Politics, Economy, and Society: Writings and Lectures, Volume 4 [Volume 4 ed.] 9781509543861, 9781509543878, 1509543864

Table of contents :
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Editor’s Introduction
Note on the French Edition
I Theological-Political Prologue
1 The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians
The Twofold Biblical “Reading” of the State
The Twofold History of Power
Our Twofold Political Task
2 From Marxism to Contemporary Communism
Marxism’s Scope
The Petrification of Marxism
3 Socialism Today
The Economic Level: Planning
The Social and Political Level: Democratic Governance
The Cultural Level: Socialist Humanism
II The Paradoxes of the Political
4 Hegel Today
The Phenomenology of Spirit, or How to Enter into Hegel’s System
Three theses
Three questions
The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences or Fifteen Years Later
Logic
The philosophy of nature
The philosophy of spirit
Questions
Fascinations
Resistances
5 Morality, Ethics, and Politics
[The Capable Human Being]
[From the Capable Subject to the Historical Subject]
[Politics, the Milieu Where the Ethical Aim is Fulfilled]
[The Political Paradox]
[Responsibility and Fragility]
6 Responsibility and Fragility
Rival Cities
Paradoxes of the Political
International Society
7 The Paradoxes of Authority
[Reciprocity and Dissymmetry]
[The Foundation Before the Foundation]
[Authority and Mutual Indebtedness]
8 Happiness, Off Site
Happiness and What is One’s Own
Happiness and Close Relations: Friendship
Happiness and the Distant: Justice
III Politics, Economy, and Societies
9 Is Crisis a Phenomenon Specific to Modernity?
Some “Regional” Concepts of Crisis
Criteria for a “Generalized” Concept of Crisis
Criteria for a “Modern” Concept of Crisis?
10 Money: From One Suspicion to the Next
The Moral Level
The Economic Level
The Political Level
11 The Erosion of Tolerance and the Resistance of the Intolerable
12 The Condition of the Foreigner
Basic Distinction: “Foreigner” versus “Member”
The Foreigner “Chez Nous”
The foreigner as visitor
The foreigner as immigrant
The foreigner as refugee
13 Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity
The Question of Memory
What is the Cause of the Fragility of Identity?
The Other Experienced as a Threat
The Heritage of Founding Violence
IV Europe
14 What New Ethos for Europe?
The Model of Translation
The Model of the Exchange of Memories
The Model of Forgiveness
15 The Dialogue of Cultures, the Confrontation of Heritages
16 The Crisis of Historical Consciousness and Europe
[Exhausting the Project of the Enlightenment?]
[From Dissolution to Reconstruction]
V Epilogue
17 The Struggle for Recognition and the Economy of the Gift
[Recognition]
[The Gift]
Origin of the Texts
Notes
Editor’s Introduction
1. The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians
2. From Marxism to Contemporary Communism
3. Socialism Today
4. Hegel Today
5. Morality, Ethics, and Politics
6. Responsibility and Fragility
8. Happiness, Off Site
9. Is Crisis a Phenomenon Specific to Modernity?
10. Money: From One Suspicion to the Next
12. The Condition of the Foreigner
13. Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity
14. What New Ethos for Europe?
15. The Dialogue of Cultures, the Confrontation of Heritages
16. The Crisis of Historical Consciousness and Europe
17. The Struggle for Recognition and the Economy of the Gift
Index
EULA

Citation preview

Politics, Economy, and Society

Politics, Economy, and Society Writings and Lectures, Volume 4

Paul Ricoeur Edited and with an Introduction by Pierre-Olivier Monteil Translated by Kathleen Blamey

polity

Originally published in French as Politique, économie et société. Écrits et conférences, 4 © Editions du Seuil, 2019 This English translation © Polity Press, 2021 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4386-1 – hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4387-8 – paperback A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.5/12 Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Contents

Editor’s Introduction Note on the French Edition

vii xiii

I  Theological-Political Prologue 1. The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians 2. From Marxism to Contemporary Communism 3. Socialism Today

1 3 13 20

II  The Paradoxes of the Political 4. Hegel Today 5. Morality, Ethics, and Politics 6. Responsibility and Fragility 7. The Paradoxes of Authority 8. Happiness, Off Site

29 31 52 65 80 89

III  Politics, Economy, and Societies 99 9. Is Crisis a Phenomenon Specific to Modernity? 101 10. Money: From One Suspicion to the Next 121 11. The Erosion of Tolerance and the Resistance of the Intolerable 135 12. The Condition of the Foreigner 147 13. Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity 159

vi Contents IV Europe 14. What New Ethos for Europe? 15. The Dialogue of Cultures, the Confrontation of Heritages 16. The Crisis of Historical Consciousness and Europe

169 171 182 188

V Epilogue 197 17. The Struggle for Recognition and the Economy of the Gift 199 Origin of the Texts Notes Index

209 212 219

Editor’s Introduction

Paul Ricoeur’s work is rarely viewed through the lens of political philosophy. And yet the question of power and the desire-to-livetogether in the polis is his constant preoccupation and the substance of numerous writings.1 However, none of these themes are presented as part of an overall system in which they are a part. Lectures 1. Autour du politique is composed of studies coming from a wide range of periods and treating apparently unrelated topics.2 Ideology and Utopia deals with the political from the standpoint of the social imagination, but the anthropological and epistemological reflections on this topic do not extend to the institutional forms of the political.3 This last aspect is indirectly approached in two other collections, notably through a reflection on the law.4 Finally, the most fully developed text on the political as such is to be found in the series of three studies on ethics, morality, and practical wisdom in Oneself as Another.5 Generally speaking, Ricoeur assigned a limited scope to each of his writings; he himself characterizes his thinking as a style that privileges fragmentation. This is singularly the case in political matters, where he seems to have been unconcerned about confining to oblivion so many studies never to be republished. The selection of the texts collected here has been guided by the concern to repair this oversight by restoring Ricoeur’s political project in its coherence and in the diversity of its centers of interest.6 An initial criterion, that of chronology, has prevailed: retrieving the most salient features of the development of his thought over a period of six decades. This

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is complemented by a thematic criterion, which has led to retaining the most significant texts and – a more difficult task – setting aside those deemed circumstantial: those with less apparent philosophical intent, as the content was focused on a question specific to a point in time. The first section brings together texts from the 1950s and 1960s, written in the context of the Christianisme social [Social Christianity] movement during the period, from 1958 to 1970, when Ricoeur was its president. Is there any need to underscore this fact? Since these writings, which contain reflections that remain entirely pertinent today, are related to a political and theological context that is now distant from our own, we have provided in notes, when necessary, some information useful for understanding them. It was indeed within the framework of this Protestant movement that the philosopher first developed his political thought. Far from a Christian apologetic, it was for him a matter of articulating conviction and responsibility, paying particular attention to giving an account of the tradition within which he placed himself, through the mediation of the public debate he solicited. On the basis of this foothold, an evolution ensued, and over its course the philosopher continued, little by little, to strip his formulations of their theological or biblical references, as if increasingly to open them up to discussion in secular terms. In this respect, the text “The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians” constitutes the exception that proves the rule. For this 1958 article is the transposition in theological terms of “The Political Paradox,” the seminal text published the preceding year in the journal Esprit, after the Soviet repression of the Budapest uprising in October 1956.7 In these circumstances, the “Christians’ task” is to demonstrate with respect to the State both responsibility, by actively participating in democratic institutions, and critical vigilance. In the first instance, Ricoeur dismisses, back-to-back, anarchism and the apology of submission. In the second, he rejects both millennialist utopia and sterile criticism. The central point is focused on the double-sided reality which is the State, a protective and pedagogical institution, but at the same time the power that is potentially subjugating through lies and illusions. The parallel with respect to the argument of “The Political Paradox” is clear: the political is the realm of an extreme tension between “rationality” – the explanation it gives of the world – and “irrationality,” which is seen in the use of force, repression, totalitarianism. This internal tension is constitutive of the political, for the claim to provide a total meaning to the world generates violence:



Editor’s Introduction

ix

the more one desires the good, the more one is inclined to impose it. In this way, Ricoeur warns the citizen, the guardian of democracy, against any totalizing system of explaining the world, any dogmatic understanding of history. As a corollary, power should be divided and controlled. Ricoeur declares himself to be in favor of a political liberalism, that is, a State respectful of limits to its domain and confident in the liberty of its citizens. In his effort to grasp the political as such, Ricoeur discerns an evil specific to it, the grandeur of the political ambition and its claims. The result of this is a critique of Marxism, published in 1959 in “From Marxism to Contemporary Communism.” If Marxism succumbed to political evil with Stalinism, this is because it, quite wrongly, made political domination the consequence of another evil: economic exploitation. In this text, Ricoeur presents a diagnosis of “the petrification of Marxism.” The following year, however, in “Socialism Today,” he is no less critical in the face of “the gradual downfall of the great dream of the founders of socialism,” degraded to the welfare state. The heirs of Marx and Proudhon are in serious danger of turning away from the fundamental significance of work in human activity, to the benefit of a simple socialization of abundance and, finally, to the promotion of the “common man” (l’homme quelconque). Beyond the question of Ricoeur’s political allegiances – he, the great reader of Marx, is not himself Marxist, but socialist in his leanings – it is his philosophical approach that is especially to be underscored. The terms, “dream,” “decline,” and “petrification” seem to suggest that political evil is accompanied over time by the ideological rigidness of utopia in the domain of the social imagination. In addition to the preceding two criteria, there is a third, methodological one. It is conveyed in the ample reflection on “Hegel Today,” from 1974, which opens the second section.8 Political evil has its counterpart on the level of thinking, which requires elucidation. What is at issue is the temptation of synthesis, of totalization, the illusion that leads thought astray. Applying this observation to the work of philosophy itself, Ricoeur states his “invincible points of resistance” with respect to Hegelian absolute knowledge. There are intractable aspects of human experience that do not allow themselves to be totalized within a theory. They remind us of the sense of limitation and of the impossibility of attaining a view of the whole. With Kant, we come back to an awareness of the limits of knowledge. From this perspective, the fragmentary style Ricoeur has adopted is highlighted as a philosophical strategy in opposition to the claims of a definitive synthesis. In this sense, there is good

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reason to see in the texts collected in this volume less an ensemble that forms a system, than exercises of systemization in the critique of system-building. The reflection on Hegel nevertheless leads to a proposal. In fact, Ricoeur advances the possibility of a function that would be related more to the imagination than to knowledge, here a utopian function, which would be the site of figures portraying the realization of man, in the forward projection of his freedom – rather than in the mode of totalization. The theme of imagination, clearly present in Ricoeur, thus finds an application in the political field. One has only to consider on this point writings that can be found elsewhere.9 The next three texts date from the 1990s. “Morality, Ethics, and Politics” (1993) provides a summary of Ricoeur’s political thinking as it has progressively unfolded since “The Political Paradox.” It is not without importance that this text was published in Pouvoir, a journal intended for constitutional scholars and political figures, as if to solicit a dialogue with interlocutors who were not necessarily philosophers. The major interest of this article is to have set out a multi-storied architecture, after the model of Oneself as Another, superimposing an anthropology, an ethics, and a politics. The political sphere occupies the top level. Among other developments, two new “paradoxes” are added to the first. This construction no longer concerns the cognitive realm alone, but also includes action, sensibility, and temporality. It requires that the citizen be capable of reconciling opposites, combining belonging and distancing, identity and otherness, conviction and responsibility.10 A democratic ethics comes to light, which strives to make both the institution and protest possible, relying on the lived experience of conflict internalized in individuals.11 In “Responsibility and Fragility” (1992), as well as in “Morality, Ethics, and Politics,” Ricoeur conceives of the political by linking it to the ethical.12 This is the corollary of political liberalism. Indeed, once the State abstains from intervening, not everything is political. There are apolitical, or pre-political, margins where civil society flourishes. However, the freedom of action animating social mores and ethical life produces a certain sense of the desire-to-livetogether, which in a democracy serves to impress its orientation on the political. In return, democracy is entrusted to the protection of the citizenry, auditors of its fragility. This is highlighted in the 1992 article. To do this, Ricoeur identifies the points of fragility belonging, precisely, to the three figures of the “Political Paradox,” providing to citizens the corresponding themes of vigilance and participation.



Editor’s Introduction

xi

Ethics and politics are in a relation of mutual critique. Political institutions are necessary to limit the violence of social mores and actions; but, conversely, they have legitimacy only in the service of democratic ethics. The question of legitimacy, notably, refers back to the question of determining what constitutes authority. In “The Paradoxes of Authority” (1997), an unpublished lecture,13 Ricoeur reflects on the vertical axis of domination. He defines authority as a combination of asymmetry and concealed reciprocity, once authority is viewed to exist only as recognized. In this way, he shows that obedience can be exercised in the name of autonomy – and not against it – if it intervenes in response to a proposal that calls upon one’s autonomy. In this case, domination does not found power, but the other way around. The relation of domination only covers over and occults the roots of a desire-to-live-together, constitutive of the power stemming from acting-in-common (in Hannah Arendt’s sense).14 This brings to light a positive foundation of the social bond, which does not stem from fear. These are the stakes of grandeur: either the citizen obeys power because, in its calling upon him, he grows in stature; or, ceding to the inebriation of grandeur, domination diminishes him, drawing his criticism and his just revolt. The third and fourth sections extend the perspective to themes related to the economy, society, and to Europe. One should speak of society in the plural here to mark the pluralist dimension affecting these reflections on tolerance, the situation of the foreigner, identity, and, of course, the issues at stake in the difficult elaboration of a European ethos. Broadening the horizon in this way is all the more necessary as, up until the 1980s, the political is often envisaged by Ricoeur in its function of mediation between the economic and the cultural, in reference to the Kantian trilogy of the passions of possession, power, and value.15 But this manner of problematizing no longer appears as systematically after this period, as if the neo-liberal turn prevented drawing any clear line between these three spheres, as they were being overtaken by the logic of the market. In this new context, Ricoeur approaches the economic sphere with a series of probes, as it were, in the studies on money and crisis. One can then wonder what remains of the critique addressed in the 1960s to the ambition of a “bourgeois” society centered on well-being alone and of a socialism in danger of becoming the promoter of the common man. More circumspect, the argument does not, however, seem to be absent, even as it adopts new forms. This is the case in “The Struggle for Recognition and the Economy of the Gift,” a lecture given by Ricoeur while he was preparing The Course of Recognition, the last work published during his lifetime.16

xii

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Fearing that an infinite demand for recognition would produce only an insatiable expectation, he introduces a remedy in the struggle for recognition: the gift. This represents the utopian incentive that can keep social exchanges from lapsing into violence. Instead of the unlimited thirst for money, Ricoeur proposes a respite from the race for production and for enrichment. This is doubtless the mark of a continuity – beyond the evolutions of historical context and the shifts in his own thinking17 – a constant preoccupation that runs through his entire meditation on the political: the aspiration for freedom.

Note on the French Edition

The “Writings and Lectures” in this volume were assembled with scrupulous respect for the original texts, after approval by the Ricoeur Foundation. Modifications made to the body of these texts concern punctuation, typographical errors, and the most obvious inaccuracies that may have appeared in previously published versions. However, the text properly speaking has been retained in its entirety, without changes. Latin or foreign language expressions have been systematically placed in italics. Modifications and complements have been added to quotations and to references, when these were imprecise, incomplete, or absent; I did not, however, find it necessary to underscore all of these. Only the most important have been noted. Missing bibliographical references have been added when the work in question gives rise to a discussion and is not merely cited, with no further commentary. Missing words were added, as were section headings intended to facilitate reading when the original text did not include them. All of these are indicated in square brackets. I want to thank Marc Boss, director of the Ricoeur Foundation, Daniel Frey, president of the advisory council, Jean-Louis Schlegel, secretary of the editorial board, and Johan Michel for their valuable assistance at every step of this task. I also thank Olivier Villemot for rendering the texts in digital form. P.-O. M.

I Theological-Political Prologue

1 The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians

The Twofold Biblical “Reading” of the State It is of critical importance for a Christian interpretation of the State that the New Testament writers handed down to us not one but two readings of political reality: one, that of Saint Paul, leads to a difficult justification, the other, that of Saint John, to a tenacious distrust. For one, the State is the figure of the “magistrate,” for the other, it is the figure of the “Beast.” We must begin by allowing these two figures to take shape within us, keeping both of them as possibilities, contemporaneous with one another, in every State we encounter. Saint Paul, addressing Christians in the capital of the Empire – who were little inclined to recognize the authority of a pagan power, foreign to the Good News and, moreover, compromised in the trial that ended in the slow death of the Lord – calls upon his correspondents to obey not out of fear but as a matter of conscience: the State, wielding the sword, which punishes, is “instituted” by God for the “good” of the citizens. And yet this State has a very strange place in the economy of salvation, very strange and very precarious: the apostle has just celebrated the greatness of love – love, which creates reciprocal ties (“Love one another in brotherly love”) – love which forgives and repays good for evil. Now, the magistrate does not do that: the relation between the magistrate and the citizens is not reciprocal. He does not forgive, he repays evil for evil.

4

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His province is not love but justice; the “good” he serves is, therefore, not the “salvation” of humankind, but the maintenance of “institutions.” One could say that through him a violent pedagogy is continued, a coercive education of human beings as members of historical communities, organized and governed by the State. Saint Paul does not say (and perhaps does not know) how this pedagogy, penal in nature, is related to Christ’s charity: he only knows that this instituted order (taxis in Greek) realizes God’s intention concerning human history. And at the same time he attests to the divine meaning of the institution of the State, Saint Paul reserves the possibility of an opposing reading. For, at the same time as this State is an “institution,” it is also “power.” Following the somewhat mythical conceptions of the era, Saint Paul pictures a more or less personalized demon hiding behind each political entity; now, these powers have already been vanquished on the Cross – at the same time as the Law, Sin, Death, and other powers – but are not yet annihilated. This ambiguous status (“already” but “not yet”), on which Oscar Cullmann1 has decisively commented, does much to illuminate the theological significance of the State: intended by God as an institution, half-way between condemnation and destruction as power, altogether out of kilter with the economy of salvation, and in reprieve until the end of the world. It is therefore not surprising that in another historical context, where the evil of persecution overwhelms the good of order and the law, it is the figure of the “Beast” which serves to denote the evil power. Chapter XIII of the Apocalypse depicts, moreover, a Beast, wounded, doubtless mortally, but whose wound is healed for a time; the power of the Beast is not so much the power of irresistible force as of seduction. The Beast produces marvels and demands the adoration of the people; it subjugates through lies and illusions (a description, as we see, close to that of the “tyrant” in Plato, who reigns only thanks to the “sophist,” who first twists language and corrupts belief). This twofold theological grid is full of meaning for us: hereafter we know that it is not possible to situate ourselves in an anarchism motivated by religion, under the pretext that the State does not declare its belief in Jesus Christ, but nor can we take refuge in an apology for the State in the name of “submitting ourselves to the authorities.” The State is this two-sided reality, at once instituted and fallen.



Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians

5

The Twofold History of Power We therefore have to orient ourselves in the political sphere by means of this twofold guidance. The modern State advances both along the line of the “institution” (what Saint Paul terms taxis), and along the line of “power,” seduction, and threat. On the one hand, we can indeed say that there is progress on the part of the State in history; it is even admirable that after so many tears and so much blood, the juridical and cultural accomplishments of humanity have been able to be saved, renewed, and carried further, in short, that humanity continues beyond the fall of empires, as a single being who never ceases to learn and to remember. This perpetuation of humanity, protected by the “institution,” is a kind of verification by history of Saint Paul’s risky affirmation that all authorities are instituted by God. I will offer four signs of this institutional growth of the State in history. 1. The State is a reality that tends to evolve from an autocratic stage to a constitutional stage. All States are born out of the violence of amassers of territory, wagers of war, inveiglers of dowries and inheritances, subjugators of peoples, unjust conquerors. But we see force moving toward form, becoming enduring by becoming legitimate, associating ever more groups and individuals with the exercise of power, promoting discussion, submitting to the control of the subjects. Constitutionality is the juridical expression of the movement by which the will of the State is stabilized in a law that defines power, divides it, and limits it. To be sure, States succumb to violence through war and dictatorship, but the juridical experience is preserved; another State, somewhere else, welcomes it, and continues it. However slow it may be, however halting, the movement of de-Stalinization, the liberalization of Soviet power, will not escape this law’s tendency, in which, for my part, I see a verification of Saint Paul’s wager on the State. 2. A second sign of this institutional growth of the State is the rationalization of the State by means of its administrative body. There is not sufficient reflection on this important fact, which is just as characteristic of the modern State as its legal system. A State worthy of this name is today a power capable of organizing a body of civil servants, who not only carry out its decisions but develop them without having political responsibility for them. The existence of government service as a politically neutral body has radically transformed the nature of the political. In it, a part of the function of

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the magistrate is realized, that is, the part of power without political responsibility. This development of a public administration (on the basis of which we judge in part the capacities of young States that have recently emerged in Asia and in Africa) is based in the prolongation of technical rationality, more precisely, in the industrial organization of labor. In this way, power, which is fundamentally irrational as a demonic force, is rationalized by the legal system expressed in the constitution and by the technical prowess expressed in administration. 3. A third sign of institutional progress lies in the organization of public discussion in modern societies. However perverted and subjugated it may be, public opinion is a new sort of reality, which has developed on the basis of a certain number of “political vocations” studied by Max Weber in the past. Militants, office holders, members of parties and unions, journalists, opinion and human relations experts, publicists, and journal editors are the administrators of a new reality, which is an institution in its own right and the organized form of public discussion. Perhaps we should reserve the word “democracy” to designate the degree of participation by citizens in power by means of organized discussion (rather than calling “democracy” the constitutional stage that follows the autocratic stage). 4. Finally, the appearance of large-scale planning represents the most recent form of the institution of the State. The reduction of chance to the benefit of forecasts and long-term projects presents in the economic and social sectors of the life of the community the same kind of rationality which had long since triumphed in other sectors. When the State assumed the monopoly of vengeance and constituted itself as the sole penal force of the community, it rationalized punishment: a table of penalties henceforth corresponds to a nomenclature of infractions. In the same way, the State has defined in a civil Code the different “roles,” their rights and their duties – the role of father, husband, heir, buyer, contracting party, and so on. This codification has rationalized and, in a sense, already set out the plan of social relations. The grand economic plans of the modern State are in line with this double rationalization of the “criminal” and the “civil” and belong to the same institutional spirit. *** I think we have to state all of this, if we are to give the slightest meaning to what is taking place before our eyes and to avoid an unlimited irrationalism, without bounds and without criteria.



Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians

7

But at the same time we state all this, we have also to say something else, which manifests the endless ambiguity of political reality. All growth in the institution is also a growth in power and in the threat of tyranny. The same phenomena that we have traced under the sign of rationality can also be viewed under the sign of the demonic. Thus, simultaneously in Germany and in Russia, we have seen constitutions serving as alibis for tyranny. The modern tyrant does not abolish the Constitution, but finds in it the apparent forms and sometimes the legal means for his tyranny, playing with the delegation of powers, the plurality of offices, exceptional forms of legislation, and special powers. The central administration, branching into every aspect of the social body, in no way prevents political power from being completely insane at the top, as we saw during the dictatorship of Stalin. Quite the opposite, to the tyrant’s madness it offered the technical means of an organized and long-lasting oppression. Opinion technologies, moreover, deliver the public over to ideologies at once passionate in their themes and rational in their schema­tization; the parties become “machines,” where technological prowess in organization is equaled only by the spirit of abstraction driving their slogans, programs, and propaganda. Finally, the great socialist plans provide the central power with the means of pressuring individuals in a way that no bourgeois State has managed to assemble. The monopoly of ownership of the means of production, the monopoly of employment, the monopoly of provisions, the monopoly of financial resources, and hence of the means of expression, scientific research, culture, art, thought – all these monopolies concentrated in the same hands make the modern State a considerable and formidable power. There is no point in thinking that the government of persons is in the process of being transformed into the administration of things, because all progress in the administration of things (and supposing that planning is a progress) is also progress in the governance of persons. The apportionment of the great financial costs of the Plan (investments and consumption, well-being and culture, etc.) represents a series of global decisions concerning the life of individuals and the meaning of their life: a plan is an ethics in action, and by this means, a manner of governing men and women. All these threats are tendencies, as are the resources of reason, order, and justice that the State develops as the history of power unfolds. What makes the State a great enigma is that both tendencies are contemporaneous and together form the reality of power. The State is, in our midst, the unresolved contradiction of rationality and power.

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Our Twofold Political Task Before drawing some consequences for action on the basis of this double reading of political reality, is there a need to recall two essential rules? First rule: it is not legitimate (nor even possible) to deduce a politics from a theology. For any political commitment is at the point of intersection of a religious or ethical conviction, of information of an essentially profane nature, of a situation that defines a limited number of available possibilities and means, and of a more or less risky option. It is not possible to eliminate from political action the tension arising out of the confrontation of these various factors. In particular, conviction which is not tempered by a reflection on the possible would lead to a demand for the impossible by demanding perfection: for if I am not perfect in everything, I am perfect in nothing. On the other hand, a logic of means, not tempered by a meditation on ends, would easily lead to cynicism. Purism and cynicism are the two extremes between which political action moves, wavering in its calculated culpability back and forth between the morality of all or nothing and the technique of realization. Second rule: political engagement makes no sense for the Church but only for believers. This seems clear in principle, but it is not yet the case in fact: Churches are themselves cultural realities that weigh in the balance of power, and there still remains a more or less unacknowledged, residual, shameful politics of the Church. This is why the secularism of the State has not yet been realized: we are witnessing the death-throes of political and clerical Christianity, and this interminable agony is demoralizing for believers and unbelievers. It is therefore in terms of the political responsibility of the Christian individual that we must now draw the conclusions of the preceding contradictory analysis. If this analysis is correct, we have to say that we must at one and the same time improve the political institution in the sense of greater rationality and exercise vigilance against the abuse of power inherent in State power. *** What sort of institutional improvements are we particularly responsible for today? 1. It seems to me that, first of all, we have to continue constitutional evolution in a reasonable direction, one that takes into account the appearance of new nations in the geographical area controlled



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by the French State. The number one problem of French politics is transforming the centralized State, inherited from the monarchy and from the Jacobin Republic, into a federal State, capable of bringing together on an egalitarian basis the nations that have emerged within its borders; this invention of new structures would genuinely promote rationality, for it would consist in adapting constitutional reality to the historical, cultural, and human reality of the modern world. The alternative will be decisive: either we do this, and new ties will be made with peoples overseas, or else we do not do this, and these peoples will carve out their own destiny apart from us, even against us. 2. Next, we have to reinvigorate the life of political parties. We cannot say that the experience of multiple political parties is doomed, and that this pluralism simply reflects class divisions: we need a political instrument that will allow citizens to enter into discussion in order to shape and to formulate opinion. The existence of several parties would still be essential, even in a classless society, because it translates the fact that politics is not science, but opinion; there is only one science – and even this is not entirely true – but there are several opinions on questions concerning the direction of public policy. Thus, it is in the interest of democracy that the parties survive the death threats resulting from the weight of bureaucracy, the ossification of party machinery, the false reality of ideologies unrelated to the real problems of the day, and the absurd proliferation and pretentious dogmatism of French political parties. Doubtless, two parties would be sufficient, on condition that they integrate many contradictions, resolved in concrete forms of governance, and that internally they encourage ongoing and open discussion. This is the essential condition for reinvigorating public opinion. 3. We then have to invent new ways for citizens to participate in power other than the election system and parliamentary representation. Here we can learn from the efforts in Yugoslavia, Poland, and other examples of producing new forms of representation for groups of workers and consumers. If a labor-based economy is in view which makes work the dominant economic category, only a political system in which workers would be represented as workers could make this labor-economy a civilization of workers. The task of inventing new forms of representation is perhaps to be combined with the reinvigoration of political parties; it is not simply a matter of defending democracy but of expanding it. 4. Finally, we have to, as people say, reinforce the authority of the State, but in a different way than is often stated. This would not be the primary task if reinforcing the authority of the State is taken

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to mean increasing the indirect power of several pressure groups over a weak State which, moreover, has not changed its centralized structure and relies on artificial parties, lacking substance, and without internal democracy. And yet this is what is commonly called reinforcing the authority of the State. Now, if this expression has a meaning, it signifies that civil power has authority over military power, over the police and the administration, that the decisionmaking power belongs to the executive and not to technocrats, that the executive is answerable only to popular representation and not to pressure groups, be they beet farmers or oil magnates. This action is reasonable action and presumes that the State can be reasonable, that it is reasonable to the extent that it is the State, and that it can become ever more so. *** However, this reasonable task in view of a reasonable State does not exclude – but, quite the opposite, includes – a vigilance that never lets down its guard, directed against the ever-increasing threat of an unreasonable and violent State. This vigilance takes several forms. 1. It is first of all a critical vigilance on the plane of reflection. Political philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Marx has never ceased returning to the theme of political perversions or alienations. But this vigilance wavers when political evil is believed to come from somewhere other than the political sphere, from the conflicts of classes or groups, and that having a good economy is sufficient for having a good political system. Constant reflection on the evils proper to the political, on the passions of power, is the soul of all political vigilance directed against the “abuse of power.” 2. But this vigilance must also take the form of an appeal and an awakening. It is sometimes necessary to appeal to the State on the basis of its founding values. Every State rests on an implicit or tacit consent, on a “pact” that seals a set of common beliefs, common ends, a common good (this is the “good” Saint Paul was speaking of when he said that the magistrate exercises constraint “for your good”). The State can and must be judged on the basis of the values that justify it. Thus, citizens can never be exempt by the State from serving these ideals, and have the duty to condemn actions incompatible with these ideals (exactions, we have to call them); protests against torture flow from this source. At the limit of protest, there is the possibility of illegal actions which have the value of testimony with respect to the “good” upon which the State itself is founded. These acts, in appearance harmful, are in reality very positive; they



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reaffirm and firm up the ethical foundation of the nation and of the State. 3. Finally, this vigilance has to take a properly political form and link together with the institutional reform we were speaking of earlier. Indeed, we have at one and the same time to reinforce the State and to limit its power: this is the most extreme practical consequence of our entire analysis. This means the following: in the period when we have to extend the competencies of the State in the economic and social arena and to move forward along the path of the socialist State, we have to take up once again the task of liberal politics, which has always consisted in two things: dividing power among various powers, and controlling the power of the executive by means of popular representation. Dividing power means, in particular, ensuring the independence of judges which the political tends to subjugate. This is what Stalinism ran up against, because the tyrant could not have purged and liquidated his political enemies without the complicity and subservience of the power of the judiciary. But the division of power perhaps implies the invention of new powers which the liberal tradition has not known; I am thinking in particular of the necessity of guaranteeing, and even of establishing the independence of, cultural power, which in fact covers a vast domain, from the university (which has not yet found its appropriate place, between independence with respect to the executive and the anarchical freedom of competition) to the press (which currently has a choice solely between State support or capitalist support), passing by way of scientific research, publishing, and the fine arts. The socialist State, more than any other, requires this sort of separation of powers, by reason of the very economic concentration of power it exercises; more than any other, it needs the independence of judges, of the university, and of the press. If citizens have access to no sources of information other than those of the State, socialist power immediately veers toward tyranny; the same is true if scientific research and literary and artistic creation are not free. However, power cannot be divided unless executive power is controlled. And here I want to recall how misleading is the dream of the withering away of the State, originating in anarchism and integrated into communism. To be sure, the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois State, its military and police forces, can wither away, but not the State as the power of organization and decision-making, as a monopoly of unconditional constraint. In any case, the State has to be reinforced before eventually withering away. And the problem is keeping it from subjugating people during the no doubt

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lengthy period in which it will still have to be reinforced. Now, the control of the State is the control by the citizens, by the workers, by the base. It is the movement of sovereignty from the bottom up, in opposition to the government’s movement from the top down, and this bottom-up movement has to be willed, managed, defended, and extended in opposition to the tendency of power to eliminate the forces out of which this bottom-up movement has come. This is the entire meaning of the liberal combat. *** I have said that there is not a Christian politics, but a politics of the Christian as a citizen. It must be said that there is a Christian style in politics. This style consists in finding the just place of the political in life: elevated but not supreme. An elevated place, because the political is the primary education of the human species, through order and justice, but not the supreme place, because this violent pedagogy educates human beings in external freedom, but does not save them, does not free them radically from themselves, does not make them “happy,” in the sense of the Beatitudes. This style consists as well in the seriousness of the engagement, without the fanaticism of faith. For the Christian knows that she is responsible for an institution that is God’s intention with respect to human history, but she knows that this institution falls prey to a vertigo of power, with a desire of divinization that clings to it, body and soul. Finally, this style marks a vigilance that wards against sterile critique as well as against millennialist utopia. A single intention animates this style: making the State possible, in accordance with its proper destination, in this precarious interval between the passions of individuals and the preaching of reciprocal love, which forgives and repays good for evil.

2 From Marxism to Contemporary Communism

Up to what point is contemporary communism, guided by the Party and bound up with the political fate of the Soviet Union, the sole and legitimate heir to Marx and, more specifically, to his written work? The question occupying us here is prior to all discussion broadly concerning Marxism and orthodox communism. I would like to show that, from Marx to Stalin, there exists a considerable gap, that from one to the other, Marxism has continued to close itself off, conceiving of itself more and more dogmatically and in a more mechanistic sense. Political Machiavellianism has smothered it as free thought; its eschatology has been reduced to a technological aspiration. And yet Marxism is more comprehensive than its Stalinist projection. We are going to try to understand this movement of Marxism’s progressive crystallization.

Marxism’s Scope We must go back to the young Marx’s philosophy: it truly constitutes the nebula of Marxism. The roots of this philosophy extend down into the theology of the young Hegel. It is indeed in the Early Theological Writings that the theme of alienation, in the sense of the loss of human substance in an Other than self, is developed in Hegel. For the young Hegel, initially the Jew was the model of this consciousness, canceling itself by emptying

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itself in a foreign Absolute. However, throughout his entire life, Hegel will try to show the fruitfulness of this “unhappy consciousness,” at least when it is superseded, surpassed, and integrated into absolute knowledge, in which consciousness and its Other are reconciled. Feuerbach would take up the original theme once more and turn it into a radical atheism: if man prostrates himself before God, his task is to “receive … the rejected nature into his heart again”;1 if God appears when man is annihilated, God must disappear in order for man to reappear. Marx’s atheism is constituted as an extension of this atheism: Marx was atheist and humanist before he was communist. “The religion of workers has no God because it seeks to restore the divinity of man” (letter to Hartmann); it is the (positive) vision of human beings as the producers of their own history which guides the (negative) critique of alienation. One cannot overestimate the importance of the texts in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: here we see the critique of religion, complete in its principle, seeking its economic base. It is the production of the human being by a human being that renders the idea of creation unacceptable: “But since for socialist man the whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labor, and the development of nature for man, he therefore has palpable and incontrovertible proof of his self-mediated birth, of his process of emergence.”2 Man’s ability to recover what has been lost makes God’s existence superfluous. But already, this text introduces the feature specific to Marx: the interpretation of man as worker and, as such, as the producer of his own existence: this is where the alienation stemming from Hegel and Feuerbach begins to be placed in an economic and social situation. We can thus, already at this period, speak of materialism; Marxist materialism is prior to the theory of class struggle; it signifies that alienation stems from the material existence of human beings and extends up to their spiritual existence. But materialism takes on substance when the relation of spiritual life to material life is conceived in close connection to the idea of “reflection.” The German Ideology is a critical witness here: it is Marx’s most materialist text. Ideas “are continually evolving out of the real lifeprocess.”3 The nature of individuals must be found “not as they may appear … but as they actually are, as they act, produce materially.”4 Ultimately, it must be said that “There is no history of politics, law, science, art, religion”: “such is the true materialism of real society.” This materialism seeks to make itself scientific through a history of “money”: in texts prior to the Manifesto, money is already



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the instrument of the material alienation of human beings; to understand its mechanism is already to overcome alienation (se désaliéner). A new critique is thus born, which is no longer a critique of consciousness by consciousness, but a real critique of real conditions. The sharpest thrust of this critique is the last of the Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.” The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts sum up the situation well, in calling for “the positive suppression of all estrangement [alienation], and the return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his human, i.e. social existence.” The text continues: “Religious estrangement as such takes place only in the sphere of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life – its supersession therefore embraces both aspects.”5 Why speak of a Marxist nebula with regard to these texts? Because materialism can receive several meanings. This materialism is not a materialism of things, but a materialism of human beings. Better yet, a realism: the fact that the individual is a “producer” underscores that she is not nature, animality; moreover, the individual does not “produce” simply to live, but to become human and to humanize nature. Nature itself appears as the “inorganic body of the individual.” Work thus becomes more than an economic category: through work, people express themselves, grow, create. Through work, it would seem that Marx is pursuing a dream of innocence: the reconciliation of the human being with things, with others, with the self – reintegration “at home” (chez soi). This is why human alienation is itself always more than economic; it is the total dehumanization of the individual. “What the product of his labor is, he is not.”6 Marx knows what this means for the individual, producing himself as merchandise, before understanding the mechanism of surplus-value. Alienation is scandalous precisely because “Labor is the only means whereby man can enhance the value of natural products, and labor is the active property of man … [and] the only constant price of things.”7 One does not see how this description can be given without an expression of indignation, a properly ethical moment of evaluation: “The devaluation (Entwertung) of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value (Verwertung) of the world of things.”8 However, if Marxism, in its beginnings, is more than economic, on what level is it to be situated? Is it philosophy? Sociology? It seems to me that Marxism created a mode of thinking that is to scientific economics what phenomenology is to psychology. There is perhaps no mechanism for which Marx would truly be the inventor. To

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borrow Father Bigo’s expression, “Marxism is not the explanation of a mechanism, but an explanation of existence.” Marx’s science does not aim at eliciting empirical laws and finding better forms of organization. It takes capital and value as situations in which human beings find themselves, and it sets for itself the task of showing the deep contradictions they contain. Marxist science – lengthy analyses would be necessary to make acceptable this idea which is, at first glance, disturbing – is actually a philosophy of man, a meta-physics of the subject, more precisely a meta-economics of capital and value.9

It is because this is a meta-economics that the Hegelian law of contradiction and reconciliation could be taken up in a dialectic of real human beings. Humanity’s movement then appears as the passage from unity without distinction (archaic communism) to the economy of classes, which is the antithesis of the preceding thesis. The synthesis is thus a return to the thesis, but by means of “negation”: from the class-based economy, the technology is retained but the exploitation is suppressed. This sort of overview escapes empirical verification. It is rather a matter of illuminating by the totality of history each of its moments; the grasp of this totality includes at one and the same time a sociological forecast, a judgment of economic and ethical value, and a maxim of action. By the same stroke, the exploitation of man by man that introduces the “negative” is neither a moral evil nor an external fate; it is not a dialectic external to the human being, a mechanical determinism, but a movement of the human being as such: “the whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labor.”10 On the other hand, the division of labor necessarily produces the division into classes, without anyone being held responsible. Exploitation and alienation cannot be broken down into individual acts of violence, into robbery, tricks, fraud; everything occurs as if humanity taken as a whole had preferred progress through suffering over contentment in stagnation. This is why Marx cannot be considered a moralist, despite the role of indignation in the conscious awareness of economic evil and of protest on behalf of the human laborer. For the denunciation is not cast on the level of human intentions, but on the level of the relations of production in which they are implicated. This is the place to remember that the hero of the Marxist opus is not the capitalist, nor even the proletarian, but capital as the alienated portion of the human being which has become situation and thing. Thus, the conscious awareness of this situation, in Marx himself for example, and in all who discover their alienation, is not an



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ethical liberation, valued for its purity, but a moment of progress by which history as a whole passes from alienation to freedom. In this way, “consciousness” – psychological and moral – has neither the power to initiate alienation nor the responsibility for overcoming alienation: the “ethical” act constituted by Marx’s work itself locates itself within the field of forces it comprises. Such is the dialectic: human, and yet not moral, governed by things, but by things that make up a part of the human being, forgotten, suppressed, alienated. As we see, all of this is highly ambiguous and can veer either toward a highly complex humanism, or toward a very crude materialism, mechanistic and deterministic.

The Petrification of Marxism The phenomenon of contraction, of crystallization to which we alluded in the opening section, has a threefold origin: in Marx himself, in Lenin, and in the practice of the single Bolshevik Party. — Marx himself is responsible for the collapse of his material­ism into a vulgar, mechanistic, and reified materialism. The anti-Hegelian polemic forced him to consider his system to be the inverse of German idealism: it would be the dialectic set back on its feet. But this opposite-course form of materialism ineluctably tends toward the theory of consciousness as reflection. There is no doubt that Marx gave all the necessary pledges to this theory in his own interpretation of forms of alienation other than the economic: ideology is the reflection of economic alienation. And yet, as Lukács saw, in the theory of “false consciousness” there was a grand theory of masks, illusion, unreality, quite different from the crude theory of reflection (a reflection is still something: for example, a reflection in water, in a mirror). One has only to think of the great texts on the State in Marx’s early writings, in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and in The Jewish Question: “In the State [man] is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty … [He is] filled with an unreal universality.”11 The illusory, the unreal, false consciousness, these are something other than reflections! Finally, it is on the occasion of these analyses worthy of Plato’s Sophist (the unreal reality of false consciousness!) that Marx sank into the crudest materialism. It is the symmetry of idealism and materialism, and the purely polemical definition of the latter term, that caused Marxism to swing from a humanist realism to a historical materialism.

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— Lenin is responsible for two things. 1. In his theoretical work, centered around Materialism and Empirico-Criticism, he continually pushed the theory of consciousness and of ideology in the most reductive direction. His struggle against neo-Kantianism, against Mach, against theories of consciousness conceived as the center and origin of meaning, places him in a polemical situation comparable to that of Marx in opposition to Hegelian idealism. At the same time, Marxists were accentuating alleged scientistic claims of the theory of value in face of the resistances of bourgeois economists. Marxism claimed to triumph, on empirical grounds, as a scientific theory of currency, crises, and the laws of the market. It readily placed itself on the terrain of nineteenth-century scientistic positivism. Now, it is doubtful that Marxism is on its true terrain here: its theory of value is a consequence of its theory of alienation; it describes the alienated world. Materialism itself is a description of the loss of the human in things; this is not a scientific law, but the truth of a world without truth. All this, which is implicit in original Marxism, is lost in the claim to establish it as objective science. 2. But it is perhaps the theory of the proletarian State and its neo-Machiavellianism which bears greatest responsibility for the petrification of Marxism. The State and Revolution is in this regard a fundamental point of reference in the history of dogmatic Marxism. In opposition to the social contract theory, the State appears here not as the organ of the general will, but as an instrument of domination, of the oppression of one class by another. This exercise in lucidity, which denounces the unreality of the State insofar as it is law and its violence insofar as it is power, turns into an apology for proletarian violence; since the State is fundamentally repressive and penalizing, it is just such a State that the proletarian revolution will set up against the enemies of the people: “the State is an evil to which the proletariat will fall heir” until it withers away. The State “is an inheritance of evil, bound to be transmitted to the proletariat when it has become victorious in its struggle for class supremacy, and the worst features of which it will have to lop off at once, as the Commune did, until a new race, grown up under new, free social conditions, will be in a position to shake off from itself this State rubbish in its entirety.”12 One may wonder if this commerce with violence has not reconstituted Marxism as “false consciousness,” as “ideology.” Here once again is the ruse of reason, with the reason of State: here once again are secrets, lies, craftiness, and the lack of transparency of action, once action has been integrated into the shadowy strategy of the



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proletarian State. Step by step, the entire domain of truth is frozen in place: the Party declares the truth about art, science, public and private morality. — Marxism’s political philosophy leads us to a consideration of the final factor in the petrification of Marxism: the practice of the one-party system. The idea that there exists a group of people who have a monopoly on the interpretation of history as a whole, the idea that this group constitutes the sole central perspective on the whole – ideas such as these are the source of the dogmatism that has frozen Marxism. This dogmatism with respect to truth, itself related to the political philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, rebounds on all Marxist theses, altering them in return: everything that remained ambiguous in Marxism is firmly settled along the line of orthodoxy; the more dogmatic – the more “materialist” and less “dialectical” – interpretation wins out on a regular basis over the more complex, the more open interpretation. Does an open Marxism still exist somewhere? Do its adepts – cut off from the Party apparatus and from real power, separated from action and relegated to a bookish doctrine – still have a future? It is a matter of determining what today constitutes the audience of non-Stalinist, non-dogmatic Marxists, who are not engaged in the Party’s orthodoxy. Only the history of the coming decades will show whether an open Marxism can still renew scholastic Marxism from the inside. Christians should at least know that original Marxism is no less irreligious than contemporary communism. It is not because it is more “humanist” and less “materialist” that it is less atheist. Quite the opposite: its radical humanism is perhaps closer to the source from which atheism springs, namely the conviction that human beings are the producers of their own existence.

3 Socialism Today

It is difficult to speak about socialism today: socialism is a key word for hundreds of millions of people and, at the same time, formidably equivocal in our economic and political language. Does “socialism” designate the program of Western socialist parties, or the authoritarian stage of Eastern communism before the withering away of the State? Does it refer to the vague demands of the Left just about everywhere in the world? In India, in Guinea? And how does it differ from neo-capitalism? Is it the doctrine of the “Founding Fathers” or the actual experience described on the ground? How are we to avoid stitching together a reformist practice and a revolutionary phraseology? We might then be tempted to give up this term on the pretext that it is out of date, that it is part of the Left’s logomachy, or that, under its cover, we are only rehashing worn out analyses. But then the danger is that we are “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” the kernel of hope with the chaff of words. How can we retain the aim and renew the analyses? My task is to rediscover these enduring aims. André Philip’s task will be to recalibrate the new analysis in line with the fundamental intention of socialism.1

The Economic Level: Planning I will begin by defining an initial, purely economic, level of socialism. By socialism, we understand the passage from a market economy to a planned economy, subordinated to human needs and accompanied



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by a transfer of ownership of the means of production to collective or public entities. This definition contains three aspects: it is their union that allows us to speak of socialism. 1. By market economy is to be understood an economy in which the regulation of production and consumption occurs on the basis of profit and financially solvent need. A planned economy is one in which economic decision-making no longer depends, in the final analysis, on the ownership of goods but belongs to instruments of common interest, an economy in which the fundamental motive is the maximum satisfaction of actual needs, following an order of urgency. From this angle, socialism marks the conquest of the economy by rationality, by the very rationality that first operated in technology and in science. In the regime of planning, economic reality is “constructed,” as it were, by forecasts and decisions. When can we speak of socialist planning? The question is not as straightforward as it may seem. The concern with rationality has existed and still exists outside of socialism: post-war Keynesian interventionism did not challenge the private ownership of the means of production but only advocated rational adjustment of State interventions (monetary policy to encourage expansion, the prudent growth of public investment, the redistribution of revenue, etc.). Between this interventionism and socialism properly speaking, there is an entire range of forms of economic regulation, characterized by diverse efforts to rectify the most damaging effects of the capitalist economy based on national financial data. Among this vast range, there are all sorts of therapeutic interventions, functional plans, limited forms of planning, respectful of the structures and institutions of the capitalist system; some concern only categories of goods, others, areas of activity. The forecast then concerns the various means of balancing the economy which are possible on the basis of diverse political choices. In this way, planning can coincide with an economy that could still globally be called a market economy. In these systems, which are mixtures of injunctions and spontaneous economic activity, basic needs are no longer satisfied on the basis of solvency; the motive of social utility wins out over the profit motive. Profit can itself undergo partial socialization in the form of a reapportionment of profits or by means of fiscal policies, or finally through social programs. The danger of these mixed economies is their incoherence. Two forms of logic vie for dominance: the logic of collective advantage and the logic of the advantages of private individuals. Public enterprises lean toward imitating private corporations and pursuing, as

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they do, private sector ends. Moreover, if the State is not controlled by workers, but by representatives of the non-nationalized part of the economy, the capitalist mentality will continue to be expressed, even in the heart of the public sector. Finally, there is the fear that when planning has been stripped of its social aim, it will simply be a means in the service of a purely cybernetic guidance of the economy, a pure technology of equilibrium and expansion, foreign to any concern for real human beings. This is why a second feature has to be added to the simple definition in terms of economic rationality. 2. The second feature is the reference of the economic project to human need. This requires us to speak of a change in structure and in mentality and not simply of a change in function; a global strategic vision of economic action replaces the standpoint and the interests of small economic units. A clear vision of global priorities and decisions concerning human beings dominates the economic project. Thus, already on this level, the humanist aspect of socialism is announced, something we will return to in conclusion. The macrodecisions of the planners necessarily have an ethical character: whether to favor cultural goods over material goods, consumption over investment, etc. So many questions that fundamentally concern the fate of human beings. 3. Third feature: the collective appropriation of the means of production. This was the main point in the eyes of the founders of socialism. Why this change? Why is it that the collective appropriation of the means of production that previously was a goal is today no more than a means? Socialism’s founders spoke of a theory of alienation, centered on the idea of the direct exploitation of labor by the owner of capital (the Marxist theory of surplusvalue is the best example of this theory of alienation). Property thus appeared as the immediate means of the expropriation of the laborer, deprived of the product of his work. Appropriating the means of production immediately appeared as an expropriation. In this way, the most proximate aim of socialism was the expropriation of the expropriators: property is theft, Proudhon said. Today we are less sensitive to the direct effects of the right to property, to the immediate consequences of the legal status of the ownership of the means of production: the emphasis has shifted to the influences of ownership on the power of decision-making. In this respect, property appears to be an obstacle in two ways: it is first an obstacle to governance in the general interest. The irrational intervention of profit and financially solvent needs stands in the way of reaching significant and regular rates of expansion. Under this first aspect, property is criticized in terms of a purely technocratic argument as



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an irrational economic phenomenon. On the other hand, property is responsible for distorting planning, moving it in the direction of a pure technology of equilibrium and expansion. This second argument has a more humanistic bent than the former one: property is an impedi­ment to bringing out the properly socialist motive of the maximum satisfaction of human needs. But in both forms of the argument, property appears less as an instrument of direct exploitation than as an obstacle to the rationality of the plan and to the prevalence of the human motive over the technocratic motive. Such is the appearance of socialism to us from this first perspective. It is the idea that a system driven by the motive of social gain is more rational than one delivered over to the competition of economic units each pursuing its own profit. Socialism then appears as the system that best allows calculating the interest of the community taken as a whole.

