The Defeat of Solidarity (2005) was resumed, the difference being that this time the overriding issue was the credibility of democratic political procedures. If my observations are correct, voting in the election eventually came to

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have less to do with actually choosing the president and more do to with expressing judgment on the transition and the species of democracy formed during and by the transition process. The form of democracy was actually the pivot of the electoral campaign, in which single-member legislative districts and referenda were framed as the fundamental mechanisms of the people’s sovereignty. The touting of these issues dovetailed with the right wing’s value politics as they heralded not merely an institutional change, but a radical makeover of political and social life. Experts still dispute the real consequences of such rebuilding of political institutions, but I do not believe that this dispute actually provokes social emotions around political controversies. The advocates of single-member legislative districts and the champions of referenda see change as attainment of the democratic ideal. They want to have unmediated politics triumph over party divides. But ideals, being ideals, will never fully materialize, though this does not undermine their role especially in the face of disappointments with and a decline of the classic party-based model of political practice. In the Polish context, these ideals mean that it is possible to return to the concept of the nation as a unity of people who share the same values. Party divisions, which are part and parcel of liberal democracy, have come to be perceived as artificially brought from outside – a thing which does not fit Polish tradition of doing politics. Mair’s book lists five conditions that must be met if the party government model (i.e., the classic model of governance formed in the democratic system) is to prevail. 1 2 3 4 5

A party (parties) wins control of the executive through elections. Political leaders are chosen by and through parties. Parties offer voters clear alternatives. Public policy is determined by a party (parties) in the executive. The executive is held accountable for its actions through parties.

If one takes these parameters into consideration, then clearly the party government system is crumbling; and it is frequently challenged by other, alternative democratic models. The referendum model and the model presupposing accountability to the voters rather than to the parties are plausible alternative democratic options. Another alternative is embodied in new social movements which, deliberately, do not aim to evolve into parties, but instead focus in their actions on a few concrete issues. In Poland, the movement initiated and led by Paweł Kukiz, a former popular singer turned politician, is an excellent case in point. The Kukiz Movement integrates many various groups around a specific slogan of single-member legislative districts. Crucially, the movement has an expressly and intrinsically anti-party character, and repudiates the rhetoric of political parties. It is difficult to predict its future, but the very fact that such a group has come into being and had some success in the elections speaks volumes about the structural changes Polish politics is undergoing.

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The biggest winner in the last elections was, as mentioned above, the Law and Justice (PiS) party, a party founded by the Kaczyn´ski brothers which proposes a return to Polish traditional national and religious values The party pulled off an unprecedented stunt in framing itself as an anti-system movement and as continuing party politics at the same time. The promotion of the anti-system stance helped the party to considerably expand their electorate beyond its traditional supporters who are attached to national and religious values. The Law and Justice party managed to attract voters who had grown not only weary of the Civic Platform’s extravagancies and relative authoritarianism, but also disaffected with the party’s persistent adherence to the administrative style of political practice. In other words, at stake were not just particular political solutions, but the very choice of the political style to be implemented in Poland. Actually, even the option to change the democratic model as such became part of the political agenda. Which option will win depends on the voters. The outcome comes down not only to how they will decide to vote, but also to how many of them will decide to vote at all. This is the most unpredictable factor since the natural features of the democratic system intermingle here with transformations in electoral behaviors, which are themselves entangled in specific aspects of electoral participation in Poland. Contemporary democratic systems are seeing the decay of the classic party electorate, which is, in fact, one reason for the crisis haunting the party-based model of political practice. Instead, there emerges a hybrid voter – one who is interested in particular issues rather than in overarching ideological disputes. In Poland, this tendency appears in the context of a rather inconsistent and shifty party system, in which parties are relatively quick to emerge, dissolve, and re-brand. This volatility goes hand in hand with the fact that voters have mutually conflicting, interfering, and overlapping ways of identifying with parties. One votes for parties that promise to solve particular problems related to subsistence, but one votes also against one’s interest for the sake of values.

Coda: toward non-party non-consensual democracy? It is clear that a serious discussion has commenced on the form of democracy in the wake of Polish 2015 elections. It entails delving into an entire array of issues, such as assessment of the socio-political transformation, the role of values in politics, the relationship between the community and democratic institutions, etc. What conclusions this debate will yield is unpredictable because the debates lead us to a territory still uncharted, though intensely explored in many countries. Experts are divided on the key issue, that is, on whether the problems democracy is facing may be better remedied by more democracy or, for that matter, by less of it. In his book that I have been drawing on so far, Mair fears that the collapse of the party-based democracy model may entail the collapse of democracy altogether because other democratic systems are either marginal or ephemeral. What is more, as Fareed Zakaria

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argues in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2007), the development of democratic institutions in the areas which previously belonged to the executive or the judiciary leads to a tyranny of the majority impinging on the personal freedom of the individual. Zakaria insists that, in order to defend democracy, we definitely need less democracy. Similar anxieties surface in the debates that are unfolding in Poland, particularly as these debates bring about the still vivid memories of the years when the Law and Justice party acceded to power for the first time (2005–2007). Still, I do not think it wise to dismiss the opinions of the voters who vote for the Law and Justice party although they are not conservatives, in the hope of bringing about a comprehensive social and political change. This may sound like a logical tautology, but if one votes in favor of such change, one must certainly have valid reasons to do so, or at least feel acutely distressed with the existing democratic politics. Such sentiments definitely deserve more than a dismissive shrug of the shoulders for, even if these emotions are temporary, they are bound to resurface again with vengeance. John Dewey, a prominent American theorist of democracy, concurred with the opinion that a remedy for the problems of democracy was more democracy. The current debates on the form of the democratic system in Poland, as well as in many other democracies, have made us realize, with utmost clarity, that democracy is an extremely complex system in which various, often contradictory, tendencies interweave. We cannot delude ourselves that eventually, like in some ideal party system, the game that we play will lead to a consensus. In my book Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community (Koczanowicz 2015), I tried to show that a non-consensual democracy model is viable if the major political agents are prepared to understand the motivations and beliefs of their adversaries. Even though this understanding does not pave a path to consensus, it promotes changes in the trajectory of political struggles. The strength and beauty of democracy lie in that it produces institutional and psychological conditions that foster such an understanding. Democracy’s limitation, in turn, lies in the fact that no one can be forced to actually take advantage of these conditions that promote the understanding of the needs and hopes of different people.

References Arendt, Hannah, “Public Rights and Private Interests,” in Small Comforts for Hard Times: Humanists on Public Policy, ed. Florian Stuber (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 90–123. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Speech Genre & Other Late Essays, trans. V.W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas, 1994). Boltanski, Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, trans. Gregory Elliot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1990).

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de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works: Volume 2 1925–1927, ed. Jo Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 235–372. Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. David McLelland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Foucault, Michel, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 3, ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 1–89. Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Goldfarb, Jeffrey, The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Heller, Agnes, Everyday Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Koczanowicz, Leszek, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008). Koczanowicz, Leszek, Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Koczanowicz, Leszek, “The Polish Case: Community and Democracy under the PiS,” New Left Review, 102 (2016): 77–96. Konrad, Gyorgi, Antipolitics, trans. Richard E. Allen (New York: Harcourt, 1984). Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2014). Lefort, Claude, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Lefort, Claude, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, trans. Julian Bourg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Mair, Peter, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013). Marchart, Oliver, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Marx, Karl, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1959). Mead, George, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). Michnik, Adam, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Mouffe, Chantal, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005). Näsström, Sara and Sara Kalm, “A Democratic Critique of Precarity,” Global Discourse, 5, no. 4(2014): 556–573. Ost, David, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Ricoeur, Paul. “The Political Paradox,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Sluga, Hans, Politics and the Search for the Common Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Zakaria, Fareed, The Future of Freedom. Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007).

2

The idea of tolerance and social dialogue in the democratic state Remarks on Jacques Derrida’s and Jürgen Habermas’s views on the idea of tolerance in the modern liberal-democratic state Paweł Dybel

One In modern political philosophy tolerance is often associated with the tradition of liberal thought in which it originates. Since tolerance implies an attitude of openness toward various forms of otherness, it is treated as a basic element of dialogical inter-human relationships in democratic societies. Critiques of tolerance often point to the conceptual limits of tolerance and to the problematic ways in which it is put to use in modern democratic states. Not surprisingly, the subject of tolerance has inspired some fierce debates, a particularly noteworthy example of which appears in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2013), edited by Giovanna Borradori. The book consists of interviews with Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, in which the thinkers respond to questions about pressing political issues of the day. One of the queries concerns the idea of tolerance; specifically, both Derrida and Habermas are asked to express their opinion on the possible origins of the concept and, perhaps more pertinently, to reflect on how tolerance functions in the present day. Expectedly, Derrida and Habermas offer entirely different and, at times, contradictory answers to these questions.

Two According to Derrida, tolerance as a political practice in democratic societies is highly problematic, not least because of what he describes as the hypocrisies and internal contradictions inherent to such tolerance. Thus, Derrida argues that such tolerance cannot actually counterbalance the growing phenomena of religious fundamentalism in the modern world. As Derrida explains, international acts of intellectual and political resistance and protests are much more effective in this regard. Derrida’s skepticism regarding the concept of tolerance originates in a European tradition according to which tolerance is a form of charity, and in particular it is a Christian charity, even if the term has been and continues to be appropriated by non-Christians, specifically Jews and Muslims. According to this tradition,

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Tolerance is always on the side of the “reason of the strongest”, where “might is right”; it is a supplementary mark of sovereignty, the good face of sovereignty, which says to the other from its elevated position, I am letting you be, you are insufferable, I am leaving you a place in my home, but do not forget that this is my home. (Cited in Borradori 2013, 127) This understanding of tolerance implies an asymmetrical “paternalistic” relationship between its subject (the one who tolerates) and its object (the one who is tolerated). Consequently, what underlies this idea is not the relation of dialogical partnership and real openness toward the Other (and different forms of cultural otherness) but in fact the relation of dominance and power. Such a paternalistic understanding of tolerance was first made manifest in the Edict of Nantes issued by King Henry IV in 1598. The edict introduced freedom of religion and equality for Protestants, bringing to an end a difficult period of religious wars in France. Significantly, the edict was issued by the King of France at a time when the Catholic faction had obtained such a dominant position in the country, that Protestants were no longer able to threaten it. Therefore: The word “tolerance” is first of all marked by a religious war between Christians, or between Christians and non-Christians. Tolerance is a Christian virtue, or for that matter a Catholic virtue. The Christian must tolerate the non-Christian, but, even more so, the Catholic must let the Protestant be. (Cited in Borradori 2013, 126) Because claims of a religious nature are often behind contemporary acts of terrorism, the word tolerance is used as a way of emphasizing a commitment to peaceful coexistence. This is of course an understandable reaction and is not altogether without merit. However, the fact remains that tolerance and dialogue have become catchphrases for politicians and communal leaders who represent the majority population in a democratic state. As Derrida goes onto demonstrate, tolerance is thus often meted out by those in power to those who form a minority, but only when the latter are prepared to embrace the terms set forth by the hegemony. This idea of tolerance is thus fundamentally conditional as it depends on a certain set of power relations, and more specifically is generally preached by those in positions of power who then exert pressure on the minority group to accept the conditions laid out by the majority population as payment-in-kind for granting them certain rights. Such a model of tolerance is intrinsically exclusive, and its exclusiveness is not limited to the power dynamics just described, but is manifest also in the fact that tolerance is not extended to those who refuse the terms and conditions set forth by those in power. Thus it turns out that the practice of tolerance, both historically and in the present day, is in sharp contradiction to the democratic ideas of social equality

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and justice. Indeed, the most often practiced kind of tolerance relies not on relations of partnership between different groups but, rather, on a power dynamic that involves dominance and submission. In other words, these are not truly dialogical relations in which all partners are treated as equal autonomous subjects. Instead, the dissenting or minority groups are turned into objects through which the majority exerts its power. Such a dynamic often involves violence, marginalization and even exclusion. Indeed, as Derrida makes clear, the Western practice of tolerance has more in common with the Christian act of charity and grace in which those on the giving end are also those who set up and enforce the conditions according to which the other may be tolerated, and which, when not met, results in the exclusion of the other. Instead of tolerance, Derrida proposes that we adopt a different conception of openness, that of hospitality. As Derrida goes onto explain, hospitality, as conceived in the European intellectual tradition, entails a willingness to accommodate the radically different other under one’s own roof, and to accept his or her otherness. But pure or unconditional hospitality does not consist in such an invitation (“I invite you, I welcome you into my home, on the condition that you adapt to the laws and norms of my territory, according to my language, tradition, memory and so on”). Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other. I would call this a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation. The visit might actually be very dangerous, and we must not ignore this fact, but would a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other, be true hospitality? (Borradori 2013, 128–129) Interestingly, Derrida simultaneously maintains that it is impossible to realize this sort of pure unconditional hospitality in the social practice. It would of course be difficult to institute such a law in a democratic society, and besides it would be foolish to throw all caution to the wind in the effort to practice hospitality. However, we can only arrive at a viable notion of hospitality by considering what radical hospitality might look like: We would not even have the idea of love or of “living together” (vivre ensemble) with the other in a way that is not a part of some totality or “ensemble”. Unconditional hospitality, which is neither juridical nor political, is nonetheless the condition of the political and the juridical. For these very reasons, I am not even sure whether it is ethical, insofar as it does not even depend on a decision. But what is “ethics” without hospitality? (Borradori 2013, 129)

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Through this juxtaposition of unconditional hospitality against what he calls conditional, exclusionary model of tolerance, Derrida aims to reveal a condition of possibility of this model (in a Kantian sense) that has been underappreciated and thus unrealized for many centuries. While Derrida’s argument appears convincing, his notion of unconditional hospitality, as that which is pre-ontological and virtual and thus opposed to the ontic, concrete condition, is inherently flawed. Derrida fails to explain why unconditional hospitality is an indispensable condition of possibility of tolerance. In other words, what does it really mean that unconditional hospitability is the condition of possibility of the conditional model of tolerance, if – as Derrida maintains – it is as such unrealizable in social practice? In what sense does unconditional hospitality influence the conditional character of tolerance as it was formulated in the European tradition of Enlightenment? Moreover, it is not entirely clear what distinguishes conditional hospitality from conditional tolerance of which Derrida was so highly critical. In both cases, the acceptance of the other is contingent on a set of norms instituted and enforced by the one inviting someone as a guest or tolerating him/her as a citizen of the same democratic state in which they both are living. Indeed, the two attitudes are identical. If Derrida believes that conditional hospitality is the only kind of acceptance that is likely to be realized in contemporary society, why does he go to such great lengths to undermine the concept of tolerance? Indeed, wouldn’t his overall argument not be better served through a critique that opposes conditional tolerance with unconditional tolerance? To do so, of course, would be to acknowledge that unconditional tolerance, much like unconditional hospitality, is purely theoretical, that it is something the application of which in the real world is likely to have disastrous consequences. Derrida’s urging to replace tolerance with hospitality thus appears highly problematic, and comes across as artificial and rather inconsequential word-play. Furthermore, Derrida’s insistence that tolerance is a Christian concept is unconvincing. According to the French philosopher, the first significant testimony of this was the Edict of Nantes which was in fact conceived as an act of charity offered by the victorious Catholics to the defeated Protestants. But this example seems arbitrary rather than paradigmatic. Indeed, Derrida tends to over-emphasize the significance of this one historical event, while altogether eliding the concept of tolerance that was far more ubiquitous to European intellectual and philosophical tradition. This understanding has its origins in the Middle Ages. At the Council in Konstanz (1414–1418) Paweł Włodkowicz, the lawyer who represented the standpoint of the Polish Kingdom in the dispute with the Teutonic Order, defended the maxim fides ex necessitate esse non debet (the faith cannot originate from coercion). In his writings Włodkowicz insists that the followers of non-Christian religions must not be discriminated against, nor forced to change. In his remarks on war and tolerance, he wrote: If the pagans would like to live amongst Christians, one should not cause nuisance on their persons and their possessions, but tolerate them … Yet

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In the European philosophical tradition it was first of all Nicolas of Cusa (1401– 1464) who introduced a concept of tolerance that represented a comprehensive, Christian-humanist view. He defended the idea of religious tolerance and argued that all beliefs are just different manifestations of one true religion (Nicholas of Cusa 1990). This idea was absorbed into Christian thought and paved the way for an approach that encourages dialogue and efforts toward finding a common ground between people of different religious persuasions. Later on, during the wars of religion in Europe, Sebastian Castellio criticized the intolerance of both Catholic and Calvinist practices. Another significant early argument for tolerance was put forward by the French lawyer Jean Bodin (1530– 1596), who drew on the concept of a stable monarchic state. This marked one of the first attempts to develop an argument for tolerance that was not based on religion. During the Enlightenment, the most influential argument for tolerance was the one developed by John Locke. In his well-known essay “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689) Locke argues that persuasion and reason, rather than force, should be used when trying to gain converts (Locke 1991). Thus we see that a tolerance in the European tradition has not always followed the paternal model evinced by the Edict of Nantes.

Three Derrida fails to take into account yet another important moment in the evolution of European conceptions of tolerance, one that preceded the Edict of Nantes by a quarter of a century. At that time, the Polish nobles drew up a legal document called Konfederacja Warszawska (Warsaw Confederation) that imposed on the King and other state authorities the obligation to treat the different churches and their members equally (Korolko and Tazbir 1980). The concept of tolerance put forward in this document had nothing to do with the acts of charity or grace from the side of the dominant religious or ethnic social group. Rather, it had the status of law, according to which all citizens of the state were required to tolerate the “other” and his/her religious beliefs and customs. Similarly problematic is Derrida’s reduction of tolerance to a Christian virtue, which implies that it has its roots in the religious tradition of Christianity. To see how one-sided this idea is it is enough to recall that in his “A Letter Concerning Toleration” Locke posits that the idea of tolerance can only be implemented in social practice if church and state are strictly separated. What is behind this proposal is the conviction that tolerance is only possible given the guarantee of the autonomy of the secular social sphere. This is so because it is the particular, absolutist nature of religious beliefs that poses a major obstacle to tolerance between and among members of different religious groups.

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The origin of tolerance as a concept is closely linked to the birth of modern democratic societies with their insistence on a fundamental separation between church and state, rooted in the liberal notion that a democratic state must be free of any religious bias and should be ideologically neutral. This conviction has nothing to do with Kantian thought, in which the secularization of Christianity is ultimately aims to reveal the underlying essence of the Christian faith. Instead, it is rationality and reason that are seen as neutral, and as instrumental in the formulation of secular law. Ironically, Derrida’s notion of unconditional hospitality draws heavily on the Christian tradition. Myriad examples of such hospitality are described in the New Testament (e.g., the scene of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary) and in the later Christian mystical tradition. This type of hospitality is predicated on unconditional openness toward the radically different Other, be it God, someone speaking or acting on God’s behalf, or other manifestations of the sacred. Even Kant’s secular conception of hospitality draws on this religious tradition. While one can understand Derrida’s interest in the Christian conception of hospitality, it remains unclear whether this hospitality is in any way related to the democratic ideals of social equality and justice. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the Christian model could be implemented as a political practice, since it is at odds with the fundamental exigencies of the democratic system, according to which tolerance is extended. To tolerate the other means to let him have views different from ours and follow prescriptions of another religion, other customs, etc., rather than being unconditionally hospitable toward him/her. The other in the democratic state is first of all a citizen like us, and not a guest whom we have to invite to our home. Consequently, the idea of tolerance as formulated in the tradition of European liberalism implies an entirely different attitude to the others than Derrida’s demand of unconditional hospitality. The crucial point is that this demand excludes any dialogical relation with the other, who has to be accepted in the different aspects of his otherness. The other who is met and accepted in this way is not the one to whom we can talk and with whom we can discuss various issues. It is the other whom we can only look at, fascinated by the very fact of his/her otherness. In other words, it is the other who seduces us to submerge in the miracle of his/her radical otherness. In his insistent focus on the Edict of Nantes (i.e., on the ontic dimension of hospitality) Derrida elides altogether the ways in which hospitality is tied to the rise of modern democracies and European rationalism. Derrida thus fails to take into account philosophical origins of hospitality, instead directing his critique against its ontic manifestations, which he sees as a fundamental distortion of the concept. Derrida thus misunderstands the very essence of the European idea of tolerance.

Four Habermas is highly critical of Derrida’s approach to the European idea of tolerance. According to Habermas, the example of the Edict of Nantes, which

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Derrida understands as a paternalistic application of this idea in political and social practice, is less a result of a particular religious tradition or an ethos than it is reflective of a system of monarchy in which one individual was endowed the power to decide how and to whom to extend the state’s tolerance, and what conditions must be met in order for such tolerance to be granted. This paternalistic model of tolerance is, of course, at odds with the notion of equality that serves as the foundation of democratic society: Within a democratic community whose citizens reciprocally grant one another equal rights, no room is left for any authority allowed to one-sidedly determine the boundaries of what is to be tolerated. On the basis of the citizen’s equal rights and reciprocal respect for each other, nobody possesses the privilege of setting the boundaries of tolerance from the viewpoint of their own preferences and value-orientations. Certainly, to tolerate other people’s beliefs without accepting their truth, and to tolerate other ways of life without appreciating their intrinsic value as we do with regard to our own, requires a common standard. In the case of a democratic community, this common value base is found in the principle of the constitution. (Borradori 2013, 41) In contrast to the paternalistic relations that emerge from a monarchical model of state power in which the individual King is invested with unlimited power and impersonates the Law, the democratic model according to which all citizens are equal before the Law opens up the possibility for radical acceptance of the other. The modern democratic state tolerates even the resistance of those dissidents who: After exhausting all legal avenues, nonetheless oppose legitimately reached decisions. It only imposes the condition that this rule-breaking resistance be plausibly justified in the spirit and wording of the constitution and conducted by symbolic means that lend the fight the character of a nonviolent appeal to the majority to once again reflect on their decisions. (Borradori 2013, 41–42) This situation of the permanent reflexive overcoming in the modern democratic state of the limits of tolerance is the result of the universalist nature of such state’s legal order: In the strict sense, “universalism” amounts to the egalitarian individualism of a morality that demands mutual recognition, in the sense of equal respect and reciprocal consideration for everybody. Membership in this inclusive moral community, which is therefore open to all, promises not only solidarity, and a nondiscriminating inclusion, but at the same time equal rights for the protection of everybody’s individuality and otherness. (Borradori 2013, 42)

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Unlike Derrida, Habermas believes that tolerance is inextricably bound up with the demand for mutual recognition that is a foundational principle of the democratic social order. Of course, the practice of tolerance is not always aligned with the concept’s underlying principles, and sometimes stands in outright opposition to the idea of tolerance. Such distortions occur when, for example, a powerful social group chooses to take advantage of its position of privilege to further secure its influence and importance Habermas is no doubt right in pointing out that the paternalistic model of tolerance exemplified in the Edict of Nantes would be untenable in the modern democratic state. For the central point and fundation of this system is not one person – the King – or a specific privileged social group but rather all citizens of the democratic state who are guaranteed equal rights. But is the Habermasian collective subject as author of the laws of the democratic state in accordance with the universal nature of law not a kind of theoretical fiction? Indeed, if we take a closer look at the legal systems at work in the democratic state, we find various laws that are at odds, both in theory and in practice, with the principles of equality and reciprocity. It is not simply that those instituting the law are motivated primarily by a desire to secure their own interests. Rather, what is very often at stake are values of a particular cultural tradition that influence the legal system in a given democratic state. Perhaps the best example of this is the controversial and fiercely debated French ban on the wearing of burkas in public places. On the one hand, the state contends that it introduced the ban in order to ensure equality, which, according to the western mindset, is undermined by the burka. On the other hand, orthodox Muslims maintain that the burka is a religious custom and that the ban is thus a violation of their religious freedom, and evidence of religious discrimination by the state. The problem, of course, is that there is truth to each side, here, but these truths are mutually exclusive. As a result, laws supposedly introduced to protect social equality are seen as discriminatory and unjust, and embodying state-sanctioned intolerance. This is not to undermine Habermas’s argument, but only to point to its limitations. Thus, Habermas is right to assert that social equality and justice are the guiding principles of the legal system in the modern democratic state, guaranteeing social tolerance and partnership between members of different social groups. Yet this does not mean – as he seems to believe it does – that this system is universally valid and tenable. Indeed, the western democratic state and the system of law associated with it arose from a particular historical context and its usefulness is limited to this very context. Similarly, the European conception of tolerance is a product of a particular time and place and cannot be easily transposed onto other cultures. Habermas is right to criticize Derrida’s notion of tolerance as a manifestation of power dynamics more often associated with the monarchic state, rather than the egalitarian model more closely linked to the rise of the modern democratic state. And yet, when the latter model is implemented and enforced in the current democratic state, without any regard for the cultural diversity of the

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population, what emerges is a conditional tolerance, where the citizen must choose either to accept the western notion of equality (by accepting the ban on burkas, for example) or to be held in contempt of the law. Part of the problem here is that the interplay between religious and social life in non-western traditions is often quite different from its western counterpart. A major challenge for the modern democratic state is determining how best to ensure social equality while making sure that the religious rights of religious groups or individuals are not violated or otherwise undermined. There is no easy solution here, since oftentimes religious customs tend to be fundamentally at odds with western values. Habermas maintains that the egalitarian model of tolerance draws on rational, universal values that constitute the foundation of the democratic state in which they function as the expression of the collective will of the citizens of the state. It is upon these very values that the legal system of the state is formed. According to this line of reasoning, the democratic state is right to institute laws aimed at protecting these values. However, the problem remains that the western value system was forged in and by a particular historical context. Thus, while Habermas is correct in asserting that the democratic state must act in accordance with these values, since these are what constitute the legal order of the democratic state, his conviction that such values are universal because they are rational must be questioned.

Five The question that arises from this discussion is: does the democratic state have the right to expect that all its citizens to comply with legal regulations based on the egalitarian model of tolerance? Or, must the democratic state tolerate customs and religious values that are at odds with the very assumptions on which this model relies? Certainly, the future of the democratic order is not threatened when individual Muslim women wear burkas. What is more, many of these women argue that they are not forced to wear them by men or families but rather that they choose to follow a custom they find meaningful. While individuals are free to criticize this custom, official tolerance of the custom and those who choose to abide by it does not, in fact, undermine the democratic system or the western way of life. Still, the burka does strike the western mindset as inherently discriminatory, and of course the fact remains that some Muslim women are forced to wear the burka against their own free will. This is the dilemma that cannot be easily solved. A different problem arises when the other is not willing to tolerate the western way of life, dress, customs, etc. What is more, sometimes the other tries to impose his or her own customs on us (the other’s other). Such was the case when members of the so-called Sharia police organized spontaneously in some German cities by radical Muslims who used threats against the owners of alcohol-selling restaurants and shop. This poses a genuine threat to the democratic order. Not only is such behavior fundamentally intolerant, but it also precludes conversation about tolerance and intolerance. For it a priori

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rules out any discussion on the right of private owners of restaurants and shops to sell alcohol. The only argument that these young radical Muslims put forward is a religious one: Islam forbids to do it. Therefore, the only means to prevent selling alcohol is, according to them, to use threats against private restaurant owners or resort to other forms of repression. But let us imagine a situation in which tolerance is really entirely reciprocal, in which people of different ideological persuasions, religions, national or ethnic backgrounds – people who follow different customs and ways of life – are able to enter into dialogue as equal partners and accept their mutual differences. According to Habermas, in such circumstances, the responsibility of the democratic state is to create legal and institutional frameworks that help these different individuals and groups to treat each other with openness and equality and to engage in mutual dialogue. In such dialogue, rational arguments can be advanced to convince the interlocutors and, consequently, an agreement can be reached on disputed and controversial issues. Yet, this vision of the democratic state in which all social tensions and conflicts are solved in the dialogue among its members with each other that goes on smoothly within the institutional framework guaranteed by this state is entirely illusory since reality on the ground often proves to be different. Many controversies and conflicts between religious, ethnic or national groups have their roots in the different cultural traditions whose main ideas and values sometimes contradict each other. Consequently, these controversies cannot be resolved by way of rational argumentation. One of them, mentioned above, is the controversy about Muslim women wearing burkas that has arisen in France and Germany in recent years. But there are also controversies and conflicts that arise around the tendencies of some ethnic groups in Spain, Italy, France or the United Kingdom to separate from the respective democratic states and establish their own entirely new state: Basque, Catalonian, Corsican, Scottish, etc. In these cases, it is impossible to achieve any rational consensus between the groups in conflict since what is at stake here are the different and mutually exclusive ideas sometimes entwined with economic interests. Another example is the situation of a Polish minority in Germany that, unlike the Germans in Poland, has no right to elect their own candidates to the local parliaments and to the Bundestag. The German administration argues that around two million people of Polish origin living in Germany are mainly immigrants (although many of them settled in Germany decades ago) and not a historical minority living in Germany through hundreds of years (at the same time, however, Turks have been enfranchised in Germany even though they are evidently not a historical minority dating back to centuries ago). Yet, what is behind this rational argument is the long historical tradition of enforced Germanization of Poles by the German state that commenced in the nineteenth century. Therefore, for the Poles living in Germany such policy is associated with the traditional politics of Germanization of Poles, launched by Bismarck and picked up by the German governments in the Second and Third Reich until World War II.

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These examples demonstrate that the democratic state is often confronted with conflictual situations that cannot be resolved in a debate in which all sides use rational arguments and, in the end, are able to agree on contentious issues. Even if such an agreement could indeed be reached, the state authorities may not be prepared to pursue it for fear of disaffecting their traditional voters or since their attitudes to national or ethnic minorities are conditioned by long-established ideas and habits. Yet, in most cases the conflicts that arise in the democratic state between different groups of its citizens cannot be solved in discussions based on rational arguments because the standpoints of these groups are often informed by their vital and mutually exclusive interest: economic, national, religious, cultural, etc. In such cases, the authorities of democratic states are forced to make decisions that respect only the standpoint of one side, while turning down that of the other. Sometimes justified and sometimes questionable, these decisions always restrict the equal rights of groups of citizens whose claims have been put in question. These cases reveal that in many cases it is practically impossible to implement in the democratic state the egalitarian model of tolerance, as put forth by Habermas. The main reason is that the modern liberal idea of tolerance has its roots in some specific traits of European history, including: separation of the state from the church, reaction to the religious wars that devastated many European countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, etc. In addition, the idea of tolerance belongs to the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment together with its modern followers, such as the philosophical concepts of human being and human rights, concepts of freedom, fight for the equal rights of women, etc. In other words, the European idea of tolerance is the product of European culture and, therefore, it is contingent. Consequently, tolerance cannot be often accepted in all its aspects by the members of social groups that have been brought up in other cultural traditions. Habermas, who strongly believes that this idea of tolerance is essentially universal and that its rigorous application in the social sphere would in the end guarantee the equal rights for all citizens, ignores the historical genealogy and the contingent character of this idea. His point of view does not take into account the complex character and the real weight of many differences between social groups that stem from different cultural traditions and cannot be the object of dispute in which presumably rational arguments are used. However, this does not mean that the idea of tolerance cannot function as an essential point of reference and as a regulator of inter-human relationships in the democratic state. For, instead of treating tolerance as an ideal universal pattern that should be rigorously and holistically applied in the democratic state, we can regard it as a sort of Kantian regulative idea. That is to say, on the one hand tolerance is seen as an abstract concept that does not exist in its ideal form and represents only a sort of theoretical fiction. On the other hand, however, it is treated as an indispensable point of reference in the legal ordering of inter-human relations in the democratic state. Put differently, while it is impossible to enforce the idea of tolerance in its ideal form, it ought

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nevertheless to be maintained, if only as a signpost giving the direction to legal stipulations of rights and obligations citizens of a democratic state have in their mutual dealings. The application of all possible implications of the idea of tolerance in the social sphere would then be accompanied by the consciousness of its limits rooted in its genealogy in the tradition of European culture. Paradoxically, it would then be tolerance of the most comprehensive and inclusive kind, whose application took into account the cultural differences between various social groups living in the democratic state, tolerance that would not differentiate on the basis of religious affiliation, customs, political views, etc. Tolerance, thus, should be seen not as a rigid universal norm on the basis of which strict prescriptions and rules of inter-human relationships are formulated, since this would lead to a rationalist fundamentalism that ignored cultural differences between the citizens of the democratic state. Rather than taking a hard-line approach to tolerance as a universal truth, what is required is tolerance of the broadest scope, one that respectfully takes into account diverse worldviews and the myriad historical and cultural contexts out of which they arose. This tolerance has its natural limits since not all political views, religious beliefs, customs, ways of behavior, etc. which stem from non-European cultural traditions could be accepted in the modern democratic state (e.g., the treatment of women, the understanding of relationship between church and state, the place of religious beliefs and customs in the social sphere, etc.). What is more, there are also some political ideas and views, such as racism, fascism, nationalism, authoritarianism, etc. that are the product of European cultural traditions that pose a threat to the democratic order. The idea of tolerance in the democratic state is then endangered not only from outside but also from inside. However, there are, at the same time, many views, religious beliefs, customs, etc. that have their roots in different cultures and do not seem to be rational in a European sense, yet do not pose any threat to democratic order. Therefore, they could be without any restrictions accepted in Europe. To recognize this and to draw a clear demarcating line between those views, customs, beliefs, etc. that could be tolerated by the democratic state and those that could not is an unending task of Europe’s authorities. Faced with the permanent transformation of the political context, we should repeatedly revise and re-engage with this task. Due to the fact that the idea of tolerance does not represent universal truth but is historically contingent, the democratic state does not have any objective criterion that would allow drawing this demarcating line once and forever. Yet, we cannot forget that we can rely not only on legal regulations that make the idea of tolerance effective in the social sphere but first of all on the readiness of the citizens of the democratic state to uphold it in their relationships with others. And this preparedness is also largely a result of their cultures and traditions. Summary In the chapter, I engage in discussion with Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas around the subject of tolerance in modern democratic society. I

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focus on comments the two thinkers made in interviews with Giovanna Borradori. Responding to Derrida’s statements, I challenge his assertion that in the European tradition tolerance assumed the “paternalistic” form because it was always those in power who were in the position to implement tolerance as a value and to make it law. I argue that the varied tradition of European thought on tolerance does not fit into this scheme and is based on a recognition of different forms of religious otherness. As I explain, Habermas is right to criticize Derrida’s understanding of the idea of tolerance for its one-sidedness. At the same time, the concept of tolerance that Habermas proposes is problematic since it treats tolerance as a universal truth and does not take into account the specific culture and history out of which it emerged, that is, the tradition of European rationalism. Habermas fails to recognize the degree to which present-day conflicts are rooted in cultural differences that go back many centuries. What I propose is that tolerance must be understood as a regulative idea, in the Kantian sense, rather than as a rigid norm or universal truth. Only through acknowledgment of these differences can we approximate the ideals of unconditional tolerance and help to make the world a more equitable place.

References Borradori, Giovanna, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). Korolko, Marian and Tazbir, Janusz, eds. Konfederacja warszawska 1573 roku. Wielka karta polskiej tolerancji [Warsovian Confederation 1573: A Great Charter of Polish Tolerance] (Warszawa: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1980). Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. J. Hortan and S. Mendus (New York: Routledge, 1991). Nicholas of Cusa, De pace fidei and Cribratio Allcorani, trans. John Hopkins (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1990). Włodkowicz, Paweł, Pisma wybrane Pawła Włodkowica [Selected Writings of Paweł Włodkowicz], ed. L. Ehrlich, Vol. 1 (Warszawa: Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1968).

3

Exception, metaphor, and political action Arendt contra Schmitt Ewa Płonowska Ziarek

As the resurgence and the victory of the right-wing nationalist and populist movements in the West shows – from Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States, the Brexit victory in the United Kingdom, to the victories of the rightwing populist parties in Europe – the strengthening of national sovereignty continues to be a powerful political weapon for mobilizing the masses toward nondemocratic ends. America first, make Britain great again, restore Polish sovereignty – all these slogans appeal to national sovereignty as the symbolic compensation for economic instability and political alienation, on the one hand; and on the other, as a justification for exclusion of refugees, immigrants, Muslims, racialized, and sexualized others. National sovereignty is also a symbolic weapon against the threat to the nation state presented by transnational political and economic formations such as the European Union or the global flows of capital, labor, and bodies. This mobilization of nationalist sovereignty goes hand in hand with racism, anti-immigrant phobia, and sexuality. The appeal to national sovereignty above the law at the very moment when the nation state is in crisis and the concomitant violent divisions of us versus them, reinforced by imaginary or real walls – as in Donald Trump’s project to build a Great Wall on the US/Mexico border more imposing than the Great Wall of China – represents a real danger to democracy, dialogue, and hospitality. Although often contested theoretically, sovereignty and its implicit or explicit theological underpinnings, visible for example in anti-Muslim racism, remains a powerful political weapon undermining democratic dialogue. The main question I want to examine in this chapter is how we can rethink democratic politics and pluralist, political engagements apart from the notion of sovereignty and its theological logic. To sketch a preliminary answer, I propose to reinterpret the role of exception in Carl Schmitt’s political theology in light of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of the transformative novelty of political action, which depends upon democratic plurality. What is at stake here is not a conflation of Schmittian exception and Arendt’s novelty, as Sheyla Benhabib worries, but rather, an analysis of Arendt’s critique of, and her alternatives to, Schmitt’s replacement of constituting revolutionary power with personalist sovereign decision. Why Schmitt, we may ask? Although Arendt herself hardly ever discusses Schmitt directly,1 a number of Arendt

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scholars see her work as an implicit critique of Schmitt. The relevance of Schmitt for my chapter and for contemporary discussions of democracy lies in his diagnosis of two polar tendencies which still threaten modern democratic politics: the subordination of the political to technocratic efficiency and economic liberalism, on the one hand; and the appeal to the theological underpinnings of political concepts and practices, in order to regain political autonomy from economics, on the other. Schmitt of course does not view this appeal to theology as a danger but rather as a salvation of politics. In order to reclaim the dignity of the political, Schmitt underscores the theological structure of the Western secular concept of sovereignty in his 1922 Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Schmitt does not deny the process of secularization and the separation between the state and religion, but argues that theology continues its existence in modern politics by shaping the conceptual apparatus of the state, sovereignty, political decision, and even the possibility of change. As he puts it, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 1985, 36). What is striking in this quote is the emphasis upon “all concepts,” even though Schmitt himself focuses primarily upon the theological underpinnings of sovereignty and authority. He calls this conceptual dependence of secular sovereignty and political concepts upon the structure of theological thought “political theology”. Although Arendt has been regarded as a staunch secularist opposed to Schmitt’s theological concept of personal sovereignty, as Agamben rightly points out (Agamben 1998, 41), she too borrows certain political concepts from Jewish and Christian theologies. Most notably, she uses St. Augustine’s account of the creation in terms of the new beginning (Arendt 1958, 177), the Abrahamic model of political promise (243–244), and the biblical notion of forgiveness (236–243) as a remedy for the unpredictability of action. She is particularly interested in St. Augustine’s claim that the reason for the creation of the human is the possibility of the new beginning, which does not exist from the perspective of eternity. Consequently, the juxtaposition of Arendt and Schmitt does not simply oppose secularism to political theology, as it has been usually argued, but raises three crucial problems:2 First, what is the role of analogy and figurative language not only in the concept of sovereignty but also in democratic politics? Second, what are the different meanings of exception in political life? And third, can exception be separated from sovereign decision and reinterpreted instead as the unpredictable novelty of political action; as the possibility of a new beginning? As these questions suggest, what is at stake in my chapter is not a conflation of the Schmittian exception and Arendt’s new beginning (Benhabib 2010, 55–62, 60–61), but rather an analysis of the political consequences of Arendt’s implicit critique of Schmitt’s replacement of constituting revolutionary power by the sovereign decision – a decision legitimated by the persistent use of analogy between political and theological concepts. The debate about the role of exception is crucial not only for Arendt’s theory of action but to all non-foundational politics of difference and democracy.

