Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues 9780231526364

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique
CRITICAL THEORY AND THE QUESTION OF CULTURE
1. Critical Theory Today: Politics, Ethics, Culture - Opening Dialogue
2. Concrete Universality and Critical Social Theory: Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill
3. Global Justice and the Renewal of the Critical Theory Tradition: Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURAL POLITICS
4. Accounting for a Philosophic Itinerary: Genealogies of Power and Ethics of Nonviolence: Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill
5. The Present in the Light of the Longue Duree: Dialogue with Alredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill
6. A Prisoner of Hope in the Night of the American Empire: Dialogue with Gabriel Rockhill
CULTURE AS CRITIQUE: The Limits of Liberalism?
7. Liberalism: Politics, Ethics, and Markets - Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Ronan Sharkey
8. Cultural Rights and Social-Democratic Principles: Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill
EPILOGUE: Critical Theory and Recognition
9. The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and the Theory of Recognition: Dialogue with Olivier Voirol
Notes
Contributors

Citation preview

POLITICS OF CULTURE AND THE SPIRIT OF CRITIQUE

New Directions in Critical Theory Amy Allen, General Editor

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N E W D I R ECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY Amy Allen, General Editor New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections. Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones

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Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique D

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A

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G

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Edited with an introduction by GABRIEL ROCKHILL ALFREDO GOMEZ-MULLER

Seyla Benhabib Nancy Fraser Judith Butler Immanuel Wallerstein Cornel West Michael Sandel Will Kymlicka Axel Honneth

c o l u m b i a

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u n i v e r s i t y

p r e s s

New York

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Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Politics of culture and the spirit of critique : dialogues / edited with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gómez-Muller ; Seyla Benhabib . . . [et al.]. p.   cm. — (New directions in critical theory) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-231-15186-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-15187-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-52636-4 (e-book) 1. Social sciences--Philosophy.  I. Rockhill, Gabriel.  II. Gómez-Muller, Alfredo. III. Benhabib, Seyla.  IV. Title.  V. Series.

H61.P58725  2011



306.2--dc22

2010025639

Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since the book was prepared.

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CONTENTS



Acknowledgments

vii



Introduction:

1



Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique



Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller



Critical Theory and the Question of Culture

25



1 / Critical Theory Today: Politics, Ethics, Culture

27



Opening Dialogue



Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill 48



2 / Concrete Universality and Critical Social Theory



Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill



Seyla Benhabib



3 / Global Justice and the Renewal of the Critical Theory Tradition



Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill



Nancy Fraser



Critical Perspectives on Cultural Politics

81



4 / Accounting for a Philosophic Itinerary:

83



Genealogies of Power and Ethics of Nonviolence



Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill



Judith Butler

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66

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vi  /   C O N T E N T S



5 / The Present in the Light of the Longue Durée



Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill



Immanuel Wallerstein



98

6 / A Prisoner of Hope in the Night of the American Empire 113



Dialogue with Gabriel Rockhill



Cornel West



Culture as Critique: The Limits of Liberalism? 129



7 / Liberalism: Politics, Ethics, and Markets 131



Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Ronan Sharkey



Michael Sandel



8 / Cultural Rights and Social-Democratic Principles 142



Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill



Will Kymlicka



Epilogue:  Critical Theory and Recognition 163 9 / The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School  165



and the Theory of Recognition



Dialogue with Olivier Voirol



Axel Honneth



Notes 191



Contributors 205

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to express our deep gratitude to all of those who have contributed to this project. First and foremost, we would like to thank the participants in the dialogues for their willingness to take part in these exchanges and review their final, written form. We greatly appreciate the time that they took to engage with us on these important issues and respond to our concerns. We would like to extend a special thanks to Seyla Benhabib for her helpful comments on an early draft of the introduction. This book owes a special debt to the diligent work and support of Caroline Montel-Glénisson. As the director of New York University in France, she agreed to host our research group Politique et culture from 2005 to 2007 and facilitated the organization of our conference series, Le Débat transatlantique sur les sociétés multiculturelles, which included lectures by many of the authors interviewed in this book. Through her generosity and dynamism, she helped us overcome many of the material obstacles that we encountered during the evolution of this project. We would also like to thank all the individuals and institutions that supported, in various ways, the activities of our research group, Politique et culture, including the Centre Parisien d’Etudes Critiques (Brent Keever), l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Michel Wieviorka and the CADIS), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Philosophy Department at the Institut Catholique de Paris (Philippe Capelle, Hubert Faes, the Laboratoire de Philosophie Pratique et d’Anthropologie Philosophique, and the Groupe Interdisciplinaire de Recherches en Ethique), the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Pascal Delisle and the Centre Américain), UNESCO (Valentine Moghadam), and the Université Américaine de Paris (Richard Beardsworth, Susan Mackay, and Celeste Schenck). We would like to express our gratitude to the international

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viii  /   A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

journal of philosophy, Concordia, that originally published the interviews with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Michael Sandel.1 The Office of Research and Sponsored Projects at Villanova University deserves special mention. The Summer Research Fellowship and the Research Support Grant offered to Gabriel Rockhill, as well as the support of Villanova University’s Philosophy Department, were essential to the completion of the final version of the manuscript. It is important to underscore the essential contribution made by the numerous students, friends, and colleagues who assisted in the completion of this project. Ronan Sharkey, our former colleague in the Philosophy Department at the Institut Catholique de Paris, participated in the interview with Michael Sandel and transcribed it for publication. Olivier Voirol graciously agreed to give us the translation rights for his insightful interview with Axel Honneth, which fits perfectly within the framework of this collection. The interviews with Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Will Kymlicka were transcribed respectively by John Rosania, Caitlin Vavasour, Caitlin Hammer, Emily Rockhill, Natacha Mba, and Apolonia Franco Elizondo. John V. Garner agreed to translate from French the opening dialogue as well as the discussion with Immanuel Wallerstein. Jean-Philippe Deranty translated the interview with Axel Honneth from German. We would like to express our deep gratitude to all these individuals for their assistance in completing this project. Finally, this book would not have been possible without the support and diligent insight of Amy Allen, general editor of the series New Directions in Critical Theory, and Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor for animal studies, philosophy, and religion at Columbia University Press. Their comments and suggestions have been essential to bringing the book into its final form. We are very pleased to be able to make a contribution to their important series.

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INTRODUCTION Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller Mais, qu’est-ce que c’est donc un noir? et d’abord, c’est de quelle couleur? —Jean Genet

THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

The concept of culture has been subject to an unprecedented inflation in Anglophone moral and political philosophy since at least the end of the 1970s. The twilight of the cold war at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s appears to have fueled this conceptual inflation as both conservatives and progressives scrambled to make sense of what has sometimes been perceived as the reemergence of a set of long-standing cultural issues, which had been at least partially overshadowed by the block ideology of the preceding decades.1 New social movements as well as the “culture war” and a series of intense debates on gender, race, sexual orientation, immigration, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, identity politics, and secularism have also surely contributed to the newly won prominence of the question of “culture.” It is arguable, as we will see, that this prominence expresses itself in an intensive and extensive conceptual inflation, insofar as the notion of culture has come to impress itself with increasing intensity at the same time that its meaning has been extended in unprecedented ways. As the anthropologist David Scott aptly explains, the notion of culture has become a nearly indispensable issue, if not the master-concept, in “postRawlsian”—or, rather, post–A Theory of Justice—moral and political theory: A large and growing number of Western political theorists now seem to feel compelled to take account of culture in order to pursue and sustain a critical reflection on liberalism and democracy. It now appears that fairness demands more than the neutrality offered by Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and that considerations of justice, freedom, citizenship, equality, and political

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community require respect for difference understood as cultural identity. Such concepts as “cultural rights,” “multiculturalism,” “the claims of diversity,” “the politics of difference,” “the politics of recognition,” and so on, mark the new preoccupation with culture among political theorists.2

Nancy Fraser refers to this change as “a shift in the grammar of political claims-making,” and she argues that in the “‘postsocialist’ political imaginary” the question of redistribution has been largely displaced by a cultural politics of recognition.3 At the same time, the meaning of culture has been significantly extended to include an entire set of issues regarding the status of marginalized identities, ranging from ethnicity and race to religion, gender, sex, disability, and sexual orientation. “Culture,” writes Seyla Benhabib in The Claims of Culture, “has become a ubiquitous synonym for identity, an identity marker and differentiator.”4 The very notion of culture has been politically and morally distended in becoming a general concept linking together, under a single theoretical umbrella, various forms of oppression and the struggles against them, ranging from the legal battles for indigenous rights to the attempts to dismantle social stereotypes and fight against racial or religious discrimination. Benhabib summarizes this intensive and extensive inflation of the concept of culture when she writes: Since the late 1970s demands for the recognition of identities based on gender, race, language, ethnic background, and sexual orientation have been challenging the legitimacy of established constitutional democracies. . . . Whether we call the current movements “struggles for recognition” (Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth), “identity/difference movements” (Iris Young, William Connolly), or “movements for cultural rights and multicultural citizenship” (Will Kymlicka), they signal a new political imaginary that propels cultural identity issues in the broadest sense to the forefront of political discourse.5

Although it is difficult to determine the precise horizons of this intensive and extensive inflation of the concept of culture, which has now become part of the practical knowledge of participants in contemporary debates on moral and political philosophy, it can at least partially be indexed by the dramatic rise to fame—and infamy—of the concept of multiculturalism.6

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INTRODUCTION  /  3

To take a few pertinent examples, it is significant that the first two articles in the New York Times on multiculturalism date from the 1970s. Although fifteen articles appeared in the 1980s, it has primarily been since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 that there has been a dramatic increase in the use of the term: 896 articles from 1990 through 2005.7 A similar trend can be found in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. Searches in “Major World Publications” on LexisNexis reveal the same basic tendency: 0 articles before 1970, 120 in the 1970s, 2,264 in the 1980s, and then a spectacular increase through the course of the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century.8 This rise to prominence is, moreover, not only visible in the press but also in book publications. Based on keyword searches, the Library of Congress includes 29 books published on multiculturalism from the 1970s, 120 from the 1980s, 995 from the 1990s, and 1,033 from 2000 to 2005. Similar trends can be confirmed through the catalogues of national libraries in Europe. Without overly conflating the quantitative success of the concept of multiculturalism with the cultural shift in politics, we can nonetheless use it as a partial index of the increasing concern with cultural issues since the 1970s. The rising importance of culture in politics and morality has met with numerous reactions. A number of authors have readily embraced the new use of the concept of culture as a useful notion for discussing contemporary society and politics. Generally speaking, they fall into two camps, which share in common a guiding principle: there are fundamental cultural differences that should be recognized. The conservatives maintain that it is important to acknowledge the existence of cultures as distinct entities and keep them separate in order to avoid the conflict that is inevitably produced by extensive interaction. The progressives argue for recognizing cultural difference in order to rectify patterns of discrimination based on the denigration or exclusion of underprivileged cultures. Outside these two dominant positions—which can be schematically opposed, following Benhabib, as the “clash of civilizations” versus “mainstream multiculturalism”—other authors have come to critically reflect on the newly won authority of the expanded notion of culture and the dangers inherent in the theoretical and practical framework that undergirds it. These dangers, as the following list illustrates, have often served as the basis for critiques of the idea of a clash of civilizations as well as of mainstream multiculturalism:

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• the obfuscation of the very notion of culture due to its transformation into an imprecise—if not catch-all—concept • the reification of cultural identities, which are treated as clearly delimited, natural givens rather than socially produced phenomena that are in constant mutation • the evacuation of the historical dimension of cultures in favor of a myopic, presentist understanding of cultural relations • the retreat of social and economic concerns in the face of the moral imperative of recognition, which does not necessarily require a structural or material transformation of society • the exclusion of truly marginalized voices by an elitist, academic, and largely Anglophone or North American multicultural discourse that is so obsessed with the voice of the other that it ends up speaking in its place in order to make it heard • the commodification of cultural difference in contemporary society and the risk of an underlying complicity between the politics of cultural recognition and the ideology of multinational capitalism.9 In some cases, these dangers have been used as a justification for rejecting wholeheartedly the cultural shift in politics. However, a number of thinkers have avoided such a reaction while nonetheless taking seriously various criticisms of the conceptual structures and strategies affiliated with the politics of culture. In other words, they have sought to progressively work through these problems in order to come up with more innovative and nuanced solutions, which include, but are not limited to Seyla Benhabib’s conceptualization of cultures as hybrid and polyvocal systems of action and signification, Nancy Fraser’s refusal to abandon the politics of redistribution and her stalwart dedication to solving the recognition/redistribution conundrum, Judith Butler’s deconstruction of gender and sexual identities, Immanuel Wallerstein’s analysis of the social and historical formation of cultures as well as of the disciplines that study them, Cornel West’s rejection of black nationalism and racial reasoning in favor of a cultural democracy that unites various fronts in the fight for equality, Michael Sandel’s critique of the liberal conceptualization of the subject in favor of an understanding of the self as an anchored, social being, Will Kymlicka’s attempt to show the ways in which liberalism is not in fact antithetical to multiculturalism, and Axel Honneth’s partial continuation and deepening of Habermas’s commu-

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INTRODUCTION  /  5

nicational turn in critical theory via a detailed normative account of social integration in terms of mutual recognition. It is within this general framework of the critical juncture of cultural politics that we decided to organize a series of discussions with renowned intellectuals on the issues of politics, ethics, and current events. In each case we began by asking the authors to provide a retrospective account of their work to date, which serves both to introduce their writings to those who are unfamiliar with them and to provide an insider’s view of their research and its evolution for those who are. We then allowed the dialogues to unfold around a series of common themes—oppression, emancipation, recognition, culture, religion, ethics, critical theory, history, current events—with two primary goals in mind. First of all, we wanted to press the authors on their relative positions on ethics and politics, particularly regarding critical debates on the status of cultural issues. This allowed us to make the differences between the various participants in the dialogues readily apparent (which in some cases are extreme, ranging from liberalism to more or less radical forms of critical theory) in order to present the reader with a vast and motley array of positions rather than a set of minor variations rooted in a single theoretical and normative framework. Such an approach also provided us with an opportunity to question the authors on various features and implications of their work that they have yet to fully develop. Our second major goal was to have the participants in the dialogues give us a sense of their understanding of our current historical moment and the future of politics. This means that the discussions aim at being at once philosophical and topical, both intellectual and practical. It is our hope that there are both novel philosophic developments expressed by the authors interviewed and keen insights into the state of world affairs in this critical time for cultural politics. In order to frame the dialogues and develop our respective positions on the issues discussed, we added an opening dialogue. Our common concern with critical theory and its contribution to the issues discussed in the interviews provided the starting point for our discussion. We then structured the exchange around the major themes of the interviews in order to provide an introduction and clearly map out a number of the fundamental issues at stake. The opening dialogue also gave us the opportunity to intervene at length and develop our own set of arguments, which will help give the reader a better sense of the preoccupations at work behind many of the

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questions that are asked in the interviews. The central concern that emerges in the opening dialogue, and largely structures the ensuing discussions, is best framed in terms of a question: what is the role of critical theory in current debates on the politics of culture?

THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THEORY

The concept of culture is derived from the Latin cultura, and the term in English originally meant husbandry or the act of tending to the growth of crops or animals. As of the early sixteenth century, its meaning was extended to include human development, as illustrated by expressions such as “the culture and manurance of minds” (Bacon, 1605) or “a culture of their minds” (Hobbes, 1651).10 Through the course of an intricate and complicated evolution, it eventually came to be used as an independent noun without a complement to refer to an abstract process of development or the result thereof. Although it is impossible to give precise dates to this transformation, Raymond Williams asserts that “culture as an independent noun, a process or the product of such a process, is not important before 1C18 [the last period (third) of the eighteenth century] and is not common before mC19 [the middle period (third) of the nineteenth century].”11 A parallel but slightly staggered development is to be found in the evolution of the French term culture, whose figurative use in expressions like la culture de l’esprit dates from the mid-sixteenth century. As this use spread through the language of the Enlightenment via figures like Turgot, d’Alembert, Rousseau, and Condorcet, it came to mean not only a process of refinement and instruction but also the result of such a process. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the French began using the term as an independent noun, at approximately the same time as the emergence of the term civilization in English and civilisation in French. The French word culture was then borrowed into German around the end of the eighteenth century. According to the analysis provided by Philippe Bénéton, the concepts of culture and civilization had a universal status in the eighteenth century.12 It was assumed that there was a single process of culture and civilization as well as one final state—distinct from barbarism—referred to as culture or civilization. This conception was directly linked to an important modi-

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INTRODUCTION  /  7

fication in Enlightenment thought. A historical spectrum of development largely replaced the ontological opposition between the “savages” and the “civilized.” The distinction was no longer based primarily on a difference of kind, but on a difference of degree: “savages” were simply at a primitive stage in the universal process of civilization. This historical conception, which is ultimately tied to what’s been called the modern regime of historicity,13 is directly related to the emergence of anthropology and ethnology, and it cannot be divorced from the process of colonization that the French would proudly refer to as a mission civilisatrice.14 It has only been since approximately the end of the eighteenth century that cultures and civilizations have come to be spoken of in the plural. Herder’s unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784– 1791) is an excellent example of this shift insofar as he attacks the idea of the development of civilization and culture as a universal, linear process leading toward a common end: European culture. This multiplication of cultures and civilizations went hand in hand with the early signs of nationalization, which according to Philippe Bénéton would intensify at the end of the nineteenth century. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias has provided a compelling analysis of this multiplication and the subsequent cultural variation in the very understanding of the concepts of culture and civilization. Moreover, he focuses on a group of authors who would later constitute one of the central theoretical reference points for Frankfurt School critical theory. He describes how the German intellectual bourgeoisie of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries embraced and valorized the notion of Kultur—true intellectual and spiritual training or education—over and against the concept of Zivilisation, identified with the cold classicism and superficial refinement of the French aristocracy.15 In retrospect this means that the modern concept of culture is only approximately two hundred years old. By the modern concept of culture, we mean the use of this term as an independent, abstract noun referring to a historical process, or the result thereof, which is largely identified with a national or ethnic group (which does not, of course, preclude attempts at universalizing particular cultures or civilizations). This means that rather than simply being a natural, pregiven reality, culture as an anthropological concept is in fact a social and historical product linked to what we would call modern European culture. The chronological and geographic specificity of this concept raises a myriad of crucial questions concerning

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the relationship between the reality of cultural practices and their perception qua “cultural practices.” Since addressing these questions would lead us far from our current concerns, let it suffice to say that the modern notion of culture cannot be divorced from the question of the “cultures” within which this notion was developed. With this in mind, we can now turn to one of the central concerns of this volume: the relationship between culture and the tradition of critical theory. Before exploring the various facets of this relationship, it is important to say a few words about the heritage of critical theory. It has become commonplace to identify critical theory with the Frankfurt School, and it is interesting to note in this regard that the early members of this school tended to trace the emergence of critical theory back to the nineteenth century and to intellectual developments closely tied to the conceptual evolution of culture and civilization that we have been discussing. Let us start, however, with the Frankfurt School, or more precisely with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). Officially founded on February 3, 1923, this financially autonomous institute was linked to the University of Frankfurt, which had itself been established in 1914.16 The original name of the institute, which was abandoned to avoid undue provocation, has the advantage of revealing the general orientation of its founders: Institut für Marxismus. Like Marx, the early members of the institute tended to reject idealism in the name of materialism and sought to develop a form of philosophically sophisticated social science aimed at transforming society in view of a generalized emancipation. However, this by no means necessitated accepting Marxism tel quel, but required an overall reassessment of the Marxist project.17 Since the members of the institute did not necessarily agree on all of the details of this assessment, perhaps the best way of understanding early critical theory is by outlining one of the central orientations of the intellectual leaders of this “school” insofar as it can be deduced from two key essays that were both published the same year (1937) in the journal serving as the hub of the institute’s activities from 1932 to 1941 (the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung): “Traditional and Critical Theory” by Max Horkheimer and “Philosophy and Critical Theory” by Herbert Marcuse. According to Horkheimer, who assumed the directorship of the Institut für Sozialforschung in 1931, traditional theory dates from the time of Descartes and aims at establishing a universal, systematic science capable

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of organizing the totality of facts into a harmonious conceptual whole. It presupposes the dualism of subject and object, as well as the opposition between description and prescription, knowledge and action. This means that traditional theory purports to provide us with a neutral description of what is, thereby constituting a form of nearly immaterial knowledge divorced from action and practice. Furthermore, Horkheimer argues that this concept of theory has been naturalized to such an extent that there is little or no room for critical reflection on its own proper historicity and its inscription in the social field.18 Due to the success of the natural sciences, the underlying paradigm of traditional theory has, moreover, been adopted by the social and human sciences as the primary model for all theory. Against this overwhelming tendency, Horkheimer insists on the necessity of reinscribing traditional theory in history and revealing the ways in which the legitimation of scientific claims is ultimately rooted in the values of society. Rather than being neutral and autonomous, theory is bound up with the material development of society and its normative orientation. According to Horkheimer: “The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception.”19 “The perceived fact,” Horkeimer goes on to write, “is [. . .] co-determined by human ideas and concepts, even before its conscious theoretical elaboration by the knowing individual.”20 Critical theory, unlike traditional theory, comes to terms with historical inscription and denaturalizes ingrained assumptions regarding the supposed nature of theory. In particular, it dismantles two of the central dualisms of traditional theory. First of all, it jettisons the notion of an abstract subject distinct from its object of investigation: Critical thinking is the function neither of the isolated individual nor of a sum-total of individuals. Its subject is rather a definite individual in his real relation to other individuals and groups, in his conflict with a particular class, and, finally, in the resultant web of relationships with the social totality and with nature. The subject is no mathematical point like the ego of bourgeois philosophy; his activity is the construction of the social present.21

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Secondly, critical theory rejects the idea of a neutral, universal truth and emphasizes the intertwining relationships between description and prescription, knowledge and action, theory and practice.22 This explains why Horkheimer ultimately identifies critical theory with an “existential judgment” grounded in a view of history with partial Marxist undertones: The critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment. To put it in broad terms, the theory says that the basic form of the historically given commodity economy on which modern history rests contains in itself the internal and external tensions of the modern era; it generates these tensions over and over again in an increasingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of human powers, and emancipation for the individual, after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism.23

Herbert Marcuse had become a member of the institute in 1932, and his article “Philosophy and Critical Theory” shares much in common with Horkheimer’s flagship publication. He claims that the historical emergence of critical theory is linked to the development of economic materialism and the critique of philosophic idealism. Whereas philosophy had traditionally aimed at establishing the absolute foundations of being, Marcuse argues that critical theory studies the economic and political structures of specific historical conjunctures. This does not mean, however, that critical theory can be reduced to a form of positivism. On the contrary, Marcuse, like Horkheimer, rejects positivism, and he asserts that critical theory shares with philosophy the attempt to think beyond the given situation. If its utopian dimension is not entirely philosophical, it is because the conception of utopia operative in critical theory is bound to concrete material conditions rather than being linked to abstract ideas.24 Critical theory, unlike abstract philosophy, ultimately seeks to make society rational by subordinating the economy to individual needs. Its fundamental objective is thus to transform the material conditions of society in view of liberating humanity. Based on these two outlines of critical theory, it is possible to delineate one of the central orientations of some of the key members of the early Frankfurt School. First of all, critical theory follows Marx in abandoning idealism in favor of materialism. Secondly, this materialism avoids the pit-

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falls of positivism by maintaining a utopian dimension and critically dismantling the naive opposition between subject and object. Thirdly, critical theory is in and of itself a practical undertaking that aims at transforming society in view of a generalized emancipation. In summary, critical theory is a materialist, utopian, and emancipatory project of social transformation that seeks to avoid the Scylla of idealism and the Charybdis of positivism by jettisoning the oppositional structures—subject/object, description/prescription, theory/practice, rationalism/empiricism—upon which they depend in the name of a unique form of dialectical social science. This orientation—which is not a doctrine—of two of the leading members of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s cannot account for all of the work being done at that time or all of the subsequent developments of the school. However, it can serve as a valuable reference point for returning to our earlier discussion of the question of culture. It is clear, to begin with, that the first generation of the Frankfurt School partially inherited the use of the concept of Kultur that Elias analyzed in his study of the emergence of the concept in German toward the end of the eighteenth century. However, the strong normative opposition between Kultur and Zivilisation tended to be replaced by a dialectical understanding (undoubtedly due in part to the intellectual influence of the Marxist tradition as well as the ominous shadow cast by the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s) in which the deleterious effects of culture were emphasized, in conjunction with any possible positive impact.25 Marcuse’s early article on “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937), which appears to anticipate or even inform Elias’s analysis, draws on the distinction between culture and civilization in order to condemn the bourgeois spiritualization of culture at the expense of humanity’s material condition: “That culture [Kultur] is a matter of spiritual [seelisch] values is constitutive of the affirmative concept of culture [affirmativen Kulturbegriff] at least since Herder. Spiritual [seelischen] values belong to the definition of culture [Kultur] in contrast to mere civilization [Zivilisation].”26 “Culture [Kultur],” he writes in another passage that recalls Elias’s work, “means not so much a better world as a nobler one: a world to be brought about not through the overthrow of the material order of life but through events in the individual’s soul. Humanity becomes an inner state.”27 Although Adorno questioned what he interpreted as Marcuse’s naive embrace of sensualist aspects of mass art, he nonetheless shared with him the critical assessment of the nefarious effects produced by certain forms of cul-

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ture. Consider, for instance, the following appraisal, which he wrote with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947): Culture has always played its part in taming revolutionary and barbaric instincts [Zur Bändigung der revolutionären wie der barbarischen Instinkte hat Kultur seit je beigetragen]. Industrial culture adds its contribution. It shows the condition under which this merciless life can be lived at all. The individual who is thoroughly weary must use his weariness as energy for his surrender to the collective power which wears him out. In films, those permanently desperate situations which crush the spectator in ordinary life somehow become a promise that one can go on living. One has only to become aware of one’s own nothingness, only to recognize defeat and one is one with it all.28

It is in this light, moreover, that they analyzed the “culture industry” as the entertainment business that repressively imposes its homogenizing stamp on everything and everyone: The ruthless unity in the culture industry [Kulturindustrie] is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type.29

This critical assessment of the culture industry, which did not preclude the possibility of more positive forms of culture, is also to be found in other well-known essays by Adorno, such as “The Culture Industry Reconsidered” and “Cultural Criticism and Society.”30 For our concerns here, what is important to highlight is the general understanding of the term Kultur that permeates these writings by the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Whether it be taken in a positive or in a negative sense, Kultur refers to the artistic and intellectual developments of a given society. For heuristic rea-

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sons, we can refer to this understanding of Kultur as the aesthetic conception of culture.31 These same authors often had recourse to another conception of culture—a civilizational conception—which they clearly inherited from Freud: “the word ‘civilization [Kultur]’ describes the whole sum of achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.”32 Marcuse explicitly follows Freud in Eros and Civilization (1955), where he takes as his starting point the following definition of culture: “the methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions.”33 Culture in this sense is understood as a relatively monolithic structure of human existence and is therefore sometimes rendered in English as “civilization,” as in Marcuse’s title Eros and Civilization. It is significant, moreover, that Marcuse follows Freud in this work by abandoning the very distinction between culture [Kultur] and civilization [Zivilisation]: “‘Civilization’ is used interchangeably with ‘culture’—as in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.”34 As for Adorno and Horkheimer, their analysis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment makes extensive use of this more expansive, civilizational conception of culture. It is certainly significant that they occasionally use the term Zivilisation when they’re discussing culture in the broad sense: “The history of civilization [Zivilisation] is the history of the introversion of sacrifice. In other words: the history of renunciation.”35 However, the terms Kultur and Zivilisation nonetheless remain in very close proximity and sometimes appear to be interchangeable: “Wholly to expunge the odious overpowering longing to return to a state of nature is the cruelty produced by an abortive civilization [Zivilisation]: barbarism, the other face of culture [Kultur].”36 The aesthetic conception and the civilizational conception of culture—which are clearly indebted at a certain level to the dual influence of Marxism and Freudianism—are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, they can be seen as corresponding to different levels of generality: Kultur in the aesthetic and intellectual sense can be interpreted as part of Kultur in the larger, civilizational sense.37 With these two working definitions in mind, we can draw the conclusion that one of the central aims of early critical theory was to provide a detailed account of the nefarious effects of Kultur—in both the aesthetic and the civilizational sense—as well as an analysis of the potential

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inherent primarily in aesthetic and intellectual culture to transcend the status quo and help usher in a new social order, a new civilization. In the next generation of the Frankfurt School, which most commentators identify with the work of Jürgen Habermas, the meaning of culture and critique underwent important changes. For the sake of concision, let us take the example of Habermas’s first book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). He concentrates on Kultur in the aesthetic sense of the term and presents a powerful countercritique of one of the central theses in Dialectic of Enlightenment.38 Instead of the Enlightenment being understood as a civilizational project of demythologization—dialectically intertwined with myth itself—stretching back to Ancient Greece, he specifically identifies it with the long eighteenth century and interprets it as one of the richest moments in recent history because of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere.39 Distinct from both the private sphere of the market and the family as well as from the public political authority of the state, the bourgeois public sphere offered a common space for rational debate between private persons.40 One clear manifestation thereof was the appearance of social and cultural institutions that nourished opposition to the absolutist powers of the state: coffeehouses, private clubs, learned societies, literary associations, publishing houses, newspapers, journals, etc.41 These new and, in principle, egalitarian institutions for critical debate developed through the course of the long eighteenth century and were accompanied by a general shift in the relationship between culture and politics. Whereas the arts and literature had previously served to represent the two primary instances of power (the church and the court), they became more and more autonomous from these social functions. Habermas examines the commercial distribution of literature, the development of more public forms of theater, the spread of musical performances, and the emergence of public museums to argue that art began to inhabit new spaces outside the consecrated locals of the church and the state. This not only meant that modern art became a public phenomenon, in the sense of being the shared object of private individuals rather than the social representation of political or ecclesiastical power. It also meant that literature and the arts were removed from the system of values that framed them in order to become objects of public discussion. All said and done, the commercialization of culture in the Enlightenment therefore had positive effects insofar as it participated in the development of a public sphere

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of critical debate distinct from instances of public power. Culture—in the aesthetic sense—was thereby interpreted as one of the primary avenues for critique in the sense of public, rational criticism of various forms of absolutism and domination.42 In addition to reconfiguring various aspects of the relationship between culture and critique, Habermas also opened the Frankfurt School to important developments in Anglophone moral and political theory. In relationship to the topic at hand, it is important to note that he directly engaged with the multiculturalism debate in the 1990s, as perhaps best illustrated by his participation in Charles Taylor’s noteworthy publication Multiculturalism. He there discussed culture in a broader moral, social and anthropological sense as a unique form of collective life. In relationship to the groups referred to as the liberals and the communitarians, he forcefully argued against the naive opposition between a politics founded on the universalization of individual rights and a politics of cultural difference by claiming that “a correctly understood theory of rights requires a politics of recognition that protects the integrity of the individual in the life contexts in which his or her identity is formed.”43 Without going into the nuances of his argument, what is important to highlight for our concerns here is the relatively novel conception of culture at work, a conception that would come to dominate later developments in critical theory. Rather than culture being understood as a set of aesthetic and intellectual developments or a far-reaching civilizational structure, it is identified with collective forms of life—ranging from gender and sexual identities to membership in various ethnic, linguistic, and national groups—that play a central role in politics and morality. It is this understanding of culture that would largely dominate the third generation of critical theory, which includes the work of Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth.44 In spite of their important differences, these authors have distanced themselves from critical reflection on aesthetics as well as from the analysis of civilization (Kultur) in the Freudian sense of the term. Rather than proposing a new critique of the culture industry orof the repressive mechanisms of civilization, they have launched a critical investigation into collective forms of life and the dilemma of moral and political recognition. This does not mean that these authors do not occasionally touch on aesthetics or psychoanalysis, but rather that the relationship between the politics of culture and the spirit of critique seems to have significantly shifted for the third generation of critical theory. Although there

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are important terminological disagreements that need to be highlighted (particularly in the case of Honneth), “culture” is generally understood as a moral, social, or anthropological category that is of crucial importance in the constitution of human identity. Critique is primarily a matter of deconstructing faulty assumptions regarding culture and formulating a theory of collective and individual recognition that acts as a bulwark against rampant forms of injustice and discrimination. Moreover, culture is generally conceived of in the plural rather than in the singular, and it can usually be linked to a much more positive network of connotations than the “culture industry” and “civilization” in the early Frankfurt School. Culture in this specific sense tends to function in conjunction with critique: “cultural” recognition—correctly understood—is held to be a central part of any viable critical theory of society.

CULTURE TODAY: FROM CRITICAL THEORIES TO CRITICAL QUESTIONS

In our opening dialogue, we aim at making a contribution to the critical theory tradition’s engagement with culture by returning to some of the early concerns of the Frankfurt School. In particular, we insist on the importance of critical theory as a radical project of social and political transformation. We agree that such a project needs to be divorced from teleological conceptions of history that posit a final, utopian stage of historical development. This does not, however, mean jettisoning the very concept of utopia. On the contrary, we argue that utopia has to be reconceived as a circumstantial, material process of transformation that is always bound to specific sociohistorical situations. This requires, in our opinion, maintaining the fundamental multidisciplinarity of the Frankfurt School critical theory tradition while, at the same time, opening this tradition to other points of view, including most notably Jean-Paul Sartre’s situationalism and the best part of the American pragmatist tradition. The working definition that we agree on—and it’s important that it’s a working definition insofar as the mobilization of theoretical tools is always linked to specific practical concerns—is that critical theory is, or rather should be general, effective, and situationalist: its resources should be general insofar as it brings together the humanities and the social sciences, its orientation should be effective by aiming at the

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practical transformation of the world, and its means of realization should be situationalist in recognizing the radical specificity of each sociohistorical conjuncture. The remainder of our discussion aims at using this working understanding of critical theory to discuss a series of contemporary “cultural” issues: the role of ethics and religion in emancipatory political projects, the precise meaning of the term ideology and the contemporary relevancy of ideology critique, the history of the concept of culture as well as the relationship between socioeconomic justice and cultural justice, the current state of progressive politics in the world and particularly in Latin America. Although our points of view differ on these issues, our discussion and the figures touched upon—ranging from the authors interviewed in this book to Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, but also Marx, Sartre, Lévinas, Foucault, Bourdieu, and James—allow us to set the stage for the ensuing debates on the relationship between critical theory and the question of culture. The authors interviewed in part 1, Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, both directly identify with the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. In fact, it’s arguable that they are two of the leading figures—along with the recently departed Iris Young—of what might be called American critical theory. This unique form of critical theory has followed Habermas’s lead in confronting the critical theory tradition with mainstream American political philosophy, and in particular with the question of cultural politics. In so doing, both Benhabib and Fraser share a common concern with the question of culture as well as a comparable critical distance from vulgar multiculturalism. In the case of Benhabib, she lambastes and systematically dismantles the “reductionist sociology of culture,” which assumes that cultures are visibly delineable entities that can be objectively described and normatively managed.45 Against such reductionism, she advocates an approach to cultural politics in terms of three theoretical commitments that she discusses at length in our dialogue: “My approach to the politics of multiculturalism is defined by these theoretical commitments: the discourse theory of ethics; the dialogic and narrative constitution of the self; and the view of discourses as deliberative practices that center not only on norms of action and interaction, but also on negotiating situationally shared understandings across multicultural divides.”46 In addition to her account of the contribution of discourse ethics to cultural politics, we also discuss the role of fact and fiction in the globalization debate, the relationship between imperialism and what’s referred to as “the global era,”

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the distinction between religion and culture, the critique of cultural essentialism and the role of narrative articulation in the formation of cultural identities, the risks of overemphasizing discursivity, and the “scarf affair” as a particularly salient example of some of the central issues in contemporary cultural politics. Nancy Fraser is perhaps best known for the solution she proposes to the “redistribution-recognition dilemma,” which she summarizes as follows: “the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution often appear to have mutually contradictory aims. Whereas the first tends to promote group differentiation, the second tends to undermine it.”47 She rejects the “affirmative” solutions to this dilemma, which include mainstream multiculturalism and the liberal welfare state. Both these solutions address injustices that are the symptoms of a particular cultural or socioeconomic system without attempting to change the system itself. While there is no perfect solution, the transformative approach that she advocates aims at going to the root of the problem by altering the socioeconomic system via socialism and dismantling reified cultural identities with the tools of deconstruction. In our discussion, we question her on how she purports to combine the socialist goals of economic redistribution with a transformative cultural politics. More specifically, we inquire into her understanding of the history of socialism, her attempt to make critical theory into a totalizing project, the general disappearance of the question of culture in the aesthetic sense of the term, her relationship to the politics of recognition and Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism, the dialectical method of “false antitheses” operative in her work, an apparent optimism regarding democratic institutions and procedures, and, finally, her stance on the relationship between the right and the good. Given our situationalist conception of critical theory and our desire to open the Frankfurt School tradition to other modes of thought, we did not want to restrict our discussions to figures who explicitly identify with the heritage of German critical theory. On the contrary, it was integral to this project to bring in critical perspectives on cultural issues that are not identified with any particular doctrinal orientation. Therefore, in part 2, entitled “Critical Perspectives on Cultural Politics,” we organized a series of dialogues with intellectuals who have made major contributions to thinking culture from progressive points of view by using interdisciplinary tools to combat cultural essentialism as well as vulgar forms of multiculturalism.