The Social and Political Level: Democratic Governance Socialism also has to consider the standpoint of governance, that is to say, the participation of the greatest number of individuals in economic decision-making. At this level, what is at issue is the realization of democracy in the economy; socialism’s ambition is to reintegrate human beings into economic and social mechanisms. Indeed, the will to satisfy human needs in the most rational way is not sufficient to define socialism. As we well know, the often vague aspiration toward a more just, more egalitarian, more communitarian society is the true soul of socialism. But this second objective lags far behind the first. Everywhere rationality is on the march, but nowhere has the participation of the greatest number in economic decisions made progress. On this level, socialism is entirely to be instituted. And yet, from the very beginning, socialism has stood against the administration of things by a technocratic oligarchy in the manner of Saint-Simon and has aimed at a democratic administration of things, exercised in the name of the masses and controlled by them. Today we are more lucid in this respect, because we have before our eyes various pathological expressions of planning, and first of all Stalinist pathology. The question is whether the Stalinist teratology is exemplary or accidental. Can it be ascribed to planning as such or to circumstances particular to Russia, to the initial poverty of that country, to external threats, to the imperative of too-rapid industrialization, to the political ideology of dictatorship, to the personality of the dictator himself, to the absence of a

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democratic past? The question remains; it is not erased by remarking that capitalist industrialization was itself extremely costly. The risks and the cost, both political and human, of socialist planning have to be weighed. Doubtless, the illusion that Marx still nourished when he was writing The Poverty of Philosophy has to be dispelled: “The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.”2 Today we know better, the administration of things does not suppress the governance of people, but, on the contrary, reinforces it. “Things” are themselves the products of human labor, destined to satisfy human needs. This is why the administration of things refers back to the governance of labor and the needs of people; this is also why economic power is ineluctably a governance of human beings. Managing the operations of production is a form of power of man over man; at least in its initial period, the administration of things reinforces the governance of people. We have to admit that there are dangers proper to the planned economy. It concentrates power in fewer hands than the capitalist economy, hampered by its contradictions. Everything is coordinated at the summit, and the ultimate arbitration is performed by a small number of people who exercise almost unlimited power over collectivized goods. What is more, the material means of expression are in the hands of the ruling group: the latter can impose a rigid orientation on man-power, on the majority of professions, and exercise a sort of authoritarian centralization of all choices. To ensure long-term effectiveness, the ruling group has the economic means to evade the pressure of public opinion and mechanically direct this opinion itself. These dangers proper to the planned economy most sharply pose the problems of industrial democracy. I will list a few of them. First of all, it appears necessary that the planning be complete in extension, but partial in intensity, and that the number of decentralized units be multiplied. No doubt only a plan total in its extension can become the least constraining plan, because only global choices can give rise to a cascade of relatively autonomous subordinate choices within the framework of these global choices. But, for the moment, this is a problem more than a program. How can the creation of new forms of servitude by the bureaucracy be avoided? How can we ensure, on the one hand, the continuity and stability necessary to economic power and, on the other hand,



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the participation of the base in decisions other than by a fictional and a posteriori control, which is limited in the case of popular democracies to ratifying decisions taken at the top? Representative agencies have to be established that will debate fundamental choices. Parties, as we know them today, seem to be poorly equipped for this function, either because they represent interest groups, or because they combine together divergent interests which neutralize one another, as in the great American political parties. One would have to see what the Yugoslavian producers’ councils represent in this regard. Moving down further, the problem of the governance of companies by the workers has to be raised: if workers’ councils do not have the power to accept or refuse increases in the rate of productivity, if they have no say in the direction of the company, if they have no iota of control in the director’s execution of policy, one cannot truly speak of a socialist economy. Ultimately, the aim of socialism is the right of each producer to decide how the surplus of his labor will be distributed and employed on all levels. Socialism is the end of that lack of freedom represented by need, and the conquest of that positive freedom constituted by participating in all stages of decision-making. On this second level, socialism can be said to be the system where workers are the dominant social category; it is the system where the democracy of labor is contemporary with planning. And the second task can in no way be put off in the name of the first, because the more extensive and powerful the means of action at the disposal of the governance of people may be, the more democratic its institutions and mores should be. The major danger of the socialist economy lies in the entire apparatus being handed over to a ruling and privileged minority. This danger can be averted only by a radical socialization of the means of governance themselves. Now, this runs counter to the practice of a single party and to any system in which unions are reduced to the mere function of amplifying propaganda or to the role of a charitable association.

The Cultural Level: Socialist Humanism On the third level, socialism is a culture. This third definition is implied in the two preceding ones: if socialism gives precedence to real needs over profit and also over a pure technology of equilibrium and expansion – if socialism implies the participation of the greatest number in economic decisions – an

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entire conception of the human being is already outlined in this twofold exigency. The most fundamental and the most stable aim of socialism lies in its humanism. What are we to understand here by humanism? Three things, in my opinion. 1. We first find in the foreground the oldest theme of the founders of socialism: the theme of overcoming the alienation (la désaliénation) of human labor. Despite its profession of materialism, Marxism appears on this level as a fundamental humanism: it was Marxism that dismantled the mechanism by which the person lost his humanity and himself became merchandise, in the image of the fetishes he projected onto his own existence, the fetishes of merchandise and money. The profound sense of Marxism appears here: its materialism is the truth of man without truth. This truth is purely phenomenological: by this I mean that materialism is the precise description of alienated man; in this regard, the displacement of the critique of property we discussed in the first section has changed nothing concerning this descriptive truth. The alienating power of capitalism resides in the fact that, after having recognized the economic function of labor, capitalism lost its fundamental human meaning by subordinating it to the law of profit, that is to say, to the law of things and to the power of money. This is why we have never finished with this power of denunciation nor with the power of description emanating from Marx’s imposing work. I will return to this later: it is the enduring task of the Christian theology of labor to continually reconstruct the Marxist theses of alienation and overcoming alienation and to integrate them into a broad modern anthropology. 2. The second theme of this humanism is the control of the economic phenomenon by the human being. Indeed, an overcoming of alienation which was not the work of people themselves, but of a bureaucracy or an economic agency foreign to each of the workers, would only shift economic alienation into the political arena. This is why overcoming alienation has to be extended by what we have called above the socialization of the means of governance. The human significance of this theme is just as considerable as the preceding one, because it signifies that there is no socialism outside of the triumph of human responsibility over blind mechanisms, including those in politics, in the administration, and in the bureaucracy. If alienation signifies that the person has become a stranger to herself, there are many paths to this alienation, and socialism is in danger of creating new ones, under the pretext of putting an end to the earlier alienations of capitalism. To render a person the ruler of her history, to place back in her hands the power over the forces that



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unceasingly escape her, this is doubtless the endless task that truly deserves the name of permanent revolution. 3. But this is not all: new meanings of socialism have appeared as a result of the very practices of socialist societies, and they stem much more from the self-critique of these societies than from the critique of earlier societies. There is a danger not only that socialism is reduced, as we have just said, to the reign of administration and bureaucracy, but, more fundamentally, that it expresses the renewal of the project of bourgeois societies under another form: namely, a simple technology of well-being. Bourgeois society had conceived of capitalism itself as the means of attaining – through competition, the spirit of enterprise, risk and wager – the fundamental objectives of a utilitarian ethics. It might happen that socialism would be simply the renewal, by means of a better rationality and a better technology, of the same hedonistic ethics. Socialism would then be only a more advanced and more rational industrialization, pursuing the same dream of the Promethean conquest of nature and wellbeing. It would then only have pursued in a more rational manner the mastery of the world by means of a society of total satisfaction. This danger is not a fiction; for a century, we have witnessed the gradual downfall of the great dream of the founders of socialism to base the most fundamental meaning of human activity in work. Yet, work appears more and more as merely the economic cost of leisure, while leisure appears more and more as a simple amusement and a simple compensation for the hardship of work, in proportion as labor is overtaken by mass technologies that insidiously pursue its degradation. We are completely capable of foreseeing and even glimpsing the dangers of a society of consumption, even of a society of abundance, in which socialism would be reduced to the paltry triumph of the socialism of the common man. At this level, it is therefore essentially a spiritual danger that lies in wait for socialism: this danger is already at work in the welfare state and in Scandinavian socialism. In order to confront this danger, we must unceasingly return to what is least technical and closest to the “heart” of socialism. More profoundly than a technology, socialism is the cry of distress, the demands, and the hopes of people who have been the most humiliated. This is why today we cannot separate socialism from solidarity with the most underprivileged fraction of humanity, from the poverty of underdeveloped societies. The socialist motivation is fundamentally tied to the slave revolts, otherwise it is no more than that rational and dehumanized calculation whose ghost never ceases to haunt us. As Péguy said, “The affairs of socialism have

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never ceased to be the affairs of humanity.” The welfare state’s weakness lies in the absence of a human perspective. The strength of the socialist camp is, precisely, the sentiment of a collective work in action. For this reason, the friendship without borders extended to those who labor and suffer, and the keen sentiment of belonging to a single humankind, must never fade. Here is the place of utopia, which I have stressed so many times in this journal. Without utopia, there remain only calculation and technocracy. It is on this level of the unending spiritual elevation of socialism that the true dialogue with Christianity should be instituted, maintained, renewed.

II The Paradoxes of the Political

4 Hegel Today

The interest generated by Hegel today is surprising and puzzling, for people have come to Hegel, or come back to him, largely on the basis of those who rejected him: because of Kierkegaard, the solitary thinker; because of Marx, founder of the philosophy of revolution. And then, there has been interest in Hegel for himself, across a wide range of very different philosophical circles. For some this was because, for example, following the period of existentialism, where emphasis was placed on the individual subject, on anxiety, there was a need to return to a systematic philosophy, in which small individual crises would be assumed and taken in charge within a grand structure of thought, a deliverance from personal cares. In certain respects, the effacement of the subject who says, “I,” in many contemporary philosophers, moves in a direction that could be termed Hegelian. We also see a kind of return to Hegel in theological circles, in order to re-establish a firm, solid thought. Why is there such curious, such diverse interest, and which leads to contradictory judgments? In political terms, some label Hegel a man of the right: he conceived of a rational order, hence he is a thinker of order. On the left, they say: Hegel’s main theme is the epic of freedom, so he is a thinker of freedom. For the Christians or the theologians, we find two opposing judgments. Some affirm: he reflected on Christianity and, what is rare, he took the Trinity seriously. He attempted to incorporate this into a system, hence he is the thinker of Christianity. Others say: but precisely by thinking it, he emptied Christianity, because he transformed into a philosophical

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system what should be something different, the “Good News” which is not at our disposal, which cannot be systematized in this way. The rationalists, or those opposed to the preceding view, maintain: this thinker is an atheist because the spirit of which he is speaking is the human spirit. To the extent possible, he does without a transcendent being, so that, even when he speaks of God as being among us or within us, he is actually speaking of human beings: he is a humanist. In this way Kojève, in his Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, understood Hegel to be an atheist. And yet, according to Marx, this is really just a new reshuffling of the old theology under a philosophical cover. It is, therefore, first as an enigma that we encounter Hegel. I make no claim to arbitrate among these diverse interpretations. I propose something more limited. In the first part, I will begin by recalling some of the great themes of Hegelian philosophy. There is a pedagogical side to my presentation, in an effort to communicate to non-specialists a certain idea of what this philosophy is about. In the second part, I will try to situate myself more personally with respect to Hegel and state my “yes” and “no,” my agreement as well as my reservations and my doubts. We will begin then with a cursory reading of Hegel. I propose marking out two stages in the evolution of his thought. It is quite legitimate to select two very distinct moments: in 1807, Hegel offers an initial expression of his system in the Phenomenology of Spirit. A little more than fifteen years later, he publishes the definitive form in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. I will conclude the presentation of each of these stages with a sort of aside where I will sketch out a few questions to which I will return later, addressing them from my personal viewpoint.

The Phenomenology of Spirit, or How to Enter into Hegel’s System Three theses Hegel does not make things easy for us since, in the preface to this Phenomenology of Spirit, he shows that there is no introduction to philosophy. An introduction to philosophy would consist in starting with non-philosophical questions and then saying: this poses philosophical problems. It is in this way that the sciences tangle themselves in contradictions, in doubts about their own foundation. But, for Hegel, if we do not know what a philosophical question



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is, we will never be able to extract a philosophical question from the tangles of science. Nor can we enter by way of the history of philosophy. Because, to maintain that Aristotle and Descartes are philosophers in order to do the history of philosophy, one has to know what philosophy is, and, in order to understand what the history of philosophy is about, one must already know philosophy! Finally, it is impossible to enter it by way of the human sciences or by way of anything else: philosophy is something that presents itself by itself, presenting itself not beginning with problematic questions, but in its completed result. Philosophy, if it exists, has to appear as a system and precisely in this ordered arrangement in which elements are linked together and form a whole, a totality of thought. 1. But what is in this system? Hegel claims that in this system there is nothing other than what human beings have experienced, lived, or done, or thought, and that philosophy simply carries this ensemble to the level of what he terms the concept, that is to say, the meaning perfectly transparent to thought. Philosophy then presents nothing other than what is expressed in the entire range of moral, juridical, political, personal, scientific experience and so forth. It gathers together the scattered forms of experience, of action, of human knowledge, all condensed in the transparency of the concept. Philosophy is a presentation, an exposition of truth as it realizes itself. Taking note of this is reason to dismiss an entirely false idea that some might have gathered from reading only scraps of Hegel’s work. Hegel is rightly credited with inventing the dialectic. By dialectic is understood a sort of logic in which a thesis is followed by an antithesis, and finally a synthesis. It is held to constitute a mechanism capable of operating independently of content. In this way, Hegel is most often viewed as the father of a new kind of logic, dialectical logic, a form he is supposed to have added to the logic of logicians and mathematicians. Now, what Hegel essentially intended was to develop a logic that would be the very logic of reality. Hegel is a thinker of reality, and he is essentially opposed to any abstract form of logic that would operate independently of content, as is the case of the logic of logicians. The latter is not concerned with what is said in sentences, in propositions, but only with the laws of argumentation: it is formal, because the form of argumentation can be separated from all its content (what logicians call its “matter”). Throughout his entire life as a thinker, Hegel pursued a logic of reality: the totality of our experiences forms an order, it contains an order. Philosophy consists in discovering that this order is the very order of our thoughts and our experiences. So rather than ascribing to Hegel an empty and formal dialectic, one has to say

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that he conceived of the identity of the rational and the real. The rational is the real, the very meaning of reality; and what we call reality is that which we can think, because it has a meaning. Philosophy constitutes the wager that the meaning of reality can be mastered by thinking, ordered and presented, simply presented, by the philosopher. Whence the title of his first book of philosophy, the Phenomenology: for him, phenomenology means philosophy. The phenomenon is that which appears. Experience must be allowed to come forth, allowed to express itself; in expressing itself, it proposes an order that philosophy can assemble, dominate, and make transparent in the concept. The Phenomenology of Spirit concretely reunites just about everything Western culture has produced – the Greek and the barbarian, the pagan and the Christian, the Reformation and the Renaissance, the age of Enlightenment and German Romanticism. It is this experience that is totalized, insofar as it is meaningful. It is here that we can account for the dialectic, because it is the very dialectic of our experience, the dialectic of what has been suffered, accomplished, and thought by human beings. What does this mean? 2. After underscoring that Hegel’s system is the system of reality, it is time to present a second aspect of his dialectic. By this, Hegel understands that our experience advances by suffering or the work of the negative: meaning arises through contradictions that are lived dramatically by human beings or thought in a logic of opposition. The dialectic functions on this principle: if an experience is lived to its very end, it produces its contrary. Thought is then tasked with dominating these contradictions, and on the basis of this opposition, making a new position appear. It is believed that this theme is formulated by saying: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, but this retains the trace of our speech, of something that is tied to the very content of our experience as it is itself reflected through its contradictions. 3. I have just introduced this little word: reflection, and, with it, my third thesis. For Hegel, if our experience produces a subject who can say “I,” this is precisely because of these contradictions, since the very nature of the contradiction is to make us reflect. As long as we live in accordance with an experience, we are immersed in it. The moment this experience turns against itself, it makes a subject spring up, as it were, out of the negative. This is why Hegel always identifies three things in his thought. First, the work of the negative, then the appearance of a self, of something that can itself reflect on itself, and finally mediation. By means of contradiction, an experience, at first immediate, reflects on itself and becomes



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other than it was. By means of this mediation, it can be overcome, sublated. The German word Aufhebung well expresses how the contradiction is suppressed even as the terms of the contradiction are retained. It is as if raised up, grasped anew by having been thought through to the end. In this way, a new position is produced which, in its turn, will provoke a new contradiction. Hegel himself summed up the movement of this thought in an enigmatic statement: Substance is subject. What philosophers thought of as substance (what exists, in all its heft, in all the density of its reality) lacks consciousness. But in the play of contradictions, this substance becomes a subject. As Hegel stated, what-is passes into what-is-not, and out of this passage the self-consciousness of being is born.

Three questions A simple outline, as elementary as the one I have just given, directly raises an enigma I will present in the form of an initial question, followed by two others. 1. Who is the hero of the Phenomenology of Spirit? Hegel responds: It is the history of consciousness as it educates itself. An initial way of reading Hegel’s philosophy is to approach it as an eighteenth-century “novel of culture,” akin, for example, to Rousseau’s Émile, which shows how a child passes through a series of formative experiences. Out of this, a type of pedagogy is delineated in which failures, contradictions, and negative aspects play a determining role. In this way, Hegel’s work can be considered a novel of culture in philosophical form. 2. However, it is difficult to continue to maintain this initial interpretation, since the Phenomenology is called, in fact, not the phenomenology of consciousness but of Spirit. This calls for a second reading. What we call “consciousness” – you, me, individual subjects – indeed has no meaning in itself as long as we have not attained an experience in which “I” equals “we” in historical communities, in a people, in a nation, in a class – never matter which of these, what is important is to have changed scale. Meaning cannot appear as long as each person is seeking it for himself or herself. It will only arise when there is something like “spirit.” And, precisely, the work is called Phenomenology of Spirit! What did Hegel intend to designate by spirit? The various phases of human experience, distributed in space and distributed in time, form a whole, and this whole is present in each of its parts. Spirit, for Hegel, is the presence of this totality in each of its parts. But

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next, this spirit does not unfold from within, like a flower: it is what progresses by means of divisions and contradictions. One always has to leave the self, emigrate out of the self, in order to become oneself. The Phenomenology of Spirit develops the history of these relinquishments, these emigrations out of the self in order to become oneself. The most penetrating insight in Hegelian thought is this: one becomes oneself only by losing oneself. Here, Hegel employed a word that will come to have an extraordinary fortune, a word translated by alienation (Entfremdung): one must become other in order to become oneself. Human experience is made up of a series of alienations. The word has certainly evolved to a great extent over time, and today has taken on a meaning that is quite misleading. People are said to be aliéné, that is to say “crazy.” But behind this meaning that has been imposed on the word, we must retrieve its Hegelian value: to be other, and return to an even earlier sense, found in sixteenth-century commercial documents, where “to alienate” something is to separate something from oneself, “to relinquish” it. The German says “to move outside.” Externalization is necessary, and anyone who seeks to remain within the confines of his or her existence will not develop. The one who risks losing herself in something other will become herself. Hegel is driven by this profound conviction: spirit is formed by these detours. By the same stroke, spirit moves from the more abstract to the more concrete. The entire Phenomenology consists in starting from extremely rudimentary experiences and, by the play of contradictions surmounted, making new, much richer forms appear. We move in this way from the more impoverished to the richer, and from the more abstract to the more concrete. We find ourselves poles apart from abstract thinking, from a thinking that abstracts: the Phenomenology is a thinking that actualizes, becoming more and more concrete as it unites with greater complexity. At the beginning of the Phenomenology, we encounter very simple experiences, such as the struggle between master and slave. Things perhaps never happened this way, but it provides the framework of a violent relation involving death and freedom, representing an elementary form of human relations. The construction is made on the basis of these simple forms. For nothing is lost in human experience, which is continuously enriched. Spirit acts as the accumulator of its own experiences. As a consequence, evil (everything that appears as a failure) is in a certain way preserved in the progress of thought, justified by the progress of reality which is generated through its contradictions. Hegel thinks this leads to a sort of profound identification between the sense produced in this way and the consciousness



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we have of it. This is perhaps the most fertile and the most difficult idea to grasp in Hegel: the promotion of sense and the promotion of the subject proceed together. The more meaning there is to be found in the experience we are living, the more consciousness and subjectivity there is in this experience. We cannot expect to attain subjectivity by pulling out of the game and nourishing subjectivity within ourselves; instead, subjectivity is afforded to us by all that we have encountered in experience. Through its accumulation, this experience gives us both the richest, most concrete rationality and the sharpest subjectivity. This is the meaning of “substance is subject”: having a weighty, hence substantial, experience is at the same time an experience reflected upon, hence subject. The more substance there is, the more subject there is. The more meaning there is, the more consciousness there is. This is the second reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit: here we have a theory of spirit, but of the human spirit, whether individual or collective, in short, we have the human being in culture. This is a theory of culture. 3. This would be a rationalist and humanist reading. But Hegel does not stop here, for the final chapter is titled “Absolute Knowledge” and no longer “Spirit.” To arrive at this, one crosses over the chapter on spirit I have just resumed for you, and passes through what Hegel terms “religion.” He thinks back over the achievements of Greek and Christian religions and discovers in them something more elevated than human culture. He indeed considers that in the guise of figures (Pascal would have called them symbols [“figuratifs”]), an absolute is displayed, manifested. This is not merely a human spirit, but an absolute spirit. All of Hegel’s readers have come up against this difficulty: what is the relation between this absolute knowledge and this spirit in action I was speaking about earlier? Why sandwich religion between the philosophy of culture and the absolute? Is it religion that sustains philosophy or, on the contrary, is it philosophy that devours religion after having drawn support from it? I suspend my first cross-section of Hegel’s philosophy with these questions: has the viewpoint of consciousness disappeared, has the standpoint of spirit itself disappeared into absolute knowledge? Or is absolute knowledge only the recapitulation of the entire trajectory, without adding anything to it? When you have read a poem, you explain it, you break it down, you tackle it through all sorts of mediations. And then you do a final reading, carrying with it all the earlier findings. Absolute knowledge might be nothing other than the supreme rereading of all we have perceived along the way…

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The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences or Fifteen Years Later This extremely difficult book is no longer situated on the level of the simple description of what has been lived by humanity through culture, but starts from logic. Going beyond the Phenomenology, it constitutes the work of Hegel par excellence. As with all that is Hegelian, the Encyclopedia is constructed as a triad: at the summit is the logic, and the two legs of this compass are, on the one side, a philosophy of nature and, on the other, a philosophy of spirit.

Logic Without entering into the work, we must at least give an outline of Hegel’s project in this construction. He has first drawn all the consequences from the Phenomenology of Spirit, which affirmed: our experience has a meaning. This meaning is not far away, it inhabits us; the truth itself cuts its own path. We should be able to delineate all the possible structures that will ever be presented in any kind of human experience. Whatever comes to pass in human history, we will be able to express this only because certain structures will present themselves. An initial system of these structures should therefore be drawn up: this is the logic. What Hegel calls by this name does not correspond with the sense attributed by contemporary logicians, who tie it to mathematical symbolism: their logic has nothing to do with reality. It is a construction starting from a certain number of axioms and is developed by means of theorems. Certain axioms can be changed, and other types of systems derived from them, and so on. Hegel’s is a logic conforming to the one we saw in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which structures reality internally, immanently, from within. It is a real logic, and not a formal and empty one. One can nevertheless delineate it before speaking of nature, and then of human experience. One ought to be able to elaborate the system of logic, even if this logic is the logic of reality. A dialectical structure is elicited, which animates and structures every sort of natural or historical experience of human beings. Consequently, this is not a system alongside reality. In the language of Kant, one would say this is not the system of the conditions of possibility, but truly the system of the conditions of reality, the very order of things. How is it possible to place order “apart” from



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things, since it is the order of things? This is the enormous difficulty imposed by Hegel’s logic. Hegel sometimes presented it in quasitheological terms by saying: “This is God before creation,” not that he adopted a theological system, but that he found himself in the same situation as a theologian affirming that God lacks nothing and yet, nonetheless, the world has just been added to reality. It adds without adding anything since God is complete. In the same way, everything is included in the logic, nothing is missing, if not its manifestation. In this way, Hegel introduces the nature of history. His logic does appear as the logic of reality, but what will be added is the fact that it manifests itself. In making a life appear, nothing is thereby introduced except what was already included within it. This logic, which I will not go into here, is a very beautiful work. It is constructed from within: there is the logic of being, the logic of essence, the logic of the concept, that is to say, three logics within the logic. One posits, the other opposes, the third is the synthesis, a circle of circles. In proposing this rather admirable construction, Hegel has moreover not really invented anything; he has recapitulated what his predecessors had done. Throughout the course of history, a logic of this sort has always existed. When Plato reflects in the Parmenides, in the Sophist, or in the Philebus, a kind of logic of things, a logic of being is forged. In Aristotle, this corresponds to what we call the “Treatise on the Categories.” The Neo-Platonists, for their part, have recourse to “emanations,” to produce the relative out of the absolute. Here, there is also a sort of logical construction. Finally, Kant himself developed a system of categories as well! Hegel is the one who recapitulates; he constructs a system with what was only partially developed in his predecessors.

The philosophy of nature Logic constitutes the first third of the system of the Encyclopedia; Hegel then tries to present a philosophy of nature, which causes us serious problems today. This is indeed the most discredited part of his work, the most impossible to repeat today. Like many people of his era, and in particular his longtime friend and rival Schelling, he thought that what was being discovered at that time – magnetism, electricity, etc. – closely resembled what was found in logic. Could not relations of attraction and repulsion, for example, be conceived logically in the form of opposition, contradiction, and so on? In that era, philosophies of nature attempted to find in the discoveries of chemistry, electricity, and biology a sort of logic in action, a logic

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realized. Along with this, old ideas leading back to the Renaissance were resurfacing: the great thinkers of that period had sought in the secret life of nature a sort of hidden logic, a hidden art very closely resembling a logic, as if some divine logic were unconsciously at work in nature. Close to Hegel, his adversary Schelling had again tried to develop a philosophy of nature: Hegel in turn attempted to place this in his system. Whatever the disaster of this effort, we have to go back to his intention, in its twofold character: in relation to the logic that precedes and in relation to the spirit that follows. In relation to logic. The fate of what we are calling “logic” is to lose itself, to alienate itself, in the sense we have seen, to become other. We have only one way of assuring ourselves that what we call “logic” is not merely a fantastic construction of the human spirit, and that is to verify it in things. If it is true, it cannot be otherwise. If it is true, it exists. If it exists, it is in nature. In order to anchor it in reality, it has to be shown in its latent state, buried in things: nature appears as the constant test of the character of truth, of logic, as real. In relation to the philosophy of spirit, that is to say, as we shall see, in relation to the human world of history and culture. This human world is rooted in nature. It would be a mistake to say that Hegel is a spiritualist in the sense that he is thought to oppose the world of the spirit to the world of nature. The world of the spirit comes out of the world of nature. The human being is, in a certain way, a mineral before being a human. If you are flattened when you leave here (I hope you won’t be), you will not be flattened as a “human being,” but as a “thing,” flattened by another thing. A human being is a thing in the universe. The entire Pascalian pathos grows out of this reflection: we are a mineral among minerals. And then the human being is a plant, one that knows what it means to be rooted and uprooted. Finally, the human being is an animal with desires and perceptions. The human world is, therefore, a world that is in exile from the mineral world, from the world of plants and animals. It is in exile, and the drama is always that it is through this exile that one returns back home. The problem of exile is how to rediscover one’s roots. As a result, the spirit that tears itself away also has to be a spirit that implants itself. This is an extremely profound vision; it may perhaps lead us to quite contemporary problems of human beings and the environment. Humans are bound to the earth by a pact which cannot be repudiated or ignored without provoking injuries to human beings themselves. Hegel indeed perceived this relation between the world of the spirit and the world of nature as a dialectical relation. As humans, we tear ourselves away from nature, but we also come out of nature and return to it.



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The philosophy of spirit The third part of his system, which is admirable, represents what Hegel calls the Philosophy of Spirit. We again find stages: we move from experience to experience, always ever richer. We begin within the confines of nature: human beings have a race, a sex, a body. Well before existentialism, Hegel described these things in the name of anthropology. For him, anthropology represents the turn from the philosophy of nature to the philosophy of spirit. And here he reinserted, as a block in his elaboration, everything he had said in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Phenomenology appears now as just one segment in this extraordinary course leading to what he terms the theory of the objective spirit, that is to say, the human being’s progress toward the social, the political realization of humankind. Hegel vigorously fought against Kant here. Human beings are born human not because each has an individual consciousness, but because this individual consciousness enters into a dialectical relation with other individual consciousnesses in order to produce institutions. Hegel was the thinker of the institution: it is in the institution that we lose ourselves, first, in accordance with the great law of alienation, but, then, it is in the institution that we find ourselves by means of this relinquishment. If you want to remain yourself, you will be nothing. If you enter into the social game and its rules, you will receive in return a more human consciousness. This grand detour by way of the institution is the strong point of the Hegelian philosophy of spirit. Hegel attached such importance to this chapter on the objective spirit, spirit having become a sort of object of institutions, that he returned to this fragment to make it into an entire work titled The Philosophy of Right, one of Hegel’s most accessible texts. He takes the word “right” in a very broad sense: institutions, that is to say, the instruments of culture, of civilization, by means of which freedom, rather than being a dream or a demand, itself becomes real, enters into reality. In this presentation, I have continued to stress the sense of the real in Hegel. One must enter into reality. You will not enter into reality if you want to remain yourself. But neither will you enter into reality if your freedom is purely protest. Here, Hegel has much to tell us: freedom that does not pass by way of the institution, in order to relinquish itself, will remain in his eyes a “furor of destruction.” The furor of destruction is freedom holding itself back from entering into a social game it does not control. Hegel affirms: Lose yourself, and in the end, you will find yourself once more. This is the political

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Hegel, who has been attacked for having divinized the State. He does speak of the divine, but for him, a State is, precisely, the educator of freedom and not a tyrant. The institutional principle enables an historical community to take decisions and, in this way, to enable everyone to become a citizen instead of remaining an individual consciousness, a consciousness of opposition. Nor should Hegel be taken to be the thinker of the State, for the good reason that the Encyclopedia does not stop here. Beyond what he calls the objective spirit, there is the absolute, represented by three functions situated beyond the political. They are art, religion, and philosophy. In this trilogy, we have the experience of a relation with all human beings, going beyond the fragmentation of States. A universal therefore exists beyond the political. Here we have, moreover, an experience of reality. For “art (Hegel said this before Heidegger) is what makes matter sing” – material, stone. We return to the “ground,” alongside things. Life in the absolute does not consist in a flight into the beyond; it is a deepening of reality.

Questions I am stopping here to raise some questions. They result first from the reading I have suggested to you and will then lead me to a few more personal reflections. 1. Historians have been troubled by the fact that there are two great Hegelian works: the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia. Does the Encyclopedia cancel out the Phenomenology? One might expect so, but then why did Hegel insist on republishing his Phenomenology, taking such pains with it? Is the system, then, unrealizable, since it must be undertaken in two different ways, starting from consciousness and starting from logic? Is this not the sign of a deep divide, which Hegel was unable to surmount? 2. We also wondered how one could begin with logic, when logic is nothing other than the logic of the real. Do nature and history add nothing to this? This is the Marxist objection that Hegelian philosophy is ultimately a philosophy of discourse, and that the labor, the suffering of human beings, and their needs are seemingly disdained by a logic that floats above them. 3. And then there are those, like Kierkegaard, who do not want the individual to be lost in the system. For him, if the individual is swallowed up in the State and in the system of logic, the individual is no longer responsible. What is more, it is not only when the individual protests that she is not integrated into the system, but also



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when she suffers and experiences evil. Cannot these experiences of suffering, death, and evil be considered episodes in the system? Are not these cases evidence of a resistance to the system? 4. Then there are also all the liberals who mistrust this divination of the State, and who consider that, in Hegel, the citizen is too subordinate to the State. 5. Finally, there are Evangelical Christians – including Karl Barth, of course – who affirm that a perfectly thought out Christianity is Christianity dissolved, and that the coming of the Christ cannot be merely an episode in the logic. I now come to the questions I will try to take up from the standpoint of my own interests. I hope to have earned the right to say something a little more personal, after having attempted to account for the consensus of commentators in as even-handed a manner as possible. If I have been asked to speak about Hegel, it is not because I am an historian of Hegel, but because, in a certain way, I am fascinated by Hegel, fascinated and repelled. I would like to try to explain myself first perhaps in terms of this fascination.

Fascinations I arrived at Hegel along three paths, starting from my own work. 1. First, starting from psychoanalysis and Freud. What struck me was a common core and then an inverse orientation. Both of these things were equally interesting to me. A common core, because Hegel was very keenly aware of the force of human desire, and of the fact that human beings are not just thought, but are rooted in a vital force. First, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, then in the Encyclopedia, there is a full description of what could be called human desire. In particular, we find the admirable theme in the Phenomenology of Spirit that human desire is not animal desire, because it is the desire of another desire. This desire of desire produces a problem as it passes into language, where it becomes, as Lacan would say, “demand addressed to the other.” This is the crux of the problem Hegel named the problem of recognition. One person wants to recognize another human being in this reciprocity of desire. Desire becomes the desire for recognition. Now, this is the central problem of psychoanalysis, which is also born out of a problem of conflict, not the conflict of master and slave, but the battle of every offspring with the parental figure. The entire problem of Oedipus in Freud is profoundly consonant with the problem of master and slave: beginning with an unequal relation, how to arrive at reciprocity? This

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is an absolutely fundamental human experience. We all start from unequal relations – with our teachers, with the people who employ us: how to create reciprocity in non-reciprocity? This problem begins with the Oedipus problem, since each of us is born to parents who speak before we speak, who exist before we exist. There is indeed a common core here. But what seemed interesting and significant to me is that Freud and Hegel are not looking in the same direction. Freud looks back, he seeks in childhood – and now others seek even further back, before language – the fundamental sources of human disorders. I saw this as a kind of archeology. The archaic layers are excavated to find the foundations of our conflicts. Psychoanalysis seemed to me to be this sort of sectioning, into ever deeper levels, reaching human drives and instincts. Now, Hegel does the opposite: he proposes seeing how a human being goes through a certain experience in the world of desire and conflict in order to enter into ever more complex cultural experiences, up to and beyond the level of the political. In this, I saw a movement always in the direction of ever greater meaning, by which we move away from our biological roots, because we must also pull up our roots. We therefore have a certain experience of uprootedness in relation to desire in the world of culture. This theory of culture is the counterweight to the theory of drives in Freud. I gave the name of teleology to this movement in which meaning comes from the end and not from the beginning, since what characterizes Hegelian philosophy is that everything is thought on the basis of final knowledge. Experiences are then only an approximation, a composition in progress toward total knowledge. I understood things in the following way: What is it to become an adult? It is to step out of childhood, and take the route for which Hegel tried to give us the deep, internal logic. It is to pass through the crisis of the master and the slave; it is to become, in our turn, the consciousness of the Stoic, then the consciousness of the Sceptic, and then become the unhappy consciousness, and then enter into reason, and then enter… Is this not a sort of pedagogy that has been thought, reflected, and made into logic? A pedagogy that replies to this unresolved question in Freud: How does one leave Oedipus behind? Freud showed us how we enter this conflict. But why do some people come out of it neurotic and others not? Hegel’s philosophy brings us this sort of progressive constitution of meaning that uproots us from our infantilism and our archaism. Moreover, Hegel himself conceived of his philosophy as the entrance to maturity and an indefinite departure from childhood. I have tried to keep something of both Freud and Hegel by saying: the human being is the being that unceasingly tears itself away from



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its ground, yet seeks in its ground and in its deepest instincts the impulse of its own life. I am encouraged by Freud and by Hegel, because Freud tells us that the aim of life is the sublimation of our instincts (putting them to work on another level) and because Hegel tells us that we can progress only if we have been uprooted. It seems to me that this idea of progression through regression is found in myths and in all the very powerful forms of human language, which always root us back into a ground, while moving beyond instinctual levels toward a more spiritual sense. For me, this profound dialectic takes shape in the convergence of Freud and Hegel. This is the first thing that drew me to Hegel. 2. The second thing concerns what I presented earlier as the theory of objective spirit, the relation between freedom and institutions. The problem torments me as I try to understand my epoch and as I think about a certain administrative experience I’ve had. Should we not be worried when we observe the deep divide in our own day between the fact that our institutions are becoming more bureaucratic and more incomprehensible to us and the fact that freedom is conceived only as protestation and so as anti-institutional? Hegel brings me back to this question: How can a human being enter into an institution and find his freedom there? Hegel is the one who thought this. But can this be the case, without a certain dialectical philosophy and without a certain conception of the dialectical constitution of the meaning of human experience? If I turn to my own earlier works, to the Voluntary and the Involuntary written some twenty years ago, I recognize that at that time I did not have the means of resolving this problem, because all the dimensions that appear in Hegel were not to be found there. What was lacking first of all was the encounter between one will and another will. My work was very subjectivist and almost solipsistic: it never presented anything other than a single person alone, with his or her body and the world. Hegel teaches us that everything begins when one will encounters another will (whether this is in the relation of master and slave or, in the Philosophy of Right, the juridical relation of the contract). Moreover, the will has to be incarnated in a work. As long as we have not reflected on how a will, which is a power of the arbitrary, can compress itself within a completed work, we remain incapable of attaining the very principle of the institution, for freedom has to lose its great scope, its terrible power to say “no,” in order to say “yes” to something limited. Once one says “yes” to something limited, a history can begin. Nothing happens as long as freedom holds back and tries to retain the full range of its choices. This is Hegel’s lesson.

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And what is more: not only does a will have to enter into a work and be challenged by other wills, but it must enter into something that has an institutional structure. The law is not the enemy of freedom, but the path of freedom. For me, this is a brilliant and unsurpassable idea: the law is not an autonomous, self-sufficient system, rather its philosophical meaning lies in the passage from abstract freedom to real freedom. The question I am currently working on is determining whether purely reflective philosophies, relying on the gaze one casts on oneself, are capable of developing a philosophy of the will worthy of this name. Must one not pass instead by way of dialectical structures implying a logic other than non-contradiction? I am inclined to say that the heart of Hegel’s thought is not the theory of absolute knowledge, but the theory of objective spirit. In it, he shows that all human situations are dialectical situations, in which meaning is created out of contradictions overcome. If you do not engage in this sort of problematic, you will not account for the human. And here, I completely agree with Hegel. This internal logic is a sort of dialectical structure of the human self-production of meaning. If we affirm with Aristotle that the will is nothing other than deliberative desire, this is a dialectical proposition: desire is as if posited and negated (by the idea of rationality), then taken up again… The will is the very energy of desire, which has been contradicted by others, by values, by duty, but which, through all these vicissitudes, has maintained its energy. If one uses Marxist or another language to declare that theory and praxis must be joined together, this is a dialectical proposition because the human being becomes simultaneously theoretical and practical. These two functions are tied together like staircases revolving inside one another. The practical and the theoretical are wound around one another producing a sort of mutual encircling of the dialectic. If you say that the individual is nothing until he or she is a member of a community, citizen of a polis, this is a dialectical proposition. The individual is posited; then, in a certain manner, the negation of the individual is posited – a relinquishment, the return on which is a keener and sharper consciousness as a result of this detour. Such is the deep, underlying movement Hegel illustrates to us through the positive character of alienation. 3. Finally, the third reason I was brought to Hegel’s side is the relation he sees between religion and philosophy. Whatever reservations we may have regarding the Hegelian solution, he raised a genuine problem, and one, moreover, that does not assume a personal embrace of faith. This refers to the fact that in myths something is said that is not reducible to the domination of nature



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or of human beings, something that does not belong to utilitarian language. This saying signifies the relation of human beings to others, to the entirety of things, to being. There is thus a world of representation. Representation, for Hegel, consists of all the figures. There is a world of figures that give rise to thought. In my own expression: “the symbol gives rise to thought,” I try to think along with Hegel, for he was the first to provide a recapitulation of universal symbolism across all religions, in order to try to extrapolate the meaning of what he called the concept. It remains to be seen whether the meaning of what is said in this “representation” is lost or is found in the concept. However, the entire problem which I pose as the problem of “interpretation” is a problem that was clearly seen by Hegel in the chapter on “Religion” in the Phenomenology of Spirit and at the end of the Encyclopedia.

Resistances This has been everything that has led me to Hegel. I would like to conclude – but humbly, in the presence of the immensity of Hegel’s genius – with the points of invincible resistance I experience in confronting Hegel. 1. Just like all non-Hegelians, my question will concern absolute knowledge. I want to present a strong version of this argument because there are some weak versions of it. It has been said, for example: Could Hegel have imagined in 1821 that history would end with him?1 Hegel was not stupid: he knew that human history would continue after his death! But, for him in 1821, the experience of human history had become sufficiently clear for its fundamental meaning to be stated: this experience is meaningful and this meaning can be read. Hegel was convinced that his era had seen the happy convergence of three cultural phenomena. First, the fact that, thanks to the eighteenth century, to the Aufklärung, the human project had become clear; it is the project of freedom, what Hegel termed the spirit certain of itself. The spirit knows what it wants, it wants itself. This appeared, and now we know it, because all of history has led to this point of clairvoyance and lucidity with respect to the self. Next, the political experience opened by the French Revolution allows us to say what it is to live in a State (even if this State failed with the Terror and led to Napoleon). Something appeared, in particular thanks to Rousseau: a human being is truly a human being only as a citizen. One becomes a citizen by signing the social contract

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with every other human being. Even if we do not as yet have a State worthy of the name, we all seek it because we know what it is: a State in which we would encounter ourselves, in which we could say of this State, that we were the ones who willed it. Finally, the religious experience of humanity was clarified by the Reformation and eighteenth-century liberal Protestantism. In a certain manner, the religious person has become transparent to himself or herself, has left superstition behind, etc. This threefold increase in meaning through rational experience, which is the experience of freedom, political experience, and religious experience, henceforth allows us “to say,” to totalize. If we want to attack Hegel, this will not be by reproaching him with having believed that he is the end of history. In a sense, every person is at the end of history, because one is always at the moment of taking stock of oneself, and because this can always be done in a rational way without leaving out fundamental experience. It is always possible to recapitulate meaning at a given moment, and Hegel would say to us: Develop the Hegelian system today! It would not be the same, because new experiences have appeared, but this would be an articulated meaning. So, if we want to cast all of this into doubt, our doubt has to be more incisive. Here it is: are there not aspects in human experience that are intractable, sometimes insignificant, but often discordant? Think of the civilizations that did not participate in the grand construction Hegel presents, barbarian civilizations, for instance; what would one do with the Incas in the Hegelian system? There remain elements of the insular in human experience, something that cannot be totalized. There is also a sort of break in human experience, which Kant saw more deeply and more clearly than Hegel, and which he called evil, following the Christian reflection on sin. This break is not simply Hegelian negation, something that could be recovered: it poses a problem of regeneration or of conversion, and not of simple transformation in discourse. Finally, there is the event. Whether this be the historical event, the event of an encounter, of a love, or the encounter of each of us with death. Is there not here something that is the contrary of discourse? In the face of discourse, escaping it, is there not something that happens, and something that requires in every instance a unique face-to-face? Kierkegaard and Marx encountered this problem of the relation between the event and discourse, and this problem confounds me personally. This is what turns me away from Hegel and back toward Kant, or rather to certain aspects of Kantianism.



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Next to Hegel, Kant takes on extraordinary grandeur, as the philosopher who reflected on limits (whereas Hegel himself reflected on the totality). Kant obstinately reminds us that human experience cannot be elevated to this viewpoint of the ensemble, of the totality; it is always as situated somewhere, in a kind of perspectivism, that we perceive the ensemble of things. A fundamental task of philosophy is to become conscious of the limits of knowledge. I don’t know what to make of these limits with respect to Hegel, because, for him, a limit is always exceeded: it belongs to the mediation, it always takes us further. But have we not just seen, in intractable reality, in evil, and in the event, that we are constantly experiencing limits? You might say to me: limit or mediation, what does it matter? I think otherwise, because freedom itself requires that we take responsibility for the limits of existence and of knowledge. The philosophical stakes are enormous. Although our knowledge leads us to describe biological, sociological, and other determinations, when I say: “I am free, I free myself,” I hold myself to be responsible. To tie this affirmation of responsibility to a lack of knowledge, to the fact that, in reality, I do not know how I am free, is to reach an impregnable domain. Freedom does not know itself: it desires itself, and it risks itself. With Hegel, we advance toward the security of knowledge; in so doing, he loses this element of risk tied to freedom, which would give renewed value to something I call “hope,” and which I find in Kant. The unfolding of human history does not rest on knowledge, but comes up against the limits of knowledge. If this human experience is tied to the risk of freedom, then I do not know how things will turn out. Perhaps humanity will destroy itself … in any case, there is no guarantee. What Hegel presented as knowledge is perhaps, after all, only the name of hope in disguise. For me, but this is not anti-Hegelian, hope is the conviction that the human being will always be accompanied by language that affords human existing. Human beings will not simply be delivered over to the useful and the utilitarian; there will always be the language of the poet or the thinker, prophetic language. This perspective on the undetermined future, where one risks oneself, is not found in Hegel, since for him the philosopher looks back on the meaning that has accumulated behind him. There is a very beautiful text where Hegel compares philosophy to the owl taking flight at dusk: when the day is done, one takes stock. For him, the philosopher is in no way prophesizing. He is the one who declares: Now we know enough to be able to say that philosophy is a kind of recapitulation. In the same stroke, it is on the order of reminiscence. I wonder whether there is not a function of philosophy tied to the risk of freedom, which

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would be something like a utopian function, a function that would push ahead to project humanity’s free being, tied less to a form of knowledge than to the imagination. To accomplish this, the imagination would have to be rehabilitated as the place where the figures of the realization of humanity are to be found. 2. This has led me to reflect on a philosophical style that is not far removed from that of Hegel, in that it proceeds by means of fascination and distrust. Along with others, I have called this the philosophy of interpretation or hermeneutical philosophy. A certain common project doubtless connects the hermeneutical task and Hegelian thinking: a philosophy of interpretation is serious only if it is quasi-Hegelian, or at any rate only if it is always in debate with Hegel. Along with him, this philosophy has the conviction that human experience is meaningful and is not just absurd. There is also the shared conviction that the meaning of human experience is created through us, but not by us; we do not command meaning, but meaning makes us at the same time as we make it. A philosophy of interpretation has to preserve this reciprocity, which I so much admire in Hegel: substance is subject; consequently, the progress of meaning is a progress of the subject. In the same way, we must persevere in the task of raising our images, our myths, our symbols to the level of the concept and, consequently, gathering all of us together. Heidegger, moreover, has retained this idea that the logos is that which gathers together. And yet, I believe there is an irreducible difference between a philosophical project that would be called a philosophy of interpretation and Hegelianism: interpretation is always a function of the finite. Because I do not know the whole, it is in the midst of things, in the midst of discourses, that I interpret and that I try to orient myself. I remain a finite point of view on the totality. I cannot place myself, like Hegel, in a position from which to see the whole. This manner of rivaling the whole seems to me to be prohibited to philosophical consciousness. In return, interpretation preserves a certain circularity. The one interpreting and the thing interpreted form a circle. When I try to understand my era, I understand it in terms of what I am. But at the same time, what I am is given to me through what I understand. This circle between the interpreter and the thing understood constitutes an insurmountable obstacle. The Hegelian claim would swallow up the point of view of the interpreter. And this claim is unrealizable. The consequence of this, as disturbing as it may be, is that there are multiple interpretations. A conflict of interpretations arises out of a kind of disappointment; faced with the impossibility of forming a system, I always situate myself in relation to others who



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read things differently. This conflictual situation can never resolve itself or be reconciled in total knowledge: we are delivered over into confrontation. All we can do is to conduct this confrontation within the bounds of friendship, within what Karl Jaspers called loving combat, something irreducible to Hegelian knowledge. In conclusion, I freely confess that the philosophy of interpretation will be an unhappy Hegelian philosophy. It is continually motivated by Hegelian problems, by a meditation on Hegel, but it has given up Hegelian reconciliation. What consoles me in saying this is that Hegelianism was perhaps a philosophy of interpretation under the cover of a philosophy of knowledge. I find an indication of this in the fact that when Hegel speaks of absolute truth, he himself knows very well that he is saying this in a given epoch, and that it is in the midst of this epoch that he too is interpreting. There is a constant work of interpretation, consisting in joining human experiences with a moment of logic. This work of correspondence between, for example, master and slave and a certain logical structure is a constant work of interpretation. Hegelian philosophy was therefore perhaps, itself as well, an unhappy philosophy of interpretation. What is important is to determine if there is, as Hegel thought, an hour for philosophizing: his time was perhaps a moment for philosophers, a moment when one could see human experience coming together. Our epoch is perhaps not one for philosophers, and we may be able to attempt only partial interpretations. The happy moment when all of human experience comes together occurs perhaps only a few times in history, and we find ourselves more often in the interval rather than in the fullness of time. We are currently pursuing very partial philosophies, waiting for a new, favorable hour when meaning will be clearer. Today many things are coming apart, requiring extensive critical investigations with respect to our culture and to a certain number of decisions that have been taken in our economic world in the form of capitalism, in the form of technology or bureaucracy. The critical function for the moment obscures the task, but the task will always be a Hegelian, or quasi-Hegelian, task.

5 Morality, Ethics, and Politics

Was it wise to propose for consideration a relation in three terms – morality, ethics, and politics – instead of the classical binary relation: morality and politics, or the equivalent, ethics and politics?1 Yes, I think so. The distinction between ethics and morality is justified not only on the personal level but, as I am attempting to show, on the institutional level as well, and, more precisely, on the level of political institutions. I readily grant that a certain lexical arbitrariness is inevitable here, since the first term comes from Greek, the second from Latin, and both of these refer to a common phenomenon – mores. However, if the choice of words can be challenged, the distinction implied, it seems to me, cannot. We need a word to express, following Spinoza (who designates his master-work by the term Ethics), the entire course of a human life from the most basic effort to persevere in being all the way to the accomplishment of this task in what can be called, in accordance with the convictions of the ones or the others, desire, satisfaction, contentment, happiness, beatitude. For my part, to designate this deep level of moral life, I have borrowed from Aristotle the least determinate expression, “the wish for the good life.” Speaking of wishing, what is put into play here is simply an optative, not yet an imperative. Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, and Nabert would all agree on this point. However, we also need another word to designate the relation, in terms of a law or a norm, of what is permitted or forbidden. The law and the norm introduce the two features, universality and constraint, that well



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sum up the term, “obligation.” I therefore propose to reserve the term “ethics” for the order of the good, and “morality” for the order of obligation. I will not take the time here to justify philosophically the recourse to two sorts of predicates applied to actions and to their agents, the predicate good and the predicate obligatory. I will limit myself to a single argument: if the wish for the good life is more radically inscribed in us than, let us say, the prohibition of murder or lying, an ethics cannot do without morality – the optative cannot dispense with the imperative. And this is because of the violence inflicted by one human agent on another agent, who becomes the patient and potentially the victim. In short, there is evil, a harm committed by someone at the expense of another, and, for this reason, the optative of living well cannot dispense with taking into account the imperative of duty, negatively in the form of interdiction or positively in the form of obligation. The following study will place the main emphasis on the reference of the political to the ethical level, without thereby omitting the critical agency of the norm, without which the political would be cut off from an essential dimension.

[The Capable Human Being] The reference of politics to the ethics of living well would be confirmed if we were able to show that the human being is fundamentally defined by powers that will reach their complete actualization only in the field of political existence, in other words in the framework of a polis. In this respect, reflecting on the capable human being seems to me to constitute the anthropological preface required by political philosophy. A brief examination of the constituent elements of what can be called individual or personal identity will help to understand this. This content is manifested by the series of responses to the questions implying the personal pronoun “who”: Who is speaking? Who has performed this or that action? Whose story is recounted in this narrative? Who is responsible for this damage or this infraction? Answers to these questions involving “Who?” stack up to create an edifice that culminates in the ethical capacity par excellence, that of a subject to whom actions placed under the predicates of good or bad can be imputed. The question: “Who is speaking?” is the most basic one, inasmuch as all the others imply the use of language. Only

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someone capable of designating herself as the author of her statements can give an answer to this question. The theory of speech acts has accustomed us to approach language from the angle of a pragmatics of discourse; the approach, however, must not stop with a theory of statements but move back to the speaker capable of designating herself. The second stage in the constitution of selfhood (ipséité) is introduced by the question: “Who is the author of the action?” The transition is supplied here by the simple fact that speech acts are themselves types of action. As these are practices, like professions, games, the arts, neither the question “What?” nor the question “Why?” – and so neither description nor explanation – can exhaust the investigation of the sense of an action. There is still the need to designate the one who does something for certain reasons as being the agent to whom the action can be ascribed and, on this basis, morally and legally imputed. The tie between the action and its agent is not something that could be observed; it is a power that the agent believes herself to be fully capable of exercising. This attestation will appear later on as the cornerstone of the reconstruction of the idea of the political subject. We enter a new stage in the constitution of a capable subject with the narrative dimension of identity. The notion of narrative identity, which I have worked on for a long time, seems to me to constitute the indispensable link between the identity of a speaking subject and the identity of an ethical-legal subject. The principal reason is that narrative identity takes into account the temporal dimension of existence, which had not previously been thematized. Now, it is in the various forms of narrative – the narrative of daily life, historical narrative, or fictional narrative – that a life is gathered up and recounted. The ethical subject is constructed upon this threefold base – linguistic, practical, narrative. Although it is first of an action, of a practice, that we say it is good or bad, the ethical predicate applies reflexively to the one who can designate himself as the author of his words, the agent of his actions, the character in the narratives recounted about him or by him. In this reflexive movement, the subject places himself within the horizon of the idea of the good, and judges his actions – or allows his actions to be judged – from the standpoint of the good life toward which these actions tend. In short, only a subject capable of evaluating his actions, of formulating preferences related to the sense of the good and bad predicates, hence of introducing a hierarchy of values when it is a matter of choosing between possible actions – only a subject such as this can hold himself in esteem.