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What is still important in Schmitt’s theory of exception is not its exclusive association with the sovereign decision, but rather its critical potential, which can be mobilized against the bureaucracy and technical efficiency of bourgeois liberalism, on the one hand, and against historical/natural causality, on the other. Schmitt claims that modernity, whether it is the rationalism of the Enlightenment, technical efficiency liberalism, impersonal normative systems, or the organic unity of the people proposed by Rousseau as the basis of democracy, “rejected the exception in every form” (Schmitt 1985, 37). For Schmitt as for Arendt, the technical efficiency of bourgeois liberalism and historical/natural causality culminate in the politics of identity, systematicity, and the elimination of conflict and unpredictability: as Schmitt puts it, political thought in the nineteenth century was governed by the concept of causality (Schmitt 1985, 42–43) and calculability (Schmitt 1985, 28). According to Schmitt, the transposition of natural or historical causality into the domain of politics eliminates the political itself since it reduces politics either to bureaucratic efficiency or to organic unity of the collective will.3 For him, the constituting power of the people is precisely based on the fiction of such organic unity. Thus, Schmitt claims, in Western modernity politics is reduced either to “organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks” (Schmitt 1985, 65) or to the opposite idea “that the right emerges by itself if the immanence of life is not disturbed” by technocratic government (Schmitt 1985, 66). The continuing subordination of thinking at Western universities to quantifiable academic analytics, the ongoing explanation of politics in terms of data and statistics, the subordination of the political to economic ends of neoliberalism (as we see in Trump’s presidential campaign proposing to run the country on the model of business) makes Schmitt’s diagnosis of the dangers of modernity – although of course not his solutions – relevant to a host of leftist critics. Although Schmitt is a conservative thinker who later became a Nazi sympathizer, his analysis of the destruction of politics by technological efficiency, causality, “mathematical” scientific reason (Schmitt 1985, 42), and organic unity can be seen as a precursor of the leftist critics of Western modernity, for example, of Adorno’s critique of the compulsion to identity in administered society; Negri’s critique of contractualism; and Arendt’s critique of calculation, biopower,4 and totalitarianism, even though all three of these writers draw radically different conclusions from their critiques. Let us take as a brief example Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous critique of the Enlightenment, a critique which stresses the complicity between instrumental rationality and capital leading to fascism: “for the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect … Enlightenment is totalitarian” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1993, 6). Like Arendt, Adorno faults, among other historical developments, capitalist exchange and logic, both of which “provided to the Enlightenment thinkers the schema of the calculability of the world” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1993, 7). As an alternative, Adorno calls for thinking and practice that would radicalize contradiction as the manifestation of heterogeneity and non-identity in thought and politics.5

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From The Origins of Totalitarianism 6 to The Life of the Mind (1978, 87), Arendt rejects the reduction of thinking and politics to logical determinism, which, when transported into the domain of history becomes the basis of totalitarian ideology. Negri, for his part, contests the subordination of constituent, revolutionary power to established juridical order and parliamentary proceduralism (Negri 1999, 1–24). For all of these theorists, the destructive developments of modernity based upon technological efficiency, instrumental rationality, and the substitution of economy for politics aim to eliminate exception (Schmitt), non-identity (Adorno), uniqueness and action (Arendt), or revolutionary insurgency (Negri). The problem with Schmitt’s theory of exception is that it is subordinated to a personal and decisionist conception of sovereignty: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 1985, 5). The role of the exception is to reveal sovereign decision “in the true sense of the word” (Schmitt 1985, 6); that is, to show that the personal authority of the sovereign is endowed with the power to suspend the law, declare a state of emergency, and decide – for instance in the case of civil war – who is the enemy of the state. In other words, Schmitt establishes a correlation between the transcendence of sovereignty beyond the law (that is, the constituted political order) and exception, which disrupts it. This subordination of the unexpected occurrence to sovereign decision is the most conservative aspect of Schmitt’s work. Thus, the decisive issue that a juxtaposition of Schmitt and Arendt raises is whether exception, understood as the unexpected political occurrence, can be extricated from sovereignty and reinterpreted instead as a new beginning in political life, created by intersubjective political action. Can the force of the exception be reinterpreted as the source of transformative political power in democracy, irreducible to the power of sovereignty? The contradictions in Schmitt’s thought are well known and have generated many divergent interpretations of his key terms – secularism/political theology, rhetorical/existential realism, the friend/enemy distinction, decision/ exception – and of their relevance for contemporary political theory. To situate Arendt’s response to Schmitt, I want to briefly focus upon only two of the most prominent examples of such contradictory interpretations of Schmitt in the work of the two Italian political philosophers, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. Both Agamben and Negri critique Schmitt’s personal and decisionist logic of sovereignty but draw opposite conclusions. Agamben interprets sovereign decision in terms of political violence; by contrast, Negri stresses an enabling negativity in Schmitt’s suspension of the law. More specifically, in Homo Sacer Agamben reinterprets the sovereign power to decide who is the enemy of the state as the violent exclusion of citizens stripped from political rights and reduced to bare life (Agamben 1998, 15–62). Such exclusion of bare life from the political and its subjection to murderous violence culminates in Western modernity in the Nazi concentration camps (Agamben 1998, 166–180). In other words, Agamben reinterprets the Schmittian notion of the enemy as bare life. Second, Agamben agrees with Schmitt that the notions of exception as well as constituting power are inseparable from

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sovereignty and cannot exist without it. By being subordinated to the sovereign decision, exception becomes a figure of the exclusion of bare life. Paradoxically, Agamben’s identification of the exception with sovereignty is stronger than Schmitt’s because he does not interrogate different figures of exception in Schmitt’s writings. Finally, Agamben argues that sovereignty is synonymous with constituent or constituting power since both transcend the constituted political order (Agamben 1998, 43).7 Yet such an identification of sovereignty with constituting power does not take into account the possibility of a new beginning created through political action. It is precisely this possibility of a new beginning created by human plurality acting in concert that is at the core of Arendt’s political thought. In a diametrically opposite interpretation to Agamben’s, Negri focuses upon the critical, dynamic potential of the negativity implicit in the sovereign’s suspension of the law and wants to reclaim this negativity as an element of revolutionary insurgency; that is, as an element of constituent power.8 This negativity of revolutionary constituent power can be radicalized in order to suspend, ultimately, sovereignty itself. “Sovereign is the one who can ‘suspend’ the law, who can thus suspend the law that itself establishes sovereignty” (Negri 1999, 20). In this way, constituent power can ultimately be separated from sovereign decisionism. Consequently, Agamben and Negri derive from Schmitt two different models of constituent power: for Agamben, this power manifests itself as the murderous violence of sovereign decision upon the state of exception and leads to the concomitant expulsion of bare life from the polis. For Negri, the negativity of constituent power ultimately suspends sovereignty and can be reclaimed as the iconoclastic insurgency of the multitude. My own emphasis upon the difference between exception and sovereign decision is in certain respects parallel to Negri’s attempt to liberate the negativity of insurgency from the restrictions of sovereignty. Yet, contra Negri, I argue that the radicalization of negativity cannot be accomplished without a linguistic critique of sovereignty. My second claim is that negativity is insufficient because the power generated through political action is not only negative but also transformative – it enables the creation of new political relations and institutions. It is the power of the new beginning. That is why I turn to Arendt’s theory of action, which precisely underscores the linguistic and transformative character of political action, both of which depend upon human plurality. In order to separate exception from sovereign decision, I will first revisit the dependence of sovereignty upon figurative language in Schmitt’s work – a dependence ignored by both Agamben and Negri. Because language and rhetoric suspend sovereign decisionism, Schmitt rejects the process of democratic deliberation. Yet despite this rejection, he relies heavily upon figurative language in order to establish the transcendence of the sovereign’s decision vis-à-vis the constituted legal order. Such transcendence of sovereignty with respect to jurisprudence is based upon a double analogy with the transcendence of God: “the transgression of the laws of nature … brought about by direct

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intervention” of God is like “the sovereign’s direct intervention in a valid legal order” (Schmitt 1985, 36–37). The first level of this analogy establishes the similarity and difference between the law of nature and juridical law, whereas the second level of analogy shows the similarity between the Divine transgression of natural causality and the sovereign transgression of the legal order. As Schmitt concludes, “only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries” (Schmitt 1985, 36). Yet what does it mean to be aware of this analogy in the conception of sovereignty? Hans Blumenberg is one of the first critics to point out this contradiction between rejection and dependence upon figurative language in Schmitt’s thought. According to Blumenberg, despite his emphasis upon analogy in the conception of sovereignty, Schmitt literalizes metaphoric language in order to justify the personal, realist notion of the sovereign subject.9 As Graham Hammill puts it, “Blumenberg’s point is to show that Schmitt justifies a political argument through a metaphor that he treats as if it were real … [he] literalizes that metaphor in the very real person who oversees the executive branch of government.”10 More than revealing the rhetorical dimension of politics, the analogy shows that both sovereign power and the possibility of exception depend upon a transand inter-personal figurative language. Following Aristotle’s definition of metaphor, figurative language performs the transfer between the general and the particular, the particular and the general, or the particular and the particular.11 In so doing, metaphor is both the ground and the displacement of the sovereign decision, which for Schmitt is the only element mediating between general juridical rule and the particular case. Consequently, sovereign power, which depends upon the literalization of analogy and upon a metaphorical transfer between the general and the particular, is no longer “sovereign” and absolute. Furthermore, in Schmitt’s work not only sovereignty but also exception depends for its condition of possibility upon metaphor since metaphor enables a transfer between similitude and unpredictable difference. By looking at Schmitt’s own analysis, we are struck in particular by the contradictory examples of exception – most notably civil war and miracle – and by the vacillation between the literal and the metaphoric meanings of these examples. In its literal or real sense, exception means the state of war; in its figurative sense, it is associated with a divine miracle. In its literal sense, exception represents extreme danger; a situation of irreconcilable political conflict threatening the dissolution of the state (Schmitt 1985, 6). This literal interpretation of exception as civil war justifies sovereign decision as the only power that can restore order and security by deciding who the enemy of the state is (Schmitt 1985, 9). By contrast, the figurative meaning of exception in Schmitt’s argument is expressed by the analogy between exception and miracle: “the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (Schmitt 1985, 36).12 In theology as in everyday speech, miracle is hardly ever associated with violence or war. However, when miracle and war are nonetheless treated as synonymous, we are confronted with the spectacle of holy war, which threatens democratic politics today from the outside

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and from the inside: consider for instance George Bush’s Axis of Evil or the Polish Catholic Church’s gender wars.13 Yet, if there is an irreconcilable difference between war and miracle, as Arendt argues, then exception is not just the irruption of violence or the occurrence of an anonymous event, but, on the contrary, the unpredictable new beginning generated by action, which precedes any decision or knowledge of the actors themselves. This reinterpretation depends upon Arendt’s interpretation of the role of metaphorical language, which links political concepts not with theological transcendence but rather with the sensible world shared by human plurality. There is no doubt that Arendt shares with Schmitt a critique of the reduction of the political to constituted legal order and bureaucracy. Like Schmitt, she also rejects any explanations of politics in terms of natural or historical causality, which for her operate as biopower and in the extreme case as totalitarianism. The radical difference between these two thinkers is the aftermath of such a critique: the alignment of exception with the sovereign decision in Schmitt contra Arendt’s rejections of “spurious” sovereignty “claimed by an isolated single entity,” individual or collective (Arendt 1958, 245), and her reinterpretation of exception in a double sense: first, as the new beginning in political life enacted by a plurality of political agents; and second, as disclosure of the uniqueness of each agent through action and speech. As if in an implicit reference to Schmitt, Arendt also uses the metaphor of a miracle for the unpredictable novelty of political action: “the new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability … the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle” (Arendt 1958, 178). “Action is, in fact, the one miracleworking faculty of man” (Arendt 1958, 246). As the expression “in the guise of a miracle” implies, for Arendt the relation between the political novelty of action and miracle is figurative. It is this interdependence between the creative force of figurative language, the novelty of political action, and the plurality of the agents that cannot be harnessed by the power of sovereign decision. On the contrary, as the limit of normative, rule-governed political and linguistic systems, the metaphoric “guise of a miracle” reveals both linguistic creativity and the unpredictable novelty of intersubjective action in secular politics. Arendt’s linguistic, political reinterpretation of the exception as a figurative miracle and a new beginning enacted by a plurality of strangers inhabiting a common world is what in the last analysis severs exception from sovereign decision. In her critique of sovereignty, Arendt mobilizes both the linguistic and intersubjective dimensions of action: speech and deeds. For example, when Arendt turns to political theology, she, contra Schmitt, stresses the primacy of language and underscores the linguistic dimension of a new political beginning: “In the beginning was the Word.”14 In democratic politics speech and action are “coeval”: neither speech nor deeds occur in isolation, but presuppose the plurality of human beings. In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that language is indispensable to human action because it enables a negotiation between “the twofold character” of human plurality, namely of equality and distinction (Arendt 1958, 175–176). In The Life of the Mind,

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Arendt carries this analysis of language further by specifically addressing the metaphorical origins of all conceptual language. Although Arendt primarily develops the philosophical implications of the metaphoric origins of concepts, we can extend her analysis and stress the metaphorical origins of theological and political concepts as well. Like Nietzsche and Derrida, Arendt claims that all conceptual philosophical language is derived from metaphors. However, unlike the philosophical tradition, which denounces metaphor as a source of error, imprecision, or lies, Arendt praises metaphor as an extraordinary “gift” of language (Arendt 1978, 105). This gift enables even the most abstract thought to be reconnected with sensibility, the common world, and human plurality. Metaphor therefore “undoes” (Arendt 1978, 103), or provides a cure, for the temporal withdrawal of thinking from the multiple political engagements with others. Not simply one instance of figurative language among many, metaphor, according to Arendt, is characterized by a fundamental transferability: it is a bridge over the abyss separating the particular and the general, the sensible and the conceptual, the singular and the common, the visible and the invisible. For Arendt, metaphor has an existential and ontological weight because it enables “the transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among appearances,” that is, a transition from thinking to being and acting with others (Arendt 1978, 103). On the level of politics, metaphor performs this transferability on three different levels: first of all, it is a bridge between singularity that escapes concepts and the shared generality of linguistic meaning. Second, it is a transfer from abstract conceptuality to the sensible world which we share and inhabit with others. And finally, it is transferability from the uniqueness of each agent to the shared political space of appearances, in which we are exposed to others prior to being for ourselves. To put it differently, metaphor enables a transfer between the singularity of each actor and the plurality of others. The metaphorical origins of language in sense experience and the world we share with others reveal the primacy of human plurality, acting, and inhabiting the world even for philosophical thinking. “In bridging the gulf between the realm of the invisible and the world of appearances” (Arendt 1978, 108), metaphor “indicates in its own manner the absolute primacy of the world of appearances” (Arendt 1978, 109).15 In so doing, it contests the delusion of the two world theory (invisible Being and visible phenomena). By connecting us to the mundane, metaphor is “a kind of ‘proof’ that mind and body, thinking and sense experience, the invisible and the visible, belong together” (Arendt 1978, 109). Let us notice that this threefold metaphorical transferability between the sensible and the abstract, the singular and the general, thinking and being with others, moves in the opposite philosophical and political direction than the use of theological analogy in Schmitt’s thought. As we have seen, for Schmitt the role of analogy is to reveal the similarity between the transcendence of sovereignty and the transcendence of God; by contrast, for Arendt, metaphor reveals the dependence of all concepts – philosophical, theological, and political – upon the sensible, mundane existence with others; upon the human condition of plurality.

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As she famously claims, such plurality is the condition of action and of all political life on earth: “action … corresponds to the human condition of plurality … This plurality is specifically the condition … of all political life” (Arendt 1958, 7). Because metaphoric language, including the metaphor of a miracle, also discloses this condition of human plurality on earth, both the linguistic and the ontological aspects of figurative language undermine any claims to personal or collective sovereignty because plurality in Arendt’s sense of the word cannot be unified into a general or national sovereign will. Unlike the associations of sovereignty with death, metaphor reconnects thinking and acting with political life. By returning to Aristotle, Arendt points out that the “only possible metaphor … for the life of mind is the sensation of being alive” (Arendt 1978, 123). And in The Human Condition, she reminds us that “‘to live’ and ‘to be among men’ or ‘to die’… and to ‘cease to be among men’” are synonymous (Arendt 1958, 7–8). Perhaps it is because of this metaphoric link to the sensible and linguistic experience of living and acting with others in the world that Schmitt has suppressed the analogical basis of this conception of sovereignty. Arendt’s understanding of metaphor is intertwined with the basic premises of her political thought, such as plurality, uniqueness, and the new beginning.16 Let us now examine these premises in greater detail; in particular, the ontological condition of human plurality, upon which both action and the new beginning in politics depend. The intersubjective, irreducibly plural character of action has to be understood in three ways. First, in line with the more common understanding of politics, Arendt concedes that action has always a pragmatic dimension; that it originates from a multiplicity of human interests. Yet, she reinterprets this plurality of interests as the inter-esse, or the in-between; that is, as the worldly relations between agents which “can relate and bind them together” (Arendt 1958, 182). In other words, the pragmatic dimension of action already discloses a form of relationality which exceeds calculability and a means/ends rationality. Second, in addition to this concern with the worldly in-between, action discloses a more profound, political sense of human interrelatedness (Arendt 1958, 183), performed through deeds and words. Not mediated by objects or interests, this political interrelatedness is characterized by an irreducible tension between equality and distinction; plurality and uniqueness of agents. And finally, and most importantly, in contrast to the primacy of the sovereign decision in Schmitt’s work, for Arendt, human plurality presupposed and disclosed by language and action cannot be reduced to a common will or to the agency of political actors. In Arendt’s political philosophy, there is no agency, no decision, prior to the act of doing and speaking with others. Consequently, Arendt reverses the usual understanding of agency, according to which action realizes the intentions of the sovereign subject: “nobody is the author or producer” of action (Arendt 1958, 184). Neither agency nor collective or individual will cause action, but, on the contrary, it is action that discloses and creates intersubjective agency retrospectively. The important consequence of this dependence of agency upon the act is that political agency is irreducible not only to the personal but also to collective or national sovereignty.

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Although dependent upon human plurality, action not only creates intersubjective agency and new power relations but also discloses the uniqueness of each agent. Since it is action with others that reveals our uniqueness for the first time, such uniqueness cannot precede action – acting with others is in fact its condition of possibility. There is no doer without the deed; no uniqueness without collective participation. Arendt calls this paradoxical singularity disclosed through action the “who” and distinguishes it from the “what,” which she associates with shareable attributes and qualities forming group identities and subject positions. As I have argued elsewhere (Ziarek 2016), such attributes are shaped by power relations of race, gender, division of labor, institutions, ethnicity, age, nationality, occupation, religion, race, sex, as well as all kinds of affiliations and contributions that we make. These attributes are relational, imbricated in patterns of power and knowledge, caught in hierarchies or exclusions, and reshaped by struggles against such exclusions. By contrast, the “who” is singular and intangible, since it exceeds relational meanings of power, knowledge, and identities. Such singularity can only be posed in the form of a question: who are you? That is, singularity is disclosed linguistically through an address to the other. And when we attempt to answer this question in the form of either an individual or collective self-definition, rather than to disclose it through actions, the answer invariably slides into “what.” As Arendt puts it, “the moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is” (Arendt 1958, 181). Since, as Cavarero points out, uniqueness depends upon the exposure to others, upon a kind of “perspectival dislocation” and being beside oneself (Cavarero 2000, 44), it is accompanied by an obscurity of political motivations and an obscurity of ourselves to ourselves. Consequently, the disclosure of singularity through action inverts the usual oppositions between the inner and the outer, public and private; self-knowledge and collective understanding. Once we depart from the premise of sovereignty and the autonomous political subject – collective or individual – as the basis of politics, we have to accept that actors not only do not know others with whom they act, but, as Arendt insists, they do not know themselves. The uniqueness of a “who” is the limit of cognition, language, and discursive structures. That is why the disclosure of singularity pushes political language to the limits of expression: “The manifestation of who the speaker and doer unexchangeably is, though it is plainly visible, retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts toward unequivocal verbal expression” (Arendt 1958, 181). Could we say that this challenge posed to political, ordinary, and philosophical languages calls for their expansion toward figurative expression, which seems to be better suited for the negotiation between generality and singularity? In a further reversal, the uniqueness of the agent is more apparent to others than to herself, and that is why it both requires and presupposes human plurality. In order to disclose uniqueness to others, political language has to mediate and sustain the necessary tension between the singularity of political actors and their equality in the polis. In other words, language, and figurative language in particular, performs interconnectedness between

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similitude (equality) and difference (uniqueness). Only thanks to such interconnectedness can language sustain the irreducible plurality and singularity of actors without negating their equality. Although Arendt does not follow this line of analysis consistently, her own work on totalitarianism, refugees, homosexuality, and anti-Semitism shows that whatness – or the political, cultural, gendered, and religious affiliations and attributes of subjectivity – can either be ossified into biopolitical norms or destroyed altogether.17 Both the biopolitical normalization and thanatopolitical destruction of worldly attributes we share with others invariably lead to the destruction of the uniqueness of agents. Consequently, although the “who” and “what” of agency are irreducible to each other, they are nonetheless intimately interconnected. Note, for example, that although the disclosure of uniqueness occurs in the form of a question “who are you?” not every mode of address will reveal singularity. On the contrary, we can immediately enumerate many contexts and many modalities of the address which will obliterate such a disclosure in advance: a police interrogation, torture, a border crossing investigation, racial profiling, and so forth. That is why the what/who distinction, which makes sense only in the context of joint action, is invariably gendered, racialized, and entangled in the whole network of relations of power knowledge. Yet, although the singularity of a who depends upon this network, the uniqueness disclosed through action also exceeds it and remains irreducible to categorization. By rejecting the logic of sovereignty, Arendt nonetheless emphasizes the key role of unpredictability and novelty in democratic politics. Released from the sovereign decision, and yet not reduced to the impersonal event, the unpredictable in Arendt’s philosophy is redefined instead as the new beginning created by action against “overwhelming odds” (Arendt 1958, 178). Such a new beginning might surprise even the participants of action. In the temporal sense, beginning creates a hiatus between the past and the future, the old and the new; the no longer and the not yet. Consequently, the temporality of a new beginning creates a radical break in the continuity of history and in so doing contests any attempt to reinterpret politics in terms of either natural or historical causality. Whether she discusses a revolutionary beginning or the unpredictable innovation of every political action, Arendt refuses to ground the act of the beginning in the will of the people or the transcendental figure of the sovereign or legislator (Arendt 1963, 185), although as Agamben points out, she provides an excellent diagnosis of the temptation to provide transcendental foundations for this seeming groundlessness of the revolutionary beginning (Agamben 1998, 41). In Western political theory when the act of the beginning lacks foundation it seems illegitimate, violent, or arbitrary. Arendt, however, rejects the binary opposition between arbitrary violence and foundationalism and points instead to a third option. As Peg Birmingham, among other Arendt critics, persuasively argues, what saves the act of the beginning from arbitrariness is the possibility that such a beginning carries its own principle (Birmingham 2006, 57–87). Such a possibility is inscribed in the Latin etymology of the word “principle,” derived from “principium,” which means both the beginning and the principle. Because

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the principle and the beginning are coeval, they are neither arbitrary nor fixed but enable endless interpretations, contestations, and narratives in political life. This interconnection between the new beginning and the new principle in political life characterizes Arendt’s understanding of constituting power. Constituting power is differentiated from both arbitrary violence and sovereign power not only because it carries with it its own principle, but also because such power is generated by alliances based upon mutual promises made by heterogeneous political agents. We could say that alliance is a dynamic and open-ended political organization necessary to assemble plural participants for the purpose of action.18 As Arendt puts it, alliance is the very “grammar” of action and the “syntax” constitutive of power (Arendt 1963, 175). As the words “grammar” and “syntax” suggest, alliance introduces into the intangible web of human relations a minimum of articulation which keeps the participants of action together despite the frailty and the unpredictability of human interactions. Such a minimal organization is created by nothing more and nothing less than mutual promises. Because promise is an act in its own right (Arendt 1958, 243–245), and therefore a linguistic form of action, it can “combine” people together for a joint action while respecting their plurality and uniqueness. This performativity of the promise generates a dynamic and interactive political organization assembling actors together even though they do not know themselves or the consequences of their actions. Political alliance in Arendt’s sense of the word does not presuppose a common origin, or common past as, for instance, nationality does. Furthermore, since action depends upon agents’ uniqueness and plurality, political alliance does not presuppose common identity or common interests. On the contrary, even the pragmatic goals of action are generated by an alliance and remain contestable (Arendt 1963, 170–171). What is even more crucial for democratic politics, including feminist antiracist politics, is Arendt’s claim in On Revolution that alliance for the purpose of action does not presuppose the equality of actors but in fact creates political equality through the act of reciprocal promises (Arendt 1963, 173). Thus, although intersubjective participation in existing democracies is limited by multiple subjugations and exclusions, nonetheless, as the histories of political protests, marches, and struggles show us again and again, from the international Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter movements, marginalized or discriminated groups, by contesting injustice and oppression, already create equality among themselves in the process of action regardless of whether or not they succeed in transforming oppressive relations on the institutional level. Because Arendt’s notion of political alliance does not presuppose identity or common history, it is especially important for feminist and poststructuralist critiques of the political, which, as Judith Butler, among others, points out, are often criticized for failing to formulate political agency or to provide a basis for political organization (Butler 1992, 3–21). Yet, in order to appreciate the import of Arendt’s intervention into political theory, it is crucial to note that Arendt distinguishes her notion of political association from Biblical Covenant and from liberal contract theory, both of which are based upon the consent to

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be governed by, and therefore submission to, external authority (Arendt 1963, 172–173). Throughout her work, Arendt criticizes the principle of consent as an insufficient basis for political coalition. What is wrong with the biblical and the secular liberal notion of consent is that it diminishes the power of collectivity rather than generating new powers through political associations. As far as the power of collectivity is concerned, consent is a negative principle of limitation (of the individuals and of the state) rather than a generative principle of the new as constitutive of power. Furthermore, it is a vertical relation of subjects to external authority, rather than a mutual relationality among the multiple members of the alliance. Despite Arendt’s critique of liberalism and contractualism, even attentive readers of Arendt, like Negri, often confuse her notion of alliance with liberal contract theory. For Negri, Arendt’s claim that the beginning and revolutionary power do not require any foundation is the most radical aspect of her thought (Negri 1999, 16). Ultimately, however, Negri prefers Schmitt’s suspension of the law to Arendt’s intersubjective action, precisely because of her insistence upon alliances among the political actors. For Negri, such an alliance represents another form of contractualism, which limits the groundlessness of insurgency because he confuses political alliance based on promises with political contract. In On Revolution (1963, 170–171), Arendt specifically critiques contract theory and provides her notion of alliance as an alternative to it. The first crucial difference is that forming alliances with others is enabled by the fact that we are relational beings from the start; that is, we exist in a “web of relations” in the common world, in sharp contrast to isolated individuals presupposed by contract theory. As we have seen, specific alliances for concrete actions and the founding alliances constituting new political bodies are not formed by atomized liberal individuals, but rather by relational beings. The second difference is that in contract theory the consent to be governed leads to the isolation and loss of power of each member of the body politic, whereas the members of the alliance gain power and community. And lastly, contract theory treats power as a commodity which can be given to the sovereign in exchange for protection. By contrast, the power at work in alliance is creative and generative. Consequently, alliance in Arendt’s political theory allows us to distinguish constituting political power from popular, state, or personal sovereignty (Arendt 1963, 168). In contrast to contract theory, alliances based upon promises are precarious: by gathering strangers for the purpose of action, promises provide merely “guideposts” in “an ocean of uncertainty” (Arendt 1958, 244). That is why alliances can be dispersed by violence, as we witness in Syria or Ukraine, or dissipated from within when the participants are driven apart by internal conflicts. Yet such precariousness of political alliances, related to the frailty of action, is a price for their dynamic, plural, and open-ended (that is, welcoming new participants) character. Once alliances and the promises that keep them together are transformed into predictability – and Nietzsche has taught us the cost of such transformation19 – they become self-defeating.20

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I have argued that the main issue in a juxtaposition of Arendt and Schmitt relevant for contemporary discussions of democracy is not only the opposition between secularism and political theology, but also the question of whether the force of exception, or the miracle of the unexpected occurrence, can be reinterpreted as the new beginning created by intersubjective political action. By rejecting the idea of sovereignty, Arendt allows us to redefine exception – its unpredictable disruption of the constituted legal order, bureaucracy, natural, or historical causality – in two crucial ways: first, as the uniqueness of each agent disclosed by acting together; and second, as the unforeseeable novelty enacted by the plurality of human beings coming together for the purpose of action. Despite the destructive effects of violence, imperialism, the ongoing threat of genocide, war, and military technology threatening the survival of the planet, political action remains a fragile condition of intersubjective agency, mundane freedom, and a new beginning. In a very suggestive formulation, Arendt calls this new beginning in politics a capacity to enact with others the “birth” of a new world. Occurring “against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability,” such an unforeseeable novelty in politics is indeed a miracle (Arendt 1958, 178). In contrast to the sovereign’s power of death, Arendt’s theory of action is based upon the human condition of natality.

Notes 1 One of the few examples is Arendt’s reference to Schmitt in her essay on Waldemar Gurian describing Schmitt as “the famous professor of constitutional and international law who later became a Nazi” (Arendt 2014, 252). 2 As the editors of Thinking in Dark Times, point out, although Arendt owned nine books of Schmitt, she hardly engaged Schmitt directly (Berkowitz 2010, 62–63). Nonetheless, the relationship between Schmitt and Arendt has been an object of rich debate. Jay stresses the parallels between Schmitt and Arendt’s notion of politics as a fundamental aspect of human existence (Jay 1986, 237–256), whereas other thinkers underscore the decisive differences between them. Benhabib stresses the incompatibility between Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction and Arendt’s democratic plurality (Benhabib 2010, 60–61); Shaw compares their different concepts of political authority (Shaw 2006); Jurkevics shows their different concepts of the world, earth, and geopolitics (Jurkevics 2015); and Villa underlines their different concepts of the existential politics (Villa 1995). For a useful overview of the debate on Arendt’s relation to Schmitt, see Villa (2012, 78–104). 3 As Tracy Strong observes, Schmitt’s definition of the political as secularized theology resonates with Max Weber’s “disenchantment” (Strong 1985, vii–xxxv, xxiv). 4 For Arendt’s critique of biopower, see Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (2013). 5 As Adorno writes, “Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity” (Adorno 2007, 5). For a discussion of Adorno’s critique of identity and Arendt’s concept of novelty see Villa (2012, 78–104). 6 For the complicity between the compulsion of logic and totalitarian terror, see Arendt (1968, 468–474). 7 For my critique of Agamben on this point, see Ziarek (2008, 89–105).

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8 For consistency with the translations of Agamben and Negri cited in this text, we use the term “constituting power” when referencing Agamben and “constituent power” when referencing Negri. 9 See Hans Blumenberg (1983, 101; 2010). 10 Hammill (2012b, 10; 2012a, 84–101). 11 See Aristotle (1989, 44–45). 12 According to Tracy Strong, miracle, like sovereignty, can be traced to Hobbes’s Leviathan, where a miracle is an extraordinary occurrence, manifesting God to the Elect (Strong 1985, xx). 13 For example, see Henryk Hoser (2013). 14 The context is as follows: “The conviction, in the beginning was a crime … has carried through the centuries no less self-evident plausibility for the state of human affairs than … ‘In the beginning was the Word’” (Arendt 1963, 20). 15 In The Life of the Mind, Arendt discusses the role of metaphor in the context of memory, which performs transferability over a gap between the past and the future (1978, 103–105). 16 The secondary literature on Arendt is enormous. In addition to the works cited in this chapter, for the most comprehensive analysis of her work see for instance Villa (2000); Birmingham (2006); Honig (1995); and Kristeva (2001). 17 For further discussion of the what/who distinction see Ziarek (2016). 18 For Butler’s own performative theory of assembly, see (2015, 44–56, 76–80). 19 Arendt herself refers to Nietzsche’s analysis of promise but criticizes him for aligning promise with the will to power of the isolated subject (Arendt 1958, 245). 20 The notion of an alliance allows Arendt to reinterpret constituting power, the concept of which dates back to the French revolution (Arendt 1963, 166).

References Adorno, Theodor, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007). Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1963). Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968). Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind (San Diego: Harcourt, 1978). Arendt, Hannah, Men in Dark Times (Bowdon: Stellar Books, 2014). Aristotle, On Poetry and Style: the Poetics and the Rhetoric, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989). Benhabib, Sheyla, “Hannah Arendt’s Political Engagements,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 55–62. Berkowitz, Roger, “Introduction: Thinking in Dark Times,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 3–14. Berkowitz, Roger, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan, eds. Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Birmingham, Peg, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).

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Blumenberg, Hans, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). Butler, Judith, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–21. Butler, Judith, Notes toward the Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Cavarero, Adrianna, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (New York: Routledge, 2000). Diprose, Rosalyn and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, “Time for Beginners: Natality, Biopolitics, and Political Theology,” PhiloSophia 3, no. 2(2013): 107–120. Hammill, Graham, “Blumenberg and Schmitt on the Rhetoric of Political Theology,” in Political Theology and Early Modernity, ed. Graham Hammill and Julia R. Lupton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012a), 84–101. Hammill, Graham, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012b). Honig, Bonnie, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995). Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993). Hoser, Henryk, “Ideologia gender a pawda o czlowieku,” Sympozjum Rewolucja Genderowa, WSKSiM. Torun, 2013. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v= HXbgSfw_Eac [Accessed November 3, 2015]. Jay, Martin, “The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 237–256. Jurkevics, Anna, “Hannah Arendt Reads Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth: A Dialogue on Law and Geopolitics from the Margins,” European Journal of Political Theory 16, no. 3 (2015): 345–366. Kristeva, Julia, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Negri, Antonio, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Shaw, Carl, “Power and Authority in Constitutional Theory: Hidden Dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt.” Paper read at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 31, 2006, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Strong, Tracy, “The Sovereign and the Exception: Carl Schmitt, Politics, Theology, and Leadership,” in Political Theology, by Carl Schmitt, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), vii–xxxv. Villa, Dana, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Villa, Dana, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Villa, Dana, “From the Critique of Identity to Plurality in Politics: Reconsidering Adorno and Arendt,” in Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical

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Investigations, ed. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 78–104. Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska. 2008. “Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender.” In The Agamben Effect, ed. Alison Ross, 89–105. South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue. Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska, “Shall We Gender? Who? Where? When?” in Genders Future Tense 1, vol. 2. (Boulder: University of Colorado 2016). Available at: www.colora do.edu/genders/2016/05/19/shall-we-gender-where-who-when [Accessed November 3, 2016].

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Radical politics “We the People” or “we mortals” Krzysztof Ziarek

The first part of the chapter’s subtitle is easily identifiable as the opening phrase of the Constitution of the United States. It identifies the subject in whose name the principles and rules contained in the document are announced. The second locution, “we mortals,” is a leitmotif occurring in many of Martin Heidegger’s late writings, among others in On the Way to Language (Heidegger 1971a, 128), The Principle of Reason (Heidegger 1996, 186–187), or the eulogy on the occasion of Hans Jantzen’s death (Petzet 1993, xxxi). For instance in “The Way to Language,” Heidegger writes that the event “is itself the most inconspicuous of the inconspicuous, the simplest of the simple, the nearest of the near, and the farthest of the far in which we mortals reside all life long” (Heidegger 1993, 415, trans. modified; Heidegger 1985, 247). For Heidegger, the event as the simplest and the most inconspicuous plosion of being opens and grants the location, the spatio-temporal region, which, albeit usually unnoticed and unremarked, charts the perimeter and indicates the parameters for the existence characteristic of the “mortals.” It is precisely this unobtrusive manner in which the event takes place that lets human beings exist as mortals and calls for them to do so. As formulated in the title, the juxtaposition between “We the People” and “we mortals” can appear incommensurate or at least asymmetrical, since it would be more apposite to contrast “we mortals” with “we humans,” and then proceed to develop the implications of the difference between humans and mortals for politics. While the second comparison—the one between humans and mortals—will indeed constitute the core of my presentation, I want to signal through this subtitle and its somewhat incommensurate use of the term “the People” an important departure from the usual optics for the discussion of all matters “political.” It will not be the question here of a new reflection on politics or of proposing a different or reformed politeia but rather of inflecting and transforming the optics within which politics get to be thought in the first place. At issue will be the very horizon within which existence can be seen to acquire its political orientation, that is, the setting and the markers that give relations and modes of being political valence. It is crucial to note that the very term, “people,” though often taken for granted or thought to be self-evident in political discourses, carries with it

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significant grammatical, semantic, and conceptual, let alone historical, determinations, irrespective of the political articulations or ideological significations given to it. At first glance, two important, even decisive, vectors for political thought subtend this term. First, the designation “people” implies the collective notion of human beings, which forms the backdrop against which something like a people could be conceived in the first place, and then distinguished, identified, and defined. Second, the word “people,” in whose name the declaration of political constitutions, goals, and ambitions often takes place, indicates the conceptual basis upon which the internal organization of the polis and of politics takes place. Most important, it specifies politics as a human or an inter-human affair, thus injecting into the very notions of politics and polity—without necessarily directly specifying them—the governing ideas about humanity and humankind. Furthermore, it also makes politics principally a matter of the internal organization and functioning of a polis, a nation, or a state. These determinations frame from the start and shape from within both politics and political discourses and yet most often they are neither expressly brought into the discussion nor reflected upon. The notion of the people implies as well territorial, linguistic, and even ethnic specificity. It indicates a delimited locality and an identifiable body of members who have grounds and rights to belong to the community—whether territorial, linguistic, or cultural—designated as this specific people. The starting point for understanding this notion of the people comes from the boundaries from which and within which the identity and the membership of a people is constituted, and which therefore allow such a people to differentiate itself from other ethnic groups or national formations. The English noun “people” is derived from the Latin populus, literally, a populace. In Greece, at least according to Aristotle’s Politics, this term refers to the demos of a polis, or a city-state, and not to an ethnos or national populace. It has limited local or regional, rather than more broadly ethnic, roots. In fact, Aristotle would likely hesitate to call the constitution of a nation-state, especially in its modern sense, “democratic,” as he doubted whether an ethnos or a nation, because of its territorial dimensions and population size, could ever constitute a polity, let alone a democratic one, which for Aristotle requires direct participation and thus seems to be limited to a more local population, namely that of a polis, a city-state. Even from this brief reference to Aristotle, it is easy to see that the nation-state brings a fundamental change to thinking about politics, one whose extent I cannot discuss here. Within this modern-day context, there is a host of important changes that modern humanism, techno-science, and bio-power have introduced into political thought, or more specifically into the notion of the people. I am less interested here in these shifts than in the broader optics within which these alterations in the thought of politics become articulated in modernity. For instance, the influence of humanist conceptions of the “rational animal” on the political articulation of the “rights of men” and citizenship; or the role of what Arendt identifies as “the modern privilege of life” (Arendt 1958) in the formation of biopolitics and its increasing reliance on techno-science. These in turn point to

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how the very concept “the people” reflects in its various incarnations the fundamental ways in which thought—here the thought of the political—is already positioned and oriented in terms of boundaries and limits, on the one hand, and forms and requirements of belonging, on the other. The first three modern constitutions: chronologically, American, Polish, and French, make in their own ways reference to how their thought of constitutional politics comes to be voiced from the specific, even if not always expressly articulated, location of the human and its given orientation within life, existence, or world. The American constitution makes its proclamation in the name of “the People,” identifying the political entity empowering the foundation of the new polity and in turn empowered by it to its citizenship. The Polish constitution of May 3, 1791, though technically declared by the King, refers to the common “fate” binding those in whose name the constitution is enunciated. It begins with the following statement: “Cognizant that the fate of all of us hangs upon . grounding and perfecting the national constitution” (“Uznaja˛ c, iz los nas wszystkich od ugruntowania i udoskonalenia konstytucji narodowej jedynie zawisł”).1 The text appeals to the nation and the people (naród in Polish has this double meaning) first through the adjective “national” modifying the noun “constitution” and expressly as “naród” (the people) several lines later in the preamble, after the invocation of the “universal good,” freedom, and the Fatherland. The French constitutions of the late eighteenth century spring from “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” which begins with the basic affirmation that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”2 Without in any way diminishing the political force of declaring human beings universally free and equal irrespective of the possibility of changes in the conditions of their existence, what I want to underscore here is, on the one hand, the basis of this declaration in the idea of the “human being” and, on the other, the stakes of articulating politics in terms of rights and citizenship. With this very cursory glance at the conceptual framing of the first modern constitutions, three characterizations or demarcations emerge as pivotal to orienting the thought of politics: the notion of the human as a living, rational being; the idea of endowment or possession intrinsic to such a being, namely, logos, reason, and rights; and the centripetal political organization based on the conjunction between human beings and their rights and possessions. With regard to political constitution or organization, the question of possession concerns specifically rights—from freedom and equality to the more specific or circumscribed rights to vote and to political representation. General as they are, these political endowments or possessions are grounded in a more fundamental sense of what might be called the “human entitlement.” One can sketch out the context for understanding this presumptive entitlement by pointing to two crucial influences on the Western formulation of political thought: Aristotle and the Bible. As Aristotle puts it in Politics, “Plants exist for the benefit of animals, and some animals exist for the benefit of others … Accordingly, if nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, all animals must have been made by nature for the sake of men” (Aristotle 1995, 23). A

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well-known passage from “Genesis I” about the relation of “man” and other beings, which casts human beings in the role of the “masters,” reads: God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. God blessed them, saying to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all the living creatures that move on earth.”3 Aristotle invokes nature (physis) and its intrinsically hierarchical relations and the Bible furnishes the story of creation in order to legitimate “natural” or “divine” assignation of all of forms of life to the dominion of human beings. This entitlement and all the possessions and power it bestows become thus a “natural,” evident and unquestioned, part of the understanding of human beings. While a much more substantive argument would have to be presented in order to develop the grounds for such an understanding of the entitlement and the distinctiveness associated with human beings, the two quotations above are meant as indications of the different ways in which the human being comes to prioritize itself within living beings, assuming the position of both centrality and primacy. What matters is that, however grounded and formulated, this prerogative underpins the various articulations that the idea of the human has received in the course of the Western tradition, articulations that have in common the notion that, as Heidegger bluntly puts it in “Letter on Humanism,” the human being comprehends its essence and its position as that of the “lord of beings” (Heidegger 1993, 245). This privilege in relation to both living beings and non-living matter forms the bedrock of conceptualizing the human being as a living entity and feeds directly into the understanding of politics. It is not only that a human being is born and remains equal to all other humans but, as the title of “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” makes clear, such a being is “naturally,” that is, thanks to its birth and its assumed place within the “natural” order, endowed with rights and possessions. The Declaration does not need to spell out that these rights and possessions accrue to the human being “naturally” as part, and politically a fundamental one, of the larger prerogative or entitlement with regard to non-human beings that the title “human” carries with it. Against the backdrop of this “natural” location and entitlement of human beings, diverse notions of polity, ancient and modern, have come to be formulated. When we frame the issue of politics this way, what calls for thinking is not politics itself but rather the way we first arrive at politics: at polis, constitution, citizenship, rights, and so on. At issue are the vectors, way-markers, and orientation points that shape the very realm in which something like a polity and its people or citizens come to be experienced and understood as such. For all the claims to radical politics, whether voiced on the left or on the right side of political spectrum, nothing will change “radically,” that is, here specifically

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with regard to the rootedness of politics and political thought in the conception of the human being and its assumed centrality or privilege, until we question the way politics—the very formation of the ideas of polis (state), the political, or political rights—remains embedded in and oriented by certain conceptions of being, beings, world, humanity, etc. This is not to downplay the political and ethical importance, even exigency, of the still needed changes with regard to gender, race, sexual orientation, economic impoverishment, or even glaring absence of human or political rights, that lie as a continuing challenge for political transformation. I only wish to signal here a distinctive sense of “radical politics” envisioned in my title; the adjective “radical” is taken etymologically to pertain to the roots of all matters political, and thus as dedicated to resituating the very formation and meaning of what counts or might come to count as political. What may be of help in suggesting how such a displacement and resituating of the political might begin to be envisioned can be drawn, for instance, from aspects of the Chinese thought of Daoism. It is worth pointing out briefly that Daoism, especially the so-called Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, offers a very different “situation” or positioning of human beings than Western thought in general, namely one that gives humans not only a distinct position but also a dissimilar status from those habitually associated with their understanding in the West. The thought of Dao (way) locates what comes into existence not with regard to any particular being or set of beings, the way Aristotle and the Bible do with regard to human beings, but instead in terms of the inevitable change to which all beings, human beings among them, are open and should be capable of adjusting. As Franklin Perkins explains, “the Daodejing begins with the spontaneous emergence of things and forms. Human history is never mentioned … Human beings are approached as just one of the many things generated by nature” (Perkins 2014, 93). What matters in this perspective are in fact not beings, their essences or endowments, but rather the shifting and transient way in which they all emerge into and disappear from existence. The foundational text of I Ching (The Book of Changes), predating all different orientations in ancient Chinese thought, in its divination recipes and practices casts the framework for understanding the human being, including political situation and actions, fundamentally in terms of the ever-changing Dao. Aristotle and the Bible frame the discussion of the place of human beings in terms of “for the sake of” (heneka in Greek), giving the human the place of privilege within an assumed or predicated hierarchy of beings. Daoism, by contrast, emphasizes the flexible and nimble location within the flow or the way (Dao), placing a premium not simply on asserting or maintaining the hierarchy but on not disturbing the Dao in its flows and shifting arrangements. Accentuating the interflow of yin/yang, Daoism makes differentiations less a matter of hierarchy or power relations than of the different, necessarily complementary and codependent, even partially shared or overlapping, positioning within the way. In this fluid and morphing constellation, everything appears related to and seems to be for the sake of everything else, without the need to designate positions of

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centrality or fixed places of power. A privileged position, like the one ascribed to human beings in different ways by Aristotle and the Bible, does not come to the fore, and, even if discerned or remarked upon, is highlighted as one part of the larger in scope way-making of the Dao. Politics or political action, discussed in terms of the ruling practices, focuses on the fittingness or suitability of acting with regard to the dynamics of the Dao. Change and finitude, rather than foundation, position, or privilege, come to orient the relations of humans to other humans and to non-human beings. I have begun here to query and displace somewhat the notion of the human being that underpins the ideas of “the people” and of politics as their formative and regulating foundation. In this broader conceptual context, it is time now to look more specifically at the diverging vectors of “humans” and “mortals” indicated by my title. The notion of the human as a living being hearkens back to the Greek zoon logon echon, not so much a rational animal (animal rationale) as a living being, a specific form of zoe, that has logos: an untranslatable Greek word4 that implies language, judgment, discourse, reasoning, principle, and thus perhaps a broader sense of endowment than the one communicated in its supposed Latin equivalent, animal rationale. What is crucial is that this pedigree designated for the human being as zoon logon echon links it essentially and inextricably with the idea of life, which the Latin translation, animal rationale, inflects by tying it more specifically and directly to animality and animal life by stipulating ratio (reason, rationality) as the constitutive difference. Life not only constitutes the horizon but also institutes the basis, or the core, for understanding what it means to be human, namely a human life form or a human living being. Politics and political discourse orient thought toward the notion of the people from within this broader sense of humankind and the understanding of the constitutive difference of the human as a living being. Since “human” means “human animal,” the primary difference involved in determining the distinctiveness of the human is its differentiation from other, non-human animals. The Greek zoon, which refers to all forms of living beings, implies in fact a larger scope than the Latin animal rationale: within the Greek notion of zoe humans come to be distinguished not only from non-human animals through the possession of logos but also from other living beings, including gods, whose life is characterized by immortality. In this context, the distinctness of human beings is based on possessing (echein) particular features and is underscored with regard to politics as governed by the notion of “good life” (eu zen). Others, living and non-living beings, sometimes including human slaves, come to be considered as existing “for the sake” of humans and their good life, that is, as already in servitude to humans, whether we take, their difference notwithstanding, the Aristotelian or the Biblical viewpoint. By contrast, the notion of “mortals” orientates thought and by implication the thought of politics in quite a different and distinct manner. Its primary vector is not possession, mastery, or the idea of service to particular beings—being for the sake of, that is, ultimately for the sake of human beings—but instead

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mortality, which takes its shape as a multiply vectored relatedness, oriented within and by the world and its event. In the inventive and in some ways unprecedented formulation given to it by Heidegger, the phrase “we mortals”5 is relationally bound in such a way that it has always already invoked earth, sky, and divinities, or immortals. When we say mortals, we are then thinking of the other three along with them by way of the onefold [Einfalt, also infold] of the four. / Earth and sky, divinities and mortals—of itself at one with one another, belong together out of the onefold of the single fourfold. Each of the four mirrors in its own way the being [Wesen] of the others. (Heidegger 1971b, 177, trans. modified) The notion of “the human” invokes its difference on the one hand from the animal, or more broadly from non-human living beings, and, on the other, from the inhuman. It also refers to the specific endowment, possessions, or features attributed to human beings and crucially determining both their particular location within the world and therefore also the basis for political thought and action. By contrast, mortals, almost always invoked by Heidegger in the plural, with one or two exceptions, do not experience or understand themselves first in terms of essences, characteristics, or possessions but are instead oriented by their care, concern, or engagement with being. For Heidegger, the dignity of the human lies neither in the logos understood as rationality, nor in the sacredness of life, nor in the privileged position assigned to or assumed by humans within creation or the universe. This dignity is neither natural nor created, but rather granted to mortals from and for the sake of being, that is, it informs and unfolds as their very manner of being. As he explains in “Letter on Humanism,” the dignity at issue is that of being, namely of its non-repeatable, one-time occurrence. Making being the source of dignity, Heidegger radically displaces the human, evacuates its accrued concepts and significations, and reorients the being that we have come to know as human toward mortal existence, whose ethos, or mode of dwelling, comes specifically from the capacity for death; not in the sense of the end of life and the demise of a living being, but as the capacity to experience, while and through existing, death and the nothingness that opens itself and undergirds this experience. In the essay entitled “The Thing” Heidegger explains: “We now call mortals mortals—not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death” (Heidegger 1971b, 176). In the manuscript entitled Das Ereginis (The Event), written in 1941–1942 and published just a few years ago, Heidegger emphatically dissociates death and thus mortality from being grounded in any notion of life or its inevitable end. Death is explained instead through a rethought conception of Da-sein as the site, the there, where relation to being comes to light each time single and non-repeatable.