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Judith Butler, to begin with, has played a central role in the deconstruction of the identity categories commonly used to establish conventional forms of cultural politics. This has not, however, led her to simply abandon cultural questions or embrace a simplistic form of relativism. On the contrary, she has a long-standing interest in the constitution of subjectivity and its relationship to cultural norms and codes, while at the same time maintaining that “cultures are not bounded entities; the mode of their exchange is, in fact, constitutive of their identity.”48 Individual and collective identities are therefore largely conceived of as circumstantial constructs in differential processes of normalization and “denormalization.” In our discussion, we engage with the question of the relationship between politics and ethics (including the issue of whether or not these concepts or domains can be easily distinguished), the problematic of recognition, the status of genealogy in her work, the possibility of a Lévinasian ethics without a transcendent reference point, the relationship between Lévinas and Adorno, and her work on postcolonialism. Although he is of a slightly older generation and rarely affiliated with what is sometimes perceived as more fashionable trends in contemporary theory, Immanuel Wallerstein has provided one of the most progressive and historically astute accounts of cultural identities to date. He is, of course, best known for his sociological work on the history of capitalism, for which he has earned a worldwide reputation as one of the founding fathers of world-systems analysis. However, as he reminds us at the beginning of our discussion, his first writings were on Africa, and he used a Braudelian perspective of longue durée to analyze the emergence of colonialism and the struggles for independence. This perspective, in conjunction with his extensive work on the history of capitalism as a world-system, has allowed him to make an extremely original, important, and relatively unorthodox contribution to contemporary debates on culture. Consider, for example, the following statement on the emergence of India as a “sovereign state” between 1750 and 1948: The outcome in terms of boundaries was not at all foreordained, but . . . whatever would have been the outcome would have become the entity we know as India. Had Nepal been absorbed into “India” in that period, we would no more talk of a Nepalese people/nation/culture today than we speak of a Hyderabad people/nation/culture. . . . [This] points up the arbitrariness

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of all statements about India’s (or anyone else’s) “culture.” India’s culture is what we collectively say it is. And we can disagree. We can also change our mind. If 50 years from now we define India’s historical culture differently from the way in which we define it today, India’s culture will have in fact changed in the past.49

Our discussion with Wallerstein ranges from the ways in which the past can shed light on the present to the dependence of the disciplinary division of knowledge on the capitalist world system, the difference between historical crises and revolutions, the place of cultural demands in contemporary politics, the relationship between politics in Latin America and politics in the Middle East, and the contradiction of “exclusive inclusion” inherent in racism and sexism. Cornel West, our third interlocutor in part 3, is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary American pragmatism, and he is perhaps best known as the outspoken author of the national best seller Race Matters (1993). In this work and elsewhere, he criticizes black nationalism, racial reasoning as well as the “reflectionist” and the “social engineering” arguments regarding the representation of blacks, which respectively affirm that representations should reflect real black communities or project positive images to counter racist stereotypes. All these forms of cultural politics rely on an underlying essentialism and refuse to acknowledge that blackness, like other cultural categories, is a social and political construct. In opposition to such approaches, West has argued for an antiessentialist, radically historicist and pragmatist cultural democracy that unites the various fronts in the struggle against economic, political, cultural, and spiritual oppression. One of the adjectives that he regularly employs to describe his project is “prophetic,” meaning that at the core of his work there is a struggle against nihilism and an attempt to transform the fundamental values that structure our daily lives.50 In our dialogue, we discuss this existential commitment that lies at the heart of his project, and we touch upon a wide variety of themes in his work to date: his method of navigating between erudite publications and public interventions, his debt to the critical theory tradition and his role as a cultural producer, the historical contingency of white supremacy and its conceptual categories, the uniqueness of cultural or neoracism, the way in which radical historicism resists both relativism and essentialism, the influence of American pragmatism on his work, the

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current state of the American Empire, and the securitarian logic of the new ideological framework opposing democracy and terrorism. Part 3 proposes an additional step in the elaboration of the relationship between culture and critique. Instead of restricting our discussions to a set of authors who identify with the critical theory tradition or maintain critical perspectives on cultural issues that have more or less direct ties to this tradition, we wanted to include discussions with theorists who are at the center of current debates on the role of culture in political liberalism. This was not, however, simply an opportunity to return to more “mainstream concerns.” The goal of part 3, entitled “Culture as Critique: The Limits of Liberalism?” is to inject a series of critical questions into one of the dominant debates on cultural politics in the contemporary world. This includes questions on social democracy, the Marxist tradition, the history of colonization, liberalism’s relationship to imperialism, world poverty, economic immigration, racism, and the overall relationship between the project of political liberalism and the deleterious effects of the advancement of market capitalism. These questions are directly related to our understanding of the title of this book, Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: contemporary cultural debates around liberalism and “communitarianism,” as well as alternatives to these two positions, should accord pride of place to these types of critical questions. Michael Sandel is perhaps most well known for his book The Limits of Justice (1982). Although he was quickly identified with the “communitarian” critique of Rawlsian liberalism, he clearly explains in the preface to the second edition of his book two essential reasons why his project should not be hastily identified with “communitarianism.”51 First of all, his wellknown critique of the priority of the right over the good only applies to one aspect of this priority: Rawls’s claim that “the principles of justice that specify our rights do not depend for their justification on any particular conception of the good life or [. . .] on any ‘comprehensive’ moral or religious conception.”52 He does not, however, attack the liberal claim that there is a set of inalienable individual rights. Secondly, he describes his attempt to link justice to conceptions of the good as “teleological”: “principles of justice depend for their justification on the moral worth or intrinsic good of the ends they serve.”53 He thereby wants to avoid the relativism that consists in simply grounding the principles of justice in the values of particular communities. Sandel’s critique of deontological liberalism and

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his own political project thereby necessitate rethinking the relationship between self and society as well as between communal norms and universality. These themes are at the core of our discussion (which took place with the generous participation of Ronan Sharkey), as are the issues of historical relativism, religion, abortion, the environment, the genesis of social goods, and the moral limits of markets. Will Kymlicka’s reputation is founded, in part, on his ambitious attempt to overcome the simplistic opposition between liberalism and multiculturalism, between “individual rights” and “collective rights.” In his noteworthy publication Multicultural Citizenship (1995), he argues that the liberal tradition was largely preoccupied with the question of minority rights through the course of the nineteenth century and up until World War II. In an attempt to update this tradition by providing a liberal defense of minority rights in a time when such an undertaking has been largely discredited, he proposes to make a distinction between various types of minority groups in order to avoid the undue confusion that comes from conflating them. A national minority, he argues, is an autonomous cultural group that has been incorporated into a larger, multination state. An ethnic group, on the contrary, is a group that has immigrated and become part of a polyethnic state.54 The core of Kymlicka’s argument consists in claiming that liberals should defend the external protection of national minorities, which aims at defending the autonomy of societal cultures within a larger state, without permitting these societal cultures to impose internal restrictions on the fundamental civil liberties of its members. In leaving their country of origin, ethnic groups—unlike national minorities—have given up their right to external protection according to Kymlicka, but they do have the right to integration, which necessitates a broad struggle against discrimination. In our conversation with Kymlicka, we question him on these distinctions as well as on his notion of societal cultures and his overall project of a liberal multi­culturalism. We also discuss the ties between liberalism and imperialism, the history of American race relations, the relationship between culture and ideology, the role of class and the economy in multicultural liberalism, the notion of “voluntary” immigration, and the impact of the history of colonization on the constitution of underprivileged groups. Beginning with the work of contemporary critical theorists on the question of culture, the overall trajectory of Politics of Culture and the Spirit

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of Critique includes a series of discussions with important authors maintaining critical perspectives on cultural issues before concluding with a set of critical questions formulated for theorists of cultural politics linked in diverse ways to the Rawlsian tradition. This entire movement from critical theory to liberal debates on cultural politics is then partially reproduced, in microcosm, in the final interview with Axel Honneth. As one of the leading members of the Frankfurt School, Honneth has been at the forefront of the third generation of critical theory. He shares, in part, Habermas’s openness to Anglophone moral and political philosophy, and his theorization of recognition has strong ties to debates on liberalism and multiculturalism in North America. At the same time, he wants to remain anchored in the critical theory tradition by deepening and extending Habermas’s contribution to the Frankfurt School, most notably by foregrounding an element largely ignored or misunderstood—according to his account—by the first generation of critical theorists: the sphere of “the social.” More specifically, he has studied three levels of mutual recognition that allow for the social development and self-realization of people as autonomous individuals: love, law, and solidarity, which respectively produce self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. He discusses these features of his central concept of recognition in an interview with our friend and colleague, Olivier Voirol, who also inquires into his relationship to the critical theory tradition, his debt to—and criticisms of— Habermas, his stance on Marxism and the linguistic turn, his engagement with French theory, the role of the body and materiality in recognition, and the importance of analyzing social pathologies in developing a critical theory of society. The three parts of this book attest to our threefold objective: • to explore, analyze, and assess the present and future contribution of the critical theory tradition to current debates on the question of culture; • to enrich and extend the critical theory tradition by relating it to other progressive work being done on the role of culture—broadly conceived— in politics and ethics; • to engage political theorists working out of liberalism by confronting them with critical questions inspired in part by the heritage of the Frankfurt School.

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All three of these goals can be united under the general heading of “new directions in critical theory.” Ranging from the most recent developments in the critical theory tradition and progressive interventions at its horizons to dialogues intended to bring critical theory into larger discussions in social and political philosophy, the three parts of this book aim at honing old tools and developing new strategies for a critical theory of “culture” in contemporary society.

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CRITICAL THEORY AND THE Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R E

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1 / CRI T I C A L T H E O RY T O D AY Politics, Ethics, Culture Opening Dialogue Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill We do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future, but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old. . . . I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be. —Karl Marx

Gabriel Rockhill:  In order to introduce and discuss the fundamental stakes of the dialogues collected in this book, let us take as our starting point a shared reference: the tradition of critical theory. First of all, it is important to note, at a historical level, that the emergence of critical theory, in the broadest sense of the term, is directly linked to a series of social changes going back to the eighteenth century. In particular, these changes include the rise to power of the modern sciences, the partial secularization of culture, and the more or less definitive institutionalization of philosophical discourse, not to mention the destabilization of the traditional social structure with the collapse of the ancien régime. The “critical task” that imposed itself at the time was to establish the limits of philosophy by circumscribing its legitimate sphere of activity in relation to science and religion (within the context of a series of sociopolitical upheavals). It was necessary to relinquish to the scientists an important domain of knowledge (connaissances)—that of the natural sciences—which had formerly fallen under the general name of philosophia. And metaphysics, having already undergone numerous critiques, was no longer a reliable bracing point capable of ensuring philosophical foundations as such. Finally, with the progressive institutionalization of philosophy since the end of the eighteenth century, which largely sounded the death knell of the extrainstitutional practice of philosophia in the classical age, philosophers found themselves in an institutional battle for the legitimacy of their discipline.1

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Without wishing to accord it too much importance, we can cite the example of the works of Immanuel Kant—in particular, the Critique of Pure Reason and The Conflict of the Faculties—in which he undertakes a critique of philosophy in order to definitively establish its limits and ensure for it a legitimate domain of activity.2 From this point of view, one can say that one of the most general questions investigated by Kant and several of his predecessors in the century of the Enlightenment3—a question taken up later, from different points of view, by Hegel and Marx—was the following: what role must philosophy play in this new sociohistorical configuration of knowledge (connaissances) and practices? At stake, then, is not solely a theoretical question concerning the legitimate place of philosophy in a new distribution of knowledge (savoirs) but also a thoroughly practical question: what can philosophy do in a world transformed by the evolution of the sciences, of industries, of modern institutions, of political movements, and so on? It is after the rise to power of the human and social sciences in the course of the nineteenth century that critical theory, in the strict sense of the term (the Frankfurt School), proposed to take up these same questions in a new historical context: a context marked, in particular, by the rapid evolution of capitalism and consumer society, by imperialism and colonialism, by the First World War and the Russian Revolution. As such, what one commonly calls critical theory today is the theory that responded to the general reconfiguration of philosophical practice in the modern age by calling into question the traditional vocation of philosophy in order to situate it in relation to the human and social sciences. The aim was to find a form of pluridisciplinary, critical thought capable of avoiding philosophical idealism as well as scientific positivism. It is in this way that critical theory, in the strict sense of the term, recaptured, in a new way and at another historical conjuncture, a question inherited from several of its illustrious predecessors: what can philosophy do in the contemporary world, and what can critical thinking do in our precise sociohistorical context? This question, moreover, conveys one of the major concerns of our dialogues, inasmuch as we question our interlocutors about the critical power of thought in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is a world characterized by “globalization” and what one calls the collapse of the socialist alternative, by the supposed war between democracy and terrorism, by neoimperialism and economic colonialism, but also by “new social movements,” numerous debates on multiculturalism and postcolonialism, the crisis of the neoliberal system, and the emergence of a new socialism in Latin America.

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Alfredo Gomez-Muller: To various degrees, and in different ways, the authors with whom we have dialogued in this book all practice forms of pluridisciplinarity, a fact that has given rise to a lack of comprehension or even a certain hostility among the defenders of the established order of knowledge (savoirs). Nonetheless, they practice these forms of pluridisciplinarity without having, in any strict sense, a general critical theory at their disposal. They start from concrete problems, relative to precise situations and phenomena, which they try to understand with theoretical resources from various forms of knowledge (savoirs). In this sense their theoretical practice precedes “theory.” This fact is perhaps not without consequences for the idea one can formulate of critical theory itself, of its status and the possibility of its construction. This is even more important given that the practice in question is, for most of our interlocutors, a theoretical practice of practice. Indeed, the principal object of their research is linked to the domain of action, and it concerns ethics, morals, politics, and law. In this respect the interviews collected here can also be read as an entranceway to practical philosophy or, if one prefers, to contemporary thought relative to the principles, rules, and contents of action. The primary interest of our interlocutors is practical, and it is in the development of this practical interest that they are led to explore new paths of analysis and, for some of them, to critically question just as much the traditional methods for the production of knowledge as the established conceptions of knowledge. This was already the orientation of Kant’s undertaking, in which the question of the general conditions of knowledge (connaissance) is rooted from the start in a practical interest. To unmask the pseudoknowledge of dogmatic metaphysics and of ontotheology is also to call into question the reign of political absolutism. For Kant, it is not a matter of criticizing philosophy in order to criticize philosophy but, instead, to criticize philosophy insofar as it can participate in a system of domination not only of ideas but also of human beings. The practical interest “takes precedence” over the theoretical interest of reason. I also find this precedence in the practice of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, where the term critique always means a critique of domination and, in this way, a theoretical practice of emancipation. This historical link between practice and critical theory is perhaps not contingent, and it might determine both its condition of possibility and its status. It probably consists in a necessary link: the necessity of a critical theory, understood as a theoretical critique of instituted theory, is not separate from the necessity of the social and political critique of domination. The possibility

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of a critical theory is attached, in analytic language, to the “metatheoretical” sphere of practice or, in dialectical language, to the sphere of praxis. Perhaps the most central problem of critical theory resides in this relationship between “theory” and “practice,” which dialectical rationality thinks, since Marx, with the aid of the concept of praxis. Thought dialectically, critical theory would not simply be a method for appropriately thinking the practices of emancipation but the method according to which the practices of emancipation think themselves. From this point of view, the methodology of critical theory cannot be defined a priori, or in a formal way, but only in starting from practice, in other words, from the singularity of the situations and the challenges that the latter present. Its heuristic fecundity is displayed through its effective capacity to make sense of the realities that constitute its object. Similarly, following this perspective, which is not taken up in these interviews, the task of a critical theory is perhaps not only to link the social and human sciences with philosophy (that is to say, to link theories or forms of theoretical production) but also to link theory and practice—individual and collective practices of emancipation. Every theoretical practice certainly possesses a social and political significance, but only a theoretical practice attentive to the social condition of the production of knowledge and concerned with not reproducing the alienating aspects of those conditions can have an emancipatory significance. Along these lines it would, without doubt, be appropriate to revisit the Sartrean notion of praxis as well as certain developments in the social and intellectual history of the twentieth century, such as the Gramscian conception of the organic intellectual, the late Sartre’s investigation into the new intellectual, the experience of liberation theologies in Latin America, and Orlando Fals Borda’s IAP (Investigación-Acción-Participación) sociology. How could a theory that purports to be critical exempt from critique the question of the status of the intellectual and, more generally, the question of the subject producing knowledge? By holding itself within the traditional separation between theory and practice, critical theory would leave itself open to the risk of reproducing one of the most profound forms of domination. GR: You are entirely right to insist on the centrality of practice in critical theory. I would specify, for my part, that there exist at least three dimensions of the interconnection between theory and practice. First of all, it is important to emphasize that philosophy itself, like every theoretical endeavor, is in effect a theoretical practice and that the thinking of philosophers is anchored in

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activities and institutions that largely determine the parameters of thinking. A philosophical doing (faire philosophique), with all of the “natural” dispositions that result from it, predisposes philosophical thinking to certain tracks of reflection. Secondly, we can speak of practical theories insofar as certain ideas have a genuine effective power. As a case in point, one can cite several dominant conservative ideas that purport to describe “what there is” while actually creating and recreating “what there is”: globalization, the struggle between democracy and terrorism, the “veil problem,” etc. Thirdly, practice in the traditional sense of the term—meaning the activity that aims at transforming the world—is directly linked to a general conception of the field of possibility, to an implicit theory of practices. In these diverse interconnections of theory and practice, it seems to me that this third aspect constitutes one of the important stakes of critical theory today. As Nancy Fraser has emphasized, critical theory—at least in the Euro-American world—is faced with the social delegitimation of a certain form of emancipatory politics. As such, one of the tasks that imposes itself— and several authors in this collection grapple with it—is to rethink the very nature of emancipatory praxis outside of the logic of temporal utopia (where the end of history would coincide with a generalized emancipation). Instead of quite simply abandoning utopian thought, I would say that it is necessary to move from a political practice centered on temporal utopia—where this is conceived of as a moment in the future (l’avenir) (or, perhaps, a moment that is always to come [à venir] according to the messianic historical logic of an author like Derrida)—to a praxis founded on a conception of utopia as a concrete and circumstantial process of transformation. This is not to say that it is henceforth impossible to generalize from specific situations, or to link common struggles, but rather that it is necessary to break with the idea of a final solution in the form of a temporal “nonplace.” Emancipation, if we can employ this term without essentializing it, is a process that always needs to be renewed through concrete struggles, including the struggle over the very definition of the concept of emancipation. Among the resources that would help us work in this direction, you have already highlighted one of the most fecund reference points: the situationalist praxis of Sartre and others for whom action emerges from precise circumstances and practice develops against the backdrop of specific problems, whether it be racism, plutocratic imperialism, consumer society, or punditocracy. In line with the transatlantic spirit of our interlocutors in this collection—all of whom are a

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testament to an intellectual dynamic between Europe and North America—I would also add the pragmatist tradition from William James to Robert Brandom and Cornel West. In the best part of this tradition, essentialist philosophy and metaphysics are set aside in the name of a contextualist approach founded on fallibilism, absolute principles are called into question, and radical historicism is advocated in conjunction with holistic analyses of practice. Such a methodological orientation, which is far from being equivalent to a simple “instrumentalization” of theory, can surely contribute to the objectives of a critical theory for the contemporary world. At a methodological level, would you agree in saying that critical theory today must be transversal with regard to its resources (linking philosophy with the social and human sciences), effective with regard to its ends (and thus centered on the practical transformation of the world), and situationalist or pragmatist with regard to its realization? AGM: As for the general content of these three conditions of critical theory, I would indeed agree. Concerning the second condition or characteristic of a critical theory, which is related to its aim for the practical transformation of the world, I nonetheless wonder about the signification of the adjective effective. Is not this term, here, quite simply equivalent to ethics or to ethicopolitical praxis? Saying that critical theory must be effective, in the sense of its practical goals of the transformation of the world, amounts to saying that it must be ethical and political. However, from the point of view of a certain instituted knowledge, this would suffice to discount critical theory as an error of thought—a confusion of the “is” and the “ought”—or as an ideology. Are we not confusing the descriptive and the prescriptive? How can theory, which pertains to the general and the necessary, be ethical or political when the orientations of practice are purely particular and contingent? Against these “objections,” I believe that critical theory does not need to erase its ethical aspect (éthicité) in order to save its theoretical aspect (théoricité). The whole venture of critical theory resides precisely in the affirmation of the correlative double exigency of the theoretical (théoricité) and the ethical (éthicité). It is in starting from this affirmation that it can establish, for example, the ideological status of these purported objections from instituted knowledge, which rest on specific social, economic, and cultural presuppositions. The pretense of this knowledge to pure practical neutrality, like the practical thesis about the dichotomous separation between the “just” and the “good,” secure for the

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established systems of domination a function of legitimation. The Rawlsian subject analyzed by Michael Sandel, just like the individualist and possessive subject studied by C. B. Macpherson, is attached to a certain conception of politics and social relations that underlies the Western liberal project of instituting a “universal” theory of justice or democracy. However, the affirmation of the theoretical (théoricité) or the ethical aspect (éthicité) of critical theory supposes the possibility of establishing a dividing line between ethics and theory, on the one hand, and ideology, on the other. I believe that one of the most important tasks of critical theory today is to recapture, in a new way, the distinction between “science” (or theoretical knowledge) and ideology. For my part, I think that we should take up the initial determination of the Marxian concept of ideology, which allows us to characterize ideology as an inverted or reverse image of the real, having each time as its function the legitimation of given relationships of domination. From this point of view, I would not say that the conservative ideas that you mentioned are practical theories, properly speaking. The discourse on the opposition between “democracy” and “terrorism” or on the threat of the Islamic “veil” are, rather, ideological configurations produced by specific modes of domination (Western neocolonialism, for example). Inversely, and keeping a distance from certain Marxists like Lenin, I find very problematic the idea according to which there would be a “proletarian ideology.” We cannot characterize in the same fashion a configuration of domination and a thinking of emancipation, that is to say, a critical theory. The distinction between theoretical knowledge and ideological representations does not rest simply on the procedures of knowledge production but also, and inseparably, on the practical (emancipatory) significance of this knowledge. However, this practical significance perpetually rebuilds itself through social interaction, and, in this sense, emancipation is always, as you say, a process to be renewed, a utopia that is not temporal but present, i.e. in the process of being verified in concrete practices of transformation. From this point of view, the relationship of critical theory to practice differs essentially from the relationship to the practice proper to the old “scientific socialism.” There, the future, understood according to a mechanistic and deterministic logic, presented itself in the mode of the necessary and not of the possible (thus legitimizing dogmatism and political domination). Today it seems to me that what is important, from the “practical” point of view just as much as from the “theoretical” point of view, is to learn to think of the future as possible and not

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as necessary. We are rediscovering utopia as the field of possibles and, by the same token, the idea that socialism, in one sense, can only be utopian. Perhaps this opens up the prospect of a new metaphysics, which someone like Derrida, for example, attempted to think with the idea of the messianicity of justice. Centered, as it is, on the practical transformation of the world, can critical theory do without this “metaphysical” questioning or, if you prefer, a reflection on the sources of utopia and the being of the possible, in the sense found in the philosophies of existence? GR: Critical theory is indeed linked to a reflection on the being of the possible, or what Herbert Marcuse called “transcendence.” It is not, however, a matter of a metaphysical referent fixed beyond the immanent world but of an investigation into the real historical alternatives that go beyond the current universe of discourse and action. It is in this sense that critical theory calls us to transcend the world. Such a quest for transcendence—to take an example from one of the controversial subjects in our discussion with Judith Butler—does not necessarily suppose an encounter with absolute alterity. On the contrary, ethical transcendence à la Lévinas, by purporting to discover an Archimedean point “beyond being,” tends instead to be a stumbling block to critical theory’s process of transcendence. Such a discovery comes from an existential conviction, or rather from an ethical faith, that stands in the way of critical reflection by dogmatically valorizing difference and alterity as values in themselves.4 Moreover, ethical transcendence finds itself at grips with an irreducible paradox insofar as it cannot prevent itself from bringing the totality of the world back to a fundamental sameness: the sameness of the logic of the same and the other.5 This is not to say that ethics has no place in critical theory, and it is indeed impossible to maintain a rigorous distinction between description and prescription (the so-called descriptive use of the term terrorist today is an excellent example of the intertwining relationship between the descriptive and the prescriptive, in particular when one compares it to the use of the term resistance fighter). But it is necessary, in my view, to call into question the dogmatism of the ethical turn in political philosophy just as much as the moralization of politics, which is an extremely widespread phenomenon in the United States. Could you clarify, therefore, what you understand by

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“the ethical” (l’éthicité) and develop your explanation of its relationship to critical theory? AGM: The ethical aspect (l’éthicité) of critical theory resides principally in its aim for the practical transformation of the world. The general register of ethics is the “ought” (devoir-être) and not the “is.” To ethically judge a state of things in the world—for example, a certain type of given relationship between humans—is to consider this state of things as not having to be (ne devant pas être) and as having to be overcome (devant-être dépassé). The ethical (l’éthicité) identifies itself, from this initial point of view, with negativity. An ethical thought or action is a thought or action that denies, or that aims at denying, something that is presently in effect or that is real in the domain of interhuman relations, which can also include, from a certain point of view, the domain of the relations of the human with living things in general. And yet ethical negativity has as a characteristic that it is correlative to the opening of another state of things, of a state of possible things. The ethical negation of a given world is always attached to the affirmation that another world is possible. The ethical possible, which Marcuse named “transcendence,” supposes a specific mode of temporalization: the possible is always a possible to come (possible à venir), and, as Heidegger and Sartre saw, every human project supposes the opening of the future (l’avenir) as such. In a more general way, the ethical (l’éthicité) and its critical power suppose a complex temporalization, integrating diverse extases of temporality. The reduction to the present, or to the pure present of the present, seems to me to exclude possibility as such and, likewise, ethics. I believe that the regime of pure presence, amputated from the possible as such, is conservative and conformist. Ethics, which is negativity and transcendence, always opens up a possible. Yet ethics does not open up just any possible. The form of interhuman relation that it signifies as possible is a form of relation that is grasped as better than the present form of relation. Ethics always says that what is not and must be (doit être) is better than what is; and it is precisely because it is better that this possible must be (doit être). The aim of the transformation of the world, which we recognized as the constitutive aim of critical theory, presupposes the idea that the world aimed at will be better than the present world or, as Sartre said, that it is value (il est valeur). Ethics, when referred to these characteristics that define a specific relation to time and to what is—

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complex temporalization, “transcendence” (possibility), negativity, value, and thus a certain ethos—sets itself apart from the moral formalism characteristic of individualist liberalism. It is inscribed beyond the deontological distinction between the just and the good or between morals and ethics (in the liberal relativist sense of a particular view of the world). The ethos that ethics aims to construct is not the expression of a particular conviction but, instead, a necessary possible, just like the alternative ways of living that we explore today in order to confront the exhaustion of the energy resources of the planet or the devastating consequences of the ideology of indefinite growth. I would add here—keeping a distance from a liberal ecologism à la Jonas—that in our ways of life the transformation of our connection to the natural realm cannot be separated from the transformation of our connections with others and, in particular, with other cultures. However, this transformation of our connection with others brings out, in a more general way, the question of the ethico-symbolic “status” of alterity. It is here, it seems to me, that Lévinas opens some very interesting perspectives for reflection from the point of view of a critical theory, as Judith Butler suggested to us. A good part, if not the core, of our interview with her revolves around Lévinas and, more concretely, the question of transcendence. As for the interest that she maintains in Lévinas, I, for my part, retain two things: the “way in which the face of the other addresses an infinite call” and the fact that “God is not Substance.” I would explain this interest through the importance of the consequences—practical as well as theoretical—of these two points, which, in fact, refer to one and the same question. For Lévinas, the encounter with the face is not an experience among others. The face, Lévinas told us in the course of an interview in 1982, is the beginning of all intelligibility, that is to say, the emergence of meaning. It does not seems to me that Lévinas arbitrarily and dogmatically valorizes alterity.6 He simply says that the possibility of all valorization, like all discourse in general, refers to the paradoxical “experience” of this exteriority that is expression, speaking, language. If the face was just a new “Archimedean point,” it would perhaps be of no interest, since it would still be a point somewhere in space among other undifferentiated points. A point that serves for leveraging is a point nevertheless. The “interest” of the face comes precisely from its “disinter-estedness,” from the fact that it is not reducible to a point.7 Instead of introducing a dogmatism, this “place” without place—this utopia of the face—is a radical calling into question of both established thematizations and habitual ways of being and acting.

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GR: The Lévinasian other nonetheless supposes a leap of faith, even in its most desubstantialized forms, as with the later Lévinas, Derrida, Lyotard, Ricoeur, Butler, or others. Whether one replaces the face as a kath’auto manifestation with a recognition that constitutively fails or with a differential operation incessantly displacing the givens of the situation toward a “possible-impossible” beyond, one still upholds what is essential: the systematic distinction between sameness and alterity as well as the categorical valorization of the latter as a value in itself, or even as a value that precedes all values by making the production of meaning and values possible.8 In the Lévinasian heritage—and the reasons are to be sought in the effects of the Second World War as well as in a simplistic and self-valorizing conception of the relation between philosophy and ethical violence—alterity always maintains a minimal constitutive identity that distinguishes it from sameness, and it functions as a value-concept beyond or across all concepts and all values. You believe in it or you do not, but those who believe in it make use of a subtle—and suspect—transcendental, recursive logic in order to make it out as if alterity constitutes the condition of possibility of all belief and non-belief, as if alterity were always independent of the pious act of positing its existence (hence the obsessive need to incessantly deconstruct all the conceptual traces of the philosopher who posits it). By following the ethics of the face to the end, one runs up against the contradiction of desubstantialization: as deconstructed and desubstantialized as it may be, alterity will never shed its minimal constitutive identity qua alterity, without which it would quite simply be confused with sameness! This is even the case for the most sophisticated solutions, which consist in conceiving of alterity as a process or an operation of displacement: in spite of the quantity or the quality of the displacements, the operation of differentiation will always be the same at base, since it is a matter of systematically, and in every case, distinguishing differential processes from procedures of identification. That is one of the key elements in the clandestine essentialism of deconstruction. The values attached to alterity constitute another element, because it is a case of fixed values that one can never call into question since they necessarily precede—according to the philosophers who purport to be the guardians of the most fundamental values and ideas—all questioning and all critique. Confronted with the dissimulated essentialism of deconstructivist ethics, it is important to recall that there are oppressive differences as well as liberat-

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ing identities. Domination does not obey conceptual categories or metaphysics, and identity and difference are relational terms with no a priori value. From my point of view—and I am distancing myself from the stance that you seem to share with Butler on this issue—Lévinasian ethics can only have a pragmatic use in critical theory. I do not deny that it can sometimes serve as a point of articulation—to speak like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy—in concrete struggles. But it can just as well back oppressive practices like Zionism, Islamophobia, Eurocentrism, or the reinforcement of patriarchy.9 Contrary to what certain participants in the “ethical turn” of political philosophy believe, it is far from constituting the panacea for the ethical-political evils of our time. AGM: The idea of presenting ethics as a solution to all evils has, for a long time, been put forward by all those who intend to preserve the established order. It is a way of neutralizing the political and the social and, in this way, of hindering their potential for transformation. However, I believe that there are elements in Lévinas’s thought that, along with other expressions of the thinking of practice, can help us to articulate, signify, and develop this potential for transformation, and not only in a pragmatic sense. The notion of the face, in particular, seems to me to be very fecund, provided of course that it is not made into a concept or a postulate. The Lévinasian other is not postulated; it is encountered. The approach to the other that Lévinas proposes is strongly marked by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, which excludes from the start the interpretation that would make of the other something that would be posited or deduced. Likewise, the encounter with the other supposes no “faith” in the theological sense; it plays out in the banality of the everyday, even here concretely in this dialogue “between us” (entre nous), where we are ceaselessly putting difference and identity to the test.10 The other is the other human. From this point of view, the notions of identity and of difference seem to me to have nothing suspect about them. For me, they become problematic only if one approaches them in a purely abstract, noncontextual, nonsituational, atemporal, and ahistorical way by opposing them in an insurmountable dichotomy, in such a way that saying “me” or “us” is equivalent to excluding alterity from identity proper, the alterity that traverses us and constitutes us qua singularity. Approached in a concrete manner—in a situation and historically—identity and difference involve an axiological signification of which each person can

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have the immediate experience in the everydayness of social life and, more specifically, in what Axel Honneth calls the struggles for recognition. I think that it is not only possible but also necessary to develop social and political practices capable of taking responsibility for the value of identity and of difference, and of doing so in a nonessentialist way or, in what amounts to the same thing in my view, in a nonideological or dominating way. In this regard, it is interesting to note that, in order to describe the paradoxical experience of the face, Lévinas always appeals to a series of very precise situations: the widow, the orphan, the pauper, the foreigner. In the context of the biblical tradition from which Lévinas borrows them, what these four “concrete” contents of the face have in common is that they represent particularly vulnerable forms of the human condition. These are four “identities” that are particularly exposed to domination, to nonrecognition, to exploitation, and to death. The experience of alterity is therefore also a certain experience of domination in which domination presents itself as domination to be overcome by what Lévinas calls the “welcoming” (l’accueil) of the face or by what the tradition of critical theory calls emancipation. The value of the face, or, rather, its status as a condition for all possible evaluation, is attached precisely to this dimension of the critique of domination, to this production of a discourse that is not ideology, in the Marxian sense that I have indicated. GR: I would recall, for my part, the difference—very important but often forgotten—between ethics and justice, that is, between the encounter with the other and the arrival of the third party (le tiers). According to Lévinas, it is precisely in relation to the third party—the other other who is always already there, imposing himself or herself as a social break in the isolated encounter with a lone and unique face—that the ethical relation is “corrected” by a political calculation capable not only of relativizing my ethical responsibility to the other but also of ontologically putting it back in its place by “staring away” or “defacing” the face (“dé-visageant” le visage): “The relationship with the third party is an incessant correction to the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is stared away or defaced [le visage se dé-visage]. There is weighing, thought, objectification and thus a decree in which my an-archic relationship to he-ness [l’illéité] is betrayed.”11 This conflictual relation between ethics and justice raises a great number of questions, but I propose that we move on from Lévinas’s thought (our disagreement on this point

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is now clear enough) in order to return to another question that you raised earlier, namely that of the ethico-political role of the concept of ideology. On this issue, I think that there is much to learn from the various critiques of the representational conception of ideology, which is often identified—perhaps wrongly—with the image of a camera obscura presenting the world upside down.12 Take, for example, the functionalist conception of ideology according to which an idea can prove to be true while nonetheless playing an ideological role. It is undeniable, for example, that the number of blacks in prison in the United States is proportionally very high compared to the number of whites.13 This true idea can serve ideological ends by reinforcing stereotypes concerning the purported criminal nature of blacks, but it can just as well serve emancipatory ends by being used to shed light on racism and all of the socioeconomic and institutional injustices suffered by blacks in the United States. What counts according to the functionalist conception is the use and the function of an idea more than its truth or its falsity. We can also cite the example of the materialist conception of ideology, summarized succinctly by Louis Althusser in his paraphrase of a formula from Pascal: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”14 According to this conception, which is not without links to the notion of doxa in Pierre Bordieu or the analysis of power relations proposed by Michel Foucault, it is material practices that form us as thinking and acting subjects. It would not suffice, therefore, to unmask the illusory representations of our class; instead, it is necessary to undertake a scientific analysis of the materiality of ideologies with the goal of reconfiguring institutions and practices. I agree entirely that a reflection on ideology must be at the heart of critical theory today. And we should traverse the long history of the concept of ideology with an eye to perfecting our theoretical tools and practices. It is important to recall that the term ideology is relatively new. It appeared at the end of the eighteenth century in the works of A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy and the idéologues before being given a negative connotation at the beginning of the nineteenth century by critiques such as the one launched by Napoleon in December 1812. Its use in the political world is linked, moreover, to an entire series of important transformations: the emergence and evolution of the modern concept of popular sovereignty, the rapid expansion of the press and the accelerated circulation of political ideas, the growing ubiquity of sociopolitical change, the emergence of the human sciences, and the gradual breakthrough of the “modern regime of historicity,” wherein linear time

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came to replace the circular time of the “ancient regime of historicity.”15 Although I cannot enter into all of the details here, I believe that the recovery of the concept of ideology must pass through an examination of the very history of this concept. I think that it is also necessary to multiply the levels of analysis in order to avoid the simple dichotomy between ideology and science—called into question, in particular, by Jacques Rancière—by shedding light on all of the determinants at work in acts and discourses. The question, therefore, is not one of simply choosing between diverse conceptions of ideology but rather of examining in minute detail the role of different forms of ideology and the place of political imaginaries in specific practices. Take just two examples: the purported menace of the “Islamic veil” and the supposed struggle between democracy and terrorism. These have aspects that are representational (the production of illusions, pure and simple), functionalist (the mobilization of facts for suspect ends), and material (the formation of subjects “sensitive” to these questions or the production of the quasi-automatic concatenations of media discourse).16 If I said above that these discourses constitute practical theories, it is because they are directly implicated in an entire series of real actions, from school expulsions to so-called preventive wars. Furthermore, they are rooted in a more general political imaginary (I mean, by this, a practical mode of intelligibility of politics, a system of thought, perception, and speech), which for France could be qualified as républicaniste, and in the case of the United States could be christened with the revealing battle cry of the American administration: War on Terror.17 AGM: When I was speaking earlier about an interest in the Marxian concept of ideology, I evoked the fact that for Marx, the inverted representation of the real functions as a legitimation for given relations of domination. From my point of view, the determining element of the Marxian concept, which arises in a historical context characterized essentially by the birth and development of the worker movement against capitalist oppression, is the reference to the reality of domination. Ideology is not simply an operation of inverting the real (the camera obscura), but an operation of inverting the real that serves the function of dissimulating domination as such, or even of legitimating this domination. From this perspective, unmasking ideology is not equivalent to unmasking the illusions of our society in general, but rather to bringing to light the relation that links certain representations of the real to certain modes of domination. The “real” in question here is not just