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[From the Capable Subject to the Historical Subject] What we now have to demonstrate is that it is only in society and, more precisely, only in just institutions, that a capable subject becomes an acting subject, an existing subject, an historical subject. If there is no difficulty in bringing to light the contribution of the other-than-self on each of the levels of self-constitution, it is of greater importance to our reflection to introduce within the very notion of the other the distinction between another who is made manifest by her face (and so susceptible of entering into interpersonal relationships, the model of which is friendship), and a faceless other, who would be a third party, constitutive of the political bond. The critical point for a political philosophy is really the moment when the relation to others, as it multiplies, gives way to the mediation of the institution. It is not with the duo: I-you that we should stop; we have to advance to the third party: I-you-the third party, or each one. It is easy to repeat the step-by-step constitution of the identity of the self from the standpoint of this third party. It is first in the situation of interlocution that a subject of discourse can identify herself and designate herself. To a speaker in the first person there corresponds a recipient in the second person. The moral, legal, and political implications of this polarity are noteworthy, inasmuch as the positions of the speaker and the listener can be exchanged, while the interlocutors themselves cannot be substituted one for another. When I say you, I understand that you are capable of designating yourself as an I. The mastery of personal pronouns has been achieved only when the rules of this exchange have been fully understood. And this full understanding, in turn, provides the basic condition for the emergence of a legal subject, member of a political body. Like me, the other can designate herself as I when she speaks. The expression “like me” already implies the recognition of the other as my equal in terms of rights and duties. But verbal exchange – better termed, sharing words – is possible only on the basis of the institution of language as the collection of the rules of exchange and of sharing. Each of the interlocutors presupposes this as the social condition of every speech event. To express this better in other words, the social condition makes the “you” an “each one,” when the rules of our language include innumerable recipients only an infinitesimal minority of whom are susceptible of entering into a relation of friendship. In this respect, writing has the function of performing this shift from the “you” in friendly

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exchange to the third party in limitless virtual communication. To be sure, the institution of language is not in itself political. But we know that a bad political regime can corrupt verbal communication by a systematic recourse to flattery and to fear, and a constant invitation to lies. Action, in turn, as it is executed, presents a comparable tertiary constitution, which again illuminates the mediation of the institution. We evoked earlier the confidence I can have in my power to act as an agent. This confidence, this attestation, shifts from me to the other and returns from the other to me. I am aware that I can and I believe that, like me, you too can. And it is you who, by having confidence in me, in counting on me, help me to remain a capable subject. But this recognition of an equal capacity on the part of other agents, engaged as I am in various kinds of interactions, requires the mediation of rules for action, which we see clearly at work in professions, the arts, or games. These rules constitute standards of excellence allowing us to measure degrees of success or accomplishment in individual enterprises. These standards of excellence permit characterizing, for example, the profession of physician by the rules that define a “good” doctor. Just as writing establishes a gap between the “you” of friendly exchange and the third party of unlimited communication, various orders of social systems insert themselves between the action segments of the participants in every cooperative undertaking. Following Jean-Marc Ferry in Les Puissances de l’expérience,2 we can place the largescale organizations that structure interaction under the apt title of “orders of recognition”: technological system, monetary and fiscal systems, legal system, bureaucratic system, media system, pedagogical system, scientific system. It is initially as one of these systems that the democratic system comes to be inscribed in the series of orders of recognition (we will return later to this point, which can give rise to a paradox). The fact that recognition is what is at stake in this organization is something that must not be forgotten when facing a systemic abstraction that banishes any consideration of peoples’ initiatives and interventions as they confront these systems. Inversely, if the organization of social systems is the mediation required for recognition, this will have to be confirmed in the encounter with communitarianism, and its purported dream of rebuilding the political bond based on the model of an interpersonal bond illustrated by friendship and love. One might doubt that narrative identity would present the same tertiary structure as discourse and action. But it does. Life stories are so entangled with one another that the narrative each person



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creates or receives of his or her own life becomes a segment of those other narratives which are the narrative of others. Nations, peoples, classes, communities of all kinds, can then be considered as institutions that recognize themselves, each for itself and all for one another, by their narrative identity. It is in this sense that history, as historiography, can itself be considered to be an institution destined to manifest and to preserve the temporal dimension of the “orders of recognition” we have just examined. We now come to the properly ethical level of self-esteem. We have underscored its contribution to the constitution of a capable subject, capable essentially of ethical-legal imputation, capable of answering for its actions and of bearing the consequences for them, of repairing damages if these acts are incriminated on the level of civil law, and of suffering punishment on the level of criminal law. This capacity defines responsibility in the ethical-legal sense (we will later introduce another use of the concept of responsibility in relation to the fragility of political institutions). Now, the intersubjective character of responsibility taken in this sense is evident. The example of promising will show this. The other is implied in a number of ways: as beneficiary, as witness, as judge, and more fundamentally as the one who, in counting on me, on my capacity for keeping my word, summons me to responsibility, makes me responsible. Within this structure of trust, we find the social bond established by contracts, pacts of all kinds, which give a legal structure to the exchange – giving one’s word. The fact that pacts have to be observed is the principle that constitutes a rule of recognition extending beyond the face-to-face of the person-to-person promise. This rule encompasses all who live under the same laws and, in the case of international or humanitarian law, all of humanity. The vis-à-vis is no longer you, but the third party, remarkably characterized by the impersonal pronoun, each one (chacun). As stated above regarding the institution of language, the political corruption of public pacts contaminates private promises and destroys the fiduciary framework of contracts.

[Politics, the Milieu Where the Ethical Aim is Fulfilled] We have arrived at the point where the political realm appears as the milieu where the wish for the good life is fulfilled. In this way, Aristotle, at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, introduces the political bond as the actualization par excellence of the ethical aim.

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By what means does the political perform this teleological function with respect to the ethical aim? The political has just been described in terms of a spatial image, as a milieu of fulfillment. This metaphor is very suggestive: it directs us toward the idea, dear to Hannah Arendt, of a public space of appearance. The expression conveys a theme from the Enlightenment, the theme of publicity, in the sense of bringing to light, without constraint or dissimulation, an entire network of allegiances within which every human life traces its brief history. This notion of a public space expresses, first, the condition of plurality resulting from the extension of inter-human relations to all those left out as the third party from the face-to-face between I and you. This condition of plurality, in turn, characterizes the desireto-live-together of an historical community – people, nation, region, class, etc. – itself irreducible to interpersonal relations. The political institution confers on this desire-to-live-together a structure distinct from all the systems characterized earlier as “orders of recognition.” With Hannah Arendt again, the term power is used for the common force resulting from this desire-to-live-together, and which exists only as long as this power is actual, as in the terrifying experiences of defeat, when the bond is broken, providing proof by the negative. As the word indicates, political power is, through all the levels of power considered above, in continuity with the power by which we defined the capable human being. In return, it confers on this structure of power a perspective of duration and stability and, even more fundamentally, the horizon of public peace, understood as the tranquility of order. It is now possible to ask what specific ethical value would belong to the properly political level of the institution, and actually constitute the political as institution. Without hesitation, we can answer: justice. “Justice,” Rawls writes at the beginning of the Theory of Justice, “is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”3 The use of the word “virtue” in this context underscores the participation of the political bond in the sphere of interactions belonging to ethical judgment. In my own work, Oneself as Another, I attempted to indicate this commonality by a formula that extends to the political realm the threefold character of the self, of others in the face-to-face encounter, and of “each one” as a third party. According to this formula, the ethical aim consists in the aspiration to a good life (the self), with and for others (the face-to-face), in just institutions (the third party or each one). It will be objected that justice is not a political prerogative, inasmuch as it is the “primary virtue of social institutions,” and so of all institutions. This is true. But justice concerns these other



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institutions only to the extent that they are considered from the standpoint of the distribution of roles, tasks, advantages and disadvantages among the members of society, under the condition of wanting-to-live-together, which makes society a unique cooperative enterprise. Now, society considered from this angle is political society. In this sense, justice, through its distributive character, brings the element of distinction, of articulation, of coordination, which is lacking in the notion of wanting-to-live-together, which, without this important qualification, would give way to a fusional tendency in the relation to others, as is seen in nationalism and other reductions of the political bond to an ethical bond. This aspect of distinction moves to the forefront with the concept of distribution, which, from Aristotle to the Medieval philosophers and to John Rawls, is closely tied to the concept of justice. The term “distribution” is itself important: it expresses the other side of the idea of sharing, the first being the fact of taking part in an institution, the second consisting in assigning to each one a distinct share in the system of distribution. This scope of the field of application of the idea of justice as distribution confirms that this concept is not limited to the economic field as a complement to the concept of production. All social transactions can be considered as distributions of shares. And all these shares are not on the order of market goods but include, for example, positions of authority and responsibility. As Aristotle observed in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, the political community is implied when what is to be distributed are “honors or riches, or other advantages to be divided up among the members of the political community” (V, 5, 1130b 30–33). The ancient link between justice and equality (the Greek isotês) attests to the fact that the demand for justice extends the wish for the good life into the field of institutions and that, at the same time, it begins the transition from the ethical plane to the moral plane of the norm. On the one hand, equality is the political realization of the desire for recognition; we have followed this trajectory from the linguistic plane of interlocution, the plane of praxis in interaction, the narrative plane of life histories, and as far as the ethical plane of self-esteem. On the other hand, the demand for justice calls for the rule of justice, and this, in turn, for the principles of justice. This transition could have been anticipated when we spoke earlier about the “orders of recognition” and their unmistakably systemic character. Equality, however, in which these “orders of recognition” culminate, itself poses significant problems to critical reason. The distinction between arithmetic

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equality and proportional equality, famous since Aristotle, marks the inclusion of the problem of justice within the moral dimension of the norm. This test occasioned by the norm affects all three terms of the tertiary model that has served as our guide here: the self, the other in the face-to-face encounter, and the third party mediated by institutions. This means that we enter into the moral problem of justice only if we have first taken into account the requirement of universalization, by reason of which the self is raised to autonomy, and only if we have introduced at the very heart of the relation to others the universal measure by which what I respect in the other is that person’s humanity. Justice, considered on the normative level, forms a homogeneous series with self-autonomy and the respect for humanity in my own person and in every other. Placed in this way within the context of autonomy and respect, the sense of justice is raised to the rank of the rule of justice, in Perelman’s words, or of the principles of justice, in John Rawls’s words. With regard, more specifically, to the principles of justice, the impulse to formalize the idea of justice can be linked to contract theories, and the development of a purely procedural version in the manner of Rawls. The legitimacy of formalism is not in question here. The real questions are posed beyond this, and do not actually arise unless the appeals for a purely procedural conception of justice have been taken into account. The main question is to determine whether the reduction to procedure, illustrated by Rawls’s two principles of justice, does not leave a residue that cannot be adequately addressed without a certain return to communitarian roots, and to the ethical sense of the social bond. To raise this question is not to deny the legitimacy of procedures of formalization, but to lend an ear to a request to which these very procedures give a voice. If society can, indeed, be legitimately conceived as a great system of distribution, how can we not take into account the real heterogeneity of the goods to be distributed? In particular, how could we not give effect to the distinction between market goods (such as revenues, patrimonies, services) and non-market goods (such as citizenship, security, public assistance, health, education, public services, etc.)? It is the very notion of social goods, presented by Rawls, that gives rise to the question: In what way are these goods, goods? And in what way are they to be distinguished from one another? This question, which involves the entire range of social interactions, restores particular gravity to the question of political power, inasmuch as the State appears as the agent of all the arbitrations required by the competition of rival claims stemming from the heterogeneity of goods: this problem is



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particularly urgent in liberal democratic societies, where the line between market and non-market goods is difficult to trace. It appears that contractual and procedural formalism, in which the normative spirit of public morality is triumphant, cannot help but refer back to a reflection on an understanding focused on the comparative evaluation of the social goods in competition. This understanding can itself be nothing other than an understanding in common, operating on the level of public discussion. And it cannot help but refer back to the respect of persons, and beyond this still formal respect, to selfesteem and to the mutual recognition of persons.

[The Political Paradox] What could prompt us to dispense with this reflection is a philosophy of the State that, without its knowledge, remains Hegelian, in which the arbitrage exercised by the State between what Michael Walzer calls the “spheres of justice”4 would itself escape moral judgment and, ultimately, ethical evaluation. If this cannot be done, it is because the State itself, as power, is a good related to the understanding and the agreement of the members of the political community. What can forearm us to resist supra-ethical exaltation is the constant reminder of the paradoxes affecting the position of the State as power. In the past, on the occasion of a meditation on the “flames of Budapest,” I isolated what appeared to me to be the political paradox par excellence, namely the conflict between form and force in establishing political power. If, with Éric Weil, we define the State as the organization thanks to which “a historical community is capable of making decisions,” this decisional character combines, to various degrees, a rational aspect and an irrational aspect. To the first belong all the features that make the State a Rule of Law: the organization of public powers on the basis of constitutional texts, a check on the constitutionality of laws, legal formalism ensuring the equality of all people in the eyes of the law, honest bureaucracy in service to the State, the independence of judges, parliamentary checks on the government, and, above all, the education of all in freedom through public discussion. Taken together, these features designate the reasonable side of the State. However, there is no way to eliminate from the notion of the State the potentially irrational side of force. Max Weber did not hesitate to include in his definition of the State, “the monopoly of legitimate violence.” To be sure, the adjective “legitimate” prevents confusing the force belonging to the State with violence. But the close tie remains between this force and

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the historical use of violence by the founders of empires and the consolidators of territories. The most rational State, the Rule of Law, retains the scar of violence of those whom Hegel called the great men of universal history. A residue of violence can be discerned in the arbitrary character that ineluctably continues to affect decisionmaking – to employ Éric Weil’s expression – where the decision, in the final analysis, is the decision of someone, of one individual or of several individuals, in whom the sovereignty of a people resides. This arbitrary character is terrifyingly illustrated by the power of some leaders of State to unleash atomic weapons; the power of the State is then the power over death. This paradox of form and force, however, is not the only one, nor perhaps the most fundamental one. Next to it, or at its base, lies a paradox that divides power against itself in another way: namely, the relation between the vertical and hierarchical dimension of domination and the horizontal and consensual dimension of the desire-to-live-together. In our section on ethics, we assumed the belief that power arose solely out of the desire to live together. This does indeed constitute the condition sine qua non of the existence of the political bond. But it is not the sufficient condition. Here too, Weber can help us out. In all social interactions, the political relation arises out of a split between the governing and the governed. For one thing, this divide is the result of the violence we have seen to play a residual role at the very heart of the Rule of Law. For another, more original reason, this divide plays the perhaps unavoidable role of authority, in the sense of legitimacy inherited from earlier powers, as this was illustrated by the transmission of the symbols of power from Caesar to Caesar in the political history of the West. At best, those holding this authority are the Ancients – auctoritas in senatu, potestas in populo; at worst, they are the heirs of the tyrants of old. For millennia, an entire political philosophy consisted in founding the vertical character of the relation of domination on divine transcendence. This poses the question of whether another “theologico-political” structure is possible, one which would assume the horizontal dimension of power and subordinate the vertical dimension of domination to it. Spinoza’s distinction between potentia and potestas points perhaps in the direction of this renewal of the theological approach to the political. The task remains, perhaps fated never to be accomplished, of how to correctly join the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension, domination and power. This task calls for an ethicalmoral reflection on the constituent elements of power. A third figure of the political paradox has been brought to light by a contemporary critic of the idea of justice as unitary and indivisible.



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In Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer dismantles the idea of justice by considering the heterogeneity of social goods, whose distribution is supposed to be governed by a rule of justice. Other is the sphere of nationality, other the sphere of market goods, other the sphere of security and public assistance, other the sphere of education, etc., other, finally, the sphere of political power, where the common good is defined as the public good. Having dismantled the idea of justice, the properly political sphere appears as one sphere among others, inasmuch as power is also a social good, distributed in accordance with rules of its own. There is a paradox, nevertheless, because the State, in possession of this power, appears at once as one sphere among others and as enveloping all the spheres, and, as such, as the regulating agency called upon to prevent one sphere from infringing on another. The work by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification,5 leads to the same sort of paradox, starting from an analysis that emphasizes the plurality of principles of justification in litigious situations. They speak of “polities” and of “worlds,” as Walzer does of “spheres of justice.” In this way, the “civil polity” appears as a polity distinct from the “inspired polity,” the “market polity,” the “polity of fame,” the “domestic polity,” or the “industrial polity.” The critical point, here too, is the line of fracture between the market polity and the civil polity, as they no longer share the same criteria of worth. And, the compromises that are to be made along this border can only be arbitrated by the State, which, as in Walzer, assumes the role of both a part and the whole. This apparent aporia is perhaps revealing with respect to a characteristic malaise of the modern democratic State, which, at the close of the theologico-political era, lost the sacred unction that set it unambiguously above all the spheres of justice and all the principles of justification. The two works to which we have just referred have the merit of confronting us with an unprecedented situation – one unthinkable, in any case, in terms of our republican and Jacobin tradition – namely, that the State, as the source of law, finds itself in the uncomfortable situation of an entity called upon to behave at one and the same time as the whole and as a part, as an inclusive agency and a region included. This paradox strikes at the heart of the very notion of political power.

[Responsibility and Fragility] Why was it so important to pursue this reflection on the connections between the political institution and the ethical-moral reference?

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There is a negative reason and a positive reason. To start with, from a critical standpoint, reflecting on the political paradoxes puts us on guard against hypostasizing the political, as these paradoxes reveal its fragility. Earlier, we followed Hannah Arendt when she contrasted the power stemming from the desire-to-live-together with the fragility of all things human, submitted to the outrage of mortality. We must now speak of the fragility proper to the political, which is reflected in, among other things, the fragility of its concepts (liberty, equality, fraternity…) and in its language (the rhetoric of competition encompassing power!). This critical examination is, in its turn, only the reverse side of the responsibility of citizens, who are entrusted with this fragility of modern democracies, lacking any absolute guarantee. If the fragile constitutes, in every circumstance, the very object of responsibility, as Hans Jonas teaches us in The Imperative of Responsibility, the political, by reason of its own fragility, is placed under the watch and under the care of the citizens. Our meditation thus concludes in a loop. At the start, we asked what sort of subject was presupposed by political philosophy; to this we replied: a capable human being, a being defined by powers that flourish to their full extent only in an institutional milieu crowned by a political system. Political power appeared, in this way, as the condition for the actualization of the powers of the capable human being. Let us call this capable human being actualized by the political system, a citizen. The circle with which we wish to conclude consists in the following: political power, by reason of the fragility revealed by the paradoxes of power, can be “saved” only by the vigilance of these same citizens, which the city has, as it were, engendered.

6 Responsibility and Fragility

I would first like to thank you for inviting me to commence the activities celebrating the centenary of the AEPP [Association des étudiants protestants de Paris] with this talk. You have asked me to respond to the question of the sense that history might still have in light of its tragic aspects, or, to speak of this without expressing my opinion on the notion of the tragic, in light of the incredible forms of violence witnessed in this terrible twentieth century. Please allow me to make two adjustments to the question you addressed to me. First, allow me not to attack the intimidating theme of the sense of history head on, but to hold this in reserve until the last minute, until the end of this discussion. I prefer to start instead with the general theme of our meeting: What is our responsibility today in the world we live in? If I prefer to begin in this way, it is because I believe I can say something straightaway about responsibility. And it is also because the path that would lead from a sense of history to our responsibilities, and would then find a justification in this alleged or presumed sense, has become uncertain, perhaps unfeasible for us; whereas the narrow path from the sense of responsibility to the sense of history is still open, doubtless at the price of a full-scale revision of what was understood in the past by the “sense of history.” The second adjustment I am suggesting is minor but not unimportant. Today we misuse the expression “the tragic consciousness of history” tossing it about willy-nilly, to include large-scale natural disasters, the unexpected or early loss of a loved

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one, along with major conflicts in which human beings aggravate the situation and precipitate catastrophe – this last use of the word being closest to the Greek origin of tragedy. In order to avoid this equivocation, I prefer to speak here of the fragility inherent in the public exercise of human action rather than the tragic nature of action, despite an important kinship between the two phenomena. This kinship consists in the fact that the fragile, like the tragic, arises out of a conflict between people of quality, whose very greatness puts them in conflict. All the examples we will be considering put into play the worthiness, not the pettiness of human agents; in addition, the fragile, like the tragic, reveals in the very qualities that are in conflict through the actions of the protagonists a sort of stubbornness in finiteness, an isolation from the other. The great difference, however, between the fragile and the tragic lies in their specific relation to responsibility. The tragic evokes a situation in which a human being becomes painfully aware of a destiny or a fate that weighs on his or her very life, nature, or condition. The “fateful” or “destinal” dimension of the conflict makes this conflict unavoidable, and makes the “collision” – to borrow Hegel’s expression in his Aesthetics – end in the mutual destruction of the protagonists. Fragility does not involve this faculty by which the adversaries contribute to their defeat through the very efforts they deploy to stave off the disastrous outcome. Fragility instead calls for action by reason of an intrinsic tie – which we will now show – to the idea of responsibility. But we should perhaps not forget this disturbing kinship with the tragic, whenever the most wellintentioned human actions appear to aggravate the harms they claim to cure. The tie between fragility and responsibility – a tie I have just called intrinsic – can be demonstrated starting from the very idea of responsibility. Following Hans Jonas in The Imperative of Responsibility, I would say that responsibility has the fragile as its specific counterpart, that is to say, at once what is perishable due to its natural weakness and what is threatened by the blows of historical violence. The philosopher calls this a principle because it directly expresses an imperative which nothing precedes; we discover this principle as it is enveloped in a feeling, a feeling that affects us, touches us in our original condition on the level of a fundamental human sentiment. We feel that we are solicited, enjoined by the fragile, in the multiple figures that we will invoke a little later – enjoined to do something for …, to bring assistance, of course, but more than that, to promote growth, to foster accomplishment and flourishing.



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The force of this sentiment consists first in the fact that we are made to recognize a situation that exists, but should not exist. The imperative merges with what we perceive as deplorable, unbearable, inadmissible, unjustifiable. You see, when a child is born, by the very fact that the infant is here, there is an obligation to do something. This fragility makes us responsible. Now, what does it mean to be made responsible? This: when the fragile is not something but someone, as will be the case in all the situations we are considering – individuals, groups, communities, even humanity – this someone appears to us to be entrusted to our charge. We are charged with this responsibility. But take note: the image of a charge, of a burden that one takes on, should not make us neglect the other component stressed in the expression “entrusted to our charge.” The fragile, who is someone, is counting on us, waiting for our help and our care, and trusting in our action. This bond of trust is fundamental. It is important that, before suspicion, we encounter this bond as intimately tied to the request, the injunction, the imperative. As a result, in the sentiment of responsibility we feel that we are made responsible for … by … Let’s stop here to measure the gap that separates an analysis of responsibility introduced by the relation to the fragile and a more traditional analysis in which responsibility consists in being able to designate oneself as the author of one’s own actions. This definition has not, of course, been abolished. If we were not capable, after the fact, of retrieving the course of our actions in a brief recollection and assembling them around a pole that we say is us, the authors of our actions, then no one could any longer count on us or expect that we would keep our promises. But following in the train of action, notice how short-term this notion of responsibility is: first, it is turned toward the past, not the future. And this continues to be true even when we maintain we are ready to repair the damage caused by our actions (this is the definition of responsibility in civil law), or when we assume the penal consequences of unlawful actions (this is the definition of responsibility in the penal code). To be sure, the consequences that have been assumed already include a slice of the future in relation to the acts themselves. But these consequences, too, have already occurred at the time the sentence is passed; in this way, we are always pulled back, toward retrospection. This differs significantly from the call that comes from the fragile. The question is then: What are we to do with this fragile being, what are we to do for her, for him? We are now directed toward the future of a being who has to be helped to survive, to grow. And this future can be very distant from

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our present, as in the cases Han Jonas considers, essentially involving threats to the environment, to the ecosystem within which the human adventure unfolds. The imperative that requires us to act in such a way as to ensure that humanity will continue after us, guides us in the direction of a future as vast as the distant effects of our technological interventions. I will not go into the examples chosen by Jonas here; I am merely noting the situations he has considered. This is not, however, the most significant reversal. The capacity to designate oneself as the author of one’s actions is affirmed – or better, attested to – in a relation of a self to itself: I … myself, you … yourself, he … himself/she … herself. The call, the injunction, the trust as well, coming from the fragile person, establishes that it is always an other who declares that we are responsible – or better, an other who makes us responsible, or as Levinas says, summons us to responsibility. By counting on me, the other makes me responsible for my actions. I will not allow myself to be sucked into the sterile debate over which comes first: the capacity to designate oneself as the author of one’s actions, or the call of the fragile. Let us say that a capacity has to be awakened in order to become real and active, and that it is in the milieu of otherness that we become actually responsible. Inversely, once the other signals her confidence in me – or as we say, trusts me – what she is counting on is precisely that I will keep my word, that I will behave as an agent, as the author of my actions. Let’s say no more about this contentious chapter. Isn’t this ultimately a matter of mutual recognition, of recognition in which the other would cease to be a stranger and instead be treated as my counterpart, in accordance with our fundamental similarity as human beings? Having arrived at this point, we can no longer hide behind generalities and delay the moment of sketching out something on the order of a typology of the fragile, essentially of the fragile human being, in the field of public practice.

Rival Cities Let’s consider, to begin with, the level of civil society, which we are not confusing with political society, defined essentially by the institution of the State and by the exercise of power associated with it. Today sociologists, economists, and political scientists are paying close attention to the permanent nature of conflicts on the level of the organizational and institutional structures of civil society. It is



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not enough to say that conflict is permanent – rather, it appears to grow in proportion to the increasing complexity of social structures. I will be referring here to two important contemporary analyses that accord a strategic position to conflict. The first, Michael Walzer’s analysis in Spheres of Justice, directly relates conflict to the idea of justice and to the treatment of the latter in the abstract, formal, and procedural sense illustrated by John Rawls in the Theory of Justice. Rawls, of course, distinguishes two ideas of justice: equality before the law, on the one hand; and on the other, the equality of opportunity, taking into account the status of the most favored in unequal distributions. Each of these ideas, however, could be said to be unitary in the sense that it presides, in each case, over a distribution in accordance with a single rule – arithmetical in one case, geometrical or proportional in the other, regardless of the things distributed: remunerations, patrimony, positions of authority, etc. The dismantlement of the unitary idea of justice carried out by Walzer proceeds by examining the heterogeneity of the goods to be distributed, a heterogeneity highlighted by the distributive conception itself. This heterogeneity, which we would call qualitative, is apparent in comparing market and non-market goods. Our conviction here is that not everything can be sold, not everything can be bought. Indeed, what about citizenship, this primary good and this primary right, that of belonging to a political community in accordance with certain rules of admission and exclusion? What about health, education, or safety? Or access to public office and, in general, to positions of authority or command? Our societies today are riven by one sphere repeatedly encroaching on another. In addition to inequalities internal to each sphere (in the case of citizenship, for example, difficulties concerning the right to asylum, the fate of immigrants, foreigners’ right to vote, etc.), the most serious conflicts arise between different spheres. Education and health appear at once as market and as non-market goods; both have a cost, although they possess a value other than their monetary price. The compromises arising from these border conflicts are at the heart of European policies, seeking a social market economy, arbitrating between the efficiency, the competitiveness of the market, and the solidarity required to compensate for the inequalities created by the market itself. We find a second type of analysis in the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth. Joining the expertise of a sociologist to that of an economist, the authors explore the conflicts stemming from strategies of justification used by social actors to guide them in situations created by

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their participation in spheres of activity, which are multiple and irreducible to one another, although each is internally coherent. The authors, in this way, arrive at a limited series of models capable of establishing agreement in contentious situations. In each case, these models govern justified systems of action, which are rightly called “polities,” inasmuch as they provide sufficient coherency for an order of human transactions, for a “world,” and inasmuch as things, objects, and systems serve as stable referents for forming a “common world” of experiences unfolding in a given “polity.” Thus, in the “inspired polity” the worth of persons finds favor without any reference to money, glory or utility; this is the polity of marginals, artists, and contemplatives. In the “polity of fame,” worth depends on renown, on the opinion of others; here you find sports heroes, artists, those who make frequent appearances in the media – here, the existence and worth of each person depends entirely on the esteem of other people. In the “market polity” it is the scarcity of certain goods, coveted by all, and the competition of their desires that binds people together. In the “domestic polity,” which includes what Hannah Arendt called “the household,” the values of loyalty, fidelity, and reverence reign. The “civic polity” rests on the subordination of individual interest to the will of all expressed by positive law. In the “industrial polity,” rules of operation that obey higher principles of utility dominate. Fundamentally, the primary importance of this work is its contribution to a theory of conflict and compromise. The large-scale collective entities we have just outlined are the site of two kinds of conflicts. In each “polity,” conflicts result from tests related to establishing worth. In these experiences, various objects that make the “polity” a “world” are taken in evidence; to these internal challenges and legitimations are added the border conflicts between distinct orders. As the authors write: “Everything that makes it possible to construct the worth of a polity can thus be used to deconstruct worths established with reference to other higher common principles, so that the same devices serve alternately for topical composition and critical unveiling.”1 A typology of situations of discord is thus added to the presentation of “worlds” and their foundations of agreement. It then appears that the constraint of justification within a “world” results from this confrontation with the critique coming from the existence of other “polities” ordered in a different way. This theory of conflicts has as a corollary a theory of compromise, which gives the book its point and its bite: “In a compromise, people agree to come to terms, that is, to suspend a clash – a dispute involving more than one world – without settling it through recourse to a test in just



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one of the worlds.”2 In other words, compromises are fragile and poorly grounded. We see how conflict borders on tragedy: Max Weber and Raymond Aron have already reflected on the troubling fact that all the values touted by civil society cannot be satisfied at the same time. However, a conflict escapes the law of tragedy, which, as we said earlier, is collision leading to destruction, inasmuch as it calls for the riposte of a consummate art of negotiation and compromise. In addition, it is within the capacity of persons to identify, in each case, the rules in play, the objects relevant to a given polity, the appropriate tests to be conducted; what is more, they have to borrow the critical weapons from the forms of argument of the neighboring “polity” necessary to challenge the arguments of the “polity” in question. Finally, people have the power to switch from one “polity” to another over the course of time. This capacity to inhabit several worlds is ultimately constitutive of the person; its arm is judgment. This is why the book speaks of justification rather than justice. In this respect, the most important concept in the book would be the concept of the test, or ordeal, the key concept of a pragmatics of judgment. It is here that, for my part, I see the idea of fragility and the idea of responsibility calling for one another, or, as Hegel would say, passing into one another.

Paradoxes of the Political To the extent to which political society is irreducible to civil society, it has its own sources of fragility and summons its own ripostes of responsibility, which, in each case, are related to the central phenomenon of power. I would like to underscore two sources of conflict at the root of the political. First, in the course of history, power as such comes out of the encounter of two major lines of force: on the one hand, the violence of masters, conquerors of territory, inveiglers of inheritances, oppressors of ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities; on the other hand, the institutionalization of this founding violence under the pressure of judicial rationality. At this point of equilibrium, characteristic of the Rule of Law, political power can be defined as both force, invested with legitimate violence, and form, as it submits itself to the constitutional rule in accordance with which its founding violence has been humanized and institutionalized. The Rule of Law is situated in the space between these two extremes, the initial, founding violence and the residual violence that can be seen

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in operation in the police force, which has taken in hand this residual violence as citizens have progressively been stripped of the power of revenge, expropriated, in a sense, from private relations of violence. This is the first form of fragility belonging to political power, its institutional and constitutional fragility, so to speak. A second source of fragility comes from the intersection, on the level of power, between a vertical relation of domination/ subordination and a horizontal relation constituted by the desireto-live-together of an historical community. The intersection of these two axes constitutes a second source of fragility, insofar as the authority resulting from the hierarchical relation tends to mask, even inhibit and repress, the desire-to-live-together, the true source of power. The ultimate fragility is that of the desire-to-live-together, which, unknown to itself, is founding, recognizing itself only in times of danger – the country in danger! – and more painfully in the defeat [la défaite], when, as the word indicates, everything falls apart [se défait]. What falls apart in defeat is the bond of cooperation, something so hidden and deeply buried, it is as if forgotten. And yet it is onto this bond that the relation of domination is grafted, which functions well only thanks to what La Boétie called “voluntary submission.” It is on this point that fragility borders on tragedy. It falls short of tragedy, however, once the competition between the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension is taken in charge by the political responsibility of citizens, whether individually or as a body. This fragility specific to power has to be taken in charge once we no longer know of any political regime without a State. Whence the paradox of the political: the polis, in the broadest sense of the word, is the living organism capable of conferring duration, permanence, on all things human, in themselves so ephemeral, so fragile. Now, to this fragility, entrusted to the polis, political power adds its own fragility. We would like to have the horizontal tie of cooperation engender and nourish the vertical tie of domination, but if the political bond were reduced to the desire-to-live-together, it would be even more fragile than all the social ties delivered over and entrusted to it. An additional source of fragility is found in the nature of the modern democratic State. Besides the fact that it draws its sovereignty only from a virtual pact – theorized by Rousseau as the social contract and thus raised to the rank of a fictional act of foundation – the most widespread variant of democracy is, as we know, representative democracy. Now, the latter is shown to be increasingly fragile when my elected representative, held in principle to be my



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alter ego, once elected proves to be part of a different world, the political world which obeys its own gravitational laws. No doubt this symptom of fragility afflicting the only known form of democracy – at least in the West – is profoundly connected to the very paradox of democracy, namely that it stems from a self-foundation whose authority comes only from itself. In the same stroke, the bond of trust underlying the fictional compact of the political contract alone bears all the weight of the vertical and horizontal relations of power. It is impossible to enumerate the points of weakness, the cracks in the fallibility of the political realm. I have evoked elsewhere the fragility of political language, forced by its dependence on rhetoric to oscillate between rational argumentation and sophism, which proceeds by seduction or, worse, intimidation. I have said enough about the internal tensions that bring the fragility of political action to border on the tragic, in the sense of Greek tragedy. Nor is it by chance that Greek tragedy unfolds in the arena of figures of power in conflict. Nevertheless, it seems to me that I have, at the same time, pointed out the place of responsibility, inasmuch as this is also the very place of fragility. Let us consider things in reverse order. I will begin with responsibility on the level of language. The responsibility here proves to be, in particular, that of intellectuals: it is their job to clarify the confused notions of political rhetoric, to raise them, as far as is possible, to the level of the concept, to shed light on the stakes involved, to show the ties between properly political choices and choices to be made on the level of civil society through the conflict of the spheres of justice, the competition between the “polities” and the “worlds” we inhabit through our multiple roles. But this is not only the responsibility of the intellectuals: more important is the responsibility of the citizen. The citizen has to know that the great polis is fragile, that it rests on a horizontal tie constitutive of the desire-to-live-together; in short, the citizen has to link public salvation to the vitality of community life, where the desireto-live-together is regenerated.

International Society Today we can no longer limit ourselves to the confrontation between civil society and political society. We now have a new entity to deal with, one that needs to be created more than simply recognized; by this I mean the post-national State, which is being sought in Europe and perhaps in other places. I will not linger here on the problem

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of the political institutions to be created, although this is significant. The problem is serious, though, if we do not want to repeat on the higher level, that of so-called super-nationality, the well-known structures of the Nation-State. The properly political question is certainly unprecedented, but it is to the degree that it is unprecedented that it calls for reflection on the ethical and spiritual conduct of individuals, intellectuals, cultural figures as well as societies of thought, churches, and other religious communities, susceptible of contributing to the political imagination this calls for. It would be wrong to believe that the transfers of sovereignty to the benefit of political entities yet to be invented could succeed on the formal level of institutions, unless the will to make these transfers took its dynamism from the transformation of mentalities. The problem posed is rather well known. Very broadly, it is a problem of combining identity and otherness on the many levels that have to be recognized. Here is the new region of fragility in which we are involved today. As a quick orientation in this potentially tragic zone of conflict, I thought I would test several models of integration, susceptible of guiding responsible forms of conduct in what I have called the new region of fragility. There is much to say about what we can call the translation model. It is well to recall here that language (le langage) exists only in [natural] languages (les langues). It displays its universality, then, only in the act of translating. Now, translation is not simply a factual transaction that is more or less successful, it is a requirement in principle; in this respect, a universal principle of translatability can be invoked. We posit that every language is, in principle, translatable into every other language. This is the presupposition of those who deciphered hieroglyphics and of all professional or amateur translators. Moreover, translating is a spiritual act; it consists in transporting oneself into the linguistic domain of another, residing with the other, and bringing the other back into one’s own home as an invited guest. I will call this linguistic hospitality. This is the first way of bearing responsibility for language amidst the fracture of languages. This model, however, presupposes a second one, which in a sense underlies it; this is the model of the exchange of memories. What is to be shattered here is the principle of closure, always susceptible of contaminating what I call narrative identity. It is always important to remember that we are caught up in the stories of others, in stories which themselves are multiple, told by others about themselves and by others about ourselves. The task of exchanging memories comes from this. It is a matter of assuming, through imagination and



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through sympathy, the stories of others recounted in the life histories concerning them. This requirement is far-reaching; it requires us to learn to tell our own story differently through the narratives that others relate about us. This is how memories are readjusted in the readjustment of narratives. This readjustment touches on a sensitive point – the events considered founding events in a nation’s history. A rereading of events like these is required by each of us in light of the stories that others recount. We also have to understand that other people are referring to other founding events, which cannot be substituted for our own, but which are not incommunicable. In this way, at the very root of what we have just called linguistic hospitality, another sort of hospitality takes shape, which can be termed narrative hospitality, consisting in welcoming the history of others into my own history. On the horizon of this effort to revise our own traditional narratives, a third model of mediation, and thus of responsibility at the heart of the fragile, comes into view – the model of forgiveness. Here, we touch on the wounds inflicted on all sides by the grand actors of world history. The acting have all been, at one time or another, the suffering. What is important, then, is to start with the suffering of others, imagining their injuries before going on to our own. A question obviously arises here: Can forgiveness be a political category? “Shatter the debt” says the beautiful title of Olivier Abel’s work.3 I grant that here we are on the border between the political and the poetic, but it is good to know that politics, even at its most rigorous, remains political only if the rule of mutual recognition is able, in exceptional circumstances, to accept the infraction of forgiveness, by reason of which something akin to the economy of the gift, with its logic of overabundance, joins together with an economy of reciprocity, and thus an economy of equivalence. I am thinking here of the gesture of Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling at Auschwitz, of President Václav Havel asking the Germans for forgiveness for the shabby treatment of the Sudetenland at the end of the Second World War, of President Anwar Sadat appearing at the Knesset in Jerusalem. It is undeniable that these gestures reply to the fragile with even greater signs of fragility. Protests over the unpardonable, demands for imprescriptibility, suffice to remind us of this hyperfragility. It has to be admitted: with respect to the victims of imprescriptible crimes, which people hold to be unforgivable, there is no wisdom other than to wait for better days when the formulation of the harms suffered by those offended will have exercised its cathartic effect, and when the offenders will have gone to the very

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end of the memory of the crimes committed by their fellow citizens. There is a time for the unforgivable and a time for forgiveness. Forgiveness requires infinite patience. Please allow me to conclude with two questions. The first is this: What happens to the sense of history in all this? I would not say that this question has lost all meaning along the way, but I would say that it has certainly lost a good deal of its obsessional character, becoming once again what it has always been – an open question, but an anxious question, even a paralyzing question. And this is the case because, in order to emerge out of the sentiment of responsibility, the idea of responsibility for the fragile does not require us to know beforehand how to respond to the questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These are key questions, endless questions of gnosis. We must frankly state: in none of the cases considered above has it been important to know where history is going. It is enough that the fragility we have recognized summons us here and now, without any guarantee of success, nor even any immediate effect. I will go further: a certain sense of history screens out responsibility, by giving us the false guarantee that, following a natural tendency, things will move in the right direction by themselves. This perverse effect is definitely perceptible in the idea of progress, inasmuch as this idea tends to rely on the accumulation of knowledge and technology and on an undeniable rise in the level of instruction throughout the entire planet, so that one can expect a cumulative and irreversible improvement on the level of mores. A similar perverse effect can result in a Stoic or Judeo-Christian providentialist theology, under the patronage of Saint Augustine or Bossuet’s “universal history.” And what would have to be questioned here is the reduction of biblical prophecy, of the eschatology of the early Church, and, in general, of the religious theme of hope, to knowledge of the whole of history. I will say something about this in response to my second question. But for now, I am putting it aside, taking it off the level where one would want it to function as a guarantor of success in reaching the ends we are seeking, under the goad of responsibility for the fragile. We have to say that we do not know what will become of our undertakings. And for a fundamental reason: we have no overarching view, no overhang, no bird’s-eye view on what would deserve to be called the “whole of history.” And this by no means excuses us from being summoned, here and now, to responsibility. Here and now? Is this to say that there is no place for any historical sense where the sense of history is lacking?



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I don’t believe I am engaging in mere word play by distinguishing between historical sense and a sense of history. The problems we raised in the preceding three rubrics, despite their fragmentary, segmented, untotalizible nature, present the historical character that I defined in Time and Narrative 3, borrowing Reinhart Koselleck’s categories, opposing the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.” By “space of experience,” he understands the accumulated and sort of miniaturized past in individual or collective memory. By “horizon of expectation,” he understands the projection into a future, more or less distant, of the anticipations and tasks that, retrospectively, give meaning to our initiatives. It is, in fact, initiative – the capacity of human intervention in the course of history – that preserves the polarity between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” and serves as a kind of point of intersection between these poles. An important aspect is the following: by a rebound effect of the horizon of expectation on the space of experience, the meaning of traditions received in heritage never ceases to change; in every tradition there is something living and something dead. The living is what can be reinterpreted, reactivated in new contexts, and so continually decontextualized and recontextualized. This is not all: in the traditions handed down, we find not only unfulfilled potentialities, but also unkept promises, in other words, futures past that have remained, literally, dead letters. In large measure, our utopias, or what we name as such, are tendencies that have been killed off, yet included in our heritage, and in the process of reinterpretation. One example can show this: we see how over the course of centuries the Hebraic model of the flight from Egypt, the Exodus, has been transformed: was it not the justification for the campaigns of liberation by Martin Luther King and for overthrowing the repressive politics of apartheid in South Africa, when it was not the ideology of Zionism? The meaning of founding events remains unfulfilled. This is, moreover, one of the reasons why history cannot be totalized, and perhaps especially not history that has been eclipsed. It holds unexploited, unexplored resources; in particular, the history of the vanquished still remains to be written. (I note in passing that to want to make the history of victims into a system would be the inverse, yet systematic, mistake. Victimization, like evil, is dispersed. It does not constitute a single mass. It is, of course, necessary to give – or rather lend – a voice to the victims; but this must be done differently in each instance. Here, to Auschwitz, there to the gulag, over there to the Indians sacrificed to the Great Explorations, which were great only for another history, the history of the victors.)

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In short, we can only do history by creating narratives; and we must say about the narrative what we say about being, that it can be said in many ways! So, what we have just said about historical meaning, about its bipolar structure, about the exchanges between the horizons of past and future, should be applied to each of the entities or instances encountered in the preceding analyses. We would then see in what sense, in each case in a different manner, the figures of the tragic, or as we have said, more precisely, the sources of fragility, are also the sources of history, in the sense of “making history.” My second question is the following: What becomes of hope in all this? You may say that this word has not been uttered: haven’t I, in fact, sacrificed hope when I gave up on the meaning of history? Well, I would like to say in a few words in what sense we can speak of a hope that would be disconnected from a purported meaning of history. I will not limit myself to the argument, actually a very strong one, that a knowledge of history would dispense with hope. I will not limit myself to this argument because it might make you think that hope always comes to occupy a slot left empty by knowledge of the meaning of history. Now, I do not by any means believe that hope and the meaning of history occupy the same place, positively or negatively. Where, then, is the place for hope? It is perhaps too lengthy to state here, but I will risk a few minutes on this. Despite the late hour, I propose to make a detour by way of the pair love/justice (I am encouraged in this by what I said earlier about forgiveness on the international level). Love is not an ethical virtue. It constitutes the poetic dimension and, in this sense, the supra-ethical dimension of human action. Poetic, in the sense that it is expressed poetically (think of the Beatitudes and the Hymn to Love4 in the Epistle to the Corinthians), and, in addition, it is seen poetically (think of the excessive, hyperbolic actions tied to the suffering Servant in Second Isaiah, of the extravagances of Jesus’s parables, of the impossible invitation to love one’s enemies in the Sermon on the Mount). In every instance, love opposes its logic of overabundance to justice’s logic of equivalence. A great part of ethics plays out in this dialectic of love and justice. Now, it is to love that hope must be tied, and not to the meaning of history. It is to the extent to which there is something like a dialectic of love and justice that we are able to pose the question of hope and of the place of hope. Because, for me, hope has to do with the vitality of this dialectic between love and justice. The question arises again and again of determining up to what



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point the extraordinary nature of love can infiltrate the ordinary case of justice. This was Kierkegaard’s question in proclaiming the “suspension of the ethical”; this is also the question of the Parables: how to disorient action in order to reorient it? And so, I would like to say that this detour in fini by way of the dialectic of love and justice is not a way of ending in despair (désespoir de cause). It is not in despair, but in hope for all our causes (en espoir pour toutes nos causes). Because, ultimately, what am I hoping for? (Here, I am speaking absolutely personally.) I hope that there will always be poets to express love poetically; exceptional beings who bear witness to it poetically, but also ordinary ears to hear this and to attempt to carry it out. This is what I hope for, without any guarantee or assurance. And so, you will understand in what sense the fate of what has been called poetic inspiration defies any effort to connect it to the presence or absence of a global meaning of history; it can only be connected, in an uncertain and improbable manner, to the islands of meaning and intelligibility that stand out as an archipelago against what the great spiritual figures have called an “ocean of ignorance.”

7 The Paradoxes of Authority

Authority, we have to admit, has bad press these days. It has become almost impossible to make a straightforward defense of authority. So, what else can be done? What I propose to do is to return to certain unavoidable questions which a non-dialectical conception of authority tends to cover over, inasmuch as this conception presents itself as an answer that erases the question. To recover the problematic dimension that has been lost, I propose the following initial paradox: on the one hand, that which authorizes comes from further back than what is authorized; but, on the other hand, the authorization is not without a concealed relation of reciprocity. This initial paradox of reciprocity in dissymmetry opens the way for a series of variations, which we will explore. They all gravitate around this opaque point: something higher authorizes the authority, but this something which authorizes is worthless unless it is recognized. There exists a relation-in-return, through which the authorization is at once founded and founding. Before setting out this paradox, I would like to say a few words about two important philosophical traditions which have dominated moral philosophy and which might appear to dispense with the notion of authority and its enigmas, to the extent that both place the source of authority as close as possible to the agent of action, and so, to us. I am thinking first of Aristotle, whose ethics is rooted in reasonable desire, in the deliberative wish for an accomplished life, for a happy life. The question is whether this wish is capable



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of assuring the complete autarchy of the sage. I am thinking next of Kant, whose key idea in moral philosophy is autonomy, that is, the thesis of the identity of the self and the norm. All that is not autonomy, hence any dependence on another, must be cast aside as heteronomy. Question: Is there nothing to be said in favor of authority without wounding autonomy?

[Reciprocity and Dissymmetry] In responding to the question posed by each of these great moral philosophies, I will consider three themes that together seem to me to constitute the opaque heart of the idea of authority. Moving from the simplest to the most difficult, I will begin with the sense of exteriority connected to the idea of authority. Even though, in Aristotle, desire does indeed appear to be constitutive of our inner being as it relates to life and to action, and likewise, in Kant, practical reason does appear to be internal with respect to itself, the first manifestation of exteriority is the eruption of the other into the field of morality. According to Levinas, it is from the other that the injunction comes to us, in what he terms the call to responsibility. In this way, keeping one’s promise is not simply being right with oneself, out of fear of breaking one’s vow, it is also responding to the expectation of the other. Someone is counting on me, counting that I will keep my promise, and helping me to do this by obliging me to do so. The first idea to be retained is thus the idea of an exteriority tied to the idea of otherness. The second idea to consider is the idea of superiority. With it, we return to our initial paradox, concerning the vertical direction characterizing the relation, command–obey. Here, we touch on an experience of moral consciousness, conscience, which finds its expression in various figures of authority. Authority takes on figures (se figure): the figure of the Greek masters of wisdom, and of the Jewish masters of justice. Generally speaking, one could say that there would probably be no moral life without the exemplarity of the great witnesses of moral life. I am underscoring the word “exemplarity,” which includes an element of long duration and, as a consequence, cannot be mistaken for immutability, as is still the case in the pontifical encyclical The Splendor of Truth, which moves too quickly from the exemplarity of Christ to the immutability of the moral rule. It seems to me that exemplarity contains an historical dimension in that it includes the capacity to confront history, even to engender it, and, for this reason, escapes the alternative

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between the immutable and the changing, an alternative in which moral discussion too often gets bogged down, as if there were only two possible solutions: either eternal, immutable rules or an inconsistent and changing history of conscience. In contrast to this alternative, exemplarity contains a temporal element of perenniality, which does not imply the absence of history but instead, we might say, endurance in history. This remarkable feature is essential for this second component of the idea of authority, the element of superiority. The third constitutive idea, after those of exteriority and superiority, is the idea of anteriority. Here, we encounter the greatest difficulty. We can never, in fact, be certain of the moment when a norm is born. We can revolt against rules, we can also change them – and this is essential to the historical character which is the counterpoint to what has just been said about perenniality – but, to begin with, there is a heritage, first there is a debt. Here, we touch on a strange paradox that will lead us to the heart of the difficulty: there is always a law before the law. Before laws, there is the Law, that is, the whole ensemble of the symbolic field constitutive of our humanity and which, as such, renders the law always anterior to itself. This paradox of moral life has a parallel in other fields adjacent to morality. I am thinking first of all of the political order. In point of fact, the idea of authority has its birthplace in the political realm. This is where the phenomenon of hierarchy clearly manifests itself: above, the governing; below, the governed. Max Weber’s entire analysis of politics begins with the appearance of this hierarchical relation in the social realm. In this way, the idea of authority proves itself inexpugnable. We can invoke in this regard the Latin expression Hannah Arendt liked to repeat: potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu – power is in the people, authority is in the Senate. This signifies that political power is located at the intersection of two axes: a vertical axis and a horizontal axis. On the one hand, power is simply the result of the wish to live together; an historical community continues to exist as long as people actually do wish to live together. When they no longer do, the civil tie is undone (se défait), in the strong sense of the word un-done (dé-faite): one can speak of an historical defeat, un-doing (dé-faite), just as we speak of a military defeat, un-doing (dé-faite). This tragic spectacle of un-doing is occurring in the case of entire peoples, such as in the former Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union. Power can continue to endure only if the horizontal axis intersects with the vertical axis of authority. What then is this auctoritas, this authority, that the



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Latins placed in the Senate? It is clear that the people exist now, inasmuch as they can assemble in the forum, in the agora. But the Senate? Is this an assembly of the ancients? In a sense, yes. But, in another sense, localizing it in this way is misleading. If, in fact, one looks for the historical origin of what Max Weber terms domination (Herrschaft), one is caught up in an endless trail into the past. Never does one find a first. Before one imperium, there is another imperium. As if Caesar were always born of another Caesar, albeit a democratic one. The chain of authority is lost in the darkness of the ages. The truth of this is confirmed as every new power seeks to legitimize itself as a renaissance, a recourse to a power older than itself. Michelet depicts the French Revolution as a zero point in time. But this time did not think of itself as a zero point. It thought of itself as the renewal of the Roman Republic. In this way, there is a renaissance only where there is a repetition of an earlier authority. Which, then, is the first Caesar? Caesars, we were saying, are born of Caesars, but behind the Caesars, there is an Alexander, and behind Alexander, there are the Eastern potentates … Never do we come across a first power. We can now attempt to relate this analysis of the lateral political field back to the moral field as such. What is the significance of this relation of antecedence in the moral field? It is this: the great moral agencies, and the great moral customs, always rest on a foundation that would be, in the moral order, what auctoritas is in the political order. This problem has been encountered by numerous philosophers under the heading of the problem of the legislator. Rousseau, for example, starting from the thesis that the general will is not reducible to the will of the majority, to the sum of individual wills, is led to ask how this general will can relate to our individual wills. He suggests that this can only be through the help of a mediator, the legislator. With the legislator, we come across a major figure of authority, that of the authorized authority. This is a paradox, since the legislator himself receives the law. In our Western Judeo-Christian tradition, the emblematic figure of this paradox is Moses. Here we have the very figure of the legislator, who is the legislator of his people only because he receives the Law. All the narratives relating to Sinai revolve around this knot: Moses receives the Tablets which are first broken, then rewritten, and finally lost. But the origin always remains further back. We thus find on the moral plane an enigma entirely parallel to that just evoked in the political order: here, too, the legislator is always preceded by another legislator.