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We still know nothing of the ontological essence of death, because we think metaphysically, take the human being as a zoon, and explain death, from the opposition to “life” … Death is to be thought inceptually, i.e. out of the event and with respect to Da-sein … The end—in the sense of consummation—relates to Da-sein (not to life) … Death essentially occurs not when someone is dead, but when the departure into the steadfastness of Dasein attains its consummation [Vollendung]. Therefore death also does not essentially occur when someone “dies,” if dying is merely the extinguishing of “life.” (Heidegger 2012, 165, ellipses mine) To think death in relation to life, that is, as its unavoidable end, is to grasp death metaphysically, forgetting the signal ontological resonance of death that both undergirds and undercuts every moment of existence. Thought in terms of mortality, that is, in terms of the span between birth and death, dying refers to the always singular, one-time, and non-repeatable, that is, “mortal,” relation to being; specifically the relation to the dignity of its inceptive, non-repeatable event and giving. This relation is each time borne out as Da-sein, that is, as beingthere, namely as carried out within an idiomatic, singular relation to being. The term “mortals” thus invokes death not as the inevitable end of a living being but rather as being-toward-death, occurring ever only as the always singular moment when humans are—or more properly, become—capable of standing in Da-sein, that is, in the mode of relation to being as event. Thus, mortals experience the inceptivity of each moment through “death,” that is, through the nihilation that simultaneously underpins and undoes all coming to apparent presence. This means that mortals can undergo this kind of death only when still remaining in being, that is, while existent or being alive. One could put it this way: living (through) a moment means standing in the open nothingness of this very instant, which is never truly present but, in its proper and non-present while, lights up and spans the between of the void of the past and the emptiness of the future. This transit between the two forms of emptiness: the past and the future, opens their relation as the moment that stretches over the abyss of nothingness. To die means in this context to experience—to traverse, to go the way of—the open nothingness of being manifest as the so-called “present” moment unfolding in its non-repeatable singularity. Being unfolds as this experience of “dying,” or, in other words, as mortal being that befits mortals. Mortality means the traversal of being as nothingness, as the nothing that is not only never separate or separable from being but instead forms its obverse side: not its negation but rather its very momentum that lets be, allowing beginning, inception, or birth precisely as the hallmarks of mortality. In this way, nothingness also marks the limen, on both sides, of presence, presence that materializes ever only as apparent presence, never stable or fixed because pulsing with nothingness. This is why mortals are not determined as essences but instead become vectored into the occurrence or the event of the world. They can experience the non-recurrence and the each time signal beginning of being on

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earth and underneath the sky. Within this exchange, earth is never a being that is in service to mortals, a globe or a Mercatorial space to be colonized, objectified, manipulated, or exploited. Mortality entails a non-manipulative and nonexploitative relation to beings found on earth underneath the sky; not just living beings but also things and inanimate beings. This non-manipulative relating involves precisely allowing beings and things to be encountered and experienced with regard to the mortal way of being, that is, in a way that allows their existence as manifest from the open nothingness of being. Only when encountered in this manner, can things bear open the world for mortals and thus let them be mortals. This is why in his essay, “The Thing,” Heidegger can specify the initial or originary relation of mortals to things in terms of gratitude for the way in which things bear the world and allow mortals to experience their being as being-in-the-world. Simply put, there would be no world without things that carry it and let us experience it and dwell in its momentariness. Even this short sketch suggests that this approach is markedly different from the contemporary techno-scientific frenzy of breaking down into informational components, isolation, manipulation, and exploitation, where “earth” and “things” that make the world possible are overpowered as resources to be marshaled and exploited for the benefit of human life. If the term “human being” anchors the idea of the human in the notion of life, the name “mortals” ruptures this envelope of the living and disallows limiting or focusing the perspective within which to understand the human mode of being to life or living beings, let alone formulating it exclusively in terms of the unquestioned priority of human life. In short, the juxtaposition of “mortals” with “humans” decisively calls into question what Arendt discerns as the modern privilege of life, which has emerged and reigned triumphant at least since Bentham. As Arendt argues, “the modern age continued to operate under the assumption that life, and not the world, is the highest good of man” (Arendt 1958, 318). Symptomatically, Arendt diagnoses the most important change formative of modernity as the devaluation of world in view of the primacy of life, of its preservation and regulation. Heidegger’s writings on the world, the fourfold, things, and mortals pivot thinking away from this modern privileging of life, and with it of humans as living beings, to the broader sense of the world’s event and the mortals’ location within its unfolding momentary space-time. In this larger context, when contrasted with “We the People,” the phrase “we mortals” can be taken to interrogate the whole apparatus of biopolitics, thus laying bare the foundations upon which politics could have been at all narrowly telescoped onto the matter of life, in the process disregarding or obscuring the mortal way in which beings that have called themselves “human” exist. If according to Aristotle humans engage in politics, specifically in the constitution of the polis as politeia, for the sake of a good life, the notion of mortals calls into question the idea of the human as defined through the prism of life and thus makes possible and calls for resituating politics with regard to the event of the world. Politics does not, of course, ignore the world, but it treats it secondarily, often limiting its understanding of the world to the

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inter-human world or else dealing with the world as relative to human affairs, that is, as their support subject to their manipulation and benefit, and vectored primarily to their interests. By contrast, what the phrase “we mortals” foregrounds is the originary responsiveness to the event of the world, in which mortals play a role and to which they are called to respond appropriately, according to the elusive and inconspicuous measure of the event, yet which they neither control, master, nor lead. This responsiveness is not just a response but is equally a call to responsibility for the singular, non-repeatable giving of being, and thus for all beings that manifest from the event. It is from this unusual sense of responsiveness and responsibility that mortal thought and action should gather their momentum, detaching themselves from the omnipresent and overbearing sway of the human living being and its purported dominion, or lordship, over beings. It is no surprise then that Heidegger remarks that we still have to learn to be mortals. “Rational living beings must first become mortals” (Heidegger 1971b, 176). This implies that we have not yet been mortal, at best perhaps only on rare occasions, parading instead in the convenient prerogatives of human beings. This call to mortals—to mortality, non-repeatable beginning, and singular event—may appear difficult to many, perhaps even unpalatable. It has clearly been sorely misread or misapprehended in much of the response to Heidegger’s thought, the response that is still much too Western and too little open to those Eastern ways of thinking that never downgraded or degraded the nothingness intrinsic to being, mortality, and beginning. It goes against much that the West has ensconced as its tradition, whether in its Greek, and Greco-Roman, or Judeo-Christian, monotheistic roots. It is these roots than need to be brought to the surface, so that perhaps we can think of ourselves less in human and humanizing terms, terms that shape us with regard to how other beings are there already in our service, and more how, as mortals, we might respond to and find ourselves in service to being. It is possible to say that Heidegger turns the humanistic notion of the rational animal inside out, converting it from the privileged master of the universe and lord of beings to simply a mortal positioned in its being by the initial call of being to response, care, and responsibility. Taking care here is not, however, to be understood simply as an extension of human or animal caring. For what mortals need to take care of above all is the signal, one-time giving of being, its beat of nothingness, and so accordingly to keep their relations, attitudes, and actions radically open with regard to the non-recurrent event of being. All other forms of care: human, care of the self, health care, etc., need to be inflected through this originary response-care to being. The ability for this response is what makes us beings in the first place, mortal beings that we are, even though we try to strenuously ignore it, afraid of nothingness and misunderstanding the nothing in being whose awareness makes us who we are. There is no direct route from this response constitutive of being mortal to a politics, to political ideas or programs, but it is clear that the invocation “we mortals” entails a radical—going to the very roots of the human—re-

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orienting of the bearings and the structural supports that have brought about the understanding of the humans and their politics. While the parameters and markers for such a transformation are yet to be brought to light, it is clear that this re-orientation would entail a fundamental turn from life to world, and for that matter to world taken not as a collection (or a collective) of things or beings but instead actuated as event. That said, the phrases “We the People” and “we mortals” indicate a crucial difference both in the starting point for thinking politics and in the framework for developing such reflection. In the first case, the starting point is the idea of “people,” which renders human beings the center of affairs and, most often, the sole or exclusive focus of political thought and politics. Such approach makes politics primarily, if not exclusively, the domain of the human. It thus determines the nodal points of politics in such terms as human identity (individual and group), belonging to a polity, and rights, citizenship, entitlements, etc., that come with it. The phrase “we mortals” suggests a fundamentally different optics for politics, one that begins with and takes the cue for its elaboration from the manner in which mortals belong to and take their finite place in the world. In this context, politics would never be focused on or limited to human beings and their concerns, but instead it would prioritize the world and from this perspective consider humans and their needs specifically to the extent to which they are part of such a world and in terms of how they can belong to this world. It would put the world in its center, understand the human primarily through the prism of finitude—with both the opportunities and duties which such a mode of being entails with regard to a non-mortal world, and in relation to other living and non-living beings that also belong to it. If “We the People” defines politics in terms of belonging to a people or, when taken more universally, to humankind, “we mortals” implies a distinctly altered context and manner of belonging. The world and other beings are not there for human benefit or to be exploited, just as they are not simply evaluated and fitted to human measure. Rather, they are to be allowed their mode of belonging to such a world. Thus the parameters and the goals of political reflection and politics proper would need to be substantially different, developed not just for the advantage of human beings but with the primary consideration of the world as such, the world to which as mortals humans too belong. For instance, it would entail considering not simply the rights of humans but also the terms on which other beings, including non-living beings, belong to the world as well. And the way in which human beings decide to belong among and together with other beings within the world would then define their rights and duties. Instead of what today we understand as global politics, there could perhaps be a politics of the world, and thus also for the world. Within the framework of Heidegger’s thought, such re-orienting cannot be forced or manufactured at will, in part because willing, causing, and making are at the very heart of the privilege accorded to life and of the entitlement arrogated to the humans, on which politics is usually founded. Yet such reorienting can be prepared and prepared for, were the opportunity for it to

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manifest. Heidegger suggests it can be allowed to come to fruition, not by fiat or deed but in response to how being might unfold. In the course of such response, this responsiveness befitting mortals would have to be learned, opened to and assumed through the unlearning, at least a partial one, of the human, or more aptly nowadays of the modern techno-human. We would have to learn a new “way-making,” to echo Heidegger, a mortal opening of new pathways, routes, relations, and traversals among beings, pathways inaugurated for the sake of being, its event, and the world it gives us to experience ever singularly. And hence also opened for the sake of us, mortals, as well as other beings, always already quartered in this non-repeatable world-event.

Notes 1 “Konstytucja 3 Maja, 1971” (www3.lrs.lt/pdf/konstitucija_lenkiska_1.pdf), visited January 6, 2018. 2 www.historyguide.org/intellect/declaration.html, visited January 6, 2018. 3 www.catholic.org/bible/book.php?id=1, lines 27–28, visited January 6, 2018. 4 For an excellent and succinct discussion of logos and the issues with its (un)translatabilty, consult the entry on logos in the Dictionary of Untranslatables (Cassin 2014, 581–595). 5 In this chapter, I limit myself to considering the implications and possibilities suggested by Heidegger’s approach to “mortals” in the wake of his critique of the notion of “man” or “human” as a living being. In the 1930s, especially at the time of his rectorship at the University of Freiburg (1933–1934) and his philosophical interest in National Socialism, Heidegger engaged on numerous occasions in various attempts to formulate and then to transform the notion of “people” (Volk), and specifically of the German people. There is ample and growing scholarship on this issue and period in Heidegger’s thought, which cannot be considered here. Though to my knowledge Heidegger does not explicitly cast his discussion of mortals as an alternative to the idea of community or people, it appears that this thought of mortals, characteristic for Heidegger’s late, post-World War II writings, comes in the aftermath of his increasingly critical attitude toward the notion of the people post-1936. While the relation between “mortals” and “people” in Heidegger’s own work is crucial for understanding the shifts in Heidegger’s thought and in particular for its direction after World War II, this problematic is not the focus of my deliberations here. My purpose here is merely to suggest possible implications of the notion of mortals for reformulating the framework within which to think politics.

References Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Cassin, Barbara, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, trans. and ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014). “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” 1789, online version: www. historyguide.org/intellect/declaration.html (last accessed February 4, 2018). Heidegger, Martin, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: HarperCollins, 1971a).

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Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971b). Heidegger, Martin, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985). Heidegger, Martin, Basic Writings, trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). Heidegger, Martin, Principles of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). Heidegger, Martin, The Event, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012). “Konstytucja 3 Maja, 1971,” online version: www3.lrs.lt/pdf/konstitucija_lenkiska_1. pdf (last accessed February 4, 2018). New American Bible, online version: www.catholic.org/bible/book.php?id=1 (last accessed February 4, 2018). Perkins, Franklin, Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014). Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand, Encounters and Conversations with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

5

Dialogue as a tool enhancing the effectiveness of the activities of NGOs in modern societies1 Tomasz Grzyb, Katarzyna Byrka and Dariusz Dolin´ski

The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines civil society as a network of relations among groups, communities, and teams which stretch between “individuals” and “the state” in modern countries. Therefore, the development of a society’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – an important element of the “dense network” Encyclopaedia Britannica envisages – can be considered one valid measure of the development of this society and a democracy it inhabits. Importantly, one of the key roles of civil society as understood by Habermas (1991) is providing support to social dialogue. In turn, social dialogue (and thus also civil dialogue, collaboration between the state and civil society institutions, negotiating joint positions, and achieving compromises) is the foundation of democracy. Given that NGOs are central to civil society, their adequacy and effectiveness seem highly relevant to the complicated mosaic of mutual interdependences of the state and civil society institutions and, therefore, to forming a healthy, well-regulated society grounded in democratic principles. Over 10 years ago (2005), Piotr Fra˛ czak, Maria Rogaczewska, and Kuba Wygnan´ski authored a policy document titled A Strategy for the Development of Civil Society, in which they listed objectives to be achieved in order to enhance Poland’s growth. The document pointed out that: “Independent nongovernmental organizations and active communities (both area-focused and theme-focused) are the primary channels for citizens to engage in meaningful activity” (Fra˛ czak et al. 2005). Naturally, such engagement can take various forms. At present, there are over 100,000 various associations and over 17,000 foundations in Poland. Over 8,000 of them are officially recognized as “public benefit organizations,” which means that they have the right to receive 1 percent of income tax from individuals. Such organizations can function effectively and reach their targets only if they enjoy public trust. This trust, in turn, results primarily from the independence of NGOs, which can be and is understood in multiple ways. Obviously, one of the most important facets of NGO autonomy is that they are independent of governmental and other public authorities. Symptomatically, wherever parties with dictatorial leanings accede to power, the idea appears to limit the independence of NGOs (for example, by reducing the funding sources available to NGOs, systematically changing the legislation relative to NGOs, and ultimately – as in Russia –

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requiring NGOs to register as agents of foreign states). Such anti-NGO policies are currently being launched in several Central European countries, mainly in Hungary and in Poland. In Hungary, the Fidesz party wants to introduce a special register of all organizations that receive funding from foreign institutions, primarily in order to monitor and stigmatize these organizations. In Poland, as revealed by the INGOs Conference of the Council of Europe report published in May 2017, the government has orchestrated a campaign designed to undermine trust in NGOs. NGOs work in various spheres (a list of their most relevant fields of activity is provided in Table 5.1 below). Irrespective of their field, NGOs must all secure funding for their undertakings, and in doing this, they use diverse fundraising models. Some of them rely solely on contributions from their members, while others on tax write-offs, grants, and subsidies. Nevertheless, many NGOs actually obtain funds for their activities first of all by soliciting donations of money or in kind. There is no good reason to expect that this is set to change in the coming years. The study on “Volunteerism, Philanthropy, 1%” (Adamiak and Setniewska 2014) carried out by the Stowarzyszenie Klon/Jawor reported that 66 percent of Poles said they supported NGOs through:     

putting money into donation boxes; bank transfers; sending text messages; giving clothing to people in need; giving food as part of a food collection drive.

Inferably, the fundraising effectiveness displayed by NGOs can determine their capacity to survive and function. It should be recognized that the knowledge of social influence techniques which boost effectiveness of direct collection efforts can significantly impact the financial condition of organizations which contribute to the rise of civil society in Poland on a daily basis.

Table 5.1 Fields of activity of NGOs in Poland in 2015 No.

Field of activity

% of organizations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Sport, tourism, recreation, hobby Education Culture and art Social services and welfare Health care Local development

34 15 13 7 7 6

Note: Based on the findings of the Stowarzyszenie Klon/Jawor’s study “The Condition of the Non-Governmental Sector in Poland,” performed in 2015.

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For this reason, it is worthwhile to focus on dialogue understood in narrower terms than is generally the case. Within the psychology of social influence, dialogue is neither an approach aiming to understand another person’s position nor a tool for the exchange of opinions with a person (or people) that thinks (or think) differently on more or less important matters. The psychology of social influence defines dialogue only as a process of communication with another person who is a partner in an interaction. Essentially, thus-defined dialogue means that partners in the interaction take turns speaking and refer in their communication to that which their interlocutor has said. This is distinct from monologue, in which only one of the partners in the interaction speaks. On this model, dialogue may aim simply to produce an impression that information is exchanged rather than to effect such an exchange indeed. Of course, this is an entirely different understanding of dialogue than the one adopted by the other contributors to this volume. Proposing this approach, we want to demonstrate that dialogue can be theorized and construed in many different ways, and that even such a narrow definition of dialogue can be relevant if it serves to support civil society through facilitating the operation of NGOs. Before we begin our argument, let us ask the following question: Why do NGOs need knowledge about the rules and mechanisms of social influence? People seek to influence each other in order to achieve their own goals in a range of different situations. A waitress wants a customer to leave her a tip; a car salesman wants a client to buy a car from him; a politician wants his constituency to vote for him in the upcoming election. Each of these people can use an array of actions to increase the likelihood of persuading us to do exactly what they want us to do. Volunteers in charity organizations are in a similar situation to the waitress, the salesman, and the politician. Their job is to encourage people to engage in a particular action – to donate money, sign a petition, take part in a charity event, or become a volunteer in a correctional facility for juvenile delinquents. Just as a car dealer wants to encourage a client to buy a car from him, a volunteer from a charity organization wants to get people to engage in charitable behaviors. While the behavior charities quite uniformly aim to elicit involves donating money in fundraisers, quite different “tricks” and social influence techniques can actually prove effective in different circumstances. In this chapter, we discuss how the knowledge of social influence can be utilized within the charity sector. Specifically, our focus is on how dialogue can be employed as a tool for enhancing the effectiveness of NGOs. Psychological research into dialogue addresses two primary aspects of dialogue. First, the role of dialogue in ending conflicts and initiating cooperation is explored, both at the individual level (e.g., Cohen et al. 1990; Thomas et al. 2014), and at the group level (e.g., Clark 1996; Hammerstein 2003). These studies demonstrate that dialogue has a very important, even crucial, role in understanding the position and perspective of the “other party” as well as in devising solutions to conflicts. Second, dialogues in which people engage with themselves are examined as part of introspection research. In introspection,

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people ask themselves questions and answer them, whereby they alternately adopt optimist and pessimist (or loss-avoidance and profit-seeking) perspectives to scrutinize the issue at hand. This conversation with oneself promotes both crystallization of identity and optimization of decision-making (e.g., Hermans and Oles´ 1996; Puchalska-Wasyl et al. 2008). Our team’s many studies have reported yet another function of dialogue. We have shown that a request or a proposal to another individual which is preceded by an easy dialogue on a neutral subject is more likely to be fulfilled than a request/proposal made without such preamble. Importantly, this concerns requests of a highly moral, morally neutral, and even morally doubtful nature alike (Dolinski et al. 2001; Dolinski et al. 2005). This finding highlights the complex role that dialogue can play in democratic processes. It turns out, namely, that dialogue need not necessarily be constructive, and in some cases it can even serve as an effective tool for manipulation. As indicated by Robert Cialdini (2001), most of the various tricks and techniques used by practitioners of social influence can be classified into six main categories or principles: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. According to the reciprocity principles, people avoid being indebted to others. Therefore, when they receive something, they feel the need to reciprocate. Consequently, a small gift from a car dealer can sway the purchase decision, a waiter’s grimace or gesture warning restaurant guests not to order the fish can motivate them to leave him a big tip in return, etc. The principle of consistency inclines people to continue an action once started, and to make good on their verbal declarations. Regarding the consistency principle, practitioners of social influence can avail themselves of a multitude and variety of ploys to achieve their goals. A book series can serve as a trivial example. A person who has bought a book about birds, having long nursed a passion for the subject, may feel disposed to buy a book about reptiles as well for the sole reason that both books are part of the same (fictitious) Animals of the World series. If a volume about amphibians is later released in the same series, the person is likely to buy it too, though any other book on amphibians would not attract their interest. The principle of social proof refers to the belief that whatever other people do – and there always seems to be a lot of “others” around – must be right. If I hesitate over the choice of the insurer for my car, my decision could be crucially influenced by the fact that a particular company is trusted by the largest number of people in my country. When a woman reads that most women use a particular brand of skincare cream, she treats the information as a hint as to which cream she should buy herself. The great power of the principle of liking is hardly surprising. The fact that we tip the waiter we like more generously than the one we dislike is indeed all too obvious. In the same way, we are willing to lend money to someone we like rather than to someone we dislike; and, come the election, we will support a politician we like rather than a politician we dislike, in doing which we may regrettably all too often neglect their electoral agendas and competences. The principle of authority is associated primarily with the credibility of the person

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who tries to convince us to do one thing or another. Obviously, an automobile expert rather than a layperson will be more likely to persuade us to purchase a particular model of car. Similarly, we will be more eager to change our diet if we are told to do so by a doctor or a dietician than by a printer or taxi driver. The rule of scarcity, in turn, leads us to believe that a thing which is hard to get (or a thing that will soon be completely unavailable) is more valuable than easily available commodities. Thus, the “last house on the estate” offered by a developer, or a limited edition of an encyclopedia, can become especially desirable to and coveted by potential buyers. Cialdini’s framework based on these six main rules of social influence has some undeniable advantages. However, one problem is that it tends to be difficult to identify the particular rule behind a given social-influence stratagem or technique. Another problem is that the six-principles model is sometimes too limited to explain psychologically the effectiveness of a particular technique. Emphatically, to work effectively, a vast majority of social influence techniques (including those suggested by Cialdini) require one or another form of dialogue, exchange of opinions, or discussion. For this reason, our focus in this chapter is on dialogue.

Foot-in-the-mouth, or asking about people’s well-being The first ideas regarding the systematic use of dialogue as a specific form of communication to increase the chances of obtaining funds for charity organizations can be traced back to research conducted by Daniel Howard. Howard (1990) posited that a person who says they are well when asked how they feel will be more willing to help less fortunate people (those who feel worse) when subsequently asked to donate to charity. A person publicly declaring their well-being will feel obliged to engage in improving the wellbeing of those who are worse off. In the first of Howard’s experiments, a researcher pretending to be an employee of a committee to combat hunger telephoned randomly selected residents of Dallas. In the control group, the interviewees were informed that cakes at the price of 25 cents were going to be sold in their neighborhood, with the revenue used to fund a festive meal for the hungry (the study was conducted shortly before Thanksgiving). Each respondent was asked whether they agreed to have the vendor visit their home. In the experimental group, after the introduction, the researcher first asked the respondents about their well-being and, depending on the response, stated that it was either nice or sad to hear. Only then did the interviewer explain that a charity sale of cakes was being organized and asked the subjects to contribute. It was found that people in the experimental group bought the cakes more often than those in the control group. The problem was that the experimental group’s more frequent consent could be attributed to the perceived politeness of the interviewer. After all, asking how people are and expressing joy when they are well (or compassion when they are not) is commonly considered polite behavior. Also, it can be

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reasonably expected that people are more likely to grant a politely formulated request than to grant the same, but less politely worded, request. To exclude this interpretation, Howard conducted a second study, adding another experimental group where the researcher at the very outset expressed the hope that the other respondent was feeling well. The compliance rate in this group was found to be the same as in the control group, and more than twice lower than in the experimental group. Based on his findings, Howard concluded that the politeness of the person asking for help did not explain the differences in compliance rates between the groups. In the third experiment, Howard thoroughly analyzed the responses of the interviewees, demonstrating that the better they declared they were, the more frequently they expressed their readiness to invite the seller to their homes and the more cakes they bought. The experimental group subjects who said they were not well were as infrequently willing to contribute to the charity as the control group respondents who had not been asked how they were. Interpreting his findings, Howard stresses that the pattern he observed cannot be explained by stating that a good mood favors altruistic behavior, because people in the control group were not any worse, yet they were still significantly less likely to comply with the charity request. Similar results, indicating that the very act of asking people how they are is a crucial factor, have been reported by Fointiat (2000), who, unlike Howard, carried out her experiment not by phone, but via direct, face-to-face interaction. The effectiveness of the foot-in-the-mouth technique obviously depends on when people are asked how they actually respond. While in American culture, positive responses prevail, it is interesting to see whether a similar effect is observable in a setting where a negative response is the cultural norm. Poland is one of the few countries where “I feel bad” is a culturally expected answer (Dolinski 1996). It was found that although, when asked about their well-being, people in Poland usually answered that they did not feel fine, they still engaged more often in charity work than those who were directly asked for financial support. When Howard’s experiment was replicated in Poland, it turned out that the respondents who were asked about their well-being more frequently involved in charitable activities than those who were simply asked for a donation. At the same time, the tendency to help others was particularly strong among people who declared feeling unwell (Dolinski et al. 2001). This indicates that, although the question about a person’s well-being is a good social influence technique, the psychological mechanism underlying its effectiveness must be different than Howard assumed. Why, then, should people who are asked how they are comply more often with requests that follow than those who are not asked this question?

Dialogue involvement The foot-in-the-mouth technique described above involves not only asking the subject how they are, but also reacting to their answer accordingly, i.e., with an adequate expression of joy or compassion. This seemingly insignificant

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detail of the procedure may be fundamentally important. While in control conditions where the charity request is formulated directly, there is only a monologue from the experimenter, in the foot-in-the-mouth situation there is a dialogue between the experimenter and the subject. Dialogue and monologue are the basic modes of interpersonal communication. Monologue, as a unilateral form of communication, seems to be “cold” whereas dialogue, with its essential function of mutual communication between the interaction participants, appears to be “warm.” We can say that monologue aims to avoid a deep interaction with another person. If a request is formulated as a monologue, all we have to do is listen and then finalize the interaction. Moreover, monologue is characteristically used in contact with strangers. The matter is quite different with dialogue. This form of communication fosters cognitive activity since while discussing something with another person, we have to listen to be able to refer to their theses and arguments. In contrast to monologue, dialogue is characteristic mainly of interactions between friends and acquaintances. Contemporary social psychology has accumulated ample empirical evidence demonstrating that in interactions with other people we often react automatically to certain stimuli, and also automatically trigger some, often complex, behavioral scripts (e.g., Langer et al. 1978; Slugoski 1995; Bargh 1994). Because people are more willing to grant requests made by friends rather than strangers (e.g., Argyle and Henderson 1984; Roloff 1987), dialogue can be expected to make them more inclined to fulfill a request than monologue. Dialogue in fact triggers readiness for behaviors which are usually manifested toward friends, and therefore also for granting minor requests. To test the thesis of the crucial role of dialogue, we conducted several experiments (Dolinski et al. 2001). In one of them, we asked young people at a university campus either how they were, or whether they were students, and reacted to their responses accordingly (dialogue condition). In other groups, we simply expressed either our hope that the respondents felt well, or our supposition that they were students (monologue condition). Then we produced a donation box and asked them to drop money into it. We received donations more frequently in dialogue conditions. A similar effect, indicating that dialogue plays a key role in processes of social influence, was reported by Burger et al. (2001). These researchers, however, treated dialogue as a manifestation of a broader phenomenon which they refer to as incidental similarity (see also Burger et al. 2004). Obviously, there is a huge difference between planning an experiment and fundraising for a charity organization. The most important consideration in experiment planning is the clarity of the conditions: it is necessary to test one technique at a time to measure its effectiveness. In everyday life, this is a minor concern, if at all, since the objective of fundraising is to collect as much money as possible no matter what technique (or techniques) is (or are) used. Indeed, it is sometimes a good idea to combine two, or more, techniques to achieve a synergy effect.

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In our experiments (Dolinski et al. 2005), we aggregated two techniques: “even a penny helps” and dialogue involvement. Our experimenters, as volunteers at a foundation for marrow transplants (Urszula Jaworska Fund), asked participants for a cash donation. Our experiment design included three groups: (1) a “synergy effect group” where the researchers dialogued with participants and capped their requests with “even a penny helps”; (2) two classical experimental groups (with dialogue involvement or “even a penny helps”); and (3) a control group. Our results (see Table 5.2 below) clearly showed that the “synergy effect” worked very effectively: 75 percent of the participants agreed to donate money (which was a significantly higher result than in the other groups), and the average donation was very generous. The percentage of donators in two “regular” experimental groups was also higher than in the control group, but lower than in the combined-technique conditions. This clearly shows that aggregating two (or more) techniques can lead to a significant increase in effectiveness. Evidently, dialogue alone increases the effectiveness of a request in a pro-social situation. Having established this, we could inquire how (if at all) the length of the dialogue affects the effectiveness of the request. In other words, could we improve our chances by having a longer conversation with our interlocutor? Another experiment was conducted to answer that question. The subjects were divided into three groups: two experimental groups and one control group. The central request which all groups were faced with concerned completion of a lengthy questionnaire. The subjects, randomly selected from among adult passers-by, were asked to specify the number of questions in a lengthy questionnaire they would be willing to answer. In the control group, the question was asked straightaway with no introduction. In the first experimental group, two neutral questions were asked first: 1 Hi there, do you like winter? 2 Are roads in our city sufficiently maintained during winter? Then followed the main question concerning the questionnaire. In the second experimental group, the dialogue was extended to include five questions (and, obviously, the answers given by the respondents): Table 5.2 The percentage of donators and their donation amounts across experimental groups Monologue

% of donators Average donation (in PLN)

Dialogue

Every penny will help

Standard request

Every penny will help

Standard request

53.33 1.10

33.33 0.49

83.33 2.47

66.67 1.39

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Hi there, do you like winter? Are roads in our city sufficiently maintained during winter? Do you like snow? Do you do any winter sports? Do you have any enjoyable associations with winter?

A total of 90 adults, 50 percent of whom were women, participated in the experiment. The results we obtained indicated clear differences both in the percentage of individuals who agreed to grant the request (Figure 5.1) and in the number of questions the subjects were willing to answer (Figure 5.2). In each case, only the extended dialogue translated into significant effectiveness differences in comparison with the control group. This confirms the assumption that, at least in some cases, only an extended dialogue, used instead of feigning a dialogue by asking one or two fake questions, can increase the effectiveness of the request.

Conclusion As shown above, dialogue- and conversation-based techniques are an effective way to increase the chances charity organizations have of obtaining donations. Therefore, they can be regarded as an effective tool for enhancing the general effectiveness of “third sector” organizations in democratic societies. However, some of the techniques can cause dissonance among volunteers who are supposed to use them. The authors of this chapter have had some experience in training people who work for charity organizations. A common question we hear during training sessions is: “Why should we cheat people? 100 90 90 80 70

66.6

66.6

60 50

% of agreement

40 30 20 10 0 Short dialogue

Long dialogue

Control

Figure 5.1 Percentage of individuals who agreed to grant the request.

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40 34.7

35 30 25.7

24.1

25 20

Number of questions

15 10 5 0 Short dialogue

Long dialogue

Control

Figure 5.2 The number of questions the subjects were willing to answer.

We are asking for money for good causes, we don’t want to sell anything!” “Well, that’s right,” we usually reply, “but you work in tough conditions. You have to compete for people’s attention with people who sell things. And believe me, they are usually very well trained.” This is, in brief, the essence of our message to our trainees. If you want to attract people’s attention, you have to be efficient. You have to use tools developed within social psychology and especially social influence techniques. Your aim is not to cheat people – after all, it is absolutely crucial to leave full responsibility for the decision to the donator – but to encourage them to donate blood, become volunteers, or to give money to good causes. As already mentioned, however, dialogue may not only increase people’s tendency to engage in altruistic activities, but also serve as a tool for manipulation, pushing people to act in ways inconsistent with their own interests and/or moral norms. The term “social influence,” which is generally used by social psychologists, carries no value judgment. The term “social manipulation” evokes what are entirely negative associations. The relation between these two concepts is that manipulation is a subcategory within “social influence.” Every act of social manipulation is therefore an instance of social influence, but only some forms and types of social influence are manipulations. Behaviors are considered manipulative based on a set of criteria. The key criterion concerns the intentions of the person who seeks to exert influence. In manipulation, the person is guided only by the desire to achieve their own goals and interests, without taking into account the goals and interests of the other party. The second criterion involves an asymmetry in awareness that influence is being exerted. The individual exerting the influence knows exactly why and for what purpose they are engaging in a given act (e.g.,

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capturing another person in a dialogue), while the person being manipulated either has no awareness, or is at best only partially aware of what is going on (Dolinski 2016). Of course, in terms of democratic standards, any manipulation in social life is objectionable. However, it would be naive to expect that such activities will become less frequent in the public sphere because people are becoming more moral. It is less naive to conclude that manipulative behaviors will simply be rarer where they are less effective. Given this, a key challenge seems to be to teach people how they can resist manipulation. Doubtlessly, such books as Robert Cialdini’s popular volume (2001) are excellent resources for consciousness-raising campaigns, but workshop-based educational programs for primary and secondary school students would also be a useful intervention. To develop them is an important and urgent task for social and educational scientists. Symptomatically, such philosophical giants as Locke, Hume, and Hegel insisted that civil society is interdependent with the broader social system. Without doubt charitable organizations do not work in isolation from the laws and forces of the market – a site where profit-seeking companies operate. Naturally, charitable organizations can be expected to obtain funding in a more ethical and honest manner than business corporations dedicated to the simple accumulation of capital. Nevertheless, to meet such expectations, charities need knowledge, including the insights developed in the psychology of social influence. In this chapter, we have presented such knowledge based on the data generated in experimental field studies. We are confident that it will help charitable organizations in performing their important role, and in supporting the development of civil societies, which are pillars of democracy around the world.

Note 1 The preparation of this chapter was supported by the BST/WROC/2017/A/02 grant funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

References . Adamiak, Piotr and Dorota Setniewska, Zaangazowanie społeczne Polek i Polaków (Warszawa: KLON/Jawor, 2014). Argyle, Michael and Monika Henderson, “The Rules of Friendship,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 1 (1984): 211–237. Bargh, John A., “The Four Horsemen of Automaticity: Awareness, Intention, Efficiency, and Control in Social Cognition,” in Handbook of Social Cognition, 2nd edn, ed. R.S. Wyer and T.K. Srull (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1994), 1–40. Burger, Jerry M., Nicole Messian, Shebani Patel, Alicia Del Prado, and Carmen Anderson, “What a Coincidence! The Effects of Incidental Similarity on Compliance,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1 (2004): 35–43. Burger, Jerry M., Shelley Soroka, Katrina Gonzago, Emily Murphy, and Emily Somervell, “The Effect of Fleeting Attraction on Compliance to Requests,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27 (2001): 1578–1586.

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Cialdini, Robert B., Influence: Science and Practice (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2001). “Civil society,” 2016, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved on March 7, 2018: www. britannica.com/topic/civil-society. Clark, Herbert H., Using Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Cohen, Philip R., Jerry L. Morgan, and Martha E. Pollack, eds., Intentions in Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Dolinski, Dariusz, “The Mystery of the Polish Soul: B.W. Johnson’s Effect a Rebours,” European Journal of Social Psychology, 26 (1996): 1001–1005. Dolinski, Dariusz, Techniques of Social Influence: The Psychology of Gaining Compliance (New York: Routledge, 2016). Dolinski, Dariusz, Tomasz Grzyb, Jacek Olejnik, Slawomir Prusakowski, and Katarzyna Urban, “Let’s Dialogue About Penny: Effectiveness of Dialogue Involvement and Legitimizing Paltry Contribution Techniques,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 35(6) (2005): 1150–1170. Dolinski, Dariusz, Magdalena Nawrat, and Iza Rudak, “Dialogue Involvement as a Social Influence Technique,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27 (2001: 1395–1406. Fointiat, Valerie, “‘Foot-in-the-Mouth’ versus ‘Door-in-the-Face’ Requests,” Journal of Social Psychology, 140 (2000): 264–266. Fra˛ czak, Piotr, Magdalena Rogaczewska, and Kuba Wygnan´ski, Strategia rozwoju społeczen´stwa obywatelskiego (Warszawa: KLON/Jawor, 2005). Habermas, Jurgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Hammerstein, Peter, Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Hermans, Hubert J.M. and Piotr Oles´, “The Personal Meaning of Values: Continuity – Discontinuity of Value Experience,” Polish Psychological Bulletin, 27 (1996): 301–317. Howard, Daniel J., “The Influence of Verbal Responses to Common Greetings on Compliance Behavior: The Foot-in-the-Mouth Effect,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 20 (1990): 1185–1196. Langer, Ellen J., Arthur Blank, and Bencjon Chanowitz, “The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of ‘Placebic’ Information in Interpersonal Interaction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36 (1978): 635–642. . Puchalska-Wasyl, Małgorzata, Elzbieta Chmielnicka-Kuter, and Piotr Oles´, “From Internal Interlocutors to Psychological Functions of Dialogical Activity,” Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 21 (2008): 239–269. Roloff, Michael E., “Communication and Reciprocity within Intimate Relationships,” in Interpersonal Processes: New Directions in Communication Research, ed. Michael E. Roloff and Gerard R. Miller (Newbury Park: Sage, 1987), 11–38. Slugoski, Ben R., “Mindless Processing of Requests? Don’t Ask Twice,” British Journal of Social Psychology, 34 (1995): 335–350. Thomas, Kyle A., Peter DeScioli, Omar Haque, and Steven Pinker, “The Psychology of Coordination and Common Knowledge,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107 (2014): 657–676.

Part II

Art and literature as custodians of traumatic memory, resistance and forgiveness in democracy

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Community at the table1 Dorota Koczanowicz

The first feast that we know of took place about 12,000 years ago (Munro and Grosman 2010, 15362–15366). Seventy-one tortoises were served. The remnants of their shells, blackened with smoke, were excavated by archaeologists in the Hilazon Tachtit cave, Israel. Natalie D. Munro and Leore Grosman estimate that the tortoise meat could have fed about thirty-five people. Remains of the body of an old woman, possibly a shaman, were found in the same cave. It seems that the tortoise meat was served as a main course at her burial ceremony. This is not the only prehistoric feast that we know of. In the vicinity there is another cave in which apparently a banquet took place as well. Remains of three head of wild cattle and a man’s bones were discovered in that cave. There is no doubt that a feast was held there because the animal leftovers show traces of cutting and roasting. Clearly as early as 12,000 years ago a shared meal was seen as a suitable symbolic farewell or homage ritual to a prominent individual in the community. A meal also served as a convenient tool which “play[ed] essential roles in the negotiation and solidification of social relationships” (Munro and Grosman 2010, 15362). We know today that human evolution is not a linear process. Evolution tries out various options, and gives various species a chance. Contrary to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s earlier assumption that the formation of society started with the exchange of women in marriage, Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that made us human and produced society (Wrangham 2009). The invention of thermal meat processing proved a genuinely revolutionary moment when tribes that used cooking were able to reproduce more successfully. Richer in energy and flavor, a new diet prompted civilization to make a leap forward. The historian of culture Felipe Fernández-Armesto posits a similar thesis in his study Food: A History (Fernández-Armesto 2002). He proposes that the domestication of fire and the invention of cooking produced a breakthrough not only in terms of the development of a culinary culture but also, primarily even, in inducing social transformations: “Culture began when the raw got cooked. The campfire becomes a place of communication when people eat around it. Cooking is not just a way of preparing food but of organizing society around communal meals and predicable mealtimes” (Fernández-Armesto 2002, 4–5).

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Thermally processed food gives more energy and is better assimilable. Also, cooking promoted collaboration, division of tasks, and consequently the development of mutual dependence among the members of a group, a tribe, or a community. All major events in human life take place at the table. What people eat and what people exclude from their diet are strongly differentiating factors. Our plates tell the stories of the religion we embrace, the place we inhabit, and the class we belong to. Diets contribute to the formation of individual and collective identities.2

Dialogues around the table Philosophers subscribe to the notion that meals are socially significant as shown by anthropologists and historians of culture. Immanuel Kant differentiated between eating as instrumental in sustaining life and banqueting as catering to a wide range of functions, where nutrition plays only a minor role. Eating alone satisfies the body.3 For eating to become truly relevant, it must become a social event. Kant regarded eating in company as a profoundly human engagement and, even, as an essential element of humaneness: “The cynic’s purism and the anchorite’s mortification of the flesh, without social good living, are distorted forms of virtue which do not make virtue inviting; rather, being forsaken by the graces, they can make no claim to humanity” (Kant 2006, 182).4 Solitary eating may even be dangerous, and philosophers are particularly vulnerable to such hazards: Eating alone (solipsismus convictorii) is unhealthy for a scholar who philosophizes; it is not restoration but exhaustion (especially if it becomes solitary feasting): fatiguing rather than a stimulating play of thoughts. The savoring human being who weakens himself in thought during his solitary meal gradually loses his sprightliness. (Kant 2006, 180–181) What serves as an antidote to this predicament is conversation, which reinvigorates the philosopher. While Kant does appreciate banqueting, he paradoxically ignores eating altogether: “There is no situation in which sensibility and understanding unite in one enjoyment that can be continued as long and repeated with satisfaction as often as a good meal in good company. But here the meal is regarded merely as the vehicle for supporting the company” (Kant 2006, 139). Unsurprisingly, thus, Kant only demands vaguely that the meal be good but he scrupulously arranges the agenda of themes that should be addressed in the conversation at the table. Kant correctly understands the meal situation. More often than not our memories of a fine meal focus on the complex experience of meal sharing rather than on particular dishes or flavors. When interviewed by Łukasz Modelski, who talked to several people for his volume Pia˛ ty smak [The Fifth Taste], Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, François Mitterrand’s personal chef was at a loss about what to say about her favorite childhood meal:

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There’s no such one dish. My mother cooked great soufflés, perhaps those … What I still remember is the atmosphere, the comings and goings around the table at our home, the whole social dimension of eating, the family spirit. That was the most important thing for us, I guess. If later, when cooking, I tried to reproduce something, that social, companionable, family aura of meals would be the thing. And, anyway, this was in itself a part of a greater whole, too – one remembers flavors, but one also remembers enjoyment, a sense of security, bonding. (Modelski 2014, 252) Jean Baudrillard makes a very poignant statement on a meal seen as a communal phenomenon when he gives an emotional account of his impressions from a visit to the United States: You see that all the time here. It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other’s food. (Baudrillard 1999, 15) The French postmodernist thinker found a solitary meal emblematic of “blank solitude,” a malady that afflicts residents of the contemporary metropolis. Talking while eating and about eating is explored by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson in Word of Mouth. The subtitle articulates the book’s central question: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food, replying to which Ferguson argues: “Sometimes we talk about food simply to talk about food. Yet as often as not we talk through food to speak of love and desire, devotion and disgust, aspirations and anxieties, ideas and ideologies, joys and judgments” (Ferguson 2014, xiii–xiv). Conversations at the table ultimately conceal biological facts that belong to eating since, as Luis Fernández-Galiano insists in his commentary on Ferguson, “food talk turns the private act of eating into a public event and makes sense of the world around us by placing food in a social context” (Fernández-Galiano 2015, 13). It is only through talking about eating and food that we get an insight into the experience that our table-companion is having: “Talk anchors this food world by making it possible for us to share the unshareable – that is, our sensual, powerfully private experiences of eating” (Ferguson 2014, xiii–xiv).