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any real, nor the real in general. It designates given interhuman relations. The study of ideology, understood as the study of the function of domination played by certain representations—including representations that can present themselves as “scientific” or “theoretical”—can consequently, since Marx, be comprehended as a “functionalist” study. The Marxian concept of ideology is both “representational” and “functionalist” and, certainly, “materialist” as well in the sense that Marx inquired into the relations to materiality that subtend ideological reproduction. The important question, from my point of view, is posed at the level of the conditions for discernment of the border between the ideological and the non-ideological. To return to your example, the statistics on prison populations in the United States can serve ideological ends just as they can serve nonideological ends. In the first case, a figure—which I would not assimilate, for my part, with an “idea”—is used to stigmatize blacks. In the second, the same figure serves to unveil the racism and the injustices suffered by blacks. In other words, what makes it such that the first use of the figure is ideological is its utilization in an apparatus in the service of the domination of blacks by whites. Inversely, what makes it such that the second use of statistics is not ideological is that it is integrated into a logic of critique of domination. This logic, critical of domination, can be designated, following the Frankfurt School, as a logic of emancipation, which is, from my point of view, the very logic of ethics. Emancipation is irreducible to domination, just as ideology is irreducible to ethics or ethico-political praxis. I would not say that this is a question of affirming a “dichotomy” between ideology and science, but rather of theoretically and practically coming to terms with the opposition between ideology and critical theory, which is a knowledge oriented by a project of ethical transformation of the world. I think that there are, from a practical point of view, “hard” oppositions that one need not fear accepting, such as, for example, the opposition between colonialism and anticolonialism. Take the case of Sartre’s anticolonialism that I examined in one of my books.18 His anticolonialist discourse is not ideological but ethical, because its primordial signification is the critique of a specific form of domination. Inversely, Camus’s position, which purported to “humanize” the colonialist system without calling it into question, was fundamentally ideological. On the other hand, and outside of the question of colonialism, I believe that Camus was right when he affirmed that there always comes a time “in history when he who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with

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death.”19 This entails relapsing neither into an “essentialism” norinto a binary and simplifying logic of oppositions. Following the example of the characters of The Plague, we always have to decide if we are in the “plague” and if— yes or no—it is necessary to struggle against it.20 The number of victims of the Nazi and neo-Nazi plague (which Herzog properly represents through the sickness of the plague in his version of Nosferatu), but also the neocolonialist and neoimperialist plague, the plague of racism and the neoliberal plague, go far beyond, at the planetary level, the number of victims of the most deadly plagues of the Middle Ages. In this collection of interviews, our different interlocutors strive to say, concerning very diverse logics of domination, that two and two make four. Seyla Benhabib does so in her critique of false liberal universalism and mass culture; Nancy Fraser in exploring the relationships between cultural justice, distributive justice, and political citizenship; Judith Butler through interrogating the paradoxes of identity and, by doing so, of recognition; Immanuel Wallerstein through his conception of the capitalist world-system; Cornel West via his radical calling into question of white supremacy in the United States and in the world; Will Kymlicka through his critique of cultural domination; Michel Sandel by criticizing the unconditional domination of the market over all spheres of social and political life; and Axel Honneth by renewing, in the field of social philosophy and struggles for recognition, the critique of domination by the Frankfurt School. A central thread that traverses all of these interviews, and which gives them an “interrogative” unity, has to do with the question of cultural justice. How do you understand this central issue? GR: In approaching the question of cultural justice, which is indeed at the center of the discussions in this book, it is important to recall that our notion of culture is a modern phenomenon. Stemming from the Latin cultura, the term culture emerged in France toward the end of the thirteenth century, but it required a complement in its literal use (the culture or cultivation of lands [la culture des terres]) as well as in its figurative use (the culture or cultivation of mind [la culture de l’esprit]). It was only in 1691 that the term was used, perhaps for the first time, “without a complement in a fashion in some sense absolute, in the general sense of ‘education of the mind [formation de l’esprit].’”21 Spreading through the language of the Enlightenment, the term culture, like the word civilization, which was contemporary with it, was part of

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a new political vocabulary and a new regime of perception. This regime was linked to a universalist political perspective (cultivated and civilized Man), the emergence of the “modern regime of historicity” and the temporalization of the relationships between peoples (where all of humanity is situated within a single historical process coming to a head in European culture), the purported civilizing mission of colonization (where others are forced to follow the example of Europe), and the progressive consolidation of the nationstate around a national culture. I am referring to all of this, without being able to go into the details, in order to insist on the ways in which our categories of political perception themselves depend on a specific sociohistorical conjuncture. The perception of culture, just like the concept of culture itself, is entirely a “cultural” phenomenon. For at least twenty years, the concepts of culture and civilization have undergone a major inflation in political and moral discourse, especially, but not only, in the English-speaking world. On the right as well as on the left, culture is situated at the heart of political affairs. Instead of attributing this change to the progress or the decline of history, we should instead try to put it in perspective. On the one hand, the collapse of the block ideology at the end of the cold war allowed for the emergence or the reappearance of fundamental political issues, including racism, colonialism, the oppression of indigenous populations, and the persistence of homophobic patriarchy. On the other hand, the concept of culture easily becomes an academic catchword that loses sight of the specificity of struggles by reducing all of them to the question of “cultural” identity. I am particularly attuned to the forgetting and erasure of social, political, and economic struggles by the discourse of rights. The example of the civil rights movement comes to mind, because the dominant historical narrative concentrates on the non-violent demands for civil rights by several charismatic leaders in the South of the United States, without sufficiently taking into account the long-standing struggle for a political, social, and economic transformation of the entire United States.22 Too quickly forgotten is the opposition to the Vietnam War, anti-imperialism, the struggle against poverty, the work with the unions, and all of the attempts to transform the social structure of the United States from bottom to top. Like a number of authors in this collection—in particular Nancy Fraser, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cornel West—I think that cultural justice must necessarily be linked, as was generally the case in what is called the “civil rights movement,” to social and economic questions. Without this, it risks becoming a

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simple recognition of minority identities, going so far as to maintain their minority status precisely so as to better recognize them! In continuity with our earlier discussion, I would add that culture also has a role to play in critical theory’s project of transcendence. Indeed, the search for historical alternatives to the present situation is not only a search through the past or a sketch of possible futures; it is equally necessary to look beyond the Euro-American world by studying cultural alternatives. To cite just one example, everything that is happening in Latin America deserves to be examined very seriously. We have much to learn from the diverse attempts to found a socialist politics for the twenty-first century by struggling—to speak in broad terms—against the American empire by playing the capitalist game against itself and for socialist ends. This brings us back to your example of the plague. I think that it is necessary to add to the arithmetical politics of Camus and of a certain Herzog (where two and two make four),23 the an-arithmetical politics, if I might put it like that, of a Genet or a Fassbinder (where two and two sometimes make five). Indeed, while the political playing field is sometimes laid out in such a way that it is necessary to quite simply decide where one stands, there also exist other moments when the situation is markedly more complicated. Genet insisted, for example, on the dangers of the sacralization—ultimately murderous—of the Good in the form of “clear” political values such as Liberty or Revolution. And Fassbinder’s psychopolitics unmasked all the forms of violence that complicate the cathartic identification of evil in the external world. His position dovetails, at a certain level, with one of the poignant affirmations by Deleuze and Guattari: “It is too easy to be antifascist on the molar level and not see the fascist that you yourself are, the fascist you sustain and nourish, that you cherish yourself, with molecules both personal and collective.”24 To return to politics in Latin America, one could schematically oppose the isolationism of a Castro, where it is a question of deciding which side one is on (for or against imperialist capitalism), to the nationalistic politics of a Chavez, who is partially an accomplice in the capitalist system insofar as he sells Venezuelan oil on the international market in order to advance socialism in his country. At the same time, Castro himself was “obliged” to align himself with the Soviet Union in the universe of the cold war, and it is necessary, thus, to avoid erecting a clean opposition where there is not one. In paraphrasing Marx, one might say that it is subjects who make decisions—and who must make decisions—but not in circumstances of

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their own choosing. Whether it is a question of cultural justice or of justice tout court, politics is not always arithmetic. AGM: I would even say that it is never arithmetic, particularly when it becomes daring to say that two and two make four; in other words, there are states of things that are objectively intolerable. In Argentina, under the military dictatorship, it was necessary to break down all arithmetic and all calculation in order to be able to say that two plus two make four. The army in power designated as lunatics the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who brought to light the whole factual truth that the torturing State intended to hide: the disappearances, the torture, the assassinations. In other words, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo publicly said that two plus two make five in order to say that two plus two might make four. Politics and ethics do not stem from calculation, even if the action evidently demands the evaluation of the circumstances. Calculation, in the sense of Kierkegaard’s “objective thinking” (objectifying), is the language of management but not of the political. I think that the profound crisis that pervades politics today essentially comes down to the fact that the political tends more and more to be identified with management, with the administration of social and individual life (according to the diagnostic of Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer) and with biopolitics (in Foucault’s sense). What is interesting in Latin America today is precisely that we are witness, here and there, to forms of re-creation of the political itself. Projects for a new society are being drawn up beyond the bureaucratic management and exclusive logic of private interest. The political is becoming a space for the (re)creation of meaning and of values through the critique of traditional structures of domination and the construction of new social links. In this respect, the richest experiments are taking place in societies that strive to integrate social and cultural alternatives by constitutional transformations (Bolivia, Equator, Venezuela). They are, however, also being undertaken at the regional level through projects of construction for new relations of integration, of which the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) is perhaps the most novel expression from the economic as much as from the ethical and political point of view. Breathing room is, of course, tight. I think that they are playing the “capitalist game” whenever they cannot do otherwise— in other words, for pragmatic reasons rather than tactical or strategic ones. This is the case for Cuba as well, which never built a politics out of isolationism. Its explicitly anticapitalist politics never prevented it from maintaining

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commercial relations with capitalist countries other than the United States, insofar as certain of these countries—European countries in particular—demanded a certain autonomy relative to the politics of the United States. The isolation of Cuba was not intended but was suffered. It is an effect of the U.S. blockade, and let us not forget that American laws still exist today that penalize societies, American and non-American, that have economic relations with Cuba. In Venezuela, as in Bolivia or elsewhere, the construction of a socialism for the twenty-first century happens in a global context dominated by capitalism where it is necessary to sell oil, natural gas, or other export products. It is important to see what they are doing with the benefits of these exports, which no longer benefit a local elite and international capitalism but the project of the construction of a more just, egalitarian, and participatory society. In the implementation of this project, countries like Venezuela and Bolivia are striving to diversify and balance the functioningof the economy through the creation of poles of economic solidarity, of public property and cooperative property, that coexist with the poles of the market economy and private property. What is interesting in these processes, which arouse so much spite from the conservatives as well as the liberals around the world, resides precisely in the fact that the political is recreated, that a new conception of the public domain is emerging through this recreation. This is nothing short of the creation of human community: the value, according to Lucien Goldmann, where the only possible and necessary universal is at play.25 Translated from the French by John V. Garner and reviewed by the authors

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2 / CON C R E T E U N I V E R S A L I T Y AND CRIT I C A L S O C I A L T H E O RY Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill Seyla Benhabib

Gabriel Rockhill: How would you explain your own intellectual trajectory? Do you see significant changes between your early work on critical theory and your most recent publications on questions of global justice, or is there a set of fundamental preoccupations that animate your philosophic project to date? Seyla Benhabib: I started my philosophic work with a dissertation, which in fact constituted the first part of my book Critique, Norm, and Utopia. I wrote on Hegel’s critique of natural right theories, particularly the section on abstract right in his Philosophy of Right. Even at that point I was concerned with the problem of universalism and concrete ethical communities, and so with the problem of the concrete universal. I believe that this beginning—the Hegelian critique of natural right, which at the same time tried to incorporate a concept of the autonomy of the individual into the modern state—never really left me. I have always been preoccupied with “situating” or “concretizing” the universal, as I did in a seminal essay when my work turned to feminism. In this essay, called “The Generalized and the Concrete Other,”1 I distinguished between two visions of universalism in ethics and political philosophy: one that considers the other as a generalized other, as a being entitled to the same rights and duties we would grant to ourselves, and the other that sees the human person as a “concrete other” with specific histories, needs, and trajectories. I think that the guiding philosophical thread for me has always been thinking the dialectic and the tension among these conceptions as well as the reconciliation of the universal and the concrete other. In that sense, I think that there is a guiding theme. After I finished my dissertation on Hegel in 1977 at Yale University, I went to study in 1979 with Jürgen Habermas

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in Germany, and I stayed with him in Germany, studying there in various institutes for the next ten years. My 1986 book, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, comes directly out of this period. During this period, I traced the development of Frankfurt School critical theory in terms of Habermas’s paradigm change from instrumental to communicative rationality. I also developed a critique of communicative rationality that was inspired by feminist theory and increasingly by Hannah Arendt’s work. I think that my work has always been situated between my reading of Arendt and my own aspirations within the tradition of critical theory; already in the final chapters of Critique, Norm, and Utopia, themes of narrativity, action, and plurality are announced as well as the precise theme of the generalized and the concrete other. In the decade between 1986 and the mid-1990s, I worked on the foundations of ethical theory. In 1992, I published Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics and then participated in the debate with Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and Drucilla Cornell published in 1995 as Feminist Contentions. These were both attempts to rethink the project of universalism via the program of discourse or communicative ethics by moving it increasingly away from what I considered, along with many others, Habermas’s—at times—extreme rationalism in articulating his ethical project. The problem is perhaps his Rousseauianism and the excessive emphasis on a consensus, even if it is a regulative idea. I don’t think this dimension was clearly articulated in the early works like Legitimation Crisis. I always introduced a more Arendtian discursive, contestatory moment as well as trying to bring in the problem of different subjectivities, the subjectivity of women, the subjectivity of people of color, and in general the subjectivity of those whose voices are excluded within the discourse of communicative ethics. I think until The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global World, which was published in 2002, my work was concerned with the philosophical foundations of universalism, of working out those original Hegelian insights, if you wish. Now, beginning with the Claims of Culture and, for that matter, with a preceding work, the Transformations of Citizenship: Dilemmas of the Nation-State in the Global Era (my Spinoza lectures at the University of Amsterdam, published in 2001), I started addressing a set of more sociological issues. Like many, I am concerned that the period we are living through is caught in a fundamental transformation of the sociocultural and political framework of

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the nation-state and maybe even the framework of society itself, as Alain Touraine would argue. I have therefore focused on issues at a more sociological level, looking at the crisis of membership to the nation-state, the problems of citizenship and residency, the rights of asylum and refugees, and, in general, the promise of a cosmopolitan politics in the current state of tremendous global tension and conflict. This turn toward understanding the present has not changed my normative philosophical framework. I continue to use the framework of a discourse or communicative ethics, be it in my work on deliberative democracy and culture or in examining the questions of citizenship. So, in that sense, I think there is systematic continuity in my work, although it is true that in the last four or five years I have been working in a more, if you wish, “empirical vein,” but one that I would say—and this is my last point—is always part of traditional critical social theory, which is situated somewhere between philosophy and sociology. Critical theory has never been prima philosophia. It has always tried to articulate the categories of philosophy within the context of changing social transformations and this is what I see myself as doing in focusing on the state, citizenship, migration, and political membership. GR: Do you see this most recent turn in your work as being related to significant changes in the geopolitical situation? For instance, one of the terms and concepts that you use rather widely is globalization, and I’d be interested to know whether globalization, for you, refers to something like a new world order or if it is rather the result of a new discursive framework for perceiving and talking about the world. Is it possible—and this would be going in a slightly critical direction—that the concept of globalization is part of a relatively novel political imaginary, just as the concept of the nationstate was bound up with the emergence of a new political imaginary in the modern age? SB: That is a really interesting question. This term, of course, has been used and misused in such radical ways in contemporary debates that it has almost become hollowed out. What I understand by the term is the original definition, I think, or original analytical attempt at a definition, made by Anthony Giddens, when he talks about globalization as the compression of space and time and the intensifying consequences of human action at a distance. So, first of all, I think it is the phenomenon of the compression of space and

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time, and what this means for societies, that interests me. I think that global financial markets, electronic media, and worldwide televisual media are themselves indicators of this more fundamental transformation of the reach of human action. And I like your question about the political imaginary. I have found that actually going back to Kant’s work on this question, particularly his 1795 essay, “Perpetual Peace (Zum Ewigen Frieden),” has been extremely interesting for me because Kant, as you know, formulates so many analytical issues in this period. First, we have the third article of perpetual peace which is cosmopolitan right, where he says that cosmopolitan right shall be restricted to conditions of universal hospitality. He’s not the first to have formulated hospitality in this way. Francisco de Vitoria was the first to do so. Yet it is striking that when Kant talks about hospitality as the right of every human being to seek contact with other human beings, he is still restrictive in his views about the right of entry. In Kant’s formulation, you have a temporary right of sojourn—ein Besuchsrecht—but no right of stay—ein Gastrecht—unless granted by the sovereign. You can see his account going back and forth between the Enlightenment understanding that the desire to seek human contact with others is a fundamental human right and the need to impose some limits and boundaries, which he himself makes very clear in his footnotes against the attempts of colonizing powers to break down the walls in China and Japan, boundaries that are always arbitrary. If you read the footnotes in the text, Kant’s is an anti-imperialist argument that is also saying that China and Japan have the right to limit contact with outsiders to certain trading posts, but that they should not deny contact all together; yet, if the foreigners come with aggressive intentions to force entry and commerce into these societies that are not welcoming them, then they cannot be accorded the right of hospitality. Already at this moment, we have these two faces of what we have since come to know as globalization. On the one hand, there really is a genuine possibility right now of the emergence not of a single demos but of a planetary ethical and political consciousness. We see the young generations everywhere, in China, India, and Brazil, and their aspiration to be part of this new world and to be part of this new world consciousness. Yet, at the same time, we also see the other side of this process, sometimes flippantly identified, if you wish, by the American journalist Thomas Friedman, as the doctrine that “the world is flat,” that everywhere a similar development is spreading. Well,

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the world is not flat; it is full of bumps and ravines, and we see in the tremendous resistance to globalization, not only through antiglobalization movements but maybe also through the emergence of various forms of religious fundamentalism, a mood that may be saying, “respect a certain moment of our own difference.” I do think that the discursive framework of our political imagination has changed. I think, from official political discourse to everyday reality, it is inconceivable today not to think in transnational—even if not exactly global— terms, because the imagination always has its limits. But we do have these contradictory possibilities between a cosmopolitical project on the one hand and a project of violently integrating parts of the world together through what is called the project of ‘Empire.’ So what is really going on? Is it cosmopolitanism, is it a cosmopolitics? Or is it actually the emergence of Empire? And I’m using this in the Hardt and Negri sense in one respect. I think that their fundamental insight that Empire cannot simply be identified with American hegemony but that Empire is a multinational and transnational process at the heart of which America may be or may be trying to be the strongest hegemony. However, it’s no longer nineteenth-century imperialism. These are anonymous networks of global financial markets, of capital, of the electronics industry, of the media, which are not dominated or controlled by single governments. What is globalization really presenting us with? That is, I think, my question, while trying to understand this discursive framework. GR: What about the political issues at stake? It’s interesting that the book you make reference to by Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, was begun in April 1988 and published in 1990. This is during the time period that led up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reconfiguration of the geopolitical scene at that point in time, including what many see as the definitive end of the socialist dream. This political dimension to the emergence of the “globalization debate” can also be related to your concluding remarks, for isn’t it necessary, in order to avoid conceiving of Empire in primarily economic terms, to take into account certain essential political factors? For instance, there is what might be referred to as the more or less visible neoimperial project of the United States and the battle, as it has been put recently, between strong and weak nation-states. Since the Reagan era this project has often been justified, or at least reinforced,

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by reference to “globalization.” Succinctly put, my question is the following: What is the role of the political in the recent changes that are referred to as globalization? SB: You are absolutely right to raise this question. Markets have not replaced politics, this is what we have learned, and markets in fact never replace politics. In retrospect now, if we think back to the first Gulf War, it had the kind of coalition that it did behind it because it seemed as if Saddam Hussein’s grab of these islands off the shore of Kuwait, which itself may have been encouraged by some misunderstanding between him and the American ambassador, was a crucial moment in the first “New World Order.” And the principle behind this New World Order was presented as being the protection of the sovereignty of weak states. But, of course, we know in retrospect that it was also the fear of Saddam’s growing power within the region and also his reach for Kuwaiti oil fields that prompted the war. Normatively, the geopolitical language was “the need to protect the sovereign equality of states.” In the intervening fifteen years, this principle of sovereign equality has been completely trampled upon. It is paid lip service and it’s still the way all international organizations are normatively organized. I think this is one of the central paradoxes in the period that we are in. There is no other principle of representation at the global level. The United Nations does have observer status for non-state peoples like the Palestinians but, on the other hand, all international organizations—the World Bank, the IMF—still have the representational model of the state as its paradigm. So we have this kind of total hypocrisy, or, to use the American political scientist Steven Krasner’s words, “sovereignty is hypocrisy,” insofar as we always acknowledge the term but continuously undermine it. Whether it is the problem of failed states like Afghanistan or outlaw states like Libya, which all of a sudden now have been resanctified to enter the international process, I think, normatively and philosophically, this is the situation we are in. The world of nation-states is not gone, but it really is in such turmoil, and there is such disjunction between the normative presence of the nation-state and the nation-state’s own capacity to control and to act in this volatile political environment, that you have the imperial project on the one hand paying lip service to sovereignty and on the other hand continually undermining it. We see this not only in the first Gulf War but also in the Iraq War, with what has happened now. Presumably the goal of the American intervention was to

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maintain the sovereign integrity of Iraq. Well, we all know that this is absolute hypocrisy. But there is something that has changed between the forms of American intervention throughout the 1950s and 1960s in Latin America and the creation of “banana republics,” between those forms of intervention and the assertion of the American sphere of influence and the kind of intervention we see today. At the moment, what is happening is an attempt to integrate parts of the world, and principally the Arab and Iranian Muslim world, into this global network and into this global market. It isn’t just a matter of changing regimes, but it is a more fundamental societal transformation. It used to be that American politics was a geopolitics of containment: if you had a friendly regime to the U.S., you did not really bother with the form of civil society, with other things. Now the policy is more ambitious. It is no longer guided by state interests, but it is guided by this more fundamental vision of transformation, which is itself much more ambivalent, and much more ambitious and destructive. Alfredo Gomez-Muller: Do you think that the traditional universal, that is, the universal as it was understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been destroyed by the hegemonic form of globalization you were just discussing, i.e., globalization qua Empire? SB: I would hope not. I would hope that, in effect, a new rearticulation of the universal is also being created. I think that in the nineteenth century the framework of the universal was distinctively bound up with the framework of the nation-state. You see this in the work of all the major sociologists from Weber to Marx and Durkheim where the Universal—das Allgemeine, to use a Hegelianism—is represented by the society that is always the society of a specific nation-state. The object of classical sociology is “society,” conceived as the bounded community of a nation-state. We have moved beyond that, and this moving beyond—never quite being beyond—opens up dangers as well as possibilities. I think that we are well aware of the dangers, but I haven’t said anything very concrete about the possibilities. So it may be important to emphasize this. Even Kant says in his essay on perpetual peace that it has now become impossible not to care for the suffering of others in the opinion of mankind, that you can no longer remain indifferent. So this emergence of a kind of consciousness of global,

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and maybe even planetary, interdependence, fragile though it is, is sometimes taking mystified forms. Think of people’s reactions to the tsunami, to natural catastrophes. There is a language of universal solidarity that is also present at times articulating itself with pop artists like Bono trying to get involved in the AIDS project in Africa and attempting to do what weak states and failed governments are not able to do. This moment of universalist interdependence or universalist solidarity is certainly weak and it takes strange forms, but I do not want to say that it is absent. It is a different rearticulation of the universal. One area in which we see this—and this is truly a complicated issue, which I have been working on since The Rights of Others—is in the ambivalent zone of humanitarian interventions. The notion of humanitarian interventions emerged out of the experience of genocide in the twentieth century, not just the Holocaust but the Armenian genocide in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, and the difficulty and the guilt that so many nations have of not having done the right thing. So the fundamental principle of humanitarian interventions really grows out of the obligation to intervene in real time, if one can, to prevent the ethnic cleansing and massacre of human beings on the basis of their race, language, ethnicity, religion, and so on. I find that this is a tremendously important normative moment in the development of human consciousness, in the development of the universal. And I think the challenge to the left, the challenge to progressive forces now is how to reoccupy that language which has been misused. We should not give up on it, but resignify it, reoccupy it, reclaim it for ourselves because the language now being used is one of “regime change.” So we are not intervening in Darfur, where in my opinion genocide is taking place in real time, but we did intervene for an illegal regime change in Iraq. I think it would be extremely wrong for the left not to fight for the real meaning of terms such as humanitarian intervention, which in my opinion amount to a new rearticulation of the universal. AGM: I would like to turn now to the question of culture. You have highlighted the creative dimension of culture and the process of continual cultural resignification. From this point of view, do you think it is possible to analytically oppose culture and religion? Do you think that religion is a purely autonomous concept in relationship to culture, or is the relationship between religion and culture perpetually reconfigured through the course of history?

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For example, in France, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, religion occupied an extremely important “cultural” position. Today this is much less the case. Does this mean that the frontier between culture and religion must be thought of historically instead of being construed as an analytic absolute? SB: I don’t think that it would be possible to avoid historical analysis, and I don’t think that it is even necessary to avoid historical analysis. I think the distinction between culture and religion is itself a very unstable distinction; it is a contested distinction. Let’s begin maybe in a very basic way because undoubtedly religion for most human cultures also constitutes one of the essential points of identity. If I remember correctly, Vico in his New Science says that religion and the burial of the dead are two of the fundamental human universals. Since then, of course, we have had the subversive arguments of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who says that it is really the position of the uncle, the brother of the mother, that is the essential key to understanding all the elementary structures of kinship. So we’ve gone from this vision of Vico to the more formalistic understanding of Lévi-Strauss. However, I think the challenge we are facing today in the political public sphere is the following. Like most of us who were brought up in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, I operate with an understanding of religion—and this is also the case in Islam—as having a definitive text and having an interpretation of it over a period of time and what is called an ortho-praxis following from the text. All the three major monotheistic religions are textually based, and there is this understanding of religious practice as in one way or another having to refer back to some kind of tradition of interpretation and analysis. Part of the reason why I think the public irritation with contemporary Islam exists is that we don’t understand why there are so many hocas (imam—Islamic clergy), why there can be so many voices interpreting texts, and there doesn’t seem to be a moment of centralization or there doesn’t seem to be a kind of methodology of interpretation. We are all puzzled that one can pronounce a fatwah here and a fatwah there. Remember Max Weber used to talk about this in his analysis of religions. He called this “kadi justice,” kadi being the word for “judge” in the Islamic tradition. So we are puzzled because both in Judaism and Christianity there is a tradition of contentious but more or less authoritative interpretation, which Islam seems to be lacking, or so it seems to many of us, viewed from the outside. So, on the one hand we are dealing with the problem of understanding what kind of culture the culture of Islam is, on the other hand we are also

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dealing in the global space with religions and belief systems such as Hinduism, Confucianism, and Shintoism. I think this is leading us to reconceptualize the relationship between religion and culture. It is no longer a matter of works by scholars concerned with arcana. If you are dealing with Japanese colleagues who have little statues representing their ancestors in certain parts of their house, and there is a certain way in which they greet them when they come in, and there you are not quite knowing how to deal with this, this is no longer a problem for the scholar. It’s a problem for the ordinary human being precisely because we are living in a globalized world where we are interacting with one another increasingly and more intensely. The lines between culture and religion under these conditions seem to me to be extremely fluid, extremely fragile. This is an issue I have been thinking a great deal about recently, because it seems that immigrant groups also bring with them religious practices that they resignify or redefine in relationship to their cultural identity under the conditions of the host country. We don’t really even need to focus only on Islam here. It has often been pointed out that Irish and Italian Catholicism in the United States has taken different forms than Irish and Italian Catholicism on the mainland and that the experience of the diaspora and migration brings in new elements. So I would agree with you that one has to study culture and religion historically. However, the analytical challenge is to understand religions that are not based on ortho-praxis and religions, as in Islam, where you do not have the relationship between the practice of interpretation and authoritarian traditions the way you do in Christianity and Judaism. And I have to admit that very often I feel ignorant myself, or I feel the limits of my own knowledge in thinking about these issues, although I grew up in an Islamic country such as Turkey. But in Turkey we grew up with a sense of collective amnesia. The republic had erased the past. GR: I would like to push you further in this direction, and the main question I would like to ask is: How far does your antiessentialism go? Regarding the notion of culture, would you be willing to admit that the very concept of culture is itself culturally particular? As you probably know, the concept as we use it today emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century, and it is therefore anchored in a very specific sociohistorical context. Nonetheless, it is common to use it as a universally valid category for framing the relations between peoples. Regarding the question of religion, I wonder if the

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relationship between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the role of the text need not be historicized as well in order to avoid essentializing it. For example, it is undoubtedly significant that Saint Jerome’s Latin version of the Bible became the authoritative version of the Book, and that it was considered heresy for hundreds of years to return to the Hebrew or Greek original. Strictly speaking, the text was not the original word of God but the authoritative translation recognized by the ecclesiastical tradition. These considerations could obviously lead us very far from the issues at hand, but the central question is, once again: How far down does your antiessentialism go when it comes to culture and religion? SB: In contemporary discussions, I think sometimes the opposition between essentialism and constructivism—which is not an opposition that I like at all—is not terribly helpful. Essentialism ends up being a straw man. For me, essentialism is, first of all, an epistemological confidence in being able to talk about cultures as clearly delineated wholes and totalities, that is, there is not enough anxiety about the individuation of cultures. Secondly, for essentialists there is the overlapping of culture and national societies, and finally the notion of the boundedness of cultures, which goes along with the problem of individuation, where very often boundedness is identified with state boundaries. Thus, for me, essentialism means something very specific because otherwise I think that in the discussion we are forced to create an uninteresting opponent in order to develop our own position. Furthermore, I would not call myself a constructivist. I have always said that, and this was one of my original disagreements with Judith Butler way back in Feminist Contentions. I do not like the term constructivism because it seems to me to hide all of the important methodological and epistemological problems in the human and the social sciences. What does it mean to be constructed or constituted? We know these are terms that come with a kind of shorthand Foucauldianism. Disciplinary practices constitute us. But what does it mean for the subject to be constituted “all the way down”? Where is the realm of freedom? I understand Foucault’s critique as not presupposing a subject that precedes the disciplinary practices, but that seems to make the subject into what one would call an overly socialized dupe. One has to look at this, of course, in the context of the denial of psychoanalysis. And it had something to do, at least in Foucault’s early work, with the critique of the overdrawn language of Cartesian consciousness and so on. But, for me, constructivism is not a helpful term. What

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I am interested in understanding is actually the process of narrative articulation, renegotiation, and resignification. I am interested in the circulation of meaning, and I find extremely helpful indications in Derrida, but also in Wittgenstein and Arendt, concerning the way the human world and human actions are always constituted by this surfeit of narrative accounts (first-order accounts of human action and second-order attitudes toward them). The term narrative should not be taken here to imply a kind of coherent story. I’m using it in the sense of a récit, in the sense of an “account giving,” identifying the what and the who in Arendt’s terms. In this sense, my antiessentialism is simply introducing this moment of narrative articulation into the concept of culture and seeing how members of cultures identify themselves as members in creating narratives of belonging. These narratives of belonging, of history, of memory, always have references to other narratives, to other moments of differentiation. I’m interested in the interaction between the self and other, the “we” and the “they.” And I think this is a universal aspect of all human communities. We are different from those over there, on the other side, insofar as we narratively identify ourselves with a group. Regarding the kind of critical discursive analysis you are suggesting, let me say that in the first chapter of my book The Claims of Culture I discuss three different approaches to culture. One is the anxiety concerning the relationship between mass culture, on the one hand, and high culture, on the other. This anxiety dominated the first half of the twentieth century and is clearly seen in the work of Frankfurt School theorists such as Adorno as well as a thinker like Hannah Arendt. Today it seems as if we have moved to what I call a kind of democratized understanding of culture, where culture becomes synonymous with the project of identity. Maybe one reason the concept of culture is circulating in our vocabulary in the way in which it is, is because the old distinction between culture and civilization is being resignified under conditions of globalization, with the growing attempt to maintain specificity and some sense of particularity in the face of overwhelming homogeneity. I find the phenomenon of the Internet and Microsoft incredible. You try to analyze the languages that you can use, but, no matter what language you are using, once you have learned the DOS basic program you know what is in the left-hand column and what is in the right-hand column, and the only culture is the position of the a, the q, and the g, the position of the letters on the keyword. Because we have this incredible media that seems to be so

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global and so universal, I think there is also anxiety about the disappearance of culture itself. Perhaps we are talking a great deal about it, about resignifying it, and maybe individuals are concerned to differentiate themselves precisely because we are also anxious about its disappearance. We no longer have the same relationship to narratives in our culture. One no longer hears stories from one’s grandmother or whomever, one has the televised medium and other mediums constituting narratives. I believe that the structure of collective memory is changing, but that may be a whole different question. AGM: Are you close to Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of narrative identity? SB: I had actually studied with MacIntyre, but I always thought this came more from Arendt than MacIntyre. I think that MacIntyre has a classical Aristotelian framework of narrative, and maybe he does not problematize it as much in terms of introducing the critical distinctions between self and other and the dynamism of these binarisms within narrativity as well as the need to question them. I certainly always felt that MacIntyre’s work on narrative was one of his central contributions. But I do want to stress that in his great work, After Virtue, the narrative of a life story is tied to the accomplishment of a certain telos, that telos which comes from our fundamental moral commitments. He develops a much more classical view of narrative than I do, with a certain built-in teleology. AGM: If it’s true that in today’s global world cultures have the possibility of perpetually resignifying themselves in exchanges with other cultures, does this resignification nonetheless presuppose the existence of meanings that are conserved in collective memories and then resignified? If so, regarding the contemporary crisis in the construction of narratives, a crisis that is undoubtedly linked to the crisis of memory, is there a risk of finally arriving at a moment where global culture can no longer produce significant resignifications, i.e. resignifications that drastically modify the collective memory of a culture? SB: Absolutely. I think that this is really a crucial moment because there could be something like—to use a term Habermas had introduced—the “end of utopian energies” and the “exhaustion of narrative creative sources,” and the two may be linked in very significant ways. I still have faith in the capacity of

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human beings to remain creative. One does see that there is a kind of public exhaustion of the sources of narrativity, and this brings us back to the problem of mass culture. The unbelievable reduction and brutality of so much of the narratives that circulate in the film industry is a telling fact. There are always exceptions, and there will always be great lyrical moments, but there is also a generalized culture that is identified with the American film industry where everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator. A colleague of mine who works in the film industry once commented that the reason why violence and car chases are so “successful” is that you don’t need to contextualize them to understand them. Contextualization is the most difficult thing to attain in the medium of the cinema. And what the new industry is producing is decontextualized films, decontextualized understandings. I don’t want to sound like a bourgeois because I know that there are also very interesting things going on with the rise of the Indian film industry and the whole project of Bollywood as opposed to Hollywood. But to get back to the more philosophical problem about the structure of narrative consciousness and the structure of memory, indeed, I think what happens when memory is so audiovisually mediated remains an open question. On the one hand, it seems that vast amounts of new knowledge become available. You can see that people can find information and interconnect it in better ways. Yet, on the other hand, there is again a kind of simplification, impoverishment, and reduction of the spheres of meaning. GR: You have claimed that “words and deeds are equiprimordial.”2 I was wondering whether or not there are practices that take on meaning or produce meaning outside narrative codification, outside the act of naming. One of the reasons I’d like to ask you this question is that I remember one of your criticisms of Judith Butler, which is that she makes “linguistic practices the primary site where we should be searching for an explication of gender constitution.”3 How would you react to the criticism that you make narrative the primary site for the manifestation of culture? SB: That is a good question because the overemphasis on discursivity may not allow for enough attention to be paid to materiality and perhaps to what someone like Bourdieu has called habitus. I am not denying significance to the discursively articulated practices in which we are “always already” situated, but at the end of the day these practices will be articulated through narrativity, whether it is the narrative of the sociologist or the narrative of

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the actor. I don’t want to deny materiality at all, but how do we really know what materiality is and how do we articulate it in consciousness? Yes, the habits of the body, yes, there is a kind of physical articulation, but it seems to me that at the end of the day there is a process of linguistic identification as well. This issue takes us back to a very old problem in philosophy: the correspondence versus the coherence theory of truth. Is our statement true because it corresponds to something that exists independently of it or is our statement true because it coheres with the totality of all other statements? I think that this is a false opposition, and certainly the emphasis on narrativity gives a different slant to the understanding of culture than does the emphasis on practice and material embodiment. But I’m interested in how individuals render an account to themselves of what it is they are doing. We are always doing something, but what is it that we are doing? I agree with you that it would be really interesting to further reflect on the relationship between material habits, habitus, and narrativity. GR: Within Bourdieu’s work, the act of becoming aware of one’s habitus or giving an account thereof can potentially modify it at a certain level. This is what he refers to as the split between practical knowledge (connaissance pratique) and learned knowledge (connaissance savante). My question, then, is the following: Are there forms of material practice that change at the moment at which they are named and accounted for? If this is indeed the case, then don’t we have to be attentive to these acts of naming and how they can transform or recode actions that might not necessarily have had such or such particular meaning at the original time of their occurrence? This question could be related to one of the other issues we wanted to talk about, which was the veil debate. You yourself have pointed out that people name “the veil” differently and that these acts of naming are linked to various acts of cultural resignification. What is the relationship between these different acts of cultural resignification and the act of naming, which can transform the very meaning of signifying acts? SB: To go back to the beginning of your question, I think that one should be very careful about an epistemological regress here because if you say a practice is changed in the very act of naming it, then that means that at time t1 we still have a way of identifying the practice as opposed to what it is at time t2.