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[The Foundation Before the Foundation] Another comparison can be made, this time to the cosmic order. There is indeed always a connection between the idea of creation and the idea of legislation, whether in the Bible or in Greek thought, as can be seen in the Stoics, who stress the kinship between the cosmic order and the moral order. Our Judeo-Christian tradition offers an entirely similar enigma to the creation narratives, which never make us contemporaries to an absolute beginning. In this regard, the structure of the creation narratives is particularly interesting if it is compared to the structure of the legislation narratives, such as the legislation of Moses in the Decalogue. There, too, the origin can never be made to coincide with a beginning. We try to date the beginning, to pin it down, but in an endless regression. The origin is always already there, slipping into the past. For this reason, creation narratives vainly attempt to make the origin coincide with the beginning. There is, then, a sort of dialectic of the origin and the beginning. As a result, we are no more in possession of a beginning of moral life than of a beginning of the political order, or of the cosmic order. We can now return to our two great traditions of moral philosophy, those mentioned above of Aristotle and of Kant. We can see in them an attempt to dodge the problem of what can be called the elusive foundation, the foundation before the foundation. In Aristotle, where the ethical principle “appears” to lie within the willing subject, the idea of exteriority returns in the masterful chapters on friendship and justice. The subject is self-founding only to the extent to which he receives the authorization to exist from the other, in a relation of friendship and of justice. Personal identity is constructed in the relation of recognition by the other. In this way, otherness creeps into the innermost core of being. Interiority and exteriority join together in the relation of friendship and justice. But we also find once again the theme of superiority tied to the desire for the good life; for no one produces, in his own desire, the very structure of the virtues that mediate this desire. Throughout the tradition of antiquity, these models of an accomplished life have names. There is the figure of courage, the figure of friendship, of generosity, and so on. The ethical order as a whole is inspired upward in this way by an exteriority-superiority through which desire is pulled up and carried higher than itself. For this reason, in Aristotle, it is very difficult to separate the analysis of moral life, which rests on the desire for accomplishment, from configurations of



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perfection – the virtues, in Aristotelian language – which are carried by a movement of ascension, subordinating moral values to political values, and the latter to the values of contemplation. This attraction from above is characteristic of ethical life, and its own proper organization is not without resemblance to a cosmic order revolving around a God who exerts an attraction without commanding. The most difficult case, however, remains that of Kant. Was he successful in eradicating from the idea of autonomy every element of exteriority, superiority, and anteriority, without these falling under the idea of heteronomy? Let’s try to answer this. Let’s consider the second formulation of the categorical imperative, which enjoins us to treat humanity in our own person and in the person of others as an end in itself and not simply as a means. A kind of exteriority is outlined here, that of humanity in the figure of the other person. In this way, the interpersonal relation prevails over the innermost imperative. The idea of heteronomy proves to be too limited here, just as it was in the case of friendship and justice in Aristotle. The latter place us under the law of the other, in accordance with the law of the expectation [of] the other with respect to us. And moreover, in Kant himself, the very definition of autonomy includes a shadowy region, to the extent that autonomy is, radically, the law one gives to oneself. Now, this synthesis of freedom and law is presented by Kant as a “fact of reason,” excluding any deduction on the basis of a prior principle, as it excludes any historical verification. The structure of the imperative is, in a sense, “given” and so always already there. In this regard, one might think that the criteria of universality applied to the maxims of the will constitute only a controlling rule and not a principle of ultimate foundation. Finally, when Kant is confronted by the question of evil, he is led to meditate on the conditions for a regeneration of free will. An entirely different question from that of autonomy is raised in this way, the question of how a will can be made suitable for becoming the will of a moral subject. Now, how could it be, if the will were not rendered autonomous thanks to an external aid, which would be meaningless unless it were inscribed in a process of regeneration of a will capable of autonomy?

[Authority and Mutual Indebtedness] In the final part of my contribution, I would like to propose a dialectical solution, which will help in conceiving of the external, the superior, and the anterior – the three predicates we have found to be connected to the idea of authority. The question is to know how one

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can achieve, not the contrary of autonomy, but an inner incitement to autonomy, an appeal to autonomy – in short, a component that would not only be compatible with autonomy, but would at once require it, accompany it, even complete it. Let us take up our three predicates again, taking them as traits characteristic of the very idea of authority. What, finally, is exteriority, from a more dialectical perspective, other than the dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy? The decisive point is that the exteriority in the incitement to autonomy never occurs without recognition. Now, there is no recognition without mutuality. In this sense, the most important concept to introduce here is that of mutual recognition. The superiority of the law, in turn, has no meaning unless it too is recognized, and this is evidenced in the experience of the “voice” of conscience. This is a most subtle connection: the recognition of superiority responds to superiority itself. This is the second use of the notion of recognition. We find this paradox incarnated in the relation of instruction constitutive of the relation between master and disciple. This relation, of course, contains a hierarchical aspect, but, at the same time, the superior is superior only as being recognized as such. Finally, what is there to say about anteriority? We could repeat a third time what has just been said about the role of recognition: if it can be said that there is an anteriority in the call of the other with respect to responsibility, it is the response – responsibility – to this call that restores mutuality and a certain equality between the caller and the called. But it is more instructive to introduce a new paradox, namely that the very anteriority of the law is inseparable from the work of interpretation by which it is actualized. The symbolic order as a whole is made productive only by these incessant reinscriptions of the law, which come to justify a posteriori the a priori of anteriority. In this way, it can be affirmed that there is a requirement of autonomy even in the anteriority of the law. To give substance to this paradox, allow me to seek initial support from a Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, the author of an extraordinary book, The Star of Redemption. Speaking of the law, the author explains that it contains in its very meaning something anterior to it, which he calls the commandment. This is a single commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In other words, before the laws, there is the commandment to love. Now, this is the strangest of all commandments, because how can you command a feeling? To respond to this anticipated objection, one has to say, first, that the love commanded is something other than an emotion, namely a disposition of the will and of the entire being; next, and



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this is the most important thing, that the commandment itself has the status of a constituting obligation. This status can be summed up in a formula: fundamentally, love is the source of obligation, love obliges. For commentary on the imperative to love, I call on another Jewish thinker, Hans Jonas, according to whom what we are fundamentally obliged to do is to bring help to the fragile. It is for the fragile that we are essentially responsible. We have a simple, familiar experience of this tie: once a child is born, the infant obliges us to make him grow, to help him grow up. Here, we find ourselves on grounds that can be shared by believers and non-believers. The believer will say, with John, the Apostle: “God is love.” But we can also refer to Eros, after the manner of Plato, even after the manner of Freud in his later writings. Love is the capacity to move in both directions, by climbing and descending along the scale of the erotic, of friendship, and of charity. It is in this relation among the three figures of love that obligation is born. This is the indirect manner by which we are able to come closer to the enigma of anteriority. What constitutes the heart of the enigma and the opacity of the idea of authority is this always-already-there character of what has obliged us. And what it is that has always-already obliged us in this way is love, whether we personify it in a being, or whether we make it into a psychic force or cosmic energy. The formula “love obliges” seems to me most apt to designate the knot that binds the founding order to the order founded. One could go so far as the formula: that to which love obliges us is what I would call loving obedience. It is at this price that authority can be said to require autonomy. I emphasize the verb “require” here; love is not in this respect the substitute for justice, but a demand for more justice, a requirement of something more in justice itself. It is because love is excess to begin with that it can demand that justice be more completely justice, be justice to the end, whatever the cost. By this detour, we thus return to Kant himself, to the extent that love demands first that justice be truly universal and not restrict its range of action to the clan, the ethnic group, etc. In passing by way of the excess of the almost impossible, the universal is summoned to be itself. But at the same time, justice is called upon to be more singularizing, that is, more attentive to the irreplaceable character of persons. This other side of the requirement for more justice results from the dialectic between the norm and the person: solicitude is extended to persons by way of the norm. This is where justice has to become equity, that is, attentive to the singularity of the vis-à-vis in the relation of justice. However, the authority of love can also be said not only to require justice initially, but to accompany justice, by inviting autonomy to

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take its place in a genuinely mutual relation. The path I will use to express this follows Habermas in his determination not to allow the ethics of communicative action to be reduced to a strategic or utilitarian form of argumentation. In order for communicative rationality to be effectively stronger than instrumental rationality, it is then necessary that, in our idea of justice, the feeling of mutual indebtedness win out over the notion of a reciprocal self-interest in preserving ourselves, each of us from the others, as this remains the case in an overly limited conception of justice, which consists in saying: Here your domain stops, there mine begins, and between the two, let’s set the limit of our respective provinces. Faced with the threat resulting from a total fragmentation of the social bond, the idea of justice can only be maintained at its highest level if it elevates itself to a sentiment of mutual indebtedness. In conclusion, I will say that it is in this reminder of mutual indebtedness that the antecedence of authority comes to be expressed in the heart of the will’s self-immanence and in daily life.

8 Happiness, Off Site

When I hear the word “happiness,” an entire skein of themes comes to mind. I will try to untangle these threads. First thread: happiness brings to mind something that I pursue, that we pursue, which, without being within our grasp, is our aim. But, on the other hand, happiness makes us think of a gift, or the luck that befalls us – or not. How, then, are we to separate the bon (good) from the heur (luck, chance) of bon-heur (happiness), the ethical moment from the daemonic (I did not say “demoniacal”)? Second thread: by virtue of a bond that has to be more than an association or, again, more than a simple verbal reversal, happiness (bonheur) calls for a contrary that would be at the same time a companion, an accomplice, perhaps a double, namely: haplessness, misfortune (malheur). How, then, are we to understand in what way the acting person is inseparably a suffering person? Third thread: happiness is the goal of a private vow – may I be happy! – whether I am aiming at it, or whether it falls to me. And yet in a certain manner, with respect to this eminently personal happiness, it is the other who contributes to it or stands in its way, who refuses it to me, or offers it to me. This other, however, is quickly divided into the one who has a face and who enters into personal exchanges with me, giving and receiving, and the one whom I will never see, but who, in the call of justice, keeps me from sleeping at night. How, then, is the experience of happiness distributed along this triad of the proper, close relations, and distant others?

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I have chosen to follow the third thread: it is in following this course, which closely resembles a flight forward, that I believe I am respecting the title of our talks: the sites of happiness (les lieux du bonheur) – and the title of my contribution: happiness, off site (hors lieu). Perhaps it will also turn out that by following the relocation of happiness from one site to another, we will have an opportunity to link together the themes running through the second and the first of our threads with the three knots in this last thread. In other words, perhaps it will be confirmed that, by moving from what is one’s own, to close relations, and to the distant, the companionship between happiness and misfortune will be tightened and the pair, aim and gift, will take on new force. Finally, we will be led to the intersection of the good and luck, of ethics and daemonics, coming full circle in our course.

Happiness and What is One’s Own It is permissible, at the start, to be a bit Aristotelian, if we want to make sense of the thesis according to which happiness is the achievement, the accomplishment we aspire to as acting beings. We have the right (don’t we?) to offer ourselves a helping of teleological discourse to get started! On condition, however, of refraining, as did Aristotle before us, from identifying human good and Platonic Good, which, as we know, resides above Being itself. In order to do this, it is enough – but this is already a lot and even a great feat – that, at the start, we place the wish for the good life, for living well, at the root of obligation, of duty, of prohibition, in short, that we place the teleology of desire at the foundation of the deontology of the will. This is the first presupposition of a philosophical use of the idea of happiness. Here is the second: that we know how to distinguish the aim of happiness from the partial accomplishments belonging to professions, arts, games, each of which has, in MacIntyre’s expression, its “standard of excellence.” Aristotle asks, is there an ergon, a task, a function for the human being as such, one that cannot be reduced to the success of the musician, the doctor, the architect? In today’s language, expressed, for instance, by Jean-Marc Ferry in Les Puissances de l’expérience: is there a completeness that cannot be analyzed in terms of the satisfactions we are likely to obtain (with a little luck – luck, we will return to it!) in one or another of the “orders of recognition” (this is Ferry’s expression), namely, the multiple social systems and the interventions in them through which we seek satisfaction? At this stage



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of our investigation, happiness – private happiness, one’s own happiness – would be the accomplishment of the one who can pass through walls, that is, who is capable of circulating between what Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot call the “orders of worth” – crossing the borders of the “polities,” of the “worlds” among which social space is distributed. Now, it is precisely the appeal to this undivided, complete satisfaction – beyond the local, commonplace, partial satisfactions – that, in its course, runs up against misfortune. In our culture, this crossroad is marked by the confrontation between ethics and tragedy. I have paid homage elsewhere to Martha Nussbaum’s work The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. In what does this fragility consist? And what sort of luck is at issue? We think, of course, of the ordinary misfortunes of the human condition: illness, suffering, old age, death. To these we can add, no less banally, the obstacles encountered in the exercise of everyday practices, the occasional activities in which we seek satisfaction. This is certainly not insignificant, especially if, in the parade of practices, one does one’s part, in the professions, the arts, and games. It is, in fact, the ludic component of our activities that we most readily connect with the idea of luck. Now, why would luck in games not serve as a marker for the risks to success in all behaviors relating to practice? But, given this, we still have said nothing about the fragility of goodness itself, not in the sense of the virtue of kindness, or benevolence, but in the sense of living well, aiming beyond ordinary practices. If there is a tragic phronein – the word returns repeatedly in the tragedy of Electra – a phronein capable of instructing moral phronesis, the virtue the Latins translated by prudentia, it is to the extent that this phronein comes out of the fearful and pitiful spectacle of fallen grandeur. The tragic, let us remember, is born out of the confrontation of protagonists who are engaged body and soul in the service of spiritual imperatives, turned antagonistic by the narrowness of the heroes’ respective engagements. Is this tragic character not displayed in filigree in what could be called the moral extremism inherent in the very appeal to a form of happiness that would exceed its pocketbook’s small change of partial satisfactions? Yet, can this extremism be avoided, when one wants happiness? It has been said: Without passion, nothing great is accomplished! Of course, passion wants everything. This is what causes its misfortune, what causes the suffering of wantingto-be-happy. Must we, then, renounce happiness and settle for satisfaction, for small satisfactions? This can be a form of wisdom, the wisdom readily recommended by the ancient chorus. But there

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is perhaps another, less philistine, wisdom that would consist in not wanting happiness, at least not as an indivisible totality, but of welcoming states of happiness as untimely fulgurations… We will speak more of this later. Let us first follow our thread and move from the first knot to the second: happiness and the other.

Happiness and Close Relations: Friendship The move we are now making from private happiness to shared happiness – let’s say from what is one’s own to what is other – has nothing forced about it. There is no practice in which a person seeks to excel – and so no “standard of excellence” relative to these practices – that does not involve common evaluations and interactions, from conflict to cooperation. And the tragic nature of action corresponding to the aim of happiness arises, precisely, from the collision of private projects. As for happiness as gift, which we would like to place above happiness as a demand, what would it amount to if it were not shared? This will be our point of departure here. To illustrate this theme at its most seductive, I propose taking as our guide the Ancients’ treatment of philia – friendship – from Plato’s Lysis, through Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, up to the books of the Roman Stoics. If, once again, I give preference to Aristotle, it is because, in him, friendship makes the transition between the apparently solitary aim of the good life and justice, the virtue of human plurality in the political sphere. I will retain a single sentence from Aristotelian ethics: “The happy man needs friends” (IX, 9). Thus, it is by reason of a lack that otherness bursts into the apparently autarkic circle of one’s own aim of happiness. What does the meditation on friendship bring, then, to our discussion? The first reason the relation of friendship is accorded great value in the eyes of the moralists is that it offers a scale of values paralleling those of the goods pursued in the aim of personal happiness. Aristotle, in this way, distinguishes friendships according to pleasure, friendships of utility, and friendships based on the good. The last one alone achieves the mutuality of a rigorously reciprocal relation, in which living-together – suzên – completes living-well – euzên – held to crown the private search for happiness. Friendship thus transcends the opposition that the Moderns believe they see between the primacy of the Same and the primacy of the Other. In relation to the debate opened in the Lysis regarding the somewhat



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artificial question of whether one should love oneself in order to love another – the celebrated quarrel of philautia – Aristotle replies that in friendship each person loves the best in himself and, to this extent, is disposed to love the other for what he or she is. Because it was him, because it was me … will be said in echo. What will later be termed recognition is already present in the reciprocity of the Greek philia. Happiness, therefore, is shifted from the private vow of accomplishment to the exchange of giving and receiving. And, precisely, to this displacement now correspond new figures of the pair happiness-misfortune (bonheur-malheur) and of the doublet aim-luck (or gift). Speaking of the misfortunes of friendship, it is just as easy now as it was earlier to evoke the litany of harms that afflict friendships by afflicting friends. But, there is something specific to friendship: it is the death of the other which causes the heartbreak of separation. Beyond this point, the solitude of the greatest sages signifies but desolation, loneliness. There is more. The death that will one day separate us is not just an event that has not yet occurred; its shadow extends before this end in the figure of unparalleled fear: “I fear for you!” To this fear, Heidegger’s well-known anticipatory resoluteness has no response – even supposing that it does reply appropriately to the anxiety attached to one’s own death. Fear for the other is not anxiety for oneself. It is with respect to this fear for the other that shared happiness is revealed to be the most fragile of goods. However, if it is true that happiness adds nothing more to friendship than, according to Spinoza, reward adds to virtue – if friendship is, in a sense, happiness itself, then its vulnerability is the very same as friendship itself. Here the dialectic of the aim and the gift returns. Perhaps we must not let go of either one, but cultivate the happiness of friendship and, in this sense, wish it fervently indeed, as long as giving and receiving continues in the exchange of a glance, or the grasp of two hands in agony. Perhaps we must also be able to cherish the moments of happiness in friendship as a gift, all the more precious because they are aleatory.

Happiness and the Distant: Justice Here we are at the third knot in the third thread: happiness and justice. The question now arises, once we have accepted – as I have stressed – that the desire to live in just institutions belongs originally to the deepest ethical level, precisely the level that determines the wish for the good life. The first implication following from

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this connection between the wish for an accomplished life and the demand for justice is the realization that the idea of the other is not limited to the face-to-face relation of friendship (nor to the relation of eros or of agape, for which philia serves here as stand-in). Beyond the other manifested by his face, is the other without a face, but not without a name, the each one of “to each his fair share,” the each one of just shares. The second implication is that this other, which we will call the distant other, distinguished from the close relation and from the neighbor, is connected to every other only through institutions. It is first of institutions that we can say they are just. Here, I am merely evoking the initial definition of justice by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice: “Justice,” he says, “is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”1 Having said this, what becomes of the idea of happiness, no longer confined, in the first instance, to the site of what is one’s own, and a second time, no longer confined to the site of the other in interpersonal relations? I think that here one must be very precise in the conceptual analysis. I will give equal weight to two theses which are irreducible to one another. In a first sense, we have to resist the idea – although, finally, it is Rawls’s own idea – according to which the idea of justice, in freeing itself from the governance of the idea of the good and in taking refuge in the procedure of contractual relations, will have given up on the pursuit of happiness. And resist it for two reasons. First, because the idea of the good returns in full measure with the idea of “basic social goods” (this is Rawls’s expression), the distribution of which is precisely at stake in the great negotiation of the original position, under the veil of ignorance. Attaching to the idea of “basic social goods” is the idea of the satisfaction (or not) of these goods. To be sure, we have said that satisfaction is not happiness, inasmuch as it fulfills partial acquisitions in accordance with the difference among primary social goods. But the idea of “common good” cannot simply be eliminated straight out on the pretext of its controversial nature. Even in authors like Michael Walzer in Spheres of Justice or Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in On Justification: Economies of Worth – the first so attentive to the plurality of spheres of justice and the second so attentive to the polities employing different criteria of worth – the question continues to be posed concerning a “common good” that would be to the social bond of an historical community what primary goods are to the distinct practices relating to them. It is most certainly not mere political or politician-style rhetoric to invoke the public good as the ensemble of the primary social goods to be satisfied. In this regard, it would be difficult indeed to attribute



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a status to the political among all the institutions if one were not to legitimately raise the question of integrating into a common project the partial projects relating to what earlier we called the “orders of recognition.” After all, public tranquility, as the tranquility of order within each State, and perpetual peace on the level Kant defines as cosmopolitan, do deserve to be considered as figures of happiness. Why, then, would we not call public happiness the sentiment shared by the members of a political community on the intra-national and international level, whenever a “state of peace” has been obtained? But there is another aspect to the problem that makes us feel a certain reticence in taking the aim of happiness to be coextensive with the aim of justice. This aspect has to do with the nature of the political, which does not designate one institution among others defined by a good to be shared, but introduces an absolutely specific problematic, that of power. To be sure, power is also something to be shared, but what is no longer to be shared is sovereignty, hence a supreme good in relation to all the basic social goods. What then arises is an idea that we vehemently reject, the idea that a sovereign power could desire to make people happy. A divide opens up in this way between the aim of public happiness as the ensemble of partial social satisfactions, and the presumptive claim of political power to want to make us happy. Even utilitarianism is a good touchstone in this respect. To be sure, it asks each person to subordinate his or her own desires to the good of the majority, but it is, precisely, up to each person to make this sacrifice of the short-term to the long-term, and of the private to the public: it is not up to the political to extort it. It is with respect to this attempt to grant to political power the task of bringing about public happiness that the idea of justice is shown to be antagonistic to the idea of happiness, no longer in the sense of the happiness sought by each person, but of happiness imposed on each person by the sovereign. This deliberately ambivalent attitude toward the relation that could be recognized or established between justice and happiness is reinforced by the spectacle of desolation we find in the course of history, which, once again, spurs us not to dissociate happiness and misfortune and to meditate, ever more intensely, on the fragility of the good life, this time in prolonging a meditation on the tragic character of action, more precisely, of historical action. No political transposition of a theodicy can, in fact, render acceptable the misfortunes lining the path of the history of the vanquished, and among these, of peoples whose fortune was never to have contributed in any way to the greatness of the victors. The fact that the history of the vanquished continues to lack any coordination with the history of

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the victors, attests on the institutional level – which is that of justice – to what we are tempted to call the twin-like nature of happiness (bonheur) and misfortune (malheur). The adherence of historical misfortune to public happiness leads to a search for justice without any concern for happiness, as long as we know of no historical State in which the happiness of some has not been paid for by the misfortune of others. This somewhat cynical remark ineluctably leads us back to our starting point, to the initial equivocation marking the idea of happiness, which opaquely links up with the ethical moment of goodness and the daemonic moment of luck. After the divorce proposed between happiness and justice, what are we to say about this equivocal tie between the will to happiness and the acceptance of luck? Perhaps this: echoing the biblical verse, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice, and everything else will be given to you,” I would say that the test to which the idea of happiness has been submitted, once it has passed through the political screen of the idea of justice, makes us inclined not only to admit the inescapable kinship of happiness and misfortune, but leads us to consider the states of happiness as aleatory states, accorded freely. Allow me to conclude this brief meditation by returning to its title. It speaks of an off site (hors lieu), but not of a without-a-site (sans lieu): happiness is off site with respect to the tense desire for private happiness, off site with respect to the giving and receiving exchanged between friends, and off site even in the quest for justice taken in hand by the sovereign. Happiness is off site, once more, with respect to the desire for an accomplishment sheltered from misfortune. Luck, finally, is off site with respect to the frantic will to make oneself happy. But this off site is not completely without a site. Until now, we have neglected to ask ourselves in what language we are able to speak of these furtive states of happiness. If this is not in the language of morality, nor in that of politics, might it not be in the language of poetry? It is perhaps thanks to poetry that luck can be welcomed as a gift. The language appropriate to this is thus the language of celebration and hymns: “Happy is the one who….” These states of happiness can be expressed only in lyrical modes of language. These alone transcend the alternative between the voluntary quest and the untimely gift. It is here, then, that we rejoin our starting point: the optative “May I be happy!” finds its place, between the sharpness of desire and the bluntness of the imperative, only in the song that joins together happiness and goodness. This meeting was placed under the sign of utopia. Will it be said that our meditation has also set utopia off site? Perhaps, after all, we



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have been speaking only of utopia [u-topia, non-place] in discussing the off site of happiness (le hors lieu du bonheur). As for the site of utopia in language, would it be entirely inappropriate to say that it too would be poetry? And would we not indeed be speaking of utopia in designating it as the poetics of politics?

III Politics, Economy, and Societies

9 Is Crisis a Phenomenon Specific to Modernity?

The question that, doubtless, has led us to choose the notion of crisis for the theme of our reflection is that of determining whether or not we are experiencing an unprecedented crisis today, one which, for the first time in history, is not transitory but permanent, definitive. Posed in this way, the question concerns the meaning we attribute to modernity: Is modernity itself an unprecedented phenomenon, one that excludes a return to what was before? Is modernity a cause of the generalized crisis? Or are we witnessing a crisis of modernity itself? If this is the massive question preoccupying us, and if these are indeed the stakes, we can wonder at the outset whether such an immense question can be decided. There are three reasons for this. First, the notion of crisis appears to be burdened with a number of equivocations. What do an emotional crisis (une crise de larmes), a ministerial crisis, a crisis of values or of civilization have in common? Isn’t this a grab-bag concept, a pseudo-concept? In response to this conceptual confusion, it seemed appropriate to begin by reviewing less controversial uses of the term “crisis,” that is, essentially “regional” concepts. Once the multiple anchorage points of the notion of crisis have been identified, we will then be led to ask if there is anything more than a vague family resemblance among these regional concepts. Second difficulty: the question posed by the alleged contemporary crisis marks the passage from several “regional” concepts to a “global” concept, involving what the French sociologist Marcel

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Mauss has called a “total social phenomenon.”1 Now, this can be reached only through the representations that society gives of itself. This being the case, it is not certain that a consensus can be established in a given society concerning the identification and, even more so, the evaluation of value-ideas or ideologies that are carried by these representations. Third difficulty: the phenomenon of modernity, evoked in the initial question, does not designate one total social phenomenon among others, but our own epoch. It is the very sense of the present that is at issue here. Now, the present, by its very nature, is unclear, because the conflicts running through it are, by definition, unresolved. The protagonists of the crisis, and of all crises, are then tempted to overestimate the originality of the epoch they are living in, to believe it to be – this is almost a tautology – without precedent. This conceptual defect is especially unfavorable for the analysis we are concerned with, inasmuch as all the regional concepts of crisis encountered in our first section have in common at least the fact that they designate a transitory phenomenon. One way or another, “one gets out of” the crisis or crises. But how are we to know whether the current crisis, however it is characterized, will, for the first time, have been a non-transitory crisis, since by definition we are in it and cannot know the judgment that future historians will make about us? Let us then, for the moment, forget about the second and third sources of puzzlement and concentrate our efforts on the first difficulty, tied to the extreme polysemy of the term.

Some “Regional” Concepts of Crisis Let us begin by noting several basic meanings found in constant usage. It seemed to me that we could discern four or five sources of diffusion, or points of anchorage (Einsatzpunkte), of the notion. 1. The first comes from medicine. In an illness, the crisis is the moment characterized by a sudden change by which the hidden pathology is revealed, and the good or bad outcome of the illness is decided. Four traits are to be noted; their possible generalization will be shown in the second part. These are: a) a pathological context in which the principal symptom is suffering or unease; b) a rupture in the temporal rhythm of the illness itself, rupture in the form of an outbreak, a sudden attack; c) the intervention of a clinical assessment, interpreting the symptoms and giving a diagnosis; d) a prognosis of the outcome in the form of an alternative: either improvement



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or aggravation. This last trait is especially important because, by adding a decision-making feature to the revelatory character of the crisis, it aims, in terms of a salutary or fatal outcome, beyond this, at a time after the crisis, at an exit from the crisis. In the hypothesis of a happy outcome, the crisis retrospectively takes on not simply a medical value, but a medicinal value, as is said of certain purgative remedies. 2. A second source of meanings can be found on the level of psycho-physiological development. Here, the crisis designates the state of profound malaise, at once corporeal and mental, related to the passage from one stage of life to another. Instead of progressing in a continuous manner, the transformation marks a discontinuity between an earlier equilibrium that has been disrupted and the new, emerging equilibrium. We speak, in this way, of the crisis of adolescence. Erik Erikson has even extended the notion to all the critical stages in life and, by this means, enumerates seven critical phases between birth and death. Alternating in this way between states of equilibrium and phases of disequilibrium is characteristic of this second model, which can be termed developmental. The kinship between the first and the second sense of crisis is not broken off, inasmuch as the critical phase is experienced as distressing, as it is relatively brief in comparison to the continuous phases of development, as at each critical phase symptoms reveal a profound maladjustment, and as an alternative is, in each case, set forth between possible improvement or aggravation. In Erikson, each critical phase is characterized by a specific alternative: trust vs. mistrust; autonomy vs. shame/doubt; initiative vs. guilt; industriousness vs. inferiority; identity cohesion vs. role confusion; intimacy vs. isolation; generativity vs. stagnation; integrity vs. despair.2 “Crisis” the author notes, “is used here in a developmental sense to connote not a threat of catastrophe, but a turning point, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential, and therefore, the ontogenetic source of generational strength and maladjustment.”3 In this sense, every crisis is a crisis of identity on the path of the stages of life, which taken together constitute a life cycle. 3. The third regional model can be called cosmopolitan, in the sense Kant gives to this term in his writings on the philosophy of history.4 We find again here the earlier developmental model, but applied to the whole of humanity. The philosopher deciphers, on the level of the species, the “fully developed,” “natural capacities directed to the use of [human] reason” (Second Thesis). In this third model, it is the series of generations that will carry out the entire process. The crisis consists in the fact that it is only by means of what

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Kant terms human “unsocial sociability” that humanity will develop its aptitude for civil society and the Rule of Law: “through continued enlightenment,” Kant observes, “the beginnings are laid for a way of thought which can in time convert the coarse, natural disposition for moral discrimination into definite practical principles, and thereby change a society of men driven together by their natural feelings into a moral whole” (Fourth Thesis).5 This idea of converting “natural feelings into a moral whole” clearly prefigures the Hegelian theme of the ruse of reason, which will mark the apotheosis of the idea of crisis on the plane of the philosophy of history. But, before that, this is the time to note the resemblances and differences between the second and the third models of crisis. First, only the ascendant phase of the process of development is retained: the model becomes, in this way, that of the passage from the state of tutelage to that of majority. In addition, the accent that had been placed on the internal dynamism governing the maturation of an organism is placed here on the phenomenon of external domination, and thus of dependence on others in the state of tutelage. In this way, tutelage is identified with heteronomy and majority with autonomy. The crisis is the passage from one to the other. We thus read in Kant in What is Enlightenment? (December, 1784): “What is enlightenment? Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in the lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ – that is the motto of enlightenment.”6 The shift in accent from the idea of childhood to the idea of tutelage brings about a profound transformation in the role of public educator: this role is now less accompanying an immanent organic development than undertaking a critique of the situation of domination held to be responsible for delaying the development of humanity. The crisis then becomes a stand-in for critique, to the extent that critical philosophy places itself in the position of educator of humankind. However, an expansion such as this does not occur without several important mutations, expressed in the relation between the notions of critique and crisis. As Koselleck has shown in a work bearing the title, Critique and Crisis,7 pre-revolutionary thinkers initially placed the accent on the moral critique of institutions of domination, and it was only under the pressure of events that the moral critique of the system of institutions became political crisis, that is, revolution and civil war. As long as critique was confined to the moral sphere and did not lead to a political decision, the century of critique,



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Koselleck notes, was able to remain oblivious to the concept of crisis. This outcome was even hidden from it by the representation of progress which, in this sense, confined the critical idea to a state of blindness with respect to itself. We move from critique to crisis when the optimistic idea of endless progress runs into the question, concealed until then, of political decision-making. Rousseau is one of the witnesses and agents of this transition. He wrote in Émile: “You trust the current order of society without imagining that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions, and that it is impossible for you to foresee or prevent the one that may affect your children.” And again: “We are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions.”8 The term “crisis” includes more here than the term “revolution,” which in the eighteenth century has nothing in common with the notion of civil war, but designates an upheaval in one of the domains of life (“Revolutions are necessary,” Diderot declares, “there have always been revolutions, and there always will be” 9). This is because the term “revolution” has not yet broken its moorings with cosmology; and through this kinship with celestial revolutions, it draws its necessity and its relative innocuousness.10 In penetrating into the political sphere, crisis dramatizes critique. Crisis brings with it a medical connotation: the power of discovery with respect to a deep-seated harm and, especially, the effect of deciding between aggravation or amelioration. “We are encountering,” Diderot also states, “a crisis that will lead either to slavery or to freedom.”11 This “either/or” belongs to the moment of prognosis following the moment of diagnosis, that is, reading the symptoms. This alternative between despotism and freedom permitted the integration of the perspective of civil war, with its terrible risks, into what was still the reassuring perspective of revolution. No doubt, the acceptance of such great peril was made possible by the transfer of the eschatological category of the Last Judgment to the philosophy of history, itself taken to be political philosophy. The threat of civil war then assumes the character of punitive action taken by the critical agency set up as a tribunal for tyrants. The utopia of progress is transformed into immanent justice. It is remarkable that it was in pre-revolutionary thought that the connection was made between universal history (Weltgeschichte) and universal tribunal (Weltgericht) – a connection that invented the Terror before the fact. The most important core of the idea of crisis is thus preserved, namely, not just the transitory nature of the crisis but its beneficial character as well. In accordance with this definition, the idea of permanent crisis is inconceivable by reason of the properly decisive character of the crisis. “Freedom,” declared Abbot Reynal, “will be

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born out of oppression … and the day of awakening is not far off.”12 In this way, the ideology of progress opened the way for integrating the idea of crisis into a resolutely optimistic political philosophy. 4. A completely different model of crisis is provided by the history of science. This epistemological model of crisis is perfectly exemplified by Kuhn’s well-known work on scientific revolutions.13 I need not linger over this here. As we know, the celebrated epistemologist stresses the discontinuous character of scientific invention. Far from proceeding merely cumulatively, progress occurs through a series of ruptures separating two coherent axiomatic systems. The rupture occurs when a sufficient number of facts, experiments, or forms of knowledge refuse to allow themselves to be integrated into the existing scientific synthesis. The paradigm then has to be changed. We find in this epistemological model some of the features of previous models: first, temporal discontinuity, then the idea of alternating states of equilibrium and phases of disequilibrium, and finally the idea of the increasing complexity of knowledge, occurring through a series of qualitative leaps. Here too, the crisis is transitory. We know it only after the fact, from the standpoint of the new axiomatic configuration. However, there is no idea of pathology, of suffering or malaise attached to this model of crisis, unless we can refer in this manner to the intellectual disarray of those defending the outmoded synthesis. 5. We now arrive at the economic concept of crisis. I did not want to begin with this use of the term “crisis,” regardless of how common and how dominant it may be, to avoid giving in to the general tendency to make it the sole model of crisis. Nor did I want to accredit the idea that the crisis was not only considered to be economic but that it could be rigorously dated – 1929 – and situated – the New York Stock Exchange. Reacting against this twofold reduction does not, however, absolve us from explaining it. Far from the economic crisis being in a relation of infrastructure to superstructure with respect to all the other crises affecting the cultural domain, we have to say that in a civilization like our own, which places the economy at the summit of its hierarchy of values, the economic form of crisis is itself erected as the model of all crises. We will return to this point in the second part, devoted, precisely, to the total social fact and to the hierarchy of values essential to it. Let us limit ourselves for the moment to a schematic description of the notion of economic crisis, without inquiring into its relation to the value-ideas that underlie society as a whole. In speaking of economic crisis, it is important to maintain the use of the plural and to speak of crises, in order to take into account “the



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diversity, the chronological succession of crises that are determined, discernible, and offer, in each case, certain traits distinguishing each one from other crises.”14 The advantage of this descriptive and historical viewpoint over the systematic and properly economic viewpoint is that it does not limit its scope to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century crises of the capitalist system, but makes room for older crises, such as those of the preindustrial, pre-capitalist system. Besides, this viewpoint has the advantage of taking into account social consequences, namely, the suffering inflicted on great masses of people, without which there would be no talk of crisis. As in the medical model, it is always the harms experienced that serve to reveal disparities, inequalities, and contradictions affecting the social system as a whole. It is, finally, forms of suffering such as these that constitute a threat to all the other equilibria and, ultimately, to the dominant ideology, that is, to the hierarchy of values by which global society is defined. The most visible empirical feature, the one that allows us provisionally to list crises under the same generic concept, is that of “a rupture of equilibrium, a crack, followed by a fall; a fall in production, in exchanges, in profits, in salaries, in stock exchange values; but a rise in bankruptcies, unemployment, and suicides.”15 It is along this downward trajectory that suffering breaks out as symptom, that the accident of the times is viewed as a structural dysfunction, and that the worst premonitions are put forth. In the economy of the Ancien Régime, it was the fluctuation in agriculture that controlled the change in prices as a whole. This schema has been established, in particular, by Camille-Ernest Labrousse:16 the underproduction of agriculture, scarcities, industrial slumps following the collapse of the rural consumer market, higher mortality rates, but also a brutal decrease in the birth rate. All this can be seen in the mixed, part-agricultural, part-industrial economies of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century; the crises (1873, 1882, 1900, 1907, 1913–14, 1921?, 1928?, 1938 …) reflect the domination of the industrial economy over the agricultural economy, the unification of markets, the predominance of the goods of production, the growing role of the financial market and of bank credit. With the 1929 crisis, the disequilibrium first appears not in the sphere of production, nor in the circulation of products, but in the circulation of capital. The stock market crisis (the Wall Street crash in the fall of 1929), followed by a bank crisis (a run on deposits), produces a commercial crisis and an industrial crisis. Given my lack of expertise, I shall say no more about the phenomenon of economic crises.

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I am going to stay with the three phenomena that have given rise to the theorization of crises. First phenomenon: autonomization, first, of the processes of production, mainly industrial, in relation to social phenomena, then of the banking system in relation to market exchanges and to production, and finally of the circuits of speculation. It is this phenomenon of autonomization that is experienced by the public as an external fatality, and for which Hegel gave a premonitory description in his Philosophy of Right,17 where he opposed the “system of needs,” conceived as an “external State,” to the mutual recognition of citizens in the political constitution of the Rule of Law. It is, precisely, the society that most highly values the economic sphere of its existence which experiences economic disorder, not as a partial, but as a total disorder (how, for example, are we to understand that there are too many commodities here and not enough over there, that here we must burn the excess commodities, and die of hunger over there?). Second phenomenon: the periodicity of crises (Kondratiev cycle, etc.). This phenomenon is perhaps the one that best specifies the economic model of crisis in relation to all the others and, in the same stroke, by extrapolation tends to become a generic feature, by virtue of the predominance of the economic phenomenon in the hierarchy of values found in advanced industrial societies. By virtue of the trait of periodicity, “the crisis is conceived of only within the framework of the movement surrounding it, the cycle, with the four stages of the rise, the crisis itself, the depression, and finally the recovery; and it is the cycle that is taken as the problem with its short-term waves and its apparent turning back upon itself.”18 Here, again, I shall not enter into the disputes between schools of thought, including, to be sure, the confrontation between Marxist and non-Marxist theses. I will focus instead on certain aspects of the periodicity of economic crises that reinforce the family resemblances between the different concepts of crisis that we have enumerated. The fact is that the economic history of peoples appears to advance only through alternating cumulative processes (which increase the vulnerability of the system during a period of growth by diminishing its capacity of adaptation), with episodes where equilibrium is ruptured; what is more, it is in the phase of depression that the resources to bring about the recovery are reconstituted. In these two aspects, the cycles that mark economic crises strongly resemble the life cycles described by psychologists and psychoanalysts. Let us go further: the very periodicity of economic crises, paradoxically, gives hope; the crisis, each time, is transitory; each time there is an exit from the crisis.



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The third noteworthy phenomenon that sets the theory of crisis into relief is the globalization of crisis. This concerns our investigation in at least two ways. First, it is revelatory with respect to the underlying phenomenon, the globalization of the market. In order to understand this phenomenon, we are forced to move beyond the limited framework of economic analysis: the globalization of markets marks, at the same time, the globalization of the phenomenon of the autonomous functioning of the economy and its dominance over the other components of global society. By the same stroke, this phenomenon no longer concerns only the economy as such, but ideology, that is, the representation that a society gives itself of its mode of operation in the world. And it is indeed an ideology, the ideology of economic liberalism, that has imposed on the Western world the representation of economic phenomena “as separate from society and constituting by themselves a distinct system to which the remainder of the social domain is to be submitted.”19 Now, this ideology, far from being “natural,” is an unprecedented innovation born in the nineteenth century: it is the ideology of the de-socialization of the economy. A more radical interpretation of the crisis of the 1930s then comes to light, which forces us to shift the idea of crisis to another level, to the extent that “what the great crisis of the thirties imposed on the world, was a re-socialization of the economy.”20 This consideration can lead us far, if we want to give full measure to the phenomenon of the globalization of crisis, because this consists not simply in the geographical extension of a purely economic disorder, but in the globalization of the crisis of the ideology underlying the autonomous functioning and the dominance of the market. Inasmuch as the market and the ideology of economic liberalism are interconnected, the globalization of the market has radically different consequences depending on the culture. As economic liberalism has become one of the components of what the West has called modernity, economic crisis signifies for the West the crisis of its modernity. As a result, what the West exports, at the time of the globalization of the crisis and the market, is the crisis of modernity itself as it is defined in Western terms. Now, during the same period, the rest of the world has not defined itself in terms of the ideology of economic liberalism; this is why, by striking a direct hit on these cultures, globalization of the market has forced them all to redefine themselves in terms not only of economic crisis, but also of the crisis of ideology which made the market an autonomous factor. In this way, the crisis shifts from the economic level to the level of the representations of the global social phenomenon.21

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Second effect of the phenomenon of globalization of the crisis on our conceptual investigation: as it has expanded geographically, the global crisis puts in play a properly political dimension, in addition to ideological cultural factors. This is especially true of the 1973–74 crisis. In addition to the properly economic character by which it differs from the 1929 crisis – a character which I am not competent to discuss in detail – it also differs from it, precisely, by its political impact: whereas the 1929 crisis struck an economy that was still autonomous, the 1973–74 crisis hit the government policies that were responding to the crisis. If we follow the analyses of Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, liberal capitalism, in its pure and unadulterated form, already moribund in 1939, was buried unceremoniously by fascism. Today’s economies are – to different degrees – mixed economies which are being hit by the crisis that has been dragging on for more than ten years. At the same time, public opinion experiences this less as an economic crisis, properly speaking, than as an impasse in the response to the crisis by government policies, as the failure of a political solution to the crisis. This is why the crisis we are still in [in 1986] is experienced as more radical, inasmuch as the political sphere (more precisely, the State) is more intimately connected to the global society than the economic, and also inasmuch as there is no worldwide State on the same scale as the crisis. In becoming global, the economic crisis is thus revealing in several ways, with regard to public opinion’s loss of trust in leaders and with regard to the contradiction between the national dimension of States and the international dimension of the crisis (the handling of the world debt is a good indicator of this need and this lack). In any event, although the economic crisis by itself does not provide the definition of the concept of crisis, it is linked together with the most wide-scale phenomena, forcing the analyst to shift reflection to the level of the global social phenomenon.

Criteria for a “Generalized” Concept of Crisis In the introduction, we mentioned the difficulties encountered by the attempt to move from the various “regional” concepts of crisis to a “generalized” concept of crisis, which would be what we could call a crisis of society. This would require, we recalled, being able to speak in precise terms of society as a whole, or following Marcel Mauss’s expression, of the “total social fact.”22 This holistic approach requires that we be capable of apprehending



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the ensemble of ideas and values by means of which a society understands itself. At several points, we have anticipated this global viewpoint, inasmuch as each “regional” concept suggested a possible generalization. In this way, the medical criterion can be generalized, to the extent one could speak of the social body and apply pathological traits to it: the crisis of society – if crisis there be – would signify that the entire body is ill, that it is affected in its capacity of integration (synchrony) and of establishing equilibrium (diachrony). There are, however, obstacles to this generalization. Is the social body more than a metaphor? And isn’t this metaphor itself dangerous because of its organicist connotations (the cells in an organism, Max Weber reminds us, do not think!). And if we speak of social pathology, where is the doctor qualified to make the diagnosis and prognosis? The pedagogical criterion also easily lends itself to generalization; the idea of development, with its corollaries of tutelage and majority, has been applied to a people, even to humanity as a whole, as Kant did in his cosmopolitan view of history. The model of an identity crisis, as it is used by psychologists, psychoanalysts, and pedagogues, can then be useful to shed light on the crisis of society. However, here too, the pedagogical model of crisis loses some of its relevance to the extent that, as we have stated, what is retained in it is only the idea of maturation without aging or death, as is seen in the idea of progress. The notion of life cycle thus loses its relevance. Finally, if we simply privilege the access to maturity, the process illuminates only a teleology of growth and makes the crisis appear univocally beneficial. The possibility of decline is thus too easily dismissed. The political criterion offers a different sort of generalization: what is at issue here is the need for legitimation on the level of the political fact. By creating within the social fact a difference between those who command and those who obey, the political institution, whether it be charismatic, traditional, or rational – to borrow Max Weber’s terminology – gives rise to an unavoidable problematic, that of power and domination (Herrschaft). It is this structure that requires legitimation; the crisis, in this sense, is a crisis of legitimacy. Now, a crisis such as this truly constitutes a crisis of society in its entirety, to the extent that the State, in Éric Weil’s expression in his Philosophie politique, is the organization of an historical community (“Organized into a State, the community is capable of making decisions”23). An eventual crisis of legitimacy will involve this decision-making capacity of global society. But then we are driven from the political to the ethical sphere, to the

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extent that the legitimation of power refers back to the axiological configuration by which society defines itself. Later, the question will be whether it is possible to directly approach these value-ideas by which society creates for itself a representation in the form of an ideology. The epistemological criterion is no less rich in its potential for generalization: Husserl’s Krisis – Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology – is here the best introduction to the problem.24 Husserl expressly distinguishes from the crises internal to a science – those we spoke about using Kuhn’s vocabulary of paradigm shifts – the crisis of foundations, which is not epistemological but transcendental, in the sense that it arrives at the justification behind forms of knowledge. The gigantomachy that puts transcendentalism and objectivism into conflict culminates, according to Husserl, in the contemporary crisis provoked by the inability to respond to the demand for ultimate justification, even by the very refusal to raise the question. In this respect, a book like Richard Rorty’s25 that condemns any foundational enterprise would be interpreted by Husserl, at one and the same time, as symptom and as confirmation of the crisis of foundations. This idea of a crisis of foundations assuredly has a power of generalization equal to the crisis of establishing equilibrium, or to the crisis of identity, or again to the crisis of legitimation. However, this generalization, too, encounters its limit: how is the question of ultimate justification to be integrated into the ensemble of ideas and values that underlie the total social phenomenon. To be sure, philosophy is at the center of this phenomenon, to the extent that it is typically Western thought and thus an agent of modernity in the West.26 As such, philosophy can be said to structure the memory of Europe, inasmuch as Europe is not a region of the world but, as Husserl would have it, an “Idea.” One can, nevertheless, doubt that philosophy has succeeded in producing, in Europe itself, the “transcendental society” capable of exercising the “archontic” function that Husserl assigned to it. By the same stroke, one can also wonder if the Eurocentrism implicit in Husserl’s words escapes the arrogance of a particular society. And whether a naïveté worse than arrogance does not infect the self-designation of the Western philosopher as the “functionary of humanity.” These unresolved questions make difficult indeed the whole generalization of the epistemological model which Husserl raised to the level of a transcendental model. One last time, we have anticipated the holistic approach that would permit grasping the concept of the crisis of society in terms of the economic model of crisis. We have, in fact, observed that



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the phenomena of unification, extension, and emancipation of the market could be considered as either the cause or the effect of other changes, in particular on the level of mentalities, as long as we continue to hold a strictly causal point of view. As soon as we shift to a structural point of view, the participation of these phenomena in the configuration of ideas and values characteristic of modern society taken as a whole becomes more evident as well as more limited. More precisely, their glorification (the idea of the market characterizes an important aspect of this configuration due to the place it occupies in the hierarchy of values in modern societies). There is a decisive break-through in the direction of the total social phenomenon: it is society as a whole which, in the modern epoch, is defined by the autonomy of the market expanded to the dimensions of the world. Its ideology holds that everything, in reality, is merchandise. The preceding remarks show that the holistic approach is legitimate (we never understand a social phenomenon except in relation to all the others from a perspective that is more structural than causal) and that, at the same time, this approach remains very indirect and incomplete. Even when they are “generalized,” our “regional” criteria do not completely mesh with one another: the organic crisis of the social body, the identity crisis in the growth, without aging, of societies and the human species as a whole, the crisis of legitimacy tied to phenomena of domination, the “transcendental” crisis of foundations, the crisis of the economy, and, to an even greater extent, the crisis of the ideology of economic liberalism. There is an evident need to search for an all-encompassing model capable of coordinating these imperfect sketches of “generalization.” But, then, there is the temptation to move to the opposite extreme and to pit a directly holistic approach against the analytic and fragmentary approach. Existential philosophies, which encounter the notion of crisis as a permanent structure of humana conditio, lend support in this direction. In this way, in the tradition of Max Scheler, in Paul Landsberg, and in Emmanuel Mounier, the militant conception of human engagement accords a central place to conflict, rupture, risk, and, in this sense, to the notion of crisis. In Landsberg, the person is depicted in dramatic terms, as torn between life forces pulling toward a dark ecstasy and spiritual forces pulling toward a higher ecstasy. The crisis is the in-between, constitutive of the courage to exist. It is less the person than the process of personalization, viewed as the conquest of singularity and difference, which contains the seed of all the partial figures of crisis that we have encountered. Crisis occurs because the

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human being has no natural “place” in the cosmos, to allude to Max Scheler’s well-known title: Man’s Place in the Cosmos.27 He finds this place only through a hierarchizing operation that discovers – as much as it creates – an ordo which is not a natural cosmos. Now, this hierarchizing activity is not without a judgment of preference, a crisis standing out against the confusion of impulses. To perceive a situation as a crisis, I would say in line with Landsberg and Mounier, is to no longer know what my place is in the universe, no longer know what stable hierarchy of values can guide my preferences, no longer clearly distinguish my friends from my foes. Commitment is, then, the only way to discern an order of values capable of appealing to me – a hierarchy of the preferable – in identifying myself with a cause that is greater than myself. Commitment is thus the source of conviction – a Hegelian term – which constitutes for the person a genuine exit from the crisis. The decisive point for what follows in our reflection is that the crux of the crisis resides in the temporal structure of the process of personalization. Commitment is the effort directed toward constructing the human future: crisis is thus born at a crossroads, where commitment struggles against the tendency toward inertia, flight, desertion. It is this relation between temporality and crisis that another thinker, Éric Weil – someone, moreover, who shows little favor for existential philosophy – has clearly illuminated in his analysis of the category of personality.28 Personality is that moment in the logic of meaning in which a human being who “interprets himself” “constitutes himself as the center of a world, which is the world of his freedom. He is absolute value, source of values: personality” (283). Defined in this way, personality marks the intensification of the conflict in which the wish to be oneself is in opposition to the values of others. This internalized conflict becomes a crisis: “Liberation through creation occurs in this way in crisis, which is at one and the same time a discerning view and a judgment. I (future present) look at and judge myself (past present)” (294). Henceforth, it has to be said that “personality is always in crisis; always, that is, at every instant it creates itself in creating its image which is its existence to come” (303). It is not by chance that Weil quotes Goethe’s Faust here: “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen” (290). Of course, Weil does not stop here, he submits this demand of the rebel “to the single, absolutely coherent discourse in which he disappears as personality” (319), in order to discover the concrete freedom of reasoned action and, in this way, to reach the category of the “work” (345). In Weil, this marks



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the exit from crisis, just as earlier, in Landsberg, the exit resulted from commitment through identification with a cause. However transitory this may be, it remains the case that crossing through the crisis necessarily characterizes a human itinerary, and that the crux of the crisis resides in the encounter of the future with the past in the process of personalization. Despite the support our meditation finds in this existential concept of crisis, we can in no way be satisfied with a generalization so broad that the notion of crisis becomes once again the all-purpose concept we have been combating from the start. We have reached the point in our argumentation ironically characterized by Plato in the Philebus in the following way: to those who too quickly assumed “multiple,” we have limited ourselves to countering too quickly, “one.” Or again, now imitating Kant, for a concept too “short,” we have substituted a concept too “long.” In submerging the concept of crisis in a philosophical anthropology for all seasons, we have stripped it of all value of discrimination: for, if everything is crisis, nothing is crisis. In sum, from dispersion, we have simply crossed over into confusion. What path of the “mixed,” what “measured” thinking, will allow us to clear the distance separating concepts of crisis that are too dispersed from a concept of crisis that is completely undifferentiated? The preceding analysis, nevertheless, contains a clue that must now be followed, namely the tie between crisis and temporality (or temporalization). In fact, if we transpose onto the level of historical consciousness what has been said on the level of the person, we encounter a structure that is at once universal and determinant, capable of providing a concept of crisis that preserves the universal, intemporal (or trans-temporal) features of the earlier analysis, while directing them toward a precise characterization of modernity. This is the structure Koselleck proposes in Futures Past;29 its approach is that of a semantics of historical concepts. The author attempts to evaluate the successive topoi in which historical consciousness is incarnated in light of the relations between the following two transcendentals of historical consciousness: the horizon of expectation and the space of experience. These are indeed transcendentals in the sense that they provide the framework within which it is possible to evaluate the variable gaps between the horizon of expectation and the space of experience. The difference between the horizon of expectation and the space of experience is no doubt noticed only when it is accentuated. This was indeed what happened during the period of the Enlightenment, thanks to the following three themes: the novelty of the times (let us not forget

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that in German Neuzeit means, precisely, modernity); the shortening of the time still separating us from the reign of humanity in its adulthood; and finally, the malleability of history in relation to human action, its Machbarkeit. With the Enlightenment thinkers, the variation of this relation between horizon of expectation and space of experience was the object of such sharp awareness that it served to reveal the categories under which this variation could be thought. An important corollary: in characterizing the topoi of modernity as a variation in the relation between horizon of expectation and space of experience, conceptual history contributes to relativizing these topoi. We are now in a position to place them in the same conceptual space as the political eschatology that reigned up to the sixteenth century, or as the political vision governed by the relation between virtù and Fortune, or as the topos of the “lessons of history.” In this sense, the formulation of the concepts of horizon of expectation and of space of experience gives us the means of understanding the dissolution of the topos of progress as a plausible variation of this same relation between horizon of expectation and space of experience. What concept of crisis, at once general and determinant, results from these categories, a concept that is no longer ahistorical like those of existential philosophy, but transhistorical? Essentially, this: once the space of experience shrinks due to the general rejection of all tradition, all heritage, and once the horizon of expectation has a tendency to pull away into an ever foggier and indistinct future, populated solely by utopias, or rather “uchronies” without any hold on the actual course of history, then the tension between horizon of expectation and space of experience becomes rupture, schism. I would be willing to think that here we have a concept, which, at one and the same time, retains something of the too “long” existential concept of crisis, namely, its rootedness in human temporality, and collects the various elements in the generalization of the “regional” concepts of crisis, which I will review one last time in inverse order: the crisis of economic liberalism, the crisis of the foundations of knowledge, the crisis of the legitimacy of power, the crisis of the identity of the community, the crisis of equilibrium and integration in the social body. If I review them in inverse order, it is because it is ultimately the medical criterion that serves as the factor of discrimination in an historical structure, which itself possesses great generality: crisis is the pathology of the process of temporalization of history; it consists in a dysfunction in the normally tense relation between the horizon of expectation and the space of experience.