Exclusion and identity In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant defines the sphere of taste as decisively subjective and asserts that experience cannot be shared or universally communicated. Popular wisdom seems to concur, for it suggests that there is no disputing about taste. Although taste is the most “private,” intimate sense, our individual tastes are not a matter of free choice, but are acquired through

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cultural training that we receive from birth onward (Bourdieu 2005). Therefore, our tastes reflect our social status and cultural background. We are indeed what we eat, but what we eat does not fully result from our individual choices. Our diet is determined in equal measure by what we know about the nutritious values of particular foods, by our emotions and by the economy. Also, our dietary decisions are affected by our need to preserve eating habits and by religion. Eating, the activity that is common to all people, is a factor that differentiates people from each other at the same time. Human cuisine begins in the transformation of the world that ensued from the domestication of nature. Massimo Montanari argues that bread is defining of civilization: In the language of Homer and the ancient Greeks, “bread eaters” is synonymous with “men.” Already in the Poem of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian text of the second millennium B.C., primitive man becomes civilized when he is no longer limited to consuming foods and drinks available in nature, such as wild herbs, water, or milk, but begins to eat bread and drink wine, “artificial” products. (Montanari 2012, 17–18) Bread-baking is an activity that sets the human apart from nature5 and also from the barbarians, whose diet relies on game (hunting) and lamb meat (sheep-rearing) (Montanari 2012, 21). Bread provides a vivid example of how eating habits culturally differentiate people from one another. Making bread the core of the Christian tradition was a decisive gesture in the process of breaking with the Jewish tradition, which bans fermented products in religious rites and observances (Montanari 2012, 23). At the same time, bread reveals how differences in daily menus overlap with classbased distinctions. In the Middle Ages, the rural diet was based on plain soups. Peasants only rarely ate bread, and then it was brown bread. White bread became a symbol of class superiority6 as it was a typically urban foodstuff served at the patrician and ecclesiastical tables (Montanari 2012, 21–22).7 Cooking and sharing the meal belongs to the dialectics of inclusion, hospitality, and rejection. This dynamic is well captured in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Polish Christmas Eve traditions. In his novel, Mann emphatically pictures the symbolic divide between the “barbarians” and cultured people by seating them at different tables.8 This is how Joachim reasoned with his brother Hans, displeased with their neighbors’ uncouth manners: “you needn’t worry, they sit a good distance away at the Bad Russian table – because there is also a Good Russian table, where the more refined Russians sit” (Mann 1996, 38). Importantly, he insisted also that moving between these physical, and yet symbolic, spaces was impossible: “So, there’s hardly any possibility you’d meet them, even if you wanted to” (Mann 1996, 38). Contrasted with this position is a venerated custom observed by Poles on Christmas Eve. The Christmas Eve supper is perhaps the most important and emotional meal of the year in Poland.

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Its uniqueness is highlighted by a selection of dishes eaten only on this occasion, special rituals, and the exceptional practice of putting on the table a supernumerary plate for whoever happens to knock on the door on this night. The tradition has it that any guest – stranger or not, friend or foe – must be hospitably received and allowed to share the meal. What may seem to showcase the openness of Polish culture is, in fact, just a suspension of the standard principles of differentiation for this one magical night. When the miracle of Jesus’s birth is over, the rules are thoroughly restored. Eating and food are tools of differentiation and, consequently, also of exclusion. Our own people are distinguished from strangers based on what “we” eat but “they” do not eat, and vice versa, what they eat and we do not eat. “We” are different from “them” because, for example, we do not eat insects, pork, snails, or beef. Today, hunger is exclusionary, as is poverty, which forces one to consume excessive amounts of high-calorie, highly processed foods. Ours is the first era in human history in which the poor are fat and the rich are slim. The artists Marina Abramovic´ and Ulay used two differently laid tables to represent the economic, cultural, and political differences between peoples in their collaborative project titled Communist Body/Fascist Body. The performance took place on the eve of the artists’ birthday in 1979 in a small Amsterdam apartment to which they had invited a small group of friends. Upon arriving at the place shortly before midnight, the guests found the artists asleep and two tables laid out for them. One table was elegant, adorned with damask cloth, crystal glasses, and silverware, and offering white bread, caviar, and German Champagne. The other table was plain – covered in sheets of Pravda, a Soviet regime-supporting daily newspaper. Russian caviar and sparkling wine were served in aluminum canteens. Marina and Ulay were born on the same day: November 30. He was born in 1943 in Germany; hence there is a swastika on his birth certificate. She was born in 1946 in Yugoslavia, and therefore there is a Communist red star on her birth certificate. The tables symbolized the distance between the artists’ respective identities, and pointed to how that gap was bound up with two mutually hostile national and economic ideologies.

Community in the making As mentioned above, eating and food have a differentiating function. Yet, at the same time a meal is a universal language and therefore eating together may effectively offer a way of becoming familiar with otherness and realizing how very diverse human experiences are. This assumption serves as a starting point for Rirkrit Tiravanija, one of the widely recognized contemporary artists who make cooking and sharing meals the cornerstone of their artistic practice. He cooks because he believes that eating and tasting are experiences that we all share and notes that “it’s surprising how people find themselves more open and more adventurous through food” (Tiravanija 2012, 1). He frequently cooks Thai curry, a staple dish from his parents’ country. Born in

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Argentina and educated in the United States, Tiravanija currently moves between Berlin and New York City. He relies on food and customs of hospitality in an attempt to alter ways of thinking about the Other, to stir interest in otherness, and to encourage cooperation between different people. His work with food is also informed by his desire to define the identity of one who “was almost always away from home” (Tiravanija 2010, 11) and craved a sense of belonging ever since childhood. Many times, Tiravanija has turned cooking and eating together into an artistic event. His reputation was established by a performance staged in 1992.9 During his solo exhibition Untitled 1992 (Free) held in New York’s 303 Gallery, he served to the public red and green curries. Curry, as Tiravanija says in his interview with Daniel Birnbaum, is a quick and simple meal, just like scrambled eggs in Western culture (Birnbaum 2015, 164). The difference is, however, that curry is never cooked in small quantities. Rather, one makes a huge pot of curry, which serves as a good starting point for banqueting together. In the 1992 project, the artist re-arranged the gallery’s space, emptied all the rooms, including the offices, and removed all the doors, including those that led to storage rooms and toilets. The offices, which previously were inaccessible to the audience, turned into “a social/meeting space,” where two pots with the nourishing curry and a third one with rice were standing. Platefuls of that food were served to the visitors at lunchtime. Tiravanija is fully aware of tensions and frictions that are generated where cultures meet, and understands that dishes may accrue political meanings.10 He is also mindful of tensions intrinsic to interpenetrations of culinary cultures and observes the adaptation processes that exotic recipes undergo before they are assimilated to local conditions. In the show a curry made of original Thai vegetables and spices was cooked in one pot whereas the produce available in ordinary Soho shops went into the making of the dish in the other one. The interplay of authenticity and locality is obviously interesting to Tiravanija, who admits to being fascinated with James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Clifford 1988). Clifford asserts that “there is not one form of speech, but many. Nor does he see a single form of culture, but instead, a rhizome agglomerate of subcultures that interfere with each other” (Tiravanija 2010, 150). The equality of all parties involved is a precondition of democratic dialogue. This always involves ethical decisions. Multicultural societies face the challenge of overcoming the legacy of the past, when the dominant culture imposed its norms and interpretive rules, precluding any authentic dialogue. Tiravanija cooks because he realizes the necessity of starting intercultural dialogue, and believes that eating together can serve as a starting point for relationships and real dialogue. Though not always leading to an agreement, such dialogue helps achieve a better understanding, a prerequisite of democratic community (Koczanowicz 2015, 160–163). Tiravanija grew up in his grandmother’s kitchen in Bangkok. She was a professional teacher of nutrition principles to future cooks and owned a restaurant. Tiravanija was eager to watch what was going on in the kitchen, both at home

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and in the restaurant, but he took to cooking himself only as a student in Toronto. He cooked for himself and his friends, and he also worked at a local Indonesian restaurant. The idea of cooking in a gallery was prompted by the young artist’s postcolonial awareness and his objections to the alienating operations of museums dedicated to “collecting and naming” (Birnbaum 2015, 163). Studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tiravanija could see various exhibits that were displayed as purely aesthetic objects, stripped of the distinct values they had in their cultures of origin. These objects were things “Permanently removed from context” (Birnbaum 2015, 165). The collection included many Asian, predominantly Thai, objects: I thought that what was happening was that the life around the object was missing. So I tried to do project of cultural retrieval. The idea was to take the pots of Buddhas and the objects that had been encased and entombed, to take them out of the case, and to use them – to create life around the objects again and point to this life in a way that shows it is more interesting than the object itself. (Birnbaum 2015, 164) What urged Tiravanija were apparently his disgruntlement with the West’s obsessive attachment to the object, his suspicions toward the notion of authenticity, and his defiance of the authority of cultural institutions. As the artist himself emphasizes: “It was a critique of the Western idea of the esthetic object and how everything lively is reduced and excluded. It seems that life has to be taken out of the equation” (Birnbaum 2015, 164). The critique was to trigger his quest for self-identity. Tiravanija’s words resonate with a bitterness that can be found in John Dewey’s criticism of what he calls “museum art” (Dewey 1980, 7–9). The American pragmatist believes that in contemporary culture as soon as an artistic product is recognized as a classic example of art the object progressively undergoes a process of alienation, in which its links to the context of its origin are severed. This is a pernicious state of affairs because such alienation disturb communication between the work and the audience: “When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance” (Dewey 1980, 1). Elevating art above and beyond all other spheres of human activity leads to turning a living, expressive object into a dead fetish which belongs in a museum cabinet rather than in social life. As mentioned above, the title of Tiravanija’s 1992 performance used the word “free.” This is how the artist explains the word’s possible meanings: “(Free) in this particular situation could signify the emptying of context/content: from exhibition to non-exhibition, from place to non-place. (Free) could also be read as open, or simply as no charge for the situation, the food” (Tiravanija and Obrist 2010, 10). In his work, Tiravanija has consistently sought to liberate art

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from being petrified into a museum fetish, and to make art a live experience. His projects are modest ones as he does not seek the razzle-dazzle or the spectacular visual or gustatory effects. He keeps close to life, and strives to induce a significant experience “even though,” as he puts it, “it’s [this experience] low and close to the ground” (Birnbaum 2015, 168). Tiravanija’s openings are not banquets embellished with sophisticated dishes since “it is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people” (Tiravanija and Obrist 2010, 7). What is given precedence in these openings is an encounter and a change facilitated by co-participation in a familiar, everyday ritual of having a meal. Deeply anchored in quotidian life, eating and cooking serve as a convenient form of expression for the artist who cares most about re-integrating art into the rhythms of life and, consequently, has worked to reinvigorate art objects. His choice to work with food and eating is informed by “the idea of being active, of participation, and then the idea of relationship to architecture and to the art institution” (Birnbaum 2015, 168). The artist admits that his cooking projects have always been motivated, in part at least, by the desire to define his identity: “I thought I should just do a simple thing I normally do and that was cooking” (Tiravanija and Obrist 2010, 116).

Impossible community On November 15, 2012, a table was put on a lawn in one of the streets in Gdansk. Anna Królikiewicz spread a white tablecloth over one part of the table and covered the other part with a colorful rug. She arranged on the table china, heavy cutlery, and wineglasses made of thick glass. Królikiewicz’s work explicitly builds on the visual and symbolic conventions of Baroque still-lifes, with their meticulously arranged compositions of dead animals, expensive tableware, and foods. The beauty of the paintings was supposed to give sensuous pleasure, but also to admonish on the hazards of indulging in the alluring, yet transient, thisworldliness. Tables in the paintings of many Northern masters suggest that a violent incident has interrupted the meal. Glasses and pedestal plates are knocked over and the nibbled-on food is left unfinished. All this serves as a warning that our lives are as brittle as a thin, easily crushed wineglass. In Królikiewicz’s project, convivial feasting was, likewise, out of the question. The table was stacked with piled up dead fish, fish bones, and cut-off fish heads. The glasses had remains of red wine in them. The plates were dirty, peppered with leftovers, and smeared with sauces or soups. The tablecloths were stained. In between the plates and the fish, the artist arranged loaves of bread and fine challoth. She used sizeable shells and lemons with spirally twisted peel as decoration. They are familiar elements in the paintings of Willem Cleasz Heda and Willem Kalf. The artist drew also on Jan Fyt and Frans Snyders by deliberately contrasting the dead and the live components on her table. Instead of including a cat or a hunting dog, which in classical, seventeenth-century still-lifes represent the domestic order as opposed to the order of nature, Królikiewicz communicated this opposition when she put a spherical aquarium with goldfish on her table.

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The installation was inspired by Baroque paintings on display at the local museum, and aimed to evoke the spirit of the city in times of prosperity, when Gdansk grew rich on trade from the East. Then the city attracted artists and invested in arts. The affluent burghers could afford to buy Persian carpets, spices, saffron, and sugar. In her art, Królikiewicz addresses the complex history of Gdansk, a rich Hanseatic city – a free city that was, nevertheless, constrained by its geographical location at the border between two cultural and political powers: the Polish Commonwealth and the Kingdom of Prussia. The artist deliberately draws on the Baroque aesthetics to tell the story of her city’s past prosperity. Królikiewicz’s performance conjures Gdansk at the peak of its power in the seventeenth century, when the city had to battle the havoc wrought by wars raging across Europe: the Thirty Years War and what came to be known in Poland as the Swedish Deluge. In what way is that period of the glory of the free, proud city that cherished its multicultural character relevant to its contemporary residents? The question is central to the installation The Table. In his study, How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton proposes a notion of embodied memory. He believes that a society’s memory is inscribed, largely, in bodily habits (in making this argument he draws heavily on John Dewey’s concept of habit). Embodied practices help actualize the past and connect it with the present. Among various examples, Connerton cites also table manners. Following Norbert Elias, he claims that table etiquette and manners exemplify embodied practices through which the intergenerational bonds are established. They also function as differential strategies. One of the differentiating bodily practices he provides is the preferred conduct of seventeenth-century French aristocrats, who embraced an elaborate code of savoir vivre to manifest their privileged status. As Connerton argues: “These ceremonial privileges were a mnemonics of the body, a constant reminder of the order of estates” (Connerton 1989, 87). “The body knows and remembers” (Pallasmaa 2005, 60) – the body is a vehicle of encoded social norms, which the community imposes and which, in turn, produce the community. The observance of traditional table manners is supposed to sustain the tenuous link to the past. By placing her table in the docklands of Gdansk, Królikiewicz wants to communicate with history and sit at the table with her ancestors. The artist also essentially questions the topos of the table as assembling, uniting, and facilitating communication. Her installation is, basically, a non-invitation to the table – staged on a cold, November night, with knocked-over chairs and a lavish setup that turns out to be littered with odd remainders of dead, swooning fish and food scraps left by an unidentified company of diners. In this way, the artist brings to light the aporias involved in community-building. As a citizen of Gdansk, she inscribes herself in the narratives of the city’s community, stems from them and is part of them (Taylor 1992). This is why in order to constitute her identity fully, she must refer to the past; yet, at the same time, her installation suggests that this gesture is, and can only be, partial.

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In his introduction to Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food, Jean-François Revel discusses the inconveniences and problems of traveling through the history of food. “Habit,” he insists, “is everything, and what is habitual is never precisely defined for those to whom it is so familiar as to be self-explanatory, for those who take it completely for granted, so that it is almost impossible to reconstruct it once it is lost” (Revel 1984, 5). It is challenging to bring back from oblivion old culinary customs, such as, for example, drinking wine diluted with seawater, which was a habit in some regions of ancient Greece, or downing oysters with sweet wine, which was a culinary standard in France at the turn of the nineteenth century (Revel 1984, 5). In Connerton’s terms, Królikiewicz’s specter banquet may be considered a ritual of commemoration, but also a demonstration of the impossibility of replicating a past experience on a contemporary dining table. Evoking the seventeenth-century history of Poland, Królikiewicz does not serve dishes based on recipes from the Compendium Ferculorum (Czerniecki 2009), Poland’s first cookbook published in 1682. She knows that the messages transmitted by echoes of the past are necessarily distorted. Unlike the contemporary tastes the flavors of ancient times – stodgy, sweet, heavily spiced – would now feel odd rather than refined. Królikiewicz, therefore, composes images that “resonate with the past,” but does not nurture the delusion that past experiences could be re-enacted. These bygone experiences are fundamentally inaccessible to us. On the one hand, food builds and nourishes the organism, but on the other hand, each bite brings us closer to digestion, decomposition, and death. This is perhaps why artists who want to address transience tend to use food in their works. In the paintings of the old masters, the vanitas motif with its counterpoint of nutrition and demise does not undercut the sensory pleasure of appreciating beautiful objects and wonderfully life-like foodstuffs. Królikiewicz’s The Table, in turn, is inhospitable. It exudes a melancholic beauty because it recalls glory gone by, but it repels as well. The beauty of decay, the elaborately positioned revolting grandeur of decomposing fish, the Oriental opulence of tableware, all these effects are magnetizing, yet at the same time they arouse a sense of distance, inaccessibility, and alienation. The performance participants are late. The party is long over …

Filling in the gaps As Zygmunt Bauman argues, culture orders social reality although it is not orderly itself since it has lost its erstwhile quality of a rigorously arranged system of norms and values (Bauman 2000, 181–199). Culture carries a potential of values which are actualized and embodied in human relationships in a particular time and place, yet values do not endure eternally. Once values come into existence, they do not last for ever as configurations but fall apart and come back together in different arrangements, depending on the needs of people acting together. Culture is a process which is only harmonious

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sometimes. Social processes usually hit a bumpy road and stumble on obstacles, like conflicts of interests, financial shortages, and/or people’s reluctance to engage. What role can the art of food and eating play in these struggles? Nicolas Bourriaud, a French curator and art theorist, asserts that art’s fundamental social function lies in the fact that “through minor gestures, artists provide the missing links in the chain of social bonds” (Bourriaud 2012, 18). His book Relational Aesthetics contains a canonical interpretation of Tiravanija’s art. Artists that according to Bourriaud epitomize relational aesthetics have something essential in common, for they “patiently darn the fabric of social relations” (Bourriaud 2012, 18). In all cultures, meals are part of the most significant rituals accompanying pivotal moments in life, starting from birth and ending with death. Appealing to taste and smell, art relies on the universal language of care and security afforded by satiety. Although we all differ and the common horizon of values has disintegrated in late modernity, eating together can serve as a perfect beginning of a relationship. To eat the food offered by another person, we must at least tentatively accept this person. Art may “construct navigation tools” (Bourriaud 2012) and transform the experience of an individual and of a society, but for this to be possible, participation must take place. It is the experience of the audience that makes different elements of the artwork come together. If the artist does not want to play a sermonizing teacher, his or her artistic practice must be interwoven with the rhythms of daily life rather than aspire to larger-than-life aloofness. Both John Dewey and relational aesthetics demand that there should be no dissociation between art and life, a situation that will benefit both art and life. Dewey writes: Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unified collective life. But they are also marvelous aids in the creation of such a life … In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity. (Dewey 1980, 81) Aesthetic experience with a shared meal as its part perfectly exemplifies the audience’s intimate engagement. The artist’s intents become embodied and, as such, are available directly, without any discursive mediation. Tiravanija releases artistic energy, which does not visually disconnect the artwork from the rhythm of life. Occasionally, audiences of collective shows mistakenly thought that Tiravanija’s performances were really banquets accompanying the exhibitions of other artists. Królikiewicz’s project deeply transmuted and aestheticized the life of the everyday. Even though the works of Tiravanija and Królikiewicz are undoubtedly different, they have something in common. Both artists repudiate equating an artwork with its material substance. Instead, both highlight the temporality of encounter between the audience and the work. In addition, Tiravanija and Królikiewicz both expand the

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range of aesthetic sensations, including smell and taste in it, and believe that sharing food can be a transformative experience. Another element that they share is engagement with tradition and memory as well as mobilization of the audience’s involvement. The artists consider the engagement of the audience to be a dialogical complement to, and completion of, the artwork rather than simple participation in the installation. John Dewey believes that “the work of art has a unique quality, but that it is that of clarifying and concentrating meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences” (Dewey 1980, 84). The main quality in the artworks discussed above lies in that they facilitate the expression of communal feelings and values. Królikiewicz’s table was supposed to help narrate the local history of Gdansk. The work also forces a realization that though it is impossible to reproduce the long-gone community of shared experience, it is indeed possible to tell a story of such a community. The narrative may strengthen the existing bonds within the community, mythologize and legitimize them ritualistically as a modern embodiment of the community’s past glories. Tiravanija works with food and eating and this helps him build a bridge of understanding for people from different cultural backgrounds who meet in the multicultural city space. Eating the same dish marks the beginning of a social and cultural relation which, elementary though it is, constitutes a community. This community, albeit a very fragile and temporary one, may be viewed as a promise of more durable and significant things to come. Perhaps it is enough to argue that, in our era of individualism enforced by the neoliberal economy and ideology, even the briefest communal experiences are simply invaluable.

Notes 1 The work on this text was supported by the NCN grant: Aesthetic value of food. Pragmatist Perspective, No. 2013/11 / B / HS1 / 04176. 2 In Poland, the carp is traditionally eaten on Christmas Eve. On this particular day, the carp serves not only as a meal but also as a symbol of Christmas and an expression of national belonging. 3 Notably, these notions change as we move eastwards. For example, Thich Nhat Nanh, the most famous contemporary Zen Master, argues that one should eat in silence as “[t]hat way we can focus our attention on our breath, the food, and the company around us in order to become fully present in the here and now” (Thich 2016, 45). Such a meal can provide considerable pleasure, and silence – conceived as calming one’s thoughts – only enhances this sensation. In such moments, as Nanh encourages, “[y]ou can stop the internal mental chatter, relax, breathe, and smile. Such a meal can provide many moments of happiness” (Thich 2016, 56). 4 All italics in this text are in the original. 5 Many scholars researching community believe that to state that a community is shaped by common language and shared values is a misrepresentation. Sheila Benhabib and many other feminist thinkers claim that gender-related experience is not bound by cultural or nation-state boundaries. Some go a step further to insist that shared experiences transcend also the human–species barriers. In her 2006 She-wolf performance, Pilar Albarracin locked herself up with a wolf to have a

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shared meal of raw meat and red wine together. The meal was supposed to highlight the human–animal bonds. What used to exemplify the peasant diet has now become symbolic of luxury and healthy nutrition: wheat is common and cheap while spelt bread is fashionable, healthy, and expensive. Another, considerably later, example of social differentiation through eating habits is coffee drinking in eighteenth-century France. Coffee drinking designated intelligent people’s separation from the mob. Besides bolstering the mind, coffee had another function, i.e. “superseding other foods and drinks such as wine and facilitating new forms of sociability centered on polite conduct, which distinguished the rational eater from the rabble” (Spary 2013, 15). For the table symbolism in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, see Symington (2011, 67). Curry became part of his show first in New York’s Scott Hanson Gallery in 1989, but then the visitors only smelled its aroma in the air without having an opportunity to taste the dish. Pad Thai, an original Thai noodle dish, was invented in the aftermath of World War II as an element of the national identity-building strategy. The difference between Pad Thai and its Chinese models lies in the Thai sweet-and-sour nutty sauce. The dish was central to the Untitled 1990 (Pad Thai) performance.

References Baudrillard, Jean, America, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1999). Bauman, Zygmunt, Ponowoczesnos´c´ jako z´ródło cierpien´ [Postmodernity and Its Disconents] (Warszawa: Sic!, 2000). Birnbaum, Daniel, “Rirkrit Tiravanija: Meaning Is Use,” Log, 34 (Spring/Summer 2015): 163–177. Bourdieu, Pierre, Dystynkcja. Społeczna krytyka władzy sa˛ dzenia [Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste], trans. Piotr Biłos (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2005). Bourriaud, Nicolas, “Nietrwałe zespolenia. Szlakiem teoretycznym od relacyjnego do ‘we˛ druja˛ cego’. Wste˛ p do wydania polskiego,” in Estetyka relacyjna [Relational Aesthetics], trans. Łukasz Białkowski (Kraków: MOCAK, 2012), 9–33. Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988). Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Czerniecki, Stanisław, Compendium ferculorum albo zebranie potraw, ed. Jarosław Dumasowski and Magdalena Spychaj (Warszawa: Muzeum-Pałac w Wilanowie, 2009). Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980). Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, Word Of Mouth: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food (Oakland and London: University of California Press, 2014). Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Near a Thousand Tables. A History of Food (New York, London, Sydney and Singapore: Free Press, 2002). Fernández-Galiano, Luis, “How Did Food Get So Big? Ten Sketches,” Log, 34 (Spring/Summer 2015): 11–16. Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Koczanowicz, Leszek, Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Modelski, Łukasz, Pia˛ ty smak. Rozmowy przy jedzeniu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014). Montanari, Massimo, Let the Meatballs Rest, and Other Stories about Food and Culture, trans. Beth Archer Brombert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Munro, Natalie D. and Leore Grosman, “Early Evidence (ca. 12,000 B.P.) for Feasting at a Burial Cave in Israel,” PNAS, 107/35 (2010): 15362–15366. Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Eyes Of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses (London: Wiley Academy, 2005). Revel, Jean-François, Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984). Spary, Emma C., Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Symington, Rodney, The Magic Mountain: A Reader’s Guide (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Thich, Nhat Nanh, How to Eat (London, Sydney, Auckland and Johannesburg: Rider, 2016). Tiravanija, Rirkrit, Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk (Bangkok: River Books and London: Edition Hanasjörg Mayer, 2010). Tiravanija, Rirkrit, “Zapowiedz´ projektu Zielony Ujazdów,” Tranzystor CSWZU, 4–07 (2012): 1. Tiravanija, Rirkrit and Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series 20 (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010). Wrangham, Richard, Catering Fire: How Cooking Made Us Humans (London: Profile Books, 2009).

7

The thought from outside Memory, truth and the repetition of faith Ramona Fotiade

The advent of cinematography in the late nineteenth century marked the dawn of a new type of realism in the visual arts, as well as a new kind of faith prompted by the life-like aspect of the moving image, which in turn led to different archival practices and a different relationship to memory, trauma and testimony. The preceding forms of visual representation (drawing, painting, sculpture) were challenged, and the notion of photographic evidence, alongside that of photographic memory, emerged, somewhere between the subjective, inevitably fleeting impression and the objective, lasting proof of the printed image. For a long time, the indexical nature of the analogue photographic imprint remained linked to the irrefutable quality of a “certificate of presence” (Barthes 2000, 87), although both still and moving pictures denote the absence of the object or person represented, hence their ambivalent, spectral nature (Derrida 2001, 77), and the paradox of what Bazin qualified as “a hallucination that is also a fact” (Bazin 2005, 16). Moving pictures, whether documentary of fictional, elicit a new system of belief, not unlike faith, which is to a certain extent independent of the knowledge the viewer has of the technique involved in producing and projecting film images, as Derrida remarked: If I was to write on cinema, what would interest me most would be its mode and its system of belief. Cinema has a totally singular modality of belief: a century ago, mankind invented an experience of belief without precedent. It would be fascinating to study the system of credibility in all the arts: in what way we believe in a novel, in certain moments in a theatre play, in what is inscribed in painting, and, of course, something which is totally different, in what cinema shows and tells us … Given that the spectral dimension is neither that of the living, nor that of the dead, neither that of hallucination, nor that of perception, the corresponding modality of belief needs to be analyzed in an absolutely original manner. (Derrida 2001, 78, my translation) In Spectres of Marx (1993), Derrida brought into view the link between haunting, memory and justice, by placing Marx’s proclamation from The Manifesto of the Communist Party (“A specter is haunting Europe – the

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specter of communism,” Marx, 2010, 14) under the joint tutelage of Shakespeare and Freud. The fictional specter with whom Shakespeare’s Hamlet converses is emblematic of the relationship each individual has with the past, with one’s parents and ancestors, which in turn shapes one’s attitude to notions of inheritance, of debt and of justice. Engaging in a dialogue with a specter is not unlike the manner responsible individuals engage with the memory of the dead and the injunction of justice, especially in view of the overlap between the perceived externality of the moral law (as an impersonal and atemporal demand) and the interiority of human agency involved in deliberation. However, as Derrida has pointed out, the inner process of recollection involved in the acknowledgment, recording and transmission of the past is complicated by repression and partial or total obliteration of traumatic memories, leading to processes of displacement, compulsion repetition and ghostly recurrence which Freud brought to light in his essays, Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907) and The Uncanny (1919). In Spectres of Marx Derrida maps over the psychoanalytical process of repression, and the inevitable return of the repressed in disguised form, onto a situation in which the question of responsibility and the demand for justice seem to be voiced not by a living being, but by a ghost. The perceived externality or other-worldly character of the moral injunction and the call for justice in Shakespeare’s tragedy is rendered as a break in temporal continuity: “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right!” (Shakespeare 1992, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V). Not only do the living and the dead belong to distinct regimes of being and time, but the question of moral responsibility, memory and justice, like Marx’s call for democracy, equality and solidarity, comes from a realm which is both that of immanence or interiority and that of transcendence or exteriority in relation to the thinking subject. In the encounter with the uncanny, whether in the oneiric or delusional set-up of Jensen’s Gradiva or in the somber, tragic filiation triangle of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the subject is confronted with something which exceeds known oppositions between past and present, imagination and perception, life and death: One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge. One does not know if it is living or if it is dead. Here is – or rather there is, over there, an unnameable or almost unnameable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or any-thing, some thing, “this thing,” but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us [qui nous regarde], comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy (“Marcellus: What, ha’s this thing appear’d againe tonight? Barnardo: I haue seene nothing”). (Derrida 1994, 5)

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The possibility of the ghostly return of something that has been suppressed from consciousness and relegated to the realm of unconscious memory brings into view “the relations between politics, history, and the ghost” (Derrida 2007, 24). Remembering in this case is closer to the unconscious repetition of a repressed traumatic event which can only reach consciousness in the disguised form of a dream or an uncanny occurrence to allow for the partial and displaced return of an otherwise censored, unacceptable content. Freud had invalidated the idea that the ghost is an external, autonomous entity – such as it was portrayed in Jensen’s Gradiva up to the final resolution of the mystery – and had shown that the assumed supernatural return of the ghost from the realm of the dead is nothing but a figment of the subject’s imagination and of his/her unconscious struggle with repressed memories. As such, one can say that the injunction with which the ghost confronts Hamlet comes from within rather than from an other-worldly sphere. “The question of the phantom is the question and the demand of the future and of justice as well” (Derrida 2007, 24). The unconscious model of archivization, which both keeps and conceals the trace of a traumatic event, giving rise to the displaced return of an unwanted memory in the form of ghosts or uncanny repetition of the past, was compared by Freud with the working of the wax slab or Mystic Writing Pad (Wunderblock). Both systems rely on a similar mechanism of recording and effacing of memory imprints, which consists of pressing a pointed stylus on the smooth whitish-grey surface of the celluloid portion of a covering-sheet in order to leave dark traces; these can then be removed by simply raising the covering-sheet from the wax slab by a slight pull which interrupts the contact between the waxed paper and the wax slab (Derrida 1978, 281). The analogy with the functioning of the mind highlights the ability of the system to erase superficial traces on the pre-conscious covering-sheet in order to allow for new impressions to be made, while nevertheless preserving the mark of previous indentations on the deeper layer of the unconscious. Freud further emphasized the similarity between the dream and a figurative type of writing (Bilderschrift), rather than a natural language, stating that “the interpretation of dreams is in every way analogous to the deciphering of an ancient figurative language, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs” (Freud 1957 [1900], 177). In his essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida brought to light the temporality which best describes the new graphematics of the unconscious (Derrida 1978, 276–277). This temporality, marked by interruptions and resumptions of contact between the superficial and deep layers of the mind, or repetition (archivization) and difference (new perceptual experience), is most conspicuously at play in the process of repetition – variation underlying the illusion of cinematic movement, and the perception of continuity across the discreet succession of individual frames when the projection speed reaches 24 frames per second. The reality effect which early cinema audiences experienced when confronted with the ghostly apparition of the first moving pictures can be said to rely on the concealment of the interplay between photographic stillness and cinematic motion, between absence and presence to the senses, in the same

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way in which dream images and uncanny occurrences both revive and conceal latent memory traces under apparently fresh impressions. As Gilles Deleuze observed in relation to the advent of cinematography, for the first time the perception of images in the world, as real, external things rather than mental entities, became equivalent to movement (Deleuze 2008a, 58–59). If images are thereafter identified to movement as movement-images, the early regime of spectation is dominated by what Deleuze calls the sensory-motor schema which points to the dependable link between sense-stimulation and motor-response to define a behaviorist and action-based type of thinking and interaction with the world. However, this type of thinking collapses in the course of the evolution of cinema under the effect of the two World Wars, and the gradual erosion of values and truths underpinning the apparently natural link between action and reaction. With the collapse of the sensory-motor schema, what comes to the fore is no longer time as an indirect representation derived from movement, but the movement of time itself. The broken, false or missing links between segments previously meant to signify the unfolding of a consistent narrative over time, allow the emergence of a different type of image, the time-image, which challenges the naturalist presuppositions of the movement-image. In relation to the Freudian notion of the uncanny, and to processes of repression and compulsion repetition, the new type of image can be said to bring into view the temporal disjunction resulting from the collapse of the traditional model of representation based on the analogy between the continuity of perception and the assumed continuity of the cinematic capturing and rendering of reality. The discontinuous temporality of the unconscious pictographic script thus finds its equivalent in the cinema with the advent of the time-image, which foregrounds precisely the simultaneity of disjunctive points in time, of past and present, virtual and actual images. In Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), the psychic mise-en-scène which according to Derrida’s interpretation replaces phonetic writing with the spatial hieroglyphics of the unconscious “optical machine” (Derrida 1978, 270), is conveyed as a theatrical staging of an inexplicable experience of entrapment, reminiscent of Sartre’s Huit clos (No Exit), with its depiction of the last judgment and of hell as the impossibility of escaping the gaze of other people in a confined space. The guests at a high society dinner party on Providence Street seem condemned to repeat the same actions and lines of dialogue within a witty filmic transposition of the Freudian repetition compulsion process, until they all become prisoners of the physical space of a drawing room in which, like in Sartre’s play, they are forced to confront their past and their innermost fears, repressed memories, traumas and guilt under the relentless gaze of the other inmates. Buñuel uses a pattern of repetitions, some of which look like continuity errors, to signal a process of regression and eternal return which according to Deleuze frees time of its subordination to movement (Deleuze 2008b, 99). For instance, in the prologue to The Exterminating Angel, the guests arrive twice in quick succession, while the servants mysteriously leave the house. At table, the host makes the same speech twice, the first time to the rapt attention of his guests, the second, ignored by everyone. After dinner, two of

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the male guests have the same conversation twice as one of them recommends himself to the other. In all there are 27 repetitions in the film, and the viewer does not become aware of the importance of this narrative device until all the dinner guests become trapped in the drawing room for no apparent reason. The confined space where they are forced to cohabitate for days or weeks on end, and where all principles of civilized behavior gradually collapse, is not separated from the living-room otherwise than by the folding panels of French doors which are left wide open all the time. The invisible barrier which prevents the guests from escaping, as well as the curtains which frame the door entrance (especially in shots taken from across the empty living-room on the other side), seem to designate the area beyond the door frame as a stage. The camera is positioned in such a way as to allow the viewer a glimpse of the inescapable descent of the dinner guests into savagery and chaos from afar, as if watching a play in which actors are prisoners of the stage for the duration of the performance. Like in Freudian psychoanalysis, which Buñuel explicitly acknowledged as a source of inspiration since his early Surrealist days in Paris, repetitions in the film signal processes of repression and displacement, and are indicative of a patient’s obsessive circling around the traumatic event, which is both regularly re-staged and denied in the experience of the uncanny. The numerous trivial repetitions in the prologue, as so many apparently clumsy continuity errors, build up to the moment when the guests become trapped in the closed-up, cyclical space-time of a collective recollection, with its uncanny moments of false recognition, sudden shifts in mood, regression to an infantile stage or jumps from conscious to unconscious reactions. As Deleuze commented in Cinema 1: in Buñuel … entropy was replaced by the cycle of the eternal return. Now, the eternal return failed to be as catastrophic as entropy, just as the cycle failed to be as degrading in all its parts, but none the less they extract a spiritual power of repetition, which poses in a new way the question of a possible salvation. The good man, the saintly man, are imprisoned in the cycle, no less than the thug and the evildoer. But is not repetition capable of breaking out of its own cycle and of “leaping” beyond good and evil? (Deleuze 2008a, 135) The solution which frees them in the end consists in the exact re-enactment of the few moments before the guests were supposed to leave at the end of the concert. Laetitia (played by Sylvia Pinal) tells everyone that they must not move because they just happen to be in the exact same positions as they were before their ordeal began. She then directs their recollection of what happened and tells them to repeat the same gestures and lines of dialogue which marked the end of the concert and of the dinner party. It is only when this has been accomplished that the cycle of repetition is suspended and the guests are free again to step out of the symbolical psychoanalytical stage and

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spatio-temporal framework they’ve inhabited. Deleuze related this break with cyclical time in Buñuel’s work to the emergence of a new type of image or sign, which he calls a “scene,” and which marks the transition from the action-image and impulse-image to a direct presentation of time or a time-image: [Buñuel] injects the power of repetition into the cinematographic image. In this way he is already going beyond the world of impulses, to knock on the doors of time and free it from the slope or the cycles which still subjugated it to a content. Buñuel does not cling to symptoms and to fetishes, he elaborates another type of sign which might be called “scene” and which perhaps gives us a direct time-image. (Deleuze 2008a, 137) Unlike processes of recognition and intentional constitution in phenomenological analysis, the repetition in this case seeks to recover the hidden, unconscious layer of meaning lying beneath appearances, and linked to the traumatic event as the obscured source of countless images, scenes or moments of uncanny recurrence perceived on the surface of consciousness but misconstrued, because they are misidentified. It is not until the correct reconstitution of the traumatic event occurs and triggers the clear recognition or recollection of the subject that the closed circuit of mechanical repetition is broken and the victims trapped in a coil of time like the character in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) are temporarily freed. The recollection process through which scientists in the post-apocalyptic world of La Jetée seek to access the past by tapping into the protagonist’s unconscious archive of memory-images, similarly ends with an illusory escape from the cycle of eternal return. The persistent photographic image of a scene from the protagonist’s childhood, for which he is selected to undergo a series of scientific experiments, aiming to send him back in time in search for the means to resurrect life on earth after a nuclear wipeout, turns out to be no other than the scene of his own assassination at the hands of a secret agent sent from the future. Full recollection of a repressed traumatic event in this case does not free the subject from the cycle of repetition, condensation and displacement. It only seems to confirm Freud’s observed bond between repetition compulsion and the death drive (Derrida 1998, 12). The economy at work in the staged attempt to deal with collective trauma (such as apocalyptic disaster in La Jetée or the inescapable spectre of human mortality and divine judgement in The Exterminating Angel) takes the shape of a confrontation between the “death drive and the pleasure principle, between Thanatos and Eros but also between … the reality principle and the pleasure principle” (Derrida 1998, 12). The enigma of the strong childhood memory in La Jetée is solved through a psychoanalytical process which involves time travel, based on the documentary evidence and indexical nature of the analogy between a strong mental image and an analogue photograph, given that they were both at some point in contact with the real object in the world through the medium of light. Yet, one should bear in mind that the certainty afforded by photographs or recurrent

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mental images does not in itself hold the key to the meaning of one’s passage through time, and cannot be called to verify the continuity of a human being at different stages in his life, or even help decide who or what is a human being. In Ridley Scott’s iconic sci-fi film, Blade Runner (1982), Rachel, one of the so-called replicants or sophisticated androids who have become virtually indistinguishable from real people, tries to prove her identity as a human being by showing Deckard, the detective, a photograph of her as a child with her parents. When Deckard explains to her that all replicants have had the same memory implant added at inception, down to the exact words that they use to describe the scene and the analogue photograph to match, he points to the only characteristic which these otherwise limitlessly agile and intelligent creatures of a post-human universe cannot possess. The sense of identity that the androids display, along with the photographs called to substantiate it, are two-dimensional, lack the depth of time which memory, dreams and the unconscious add to our perception of images, and of ourselves. This implicitly justifies the exclusion and sense of radical otherness which affect the perception of the androids in Blade Runner. Deckard initially refuses to engage in a dialogue with the replicants otherwise than in the form of a psychological test to determine their inhumanity. He casually dismisses Rachel’s appeal to common emotional experiences, such as childhood memories, when she attempts to break through his insensitive appearance as state-paid assassin. Half-way through the film we come to understand that the replicants have no past because they were created as adults to perform very specialized tasks with an ability which far exceeds that of human beings, and with a very short lifespan of five years, giving them little time to develop complex emotions and memories. Due to their intelligence and agility they manage to escape the planet they were confined to, and they come to Earth to seek and meet their maker, the scientist who created them, in order to ask him to extend their lives. Upon learning that nothing can be done to change the way they were programmed, and that all attempts to modify their genetic code have failed, the replicants rebel and kill their maker. However, before the last and most evolved of the androids dies, in a final confrontation with the detective sent to eliminate them, the tables are turned and we, the viewers, are forced to face our own inhumanity and question our notion of what it is to be a human being. The scene is also indicative of the lack of individual freedom and solidarity in a utopian future society where all the democratic mechanisms of dialogue, equality and diversity have been superseded by the totalitarian rule of a cast of scientists and technocrats, controlling the “sub-human” class of androids by their extremely short lifespan (within a Frankenstein-inspired tale of human ingenuity against divine creation). When Roy, the leader of the replicants, is on the point of defeating his opponent, detective Deckard, in mortal combat on the rooftops of post-industrial, dilapidated buildings, he holds in his hands a white dove (a symbol of the soul). The fact that Roy then unexpectedly decides to save Deckard from certain death, by catching and pulling him out of the void as Deckard lets go of the ledge he is hanging on

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at the top of a skyscraper, brings into view a sudden shift in narrative tone and emotional import of the scene. Significantly, the hand with which Roy catches Deckard when he falls is pierced by a nail (following an earlier confrontation between the two), and this further brings into view the troubling parallel between the hunted, ostracized android and a postmodern Christ figure. Humanity is saved by a superhuman rebel who has killed his maker and failed to achieve immortality, but restores the dignity of human life through the value of emotion and the shared experience of time-bound memory. Roy’s gesture is silently indicative of the kind of redemptive empathy and human solidarity that triggers Deckard’s initial disbelief then gradual recognition of the other’s ability to experience love, fear, grief and nostalgia, within an exchange which brings into sight the full meaning of the ideas of justice, democracy and freedom. “I’ve seen things that you people wouldn’t believe,” Roy says to Deckard in the last moments before he dies, as the pouring rain washes blood and tears away from his face. As he speaks, a counter-shot discloses the reaction in Deckard’s eyes change from stupefaction, mistrust, to empathy and compassion, when he starts to realize that Roy made a deliberate decision not to kill him, and that they both face the same death sentence in the end: “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion” – recalls Roy as if in retrospective slow motion in what is arguably the most moving scene in the film. “I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhouser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” It is not the physical evidence of the photographs that Rachel produces to persuade Deckard of her real identity as a human being, but the depth of emotion and sense of irretrievable loss, death and meaninglessness of temporal existence deprived of any form of permanence that ultimately triggers Deckard’s compassion and makes him re-assess his understanding of human nature. He can then accept his own feelings of love for Rachel and find the courage to escape with her toward a common, uncertain future knowing that, unlike previous generation replicants, she does not have a pre-determined lifespan. The rapidly disappearing frontier between genetically engineered androids and human beings in the age of virtual reality, a theme explored in more recent science-fiction productions such as Gattaca (1997) and The Island (2005), highlights the importance of memory, empathy, communication and dialogue in the construction of identity and the relationship between the self and the other in a technologically advanced, yet open and democratic, society. The connection between memory images, photographs and the possibility of retrieving a lost moment in time through time-traveling is also at the centre of the multi-layered narrative of Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (2004), which deliberately blurs the boundaries between competing spatio-temporal frameworks, between past and present, fiction and reality. At the beginning of the film, a young man named Tak is traveling on a train bound for a mysterious place or time where lonely souls hope to recapture their lost love, as nothing ever changes once they

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reach their destination. The futuristic world of intricate rail networks and neonlit architecture which the character inhabits is strongly reminiscent of the postindustrial universe in Blade Runner, as is Tak’s affair with an android. Here the android brings to mind the robotic lifestyle of real human beings unable to break free from the cycle of compulsive repetition, repression and mourning. In the opening sequence of 2046, the image of the high-speed train moving through time (or perhaps inner mental space) is swiftly replaced by what looks like a reel of analogue film moving inside a camera. This alerts the viewer to the possibility that cinematic fiction provides an alternative to the closed circuit of inaccessible moments in the past, and to failed attempts at trying to re-stage key experiences in order to change the course of events. In a similar manner to La Jetée, Wong Kar Wai uses parallel layers of reality or present time narrative as well as disconcerting flashbacks to create the impression of a subjective reconstruction of the past, which has a creative rather than merely repetitive dimension. After the prologue, the action moves back to 1963 and Chow Mo-wan’s complicated love life, as he compulsively tries to resurrect his unconsummated affair with Su Li-zhen. Chow has casual relationships or falls in love with unresponsive women, including a gambler from Singapore (a doppelganger of Su Lizhen, nicknamed Black Spider), who rejects him and sends him anew on a spiraling quest for fulfillment, through real or imagined scenarios of unrequited love, loss and attempts at re-staging the past. Half an hour into the film, we discover that Chow is a journalist and fiction author who decides to write a sci-fi novel entitled 2046 which is a thinly disguised autobiographical account of events he records in the hope of reaching a different conclusion. The characters in his novel are the equivalent of real-life men and women in his life. One of them is the transposition of his love interest’s partner, Wang Jing-wen’s Japanese fiancé. We are then forced to re-assess the prologue, narrated in voice-over by time-traveling character, Tak, as fiction rather than as framing narration, and relate the sciencefiction plot to Chow’s subjectivity. His identification with the young Japanese protagonist in the novel, Tak, in love with an android, becomes obvious when we are given to understand Chow’s emotional attachment to Wang Jing-wen, the daughter of his landlord (played by Faye Wong Fei, the same actress who plays the android in the futuristic world), herself in love with a young Japanese man. The frequent cross-references to characters and situations from Wang Kar Wai’s previous features, In the Mood for Love (2000) and Days of Being Wild (1991), make 2046 a postmodern sequel in a trilogy which explicitly highlights the repetition and theatrical re-enactment of a traumatic event. The plot of 2046 combines the retrospective search for the loved woman (in similar fashion to the time-traveling sci-fi narrative in La Jetée), with the experience of temporal stasis and psychological confinement in The Exterminating Angel. The result is an unconventional portrayal of the interactions between personal trajectories and collective history, between personal and collective memory, trauma and reconciliation with the past, as the Sino-Japanese conflict is transposed at the level of inter-generational tensions and ultimate acceptance of alterity and difference illustrated by Wang Jing-wen’s love story.