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GR: But it could be retroactively constituted as such, meaning that the practice at t1, once we get to t2, changes and is therefore made into something different than what it was at t1 due to the act of naming or renaming that occurs at t2. SB: Yes. My only point is that in order to be able to make those very distinctions, we are going to need narrative accounts of t1 and t2. GR: You have a very broad understanding of narrative then? SB: Yes, I do. And I would also like to take exception to one little formulation in what you said. “Naming” is a loaded concept in the philosophy of language in the sense that it implies a kind of discrete act of identification of meaning, and I am opposed to this view, being more of a Wittgensteinian. I believe that there is no single act of meaning and that words do what they do because of the language games—I don’t even very much like the language of “games”—because of the way in which communicative practices in the lifeworld constitute themselves. So my concept of narrative is really less one of “naming” than “reason giving” or “giving an account of.” Let’s come to the affaire du foulard (scarf affair), which you brought up in this context. It seems to me, as I have argued in various writings and in the lecture,4 that the foulard is an odd symbol around which so much of our current cultural-political malaise comes to a head. To remind us of an observation made by Simone de Beauvoir, the position of women is always pivotal in the negotiation of intracultural differences, precisely because women are supposed to preserve that which culture is essentially about. Women’s position in every culture is supposed to be much closer to the moment of nature, however, it is culture which shapes and defines the moment of nature. In intracultural and transcultural discourse, women’s positions come, I think, closest to the fundamental issues of identity. So the affaire du foulard on the one hand articulates the gender issue. On the other hand, you obviously have a problem of drawing the boundaries between the public and private as well as the boundaries between the democratic state and religion. To add yet another level of complexity to the debate, there are different contexts for the veil issue. The French context, for example, is not the same as the Turkish context. In the French context, the question of the foulard is tied to the integration of immigrants and the management of the postcolonial experience.

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So, all of sudden, an object of clothing begins to carry tremendous sociological significance and burden, as if we are trying to resolve all these hotly contested issues around this particular symbol. Is the problem of the integration of immigrant youth really solved if the girls do not cover their hair? Is the problem of the line between the public and the private really established in democracies if Muslim girls obey a law that many consider unjust? Is the question of Islam and democracy resolved? No. None of these questions are really addressed. Instead we attach ourselves to this particular object of clothing because it seems to be such an obvious, visible sign of something that we are unable to resolve. Like most secular feminists, I changed my mind about this issue. I began by worrying about this phenomenon, which I had already observed in the mid 1980s in Turkey, much before it became such a huge issue in the rest of the world. I could see young girls beginning to wear the scarves, and this to me was an absolute puzzlement, and very worrisome, because I thought that this was basically a regression and an acceptance of repression through which women became instruments of an ideology that I found objectionable. I cannot exactly put my finger on what made me reconsider this point of view. Discussions within the women’s movement about Islamic feminism, the work of sociologists like Nilufer Gole and Fatima Mernisi, slowly made me realize that this item of clothing does not really mean what we on the surface assume it to mean, namely, a voluntary acceptance on the part of women of secondary-class citizenship. It means rather a moment of identification, and yet what kind of identification? Are these women identifying with Islamic hierarchy or patriarchy, or are they, as I now believe, using an object of clothing to mark their own paradoxical emancipation from the Islamic hierarchy in the home? Many girls from religious family backgrounds want to engage with and emerge into the public sphere. This may be different in France for immigrant families who are anxious to have their children in the public sphere, in the schools, and to be educated as best as they can. But in Turkey these attitudes are still not that widespread. The emergence of women into the public sphere immediately raises the question of “female modesty” and how the rules of Islam governing the female body can be observed in the public sphere. By the way, in Orthodox Judaism as well the showing of women’s hair is haram, a taboo. Therefore, many Orthodox Jewish women wear wigs, and you do not know that they are not showing their real hair. Today many

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Muslim women are also wearing wigs so that you do not know that they are not showing their real hair. And what is really the problem if they are not? I am more interested in women’s education, professionalism, work, and presence in the public sphere than in what they choose to reveal of themselves or not, whether it is their hair or a wig or whatever. The whole foulard affair has a theatrical or a performance aspect; there is constant play. We need to pay attention to the volatility of consciousness and naming. I pointed out yesterday that in French, the original term used was le foulard (scarf), which then changed to le voile (veil).5 However, I don’t think that le voile was really an issue for the schoolgirls. It is only basically women coming from the Wahhabi background, or from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, who wear le voile. The majority of women and girls from Tunisia, Algeria, and Turkey do not wear le voile, which covers the whole face or covers forehead and mouth but leaves the nose exposed. Now we also have the “turban,” which is different from the foulard; the turban is basically a piece of cloth wrapped around the head, and it is what Muslim men used to wear. Many girls now are wearing the turban like a bandanna, un bandeau—the way Simone de Beauvoir used to wear in her later years! So the whole practice of the scarf is going through an instability of signification, and there is a lot of play with different items of clothing. It is assuming carnivalesque proportions. It is too bad that neither the French state nor the Turkish state have enough of a sense of humor to understand the games that women are playing! This is also part of the work of culture.

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3 / GLOBAL JUSTICE A N D T H E R E N E WA L O F THE CRITICA L T H E O RY T R A D I T I O N Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill Nancy Fraser

Gabriel Rockhill: A large portion of your project is premised on establishing an account of the contemporary situation in politics and political philosophy. In Justice Interruptus (1997), you situate your project in relationship to the “post-socialist condition.” Could you explain how your work is informed by and is reacting to this “condition”? In your most recent work, you tend to situate your project in relationship to the “global age.” How does globalization relate to what you call the “post-socialist condition,” and how do you see your work evolving in relationship to its historical context? Nancy Fraser: Let me start with the “post-socialist condition.” I coined this term in the mid 1990s to characterize the predominant mood following the fall of communism, in which an apparently delegitimated social egalitarianism gave way to a miraculously resurrected free-market fundamentalism. Whenever I use the expression “post-socialist condition,” then, I put it in scare quotes to indicate that I am referring to an ideological trope. It’s not, in other words, that I myself think socialism is irrelevant; rather, this was the common sense of the age. Naming an epochal shift in the grammar of political claims making, the phrase signaled the fact that many progressive social actors had ceased couching their claims in terms of distributive justice and were resorting instead to new discourses of identity and difference. In this shift “from redistribution to recognition,” as I called it, presumptively emancipatory movements such as feminism and antiracism, which previously militated for social equality, began in the post–cold war era to reinvent themselves as practitioners of the politics of recognition. In writing of the “post-socialist condition,” then, I aimed to call attention to the decentering of the socialist imaginary, which had oriented left-wing struggles for a

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century and a half. I also sought to contextualize that sea change in political culture in relation to the spectacular rise of neoliberalism, whose proponents could only rejoice in the decline of social egalitarianism. It was this constellation, in which identity politics dovetailed all too neatly with neoliberalism, that constituted the “post-socialist” mood. More recently, however, I have come to realize that something else was going on as well, which brings me to the notion of the “global” that you mentioned. So let’s fast-forward ahead to 2003, when I started writing about the “problem of the frame.” That is my expression for the new uncertainty that prevails today about the proper way of setting the bounds of justice and thus of deciding whose interests should count. In the cold war era, this “frame” issue was not a live question, as it generally went without saying that the unit within which justice applied was the modern territorial state. Today, however, that “Westphalian” framing of justice is in dispute, as transnational social movements of various kinds are foregrounding transborder injustices and seeking to remap the bounds of justice on a broader scale. Struck by the new salience of this “politics of framing,” I realized that my conception of the “post-socialist condition” had overlooked something important. By not posing the question of the frame explicitly, by writing about the politics of redistribution and recognition as if we already knew the proper bounds of those struggles, I had inadvertently ratified the default, Westphalian, position and foreclosed alternative possibilities. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, I have come to see that the shift from redistribution to recognition was actually part of a deeper shift from an era in which the Westphalian frame went without saying to one in which it has become contested. Thus my diagnosis of the times has altered. To my earlier conception, centered on the conjunction of neoliberalism and identity politics, I would now add another element: the current sense of uncertainty about the frame. This last element seems to me to be a defining feature of the present Zeitgeist. Alfredo Gomez-Muller: Regarding the notion of “post-socialism,” could it be said today that it is a concept no longer operative from the point of view of political analysis or political struggles insofar as it refers to a precise historical experience and seems to liquidate the entire political and theoretical heritage of the struggles for emancipation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which today still play a very important role in the imaginary of political emancipation?

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NF: Yes and no. I don’t want to link the decline of the socialist imaginary too tightly to the collapse of Soviet Union and really existing communism. As I see it, the problem runs deeper than that. If it had only been communism, then the problematic of socialist egalitarianism would have still resonated after 1989, more than before even, as democratic socialists would have finally been rid of the Stalinist albatross. But that is not in fact what happened. Far from empowering the democratic left, the fall of communism seemed to suck the energy out of movements with social egalitarian aspirations. That was obvious in Eastern Europe, where the most naive romance of the market led to an orgy of privatization and speculation, but the West European left was also demoralized. Faced with the apparent “triumph of capitalism,” many social democrats lost their nerve and rushed to accommodate neoliberalism. All this, too, belongs to the “post-socialist condition.” But let me be clear. I am not saying that there no longer exist movements oriented to egalitarian redistribution or people who consider themselves socialists—I myself am one of them! However, such currents are isolated and on the defensive. Certainly major labor and left-wing political parties no longer articulate claims for distributive justice in a serious way,at least at the national level. However, if we look instead at the transnational level, the picture is different. There, we can see some emancipatory radical-egalitarian energies. Notwithstanding the INGO-ification of transnational politics and the bureaucratization of “Europe,” which are highly problematic, some such energies have found a home in and around the World Social Forum. Whatever its defects, the WSF has served as a space of left-wing communication and mobilization, especially concerning the problem of the frame I just spoke of. Here, at the transnational level, the Westphalian frame is contested by movements aiming to enlarge the bounds of justice. This is the level I now look to for emancipatory egalitarian currents that could challenge the “post-socialist” common sense of the present era. GR: I would like to ask you a methodological question regarding the role of totality in your work. You have presented your project at times as an attempt to theorize capitalist society as a totality by combining moral philosophy, social theory, and political analysis. Could you discuss why it is important to reject the poststructuralist idée reçue according to which the “totality” is forever inaccessible? I would also be interested in hearing what you have to say about the role of culture—in the aesthetic sense of the term—in your critical

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theory of society. Thus far, the domain of aesthetics has been largely absent from your work when compared with other critical theorists interested in providing a total theory of society. Would you be willing to shed some light on this issue by relating it to your overall methodological project? NF: Let me split your question into two parts, beginning with the issue of totality. I certainly understand why you characterize my orientation on this question as antipoststructuralist, as there was a time in which I did defend the project of theorizing the social totality against such critics as Lyotard. Today, however, poststructuralism is not the primary target of my intervention. In Redistribution or Recognition? I meant rather to stake out a position against antitotalizing currents within Critical Theory itself. Historically, as you know, the Frankfurt School championed interdisciplinary inquiry integrating philosophical reflection with empirical social research. The idea was to develop a broad picture of the era’s characteristic power asymmetries and injustices, its social fault lines and political dilemmas, its emancipatory aspirations and transformative possibilities. At present, however, that ambitious totalizing project has been abandoned by most of the “third generation” of critical theorists in favor of a more modest disciplinary division of labor. Axel Honneth and I are virtually alone among this post-Habermasian generation in remaining committed to the project of an interdisciplinary “critical social theory.” Most of our colleagues are doing free-standing moral philosophy or political theory or legal theory, as if it were possible to think about such matters in isolation from contemporary capitalism and culture. That is not possible, in my view. As I see it, many so-called critical theorists have unwittingly capitulated to the forms of professional specialization that organize bourgeois academia, if I may use such a provocative term. In any case, it was there, within the universe of critical theory, that I meant to defend the project of theorizing the social totality in Redistribution or Recognition? In contrast, I don’t see myself fighting battles with poststructuralism today. In the past, I did fight those battles to a certain extent, although even then I always had one foot in both camps, being one of the few thinkers who sought to integrate the best insights of Habermas and Foucault. But now, with the passing of Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, and other key figures of that great generation, left-wing poststructuralism doesn’t seem to me a live project, with the possible exception of Judith Butler, whose work I greatly admire.

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In the end, moreover, my argument for theorizing the social totality is less philosophical than political. I understand perfectly well all the reasons— philosophical and epistemological—why one can never achieve a definitive totalization. But the question remains whether an emancipatory politics nevertheless needs a large-scale working picture of its time, what we in the New Left used to call “an analysis.” I think it does. Absent such picture, one lacks an orientation, a sense of where one is going and of where the obstacles and opportunities lie. Then, too, absent an account of the deep structural sources of injustice, which discloses the hidden connections among apparently discrete “social problems,” it is all too easy to fall into the sort of single-issue politics that is so prevalent—and so inadequate—today. I could give you lots of examples, including that of second-wave feminism, of how, for want of an account of the social totality, a potentially transformative movement has devolved into an interest group. Against the grain of current fashion, then, I continue to hope for a left that is oriented toward large-scale social transformation, grounded in a totalizing “analysis.” Now let me come to the second part of your question, concerning culture. You are right that culture has entered my theorizing in a limited way, tailored to a specific purpose. For at least ten years, my thinking has been aimed at developing an expanded theory of justice, capable of integrating the problematic of recognition with that of distribution and, more recently, with that of representation. As a result, I have been interested in culture only insofar as it is a medium of injustice. For this project, I take the relevant slice of culture to be institutionalized patterns of value that regulate social interaction. When such patterns are hierarchical, I claim, the effect is to impede some actors from participating on a par with others in social interaction. That, for me, is the very definition of injustice in general—and of misrecognition in particular. Thus, unlike Honneth and Taylor, I understand the wrong of misrecognition in terms of status subordination. For me, accordingly, to be misrecognized is to be denied the status of a peer, or full partner in social life, by virtue of institutionalized hierarchies of cultural value. Seen this way, via the “status model,” injustices of misrecognition are unlike those of maldistribution in that they are rooted in the status order, as opposed to the economic structure, of society. It is this aspect of culture, as the medium for elaborating hierarchies of status, which has been my primary focus. For me, accordingly, the principal task of cultural analysis is to understand how institutionalized significations and norms entrench differential capacities for social participation. In general,

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then, my work addresses culture only in this one, very limited sense. But, of course, this limited sense is not unrelated to other, more “aesthetic” notions of culture. One can analyze film, for example, to illuminate the processes by which cultural representations filter down to everyday life and reshape mentalities, reinforcing or challenging hierarchical patterns of value. One can analyze, too, the processes by which such representations affect people’s self-understandings, inflect their views of what’s just, and subtly make their effects felt in the political public sphere. Of course, I am a social philosopher, not a scholar of cultural studies, so I don’t usually perform such analyses myself. But the bottom line is that I am interested in culture from the standpoint of the theory of (in)justice, of which it forms an essential part. AGM: Authors like Kymlicka criticize the fact that, in approaches to cultural justice, demands for cultural justice “in the strict sense” are often assimilated to other types of identity claims (gender, sex, etc.). In your reflections on the question of recognition, you mention cultural recognition among other types of recognition. Isn’t there a problem in this insofar as there is a specificity to demands of cultural justice, which refer back to the specificity of culture as the place of production of the symbolic, that is to say of meaning and of value? NF: I see no problem in trying to develop a general account of recognition that can illuminate the entire range of claims and struggles that you mention. Quite the opposite, actually. That is precisely what I think a theory of recognition should do! For me, the difficulty lies elsewhere, in the widespread use of the phrase politics of recognition as a synonym for identity politics. Implying that the only meaning of recognition is the affirmation of group specificity, that use muddies important distinctions among different kinds of recognition, such as universalist or deconstructive recognition. It was in hopes of promoting “transformative” alternatives that I have argued against the reduction of the politics of recognition to identity politics. That argument cut two ways: first, it countered economistic thinkers, like the American writer Thomas Frank, who propose to throw out the baby of nonidentitarian recognition claims with the bathwater of identity politics; second, it encouraged feminists and multiculturalists to depsychologize their struggles by adopting a nonidentitarian politics of recognition focused on changing social institutions. In response to Frank, then, I am saying that there exist genuine injustices of misrecognition that cannot be reduced to maldistribution and

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that demand attention in their own right. In response to identitarian currents of feminism and multiculturalism, I am saying that the core injustice of misrecognition is not deformed identity but status hierarchy—hence, that the right response is not necessarily to affirm group-specific identity but to deinstitutionalize hierarchical patterns of culture value that impede parity of participation and to replace them with patterns that foster parity. To both sides, then, I am saying that there exists another kind of politics of recognition, which concerns culture in the limited sense I just described. This approach differs from that of Kymlicka, who is concerned with culture in a different sense—a sense even narrower, I think, than mine. In his case, the focus is on issues such as whether minority-language-group children must receive school instruction in the language spoken in their families, whether minority national or religious holidays are officially celebrated, whether minority language speakers have resources to support film and theatrical production, etc. These are cultural issues in a very specific—predominantly linguistic—sense, narrower, as I said, than my own. Like Kymlicka, I maintain that such issues raise genuine questions of justice, that a society that gets them wrong will entrench injustices in the sense of disparities of participation. But he would agree, I think, that it is equally important to address status inequities that result from other kinds of institutionalized value hierarchies. In other words, not all valid claims for recognition concern disadvantages that result from the sharing of political space by majority and minority language groups; and not all seek to validate linguistic pluralism. Some injustices of misrecognition arise, rather, from institutionalized patterns of cultural value that overarch all language groups. Such injustices could very well remain in force, even after minority language rights have been secured. In some cases, they could even be reinforced through such rights. For this reason, I am skeptical of Kymlicka’s equation of culture with language and of his notion of a “societal culture.” Both of those notions seem to me to invite essentialization of complex identities and reification of cross-cutting social divisions. In general, then, I am saying that, while Kymlicka’s pluralist model may seem apropos for the situation of Canadian francophones, it is not helpful for understanding other kinds of misrecognition—for example, those rooted in institutionalized gender hierarchies, which subtend every Canadian language group, even if not in precisely the same way. Certainly, these two cases suggest different pictures of “the cultural aspect of oppression.” But the question is: is there a conception of recognition that can comprehend both of

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them? In my view, the pluralist model cannot satisfactorily deal with the second (gendered) one. In contrast, the status model illuminates both. Both cases can be usefully analyzed as denials of participatory parity that are effectuated through the institutionalization of hierarchical patterns of cultural value. Hence both cases demand a political response that aims to deinstitutionalize those value patterns in favor of alternatives that promote parity. AGM: It seems to me that Kymlicka raises the question of cultural justice in contexts of cultural oppression. At root there is the demand for cultural recognition, which does not necessarily imply identity-based deviations, that is to say, ideological and political conceptions that conceive of identity in essentialist and substantialist terms. I understand your distrust regarding these conceptions, and I have the impression that it is in order to avoid this risk that you pose the problem of cultural justice in terms of pure justice or law. You say in one of your articles that “it’s not because human beings need culture that we need to recognize the right to culture, it’s because oppression is unjust.” It is necessary to struggle against cultural oppression because it is unjust, but not because cultural belonging is a fundamental need for human beings. Why is it necessary to dissociate the two levels, the juridico-political level and the anthropological level of the relationship of the subject to his or her culture(s) of belonging? NF: Let me start by clearing up one small point: it’s not the case that I conflate justice with law. For me, justice and law are not on the same level. In my conception, justice consists in the absence of socially institutionalized obstacles to participatory parity. Law, in contrast, is one among several different vehicles through which such obstacles can be institutionalized. Thus, while some obstacles to participation, such as the prohibition on gay marriage, are directly and expressly juridified, others are institutionalized nonjuridically— via market processes, family forms, professional cultures, communicative constructions, and/or informal practices in civil society. It follows that not all recognition struggles are properly directed at legal change; some, rather, should target these other modes of institutionalization. But let me turn now to the main point of your question. Why, you ask, do I dissociate the theory of justice from the “anthropological need for culture”? The first reason is that I am unsure that there exists such an “anthropological need.” That idea is but one among many rival comprehensive theories of hu-

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man being, all of which are hotly contested. I strongly doubt the argument among these rival views will be definitively settled any time soon. All the more reason, then, not to mortgage a political conception of justice to any one sectarian view, which could very well turn out to be wrong. In my view, a political conception of justice should be nonsectarian, compatible with a variety of different philosophical anthropologies. This is an insight I learned from John Rawls, with whom I disagreed about much else. The second reason is that the idea of an anthropological need for culture suggests a picture of the world in which everyone has or desires one and only one cultural home, which is sharply bounded and distinguished from others, and which should be valued and preserved intact. Whatever its merits for earlier times (which I doubt!), this picture is deeply at odds with forms of life in the present era of globalization. In today’s world of transcultural interaction, hybridization is so intense that no one can say authoritatively where one culture ends and another one begins. To speak of a deep anthropological need for a valued cultural home in this context can only be nostalgic and conservative. A more fruitful approach would interrogate power asymmetries among peoples who identify with different cultures, with the aim of disclosing injustices—in the sense of obstacles to parity of participation. But the question still remains, how are such obstacles best dismantled? It is understandable that groups of people who feel they are too small and powerless to attain parity in a large social arena may want to withdraw into a smaller arena as if to say, “at least give us control over this!” In some cases, that could be an appropriate strategy for achieving a semblance of parity, but it is not always the best way. GR: I want to ask you a question about one of the strategies that you regularly use for finessing the borders between economics and culture, a strategy that I would call the dialectic of false antitheses. Whether it is recognition and redistribution, monologism and proceduralism, affirmative and transformative remedies, the work of Benhabib and Butler, or other “apparent opposites,” you often seek to overcome dichotomies while nonetheless maintaining analytic distinctions between the two elements that are synthesized, making for a veritable Aufhebung. Could you discuss the role of this strategy in your work and situate it historically in relationship to the Hegelian and Marxist traditions? Secondly, I wanted to know if you saw any risks in deploying the same logic in rather heteroclite situations. Is there a danger of imposing this logic on the world rather than simply discovering it? For example, you refuse many of

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the traditional labels in political theory (liberalism versus communitarianism, social democracy versus multiculturalism, etc.) in order to recast all of these movements in terms of two key concepts: redistribution (including Marxism, the welfare state, the Anglo-American liberal tradition, etc.) and recognition (including the communitarian tradition, multiculturalism, deconstruction, etc.). Many authors would reject these classifications as oversimplifications. NF: There is indeed a Hegelian spirit hovering over much of my work, aimed at reconciling false antitheses. But it is tempered by another, countervailing sprit, which insists on the reality of conflict and opposes premature reconciliation. Focusing on the first of these moments, you rightly note my tendency to reject “either/or” constructions in favor of “both/and” ones, which kicks in whenever I see something of value in each of two commonly opposed positions—or, conversely, when I see a blind spot in each position and find neither to be adequate as it stands. In such cases, my Hegelian instincts surface, leading me to try to reconcile such false antitheses as Habermas versus Foucault, critical theory versus poststructuralism, and redistribution versus recognition. In the last case, I responded, in the mid-1990s, to the sharp polarization, especially in the United States, between multiculturalism and social democracy by insisting that the left need not be forced into this Hobson’s choice, because there was a way to integrate the legitimate concerns of both sides. That move expressed my Hegelian instincts. But it was immediately complicated by another, anti-Hegelian, impulse, which pulled in the opposite direction. Alert to the dangers of false, premature reconciliation, that second impulse led me to focus on the actual tensions between the two political orientations. Thus I insisted, first, that reconciling redistribution and recognition was conceptually possible and highly desirable, but that, second, it was easier said than done, given that dominant (identitarian) forms of recognition politics typically work against the usual (affirmative) forms of redistributive politics. No true Aufhebung is possible, insofar as these tensions are real. They cannot be definitively overcome but only finessed. In Redistribution or Recognition?, accordingly, I devote a great deal of attention to analyzing the perverse unintended consequences that recognition struggles can have for redistribution struggles—and vice versa—and to devising conceptual strategies through which such consequences can be mitigated. I insist, in other words, that these two political orientations do not automatically harmonize through a snap of the fingers. Rather, they need to be worked through.

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GR: Although I’d be surprised to learn of any direct influence, this reminds me of Paul Ricoeur’s work and what I would call his dialectic of reconciliation. Rather than a negative dialectic, there is an attempt to bring forth and combine the best elements from two opposing theses while simultaneously recognizing that there can never be a simple synthesis. NF: That’s an interesting observation. I don’t know Ricoeur’s work very well. But your description makes me think that on this point at least he and I have something in common. As you say, my own approach is neither a straightforward Hegelian dialectic nor a straightforward negative dialectic. AGM: In the realm of action, can one and must one “reconcile” transformative politics and affirmative politics, to use the terminology of your article from 1995 on the “dilemmas” of justice in a “post-socialist” era? In this text, you maintain that only transformative methods allow for an effective struggle against cultural injustice since “vulgar multiculturalism,” which is a simple affirmative solution, does not act at the level of the causes of ethnicocultural segregation. However, is this really possible? Is it possible to set up a purely transformative politics? Isn’t it necessary to combine these two political models according to the circumstances? NF: You have just recapitulated my own argument in Redistribution or Recognition?! In that 2003 book I modified the 1995 formulation you cited, which appeared inadequate for exactly the reasons you said. In the interim, I came to see that I had formulated the contrast between affirmative and transformative remedies in an overly abstract and decontextualized way. To correct that, I went back to a largely forgotten French thinker of the New Left, whom my students had never heard of: André Gorz. In Strategy for Labor, Gorz introduced the idea of “nonreformist reforms”: reforms that appear in the abstract to be affirmative, insofar as they don’t directly challenge the deep structures that generate injustice, but that nevertheless could, in a given context, have longterm transformative effects, insofar as they alter the balance of power in ways that enable more radical claims later on. Put differently, nonreformist reforms set in motion a trajectory that becomes increasingly transformative over time, even though they start out as affirmative. This conception proved useful to me, as it softened the overly sharp distinction with which I had begun and enabled more nuanced, context-sensitive consideration of political possibilities.

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GR: Concerning the evolution of your work, it is arguable that your most recent publications are generally more optimistic about democratic potential than your earlier writings. I would like to ask you about the nature of democratic dialogue and, more specifically, about the role of the mass media, economic interests, professional politicians, and ideological matrices in the fabrication and manipulation of what is perceived as free public opinion and open democratic debate. Is there ever a pure form of dialogical proceduralism uncontaminated by political imaginaries, ideological constructs, and various networks of power relations? To what extent is it necessary to take into account the constraints and norms that preprogram supposedly “democratic” dialogue? NF: Your question fascinates me because it offers a third-person view of my work that is at odds with my own first-person experience of it. From “the inside” I feel more pessimistic than ever about the state of the world and the left. As an American trying to survive the age of Bush, I can assure you that I feel no optimism whatever! No thinking person can live in the United States today, as I do, and not be revolted by the existing state of so-called democratic publicity. The distortions are so egregious that they need to be made central to any critical theory of the present. Alas, however, they play little role in much of contemporary “deliberative democracy,” which is blithely unconcerned with the powerful forces that skew actually existing communication in contemporary society. As it turns out, I have been thinking lately about how to renew the critical theory of the public sphere. In a recent essay, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere,” I reconstructed the debates from Habermas’s 1962 book through Between Facts and Norms so as to make visible the “Westphalian” presuppositions of all the contributors, including myself. The result was to recast the whole problem of “democratic publicity.” However hard it may have been earlier to understand how publicity could play a democratic emancipatory role within a territorial state, it is incomparably more difficult to imagine such a thing under current conditions, when not only the issues debated but also the powers that distort communication are transterritorial. In the present era, we have to deal somehow not only with the sorts of structural distortions you noted but also with their exacerbation via transnationalization—of production, finance, governance, and communication. These conditions vastly compound the familiar difficulties. What could it possibly mean for public opinion to be democratically legitimate and politically efficacious,

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when it is neither formulated by fellow citizens, who putatively enjoy a shared status of political equality, nor addressed to a sovereign state with the capacity to implement the interlocutors’ will and solve their problems? And yet, despite these mind-boggling deformations, we have no medium other than “democratic” publicity for waging political struggles, including struggles that contest these distortions. (Assuming, as I do, that we want to put aside military means.) What that means is that we have to imagine ways of converting a vicious circle into a virtuous spiral. The vicious circle is obvious enough: those with less power have less voice, which means that the powerful determine both the political agenda and political outcomes, which in turn means that the powerless not only remain such but actually lose voice over time. The virtuous spiral is harder to envision: movements of the less powerful acquire enough voice to win some reforms, however modest, that level the playing field to some degree, however slight, which augments their political voice in the next round, enabling somewhat less modest reforms and so on. I’m not optimistic in the empirical sense that I expect to see such virtuous spirals develop on a broad scale in the near future. But I insist on the conceptual possibility. GR: Your position nonetheless shows signs of a rather robust optimism in democratic participation. Is it possible that democratic participation itself is already constructed and coded in such a way that what can be said in the public sphere simply amounts to a solicited set of possible statements, which generally correspond to the yes/no binary favored by the statistical quantification of “public opinion”? Hasn’t democracy become, at least in part, an intermittent charade of human freedom that is ritualistically reactivated according to the chronological laws imposed by electoral calendars? If there is at least a grain of truth to these characterizations, do you see this as causing problems for “democratic participation”? NF: Absolutely. However, I have the impression that you and I may mean something different by “democratic participation.” I do not limit democratic participation to claims making in the official political arena of a state. I also include para-organization and subaltern contestation in what I once called “subaltern counterpublics.” Struggles for political voice also belong, in my view, in the category of “democratic participation,” even when they seek to change the boundaries and meaning of that expression. But I am tempted to turn your

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question around. I believe that the new social movements in the United States put too much of their energy in the last two decades into such parastruggles, effectively abdicating the official national political public sphere. In abstaining from electoral politics, they effectively abandoned that terrain to the right, with what disastrous results we all know. Here, then, is another of those both/ and situations. Social justice movements need to participate simultaneously in both types of arenas, subaltern and official. It is not an either/or choice. AGM: The conceptual couple of the just and the good, which has been maintained by the deontologists, is at the core of the liberal conception of democracy. In certain of your texts from the 1990s, you appropriate this distinction, which seems to me to rest on relatively problematic political, ideological, and anthropological elements. The debate between the liberals and the communitarians, for example, has shed sufficient light on the problematic aspect of the individualist-atomistic presuppositions that underlie this distinction, which is in fact a specific historical construct. Today, how do you view the couple of the just and the good? Is it a framework capable of universalization or a contingent production that is proper to certain Western political cultures, and which could be modified? Rawls’s work sometimes gives the impression that it is an immutable structure. NF: Certainly, the distinction between the right and the good emerged historically. It arose from, and makes sense in, specifically modern contexts that have experienced or absorbed the fruits of the Protestant reformation—or something analogous—and it supposes that individuals are the basic units of moral concern, whose autonomy deserves respect. So, yes, I agree with the thrust of your own analysis. Nevertheless, I endorse this distinction and the related thesis of the priority of the right over the good. The communitarian alternative, which posits a transcendent good that binds even those who reject it, is not defensible in contexts of ethical pluralism. Granted, the priority of the right has a historical genesis and is associated with the West (despite possible non-Western analogues). But we should distinguish the question of its genesis from that of its validity. As I see it, moreover, the view that the individual is the basic unit of moral concern does not represent a pernicious antisocial individualism. It in no way denies the existence or value of community ties and affiliations; it simply asks us to evaluate such arrangements in terms of their effects on individu-

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als. The reason is that in the end it is individuals who bleed and suffer and die. So that’s where the ultimate reckoning of injustice has to be made. Thus, it is not the case, as Michael Sandel once assumed, that those who accord moral primacy to individuals necessarily subscribe to an atomistic ontology that neglects solidarities and communities. What led Sandel to that mistaken view, I think, was a confusion of levels. He failed to appreciate that one can consistently oppose liberalism as an economic philosophy and as a social ontology (in Margaret Thatcher’s sense of “there is no such thing as society”), while endorsing it politically, as an alternative to communitarianism, which conditions social support for community life on individual protections, such as the rights of dissent and exit. Such rights, which are very important for the dominated fractions within communities, including women, must be understood as individual freedoms. This does not mean that communities are unimportant; it means only that they do not get a green light to oppress individuals. AGM: In the work of Taylor and Sandel, it seems to me that these rights to critique are not called into question. Moreover, Taylor sees himself as a “liberal holist.” NF: I wouldn’t try to pigeonhole Taylor. He’s a complicated and original thinker who has one foot in each camp. The question for me is not whether or not he is a liberal, but whether or not his position is coherent. I would ask the same question about Michael Walzer, who claims to be a liberal of a certain (nonstandard) kind, but who turns out on many pressing political issues to lack sufficient respect for the right to dissent, and whose communitarian Zionist loyalties led him to some positions that I consider truly shameful . . . AGM: Concerning the war in Iraq? NF: Yes, definitely. As I see it, Walzer’s support for the Iraq war was dictated by, and instrumentally subordinated to, his Zionism. That said, I must add right away that I nevertheless admire him as a theorist, especially as a theorist of “just war.” I am convinced that had he applied that theory in a genuinely unbiased fashion he would have opposed the invasion of Iraq.

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CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES O N C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S

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4 / ACCOUNTING FOR A PH I L O S O P H I C I T I N E R A RY Genealogies of Power and Ethics of Nonviolence Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill Judith Butler

Gabriel Rockhill: If you were asked to give an account of your intellectual itinerary, how would you describe the overall trajectory of your work to date? Is there—as some claim for Foucault—an ethical turn in your most recent publications, distinguishing them from what would have been an earlier political period? Is it possible, in regard to your work, to speak of two distinct domains: the ethical and the political? Or are you trying to work in ways that are irreducible to what is traditionally understood by these two terms? Judith Butler: Well, first of all, I would say that to give any account of myself or my scholarly trajectory is very difficult for me. I wrote an entire book on the difficulty of giving an account of oneself, and I’m afraid every time I try to give an account, I fail. With that failure in mind, I can only answer your questions partially and poorly. I think it is true that for many years I resisted the ethical. I thought that the ethical was a way of vacating politics or of rejecting politics, but I no longer think that’s true. I think there are ethical quandaries that emerge in the midst of situations of power, so for me these are not radically distinct domains. I would refuse an absolute distinction between the ethical and the political. I would say, for instance, when one thinks about violence and nonviolence, there is an ethical question that emerges in the midst of politics, and I think it has to do with the question of whether there are ways of responding to violence that do not engage revenge. This is a very old question; one can find it pursued in the Agamemnon. But for me this question of whether one can respond to injury in a noninjurious way is a question that is ethical, and it emerges in the midst of political passion and for a subject overwhelmed by political passion. It emerges when one’s territory has been attacked or when one feels that there is no other

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action in the face of state violence. And yet it is an ethical question because one becomes violent in response to being violated, and then where are we? Is there a possibility for pause and reflection in the midst of such a passion? On this question I have found myself having to turn to ethics. That said, it is probably important to underscore that I haven’t turned to ethics in a more general sense. I’m not interested in all ethical questions, and I’m not interested in justifying or delineating the domain of ethics as an autonomous domain. That’s not interesting. I mean maybe people can or should do this, but I would not be the one to do this, since it is the emergence of the ethical within the political that concerns me primarily. GR: Do you see lines of continuity between the questions undergirding your early publications and your more recent preoccupations in the work that you’ve been doing around certain ethical questions? JB: I don’t think I’ve always been preoccupied with questions of ethics, although it is probably important to note that Spinoza’s Ethics was one of the very first books of philosophy I read, a book that introduced me to philosophical thinking at a young age. I think that ethical questions have become more explicit for me in my most recent work. I think that if there is a single theme that I would identify as unifying my work—maybe all my work—I would say it’s the theme of desire and recognition. But when one starts thinking more carefully about recognition—through what terms is it given? what are its risks and promises?—it turns out to have an ethical and a political dimension, so perhaps through the notion of recognition one could find an implicit or nascent emergence of the ethical. GR: Concerning the question of recognition, you’ve problematized this term and concept on numerous occasions, particularly in your most recent work, by emphasizing—as you did at the beginning of our conversation—the impossibility of an absolute and complete recognition of oneself or of others. How is it that this impossibility of recognition can actually be constitutive of something like an ethical act? How is the impossibility of recognition itself an essential aspect of what we call recognition? JB: One could turn very easily to the Lévinasian critique of Hegel to answer that question. For Lévinas, the problem is not to recognize the other—he

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describes the encounter with the other in different terms. Hegelian recognition involves finding that the other is like myself, that we are structurally similar, and that our recognition of the other is fundamentally a recognition of likeness. For Lévinas, the radical exteriority of the other is what must be registered or affirmed or encountered, but, strictly speaking, one does not recognize the radical exteriority of the other: radical exteriority undoes the notion of recognition. It’s what makes recognition necessarily failed. So I could try to offer recognition to another, but, for it to work, it must fail, which means that it would have to be a recognition that would be open-ended and unsuccessful in that regard. It would have to be a recognition that fails to capture the other. Of course, most critics of Hegel fear that recognition is always a form of mastery or assimilation. I don’t quite believe that, but I do believe that one must respond to that criticism. To answer, one must point out that there may well be forms of recognition that do not presume to know the other in advance of knowing the other, and that kind of recognition would take the form of a question: “who are you?” The question “who are you?” can be a form of recognition. Kept open, the question is a relation to the other for which no determinate answers will ever completely satisfy. If they did satisfy, that would negate the futurity of the other, the other as one who is becoming as well as my relation to the other as something that is perpetually open. So it’s true that recognition has changed for me. And this is complicated because at a political and legal level I have also argued that there must be norms of recognition in place for certain lives to be construed as intelligible or viable. Norms of recognition are necessary, say, for minority communities, for gender minorities, for various stateless peoples. They’re absolutely necessary for some intelligibility to be conferred and even for the subject in question to understand oneself as intelligible. But then there’s always a risk: one does not want the subject’s intelligibility fully captured or determined by the norm of recognition either. So how does one reconcile the politically necessary norms of recognition with the ethical mandate to keep the question “who are you?” open? For me, these two imperatives are in a kind of necessary tension. GR: Does this mean that you think of recognition more in terms of a dynamic process than an ontological state?