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Criteria for a “Modern” Concept of Crisis? The third difficulty evoked in the introduction is the most intractable: even supposing we could define the “total social fact” of a society at a great distance from us in time and in space, can we apply the preceding criterion of global crisis to the present epoch? If there is no history of the present, is there a sociology of the present? At issue here is clearly what is to be understood by modernity, taking the notion not simply as a global fact, but as a present fact. Here, the social fact has to be deliberately approached from the standpoint of the value-ideas that structure the social bond and of the hierarchy of these values, a hierarchy by reason of which a dominant thematic can encompass adverse values held on a second level. These value-ideas, however, can be grasped only through ideologies, that is, representations of the global social fact, which themselves are formed in dominant groups, in subordinate groups, or in the consciousness of eminent personalities possessing a rare discernment of the stakes involved. The difficulty is immediately apparent. A society is not transparent to itself; this is also what the term “ideology” signifies. An ideology operates “behind one’s back,” or, if you like, “behind the head” of individuals in the society under consideration. So, if a society cannot know itself, the difficulty can only be partially circumvented in two ways, either by interpreting the present as the terminus ad quem of an evolution going back a long way: the present is then read by stepping back; or by interpreting it in comparison with other societies: this was already Montesquieu’s method in his Lettres persanes and today it is that of comparative anthropology; the present is then read at a distance. A thinker like Louis Dumont in his Essais sur l’individualisme combines the two methods.30 Yet, we have to admit that the results are somewhat disappointing: even given the twofold condition of stepping back and of distance, one can doubt that a single hermeneutic key suffices to interpret the present. The current state of the discussion confirms this. In fact, there are several interpretations of modernity in competition. Let us quickly review them. 1. According to Louis Dumont, individualism is what is held to distinguish modern society from traditional society, which, for him, includes both distant society – India and the caste system, for example – and ancient society, the one Christianity started to hollow out from within. By individualism, he understands the ideology that holds the individual to be a higher value than the group, the class, the people, in short, higher than the global social entity. Economic

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liberalism would be only one variant of this individualism. But our anthropologist tempers his estimation by noting that the dominant ideology encompasses its contrary, namely the values of traditional society, as is shown in the defeat of the hardline economic liberalism which Karl Polanyi views to have been buried by Hitler, and has also been attested to by the multiple varieties of mixed economic systems arising from the 1929 crisis.31 Dumont, then, decides to term these mixed ideologies, “postmodern.” We arrive at the peculiar result that modern society, stemming from the crisis of traditional society, has become, in its turn, the place of crisis, which explains the recourse to the idea of postmodernity. One can then wonder whether the true crisis is not our society’s hesitation between (recessive) traditional society, (dominant) modern society, and postmodern society (in a prospective or embryonic state). 2. The Frankfurt School, in the period of Adorno and Horkheimer, arrives at the same type of judgment: if modernity is identified with Aufklärung, then the crisis results from the Aufklärung’s unkept promises. It is as much the crisis of modernity itself as the crisis which modernity has produced: this consists essentially in the fact that modern rationality, in becoming instrumental reason, has exhausted its potential of liberation. All that remains possible is a critical theory that develops a negative dialectic, that is, the clear rejection of the perverse effects of rationality. Once again, one wonders about postmodernity, which is the very crisis of modernity. 3. A more radical appraisal of the dominant tendency of our age comes from Nietzsche and his definition of modernity in terms of nihilism. Nihilism is the loss of values, the “devaluation” of supreme values, that is to say, essentially the values tied to Christianity, which itself is interpreted as Platonism for the people. This denunciation is based, first of all, on the rationalist critique of tradition – in Daybreak and in The Gay Science – and then submits rationalism itself to violent attack: the most celebrated offshoots of rationalism, such as democracy and socialism, are then placed back into the lineage of Christianity, along with all the other expressions of the morality of the “weak.” As a result, Nietzsche appears as an antimodern thinker, who tosses modernity into the same bag as its old adversary, Christianity. Antireligious humanism then appears as a useless palliative for the uprootedness resulting from the decline of Christianity, because, unaware, it drew its own strength from the source of values it was combatting. In this way, we understand that, in the post-Nietzschean sphere of influence, the death of man is associated with the death of God. To the extent that agnostic or atheist humanism is seen as branching from the traditional



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Platonic-Christian trunk, once cut from its roots, it cannot help but wither away. When modernity has been identified with this moribund humanism, the “modern” crisis can only be the crisis of modernity itself. This is what Max Weber recognized in his moments of Nietzschean lucidity: the triumph of rationality that he extols comes, however, at the price of the disenchantment of the world, which itself is perhaps too much to bear. As a corollary to this disenchantment, the antagonistic character of values is exposed. The contemporary individual – whether modern or postmodern – experiences both the retreat of the gods and the shattering of values. Now, it is a fact that people find this twofold wound painful indeed. The crisis is this very suffering. 4. Heidegger’s announcement of the end of metaphysics recapitulates in an original way the three models of modernity’s failings, which we have just briefly reviewed: the Cartesian Cogito, by placing the subject in the position of Subjectum, understood as underlying foundation, inaugurates the modern forgetfulness of being. From the agent of crisis, humanism has become the place of crisis and, finally, the victim of crisis through internal decomposition. As for technology – another name for instrumental reason – it is simply the modern figure of the metaphysics of subjectivity, to the extent that the accent on the subject has for its counterpart the impoverishment of nature, reduced to an opposing object to be dominated and exploited. As for the will to power that Nietzsche believed to be capable of opposing the will to truth, it still belongs to the cycle of the metaphysics of the subject and crowns the modern forgetfulness of being. Here again, to understand modernity is to perceive it as the end of an epoch to which a part of ourselves no longer belongs. Only the union of poetic thinking and thinking poetry could open the way to a postmodernity whose ethical features and political status are unknown to us, still less its social realization on the scale of an entire society. What seems to me to be common to these diverse interpretations of the contemporary crisis is the idea of the superimposition of two crises: the crisis of traditional society under the pressure of modern society, and that of modern society itself inasmuch as it appears as the aborted offspring of traditional society. Having said this, my initial doubt concerning the possibility of undertaking a global evaluation of the present period returns, with new arguments. 1. It does appear that our epoch cannot be defined by a single ideology: the rival definitions of modernity and, even more so, the quarrel between modernity and postmodernity attest rather to the equivocal nature of the present moment, as perhaps is true of

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every epoch for those who are living it. What is more, in the human sciences, because of the interaction between the observer and the society observed, the dogmatic assertion according to which the disenchantment of the world would be the truth of our times should not be considered an “objective” (wertfrei) finding. At the same time, this attests to the loss of conviction on the part of the individual who makes the diagnosis and who contributes, in this way, to bringing about what she has described. Henceforth, what appears to best characterize the crisis of our epoch is, on the one hand, the absence of consensus in a society divided, as we have said, between tradition, modernity, and postmodernity; on the other, and more gravely, the general retreat of convictions and of the capacity for engagement to which this retreat leads, or – and this is the same thing – the general retreat of the sacred, whether this is understood as the vertical sacred (the religious in the broadest sense of the word) or the horizontal sacred (the political in the broadest sense of the word). 2. As for knowing whether this crisis (unlike past crises that were transitory, as suggested by all the “regional” models we have examined), perhaps for the first time, would be interminable, definitive, with no exit – no one is capable of determining this for lack of proper perspective in time or distance in space. Here we can only wager and hope. My own wager and my own hope are that despite the absence of consensus and of strong conviction in our pluralist society, there is an unprecedented opportunity available to renew the heritages of the past: a twofold opportunity of resourcing and reinterpretation. As regards Christianity more particularly, the death of Christianity as a dominant sociocultural phenomenon can be the occasion for a numerically minority community of faith to regain in density what it may have lost in extension. It depends on the members of this community that this be so.

10 Money: From One Suspicion to the Next

Personal venality, the individual figure of moral corruption, is facilitated by modern society, characterized by the predominance of an uprooted, isolated, independent individual, doing as he pleases. The display and the arrogance attending a certain wealth provide the opportunity to refer back once more to the judgment of moralists, and even more so, to the judgment of sages and saints. It is unlikely that any of us has an unproblematic relationship with money. Rather than deploring this fact, we have to acknowledge that it could not be otherwise, so diverse, contradictory, and entangled are these relations. They are the heritage of different epochs, traces of which have not been definitively abolished. It is not even certain that a given attitude, characteristic of a distant past, will not, in circumstances that are difficult to predict, claim new legitimacy. I will consider three levels in our imagination regarding money: a moral level, an economic level, and a political level. If it is not false to say that the feelings and attitudes arising from the second level came to maturity only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and if it is today that we forcefully raise the problems arising from the third level, the current mix of feelings results from the fact that the behaviors acquired in different epochs remain, in a sense, contemporary with one another in the depths of the present.

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The Moral Level The fact that money has been the occasion for strong moral reactions deserves a detailed explanation. At first sight, money appears, by its very definition, to be foreign to the sphere of morality. As a means of payment – in other words, as currency – it is only an abstract sign, a simple means of exchange. One is then tempted to say that only the goods exchanged, the genuine objects of our desire to acquire and to possess, ought to be submitted to moral judgment and to be termed good or bad. As a neutral, universal mediator, isn’t money restricted to expressing the market value common to the goods exchanged, the price being the measure of this value? Being economically neutral, why wouldn’t it be morally neutral? Or rather, why wouldn’t it simply be held to be good, to the extent that, unlike barter, it opens up a twofold space of freedom, to the buyer and to the seller? However, this overly simple reasoning is misleading. The price results from a competition of desires for scarce goods offered to the appetites of all; given this, the worth of the goods acquired bears the mark of the unsatisfied desires of others. In this way, a petty, cruel game is concealed in the smallest exchange, in which it initially appears as if all that is involved is the liberty of one person to relinquish, and the liberty of the other person to choose. The exclusion of the invisible third party lies in the background, behind the simple act of buying and selling. But this is not all, nor even the main point; to the very extent to which it is neutral with respect to the goods it allows to be exchanged, money constitutes a distinct object for covetousness: to possess the universal mediator is to hold the key to the free will involved in all market transactions. It is at this level that moral judgments come into play, outside of any economic analysis. And these judgments are so important that the argument we will bring out later in favor of the market tie can be understood only at the price of a line of reasoning that is itself conducted on the grounds of morality. We shall list here the arguments that oscillate between mistrust and blatant condemnation. Unlike the covetousness tied to goods of pleasure, the desire to acquire the universal means of exchange does not in itself contain any measure; there is no sense to speak in its regard of satisfaction. Moralists of every confession, of every tradition have repeated this: the hunger for gold is insatiable; a sort of “bad infinity” is lodged in this always more which is never enough. Christian moralists, from the Fathers of the Church to the great scholastics, have only relayed



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the Greek moralists on the subject of temperance. Aristotle’s idea of a just mean between excess and deficiency is put to flight by an unlimited desire that henceforth bears the mark of sin. A stronger argument is related to defining this covetousness in terms of passion, if by passion is understood something other than desire. Desires serve to limit one another; in passion, an individual invests everything. Only human beings have the power, whether in reality or in fancy, to aim at total satisfaction, which they sometimes call happiness. When a single good is identified with this totality, the attachment to this good then becomes total. Now, by reason of the neutrality and universality tied to the undetermined power of acquisition that it procures, money is, we dare say, the dream object for such total investment. This passion we call avarice. The miser, Le Robert states, “has a passion for wealth and delights in amassing it endlessly.” But is this “delight,” happiness? Moralists have been doubtful; the phantasy of the total investment of desire in a single thing turns passion into a self-inflicted suffering: isn’t this passion called Leidenschaft in German? Here, Christian moralists have something more specific to say than the ancient moralists, in that the passion for gold, by occupying the entire range of desire, leaves no room for the love of God, which alone can be total. The sin of avarice is literally deadly, to the extent that it separates one from God, totally. We were saying that the hunger for gold is insatiable; its passion is all-devouring. Onto this critique of avarice, we can graft the further condemnation that weighed on the ensemble of secular practices and, more specifically, on the practices of commerce and lucre in contrast with the monastic life and its vow of poverty. To be sure, secular life is not as such held to be evil but, like marriage, trade suffers by comparison with the search for perfection in monastic life. With Saint Francis, the Christian monk is no longer, like the ancient sage, a scholar, a man of leisure, but a “poor man.” Poverty is celebrated as a positive value by reason of the space it opens for a soul freed from the desire to acquire and to possess. It is true that the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation upended this negative judgment cast on money and trade, even as it condemned monastic vows and rehabilitated secular labor, crowned with the aura of a vocation. But an argument specific to trades dealing with money, among all the other trades, still had to be lifted: the argument according to which money, being unproductive, when it has been loaned, did not deserve to receive its own salary; nothing, then, separates the interest on a loan from usury. Jacques Le Goff relates, in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, that if the merchant in the

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Middle Ages was not as widely despised as has been said, even if the Church very early on protected and promoted him, “it long allowed serious suspicion to persist as to the legitimacy of essential aspects of his activity … Among the principal criticisms leveled against the merchants was the charge that their profits implied a mortgage on time, which was supposed to belong to God alone.”1 The argument is interesting inasmuch as it is directed to the point at which economic life compels an encompassing vision of the world, of which time is the primordial dimension. Now, the time of the merchants is the occasion for profit, either because the lender will profit from the wait for reimbursement by the recipient, who is temporarily short on funds, or because, taking advantage of the circumstances, he is playing on the differences in price between the markets, or because he is building up his stock in anticipation of famine, or because – and this will later be the origin of a counterargument in favor of interest on loans – he has to be paid for the risk incurred as he brings in his merchandise by road or by sea. In all these ways, “the merchant’s activity is based on the assumptions of which time is the very foundation.”2 “Against the merchant’s time, the Church sets up its own time, which is supposed to belong to God alone and which cannot be the object of lucre.”3 It is on this very ground that the Reformation will take exception, by restoring all secular activities to human responsibility. A letter from Calvin to Claude Sachin is interesting in this regard: “For if we should totally prohibit the practice of usury [lending money at interest has no other name], we would restrain consciences more rigidly than God himself.” In truth, “there is no testimony in Scripture by which all usury is totally forbidden … Moses’s law (Deuteronomy 23, 19) is political and has no more bearing upon us now than equity and human reason carry. Of course, it would be good to desire that usurers were expelled from the entire world and that the name became unknown. But since that is impossible we must submit to common utility.”4 More generally, Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. III, Chapter X, calls for a moderate use of natural goods and does not require that necessity put a check on pleasure. Now that the man of savings and profits counts himself blessed by God, now that wealth is considered a sign of salvation, and frugality is at the origin of the ethics of capitalism – this is a supplementary conception, one favored, as we know, by Max Weber, but which, as Tawney has shown,5 appears to define the Puritan branch of Protestantism rather than the main current of the Reformation. Nevertheless, the rehabilitation of interest on loans by the Reformation, as well



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as the rehabilitation of trade, along with the other secular professions, attest to the fact that the principal teaching of Christianity concerning money has to be sought elsewhere, namely in the difference in the status of persons resulting from the unequal distribution of goods, and thus of money. A question of justice, of distributive justice, is raised in this way. We still hear the prophets of Israel, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, thundering against the rich who plunder the poor and humiliate them, and Jesus, proclaiming: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). Wealth is treated here as an insult and as violence done to the poor: a malediction is thus cast on wealth, and so on money, counter­ balanced by a blessing bestowed on the poor. At issue here, are the relations among human beings and no longer the relation of each person to his goods. It is true that, until the nineteenth century, revolutionary consequences had only rarely been drawn from the condemnation of wealth as injustice; wealth is partially absolved as an opportunity for generosity and alms, while poverty receives as its consolation the promise of eternal reparations. Nonetheless, the argument that the excessive gap between the rich and the poor destroys community and prevents conviviality is not erased. Perhaps this final argument may be heard again today, restoring some plausibility to the preceding ones …

The Economic Level It is noteworthy that, in order to be accepted, capitalism at its birth had to make its case on the very terrain where the coveting of money and goods had been the object of condemnation by Christian moralists. Condoning the ambition to amass wealth constitutes, in this respect, a genuine mutation on the moral plane. As Albert Hirschman has shown in The Passions and the Interests, the reversal was first one of method. Spinoza, challenging the normative attitude, proposes in book three of the Ethics to consider “the actions and appetites of human beings as if it were a question of lines, planes, or bodies.” Skeptical about the power of reason to dominate the passions, he assures that “an affection cannot be thwarted or suppressed except by a contrary and stronger affection than the one to be thwarted.” He sanctions, in this way, in the absence of any moralizing intention, the position of numerous observers of human nature in search of a compensating passion, capable of holding in check the most devastating passions, principally those

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that spur princes enamored of glory, combat, and war. Against the backdrop of these deeply pessimistic reflections, concerning the weak dominion of reason as much as the devastating effect of violent passions, Hirschman sets out the theme of passions tamed by interest, the latter understood in the sense of a reasonable love of oneself; interest, taken in the broadest sense, marks the replacement of violence by calculation across the entire gamut of passions. In this way, passion – previously, named cupidity, avarice, or the lure of profit – has come to be seen through the model of interest, capable of curbing other passions, such as ambition, the love of power, or concupiscence of the flesh. Interest, understood in the narrow sense of the appetite for gain, henceforth appears as a cold passion, which – to such an extent that its constancy makes it predictable and thus worthy of trust – “is incapable of lying,” according to a common saying of the period. And if we move from the private sphere to the public sphere, is it not true that trade is the occupation most likely to maintain peaceful relations, in contrast to the deadly folly of the princes? Compared to the aristocratic spirit, the merchant spirit is assuredly the seat of “mild” passions. The conjunction of the words “mild” and “commerce,” coming from the sphere of conversation, extends from this point on to the entire market sphere. In this way, the love of money is seen to be rehabilitated on the very plane where, once, it had been condemned, and this in the name of a peaceful passion. The moral cause of money having been won, the distinction between interest and passion, which had well served the plea in its favor, will be of no further use, and the justification of the search for profit will be able to be developed on the level of the economy alone. This change of level is complete with the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776. Henceforth, solely the economic advantages held to result from the elimination of impediments to the search for profit will be considered (for Smith in no way shares the optimism of a Montesquieu regarding the beneficial political effects of economic development, to such an extent does the political appear to him to be delivered over to “human folly”). The debate focuses on the fundamental proposition, “according to which the best means of assuring the (material) progress of a society is to allow each of its members to follow his own (material) interest as he understands it.”6 What, then, has become of our reflection on money? The genuine alternative that political economy proposes, at the end of the eighteenth century, to the earlier moral approach will arise out of the capacity of the unfettered quest for profit to create a new kind of social tie. Market exchanges, multiplying the relations



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among individuals, will set them free from the bonds of personal subordination. What is more, the market bond consists in a veritable “orchestration of acquisitive desires,” in the fortuitous expression of Boltanski and Thévenot in On Justification.7 Possessed of the same inclination for trade, individuals arrive at a common identification of the goods they exchange. But this common identification, which is reflected in the price, would not be possible if individuals were not possessed of a sympathetic disposition by means of which each can espouse the tastes and passions of the others; it is for this reason that competition does not result in separating individuals, but succeeds in linking them together. The two authors cited can then speak of the market bond as founding a “polity,” a “world.” Everything depends, of course, on the capacity of the relation of competition to produce an effect of coordination. However, the methodological liberation of the economy, resulting in neutralizing any negative appraisals concerning money, constitutes only half – or if we may say, the flip-side – of the picture. What has to be understood is the “progressive invasion of all domains of public and private life by the logic of the economy and of merchandise … The economy is the essential form of the modern world, and economic problems are our primary concerns. And yet, the true sense of life lies elsewhere. Everyone knows this. Everyone forgets this. Why?” These are the words of Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Paul Dumouchel in L’Enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie.8 Dupuy returns to this same question in his recent book, Le Sacrifice et l’Envie. Le libéralisme aux prises avec la justice sociale.9 He is replying to Louis Dumont, for whom the primary question is not on the order of methodology; the establishment of economics as the exact science of an autonomous and specialized domain makes no sense unless it is carried by a spiritual movement, that of modern individualism. Homo oeconomicus is the modern individual, without roots or ties, saddled with himself in dreary solitude. The science for which this individual is the true focus can establish its autonomy and, especially, its sovereignty only at the price of regrettably reductive and simplifying procedures. Methodological individualism, reflecting the individualism that is the model of society, stands in opposition to the holism of hierarchical societies. Outside integration into a group, independent of any formal consent, the individual, according to Dumont, can project himself only into the artifice of a contract concluded between human atoms. In opposition to this pessimistic interpretation of the economic

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man, Dupuy presents the great tradition of liberal individualism, stemming from the Scottish Enlightenment, of which Adam Smith is the primary herald. The question is first a methodological one: determining whether or not a methodological individualism can be non-reductive, whether it can conceive of market society as a spontaneous or self-organized order, on the basis of which the triumph of the individual and the reign of social justice can be reconciled. To attest to the sheer possibility of this, at the start of the movement that will lead from Adam Smith to John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Friedrich Hayek, it is important to go back from Smith’s Wealth of Nations to his Theory of Moral Sentiments,10 written seventeen years earlier and republished six times by Adam Smith before his death. It was postulated above that the orchestration of acquisitive desires is unable to produce a social tie without the help and the support of a sympathetic disposition. This is to say that the economy can justify itself only on the basis of a new treatise on the passions. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments owes nothing to economics; quite the opposite, this theory arms the economy against the drift toward egotism. We then have to understand in what way sympathy not only harmonizes with self-love, namely the interest one has in one’s own person, but is so completely bound up with self-love that they cannot be distinguished. We have to understand that sympathy, the primary and sole moral sentiment, is not to be confused with benevolence, that it presupposes the separation of beings, and thus that it can rely only on the imagination, through which, in thought, I become the other. By entering into this relation with self-love, sympathy attests to the primordial inscription of lack in the relation of self to self. Have we, for all this, opened up an alternative completely distinct from the portrait Dumont paints of Homo oeconomicus? Would there then be two individualisms, one of an independent subject and another of an autonomous subject, to take up Alain Renaut’s distinction in L’Ère de l’individu?11 This would be the case if sympathy were expressed entirely after the model Dupuy derives from his doubled and reciprocal image of a self-referential (self-love) loop, which relates the subject to itself through the intermediary of society (sympathy). It is, precisely, one of the most remarkable contributions of Dupuy’s rereading of Smith’s work to have brought to light the ambivalence, at once psychological and moral, that fundamentally characterizes sympathy. Sympathy is shown to contain its own contrary, envy, the desire to acquire what the other possesses, because it is the other who has it.



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Smith, Dupuy tells us, insisted on confronting this major difficulty by adding to the sixth edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments a chapter titled: “On the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition.”12 Note the connection rich/great, poor/mean. The state of wealth is grasped as a state of greatness, that of poverty as a state of meanness. Now, these are the states to which envy is addressed. It is “that which prevents sympathy from playing its role of harmonizer.”13 It corrupts our sympathy for the joy of others. At the same time, envy reveals a contrario an important feature of sympathy: what it corrupts is “this disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition.”14 Is this not to admit that the sentiments stirred by the relations of exchange, thus those relating to the attraction of money, are inseparable from those produced by the spectacle of power? Adam Smith says this well: what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of the attention and approbation.15

The conclusion forces itself: sympathy, which, as we have already stated, is not benevolence, “is not distinguished from the desire to possess what they [the great] possess. The desire to resemble them is inevitably the desire to have what they have.”16 Does not the Theory of Moral Sentiments end in inescapable equivocation, once “sympathy contains envy, in both senses of the verb ‘contain’”?17 The title of Dupuy’s chapter on Adam Smith, then, proves to be well-founded: “Envious sympathy” (“La sympathie envieuse”). And the title of the work reveals half of its secret: Le Sacrifice et l’Envie. By the same stroke, the famous “invisible hand,” which one might have thought was only the mythical projection of sympathy itself, becomes suspect again, to such an extent that it makes us think of the ruse of reason which, according to Hegel, draws out of the competition of short-term private interests the stable figure of a rational order on the scale of the entire history of humanity. Is it not necessary that the “invisible hand” be endowed with the occult virtue of “containing” envy?

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It would certainly be absurd to enclose the entire destiny of what was long called “political economy” within the Theory of Moral Sentiments. This would then be to commit the inverse error of those who saw a “reversal” between the Theory… and The Wealth of Nations. It would be even more absurd to judge the subsequent development of scientific economics on the basis of these beginnings. The models of the general equilibrium of the market provide a precise scientific content to the idea of auto-organization. But by rendering the myth of the “invisible hand” superfluous, have they not eliminated any examination of the two primary categories of sacrifice and envy evoked by Dupuy in his title? Now, is it not in relation to these passions that the question of justice is finally raised within the framework of liberal individualism? But, above all, one may wonder if the exact science of an important, but partial, activity – and, moreover, one submitted to considerable abstraction – the science of economics, has not given increased strength to the question, cited above, of determining at what cost the economic sphere has been placed on the same footing as the totality of human activities. The question is important for our discussion. Because, if in the eyes of the science of economics, the question of money is only a chapter in the generalized theory of exchanges, it raises once more a distinct interrogation when it is connected to the one mentioned earlier, “the progressive invasion of all domains of life – private and public, social and political – by the logic of the economy and of merchandise.” The question of “king money,” whether it is well or poorly formulated, is posed solely within this problematic. Now, this is no longer a question of the economy, but of a paradigm shift in civilization; and the problem, raised by Dumont and others, of evaluating individualism is posed anew with the same acuity at the end of this course. Might we then hope to shed light on it, at least partially, by treating the question as a political question, if we label “political” a question that concerns the entire historical community organized into a State?

The Political Level Tackling the question of money on the political level does not mean resorting directly to the well-known formula: “Money corrupts.” It involves asking ourselves: — whether, inside the political domain of the polis, there are spheres of human interaction that legitimately escape the measurement of primary social goods in terms of money;



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— under what conditions the border between spheres is transgressed, in such a way that non-market values are contaminated by market values; — how a transgression such as this is expressed on the plane of individual relations in terms of what is commonly called “corruption.” It is only in the third stage of reflection that the question, which is first raised in terms of agencies, of subsystems, of spheres, of “polities” (or as you like), will send us back to the question of money on the level of morality, where we began. The political is taken here as coextensive with the agency of sovereignty, of governance and decision-making, by which the modern State is identified. Consequently, what characterizes an activity as political is its relation to power. Having said this, we reach the first of our three questions by considering the exercise of political power from the angle of distributive justice. In a given political community, and under the aegis of the State, goods of various sorts are distributed: market goods (patrimonies, revenues, services), and non-market goods (citizenship, security, health, education, public or private offices, honors, punishments, etc.). The political question of money comes directly from the question of determining whether all the goods distributed can be considered market goods. We need to understand the true nature of the question: it is not, first of all, the behavior of individuals, open to moral judgment, that is taken into consideration here, but the nature of the subsystems defined by the nature of the goods distributed. To be sure, these goods do not acquire this name because they are evaluated, estimated, and in this sense held to be good; rather this estimation belongs to a “shared understanding,” to borrow Michael Walzer’s expression in The Spheres of Justice, whose analyses we are following here. Even if it is open to criticism and to challenges, this common symbolism has the stability of an enduring consensus, resulting from the reinforcement of founding traditions, firmly rooted in a common history. To say that all the goods distributed are not market goods is to affirm that the apparently open list of social goods is heterogeneous by virtue of the irreducibly plural character of shared understandings, of common symbolisms. Here, the political scientist’s reasoning is no different from the anthropologist’s, when the latter limits herself to augmenting the element of understanding she believes she is able to extract from the social practices themselves, estimations buried in these practices or reflected in distinct codes. In the same way, the political scientist works to identify the various shared symbolisms, to elicit from them an internal logic, namely the reasons governing the scope of validity and the limit of competence

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of this or that social good. Our further problem of corruption by money depends on the position taken initially when we say that everything is not for sale. In other words: the market does not completely saturate the political bond. Now we see, the question of money is posed on the level of its initial destination, the exchange between market goods. Its reign is measured by the amplitude of the market sphere. The only way, then, to verify what we understand by market goods is to proceed a contrario by drafting the list – this one, too, is open – of the goods which, in accordance with shared understanding, are not goods to be bought or sold. We have only to recall the quarrel over indulgences in the period of the Reformation, or the disputes over the pay-backs for military service in more recent times, to be assured that our sense of injustice is lucid indeed and sensitive to fine distinctions. There is agreement concerning the non-venality (non-purchasable character) of human beings (the end of slavery), and that of public offices, of justice, of political power, of family rights, of fundamental freedoms, and all the more so in the distribution of divine grace, of love and friendship, of leisure … of air and water. A discussion is, of course, open on the borders between the market sphere and the others: Are human organs for sale? Must the basic needs of the poorest be satisfied by the community as a whole (the problem of the welfare state)? What parts of the health system and of the educational system can be left to the laws of the market, that is, treated like market goods? The very fact that there is a doubt about this or that form of distribution does prove that here there is a problem of distributive justice. It is always on the basis of a strong consensus on essential distinctions that there can be deliberation on the uncertain lines of partitioning. Uncertainty, however, is not the most serious problem. Our second question arises out of a more worrisome problem, the transgression of one sphere into the domain of another. Walzer places this problem at the beginning and at the end of his investigation. He terms dominance the tendency of the goods belonging to a given sphere to encroach upon those of another sphere. If there was a time when ecclesiastical power – the presumed dispenser of divine grace – invaded all the other spheres, today the danger comes from the tendency of the market sphere to subordinate all the other spheres to itself, the market now being equivalent to the totality of social transactions. How is this possible? Before incriminating individuals, a more hidden phenomenon, occurring on the level of the evaluation of goods – hence, of shared symbolism – has to be examined.



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Walzer speaks here of conversion or convertibility. Conversion occurs when a given good, let’s say money, wealth, establishes itself as a value in another sphere of justice, let’s say political power. This is the ultimate secret of the phenomenon of dominance, defined as “a way of using social goods that isn’t limited by their intrinsic meanings or that shapes those meanings in its own image.”18 I will speak, in this regard, of symbolic violence. Walzer recognizes the fundamental opacity of the phenomenon: “a dominant good is converted into another good, into many others, in accordance with what often appears to be a natural process but is in fact magical, a kind of social alchemy.”19 This astonishing passage is reminiscent of the famous chapter in Marx’s Capital devoted to the “fetishism of merchandise,” merchandise raised to the level of mystical heights thanks to the fusion between the economy and religion. Now, Walzer resorts several times to conversion, only to leave it, with no further ado, in the guise of a metaphor. This is not insignificant if we admit, along with the author, that “we can characterize whole societies in terms of the patterns of conversion that are established within them.”20 And further: “History reveals no single dominant good and no naturally dominant good, but only different kinds of magic and competing bands of magicians.”21 In fact, Walzer’s work is a total battering-ram directed against the phenomenon of domination. It is a militant book, in the “abolitionist” tradition. From the start, he is clear on his purpose: “The aim of political egalitarianism is a society free from domination.”22 I would like to advance further into the breach opened by the idea of conversion, held to be a kind of magic, and to raise the question of the manner in which individuals, engaging in these transactions considered from the standpoint of this or that sphere of justice, contribute to these transgressions, to these conversions, in sum, to this magic of transmutation. It appears to me that one cannot move ahead in this direction without taking into account the status of the persons associated with the evaluations of social goods, hence without considering the worth or the meanness of the social actors, to employ the terminology of Boltanski and Thévenot in the work cited above. At the same time, Adam Smith’s analyses in the Theory of Moral Sentiments move in this direction; wealth and worth, we saw, go together. The possession of vast amounts of goods cannot be isolated from the drum beat of emotional responses on the level of public recognition. To be rich is to feel virtually great in all the other “economies of worth”: in the polity of fame, the inspired polity, the domestic polity, and, of course, in the industrial polity. Here we find the

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trait of money as universal intermediary. Money is the all-purpose, ubiquitous value. But, if it has a tendency to colonize all the non-market spheres, it is because the worth it confers on individuals is a fetish-worth, before which all the other forms of worth tend to bow down. Finally, it is on the level of the estimation of worth that everything plays out. Internalized in every individual, the magic of conversion – which operates first on the plane of goods and orders of worth – is transformed into personal venality. What in the public discourse is termed corruption is thus only the sum of three phenomena: on the level of the spheres of justice, the domination of the market sphere over the others, in particular over the political sphere; on the level of orders of worth related to the status of persons, the contamination of all the rest by the worth conferred by wealth; on the level of the internalization of social goods and established values, personal venality. Did not the strict Kant say: Every man has his price? If this is indeed the case, the last phenomenon carries us back to our initial analyses. Moving back from the third part to the second, we can say that personal venality, the individual figure of moral corruption, is facilitated by the state of modern civilization, characterized by the emergence and the domination of the uprooted, isolated, independent individual, left to do as he pleases. Moving back, finally, from the second part to the first, can we not say that the spectacle of moral corruption and the temptation of personal venality are the occasion for hearing once again the judgment of the moralists – and even more so, the judgment of sages and saints – on this other “inner master,” money? To resist the “corrupting” influence of money, must we not remain open to the spirit of moderation and mastery taught by the Greek and Latin moralists and be capable of listening again to the exhortation of Paul the Apostle, writing to the Corinthians: Let “they that buy [be] as though they possessed nothing; and they that use this world as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passes away” (Corinthians I, 7:30–1).

11  he Erosion of Tolerance and T the Resistance of the Intolerable 

Tolerance is the fruit of asceticism (askêsis) in the exercise of power. It is a virtue. An individual virtue and a collective virtue. It would indeed be a mistake to believe that tolerance takes on its meaning only in relation to a particular form of power, the power of the State. Intolerance first appears in the power of each person to impose on others his or her beliefs, convictions, and way of life, as these alone are taken to be valid, legitimate. For each person, to act is to exert a power over … In this initial asymmetry of action, every act has an agent and a recipient, a patient. But if intolerance is armed with the power over …, it is justified in the eyes of the one exerting it by the alleged legitimacy of that person’s beliefs and convictions. This presumption of legitimacy results from the disapproval of opposing, or simply different, beliefs, convictions, or ways of life. Two components are therefore necessary for intolerance: disapproval of the opposing beliefs and convictions of others and the power to prevent another from leading her life as she wishes. This is the twofold basis for the inclination to intolerance in the human heart. One might think that intolerance begins to rage only when, on the one hand, the power-to-prevent is supported by public force, possessing the might of the secular arm, and when, on the other hand, disapproval takes on the form of public condemnation by a partisan State, professing a particular vision of the good. In this respect, the Wars of Religion in Europe would be considered to constitute the enduring paradigm of intolerance, the Church – or Churches – offering the States the unction of truth, and the State supplying to a particular Church the

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sanction of secular might. In line with this longstanding paradigm, the residual religious fanaticisms of old Europe are held to have been replaced today by fundamentalist fanaticisms stemming primarily from Islam. For that matter, it was against this form of intolerance that the Western world’s discourse on tolerance was constituted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, if the power of the State, aligned until recently with ecclesiastical power, is alone in its capacity to give a public dimension to reprobation and to arm the power-to-prevent with an historical effectiveness which the will of the individual does not possess, it is still the case that public force ultimately operates only through the individual passions that serve to connect it to the most intimate inclinations of the human heart. Even the tyrant needs a sophist to compel belief through persuasion, flattery, or intimidation. In the final analysis, even when motivated by fear, it is in the individual that the fate of intolerance plays out. To lessen the discontinuity between the individual and the institution, it is legitimate to stress the role of what Walzer, in Spheres of Justice, calls “shared understandings”: it is true that we always find intermediary communities of allegiance, of conviction, and of power between the level of the individual and the level of the State. It is even, most especially, on this intermediary level that the education of the passions, which we shall discuss later, can take place. Moreover, to return to the period of the Enlightenment, the plea of the Encyclopedists on behalf of tolerance is addressed to individuals, called to rise out of their voluntary state of tutorship (Kant), as much as to States, invited to lift censorship, and to the enlightened segments of the public. It is then in a double – even threefold – sense that tolerance is a virtue. The ultimate reason for this is that power is a general anthropological structure, observed at every level where the power to act of one individual is susceptible of affecting the power to act of another and of diminishing it (Spinoza). Tolerance, we declared at the beginning, is the fruit of asceticism in the exercise of power. It consists, indeed, in a renouncement, the renouncement on the part of the one who would have the power to impose on another his form of belief, of action, in short, of the conduct of life as he sees it. Renouncing is always difficult and costly. This renouncement consists in an asceticism, whose stages are the following: 1. I bear, against my will, what I disapprove of, because I do not have the power to prevent it. 2. I disapprove of your way of life, but I strive to understand it, without, however, adhering to it.



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3. I disapprove of your way of life, but I respect in it your freedom to live as you desire, and I recognize your right to show this publicly. 4. I neither approve nor disapprove of the reasons for which you live differently than I do; but perhaps these reasons express a relation to the good that escapes me because of the finite nature of human understanding. 5. I approve of all ways of life, insofar as they cause no manifest harm to third parties; in short, I accept all ways of life because they are expressions of human plurality and diversity. Vive la différence! A few remarks on these stages and the transitions of this asceticism. There is, in fact, not a simple but a twofold asceticism: a visible asceticism of the power-to-prevent, of course; but, also, a more hidden and more costly – emotionally and intellectually – form of asceticism, that of conviction as it is directed toward others in the figure of approval and of disapproval. Renouncing power, but not yet disapproval, begins already on the first threshold. This is the minimal sense noted in dictionaries. In this way, Le Robert states in the first entry: “Tolerance: the fact of tolerating something, and not forbidding or requiring, although one could; the freedom that results from this abstention.” It was indeed as a result of this sort of abstention that things began to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the time of the Wars of Religion in Europe. The Peace of Westphalia, in Germany, partially broke up the ecclesiastical monopoly of power in the edict: Cujus region, ejus religio. The Edict of Nantes, in France, opened a breach – provisional, alas! – in the sacrosanct principle: one faith, one law, one king. For a time, two Christian confessions found a place, in accordance with certain restrictive and draconian conditions, within the same public space. But it was indeed against their will, and under the sign of mutual disapproval, that the two confessions and their members put up with one another without being able to prevent the other’s existence. A third-party arbiter had forced them to cohabitate. The mutation of disapproval begins with the second stage. It consists in an internal division – even a violent split – between adhering to one’s own conviction and the effort of imagination and sympathy by which one strives to understand a way of thinking, of acting, of living, finally, a conception of the good, other than one’s own. This split resides within the individual, the very one the defenders of the Enlightenment called upon to think for himself. This is, generally, an isolated individual, who, in advance of the majority current of his time, brings along small militant communities, as

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is witnessed in ecumenical attempts in the very midst of the Wars of Religion, following the path of an Erasmus, a Melanchthon, a Leibniz. More generally, we can attribute the fate of beliefs, torn between the critical tradition of the Greeks and the tradition of faith inherited from Judaism and Christianity, to the situation of continual confrontation at the heart of the Western world. It is against the backdrop of this fate that the institutional conquest of tolerance stands out: the secular State will one day be able to abstain from recognizing and subsidizing any confession, because civil society will have been shaped by the confrontation of critique and conviction. The decisive step, however, is made only at the third stage: it arises from an attempt to surmount the internal split dividing belief. This is not yet accomplished, at least not explicitly, even at the time of the Enlightenment: the religious beliefs criticized by the Encyclopedists are held to be superstitions and are attributed to ignorance, stupidity, hypocrisy, and relegated to the irrational part of the human soul. In fact, a true pluralism of beliefs, of ways of conducting one’s life – ultimately, visions of the good – is very difficult to assume in a non-skeptical way, that is, without the loss of some anchor in conviction. It is from here that we will set off a little later, with the help of the intolerable. But first, let’s dig a bit deeper and draw out the benefits of this new step. This step is taken thanks to the disjunction between truth and justice. It is not in the name of the truth as it appears to me – the apparent good of Medieval scholars – that I accept (and no longer merely put up with) the other, but in the name of the other’s right as equal to mine to lead his life as he intends. This is a genuine asceticism of power, to the extent that, as was stated above, the power of one person is power over another. Onto this initial asymmetry between action and passion, at the heart of human interaction, is grafted the tendency of one person to submit the will of another to his own will. The recognition of an equal right to exert one’s power of existing and acting is equivalent to the supersession of asymmetry by reciprocity. This is the spiritual movement described by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit under the title of the “dialectic of the master and the slave.” The initial inequality of these two emblematic figures is dialectically overcome by what the philosopher calls “recognition.” This is nothing less than the equal power of thinking placed under the new figure of the Stoic, resulting from the change in position between the slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Later, we will discuss the pitfalls of this symbolic equalization, which the contemporary outcome of tolerance is not without repeating. First,



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however, we must discuss the inestimable advance that results from this equalization. From the other’s right as equal to mine to express his power to act are derived the entire list of fundamental freedoms. It begins with the freedom of opinion, concretizing the right to think for oneself; it continues with freedom of expression and the other public freedoms (association, instruction, publication, assembly, etc.); it culminates with the freedom actively to participate in the constitution of political power. In democratic societies, tolerance is actual to the extent that public liberties are themselves protected and promoted by a State, which itself proclaims no particular conception of the good. Tolerance, for all that, does not cease to be a virtue, to the extent that it rests on the vow of citizens, constantly repeated, to consider the right of others to enjoy fundamental freedoms as equal to their own. In this respect, tolerance is no less a virtue of non-State institutions, such as associations, societies of thought, and religious institutions. It is even the latter, in particular, which are entrusted with the most difficult exercise of the asceticism of power. And this, of course, because of the past: but the Gordian knot between the unction conferred on political power by governing authorities of the dominant denomination, and the sanction conferred by secular might on the manifestations of ecclesiastical power, has today, in a general manner, been cut in the West. But there is a more fundamental reason to expect more from religious denominations than from any other society of thought; this reason has to do with the natural inclination of an institution of faith to impose on all what it holds to be, as its basic conviction, the supreme good. Where you find the supreme – in religion and in politics – subjugation is in the air. For a religious community, of any sort, it is by a continuous work on the self, by each of its members as well as by its authorities, that, freely and with an open heart, a limit can be set, not of truth but of justice, on the public expression of the conviction shared by the ecclesiastical community. It is even through this inner asceticism of his or her conviction that the religious person can contribute to the advance of tolerance on all the fronts where convictions are in competition. If, on the plane of truth, stage three does not go beyond a polemical version of tolerance, stage four directs tolerance toward cooperation, in the mode of what can be called conflictual consensus. It seems to me that, in this new stage, we cross over the critical threshold where tolerance, while appearing to reach its end-point, has perhaps already veered over into something we will discuss later. And we will see later how the intolerable can serve as a recourse against the slippage that begins in this stage and is

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consummated in the next. Where is the critical threshold in question situated? I neither approve nor disapprove: this is a subtle mutation, no longer a change in the tendency to constrain, but in the legitimating motivation ordinarily proclaimed in support of this tendency. In other terms, the displacement no longer affects the power but the conviction itself and its claim of truth. What indeed is a conviction that does not “hold for true,” at least at the time it is proffered, whether in an internal forum or on the public square? Yet, what is at issue is a split in the presumption of truth. If not the necessity, at least the plausibility of this new step is understandable, if we consider the hardly bearable character of the earlier split between truth and justice (in the same way as the passage from the second to the third stage was motivated by concern with overcoming the split between conviction and comprehensive sympathy). And if I were to say to myself that my conviction was not on the level of Truth (with a capital T)? After all, I do not possess the truth; I only hope (and, here, I recall my master, Gabriel Marcel) to be in the truth. All human understanding (I will add, in my heart) is finite, and thus also the understanding in which my conviction will ineluctably be expressed. Is this not the fate par excellence of a conviction that in some way touches the Absolute? “I am what I am,” says the God of the Exodus, in this way eluding capture by the literary genres in which God’s relation to human beings was allowed to be inscribed: narratives, legislation, prophesies, hymns, words of wisdom, etc. And if I were to add that it is in a circular relation that a religious community recognizes that it is founded in Scriptures, from which it has, in response, defined the code and transmitted over the centuries the major historical interpretations, should I not conclude that this founding word with respect to my community is at once supreme (in the sense that it is subordinated to nothing that would be superior in its own space of meaning) and inexhaustible, in the sense that there is a gap between the origin of its givenness (donation) and the history of its reception and transmission? If this is indeed the case, do I not have to admit that there is also truth elsewhere, outside of my province? If I am capable of taking this step, I will have converted passive tolerance into active tolerance, bearing-with into acceptance. I will, simply, have let the other exist. It will be noted that I have written the preceding paragraph entirely in the first person, in contrast to the earlier paragraphs in which the “I” could be converted (and even ought to have been converted) into anyone or each one. The asceticism proposed now can be practiced only by the individual, in the Kierkegaardian



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sense, that is, in the anti-Hegelian sense. It is the rare asceticism found in a few sages of the religions of our planet. An entire culture could attain this only by radiating out from person to person, from one small community to another small community. And this in a radically anti-sectarian climate. At this point, I look back on the course that has been covered. Can a well-ordered society, to borrow John Rawls’s expression, propose to go beyond stage three, massively or even by a majority, where truth and justice remain separated? Isn’t the wise course to join the public virtues of stage three to the private virtues of stage four, under pain of seeing the highest form of wisdom squirreled away in an incommunicable elitism? And of allowing an abyss to open up between wisdom and citizenship? Such scruples are borne out in the spectacle of the contemporary fate of tolerance on the level of common consciousness. If the sages of level four ought not to distance themselves from the citizens of level three, this is because the curve of tolerance, after reaching its summit, has already shifted within the society some call postmodern, that is, Western society after the Enlightenment. Everything occurs, in fact, as if tolerance had been tracing a vast historical curve, first ascending, then today descending, starting from the level of intolerance then culminating somewhere between stage three, where truth and justice remain juxtaposed, and stage four, where the idea of truth explodes, putting itself in line with what justice had already foreseen, as if tolerance were following its course beyond its point of culmination. But going where? I have sketched out, under the heading of level five, the profile of a profession of indifference, whether implicit or explicit. The stage we have reached today is one where people approve of everything, because everything is the same, everything is equal. Antoine Garapon refers to this mutation in his contribution: for him, the model of tolerance coming out of the Wars of Religion has spent its resources, because today there are no longer any professions of faith to reconcile and, above all, to force to cohabitate. In the absence of any shared points of reference, the two common residual concerns, that of public safety, in the face of new forms of danger, and that of public health, in the face of bodily threats, bring to the fore the arbitration of the judicial institution, with its agreedupon procedures, and the protection of the medical institution. Arbitration and protection: the new figures of tolerance. However, this is no longer a question of accomplishment but of substitution. At the same time, the attacks by postmodern writers against the rationality of the Enlightenment and against “modernity” have

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provided comfort, quite involuntarily, to the internal decomposition of the patient edifice, which, as we underscored in our discussion of stage three, has carried to its pinnacle the profession of human rights, today considered an obsolete ideology. To be sure, everyone is fighting for human rights, but the work of asceticism – asceticism of conviction as well as that of power – on the level of individuals as well as institutions has ceased to be relevant; it has become indecipherable, nonsensical. It is troubling to ask oneself what secret complicity – this, too, involuntary – can exist between the ultimate asceticism of stage four and the fall into indifference of stage five? This relation is troubling, as is anything that makes the authentic and the inauthentic secretly complicit. Indeed, nothing more closely resembles the statement: “There is also truth outside of my province,” than the statement: “Differences are indifferent.” Did not Hegel anticipate this change of level that transmutes the same into its other, when he made the figure of the sceptic follow that of the stoic? If the slave and the emperor are similar in that they “think,” then all that distinguishes them, that is to say, all the historical differences, are insignificant, in-different. How, then, are we to remain on the crest? How are we to prevent the acceptance of the truth of the other from contributing to the argument on behalf of indifference, that is, if it has arguments? How can we restore to tolerance its historical substance, which the evocation of some far-off common underlying principle seems to have caused to fade away? It is at this point that, unexpectedly, the question of the intolerable emerges as the ultimate refuge of a tolerance that is reflected on and intended. The intolerable is that which one would want not to tolerate, although one could do so or even should do so. In this sense, the intolerable is the polar opposite of intolerance, the behavior of reprobation and of hindrance which tolerance sought to overcome. The intolerable is problematic only against the backdrop of tolerance, achieved or in the process of attainment. What makes it problematic is the claim to set a limit on tolerance. The intolerable is actually on the same line of disapproval as tolerance. But while tolerance abstains from …, the intolerable calls for suspending the abstention. This is why it is fully relevant only in a culture that has been educated by and in tolerance. And it is for this precise reason that we can expect from it the effect of a wake-up call in a culture, lacking any clear points of reference, in which tolerance has already turned into indifference. But in order to justify this expectation, to which we will return in conclusion, a few preliminary questions have to be answered: By



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what means do we recognize the intolerable? What is typically intolerable? In the name of what is the intolerable denounced? We must begin with the first question because, as we’ll see in a moment, the answer to the second question risks losing itself, wandering off in too many directions. The intolerable is recognized by the passion that detects it, namely indignation, an eminently reactive passion. It is as such that indignation clearly stands out against the dominant torpor of a society ready to accept everything as equally insignificant. Indignation is first of all a cry: This is intolerable! Indignation is moral anger, an “attesting and contesting” figure of virtue. However, if indignation can be recognized by its heated reactive character, across the diversity of its manifestations which would call for a phenomenology, it is more difficult to distinguish in these a common object. Occasions for indignation appear in no particular order: what is there in common between the disgust aroused by the crime of pedophilia, the horror that stories coming from the deportation and extermination camps continue to inspire, the scorn responding to vicious attacks of rampant calumny directed against an honest person, the revolt against displays of racism, against the disguised return of forms of slavery, against extreme inequalities, or against policies of exclusion? It seems that we are condemned to proceed inductively: but with what focus in view? Are not the figures of evil, if indeed it is a question of evil, which indignation denounces – without being capable of designating the good of which they are the contrary – are these not dispersed by their very nature? If the good is ultimately one, isn’t evil principally legion? Let us try, nevertheless. It is easy to delimit a certain number of “shameful” behaviors: those that harm the very exercise of tolerance. Tolerance, as has been stated here, is a reflexive virtue awaiting reciprocity. This amounts to saying that the first intolerable is intolerance itself. A surprising proposition that seems to carry us back to the starting point. Yet, this is not really the case. Whether the intolerance is religious, as in the grand period of the Wars of Religion in Europe or as it is now in various parts of the world, or political or cultural, as in dictatorships where the governing class takes on the power of policing morality – intolerance has become intolerable only in comparison to a state of culture in which stage three described above has been attained by a significant number of political regimes supported by enlightened public opinion. However, all that is intolerable cannot be reduced to the resistance of intolerance to the earlier advances and progress of tolerance out

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in the world or at home. Perhaps we should then focus on one word: “harm.” It will have been noted that this is the only clause in the definition of tolerance in stage five that has not been commented on: “I approve all ways of life provided that they cause no manifest harm to third parties.” Harming is the negative flipside of helping, of aiding, of the benevolence capable of augmenting others’ power of existing (to continue in the Spinozist vocabulary privileged here). Do no harm, a minimal ethics. Prevent harm, a minimal politics. Scattered figures of harm, yet possessing the kinship of all the harms bound together by indignation. The negative of the object “harm,” confronting the negative of the feeling “indignation.” In this respect, just as Hans Jonas speaks of a heuristic of fear – in a sense that finally proves to be closer than it might seem to our theme of indignation – there would be a heuristic of indignation, the final bastion of a common morality in ruins. And if, for a moment, we were to follow Jonas’s path along the way that joins the “principle of responsibility” to its privileged counterpart, the fragile, would it not make sense to say that the heuristic of indignation alerts moral vigilance to the vast category of the fragile, that is, to vulnerability to harm? Harm, then: a wrong done to the power of existing of others, stifling the others’ growth. In this instant, for a second time the abject figure of the murderous pedophile appears before our eyes. Joining this figure are the torturers, the clandestine traffickers of the slave trade, all those who exploit the vulnerability that is characteristic of, without being limited to, childhood. In this expansion outward from the focus on mistreated children, the theme of fragility overlaps, as Jonas had suggested, with another form of fragility, which is that of the democratic State itself, to the extent that, lacking transcendent legitimacy, it rests – at least as a first approximation – only on the desire-to-live-together of the greatest number in just institutions protecting fundamental freedoms. The child and the State: polar figures of fragility. If it is, therefore, possible to recognize a positive motivation in indignation, an eminently reactive sentiment, this would be in the responsibility with respect to fragility in its diverse forms, extending to the ends of the earth. This attempt to restore to indignation the other side of the coin of which it is the reverse leads us to the threshold of the final question raised above: In the name of what is the intolerable denounced? John Rawls, discussing the moral ground for which his principles of justice are held to provide a rational argument – specifically here, one that is contractual and procedural – speaks of “considered convictions” and attempts to establish a sort of “reflective equilibrium” between these and his argumentation.