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Before moving on to discuss Wong Kar Wai’s strategy for breaking the cycle of sterile repetition and introducing the possibility of what Deleuze calls “a creative instant in time” (Deleuze 2008a, 136), I would like to consider Alain Resnais’s use of a multi-layered narrative, and of a hybrid type of filming (a combination of digital video and 35mm) in You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (2012). The penultimate film project which Resnais completed before his death in 2014, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet revisits some of the themes which he first explored half a century earlier, in Last Year at Marienbad (1961), such as memory, theatrical versus cinematic performance, lost love, yearning, death and resurrection of the past. You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet is a free adaptation of two plays by Jean Anouilh (Eurydices and Antoine, or the Love that Failed), in which Resnais stages a confrontation between the different spatio-temporal regimes of video and theatrical performance, and video and cinematic performance, in order to erode and suspend the boundaries between reality and fiction, leading to the possibility of parallel re-enactments of the same story: the myth of Orpheus, the legendary Greek musician and poet who went to the underworld in search of his beloved Eurydice, but failed to bring her back to life when he broke his promise and turned to look at her while leading her out into the upper world. In the prologue of Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, a star cast of actors (playing themselves) are summoned to a last ceremony after the death of their friend, the celebrated playwright, Antoine d’Anthac. Three generations of actors who played a role in different performances of d’Anthac’s adaptation of the myth of Orpheus, are reunited and asked to judge the merits of yet another, recent, staging of the play by a young company. The new staging has been recorded and is projected to the assembled audience on a HDTV wall-mount, after the ghostly apparition of the deceased host is seen on the screen, addressing his friends via a pre-recorded digital film. However, the full metaphysical implications of this passage from absence to presence, spectral apparitions to direct perception, only comes into view as the action of Anouilh’s play, set in a railway station, reaches the point when Orpheus has lost Eurydice. In the modern re-writing of the myth, Orpheus, a violinist in the station restaurant, falls in love with a young actress in an itinerant theater company. Although they run away together, Orpheus’s mistrust and jealousy drive Eurydice to leave him and die in tragic circumstances, probably by suicide, which he bitterly regrets. He is then told by a mysterious character, M. Henri, that if he wants to resurrect Eurydice he simply has to wait at the train station beside her spirit until sunrise—but he mustn’t look into her eyes or she will die a second death. Inevitably, Orpheus turns and looks at Eurydice before sunrise and she is lost forever. Their only chance of being reunited is outside the irreversible flow of time, in death. And the repetitions, parallel versions and multi-media re-stagings of the same story ultimately converge in the search for this impossible way out of cyclical time. In metaphorical terms, the process of turning back to look at the past rather than continue to walk out into the light re-establishes the limit between the living and the dead. Memory, devoid of the faith in the possible overcoming of temporal irreversibility which would break the cycle of

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eternal return, is nothing but an archival machine which inscribes “death and finitude within the psyche” (Derrida 1998, 14). If the mere compulsive return and accurate re-enactment of the scene fails to achieve the expected result, as it turns out in Wong Kar Wai’s prequel to 2046, In the Mood for Love, the solution comes with the possibility of entrusting the repressed feelings of unfulfilled desire and lost love to a nonhuman type of memory archive. In the epilogue of the film, Chow is seen wandering alone in the Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, then stopping to examine a hole in the ruined stone wall of a monastery into which he is whispering his secret. This is in keeping with a story he had told a friend over dinner about older times when people who had a secret that could not be shared would go on top of a mountain, find a tree, make a hollow in it and whisper the secret in the hollow, then cover it with mud. However, Chow’s confession is witnessed from afar by a Buddhist child monk who is standing in front of the camera, with his back turned to us, in the exact position in which a photographer or a cameraman would choose to be. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes remarked that “the Photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist in ‘seeing’ but in being there,” and that “above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at what he is leading – what he is giving to me!” (Barthes 2000, 47). The child monk’s gaze, which is interposed between us, the audience, and the image of Chow, is leading us, the spectral witnesses in the frame, like Eurydice, from the contemplation of barren, ash clad ruins, indicative of death, mourning and the irreversible passage of time, to the light of life and possible renewal or rebirth. This hypothesis is confirmed later by a shot of the hole into which Chow whispered his secret, invaded by grass growing out of the temple’s stone wall. The question of witnessing and of transmission which determined the unexpected recognition of the other’s humanity in the sequence of Roy’s death in Blade Runner acquires a further dimension with the reference to the singularity of the archival, memory trace as secret and innermost truth which lives on. The silent image of the child witness opens up the closed circuit of sterile recollection or eternal return of the same to a radically different temporality and to what Deleuze designated as “the repetition of faith”: The repetition of the past is possible materially, but spiritually impossible, in the name of Time: on the contrary, the repetition of faith, directed towards the future, seems to be materially impossible, but spiritually possible because it consists in beginning everything again, in ascending the path which is imprisoned by the cycle, by virtue of a creative instant of time. (Deleuze 2008a, 136) The sunlit orange glow of the child Buddhist monk’s contour leading our gaze from the death laden visual inscription of memory as loss and sterile repetition to future resurrection seems to reverse the pessimistic ending in La Jetée which pre-supposed the co-presence in the same spatio-temporal framework of the

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child witness and of his adult incarnation traveling back in time to meet his Eurydice but getting killed instead. While we never get to see the child who, like the Buddhist monk in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, is present at the scene taking a mental snapshot of the man trapped in a loop of time, the way the camera is positioned in the epilogue to Chris Marker’s La Jetée induces our identification not with the silhouette of the killer on the right of the frame, but with the low-angle viewpoint of the child witness. The notion of capturing the instant of one’s death, which is essentially out of time, among the mental images (or still photographs) which the protagonist has stored in his unconscious, opens up the possibility of stepping out of the implacable circular repetition of past events in one’s life. In so far as the protagonist in La Jetée seems to be able to access any past moment (or freeze frame memory image) at will from a distant point in the future, there is every reason to believe that he has succeeded in transcending the fixed, intractable reality of the past, injecting it with the real-life movement of a creative type of thinking; a thinking which restores the freedom to the perceiving subject not as Heideggerian “freedom unto death” [Freiheit zum Tode] (Heidegger 2001, 311) but as “freedom unto life” [Freiheit zum Leben]. The ultimate meaning of the character’s life, as transfigured by its photographic or cinematic re-creation rather than mere reproduction, corresponds to its potential future restitution in the perceiving consciousness of the viewer. The image of the hole in the tree to which Chow confided his secret at the end of In the Mood for Love, comes back in the epilogue of 2046, framed by the neon-lit manuscript of his futuristic novel, and at times replacing the image of the tunnels through which the high-speed train is traveling to a place outside time. The metaphor of time travel in 2046 seeks to recover the primitive interpretation of analogue photographic and cinematic images as silent designators of contact: “not a copy of reality, but an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art” (Barthes 2000, 88). The leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton, similarly remarked that half a century after the invention of the cinematograph, there is a way of going to the cinema as others go to church, and that “quite independently of what is playing, it is there that the only absolutely modern mystery is celebrated” (Breton 2000, 74). At a time when belief in the world has been eroded, cinema, as Deleuze argued, needs to restore the broken link between man and the world: The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us … The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith … Whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world. (Deleuze 2008b, 166) With the advent of the time-image in the cinema, the language of photographic memory and unconscious dream-images has evolved from the motor-sensory

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schema to an aesthetics of undecidability, of spectrality and virtual resurrection. A new type of thinking has replaced the mechanical, death-laden repetition of the movement-image. The time-image of films like La Jetée, The Exterminating Angel, In the Mood for Love, 2046 corresponds to a “thought from outside” (Deleuze 2005, 376), superseding the iterative processes at play in phenomenological description through a “repetition of faith, directed towards the future” (Deleuze 2008a, 136) which breaks the logic of temporal irreversibility and introduces the notion of a possible overcoming of oblivion and ultimately of death. The universality of the cinematic language can be said to reside in the paradoxically singular and idiosyncratic ability to point at, punctuate and pierce the viewer’s private storehouse of images, memories and past experiences, in order to project a meaningful story on the white screen of his/her imagination. Cinema provides therefore the ideal medium for our shared, yet intimate, reflections on the human condition, temporal irreversibility, death and the meaning of life; the message of a film is loaded with the contingency of personal experience just like photographs are inevitably ballasted with the empirical evidence of their referent, and the accidental, unique and apparently irretrievable unfolding of a moment in time. Like living snapshots of existence, filmic narratives both signify our ephemeral passage through time and the implicit faith in the ultimately meaningful traces of our presence in the wider universal narrative.

References 2046, dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 2004. Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 2000). Bazin, André, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema?, volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005), 9–16. Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott, 1982. Breton, André, “As in a Wood,” in Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), 72–77. Days of Being Wild, dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Masumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2008a). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2008b). Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1978). Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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Derrida, Jacques, “Le cinéma et ses fantômes,” interview with Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, Cahiers du cinéma 556 (April 2001): 75–85. Derrida, Jacques and Stiegler, Bernard, Ecographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007). El àngel exterminador [The Exterminating Angel], dir. Luis Buñuel, 1962. Freud, Sigmund, “The Dream Work,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, volume 13 (London: Hogarth, 1957 [1900]), 381–651. Freud, Sigmund, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, volume 9 (London: Hogarth, 1959 [1907]), 7–96. Freud, Sigmund, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud volume XIX, trans. James Strachey, volume 19 (London: Hogarth, 1957 [1924]), 227–232. Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, volume 17 (London: Hogarth, 1955 [1919]), 217–252. Gattaca, dir. Andrew Niccol, 1997. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2001). In the Mood for Love, dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 2000. The Island, dir. Michael Bay, 2005. La Jetée, dir. Chris Marker, 1962. Last Year at Marienbad, dir. Alain Resnais, 1961. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, and corrected against the 1888 edition by Andy Blunden (2004), Marxists Internet Archive 1987, 2000, 2010. Available at: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf (last accessed on October 30, 2017). Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ASCII text placed in the public domain by Moby Lexical Tools, 1992. Available at: www.w3.org/Peop le/maxf/XSLideMaker/hamlet.pdf (last accessed on October 30, 2017). You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, dir. Alain Resnais, 2012.

8

You have to write your own life Storytelling as the modern piece of resistance Agata Bielik-Robson

The imperative formulated in the title – You must write your own life – was originally used by Hans Jaeger, the founder of the Norwegian fin-de-siècle bohemian community which, for a time at least, included also Edward Munch and August Strindberg. The imperative figured as the first commandment in their rebellious code which comprised of nine “anti-laws,” each one of them antinomically subverting the rules of behavior of the nineteenth-century pettybourgeois society. In this chapter, I will use its slogan-like power to show how modernity enlists literature as an instrument of self-definition and individuation which resists submission to the societal law and order, yet, simultaneously, constitutes the highest and most lasting achievement of modern culture. Hence my subtitle, “piece of resistance,” suggests both rebellion and accomplishment at the same time. I want to prove that “writing one’s own life” as the storytelling canvas of modern literature fulfills the function which Victor Turner, in his reflections on modernity, calls liminoid (Turner 1974). The concept of liminoidality refers to the permanent borderline which, in modern times, moves from the fringe to the very center, now occupied by the anomian individual who evades being coopted by generic social roles. This chapter offers an exercise in political philosophy of literary narrative, in which the latter emerges as a “piece of resistance” of modern democracy. Literature brings to the fore a liminoid, antinomian, agonistic, and adversarial practice, absolutely necessary for the maintenance of healthy democratic life in which modern individuals can communicate and share their private concerns without giving up on their idiosyncrasy. In the first part, I will thus present Turner’s theory of the modern liminoid subject which refuses to submit immediately to the law of a fixed public identity demanded by tradition and lingers on the threshold of initiation. This deferment of initiation, which plays with the law instead of giving instantaneously into its power and in this manner weakens – or, even stronger, “sickens” (Benjamin 2006, 326) – the tradition, appears to be the domain of modern literary practice. But the stake is, in fact, more fundamental than just the Benjaminian “sickening of the tradition” (Benjamin 2006): modern literature is also a ludic liminoid negotiation with the most essential of all rites of passages, which is the initiation into language – the anthropogenic transition from the mute beast to the speaking subject.

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In the second part, therefore, I will apply the idea of the liminoid subject to modern theories of literary narrative, created by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. While in modernity, philosophy – from Descartes, via Kant and Hegel, to Heidegger – tends to uphold the traditional model of initiation, which it portrays as necessary and universal, literary thinking begs to differ and insists on a more playful position, which here will be associated with the Kafkan stance before the law (Kafka 1998, 214). Thus, for Benjamin, the very act of storytelling is antinomian in the subtle sense of opposing the generality of the law: just as Haggadah, the narrative part of the Talmud, stands against Halakhah, the legal part, so does story make room for the idiosyncrasy of the singular life (Benjamin 2005, 497). For Derrida, very similarly, the autobiographical “writing of my life” (Derrida 2008, 52) serves the means of postponing the entrance to the gate of the law and gives time to the individual as a separate and private being. It is essential that this privacy and separation can find expression only in the literary element of différance, understood simultaneously as difference and deferment.

The liminoid subject Victor Turner is mostly known for his theory of liminality or the threshold experience. Turner himself saw his work as the continuation of Arnold van Gennep’s anthropology of initiation understood as rite du passage, i.e., crossing a boundary, going over the threshold, limen (van Gennep 1961; Turner 1969). The liminal state, which constitutes the gist of the ritual process of the passage, is the stage of transition between two fixed identities – for instance, child and adult – and, as such, is characterized by fluidity. The liminal state is a time of waiting and preparation, but also a time taken out of the rigidly determined social order. In the liminal stage, the subject may enjoy more freedom than she is usually allowed and she may explore ludic potentialities of the so called antistructure which comprises the playful reverse of the societal organization, while the subject is free from the immediate demands of survival. Liminality is thus playful, creative, and relaxed, open to potentialities which do not come to the fore in the work-oriented serious perspective determined by the necessities of life. And although Turner coined the term “liminality” in order to describe the rituals of initiation characteristic of the tribal communities, he also created a derivative of this term – liminoidality – which he used to examine the modern societies that emerged after the Industrial Revolution. In his essay “From Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual” (Turner 1974), Turner expands his theory of the liminal stage to Western modern societies and, at the same time, sets the limit of its applicability: precisely on the threshold of modernity. One could thus risk a meta-formulation and say that the rite of passage from the premodern to the modern way of life comes about along the transition from liminal to liminoid, or, in other words, that the initiation into modernity occurs – seemingly paradoxically – with the refusal to become initiated. The term “liminoid” suggests certain affinity with

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“liminal,” but, as Turner emphasizes, it does not fulfill the same function: it does not prepare the subject to submit to the initiating procedure, but deliberately lingers on the threshold and postpones the moment of initiation as long as possible, potentially indefinitely. The moment liminality transforms into liminoidality, the borderline phase can no longer be regarded as a transition. The phase that is in-between accepted societal roles becomes a new model of social existence, released from the pressure to be initiated and thus acquire a fixed, serious identity. Turner connects this revolutionary change with the modern expansion of leisure which, although dependent on work, grows increasingly antithetical to the sheer demands of survival and begins to dictate its own, more ludic, rules to the whole scope of human life. More than that, in modernity the so-called leisure activities – literature, art, drama – become new serious domains in their own right, taking over the earnest stakes previously associated mostly with the survival oriented work and labor. Turner says: Leisure is 1) freedom to enter, even to generate new symbolic worlds of entertainment, sports, games, diversions of all kinds. It is, furthermore, 2) freedom to transcend social structural limitations, freedom to play with ideas, with fantasies, with words (from Rabelais to Joyce and Samuel Beckett), with paint (from the Impressionists to Action Painting and Art Nouveau), and with social relationships, in friendship, sensitivity training, psychodramas, and in other ways. Here far more than in tribal or agrarian rites and ceremonies, the ludic and the experimental are stressed. (Turner 1974, 69) By pushing Turner a bit into a bolder speculation, we could say that the liminoid phenomena of the leisure sphere are produced by and addressed to a new type of subjectivity unknown to premodern societies: the liminoid subject. It is a subject emerging from a very different process of subjectification, not based on the rite of initiation, though not openly opposed to it either. In describing the realm of playful potentialities freely explored by liminoid leisure practices, Turner does not use the term “anti-structure,” but rather “proto-structure” – precisely in order to denote the other, non-necessitarian mode of subjective being before the law, that is lingering in-between, with “no fixed abode,”1 feeling at home in the space of the passage itself, or, to use a Benjaminian image, to be a permanent flâneur wandering through die Passagen (Benjamin 2002). The liminoid subject does not reject the initiation altogether, but nonetheless refuses to submit to it immediately, or simply, submit. By postponing the moment of submission, the subject transforms submission into a matter of choice. It wants to take away from the rite of the passage the somber air of necessity and compulsion; if the subject is to die in its previous form and assume another, it would rather choose to “die in its own fashion” (Freud 1989, 613) – and, as we shall see soon, this Freudian formula does not pop up here by accident. If Turner is right, then the key to the modern concept of individuation lies precisely in the liminoid subject’s

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tactic of buying time before he enters the gate of initiation, in which the preposition “before” gains both spatial and temporal meaning: the Kafkan before the law (Kafka 1998) as, simultaneously, facing the law and deferring its arrival. The liminoid subject always approaches the law with the characteristic attitude of yes, but not yet. Hovering between rejection and acceptance, the temporal modification of not yet changes the rules of the initiating game, by allowing for a completely new position to emerge. The subject standing before the law – facing it, but not yet entering it – buys time to think critically, that is, literally in crisis, on the edge. Turner writes: Liminoid phenomena … are often parts of social critiques or even revolutionary manifestoes-books, plays, paintings, films, etc., exposing the injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities of the mainstream economic and political structures and organizations. In complex modern societies both types coexist in a sort of cultural pluralism. But the liminal, found in the activities of churches, sects, and movements, in the initiation rites of clubs, fraternities, masonic orders and other secret societies, etc. is no longer society-wide. Nor are liminoid phenomena, which tend to be the leisure genres of art, sport, pastimes, games, etc., practiced by and for particular groups, categories, segments, and sectors of large-scale industrial societies of all types. But for most people the liminoid is still felt to be freer than the liminal, a matter of choice not obligation. The liminoid is more like a commodity – indeed, often is a commodity, which one selects and pays for – than the liminal, which elicits loyalty and is bound up with one’s membership or desired membership in some highly corporate group. One works at the liminal, one plays with the liminoid. (Turner 1974, 86; my emphasis) Unlike the liminal, which marks the passage between general communal identities and as such elicits group loyalty, the liminoid addresses itself to the individual; perhaps even more importantly, it makes the modern individual into the free agent of choice and exchange (the word leisure, Turner says, comes also from the Sanskrit root leik which means the commodity exchange: Turner 1974, 71). Thus, although the liminal is the traditional time of the carnivalesque reversal, the liminoid is the modern time of permanent subversion: Just as when tribesmen make masks, disguise themselves as monsters, heap up disparate ritual symbols, invert or parody profane reality in myths and folk-tales, so do the genres of industrial leisure, the theater, poetry, novel, ballet, film, sport, rock music, classical music, art, pop art, and so on, play with the factors of culture, sometimes assembling them in random, grotesque, improbable, surprising, shocking, usually experimental combinations. But they do this in a much more complicated way

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than in the liminality of tribal initiations. They multiply specialized genres of artistic and popular entertainments, mass culture, pop culture, folk culture, high culture, counter-culture, underground culture, etc., as against the relatively limited symbolic genres of “tribal” society, and within each they allow lavish scope to authors, poets, dramatists, painters, sculptors, composers, musicians, actors, comedians, folksingers, rock musicians, “makers” generally, to generate not only weird forms, but also, and not infrequently, models, direct and parabolic or aesopian, that are highly critical of the status quo as a whole or in part … The liminal phases of tribal society invert but do not usually subvert the status quo, the structural form, of society; reversal underlines that chaos is the alternative to cosmos, so they had better stick to cosmos, that is, the traditional order of culture, though they can for a brief while have a heck of a good time being chaotic, in some saturnalian or lupercalian revelry, some charivari, or institutionalized orgy. But supposedly “entertainment” genres of industrial society are often subversive, lampooning, burlesquing, or subtly putting down the central values of the basic, work-sphere society, or at least of selected sectors of that society. (Turner 1974, 72) These supposedly entertaining but, in fact, serious genres constitute the metapolitical context of liberties in modern liberal democracy. The adversarial and subversive impact of modern poets and writers appears to be rooted in what we, after Turner, can call the invention of the liminoid subject who lingers on the threshold of initiation and finds her abode in the fluid element of the permanent and deliberately belated passage before the law. And the law which the subject simultaneously faces and hesitates to embrace is the most fundamental of all human laws: the law of language.

Before the law It is quite possible that Franz Kafka’s famous parable tells precisely the story of the belated initiation into the law of language, which constitutes “this strange institution called [modern] literature” (Derrida 1992). In the short fable told by the judge in The Trial, which parodies talmudic haggadic narrative, there are just two protagonists: the villager (am ha’aretz, the ignorant man from the country, or the simpleton but also a man of nature who doesn’t know city life and its institutions) and the doorkeeper (the guardian of the tradition, who, in the talmudic manner, builds a “fance around the Torah,”2 and thus bars access to the Law). The villager lingers in front of the gate which he knows is the gate to the Law. He does not enter it, he just waits until he is invited and ushered through, but the invitation never comes, it is always postponed. Finally, when the am ha’aretz is about to die, the guardian of the gate to the Law informs him that this gate was just for him and since he did not enter it, it has to be closed at the moment of the law-seeker’s death.

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One way to interpret this parable is to follow Jacques Lacan whose psychoanalytic approach closely parallels van Gennep’s studies on rite de passage. Lacan often invokes Kafka, especially Penal Colony, where the machine of language is presented as a torture instrument, writing the letters of punishment directly on the prisoner’s body. By following the Pauline triple identification of letter, law, and death, Lacan perceives the act of the linguistic initiation of the child as an irreversible passage from life to death, i.e. from the stage governed by the vital order of life-oriented drives to the stage in which, according to Paul’s “Letter to Corinthians,” “the letter kills” (Saint Paul 1979; Cor. 2, 3:6), ruled by the thanatic symbolic order (Lacan 1977, 300). The iron rule of the linguistic initiation constitutes the necessary and inexorable logic: singular life must die for language to overwrite the subject and introduce her into the realm of the symbolic general law. Yet, the individual characteristics do not disappear completely, for, while the law remains general, every initiation into the law is singular and unique: every subject enters the gate of language in its own way. The Kafkan gate then symbolizes the liminal transition between the individual idiosyncrasy, which cannot articulate itself in language, and the universality of the symbolic system, which subsequently captures the living singularity and dissolves it. Each subject has its symptom which unconsciously repeats its moment of origination or, in the formulation of Maurice Blanchot, “the instant of my death” (Blanchot 2000): it is the original sacrifice in which the subject had to offer its life in exchange for the gift of language. By invoking sacrifice, irreversibility and completeness of the rite de passage, Lacan locates himself firmly on the traditionalist side of initiation the way it was done in the archaic societies. His view of the gate to the Law is liminal – not liminoid (Lacan 1977, 107). Another way to look at Kafka’s parable is to see it precisely as a permanently liminoid structure in which the moment of initiation becomes indefinitely belated or deferred. But it does not mean that the initiation does not occur at all; it is happening all right, yet as a continuing liminoid process which delays its completion and in this manner prolongs the very moment of the passage. What Lacan would see as the mere instant of individuation – the always singular moment of submission to the general system of meaning, which constitutes the sujet as such – here becomes paradoxically extended as a liminoid mode of being, in which the gate to the Law turns into a revolving door (as we shall yet see, the concept of extention is of a high significance here). Yet, it would be wrong to think that the liminoid subject is stuck in the aporia which literally means “blockage of the way”: for Jacques Derrida, who also commented on Kafka’s story, it is a living aporia (Derrida 1994a), a liminoid mode of living in which the subject, revolving in the passage, faces alternatively two general systems – Life and Language – and resists dissolving in either one of them. The subject is permanently individuating, by delaying the moment of the full initiation/submission in the manner Lacan saw (and dismissed) as characteristic of the hysterical position which refuses to make a sacrifice. It is living-on in the aporetic suspension, unwilling to give up upon its life and enter the realm of the law/death. But it is also unwilling to give up on the articulation of its idiosyncrasy which can come to the fore only in language.

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Because of this inherently self-contradicting will, the liminoid subject – simultaneously the man of nature and the user of language – stands before the law, in front and prior to it, dévant et avant, in the hope that it will be able to play the law and thus cheat the law (jouer la loi). The subject hopes to drag into the law’s sacrosanct sphere the beastly creaturely element of life itself. In his commentary on Kafka’s parable, “Before the Law,” Derrida says: Thus literature itself makes law, emerging in that place where the law is made. Therefore, under certain determined conditions, it can exercise the legislative power of linguistic performativity to sidestep existing laws from which, however, it derives protection and receives its conditions of emergence … Under these conditions literature can play the law, repeating it while diverting or circumventing it … In the fleeting moment when it plays the law, a literature passes literature. It is on both sides of the line that separates law from the outlaw, it splits the being-before-the-law, it is at once, like the man from the country, “before the law” and “prior to the law” [dévant la loi et avant la loi]. (Derrida 1992, 216; my emphasis)3 What thus allows for this dialectical individuation is the permanent deviation from the fully initiating submission: the hysterical No thrown to the symbolic mastery, determined to carry into the deadly sphere of language a piece of resistance – a piece of my own life. I am alive, says the Hysteric – and this is his/her only argument, his/her singular sense of aliveness, which resists being offered on the altar of linguistic abstraction. But, at the same time, the Hysteric says that, and although it makes no sense from the point of view of the masterly logic, s/he insists on repeating his/her negation – until, due to diversion and circumvention, this stubborn, but also playful, repetition creates its own dialectical logic of the belated and reluctant initiation, which changes the law itself.4 The phrase before the law acquires thus also a temporal significance: the liminoid subject hesitates on the threshold before the law seizes him. The subject sees the law coming – feels the seductive “attraction of the law”5 or force de loi (Derrida 2001) – and deliberately resists it. But this postponing resistance is not just a passive waiting before the Law: resistance is an active strategy which does not consist in merely deferring the inevitable but in changing the rules of the game itself. By refusing to submit immediately and without murmur – in the manner of the Lacanian “submission, gift, grace: da, da, da” (Lacan 1977, 107)6 – the liminoid subject transforms the Law itself: it turns language into literature and passes literature as a new law. The space of literature, therefore, is not the Blanchotian realm of death, in which my aliveness dies when overwritten by the linguistic system (Blanchot 1982, 1995), but the liminoid time-space which indefinitely prolongs the borderline mode of being, always on the threshold. In his reflections on Kafka, Walter Benjamin envisaged this borderline as a space of the agon between the Law and Storytelling, or between the Halacha

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and the Haggada, the legal versus the narrative part of the Talmud; unlike the uneducated am ha’aretz, the common man, who just sits in front of the gate, too much in awe to enter it, the haggadic storyteller raises his weighty paw against the legal order (Benjamin 2006, 326). The use of the animal metaphor here is far from accidental: the weighty paw of the beast strikes the sovereign structure of the Law and makes it founder. The Beast, which stands for uncouth life of the reprobate man of nature, assaults the Sovereign, who stands for the master of the symbolic sphere.7 The hysteric, therefore, does not rebel in vain: he strikes back and transforms the rules of the game. In the letter to Scholem from June 1938, Benjamin explains: Kafka’s work represents a sickening of tradition. Wisdom has sometimes been defined as the epic side of truth. Wisdom is thus characterized as an attribute of tradition; it is truth in haggadic consistency. This consistency of truth has been lost … Kafka’s genius lay in the fact that he tried something altogether new: he gave up truth so that he could hold to its transmissibility, the haggadic element. His works are by nature parables. But their poverty and their beauty consist in their need to be more than parables. They don’t simply lie down at the feet of doctrine, the way Haggadah lies down at the feet of Halahkah. Having crouched down, they unexpectedly cuff doctrine with a weighty paw. (Benjamin 2006, 326; my emphasis) But the whole point here is to see the sickening of tradition as something potentially positive: as a chance for the always anarchic, always antinomian writing subject to assert herself on the epic side of truth.8 The weaker the power of the initiation, drawing the subject to the other side of the gate, the more time – and time is crucial here – for the subject to linger in front of it, wait, slow down the rite of the passage and find in it an alternative “wisdom,” an alternative – permanently liminoid and aporetic – manner of life which Derrida calls living-on or survie (Derrida 1979). Between the Beast and the Sovereign, between life and death, between living anarchy and legal order, between bare affect and systematic language: the liminoid subject restlessly oscillates (schwebt) in-between, in the permanent revolution of these revolving doors in which the Gate to the Law has metamorphosed. For Derrida, this is precisely the meaning of aporia: aporia is oscillation, but also revolution. First, in the literal sense of the swift rotary motion, but then in its metaphorical meaning too, as the antinomian practice designed to subvert the logo-nomo-centric order of solid identities waiting for us there, on the other side of the initiating passage. The liminoid subject, who refuses to be fully initiated, is precisely in this neither/nor position that allows her to write: to write-her-own-life. Not to overwrite life, as in the Lacanian system, but to write-life: survive, live-on in the language by the means of récit which, in Derrida’s interpretation, is as much a literary narrative as it is a living “report,” a story of my life brought into the symbolic sphere.9

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The resistance against initiation is the great theme of Derrida’s last seminars – The Beast and the Sovereign (Derrida 2009, 2011), but most of all Death Penalty (Derrida 2014) – where he builds strong opposition between philosophical and literary conceptions of human subjectivity. This opposition curiously reflects the Benjaminian rivalry between Halakhah and Haggadah: the legal prohibition versus the literary dispensation. On the surface, what interests Derrida in Death Penalty, is the defense of the universal right to live undertaken by modern writers, as Victor Hugo in his famous abolitionist speeches delivered between 1820 and 1882, against the stance taken by most of modern philosophy, Kant and Hegel especially, which identifies the death penalty as the deep structure of the human law. Yet Derrida’s argument is far more fundamental: he analyzes the feud between writers and philosophers in order to demonstrate the antagonism between two visions of the human subject and its use of language. This antagonism reflects the Kantian distinction between the feeling soul and the subject of pure thinking, divided by the violent passage which proceeds precisely according to the scheme of traditional initiation as depicted by van Gennep or Turner. In order to acquire a new identity of a spirit capable of pure formal thought, the subject must sacrifice all its emotional content which is regarded by Kant as pathological (pathein meaning in Greek both feeling and suffering, emotion and affliction): the feeling soul must shake the disease of affectivity and die as a living subject, so the pure spirit can be born. The philosophical subject, therefore, is based on the rejection of its living content which is being sacrificed in the cruel thanatotropic rite of initiation. The literary subject, on the other hand, lingers in the passage: it refuses to dispose of its living affectivity as a mere pathology or affliction, yet, at the same time, it wants to embrace language as a means of personal articulation. And although philosophers, assuming the highest authority of the masters of initiation, claim that such a linguistic hybridity is illogical and thus impossible, the literary subject insists on precisely this impossibility. She wants to have the cake and eat it: she wants to play. She refuses to be put to the rite of initiation through death and wants to have a different language altogether: the one grounded not in death, but in life. But – is such writing-one’s-own-life really impossible?

The Sheherazade strategy The liminoid, lingering subidentity of the writing subject becomes most manifest in what we could call the Sheherazade strategy: this is where the play – play with the law – becomes truly serious and changes the model of the game itself. Philosophy, which demonstrates absolute attachment to the law and the sovereign paradigm, demands that the subject submit and submit immediately; literature, on the other hand, insists on buying time for the subject and because of that appears more conducive to relativization, forgiveness, pardon, exceptionality, and all sorts of extenuating circumstances. For Derrida, therefore, the literary narrative becomes the privileged

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expression of life which, as long as it lives, asks to be pardoned by the blind and all-leveling hard law (dura lex). Literary narrative wants to be this life, unique and singular, indissoluble in the generalities of the linguistic system: it is writers who, before abolishing the death penalty or “destroying” it, have imposed the concept of extenuating circumstances. Not innocence, but the means of exculpation by sheltering from the blind hardness of the law, by attenuating the punishment. (Derrida 2014, 104) Derrida’s concern here is not the Nietzschean “innocence of becoming” (Nietzsche 2005, 181) which would exonerate life altogether and relieve it from any restraint of the law; not the uncontaminated beastly element or bare life outside the law. This is not a desirable outcome for Derrida who fights simultaneously on two fronts: he is against the absolutism of death and deadly initiation, on the one hand, but he is also against the vitalist image of lawless, unscathed, and happily prelinguistic life, on the other. What is at stake here is a pardon which softens, bends, mollifies and attenuates the law – the Shakespearian “mercy [which] seasons justice” (Shakespeare 1991, 211) – without relieving of the yoke of law altogether. This is “the writer’s right, a right no less sacred than the legislator’s” (Derrida 2014, 105) – to speak in the name of the finite life which knows that it cannot escape the law of death for good, but can nonetheless postpone the verdict and exercise its autonomous right to live and the possibility of more life in the time of delay, deferment, and temporary release. Derrida’s sole object of interest, therefore, is the finite life which, despite its finitude, is not defined by its end and asserts itself in its right to différance: to be a living-on, distinct and individual, and not just a sacrificial process of dying, in which the “pathological” singularity must be offered for the sake of the general identity. His theme is another finitude, freed from the philosophical overestimation of death as the inner law of human existence, according to which human animal must die as such in order to become a speaking subject. The writer’s right is here sacred precisely because it appeals to the other, more repressed, aspect of religiosity which, due to its rebellion against the sacrificial yoke of law, Derrida calls messianic. No more sacrifices! – this paradigmatically messianic call of Saint Paul can thus also be understood as No more initiations!: no more cruelty of self-offerings, no more flirting with the sublime symbolism of death, no more disdain for life. The modern liminoid subject, lingering before the law, stands for all these beastly elements of existence that resist becoming a sacrificial lamb on the altar of sovereignty: whether sovereignty is understood as the sovereign law of language or the sovereign law of the state. So, although the content of Derrida’s seminar is death-as-penalty and penalty-as-death, on the performative level, the whole text is structured as a literary narrative which, in the manner of Sheherazade, postpones the lethal verdict, relieves of the sacrifice, and lets the singular life live on in the time of

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delay: “We would begin by pretending to begin before the beginning. As if, already, we wanted to delay the end … It is indeed of an end, but of an end decided, by a verdict, of an end decreed by a judicial decree [arrêt e par un arrêt de justice], it is of a decided end that decidedly we are going to talk endlessly” (Derrida 2014, 1): endlessly and against. Mercy granted by the messianic narrative of literature, as opposed to the dura lex of the legislative philosophical discourse, consists here in a given time: a gift of temporality which creates a separate and idiosyncratic time of the finite living-on spun between the two absolutes. The softening, seasoning, and playful literary touch evades them both: death as pure law and life as pure lawless innocence (Derrida 1994b). The word arrêt used here by Derrida is a literary citation: it comes from Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort (Blanchot 1948). The ultimate confrontation with Blanchot, on whom Derrida had been writing constantly at least from the time of Parages, constitutes the gist of the Death Penalty seminar: it is Derrida’s high argument in favor of “the right of literature not as right to death (as has been said otherwise, since Blanchot), but as right to life, right beyond right, and right to the abolition of the death penalty” (Derrida 2014, 111). For it is Blanchot who, in his apology of “literature as terror, as literaterror” (Derrida 2014, 117), formulates the most striking “Hegelian-Mallarmean obverse of Hugo’s abolitionism” (Derrida 2014, 111): while Derrida sees literature as a mouthpiece representing the party of life, always endangered by the harshness of the law, Blanchot sees literature as a thanatic device, not only mirroring but fully realising the very idea of revolutionary violence. Yet, there is also another aspect of Blanchot’s writings, which goes against his autothematic reflections in “Literature and the Right to Death” (Blanchot 1995). For Derrida, Blanchot’s eponymous arrêt is the focus of the originary ambivalence between verdict and postponement: it may mean both, the sentence which determines the instant of my death and the deferment of the sentence, which arrests the process of dying. Thus, while Derrida attacks Blanchot as the Hegelian philosopher of the right to death, who revels in the dark allures of the deadly initiation, he also tries to save Blanchot as a writer who, when creating his récit, practices merciful postponement which gives life more life without any salto mortale, allowing it to progress on the horizontal ordinary plain of continuity before the law. By lingering on the threshold of the lethal passage, Sheherazade’s narrative extenuates life, by calling upon the extenuating circumstances: her story does not want any miraculous metanoia, but merely the horizontal extension which allows to linger in this life a bit longer. Both these Derridean motives – literature as a mouthpiece of life, as well as its piece of resistance, and as the Sheherazade strategy of postponement – derive from Walter Benjamin’s essay on Nikolai Leskov, “The Storyteller” (Benjamin 2006, 154).10 Here the storyteller becomes the Fürsprech der Kreatur, the mouthpiece of creation, while his story is a plastic form, radiating from the nether side of this life (Benjamin 2006, 154): a form which mediates/oscillates between the anarchic bare life, spent in the extension of the worldly immanence,

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and the rigid order of the law which is of an alien transcendent origin. While storytelling must progress by the very nature of the narrative itself, it also postpones and procrastinates, and thereby can stay within the flux of life and its law-defying indefiniteness. Already in his early talk on Kafka on German radio, from July 1931, Benjamin sees the antagonistic use of the haggadic element against the halachic order as the most distinctive feature of Kafkan parables: Like the haggadic parts of the Talmud, these books, too, are stories; they are a Haggadah that constantly pauses, luxuriating in the most detailed descriptions, in the simultaneous hope and fear that it might encounter the halachic order, the doctrine itself, on route … The fact that the Law never finds expression as such – this and nothing else is the gracious dispensation of the fragment. (Benjamin 2005, 496–497; my emphasis) This is also the leitmotif of Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s “Before the Law”: thanks to the meandering and evasive nature of the narrative itself, the Gorgon of the Law and its severe radiance can never be approached directly. Thanks to the “gracious dispensation of the fragment” (Benjamin 2005, 497) in the story which throws glances in all possible directions and luxuriates in aside details, but never looks straight ahead, the divine Law does not have to be confronted face to face – because such direct seeing of the face could only mean death. Singular life germinates within the given time in the narrative art of evasion, which finds the longest and most roundabout and extended route to its finale, instead of issuing directly zum Tode, unto death. **** Hans Jaeger insisted: You must write your own life; you must bend the system of language in such a way that it serves the purpose of articulating your own living idiosyncrasy and never ever submit to it; never ever sacrifice your life for the sake of the law; dare to be antinomian. Is it possible or not? All the masters of initiation in all the domains of human life – anthropology (van Gennep), philosophy (Kant, Hegel), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and literature (Blanchot) – will merely confirm the fantastical nature of Jaeger’s imperative. They will always repeat that the human animal becomes a human subject only due to the sacrificial logic of initiation – entering the law – based on the natural model of death. If human being acquires language, then only in exchange for her own life. Writing-one’s-own-life would thus be the most improbable antinomy, cutting into the very core of the logical either/or. Yet, the stubborn liminoid practice of modern writers – those haggadic rebels who emancipated their narratives from the halakhic domination – shows that, in modernity, the seemingly impossible becomes flesh. If Turner and Derrida are right that modern liberal democracy cannot do without writers, it is because they demonstrate – even if they cannot prove it – that the cruel ritual of initiation is no longer the only gate to the law of humanity.