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JB: Yes. GR: And would the shift from ontological questions to questions of action, practice and performance be indicative of a methodological tendency in your work? Would it be correct to say that you generally reject ontological questions concerning the nature of things in order to analyze the dynamic processes that are then labeled as things, or do you find that to be an incorrect characterization of one of the strategies you deploy? JB: I’m very interested in ontology, i.e., when and where one can say “I am” such a thing, when you are this or that category. But I think that ontologies are constituted within certain fields of intelligibility, so for me there’s always a question prior to ontology, which is the question of power and what it orchestrates: who or what can be, has the power to be, and what allows someone or something to emerge into the field of ontology? Early on I used Foucault to ask about the operations of power and discourse that allowed, say, certain ontologies of gender to form or to become deformed. Perhaps I would still use that framework in some way, but I do think that achieving an ontological determination is a contingent process; those that are achieved can be unachieved, they can be undone or called into question in various ways. The possibility of a critical intervention into an established field of ontology must also be at work. I don’t know if that answers your question—it’s maybe a way to approach it from the side. GR: It definitely addresses some of the basic issues. I’m curious about how these ontologies—as they’re constituted out of what I assume are sociohistoric conditions of possibility—are formed or how they take on weight. Are they institutionalized practices? Are they socially recognized norms? Are they culturally accepted modes of behavior? How do you understand these ontologies once they take on weight? JB: I think you could take a notion like gender and say that two genders are built up over time, that there’s a sedimentation of practices, and that these practices are structured by norms that produce the effects of a certain kind of ontological givenness. So what you call “weight” seems to me to be the effect of the uncontested sedimentation of norms. Those very genders that we think of as having achieved a kind of ontological weightiness, however, can be made

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lighter, exposed as more fragile and less established, and all this depends on what happens in the course of the reiteration of norms. So sedimentation, which is a term from the late Husserl, could be understood as one process where norms and practices reiterate over time to produce a kind of effect of weight and gravity and givenness. But iterability is presupposed by every version of sedimentation, and if we have a notion of iterability—which I think Jacques Derrida has given us—that opens up the process of repetition to the possibilities of desedimentation, fluidity, decomposition, or recomposition. GR: I would like to ask you about the role of genealogy in your work. It seems that the genealogies that you’ve done, up to now at least, are genealogies of the present, if I can use this expression. What I mean is that you focus on the ways in which certain sedimented norms dominate the present and can potentially be desedimented by counter-practices. On the contrary, Foucault, from whom you acknowledge borrowing the term and concept, mainly does genealogies of the past, even if he regularly brings his historical work to bear on the present. Why do you tend to privilege the contemporary in what we might loosely call your genealogies? Does the present play a special role for you? Would you be interested in doing genealogies of the past à la Foucault or is that a project that is distinct from your own? JB: First of all, let me say that in the introduction to the second volume of the History of Sexuality Foucault makes very clear that a return to the premodern is necessary for the genealogy of the present. And it’s precisely because certain notions of the self have become problematic for him in the present that he must make the premodern turn, and he makes it precisely in order to interrogate those questions. I very much doubt that I would ever be capable of being a very good historian. I think that because I’m trained in philosophy I don’t have that disciplinary range. However, my particular limitations should not be misconstrued as a methodological opposition. It’s just not what I have to offer. I’m trained in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy and certainly twentieth-century French thought. I am interested in the history of philosophy, and I’m extremely interested in all of the scholarship that is done in the history of sexuality, or the history of the notion of the subject, or even the history of the emergence of the notion of norms. Yet I’m not sure I could myself conduct these histories, so I avow my dependency on them.

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Genealogy is interesting to me because it encourages us not to think there is a single origin to concepts that exist for us in the present. The idea that a genealogy has multiple origins is extremely interesting to me precisely because one can sometimes look and see how certain historical trajectories converge with one another, or produce new convergences and assemblages of various kinds, and that, very often, can break up a uniform or a monolithic formation. Alfredo Gomez-Muller: I would like to come back to the theme of recognition and the relationship between ethics and politics. When one is confronted with the questions “what is it to recognize someone?” and “must one recognize the other?” there are two important responses that are present today in the ethical and political debates in France, the United States, and elsewhere. One of them concerns the recognition of the other—to borrow Lévinas’s term—as hunger or faim. To recognize the other is to recognize his or her hunger. In other words, it’s the socioeconomic dimension of recognition that is important. This dimension is not new. There is the socialist tradition, among others, which has taken up, in various ways, this aspect of the recognition of the other. Recognition is a matter of recognizing the other as one recognizes a being who is vulnerable and fragile, who has a body, who has material needs. Everything comes down to materiality. The other response consists in recognizing the other as someone who is marked by cultural belonging, which is in tension and is not necessarily based on established essences. Thus, there are two domains of recognition. The question I would like to ask you is do you consider there to be a link between these domains of ethical and political recognition? Or do these two domains seem completely separate to you? JB: It’s interesting that you term the first form of recognition “socioeconomic.” I’m not sure whether you’re suggesting that the Lévinasian approach to the problem has a socioeconomic dimension, because it seems to me that the notion of hunger, of wanting, of being in a state of need, is only one part of the Lévinasian approach to these issues. I think that the idea of the fragility or the precariousness of the other, the fact that the other is subject to wants and to needs, is possibly what necessitates a certain ethical relationship to the other. But let’s set Lévinas aside. I think that what’s interesting about the formulation of the other as hungry or in need is precisely the idea that I have an ethical relation to that

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person regardless of whether I share a common cultural world. Ethics, in this sense, does not presume commonality, unless we want to say that need structures us all, as it surely does. But to say this is also to say that need structures us all regardless of the cultural organization of need. If someone is in need, regardless of whether we share a language or a community or a tradition, that need makes a claim upon me and requires a certain kind of recognition or response. To know that need requires a set of cultural translations, but it is not necessarily to model the other’s need on one’s own. One might say, from a culturalist standpoint, “oh, but I can only offer recognition within an established language or within a certain set of cultural norms,” but I think this is not true. I think when we say that we must recognize another in need, regardless of whether we share a common language, we are saying we must engage in a cultural translation at that moment in which we respond ethically and offer recognition of some kind. So I’m obliged not just to recognize this other with whom I have no common cultural heritage, no common language, but I am also obliged to undergo cultural translation in order that my recognition be given over to the other. So it seems to me there are two ethical demands: to respond to the other and to undergo the traduction culturelle that would make that recognition available. And, of course, what that means is yielding one’s own cultural location in order to give in this way, to give up, to cede one’s cultural location to a degree in order to offer the recognition that is required. There is a connection between the cultural notion of recognition and the socioeconomic, but my firm belief is that one cannot subscribe to a notion of cultural unity or communitarian boundedness as the precondition of any act of recognition, because to be political, to be non-nationalist, to be contemporary, to exist in this globalized world, one needs not only to allow for the encounter of different languages and different norms but to formulate a response within the terms of that difference. The question of recognition takes places precisely there at that encounter; otherwise, it seems to me, we become culturalist and parochial and narrow. This is, in my view, a great danger. AGM: Today, as you know, there are important debates on the universal status of what is called the universal: Is what we call universal really universal or is it based on historically determined cultural horizons? Another debate is on the possibility of a justification and foundation of universality. These are two major questions today regarding the universal. How do you conceive of the

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normative universal in ethics and/or in politics? Do you think that the practical and theoretical postulation of the universal is possible? Or do you think that we should give up on the idea of a universal normative principle? JB: You give me two problems with your questions. The first is the problem of universality and the second is the problem of normativity. How many days do we have? (Laughter.) My sense is that, when we talk about universality, we often assume it is restrained by a logic of noncontradiction, that if something is universal it is not particular, and that it is universal for all time and for all people and there can be no circumstances that would contradict it or at least contradict its status as principle. But I think, in fact, the minute we reconceive universality as a kind of claim, as a kind of position that is taken up in discourse, we claim a right to be universal—it functions more as an adjective in this case—as when we claim a norm to be universal. We posit these rights or these norms as universal: equality, protection against discrimination. We are, I think, acting then in an aspirational way, that is to say, we aspire to these norms, we are bespeaking an aspiration. It seems to me that we’re not so much describing a logical principle as we are bespeaking an aspiration. There are, of course, different languages through which those aspirations can be articulated. When someone posits universality, we have to ask what aspiration is being posited, through what terms, through what vocabulary, in relation to what other set of terms, because it could be in the domain of, say, international human rights that, when one says “universal,” one says a “right.” This is a right that is not supported by positive law or within an existing frame of national sovereignty, so it’s over and against such frames that the universal functions. The human rights claim has a very specific rhetorical point, which is to posit or to call for a new kind of norm that is not necessarily legitimated or instantiated by existing positive law. Now, I think that at that point there is certainly a normativity at work when universal rights are posited, and this is a normativity that is aspired to through the claim. It is conjectured, it is imagined, it is discursively instantiated, we might say, and it is a way of calling into question existing formulations of right and law that do not fully exhaust the domain of a normativity that exceeds positive law. In the same way, I would say—and did say, in my book with Žižek and Laclau—that there are competing versions of universality. How and when certain rights are described as universal depends on context, depends on the mode of address through which the positing occurs, that is, to whom they

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are being addressed, and it depends as well on the existing set of rules or laws against which that positing takes place. For instance, when coalitions, international or transnational, convene on the question of women’s human rights, they disagree on what should be called universal. And this a very interesting problem—the disagreement on what is universal—because if the universal is objective and logical, then everyone is subject to it, no matter what, but if it is disputed and contested, then the formulation must emerge out of a contestation, bear the marks of that contestation, and in this sense operate as discursive, political, and contextual. Now there are some people, like my friend Ernesto Laclau, who just says this is impossible. We can’t have competing universalities. Universality must be true for everyone and under all conditions. Now, I respect Ernesto very much, but here we disagree, but perhaps Étienne Balibar agrees with me on this point. He thinks that, in fact, the notion of cultural translation presupposes that there are various usages for the term universality and that we must be able to start the conversation in which we try to negotiate those differences, and that that’s where a kind of democratic contestation emerges, a contestation that gives meaning to universality and, without which, universality can have no meaning. GR: I would like to add to the question concerning the universal a question regarding the transcendent. One of the ways in which you describe your most recent project is in terms of “a possible Jewish ethic of non-violence,” and you make reference in particular to Lévinas.1 I was wondering how it is that, although you indicate the centrality of Judaism, the role of God seems to be minimized compared to the overwhelming presence of God in Lévinas’s work. How can you maintain an ethics of the face without the transcendent Other in whose trace the face exists? Is it possible from a Lévinasian perspective to construct an ethics that is not necessarily reliant on this transcendent reference point? Or does such an ethics become, as Alain Badiou has recently claimed, “a dog’s dinner [de la bouillie pour les chats]”?2 Are you required to replace God by something like an immanent universal humanism? How do you establish an ethics of alterity without transcendence, if that is, indeed, what you want to do? JB: Wouldn’t it be interesting if a dog’s dinner were a sacred thing? That would have to be my response to Badiou, if there were such a response. And maybe it is, but I don’t know . . . There’s the question of where God exists in

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Lévinas’s philosophy, or how one speaks of God in that context and whether one must speak about God, and I have an answer for that. But there’s a second question: to read Lévinas or to make use of Lévinas, must one use all of Lévinas? Is it possible to appropriate some parts of Lévinas to produce a Lévinasian perspective that Lévinas would not have held, that he would not have anticipated and of which he would not have approved? I am not orthodox in any sense, so I don’t think that to find something very useful in Lévinas I must therefore subscribe to all of Lévinas. But what is God in Lévinas? It’s an interesting problem since the relation to the face, which is the relationship to the other, to autrui, is the place where the relation to God takes place. There is no relation to God that does not take place through that face because one does not even understand God’s commandment, “thou shalt not kill,” except in relation to this other here before me whom I’m obligated not to kill. For this to make sense, we don’t have to engage in a metaphysical or theological debate on the existence of God. In the same way, in Kierkegaard you will never find a metaphysical debate on the existence of God. Yes there is God, no there is not, I shall prove that there is God, I shall defeat those who say there is no God—this never happens. God does not have an ontology. God is what can have no ontology, so to ask “does God exist?” this is already an impossible question in Lévinasian terms because God can never exist—in a way, this is the Jewish refusal of incarnation and iconography. If God is anything, God is what is anterior to existence itself. So, for me, it’s true that the problem of God as such does not interest me. I am, however, interested in the fact that so many twentieth-century Jewish philosophies assume the historical situation of having been abandoned by God. But this then introduces a specifically theological language for a fundamentally historical experience. If you read not just Lévinas but Heschel, or even Edmund Jabès, where is God? I mean, one can find there the question “where is God?” But there is no “we must believe in God” or “to be Jewish you must believe in God.” No. It’s, rather, “what happened to him? He didn’t show up when we needed him.” And then there are many questions that emerge because he failed to show. It’s a Beckett kind of Judaism. But I think this is already very Jewish. It is very Jewish to be abandoned by God. So it’s a relationship to a not knowing, a having no security, having been abandoned, perhaps also a situation of exile. It is articulated in the aftermath of whatever theology might once have been plausible. It doesn’t believe in God anymore, even as Judaism takes its bearings in the ruins of

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that world that is abandoned by God. And it’s a specific figure of God who abandoned, but even that belief is not quite a belief in the former existence of God. If theology has any meaning, it is to be found in abandonment as a certain predicament. It means that there’s a problem of belief that is no longer possible, if it ever was. And if it was possible for someone else, it doesn’t concern us because it’s not possible now. For me, what interests me in the Lévinasian moment is the way in which the face of the other makes an infinite demand. And, in the notion of infinity, we can see the trace of the theology of what you’re calling a transcendence, but not because something stands behind the face but because the face never ceases to make that demand. It’s the infinity of that demand which is perhaps the transcendent feature, but that is the infinite action or impress of the face. It’s a temporal feature of the face, it’s a temporal claim that the face makes, but it doesn’t assume the metaphysical reality of some transcendent being who persists above and beyond the face, someplace else. There’s no time or reason for that speculation. AGM: And the Lévinasian idea of the face as an evasion of being, isn’t there a metaphysical dimension to this? JB: That is, of course, an early formulation of his where he’s differentiating himself from Heidegger. The evasion of being is, in his early work, described exactly as that, as evasion or as escape, but I think that in Otherwise Than Being we get perhaps a slightly different orientation. He makes this distinction between saying and the said, and there it would appear that the saying, le dire, he’s talking about is a kind of dimension of voice that is animated through the face, interestingly enough. I think that one’s relation to the face is auditory in Lévinas. It’s a very interesting mixing of the senses that takes place through the figure of the face. And it’s true you could say le dire constantly evades le dit, but the way he puts it is different, he says le dit must betray le dire. It’s a necessary betrayal. In order for the voice to become audible, it must transmute into something that can be heard. Hence to be moved, or touched, to encounter this saying is only possible through betrayal of the transcendent function. We can’t have a direct relationship to the transcendent. It’s only through this face, this cry, this particular being in need in front of me that such language comes to make sense at all, if it does.

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GR: I agree with your characterization of Lévinas as being someone who understands the transcendent as only manifest in the immanent, hence the power of his notion of the face.3 It’s still slightly unclear to me how you can maintain the immanent call of the other if there’s not necessarily a metaphysical guarantee of sorts, if the other doesn’t find itself in the trace of the Other to such an extent that they cannot even be distinguished at a certain level. The English translation of Totality and Infinity is revealing in this regard, because it attempts to make a rather rigorous distinction between the “other” and the “Other” that cannot be easily mapped onto the French original.4 I’m more or less reformulating my earlier question because I’m still interested in having you explain the relationship between your proposed Jewish ethic of nonviolence and Lévinas’s metaphysical ethics of infinity, which, by the way, is also based on an understanding of ethics qua violence. JB: Let me say this: I think that for Lévinas, strictly speaking, the transcendent does not and cannot manifest itself in the immanent. It’s not a relationship of manifestation. In fact, the prohibition against all icons, all iconicity, is precisely the prohibition against the idea that the transcendent can appear in immanent form. It cannot. When it is relayed or when it is spoken through the face, it’s not manifest. It’s rather betrayed in the moment of taking form. So there is no way to make that transition between the transcendent and the immanent except through a kind of breaking or a betrayal. It’s very non-Hegelian in that way. But I must say that every time you ask me the question whether I must then subscribe to the transcendent God who is somehow speaking, I become slightly amused. All I think of to do is to tell you one of the many Jewish jokes I know about the impossibility of ever finding this God, about people getting up in synagogue and saying, “so who is this God anyway? I’d like his telephone number, I’d like to have a word with him, I don’t particularly like the way he’s doing things!” It’s tragic maybe, but for me Jewish humor is precisely what emerges here at this question of the unknowability, the unverifiability, the possible final irrelevance of something called a God. What interests me about Lévinas is that God is not substance. There’s no “there is a God who is a substance,” it’s not a thing. There is an activity, a saying, that is in infinite present tense. It’s a continuous present, so there is no sujet qui parle; there is no sujet avant le dire, there is only this, le dire. So whatever it is, this transcendent thing is The Speaking, The Saying, which I think, taken

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as this verb form that he insists upon, makes us despair of the question of a subject before the verb. I think that we don’t need the subject before the verb. But I’m sorry I become more Jewish as you ask me this question, but less theological. I think there might even be, in twentieth-century Judaism, an important inverse relation between theology and being Jewish. I think the more you despair of theology the more Jewish you become. GR: Interesting formulation. I’d like to turn to the way you navigate between the two major theoretical reference points in your latest work, at least on ethics: Lévinas and Adorno. These two authors appear, at least at first sight, incompatible for a number of theoretical and practical reasons. How can you avoid this apparent incompatibility between two approaches to ethics? How is it possible to wed critical reflection on the social conditions that produce norms, i.e. an Adornian approach to ethics, with the affirmation that there are certain values such as generosity, tolerance, and nonviolence, which seem to be exceptions to the specificity of cultural contexts? Is it possible to defend such an affirmation while maintaining a critical social stance that is close to that of Adorno? JB: Well, I should say that for me the point is not to make the positions of Adorno and Lévinas compatible. I’m not interested in compatibility; I am interested in what happens when you put them into encounter with one another, you put them into a certain kind of dialogue, and what emerges as a consequence. But there’s no wedding, there’s no aspiration to establish a compatibility between them. I think, for myself, I would certainly agree with Adorno that there are specific social conditions under which subjects emerge and that these social conditions are encountered in various kinds of contradictions. He asks the question of how one can live a good life in a bad life, and the bad life is the historical conditions of life that are already in place and the good life is a question of an ethical conduct. Or, you know, he points out again the notion of the human: how do we dispute the kind of humanism that would disparage the importance of social conditions and yet how do we reclaim the human in order to criticize dehumanization? So these are, one might say, paradoxes that emerge out of very specific social and historical conditions. I don’t think of generosity or nonviolence as exceptions to cultural norms necessarily. I think that when one invokes nonviolence, one invokes a legacy

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of nonviolent positions. One could perhaps situate even Lévinas as a philosophical position in the context of Gandhi or in the context of other pacifist or philosophical positions that have articulated a certain kind of ethical claim, even as Lévinas himself was no pacifist. For me, philosophical texts are part of cultural legacies, they are ways of articulating and conveying alternative cultural norms or possible normativities to come, but they don’t transcend the cultural life of norms. However, it’s true that I’ve spent most of my scholarly work thinking about the cultural norms under which a subject is formed and then, perhaps with Foucault, asking what possibilities must exist for the subject to form itself and how one forms oneself in relation to the other, with such a norm, through it, and even against it. So these norms are not fixed in place: they are variable and revisable, at least in principle, and sometimes in practice. For instance, the other is never given to me pure and simple, which is why there are cultural frames for the presentation of the other. This is why I’m interested in photojournalism, say, or the media coverage of the war in Iraq (or lack thereof). Whose face can work upon me as a face and whose cannot? And what are the cultural norms that elicit an ethical response and what are the ones that foreclose it? Again, I am not saying that we need a common language to convey that face, but we do need a situation of cultural translation. So, here again, this is a very unorthodox use of Lévinas, but it certainly keeps me consistent in the sense that I’m continuing to wonder how a subject is formed through cultural norms and how those norms can inform or structure possible relationalities, and how they can be altered for different subject formations and for new possibilities of responsiveness. AGM: This evening you are going to talk about Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which belongs to what is referred to in the United States as postcolonial studies.5 Is your interest in the debate on violence in the work of Sartre and Fanon indicative of a new interest in postcolonial questions? How do you situate your work in contemporary critical theory in relationship to the work being done in postcolonial studies? JB: I don’t know if this is particularly new only because I have long-standing intellectual exchanges with Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Stuart Hall for instance. It was more than fifteen years ago that I taught an introduction to postcolonial theory at Johns Hopkins. Homi Bhabha and I have had many

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conversations and joint activities, and I think you can see in his notion of mimicry some alliances with my idea of gender performativity. His interest in the identifications that the colonized make with the colonial norms of humanness are interesting because they are approximations of the norms, which means that they both succeed and fail in approximating the norm. In the same way, my work on gender had the same kind of structure, so that brought us into conversation with one another. I do think that right now in the United States there is an increasing tendency to regard Islamic cultures or “non-Western”—whatever they mean by that—cultures as barbaric, and so it becomes increasingly important to try to understand the different sorts of violence that come from neocolonial state formations. One can’t give a culturalist explanation for intra-Iraqi violence, for instance, but one has to situate those conflicts within larger global economic and political forms of hegemony. The U.S. imagines that it stands for both culture and civilization, and yet it cannot explain its own cruelty and torture within this self-definition. Thus, it casts the violence it cannot explain as the nascent cultural violence of Arab cultures or Islam, even as it periodically invokes a doctrine of tolerance toward this same “Other.” Here is a notion of the “Other” one must clearly work to dismantle. The post of postcolonial does not mean that the colonial is “over”; it means that one has to chart the formations of its enduring and animated aftermath. The culturalist deformation of Islam refuses to consider the colonial histories that continue to operate in that region, so we need a new way of thinking about both temporality and spatiality to do this. And that is clearly part of what postcolonial studies has done for contemporary cultural theory. We have to be able to think a history that remains animated in and through its ruins.

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5 / THE P R E S E N T I N T H E L I G H T OF THE LONGUE DURÉE Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill Immanuel Wallerstein

Gabriel Rockhill: You are, above all, known as the author of The Modern WorldSystem, which established you as one of the founders of world-systems analysis.1 Yet, as an historian, you have not been satisfied with focusing uniquely on the past. You are equally an “historian” of the present and, one could say, of the future. This aspect of your work attests to at least two singularities of your project that I would like to discuss. First of all, it shows the point at which your work goes beyond the traditional confines of the discipline of history, and I would like to hear what you have to say about the role of multior unidisciplinarity in your research. Secondly, the interest that you take in the present and in the future suggests that, for you, the stakes of history are just as well the stakes of the present. How, then, do you see the link between the work of the historian and the present time? Is it appropriate to speak of commitment (engagement) in the case of the historian in the same sense that Sartre spoke of the commitment (engagement) of prose writers? Immanuel Wallerstein: I don’t worry about the labels. At the institutional level, I am not an historian. I have a doctorate in sociology and I have always taught sociology. However, since I am against all of these disciplinary divisions, I can just as well be called an historian, a political scientist, a philosopher, an economist, or an anthropologist. I can justify each of these labels on different grounds, and that does not bother me at all. It’s for this reason that I refuse the intellectual distinction ordinarily demanded between work that deals with the past and that which deals with the present. Indeed, I am opposed to the same distinction regarding works dealing with the future. In a certain sense, everyone who writes on social realities is always writing essentially on the present. The author who writes about social realities has,

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as a task, the interpretation of what has come about in the past as well as the anticipation of what is likely to take place in the future by referring, in both cases, to the present. We are confronted with knowledge of social reality that continually changes, insofar as the present itself evolves, for, after all, the present of today is the past of tomorrow. The present itself exists only for a nano second. In my personal intellectual itinerary, I began by writing on current affairs. My first writings deal with what was unfolding daily in Africa. So, I began as an Africanist. I was writing about what happened in Africa primarily during the ending years of the colonial years and the first years of independence. Still, I always tended to situate my analyses in a context of the longue durée, as Fernand Braudel uses the term, although the expression was completely foreign to me at the time.2 In my first book—the French translation of which is entitled L’Afrique et l’indépendance, in Éditions-Présence Africaine3—the first chapter deals with the history of Africa across two thousand, or even three thousand years, and, in the rest of the work, I was interested in current affairs properly speaking. It seemed evident to me that one cannot escape from what we call the arrow of time. It’s there, inserted in all that we do. And for an engaged intellectual, who is supposed to interpret the current political, historical, and social situation, it is important to analyze the direction that we are in the process of taking. It’s for that reason that, for what has been about twenty or even thirty years now, I have been working on three specific domains that, despite their differences, are in my view quite linked together. The first domain is the description of the historical development of what I call the modern world-system. This world-system is a capitalist world-economy. It began in the long sixteenth century. It’s the system in which we still are living. I have a series of writings dealing with this subject. I also write a lot on what happens in the contemporary world, and while this represents another series of writings, it’s nonetheless not entirely different from the preceding series because I always situate my analyses in the context of the modern world-system. Most of the time my writings that deal with current affairs lead me to a sort of anticipation of the future—of what is about to take place—which is the second moment. Further, I have noticed that in the unfolding of my work, I am sometimes confronted with a lot of objections THAT ARE methodological and above all epistemological. As a result, I have pursued an interest in these subjects as

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well, which is my third realm, I observe that one of the pillars of the modern world-system is constituted precisely by the structures of knowledge. Consequently, I study the historical trajectory of these structures. This has permitted me to observe that the modern world’s system of knowledge is entirely different from all previous systems, in that the current system is the producer of an ongoing debate between two epistemologies—that of science and that of the humanities (or of philosophy)—that see each other in somewhat antagonistic terms. So, for twelve or fifteen years now, I have produced a series of writings dealing less with economic questions than with epistemological ones. In sum, that’s how my career has played out. GR: You have shown yourself to be very critical of what I would call eclectic multidisciplinarity, which consists in taking the disciplines such as they existed in the nineteenth century and making a kind of theoretical potpourri out of them, wherein a bit of history, a bit of sociology, a bit of anthropology, and so on are combined haphazardly. Against this, you propose to return to the historical emergence of the disciplines in order to understand their link to a system of knowledge and its epistemological limits. How would you describe the unidisciplinarity that results from this? IW: The entire question must be taken in the context of the development, in the modern world, of the concept of the “two cultures,” as it’s called today. The famous eighteenth-century “divorce” between philosophy and science was not scripted as a sort of inevitable thing. Rather, it arose out of the needs of the modern world-system, which introduced a rupture in the unicity of the modes of cognition (connaissance) and the modes of historical knowledge (savoir). On this subject I cite the case of Immanuel Kant, considered by everyone today as a great philosopher. He taught at the University of Königsberg at the end of the eighteenth century, where he gave courses that we label today as philosophy, poetry, international relations, astronomy, geography, etc. He considered this to be something absolutely normal; it was not an extraordinary or exceptional practice. The same is true of Aristotle, another great philosopher who wrote on science, logic, politics, etc.—categories that he refused to separate. These separations appeared only toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. At that time we witness a reorganization of structures and the creation of the disciplinary departments

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as the basic units of the resuscitated universities of the nineteenth century. From then on, each department was the space of reflection for a discipline, and the disciplines were supposed to be different in essential ways from one another. The very concept of the discipline is a separatist concept, in that it defines a specific field of work on which it is necessary to specialize and that determines, in a precise way, the possibility of teaching or of writing in well-defined domains. While this is something that has already been done by a number of authors, I have traced out the evolution of the names of the disciplines. That is to say, all these disciplines carried well-specified names, such as French, sociology, or chemistry. It’s at the end of this process that the specific organizational structures were created. A discipline is essentially three things. It is, first of all, an intellectual claim that there exists a legitimate field of work that is different from others and is defined in a specific fashion. One could wonder—and I did this within the framework of the social sciences—why the division of fields took the form that it did. It became wholly accepted that each discipline set itself radically apart from another. Economy, it was said, is not history, and even less so is it anthropology or political science. In the second place, the intellectual argument led to the creation of separate organizational structures. Today, we award diplomas attesting to knowledge in specific disciplines and encourage their holders to pursue specializations within their fields. In the same way, each discipline has its journals and its professional associations. This creates an oppressive atmosphere insofar as everyone belongs to a specific discipline and consequently is pressed to remain in the fold of that discipline. We are enclosed in our disciplines and in our specializations, and we feel imprisoned. It’s difficult for a young geography professor to publish an article in a psychoanalytic journal, and vice versa, insofar as such an act is not necessarily well regarded. In addition to this organizational aspect, there also exists a cultural aspect, about which one can evoke a striking example. If one asks a sociologist, “who are the three great sociologists?” there is a standard answer. Since the Second World War, the usual answer is Durkheim, Weber, and Marx. There are very few sociologists who have not read those three authors. But Marx did not call himself a sociologist. Even less did Weber, who was recognized throughout his life as an economist and historian and who began to call himself a sociologist only at the end of his life. The fact of reading certain books is linked in our minds with a certain category of persons.

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Since the Second World War, the intellectual logic that justified the disciplinary divisions within the social science has collapsed for a good number of reasons. However, at the same time, the organizational structure has become much stronger. There is a disconnect between the organizational structures and the intellectual logic, which has led many to think that we have to make up for this difficulty through being multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or pluridisciplinary. This has been the subject of numerous debates since the 1950s. For example, when it’s a question of discussing the world of work, there is a call for interdisciplinarity, which means that we will bring together various scholars: an industrial sociologist, a historian of workers’ movement, a labor economist, etc. Each will offer his or her particular contribution. That’s what being multidisciplinary is about today. I do not agree with this practice at all. I feel that it is not thought through with much rigor and does not constitute a solution to the presumed problem. Essentially, it has strengthened the established intellectual divisions rather than overcome them. It therefore constitutes a false path. In my system of thought, I insist instead upon a unidisciplinary logic. Of course, I know that I am still confronted with divided organizational structures, and I am conscious of the difficulty of such a project. Alfredo Gomez-Muller: Does this logic of epistemological separation have something in common with the logic of capitalism? IW: Yes, absolutely! There were three lines of cleavages between the possible disciplines created in the nineteenth century. There was, first of all, the division between the past and the present, which we spoke of at the beginning of this interview. It was thought possible to speak of one or the other, but not speak in the same language of both. It was an utterly simple division: history is the past, most often a rather remote past. The historian was not supposed to write about the last fifty or even one hundred years. As for those who were writing on the present, they were divided among economists, political scientists, and sociologists. The four disciplines wrote almost exclusively about the Western world. Their practitioners in the nineteenth century came, 95 percent of the time, from five countries: France, Great Britain, the United States, the Germanies, and the Italies. Those from other countries represented a tiny minority. The great majority of all these authors wrote about their own country. There were a limited number who ventured to write on a country other

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than their own, and almost all of these were writing about one of the other five main countries. One obvious question is why were there three disciplines for the present but only one for the past. That directly derives from the principles of liberalism. Liberal ideology insisted that modernity is defined by social differentiation between three domains: the market, the state, and civil society. For the liberals, what was involved was not only a recognition of what seemed to them a reality, but fulfilling the duty of maintaining the separateness of these three domains. Otherwise, one is not modern. Hence, if we are analyzing the present, those who study the market are the economists, those who study the state are the political scientists, and those who study civil society are the sociologists. This separation arose from the dominant logic of the nineteenth century. This was also the great era of colonialism, when expeditions to and conquest of Africa and Asia were being organized. This involved encounters with new peoples. There was a curiosity and a need to know more about these peoples. These peoples were analyzed and described as uncivilized primitives. To study them, a discipline was invented—anthropology. It invented special methods to study these new “tribal” peoples. Scholars noted, in addition, that a large part of the world resembled neither the “tribal” peoples nor the Western world. In the nineteenth century, they invented another world, constituted by other non-Western “civilizations”—notably China, India, Russia, Persia, the Arab or Muslim world. To study them, another discipline was created—Orientalism. Orientalists had to learn the languages—very difficult ones—of these peoples. They had an array of documents to study, mostly religious documents. They sought to understand the totality of a “civilization.” Why? In my opinion, it’s because these civilizations were not considered “modern.” They sought to explain why these civilizations were civilized but not modern. The basic answer was that they were not modern because, in one way or the other, they have become stagnant or “frozen.” That’s how these six disciplines were formed. I shall not enter here into the debate that consists in wondering about the objectivity of all these disciplines. I merely note that, from an organizational point of view, all these separations that were created could be justified from the point of view of the dominant ideology of the nineteenth century. After the Second World War, the rise of the national liberation movements in Africa and Asia rendered these divisions useless. For the United States or

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Western countries in general, it was not very helpful to have notions about the ethnology of the Baoulés, for example. The most important thing for them was to know why there were national liberation movements in certain countries. The governments and the scholars were asking themselves what these movements represented, what they wanted, what their demands were. The case of China, with a Communist party in power, is a good example. Consequently, the scholarly world immediately divested itself of the distinction between the West and the rest of the world—four disciplines for the West and two for the rest of the world. The historians, economists, and the other specialists began to study the non-Western world as well as the West. AGM: We clearly see the link here between liberal ideology and this logic of differentiation. What were the links between capitalism as an economic system and this differentiation at the epistemological level? IW: Capitalism, as an economic system, needed a cultural legitimation. It’s here that the French Revolution played an important role by legitimating two concepts previously not widely accepted: that sovereignty resided in the “people” and political change was absolutely normal. The two together proved quite dangerous from the point of view of those in power. The means to limit the impact of these new cultural themes had to be found. This is the origin of the three great modern ideologies—conservatism, centrist liberalism, and radicalism. It was centrist liberalism that would come to dominate the horizon of thought. I call this becoming the “geoculture” of the modern world-system. In the ideology of centrist liberalism, it was argued that yes, it is true that the world changes constantly in a completely normal, progressive fashion, but this change should be controlled and deliberate. The pace of change had to be put back into the hands of experts, so that they can wisely manipulate the process of change in a reasonable manner. This ideology underlay the logic of differentiation, which proved very useful to capitalism. It justified both the dominance of liberalism as an ideology and the creation of the social sciences as a reflection of this liberal point of view. Social science has always tried, in one way or another, to join the study of current reality to political reformism. This attempt was rather successful up to about 1945. After the Second World War, the world faced anew a similar situation—the expression and the revolt of the Third World. Governments and scholars in

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the West were asking themselves how they might tame that rebellion, how to understand their demands and make them fit reasonably into the ongoing world-system. This new situation required new instruments. It is thus that arose the concept of area studies. Area studies was based on the premise that all regions of the world followed the same pattern of “development,” but that Western countries were further along on this universal path. Some countries are, for example, in phase four of development and some only in phase two. It’s thus very useful to teach those who are in phase two what to do in order to cross over from phase two into phase four; for those who are in phase two, it’s a way of imitating those who find themselves in phase four. What was needed, in short, was for non-Western countries to learn from Western countries how to proceed, how to “develop.” In addition, insofar as the world continued to evolve politically, new questions began to be posed. For example, there was the political rise of what one could call the “forgotten peoples”—women, “minorities,” etc. Especially after 1968, these peoples insisted on getting into the academy. From then on they demanded feminist studies, Jewish studies, Black studies, gay and lesbian studies, etc. It was a way of creating and enlarging the organizational structures at the heart of the university. One may observe, between approximately 1750 and 1900, a sort of reduction of the nominal divisions at the university; they passed from two hundred names of “titles” of divisions of knowledge to six or seven—a considerable reduction. Since 1945, and above all since 1970, there has been a reversal in the tendency and an explosion of “disciplinary” names in the university. GR: I would like to ask to you a question concerning the historiographical concepts used in order to organize time. It is true that you have called into question several received ideas, including, notably, the notions of the “industrial revolution” and the “French Revolution.” At the same time, you propose to speak of historical “crises,” like those that took place around 1500 or the one that is proper to our own era. What are the historiographical differences between the notion of revolution and that of crisis, or the concept of event and that of transition? IW: In the beginning, I drew inspiration from Braudel’s critique. He said that, once knowledge was divided into the “two cultures,” there had been a decision that only two sorts of temporalities exist: eternal time, which is

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the domain of economists, sociologists, and political scientists, and episodic time (l’histoire événementielle), which is the domain of historians. Braudel thought that, for the most part, neither one of the two is very interesting. If eternal time exists, he said, it was the time of the wise men (sages). As for episodic time, it was “dust.” I understand that last term in two ways: dust in the sense that one speaks of something without importance, which evaporates rapidly, and dust in the sense of “dust in the eyes,” a dust that prevents you from seeing reality. Braudel insisted on two other, much more important temporalities, which are the longue durée and the moyenne durée, or cyclical time. The longue durée refers to structures that persist during long periods—not eternal but very persistent. These are structures at once climatological, cultural, economic, etc., which one could study in one way or the other. Cyclical time, for its part, is essentially the time of cycles—again, not eternal cycles, but cycles within the framework of a structure of longue durée. There are A-periods and B-periods that exist and appear regularly. People act differently in A- and B-periods. In opposition to the dominant historiographical view up until then, Braudel considered these two temporalities to be primordial. I agree with that classification, to which I add a third temporality. Why? I was influenced a lot by Braudel, but also by Ilya Prigogine, a physical scientist who received the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but also one who wrote on more or less philosophical themes. His fundamental question is: what is chemistry? Historically, it is the study of the behavior of molecules, which are characterized by entropy. Physicists consider chemistry as something inferior to physics, insofar as it is difficult for the chemist to predict with exactitude what really happens in the molecule. According to the physicists, chemists have a conception of the phenomenon limited by their ignorance. One day it will be possible to be able to explain these phenomena in the traditional, that is, the Newtonian way. Prigogine and other chemists inverted the theoretical perspective by affirming the contrary. They asserted the fundamental reality of indeterminacy, of the impossibility of knowing the future, as well as the nonreversibility of time. They insisted on the arrow of time. Prigogine and his colleagues effectuated a total inversion of modern science, contesting the traditional values of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. It follows from this inversion that no physical or biological system is eternal. Over time, every system inevitably moves far from equilibrium. Eventu-

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ally it arrives at a point where there is the possibility of having two solutions to a single formula. In the terms of complexity science, one arrives at a bifurcation. The only thing that we are sure about is that the phenomenon cannot continue in this way. However, it’s not possible to say, a priori, which direction the bifurcation will take, and there is no way of knowing in advance. In a bifurcation, there is chaos in the sense that things are tumultuous, unpredictable, and rapidly changing. So, I relied on this concept in order to explain exactly what happens in the capitalist world-system. I tried to show why we have come to the point at which the system—the one in which we currently live—has begun to bifurcate. It’s not possible to foresee the direction or the pace that the bifurcation will take, but it is nevertheless possible to say that the capitalist system will not be able to exist for very much longer because it is in structural crisis. Hence, I do not use the word crisis for each little functional turning point of the system, but only for the big moment of the bifurcation. Five hundred years were needed in order for the capitalist system to arrive at this point, and that’s where we find ourselves at present. That’s the reason why we’re not able to predict the way out of this undertaking, because the actors are so numerous, and they are “acting” at every nanosecond of time. For me, it’s a way of explaining the ancient antinomy between free will and determinism. It’s not a question of choosing between these two arguments; it’s rather a question of choosing the moment. When the sociohistorical system is in its “normal” phase of development, there’s determinism in the sense that there are many attempts to change the system, which in the end more or less returns to equilibrium. When, however, the system is in structural crisis, it can no longer return to equilibrium, and it’s at that moment that we can speak of a situation of free will. The acts of each of us is what will account for the change in the system. We are in the process of making a collective choice, one between two possible outcomes. I have thus historicized the antinomy of determinism and free will. GR: What are the most manifest signs, today, of this crisis? IW: In my writings dealing with current affairs, I have said that the real political problem today is not about knowing if it is necessary to say yes or no to capitalism but instead about knowing which system we are going to create after capitalism. Now, I speak of the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto

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Alegre as the two branches of this bifurcation, stating that the supporters of the spirit of Davos are searching for a system that has certain characteristics corresponding to those of capitalism (hierarchical, exploitative, polarizing), whereas the partisans of the spirit of Porto Alegre are in search of a relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian system. We do not know the nature of the institutions that are entailed by these two possible evolutions. If I had lived in the fifteenth century, and if I had possessed all the knowledge that I hold today, then I would have been able to say that the European world, which was a feudal system, was in the middle of a structural crisis. There was a bifurcation and, therefore, there had to be a new system. But if someone had asked me about the nature of the new system to come, I would not have been able to guess that it was going to be the institutions of contemporary capitalism. We are incapable of foreseeing or saying what the new structures will look like. Many say that, after feudalism, capitalism was inevitable. That’s a general theme that is common to both most Marxists and most centrist liberals. But I do not subscribe to this view. I think that it’s necessary to explain why, in the structural crisis of feudalism—which was real—we chose capitalism in place of some alternative. AGM: At the beginning of the interview, you spoke about the dimension of anticipation, of the future. How do you conceive of this? IW: I was just speaking to you about that, in a way. One can by no means anticipate in detail; that’s entirely impossible. Only the fact of being before a political choice, and the broad outline of this choice, the preferences in play, can be outlined. Of course, my preferences do not necessarily coincide with yours. I can always try to convince you, but there is something else at stake here that is part of everyday political life. That’s the reason why I refuse the concept of “inevitable progress,” which is the great concept of the Enlightenment. However, this does not entail saying, instead, that no progress is possible. There is no inevitable progress but, instead, there is possible progress. When I anticipate things, I say to myself that, in the future, it may be that the outcome is better than the present system, but it may be worse than the system in which we are currently living. We might characterize the odds of the choice going in one direction or the other as fifty-fifty. However I think that fifty-fifty is not a little, but a lot.