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I propose another sort of “reflective equilibrium” between the virtuous anger of indignation and a return to the forgotten sources of our culture. If indignation can form a barrage against the moral indifference into which tolerance is slowly sinking, it is to the extent that it rings an alarm. Indeed, democracy should not be said to be founded on a void; instead, it expresses an over-abundance, flowing from the forgotten sources of our culture. The culture of the West, for its part, results from the conflictual, but ultimately fruitful, encounter between Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures, the successive Renaissances, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the nationalist and socialist movements of the nineteenth century, and so on. It would be another task – alongside the plea for tolerance, where the main accent is placed on abstaining from forbidding and from preventing – to draw instead from the resources of indignation, stirred up by the intolerable, extracting from these the energy for a moral re-foundation of democracy. This re-foundation would have to be multiple, proceeding by way of intersecting heritages. If indignation does not result in this sort of work on oneself, out of which our multiple traditions would recognize themselves as together co-founding a shared desire-to-live-together, they would risk arming the might of an avenger who, under the pretext of limiting the abuses of tolerance, would reinvent intolerance under the cover of virtue. It is, in particular, when indignation opens the way for repressive actions, in open conflict with one public freedom or another – first among these, the freedom of expression – that the restrictions imposed in this way risk being perceived as intolerable by the freest minds. In this respect, Monique Canto-Sperber, confronting this same problem in our volume, pleads in favor of the spirit of “ponderation.” In my eyes, ponderation is indeed an important expression of practical wisdom in the tradition of tragic and Aristotelian phronesis, and of Scholastic prudence. Ponderation, as the word indicates, involves weighing the pros and cons of an unlimited tolerance that is in danger of allowing harm to be done to the most fragile in the name of freedom and risking a return to intolerance under the cover of moral order. An important expression of this ponderation would be to give up an attempt to reconstitute a moral consensus, which cannot exist in a pluralist society. Wisdom is to settle for fragile compromises, along the lines of what Rawls calls “overlapping consensus,” which is kept in check by what he terms “recognition of reasonable disagreements.” A second expression would be not to compel a premature or forced conclusion of the questions under debate, such as abortion (which has been decriminalized but not removed from its uncertain status of a lesser wrong)

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or euthanasia, and more generally of the problems raised by the relation of private and public morality to life and to death. What is important in this regard is that the conflict be considered relevant by all the protagonists involved. The vehemence of an ordered discussion would strongly attest to a consciousness awakened from its indifference by the vigor of indignation. But the counsel of wisdom remains. Limits would have to be placed on indignation and its furor. The wisdom of the Greeks proclaimed, “Nothing in excess.” Is it not the same wisdom, the same “ponderation,” that is recommended by the “mitezza,” praised by Noberto Bobbio at the start of this collection of essays?

12 The Condition of the Foreigner

Basic Distinction: “Foreigner” versus “Member” Before considering the differences in legal status and in the concrete conditions distinguishing foreigners among themselves, a particular sort of fragmentation produced by history has to be set in its place, a fragmentation by reason of which humanity exists nowhere as a single political body, but is offered to our attention as divided into multiple communities, constituted in such a way that certain humans belong to them as members, all others being foreigners. This basic distinction is not to be confused with the pair friend/enemy which a certain political philosophy likes to showcase. The latter relation belongs to a clearly delimited problematic, that of war and peace. Before this, there is the opposition between belonging and not belonging to an historical community, the Nation-State – in our case, being French. In this pair, a single term, the quality of being a member, is “marked,” the second, that of being foreign, is not. Our dictionaries state without ambiguity the asymmetry proper to this basic distinction. “Étranger” (foreigner/foreign), Le Robert says, is “someone who is of another nation; what is other in speaking of a nation.” Stated simply: someone who is foreign is not “from here” (“chez nous”) – not one of us. This tells us nothing about who the stranger is for himself, “at home” (“chez lui”) – nor anything about relations of alliance, neutrality, or enmity established between “us” and “them.” This lexical constraint goes well beyond words; the vocabulary sets down these terms: if – and we will return to

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this – we do not know who we are, we are expected to know what we belong to, what community we are members of. From this tacit presupposition it results that, prior to any attempt to fill in the empty space of the word “foreigner,” our task is to clarify, as far as possible, the nature of this belonging in relation to which the condition of foreigner is first defined by default. We must not fear spending time on the legal aspect of the problem. Something has already been stated at this level to raise the veil, in part, of what has been left unsaid, which weighs on the understanding we have of our belonging as members of the national community, and by ricochet on the representation of the foreigner we construct for ourselves. An initial observation is called for: if we place ourselves in the standpoint of distributive justice,1 the good constitutive of membership in a nation is not a good we distribute among ourselves: we possess it already. It is to others that we distribute it, and this is a matter of sovereignty. To be sure, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to a nationality,” and again: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality.” But this right to …, like other rights to …, cannot be sanctioned unless it is directed to the precise agency entrusted with this obligation, and responsible for honoring it. To clarify this point, let us place ourselves for a moment in the perspective of a foreigner who desires and makes a request to be admitted among us – to receive French nationality. The first thing he discovers is that allowing a foreigner to receive our nationality (and our citizenship, we will say later) is a sovereign decision taken by the political authorities of the State. Definitively, nothing is more absolute than the recognition of the State’s sovereignty to attribute or refuse nationality. Now, to what is the foreigner asking to be admitted? Let us remain here on the level of the law, and save for subsequent reflection the question of the understanding we have of the very sense of our belonging, which is something we always already possess. For our purposes, two or three remarks will suffice. In private international law, nationality is defined as follows: “Legal membership of a person in a population constituting a State.”2 To the notion of population is joined that of territory, hence of borders as the limits of the jurisdiction of public, political, and legal authorities. These three notions – State, territory, and population – are thus so closely bound together that membership in the population constituting a State is equivalent to defining the substance of the State in terms of this population: the French, the English, etc. In this sense, an independent State establishes itself by defining its population, its “nationals.”3 More delicate is the relation between nationality and



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citizenship. In our republican and Jacobin tradition, the two notions tend to overlap with one another without, however, being identical. Citizenship consists in the legal bond that connects a physical person to a given State. To this bond are attached civil and political rights, principal among these the right to participate in political power, as an eligible voter or candidate in different electoral consultations. But even for us, nationality and citizenship do not completely coincide, to the extent that not all nationals are citizens in full: minors, the mentally disabled, those convicted of certain crimes do not enjoy the right to vote. On the other hand, in France, nationals alone are citizens: this is not the case everywhere, since in some countries, foreign residents are, under certain rules, allowed to participate in local elections. Here too, it was not always the case that nationals alone are citizens: under the Revolution, certain foreigners were considered foreign-citizens. In the current state of French law,4 a citizen is a national considered as the bearer of civil rights and of a parcel of national sovereignty. This equation, reserving for nationals the enjoyment and exercise of civic rights, results in transforming the idea of a national into a mechanism of exclusion with respect to foreigners. Since there is no principle of international law that imposes on States the requirement of according political rights to foreigners, the political incapacity of foreign residents remains in France, in the words of one of our great legal scholars, “an absolute rule that brooks no exception.”5 To complete this legal framework, it must be added that for those who are already members, belonging to the nation has become a property of the person, just as our name, lineage, sex, place and date of birth. Show your identity card! The allotment of membership in your nation has already taken place. The legal barrier between nationals and foreigners is impenetrable. The foreigner is not only someone who is not one of us, but someone who is not authorized to become one of us by the mere fact that he wants to or asks to. He cannot demand this. And the country with respect to which he is a foreigner can sovereignly refuse to admit him. There are even circumstances or countries in which admission can be annulled with equal sovereignty, by expulsion or, for certain countries, by banishment. The discretionary character of admission to a nationality and the absence of limits on the sovereignty of the political act of welcome only underscore with the greatest firmness the absence of symmetry in the pair member/foreigner. What remains unsaid in this purely legal analysis of the condition of foreigner, however, is the nature of the understanding we have of ourselves as members belonging to a particular national community. Now, by questioning ourselves about our understanding of our own

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belonging, we will be led to give, for the first time, a content to the unmarked term of foreigner. We can go no further in the understanding we have of our “chez nous” without constructing some sort of representation of what his “chez lui” would signify for the foreigner. We cannot sidestep this test of understanding, to the extent that the sovereign choices of the State that represents us cannot be made unless they are in agreement with what the current members of the community understand to be the sense of the membership they have already acquired or, again, to be in agreement with what they would hope this belonging would become. Now, the prior possession of this good, which we have acknowledged we do not distribute to ourselves, defines the framework within which distributive justice operates, as it bears on all the other social goods: market or non-market goods. We have to admit that the understanding we have of belonging to a given country, a given nation, a given State, does not rest on any clear and transparent reason. In truth, it is not a question of reasons – I mean, of motives – that we could support with arguments if a contrarian were to ask us to justify being French, rather than English or German. In this respect, it would be a serious mistake to interpret the desire to live together with these compatriots, with these fellow citizens, in terms of a contract. If the notion of a social contract has a place on the community level, it is on the plane of the Constitution, in the sense of constitutional law, which presupposes an assembled community, discussing in a perfectly unreal, imaginary situation, the best way to govern. This difficulty is related to Rousseau’s notion of the “social contract,” and to the hypothesis constructed by John Rawls, in the Theory of Justice, of an “original position,” made visible by the fable of the “veil of ignorance.” The understanding we have of belonging to the same national community is a shared understanding, nourished by a history incarnated in mores, manifested in ways of living, of working, of loving, and supported by the founding narratives that establish our identity. Ordinary conversation is the level of discourse this understanding belongs to, when it is expressed. But most often our desire-to-live-together remains un-said. It is even so deeply buried that it rises to the surface only when it is contested as a result of disparagement, threatened by civil discord, even “undone” as a result of military defeat or revolution. Now, it is precisely on this level of chiaroscuro that the foreigner begins to step out of his anonymity; to explain our collective identity, we need to compare ourselves to others. This is when our prejudices tumble out – our hasty characterizations, even our positive judgments and our praises. At least, in the moment of



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comparison, the foreigner has ceased to be the unmarked term in the pair: member/foreigner. Our self-understanding emerges from the un-said and begins to become clearer only through comparison, differentiation, opposition. We even try to imagine the understanding that others have of themselves, imagining what it would be like to be English, German … We experience sympathy, indifference, hostility. We approve or disapprove of the relations of friendship, neutrality, or hostility that our States maintain on the international stage. In short, we repeat the foreign policy of our country through feelings capable of running the entire gamut of emotions from closeness to distance. Taking one more step, we become aware of the fact that what certain official international documents call the “human family” exists only as politically fragmented, as is reflected in the map of religions, cultures, ethnicities, and – in a particularly surprising and instructive manner, as we will state later – in the diversity of languages, on which Wilhelm von Humboldt reflected. Our imagination can even carry us so far as to picture ourselves as belonging to any community whatsoever, one among all the others. Seen from everywhere and from nowhere, our country appears to us in a flash as other than the others. At the end of this aleatory course in the imagination, the initial equation has been reversed: our country appears, in its turn, as the unmarked term in the pair members/foreigners. It is at this level that the memory of having been a stranger/foreigner oneself, as celebrated passages in the Old Testament confirm, casts an aura of good will on the declaration according to which we are all strangers, each of us in relation to others.

The Foreigner “Chez Nous” The act of imagination by which we see ourselves as foreign with respect to others leaves the realm of fantasy once it undergoes the test of the duty of hospitality; we will now examine several genuinely real figures in this regard. These correspond to three situations that can be classified in increasing order of their tragic circumstances: the “foreigner chez nous” is, first, the visitor who comes of his own free will; next, the immigrant, more precisely, the foreign worker who lives in our country more or less against his will; finally, the refugee, the asylum seeker, who hopes, most often in vain, to be admitted to our country. This last occasion for hospitality properly conforms to the tragic situation of action, inasmuch as the foreigner assumes the posture of “supplicant” here.

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The foreigner as visitor This peaceable figure – in the twofold sense that it gives visibility to a state of peace and that it augments the spirit of peace – itself contains many aspects, from the tourist who moves freely in the territory of the country of reception to the resident who moves to a place and stays there. Both of them illustrate the act of living together, shared by nationals and foreigners. This figure of the foreigner recalls the importance of the categories of territory and population for the stability of the status of membership in the national community. It is this dimension of the condition of membership that the foreigner is authorized to share. Without becoming a citizen, the visitor enjoys the opportunities of freedom of movement and commerce; she shares certain basic social goods, such as safety, medical care, even education. Of course, this happy condition has to be charged to the globalization of exchanges. But this would be ineffectual without the practice of what Kant termed, precisely, in Perpetual Peace, “the right to associate,” and in which he sees a well-founded corollary to the cosmopolitan right.6 Kant’s argument deserves to be cited in its entirety: “Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality (Wirthbarkeit) means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.” This is “a right to associate, [the right] which all men have [as members of society]. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.”7 Kant sums up the declaration of this right in the concept of “universal hospitality.”8 The traveler’s or the foreign resident’s right to associate is far from being a mere curiosity. It quite simply reveals the very essence of hospitality, which Le Robert defines as follows: “The fact of receiving someone into one’s home, possibly providing lodging, and food at no cost.” Le Robert’s definition appears to privilege food and lodging; to these, I would like to add conversation. Not only because it is at this level, as we said earlier, that the initial tacit understanding the member has of belonging to a community reaches the plane of language, but because it is on the level of the exchange of words that the initial asymmetry between the member and the foreigner begins concretely to be rectified. In this regard, we cannot too strongly underscore the phenomenon of the translation of one language into another as a model of the “equalization of conditions,” as



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Tocqueville would describe it. The act of translating functions on the level of the dispersion of languages, the symbol of the dispersion of peoples. Do we not speak of teaching “foreign languages”? If translation constitutes a model for the encounter with the foreign, it is to the extent that, in its very operation, it consists in genuine linguistic hospitality, the speaker of the language of reception carrying herself to the level of the text’s language of origin which she will, in a way, inhabit in order to translate it, receiving, in return, the translated message in her own language. Here is a beautiful illustration of the universal hospitality celebrated by Kant, and which confers a value of prophecy on the right to visit, as a living parable of perpetual peace. Let us repeat: “Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.”

The foreigner as immigrant This, obviously, refers to the condition of the foreign worker, a condition designated by terms such as Gastarbeiter or guest worker. To be sure, there are other immigrants in addition to foreign workers, among these refugees admitted as asylum seekers, which we will discuss later, or those admitted on an emergency basis due to the forced displacement of populations, and mass migrations caused by the violence of history. But in ordinary language – the language of unions, the Administration, and politicians – it is foreign workers who are referred to in the public discourse on immigrants. And, especially, these are the ones who give rise to the problems we will discuss. We must not forget how this category of visitors by necessity has come about. It is the need for low-skilled workers, in jobs that are generally unpleasant, which is at the origin of this large-scale migratory flow. It is, therefore, labor, the ordinary necessity of economic life, that defines this category of foreigners “chez nous.” We are no longer in the register of freedom of choice, as with the visitors who come of their own free will, but in the order of necessity, more precisely, the regime of survival and the need to provide for families, who for the most part have remained in their country. The life of this sort of foreigner is traced out by actors (economic and political actors) other than themselves. To be sure, they inhabit the space protected by the State that has admitted them, where they can move freely and where they are consumers like us, the nationals. Part of their freedom is due to their participation, like us, in the market economy, another part results from their access, within certain limits, to the protection of the welfare state. They

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possess union rights and, in principle, benefit from the same right to housing as the nationals; but they are not citizens and are governed without their consent. If, elsewhere, they are called “guests,” this is because they are not immigrants who are seeking a new residence and new citizenship. They are expected to return home once their contract is terminated and their visa has expired. The right to family reunification causes difficulties for them; they are the first to suffer from segregation in housing; cultural assimilation is difficult for them, even as it is easier for their children. The question of their freedom of religion is unresolved, even if it is not prohibited. As their residence in the country is tied to their employment, their position is all the more precarious as they enter into competition with nationals in the labor market and risk increasing the number of unemployed. But the hardest burden they bear is the distance from their home. Their situation puts into sharp relief the contrast between the mobility of labor across the globe and the restricted political space of citizenship. More fundamentally, they have not contributed to the silent history of wanting-to-live-together which underlies the national pact. Onto this reality are grafted the fantasies of public opinion, which are expressed primarily in the amalgamation of legal immigrant workers and undocumented foreigners, suspected of being a threat to security, even of terrorism. Suspicion, distrust, xenophobia tend to permeate the understanding nationals have of the foreigners’ presence in the same political space. If, as we said above, this understanding quite naturally includes a sentiment of difference with respect to the foreigner, exclusion transforms this difference into rejection. The response to this sorry situation has to take place on two levels. First, a response on the level of political justice9 owed to resident workers; something has to be invented here, a sort of first-degree admission, coming before the second-degree admission consisting in naturalization, which could eventually include participation in local elections, as is the case in certain Western democracies. This first-degree admission would have to be negotiated with the home countries of the foreign workers, as is already beginning to be done in certain existing treaties or in agreements now being negotiated. But, most of all, the response should take place on the level of the human right to hospitality explored above in the de-dramatized situation of the foreigner as a visitor. In this respect, the writings of Kant and Fichte on universal hospitality ought to contribute to changes in legislation and, before that, to converting mentalities. The same right of peoples that previously governed war and peace among nations should in our day and age govern the relations



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between host countries and these visitors by necessity, the immigrant workers.

The foreigner as refugee The question of refugees, by itself, constitutes an immense chapter, exceeding the limits of a reflection on the condition of the foreigner. The sovereign choice of a State regarding the composition of its population, and hence access to its territory, conflicts here with a right stemming from a source other than the free and spontaneous wish to live elsewhere, namely from the right to protection of persecuted populations, to which corresponds a right to asylum on the side of the countries of reception. If we were able to submit the right of foreign workers to the rule of justice, the right of refugees has to be submitted to the duty of assistance, the duty to bring aid to persons in danger.10 In the background of the contemporary right of refugees, we find, of course, the tradition of asylum, which is itself tied to the ancient tradition of hospitality offered to fugitives escaping the vengeful justice of their country of origin. As we know, asylum is present in the institutions of our principal founding civilizations. We can invoke here the twofold background, biblical and Hellenic, asylum being defined as a place of refuge which, unable to be pillaged, is inviolable. Grotius writes in 1625: “a fixed abode ought not to be refused to strangers, who being expelled from their own country, seek a retreat elsewhere: provided they submit to the laws of the State, and refrain from everything that might give occasion to sedition” (De jure belli ac pacis, Bk. II, Ch. II, Para. xvi). In the eighteenth century, asylum becomes political: Protestant exiles benefit from it in various points around Europe – and Voltaire, as well … What is important for us is noting the twist that the conception of exile as a right of the person represents with respect to the prerogatives of the host country. It was even as an exception to the rule of extradition that legal scholars, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, raised the question of asylum.11 However, up until the twentieth century, asylum has continued to be essentially an individual question touching people who have a political role. After the upheavals of the twentieth century, a new concept appears under the title of refugee. The fact that it entails a right to asylum should not mask the difference in status. The problem is now placed within the framework of vast, forced mass migrations. This is of interest to us here inasmuch as, in addition to the fact that

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the refugee benefits from the protection of an international organization, the primary responsibility for welcoming the refugee belongs to the country of asylum – at some point, our own country. It is at this stage in the operation that the concern with protecting refugees enters into conflict, openly or surreptitiously, with the concern to protect the territorial sovereignty of the host country. Let us first recall how the Geneva Convention of July 28, 1951 defined the status of refugee. The term applied to any person who as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside of the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.12

Everything rests on the idea of a reasonable fear of persecution; the subjective idea of fear is tempered by the enumeration of objective criteria, namely the causes of persecution (race, religion, nationality, political opinions, social group – intellectuals, university professors, homosexuals …). Nothing will be said about the subsequent evolution of the definition, nor of the mandate entrusted by the United Nations General Assembly to the High Commissioner for Refugees, in order to focus on the litigious point where the general problematic of the foreigner is once more put into question: the policy of admitting refugees is, once again, the province of national sovereignty. The latter remains intact in the case of the refugees whom the host country will seek out; on the other hand, those who come to it themselves pose the thorny problem of the right of refugees to the right of asylum. The origin of the problem is the following: States, being bound by successive international agreements, cannot refuse the request for asylum. However, they sovereignly possess the prerogative to put in place eligibility criteria for the status of refugee, where the sole objective is “recognizing” the qualifications of the asylum seeker. The host country must then give itself the means to verify that the person who presents himself as a refugee actually does possess the characteristics enumerated in the international definition. The decision of eligibility therefore, in principle, consists only in declaring, in recognizing, this match. This concept of recognition thus belongs to international law; but it is in the very procedure of recognition that the traps will be laid by the haughty principle of sovereignty. The asylum seeker, who is not yet



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a refugee until the procedure of recognition has been completed, has as his sole weapon the principle of good faith, better known as the presumption of innocence. Now, the principle of good faith itself rests only on the “inherent dignity … of all members of the human family,”13 declared in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We see where the dispute will lie: is it entirely up to the asylum seeker to prove that she genuinely fits the definition of the status she is claiming? Now, the effects of persecution and the circumstances of her departure risk making her testimony her only proof. Shouldn’t the search for proof, then, be shared between the authorities of the host country and the one requesting asylum, as is recommended by the High Commissioner for Refugees? What is more, shouldn’t the asylum seeker, from the time of her entrance into the host country, be presumed to be a refugee? And, isn’t the definition of refugee, essentially dating from 1951, too restrictive? Is there not, then, a need to invent a new right to asylum? We have talked about asylum before speaking about the refugee. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 1948, thus anterior to the convention on refugees, states in Article 14: “Everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”14 But this right – like so many other rights to … – is, precisely, not binding on any compulsory authority. The fact is that the principle of a State’s territorial sovereignty remains the very foundation of our contemporary public international law and includes the ability to control the entry of foreigners into the national territory and, if need be, to expel them. The truth is that the industrialized countries, as a whole, tend to secure themselves as fortresses in the face of the uncontrolled flow of migrations unleashed by the disasters of our century. What should be taken into consideration in this respect are the measures taken on the scale of Europe which, too often, contradict the tradition of asylum and the protection of the rights and freedoms of persons, beginning with measures to fight against the “abuses” of the right to asylum (the notion of “manifestly unfounded” requests for asylum). Everything conspires to reject as many asylum seekers as possible, keeping them at a distance from Western borders. According to François Crépeau’s observation: “It is … always more a matter of protecting States from the flow of refugees than of protecting the latter from the causes of their exile.”15 Even the legitimate concern with averting exile, for example by invoking or creating a right “not to be displaced” or the “right to a community” (by returning to the community of origin?), can be interpreted as a subtle means of protecting advanced industrialized countries against these waves of immigrants and as a way

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of evading the duty of protection owed to victims of persecution and other calamities. But we cannot direct all the ammunition of critique against the principle of national sovereignty; we cannot lose sight of the fact underscored at the end of our initial discussion, namely that the State represents us, even in our reticence to broaden the circle of “chez nous,” at the risk of putting into question once more what remains unsaid in our desire-to-live-together. In this respect, the duty to bring assistance to unfortunate foreigners has little weight, as long as the sense of universal hospitality and the commitment to a new “project of perpetual peace” has not won out, at the very heart of the understanding we have of ourselves, over the legitimate satisfaction of belonging, as a free citizen, to “our” national community.

13 Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity

I am happy that our Fédération internationale de l’ACAT [Action of Christians for the Abolition of Torture] colloquium has chosen as its theme the question of identity, together with the question of the recognition of others.1 This question places an utterly baffling issue before us. We can express this in the interrogative form: Who are we? More gravely, we are directly confronted by the presumed, alleged, purported nature of identity claims. This presumption is contained in responses seeking to mask the anxiety of the question. To the question “Who?” – Who am I? – we answer in terms of “What.” In the form of: here is what we are, we others. We are this way, like this and not otherwise. The fragility of identity, which will occupy us in a moment, is apparent in the fragility of these “What” responses, alleging to give the recipe of identity, proclaimed and reclaimed.

The Question of Memory I would like to devote my first set of remarks to the doubling of this question on the personal and collective level. The question “Who?” can be raised in the first-person singular: me, I, or in the first-person plural: us, we. The legitimacy of this doubling has been put to the test in the case of the problem of memory, which will play a large role in our discussion in terms of the narrative and history.

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Already on the level of memory, the question of the sense of identity is not easy, in that, at least at first sight, memory can be an identity that is not only personal but intimate: remembering is directly remembering oneself. This was already the lesson of Saint Augustine in the Confessions and again, in the modern period, in the English philosopher, John Locke. In his Essay on Human Understanding, Locke proposes to identify one by one all the terms in the series: identity, consciousness, memory, self. By identity, he means the primacy of the same over what he terms “diversity” and what we call otherness (altérité); and this, by virtue of the principle according to which a thing is the same as itself, and not another. This self-identity, which can be followed from the acorn to the oak, which remains the same from the seed to the tree, culminates with the self which recognizes itself as the same in the moment of reflection across different places and times. And it is memory that attests to the continuity of existence and the permanence of oneself. Taken radically, this series of equations leaves no room for something like a collective memory and, correlatively, for the idea of identity applied to groups, collectivities, communities, nations. At most, this would amount to a possibly misleading analogy. Now, common experience conflicts with this semantic puritanism. Memory is not simply personal, private reminiscence, but also commemoration, that is, shared memory. We see this in peoples as least as much as in individuals; we see it in our holidays with their celebrations and rituals. Not only does the idea of collective memory appear to be appropriate to a direct and immediate experience of shared memory, but one can legitimately wonder if personal, private memory is not in large part a social construct. Think of the role of language in memory in its declarative phase: a memory is expressed in the mother tongue, in the language of everyone; our earliest memories, those of our childhood, represent us entangled with the lives of others, in the family, at school, in public; it is often together that we evoke a shared past. Finally, examining particular situations, such as that of psychoanalytic therapy, reveals to us that the most private recollection is not easy and requires being assisted, even permitted, authorized by another. In sum, our memory is always already entangled with the memoires of others. To rapidly conclude this initial discussion, I would like to say that the attribution of memory to someone is a very complex operation which can, in principle, be performed in reference to all the grammatical persons: I remember, he/she remembers, we remember, they remember. This multiple attribution of memory will henceforth be our guide in the following analyses and will authorize a continual

  Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity 161 back-and-forth between the level of the person and the level of the community. This entanglement, we shall see, is even such that in certain cases collective identity will present in a more vivid and more disturbing manner the problem of its justification, even its purification, its pacification, its healing – so true it is that our collective memories, even more than our personal memories, are wounded, diseased memories. This question of the equal right to the attribution of memory, and by way of memory to the identity of persons and communities, having been provisionally settled, we are now in a position to confront a major difficulty, that of the fragility of identity. It is in the course of this second phase of our investigation that the confrontation with the otherness of others will be met, on the plane of the individual as well as on the plane of the collective.

What is the Cause of the Fragility of Identity? The first cause of the fragility of identity must be held to be its difficult relation to time; this primary difficulty justifies the recourse to memory as the temporal component of identity, in conjunction with the evaluation of the present and the projection of the future. Now, the relation to time raises a difficulty because of the equivocal character of the notion of the same, implicit in the notion of the identical. What, in fact, does it mean to remain the same over time? In the past, I wrestled with this enigma, for which I proposed distinguishing two senses of identity: the same as idem, même, gleich; the same as ipse, self, selbst. It appeared to me that the maintenance of the self in time was based on a complex play between sameness (mêmeté) and selfhood (ipséité), to venture such infelicitous terms. In this equivocal play, the practical and passionate aspects are more formidable than the conceptual, epistemic aspects. I would say that the temptation of a nativist, essentialist identity, Jacques Le Goff’s “identitary unreason” (déraison identitaire), consists in the retreat from ipse identity back into idem identity, or, if one prefers, in the slippage, in the drift, leading from the suppleness proper to the maintenance of the self in promising, to the inflexible rigidity of a character, in the quasi-typographical sense of the term. Let us linger for a moment on this first cause of fragility. By virtue of what we have just said about the imbrication of individual memory and collective memory, this difficult management of time concerns both sorts of memory. On the plane of the individual, we have learned from psycho­ analysis how difficult it is to summon memories and to confront

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one’s own past. The subject is the victim of traumatisms, emotional wounds; and his tendency, Freud observes in the celebrated essay, Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten), is to cede to the compulsion to repeat which Freud attributes to the resistances of repression. The result of this is that the subject repeats these phantasies instead of working through them; what is more, he allows them to be enacted in behaviors that threaten himself and others. The analogy on the plane of collective memory is obvious; memories of peoples are wounded memories, haunted by the recollection of the glories and humiliations of a bygone past. It is astonishing and troubling that collective memory presents a caricaturist version of these bouts of repetition and their re-enactment in the form of an obsession with a past endlessly picked over. It must even be admitted that the work of memory is more difficult to undertake on the collective level than on the individual level, and that the resources offered by analysis have no equivalent there. Where would we find the symmetry of transference? Of the talking cure? Who is the psychoanalyst? Who can guide the labor of working through? The question becomes even more troubling when we add the idea of the work of mourning to the idea of the work of memory. The work of mourning, Freud writes in another essay [Mourning and Melancholia], consists in the emotional treatment of the loss of the loved object and, thus, also of an object of hate. The subject is asked to break, one by one, the ties resulting from her libidinal investments under the harsh constraints of the reality principle, in opposition to the pleasure principle. This is the price to be paid for a liberating divestment; otherwise, the subject is carried down the path of mourning, leading to melancholy, to depression, where to the loss of the object is added the loss of self-esteem, the Ichgefühle of which Freud speaks. In this regard, a remark in this essay should alert us: speaking of melancholic subjects, Freud says that “their complaints are accusations” (ihre Klagen sind Anklagen). It is as if self-hatred were transformed into hatred of others in the morbid chemistry of melancholy. It results from this analysis that the work of memory on itself does not occur without a work of mourning, which is not simply a passive lamentation, but consists in a work on loss, moving to reconciliation with the lost object at the conclusion of its complete internalization. There are no lack of parallels on the collective plane; the notion of the lost object finds a direct application in the “losses” affecting the power, the territory, and the peoples that constitute the substance of a State. The difficulties of the process of mourning are even more serious here than on the plane of the individual. From this results

  Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity 163 the equivocal nature of the great funeral ceremonies around which a battered people congregate. And the phrase ihre Klagen sind Anklagen once more rings out on this level in sinister fashion. The troubling fact is that the memory of wounds is longer and more tenacious on the collective plane than on the plane of the individual; the hatreds there are millenary and inconsolable. For this reason, they give the impression of excess: too much memory here, too much forgetting there. The same repetitive memory, the same melancholic memory leads some to its visible acting out in forms of violence that do not remain symbolic, and others to the morbid rehashing of ancient wounds. It is on the level of collective memory even more perhaps than on the level of individual memory that the overlap between the work of mourning and the work of memory takes on its full sense. As it is a matter of wounds to national pride (amour propre), we can rightly speak of a lost love object. Wounded memory is always forced to confront its losses. What it does not know how to do is the work imposed by the test of reality, abandoning the investments by which the libido continues to be tied to the lost object, as long as the loss has not been definitively internalized. But this is also the place to underscore that the submission to the test of reality constitutive of the genuine work of mourning is also an integral part of the work of memory. Concerning the melancholic component of disorders of collective memory, there is reason for concern about the absence of a parallel on the level of therapeutics. At most, one can only appeal to patience with respect to others and to oneself; the work of mourning requires no less time than the work of memory.

The Other Experienced as a Threat I will now bring up a second source of fragility for identity: the confrontation with the other experienced as a threat. It is a fact that the other, because he is other, comes to be perceived as a danger for one’s own identity – our identity as well as my identity. This may well be surprising: must our identity be so fragile that it is not capable of putting up with, of being able to bear, the fact that others have different ways than we have of leading their lives, of understanding themselves, of inscribing their own identity in the fabric of living together? This is the case. It is as a result of humiliations, of real or imagined attacks on self-esteem, suffering the blows of poorly tolerated otherness, that acceptance veers toward rejection, exclusion, in the relation the same maintains with the other.

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Is it possible to analyze further this hostile reaction to the other? We could perhaps find a biological root for it in the immunity system’s defense, as we see in the rejection of a foreign body in the case of a graft; the organism fiercely defends its identity, with two exceptions, which are more than exceptions: cancer and the development of the embryo. In this respect, AIDS presents a troubling example of the intruder’s ruse, maneuvering to open the locks of immunity. What is occurring on the borders of the cell and of the organism are operations of recognition and identification which take place in accordance with precise codes. This defense mechanism of identity takes on specifically human forms with the intervention of the phenomenon of language. Despite the relative successes of translation and linguistic exchanges, languages are not hospitable to one another. Something occurs on this level that is comparable to the immune defense on the level of biology. Yet, language constitutes the essential mediation between memory and narrative: memories are articulated in stories. Hannah Arendt says somewhere that the narrative expresses the “who” of action. The narrative easily contributes to linking up the identity of a memory to itself; my memories are not yours; if need be, they exclude yours. To complicate matters, in addition to feeling threatened as a result of a poorly tolerated otherness, there is added the relation of envy, which presents no less of an obstacle to the recognition of others. Envy, a dictionary says, consists in a sentiment of sadness, of irritation, and of hate directed against someone who possesses a good one does not have. Envy makes other people’s happiness intolerable. To the difficulty of sharing misfortune is added the refusal to share happiness. It would have to be shown here how the active side of rivalry over possession is added to the passive side of envy as a form of sadness. Beginning with this desire to enjoy an advantage, a pleasure, equal to that of another, René Girard constructs his theory of mimesis and his interpretation of the phenomenon of the scapegoat as stemming from the mimetic rivalry resulting from the reconciliation of all against one. These phenomena of defense, rejection, and envy afford us the opportunity to bridge the distance between individual identity and collective identity; the central phenomenon is the threat to the integrity of the self that is represented by the mere existence of an other who is different from me. This threat emerges again on a vast scale at the collective level. Collectivities themselves also have a problem of a quasi-biological immune defense. It is even on this grand scale that phenomena can be perceived that have almost no equivalent on the personal level, other than by means

  Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity 165 of an inverse transfer from the collective plane to the plane of personal identity. These are phenomena of manipulation that can be attributed to a disturbing and multiform factor, wedged in between demands of collective identity and public expressions of memory. The phenomenon is tied to ideology, and its readily dissimulated mechanism; unlike utopia, with which ideology ought to be paired, it is unavowable. Ideology disguises itself by turning into denunciation against adversaries in the field of competition among ideologies; it is always the other who sinks to ideology. What is more, it operates on several levels. In the thick of action, it constitutes an insuperable strategy, as a symbolic mediation belonging to a “semiotics of culture” (Clifford Geertz); as a factor of integration, ideology can play the role of a guardian of identity. But this function of safeguard is not free from processes of justification in a given system of order or power, whether this be forms of property, of the family, of authority, of the State, or of religion. From this, there is easy passage to more apparent forms of the distortion of reality, which the adversaries take pleasure in mutually accusing one another of promoting. We see straight away the level at which ideologues can intervene in the process of self-identification of an historical community: at the level of the narrative function. The ideology of memory is made possible by means of the resources of variation offered by the narrative’s work of configuration. Every narrative is selective. Not everything is recounted, but only those salient moments of action that allow for a construction of the plot, which involves not only the events recounted but the protagonists of the action, the characters. The result is that one can always recount differently. It is this selective function of the narrative that affords the opportunity and the means of a cunning strategy of manipulation, which consists directly in a strategy of forgetfulness as well as in remembrance. To these strategies belong attempts made by certain pressure groups – whether they be in power, in opposition, or issuing from active minorities – to impose an “authorized” history, an official history, publicly learned and celebrated. A memory that is practiced is, on the institutional level, a memory that is taught; compulsory memorization is thus enrolled on behalf of the remembrance of the vicissitudes of a common history, held to be the founding events of a common identity. The closure of the narrative is thus placed in the service of the closure of the community’s self-designated identity. The history taught, the history learned, but also the history celebrated. To compulsory memorization are added the customary commemorations. A formidable pact is drawn up in this way

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between remembrance, memorization, and commemoration. This seizure of history is not the specialty of totalitarian regimes; it is the appanage of all glory-seeking zealots. We have said enough about this second cause of the fallibility of memory and its ideological exploitation. One of the responses to these manipulations is to be sought on the very level where they have the advantage of operating – on the level of the narrative. One can always recount differently, we have just said. But, as it happens, this resource is available not only for distorting facts, but also for critiquing manipulation. Recounting differently, by placing divergent narratives in confrontation, as historians have learned to do on the plane of the critique of testimonies – those narratives that have become documents and archives. Placing narratives in confrontation means, first of all, allowing others to recount, and in particular allowing our founding narratives to be recounted by others, and in this way arriving at a different emplotment of the events that are at the base of our communitary or national celebrations. Here we touch on the adjustments that history can make with respect to memory. In addition to its scope in space and in time, history brings the goad of comparison, thanks to which we are called to reinterpret our identity in terms of difference in relation to adverse identities. Along this path the initial tendency to experience the confrontation with others as a threat to one’s own identity – our identity as well as my identity – can be turned on its head. “Reaffirm one’s own identity without rejecting or mistreating the other,” states the title of our session. This can be done by the critical narrative, in contrast to the narratives of “identitary unreason.”

The Heritage of Founding Violence To conclude, I would like to evoke a final cause of the fragility of identity: the heritage of founding violence. This last consideration draws us closer to the principal preoccupation of our Fédération internationale de l’ACAT: torture. We frame this in a broader context by evoking what I have just called the heritage of founding violence. It is a fact that there is no historical community that was not born out of a relation, which can be said to be original, with war. What we celebrate under the heading of founding events are essentially acts of violence legitimated after the fact by a precarious Rule of Law, and even by their very age, their decrepitude. It is not by chance that the founders of political philosophy, Hobbes at the head, placed the fear of violent death at the base of the security reflex

  Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity 167 upon which all the varied and divergent forms of the principle of sovereignty are grafted. In the strong sense of the word, it is security that individuals expect from the State, however it chooses to proceed in its response to the fear of violent death at the institutional level. To evoke this fear is to recall the place of murder in the genesis of the political. It is legitimate to wonder if this scar has ever been erased even in States under the Rule of Law. The marks of violence are visible everywhere. On the level of individuals, it is the persistence of the spirit of vengeance at the heart of the spirit of justice. To be sure, the State has disarmed its citizens, depriving them of the possibility of exercising justice themselves; but it has concentrated in its own hands the exercise of purportedly legitimate violence. All punishment, however much it may be proportional to the infraction or to the crime, adds suffering to that imposed on the aggressor. And among these sanctions, the death penalty, justified at the beginning of the century throughout Europe, continues to be practiced in several, otherwise democratic, States. This is to say that the exercise of violent death has not been eradicated from States under the Rule of Law. A particular type of discord appears here, which radically separates the political plane from the private plane on the order of external relations. This is to say, hostilities between peoples or their governments are of a different order than the relations of enmity between private individuals; the latter remain accessible to compromise, to transaction. On the level of States, the relation friend/enemy prevails, raging in situations where the survival or integrity of the community are at stake. We know in what manner a political thinker like Carl Schmitt has continued to argue along this line of thought. Regardless of what one may think about this, the bitter problem of war and its cruel law continues to be posed. What is there to say, in particular, about the license to murder in a state of war? Killing is not only permitted, it is ordered. Moreover, we are well aware that, under the cover of the alleged law of war, torture has been and is still being practiced. To be sure, limits to this alleged law have been imposed by the international community under the heading of war crimes, to say nothing of genocide and crimes against humanity. Now, torture and inhuman conduct figure among war crimes. But this right fails to include any sanctions, remaining under the protection of moral outrage alone. At least we need to know why we protest and militate. It is in the name of the idea of the dignity of every human being, even the guilty; in the name of the right of all to our consideration. Because behind the infliction of suffering hides the humiliation

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of the persecuted other, to the point he loses all self-respect, and despises himself. Here, my words join those of the other speakers in this colloquium and those of all the participants.

IV Europe

14 What New Ethos for Europe?

It is not unrealistic to pose the question of the Europe to come in terms of the imagination. Its political organization indeed presents an unprecedented problem, that is, how to go beyond the form of the Nation-State on the institutional level without, however, repeating its well-known structures on a higher – supranational – level. In addition to this, the invention of new institutions cannot be inspired by any of the existing federal States (Switzerland, Germany, the United States), which possess the same symbols of sovereignty (currency, army, diplomacy) as less complex Nation-States. The expression “post-national” State is appropriate in this twofold sense, inasmuch as it leaves open – precisely, to the imagination – the question of determining what sort of entirely new institutions can respond to a political situation which itself is without precedent. I would like to say here in what way a reflection on the ethical and spiritual conduct of individuals, intellectuals, cultural figures as well as societies of thought, churches, and other religious denominations, can contribute to this political imagination. It would actually be false to believe that transfers of sovereignty to the benefit of a political entity entirely yet to be invented could succeed on the formal plane of political and juridical institutions, unless the will to perform these transfers drew its energy from the transformation of attitudes involving the ethos of individuals, groups, and peoples. The problem raised is rather well known. It is, broadly speaking, a matter of associating “identity” and “otherness” on numerous levels

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that will then have to be distinguished. What we are most cruelly lacking are models of integration between the two poles I have just designated in highly abstract terms, in the manner of the supercategories to which Plato’s dialogues have initiated us! In order to eliminate this impression of disturbing abstraction, I propose classifying models of integration having to do with identity and otherness in accordance with their increasing order of spiritual density.

The Model of Translation The first model offered to our reflection is that of the translation of one language into another. This initial model is perfectly suited to the situation of Europe, which, from the linguistic point of view, presents a pluralism that is not only unavoidable, but whose preservation is infinitely to be wished for. It is most likely not the dream of affording a new opportunity to Esperanto that is most threatening to us, nor even the dream of making a single grand language of culture the sole instrument of communication; it is rather the danger of incommunicability resulting from the jealous withdrawal of each person into his or her linguistic tradition. Now, Europe is and will be ineluctably polyglot. It is here that the model of translation contains requirements and promises that extend to the very heart of the ethical and spiritual lives of individuals and peoples. In order to be understood, this model calls for a return to the most fundamental conditions of language function. The fact from which we must start is that language as such (le langage) exists nowhere but in languages themselves (des langues). Its universal potentialities are realized only in systems differentiated on the planes of phonology, lexicon, syntax, style, etc. And yet languages do not constitute closed systems, excluding communication. If this were the case, there would be the same difference between linguistic groups as between living species in biology. If there is only one human species, this is, in particular, because transfers of meaning are possible from one language to another, in short, because one can translate. But what does it mean to be able to translate? This possibility, or rather this capability, is not only confirmed by the fact that we are actually able to translate speech and texts from one language to another, and this without totally harmful and, especially, absolutely irreparable semantic loss. The possibility of translation is postulated more fundamentally as an a priori of communication. In this sense, we can speak of the “principle of universal translatability.” Translation is de facto (de fait), translatability is de jure (de droit).



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It is this presupposition that has armed the courage and sharpened the ingenuity of decipherers of hieroglyphics or other systems of signs, some of which are still inviolate. But let us look closer into the operation of translation. To begin with, it supposes bilingual translators, hence flesh and blood mediators; then, it consists in the search for the best possible equivalence between the resources proper to the language of reception and those belonging to the language of origin. In this respect, the haughty model of “the spoliation (dépouilles) of the Egyptians” that we find in one place in Saint Augustine is not the model that deserves to be honored, but rather the more modest one, proposed by von Humboldt, of raising the genius of one’s own language to the level of that of the foreign language, especially when it is a question of original creations constituting a challenge for the language of reception. This is truly a matter of living in the home of the other, in order to bring him back to one’s home as an invited guest. We see straight away in what way translation constitutes an appropriate model for the specific problem posed by the construction of Europe. First, on the institutional plane, it invites us to encourage teaching two living languages in the European zone, in order to ensure an audience for each of the languages which are not themselves in a dominant position on the level of communication. More especially, on a truly spiritual plane, it invites us to expand the spirit of translation to the relation between cultures themselves, that is, to the contents of meaning conveyed by translation. It is here that translators from culture to culture are needed, cultural bilinguals capable of accompanying this operation of transfer into the mental universe of the other culture, taking into account its own customs, its basic beliefs, its major convictions, in short, the ensemble of significant references. We can speak in this sense of an ethos of translation, the aim of which would be to repeat on the cultural and spiritual level the gesture of linguistic hospitality evoked above.