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Notes 1 With these words Franz Kafka, in his short story, “The Cares of the Family Man,” describes a fantastical creature, Odradek, who is a pure liminoid projection: with no fixed abode, Odradek lingers on thresholds, hallways, and passages, and causes a lot of trouble to the concerned family man who is appalled by such an antinomian existence (Kafka 1995). 2 According to the talmudic wisdom of Pirkei Avoth (The Sentences of the Fathers), which recommends many levels of initiation into the secrets of the sacred text (Hertz 1945, 1:1). 3 This wonderfully complex passage can also be read as a polemic with Giorgio Agamben and his theory of profanation which too is to be achieved and subsequently sealed by “playing the law.” But while Agamben’s intention is to abolish the law and dispel the last aura of its force, attraction, validity, or Geltung (Agamben 2007) – Derrida sees the play not as a profanatory device, but, more in the Winnicottian manner, as a means of dispensation which eases the pressure of necessity and creates a potential transitional space in-between. Derrida’s aim is not to return to the anarchic state of innocence without the law, which characterizes Agamben’s nuda vita, but to maintain the law in a playful manner as devant et avant la loi. 4 On the role of the hysterical position in buying time as the strategy of slowing down the initiating passage, see also my The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction, especially the chapter “Language as a Death Kit” (Bielik-Robson 2011, 123–134). 5 On the seductive side of the law as the “female element,” see another essay by Derrida in Acts of Literature: “The Law of Genre,” devoted to Maurice Blanchot’s Madness of the Day (Derrida 1992, 248). 6 This is how Lacan interprets the fragment from the Upanishads he has taken from “What the Thunder Said,” the fifth part of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “That is what the divine voice caused to be heard in the thunder: Submission, gift, grace. Da da da” (Lacan 1977, 107). But what the subject heard and how he heard it remains absolutely a private experience of its own. What makes this experience singular is not resistance to submission, but the tuche: the accidental, fully contingent nature of the traumatic scene in which the voice is heard and obeyed. 7 This is an allusion to the title of Derrida’s penultimate series of seminars called The Beast and the Sovereign, which, in my opinion, mirrors the Talmudic opposition between Haggadah and Halakhah, mediated via Benjamin (Derrida 2009, 2011). 8 This is also a point strongly stressed by Turner, when he says: “Liminality may be the scene of disease, despair, death, suicide, the breakdown without compensatory replacement of normative, well defined social ties and bonds. It may be anomie, alienation, angst, the three fatal ‘alpha’ sisters of many modern myths … Liminality is both more creative and more destructive than the structural norm” (Turner 1974, 78), and this characteristic applies a fortiori to liminoidality which makes this moment of crisis/sickening permanent. 9 This is the reason why Derrida defines man as an autobiographical animal: an animal which cannot just live, but must retell its life and write it in the form of report before the law. This thesis, however, should not be understood as a naive view of literature as predominantly autobiographical in content. It is rather a formal remark: my life or my aliveness, which makes for the sense of singularity of the liminoid subject, changes the law of language by opening it to a free-play and an experimental innovation: “But as for me, who am I? … Every response that I give to this question will belong to a self-definition, as a first autobiographical gesture involving only the writing of my life, my self, me alone” (Derrida 2008, 52; my emphasis).

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10 In his interpretation of Leskov, very similar to the one offered on Kafka, Benjamin depicts the art of storytelling as creating the “epic side of truth” which he calls “wisdom” (Benjamin 2006, 326) – and this balance between truth and wisdom is precisely what has been lost in a now deeply disturbed relationship between Halakhah and Haggadah. Yet for Benjamin, this disturbed or sickened relation between the legal and the narrative parts of the Talmud is not to be deplored. To the contrary, this gap offers a chance of another – liminoid – wisdom to come to the fore.

References Agamben, Giorgio, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002). Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, Vol. 3, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Bielik-Robson, Agata, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011). Blanchot, Maurice, L‘arrêt de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Blanchot, Maurice, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1982). Blanchot, Maurice, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Lydia Davies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 300–344. Blanchot, Maurice, The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Derrida, Jacques, “Living On: Borderlines,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Continuum, 1979), 62–142. Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, trans. Avital Ronnel (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Derrida, Jacques, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994a). Derrida, Jacques, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994b). Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Derrida, Jacques, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Derrida, Jacques, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Derrida, Jacques, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Derrida, Jacques, The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). Freud, Sigmund, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989).

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Hertz, Joseph, ed. and trans, Pirke Aboth: The Sayings of the Fathers (London: Behrman House Publishers, 1945). Kafka, Franz, The Complete Stories, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1995). Kafka, Franz, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken, 1998). Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 1977). Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Saint Paul, “Letter to Corinthians 2,” New King James Version of the New Testament (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1979), 2, 3:6. Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, in Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Ani-Structure (Michigan: Aldine, 1969). Turner, Victor, “From Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice University Studies, vol. 60, no. 3 (1974): 53–92.

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Duras vs. Duras Traumatic memory and the question of deferred retroaction1 Eran Dorfman

Successful dialogues are based upon mutual understanding and common ground such that both sides can easily communicate. But what happens when the dialogue is based upon something that cannot be understood or shared? This is the case of trauma, which challenges the very basic assumptions of subjectivity, experience and communication. The question of trauma and the access to it has not ceased to trouble Western culture from Freud’s time to our days. To give an example, in 1984 Jeffrey Masson shocked the psychoanalytical milieu with his provocative The Assault on Truth (Masson 1984), claiming that Freud’s alleged abandonment of the seduction theory – according to which the origin of neurosis lies in real traumatic events of sexual abuse in childhood – was motivated by opportunistic rather than professional causes. According to Masson, psychoanalysis conveniently refuses to admit the reality of sexual abuse, attributing their memory to the imagination of the victims. But does this mean that we should believe every story relating to events in early childhood when we know how unreliable human memory is? In 1996 Cathy Caruth developed a sophisticated theory of trauma based on Freud’s mechanism of Nachträglichkeit, usually translated as belatedness or deferred action. Indeed, Freud has noticed very early on that the shocking experience of trauma cannot be dealt with in real time, but only retrospectively. Yet how can one distinguish between “real” trauma and its later repetitions? In order to address these questions, I will first examine Freud’s conceptualization of Nachträglichkeit, which I propose to translate as deferred retroaction, and will then turn to two works of Marguerite Duras. I will show that one cannot access the original traumatic event through memory alone but rather through repetition, yet this repetition creates and enables its origin no less than it is enabled by it. Moreover, this repetition should be made in a dialogical framework, such that deferred retroaction is a key-element not only for understanding trauma and memory, but also for characterizing the implicit obstacles which often make dialogues fail.

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Freud’s mechanism of deferred retroaction The mechanism of deferred retroaction has been extensively used by Freud in his analysis of two cases, the first is that of Emma, written in 1895 (before the abandonment of the seduction theory), and the second is the case of the Wolf Man, published in 1918. In this section I will present the two cases and will argue that they correspond to two different models of trauma, that is, two models of memory and the consequent dialogue it permits. In his posthumous 1895 Project for Scientific Psychology (Freud 1895), Freud presents the case of the young Emma who suffers from agoraphobic symptoms. She attributes these symptoms to an incident she had at the age of twelve, when she was visiting a shop and then suddenly saw two shop assistants laughing. She was convinced that the two were mocking her for her clothes, was filled with anxiety, and ran out of the shop. From this moment on developed agoraphobic symptoms (Freud 1895, 353–356). How is it possible that such a trifling scene could lead to continuous anxiety? It is during analysis that Freud discovered what he proposes as the real reason for Emma’s symptoms. The scene in the shop, Freud claims, actually repeated and retroacted another, more primordial scene from the age of eight, in which Emma was sexually assaulted by a grocery keeper. Emma had originally forgotten the first scene because what had happened remained unclear to her until she became sexually mature and had the chance to undergo a similar event. Only then she acknowledged – and immediately repressed – the original assault that she had not been able to fully experience in the first place. In this phase of his career, known as the seduction theory, Freud thought that the symptoms disappear only when the original event becomes conscious again and receives a proper name. In other words, Emma needed to somehow repeat the original scene for the second time during analysis, and until that moment she was doomed to eternally repeat her symptoms. It is through the dialogue with the analyst that the memory may become conscious again, which gives analysis the status of a “talking cure,” a term coined by Bertha Pappenheim, one of the first patients in the history of psychoanalysis. We thus find three times or moments in Emma’s story: the present moment during analysis; the scene in the shop at the age of twelve which Freud calls Scene 1; and finally the original scene at the age of eight, named Scene 2. It is interesting to observe, as Jean Laplanche stresses (Laplanche 2006, 29–32),2 the bidirectional temporality that Freud discerns when he characterizes the first scene as Scene 2, namely the second scene. This temporality is called by Freud Nachträglichkeit, usually translated as deferred action or belatedness. However, I propose to translate it as deferred retroaction, since it involves both deferral (from the past toward the present) and retroaction (from the present to the past). Deferred retroaction thus involves a continuous play between the different scenes, such that the original scene is not a static chronological source but a dynamic element which is constantly reshaped by and in the present.3

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However, Freud soon realized that the access to the original scene is much more difficult than he first thought. It is famous that in 1897 he “abandoned” the seduction theory, according to which at the basis of neurosis lies a concrete and retraceable traumatic sexual scene from early childhood. He adopts instead a theory of infantile sexuality, with the child producing sexual fantasies in a very early age. It is thus these fantasies, rather than real events, that may later become traumatic (Freud 1892–1899, 259–260). Yet, I propose that Freud’s alleged abandonment of the seduction theory does not actually change the very structure of deferred retroaction, but rather stresses the role of psychoanalysis itself in repeating and reshaping past trauma. In other words, Freud gradually realized how radical the idea of deferred retroaction was, since it gives the present the same weight that it gives to the past. In order to clarify and base this claim, let me examine the famous example of the “Wolf Man” (Freud 1918). Sergei Pankejeff, a young Russian aristocrat, tells Freud during analysis of a childhood dream from age four: he sees a tree and on its branches are six or seven wolves sitting motionless, staring at him fixedly, and this quickly leads him to wake up in fright. What is the dream’s source and why does it continue to haunt the patient? Freud undertakes some real detective work, using different evidence to finally arrive at the mystery’s “solution.” He thus locates a “primal scene” (Urszene) that the dream is supposed to reveal by deferred retroaction. This scene allegedly took place when Wolf Man was eighteen months old and watched his parents in coitus a tergo, i. e., in an animalistic pose that greatly frightened him. Since the infant still did not know how to interpret what he saw, the scene was inscribed unprocessed into his psychic apparatus, where it waited for a second event to activate it. And this second event came about in nothing other than the guise of the wolves dream. The dream, then, not only activated and repeated memory, but in fact created it, allowing trauma to take place for the first time – which is, in effect, already the second time (Freud 1918, 29–47). It should be noted that the Wolf Man couldn’t actually recall the primal scene during any stage of therapy. Freud himself admits that the Wolf Man could have seen dogs copulating in the field and not his parents. Yet, despite many reconsiderations, Freud still insists on the scene’s reality. Why, then, assume the existence of a primal scene if the patient does not remember it? I would claim that this does not stem from Freud’s naive belief in a real origin, but rather from his desire to confer a liminal status on analysis – between recollection, repetition and creation. The patient supposedly recalls many past scenes, trying to locate in them the reasons for his/her present suffering, but in effect s/he is reliving them and in the process recreating them in a way that aligns with their present situation. The primal scene, then, is above all else a lure and a temptation: the promise of a miraculous recollection which is nothing but a motivation to further investigate. Had the existence of the primal scene not been posited, there would have been nothing to recollect and reproduce in analysis, and the patients would be left with their symptoms and with no solution to their pain.4

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Indeed, it is no coincidence that soon after the analysis of the Wolf Man ended, Freud discovered the compulsion to repeat. As he states in “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (Freud 1915),5 the compulsion to repeat is a mechanical and symptomatic repetition that can be cured only through a new repetition of a different kind. Although deferred retroaction is not explicitly mentioned here, it is nonetheless implied as not only what leads to the repetitive symptom but also what could function as its cure. Freud begins by posing the problem of forgetting, and mentions the patient’s frequent “disappointment at the fact that not enough things come into his head that he can call ‘forgotten’” (Freud 1915, 148). Why is it so? “Forgetting impressions, scenes or experiences nearly always reduces itself to shutting them off” (Freud 1915, 148), he claims. That is, these impressions are available to the patient but without a context or meaning. Therefore, in order to be cured of the symptoms the patient must repeat the scene in a way that would give it meaning. And this, according to Freud, can take place in the analysis itself which combines repetition, recollection and transference: The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. (Freud 1915, 154) In other words, as we already saw, it is only through a dialogue with the analyst that the patient can recollect – or recreate – his or her past trauma. The role of analysis is to overcome past trauma by the very act of its dialogical repetition, a repetition which is actually more invention than recreation. In this sense analysis itself is also an event of deferred retroaction. Psychoanalysis generates trauma that could not have happened as such in the past, but does so under controlled conditions and with the therapist’s help. During this traumatic experience the patients are not left dumbfounded, as they were when the original trauma took place. In other words, to overcome the symptom’s persistent and unintelligible return, a deeper return, a return within the framework of a dialogue, must be created, which will eventually lead to a cure. Analyst and patient return to the past, reconstructing it as they grope toward its origin, not in order to fall victims to it and perpetuate the trauma, but in order to overcome it. Facing the past is therefore also facing the future, and the deferred retroaction mechanism is always two-sided and multi-temporal. With these insights in mind, let us now examine two cinematographic/literary works by Marguerite Duras, an author who is often associated with the theme of trauma and repetition. I shall first present Hiroshima mon amour, and through it discuss Cathy Caruth’s interpretation of Freud, and then move to The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein to show the implications of trauma in everyday life.

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Duras (1): Hiroshima mon amour “You see, Nevers is the city in the world, and even the thing in the world, I dream about most often at night. And at the same time it’s the thing I think about the least” (Duras 1961, 37), says the heroine of Alain Resnais’s 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, with a screenplay by Duras. Nevers, the heroine’s birthplace in France, is the traumatic place in which she lost, at the end of World War II, her German lover, who was shot during the Liberation by the French resistance. After a year of mourning that involved disgrace, psychotic rage, depression and isolation, she is forced by her parents to leave Nevers, to which she would probably never return, but by which she is haunted in her nights. Only twelve years later, in another traumatized place, namely Hiroshima, and with another traumatized person, a Japanese man, can she consciously and deliberately retrieve her traumatic memory. At the end of a very long night, during which she not only tells the Japanese man her story, but actually repeats and retroacts her trauma by identifying her new lover with her lost German lover, she finally receives from him her name, and the “therapeutic session” that the film institutes ends with an act of baptism: “Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers in France” (Duras 1961, 83). One cannot escape one’s traumatic past. Or rather: one is defined by it. The film thus shows how a traumatic event is repressed although it is available to consciousness.6 Trauma is repressed to the extent that it is not adequately repeated and discharged: it should be repeated not only in dreams, but also in reality, and – crucially – with the mediation of another person. This person is an addressee in a dialogue who serves as an object of transference. S/he would therefore permit a deferred retroaction of the original scene, enabling the elaboration, translation and finally the discharge of the original event. We thus see here, as is implied in Freud’s text on repetition and recollection, a possibility of a therapeutic deferred retroaction: a retroaction that integrates rather than parries or quarantines the trauma. As Freud states, repression does not necessarily involve forgetting, but rather the inaccessibility of a certain memory to the present affective life, that is, its isolation from other events and associations such that it remains intact, frozen in time. Repression thus involves the meeting point of the past and the present, as Freud wrote already in 1896: “pathological defense [repression] only occurs against a memory-trace from an earlier phase which has not yet been translated” (Freud 1892–1899, 235). In order to translate the memorytrace, the psychic apparatus must first retroact it, that is, repeat the memory through another event which would revive and integrate it in the present. One could thus say that the French woman, through a process of “therapeutic” repetition of her experience of loss (at the end of the film she seems to have lost her Japanese lover, too), managed to translate what had happened to her, thereby (re-)experiencing and overcoming her trauma. However, it is important to note that the deferred retroaction she was involved in fits only to Freud’s thought within the seduction theory (the case of Emma). What recurs

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is a deferral of a concrete and well-defined event which awaits its retroaction in a later period. But what about the much more complicated deferral introduced in the new model, according to which a traumatic past event can serve only as a motivation to investigate (the case of the Wolf Man)? In her 1996 book, Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth analyses Hiroshima mon amour, using it to articulate her own theory of trauma as deferred experience, summarized as follows: “The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself” (Caruth 1996, 12). Trauma is not a definable event, but rather “a possibility always there but never certain” (Caruth 1996, 115). To illustrate this idea, Caruth examines Freud’s three introductions to his 1939 text Moses and Monotheism and claims that Freud’s own personal trauma in the time of writing these introductions did not consist in the invasion of Austria by Nazi Germany, but rather in his leaving Vienna. Trauma “is borne by an act of departure” (Caruth 1996, 21–22), a claim that is equally illustrated by Freud’s famous descriptions of his grandson’s fort-da game, stemming from his mother’s daily leaving (Caruth 1996, 65–67). Hiroshima mon amour, Caruth continues, also presents a trauma based upon departure, this time of the German lover who died in the French woman’s arms. However, the event of departure is hardly clear: during the long hours she held her dying lover, the heroine could not recognize when precisely death took place during that night, nor could she distinguish the spatial difference between his body and hers. Caruth meticulously analyzes the various displacements, exchanges and crossings within and between the two traumas: the trauma of Nevers and the trauma of Hiroshima. But despite all the uncertainties Caruth finds in the trauma of departure, her basic hypothesis remains that a concrete trauma did take place, and the question that consequently interests her is how to “properly” evoke, testify and verbalize it despite its overwhelming yet uncertain character. This last point is crucial to understanding Caruth’s ambitious project, which is not only to explain what trauma is, but also to resolve what she calls the postmodern crisis of reference, that is, the uncertainty of a presumed origin. On the one hand, Caruth allows a relatively stable reference – a traumatic event of departure – but on the other hand, using both deconstructive and Lacanian terminology, she characterizes this experience as a missed encounter, deferring it to an indefinite moment of departure. This suggestion would seem at first glance to fit Freud’s theory of deferred retroaction, but, as Ruth Leys shows, Caruth considers the belatedness (deferral) of the traumatic experience as an “incubation period” that does not change or influence the original event (Leys 2000, 270–272). In other words, Caruth does not fully recognize the primacy of repetition over the repeated and consequently does not seriously deal with questions such as: in what ways can one displace and repeat the “primal scene”?7 What outlets may these repetitions have? By not addressing these questions, the traumatic event risks

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becoming a mystified extraordinary realm that overshadows the ordinary, non-traumatic everyday life. Indeed, how comfortable it would be if all the dullness of our everyday life was to be attributed to some extraordinary traumatic event!8 However, I do not wish to say that concrete traumas never take place. A helpful distinction in this context would be Dominick LaCapra’s elaboration of two kinds of trauma, the first structural and the second historical (LaCapra 2001, 76–85). The structural trauma is universal and abstract, concerning the traumatic structure of human life as such, whereas the historical trauma refers to a concrete event, such as sexual abuse, a car accident or the experience of genocide. Caruth’s theory seems to slide between these two traumas, since it implies, on the one hand, that all of us have suffered from trauma, but, on the other hand, this trauma is located in an archaic event of departure – for instance Moses leading the Hebrew people to leave Egypt – which can somehow be transmitted between generations. Indefinite as it may be, the traumatic structure of modern experience is supposed by Caruth to be based upon a primordial event, a suggestion that was already made by Freud and which is difficult to uphold.

Duras (2): The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein In order to examine another model of trauma which is both historical and structural, let us turn to a second example, taken from Duras’s 1964 novel The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (Duras 1966). Lol is a young and attractive woman engaged to the handsome and rich Michael Richardson. The two seem to make a perfect couple, when one evening they attend a ball, in the middle of which a mysterious older woman enters the scene and attracts the attention of the young fiancé. Michael and Lol dance one more time, their last time, after which Michael turns to the woman and dances with her – again and again, all night long. What is Lol’s reaction to this betrayal? Curiously, she does not try to talk to Michael or do something to stop the couple and break their burgeoning intimacy. Instead, she remains quiet and passively watches them from a distance, standing at the back of the dancing hall, with her best friend Tatiana at her side, holding her hand and caressing it. After hours of rigid passivity, dawn finally breaks, the orchestra ceases to play, the ball ends and the new couple make their way toward the exit. Only then does Lol open her mouth, yelling they must stay and continue to dance, for the morning has not yet come. She wants to perpetuate the night. She wants to prolong and repeat the scene. The couple however does not even seem to hear her screams and calmly walks away, upon which Lol finally collapses, sinking into a long period of illness. Similarly to the heroine of Hiroshima mon amour, Lol slowly recovers from her traumatic loss. She, too, leaves her hometown, gets married and has children. But she is not entirely recovered. Years later, Lol and her family move back to her home town, where she soon notices a man who reminds her of Michael

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Richardson: this is an opportunity to repeat. She follows him and discovers that he is the lover of Tatiana, the childhood friend who held and caressed her hand during the night of the ball. Lol falls in love with this man, but curiously, she does not want to make love to him, but to watch him make love to Tatiana. She needs her lover to dance with another woman; she needs to watch him, from a safe distance; she needs him to “betray” and “abandon” her. She therefore asks him to continue his meetings with Tatiana in a hotel where she can watch them from the rye field behind. After several such voyeuristic experiences, Lol asks her “lover” to accompany her to the dance hall where the primal scene took place. They take a train and arrive at the dance hall, but disappointingly nothing happens, and Lol does not even recognize the place. The wish to repeat the scene once and for all, as in Hiroshima mon amour, collapses, and Lol must find a new solution to the problem of repetition. She thus abandons herself to her lover, letting him make love to her for the first time, but this awkward experience, too, does not give her much pleasure. There seems to be no way out of Lol’s illness, and the novel ends upon her return from the trip, when she finds herself lying again in the rye field, the only place where she can find satisfaction, watching her loved object from a distance, both present and absent, present as absent: fort-da. It is tempting to evaluate the repetition of the Hiroshima heroine as therapeutic and that of Lol as mechanical or destructive. After all, the former seems to have been cured of her fixation through the name – the symbolization of her trauma – she received, whereas Lol only sinks ever more deeply into her ineffable and anti-dialogical neurosis, or even psychosis.9 The heroine of Hiroshima has actively revived her past, permitting herself to re-experience loss, and freeing herself to feel love again. Lol, on the other hand, remains largely passive, finding her satisfaction only in the desire of the other which she must watch from a safe and voyeuristic distance. She compulsively repeats her loss, but this repetition does not seem to have any therapeutic effect on her. Like Freud’s patient Emma, who would not go out to shop alone as every shopping experience represents her past trauma, so too Lol perpetuates her traumatic experience by finding substitutes for it which are nonetheless mechanical. And yet, unlike Emma who was allegedly cured by Freud, Lol is doomed to repeat, never attaining the desired therapeutic effect she seeks. So what do we do with Lol? What knowledge does she bring to us?10 I would suggest that it is precisely the non-therapeutic value of Lol’s repetition, that is, its persistent, compulsive character, which makes her life-story closer to the experience of each one of us which is “post-traumatic” or shocking in general (“structural trauma”), whereas the repetition of the French woman in Hiroshima mon amour refers to a concrete moment in time, indefinite and remote as it may be (“historical trauma”). Indeed, the Hiroshima repetition is much more appealing, corresponding to our fantasies of salvation through an extraordinary event. Yet we rarely travel to exotic places in order to reproduce the traumas of our past, and we rarely ever recover from them. Rather, it is mostly in our everyday life that we find ourselves, consciously or not,

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repeating things – small and big, trivial and significant. We repeat things, but this repetition does not seem to have any meaning for us, since meaning is attributed only to the New and not to the repetitious. But this does not mean that Lol has not suffered a concrete trauma, which makes her a limit case, being affected by both structural and historical trauma, as the scene of the ball shows. This scene might look primal at first, but it turns out to be nothing but a continuation and repetition of a more primordial element: Tatiana did not believe that Lol Stein’s insanity could be traced back solely to that ball, she traced its origins back further, further in Lol’s life, back to her youth, she saw it as stemming from somewhere else. In school, she says, there was something lacking in Lol, she was already then strangely incomplete, she had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become. In school, she was a marvel of gentleness and indifference, she changed friends with abandon, she never made the least effort to combat boredom, nor had she ever been known to shed a sentimental schoolgirl’s tear. (Duras 1966, 71) Lol’s early years are characterized here as a mixture of boredom and lack, a lack which does not stem from concrete unfulfilled needs, but rather from the inability to locate any need in the first place. Lol thus waits for something to happen, for a salvation through an external “big” event, for example a passionate love affair. However, this love affair, too, would never be enough. It is only when it is over, drawn to an end in a traumatic scene, that the indefinite lack Lol has suffered from can become definite, or, in Lol’s extreme case, the boredom can turn into what seems to be madness.11 The primal scene is thus an effect of the trauma no less than it is its cause. As such it exemplifies, much more than the Hiroshima trauma, Freud’s notion of deferred retroaction. For even if the primal scene repeats an earlier traumatic loss, the latter cannot be located outside the event that has retroactively caused it. The primal scene, then, declares itself to be “the” event: an external and well-defined trauma which Lol can only passively follow, watching her own destruction with a negative jouissance, that is, an absence which is so total that it is no longer distinguishable from presence. The end of Duras’s novel may be regarded as a mechanical repetition of the primal scene, but at the last minute something halts this movement: “Lol had arrived there ahead of us. She was asleep in the field of rye, worn out, worn out by our trip” (Duras 1966, 181). Lol wanted to repeat the scene but she fell asleep because she was tired from the trip to the dance hall, that is, the trip of repetition. Perhaps, after this trip, she understands that the primal scene, the night of the ball, is not important in itself, but is needed in order to create her own mythology of the lost object of love. Lol is thus tired of repeating the scene and shuts her eyes, refusing to watch it again, to reproduce the extraordinary

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traumatic event which supposedly stands at the basis of her illness. The problem is that she does not know any other form of repetition, and the novel ends with this aporia, which equally characterizes modern everyday life, repeating something the origin of which no longer explains or resolves the repetition.

Conclusion: trauma, love and dialogue Does any introduction of deferral necessarily lead to an endless repetition with no possibility of retrieving a traumatic origin that would end the repetition? It would be tempting to use my analysis to deconstruct Freud and show, for instance, that he looks for presence but repeatedly ends up with absence, deferring the presence of the traumatic experience to an indefinite time. Indeed, deferred retroaction can be considered as a Derridean différance,12 that is, a difference that defers itself, a persistent inability to trace back a stable origin. However, Derrida’s conceptualization follows the same scheme of two extreme poles that nourish and complement each other. On the one hand there is an automatic repetition, and on the other hand an indefinite deferral. Indeed, this is a combination of polarities that stands at the basis of many postmodern theories. But the problem is that the relationship and movement between the two poles remain obscure, whereas Freud’s original notion of deferred retroaction does acknowledge (or create) a primal scene, but on the other hand it tells us that the scene is only to be approached from, through and by the present, namely on the analyst’s couch and through transference and dialogue. Rather than oscillating between a too stable primal scene and a too rigid one, I propose to use Freud’s insights and with them listen to Lol and the lesson she, or rather Duras, teaches us. The end of the novel, I claimed, tells us to stop hunting for a primal scene and give up the endless repetition. But what is the alternative solution to this repetitive hunting? I would propose that the novel supplies such an alternative precisely through its combination of repetitive quest for a scene on the one hand, and a repetitive avowal regarding the futility of the scene on the other hand. In this way the need for repetition is simultaneously acknowledged and overcome, yet this overcoming is achieved only gradually and painfully, just as it happens in psychoanalysis itself. This process, however, involves a crucial element that returns us to the beginning of this chapter, namely the mutual dependency of memory and dialogue. Indeed, Lol is never left alone during her repetition and search for the primal scene. She is not alone most of all because the narrator is none other than Jacques Hold, her lover, who describes the scene from an uncertain distance. The narrator is hesitant regarding the truth of what he describes, yet his distance and hesitations actually stem from his unbearable wish for proximity to Lol and her past. He is in love with her and strives to be as close to her as he can, but this closeness can be maintained only in and through his imagination. And indeed, he often repeats the same words before he describes Lol’s past, in a kind of a loving warning: “I imagine,” as if to say that he does not have direct access to what he recounts.

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Jacques imagines Lol, imagines the primal scene, yet his imagination subtracts nothing from the truth, since the truth of trauma, as I argued, is neither objective nor subjective, but intersubjective. Deferred retroaction is a dialogue and negotiation of truth which can take place in psychoanalysis, but also in literature, art or real life. But if there is one lesson that both the Hiroshima woman and Lol teach us, it is that we can only give meaning to the primal scene and integrate it in the present of our lives if we do so through love, that is, in a relationship with other people. Love would probably not undo trauma, but it would reconnect it to the present. The traumatic primal scene thus becomes a scene of love but also a scene of betrayal precisely due to its traumatic character. And this unravels not only the cause of trauma but also the nature of love. Love is an intersubjective negotiation and dialogue marked by immanent uncertainty and pain. This negotiation and dialogue must not only be made with another person (imagined or real), but also be attached to a place and a scene that would ground it. The primal scene gives both love and trauma flesh and blood, standing as a fragile yet unshakable Truth in a world that stopped believing in this word.

Notes 1 This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 732/14). 2 Laplanche further explains his position in an interesting interview with Cathy Caruth from 1994 (see Caruth 2001). 3 Lyotard takes this insight a step further in his analysis of the case of Emma. He claims that originally, in Scene 2, only a “pure” affect existed, with no representation. It is only later, in Scene 1 and during analysis, that a representation is given to the affect. Lyotard applies to this case his theory of language as it has been developed in The Differend, and claims that only the adult can articulate the traumatic scene of childhood, retroactively transforming a “pure” or ideal affect-phrase into a meaningful phrase (Lyotard 2002, 38). The adult should give an identity to what inherently lacks any identity, and Lyotard curiously calls this act love, characterized as accepting the non-differentiation and untranslatability of the other: “Adults can accept their children, after all, only in love” (Lyotard 2002, 45). 4 Hence we do not also have to assume that trauma is exclusively sexually based. Originally Freud had in fact claimed that sexuality is necessary for the deferred retroaction mechanism, since it is the only one that allows a two-phase development. But if all trauma is characterized by a self-effacement by those who experience it then the dual-stage mechanism is not limited to the sexual realm. And indeed, as his work unfolded Freud tried to understand how non-sexual primal trauma is activated by deferred retroaction: first the general trauma of the very creation of life on earth, and then the private trauma of birth. 5 Freud repeats the essential ideas of this text in his 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He examines in it several types of repetition and when he turns to the repetitive symptoms of hysterical patients he says that in order to overcome it the analyst should make the patient “re-experience some portion of his forgotten life” (Freud 1920, 19). The therapeutic session thus becomes an arena in which the patients repeat “unwanted situations and painful emotions” (Freud 1920, 21). It is interesting to note that Freud does not mention anymore if these situations are sexual. Since

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repetition overshadows its presumed origin, the latter can now take different forms and shapes, be they sexual or other. Christopher Bollas has tried to explain this phenomenon by his notion of The Unthought Known (see Bollas 1987). This question is largely dealt, yet in a slightly different context, by Ned Lukacher (1986). For a full analysis of this theme see Dorfman (2014). See Lacan (1996). For a similar interrogation from a feminist perspective see Edson (1992). This is why Lol faces her trauma only when the ball ends. Caruth would see it as another proof that trauma is the result of departure, but I would claim that it is only upon departure that one can and must confront the consequences of the invading energies, that is, the strong impression which constitutes the trauma. To answer Caruth, it is only when Freud left Vienna that he was able to fully understand the implications of the Nazi invasion. See Derrida’s discussion of Nachträglichkeit as différance in Derrida (1978).

References Bollas, Christopher, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Caruth, Cathy, “An Interview with Jean Laplanche,” Postmodern Culture, 11(2) (2001), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/27730 (retrieved October 31, 2017). Derrida, Jacques, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196–231. Dorfman, Eran, Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral, Repetition (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Duras, Marguerite, Hiroshima Mon Amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961). Duras, Marguerite, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966). Edson, Laurie, “Knowing Lol: Duras, Epistemology and Gendered Mediation,” SubStance, 21(2) (1992): 17–31. Freud, Sigmund, “Extracts from the Fliess Papers,” Standard Edition, Vol. 1 (1892– 1899), 175–282. Freud, Sigmund, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Standard Edition, Vol. 1 (1895), 283–397. Freud, Sigmund, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” Standard Edition, Vol. 12 (1915), 145–156. Freud, Sigmund, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” Standard Edition, Vol. 17 (1918), 1–122. Freud, Sigmund, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (1920), 7–64. Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols. 1–24, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974). Lacan, Jacques, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” in Writing and Psychoanalysis: A Reader, ed. John Lechte (London and Sydney: Arnold, 1996), 136–142.

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LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Laplanche, Jean, Problématiques VI: L’après coup (Paris: PUF, 2006). Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Lukacher, Ned, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Lyotard, Jean-François, “Emma: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,” in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 23–45. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).

10 The shifting landscape of Jewishness in contemporary Kafka criticism Abraham Rubin

Introduction The question of Franz Kafka’s relationship to Judaism and the role it played in his creative process has been a contentious matter since the earliest reception of his work. In a 1924 obituary published in the Prague-Jewish weekly Selbstwehr, the moral philosopher and Zionist activist Felix Weltsch (1884–1964) commemorated his close friend, noting that although Kafka was best recognized for his command of the German language, “the soul that produced this language was Jewish through and through” (Weltsch 1983, 27).1 Kafka’s future readers, he declared, “have yet to uncover the intrinsic connection to Judaism that inspired the work of this great Western-Jewish poet of the German tongue” (Weltsch 1983, 27). In the nine decades that have passed since Weltsch published his obituary, numerous studies have been devoted to interrogating the “intrinsic connection” linking the “German” and “Jewish” elements in Kafka’s writing. Weltsch’s challenge prefigures a methodological and ideological dilemma that has preoccupied scholars in the field of German-Jewish Studies since 1945. Scholars ask, what is it that constitutes the “Jewishness” of figures such as Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud? Is there anything inherently Jewish about their work, and if so, how might the Jewish dimension of their work be accounted for? While questions of this sort seemingly belong to the realm of Jewish apologetics—and in certain cases may rightly be labeled as such—their justification lies in the scholarly effort to understand the cross-cultural encounter that shaped German-Jewish modernity, and which gave rise to so many of Europe’s literary and intellectual milestones. Figuring prominently in this ideologically heated debate is the contested question of the “German-Jewish dialogue”—did such a dialogue ever take place and if so what form did it assume? Moreover, do the concepts “German” and “Jewish” represent independent cultural and national entities, or does the hyphen that connects—but also separates—the two terms signify a more complex and nuanced relationship? The problem cuts both ways, as Jack Zipes and Sander Gilman write in their introduction to the Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture:

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Abraham Rubin How can one separate the writings of the Jews in German-speaking countries from the culture in which they wrote? How dare one amalgamate their writing with the cultural production of those so inherently hostile to them? Who are “they”? Where are “they”? Who and where were “they”? Who is, at the end of all of this, “Other,” and is “Self,” “Jew,” and “German”? (Gilman and Zipes 1997, xxvi)

Many of these questions have found their unique resonance in the scholarship dealing with Kafka’s Judaism. Critics, while acknowledging the significance of Kafka’s Jewish background, strongly disagree when it comes to pinpointing the Jewish presence in his fiction. Over the years, Kafka’s writings—both literary and biographical—have served as a veritable laboratory for the investigation of the ambiguities of modern German-Jewish identity. The diverse scholarly approaches to Kafka’s ever-elusive Jewishness seem to reflect the changes that have taken place in the field of German-Jewish Studies over the years. The persistent interest in Kafka’s Jewish background and its relationship to his writing is attested to by an ever-increasing number of works that have appeared on this topic over the past decades. Like Weltsch, many of Kafka’s contemporary critics regard his writing—whether implicitly or explicitly—as a representative case study of German-Jewish modernity. The noted Kafka critic Heinz Politzer has likened Kafka’s stories to Rorschach tests, the formless inkblots onto which a patient will project his or her own mental imagery (Politzer 1962, 21). Politzer’s analogy suggests that critics tend to discover precisely those things, which they set out to discover in Kafka’s texts in the first place. It is reasonable to assume that this phenomenon holds true for the “Jewish readings” of Kafka as well. In the spirit of Politzer’s observation, then, I would like to argue that what the “Jewish readings” of Kafka’s work bring to light is primarily the identity politics and cultural sensibilities of his commentators. It is under this working assumption that this chapter examines the ways scholars, from the 1950s to the present, have understood Kafka’s work as “Jewish.” This chapter looks at the transformations in this subfield of Kafka criticism as a barometer for the changes that have taken place in the field of German-Jewish Studies since the end of World War II. The first part of the chapter surveys Kafka’s reception from the 1950s to the 1980s in an attempt to explain the historical and ideological forces that shaped the divergent responses to his work in Israel and the United States. For the German-Jewish intellectuals writing in Israel, Kafka’s literary legacy was primarily one of national self-affirmation. In contrast to the Israeli context, where Kafka was canonized as an avid Zionist, his critics in the United States consecrated his writing as part of a universalist tradition of “high modernism,” while at the same time ignoring his deep ties to Judaism. The second part of the chapter focuses on the past two decades of North American Kafka criticism and how it has reframed the question of the author’s Jewishness. The comparison to Kafka’s postwar reception reveals how radically the author’s image as a Jewish writer has changed since the 1990s.

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Cold War criticism was profoundly binary in its approach, with critics dividing into two ideological camps—if the first canonized Kafka as the author of a quasi-universal experience of modernity, the second nationalized his writing as part of a Jewish literary canon. As opposed to Cold War scholarship, which saw Kafka as either Jewish or German, contemporary critics no longer theorize the author’s identity in such monolithic categories, as if he belonged to one discrete national or cultural tradition. In contemporary scholarship, the “key” to Kafka’s Jewishness is often related to the boundary-crossing and transnational character of his work. I argue that the transnational-turn in Kafka criticism mirrors recent attempts to refashion the field of Jewish Studies as an integral part of the multicultural university. This renewed understanding of Kafka’s Jewishness attests to a broader shift in the cultural politics of Jewish Studies in North America, which in recent decades have been moving away from the margins of “ethnic” and “area” studies, in what David Biale has described as the effort to “integrate the Jewish experience into the history of human culture as a whole” (Biale 1996, 183).