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GR: Do the temporal structures that we use to organize the past have their own historicity? Is our way of thinking about the unfolding of time different today from the way people conceived of historical time in other eras? IW: There is great debate about the way to conceive of the past. Maybe you are asking me, “What is the majority position?” That position has not wholly changed, whether it be with historians or with people in general. Most people continue to use the same logic, the same mode of reasoning as before. Nonetheless, these viewpoints are argued with less certainty; they are much more openly contested. GR: What do you think of the arguments surrounding “presentism,” namely, the idea according to which our time is very largely dominated by the present, to the extent that a collective amnesia obscures the past and a postrevolutionary political imaginary rules out, from the start, every future that is not the simple repetition of the present? IW: The word presentism, like the word historicism, lends itself to many interpretations. GR: I am thinking, among other things, of the writings of François Hartog, which rely largely on those of Reinhart Koselleck. IW: I began by stating that, in a certain sense, we are always in the process of discussing the present, even when we are speaking of the past. On that point, one could qualify me as presentist, but that does not signify that we are faced with the end of history. That’s ridiculous! We are not facing the end of history and we never will. There are certainly a lot of analyses relating to the end of revolutions, such as we conceived them in the nineteenth century. Those revolutions did not pan out, precisely because the persons involved did not comprehend the limits of political action when the system itself unfolds in a “normal” way. The French Revolution did not alter as much as we say it did or as much as we would like it to have done. It fits within the continuity of French history, of the reinforcement of the structures of the state, etc. I think that the author to whom you are alluding is entirely correct, but he did not pay attention to the changes that are produced in the world

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cultural system. He was essentially interested in the changes that came about in the French political and economic structures. Marc Bloch has shown in his writings that a good part of the feudalism “eliminated” by the French Revolution was still in existence at the end of the nineteenth century. It was not until 1911 that the juridical structures were finally eliminated, not to mention other ancient structures. If being presentist is a way of recognizing that we were wrong in our analyses concerning the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, I am in agreement. We were mistaken, and, as you know, I speak about it in my writings. AGM: I would like to know your thoughts concerning one aspect of our present time. For twenty, or even thirty years, we have witnessed, in all the societies of the planet, an upsurge of demands that touch upon cultural identity— ones that can sometimes get translated politically in terms of multiculturalist demands. What is your reading of this phenomenon? IW: It’s a reaction to the concept of the nation, as I indicated in my previous argument, but it is above all a phenomenon of the democratization of the world. Who are the people who demand a cultural identity? In most cases, these are persons who feel oppressed in the current system and are “forgotten” both on the political and intellectual plane. So they send out the following message: “We also exist, we have the same rights as you, the same qualities; as a result we must benefit from the same privileges.” Those who express these demands are persons of color (for example, blacks), women, the indigenous peoples of Latin America, all of whom today are organized in very important movements. It’s also often a reaction to Communism, or a reaction to the concept of the nation as a process of assimilation to a single national culture. For the most part, these are very working-class movements that, once in power, adopt a different attitude. The Kosovars, for example, demand their cultural rights in the sense of having an independent state; they do not want to be under the yoke of Serbia. But are they going to allow the Serbs who live in that part of Kosovo to exert their cultural rights? That remains to be seen, and, in my opinion, it’s very doubtful. AGM: And how about the particular case of Bolivia?

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IW: Bolivia, that’s a good example. The majority of the population is indigenous. They decry the fact that they are, for the most part, poor people, people marginalized or historically ignored. It’s for that reason that access to the political system is difficult for them. They no longer wanted to accept that situation and, as a consequence, got a man elected who would be able to represent them and who is going to make things change in Bolivia. That man is Evo Morales. In the case of Bolivia, it’s a question of the majority of the population, which is not always the case when this type of demand is concerned. To the extent that Bolivia is geographically structured in such a way that the Europeans live as a majority in the eastern region—the region in which there are certain important resources—that region threatens to secede. When Evo Morales was elected, I wrote a little article entitled “Two Cheers for Evo.” Quite evidently, it’s good to recognize the cultural, political, and economic rights of this oppressed population. But we are not sure of the fact that Evo Morales will act in the interest of everyone. He is also confronted by an opposition from the left, which is indigenous as well and considers him a man of compromise, capable of betrayal. Evidently, the fact of being American Indian does not permit anything and does not necessarily entail a perfect position on all the questions. But the rise to power of an indigenous person, for the first time in the history of Bolivia, is a good thing. It’s in some sense what took place when John Kennedy was elected president of the United States. Before that, it was not generally acceptable that a Catholic could be president of the United States. In the same way, we will now be willing to go along with the fact that a Mormon, a Jew, or a Muslim can be president of the republic. So we are shattering all these limits, and that is positive. I think that it’s somewhat the same thing in Latin America. Chavez, who has committed a lot of errors, is a mestizo, and that forms a part of the reality of Venezuela, both of his supporters and of his opposition. All this is quite new in Latin America. It does not signify that no mestizo has occupied an important political function, but it merely suffices to recall that when Latin America was demanding independence, two centuries ago, the indigenous peoples were put on the sidelines. GR: Is this tied to the shifting of American political interests from the Americas to the Middle East?

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IW: It’s always a question of two things at once. One has to explain the fact that there is a group that, for particular political reasons, is ready to demand something. And, at the same time, there is the space that was patiently created through the fact of the United States’s distraction, and thus the diminution of their power to interfere as they did in the past in Latin America. This was due both to their generalized decline and the fact of their overwhelming investment of energy in the Middle East. So, the opportunity was there. It had to be seized, and there was someone to seize it. Hence you get these indigenous movements, more or less on the left. Both factors were necessary, and they benefited from both. So here you have what explains why there is suddenly this change over five years. I remember vividly the 1990s, when very few people would have foreseen this wave of elections in Latin America. GR: Whether it be in Latin America or elsewhere, are these cultural demands linked to what you call the crisis of world-systems? IW: Yes and no. The logic of the capitalist system is contradictory, just like the logic of every system. And, in order to limit the possibility of a revolution among the oppressed people, no small number of concessions had to be made, which has proven to be positive. There is a sort of long democratization of the system, and this is a reflection of it. In the end, after the workers and the women, indigenous people are saying it’s our turn to make strong demands. So, I arrange this in a sort of continual lineage of consolidation of these demands for equality. GR: It therefore remains tied to the contradiction of “inclusion/exclusion” that you have foregrounded in the history of racism and sexism? IW: Absolutely! Racism is fundamental; it is still present, but it’s less legitimate. Even Le Pen says, “I’m not a racist.” And yet, a hundred years ago in France, one could call oneself a racist and assert that the white man was superior. That was the discourse of a Hitler and a good many others. Today, in every case, racism has to conceal itself behind formulas while the antiracists are able to express themselves in a much more open fashion. Translated from the French by John V. Garner

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6 / A PRISONER OF HOPE IN THE NIGHT OF T H E A M E R I C A N E M P I R E Dialogue with Gabriel Rockhill Cornel West

Gabriel Rockhill: An overview of your work to date gives less a sense of sharp turns or breaks than an impression of intellectual intensification. I mean by this that the majority of your fundamental concerns have been present from your very first publications: prophetic pragmatism, radical historicism, genealogy, the critique of nihilism, black cultural democracy, race matters, and social critique. In looking back over your work to date, do you have the same impression? How would you explain your intellectual itinerary from your current perspective? How do you see your research projects evolving in the immediate future? Cornel West: I think you’re right about intensification and I think that when you actually look at what I have done over twenty-five years now, since 1982, it certainly began with a deep sense of existential scars, ontological wounds, and psychic bruises of white supremacy. At the core of my work is the issue of what it means to be human and living in a situation where you encounter the absurd as an American in America because you’re dealing with these scars, bruises, and wounds and yet determined to respond, to resist, to critique, to make some sense out of it. That’s why Kierkegaard has always meant so very much to me, because here is somebody who’s wrestling with the absurd in the sense of his own thorn in his flesh. Of course, I had a different thorn than he did, but we’re both human. I grew up in a segregated America, segregated California, and tried to come to terms with what it means to be human, but my initial encounter was with this white supremacy bombardment. Now, from there, of course I would go on to engage in a much larger critical analysis of American Empire, capitalist modes of production, patriarchal modes of domination, homophobic modes of degradation, but it was that

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encounter with white supremacy that sat at the center. And then there was also the deep prophetic Christian foundation for me, which has always been the launching pad for my conversations with Marxism, pragmatism, various forms of radical historicism, even radical forms of radical humanism (I would consider people like Erich Auerbach and Edward Said humanists from whom I’ve learned much, though neither one would be in any way Marxist). GR: Given this existential source of your engagement, why was it important for you to articulate your struggle in a philosophic trajectory? CW: Well I just felt that one has to be in conversation with the most sophisticated voices, the most refined viewpoints, and as I matriculated through college I was deeply, deeply affected by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Lukács, and Simmel. These writers and thinkers constituted not just a challenge to my own sense of wrestling with the absurd in the form of trying to make sense of the white supremacist bombardment coming at me, but they also reflected on paideia, which I take very seriously, this deep sense of cultivating a self and a maturation of the soul and an attempt to somehow generate an energy, an agency, an effort, some kind of resistance before one dies. GR: How does the intertwining of this existential dimension and the philosophic dimension relate to your own discursive strategies and your ability to adeptly navigate between publications that are primarily for the erudite audience of the intelligentsia and less scholarly writings that are accessible to a larger public? CW: I think that for me the deepest existential source of coming to terms with the white supremacist bombardment was music. And I think, in some ways, that this is true for black America as a whole, from spirituals and blues through jazz, rhythm and blues, and even up to hip-hop. From the very beginning, I always conceived of myself as aspiring to be a bluesman in a world of ideas and a jazzman in the life of the mind. And what is distinctive about using blues and jazz as a kind of model or source of intellectual inspiration is to be flexible and fluid and improvisational, multidimensional, finding one’s own voice but deploying that voice in a variety of different contexts, a variety of different discursive strategies, a variety of different modes of rhetorical persuasion as well as logical argumentation in order to

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make some kind of impact on the world. In that regard, you can imagine, I had to almost reverse the disciplinary divisions of knowledge in the academy. I always had to go up against more academic forms of presentation, even of producing knowledge in a certain sense, and, of course, as a bluesman or a jazzman it meant that I wanted to be a public preacher of paideia and I had to go where the public was. For there’s an academic public I take very seriously as a professor at Princeton and teacher to students and so forth. There’s a cultural public through television and radio, such as with my dear brother Tavis Smiley’s show; every week now for five years we go from Leopardi’s poetry to the hip-hop music of Chuck D. There is an artistic public that I relate to, and of course there’s a religious public that is not simply Christian. There’s an organized working-class public; I spend time with trade union movements and their various centers. Each one of these publics is a crucial site for the articulation of a kind of deep democratic vision that I have. But, in the end, it has much to do with the blues orientation and the jazz sensibility where you’re not static, you’re not stationary, you’re always dynamic and open to speaking in and enacting one’s own paideia in the light of these different contexts. GR: How do these movements across different media of communication and various disciplines relate to the tradition of critical theory? Do you see your work as embracing a similar objective, i.e. a critical engagement with society that breaks down the boundaries of the disciplines and questions traditional modes of communication? CW: I think in many ways it’s similar. Adorno and Benjamin provided a ­poignant analysis of the cultural industry and the former put forward an unbelievable philosophy of music, even though of course I disagree with him on jazz. But Benjamin and Adorno mean much to me, and not simply because they traverse the disciplines so smoothly and with such intellectual agility but also because they understand—as I experienced it—the centrality of the catastrophic, the traumatic, the monstrous, the scandalous, and the calamitous so that the starting point is really the effects of a catastrophe on a mainstream that seemingly is functioning smoothly. And so I identify with those two in a very important way when it comes to early twentieth-century views, and of course for Adorno till the 1960s. But I must say the difference here is that I am also a participant in and

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not simply a critical theorist of culture. I released a CD in 2001, Sketches of My Culture, and another in 2003 entitled Street Knowledge. In 2007, there’s my new CD Never Forget with Prince—it’s the first time ever Prince has allowed his music on a hip-hop CD—Andre 3000 of Outkast, Dave Hollister, and others. So, you see, I’m a participant in cultural creation, not just a critic, as it were. Critics can, of course, be creative in their own ways, but it’s very different when you’re actually producing the very things that the critics themselves are going to be talking about and trying to make sense of. And this is even true in some ways as well in film, such as in The Matrix 2 and 3. I think one difference would be that I understand paideia as tied to the performative, but the performative here is not to be reduced to mere amusement and entertainment, it’s to acknowledge enactment, bodily enactment as well as intellectual enactment in the name of still trying to shatter the sleepwalking, to awaken, to unnerve, to unhouse people—that Socratic function that Adorno performs. GR: In addition to being a participant in cultural production, you’re also a militant. Is this part of the performative element in your work? CW: Absolutely! I think that the performative as bodily enactment and intellectual enactment has everything to do with trying to exemplify a certain sense of urgency, a certain kind of state of emergency that we find ourselves in. And, most importantly, I think it also tries to highlight the energy requisite for the kind of courage we need, the courage to think critically, the courage to be empathetic and highlight the plight of the most vulnerable in our society and world and the courage to hope, to be alive, to point out light in darkness, the courage to keep the candle flickering in the night of the American Empire. GR: There are at least three identifiable fronts in your struggle against American Empire. You are concerned with what are often labeled as “cultural issues,” that is, questions regarding the recognition of minority identities. However, you also focus on economic issues, which you don’t want to sacrifice in the name of a simple identity politics. Thirdly, there are spiritual issues, which are really at the core of a lot of your work. How do you see the cultural, the economic, and the spiritual coming together to form a common front against racist and imperialist forms of oppression?

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CW: Well, you’ve hit on some important issues, and for me, of course, one of the crucial starting points is the challenge of nihilism. You see this theme as a kind of drumbeat throughout my work, partly because I struggle with it myself. There is a hopelessness, a meaninglessness, a lovelessness that produces persons who have difficulty becoming agents. They become passive objects in history, they become deferential to the powers that be. They become cowardly, they succumb to conformity and complacency. What you’re calling spiritual issues, or what I call spiritual/existential issues, are grounded in how we generate some sense of hope so that people become agents and most importantly can become part of collective insurgencies. You see, agency for me is not just a personal thing, even though we have to make individual choices, but it is becoming part of collectivities, of organized institutions and groups that can bring power and pressure to bear on unjust status quos. This is another reason why I identify with people like Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, and others who try to keep alive utopian energies. In order to do that, you have to wrestle with despair, dread, disappointment, and disenchantment. Of course, after the last forty years, where the left has been defeated in a variety of different ways, there are real questions of hope and how you sustain agency under circumstances that don’t lend themselves to much hope. This is inseparable from the cultural as well as from the economic, and, I would add, the political as well, because the nation-state is also very important, especially in the struggle for black people in terms of rights and liberties being protected and so on. But you’re absolutely right: all four of these dimensions are bound together. They are not identical, and there’s a specificity to each, a kind of relative autonomy, to invoke the old Althusserian term, but they nonetheless remain inseparable. Keep in mind, though, that the issue of Empire and white supremacy sit at the center of my own work, even though of course I’m concerned with patriarchy and homophobia, as well as theological questions that are looming large these days. GR: On this topic, there is a rather widespread critique of your work, which consists in saying that the question of race dominates at the expense of other important “cultural” elements. However, it’s very clear that throughout your writings you have been extremely critical of forms of black nationalism and you have advocated a form of cultural democracy aimed at equality between men and women, between heterosexuals and homosexuals, etc. How do you respect the specificity of the African American situation—which is socially

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and historically very unique—and at the same time avoid using this exceptional experience as a universal model for analyzing or evaluating all other struggles for equality? CW: I follow the great Antonio Gramsci on this point: it’s very important that in accenting historical specificity you don’t generate general theories from that historical specificity that downplay other historical specificities. But as someone who follows Gramsci quite seriously, I am deeply concerned about the U.S. imperial context and the ways in which we can keep alive democratic traditions of struggle, division, analysis as well as organization. The conversations that I would have with others around the world certainly have to do with universal values like democracy, freedom, justice, fairness, and so forth. But because I am a participant in the heat of battle in the American Empire, wrestling with the underside of that Empire, and since that underside of the Empire has so much to do with the coincidence of corporate capitalist practices, white supremacist practices, and the role of the nationstate in the culture industry, it’s possible that people might think wrongly that I’m trying to generate a kind of general theory based specifically on the situation of black people in the American Empire. On the other hand, it’s very important to keep in mind that white supremacy comes in a variety of different forms; it’s central to the making of the modern world. When we go to France it has its own specific forms, both in the métropole as well as in Senegal, Martinique, Algeria, and so forth. When we go to Britain, it has its own specific forms that go back to Jamaica, Ghana, Barbados, Australia, Canada, and of course the United States. One of my biggest problems with most critical theorists is that very few understand the weight and gravity of the vicious legacy of white supremacy and how it shaped so much of the modern world. It’s not a matter of just being antiracist. You read most books on modernity and on postmodernity, and you would think that slavery in the New World was somehow not important or less important than Lancashire mills in Britain. Well there are no Lancashire mills in Britain without the cotton picked in the New World by the slaves. Twenty-two percent of the population of the thirteen colonies of America were enslaved Africans. There’s very little serious attention paid to the weight and gravity of white supremacy, especially white supremacist slavery, but then later on, of course, other forms of white supremacy that shaped the modern world. And, of course, we more and more are being challenged by people like Paul Gilroy and others, but when it

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comes to most mainstream critical theory in America and Europe, there’s still a certain kind of blindness here. I’m very critical of that, and I’m saying this to fellow colleagues and comrades whom I have much respect for. GR: At the same time, you argue that white supremacy is a historically specific construct that emerged at one point in time and was linked to an imperial project that has its own social and historical specificity. You even claim in Race Matters that “blackness is a political and ethical construct,” meaning that there is no authentic black nature outside of historical contingencies.1 How do you struggle on the political and discursive front against white supremacy and its construction of a certain concept of “blackness”? Why is it important to show the historical contingency of both white supremacy and its conceptual categories? CW: You’ve got to historicize it and contextualize it, and in doing so you can recognize its contingent character, the conditions under which it emerged, the various forms that it takes and has sustained over time, the various ways in which it is appropriated under changing circumstances and you can thereby see the possibility of, if not eliminating it, at least greatly attenuating it. Right now, of course, white supremacy has taken on such deep roots in the modern world that it’s going to take unbelievable effort, individual and collective, to do away with it, but we can certainly push it back and, of course, we’ve made some major strides in the last two hundred years. But we’ve got a long, long way to go. We have to acknowledge the ways in which white supremacists’ practices became more and more predominant and intellectually systematized as a result of the attempt to not simply control black labor but also to control black bodies, the attempt to speak the white fears, speak the white hatred, generate white hatred that would justify white greed. There are certain ways of deploying white supremacist ideas and practices that help the elites at the top prosper. On the other hand, of course, white supremacy has never been simply a tool of the corporate elite. It has structured meaning and feelings in such a way that Sicilians have been constituted as white people, the Poles have been constituted as white people. Of course, in the United States the Irish and the English have both been constituted by the category of whiteness in spite of seven hundred years of colonial strife and conflict. So you can see how powerful that construct of whiteness vis-à-vis blackness.

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GR: Isn’t it the same case with blackness? It’s very interesting the way in which social constructs operate and how individuals who have either very little “black blood”—whatever that would mean—or are members of Latino or other communities are very often identified in America as black due to cultural modes of perception. CW: Absolutely. Of course, in the United States we had a one drop rule based on a Manichaean distinction between black and white, as opposed to Jamaica or Venezuela or Brazil, where the one drop rule was not operative, and therefore the construction of blackness took on a very different form. This is a reminder of the historical fluidity of the category and the various ways in which the category is a weapon in the context of a struggle over class power, economic power, sexual power, and other forms of power. GR: Since white supremacy is a historical construct, I’d be interested in getting your opinion on what has been referred to as a new model of racism, sometimes called cultural racism or neoracism, i.e. the idea that there’s a novel form of discrimination in which skin color has been replaced or supplemented by cultural practices. I’m thinking of the work of Étienne Balibar and others who have investigated the claim that there is a cultural racism that allows individuals to be antiracist in the old sense of the term while nonetheless discriminating against certain cultural practices (ways of speaking, styles of dress, culinary habits, etc.). At a simplistic level, it could be said that cultural racists accept blacks on one condition: that they behave like whites (the same could be said for forms of cultural homophobia, cultural misogyny, etc.). What is your opinion on this form of cultural racism? Do you think it exists and, if so, how do you see it relating to other forms of straightforward biological racism or anonymously perpetuated institutional racism? CW: I think Balibar and others are on to something important. In some ways, this has long been at work in the United States, because you have black folk who are able to become so highly assimilated within the mainstream culture that they become honorary whites even as they’re black, and therefore find themselves more and more used as tools in order to hide and conceal the social misery of the black folk who are not as assimilated as they are or have not had the opportunities they have had. So I think it’s a

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way of getting at this complicated situation that’s useful, but keep in mind that in the end we’re talking about different forms of xenophobia. It can be based on phenotypes, it can be based on culture, it can be based on religion, it can be based on geographic region, it can be based on dialect. There are so many ways in which to attempt to use difference as a justification for degradation and a justification for subordination, as opposed to accenting difference—of course there are people with different phenotypes, different colors, and so forth—as a particular way in which humanity and all its various forms is manifest. GR: I would like to come back to the question of historicism and ask you about its relationship to relativism. You maintain the position of a radical historicist, which allows you to avoid essentialism and transhistorical universalism. At the same time, you want to avoid simple relativism. CW: I would like to avoid relativism, absolutely. GR: How can you, as a radical historicist engaged in ethical and political questions, avoid the two horns of essentialism and relativism? CW: I think the middle position between essentialism and relativism would be contextualism. You get this in Dewey, you get this in the best of Marx, I would argue, but you also get this in very sophisticated form these days in Robert Brandom, the most important pragmatic philosopher of language writing today. The contextualism that you get is based on the idea that you can hold onto claims about getting things right, you can hold onto claims about relative forms of objectivity, contextual forms of objectivity, so that you still believe, in fact, that certain interpretations are better than others, that, in fact, quantum mechanics is better than astrology or that the new physics of our day is better than Ptolemy. It isn’t in anyway relativistic in a sophomoric sense, yet it’s still relative to a context. Firstly because it’s always open to revision, which is to say it could be wrong, and secondly because it is self-critical and therefore always attempting to call the worst of its theories into question. It’s like Quine’s web of belief, if you recall, where the core beliefs are at the center and peripheral beliefs are on the edge and you can give up some on the edge and hold onto the core. When the core itself is called into question, you have a paradigm shift where all theories have to go, and

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that’s very rare but of course it does take place. And I think this is true not only in science but also in culture, it’s true in religion, it’s true in art. So in that sense, as you can see, I’m actually quite historicist about our science and I think that the shifts in science have much to do with various paradigms being radically called into question, due in part to political struggles that go on in science in terms of who gets money for research, what kind of issues gain priority, what kind of education and socializing system is in place so that the people who get a chance to raise certain kinds of questions have weight and gravity. And yet, at the same time, because there are certain kinds of appeals to evidence, certain kinds of dialogical engagements to oppose good arguments to bad arguments, we still opt for them having the best theories, but those best theories have no direct connection to Reality, they’re always in process, they’re always changing. I know that’s a long answer to the question, but the contextualism here is very, very important. GR: Is contextualism to be understood as a negotiated contextualism, meaning that the context itself is not a simple given fact but rather the result of complex negotiations between various agents struggling to provide or impose an operative image of their surroundings? CW: That’s right, and of course you always have to bring in the issue of resources, and raw, brute power because sometimes it has to do with a repressive apparatus, sometimes it has to do with consensual apparatus. This is true in struggles for research money in physics, but it is also true in foreign policies in the Middle East. All struggles of this nature have these ideologically latent power-driven qualities. But in the end the claims are not solely about ideology, or solely about power, they are still attempts to get at the truth. However, there’s a radical difference between Truth, which is the ultimate way that the world is, and truth, which includes all of the various claims to get at the way the world actually is. It is, of course, an endless pursuit, an incessant quest, and here people like Charles Peirce and Dewey mean much to me in terms of their understanding of this quest and pursuit. GR: Within the parameters of truth, rather than Truth, can I ask you what your views are on the current political context? How would you describe the political conjuncture of the contemporary world?

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CW: I think there are two ways of looking at it. On the one hand, we’re still in the era of the American Empire with the attempt to shape the world in light of corporate American interests, both at the cultural level in terms of the entertainment industry, and at the geo-political and economical level in terms of multinational corporations. The American Empire is still having its way and gaining access to the kind of resources it needs in order to sustain the “American way of life.” At home, that means obscene wealth and inequality. At home that means a very lethargic political system much characterized by legalized bribery and normalized corruption. At home, that means a market-driven culture that pacifies and tries to render the citizens sleepwalkers so that they can see themselves as consumers more than citizens, whose end and aim is to buy and to sell rather than to critically engage in the public interest and expand the common good. Now, on the other hand though, we do have the European Union emerging that may in fact, slowly but surely, begin to break from the American Empire, the Washington consensus, the kind of neoliberal model that has been in place. Most importantly, I think Latin America is a very important place to keep an eye on, with Hugo Chavez and a host of others constituting a regional challenge to American imperial power. Thirdly, of course, there’s Asia, with China emerging now with tremendous potential economically, although it is politically tied to a motive of repression and regimentation that is highly objectionable on moral as well as on political grounds. Economically, other Asian regional units are also beginning to become major players. And, of course, I would like to see Africa and the African unions playing a more important role, though I think South Africa in some ways is worth looking at as well. So, on the one hand, you have the deep internal decay of the American Empire and, on the other, the tremendous external challenge from other regions. The final end and aim, for me, is really to keep alive what I call deep democratic possibilities. Now the one other addition I would like to make has to do with not simply the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the relative collapse of secular, authoritarian regimes and the replacement with deeply religious forms of authority in the Middle East, especially in Arab/Islamic nations, a particular slice of which has been affected by Al Qaeda and others seizing the public imagination with its various ugly acts of symbolic and literal pillage against innocent people. There’s a very multilayered story: all the pieces

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are not put together within a few paragraphs here, but those are the various points that I would like to highlight in terms of where we are now. GR: In your comments on the American Empire, you highlighted both cultural imperialism and geopolitical imperialism, which is linked to the neoliberal economy. It’s interesting that you didn’t touch on the ideological dimension of the American Empire. Since I know that you have discussed this in your writings, I was wondering if you could explain its role and elucidate your criticisms of the logic of terror. More specifically, I wanted to get your views on what I would call a securitarian conception of politics in which the remedy (more security) runs the risk of guaranteeing the persistence and even the intensification of the perceived threat (terrorism). CW: Are you talking about responses to 9/11? GR: For instance, but I’m primarily thinking about the success of the American Empire in producing and exporting the new ideological frame for understanding world politics today. At its core, this frame replaces the cold war polarization between two blocks by an opposition between the strong states purportedly defending freedom and democracy, on the one hand, and weak states led by tyrant leaders as well as disparate bands of virtual terrorists. I wanted to get your thoughts on the power of this new ideological matrix as well as on the securitarian logic that is used as a supposed remedy to the new source of evil, and which is largely based on perpetuating irrational fears that preclude any rational assessment of the situation. CW: I see what you’re getting at. Part of the problem here is that America has intervened militarily in Latin America over three hundred times in the last hundred years. It’s going to be difficult for them to somehow juxtapose terrorism with democracy when they have militaristic policies that were often reinforcing antidemocratic regimes, sometimes overthrowing democratic regimes, as in Guatemala, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, let alone Iran and other countries. So that this notion of national security becomes not just an elastic term but almost an empty term into which you can pour a variety of different contents. And, if you pour in the American imperial content, the invasions are in the name of democracy. But it’s clear that what is being promoted is autocracy, and therefore it undermines the very possibility of

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democracy having real meaning and content. This actually reinforces certain kinds of guerrillalike responses to America because people are seeing through the democratic menagerie and seeing the autocratic and militaristic content and substance. This is something that black people in America are able to see quite clearly. In this land of liberty and freedom, there’s slavery, Jim Crow laws, and American terrorism. One of the points that I have made over and over again is that American terrorism is as American as apple pie and cherry pie. When you’re talking about lynching or when you’re talking about black people themselves feeling unsafe and unprotected, and subject to random violence and hated for who they are, this is a regular part of American history. September 11, 2001 marks the first time in the history of America that all Americans feel unsafe and unprotected, and subject to random acts of violence and hated for who they are. For black folks, it’s not a new experience at all. To be a nigger in America is to be intimidated, scared, helpless, hopeless, and therefore rendered deferential to the powers that be. Now, there’s a sense in which the Bush administration tried to niggerize the American citizenry. Given the fact that there was a situation of tremendous fear, they tried to intimidate and scare the general populace, rendering them essentially hopeless in order to manipulate them and get them to defer to Bush’s authority. Since black folk are veterans of American terrorism, veterans of niggerization, already a blues people, now that this sentimental nation has the blues after 9/11, the question is whether a blues nation can learn from a blues people. We have responded to American terrorism by talking about democracy at the deepest level, not just rights and liberties but also dignity and self-respect, not just dignity and self-respect in the private sphere but also in the workplace. Now we have not gone as far as talking about workers’ control. Black people have a rich socialist and communist tradition. It’s never been a tradition that sits at the center for the black masses, but they have always been concerned with the dignity of labor and the dignity of people, more at the entrepreneurial level, gaining access and control over their businesses as opposed to the workplace. Part of that has to do with the fact that the American labor movement for so long was so deeply racist that it became very difficult to convince black people that the socialist and communist movements were going to be part of their freedom struggle, because the racism coming from the trade unions was always so ugly.

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GR: In juxtaposition to the charade of democracy, you advocate a robust form of cultural democracy. Could you say more about this positive sense of democracy and the way in which you see democracy as being not only a form of governance but, more profoundly, a cultural mode of being? CW: That’s a very important distinction. I talked about black people as being the blues people and the jazz people. The blues are fundamentally about finding your voice and being able to persevere and prevail against overwhelming odds. Jazz is also about finding your voice, but in a group with antagonistic cooperation, which means bouncing against one another so that you’re giving each other more and more courage to engage in higher levels of collective performance (performance is not just about titillating but it’s really about empowering because music was the fundamental source of empowering and ennobling that enabled a downtrodden people to keep their dignity and fight for their self-respect). This means that jazz is a mode of democratic symbolic action, just as blues is a mode of deep, tear-soaked individuality. It has nothing to do with American bourgeois individualism; it’s very important to keep that distinction. It’s important not only because the struggle for rights and liberties is important, the struggle for jobs with minimum wage, the struggle for citizenship status, but because it cuts deeper than that, to an existential form of democracy. Louis Armstrong was an existential democrat, which meant that he believed in the dignity of ordinary people and the potentiality of everyday people. Keep in mind the national Negro anthem “Lift Every Voice.” If you have enough courage to lift your voice, become an agent in the world connecting with other voices, you can democratize your situation, because democracy is about voice lifting and lack of democracy is about lack of voice. Now, of course, in performance, it’s your body as part of your voice, your critical intelligence as part of your voice, your feelings and passions as part of your voice. It’s a matter of mind, body, and soul, and therefore embodiment and enactment. It’s very difficult for an academic mainstream to grasp this because they’re so used to looking at black people as just narrow entertainers and minstrels, rather than people who have very different cultural ways of enacting democratic modes of being and ways of life as intellectuals, as democratic intellectuals. In the end, I think it comes down to courage as the enabling virtue to engage in the exposing of lies, a bearing witness, and an attempt to be part of collective insurgencies so that you’re not isolated and alone but you’re

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part of some group, some organization, as it were. I think the problem these days among American intellectuals is that there’s simply a failure of nerve to expose lies and tell the truth as critical witnesses. I mean, we do not have an American intelligentsia that can be honest about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We do not have an American intelligentsia that can really attempt to tell deep painful truths about the past as well as the present of the American Empire. And this is not in any way being anti-American. I’m sometimes accused of being anti-American, and I just say that like Plato attempted to make the world safe for Socrates, I’m attempting to make the world safe for the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. That’s my fundamental calling. It’s a calling, not a career; it’s a vocation, not a profession. And Martin Luther King Jr. to me is the best of America. So how can I be anti-American? When I say that the future of America is black I’m not talking about Clarence Thomas, because if that’s the future of America it’s going to be autocratic. It has nothing to do with phenotype. The future of America is black because the true meaning of democracy is to be found in Martin Luther King Jr., connected to Frederick Douglas, connected to the best of the Black Panther Party, connected to Ella Baker. This heritage shows what the true meaning of democracy ought to be, if America is to shed its imperial content and substance and actually allow democratic possibilities to loom large. I don’t think that Martin Luther King Jr. is the only one, but, in fact, it has been the black struggle for freedom that has constituted both the moral conscience and the litmus test for American democracy. It’s in this sense that the future of America ought to be black, it ought to be building on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., or in the end there will be no American democracy. There will just be more American imperial practices abroad and more autocratic practices at home. GR: Are you hopeful for the future? CW: I am in no way optimistic, but I am a prisoner of hope.

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C U LT U R E A S C R I T I Q U E The Limits of Liberalism?