The Model of the Exchange of Memories I am calling the second model, the exchange of memories. It is clear right away how it links up with the previous model: translating a foreign culture into the categories proper to one’s own culture presupposes, we said, a prior transfer into the cultural milieu governed by the ethical and spiritual categories of the other. Now, the primary difference that calls for transfer and hospitality is a difference of memory, on the very level of the customs, rules, norms, beliefs, and

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convictions which make up the identity of a culture. Speaking of memory, however, is not only evoking a psycho-physiological faculty related to the conservation and the evocation of traces of the past; it is putting forward the “narrative” function by which this primary capacity for conservation and evocation operates on the public plane of language. Already on the plane of the individual, it is through narratives concerning others and ourselves that we articulate and configure our own temporality. Two remarkable phenomena offer themselves to description here, which can easily be transposed later to the problem at hand. The first concerns the “narrative identity” of the characters in the narrative; indeed, at the same time as the actions recounted receive the temporal unity of a story from the plot, the characters of the narrative can also be said to be emplotted. They are recounted at the same time as the story itself. This initial remark is heavy with consequences, the main one being: narrative identity is not that of an immutable substance or of a rigid structure, but the mobile identity resulting from the combination of the concordance of the story, taken as a structured totality, and the discordance imposed by the peripeteia encountered. In other words, narrative identity participates in the mobility of the narrative, in its dialectic of order and disorder. An important corollary offers itself: it is possible to revise a recounted story by taking other peripeteia into account, even organizing the incidents recounted in a different way. It is even possible to recount several stories about the same events (whatever sense can be given to the expression “the same events”). This is what happens when we strive to take someone else’s story into account. This last remark leads to the second phenomenon I want to underscore here. If each person receives a certain narrative identity from the stories that are told to him or that he recounts about himself, this identity is mixed together with that of others, thereby producing second-degree stories which are the very ones that constitute the intersections between multiple stories. In this way, my own life story is a segment of your life story: the story of my parents, my friends, my adversaries, and innumerable strangers. We are literally “entangled in stories,” following the beautiful title of Wilhelm Schapp’s In Geschichten verstrickt.1 From these two phenomena taken together – the narrative constitution of each personal identity and the entanglement of lives and personal adventures in the stories offered by some and endured by others, and especially those recounted by some about others – a model results, whose ethical significance is easy to foresee, a model I call the “exchange of memories.” Communication, on the plane where the work of translation has already taken us, with its art of transference



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and its ethic of linguistic hospitality, requires this additional step, consisting in taking up, in imagination and in sympathy, the story of the other through the life narratives concerning her. This is what we learn to do in our commerce with the fictional characters with whom we provisionally identify ourselves in reading. These mobile identifications contribute to the refiguration of our own past and to the refiguration of the past of others through the continual remodeling of the stories we tell about one another. But a deeper involvement is required by the passage from the plane of fiction to that of historical reality. Of course, it is not a question of reliving events that actually happened to others; the unsubstitutable nature of life experiences makes this chimerical mind-reading impossible; more modestly, but more energetically as well, it is a matter of exchanging memories on the narrative level where these memories offer themselves to our understanding. A novel ethos is born from applying the understanding to the interlacing of new narratives with one another, as they structure and configure the intersections between memories. This is a genuine task, a genuine work, in which the Anerkennung of German Idealism can be recognized, namely “recognition” considered in its narrative dimension. It is easy to transpose this to the sphere of the European situation. However, the second lesson, the one drawn from the entanglement of stories on the interpersonal level, attains its goal only if the first – that is, the narrative constitution of one’s own identity – has been understood and assumed fully. The identity of a group, a culture, a people, a nation is not an immutable substance, nor a rigid structure, but the identity of a story recounted. Yet, the contemporary implications of this principle of narrative identity have scarcely been perceived. A frozen, arrogant conception of cultural identity blocks the perception of the corollaries of this principle evoked above, that is, the possibility of revising every story transmitted and making room for multiple stories concerning the same past. Now, what prevents cultures from allowing a different account is the role exerted on collective memory by what are called founding events, as their repeated commemoration and celebration tends to freeze the history of each cultural group in an identity that is not only immutable, but voluntarily and systematically incommunicable. The European ethos in search of itself does not, to be sure, require giving up these important historical references, but instead demands an effort to produce a plural reading, an initial example of which is found in the quarrel among French historians over the meaning of the French Revolution, and a second one in the quarrel among German historians over the meaning of the criminal episodes of

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the Second World War. Recounting differently is not contrary to a certain historical piety, inasmuch as the inexhaustible richness of the event is honored by the variety of narratives recounted about it and by the competition generated by this variety. The capacity to recount the founding events of our national history differently finds support in the exchange of cultural memories. This capacity for exchange has as its touchstone the will to share, symbolically and respectfully, the commemoration of founding events of other national cultures as well as those of their ethnic minorities, or their minority religious denominations. In this exchange of memories, it is not only a matter of submitting the founding events of the culture of different people to alternate readings, but of mutually helping one another to liberate the parcel of life and renewal that has been held captive in rigid, embalmed, lifeless traditions. In this regard, I have put off until now the discussion of this phenomenon of “tradition.” We can get away from the clichés and anathema clinging to tradition only at the end of the twofold linguistic and narrative course that has just been proposed. It is necessary to pass through the ethical requirements of translation – what I have called “linguistic hospitality” – and through the necessary exchange of memories, which is another sort of narrative hospitality, in order to approach the phenomenon of tradition in its properly dialectical dimension. Tradition in the singular signifies transmission, transmission of things said, of beliefs professed, of norms assumed, etc. Now, this transmission is not living unless tradition remains a partner in the pair it forms with innovation. Tradition represents the side of a debt owed to the past and reminds us that nothing comes from nothing; yet, a tradition remains living only if it continues to be taken up into an uninterrupted process of reinterpretation. This is where the revision of past narratives and the plural reading of founding events intervenes. Tradition’s other pole, innovation, now remains to be discussed. In this regard, an important aspect of the rereading and the revision of the traditions transmitted consists in distinguishing the promises of the past that were not kept. The past, in fact, is not only the bygone (le révolu), what has occurred and cannot be changed; it lives in memory thanks to the arrows into the future (futurité) that were not released or whose trajectory was interrupted. The past’s unrealized future constitutes, perhaps, the richest part of a tradition. The deliverance of this unrealized future of the past is the major benefit that can be anticipated from the intersection of memories and the exchange of narratives. It is primarily the founding events of an historical community that would have to be submitted to this critical reading,



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so as to release the charge of hope they carried, but which was betrayed by the subsequent course of history. The past is a graveyard of unkept promises, which are to be revived in the same way as the bones in the Valley of Jehoshaphat in the prophecy of Ezekiel.

The Model of Forgiveness What has just been said about the resurrection of the unkept promises of the past leads to a third threshold: forgiveness. The considerations that follow are related in two ways to what has preceded: on the one hand, the role of narrative in the constitution of narrative identity has marked the place of what we have called the revision of the past brought about by the manner of recounting differently; now, forgiveness is a specific form of revising the past and, through it, of revising the narrative identity proper to each person. On the other hand, the entanglement of life stories provides the opportunity for a revision, no longer the solitary and introspective revision of one’s own past, but for a mutual revision, in which we have been able to glimpse the most precious fruit of the exchange of memories. Forgiveness is itself also a specific form of this mutual revision, in relation to which the release of the unkept promises of the past is the most precious effect. The novelty of this third model is tied to a phenomenon complementary to that of the founding events extolled by an historical community, namely the “wounds” inflicted by what Mircea Eliade has called the “terror of history.” What was said above under the heading of the exchange of memories has to be taken up anew from the perspective of suffering and no longer from the perspective of great deeds. Suffering thus appears twice in the tableau of our meditation; it appears first as suffering endured in the transformation of the agents of history into victims, and it appears a second time as suffering inflicted on others. This point is so important that we must invert the order followed above, when we moved from narrative identity to the entanglement of life stories. This time we must start from the suffering of others, imagining the suffering of others before mulling over our own. The reader will have easily anticipated what follows: a major feature of Europe is the incredible amount of suffering that most of the States, great or small, taken two by two or through the intermediary of alliances, have inflicted on one another in the past. The history of Europe is cruel: wars of religion, wars of conquest, wars of extermination, subjugation of ethnic minorities, expulsions

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or repressions of religious minorities; the litany is endless. Western Europe has scarcely emerged from this nightmare; Central and Eastern Europe are in danger of succumbing to it. We know too well the slope leading to these horrors: the perverse recourse to narrative identity, stripped of the important corrections we have described – the revision of one’s own narratives, the entanglement with the narratives of the other. To these non-negligible corrections, we now add this complement: understanding the suffering of others in the past and in the present. With this, the exchange of memories required by our second model demands, according to the new model, the exchange of the memory of sufferings inflicted and suffered. This exchange requires more than the imagination and sympathy invoked above. This “more” has something to do with forgiveness, inasmuch as forgiveness consists in “shattering the debt,” according to the beautiful subtitle of the volume devoted to the theme of forgiveness published by Éditions Autrement.2 It is true that forgiveness in its fullest sense far exceeds political categories; it belongs to an order – the order of charity – that extends even beyond the order of morality. Forgiveness belongs to an economy of the gift, where the logic of overabundance exceeds the logic of reciprocity, an application of which we perceived earlier in the exercise of recognition presupposed by the model of translation and by the model of intersecting narration. Insofar as it exceeds the order of morality, the economy of the gift belongs instead to what could be called the “poetics” of moral life, if the word “poetics” is taken in its twofold sense: creativity on the plane of the dynamics of action, song and hymn on the plane of verbal expression. Forgiveness thus essentially belongs to this spiritual economy, to this poetics of moral life. Its “poetic” power consists in shattering the law of the irreversibility of time, in changing – if not the past as the collection of all that has happened – at least its meaning for the people of the present. It does this by lifting the weight of guilt that paralyzes the relation that acting and suffering people have with their own history. It does not abolish the debt, inasmuch as we are, and remain, heirs of the past, but it lifts the pain of the debt. These considerations, we have said, do not have their primary use in the political sphere, where the major rule is justice and reciprocity, not charity and the gift. May we not, nevertheless, suggest that the order of justice and reciprocity may well be capable of being touched by the order of charity and the gift: touched, that is to say, affected, and, dare I say, moved? Do we not have examples of this in the sphere of criminal justice, with royal reprieve, prescription, and the reduction of sentences? And in the social sphere, with certain



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charitable expressions of solidarity? And on the level of peoples and nations? I referred above to this “more” required in the exchange of wounded memories, and I suggested that this “more” had something to do with forgiveness. In fact, there is a great need for the peoples of Europe to have compassion for one another, and to imagine, I repeat, the suffering of others at the moment they cry for vengeance for the wounds that were inflicted on them in the past. What is required here bears a strong resemblance to forgiveness. It is, nonetheless, with the greatest prudence, and guided by a sober clairvoyance, that we must enter along this path. There are, in fact, two pitfalls to avoid. The first would be to confuse forgiveness with forgetfulness; quite the opposite, we can forgive only where there is no forgetfulness, where a voice has been returned to those who have been humiliated. “Shatter the debt and forgetfulness,” is the beautiful title evoked earlier. There is nothing more detestable than what Jankélévitch called forgetful forgiveness (le pardon oublieux), the fruit of frivolity and indifference. This is why the work of forgiveness has to be grafted onto the work of memory in the language of narration. The second pitfall would be to take forgiveness from the wrong side; the first relation we have to forgiveness is not the practice of forgiveness easily performed – which would amount once again to forgetting – but the difficult practice of asking for forgiveness. With respect to those who are the victims of imprescriptible crimes they hold to be unpardonable, there is no other wisdom than to wait for better times, when the formulation of wrongs suffered by the offence will have exerted its primary cathartic effect, and when the offender will have gone to the very depths of understanding the crimes he has committed. There is a time for the unforgiveable and a time for forgiveness. Forgiveness requires longstanding patience. In this regard, recourse to the model of forgiveness does not distance us as far from the political sphere as one might have thought. The history of the past few years offers us several admirable examples of a sort of short-circuit between the poetic and the political. Each of us has retained the image of Willy Brandt kneeling in Warsaw; we also think of Václav Havel writing to the President of the German Federal Republic to ask for forgiveness for the suffering inflicted on the people of the Sudetenland after the Second World War; we also think about the forgiveness requested by German authorities addressed to the Jewish people, and their meticulous care in providing reparation in multiple ways to the survivors of the final solution. Finally, we think of Anwar El Sadat’s lightning-quick trip to Jerusalem. However, even as charity exceeds justice, so too

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must we be careful not to substitute it for justice. Charity remains a surplus, this surplus of compassion and tenderness capable of supplying the exchange of memories with its profound motivation, its daring, and its élan. By way of conclusion, I would like to relate my remarks to two other themes treated in separate contributions. I will first recall the debate resulting from the conflict between the universalist claim tied to the very idea of the Rule of Law and of human rights, and the call of communitarians citing the insurmountable differences that separate collective identities. It would be possible, from the standpoint of this conflict, to return to the three models of mediation proposed here between identity and otherness. We said that translation is the only way of demonstrating the universality of language (langage) in the diversity of natural languages (langues). Intersecting narration, we added, is the only way of opening the memory of the ones to the memory of others; forgiveness, we confirmed in conclusion, is the only way of shattering the debt and forgetfulness, and, in this sense, of lifting the obstacles to the exercise of justice and recognition. From beginning to end, our analyses were confined to the plane of “mediations”; in this sense, the models proposed are transferable to the debate over the universal and the historical: they reinforce the arguments of those for whom the universal has no ground for justification other than the historical, and of those for whom the only way of escaping the accusation of ethnocentrism is to return to the superior arguments of the other. A second debate concerns the contribution of Christian denominations to this threefold work of translation, intersecting narration, and mutual compassion. Christian denominations certainly have a role to play, as they have received as their heritage the evangelical word of forgiveness and love for their enemies. In this sense, their manner of approaching the problems discussed here would be to begin with forgiveness and to place under the sign of forgiveness the other themes, the intersection of memories, and the translation of one cultural language into another. But Christian communities also have a price to pay if they are to be heard. This price is twofold: on the one hand, they have to follow to the very end the path of the renunciation of power, power exercised sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through the intermediary of the secular arm, sometimes – more subtly – by reinforcing by their authority the vertical dimension of domination, characteristic of the phenomenon of sovereignty, primarily within the framework of Nation-States, at the expense of the horizontal relation of the desire-to-live-together. To this extent Christian communities will have clearly broken with



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a certain “theological politics,” where the prime purpose of the theological is to justify the dimension of domination in political relations, and, in contrast, will be open to making way for a different “theological politics,” where the ecclesial relation, affirming itself as a place of mutual assistance in light of salvation, would truly become a model of fraternity for all other institutions. It is to this extent that the message of the Gospel will have a good chance of being heard by politicians throughout the whole of Europe. This brings me to say – and this is the second price to be paid by Christian communities – that the first place where the model of forgiveness should be put to the test is in interdenominational exchanges. It is first of all with respect to one another that the great Christian communities have to practice mutual forgiveness in order to “shatter the debt” inherited from a long history of persecution, inquisition, and repression, whether this violence was done by some with respect to others, or by all with respect to non-Christians and non-believers. The project of a new evangelization of Europe is at this double price.

15 The Dialogue of Cultures, the Confrontation of Heritages

The reflections I would like to offer for discussion come out of a re-examination today of the validity of what has constituted a great conquest: the model of tolerance. I would like to show for what reason we have now gone beyond this model and are in search of a more positive foundation that will go beyond the element of abstention retained in the concept of tolerance. This principle of tolerance has attained, and perhaps exceeded, its goal in advanced industrial societies, in institutional democracies. This is why, some while ago, I ventured to title my contribution to an issue of the journal Diogène devoted to tolerance, “The Erosion of Tolerance and the Resistance of the Intolerable.”1 I will begin by briefly retracing the course of thinking that our political, cultural, and spiritual culture has traversed over the past two hundred years, to provide a meaning for the words: the “erosion of tolerance.” I would like to show that this course of thinking, which must first be valued as a virtue, has produced a certain weak consensus and a sort of moral disarmament. This was a conquest made at great cost, but which is now in danger of being transformed into a Pyrrhic victory. I will run through the stages of what I have just called, in turn, an idea and a virtue: the idea of tolerance and the virtue of tolerance. My discussion will be in no way historical and chronological, but will instead point out the stages of an initiation. This was indeed a costly idea and, as such, the price to be paid for the conquest of a virtue: an individual virtue and a collective virtue, nothing less than the fruit of an asceticism in the exercise of



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power. In fact, the victory over intolerance is a victory over a strong principle of human nature, that is, the temptation for anyone who has a sliver of power – or who possesses great power – to impose it on others. In this sense, all power is potentially a “power over.” This is the temptation, the attempt to impose on others one’s own beliefs, one’s own convictions, one’s way of life, when one believes these alone are valid, these alone are legitimate. Now, if intolerance is armed with this “power over …,” it is justified, by those exerting it, by reason of the presumed legitimacy of the belief, the conviction. And, in its turn, this presumption of legitimacy results from the disapproval of opposing, or simply different, beliefs, convictions, and ways of life. I would say then that: disapproval + power to prevent = intolerance. The Europe of the Wars of Religion constituted, in this respect, the battlefield, the training ground, and the paradigmatic example of the fight against intolerance; and the end of these wars has been, until very recently in our culture, the signal of the tipping point from intolerance to tolerance, and perhaps to a point – I would not say of a vegetative state (coma dépassé) – but of tolerance superseded (tolérance dépassée). Let us go back over the stages of this renouncement of both violence and the presumption of complete truth. This is the exemplary history of a twofold process, the delegitimation of the right to prevent and the disarming of the power to prevent. The first threshold can be summed up in the formula: “I bear, against my will, what I disapprove of, because I do not have the power to prevent it.” This is the minimal stage found in dictionaries. In Le Robert, the definition of the word “tolerance” still refers to this basic level of everyday language. “Tolerance: the fact of tolerating something, and not forbidding or requiring, although one could; the freedom that results from this abstention.” If this first threshold were to be situated historically, this would be, in Europe, with the Peace of Westphalia – Cujus region, ejus religio; what cannot be prevented here, is tolerated there. In France, the equivalent would be the breach opened by the Edict of Nantes. What is important here, is “against my will”: I bear, against my will, what I disapprove of. In the religious sphere just mentioned, a mutual disapproval reigned, but with the impossibility of prevention. This is, moreover, where a “third party” will emerge, forcing cohabitation; this is forced cohabitation. The second stage is the following: “I disapprove of your way of life, but I strive to understand it, without, however, adhering to it.”

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This marks a sort of inner crisis of conviction, even the experience of being torn between strong commitment on one side and, on the other, the effort of imagination and sympathy to meet the other where he is, but where I cannot and do not want to go. This second threshold is represented historically and chronologically by figures such as Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Leibniz, hence, in the religious sphere by the first ecumenism. Outlined here for the first time is the fate of Europe, which in certain respects is a tragic fate, called upon to interweave heterogeneous heritages – Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian – while adding to them science and critique, in an unstable relation between critique and conviction. But, precisely, this is an untenable stage only if one does not progress to the following stage, which is the decisive one: “I disapprove of your way of life, but I respect in it your freedom to live as you desire, and I recognize your right to display this freedom publicly.” What is stated here is not yet shared truth, but a right that is recognized. One could speak here of “the right to err,” the most elevated form of which would be the right to abjure one’s religion. I would situate the models of the period of the Enlightenment on this level, where mutual disapproval persists. For thinkers of the Enlightenment, the religious were superstitious, and it was necessary “to stamp out intolerance” (Voltaire’s “Écraser l’infâme”). And for the religious, truth remained transcendent, based on the authority of Scripture and ecclesiastical traditions. Nevertheless, it was in this climate of mutual disapproval, but of the recognition of the right to apostasy, that the rights of freedom of opinion, of expression, of association, of publication, of assembly, of instruction were forged, culminating in the greatest of freedoms, the positive freedom, the equal right to actively participate in constituting political power, regardless of the beliefs at stake. It is perhaps here that the confrontation between the English and the French models of tolerance comes into play. The possibility of going beyond this point is thought be tied to what I would describe as a fourth stage. The third was the decisive step, the next would be the turning point: “I neither approve nor disapprove of the reasons for which you live differently than I do, but perhaps these reasons express a relation to the good that escapes me because of the finite nature of human understanding.” It is here that the delegitimation process of what I have continued to call “disapproval” comes into play. This is at once the disarming of power and the dismantling of conviction. What earlier marked the rending of conviction now becomes the rending of truth. The two



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proceed together, inasmuch as conviction implies “holding as true” what one professes, in short, a presumption of truth. Now, at this stage a sketch of something beyond the right to err begins to take shape; this is the presumption that you have a parcel of truth, you touch a side of truth that is not mine but which, like mine, is in the truth. My master, Gabriel Marcel liked to say, “I am not in a relation of possessing the truth, but I hope to be in the truth.” Truth is then considered to be a region of light which I do not control and do not constitute. Therefore, I presume that in convictions I do not share, but which I decline to disapprove, there is something I do not understand but that you understand, something I cannot include but that I do not want to exclude either; so, perhaps, and even probably, if not certainly, there is truth outside of my experience. Here, justice and truth, separated at the preceding stage, are reunited, but at the price of an implosion of the very idea of truth. It is here that everything can tip from tolerance into indifference. The Western world, in this regard, is put to a test entirely unlike its entrance into tolerance; instead, the problem is now how to exit an outmoded model. I do not mean in any way to say that intolerance is no longer a problem for us, but it can be said that on the whole in Western culture, in industrialized societies, the heritage of the Wars of Religion is residual, recessive, if you like. There may be “pockets” of intolerance, but this is not the dominant feature that today borders on the implosion of the idea of truth. This is the fifth stage, where recognition of differences becomes indifference. This passage from difference to indifference seems to me to be characteristic of the society in which we live. The question is then: What can we do, and what should we do, beyond this turning point? Action could be limited to punctual outbursts of indignation; and it is true that our society is also marked by this. The possibility of this slippage is implied in the restrictive clause added to the definition at this final stage! I accept all ways of life, “on the condition they cause no manifest harm to third parties.” This idea of harm serves as a safety catch; but it is limited to the level of the cry: “This is intolerable!” Here we are at the level of indignation, a “reactive passion,” in Nietzsche’s vocabulary. We strongly denounce the horror of deportation and extermination camps, pedophilia and child abuse, extreme inequality. … All these figures of evil do not form a body of wickedness, but act as discontinuous eruptions in a scored space. These are indeed recognized as “evil,” but we do not know of what “good” they are the contrary.

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This safety catch placed on indifference can inspire no more than a minimal policy: prevent harm. But the injunction not to harm, if it is more obvious, remains far weaker than the injunction to do good. There is, to be sure, an emerging positivity, which Hans Jonas tried to define under the idea of “fragility,” with all responsibility subject to being defined as responsibility with respect to the fragile. And it is not by accident that he gives two separate examples which, at first sight, are without any connection – childhood and the State. In both cases, the object of responsibility consists in something whose growth is always in danger. Lending support to something that grows, this is responsibility. I would like to pause for a moment on this point of perplexity in order to offer a matter for discussion. Outside of this restrictive clause of “do no harm” – restrictive with respect to the “I understand everything,” in what I have called the resistance of the intolerable to the erosion of tolerance – we are in danger of seeing an ethics of the political replaced by non-ethical forms of the political, expressed primarily in the concern for security in the face of all modern forms of danger. The idea of danger thus becomes the focus of intellectual mobilization, but without the ethical rudder of the political; ultimately, in fact, the sole response would be to cover all risks by assuring security. Assuring security would finally be the only obligation in the face of every danger. Besides security, the other replacement principle would be the concern for health, with a greater emphasis on all the threats to the biological body. This obsession with health, joined to that of security, paradoxically leads us back to Hobbes’s political philosophy, where the entrance into the political sphere is guarded by the fear of violent death. With this perplexity as a backdrop, I propose to concentrate my reflection on the idea of a re-foundation, understood in the sense of a co-foundation: the old adversaries of the Wars of Religion who tolerated one another, all the while disapproving of one another, are now, in the face of nihilism, confronted with the obligation to associate with one another in a relation of co-foundation. For we cannot confine ourselves to the intolerable, to the system of security, or to health: we must know in the name of what we are denouncing the intolerable and on what ethical basis we can conceive of security and health. To say “co-foundation” is to suggest rethinking all the components of our complex European heritage, in accordance with their capacity for survival and what I have at times called the unkept promises of the past. None of these heritages has depleted itself through its results, which have been failures as much as successes. I return to



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Jürgen Habermas’s formula when he says that the program-project of rationality has not exhausted its resources. But I will say the same thing about all the heritages I will enumerate: Greek and Roman, Jewish and Christian, Medieval and Renaissance, Enlightenment, nineteenth-century Romanticism, which has not been reduced to an aesthetic but constitutes a vision of the world worthy of participating in the great work of re-foundation and co-foundation. I do not want, in any way, to conceal the difficulty of this project, because it is in opposition to the idea that democracy is built on a void. That is to say, if there is no transcendent principle, then democracy is in a permanent state of self-production starting from nothing, or starting from itself. This opposition does not keep us from retaining something of the thesis of the other foundation: passing also through the moment of the void in order to discover what I would call instead the “too-full,” something that overflows from the forgotten sources of our culture; the dimension of forgetfulness of what is buried and which, precisely, has not reached maturity, is not expressed, but is an undeniable component of the process of re-foundation–co-foundation. In this regard, the intolerable would resonate only as an awakening, from which a “consensual-conflictual” conception of our future would result: admitting that consensus rests on the recognition of lines of fracture, but assuming in common what I earlier called the intersecting heritages and the promises not honored in all the cultural and spiritual undertakings of the past. Beyond abstaining from interdiction, which was ultimately the core of the idea of tolerance, it would be a matter of what Rawls has well named “overlapping consensus,” to which he has added more recently “accepting reasonable disagreements.” I attach a great deal of importance to the idea of accepting reasonable disagreements: we have to admit that there is something irreducible in differences of conviction and that all conflicts, all disputes cannot be purged. The project of a reconciliation of all with all is, ultimately, a violent project. Among disagreements, some are non-negotiable; this is what we are all trying to determine, whatever position we are taking, with respect to Islam. We have to distinguish those with whom we can debate from those with whom we cannot. We ourselves are making a sort of division between those who seem to us susceptible of participating in what I am calling a “consensual-conflictual” relation, and those who cannot enter into this discussion and with respect to whom we have to continue to say: “No tolerance for the intolerant.” It is with these remarks on dissensus-consensus that I would like to stop here and open the discussion.

16 The Crisis of Historical Consciousness and Europe

Before specifically addressing Europe and European historical consciousness, I would like to set out the conceptual framework of my reflections. For this purpose, I am pleased to adopt the terminology proposed by Reinhart Koselleck in his works – Krise und Kritik and, especially, Die Vergangene Zukunft – devoted to a philosophical semantics applied, precisely, to the notions of historical time and historical consciousness.1 I will retain from the analyses of the professor from the University of Bielefeld and the University of Chicago the following three features, which go beyond the case of Europe and at the same time allow us to capture the specificity of European historical consciousness. The first feature concerns the basic polarity between what Koselleck calls “the space of experience” (Erfahrungsraum) and “the horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont). By “space of experience” we are to understand the ensemble of heritages coming from the past, whose sedimented traces constitute something like the ground supporting what can be termed Kulturwandel. The space of experience, however, exists only as the polar opposite of a horizon of expectation onto which are projected the forecasts and anticipations, hopes and fears, even utopias, providing a content to the historical future. Let me add right away that the horizon of the future is irreducible to the space of experience and that the dialectic between these two poles is what ensures the dynamics of historical consciousness. Second feature: the exchange between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation is produced in the living present of a



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culture. This present is not itself reducible to a point on a timeline, a simple break between a before and an after. Only some random instant would be defined in this way, not the living present. It is the mediator of the dialectic between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. It is rich with the recent past and the imminent future. What is more, it cannot be reduced to the simple presence of an environment, in other words, to the perception of the world as it offers itself to our gaze. It contains the active and practical form of what could be termed “initiative,” if by this we understand the capacity to intervene in the course of things, the power to bring about new events. Finally, I would like to stress a third feature of historical consciousness, the sentiment of an orientation in the passage of time. This orientation borrows its initial impulse from the horizon of expectation, then affects correlatively the space of experience, either to impoverish it or to enrich it, and finally confers on the experience of the present the degree of sense or non-sense that ultimately gives historical consciousness its qualitative value, irreducible to the chronological dimension of time alone. “Sense,” here, signifies at once direction and signification, as is the case with the French acceptation of “sens.” Armed with these conceptual tools, I would now like to characterize the historical consciousness of Europe. I will first emphasize the crisis that affects this historical consciousness today and will then venture a few remarks concerning the reversal from dissolution to reconstruction.

[Exhausting the Project of the Enlightenment?] Beginning with the space of experience proper to Europe, I would like to underscore two major traits that govern all possible forms of Kulturwandel which will not fail to be brought up in the course of our symposium. What must first be underscored is the complexity of the heritage received from the past. This is the result of the interweaving of strong, extraordinarily heterogeneous traditions: the traditions of ancient Israel and primitive Christianity, which very early on are intermixed with Greek, then Latin cultures, the JudeoGreek intermingling continuing from crisis to crisis through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the period of the Enlightenment, philosophical, literary, and political Romanticism, etc. This first trait already has a connection to the theme of our symposium: migration and cultural change, inasmuch as these

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mixtures were the fruit of real migrations in space and, in each case, resulted in considerable cultural changes. Let us say right now that the cloth produced through the interweaving of such diverse threads is extraordinarily fragile. This fragility is due in particular to the other major trait of European historical consciousness, the intersection between convictions stemming from intensely rival traditions and the spirit of critique. In this respect, European culture considered as a whole is perhaps the only one to have taken on the considerable task of constantly combining convictions and critique. In this way, Christianity, unlike Islam, has always had to come to terms with its rationalist adversary and internalize critique as self-critique. In a sense, crisis is not a contingent accident, even less a modern malady: it is constitutive of European consciousness. The heterogeneity of its founding traditions and the discord between convictions and critique have led me to employ the word “fragility.” I would like to stress this fragility of Europe’s space of experience before turning to the fragility of the consciousness of the future. It is, in fact, an easy move from fragility to pathology. This pathology presents itself as a crisis of memory and of tradition. A crisis of memory: we touch here on a disturbing paradox; depending on the region, the nation or the people suffer from either a surfeit of memory or a lack of memory. In the first case, tragically illustrated by the former Yugoslavia, each community wants to remember only the epochs of grandeur and glory and, by contrast, only the humiliations endured. In the second case, which is that of Western Europe post-Hitler and perhaps Eastern Europe post-Stalin, the rejection of transparency amounts to a will to forget and leads to a flight from culpability. What is common to both, apparently opposing, phenomena is a perverse relation to tradition. Torn away from the dialectic described above between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, tradition is reduced to a residue, deposited and petrified, which some exalt and others strive to cover over and bury. The crisis of memory and tradition, however, never appears without a crisis of projection into the future; sometimes the horizon of expectation is emptied of all content, of any goal worth pursuing. As a result, everywhere mistrust grows concerning any middle-term projection, and to an even greater extent, concerning any long-term prophecy. Yet, just the opposite can also be seen: in the absence of any accessible project, people take refuge in fantasy utopias, which destroy any reasonable and hard-fought attempts at reforms. This double pathology, affecting the future as well as the past, is reflected, in turn, in an impoverishment of the present, understood, as was mentioned above, as the capacity for initiative, for



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intervening in the course of things. It is in this way that we witness, here and there, a privatization of desires and projects, a shortsighted cult of consumerism. At the origin of this movement of retreat, a disengagement with respect to all civic responsibility can easily be observed. Individuals forget that the nation exists only by reason of a desire-to-live-together, maintained and ratified by a tacit contract made between citizens of one people or one nation. Individualism, which is often deplored without being analyzed, is doubtless only the effect of this retreat, moving away from the desire-to-live-together and away from the civic contract that would ratify it. Here again, the pathology of the social tie only makes its extreme fragility visible. I will conclude this reflection on the crisis of the historical consciousness in Europe by underscoring the phenomenon sharply highlighted by Koselleck, namely the loss of any sense of history, any orientation of historical time. If some speak of the postmodern period, the expression is justified, insofar as modernity can be identified with the rational idea of progress. Fundamentally, we suffer no less from the erasure of the idea of progress received from the Enlightenment than from the secularization that affects Christian Europe, even from a distancing with respect to the Greek source just as clearly as with respect to the Jewish source of our private and public culture. In this way, the collapse of the idea of progress leads, by contrast, to augmenting by turns the sentiment of randomness or of a crushing fate, when it does not lead us to fall prey to the seduction exerted on us by the ideas of chaos, of difference, of wandering. The last term should serve to ring the alarm for us here and now, we who speak of migrations. Because the successful migrations that made Europe, and to which I alluded earlier, were the opposite of wanderings; or rather, they were the sorts of wanderings that were intercepted and interrupted by the slow and painful tests of acculturating the Barbarians, from whom we have all descended to one extent or another, within the stable cultural spaces of the Roman empire, the space of Christian Europe, then of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and then of the Europe of the Enlightenment. These were the components of what above was called the space of experience. Before being spaces of sedimentation, these were spaces of integration and stabilization. This is why the question, to recall Habermas’s formula, is posed – whether the Enlightenment project is exhausted today, or, whether, by moving further back into the past, the Greco-Roman heritage and the Judeo-Christian heritage are still capable of being reactivated. With this question, I conclude the part of my lecture devoted to the crisis of historical consciousness, and I

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now turn to the modest considerations of my second part, which I have titled: From Dissolution to Reconstruction.

[From Dissolution to Reconstruction] I would first like to return to what was said above about the pathology of memory and tradition and, correlatively, about the pathology of the anticipation of the future. We evoked earlier the paradox constituted, in turn, by the excess of memory and by the lack of memory. To resolve and not simply understand this paradox, it is important to inquire into the manner in which collective memory, as well as individual memory, is formed. Collective memory in large part rests on the narratives accepted by the majority concerning founding events, concerning moments of glory and the suffering peoples have endured. The structure of a memory such as this is, therefore, essentially narrative. It is to this narrative structure of our convictions that the spirit of critique, referred to above as one of the great achievements of European culture, must be applied. Here is how this can be done. We must first accept the idea that it is always possible to recount the same events differently. This great hermeneutical principle was first taught to us by professional historians. For them, the testimony of contemporaries about a significant event, the memories of survivors of great ordeals, traditions handed down over several generations – all this must be passed through the sieve of written documents and submitted to the test of textual critique. The confrontation between memory and history is, in this regard, the major critical test with which collective memory should be confronted. The most important consequence of this testing is the doubling of what we ordinarily call habit-memory or, in other terms, what Freud called repetition-memory, to which he attributed the resistance to the consciousness of the infantile past, and hence to a cure. This is the memory that locks peoples into resentment and hatred. The other memory is what Bergson termed “mémoire-souvenir” (memory as distinct recollection) and Freud, remembering (erinnern) in Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten). This is an active, discriminating, interrogating, meditating memory. Repetition-memory resists critique; remembering (mémoire-souvenir) is fundamentally a critical-memory (mémoire-critique). We understand, then, that some communities suffer from an excess of memory and others from a lack of memory. Because what some cultivate with morbid delectation, and what others flee with bad conscience, is the



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same repetition-memory. Some enjoy losing themselves in it, others are afraid of being swallowed up by it. But both sides suffer from the same deficit of critical-memory; in particular, they do not accept the test of documentary history and its necessary stage of distancing and objectification. But this is still only an initial condition for healing memory. We have said that memory has a narrative structure. Now, the narratives that one person or one community construct with regard to themselves are entangled with the narratives that others transmit not only about themselves but about us. We are characters in the stories others tell. Our narrative of glory will figure in the narratives of humiliation of our neighbors, of our past or present adversaries, and vice versa. This entanglement of narratives reflects a deeper phenomenon, namely the entanglement of memories themselves. This phenomenon has been highlighted by Wilhelm Schapp in his beautiful book In Geschichten verstrickt.2 This entanglement might indeed be treated as a merely passive phenomenon, even simply as a stroke of fate, as is first suggested by the very expression “entanglement.” However, just as we must move from repetition-memory to distinct recollection, to criticalmemory, so too we must dare to move from entanglement endured to a genuine, active exchange of memories. This is the most effective way of recounting differently: passing by way of the narratives of others in order to understand ourselves, reading our history through the eyes of historians belonging to a people other than our own, even historians belonging to great cultures other than the ones that contributed to the interweaving evoked earlier among the founding cultures of contemporary Europe – this is the immense task to which we must harness a therapy for European memory. The exchange of memories we have mentioned consists in a true migration, and in intersecting migrations: we are learning to transport ourselves into the memories of others and to inhabit their narratives; we welcome as migrants the memories nourishing the historical consciousness of the guests we receive in our home. On the basis of this spiritual experience of the voluntary exchange of memories within the space of Europe, we can legitimately raise the question whether this exchange of memories can be extended beyond the cultural space resulting from the great migrations of the past, and whether we can indeed term “migrations” the transfers at the origin of the great cultural changes of the past. This question is raised pointedly with respect to Islamic cultures, which, except for fruitful exchanges in the Middle Ages, did not participate in the great spiritual adventures that have built modern Europe, namely, once again, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Without prejudging the

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response to this most troublesome question, it might be said, with Husserl and Jaspers, that Europe is not defined by borders, but by centers of influence, arranged in constellations with uncertain limits, and that it is this structure of networks that has given rise to a certain mobile idea of Europe, where the dimension of project wins out over the dimension of memory. Allow me to open a parenthesis here concerning the relation between memory and forgetting. Just as there are two forms of memory – repetition-memory and inquiring or critical memory – there are two kinds of forgetting. There is the one we have spoken of, the deficit of active memory, forgetting as a flight. But there is also a voluntary form of forgetting, related to forgiveness, and which belongs to the therapeutics for revenge. This form of forgetting, cultivated cautiously, sets a term on revenge without abolishing moral responsibility, bound up with endless culpability. It is good for the health of societies that crimes – those which are not assimilated with genocide and crimes against humanity – are prescribed. It is not a paradox to say that this kind of forgetting is a corollary to the critical-memory that we have opposed to repetition-memory. The parenthesis is closed. Before saying a word about the therapy to be applied to the sense of the future, I would like to stress once more the phenomenon we have paired with memory, that is to say, tradition. In a sense, tradition and memory are associated phenomena, but tradition appears to have a greater affinity with repetition-memory than with distinct recollection and critical-memory. This is true up to a certain point: tradition borrows its character of transmission from its character of sediment, which refers to the phenomenon of the trace. But just as a trace is not only left as a mark or an imprint by the passage of a living being, but must be actively and critically examined and followed back, a tradition also has to be treated as a living reality. And this in the following way. First, a tradition remains living only if it is endlessly reinterpreted. This remark applies to Christian traditions as well as to Greco-Roman and Medieval heritages, and to the traditions handed down from the period of the Enlightenment. Critique is itself one tradition among others, incorporated into inherited convictions and requiring a culture that is continuously renovated. In addition, in the light of historical critique, a tradition is revealed to carry promises that were unfulfilled, even thwarted and repressed by new historical actors. It can be said, without untoward paradox, that people of past epochs carried with them expectations, dreams, and utopias which were not actualized, but which it is important for us to liberate and to incorporate into our own expectations, giving them a content and, I dare say, a body. In short, we



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must arrive at an open conception of tradition. More precisely, we must reopen the past and free its vision of the future. Is this not a manner of migrating into what was unrealized in the past? The last suggestion allows us to say a word about a therapy for the future. Freeing the unkept promises of the past is already part of this therapy, inasmuch as what our capacity of projection into the future is suffering from is a lack of content. In this sense, innovation and tradition are two sides of the same phenomenon constitutive of historical consciousness. But I willingly concede that, in order to nourish our leap into the future, it is not enough to draw from the past and to treat traditions as living resources rather than as deposits. Here, I would like to underscore an aspect of the problem concerning the question of migration as an aspect of cultural change. The major innovation to which we are summoned today concerns integrating a range of attitudes with respect to the future, which are continually threatening to split apart: whether this be a matter of technical forecasts, economic expectations, or the resolution of ethical problems posed by threats to the ecosystem, by the possibility of interventions into the genetic makeup of human beings, or by the overabundance of signs in circulation confounding our capacity of integration. I maintain that this problem of integration concerns the phenomenon of migration to the extent that the successful migrations of the past also consisted in a gradual integration of heterogeneous values within a cultural space of reception, itself enriched by these invasions which first threatened its cohesiveness. I would like to add the two components of the therapy for the past we have just discussed: the integration of promises freed from the carcass of a dead past together with our capacity of projection into the future, and the integration within the same horizon of expectation of heterogeneous modalities of anticipation. The third component is the most difficult to appreciate in its just value: I am speaking here of the utopian dimension. It is possible to be mistrustful of utopias because of their doctrinal rigidity, their scorn with respect to undertaking the first concrete measures in the direction of their realization. But peoples can no more live without utopias than individuals can live without dreams. In this regard, a Europe without established borders is a utopia, inasmuch as it is first of all an Idea as it was considered to be by Husserl and Jaspers, cited above. The very expression “horizon of expectation” is somewhat evocative of utopia, insofar as the horizon is that which is never reached. But what is important is that our utopias be responsible utopias, taking into account what is doable as well as what is desirable, coming to terms not only with the regrettable resistances of reality, but with the practical paths

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opened up by historical experience. This is the place to recall with Max Weber that the ethics of conviction must not eclipse the ethics of responsibility. Integrating one ethics with another remains a great task, perhaps the greatest utopia. Allow me to conclude, as promised, on a question that concerns the last of the components of historical consciousness enumerated in the introduction, following Koselleck. The question is this: Can one live without a sense of history? The question has become troubling following the loss of the belief in progress. We find the question again, posed by Habermas, of whether the program of the Enlightenment is exhausted. I will rapidly sketch out two responses which will do no more than touch on the question. I will say, first, that we have no need to know where history is going to understand our duty in its regard. Everything we have said about the therapy for historical consciousness relies on practical reason and does not assume any knowledge concerning the final orientation of history. The idea of Europe as a space of integration of migrations past, present, and to come is to be taken in the sense of Kant’s idea of perpetual peace. The certainty of duty has no need for the guarantee of a sense that would impose itself regardless of our actions. Duty is never knowledge. Second response: Even if we take seriously, as Kant himself did, the question: What may I hope? – it remains the case that the hope that nourishes the unkept promises of the past, along with the utopian projections of our imagination, will never amount to a guarantee that we could claim mastery over the course of history. Insofar as it remains a wager in the absence of any guarantee, hope continues in its own way to be a docta ignorantia.

V Epilogue

17  he Struggle for Recognition T and the Economy of the Gift

The title of this lecture, “The Struggle for Recognition and the Economy of the Gift,” seems to be mixing fire and water, the word “struggle” and the word “gift.” But what is at issue is actually the word “recognition,” mutual recognition. This work is part of a much broader effort to give the concept of “recognition” (reconnaissance) a philosophical dignity it does not possess compared to the word “knowledge” (connaisance). There are theories of knowledge, treatises on knowledge, but from what I understand, there is no great book bearing the title, On Recognition. I am not even sure this book can be written, and I will be presenting here only fragments of my investigation. The concept of recognition entered into philosophy essentially by way of the German philosopher Hegel, almost at the start of his philosophical work, in Jena, between 1802 and 1806. The theme of recognition is not unknown to the French-language public thanks to Alexandre Kojève’s work on Hegel’s great book which followed this period of preparation, the Phenomenology of Spirit. The core of this work is precisely the struggle for recognition, but based on a theme that appeared somewhat reductive to me, the struggle of master and slave, and which indeed in this book can end only by dispatching back-to-back the master and the slave who have recognized one another as both sharing thought. The outcome of the struggle for recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit is thus stoicism, where a master and a slave, an emperor and a slave, both say “we think”; and since both are thinking, they are indifferently master or slave.

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Stoicism thus leads to skepticism. Moving further back from this well-wrought, admirable work, moving from the Phenomenology of Spirit back to the Jena period, I then followed the work of another generation of scholars, who out of these fragmentary, unfinished works have been reworking the idea of the struggle for recognition, but with a much more promising outlook for subsequent developments than the sort of closure I was mentioning with respect to stoicism and skepticism. In these writings, and especially in their re-actualization in Germany, principally among young scholars, and also in Louvain-la-Neuve around Jacques Taminiaux, the idea generally put forward is the following: If we remain only within the horizon of the struggle for recognition, we will create an insatiable need, a sort of new unhappy consciousness, an endless demand. This is why I wondered if we did not already possess, in our daily life, the experience of being recognized in an exchange that is, precisely, the exchange of a gift. I am thus making an attempt – without knowing if it can succeed, although I am certain it is fruitful – to complete and correct the ultimately violent idea of struggle with the nonviolent idea of the gift. This, then, is the general line of my presentation.

[Recognition] Returning to Hegel’s work in Jena, I want to point out the constant adversary that political philosophy has tried to combat and to eliminate: this is the Hobbes of the Leviathan. It could be said that the entire natural law tradition from Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Leibniz, and up to Fichte, leads to a refutation of Hobbes. Hobbes’s idea, as everyone knows at least in broad strokes, is that in what he terms the state of nature – a sort of fable of origin, and one which is perfectly reconstructed by an empirical description of the state of affairs – human beings are driven solely by the fear of violent death at the hands of another. The passions reigning over this fear are competition, distrust, and glory. Basically, we shall be circling around the idea of distrust, as the recognition we are going to see is the rejoinder to the distrust serving to exit the state of nature as presented by Hobbes. His solution is a contract but a contract between men bound together by fear and who submit themselves to a sovereign. The latter is not included in the contract, does not participate as a contracting party to the contract, with the result that an artifice, the State, is represented by the great beast in the Book of Job: Leviathan. The problem posed to Hobbes and to all his successors is to determine whether there could



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be a moral ground distinct from fear, a moral ground which can be said to provide a human or humanist dimension to the grand political enterprise. The young Hegel places himself in this lineage; but he has behind him considerable support from the anti-Hobbesians, if I may so call them – those, that is, in the natural right tradition, rather poorly defined, with its idea that there is an original moral mark on humankind. We find this in Grotius in the “moral quality of the person” – qualitas moralis personae, in Grotius’s expression – on the basis of which one can legitimately possess, produce, and act; this is the first step. The second step, of course, is taken by Kant, with his idea of autonomy: in the proper sense of the word, the self and the norm form an absolutely primitive bond. A categorical imperative follows from this, and it involves no problem deriving from fear: it is a primordial foundation of morality. Instead, the problem is how to draw a political philosophy out of the principle of autonomy, and it is at this stage that the final step intervenes with the great philosopher – perhaps the most difficult to read in all of German philosophy – Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He was the first to tie the idea of self-reflection to the idea of orientation toward the Other; this reciprocal determination of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity is Fichte’s work, and in this sense, at least in this period, Hegel is a Fichtean. To these motivations I will add Hegel’s boundless admiration for the Greek City-State and the idea of rediscovering the beautiful City under the conditions of modernity. The two works, or rather the two fragments from which I will draw support, and which I will describe in a brief presentation, are The System of Ethical Life of 1802 and Realphilosophie, philosophy of real life, from the period 1804–6. We use the term “vie éthique” in French [“ethical life” in English] to translate the German word of great import, Sitten: “mores,” “customs”; this means that instead of starting from the abstract idea of moral duty, we begin with the practice of customs, mores. There is a kind of echo here of Aristotle, who wrote an ethics stemming from the word ethos, mores. So, no longer able to use the word “mœurs” in French [or “mores” in English] as “Sitten” is used in German, the word has been translated by “ethical.” In the expression “ethical life,” there is a concern with what is concrete in human practices and not simply with abstract moral obligations. A method is grafted onto this project with the purpose of making negativity – that is to say, everything that in one way or another, negates – appear as the dynamic engine driving ideas and practices. Exiting natural life, the fact of simply being-there – Dasein in German – is the work of the negative as it continually pushes forward. The Hegelian project – which fundamentally will

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not change before arriving at the most convincing accomplishment of Hegel’s work in this domain of practice, namely the Philosophy of Right – consists in a course across levels and institutions in which a human order is constructed little by little through the multiplication of negations. The origin of the political is thus the exit from fear through this spiritual impetus as it produces increasingly rich institutions out of the void of active and living negativity. In the last great work, the Philosophy of Right, institutions are organized around the family, civil society, and ultimately political society, where Hegelians attempt to recover the equivalent of the beautiful Greek City, but on the basis of the individuality born out of the Renaissance, the period of the Enlightenment, and through Kantian and Fichtean philosophy. With regard to the second work, Realphilosophie – and the term real indicates this – it is a matter of saying how spirit, Geist, enters into history, how freedom which is first an abstract idea becomes historical. It is, therefore, through an entire history of practical, pragmatic, and institutional conquests by human beings that this destiny is created – finally political, in the broad sense – of living together under laws and institutions. Hegel traces three successive models of recognition: the first, under the auspices of love (which was already an important Hegelian word), is affectivity in the form of sexuality and eroticism as well as friendship and mutual respect. The word “love” is a word that defines all the close relations human beings engage in with affection. The second level, the juridical, is the level of law, where contractual relations generally dominate – but, for Hegel, these contractual relations are always a weak form of human connection because in the relation of contracts, primarily concerning property, people are separated more than united, distinguishing “what is mine” from “what is yours.” And the separation of mine from yours is not an act of recognition; it could be said that in a certain sense an element of distrust remains in the contractual relation. I think it is important to note the permanence of anti-contractualism throughout all of Hegel’s work: the contract is an abstract relation, which, moreover, carries with it its own sanction, namely that it produces infraction. Hegel somewhat magnifies the concept of infraction with the concept of crime; and what is most surprising in reading these two essays is, I would not say the apology of crime, but an attempt to understand how crime contributes to the progress of human relations by upsetting the simply juridical relation which is in a sense denounced for its spiritual poverty. I venture to say in passing that when, in a society, all genuine human relations tied to civil society, to political society, are destroyed, we simply fall back on legal relations, and it is



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criminality that reveals in a sense the profound inhumanity of relations that would be no more than juridical relations. Beyond this simply abstract, purely juridical relation, there is the search for a community-based bond which, for Hegel, is the State (this is the third level). It is a highly controversial topic whether or not the description and construction of the Hegelian State continue to be charged with mutual distrust. I would like to say a few words here about the contemporary efforts of re-appropriation and re-actualization of the philosophy of the young Hegel, reconstructing and seeking in our experience concrete equivalents of Hegelian negation. The key idea that I am now presenting comes from Axel Honneth’s work The Struggle for Recognition; that is, it is through the negative experiences of contempt, Missachtung, that we discover our own desire for recognition; our desire for recognition is born out of the dis-satisfaction or unhappiness of contempt.1 Honneth’s reconstruction of the heritage of the young Hegel is guided by an entire phenomenology of contempt. He shows this on the three levels traced out by Hegel: the first and the last of these levels are of particular interest to me, because on the ethical level we now have abundant commentaries and reinterpretations, but the juridical level does not occupy the entire space; it is framed by something that is pre-juridical and by something that is post-juridical. It is, in succession, in the pre-juridical and in the post-juridical that Honneth sees contempt operating, along with the provocation to overcome it through recognition. This pairing of the idea of contempt with the idea of recognition appears to me to be the major accomplishment of this re-actualization. Here are a few examples: the first model – because Honneth presents us with three models of recognition in total, the level of affects (affections, as they were called in the eighteenth century), the juridical level, and the political level – covers the gamut of erotic relations, family relations, and relations of friendship, that is, to quote Honneth, all the ties “constituted by strong emotional attachments among a small number of people.”2 The pre-juridical level deserves to be covered in all these dimensions following the extraordinary richness of the negative sentiments it contains. Today, certainly, we have very rich echoes of these negative components of early affectivity in psychoanalysis, of which Hegel, of course, had no inkling. Honneth is especially interested in the postFreudian psychoanalysis of all the feelings of abandonment, distress, and misfortune of early childhood, which precede the entry into the Oedipus complex and which seem to be possible commentaries on negativity: needing to be reassured, the child seeks confidence in life, or in the event of not having this reassurance, not receiving approval,

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seeks to acquire the capacity for solitude; acquiring the capacity for solitude after abandonment and the threat of abandonment is, for Honneth, held to constitute the best contemporary, modern equivalent of the Hegelian analysis. I now move in a single bound to the other pole of conflictual recognition: Following Hegel, Honneth’s entire enterprise can be said to consist, precisely, in the destructive conflict of recognition; this phenomenology perhaps reaches its limit here and calls for a reconsideration of the quasi-founding role ascribed to the notion of conflict and struggle. At issue is what lies beyond juridical recognition as it is characterized by the author. We can only understand ourselves as holders of rights if at the same time we are cognizant of the normative obligations we have with respect to others. We exist as ourselves only on the condition of maintaining relations of mutual construction with others, as in early childhood, the capacity to be alone allowed us to escape the threats of abandonment. Here, social contempt is the new form of negation. The misfortunes of our societies, which Hegel had perfectly anticipated in his analysis of civil society, result, one could say, from the fact that civil society, marked essentially by industrialization, by the mastery of what he already knew in his day regarding industrial relations, produces poverty at the same time; there is a strange connection between the production of wealth and the production of inequalities – but we are, cruelly, living this very situation, aren’t we? In our societies, the source of misrecognition, the denial of recognition, resides in the profound contradiction that exists between an equal attribution of rights (in principle, we are all equal as citizens as holders of rights) and the inequality of the distribution of goods. This is to say that we do not know how to produce economically and socially egalitarian societies, although the juridical foundation of our societies is the equal right of access to all the sources of juridical recognition. This conflict between the attribution of rights and the distribution of goods is in a sense the unsurpassable limit of our contemporary and democratic societies. Someone who is recognized juridically and who is not recognized socially suffers from a fundamental form of contempt tied to the very structure of this contradiction. An entire chapter of Honneth’s book is devoted to contemporary figures of the denial of recognition, with its feelings of shame, anger, indignation, revolt, etc. The forms of recognition related to social esteem concern the most deeply hidden connection between the universalization tied to the conquest of the juridical and the personalization of the division of labor; this hidden connection is the source of contempt and the denial of social consideration. The lack of public



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consideration and the intimate feeling of an attack on one’s integrity go together. It is along this hazy border of the lack of social recognition due to the multiplication of inequalities in societies of equal rights that I raise the question whether the idea of struggle is, then, the final idea. Rereading Hegel’s Jena texts and their contemporary reinterpretation has led me to a point of perplexity which I can sum up as follows: is not “being recognized” in the struggle for recognition the stake (enjeu) in an endless demand, giving the impression of a “bad infinity”? This is a Hegelian expression, whether under the negative features of an insatiable negation, or the positive features of a limitless demand, thus a sort of unhappy consciousness as a product of civilization. To avert this malaise of modern unhappy consciousness and the danger of what derives from it, I decided to pair with the motivations of an interminable struggle, in the sense in which Freud speaks of an interminable analysis, experiences that are doubtless rare, but precious – happy actualizations of recognition. These are nonviolent forms of recognition that I would like to oppose to the conflictual form of recognition which is the great Hegelian heritage. It is for this reason that I have opened up the dossier of the gift again at an unexpected moment in my analysis, and I am well aware of the sort of hiatus that I am creating in the midst of my own discourse by passing from the idea of struggle to the idea of gift.