Between national particularism and abstract universalism Felix Weltsch, who fled Prague and immigrated to Palestine on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, revisited Kafka’s German-Jewish “nexus” in his 1956 article “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish-German Symbiosis: The Case of Franz Kafka.” The essay appeared in the inaugural volume of the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, a periodical devoted to the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. The article was the only contribution to focus on the life and work of a single author—possibly a harbinger of Kafka’s growing prominence in German-Jewish Studies in the postwar era. In choosing Kafka, Weltsch explained that he did not seek to evaluate the author’s importance as “the portrayer of our time” (Weltsch 1956, 266), but instead, aimed “to show how Jewish consciousness revived in a certain Jew, gradually, spontaneously, as though flowing from some underground source” (Weltsch 1956, 255). He concedes that Kafka’s linguistic home was German and that his writing was enriched by his encounter with German culture, yet argues that it was ultimately Kafka’s “ethnic and religious consciousness” as a Jew that nurtured his artistic creativity (Weltsch 1956, 267). Weltsch draws a distinction between the German outer-shell and the Jewish inner-kernel of Kafka’s prose, in order to claim him as an unequivocally Jewish writer. He concludes that Kafka’s path inevitably led to Judaism and the recognition that only the Zionist movement showed “the direction leading to a healthy national life and a correct relationship to the past and to history” (Weltsch 1956, 274–275). Weltsch’s recovery of Kafka’s writing for a Jewish-national agenda illustrates how a critic’s political and ideological convictions shape his literary analysis. For Weltsch, Kafka demonstrates “the grandeur and the collapse of the GermanJewish symbiosis” (Weltsch 1956, 275). The “German-Jewish symbiosis,” Weltsch claims, was doomed to failure not only because the Germans feared and

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rejected mass-assimilation, but because it endangered the Jews’ collective existence as a people. He discounts the German-Jewish “cultural symbiosis” as a transitory phenomenon that ultimately amounted to collective “self-mutilation” (Weltsch 1956, 263). The underlying irony of all this is that Weltsch defines Jewish particularity in terms that are taken directly from German Romanticism, an intellectual tradition whose influence he would most likely wish to disavow. His conception of Kafka’s Jewishness is deeply indebted to the Herderian idea that a work of literature expresses a Volksgeist unique to the nation of its author. The essay imposes an imaginary coherence on the concept of Jewish identity that never existed in the first place, and which glosses over the varied and nuanced ways German-speaking Jews understood their own Jewishness throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The cultural politics of the essay accurately reflect the prevalent attitude in the study of German-Jewish history and culture in the early postwar era. Weltsch’s account of Kafka is marked by a Zionist sensibility that rejects the viability of a “German-Jewish dialogue.” The terms he uses to portray Kafka’s Judaism are meant to convey the idea that “Jewish” and “German” represent mutually exclusive cultural entities. A far harsher representative of this outlook was the Hebrew University professor of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), whose rejection of the “German-Jewish symbiosis” was even more adamant. In his now famous letter, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue” (1964), the Berlin born scholar belligerently declared: “I deny that there has ever been such a German-Jewish dialogue in any genuine sense whatsoever,” and asserted that the celebrated dialogue died before it even began (Scholem 1976, 61). Scholem understands “dialogue” to be a mutually reciprocal act of communication between two equal partners: “It takes two to have a dialogue, who listen to each other, who are prepared to perceive the other as what he is and represents, and to respond to him” (Scholem 1976, 61) This dialogue, he argued, could never have existed because it was always contingent upon the Jews’ “self-denial,” and the relinquishing of their collective identity (Scholem 1976, 62). There is a direct line linking Scholem’s views on the “German-Jewish dialogue” to his views on Kafka’s Jewishness. In Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (1975) Scholem reproduced a letter on Kafka, which he had sent Benjamin in 1931. Scholem opens his explanation by stating that I have of course already had “individual thoughts” about Kafka, although these do not concern Kafka’s position in the continuum of German literature (in which he has no position of any sort, something that he himself did not have the least doubt about; as you probably know, he was a Zionist), but his position in the continuum of Jewish literature. (Scholem 2003, 216) Judging by Scholem’s other references to Kafka—both public and private—it is safe to say that he continued to hold this position long after he wrote those lines. A year before the appearance of The Story of a Friendship, on the occasion of

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receiving the literary prize of the Bavarian Academy of Arts in 1974, Scholem exhorted his audience for not recognizing the “spirit of Judaism” at the center of Kafka’s work (Scholem 1997, 23). Scholem’s understanding of Kafka’s identity as a “Jewish writer” is premised on the notion that his writing is fundamentally incompatible with the German literary canon. While Scholem’s polemical stance regarding the “myth of the German-Jewish dialogue” cannot be removed from its post-Holocaust context as an admonition against the historical idealization of German-Jewish relations, it nevertheless exhibits striking continuities with his prewar conception of Kafka’s Jewishness, and Jewish identity in general. Like Weltsch, Scholem understands Kafka as a “Jewish writer” in a way that presupposes the existence of a homogeneous and self-contained realm of Jewishness. In both cases, Scholem hypostatizes an authentic Jewishness, which is largely defined by its independence from—and opposition to—German culture. His staunch refusal to recognize the existence of a “German-Jewish dialogue” echoes the distinction he makes between the “German” and “Jewish” literary continuums in his commentary on Kafka. Max Brod, who fled Prague to Palestine alongside Felix Weltsch in 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s manuscripts, had a lot to say about German-Jewish relations in his 1966 memoir, Der Prager Kreis. Taking a more conciliatory tone than both Weltsch and Scholem, the Tel-Aviv based critic coined the concept of “Distanzliebe,” or “love from a distance,” in order to describe his ideal of healthy German-Jewish relations. A mutual sense of Distanzliebe, Brod explained, would allow the two communities, each in possession of its “own individual national-character,” to encounter one another with a deep-felt sense of admiration, while remaining respectful of the unbridgeable cultural gap that stood between them (Brod 1966, 62).2 While Brod’s ideal of Distanzliebe reflects a more positive view on GermanJewish relations, it still shares Weltsch and Scholem’s point of departure, in that it posits Germans and Jews as two discrete collectivities. The fundamental dualism underlying Brod’s vision of the German-Jewish dialogue also governed his reading of Kafka, whom he portrayed as a writer with deep roots in ancient Jewish culture. Der Prager Kreis, a memoir that concluded five decades of Kafka criticism, was Brod’s last chance to defend his image of Kafka, an image regarded by many as ideologically suspect. Putting the final touches to Kafka’s legacy, and by extension his own, Brod reasserted the formative role Judaism and Zionist ideology played in Kafka’s life and literature. Strongly opposed to the growing faction of critics who took Kafka for a post-Nietzschean nihilist and literary forebear of French Existentialism, Brod argued that it was Kafka’s relationship to Judaism that provided the key to understanding his novels (Brod 1966, 98). According to Brod, not only did Kafka strongly believe in Zionism, he had also anticipated the Holocaust. “The angst of which Kafka’s letters and diaries speak,” Brod argued, “is the fear of Hitlerism, whose future atrocities Kafka foresaw with full clarity” (Brod 1966, 84–85).3 Brod’s two assertions—that Kafka was a Zionist and that he prophetically foresaw the Holocaust—are ideologically

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complementary. The idea that Kafka anticipated the Holocaust represents the kind of interpretation that Michael André Bernstein calls backshadowing—“a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events … is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come” (Bernstein 1994, 16; italics in the original). Although Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, well before Hitler’s rise to power, Brod reads his work through the lens of his own personal experience of displacement. Brod’s explicit association between Kafka and the Shoah is implicitly present in Weltsch’s and Scholem’s commentaries as well. Not only does this association inform their reading of Kafka, it constitutes the starting point for their overall assessment of German-Jewish history and culture. It is only by viewing the Holocaust as the inevitable culmination of German-Jewish history that Scholem can criticize what he calls the “‘adventure’ of assimilation” (Scholem 1976, 77). The effort to dissociate Kafka from the German literary tradition and canonize him as a Jewish writer during the early decades of the postwar era is an understandable reaction to the persecution his critics witnessed or experienced first-hand. For a generation of émigré scholars who were personally affected by the Shoah and ideologically committed to Zionism, the idea that Kafka, whose writing had been banned by the Nazis, could simultaneously be canonized as a German and Jewish writer was an obscene falsification of recent historical events. Thus, ignoring the open-ended character of his prose, Kafka’s Israeli readers, many of them Central European émigrés, enlisted his writings for the task of national self-affirmation. Weltsch, Scholem, and Brod all demonstrate a phenomenon that Dan Diner has characterized as the “negative German-Jewish symbiosis” (Diner 1986). The Holocaust, Diner claims, has become the starting point for German and Jewish self-understanding. German and Jewish identities, he observes, are co-constituted and inextricably linked to one another by fact of the Shoah. Although Diner might have overstated his case, the thesis of a “negative symbiosis” captures something of the Zeitgeist that pervaded German-Jewish Studies in the decades following World War II. All three of these German-speaking thinkers cast German national identity and culture as a negative foil, against which they construct their image of authentic Jewishness. Drawing a clear-cut boundary between Germanness and Jewishness, Kafka’s European-born Israeli critics try to isolate him from the German cultural environment in which he lived and wrote. These readings of Kafka crystalize the pervasive identity politics in the field of German-Jewish Studies during the Cold War. Samuel Moyn has described this attitude as the “orthodox account of German Jewry,” which he criticizes for its “extremely problematic and increasingly dubious assumptions” (Moyn 1996, 292). This position, Moyn explains, consists of two prejudices. The first is a kind of Holocaust-teleology, which seeps into every aspect of the scholarly interpretation of German-Jewish experience, even in cases where such a link is unwarranted on any historical or contextual grounds. The second problem

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Moyn points to is the tendency toward “ethnic absolutism,” which he describes as representing identity as if it consisted of a “transhistorical essence with impermeable boundaries” (Moyn 1996, 295). This “ethnic absolutism,” Moyn explains, corroborated “the orthodox interpretation of German-Jewish history because it secured the desired conclusion in advance: the impossibility of interaction or identity formation of any kind which tried to bridge the gulf between the German and Jewish universes” (Moyn 1996, 296). The paradox underlying the ideological effort to isolate a “Jewish essence”—as demonstrated in the examples above—is that it simply contradicted the fluidity and permeability that has characterized Jewish identity in the modern German context. While Moyn’s incisive critique surely applies to the Israeli-émigré scholars mentioned above, it is worth noting that their dissociation of Kafka from his German cultural context merely mirrored a contemporaneous, and far more prevalent tendency to isolate Kafka from his Jewish background. As such, Scholem, Brod, and Weltsch’s effort to “nationalize” Kafka might be seen as a defiant response to the author’s literary reception in the United States and Western Europe, where the author’s Jewish background and the Jewish motifs in his work were tendentiously underplayed. During the 1950s and 1960s, American critics interpreted Kafka using the text-immanent methods of New Criticism, while their Western-European colleagues read him in light of Existential philosophy and structural semiotics. The socio-historical context and cultural specificities that gave rise to Kafka’s fiction were being ignored on both sides of the Atlantic. As Pascale Casanova notes: With Kafka’s entrance into the international literary world that anointed him after 1945 as one of the founders of literary modernity, the criteria that were then current … autonomy, formalism, polysemy, modernity, and so on—were applied to his work. Kafka thereby lost all of his national and cultural characteristics, now obscured by the process of universalization. (Casanova 2004, 353) This phenomenon partially owes itself to the fact that Kafka’s writings, which mostly lacked historical and geographical markers, seemed to belong to no specific culture or period. Yet as David Suchoff and Stephen Dowden have shown, the ahistorical readings of Kafka’s fiction were a product of distinct historical circumstances. Suchoff and Dowden attribute the formalism that characterized Kafka’s reception in the 1950s and 1960s to the cultural and political climate in Cold War America and Western Germany. Both scholars refer to George Kennan’s 1947 essay “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in order to explain the Cold War mentality that shaped the author’s postwar canonization in the United States. Although Kennan’s strategy of “containing” the Soviet threat abroad represented the main pillar of American foreign policy, it also influenced the intellectual and cultural climate in the United States. As Dowden explains,

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the Cold War “containment” mentality “sanctioned a literary criticism that did not meddle openly with matters of immediate relevance to the interplay of cultural and public life” (Dowden 1995, 42). The critical readings of Kafka that grew out of this context were either highly formalistic or narrowly biographical. Whether focusing on Kafka’s narrative technique or interrogating his fiction through a psychoanalytic lens, these studies tended to isolate Kafka’s fiction from its socio-historical context. The consequences of the Cold War containment mentality on American Kafka criticism become readily apparent when we compare it to the author’s reception in Israel. Whereas Scholem, Brod, and Weltsch emphatically stressed the centrality of Kafka’s Jewishness in their commentaries, their GermanJewish colleagues in the United States rarely mentioned the author’s Jewish background. Two important landmarks in American Kafka-criticism—Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (1962) and Walter Sokel’s Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie (1964)—serve as a case in point. Sokel and Politzer, both Viennese Jews who served as German professors at prominent American universities, published monographs on Kafka that generally disregarded the social, cultural, and political context of his work. Dowden and Suchoff attribute Politzer and Sokel’s text-immanent and ahistorical interpretations to their tenuous social position as German-Jewish immigrants in Cold War America, haunted by the fresh memory of McCarthyism. In an era in which Jews and Communists were almost synonymous, immigrant intellectuals found little incentive to call attention to their Jewishness and were disinclined to practice the kind of cultural criticism that the conservative academy in the 1950s and 1960s was bound to associate with the “Jewish left” (Suchoff 1993, 395; Dowden 1995, 39). Before the “melting pot” mentality gave way to a more multi-cultural vision of American society, Jewish immigrant scholars were under pressure to assimilate and play down their Jewish background in order to fit in. An American-based scholar could not write about Kafka from a consciously Jewish position and relate to his work as a medium of Jewish self-affirmation—as Kafka’s Israel-based commentators did at the time. It was only in the 1970s that a renewed interest in Kafka’s historical background led to a wave of studies dealing with the Jewish context of his work. The appearance of Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature in 1974 marked an important turning point in the history of Kafka criticism. Whereas scholars in the 1950s and 1960s mostly ignored Kafka’s ethnic and linguistic particularities, Deleuze and Guattari’s book heralded the beginning of a new era, in which Kafka was rediscovered and refashioned as a minority writer (Suchoff 2012, 14). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, works such as Evelyn Torton Beck’s Kafka and Yiddish Theater (1971), Marthe Robert’s As Lonely as Franz Kafka (1979), and Ritchie Robertson’s Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985) brought Kafka’s unacknowledged Jewish background to the fore. Reconstructing the cultural context of Kafka’s Jewish Prague and accounting for Kafka’s own flirtations with Zionism, these works provided readers with

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crucial information regarding Kafka’s biographical background. A crucial question that lingered in the background was how this new knowledge contributed to the aesthetic appreciation of Kafka’s work. These studies diligently traced various Jewish sources embedded in Kafka’s writing, uncovering fragments of Hassidic folktales, Kabbalistic lore, Zionist writings, and Yiddish cultural influences in his stories, but they did not necessarily explain how the various Jewish allusions furthered readers’ understanding of Kafka’s poetic imagination. Another problem was that these scholars, in their eagerness to recover Kafka’s Jewishness, which had been repressed during the 1950s and 1960s, seemed to reproduce the cultural and national binaries that characterized Brod and Weltsch’s studies. As David Suchoff observes, many of Kafka’s “post-containment” critics tended to isolate the Jewish sources they identified in his fiction and treat them as if they were opposed to the German elements in his writing. What they failed to notice was that by interweaving German, Hebrew, and Yiddish linguistic sources into his fiction, Kafka had already undermined the static categories of national identity his critics were using to classify his “Jewishness” (Suchoff 2012, 19).

A post-ethnic Kafka Since the 1990s, the field of Jewish Studies has been radically transformed through its encounter with post-colonial and post-structural theories on race, gender, and ethnicity. Critical of the “ethnic absolutism” that pervaded the study of modern Jewish culture in the wake of World War II, a new generation of scholars has come to question the notion that “Jewishness” may be regarded as a fixed category in the manner Weltsch, Brod, and Scholem seemed to think about it. Underlying their criticism of the “German-Jewish symbiosis” is the belief that one can distinguish between a stable Jewish “essence” and the assimilatory adoption of a foreign culture. The categories of identity and culture that inform their understanding of German Jewry in general—and (the Jewish) Kafka in particular—seem to be based on a priori assumptions concerning what constitutes Jewishness. Scholars today regard the effort to demarcate the cultural boundaries between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” phenomena as ideologically suspect and categorically untenable. It is in light of this realization that recent scholarship in German-Jewish Studies has sought to re-conceptualize GermanJewish modernity without replicating the oppositional thinking that formerly predominated the field. Cold War scholarship worked within a binary framework that saw the German-Jewish response to modernity as consisting in one of the two options: assimilation or dissimilation, national self-affirmation or self-negating defeatism. This dichotomy, as both Samuel Moyn and Scott Spector claim, misses out on the nuances of German-Jewish self-understanding, whose multiple, idiosyncratic manifestations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often elude the collective categories applied to them. Rather than dividing German and Jews along essentialist criteria or viewing them as ontologically fixed entities, both

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Moyn and Spector suggest that scholars focus on the culturally specific ways in which German-Jewish identity was constructed at different times and places. As Scott Spector observes, even the most flexible models of German-Jewish modernity, those that incorporate a full range of identities, ultimately fall into the well-entrenched binary that distinguishes between “authentic” and “inauthentic” forms of Jewishness. The idea that one can understand the Jewish responses to German culture on a spectrum that ranges from nationalist selfdetermination to full assimilation wrongly presupposes the ability to distinguish between those elements that are said to be “intrinsic” and those that are “foreign” to Jewish identity (Spector 2006, 356). This problem, notes Spector, is a result of the way questions concerning German-Jewish cultural production are posed. As Spector points out in reference to the German-speaking Jews of Kafka’s generation, Part of the problem resides in the question itself, which unapologetically ascribes a stasis and fixity to nationality that is ontologically naive as well as anachronistic. The focus ought not to be on what the national identifications of these young people were, but instead on how such identifications—and resistances to them—actually operated. (Spector 2000, 42) To accommodate the complex and contradictory experiences of German Jews and the diverse ways in which they understood themselves to be Jewish and German, Spector urges scholars to explore the “Jewishness” and “Germaness” of their historical subjects on their own terms, rather than trying to account for it as part of an abstract and generalized collective phenomenon. In Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains, Todd Presner makes a similar argument, noting the extent to which “the Jewish” and “the German” of German-Jewish modernity are inextricably intertwined. There is, he explains, “no pure ‘German’ or timeless geography of ‘Germany’ … German modernity is always ‘contaminated’ and, hence, means something else: namely, ‘German/ Jewish’ modernity” (Presner 2007, 6). According to Presner, there is a need to go beyond the restorative commemoration of German Jewry’s “contributions” to German culture, because such an approach preserves the categorical distinctions between “German” and “Jewish.” “To reinsert the Jews into ‘German culture’ would be to imply that they can be truly removed” (Presner 2007, 7). The effort to move past the question of “symbiosis” in favor of a more complex understanding of German-Jewish cultural dynamics is also one of the guiding principles behind Noah Isenberg’s Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism. According to Isenberg, one might easily claim that Kafka, a Jewish author who wrote in German, “represents the GermanJewish symbiosis at its best” (Isenberg 1999, 149). However, instead of trying to determine whether he was a German or Jewish modernist, Isenberg claims that it would be more fruitful to explore how Kafka interwove German and Jewish sources into his work, and how those sources interact with one another.

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The attempt to move beyond the binary opposition of “German” and “Jew” is readily apparent in the Kafka-criticism of the past decade. One recent and exciting example is David Suchoff’s Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition, which takes issue with previous accounts of Kafka’s “ethnic origins” on the grounds that they confine Kafka to the same fixed categories of identity that he was trying to break away from in the first place. Taking his cue from Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin’s “postnational” readings of the author, Suchoff explores the author’s use of Hebrew and Yiddish as a doorway to the transnational encounters that take place in his fiction (Suchoff 2012, 20). Suchoff reads the hidden Jewish sources that Kafka playfully interspersed in his writing as his way of satirizing the idea of a uniform German linguistic identity. Suchoff uses the figure of Red Peter, the talking ape at the center of Kafka’s short story “Report to an Academy” to illustrate his point. Much like Red Peter, who acquires a foreign, human language in his search of a “way out” of his cage, Kafka too assimilates different cultural and linguistic traditions in his writing in order to break out of what he perceives as an all too monolithic and confining literary tradition. Suchoff identifies the fictional ape as well as all of Kafka’s other talking animals with the author’s overall effort to introduce foreign voices into the seemingly self-enclosed temple of German culture. The Jewish linguistic and literary sources Kafka uses in his writing provide him with the key to what Suchoff calls “the hidden openness of tradition” (Suchoff 2012, 1)—a glimpse of the multilingual and transnational undercurrents that permeate a canonical tradition, which only appears to be hermetically sealed. Vivian Liska’s When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in GermanJewish Literature (2009) anticipates some of Suchoff’s “postnational” insights. Liska begins her book with Kafka’s famous question “What have I in common with Jews?”—which is also the starting point for many of the scholarly explorations into Kafka’s Judaism. Yet in contrast to her predecessors, Liska concludes that there is no definite answer to this question, because Kafka responded to it in the language of literature, a realm that “can be neither readily conceptualized nor translated into a political or ideological message” (Liska 2009, 2). Noting Kafka’s “ambivalence toward collectivities in general and toward the Jewish community in particular,” Liska argues that there is no way of decisively isolating the Jewish elements in his prose or determining the extent to which he identified with Judaism and Zionism (Liska 2009, 2–3). While Kafka’s own communal and cultural loyalties cannot be discerned from his writing, his stories nevertheless address basic questions concerning collective identity and communal belonging. Thus, rather than trying to find the historical referents to Kafka’s fictional communities or reading them as allegories for a specifically Jewish experience, she suggests that readers focus on the “dynamics at work in Kafka’s communal figurations” (Liska 2009, 17). Liska associates Kafka’s Jewishness with the “uncommon communities” and alternative forms of communal affiliation imagined in his work. As Liska reminds her readers, “German-Jewish literature should indeed not be regarded as a

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fixed and definable category or essence, but as the result of a focus, a set of questions asked in the process of reading and interpreting individual texts” (Liska 2009, 6). Suchoff and Liska’s focus on the multicultural character of Kafka’s writing represents a much broader trend among scholars such as Scott Spector, Paul Reitter, and Todd Presner, whose work on Kafka stresses the complexity, porosity, and liquidity of German-Jewish literature and identity. To borrow Suchoff’s image, their scholarship represents an attempt to follow Red Peter’s “way out” of an all too constricting identity politics, or what might be called the Cold War “cage” of German-Jewish Studies. There are, it seems, a number of historical and biographical reasons for this shift. The scholarship of an earlier generation of émigré intellectuals, whether they wrote in Israel, the United States, or Europe, was indelibly shaped by the experience of geographical and cultural displacement as well as a deep, personal loss. The émigré generation of German-Jewish scholars saw their scholarship as an instrument of self-affirmation and commemoration. Contemporary scholars in the field of German-Jewish Studies, while predominantly Jewish, do not share as personally fraught a relationship to their subject matter. Skeptical of the idea that the subtleties of German-Jewish culture may be understood in binary or fixed terms, these scholars no longer seek to conceptualize Jewishness or determine its content in advance. Instead, they explore the “in-between spaces” (Spector 2000, 235) of cultural contestation and collaboration that characterize German-Jewish modernity. The postnational turn evidenced in the scholarship on both Kafka and German-Jewish culture points to a broader change that is taking place in the field of Jewish Studies. What might have been an academic bastion for the affirmation of Jewish identity fifty years ago has progressively sought to reposition itself as a central part of the humanities.4

Conclusion Kafka’s Cold War commentators are not disinterested readers. Their contradictory interpretations are a reflection of the ideological agendas they bring to bear on his work. In all of these cases, interpreting Kafka becomes an activity that allows his critics to meditate upon the meaning of modern Jewish identity. They are simultaneously the subject and object of their interpretations, struggling to understand Kafka and at the same time make sense of their own complex cultural situation as displaced German Jews. The respective answers given to the question “what is Jewish about Kafka?” reflect the cultural dilemmas and ideological investments that preoccupied these thinkers during the post-Holocaust era. That these readings are “ideologically tainted” in no way detracts from their insightfulness and originality as works of literary interpretation. To criticize these commentaries because they were shaped by the extra-literary concerns of their authors is to assume that there is some Archimedean vantage point from which Kafka can be read “objectively.”

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Kafka’s Cold War critics are right in identifying various “Jewish” influences in his writing. Yet the motifs, metaphors, and allusions upon which they base their interpretation do not add up to a coherent or cohesive conception of Judaism. Moreover, their identification of a particular facet in Kafka’s text with the “essence of Judaism” results in the very reduction and over-simplification of modern Jewish identity. Brod, Scholem, and Weltsch understand Kafka as a “Jewish writer” in ways that presuppose the existence of a homogeneous and self-contained realm of Jewish culture. All three critics hypostatize an authentic Jewishness, which is largely defined by its independence from—and opposition to—German culture. Their readings presuppose that Kafka’s writing corresponds to some consistent “spirit” or “essence.” Yet the idea that his prose communicates a fixed ideological message is dubious at best. While contemporary critics provide us with a far subtler image of Kafka’s Jewishness, their readings do not emerge in a historical vacuum either. In fact, their interpretations are equally susceptible to the present cultural and academic Zeitgeist. The cosmopolitan and cross-cultural sensibilities they identify in Kafka’s writing and which they associate with his “Jewishness” might easily be subsumed as part of a greater trend that Shaul Magid investigates in his recent work, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (2013). Magid’s book identifies a shift in the cultural politics of American Jewry, which has moved away “from the particularism of the traditional Jewish ideology of chosenness to a new universalism—a global consciousness … that prompts Jews to offer their spiritual insights to the world” (Magid 2013, xi). At the core of what Magid describes as the “postethnic” moment in American Jewish history is the recognition that “new rubrics will be required to navigate the dislocation of ethnicity and construct a Judaism that is no longer tethered to a notion of peoplehood as previously understood” (Magid 2013, 4). The general thrust to think past the normative, binding, and homogenous categories that have historically defined Jewish identity is similarly apparent in the contemporary criticism addressing the Jewishness of Kafka’s fiction.

Acknowledgments I presented an earlier version of this chapter in July 2014 at the Berlin Roundtables Conference, “After the Change: 1989 and the Social Sciences in the post Cold War Era.” I wish to thank Ingo Richter, Stefanie Schäfer and Sabine Berking of the Irmgard Coninx Foundation for inviting me to participate in this event as well as the roundtable workshops in 2009 and 2010.

Notes 1 My translation. 2 My translation. 3 My translation.

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4 A representative example of this trajectory is perhaps the introduction to Insider/ Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (1998), where the volume’s editors suggest how Jewish Studies intersects with the multicultural ethos of American academia: “In a variety of ways, then, to be a Jew, especially at this historical juncture, means to lack a single essence, to live with multiple identities. Perhaps the Jews are even emblematic of the postmodern condition as a whole. If identity politics means to base one’s political activity on one particular identity, then the Jews’ experience of multiple identities suggests that identity politics conceived as monolithic or total needs serious rethinking” (Biale et al. 1998, 9).

References Beck, Evelyn Torton, Kafka and the Yiddish Theatre: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). Bernstein, Michael André, Forgone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Biale, David, “Between Polemics and Apologetics: Jewish Studies in the Age of Multiculturalism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 3. 2 (1996): 174–184. Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky and Susannah Heschel, eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Brod, Max, Der Prager Kreis (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966). Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.D. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Diner, Dan, “Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz,” Babylon 1 (1986): 9–20. Dowden, Stephen, Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Imagination (Columbia: Camden House, 1995). Gilman, Sander and Jack Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Isenberg, Noah, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Liska, Vivian, When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Magid, Shaul, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Moyn, Samuel, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity: Historiography and Theory,” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41. 1 (1996): 291–308. Politzer, Heinz, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962). Presner, Todd Samuel, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Robert, Marthe, As Lonely as Franz Kafka (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982). Robertson, Ritchie, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). Scholem, Gershom, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken, 1976). Scholem, Gershom, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997).

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Scholem, Gershom, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2003). Spector, Scott, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Spector, Scott, “Forget Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity to German–Jewish History,” Jewish History 20. 3–4 (2006): 349–361. Suchoff, David, “Jüdische Kritiker in der amerikanischen Nachkriegsgermanistik,” Weimarer Beiträge 39. 3 (1993): 393–409. Suchoff, David, Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Weltsch, Felix, “Franz Kafka gestorben,” in Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption 1924– 1938, ed. Jürgen Born, 25–27 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983). Weltsch, Felix, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish-German Symbiosis: The Case of Franz Kafka,” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 1. 1 (1956): 255–276.

11 Forgiveness and resentment are heterogeneous to politics W.G. Sebald’s “Max Ferber” Idit Alphandary

What is forgiveness? Can forgiveness forgive the most heinous crimes in history in the same way that it restores intersubjective connections? Julia Kristeva proposes that forgiveness is an act of love extended to the other (Kristeva and Rice 2002).1 Forgiveness is not a direct emotion but requires renunciation of revenge (Butler cited in Griswold 2007, 19–31). Importantly forgiveness enables the victim to regain self-empowerment through telling her/ his story within the bounds of dialogue (Grunebaum 2002, 308), and forgiveness is achieved in time (Kluger 2002, 313; Benjamin 1996 [1921], 286). As Derrida, Arendt, Wieviorka, and Jankélévitch have argued, forgiveness becomes paradoxical when it arrives as a response to crimes against humanity (Arendt 1958; Derrida and Wieviorka 2000; Derrida 2001; Jankélévitch 1971, 1996).2 Instead, forgiveness is meaningful only in its purest form, when it amounts to a gift. What emerges is that political forgiveness is by definition impossible because pure forgiveness is incompatible with politics. This conception of forgiveness compels us to recognize the ethical and moral limitations of politics. Politics, in the democratic state, is preoccupied with treaties, reconciliation, restitution, and national healing but is oblivious to human beings, both the living and the dead. Forgiveness, in contrast, is inherently personal, moral, and powerless; it is an act undertaken without promise of reward.3 Forgiveness remains outside of politics but the awareness of politics (and the limitations of politics) which it brings to the fore is possible only within the limits of democracy. Totalitarian regimes do not recognize an outside to politics. I will argue that in literature, while pure forgiveness is fundamentally personal, and runs counter to politics or the Other of politics, it nevertheless leaves its mark on historical developments, both as a literary trope and as an inalienable right. Literature interacts with history in myriad ways and this dialogic relationship is continually evolving. Dialogues about literature carry authority and bring about social attunement to forgiveness and resentment on the historical and personal levels. I will show that pure forgiveness issues from powerless sovereignty. Sovereignty without power entails that the victim does not view her/his act as morally superior to the perpetrator’s moral inferiority and that the act of forgiveness is not impeded by practical considerations.

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While Gilles Deleuze understands Nietzsche’s view of resentment as relating either to slave morality or as a useful tool used by the master to enhance action (Deleuze 2006, 113)4 certain interpreters argue that Nietzsche views resentment only as a debilitating emotion and psychologists follow in the footsteps of this misguided interpretation when they denounce the man of resentment. In “Resentments” (1980 [1966], 62–81), Jean Améry insists that when Holocaust survivors refuse forgiveness to the murderers and choose instead to retain their resentment toward the perpetrators, they are driven by a desire to understand the nature of crimes against humanity and the suffering of victims. Améry thus condemns “the Jews who in this hour were already trembling with forgiveness and reconciliation” (Améry 1980 [1966], 65). Améry thus implies that diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel, beginning in 1959, and the accompanying agreements regarding financial restitutions, constitute forgiveness. Resentment, for him, would be manifest in the form of legal indictment of the German perpetrators on both the personal and global fronts. Like forgiveness, pure resentment opens up a space of thinking, and for Améry a critical aspect of resentment is that it is also outside of and anathema to politics and the political. As Améry put it, “What matters to me is the description of the subjective state of the victim” (Améry 1980 [1966], 64). But perhaps resentment need not preclude the possibility of acknowledging forgiveness as that which lies outside and is Other to politics.5 Améry calls for dialogue and demands openness from the addressee, in order to create a historical truth. Thus, the German perpetrator must become acquainted with the story and the history of European Jewry in order to accept his or her own guilt, and that of the nation as a whole. In the aftermath of the war, Améry sought to institute conditions that would enable the people of Germany to acknowledge their role in enabling Hitler and the Nazi party and to lay claim to this guilt as the “negation of the world and itself, as its own negative possession” (Améry 1980 [1966], 78). Furthermore, Améry insisted that the country accept and fully acknowledge texts by survivors that indict Germany and the German people, and that it engage the public in dialogue about these texts which constitute the country’s negative cultural possessions. In his Bremen Speech (1958), the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan takes a similar stance when he says: Reachable, near and not lost, there remained amid the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this. (Cited in Felstiner 1995, 114–115) The German language can be enriched if it engages in an intra- and intersubjective dialogue about the Holocaust. Poets like Celan, essayists like Améry, philosophers like Benjamin, and novelists like Sebald enrich the

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German language by compelling it to address questions of forgiveness and resentment as the Other of politics and litigation. In “Max Ferber” W.G. Sebald articulates the value of both forgiveness and resentment in order to remain loyal to the dead. At the same time Sebald seeks to portray the living victims who wrestle with memories in which contradictory feelings of forgiveness and resentment are played out. I will show that although Sebald’s narrator—who has much in common with the biographical author—can speak only in the name of repentance he seeks to learn the language of forgiveness and resentment from his protagonists—both the dead and the surviving victims of the Holocaust. This search for traces of memory, comprehensible emotions, articulable language, and sovereignty without power leads Sebald to probe images and specters, mystery and folklore, religion and history. Sebald must construct more riddles before he can offer his readers a “‘final’ … thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched” (Sebald 1996, 231), a narrative that protects the purity of forgiveness, resentment, and thinking, and renders them synonymous with one another.6 While there are certainly differences between these terms, the value of pure forgiveness and resentment lies precisely in the urge toward critical thinking, listening, dialoguing, and instituting personal and historical representations of the truth of the catastrophe, rather than evading these processes through accelerated judicial and political decisions. In its dismissal of the relation of forgiveness to the politics of reconciliation, resentment bears a striking resemblance to divine forgiveness, and more specifically, “the divine manifestation of sovereign power … dissolves law for the sake of life itself” (Friedlander 2012, 132). Resentment and pure forgiveness emerge from sovereignty without power and they absolve the perpetrator not of guilt but of law. Pure forgiveness and resentment are interested in life itself and, in this instance, in a commitment that German people undertake to acknowledge the past through an acceptance of their negative possessions.7 For Hannah Arendt and Jacque Derrida forgiveness arrives like a revolution and radically alters the known, automatic course of events (Arendt 1958, 237). As Derrida explains, the law can be changed only when it is faced with the “‘hyperbolic’ ethical vision of forgiveness” (Derrida 2001, 51). This revolution doesn’t have to happen in words—gestures can also usher in revolutionary ideas and a revolutionary behavior toward the Other: the Other can be the Jew, Christ, or the victim who suffers for the sake of a greater good. Arendt finds revolutionary examples of the good as Otherness in the gestures of Dostoyevsky’s Christ8 and in those gestures that belong to Melville’s Billy Budd (Arendt 1965, 86). According to Derrida, “A finalized forgiveness is not forgiveness; it is only a political strategy or a psycho-therapeutic economy” (Derrida 2001, 50). Walter Benjamin precedes Derrida in the way he connects forgiveness to postponement. According to Benjamin, forgiveness receives its meaning from its opposite, which is retribution. The final act of retribution arrives at the Last Judgement, which is endlessly postponed. Thus, writes Benjamin, “this

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significance is revealed not in the world of law, where retribution rules, but only in the moral universe, where forgiveness comes out to meet it. In order to struggle against retribution, forgiveness finds its powerful ally in time” (Benjamin 1996 [1921], 286). W.G. Sebald’s “Max Ferber” shows that forgiveness and repentance are beyond morality in interpersonal exchanges and that rather than bringing closure they open up a new space for thinking and feeling. How does the story portray forgiveness and salvage pure forgiveness from being abused by the practical politics of reconciliation? How does the story, at the same time, allow resentment to surface? Sebald brings into existence the open space of thinking and nonetheless encourages German culture to accept the Holocaust as its negative possession in relation to which Germany has to feel remorse without closure and enable changes in the country’s legal and political language of institutions. In “Max Ferber,” Sebald is repentant but he behaves as if asking for forgiveness might be wrong because it involves a pragmatic request. Therefore the narrator’s remorse which becomes clear as he reflects on the past transpires in the form of free indirect discourse between Sebald and his narrator: “As I now thought back, it seemed unforgivable that I should have omitted, or failed, in those Manchester times, to ask Ferber the questions he must surely have expected from me” (Sebald 1996, 178) [“Unverzeihbar erschien es mir nun im Nachdenken, daß ich es damals in Manchester entweder verabsäumt oder nicht fertiggebracht hatte, Ferber jene Fragen zu stellen, die er erwartet haben mußte von mir” (Sebald 2013, 262)]. These questions concern Ferber’s life experience as a German Jew who fled from Germany as a child and grew up in England as an orphan. The narrator is remorseful because he is German. Ruth Kluger reminds us that the German who has a stake in his nation’s past must “take the good with the bad and own up to the crimes that were committed by your parents and grandparents” (Kluger 2002, 311). How does Sebald repent? Ferber haunts Sebald for many years. More important, Ferber’s lost German ancestors haunt Sebald and like the victim of a shipwreck the more the narrator seeks to recover the dead and salvage their remains, the more powerless he becomes. Parallel narratives that disclose a quest for life tell of the powerlessness of the repentant Sebald and the forgiving victim Ferber. Sebald populates his story with the ghosts of deceased Jews who are “legendary” (Sebald 1996, 157) because only their names are known. On his canvases, Ferber, who has become an established British painter and engraver, depicts the missing bodies of that extinct German-Jewish world: The following morning, the moment the model had sat down and he [Ferber] had taken a look at him or her, he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction. The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. (Sebald 1996, 162)

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Ferber’s art consists in applying paint to the canvas, and then scratching the paint off the canvas. His artistic work depicts loss in the form of an absence of color and of image. The images that he erases are portraits. Ferber begins to resemble the narrator (and the author) because both employ absence or negation in their artistic representations. Sebald follows in the footsteps of Ferber when he establishes and populates a world of art, fiction, and ideas with ghostly presences. Yet who initiates the pursuit of ghosts? Is it Sebald who follows in the footsteps of Ferber or is it Ferber who accepts the law of the narrative that Sebald dictates when he creates a protagonist who can only be known through his lost memories of a lost family and an obsolete culture? Sebald writes hundreds of pages in order to give an account of Ferber’s life but falls short because, “By far the greatest part [of the writing] had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions” (Sebald 1996, 230). Sebald initially meets Ferber in 1966 but their decisive meeting occurs over twenty years later in 1989. Ferber’s story is prophetic in relation to Sebald’s narrative only because the objective paintings that Ferber constructs affect Sebald as a subject. They open in him “a sort of gaol or oubliette” (Sebald 1996, 178). The narrator’s unconscious is influenced by the paintings and the older character Sebald responds in the way of desire directed at these people’s diaries and old family pictures. Sebald’s “Max Ferber” is decorated with numerous black-and-white images which are supposed to make the places and the people look real but instead make the world to which the people belonged seem less real than ghostly.9 Derrida (and numerous other speakers) argue that the language of forgiveness is fundamentally the domain of the dead because only the dead can legitimately forgive; Orpheus is a literary trope, not just a mythological character, who represents an inevitable connection between poetics and the memory of the dead. Sebald, too, creates the poetics of remorse and seeks for forgiveness when he establishes the memory of the dead. The dead are debtors at the same time that they are a source of inspiration, and they are the ones who compel the survivors to continue living even despite their weakness. Derrida is reaching beyond philosophy when he states, “pure and unconditional forgiveness, in order to have its own meaning, must have no ‘meaning,’ no finality, even no intelligibility. It is a madness of the impossible” (Derrida 2001, 44/45). Thomas Brudholm offered a sustained reflection on the value of Améry’s resentment (Brudholm 2008). Thomas Brudholm and Valéry Rosoux quote Derrida in order to conclude from this passage that pure forgiveness is impossible (Brudholm and Rosoux 2009, 49), but they do not address the question of how pure philosophy, pure thinking, and pure resentment remain possible.10 I suggest that Sebald’s turning to the dead in a gesture of forgiveness, remembering, and creativity stems from powerlessness or extreme fatigue for the sake of life itself. The gesture is enmeshed with the ghosts of those who died in the Holocaust and with the mythological ghosts that guide and guard art and mythology, particularly Orpheus whose poetry arrives as a gift and a trace of his attachment to Eurydice and by extension to Hades.

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Sebald reads the diaries of Luisa Lanzberg, Ferber’s mother, diaries that Ferber kept for many years but read only twice in his life, which is where he comes across the concept of forgiveness and of the sacrificial victim: Autumn arrives, and the autumn holidays are approaching. First comes Rosh Hashanah, bringing in the New Year … A week and a half later is Yom Kippur. Father, in his death robes, moves about the house like a ghost. A mood of rue and penitence prevails. None of us will eat until the stars rise. Then we wish each other ein gutes Anbeißen. And four days later it is already the Feast of Tabernacles … On the two main and four half feast days we shall take our meals in the sukkah. (Sebald 1996, 201) This description is written in the present tense, as if to suggest that Jewish life and practice continues to flourish in Steinach. The passage incorporates proper Hebrew names of the holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, again as if to suggest that these holidays are mainstays of local life—as they are in cities with large Jewish populations such as New York. One wonders, can it be that there was a time when Jewish culture and identity were so much part and parcel of German life? It is hard to imagine that a German author feels that it is natural to casually represent German Jews as natives who before the catastrophe wished each other bon appétit in German just before they broke the fast with a meal. Whether or not this was the case, what’s important is that this suggestion implies the narrator’s (and, thus, by extension, Sebald’s) repentance, for having allowed a whole world to collapse and disappear. At the time of Sebald’s writing German Jewry had been largely lost to oblivion and the vast majority of Germans had, and continue to have, no Jewish friends. In a particularly moving passage in the diaries Luisa says: We [the school-children] also have a guessing game. For instance, we have to guess the three things that give and take in infinite plenty. Of course no one knows the answer, which Herr Beim then tells us in tones of great significance: the earth, the sea, and the Reich. Perhaps the best thing about that day is that, before we go home, we are allowed to jump over the Hanukkah candles, which have been fixed to the threshold with drops of wax. (Sebald 1996, 204) So seamlessly the bounty of the Reich and the light of the Hanukkah candles are joined in these memoirs, written from 1939 through 1941. Pure, mad forgiveness inheres in these lines because in 1941 Luisa Lanzberg lovingly refers to the Reich of her childhood memories despite the fact that the Reich has changed and that by then the Reich automatically refers to the Third Reich. In a sovereign gesture but without power, Luisa refers to the Jewish Day of Atonement and asks for forgiveness, according to the Jewish tradition, at the

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same time that she forgives her persecutors for the sake of life itself so that she may bequeath to her son, Max, good childhood memories which he will read in England as a free man. Thus Sebald stages a funeral for the ghosts of the Jews that keep coming up from the depths of German history.11 Sebald visits Steinach, near Bad Kissingen, where he contemplates the graves in the Jewish cemetery. This gives him an opportunity to recite the legendary names of all these absent Jews: but the names I could still read – Hamburger, Kissinger, Werthaimer, Friedländer, Arnsberg, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthhold, Seeligmann, Frank, Hertz, Goldstaub, Baumblatt and Blumenthal – made me think that perhaps there was nothing that the Germans begrudged the Jews so much as their beautiful names, so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language. (Sebald 1996, 224) The sounds of the Jewish names echo meaningfully. Sebald resents the erasure of these names from German history, an erasure that emerges from envy, another name that signifies the hatred of the face of the Other, the neighbor, the Jew whose proper name has strong ties to the German language thereby rendering her/him equally German. Mourning recalls the vacillation of consciousness between unconditional repentance and forgiveness in this story but Sebald practices resentment, too, when he salvages these names from being lost in oblivion. In “Max Ferber,” Sebald releases into the world the dreams and the works of art and literature that the dead left behind. Every such dream, engraving, philosophical reflection, or short story is thus transformed into a ghost in its own right. These works make the presence of the dead more intensely felt in the world of the living. Sebald’s referring to deceased authors, philosophers, painters, and legendary subjects like the wandering Jew creates a constellation of references to Jews in literary modernism, Jews at work, and particularly Jews from Drohobycz. The signifiers in this constellation slide and form a system of substitutions so potent that Sebald is drawn into this world of Jewish work and creativity until he blends with the one artist whose work significantly saturates this story. That artist is Bruno Schulz, an author and an engraver of Jewish life in Drohobycz. Schulz’s short fiction and correspondences are as central to modernism as those of Kafka, another lover of ghosts.12 Schulz comes up in Ferber’s dream about a painting gallery in Queen Victoria’s Crystal Palace: Somewhat to the side, a stranger was sitting on the ottoman. In his lap he was holding a model of the temple of Solomon, made of pinewood, papier-mâché and gold paint. Frohmann,13 from Drohobycz, he said, bowing slightly, going on to explain that it had taken him seven years to build the temple, from the biblical description, and that he was now

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traveling from ghetto to ghetto exhibiting the model. Just look said Frohmann: you can see every crenellation on the towers, every curtain, every threshold, every sacred vessel. And I, said Ferber, bent down over the diminutive temple and realized, for the first time in my life, what a true work of art looks like.14 (Sebald 1996, 176) Frohmann from Drohobycz is an allusion to the protagonist in Joseph Roth’s reportage “Solomon’s Temple in Berlin.”15 Roth joins King Solomon together with Herr L. Schwarzbach from Drohobycz who is also known as Herr Frohmann or as Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew. In Roth’s report the miniature temple is part of an allegory about contemporary Jews in Berlin, yet Schwarzbach commemorates the destruction of the temple via creating a miniature replica of this temple. “L. Schwarzbach … has given nine years of his life to building the temple of a deceased king, without even the prospect of an architectural diploma at the end of it” (Roth 2003, 42). This wandering Jew is related to piety and happiness and he signifies pure forgiveness and repentance because he rebuilds that which is destroyed and his own labor comes to the world as a gift, the gift of commemorating a people for the sake of life itself. The act of commemoration and of forgiveness are mad because they do not belong to either an economy or a therapeutic ecology. The world that Schwarzbach and Frohmann belong to is neither interested in purity nor in forgiveness, in it “the people are godless and republican … [they] chew over the day’s news and the exchange rates” (Roth 2003, 43–44). These Jews are assimilated, and they delude themselves, “what an untenable idea antiSemitism is” (Roth 2003, 41). In Sebald’s story the same wandering Jew commemorates the destruction of European Jewry when he is “traveling from ghetto to ghetto exhibiting the model” (Sebald 1996, 176). This is a good metaphor of the value of pure forgiveness that never reaches closure yet allows us to imagine the existence of a world which is not subject to reward, guilt, and vengeance. Building the replica of the Temple is an act of forgiving a history of destruction and loss for the sake of restoring life to everything.16 Yet it is hard to speak about Drohobycz without calling forth the ghost of Bruno Schulz. The study of forgiveness and repentance in the aftermath of the Shoah is directly related to this now Ukrainian city. Schulz was born in Drohobycz and was murdered in the Drohobycz ghetto by the Gestapo officer Karl Günther and Sebald addresses this murder thereby enhancing his repentance when he secretly structures Max Ferber’s vision around the poetics of Schulz. The allusion to the wandering Jew signals to the reader to think of Schulz’s modernism while reading Sebald. Ferber’s dream more specifically addresses Schulz’s writings:17 In “Cinnamon Shops,” the narrator goes to the theater with his parents. When they are seated in the hall facing the magical backdrop the father realizes that he left his wallet at home. The young man is asked to run and fetch it before the beginning of the play. The youth takes a shortcut and, because the beautiful night activates his imagination, he loses

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his way. The streets that open up in front of his eyes are “reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make believe streets” (Schulz 1963, 55). These streets are the linings of the real streets on Market Square. The youth calls the shops on these streets “cinnamon shops because of the dark paneling of their walls” (Schulz 1963, 56). Already from the beginning it becomes clear that Sebald borrows from Schulz the dream quality that he transplants in Ferber’s dream, a dream that has Ferber lost in the halls of the Crystal Palace. The room that Ferber wanders into is the lining of other rooms. It is a makebelieve room that can be reached only if one walks through a tromp-l’oeil door. This room is dark although the other rooms are bright. On page 175, Sebald offers a picture of the room that Ferber walks into in his dream and in this picture the walls have dark paneling, like those of the cinnamon shops (Sebald 1996, 175 [see illustration]). The cinnamon shops showcase exotic items from distant countries. Among other things, they have on display “strange and rare books, old folio volumes of astonishing engravings and amazing stories” (Schulz 1963, 56). The same objects are found in the secret room in the Crystal Palace which houses the temple replica. More important, when Ferber enters the room he recognizes it as “my parents’ drawing room” (Sebald 1996, 176). In “Cinnamon Shops” the lost boy reaches the back of his old high-school. He spends a few moments inside the room of Professor Arendt, who had taught him painting and engraving. Professor Arendt brings to mind a specimen of the wandering Jew because he is sequestered in his private world. The room houses plaster-cast heads of Greek and Roman gods, “ashen profiles, and meditations dissolving into nothingness” (Schulz 1963, 58). Ferber paints ashen portraits that are intensely worked over until they are lost in nothingness. The professor is happy, enveloped in smiles, “exuding an aroma of secrecy” (Schulz 1963, 58). Herr Frohmann designates happiness probably because he hovers between the present and the past, when the temple existed, and the teacher’s room, too, exists outside of the dimension of time, “as if making knots in the passage of hours, swallowing somewhere whole empty periods” (Schulz 1963, 58). Schulz continues to wander in the halls of the old school and his descriptions of the rooms are very similar to the description of the painting gallery in the Crystal Palace. Turning the first of these, I found myself in an even wider more sumptuous hall. In one of its walls there was a wide glass arcade leading to the interior of an apartment. I could see long enfilades of rooms, furnished with great magnificence. The eye wandered over silk hangings, gilded mirrors, costly furniture, and crystal chandeliers. (Schulz 1963, 59) In his dream, in the Crystal Palace Ferber, “walked through the endless halls containing 16,000 gold framed works of art” (Sebald 1996, 175–176). On the illustration in the book Sebald includes a crystal chandelier and miniatures inside a glass cabinet (Sebald 1996, [Figure 11.1]).