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7 / LIBERALISM Politics, Ethics, and Markets Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Ronan Sharkey Michael Sandel

Ronan Sharkey: Perhaps we could start by looking at the philosophical anthropology that underlies your critique of Rawlsian liberalism. According to you, what ethical position is presupposed by what might be termed an “encumbered” or “committed” picture of the self? Michael Sandel: The first thing at stake, it seems to me, for ethics, and also for politics, is the relation between the right and the good, the relation between principles of justice as they define and justify the rights of persons, on the one hand, and conceptions of the good life, on the other. Beginning with Kant—in the tradition that runs from Kant through Rawls—there is an attempt to separate questions of the right (questions of justice, questions of moral duty . . . ) from questions of the good. And the primary reason for the attempt to separate the right from the good has to do with freedom, or at least a certain conception of freedom. The idea going back to Kant—and this is what leads to the “unencumbered self”—is this: in order to think of ourselves as free beings—as “autonomous” beings to use Kant’s language—we have to think of ourselves as bound or claimed only by obligations that we will or choose for ourselves. We can only be claimed by universal duties that we will qua rational beings, as in the Categorical Imperative, or (as in the case of contemporary versions of liberalism) we are only bound by obligations that we voluntarily incur, that we incur through an exercise of will or through a social contract or by choice. So that’s the connection, on the Kantian view, between the unencumbered self, the self not claimed by any duties or obligations, and related to an act of will or choice, the relation between that and a certain ethic; the ethic that flows from the picture of the unencumbered self is such as to assert the priority of the right over the good,

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because conceptions of the good are seen to arise from one’s particular situation, family, nation, religious faith, particular forms of identity, that serve claims independent of choice, prior to choice or will. And so if the self is situated or claimed by particular forms of identity—be they political or religious—then it’s no longer the case that the right is prior to the good. So that, at an abstract level, is the connection with the ideal of the unencumbered self. I’m the author of the only moral ties that can constrain me, and the encumbered or situated self, who may be claimed by moral ties antecedent to choice, is independent of my will. Alfredo Gomez-Muller: Do you regard the distinction between the “right” and the “good” as a valid, relevant one? MS: No, I disagree with that distinction. I would argue that it’s not always possible to separate considerations of justice, or the definition of rights, from considerations of the good. It’s not always possible and, even when it may be possible, it may not be desirable. So I don’t accept that distinction between justice and the good; to the contrary, it seems to me that arguments about justice and arguments about rights unavoidably implicate us in debates about the nature of the good life. It’s not possible to separate the two. Sometimes in moral discourse or political discourse we try to separate the two. One incentive to do so is the idea of freedom that I mentioned before. Another incentive to do so is the idea that in pluralist societies people disagree about the good: it seems tempting to try to find principles of justice that don’t depend on any particular conception of the good. But very often that attempt leads in practice to an unacknowledged reliance on some conception of the good or other. RS: Philosophers such as Rawls and Habermas nevertheless argue for this distinction on the basis of the need for universal criteria of the ethical. Do you believe this universalistic requirement to be valid for ethical discourse in the contemporary world? MS: I think it’s an open question whether it’s possible to affirm a universal conception of the good life. I don’t think we can know in advance the answer to that question. In advance, that is, of actually engaging competing accounts of the good. But I think it’s a mistake to assume, as Rawls and

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Habermas do, that the way to universal norms is by severing justice from the good. We have disagreements in modern societies about justice and rights, just as we have disagreements about how to live the good life. So, on a practical sociological level, there is controversy both at the level of defining justice and rights and at the level of how to live a good life. So I don’t think that the aspiration for universal norms is more readily achieved by trying to separate justice and rights from the good. The possibility that there could be universal agreement on a normative question exists for questions of the good and for questions of justice. Whether that possibility can be realized in any given case I don’t think can be decided in advance. I do think that moral discourse presupposes the possibility of some shared or universal norm. But I don’t think it’s more likely to find such a norm in justice rather than in the domain of the good. In both domains, which I see in any case as connected, moral discourse presupposes the possibility of some universal or shared norm, but doesn’t guarantee it: there’s no guarantee in advance, in either domain. One way of putting the disagreement with Rawls and Habermas would be to say that I’m more confident than they are about the possibility of universal understandings of the good, but another way of putting the disagreement would be to say that I’m more skeptical than they about the possibility of finding universal norms of justice detached from conceptions of the good. So one is from the standpoint of confidence and the other is from the standpoint of skepticism; but I don’t think that the asymmetry between the just and the good is a way of vindicating universal norms. AGM: Universal criteria of this kind would however be necessarily historical, historically situated . . . MS: I don’t want to say that it’s a merely historical question, whether there is a universal norm of the good, because it’s also a practical, ethical question. I would say simply that we can’t know for sure the answer to that practical question in advance. The historical situation of any reflection on the good may provide an obstacle or a resource for ethical reflection, but I wouldn’t say that it’s merely a historically contingent question; history provides the occasion, provides multiple occasions, for reflection on the good. Whether we can win through to a shared conception of the good in any given case is something we can’t know in advance.

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AGM: In the classical liberal tradition, the hypothesis of an unencumbered self presupposes the bracketing out of history, of historical change. The universality of norms is formulated in abstraction from historical reality. If we understand your position correctly, this is not the perspective from which you approach the problem . . . MS: No, no. I think that the way to the aspiration to a shared or universal understanding of the good has to work itself out through interlocutors or participants who are historically situated. So, in that respect, my answer would be that the historical situation is a necessary medium for deliberation about the good. We can’t—and this is another way of saying that political deliberation and political engagement is an unavoidable aspect of deliberation about the good, and there can be no politics, no deliberation, without some historical situation. And the mode of reflection, the mode of reasoning, the mode of argument through which we would aspire to an understanding of the good is unavoidably situated historically. Which is not to say that the social conventions that prevail at any given moment are themselves the source of the good. I don’t want to say that. That’s why I’m hesitating to embrace completely the idea of historical situationists. So I want to prevent that misunderstanding: I’m not a historical relativist, I’m not saying that the norms simply reside in the conventions, but the participants in the deliberation unavoidably draw on their own historical situation; and the historical situation is then not an obstacle, but an essential moment in reflecting on the good. I’m not an historicist in the sense of saying that the valid norms are whatever norms happen to prevail at any given historical moment. And yet the historical situation is nevertheless an indispensable aspect of moral deliberation and reflection. RS: You’re optimistic about the possibility of arriving at some sort of universal agreement on the good. However, it would be possible to be skeptical on just about all counts and say not only that it’s not possible to arrive at universal agreement on the good, but it’s not even possible to arrive at universal agreement on the right, and that therefore the role of the state would have to be seen in pragmatic terms as the guarantor of a sort of modus vivendi, which is the position that Rawls attacks in Political Liberalism. And that position— though undoubtedly pessimistic—has, in the context of a pluralistic society characterized by the coexistence of a multiplicity of rival conceptions of the

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good, a certain attractiveness as providing a sort of bulwark against chaos. How would you answer the charge that your own perspective is, on this view, unrealistically optimistic? MS: Let me first try to correct a possible misunderstanding. I was not insisting on optimism about agreement on the good; I was according equal status to skepticism and optimism. I was opposing two different ways of describing my disagreement with Rawls and Habermas. From the standpoint of the good I think they rule out too quickly, and without sufficient justification, the possibility of agreeing on the good. So that would make me seem optimistic about agreement on the good. But I could equally describe my disagreement with their view as viewing them as overly optimistic about agreeing on principles of justice and rights detached from questions of the good. So from that standpoint my criticism of their view of procedural liberalism would be a skeptical one. My main point is whether, described from the standpoint of optimism about the good or skepticism about agreeing on principles of justice detached from the good, there is a symmetry, not an asymmetry, between the right and the good. And that’s my fundamental difference with procedural liberalism of the Kantian, Rawlsian, or Habermasian kind. So I don’t want to be taxed with optimism vis-à-vis that debate because my view could equally be cast as skeptical criticism of the assumption that it is possible to win through despite the disagreements in modern society about justice and rights. As for the idea that the disagreements in modern societies should lead us to give up on the right or the good as regulative principles and simply aim for kind of pragmatic modus vivendi, I reject that idea on two grounds: first, I think the purely pragmatic case for a nonjudgmental pluralism detaches ethics from politics too completely. And that’s objectionable on moral grounds, because it seems to me that it’s always appropriate to bring moral judgments to bear on any political settlement or solution. But the purely pragmatic modus vivendi idea is also objectionable on practical grounds, because citizens of modern democratic societies, notwithstanding their disagreements—on morality, on religion, on conceptions of the good—nonetheless want public life at some level or other to give expression to larger moral meanings. So the idea of having a politics that’s purely pragmatic or merely a modus vivendi underestimates the extent to which, as a practical matter, it’s likely to be unstable. People can’t long abide a public life that’s drained altogether of moral meaning or shared purposes, conceptions of the good life. So, both on moral

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grounds and on practical grounds, it seems to me that a purely pragmatic modus vivendi, a case for pluralism that tries to be nonjudgmental with respect to the underlying moral meaning of public life and public institutions, is unlikely to be sustainable. And one evidence of this is the backlash that we see in secular societies, societies that try to evacuate public life of larger meanings; we see a backlash against purely procedural forms of politics that try to exclude moral and religious questions in the form of various kinds of fundamentalism and intolerance. So I think one of the dangers of procedural liberal politics is that it leaves unanswered the widespread hunger for public life to give expression to the shared identities and values of citizens. So on both of those grounds I would think undesirable and unrealistic the attempt to have a political settlement that would divorce morality from politics. RS: In some of your more recent writings, and in what we’ve been hearing you say over the last few days, you seem to be arguing for religion to be taken more seriously as a partner in political dialogue in democracies. Would you regard inviting religions and religious spokespeople into the public democratic debate as a way of disarming them, as a way of enabling them to become more reasonable and of helping them to emerge from the ghetto of fundamentalism? MS: I think that would be one reason, though not the only reason, for inviting those whose views are informed by religious convictions into public discourse. A second reason is that everyone may have something to learn from an engagement with different religious traditions as they inform public debate and political life. The reason I say that the hope of moderating religious radicalism or fundamentalism is just one reason, is that I don’t think we should assume that the learning will be or should be in one direction only. We may find that a more serious engagement with religion in public life will moderate or reorient some religious energies that we associate with fundamentalism or radical religious views, but we shouldn’t foreclose the possibility that those of a secular bent may have something to learn as well. That would be a second reason. And a third reason for engaging religion more openly in public discourse is that it may be a way of making life less vulnerable, rather than more vulnerable, to the energies and enthusiasms and convictions of various religious groups. The attempt to keep religion out of public life is likely to create a vacuum and to set the stage for a kind of backlash. So, to sum up, to moderate or otherwise to change radical or fun-

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damentalist religious views, to provide an occasion for learning on the part of all participants, and to avoid emptying the public sphere of larger moral meanings to such an extent that it invites a backlash: those seem to be three reasons for inviting religious voices into public discourse. RS: There’s one area where the public debate on a moral question is heavily influenced and, to a certain extent, distorted by the presence of very strong religious beliefs, and that’s on the question of abortion. In your book Democracy’s Discontent you approach the question by saying that if there is a true answer to the question of the rightness or wrongness of abortion then that should have an influence on legislation and on the way we deal politically with this question . . . MS: The abortion debate is a good example of a public question that doesn’t admit of a neutral or a procedural solution. It seems to me that, in deciding what the law should be about abortion, the state can’t avoid deliberating about the question of the moral status of abortion. And any attempt to try to put in place any regulation of abortion—whether to permit it or to prohibit it, or to permit it only under certain circumstances—each of those positions presupposes some answer to the underlying moral, and to some extent theological, question of when human life begins and what is the moral status of human life as it develops. I myself am not among those who think that abortion should be banned: I don’t. At the same time, I regard abortion as a grave moral question that needs to be taken morally seriously, and I don’t think it’s possible for law to claim to be neutral on the question, to set aside the question on the grounds that it’s religiously controversial. I don’t think that that is a defensible position. And so any society that decides to permit abortion under some circumstances should do so having engaged the best arguments, including religious arguments, about the moral status of the developing person and the question of when human life in the relevant moral sense begins. So I don’t think it’s possible to be neutral on that question, even for purposes of law. I think it reflects the poverty of political discourse that in many societies there is the claim by judges or legislators to be setting that moral question aside and to be deciding on some other grounds. RS: Perhaps we could ask you to make clear how you approach the question of the genesis of social goods. You contrast your approach with, for example, that

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of Michael Walzer, whose argument from shared meanings you criticize as relativistic. But Walzer’s theory has the merit of showing us one route by which we can explain how goods become “good.” In criticizing him, what alternative do you provide in order to explain the foundations of your axiology? MS: What is the source of the conceptions of the good that can decide such questions as that of abortion? In a way, my answer goes back to the first question we were discussing: I don’t think it’s possible to articulate the meaning of any particular good—whether it’s to do with health or security or, for that matter, the status of human life and when it begins—without attending to the social meaning of that good in a historical setting. Moral discourse is unavoidably situated; the situation is not just an obstacle to moral reflection, but a necessary source of moral deliberation and reflection. That said, the fact that a certain good has a certain historically given meaning in a certain society isn’t sufficient to decide the question of whether that represents an adequate understanding of the good in question; the social conventions may have it wrong. So that’s why I don’t want wholly unsituated moral reasoning detached from the historical situation, because goods only have meanings within a historical circumstance. But one shouldn’t exempt from judgment the historical circumstance. The conventions may be wrong, or reflect an impoverished or an inadequate understanding. Even shared understandings may reflect an impoverished or an inadequate understanding of what this good really means. RS: But what would be your criteria of impoverishment or inadequacy in terms of our understanding of the good, and from where would you draw them? MS: Well I don’t think there are any fixed criteria that can be stated in advance that can just be “plugged in” for any good at any given time. Moral deliberation of the kind I’m describing has a hermeneutic character, which is why the historical situation is a necessary ingredient of the deliberation; but it has a hermeneutic character that at least gestures toward a horizon that may lie beyond the immediate historical circumstance. So there are no fixed criteria of any great interest that could be specified in advance for all goods at all times and in all places. But that doesn’t mean that the only alternative is merely moral relativism, that anything goes. One has to assess within the hermeneutic, and also as it gestures toward the horizon beyond the immediate situation, the weight of considerations in moral deliberation. So that’s

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why I would resist some formulaic answer to the question what are the criteria, while still not wanting to embrace moral relativism. AGM: Could we turn now to the question of the relation of the position you have just outlined to the ethics of economic activity? What is the relation between the “encumbered” subject that you defend in political theory and the arguments you are currently putting forward for a set of limits to be agreed on for commercial activity? MS: One of my projects is to try to identify the moral limits of markets. Let me try to explain how this project is connected to the critique of the unencumbered self, or the disengaged subject. One way to see this would be to consider views that reject any moral limits to markets. There’s an extreme version and a more moderate version of the view that markets should in principle be unlimited. The more extreme version is associated with libertarians and with the “Law and Economics” movement prominent in American legal scholarship. It’s a utilitarian and also a libertarian idea, according to which markets are voluntary arrangements where people choose for themselves what values to place on the goods they exchange. And so, provided people do so freely, without coercion, a respect for liberty requires a respect for whatever results the market may produce. On this view any good can in principle be bought or sold provided that the two parties agree to exchange some good for money, whether it’s selling an organ for transplant—say a kidney—or whether it’s selling blood for transfusion or selling one’s services as a surrogate mother, carrying a child for pay . . . So long as the parties agree, there is consent, and freedom requires that we respect the result. The more moderate version qualifies that view by saying, “If there are very poor people, their consent is in effect coerced, because they’re subject to economic necessity, and therefore are not in a position to choose.” A very poor person might, for example, feel compelled to sell his kidney in order for his family to have enough to survive: that’s not truly voluntary, the liberal egalitarian might say, and therefore those exchanges should be restricted. But in principle there are no limits to markets provided the exchanges are truly free. So the view that rejects moral limits to markets is connected to the unencumbered self in the following way: no good is or can be degraded as such by market valuation and exchange; all that matters is that there be free choice or free consent. So the idea of the freely choosing individual self is connected to the idea we discussed at the beginning of

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the unencumbered or disengaged subject of political theory. I’m personally critical of those who would view market relations in this way. What I’m trying to do is identify certain characteristics of some goods, be they civic goods or human goods, that are corrupted or degraded if bought and sold for money. On the utilitarian view, there is only one category of moral assessment, and that’s use. Every good is open to use; all that matters is that the good be exchanged according to the rules of free consent. So the utilitarian has only one mode of valuation: use. On the Kantian liberal view there are two modes of valuation: respect for human beings, for human dignity, and for everything else use. So, for Kant, human beings must be respected. But, in the domain of goods, all goods other than human beings are open to use. On the view that I’m trying to advance, there are different modes of valuation appropriate to different goods, and they include not only respect and use but honor, appreciation, love, reverence . . . So take a nonhuman good, say an ancient tree, a sequoia or an ancient redwood tree that’s been growing for many years. Now it’s not a person, so it’s not worthy of respect in virtue of human dignity. But neither is it open to just any utilitarian conception of use. There is a certain proper mode of valuation for an ancient forest, let’s say, that restricts the use that may be made of it. Or, to take another example, say a work of art, a painting by Picasso: could someone, a wealthy person say, buy that painting and decide to use it as a rug in his house? He’s wealthy, he can afford it, he buys it, it’s his property: why not? Or, is this an improper mode of valuing that good? Now, by allowing his guests to walk on the Picasso, he’s not violating human rights—it’s not a living person, it’s not as though a living person or a slave were lying on the floor being walked on—and yet it’s an improper mode of valuation to regard that painting merely as an object of use. What is the proper mode of valuation in this case? Well, a certain kind of appreciation, let’s say. Maybe even reverence or, in the case of the old forest, a certain kind of awe would be regarded as a proper mode of valuation. And so, it seems to me, we need to try to articulate our ways of valuing goods intrinsically, which has to do with a proper understanding of the kinds of goods they are. And from such an understanding of goods would flow certain moral limits on the market exchange of goods inconsistent with the proper way of valuing those goods. So, to come back to your question, the link between the argument for the moral limits of markets and the critique of the unencumbered self and of procedural liberalism is that we cannot decide what goods should or should not be bought and sold in markets simply in terms of rights, duties, justice,

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etc., alone, but we have to ask questions about the nature of the good and the meaning of the good in question. And this matters in contemporary societies where the market is extending its reach into domains of life that were once thought to be immune from market valuation and exchange. We see, for example, the advent of for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons; a revival, in the case of security, of privatized security as an alternative to public police protection, the outsourcing of war, or the privatization of new forms of mercenaries, private companies . . . We have questions about the patenting of genes and other life forms that are emerging in Western societies. So, whether it has to do with organs, or the patenting of genes and life forms, or the commercialization of important public functions, we need to have a new debate about the nature of the goods at stake and whether certain goods are corrupted or degraded if subjected to market valuation and exchange. AGM: Finally, are there any connections between this radical critique of economic liberalism that you are advancing and the Marxian tradition? MS: Yes and no. There is a certain affinity with some of Marx’s insights, but there are also important differences. One important insight that Marx had concerned the tendency of market capitalism to colonize all spheres of life, beyond what we would understand to be ordinary commercial activity. So I think he did have an important insight about commodification, the tendency of capitalism to extend the reach of markets, without limit, into all domains of life. So that would be the similarity. The difference concerns the way of deliberating about the particular goods that should be protected from commodification. My argument is not an argument against markets as such; my argument is for keeping markets in their place. And that means that we have to have a way of reflecting on the proper place of markets. And that means, in turn, that we have to find a way, philosophically, but ultimately also politically, of identifying those goods, those spheres of life, that are diminished or corrupted or degraded if bought and sold. We have to ask the question what goods should be bought and sold for money, and what goods should not be, and then we have to find a way politically of working out arrangements that will protect those goods that would be corrupted by market valuation and exchange. So my argument is not to abolish markets, but to rein in markets and, more specifically, market-driven ways of thinking about social goods, civic goods, and human goods.

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C U LT U R A L R I G H T S A N D SOCIAL-DEM O C R AT I C P R I N C I P L E S Dialogue with Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill Will Kymlicka

Alfredo Gomez-Muller: Could you tell us how you came to be interested in questions of political multiculturalism? Will Kymlicka: It was completely accidental. I was always interested in issues of justice, but not particularly in issues of ethnicity or culture. I was raised in a social-democratic left-liberal family and tradition, which has generally been quite hostile to ideas of minority rights and multiculturalism, or simply indifferent to issues of ethnic diversity. So I had not thought about these issues until I got to university, where I heard a talk by Charles Taylor. He was discussing recent work on left-liberal theories of justice like those of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin—theories that I find very attractive. Taylor however argued that these theories were too individualistic, and the evidence for their being too individualistic is that you could not defend ideas of minority rights such as for the Quebecois and the indigenous inhabitants of Northern Canada if you believed in a Rawlsian theory of justice. That really struck me. I thought that if Taylor was right—i.e. if you had to choose between either supporting a left-liberal theory of justice or supporting bilingualism and autonomy for Quebec—then that was a real dilemma. But it was not clear to me that Taylor was correct, partly because Rawls and Dworkin themselves never discussed the issue. So that became my Ph.D. thesis. I wanted to see whether Taylor was correct in claiming that you cannot defend ideas of minority rights within a left-liberal theory of justice. I was very attracted to a Rawlsian theory of justice. As a liberal egalitarian, I was attracted to the way in which Rawls and Dworkin had managed to combine a traditional liberal commitment to individual civil rights with a strongly egalitarian commitment to the redistribution of resources and equality of opportunity. But I was

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worried by Taylor’s critique and I wanted to see whether there was a way of answering it. AGM: What do you think of Taylor’s distinction between holistic liberals and atomistic liberals, and his claim that only the former can justify multicultural rights? How would you situate your work in relationship to this distinction between two rival anthropologies? WK: Taylor’s critique of atomism is important but misleading. It is misleading because it is simply not true that any of the important thinkers in the liberal tradition have endorsed the kind of atomism that he attributes to liberals. What he gives us is somewhat of a caricature of the liberal tradition. However, I think he is right that most liberal theorists have not been sufficiently clear or explicit about the ways in which individuals are embedded in, and dependent on, larger social contexts, and that this needs to be made more explicit. Most liberals have acknowledged, in passing, that individual freedom is inevitably dependent on social relationships, cultural backgrounds, cultural repertoires, and on a larger political culture of freedom. Everything that Taylor says about how individual freedom depends on a larger social, political, and cultural context has been recognized by liberals, and in my response to Taylor I have cited various passages in the writings of the major liberal theorists where this is clear. Yet it remains true that most liberals have not been sufficiently explicit about this and have not worked out its implications in a systematic way. So that is part of what I tried to do in my first book. I wanted to make more explicit and systematic the hints that I saw in Mill, Rawls, and other liberal theorists about the social and cultural preconditions of individual autonomy. To go back to your question, then, I don’t think we can distinguish an atomistic from a holistic tradition of liberalism. I think that virtually all liberals reject atomism, but they vary in the extent to which they are explicit about it or the extent to which they work out its implications, including for questions of multiculturalism. Gabriel Rockhill: How much of this historical description is based on your own normative agenda of “squaring the circle” by overcoming the long-standing opposition between liberalism and communitarianism, i.e. rejecting the atomistic conception of liberalism without falling into an extreme form of communitarianism that precludes liberal principles?

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WK: I would not quite put it that way, because what I want to do is to excavate the already existing ways in which the liberal tradition has made assumptions about the social and cultural preconditions of freedom. This is an issue that has come up many times in the history of liberal thought, but each time in ad hoc, contingent ways. For example, many Victorian liberals were confronted with this question in the context of colonialism. They had to address the question of how to think about the promotion of individual freedom in the context of an imperial liberalism, where British colonial settlers and officials were interacting with a wide range of culturally distinct groups. These Victorian liberals developed interesting ideas about the cultural preconditions of freedom, although, of course, they were heavily biased by the fact that they were working in an imperial age, with its assumptions of racial and ethnic hierarchies. In fact, that’s one way in which I think of my project: it is intended to be a postimperial liberalism, one that revisits some of the issues of cultural diversity and cultural accommodation that have arisen in the history of the liberal tradition, but then tries to identify and eliminate the biases that emerged from the fact that those issues initially arose in an imperial framework. AGM: Isn’t the notion of imperial liberalism paradoxical? Can liberalism be imperial? WK: Today we think about liberal imperialism as a contradiction in terms, but the vast majority of nineteenth-century liberals viewed it as perfectly logical. British imperialism was overwhelmingly a liberal project: conservatives like Burke were much more skeptical of imperialism compared with Mill and the other liberals who defended imperialism. Parenthetically, this is a good example of why it is too simple to say that liberalism is exclusively about individualism or individual rights, and that therefore it is inherently opposed to imperialism or inherently opposed to multiculturalism. Looking at the history of the liberal tradition helps remind us that there is, in fact, enormous variation and contingency in the ways in which liberals have linked their commitment to individual freedom to issues of nationalism, imperialism, minority rights, and multiculturalism. We need to recall the range of views that liberals have taken historically on these issues, to see the universe of possibilities, and then judge which ones are most plausible and most respectful of enduring liberal values. It’s obviously true that nineteenth-century im-

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perial liberalism was stained by the racist assumptions of the era, but I think that the post–World War II liberal opposition to minority rights was equally biased by the contingencies of that era, such as the war against the Nazis and the emerging cold war against Communism. Those geopolitical factors strongly shaped how postwar liberals addressed issues of minority rights. We need to situate these different liberal views in their historical and geographical contexts, and see how each reflects a mixture of enduring liberal values and local biases and assumptions. GR: Could you speak about your own specific historical context, which inevitably informs your writings? How is your work as a liberal theorist influenced by the rising importance of cultural issues in politics, which have been in the forefront of Anglophone political theory since the 1980s? WK: I view myself as being very much in the Rawlsian tradition of liberal political thought, which emerged in the early 1970s. Rawls’s great contribution, in my view, was to formulate a more “rights-based” liberalism, in contrast to the utilitarian defenses of liberalism that had dominated the liberal tradition for almost a century. This shift from utilitarian to rights-based liberalism was very much a response to Rawls’s own historical context—in particular, to the problem of American race relations. Rawls was deeply affected by the discrimination that occurred against African Americans and was convinced that a utilitarian approach was insufficient to resolve it. If you approach the question of race relations on a straightforward utilitarian basis, and if large numbers of the white majority want to discriminate against blacks (as was true in many states in the American South), how can you be sure that the utilitarian answer is going to be in favor of civil rights for African Americans? If you actually count up all the preferences, it may well be that you satisfy more preferences by permitting discrimination. For Rawls, this was unacceptable. The basic rights of African Americans should not be hostage to majority preferences. So he wanted to find a new defense of civil rights for African Americans that didn’t depend on utilitarian calculations. I fully share this Rawlsian view, and I view my own work as simply extending (or adapting) that core insight to a broader range of cases. We can put the core insight this way: if we want to protect the human rights and civil rights of disadvantaged and stigmatized minorities such as African Americans, we need a nonutilitarian account that does not rely on the preferences of the

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majority. Utilitarianism cannot securely protect the rights of stigmatized minorities who are disliked by the majority. In my view, a liberal theory of minority rights can be understood as extending that insight to other kinds of disadvantage and stigmatization. In the case of African Americans in the United States, the best way to protect a despised minority against majoritarian preferences was through firm protections against discrimination in civil and political rights. In other cases, however, such as indigenous peoples or linguistic minorities like the Quebecois, or immigrant groups, the appropriate remedies will be different. Here too you have the same need to find a countermajoritarian, nonutilitarian defense of the rights of minorities against majoritarian preferences. However, these rights will not only take the form of protection from discrimination; they will also require some forms of positive minority rights, such as land claims for indigenous peoples, language rights for national minorities, or multicultural accommodations for immigrant groups. So I would locate my work in the context of this broader shift from utilitarian to rights-based liberalism, and I am interested in the implications of that core shift for a broad range of minorities who need countermajoritarian protections. I think that Rawls’s conception of a “color-blind” rights-based liberal egalitarianism is fundamentally driven by the case of African Americans. That is the example he had in mind of why we need to have a theory of rights that is not hostage to utilitarian calculations. But if you take the core insight of this shift from utilitarianism to rights-based liberalism to look at other types of groups in other countries, I think you come up with a more complex set of minority rights that are needed to defend different types of minorities against different types of majoritarian oppression. GR: This is an extremely idiosyncratic reading of Rawls. In his early work, the question of “culture” is largely absent, and, when it does enter the picture, it tends to be subsumed under the second principle of justice.1 It is only in his late work that you find a direct engagement with “cultural” questions through his study of the global relations between “reasonable liberal peoples,” “decent peoples,” “outlaw states,” “societies burdened by unfavorable conditions,” and “benevolent absolutisms.”2 However, the role of race relations remains secondary, to say the very least. His major reference point is, on the contrary, American constitutionalism and the founding fathers of the United States. Isn’t your reading of Rawls, and your reappropriation of his work, tied to the rise of multiculturalism through the late 1980s and early

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1990s? Doesn’t a “cultural” reading of Rawls, in terms of a deep-seated, but largely implicit, preoccupation with race relations, only really become possible at this point in time? WK: Yes and no. He obviously did not describe his project the way I have, so I am attributing motives and explanations that he himself does not discuss in depth. But I strongly believe that the most plausible historical explanation for why rights-based liberalism emerged and triumphed in the AngloAmerican world in the 1970s, when the work of Rawls and Dworkin came to dominate the intellectual landscape, is that it provided an intellectual framework for people to make sense of real-world social movements that were countermajoritarian, that were protecting minority groups. It’s important to remember that this reflects a major shift in the real-world problems that liberalism has faced. In the nineteenth century, when Bentham and Mill were writing, there was a privileged minority and a disadvantaged majority, and progressives were concerned to empower the majority. In that context, utilitarianism provides a good defense of liberal-democratic reforms, because shifting power away from the elite to the majority maximizes utility. Utilitarianism provides a natural and effective justification for promoting liberal values in that context. But the post–World War II context is quite different. Once universal franchise was achieved, and the majority had its civil and political rights respected, the struggles for liberal reform come primarily from a series of historically disadvantaged and marginalized groups that are disliked by the majority. And in this context you need a different, nonutilitarian way of defending liberalization. The triumph of Rawlsian liberalism is due to the fact that so many different groups have been able to use it, not just ethnic groups but gays and lesbians, women’s groups, or people with disabilities. It is much easier for them to articulate their claims in a Rawlsian language of rights-based liberalism than it is in utilitarianism. AGM: In Rawls and the liberal tradition, there is a certain mistrust of the idea of collective rights. In Multicultural Citizenship, you confront the question of collective rights, but your response to the question seems hesitant and unsure. You say that there is an ambiguity in the notion of collective rights. But isn’t the idea of collective rights nonetheless implicit in the affirmation of rights specific to a minority? Is it really possible to simply abandon the principle of collective rights? How do you position yourself today in relationship

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to the claims made in your earlier work regarding the fundamental question of collective rights? WK: I wish we could simply abolish the term collective rights. I don’t think it is a helpful term. Every time I give a talk, people ask whether I believe in collective rights or whether liberalism is compatible with collective rights. I just don’t think this is a helpful way of evaluating what really matters. For example, in Eastern Europe there is a huge debate about the idea of collective rights, by which people usually mean either territorial autonomy (so that “collective rights” for the ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia means the right to some form of territorial autonomy) or something like official language status. In my view, if that is what people mean by collective rights, we should just directly ask about territorial autonomy and official language status. That is, we should ask what forms of territorial autonomy are consistent with liberal values of individual freedom, democratic participation, solidarity, and welfare-state redistribution. Similarly for official language status: under what conditions is it appropriate for there to be more than one official language? When does this promote justice? When does it enhance individual choice? When does it restrict it? That is the substance of the dispute. When confronted with specific political claims—for the recognition of indigenous customary law, say, or for national minorities’ official language status—many people seem to think that before we can evaluate those claims we first need to decide if they are “collective rights.” Then, on the basis of whether they are collective rights or not, we can decide whether we endorse them or not. In my view, this step of trying to decide whether these claims are “collective rights” or not is unnecessary. We should just directly examine the claims and evaluate them. And, in my view, there are many circumstances where recognition of legal pluralism, territorial autonomy, and official language status is not just consistent with liberal values but in fact enhances them. Trying to categorize these claims as collective rights or not is not only unnecessary, it is also a distraction. As soon as we raise the term collective rights, people immediately set aside the specifics of the claim and instead run off to debate other metaphysical questions, such as whether groups really exist, whether they have moral status, whether they can be ascribed agency or responsibility, and so on. We get bogged down in all of these metaphysical questions regarding what it would mean for there to be collective rights when in fact we should be discussing the substance of the actual claims to see

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how this or that form of territorial autonomy, say, or official language status, would impact on liberal values of individual freedom, democratic participation, and social justice. AGM: Independently of the polemical aspect, especially in Europe, of the notion of collective rights, would you say that specific multicultural rights are nevertheless collective rights in the sense that they are rights exercised by a collectivity? WK: In the book you referred to, I call them group-differentiated rights or group-specific rights. Some of them are collectively exercised, some of them are not. In the case of indigenous peoples, certain land claims are collectively exercised; they are not a matter of individual property but of communal land. In the case of certain political representation claims, these are also collectively exercised if they involve, for instance, giving guaranteed seats to a minority or a veto within a cabinet. However, other forms of group-differentiated rights are exercised by individuals: the right of Muslims to wear a hijab, or for Sikhs to wear a turban, or the right to speak your language if you go to see local public officials. These are all individually exercised. So some of these rights are individually exercised, some are collectively exercised. My inclination is to say that this is not the crucial question. The central question is: do they enhance core liberal values or jeopardize them? Do they promote individual freedom or restrict it? Do they help to create equality between the members of different groups or do they perpetuate relations of hierarchy and inequality? Do they enhance peoples’ ability to participate democratically or do they limit it? We do not get far in answering these questions if we obsess about the question of whether rights are “individual” or “collective.” GR: It seems that one of the linchpins for you in getting out of the simplistic question of collective rights is the notion of a societal culture. You assert, for instance, that all individuals have a right to a societal culture, and that it is this right that allows individuals to fully exercise their freedom. I was wondering if you could say more about how exactly you conceive of societal cultures and their role in your unique brand of liberalism. One probable criticism of this notion is that it resembles the monolithic, superorganic concept of culture attacked by Clifford Geertz, and that cultural practices are in fact

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always highly particularized rituals grounded in concrete situations. How would you react to such a criticism? Have your thoughts on culture changed significantly since your work in the 1990s? WK: The distinction that I want to draw is between what I am calling a societal culture, on the one hand, and discrete cultural practices, on the other. This distinction is crucial to any plausible liberal conception of multiculturalism. On a liberal conception, individuals must be free to question and contest traditional cultural practices, and therefore we should expect that there will be ongoing disagreements within any society, or any ethnic group, about how to interpret those traditional practices, and about when it is appropriate to revise them or to abandon them entirely. That is what liberal democracy is all about: it enables individuals to engage in this ongoing process of questioning and debating and revising the ways of life they have inherited. I don’t want to defend any laws or policies that would inhibit individuals’ ability to question and revise the traditional practices that characterize their ethnic group. So multiculturalism for me is not about preserving traditional practices. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. I reject traditionalist or conservative interpretations of multiculturalism that seek to protect cultural practices from being questioned and revised and so on. That is the opposite of my view. I am interested precisely in enabling people to make intelligent and informed judgments, and to have free discussions and debates, about the merits of their traditional ways of life, and to learn from other ways of life. I am interested in supporting the kind of cultural context within which individuals can engage in this ongoing process of critical reflection on the merits of their traditional ways of life, and that is what my notion of societal culture is intended to do. It is intended to specify the larger societal and institutional context that provides the preconditions for individuals to reflect on discrete cultural practices. A societal culture, in this sense, is defined not by discrete cultural practices, which are always contested and changing over time, but by a common set of institutions, a common language, and a sense of forming an intergenerational community on a particular territory. This is obviously a very thin conception of culture. People can be said to belong to the same culture in this thin sense if they participate together in a common set of institutions operating in a common language, and view themselves as members of a historic community that seeks to preserve itself into the future. So, for example, the Quebecois are

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members of a common and ongoing francophone societal culture in Canada, even though most Quebecois have renounced the historic (rural, Catholic) cultural practices of their ancestors, and even though they vary enormously in their discrete cultural practices today. In my view, although the Quebecois are a minority within Canada, their societal culture fully provides the conditions for individual autonomy, and so liberals should accept the legitimacy of their desire to maintain their distinct societal culture, and should accept the language rights and autonomy rights needed to do so. GR: Does that mean that the distinction between the thin level of societal culture and the thick level of discrete practices corresponds to the public/private divide, or is that not the way you want to think about this distinction? WK: That is partly right in the sense that it is legitimate for public institutions to have as their goal the maintenance and reproduction of the thin societal culture but should not view it as their function to guarantee the reproduction of discrete cultural practices. Whether discrete practices survive or not should be left to the decisions of individuals on the basis of their own reflections and choices. However, I would not equate the distinction between societal cultures and discrete practices with the public/private divide, because there are times when it is important for the state to accommodate certain practices in public space and public institutions. For example, the state can (and should) provide Sikhs with a legal exemption that allows them to wear a turban in the police force, even if this deviates from the normal dress code. It should do this not because the state wants to make sure this particular practice perpetuates itself indefinitely, but simply because we want to make sure that laws do not place undue burdens on people who partake in this practice. So public accommodations of discrete practices are often legitimate not because the state wants to encourage more people to choose to maintain that practice, but simply to avoid unnecessary burdens on those who do make that choice. AGM: Do you distinguish between culture and ideology, or do you identify these two notions? WK: I have not thought about it in those terms. As I conceive of them, thick cultural practices are embedded in specific conceptions of the good life. So if

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you want to understand why individuals continue to value discrete cultural practices, you would have to understand the conceptions of the good life that are implicit in them, and that give meaning to them. It is fundamental to my conception of a thin societal culture that people with radically different, even incommensurable, conceptions of the good life can all be common participants in a societal culture. That means that two people can both be Quebecois and yet have radically divergent or even contradictory conceptions of the good life. One could be an observant Catholic who follows all the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church, the other could be a lesbian atheist, but they are both full members of the same thin societal culture in this sense. AGM: Does the problematic of the good life belong to ideology for you? Is it an ethical issue? Do you identify ethics and ideology? WK: Well, again, I don’t use the concept of ideology in my work. The distinction that I do use is between “the good” (conceptions of the good life) and “the right” (principles of justice), to use Rawlsian language. In one sense, both of these can be considered forms of ideology. Conceptions of the good are ethical and moral views that make sense of discrete cultural practices, and they have attributes of ideology. But theories of the right also have characteristics of ideology. From my point of view, it is very important to distinguish the good and the right, and the very possibility of there being a liberal multiculturalism depends on being able to maintain that distinction. GR: What is the role of class and the economy in your work? For instance, in distinguishing between political refugees, ethnic groups, and national minorities, you claim that one of the distinct features of ethnic groups is that they have willingly immigrated to another country. However, in the world that we are living in, it is a well-known fact that “willful” immigration is often driven by economic inequities, to name only one of the most powerful forms of coercion that pushes individuals to “choose” to immigrate. In order to deal with this situation, you suggest in passing that there should be a global redistribution of wealth that would put a cap on economic forces and allow immigration to be purely volitional. Could you develop this line of thought? What is your stance on the role of the economy and its relationship to cultural politics?