[The Gift] In his great work The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies,3 Marcel Mauss speaks of “archaic” societies, not in the sense of barbarian, but meaning that they did not enter into the general movement of civilization – a Polynesian or American society. This is important because my problem will be to determine whether the gift remains an archaic phenomenon, and whether we can discover modern equivalents of what Marcel Mauss has so well described as the “economy of the gift.” For Mauss, this is an economy, the gift being placed in the same lineage as the market economy. A rereading of Mauss today can be found in Marcel Hénaff’s book The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, Philosophy.4 This is an effort to reinterpret the dialectic of the exchange of the gift by taking it out of its archaism and restoring its future. Mauss had indeed seen in these archaic practices something strange that did not set this exchange on the path to the market economy, something that was neither an antecedent nor a precedent, hence not a “primitive

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form,” but something situated on another level. What I would like to stress is the ceremonial character of the exchange: the ceremony of exchange does not take place in the ordinary, daily life of market exchanges, well known to these populations in the form of barter or even in purchases and sales with something like currency. Hénaff stresses that the gift, the thing given in the exchange, is not at all a currency; it is not an exchange of currency, it is something else, but what? Let us return to Mauss’s analysis at the point where he stops – facing an enigma, the enigma of the gift: the gift calls for the gift-inreturn, and the great problem for Mauss is not at all “Why does one have to give?” but “Why does one have to give back?” For him, the great enigma is thus the return of the gift. The solution he gives for this was to assume for himself the explanation given by the populations themselves; and this was, moreover, the position criticized by Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, and in the rest of his work: here the sociologist or the anthropologist assumes the beliefs of those he observes. Now, what are these beliefs? That there is a magic force in the thing exchanged which must circulate and return to its origin. Giving in return is allowing the force contained in the gift to return back to its giver. The interpretation proposed by Marcel Hénaff (and which I am assuming for myself) is that what would necessitate the return of the gift is not a magic force that would be in the gift, but rather its character of substitute and pledge. The thing that is given, whatever it be – pearls or wedding vows, anything in the guise of a present, a gift – is nothing but the substitute for a tacit recognition; it is the giver who gives himself through substitution in the gift, and at the same time the gift is a pledge of restitution. The functioning of the gift in reality would not lie in the thing given but in the relation of giver to recipient, that is, a tacit recognition figured symbolically by the gift. I will take this idea of a relation of symbolic recognition as the object in the confrontation with the analyses of struggle following from Hegel. It seems to me that it is not the thing given which requires the return because of its force, but the mutual act of recognition of two beings, who are not sharing the speculative discourse of knowledge; the gestural character of recognition is a constructive gesture of recognition by means of a thing that symbolizes the giver and the recipient. I can justify this interpretation by placing it in relation to an experience that is certainly not archaic: we have an experience of what has no price, the notion of “without price.” In the relation of the gift between “primitives,” as they were called in that era, there was the equivalent of what for us was first the



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discovery in the experience of the Greeks of that which is “without price” tied to the idea of truth – whence the title of Hénaff’s book, The Price of Truth: in reality, it is the “priceless” character of truth. The founding experience here is Socrates’ reply to the Sophists: “I teach the truth without asking to be paid.” The Sophists are the ones who are professors expecting payment – and we are more in the lineage of the Sophists than of Socrates. A problem was posed at the origin which is the relation between truth and money, a relation that can be termed enmity. This enmity between truth (or what is taken as truth and taught as truth) and money itself has a long history – and Hénaff’s book is in large part a history of money in the face of truth. Indeed, money, from a simple index of the equal value of things exchanged, has itself become a thing of value in the form of capital. Here, Marxist analyses certainly have their place, regarding the manner in which exchange-value has become surplusvalue and, on this basis, a mystification, in the sense that money becomes mysterious since it produces money, whereas it should only be the sign of a real exchange of things which possess their value through their scarcity, through the work they embody, or by the surplus-value of being supplied to the consumer. That the mystification of money has become the universal measure signals the height of the conflict between truth and money. In this respect, Hénaff refers to the work by the great German sociologist Georg Simmel,5 in which he extols money, understanding its place in civilization as the universal measure of exchange; in a sense, money is the bearer of all processes of universalization – what we are experiencing today as globalization. The first phenomenon produced by globalization is the circulation of money, and Simmel even goes so far as to say that it is the symbol of freedom in the sense that one can purchase anything with money; this is freedom of choice. Simmel, however, is also a neo-Kantian moralist, and reveals something monstrous which Socrates had foreseen: the desire for money is an endless thirst. We are reminded of Horace’s auri sacra fames, “the sacred hunger for gold.” We find what all moralists, since Aristotle and the Stoics, have denounced as the desire for excess, pleonexia, the “insatiable.” The insatiable is at once the infinite and the ungraspable, whence the liberating sense of the relation to non-market goods (the title of a recent issue of the journal Esprit was given in the form of a troubling question: Do there still exist non-market goods?).6 My suggestion is that in contemporary and everyday forms of ceremonial exchange, we have a model of a practice of recognition, of nonviolent recognition. There would then be a task to undertake, which would be a reply to Honneth’s work on the forms of contempt,

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an inquiry into discrete forms of recognition in politeness, but also in festivity. Does the difference between workdays, as we call them, and holidays still maintain a founding significance, as if there were a kind of respite in the course of production, of enrichment: would the festive be, so to speak, the nonviolent rejoinder to our struggle to be recognized? We can say that we have a living experience of recognition in a relation of gifts, exchanges, services; we are no longer in the realm of insatiable demands, but we have, as it were, moments of happiness in gratitude (d’être reconnaissants) and in being recognized (d’être reconnus). Let us underscore the fact that in French the word reconnaissance signifies two things, being recognized for who one is, recognized in one’s identity, but also experiencing gratitude: there is, we can say, an exchange of gratitude in the gift. I close with my own question: Up to what point can a founding significance be given to these rare experiences? I am inclined to say that, as long as we retain the sentiment of the sacred and of the work-free character of the ceremony in the exchange under its ceremonial aspect, then we have the promise of having been recognized at least once in our life; and if we were never to have the experience of being recognized, of recognizing in gratitude the ceremonial exchange, we would be violent actors in the struggle for recognition. These rare experiences are what protect the struggle for recognition from returning to Hobbesian violence.

Origin of the Texts

“The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians.” Report presented in Bièvres in 1958 at the French National Congress of Social Christianity and published in the journal Christianisme social, 66/6–7, June–July 1958, pp. 452–63, and subsequently in the journal Autres Temps. Cahiers d’éthique sociale et politique, 76–7, Spring 2003, pp. 79–89. “From Marxism to Contemporary Communism.” Initially a talk given in 1958 at the regional Synod of Reformed Church of France in Paris, then published in the journal Christianisme social, 67/3–4, March–April 1959, pp. 151–9. “Socialism Today.” This article appeared in the journal Christianisme social, 69/7–9, July–September 1961, pp. 451–60, based on a report presented by Paul Ricoeur to the XXXIII Congress of Social Christianity, held on April 29 and 30, and May 1, 1961 in Rocheton, France. “Hegel Today.” This was a lecture given at the Maison de culture in Grenoble, published in the journal Études théologiques et religieuses, 3, 1974, pp. 335–56, and subsequently in the journal Esprit, 3–4, March–April 2006, pp. 170–90. “Morality, Ethics, and Politics.” This article was published in the journal Pouvoirs. Revue française d’études constitutionnelles et politiques, 65, 1993, pp. 5–17.

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“Responsibility and Fragility.” This was a lecture given at the Association of Protestant Students in Paris (AEPP) on March 24, 1992, published in the journal Autres Temps. Les cahiers du Christianisme sociale, 36, December 1992, pp. 7–21, and republished in Autres Temps. Cahiers d’éthique sociale et politique, 76–7, Spring 2003, pp. 127–41 (special edition: “Paul Ricoeur. Histoire et civilization. Neuf textes jalons pour un christianisme social,” with a preface by Olivier Abel). “The Paradoxes of Authority.” This article was published in Philosophie. Bulletin de liaison des professeurs de philosophie de l’académie de Versailles, CRDP, 7, February 1995, pp. 6–12. “Happiness, Off Site” This was a lecture given during the fifth Le Monde Le Mans Forum and published in Roger-Pol Droit (ed.), Où est le Bonheur? (Paris: Le Monde Éditions, 1994), pp. 327–41. “Is Crisis a Phenomenon Specific to Modernity?” This was a lecture given on November 3, 1968 at the University of Neuchâtel, published in the journal Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 120, 1988, pp. 1–19. A German version of this text was published in a collective volume containing the contributions of the 1985 Castelgandolfo meeting devoted to the theme of crisis: Krzysztof Michalski (ed.), Über die Krisis. Castelgandolfo-Gespräche (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985). The French text was reviewed by Pierre Bühler. [Note from the editor of the French edition.] “Money: From One Suspicion to the Next.” This article was published in A. Spire (ed.), L’Argent. Pour une réhabilitation morale (Paris: Éditions Autrement, collection “Mutations,” 1992), pp. 56–71. “The Erosion of Tolerance and the Resistance of the Intolerable.” This article appeared in Diogène, 176, October–December 1996, pp. 166–76. It is part of a collection of seventeen contributions published under the title “La tolérance entre l’intolérance et l’intolérable,” with a Foreword by Paul Ricoeur. Contributors to this project included Václav Havel, Octavio Paz, Yehudi Menuhin, and Desmond Tutu, along with philosophers such as Noberto Bobbio and Monique Canto-Sperber, and legal scholars such as Antoine Garapon, who are mentioned in this text. [Note from the editor of the French edition.]



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“The Condition of the Foreigner.” Paul Ricoeur wrote this text in 1996 after having participated in the Hessel Commission on foreigners, and an excerpt was published in the same year in Information et Évangélisation, and subsequently published in its entirety in Esprit, 3–4, March–April 2006, pp. 264–75. “Fragile Identity: Respect of the Other and Cultural Identity.” This text was given as a lecture at the congress of the International Federation of Action of Christians for the Abolition of Torture (ACAT) in Prague in October 2000, and was published in ACAT’s publication, “Les droits de la personne en question. Europe Europa 2000.” “What New Ethos for Europe?” This article was published in Peter Koslowski (ed.), Imaginer l’Europe. Le marché intérieur européen, tâche culturelle et économique (Paris: Le Cerf, 1992), pp. 107–16. “The Dialogue of Cultures, the Confrontation of Heritages.” This article was given as a lecture by Paul Ricoeur at the conference “Aux sources de la culture française” organized by the Ligue française de l’enseignement et de l’éducation permanente on January 30, 1997 in Paris, and was published in Dominique Lecourt (ed.), Aux sources de la culture française, with a preface by R. Lesgards and a Postface by G. Gauthier (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), pp. 97–105. “The Crisis of Historical Consciousness and Europe.” This article was published in Etica e o Futuro da Democracia (Lisbon: Ediçôes Colibri/S.P.F., 1998), pp. 29–35. “The Struggle for Recognition and the Economy of the Gift.” This inaugural lecture was given by Paul Ricoeur at the VIIe Rencontres internationales de philosophie de Camino de Santiago in November 2003, dedicated to Ricoeur’s thought and published in Spanish in Hermenéutica y responsabilidad. Homenaje a Paul Ricoeur. Actas VII Encuentros internacionales de filosofia en el Camino de Santiago, 2003, pp. 17–26.

Notes

Editor’s Introduction 1 See History and Truth, tr. C. A. Kelby (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965); Time and Narrative, 3 vols, tr. K. McLaughlin (Blamey) and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–88); From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, tr. K. Blamey and J. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991); Memory, History, Forgetting, tr. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 2 Paul Ricoeur, Lectures 1. Autour du politique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991). 3 Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G. H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 4 Paul Ricoeur, Le Juste 1 (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995) and Le Juste 2 (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 2001). 5 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, tr. K. Blamey (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). 6 An earlier collection of Paul Ricoeur’s interviews and dialogues, Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics, tr. K. Blamey, ed. Catherine Goldenstein with a Preface by Michaël Foessel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), concerned ethical and political questions. The present volume offers a selection of articles and lectures collected to shed light on the progress of Ricoeur’s political thought. 7 This article is reprinted in Ricoeur, History and Truth, pp. 247–70. 8 This text anticipates “Should We Renounce Hegel?,” a chapter in Time and Narrative 3, published eleven years later (pp. 193–206). 9 “Ideology and Utopia,” in From Text to Action, pp. 300–16; and Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. 10 This task assigns the work of interpretation to citizens. In this way,



Notes to pages x–18

213

Ricoeur employs in the domain of the political the “graft of hermeneutics onto phenomenology,” which he had introduced into his philosophical method as early as the 1960s. 11 The figure of the “political paradox” does not refer to a stance of indecision, but to a sense of compromise. Ricoeur himself warns against “what can be paralyzing in a position that oscillates between two poles” in Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics, p. 14. 12 On this important axis of Ricoeur’s political project, see the article “Freedom” (1971), reprinted in Philosophical Anthropology, tr. D. Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 124–48. 13 Unavailable to the general public, considering that this text was published in le Bulletin de liaison des professeurs de philosophie de l’académie de Versailles, and had limited circulation. It is, moreover, to be paired with an article on the same topic bearing almost the identical title published in 1996, “Le paradoxe de l’autorité,” in Le Juste 2. 14 See also, Ricoeur, Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics, p. 27. 15 See Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Politics” (1983), reprinted in From Text to Action, pp. 317–28. 16 Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, tr. D. Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 17 A question under debate is whether the encounter with the work of John Rawls marks a social-democratic turn in Ricoeur. 1.  The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians 1 Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, tr. F. Filson (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 3rd edition, 2018). 2.  From Marxism to Contemporary Communism 1 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. M. Evans (London: Trübner and Co., 1881), p. 31. 2 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings, tr. R. Livingston and G. Benton (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 357. 3 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 42. 4 Ibid., p. 41. 5 Marx, Early Writings, p. 349. 6 Ibid., p. 324. 7 Ibid., p. 287. 8 Ibid., pp. 323–4. 9 Pierre Bigo, Marxisme et Humanisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953). 10 Marx, Early Writings, p. 357. 11 Marx, The Jewish Question, in Early Writings, p. 220. 12 Friedrich Engels, Introduction to the German Edition of Marx’s The Paris Commune (New York: New York Labor News Company, 2005), p. 20, quoted by Lenin.

214

Notes to pages 20–103

3.  Socialism Today 1 André Philip was a former minister, a Socialist militant since the 1920s, and a member of the Christianisme social movement, someone Paul Ricoeur considered to be his “mentor in politics.” André Philip’s presentation was published under the same title, “Socialism Today,” in the volume cited above. 2 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishing, 1955), p. 80. 4.  Hegel Today 1 1821 is the year of the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 5.  Morality, Ethics, and Politics 1 This text was accompanied by the following summary: “Politics affects the individual on the level of the powers which the individual is capable of exercising, and on the level of the desire for the good life, which defines the ethical dimension of action. By its legitimate formalism and its array of norms and obligations, justice, the primary virtue of institutions in which these powers and this desire can be actualized, marks the transition from the ethical plane to the moral plane. In countering the tendency of the State to set itself up as a transcendent agency, the task of the critic is to point out the paradoxes affecting the exercise of political power and submit this power as well to the rule of justice.” [Note from the editor of the French edition.] 2 Jean-Marc Ferry, Les Puissances de l’expérience, Vol. II. Les Ordres de la reconnaissance (Paris: Le Cerf, 1991). 3 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 3. 4 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 5 Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, tr. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 6.  Responsibility and Fragility 1 Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, p. 158. 2 Ibid., p. 277. 3 Olivier Abel (ed.), Le Pardon. Briser la dette et l’oubli (Paris: Autrement, 1992). 4 Chapter 13 of this Epistle. 8.  Happiness, Off Site 1 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 3. 9.  Is Crisis a Phenomenon Specific to Modernity? 1 Cf. in particular, Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 9th edition, 1985). 2 Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 94.



Notes to pages 103–12

215

3 Ibid., p. 96. 4 “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. and tr. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), pp. 11–26. 5 Ibid., p. 15. 6 Kant, “What is Enlightenment?,” in On History, p. 3. 7 Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000). 8 The two passages from Rousseau’s Émile are cited by Koselleck, ibid., p. 159. 9 Ibid., cited by Koselleck, p. 160. 10 Ibid., pp. 160–1. 11 Ibid., cited by Koselleck, p. 172. 12 Ibid., cited by Koselleck, p. 182. 13 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 14 “Crises économiques,” Encyclopaedia universalis (Paris, 1968), vol. V, pp. 101–9; here p. 101. 15 Ibid. 16 Camille-Ernest Labrousse, La Crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et au début de la Révolution (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1943). 17 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 18 Encyclopaedia universalis, p. 101. 19 Louis Dumont, in his Preface to the French translation of Karl Polanyi, La Grande Transformation, tr. C. Malamoud et M. Angeno (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. i. Originally, Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). 20 Dumont, Preface, ibid. 21 Louis Dumont, in his Preface, defines the ideology of the liberal economy in the following way: “A doctrine according to which the free play of the economy being the very condition of this order, any interference [by the State] is harmful. As the market is the central institution, the market is considered as self-regulating, and society must submit to it whatever happens.” Ibid., p. vi. 22 Cf., note 1, above. 23 Éric Weil, Philosophie politique (Paris: Vrin, 1956), p. 131. 24 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, tr. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 25 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 26 For what follows, see Husserl, The Crisis, Part I: “The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity,” pp. 2–18, and “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” pp. 269–99.

216

Notes to pages 114–33

27 Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, tr. K. Frings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008). 28 Éric Weil, Logique de la philosophie (Paris: Vrin, 1950). The following quotes are taken from this work. 29 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschictlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979); Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 30 Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983). 31 See Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 10.  Money: From One Suspicion to the Next 1 Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, tr. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 29. 2 Ibid., p. 30. 3 Ibid. 4 John Calvin, “Letter to Claude Sachin,” in Mary Beaty and Benjamin Farley, Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Advice (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), pp. 139–43. 5 Richard Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926). 6 Albert Hirschman, Les Passions et les Intérêts. Justifications politiques du capitalisme avant son apogée (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), p. 102; The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 7 Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, p. 49. 8 Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Paul Dumouchel, L’Enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie (Paris: Le Seuil, 1979). 9 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Le Sacrifice et l’Envie. Le libéralisme aux prises avec la justice sociale (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1992). 10 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: Millar, 1759). 11 Alain Renaut, L’Ère de l’individu. Contribution à une histoire de la subjectivité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). 12 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 53. 13 Dupuy, Le Sacrifice et l’Envie, p. 96. 14 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 53. 15 Ibid., p. 45. 16 Dupuy, Le Sacrifice et l’Envie, p. 100. 17 Ibid. 18 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 10–11. 19 Ibid., p. 11. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. xiii.



Notes to pages 148–57

217

12.  The Condition of the Foreigner 1 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, Chapter 2, “Membership.” 2 Henri Battifol and Paul Lagarde, Droit international privé, vol. I, Conditions des étrangers (Paris: LGDJ, 1993). 3 Danièle Lochak, “La citoyenneté: un concept juridique flou,” in Dominique Colos, Claude Emeri, Jacques Zylberberg (eds.), Citoyenneté et nationalité. Perspectives en France et au Québec (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991). 4 “Droit de la citoyenneté,” in Olivier Duhamel, Droit constitutionnel et politique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993). 5 Ibid., p. 181. 6 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in On History, p. 103. 7 Ibid., pp. 102–3. 8 Note the quasi-Copernican or Newtonian argument drawn from the roundness of the earth and its resulting finiteness; note, in particular, the corollary of this right to visit, the right to associate “as a member of society.” Fichte develops this theme in “On the Right of People and on Cosmopolitan Right,” in the second annex to Foundations of Natural Right, Section 22: “He has that original human right which precedes all rightful contracts and which alone makes them possible: the right to every other human being’s expectation to be able to enter into a rightful relation with him through contracts. This alone is the one true human right that belongs to the human being as such: the right to be able to acquire rights. … It is this right to go about freely on the earth and offer to establish rightful connections with others that constitutes the right of a mere citizen of the world.” J. G. Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, tr. M. Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 333. 9 Walzer, Spheres of Justice. 10 François Crépeau, Droit d’asile. De l’hospitalité aux contrôles migratoires (Brussels: Éditions Bruylant, 1995). 11 A new category of foreigners in distress and a new modality of emergency aid have appeared under the title of the “right of intervention.” This new international humanitarian right rests on the suffering of populations for whom assistance can be administered only by reaching them, one way or another, where they live. The theoretical issue consists in the open conflict on the level of international law with the principle of State sovereignty and its corollary, the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of States. This situation is, in a sense, the inverse of that tied to the right of asylum, which mainly concerns exiles fleeing their country: they want to come “chez nous.” With them, a new tragic figure of the foreigner as “supplicant” has appeared. See the work by Mario Bettati, Le Droit d’ingérence. Mutation de l’ordre international (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996). 12 Cited in Crépeau, Droit d’asile, p. 85. 13 Cited in ibid., p. 129. 14 Cited in ibid., p. 141. 15 Ibid., p. 313.

218

Notes to pages 159–207

13.  Fragile Identity: Respect for the Other and Cultural Identity 1 This text in the original publication was preceded by the following summary: “The philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the problem of identity begins with the question of memory, personal memory and collective memory, moving back and forth between the level of the person and the level of the community. What makes identity fragile is the relation to time and the confrontation with the other perceived as a threat. A founding violence, which continues to be visible, results in behaviors where the rights of persons are countered by institutional focus on security. Stripped of sanctions, the protection of rights is delivered over to moral indignation alone.” [Note from the editor of the French edition.] 14.  What New Ethos for Europe? 1 Wilhelm Schapp, In Geschichten verstrickt. Zum Sein von Ding und Mensch (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1953). 2 Abel, ed., Le Pardon. Briser la dette et l’oubli. 15.  The Dialogue of Cultures, the Confrontation of Heritages 1 Chapter 11 in this volume. 16.  The Crisis of Historical Consciousness and Europe 1 Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, and Futures Past. 2 Schapp, In Geschichten verstrickt, p. 176. 17.  The Struggle for Recognition and the Economy of the Gift 1 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, tr. J. Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 2 Ibid., p. 95. 3 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, tr. I. Cunnison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). 4 Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, Philosophy, tr. J.-L. Morhange (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 5 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, tr. D. Frisby and T. Bottomore (London: Routledge, 2004). 6 The dossier in the journal Esprit, “Y a-t-il encore des biens non-marchands?,” February 2002, included an interview with Marcel Hénaff.

Index

Abel, Olivier, 75 action, x, 8, 54, 56, 95 Adorno, Theodor, 118 AIDS, 164 alienation, 22, 26 Hegel, 36, 41, 46 Marxism, 13–15, 16–17, 18 anteriority, 82, 85, 86 anthropology, 41, 115 anxiety, 93 Arendt, Hannah, xi, 58, 64, 70, 82, 164 Aristotle, 10, 33, 52, 201 categories, 39 desire, 80, 81 distribution, 59 equality, 59–60 ethical life, 84–5 excess, 207 friendship, 92–3 human good, 90 political bond, 57 temperance, 123 will, 46 Aron, Raymond, 71 art, 42 asceticism, 136–7, 139, 140–1, 142, 182–3

asylum seekers, 151, 155–8 atheism, 14, 19, 32, 118–19 authority, xi, 9–10, 62, 80–8, 165 autonomization, 108 autonomy, xi, 60, 81, 85–6, 87–8, 127, 201 avarice, 123 Barth, Karl, 43 the “Beast”, 4 belonging, x, 148, 149–50, 158 Bergson, Henri, 192 Bigo, Father, 15–16 Bobbio, Norberto, 146 Bolshevik Party, 17 Boltanski, Luc, 63, 69–71, 91, 94, 127, 133 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 76 bourgeois society, xi, 27 Brandt, Willy, 75, 179 bureaucracy, 24, 27, 51, 61 Calvin, John, 124 Canto-Sperber, Monique, 145 capable subject, 53–4, 57, 64 capital, 16 Capital (Marx), 133

220 Index capitalism, 51, 110 alienating power of, 26 bourgeois society, 27 economic regulation, 21 money, 125 Protestant ethics, 124 categorical imperative, 85, 201 centralization, 24 ceremonial exchange, 207–8 charity, 178, 179–80 Christianisme social, viii Christianity, viii, 3–4, 8, 12, 48, 117 death of, 120 dialogue with socialism, 28 European Wars of Religion, 135–6, 137–8 Evangelical, 43 forgiveness, 180–1 Hegel, 31–2 Marxism, 19 money, 122–3, 124–5 Nietzsche, 118 primitive, 189 self-critique, 190 theology of labor, 26 traditions, 194 see also Judeo-Christian tradition; religion circularity, 50 citizenship, 47–8, 69, 73, 141, 148–9, 154 civil society, 68–71, 73, 103–4, 138, 202, 204 class, 16, 18, 35 close relations, 89–90, 92–3 collective identity, 161, 164–5, 180 collective memory, 160, 161, 162–3, 175, 192 commemorization, 165–6 “common good”, 10, 94–5 communication, 55–6, 172, 173, 174–5 communicative rationality, 88 communism, 11, 13, 16, 19 communitarianism, 23, 56, 60, 180

compassion, 179, 180 competition, 23, 27, 200 compromise, 70–1, 145 concepts, 47 Confessions (Saint Augustine), 160 conflict, 68–71, 113, 187, 204 confrontation, 51 conscience, 81, 82, 86 consciousness Hegel, 35, 36–7, 41, 42 historical, 115, 188–96 Lenin, 18 Locke, 160 Marx, 15, 17 consensus, 145, 187 constitutional evolution, 8–9 constitutionality, 5, 61 constraint, 52–3 consumerism, 191 contempt, 203, 204, 207 contracts, 57 contradictions, 34–5, 36, 46 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx), 17 conviction, x, 8, 114, 187 civil society, 138 ethics of, 196 loss of, 120 tolerance, 136, 137, 140, 142, 184–5 corruption, 130–2, 134 cosmic order, 84 cosmopolitanism, 95, 103, 111 creation, 84 Crépeau, François, 157 crime, 202–3 crisis, 101–20 “generalized” concept of, 101–2, 110–16 “modern” concept of, 102, 117–20 “regional” concepts of, 101, 102–10, 116 Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental

Index Phenomenology (Husserl), 112 critical-memory, 192–3, 194 critique, 104–5, 138, 184, 190, 194 Critique and Crisis (Koselleck), 104, 188 Cullman, Oscar, 4 cultural identity, 173–4, 175 culture cultural change, 189–90, 195 European, 190 founding events, 176 Hegelian theory of, 37, 44 semiotics of, 165 socialist humanism, 25–8 translation of, 173 Western, 145 cynicism, 8 daemonics, 89, 96 death, 42–3, 91, 93, 145–6, 166–7, 186 dehumanization, 15 democracy, x, 6 political parties, 9 representative, 72–3 self-production of, 187 socialist governance, 23–6 sources of culture, 145 tolerance, 139 deontology, 90 depression, 162 Descartes, René, 33 desire, 43, 44, 46, 80, 81 desire-to-live-together, 58, 150, 158, 191 democracy, x domination, xi fragility, 72–3 paradox of form and force, 62 renunciation of power, 180 tolerance, 145 developmental model of crisis, 103 dialectic, 33, 34, 38, 45–6, 78–9 dictatorship, 23, 143

221

Diderot, Denis, 105 difference, 154 discourse, 48, 54 disenchantment, 119, 120 distancing, x distant other, 89–90, 94 distinction, 59 distribution, 59, 60, 69, 131, 132, 204 dogmatism, ix, 9, 13, 18, 19 dominance, 132–3 domination, xi, 62, 72 institutions of, 104 Marxist theory of the State, 18 Walzer, 133 Weber, 83, 111 Dumont, Louis, 117–18, 130 Dumouchel, Paul, 127 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 127–9, 130 duty, 53, 196 Early Theological Writings (Hegel), 13–14 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 14, 15 economic liberalism, 109, 113, 116, 117–18 economics crises, 106–7, 108, 109–10, 112–13 Marxist meta-economics, 16 money, 121, 125–30 socialist planning, 20–3 economy of the gift, 205 education, 69 egalitarianism, 23, 133, 204 The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss), 206 Eliade, Mircea, 177 Émile (Rousseau), 35, 105 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Hegel), 32, 38–43, 47 L’Enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie (Dupuy & Dumouchel), 127 enlightenment, 104

222 Index the Enlightenment, 115–16, 189, 193, 196, 202 Hegel, 34 progress, 191 publicity, 58 tolerance, 136, 137–8, 141, 145, 184 traditions, 194 envy, 128–9, 130, 164 Epictetus, 138 epistemological model of crisis, 106, 112 equality, 59–60, 61, 69, 204 Erasmus, 184 L’Ère de l’individu (Renaut), 128 Erikson, Erik, 103 Essais sur l’individualisme (Dumont), 117 Essay on Human Understanding (Locke), 160 ethics, xi, 57–64 Aristotle, 80, 84–5 capable subject, 53–4 of capitalism, 124 democratic, x governance of persons, 7 happiness, 89, 96 historical subject, 55–7 love and justice, 78–9 morality distinction, 52–3 paradoxes, 61–3 politics and, 57–61 responsibility and fragility, 63–4 socialist planning, 22 tragedy, 91 utilitarian, 27 see also morality Ethics (Spinoza), 125 Europe, xi, 69, 73–4, 184 asylum, 155, 157 historical consciousness, 188–96 new ethos for, 171–81 Wars of Religion, 135–6, 137–8, 141, 143, 183, 185 Western philosophy, 112 Evangelical Christianity, 43 events, 48, 49

evil, 3, 42–3, 49, 53, 185 the “Beast”, 4 economic, 16 Hegel, 36 indignation, 143 Kant, 48, 85 Marxist theory of the State, 18 political, ix, 10 exchange of memories, 74–5, 173–7, 178, 193 exemplarity, 81–2 existentialism, 31, 41, 113 experience dialectical constitution of, 45 Hegel, 34–5, 36–7, 38, 41, 44 hermeneutical philosophy, 50 Kant, 48–9 philosophy of interpretation, 51 “space of”, 77, 115–16, 188–9, 190, 191 exploitation, 16 exteriority, 81, 84, 85, 86 externalization, 36 false consciousness, 17, 18 fear, 93, 166–7, 186, 200–1 Ferry, Jean-Marc, 56, 90 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 14 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 154, 200, 201 finitude, 50 the foreigner, 147–58 forgetting, 194 forgiveness, 75–6, 177–81, 194 form and force, 61–2 formalism, 60–1 founding events, 175–7, 192 fragility, x, 64, 66–8, 71–3, 76, 78, 186 European historical consciousness, 190 good life, 95 of identity, 159–69 misfortune, 91 new region of, 74 obligation to help, 87 vulnerability to harm, 144

Index The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Nussbaum), 91 France, 8–9, 149, 183 see also French Revolution Frankfurt School, 118 free will, 85 freedom, xii Hegel, 31, 41–2, 45–6, 47, 48 immigrants, 153 limits of existence and knowledge, 49 Marxism, 16–17 oppression, 105–6 philosophy and, 49–50 repression of, 145 socialism, 25 tolerance, 137, 139 French Revolution, 47, 83, 149, 175 Freud, Sigmund, 43–5, 87, 162, 192, 205 friendship, 55, 56, 84, 85, 92–3, 94 Futures Past (Koselleck), 115 Garapon, Antoine, 141 Geertz, Clifford, 165 general will, 83 Geneva Convention (1951), 156 German Idealism, 175 The German Ideology (Marx), 14 Germany, 7, 175–6, 179 In Geschichten verstrickt (Schapp), 174, 193 the gift, xii, 178, 199, 200, 205–8 The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (Mauss), 205 Girard, René, 164 globalization, 109–10, 152, 207 God, 12, 85, 140 death of, 118 Hegel, 14, 32, 39 as love, 87 love of, 123

223

Marx, 14 Saint Paul, 3–4, 5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 114 good life, 52–3, 84, 90 fragility, 95 friendship, 92 justice, 58, 59, 93–4 goods, 60–1, 69, 131–3 governance, 7, 22, 23–6, 131 grandeur, xi gratitude, 208 The Great Transformation (Polanyi), 110 Greek tragedy, 73 Grotius, Hugo, 155, 200, 201 Habermas, Jürgen, 88, 186–7, 191, 196 habit-memory, 192 happiness, 89–97, 123, 164 harm, 144, 185–6 Havel, Václav, 75, 179 Hayek, Friedrich, 128 health, 69, 186 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ix–x, 31–51, 52, 66, 142 autonomization, 108 reason, 129 recognition, 138, 199–200, 201–5, 206 theology, 13–14 Heidegger, Martin, 42, 50, 93, 119 Hénaff, Marcel, 205–7 hermeneutical philosophy, 50 heteronomy, 81, 85, 86 hierarchy, 82, 117 Hirschman, Albert, 125–6 historical consciousness, 115, 188–96 historical subject, 55–7 history, 76–8 collective memory, 192 crisis, 115–16 exemplarity, 81–2 founding events, 175–7

224 Index Hegel, 39 Marx, 14, 16 memory and identity, 165, 166 misfortune, 95–6 narrative identity, 57 nations, 75 philosophy of, 105 sense of, 196 tragic consciousness of, 65–6 Hobbes, Thomas, 166–7, 186, 200–1 Honneth, Axel, 203–4, 207 hope, 49, 78–9, 196 Horace, 207 “horizon of expectation”, 77, 115–16, 188–9, 190, 195 Horkheimer, Max, 118 hospitality, 151, 152–3, 154, 158 humanism, 19, 201 antireligious, 118–19 Marx, 14, 17 socialist, 22, 23, 25–8 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 151, 173 Husserl, Edmund, 112, 194, 195 idealism, 17, 175 identity, x, 53–4, 55, 84 crisis of, 103, 111, 113, 116 cultural, 173–4, 175 fragility of, 159–69 narrative, 54, 56–7, 74, 174, 175, 177–8 otherness and, 171–2, 180 see also self ideology, 7, 117 collective identity, 165 dominant, 107, 118 economic liberalism, 109, 113 Marxism, 17, 18 imagination, x, 50, 74–5, 137, 151, 171, 184 immigrants, 151, 153–5 The Imperative of Responsibility (Jonas), 64, 66 indifference, 141, 142, 145, 146, 151, 179, 185–6 indignation, 143–6, 185

individualism, 117–18, 127–8, 130, 191 industrial democracy, 24–5 industrialization, 23–4, 27, 204 inequalities, 69, 204–5 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 124 institutions, 4, 5 action, 56 Europe, 171 Hegel, 41–2, 45, 202 historical subject, 55 international society, 74 justice, 58–9, 60, 93–5 legitimacy, xi moral critique of, 104 tolerance, 139 interiority, 84 international society, 73–4 interpretation philosophy of, 50–1 problem of, 47 interventionism, 20–1 intolerance, 135–6, 139–40, 141, 142–4, 183, 185, 187 Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit (Kojève), 32 irrationality, viii, 6 Islam, 136, 187, 190, 193 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 179 Jaspers, Karl, 51, 194, 195 Jesus Christ, 4, 43, 78, 125 The Jewish Question (Marx), 17 Jonas, Hans, 64, 66, 67–8, 87, 144, 186 Judeo-Christian tradition, 83–4, 138, 145, 184, 189, 191 judiciary, 11 justice, 4, 58–61, 62–3, 69, 85 charity, 179–80 distributive, 131, 132, 148, 150 forgiveness, 178 friendship, 84, 92 happiness, 93–6 love, 78–9, 87–8

Index money, 125 spheres of, 134 truth, 185 workers, 154 Kant, Immanuel, 41, 84, 115, 134 autonomy, 81, 85, 201 categories, 39 conditions of reality, 38 cosmopolitanism, 103, 111 human experience, 48–9 justice, 87 limits of knowledge, ix perpetual peace, 95, 153, 196 tolerance, 136 universal hospitality, 152, 153, 154 “unsocial sociability”, 103–4 Kierkegaard, Søren, 31, 42, 48, 79 King, Martin Luther, 77 knowledge epistemological model of crisis, 106 Hegelian thought, ix, 37, 44, 47, 49, 51 of history, 78 limits of, ix, 49 philosophy of, 51 progress, 76 theories of, 199 Kojève, Alexandre, 32, 199 Koselleck, Reinhart, 77, 104–5, 115, 188, 191, 196 Kuhn, Thomas, 106, 112 La Boétie, Étienne, 72 labor alienation, 26 Christian theology of, 26 democracy of, 25 governance of, 24 Hegelian philosophy, 42 Marx, 15, 16 see also work; workers Labrousse, Camille-Ernest, 107 Lacan, Jacques, 43 Landsberg, Paul, 113–14, 115

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language, 53–4, 55–6 defense of identity, 164 linguistic hospitality, 74–5, 173, 174–5, 176 narratives, 174 poetic, 49, 96–7 political, 73 regression, 45 role in memory, 160 translation, 74, 152–3, 172–3, 176, 180 law, 46, 52–3, 57, 61, 82, 83 constitutionality, 5 Hegel, 202–3 international, 156, 157 judiciary, 11 legal system, 5–6 Marxist theory of the State, 18 nationality, 148–9 superiority, 86 see also Rule of Law Le Goff, Jacques, 123–4, 161 legislators, 83 legitimacy, xi, 62 crisis of, 111–12, 113, 116 intolerance, 135, 183 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 184, 200 Lenin, Vladimir, 17, 18 Lettres persanes (Montesquieu), 117 Leviathan (Hobbes), 200 Levinas, Emmanuel, 68, 81 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 206 liberalism economic, 109, 113, 116, 117–18 political, ix, x, 11 linguistic hospitality, 74–5, 173, 174–5, 176 Locke, John, 160, 200 logic, 33, 38–9, 40, 42 lost objects, 162, 163 love, 3, 12, 56, 78–9, 86–8, 202 luck, 91, 93, 96 Lukács, György, 17 Lysis (Plato), 92–3

226 Index Machiavellianism, 13, 18 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 90 Man’s Place in the Cosmos (Scheler), 114 Marcel, Gabriel, 140, 185 Marcus Aurelius, 138 market economy, 20–1, 69, 126–7, 205 market goods, 69, 131–2 markets, 109, 112–13 Marx, Karl, ix, 10, 13–18, 24, 26, 31, 32, 48, 133 Marxism, 13–19 critique of, ix Hegelian philosophy, 42 humanism, 26 money, 207 surplus value, 22 theory and praxis, 46 master-slave dialectic, 43, 45, 51, 138, 199 materialism, 14–15, 17–18, 19, 26 Materialism and Empirico-Criticism (Marx), 18 Mauss, Marcel, 101–2, 110, 205–6 meaning contradictions, 46 dialectical constitution of, 45 Hegel, 34, 35, 37, 38 hermeneutical philosophy, 50 translation, 172 means of production, 20–1, 22–3 medicine, 102–3, 111 melancholy, 162–3 Melanchthon, 184 memory, 159–66, 180 crisis of, 190 exchange of memories, 74–5, 173–7, 178, 193 forgiveness, 179 paradox of, 192 pathology of, 192–4 merchants, 123–4 Michelet, Jules, 83 migration, 189–90, 191, 193, 195 mimesis, 164 misfortune, 91, 93, 95–6

modernity, 101–2, 109, 112, 115, 117–20, 141–2, 191 money, 14–15, 26, 121–34, 207 economic level, 121, 125–30 moral level, 121, 122–5 political level, 121, 130–4 monopolies, 7 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis Secondat, Baron de, 117, 126 moral philosophy, 80–1, 84 morality, 52–3, 81 categorical imperative, 201 justice, 59–60 Kant, 104 life and death, 145–6 money, 121, 122–5 moral order, 83 paradoxes, 82 poetics of moral life, 178 public, 61 see also ethics Moses, 83, 84 Mounier, Emmanuel, 113–14 mourning, 162–3 mutual indebtedness, 88 Nabert, Jean, 52 narrative hospitality, 75 narrative identity, 54, 56–7, 74, 174, 175, 177–8 narratives, 75, 164, 165–6, 174–5, 177–8, 192, 193 nationality, 148–9 nature, 15, 38, 39–40 negativity, 201–2, 203 neo-Machiavellianism, 18 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 57, 59, 92 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 118–19, 185 nihilism, 118, 186 the norm, 52–3, 59–60, 81, 87 Nozick, Robert, 128 Nussbaum, Martha, 91 obedience, xi obligation, 52–3, 87 Oedipus problem, 43–4, 203

Index one-party system, 19, 25 Oneself as Another (Ricoeur), 58 On Justification: Economies of Worth (Boltanski & Thévenot), 63, 69–70, 94, 127 opposition, logic of, 34 oppression, 7, 18, 105–6 order, 31, 174 “orders of recognition”, 56–7, 58, 59, 90, 95 “orders of worth”, 91, 134 original position, 94, 150 the other, 55, 57, 60, 68, 81 Fichte, 201 happiness, 92–3 justice, 94 persecuted, 167–8 recognition by, 84 as a threat, 163–6 otherness, x, 81, 160, 161, 163–4, 171–2, 180 paradigm shifts, 106, 112 paradoxes, x, 61–3, 64 of authority, 80–8 fragility, 71–3 of memory, 192 participation, x, 9, 23–6 Pascal, Blaise, 37 passion, 91, 123, 125–6 The Passions and the Interests (Hirschman), 125 Paul the Apostle, 134 peace, 95, 153, 158, 196 Péguy, Charles, 27–8 Perelman, Chaïm, 60 periodicity, 108 Perpetual Peace (Kant), 152 persecution, 156, 157, 181 personal venality, 121, 134 personality, 114–15 phenomenology, 34, 41 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 32–7, 38, 41, 42, 43, 47, 138, 199–200 philia, 92–3, 94

227

Philip, André, 20 Philosophie politique (Weil), 111 philosophy, 32–3, 34, 37, 42, 46–7 freedom, 49–50 of history, 105 of interpretation, 50–1 moral, 80–1, 84 of nature, 38, 39–40 of spirit, 38, 40, 41–2 Western, 112 The Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 41, 45, 108, 202 phronein, 91 planning, 6, 20–3, 24, 25 Plato, 17, 115, 172 Eros, 87 friendship, 92–3 logic, 39 political evil, 10 “tyrants”, 4 poetics, 178 poetry, 96–7, 119 Poland, 9 Polanyi, Karl, 110, 118 polis, 46, 53, 72, 73, 130 the political, viii–ix, xi Christian style, 12 ethical aim, 57–8 fragility, 64 linked to the ethical, x non-ethical forms of, 186 power, 95 public administration, 5–6 twofold political task, 8–12 political liberalism, ix, x, 11 political parties, 9, 19, 25 politics, xi Christian style, 12 ethics and, 52, 53, 57–61 money, 121, 130–4 political paradoxes, 61–3, 64, 71–3 theological, 180–1 polities, 70, 71, 73, 91 “common good”, 94 money, 127, 131, 133 ponderation, 145–6

228 Index postmodernity, 118, 119, 120, 141–2, 191 The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx), 24 power abuse of, 8, 10 authority, 10, 82–3 Christian interpretation of the State, 4 citizen participation, 9 crisis of legitimacy, 111–12, 116 desire-to-live-together, 58 distributive justice, 131 division and separation of, ix, 11–12 domination and, xi economic, 24–5 happiness, 95 paradoxes, 64, 71–2 renunciation of, 180 State, 5–7, 18, 61–2, 135, 136 tolerance, 136–7, 138, 182–3 praxis, 46 The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, Philosophy (Hénaff), 205, 207 progress, 76, 105, 116, 191 promising, 57, 81 propaganda, 7, 25 property, 22–3, 165, 202 Protestantism, viii, 48 Proudhon, Marcel, ix, 22 psychoanalysis, 43–4, 161–2, 203 psycho-physical development, 103 public administration, 5–6 public enterprises, 21–2 public opinion, 6, 9, 24, 143, 154 publicity, 58 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 200 Les Puissances de l’expérience (Ferry), 56, 90 punishment, 6, 167 purism, 8 rationality, viii, 7, 8 communicative, 88 constitutional evolution, 9 economic, 21, 22, 23

Hegel, 33–4 judicial, 71 modernity, 118 technical, 6 Weber, 119 Rawls, John, 58, 59, 69, 128 “considered convictions”, 144 institutions, 94 original position, 150 “overlapping consensus”, 145, 187 principles of justice, 60 well-ordered society, 141 reality, 41–2, 49 logic of, 33–4, 38–9 Realphilosophie (Hegel), 201, 202 reciprocity, 43–4, 75, 80, 92–3, 138, 178 recognition, xi–xii, 43, 199–208 desire for, 59 friendship, 93 master-slave dialectic, 138 mutual, 61, 68, 75, 86, 108, 206 orders of, 56–7, 58, 59, 90, 95 by the other, 84 reflection, 34–5 reflexivity, 54 Reformation, 34, 48, 124–5, 132, 145, 189, 191, 193 refugees, 151, 155–8 regression, 45 regulation, 21 religion Hegel, 37, 42, 46–7, 48 history, 76 ideology and identity, 165 Marx, 14, 15 tolerance, 139, 184 Wars of Religion, 135–6, 137–8, 141, 143, 183, 185, 186 see also Christianity; JudeoChristian tradition; theology remembrance, 165–6 Renaissance, 34, 40, 145, 189, 191, 193, 202 Renaut, Alain, 128

Index repetition-memory, 192–4 representation, 47 repression, viii, 162 respect, 60, 61 responsibility, x, 49 anteriority, 86 call to, 81 capable subject, 57 ethics of, 196 fragility and, 64, 65–8, 71, 72–3, 76, 144, 186 linguistic hospitality, 74 revolution, 18, 105 permanent, 26–7 Reynal, Abbot, 105–6 rhetoric, 73 rights, 148, 149, 152, 153–4 asylum, 155, 157 equal attribution of, 204 tolerance, 184 Rorty, Richard, 112 Rosenzweig, Franz, 86 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 35, 47, 72, 83, 105, 150 Rule of Law, 61, 62, 71–2, 103–4, 108, 166–7, 180 rules for action, 56 Russia, 7, 23–4 see also Soviet Union, former Sachin, Claude, 124 Le Sacrifice et l’Envie. Le libéralisme aux prises avec la justice sociale (Dupuy), 127, 129 Sadat, Anwar, 75, 179 Saint Augustine, 76, 160, 173 Saint Francis, 123 Saint Paul, 3–4, 5, 10 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 23 Scandinavian socialism, 27 Schapp, Wilhelm, 174, 193 Scheler, Max, 113–14 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 39, 40 Schmitt, Carl, 167 scientific revolutions, 106

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secularism, 8 security, 166–7, 186 self, 54, 55, 58, 60 autonomy, 81 Hegel, 36 Locke, 160 sameness and selfhood, 161 see also identity self-esteem, 57, 59, 61, 162, 163 self-love, 128 Senate, 82–3 sensibility, x separation of powers, 11 Simmel, Georg, 207 Smith, Adam, 126, 128, 129–30, 133 Social Christianity, viii social contract, 47–8, 72, 150 social goods, 60–1, 63, 94–5, 130–3, 134, 152 social imagination, ix socialism, ix, xi, 20–8 liberal politics, 11 Marx, 14 monopolies, 7 separation of powers, 11 society, xi crisis of, 110–11 international, 73–4 justice, 59 representations, 102 Socrates, 207 solidarity, 27, 69, 178–9 Sophists, 207 South Africa, 77 sovereignty, 12, 74, 95, 131 fear of violence, 166–7 nationality, 148, 149 refugees, 156, 157–8 symbols of, 171 Soviet Union, former, 5, 13, 82 see also Russia “space of experience”, 77, 115–16, 188–9, 190, 191 speech acts, 54 Spheres of Justice (Walzer), 63, 69, 94, 131, 136

230 Index Spinoza, Benedict de, 52, 62, 93, 125–6, 136 spirit, 35–6, 37, 40, 41–2, 46, 47, 202 Stalin, Joseph, 7, 13 Stalinism, ix, 11, 23 The Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig), 86 State authority, 9–10 Christian interpretation, 3–4 collective memory, 162 distributive justice, 131 division and separation of power, 11–12 double-sided reality of the, viii, 4 fragility, 72–3 French, 8–9 Hegel, 41–2, 43, 47–8, 203 Hobbes, 200 ideology and identity, 165 Marxism, 17, 18–19 nationality, 148 political liberalism, ix, x political paradoxes, 61–3 “post-national”, 171 power, 5–7, 18, 61–2, 135, 136 secularism, 8 security from the, 166–7 spheres of justice, 61 tolerance, 139 violence, 61–2 The State and Revolution (Lenin), 18 Stoics, 84, 92, 138, 199–200, 207 stories, 74–5, 174 see also narratives strangers, 147, 151, 152–3 struggle, 199, 200, 204–5 The Struggle for Recognition (Honneth), 203 subjectivity, 37 subordination, 72 substance, 35, 37, 50 suffering, 34, 42–3, 89, 91, 107, 167–8, 177–8, 192

superiority, 81, 84, 85, 86 symbolic violence, 133 symbolism, 47 sympathy, 128–9, 137, 151, 184 synthesis, ix, 16, 33, 34, 39, 106 The System of Ethical Life (Hegel), 201 Taminiaux, Jacques, 200 Tawney, Richard Henry, 124 technology, 51, 76, 119 teleology, 44, 90, 111 temporality, x, 54, 82, 114, 115, 116 fragility of identity, 161 historical time, 188, 189, 191 narratives, 174 theology, 8, 39, 76, 180–1 see also religion theory, 46 Theory of Justice (Rawls), 58, 69, 94, 150 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 128, 129–30, 133 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 15 Thévenot, Laurent, 63, 69–71, 91, 94, 127, 133 Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Le Goff), 123–4 Time and Narrative 3 (Ricoeur), 77 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 152–3 tolerance, 135–46, 182–7 torture, 10, 166, 167–8 totalitarianism, viii totalization, ix, x, 48 tradition, 176, 190, 194–5 tragedy, 65, 71, 72, 73, 91 translatability, universal, 172–3 translation, 74, 152–3, 172–3, 176, 180 tutelage, 104, 111 tyranny, 7 unions, 25 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 148, 157

Index universality, 52–3, 85, 87 utilitarianism, 95 utopias, ix, 12, 28, 49–50, 96–7, 190, 195–6 values, 10, 46, 54, 85 friendship, 92 hierarchy of, 107, 117 loss of, 118 market, 131 veil of ignorance, 94, 150 Die Vergangene Zukunft (Koselleck), 188 victimization, 77 vigilance, x, 10–11, 12, 64 violence, viii, 5, 53 Christianity, 181 fragility, 66 heritage of founding, 166–8 Marxist theory of the State, 18 melancholic memory, 163 State, 61–2 struggle for recognition, 208 symbolic, 133 virtues, 84–5, 141, 182–3 Voluntary and the Involuntary (Ricoeur), 45

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Walzer, Michael, 61, 63, 69, 94, 131, 132–3, 136 war, 167, 177 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 126, 128, 130 Weber, Max, 62, 71, 111 authority, 82 domination, 83 ethics of capitalism, 124 ethics of conviction, 196 “political vocations”, 6 rationality, 119 State violence, 61 Weil, Éric, 61, 62, 111, 114–15 welfare state, ix, 27–8, 153 What is Enlightenment? (Kant), 104 will, 45–6, 85, 88, 90 wisdom, 91–2, 141, 146 work, 15, 27 see also labor workers, 9, 12, 14, 25, 153–5 see also labor working class, 24 Yugoslavia, former, 9, 25, 82, 190 Zionism, 77

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