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Figure 11.1 “[Ferber] passed through a painted tromp-l’oeil door into a gallery …” (Sebald 1996, 176)

Yet the ties between Sebald’s “Max Ferber” and Schulz’s “Cinnamon Shops” become stronger when we study the materials that Herr Frohmann uses to build his diminutive temple. The story names pinewood, papier-mâché and gold color. In Schulz’s story, “Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies or the Second Book of Genesis,” Schulz’s father describes the creature he is interested in creating as a tailor who engages in textile workmanship. Schulz’s father thought that matter is there in order to use for the needs of creation. “There is no dead matter … lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. The range of these forms is infinite and their shades and nuances limitless” (Schulz 1963, 31). Life itself is what Ferber is trying to create when he is “excavating the features of his model” (Sebald 1996, 162). Ferber is seeking to paint what he needs, not the full image but, “facial features and eyes” for these elude him (Sebald 1996, 162). Schulz’s father does not want to create “heroes of romances” (Schulz 1963, 33) but partial creatures whose every gesture is a part of creation. The tailor would like to create dummies with just one hand or one profile, “needed for their role” (Schulz 1963, 33). These creatures can be made by sewing alone. The father names the materials with which he prefers to work. We shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material. “Can you understand,” asked my father, “the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mâché, for oakum and sawdust?” (Schulz 1963, 33) I suggest understanding this list as what turns the everyday life of those mortal Jews into something with metaphysical value. This is the reason that Sebald incorporates listing, and uses the French term “papier-mâché” the same term used by Schulz. Frohmann uses “pinewood” (Sebald 1996, 176) and Schulz’s father recommends “sawdust” (Schulz 1963, 33). Frohmann

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would like to create a third temple that would fit the measurements and needs of its own human creator, the Jew wandering from ghetto to ghetto, and Schulz’s father wants to create a man for the second time, “in the shape and semblance of a tailor’s dummy” (Schulz 1963, 33) that is because the dummy satisfies the needs of a tailor at work. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Schulz’s oeuvre, David Goldfarb argues that Schulz utilizes both the mythological effects of narrative elements and the labyrinth that gives the impression of timelessness to the story. Goldfarb argues that Schulz’s choice of elements possesses mythological force because these elements enhance the presence of the everyday. The fabrics, the dummy, the simple materials used for work serve in the creation of a meaningful world in which every object is part of a mythology of daily creation. The trash belongs in a masterpiece.18 This is how Schulz makes reality mythical. The labyrinth makes more profound the part-objects that the story uses because these part-objects point at the mysterious existence of this community, these Jews, this archetypal father-creator who is metonymical to the wandering Jew. Schulz tells the story of the labyrinth that resides in him and thereby implants the labyrinth in each one of his readers. The more we read the more we become lost in that labyrinth, which is also the labyrinth of modernism in literature that Schulz has in common with Kafka and Nabokov,19 who is one of the ghosts present in Sebald’s “Max Ferber.”20 Sebald expresses remorse over the extinction of the Jewish community and brings forgiveness to the fore when he finds in his poetics the labyrinth that predominantly belongs to Schulzan poetics. From the ruins of the Holocaust Sebald salvages Jewish fragments that might become meaningful if one could turn to them in order to understand the multivalence of the everyday life of these people. He does this by trying to magnify the presence of thoughts, feelings, and dreams that belonged to these victims when they were absorbed in their everyday work. Work has a mythological dimension because it breaks the confines of every orderly description that means to frame it. The fragment, like an unfinished painting, underscores the fact that any attempt at restoration or recuperation is fundamentally limited. The metaphysical quality that pervades Schulz’s storytelling and the feeling that time stands still become principles that Sebald incorporates in his own story of the wandering Jew. Goldfarb argues that Schulz forces the reader to be grounded in displacement. Ferber, the emigrant, signifies displacement although he never leaves Manchester. I suggest that forgiveness becomes the powerless gesture that exists between people even when what is at stake are unforgiveable crimes. A dream, like the one in which Ferber meets the man from Drohobycz, an idea, and an art object clearly exist as part of a dialogue between victim and perpetrator, and the contents of the dialogue cannot be forced by utilitarianism. Schulz pronounces his artistic credo in a violent world that persecutes art and artists and turns them into ghosts. He continues to hope that his art will survive him; he dreams of a world that recognizes the value of dreams:

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Today those remote dreams come back, and not without reason. The possibility suggests itself that no dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in the universe. Embedded in the dream is a hunger for its own reification, a demand that imposes an obligation on reality and that grows imperceptibly into a bona fide claim, an IOU clamoring for payment … He [the artist] heard a summons, an inner voice, like Noah did when he received his orders and instructions. (Schulz 1998, 271) According to this allegory, saving the great dream of art from oblivion is as important as saving living creatures from the flood, which will destroy them. Moreover, the artist, like Noah, is chosen, “He has entered a radiant new holiday regularity … has completed the liberating metamorphosis” (Schulz 1998, 271). Within the realm of ghosts in which reside the wandering Jew, and the dead master Bruno Schulz, only unforgivable crimes can be forgiven. But forgiveness does not advance redemption; it perpetuates the “hunger” of the dream from which art and the other emerge. Jean Améry resorts to daydreaming when in a hallucinated tone he recalls his torturer’s execution: SS-man Wajs from Antwerp, a repeated murderer and an especially adroit torturer, paid with his life. What more can my foul thirst for revenge demand? But if I search my mind properly, it is not a matter of revenge, nor one of atonement. The experience of persecution was, at the very bottom, that of an extreme loneliness. At stake for me is the release from the abandonment that has persisted from that time until today. When SS-man Wajs stood before the firing squad, he experienced the moral truth of his crimes. At that moment, he was with me—and I was no longer alone with the shovel handle. I would like to believe that at the moment of his execution he wanted exactly as much as I to turn back time, to undo what had been done. (Améry 1980 [1966], 70, italics in the original) Resentment, like forgiveness, is sovereign but the roots of these affects are sunk deep in powerlessness. Améry does not seek revenge but demands that a dialogue remain alive in Germany, not that law and diplomacy settle out old debts and put out the burning questions of guilt and repentance, forgiveness and resentment. Part of Améry’s dream is that the perpetrator recognize his absolute guilt in dialogue with the victim, not only at the gallows: The people of whom I am speaking and whom I am addressing here show muted understanding for my retrospective grudge. But I myself do not entirely understand this grudge, not yet; and that is why I would like to become clear about it in this essay. I would be thankful to the reader if

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Idit Alphandary he were willing to follow me, even if in the hour before us he more than once feels the wish to put down the book. (Améry 1980 [1966] 63)

“Max Ferber” imposes on the readers an unfinished narrative about the destruction of European Jewry in order to echo desires of different kinds. Through his writing, Sebald brings to the fore dreams of resentment and of forgiveness, dreams that belong to the moral universe and that obliterate the law for the sake of a living dialogue. In resentment and in forgiveness the victims seek to be released from abandonment for the sake of life itself.

Notes 1 Other scholars contend that forgiveness is a prosocial propensity (McCullough 2001). Or that it is mistakenly understood as a speech-act (Govier 2002). Govier, like Kristeva insists that forgiveness is not a speech act because it takes time for the wounds to heal and forgiveness occurs within the bounds of a continuous dialogue with the guilty party. 2 Arendt refers to radical evil rather than to crimes against humanity and Jankélévitch speaks of imprescriptible crimes according to the statute of limitations. 3 In her study of Derrida’s On Forgiveness, Kim Worthington suggests that pure forgiveness is what makes the politics of reconciliation moral (Worthington 2011). 4 In his book Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze clearly explains that the master engages in ressentiment because past memories fuel the subject with energy needed to act in relation to the present and the future. (Deleuze 2006, 112–114). 5 Studies of testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa make it clear that witnesses who do not want to forgive the perpetrators appeal to their right to resentment. The same reaction is found in testimonies from the gacaca court in Rwanda. Brudholm and Rosoux examine the works of Esther Mujawayo, a survivor of genocide in Rwanda who analyzes resentment (see Brudholm and Rosoux 2009, 41–48). 6 Georgio Agamben insists that forgiveness and resentment are relevant to each other because resentment makes historically contingent the crime that forgiveness forgives. Agamben states that resentment prevents us from forgetting the unforgettable crimes that institutions want us to forget (see Agamben 2005, 39, 138, 142). Magdalena Zolkos proposes that after resentment is consumed the victim can fathom forgiveness (see Zolkos 2007). 7 Avishai Margalit argues that divine forgiveness blots out the guilt while human forgiveness only lightly covers over the guilt so that traces of guilt remain etched in human memory (see Margalit 2002). 8 Master and Margarita is a contemporary example of the sovereignty without power of forgiveness that Christ extends in gestures (see Bulgakov 1995 [1967], 193–194, Kindle edition). 9 The final picture at the end of the story is particularly haunting because Sebald documents the material history of this picture’s discovery in Vienna, in a pawned piece of luggage. This is the image of three women working in the Litzmannstadt ghetto in Lodz which in the 1940s is known as “Polski Manchester” (Sebald 1996, 235–236). Genewein is the German photographer who took snapshots of industry and commerce in the ghetto. But Sebald does not include these visual records of persecution and the persecuted in the story. Instead, he describes a picture in words. The reader cannot see the picture in which women workers look directly

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11

12

13

14

15 16

17

18

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into the eyes of the viewer. Carol Jacobs finds another one of Genewein’s pictures in a museum and reproduces it. See Jacobs (2004, 223). It is important to recall that continental philosophy and psychoanalysis greatly trust le regard de l’outre tomb when the look from beyond the grave is related to literature (Blanchot 1955, 226), to mystery and irresponsibility (Lévinas 1983, 55–64), to melancholia (Freud 1957 [1917], 266), to eagerness and extreme horror (Bataille 1988, 71), and to film and the time-image that can change the future through an impossible glimpse of the remembered past (Deleuze 1989, 116–125). In the 1960s, the historical moment into which discussions of forgiveness and resentment erupt, Gershom Scholem writes that a dialogue never existed between Jews and Germans, “a creative answer to the Jews: that is to say one that would have addressed them with regard to what they had to give as Jews, and not what they had to give up as Jews” (Scholem 1976 [1962], 63). Scholem dismisses the value of both forgiveness and resentment and only trusts in reasonable good will. “Bridges are needed to pass over abysses; they are constructed; they are the product of conscious thinking and willing. Moral bridges, I repeat, are the product of goodwill. If they are to endure, they must be firmly anchored in both sides” (Scholem 1976 [1966], 91). Scholem contends that the influence that Kafka had in Germany, as with that of other prominent Jewish intellectuals, aroused resistance right from the beginning. “That the Germans did in fact need the Jews in their spiritual world is now, when they are no longer present, noticed by many, and there is mourning over the loss” (Scholem 1976 [1962], 86). But for Scholem now it is too late to desire that things had been different. Germans did not stand up for Kafka, Simmel, Freud, or Walter Benjamin when it was necessary. “The present belated concern with these great figures does nothing to change this fact” (Scholem 1976 [1966], 87). The German Frohmann relates happiness and divine grace to wandering and I suggest that it is not incidental that the name of the character Frohmann, the wandering Jew, lends a moral tint to happiness as if these two traits must appear together in the ethical world where forgiveness arrives like a revolution for the sake of life itself. Giorgio Agamben would call this an outlook on life from a “Messianic vocation” or a “Messianic modality” (see Agamben 2005, 23/39). The most fitting description of this dream and the desire it arouses appear in Freud’s famous footnote number 2, “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a naval, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown” (see Freud1995 [1900], 135). I thank Carol Jacobs for drawing my attention to this text (see Roth 2003). In The Rings of Saturn Sebald describes one more builder of the replica of the temple called Thomas Abrams, a farmer and a Methodist lay preacher “who for so many years immersed himself deeper and deeper into a fantasy world and spent his time in an unheated barn fiddling about with such an apparently never ending, meaningless and pointless project” (Sebald 1995, 244). Yet Lord Rothchild comes to visit Abrams and growing numbers of visitors also come to see the temple which gives the impression “of being true to life” (Sebald 1995, 245). Sebald mentions Frohmann from Drohobycz as a builder of the replica of the temple but according to Jewish lore the third temple will be built only when the Messiah arrives. Schulz’s most valuable manuscript, which is lost in the Shoah, is called The Messiah. George Gasyna speaks directly of trash, tandeta, as the material of the imagination and mythopoesis. Yet Gasyna views trash as political resistance, too, specifically in view of the looming threats of totalitarianism and he relates trash to provincial creation of new archetypes that challenges the literary institutions of the metropolitan socalled modern cultural centers. The use of trash in aesthetic production and political dissent brings the labyrinth to the fore as a structure of “pure suggestibility” (see

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Gasyna 2015, 765–768). Gasyna mentions the streets and family apartment as effects of tromp-l’oeil and mentions that the stories use a “papier-mâché” modernity (see Gasyna 2015, 775). 19 It takes Ferber a year to paint Nabokov, “the faceless ‘Man with a Butterfly Net’” (Sebald 1996, 174), but Ferber is unhappy with the complete work because it conveys “not even the remotest impression of the strangeness of the apparition it referred to” (Sebald 1996, 174). 20 Denis Hollier associates the labyrinth with Georges Bataille and with postmodernism although Bataille begins to write in the 1930s. Unlike Daedalus who creates the labyrinth from the outside Bataille is pervaded by the labyrinth (see Hollier 1992).

References Agamben, Gorgio, The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Améry, Jean, “Resentments,” in At the Mind’s Limits Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980 [1966]), 62–81. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (New York: Schocken Books, 1958). Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965). Bataille, Georges, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). Benjamin, Walter. “The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe” [1921], trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 286–287. Blanchot, Maurice, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). Brudholm, Thomas, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). Brudholm, Thomas and Valérie Rosoux, “The Unforgiving: Reflections the Restance to Forgiveness After Atrocity,” Law and Contemporary Problems, 72:33 (2009). Bulgakov, Mikhail, Master and Margarita, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Grove Press, 1995 [1967]). Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Michael Hardt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Derrida, Jacques, “On Forgiveness,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001). Derrida, Jacques in conversation with Michel Wieviorka, “Verzeihen ohne Macht: unbedingt und jenseits der Souveränität, Jahrhundert der Vergebung,” Lettere Internationale, 48 (2000): 10–18. Felstiner, John, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Freud, Sigmund, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1957 [1917]). Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1995 [1900]).

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Friedlander, Eli, Walter Benjamin A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Gasyna, George, “Tandeta (Trash): Bruno Schulz and the Micropolitics of Everyday Life,” Slavic Review, 74:4 (2015): 760–784. Govier, Trudy, Forgiveness and Revenge (London: Routledge, 2002). Griswold, L. Charles, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Grunebaum, Heidi, “Talking to Ourselves ‘Among the Innocent Dead’: On Reconciliation, Forgiveness, and Mourning,” PMLA, 17:2 (2002): 306–310. Hollier, Denis, Against Architecture, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Jacobs, Carol, “What Does It Mean to Count? W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants,” MLN, 119:5 (2004): 905–929. Jankélévitch, Vladimir, Pardonner? (Paris: Le Pavillon Reger Maria Éditeur, 1971). Jankélévitch, Vladimir, “Should We Pardon Them?” Critical Inquiry, 22:3 (Spring1996): 552–557. Kluger, Ruth, “Forgiving and Remembering,” PMLA, 17:2 (2002): 311–313. Kristeva, Julia and Alison Rice, “Forgiveness: An Interview,” PMLA, 17:2 (2002): 278–295. Lévinas, Emmanuel, Le temps et l’autre (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1983). Margalit, Avishai, “Forgiving and Forgetting,” in The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 183–209. McCullough, E. Michael, “Forgiveness: Who Does It and How Do They Do It?” Current Directions in Sociological Science, 10:6 (2001): 194–197. Roth, Joseph, “Solomon’s Temple in Berlin,” in What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 41–44. Scholem, Gershom, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976 [1962]), 61–64. Scholem, Gershom, “Jews and Germans,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976 [1966]), 71–92. Schulz, Bruno, The Streets of Crocodiles and Other Stories, trans. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Penguin, 1963). Schulz, Bruno, The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz, ed. Jerzy Ficowski (London: Picador, 1998). Sebald, G.W., The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions Books, 1995). Sebald, G.W., “Max Ferber,” in The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996), 149–237. Sebald, G.W., Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2013). Worthington, Kim, “Suturing the Wound: Derrida’s ‘On Frgivness’ and Schlink’s The Reader,” Comparative Literature, 63:2 (2011): 203–224. Zolkos, Magdalena, “Jean Améry’s Concept of Resentment at the Crossroads of Ethics and Politics,” The European Legacy, Toward New Paradigms, 12:1 (2007): 23–38.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. 2046 (dir. Wong) 118–119, 121, 122 Abramovic´, Marina see Communist Body/ Fascist Body (Abramovic´ and Ulay) Adorno, Theodor 55, 56 African Americans 2–3, 8 Agamben, Giorgio 54, 56–57, 63, 137n3, 180n6, 181n13 Albarracin, Pilar see She-wolf (Albarracin) alienation, political 4, 26, 29, 30, 34, 53 Alphandary, Idit: biographical highlights viii; chapters by 1–21, 19, 168–182 America: African Americans 2–3, 8; constitution 72; Kafka criticism 154, 155, 159–160, 164, 165; nationalism 53; Pragmatism 3, 29, 103; see also Dewey, John; solitary eating 99 Améry, Jean 19, 20, 169, 172, 179–180 Arendt, Hannah 5; biopolitics 55, 59, 63, 71; on forgiveness 168, 170; incarceration 11; political action, theory of 10, 53–54, 56, 57, 59–65, 66; on primacy of life 78; radical evil 19, 180n2; separation of politics from everyday life 29; on totalitarianism 27 Aristotle 58, 61, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78 art: Communist Body/Fascist Body (Abramovic´ and Ulay) 101; cultural origin of 103; democratic role 8, 13; and dialogue 5, 12, 13, 14, 16–17; ethical pluralism 16–17; Ferber’s painting 171–172; legitimation of individual expression 16; and leisure 127; as political 13–14; role in deterritorialization of language 5, 7–8; She-wolf (Albarracin) 108–109n5; The

Table (Królikiewicz) 104–105, 106, 107–108; Tiravanija, Rirkrit 17, 101–104, 107–108; see also cinema; literature authority principle 86–87 Bakhtin, Mikhail 8–9, 29 Barthes, Roland 111, 121, 122 Baudrillard, Jean 99 Bay, Michael: see Island, The (dir. Bay) before the law (Kafka) 126, 129–133, 136 Benjamin, Walter: correspondence with Scholem 132, 156; on forgiveness 168, 170–171; grave of 11; honouring the memory of the nameless 11; incarceration 11; Jewishness 153; on Leskov’s “The Storyteller” 135–136; and the liminoid subject 18, 125, 126, 127, 131–132, 133, 135–136; “profane illumination” 10–12 Bielik-Robson, Agata: biographical highlights viii; chapter by 18, 125–138 biopower/biopolitics 55, 59, 63, 71, 78 Blade Runner (dir. Scott) 117–118, 119, 121 Blanchot, Maurice 130, 131, 135, 136, 181n10 body art 8 Boltanski, Luc 28 Borradori, Giovanna 40, 41, 42, 46, 52 Bourdieu, Pierre 25, 26, 28, 100 Bourriaud, Nicolas 107 bread 100 Breton, André 122 Brexit 2, 53 Brod, Max 157–158, 159, 160, 161, 165

Index Buber, Martin 6–7, 10 Buñuel, Luis: see Exterminating Angel, The (dir. Buñuel) burka ban 1, 47, 48, 49 Byrka, Katarzyna: biographical highlights viii; chapter by 16, 83–93 capitalism 26, 55 Caruth, Cathy 140, 145–146, 151n11 Casanova, Pascale 159 Celan, Paul 169 Charlie Hebdo 1 Christianity 31, 40, 41, 42, 43–44, 45, 54 Cialdini, Robert B. 86–87, 93 cinema: 2046 (dir. Wong) 118–119, 121, 122; belief and faith 111; Blade Runner (dir. Scott) 117–118, 119, 121; cinematic movement 113; Exterminating Angel, The (dir. Buñuel) 17, 114–116, 119, 123; Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Resnais) 144; La Jetée, (dir. Marker) 17, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123; sensory-motor schema 114, 122–123; You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (dir. Resnais) 17, 120–121 “Cinnamon Shops” (Schulz) 175–176, 177 citizen participation 3 Civic Platform (Poland) 33, 35 civil society 3, 5, 16, 83, 84, 85, 93 coffee 109n7 Communist Body/Fascist Body (Abramovic´ and Ulay) 101 community: American Pragmatist view 3; and civil society 83; decency 4; and Heidegger’s ’mortals’ 16, 81n5; minority 4, 8; people’s rights 71; and political alliance 65; and tolerance 41, 46; see also eating, as a social event compulsion repetition: in cinema 17, 113, 114–115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122; Freud 10, 18, 112, 114, 115, 141, 142, 143, 149; love 149–150; Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, The (Duras) 147–148, 149–150; and Ricoeur’s notion of remembering 10; unconscious manifestation 18, 112, 113, 114, 142, 144 Connerton, Paul 105, 106 consensus 1, 9, 12, 16, 38, 49 consistency principle 86 constituting power 55, 56–57, 64 contract theory 55, 64–65 cooking 17, 97–98 culture: everyday dialogue 25, 30, 31, 32, 33; foot-in-mouth technique responses

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88; Holocaust as Germany’s cultural possession 169, 171; inhospitality 6; liminoidality 128–129; Polish neoliberalism 15; refugee crisis response 2; tolerance 41, 47–48, 49, 50, 51, 52; see also art; eating, as a social event; German-Jewish identity curry 17, 101–102 Daoism 74–75 Da-sein 76, 77 death: death penalty 133, 134, 179; dialogue with the dead 18, 112; and forgiveness 170, 172; Freudian death-drive 116; Heidegger’s notion of mortals 16, 70, 76–77; respect for the dead 10 Death Penalty (Derrida) 133, 134–135 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” 72, 73 Deleuze, Gilles 5; on cinema 114, 115–116, 120, 121, 122, 123, 181n10; deterritorialization 18; on Kafka 7–8, 19, 160; on Nietzsche 12, 17, 169 democracy: American pragmatism 29; Aristotle’s polity 71; civil society 83; consensus 1, 9, 12; dialogue for manipulation 86, 93; and equality 15, 41–42, 45, 46, 47–48, 102; and forgiveness 168; hidden society 27; literary narrative as resistance see liminoidality; Poland 31–38; political action, Arendt contra Schmitt 53–67; politics of and dialogue 1, 4–5, 9, 25; right-wing nationalism 53; role of art 8, 13; singularity 18–19; tolerance see tolerance departure, trauma of 145, 146, 151n11 Derrida, Jacques: and cinema 111–112, 113, 114, 116, 121; différance 126, 134, 149; on ethical encounters with the other 7; on forgiveness 168, 170, 172; and the liminoid subject 126, 129, 130, 131, 132–133, 134–135, 136; on memory 10, 20, 112; on philosophical language 60; tolerance 15–16, 40–45, 46, 52 deterritorialization of language 5, 7–8 Dewey, John 3, 29, 38, 103, 105, 107, 108 dialogue: and art 5, 12, 13, 14, 16–17; Buber’s philosophy 6–7; civil society 5, 83, 85; and consensus 9, 12, 16, 38, 39; with the dead 18, 112; eating, as a social activity 17, 98–99, 102, 108;

186

Index

forgiveness 10, 13, 19, 168, 169, 170, 178, 179, 180; German-Jewish 153, 156, 157; hidden society of 27–28, 31–32; introspection 85–86; marginalized group participation 6–9, 12; and memory 5–6, 9–10, 11, 12, 14; and Polish post-communist party politics 15, 29, 32–38; and politics of democracy 1, 4–5, 9, 25; repetition and deferred retroaction 18, 140, 141, 143, 144, 149–150; for social influence (NGO fundraising) 16, 85, 86, 87–93; tolerance 15, 16, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 49 Dieudonné 1 Diner, Dan 158 Doliński, Dariusz: biographical highlights ix; chapter by 16, 83–93 Dorfman, Eran: biographical highlights ix; chapter by 18–19, 140–151 Dowden, Stephen 159–160 dreams 113, 114, 117, 122, 142, 144, 174–175 Duras, Marguerite 18, 140, 143, 144–150 Dybel, Paweł: biographical highlights ix; chapter by 15–16, 40–52 eating, as a social event: conversations about food 17, 99; cooking and origins of culture and civilization 97–98, 100; cultural differentiation 100–101, 105; Królikiewicz’s The Table 104–105, 106, 107–108; others, understanding 17, 101–104, 107; solitary eating 98, 99; taste and dietary decisions 99–100; Tiravanija’s art 17, 101–104, 107–108 Edict of Nantes 41, 43, 44, 45–46, 47 elections 1–2, 26, 33, 34, 35–36, 37, 49, 86 emancipation 8, 15, 30–32 emotional intelligence 14, 16 Engels, Friedrich 26 Enlightenment, the 3, 44, 45, 55 equality: and democracy 15, 41–42, 45, 46, 47–48, 102; emancipatory movements 31; political alliance 64 ethnicity: Arendt’s what/who distinction 62, 63; Jewish literature see Améry, Jean; Kafka, Franz; Schultz, Bruno; Sebald, W.G.; minority art 8; nationalism and racism 53; refugee crisis 2; ’the people’ 71; tolerance 1, 44, 47, 48–49, 50 exception: Arendt’s theory of political action 16, 59–65, 66; Schmitt’s

sovereign decision 16, 53, 54, 55, 56–57, 58, 59, 61, 63 Exterminating Angel, The (dir. Buñuel) 17, 114–116, 119, 123 feminism 31, 64, 108n5 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst 99 Fidesz party (Hungary) 84 film see cinema fire 17 Flynn, Bernard 4 food see eating, as a social event foot-in-the-mouth effect 87–88 forgiveness: Abrahamic roots 19, 54; defined 168; Derrida on 168, 170, 172; dialogue 10, 168, 169, 170, 179; Jewish literature 19–20, 168, 169, 170, 171–180; and Law 13; in the liminoid space 133; politics and purity 168; and resentment 19–20, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 179; Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa 19, 180n5 fort-da 145, 147 Fotiade, Ramona: biographical highlights ix–x; chapter by 17–18, 111–123 Foucault, Michel 17, 25, 26–27, 30 France: concentration camps 11; constitution (“Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”) 72, 73; Edict of Nantes 41, 43, 44, 45–46, 47; Hiroshima mon amour 144; Muslims 1, 8, 47, 49; social differentiation through eating habits 105, 109n7 freedom: Blade Runner 117, 118; Edict of Nantes 41, 43, 44, 45–46, 47; La Jetée 122; modern constitutions 72; political emancipation 8, 15, 30–32; of speech 1; tyranny of the majority 38; within the liminal stage 126, 127 Freud, Sigmund: compulsion repetition 10, 18, 112, 114, 115, 116, 141, 142, 143, 149; deferred (retro)action principle (Nachträglichkeit) 18, 140, 141–143, 144, 148, 149; departure as trauma 145, 146; on dreams 113, 142, 181n14; freedom to “die in its own fashion” 127; on ghosts 113; Jewishness 153, 181n12; seduction theory 140, 141, 142, 144 Gattaca (dir. Niccol) 118 Gdansk 104, 105, 108

Index German-Jewish identity: Cold War Kafka scholarship 153–160, 164–165; contemporary (post-Communist) Kafka criticism 19, 161–164, 165; Sebald’s “Max Ferber” 173–174 Germany: collective guilt 169, 171; Communist Body/Fascist Body 101; Kafka’s reception in 159, 181n12; Kant and democracy 3; Polish minorities 49; Sharia police 48–49; see also German-Jewish identity Gilman, Sander 153–154 Goldfarb, David 178 Goldfarb, Jeffrey 31–32 Gradiva (Jensen) 112, 113 Great Britain and United Kingdom 2, 3, 49, 53 Grzyb, Tomasz: biographical highlights x; chapter by 16, 83–93 Guattari, Felix 5, 7, 8, 17, 18, 19, 160 Habermas, Jürgen 15, 16, 40, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 83 habit 3, 12, 29, 50, 105, 106 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 18, 112, 113 Heidegger, Martin 16, 70, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80–81, 122 Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Resnais) 144 Hiroshima mon amour (Duras) 143, 144–146, 147, 148 historical causality 55, 59, 63, 66 historical trauma 19, 146, 147, 148 Hollander, Dana 6 Holocaust: forgiveness and Jewish literature 19–20, 168, 169, 170, 171–180; Kafka’s anticipation of 157–158 Horkheimer, Max 55 hospitality: Derrida on the ethics of 7; Derrida’s theory of tolerance 16, 42–43, 45; sharing food 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106; treatment of the other 6 Howard, Daniel J. 87–88 Hugo, Victor 133, 135 Huit clos (No Exit, Sartre) 114 humanity: crimes against 19, 168; see also Holocaust; dialogue to confirm being 7; human-mortal distinction 16, 70, 75–81; human plurality, Arendt’s theory of political action 59–63, 64, 65, 66; natural/divine order 72–75; nature of humanity (Blade Runner) 117–118; the people 16, 70, 71, 72, 75 Hungary 2, 84

187

identity: as human 117, 118; singularity and liminoidality 18, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136; see also German-Jewish identity individualism 33, 46, 108 initiation: Kafka’s before the law 126, 129–133, 136; Sheherazade strategy 133–136; Turner’s theory of the liminoid subject 125, 126–129 In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong) 119, 121–122, 123 interdisciplinarity 13 introspection research 85–86 Isenberg, Noah 162 Islam 1, 47, 48–49 Island, The (dir. Bay) 118 Israel: German restitution payments 169; Hilazon Tachit excavations 97; Kafka scholarship 153–158, 159, 160, 161, 165; Middle Eastern conflict 3, 20n5, 20–21n6 Jaeger, Hans 18, 125, 136 Jensen, Wilhelm see Gradiva (Jensen) Jetée, La (dir. Marker) 17, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123 Jewish literature see Améry, Jean; Kafka, Franz; Schultz, Bruno; Sebald, W.G. Judaism: anti-Semitism in contemporary Europe 1, 2, 3; Jewish literature see Améry, Jean; Kafka, Franz; Schultz, Bruno; Sebald, W.G.; Talmud 126, 129, 131–132, 133, 136 justice: citizen participation 3; and hospitality 45; memory 10, 111–112, 113; mercy 134; remembering the dead 10; and tolerance 42, 47; traumatic memories, sharing 5, 13 Kafka, Franz: before the law 126, 129–133, 136; Cold War scholarship 153–160, 164–165; contemporary (post-Communist) criticism 19, 161–164, 165; German reception 181n12; as a minority writer 7–8, 19, 160; universalist interpretation 154, 159, 165 Kant, Immanuel 3, 45, 98, 99, 133, 136 Kar-Wai Wong see 2046 (dir. Wong); In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong) Koczanowicz, Dorota: biographical highlights x; chapter by 17, 97–109 Koczanowicz, Leszek: biographical highlights x; chapters by 1–21, 15, 25–38

188

Index

Królikiewicz, Anna 104–105, 106, 107–108 Kukiz Movement (Poland) 36 Lacan, Jacques 130, 131, 136 language: Arendt contra Schmitt 54, 57–60, 61, 62–63, 64; Bilderschrift 113; German language 153, 169–170, 174; and human agreement 3; Kafka 19, 153, 155, 163; liminoid subject 125, 129, 130–131, 132, 133, 134, 136; and memory 10, 11; metaphor 54, 58–59, 60, 61, 120–121, 122, 132, 165; minor literature 7–8, 19; of photographic memory 122–123; “profane illumination” 11–12; utterances, Bakhtin’s dialectics of 8–9 Law and Justice Party (Poland) 2, 15, 33, 37, 38 Lefebvre, Henri 25–26 Lefort, Claude 4, 29, 32 leisure 127, 128 Levinas, Emmanuel 7, 10, 181n10 Liberalism: contractualism 64, 65; emancipation 30, 31; “precarization” of workforce 33; technocratic efficiency 54, 55, 56; tolerance 4, 40, 50; writers’role 129, 136 liking principle 86 liminality 126, 127, 128 liminoidality 18; defined 125, 126–127; Kafka’s before the law 126, 129–133, 136; Sheherazade strategy 133–136; Turner’s theory of the liminoid subject 125, 126–129 Liska, Vivian 163–164 literature: forgiveness and the Holocaust 19–20, 168, 169, 171–180; Jewish see Améry, Jean; Kafka, Franz; Schultz, Bruno; Sebald, W.G.; liminoidality 125, 126, 127, 128–136; The Magic Mountain (Mann) 100; trauma and repetition in the work of Duras 18, 140, 143, 144–150 Locke, John 3, 44 logos 72, 75, 76 macropolitics 14–15 Magic Mountain, The (Mann) 100 Magid, Shaul 165 Mair, Peter 34–35, 36, 37 Mann, Thomas: see Magic Mountain, The (Mann) Marchart, Oliver 29–30

Margalit, Avishai 3–4 Marker, Chris: see Jetée, La (dir. Marker) Marxism 26, 29, 30, 31, 111–112 Masson, Jeffrey 140 “Max Ferber” (Sebald) 170, 171–177, 178, 180 Mazet-Delpeuch, Danièle 98–99 Mead, Herbert 3, 29 memory: archivization 111, 113, 116, 121; childhood, shared meals 17, 98–99; in films 117, 118, 119, 120, 121; humanness and identity 117, 118; mechanism of exclusion 9; mnemonics of the body 105; not ressentiment (resentment) 12; photographic 111, 122–123; “profane illumination” 10–12; social memory in Poland 15; see also traumatic memory mercy 134, 135 metaphor 54, 58–59, 60, 61, 120–121, 122, 132, 165 micropolitics 14–15 Middle Eastern conflict 3, 20n5, 20–21n6 Modelski, Łukasz 98–99 modernist literature 129, 154, 155, 159, 162, 174, 175, 178 modernity: cinema 122; emancipation 15, 30–32; Enlightenment thought 50; everyday life 25; German-Jewish 153, 154, 159, 161, 162, 164; liminoid subject 18, 125, 126, 127–128, 129, 134, 136; national constitutions 72; Poland 32–38; primacy of life 71, 78; representation of the people 4; secularized theology 54; technical efficiency 54, 55, 56, 71; totalitarianism 27 Montanari, Massimo 100 mortality 16, 70, 75–78, 79, 80, 81 Moyn, Samuel 158–159, 161, 162 multiculturalism 2, 48, 102, 105, 108, 164 Munch, Edward 125 “museum art” 103, 104, 105 Muslims 1, 47, 48–49 Mystic Writing Pad (Wunderblock) 113 Nachträglichkeit (deferred (retro)action) 18, 140, 141–143, 144, 148, 149–150 Nancy, Jean-Luc 8, 17 Nantes, Edict of 41, 43, 44, 45–46, 47 narrative see storytelling nationalism: Aristotle’s Politics 71; and national identity (Poland) 2, 15, 33, 37, 53, 108n2; Polish 2, 15, 33, 37, 53,

Index 108n2; response to the refugee crisis 2; rise of 53 Nazis 55, 56, 145, 155, 158, 169 Negri, Antonio 55, 56, 57, 65 neoliberalism 15, 33, 55, 108 Netanyahu, Benjamin 3 NGOs see non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Niccol, Andrew: see Gattaca (dir. Niccol) Nicolas of Cusa 44 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 17, 60, 65, 134, 169 No Exit (Sartre) 114 non-governmental organizations (NGOs): anti-NGO policies 84–85; and civil society 16, 83, 84, 85, 93; fundraising 84, 85–93 nothingness (and being) 76, 77, 79 oppression 27, 28, 31 Orpheus myth 120, 121, 172 party politics 34–36, 37 Penal Colony (Kafka) 130 persuasion, techniques of 16, 85–93 philosophy 6, 13; civil society 3, 93; communal eating 98; democracy, political action, Arendt contra Schmitt 15, 16, 53–67; emancipation 30; Heidegger, Martin 16, 70, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80–81, 122; hospitality 6, 7, 42–43, 45, 100; Kant 3, 45, 98, 99, 133, 136; micro-macro politics dialogue 14–15; models of initiation see initiation; Nietzsche’s ressentiment 12, 169; temporality, film criticism 17–18, 112, 113, 114, 115–116, 118, 119, 120–121, 123; tolerance see tolerance; see also Benjamin, Walter; Derrida, Jacques; radical politics photographs 111, 113, 116, 117, 118, 122–123, 180n9 PiS see Law and Justice Party (Poland) Poland: Christmas eve traditions 100–101, 108n2; constitution 72; everyday dialogue 15, 31–38, 88; Królikiewicz’s The Table 104–105, 106, 107–108; Law and Justice Party 2, 15, 33, 37, 38; NGOs 83, 84; response to the refugee crisis 2 police order 13–14 political action: Arendt’s theory of 10, 53–54, 56, 57, 59–65, 66; sovereign

189

decision 53, 54, 55, 56–58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66 political alienation 4, 26, 29, 30, 34, 53 Politzer, Heinz 154, 160 postmodernism 17, 99, 119, 145, 149, 166n4 power: Daoism 74, 75; disempowered groups 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 13; electronic media 31; everyday relations 25, 26–27, 29, 30, 32; forgiveness 168, 170, 171, 173–174, 179; natural order 73, 75; the people 4, 72; political action as a new beginning 57, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66; Schmitt’s theory of exception and sovereign decision 53, 54–55, 56–57, 57, 58, 59, 60–61, 63, 64, 65, 66; tolerance 41–42, 46, 47, 52; totalitarianism 27, 55, 59, 168 Pragmatism 3, 29, 103 Presner, Todd 162, 164 “profane illumination” 10–12 psychoanalysis: literature, approach to 130, 150, 160; see also Freud, Sigmund psychology of social influence 16, 85–93 radical politics 73–74, 79–80; human being 72–75, 76, 78–79, 80; mortals and mortality 16, 70, 75–78, 79, 80, 81; the people 70–72, 75, 78, 80 Rancière, Jacques 13–14 Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, The (Duras) 143, 146–149, 150 Rechtsstaat 3 reciprocity principles 86 refugee crisis 2, 3, 10, 20–21n6 religion: forgiveness, Abrahamic roots 19, 54; human beings, in the natural order 73, 74–75; initiation 130, 134; Muslims 1, 47, 48–49; notions of emancipation 30; role in dialogue and democracy 13; theological logic in Arendt contra Schmitt 53, 54, 57–58, 59, 60; see also Christianity; Judaism repetition 11, 12; see also compulsion repetition; habit “Report to an Academy” (Kafka) 163 resentment 19–20, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 179 Resnais, Alain see Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Resnais); You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (dir. Resnais) ressentiment (resentment) 12, 169 retribution 170–171 revenge 168, 179

190

Index

Ricoeur, Paul 10, 18, 29 rite de passage, deferment of: see liminoidality Rosenzweig, Franz 6 Roth, Joseph 175 Rubin, Abraham: biographical highlights xi; chapter by 19, 153–166 Russian NGOs 83–84 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 114 scarcity principle 86, 87 Schmitt, Carl 15, 16, 29, 53–54, 55, 56–58, 59, 60, 61, 66 Scholem, Gershom 132, 156–157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 181n11, 181n12 Schultz, Bruno 20, 174, 175–179 Scott, Ridley: see Blade Runner (dir. Scott) Sebald, W.G. 20, 169; see also “Max Ferber” (Sebald) separatism 49 Shakespeare, William 18, 112, 113, 134 Sheherazade strategy 133–136 She-wolf (Albarracin) 108–109n5 singularity: Arendt’s theory of action 60, 62–63; liminoidality 18, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136 Sluga, Hans 27 social influence 16, 85–93 social proof principle 86 society: decent 3–4; formation of 97–98 Sokel, Walter 160 solidarity, the ethical ideal of dialogue 9 Solidarity movement (Poland) 32 sovereignty: Arendt’s rejection of 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66; exception and sovereign decision 53, 54, 55, 56–58, 59, 61, 63; forgiveness and resentment 168, 170, 173–174, 179; national 53, 61; paternalistic tolerance 41, 46, 47; theological logic 53, 54, 57–58, 59, 60 Spector, Scott 161–162, 164 spectrality 18, 111–113, 120, 121, 123, 170, 171–172, 174, 178 speech, freedom of 1 storytelling: disclosing traumatic memories 2–3, 5, 10; Królikiewicz’s The Table 105, 108; as a modern piece of resistance see liminoidality; narrative theory 126, 129–136; see also cinema; literature Strindberg, August 125 structural trauma 19, 146, 147, 148 Suchoff, David 159, 160, 161, 163, 164

table manners 105 Table, The (Królikiewicz) 104–105, 106, 107–108 Talmud 126, 129, 131–132, 133, 136 Taussig, Michael 10–12 technocratic efficiency 54, 55, 56, 117 temporality see time terrorism 31 Thai culture 101, 102, 103 time: Arendt’s revolutionary beginning 63; forgiveness 171; Królikiewicz’s narrative in The Table 105, 106, 108; Schulz’s literature 178; science fiction time travel 116, 118, 119, 122; see also memory Tiravanija, Rirkrit 17, 101–104, 107–108 tolerance: conceptual limits 15, 16, 40, 47–50, 51, 52; Derrida’s model of 15–16, 40–45, 46, 52; France’s burka ban 1, 47, 49; Habermas’s consensual dialogue model 15, 16, 40, 45–48, 49, 50, 52; as a Kantian regulative idea 50–51, 52 totalitarianism 27, 31–32, 55, 56, 59, 117, 168 traumatic memory: departure 145–146, 151n11; dialogue and democracy, relationship to 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 13, 14; historical trauma 19, 146, 147, 148; Holocaust survivors 19–20, 168, 169, 170, 171–180; Nachträglichkeit (deferred (retro)action) 18, 140, 141–143, 144, 148, 149–150; nature of love 150; spectrality 18, 111–113, 120, 121, 123, 170, 171–172, 174, 178; structural trauma 19, 146, 147, 148 “Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies or the Second Book of Genesis:” (Schulz) 177 Trial, The (Kafka), before the law 126, 129–133, 136 tribal society 126, 127, 128–129 Trump, Donald 53, 55 Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa 19, 180n5 Turner, Victor 125, 126–129, 133, 136, 137n8 Ulay: see Communist Body/Fascist Body (Abramovic´ and Ulay) uncanny 112, 113, 114, 115, 116 United Kingdom and Great Britain 2, 3, 49, 53 universalism 46 Untitled 1992 (Free) (Tiravanija) 102, 103–104, 108

Index utterances: Bakhtin’s dialectics of 8–9 van Gennep, Arnold 126, 130, 133, 136 wandering Jew (Herr Frohmann) 174–175, 176, 178 Weltsch, Felix 153, 155–156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165 Włodkowicz, Pawel 43–44 women 5; see also burka ban

191

Wong, Kar-Wai: see 2046 (dir. Wong); In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong) Wunderblock (Mystic Writing Pad) 113 You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (dir. Resnais) 17, 120–121 Ziarek, Ewa: biographical highlights x–xi; chapter by 16, 53–67 Ziarek, Krzysztof: biographical highlights xi; chapterby 16, 70–81 Zipes, Jack 153–154