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WK: As I said at the beginning of the interview, I come from a social-democratic background and I have a strong commitment to a robust welfare state that redistributes from the advantaged to the disadvantaged. This is fundamental for me. I share Rawls’s view that justice is the first virtue of social institutions and that justice requires trying to remedy the effects of misfortune and of arbitrary and unchosen inequalities on people’s life chances. So issues of economic equality and redistribution are very important to me personally; they are at the core of my political outlook. This raises an important question: what is the relationship between multiculturalism and economic inequality, either domestically or globally? Let me start with the domestic case. Some people argue that the rise of multiculturalism reflects the retreat of class politics, that multiculturalism has displaced traditional class politics, and that if we still believe in the importance of redistributing resources, we need to shift back to class politics. On this view, there is a trade-off between focusing on cultural recognition or on economic redistribution. In my view, however, there is no such trade-off. In fact, a colleague and I have just published a book called Multiculturalism and the Welfare State that attempts to empirically test the assumption that there is a trade-off, i.e. we test the claim that the more a country goes down the road of multicultural recognition the harder it is to sustain economic redistribution. And we found there is simply no evidence for this claim. I got involved in this project precisely because of my social-democratic background: I care very much about sustaining the welfare state, and if it turned out that there was clear evidence that multiculturalism displaced concerns for redistribution, I would personally be anguished. I would be very distressed at the thought that the multiculturalist political projects that I have been defending came at the expense of the welfare state. However, I just don’t believe this is true. A more serious concern is about global inequality. As you note, I argue that where immigrants voluntarily cross international borders they can be seen as accepting certain terms of integration into a new society. Obviously this argument is strongest where immigration is truly voluntary. For example, consider people in Canada moving to Sweden or people from Sweden moving to Canada. In this case, the country where they were born and raised provided them with a decent opportunity to lead a good life, but they have chosen for whatever reason—perhaps for career reasons or because they have fallen in love—to move to another country. In this case, I think that it is entirely appropriate for the receiving state to say to such voluntary

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immigrants, “here are the terms of admission, here are the terms of acquiring citizenship” and for these terms to involve a degree of integration in the preexisting society that it would be unfair to apply to involuntarily incorporated historic minorities. Things are obviously much more complicated when we are dealing with migration from very poor countries to wealthy countries, or with refugee flows, where people are fleeing persecution. Within those contexts, the element of volition is dramatically diminished, given global inequalities, violence, and persecution. So that it is a problem for liberal theories of multiculturalism, and there is a potential unfairness, if a liberal democratic state treats all its immigrants as if they were voluntary. To my mind, the only long-term remedy for that problem is a global form of redistribution and the protection of human rights and democracy around the world, such that we move toward a world where migration is more and more truly voluntary. I don’t think it is possible for receiving states to remedy the deeper injustices of global inequality in life chances through their immigration and multiculturalism policies. The problem lies in the dramatic inequality in peoples’ life chances around the world and, in the fact, that many people face persecution, and we need to tackle this problem at its root. GR: Do liberal democracies have a responsibility at that level? WK: Absolutely. I do not have a magic formula for the way to do it. I agree with those critics of Rawls who say that the basic logic of his position, which interprets justice in terms of remedying involuntary and undeserved inequalities, pushes us to acknowledge the illegitimacy of global inequalities in peoples’ life chances. Rawls and others have made various attempts to argue that the obligation to remedy arbitrary inequalities only applies domestically, not globally, but I don’t think any of these arguments are successful. AG: I don’t have the answer to this problem either, but I do see political initiatives in certain parts of the world that seem relatively fruitful regarding the redistribution of wealth between the North and the South. I’m thinking, for example, of the political experiments that have been taking place over the last few years in South America. There is a renegotiation process with the northern states and their large companies, and there is a questioning of the traditional role played by the World Bank. What do you think about the

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political initiatives in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, which affect nearly two hundred million people today? WK: I wish I had a more informed view about different ways of thinking about global redistribution . . . Part of the reason I hesitate is that, in the social-democratic tradition I was raised in, there has traditionally been a very strong hostility amongst the Canadian left to global free trade and to multinational corporations, so that the project of global redistribution was understood to require contesting the liberalization of trade, both of goods and of capital flows. I have become more uncertain in my own mind about the most effective ways of contesting global inequalities. Issues related to the World Bank are an example of this. For most of my colleagues on the left in Canada, the World Bank and the IMF are the devil incarnate and should therefore be abolished. But there are alternative visions for how to democratize those global institutions to enhance the participation of the global South in them. There are also alternative models for making globalized trade regimes fairer, and alternative models for building free trade agreements while also enhancing environmental protection and labor rights. The more I read about these issues, the more complicated they become and the less confident I am about what the right path is. GR: I would like to come back to one of the distinctive elements of your project: the attempt to cut through the haze of multicultural groups by introducing a series of distinctions, such as the differentiation between “national minorities” and “ethnic groups.” I am curious to what extent history plays a role in the constitution of these groups and how it is possible to establish a threshold from which we can justifiably claim that an ethnic group or a national minority exists. It seems that in any country this distinction would depend entirely on what moment in historical time you take as your starting point to begin delimiting cultural groups. I was intrigued in your talk yesterday by what I sensed as the emergence of pragmatist or situationalist elements in your work.3 If such elements are indeed present, how do they come to bear on your earlier delimitation of cultural groups? WK: Liberal democracies have now built up a wealth of experience in how to think through the categorization of different kinds of groups for the purposes of assigning group-specific rights, and I think we can learn a lot from looking

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at how this has actually been done in practice. So this may be the “pragmatist” element you’re referring to. This is not a philosophical commitment to pragmatism but rather my methodological starting point for thinking about principles of justice. The best way to build up a theory of liberal multiculturalism, I believe, is to start from what is actually happening, to look at the way in which liberal democracies have in practice dealt with many of these issues in their legislation, in court cases, in constitutional provisions, in parliamentary debates, and so on—that is, to look at the actual practices of liberal democracies as they have evolved over time—and to see how legislators, judges, and others have articulated the link between various kinds of group-specific measures and basic liberal democratic values. If we do this, I think it quickly becomes clear that, across the Western democracies, liberaldemocratic policy makers have felt it necessary to distinguish in some form or other between “old” minorities and “new” minorities. This distinction is not my invention; we can find it in the legislation and the jurisprudence of every Western democracy. Even a country like France that views itself as having a unified, undifferentiated conception of citizenship distinguishes old from new minorities when it comes to issues such as the use of languages: the historic regional languages have a different legal status from immigrant languages. In other countries, there is an even more robust and complicated set of distinctions. I think there is still much we can learn from examining the ways these distinctions are drawn in Western democracies, and to see how they are defended in legislation and in court cases as serving valid public purposes, and as being consistent with constitutional norms of equality and nondiscrimination. So my methodology is to start from practice, including the practice of categorizing minorities, and then see whether we can find philosophically coherent and normatively plausible justifications for these practices. As for the more specific question of how we distinguish “immigrants” and “national minorities,” I think the crucial issue is whether the groups were present before or after the formation of an independent nation-state. In other words, if they moved to a country that had already established itself as an independent state, and were admitted under the legislation of that state, then they count as “immigrants,” in my approach, and their children and grandchildren count as immigrant-origin ethnic groups rather than as national minorities. But, if the group was already living on the territory at the time at which the state was founded, then they are one of the “state-forming peoples” (to

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use an East European phrase) and qualify as historic national minorities or indigenous peoples. In the former case, individuals and families move across international borders; in the latter case, the state incorporates an already-existing group living on its historic territory. GR: This strikes me as a very North American approach to the issue of “minority groups” insofar as there is little room for making sense of the processes of colonization and decolonization that have left their mark on the history of European democracies. For instance, how would your categories purport to deal with an Algerian living in France after 1962, but who had settled there prior to Algerian independence? Is this person simply to be considered a French national, and, if so, since when? Is he or she a national minority with a lost country, or a unique brand of postfactum immigrant (i.e. an immigrant from the moment at which ties between the two countries were severed)? Similar examples could be cited from any of the former colonies. WK: There are two parts to my answer. I don’t think the distinction itself is tied to North America. On the contrary, there is a very long-standing European debate about how to distinguish old and new minorities. Dating back to the 1950s, the Council of Europe has periodically revisited the question of whether to adopt a charter of minority rights. It only ended up doing so in 1995, but that was the result of a debate dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. It was always explicit that this proposed charter of minority rights would be for old minorities, not immigrant minorities. Although different people have used different terms such as national minorities, historic minorities, traditional minorities, autochthonous minorities, or homeland minorities, it has always been emphasized that this charter was not intended to apply to the Turks in Germany, say, or to the Bangladeshis in Britain. So I don’t think I am imposing a North American distinction on Europe. On the contrary, I am adopting a European terminology that is actually quite uncommon in North America (the term national minority is more or less unheard of in North America). However, I agree with you that the issue of colonialism complicates the story in various ways. It complicates it, on the one hand, insofar as the metropolitan state may have obligations of justice for remedying historical injustices in relation to its former colonies, including in relation to immigrants from former colonies. This is different from the more general obligation of Western states to accept refugees from poor or unstable countries. In light of

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historic responsibilities arising from colonization, it may be that ex-colonial immigrants are entitled to easier access to citizenship, say, or to affirmative action programs, in a way that does not apply to other immigrants. There are also issues arising from the fact that immigrants from former colonies have already been subjected to the colonial power’s national culture. I have often heard migrants from former colonies say, “we had the French language imposed on us in schools in Algeria or Morocco, and why should we have that imposed on us all over again when we move to France?” The whole model of assimilation presupposes that immigrants need to be turned into Frenchmen once they arrive, when in fact that is a process that has already been imposed on them during colonialism. So that is a very different situation, at least psychologically, compared to noncolonial immigrants. And then there is the even more complicated case you have mentioned of people who came to France before their country was actually independent, particularly in the Algerian case, which was considered to be a part of metropolitan France rather than just an overseas colony. So the fact that some immigrants are ex-colonial is clearly important, and I confess I don’t have a well-developed answer to the question of how exactly it should matter—i.e., whether such immigrants should be treated differently from other immigrants and, if so, how. It is possible that my distinction between immigrants and national minorities may need to be qualified and complicated to deal with this case. And, of course, there are other hard cases as well: for example, should the Russians who moved to the Baltics during the Soviet era be considered immigrants in Latvia and Estonia, or as national minorities, or some third category? However, despite these complications, I am still committed to the validity of the basic distinction between immigrant-origin ethnic groups and historically settled national minorities and indigenous peoples. I think that this basic distinction is valid, and we see it across Western democracies. The groups that fall within those two broad categories are themselves diverse, and so further kinds of distinctions need to be made within those categories, one of which may be whether immigrants come from ex-colonies or not. But I don’t think there is any way to truly accommodate diversity without recognizing that there are different kinds of diversity, requiring different kinds of accommodation. I should note that this question of categories is important not just for domestic policies but also at the international level. In fact, this is what I am currently working on.4 Many international organizations have made efforts

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to promote multiculturalism around the world, but, in order to do so, they need to able to make generalizations about which kinds of policies are appropriate for which kinds of groups. In one sense, every case is different, and you always have to know the details of each case. But if international organizations are going to formulate legal norms for the treatments of minorities, they need to make generalizations, and these inevitably involve categorizations—for example, legal norms for the treatment of “indigenous peoples,” legal norms for the treatment of “national minorities,” legal norms for the treatment of “immigrants” or the Roma, and so on. International organizations need to find categories that are relevant to many different countries, and these inevitably will require abstracting from the specificity of individual cases in individual countries. GR: Yet, as you said in your talk yesterday, you don’t want generalizations to be so general that you create an insurmountable gap forever dividing them from concrete practices.5 WK: Exactly. This is precisely the bind that international organizations are in. They want to say something constructive, which means they cannot treat all minority groups the same. They need to acknowledge that there are important distinctions between different kinds of minorities, or else they will simply miss what is actually at stake in real-world debates over accommodating diversity. However, if they just say that every case is different, then there is nothing they can do in terms of formulating general norms and principles of minority rights. So, in order to say something useful, they need to find mid-level generalizations that apply to the most common and familiar types of minority issues. And the answers they have come up with, interestingly, track some of the categories that I have been using in my own work. So, for instance, international organizations typically distinguish between immigrant groups, national minorities, and indigenous peoples, which are the same categories that I use. The fact that international organizations have come to the conclusion that those categories are relevant and helpful suggests that there really is no alternative but to work with such broad categories, despite their inevitable limitations and complications. Indeed, just as I think we can learn a lot from the way domestic legislation and courts have dealt with these issues, so too we still have a lot to learn from the way international organizations are struggling with the definition of these terms.

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GR: Methodologically, do you want to move between these two registers, putting forth certain general concepts and operative distinctions that can be used around the globe, while nonetheless intervening in specific contexts where these concepts might meet resistance or have to be reworked based on the needs of the situation? WK: Absolutely, because, at the end of the day, all these issues need to be sorted out domestically. Political philosophy and international norms can help provide some general principles or guidelines, but each political community has to go through its own debates about how to translate these into actual policies and institutions. And these debates will be heavily context dependent and full of local contingencies, such as the role of colonialism in relation to immigration in certain countries. Put another way, we have both local debates within each country about multiculturalism and also a global debate about multiculturalism. At the global level, there are ideas circulating around the world about what multiculturalism is and how it relates to liberalism or to human rights. These ideas are being carried around the world by international organizations and transnational networks of academics, policy makers, and NGOs and are shaping the way local debates are framed in various countries. So those of us who participate in international debates need to find a way of writing about these issues that helps to clarify what some of the basic issues are, what some of the basic values are, and what some of the possibilities are. This global debate inevitably abstracts from some of the specificity of individual cases, and so the concepts and models that circulate globally always need to be adapted and reconfigured locally, although hopefully they provide a helpful starting point from which these local debates can take off. AGM: Would you say that the construction of the concept of multiculturalism is a multicultural construction? WK: It should be and, in some cases, it is. I think that the debate on the rights of indigenous peoples at the United Nations is a very interesting process of genuinely intercultural negotiation and dialogue. The ideas that have emerged within the UN’s framework for indigenous rights are not simply the outcome of Western intellectuals, lawyers, or academics. Indigenous peoples have been able to get some of their own ideas into the debate—for example,

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indigenous ideas about the appropriate relationship with land and the environment, legal pluralism, the nature of legitimate authority, and so on. These indigenous ideas have had a definite impact on the final version of the UN’s norms. Unfortunately, this is an exceptional case. If we look at other aspects of the international debates on minority rights, it is almost entirely dominated by Western models, Western academics, Western NGOs, Western philanthropic organizations, and so on. Many peoples of the world have not had any significant input on the international debate on minority rights. This is a real concern for me. I have been involved in some recent collaborative projects to find out more about what kinds of debates around ethnic diversity are actually happening in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in order to see how this global discourse is trickling down to different parts of the world, and how it gets appropriated or ignored, or supported or contested.6 It is clear to me that this process is not a very inclusive one, nothing like a Habermasian participatory debate. It is still very much a debate amongst a narrow stratum of activists, academics, and policy makers who have been socialized into a common way of thinking and talking. Indigenous peoples have been astute enough and firm enough to resist this sort of homogenizing global discourse when it was inadequate to their needs. But most minority groups around the world have had little input into the global debate about liberal multiculturalism. They do not participate in it and do not have access to it. Every once in a while one of their members gets picked out from the group and gets to join the global elite that uses and circulates the new global language of liberal multiculturalism. But I am interested in thinking about how we can make the debate on multiculturalism a more truly multicultural debate.

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EPILOGUE Critical Theory and Recognition

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9 / THE CRITICAL THEORY O F T H E F R A N K F U R T SCHOOL AND THE THEO RY O F R E C O G N I T I O N Dialogue with Olivier Voirol Axel Honneth

THE NORMATIVE FOUNDATION OF A CRITICAL THEORY OF SOCIETY Olivier Voirol: For five years now you have been professor of philosophy here at the University of Frankfurt in the position formerly occupied by Jürgen Habermas. In April of this year you became the director of the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung). These are two important positions in the history of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Many of your texts are concerned with Critical Theory, a theory that you frequently discuss but have also criticized and reformulated. Thus, it can be said that you are at the moment one of the most important representatives of Critical Theory. Are you of the opinion that we can nowadays speak of Critical Theory as a tradition of thought? Has there been a tradition of thought, in any sense of the term, that has been renewed and revived? And if it does exist, what is the present situation of this tradition of thought? Axel Honneth: In a trivial sense I would say that there is today clearly a relatively lively tradition of thought that continues to exist. I am saying in a trivial sense, if we just take as a criterion whether this tradition of diverse thinkers is understood as a unity and whether there are indeed works and research projects that continue to relate to this tradition. There are indeed both, and both are done not only in Frankfurt but also in many other places in Germany. There are many people, including young people, who unproblematically attach themselves to this tradition of thought, which is considered a unity, and who attempt to pursue it. I could list for you a whole series of young people who—less in Frankfurt than in other places

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in Germany—believe they are continuing this tradition through their own work. In this positivist sense, a tradition of thought of Critical Theory actually continues to exist, indeed in a relatively lively manner. However, the question is probably not only meant in a positivist way, i.e. whether there are actually works that see themselves as a pursuit of the tradition; it is probably rather a question whether one can even speak of a tradition of thought in a stronger sense as a continuation of Critical Theory. This question I find much more difficult to answer. The problem arises already with the question of whether we are entitled to understand Habermas’s project itself, the theory of communicative action and also the research in the theory of rights, as an installment in and hence a continuation of this tradition of thought. In other words, what are the criteria—that is the question one would always have to answer as well—that must be fulfilled for a continuation of the tradition, not just in the positivist or empirical sense? Here I would answer with a certain hesitancy and answer in the positive. I would hesitate because the tradition of thought of Critical Theory obviously represents a certain gesture, a particular atmosphere, and a particular historical experience. This historical experience was that of National Socialism, and Critical Theory was, on the whole, tailored to the treatment both of the prefascist situation as well as to the break in civilization through National Socialism. Everything that comes after this is, in a sense, a different theory since it no longer addresses this historical experience. In this respect, Habermas constitutes a continuation of this tradition of thought only in a weak sense. It is, of course, a continuation because he adopts what is perhaps the basic motive of the whole tradition, namely, that of understanding the process of modernization as a process of only imperfect rationalization. The question now of whether something of the kind actually still exists in a strong sense is much more difficult to answer. I endeavor to achieve a certain continuity with this tradition, but in several respects I lack the premises and the possibilities to pursue this direction productively—the direction required to analyze our society as a form of truncated or imperfect rationality, so to speak. I do not do that type of thing, first of all, because, to start with, I do not set out my own sociotheoretical instruments in a theory-of-reason kind of way. The answer is difficult and complicated. However, I should perhaps say, if I must answer in a single sentence, that I (and probably also others) strive to continue Critical Theory in a strong sense, by engaging in theoretical en-

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deavors that attempt to do the same thing that Habermas himself attempted, namely, to develop the means and the theories which are suitable to subject our current situation to a substantiated form of criticism. OV: This normative foundation has played a great role in your work. In your book Struggle for Recognition (Kampf um Anerkennung), you try to develop a substantive, normative foundation for a theory of society. It is precisely at this point that your work is so important. You see in the normative foundation a deficit in the first Critical Theory and you are of the opinion that one must attempt to establish it more appropriately and more substantively. Why is the normative foundation of Critical Theory so important? AH: I believe that the crucial mistake of early Critical Theory, from my perspective, is not so much its inadequate normative foundation, but its flawed sociology. Early Critical Theory, both in the stage before National Socialism and in the stage following National Socialism, has never been able to develop a sophisticated concept of the social. I have attempted to show this in my dissertation, which was entitled The Critique of Power (Kritik der Macht). This sociological deficit appears to me much more problematic than the normative deficit of early Critical Theory. Incidentally, this has also been the reason why, at different stages, I have turned so strongly to the French tradition of social theory, because I believe that in this tradition, the tradition of Durkheim, the autonomy of the social has been considered much earlier. Of course all of that changed with Habermas, who basically understood his whole theory as an explication of the normative core of the social, with the idea of communicative agreement. But before Habermas I felt that Critical Theory was characterized primarily through a sociological deficit. Now the sociological deficit goes together with a normative deficit, in my view, because the early authors of the Frankfurt School were not in the position to identify in the sphere of the social itself the normative principles that could be called upon for an internal justification of critique. As a result, I have basically seen it as my own task, even in the wake of Habermas, to try and develop from a theory of the social the criteria for a critique of, as it were, pathological or imperfect realizations of the social. The way I have suggested doing this has been through a theory of recognition. The idea is that the principle of recognition constitutes, to a certain extent, the core of the social.

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It is here that the connection between the theory of society and the normative foundation exists. I believe it holds for each Critical Theory that it must preserve this connection, that it can develop its own normative criteria from a comprehensive theory of the social. This is the whole difference with the Kantian tradition. As a result, we cannot simply derive the normative criteria that we seek within a critique of societies or in a critique of the contemporary forms of socialization, we cannot simply extract these criteria from rational considerations, but we must indicate how they are central components of the social. I have seen my own task precisely in this project. And the theory of recognition is an attempt to indicate this connection between the social and internal normative principles. OV: The idea of the normative foundation of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is intimately tied to the emancipatory potentials that can be identified in praxis itself. There is the idea in Critical Theory that it is possible to formulate normative principles that the social actors can use for an emancipatory praxis that can be realized in social movements. The theory must be normatively grounded in the emancipatory potentials that are present in everyday practice; this idea is found in your theory and in that of Habermas. If one looks at the form of critique social movements most often exercise, one notices that it is a negative critique, to the extent that it represents a denunciation of particular forms of the mechanisms of domination. The question is which form should a Critical Theory that intends to be linked to social movements take. Should it be a theory that can identify the mechanisms of domination or negative processes, in order to be able to make a negative analysis of the present society, or a theory that attempts to ground itself normatively in social praxis? The demands of social movements often begin with a negative critique, without making the normative foundations of their claims immediately visible. They then have to justify their claims; this much is clear. But the question centers on the role of a critical theory of society: whether its task consists in describing negative processes or grounding the normative foundations of its critique. On the one hand, there is Foucault, who did not strive for a normative foundation, and probably, on the other hand, Habermas, who relies heavily on the normative and emancipatory foundations of Critical Theory.

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AH: I think it’s correct to depict social movements as articulating rather negative feelings and negative descriptions. Social movements only rarely emerge with positive objectives; most of the time they emerge in reaction to negative experiences and articulate mostly negative states of affair more than they express positive objectives. That is undoubtedly correct. The question is how closely one may generally view the connection between a critical theory of society and social movements. Here I am not certain at all that this connection is that close. The reason for my doubt is simply that we have a multitude of social movements; we feel sympathy toward some of them on account of their objectives, others are downright unsympathetic to us in their objectives. There are populist movements, far-right movements, xenophobic movements, and so on. All of them are social movements. I believe that, at the outset, one possesses in one’s own perspective a kind of normative orientation, which informs us about what kind of social movements are, to a certain extent, progressive, or can be meaningfully and justifiably considered progressive, and which can be considered regressive or retrograde or, in a certain sense, immoral. That is why I believe that a critical analysis of society, if it relies on social movements, is forced to give an account of these normative preorientations. Perhaps it is also only a question of different temperaments, or of different interests, which explains how strongly one concentrates on making explicit these normative preorientations. I suspect that these normative preorientations were not so different between Habermas and Foucault: one of them placed the greatest importance in the grounding of these normative preorientations, whilst the other did not see much sense in establishing these normative preorientations explicitly and, to a certain extent, in a contexttranscending way. Foucault certainly was not interested in grounding and making explicit the normative perspective from which he generally refers to social movements, the prison movement or antipsychiatry. That is, however, only a difference of interests, perhaps of philosophical orientation, but not a systematic difference. I do not believe there is a profound systematic difference here, though certainly a great difference in the style of analyses, as well as in the object domain. One of them does a lot to clarify the normative foundation, the other is not concerned with the normative foundation, but both share the same preorientations, the type of preorientation that is necessary in or-

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der to say which social movements one is following and which social movements one considers harmful or regressive or counterproductive. This is one part of the answer to the question. One should be mindful that if one admits that social movements at first represent essentially negative forms of reaction to injustice, one also has to concede that one’s particular orientation is based on a normative basis that requires a certain justification. There are also traditions in which the feeling and conviction have dominated in such a way that this justification actually does not require any specific philosophical work. And I suppose that Foucault belonged precisely to this type of tradition. Whether there are deeper reasons I find, in any case, difficult to see today (that is to say, whether Foucault was perhaps of the belief that every universalistic norm per se is somehow excluded). Here I am not so sure if, on the other hand, one asks whether Foucault would have had anything serious against human rights. Probably not. He would probably have been a resolute advocate of human rights. He would perhaps rather have said, like Rorty, that the whole effort of justification makes no sense. He would have thus oriented himself toward human rights and thus he would have conceded that he considered appropriate those norms that apply to all people. But he would have perhaps said, like Rorty, that the whole business of philosophical justification is superfluous or is not realizable because of specific systematic reasons. In this respect the difference, I believe, is not between moral universalism and perspectivism, but the difference is whether this universalism can be justified or is understood as impossible to justify.

HABERMAS AND THE COMMUNICATION-THEORETICAL TURNING POINT OF CRITICAL THEORY OV: We have just mentioned Habermas. Habermas has played a considerable role in the renewal and reformulation of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. What are, in your opinion, the main directions within this Habermasian contribution to the reformulation of Critical Theory? What are the most important points of this contribution for you, as Habermas’s successor? AH: His contribution is basically what has always been described as the communication-theoretical shift in Critical Theory, that is, Habermas’s attempt

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to ground Critical Theory no longer on a notion of society understood fundamentally through production and the corresponding conditions of production, but on a concept of the social, which is characterized primarily through the processes of mutual linguistic agreement. It is this communication-theoretical shift that consists in seeing the core of the social not so much in instrumental action, but rather in communicative action, a theory that connects with Durkheim and George Herbert Mead. This was also the essential impetus for me, which has, of course, fundamentally altered the whole architecture of Critical Theory. First of all, it no longer primarily referred to the analysis of society as a context of production, but referred to society as a context of communication, demanding a reorientation in the normative perspective. The normative perspective was no longer that of a liberation of work, or through work, but that of a release of the normative potential present in communicative agreement. For me, as someone who understands himself much more as a pupil of Habermas than as the pupil of Adorno, this transformation was an essential impulse. With it, Critical Theory has found a connection to the kind of theory of society that was in a certain way already developed by the classics, that is, Durkheim, Max Weber, and also Parsons. All of this was not at all possible previously. The old Critical Theory, in a strong connection to Marx, understood society in principle only as a work context. I believe, because of this, that it was very restricted in its normative perspective and, at the same time, I think it was also unsociological in its own specific way. I would say that the greatest achievement of Habermas in regard to Critical Theory consists precisely in this transformation, that is, in overcoming this paradigm of production or this historico-philosophical legacy that comes from Marx. OV: That means that the truncated nature of the social in early Critical Theory that you mentioned a moment ago was overcome by Habermas? AH: Yes. In a particular way it has been overcome, but in a way that I don’t consider totally successful. It comes from the fact—this was the dramaturgy of this book about the critique of power—that Habermas has replaced the paradigm of production that previously dominated Critical Theory with the paradigm of agreement, which in the end, I believe, grants too little space to the fact of social conflict. That is to say, it leaves insufficient room for the

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basic fact of a conflict and of a competition and of a struggle amongst socialized subjects. So that my own attempt then consists therein: to extend or correct, through a stronger conflict-theoretical orientation, the path opened by Habermas for a conception of the social that is based in the relation of communication. And the paradigm that I wanted to put in place, or perhaps that I understood as a deepening of the consensus model, was that of a struggle for recognition. OV: You also see the lack of a well-developed concept of struggle in Foucault as well as in all the authors that you have discussed in The Critique of Power. Can you perhaps further explain why it was so important for you to introduce a concept of struggle after you reached this conclusion? AH: An important motive for me was to see that we can only characterize the social with sufficient accuracy if we always understand it also as a field of social conflicts and struggles. And that is, of course, in a certain sense, one could say, a Marxist legacy. That is to say, I was always of the conviction that in Marx it was the idea of class struggle that was perhaps more important rather than his production paradigm. I am not thinking of the formulation, which he himself chose to describe it, but as a fundamental characteristic of a basic social relation, in other words, what Simmel calls a dispute (Streit), which is designated in some traditions as a conflict and in other traditions as struggle. And so there is the fact of social antagonism, a confrontation of subjects, which to a certain extent is the other side of their orientation to agreement. This basic phenomenon of the social, from my perspective, was ignored, it seemed to me, both by the old Critical Theory as well as by Habermas, while for Foucault it played a fairly prominent role, but from my perspective it was not clearly and convincingly analyzed. Here I find myself in greater harmony, on the one hand, with a specific German tradition: it is certainly grounded in Marx, as well as Hegel, but also Simmel. And, on the other hand, on French traditions, which have followed a conflict-theoretical path in connection with Durkheim. And perhaps at the end of this line stands Bourdieu, with his strong emphasis on competition and symbolic struggles. In other words, I followed a kind of three-stage plan: to replace the production paradigm with the paradigm of agreement, as a real insight into the structure of the social, but then, on top of that, to understand this structure of the social not only as

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an agreement but also as a conflict within the agreement. And what conflict within the agreement means appeared to me to be best analyzed via the paradigm of the struggle for recognition developed by Hegel.

THE PRAGMATICS OF LANGUAGE, EXPERIENCE, PHYSICALITY

OV: One can say that you agree with many of Habermas’s reformulations of Critical Theory, as you have just emphasized. But you also clearly distance yourself from him on particular points. The question of struggle is one, but there are others. I’m thinking of your critique of the pragmatics of language. In your critique you say that the Habermasian pragmatics of language cannot fully take into account the ordinary moral experience of social actors, that language is only one part of the experience. You introduce this concept of moral experience. In this sense, one could say that Habermas is more on the side of language and you are more on the side of experience. You thereby perform a fairly important distancing from the so-called linguistic turn. You replace linguistic theory with a theory of recognition, which can be taken as a theory of experience. What were the theoretical reasons that motivated this shift? AH: That is a very complicated question that is very hard to answer. Perhaps I should begin by saying that Habermas’s linguistic-theoretical turn in fact had a double meaning. My doubts are only directed against one side of this double meaning. On the one hand, the “linguistic turn” has privileged language methodologically, which means that the ways humans connect to the world and human experiences are for us basically accessible as linguistic facts. When one speaks in this way, one has a methodological fact in mind, namely, that everything that people do and process is generally given to us in the form of linguistically articulated propositions. In this sense I consider the linguistic-theoretical turn as self-evident and impossible to go back on. And it naturally has great repercussions for the old Critical Theory, which has not at all performed the methodological step of the “linguistic turn.” But the “linguistic turn” or the linguistic-theoretical turn of Critical Theory privileged language not just methodologically but also thematically. This difference is important. By the objective/substantive privileging

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of language, I mean that from now on only that which took the form of language, i.e. what can be linguistically articulated, still appeared relevant to the relations of communication among human subjects. And this was not meant in a methodological sense, but in a thematic one. As I see it, this leads to a truncated approach to the communication paradigm and to a corresponding restriction of the sphere of the social, because the social suddenly seems to be wholly absorbed in processes of linguistic agreement. And that actually appears to me to be a kind of short-circuit, as it were. And the short-circuiting somehow lies in the equalling of the methodical function of language with its objective privilege. The consequence is actually especially unfortunate, as I see it, because what the conditions of communication of a society amount to is, of course, intrinsically more extensive than what its linguistic agreement processes represent and what is achieved through linguistic processes of interaction. The prelinguistic interactions of a child with its mother already have such important and, I believe, constitutive significance for any social reproduction that one can already conclude with this example that it is fatal to reduce social processes of interaction and communication relations to a case of linguistic agreement. This is why I have always been of the belief that, although the methodological use of linguistic analysis is totally unproblematic and proper, it should not lead us to neglect nonlinguistic forms of social communication. This is what led me to define relations of interaction in the social in a richer way than merely through the model of linguistic agreement. As a consequence, nonlinguistic, including bodily, forms of social interaction, which are constitutive for social reproduction and the social identity of a society, belong to the social, but do not occur, precisely, as linguistic processes of agreement. One could say that this represents the shift from language to social experience. This means that social experience is not meant as something that we can only analyze to the extent that we make it somehow understandable as linguistically articulated. It is, however, correct that I want to bring into relief the experience of interaction in the whole spectrum of its social significance, a dimension that, I think, has been neglected through the fixation on the objective function of language in Habermas. The distinction between the methodological and the thematic privileging of language is essential for the answer. The methodological privileging appears to me to be appropriate, while the thematic privileging appears to me to be a fallacy, the fallacy that consists in transforming the centrality

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of language from a methodological to an objective thematic one. I believe that, without gestural, symbolic, bodily forms of social interaction, society is totally incapable of achieving its identity and reproducing itself. And these processes have as much significance as the linguistic processes of agreement. OV: You have just mentioned the question of the body. In your model of the three spheres of recognition (love, rights, and solidarity), which you have developed in your book Struggle for Recognition, the stage of love is linked to the question of bodily experience. This form of recognition is associated with a form of the self-relation of the subject, that is, self-confidence and a form of disrespect: practical mistreatment. “Practical mistreatment” means that the integrity of an individual is injured, for example through torture, rape, etc. This question of the body plays an important role in French social philosophy. There is a long tradition of making the body a central theme that begins with Bergson, perhaps, and, in any case, is further developed by authors like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Foucault, and Bourdieu. With the exception of Bergson, you have discussed all these authors at length, and one can say that they play a role in the development of your theory of social struggles for recognition. This is also a point where you diverge from Habermas: your great interest in French philosophers and sociologists. Does this French tradition of focusing on the body play a role in this theoretical interest in the nonlinguistic aspects of communication and the bodily dimension and, finally, in your skepticism toward the Habermasian model of interaction? AH: I believe that there were two peculiarities of French social philosophy in particular that have especially stimulated me and that I have also used as correctives against the Habermasian continuation of Critical Theory. The first is what you have just mentioned, namely, the much greater attentiveness to the human body. This probably starts, as you say, with Bergson, but I can’t exactly evaluate if his work is actually the source; in any case, it is pursued, of course, indeed quite strongly through Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, who both concede a wholly central significance to the body in their respective philosophies, and leads to thinkers like Lacan or Foucault. The other basis was certainly the higher attention, I believe, to negative phenomena of the social. For that dimension I have just called the conflictual or the competitive moment of the social. This actually stems in all

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likelihood from Rousseau and is pursued over a particular tradition up to Sartre or Bourdieu. With these two thinkers there is a strong focus on the social as a field of intersubjective competition, if not even of hostile enmity. That is the reason why I have always wanted to deal with this tradition, in order to find a perspective that would be independent of Habermas. As far as the emphasis on the corporeality of the social is concerned, I should perhaps add that I am now even more strongly convinced that all forms of social recognition have a particular bodily or symbiotic root than I was at the time I wrote the book about the struggle for recognition. I am much more convinced of that than I made out in the book itself. In the book, as you have rightly said, the body essentially emerges in the first dimension of love and plays no central role for the other dimensions. Meanwhile, I believe that social recognition in a certain sense always remains indirectly bound to symbiotic processes and, in this respect, feeds on all the gestures, the nonlinguistic expressions, the whole network of mimicry and gesture that is prelinguistic, so to speak. I believe this much more strongly than before. In this respect I would now emphasize the corporeality of social processes much more strongly than at the time that I was writing the book. OV: In your theory, corporeality is always combined with intersubjective actions. How do you see the relationship between intersubjectivity and these nonlinguistic forms of communication in which the body plays a large role? AH: I find the question easy to answer from a genetic point of view. Genetically it is true that intersubjectivity arises from prelinguistic forms of social communication relating closely to the body. This means that we also master something like the skill of intersubjectivity only in a form that is still prelinguistic, as an interaction that is basically bodily with the person to whom we relate. In this respect, the root of intersubjectivity is a form of interaction and communication related to the body, if not actually physical. Whether one now describes this directly as a form of being held, like Winnicott or in psychoanalysis, as a pure bodily interaction, or through an interaction of gestures, like George Herbert Mead, these are all prelinguistic forms of interaction bound with physical actions. Genetically speaking, these forms represent the roots for all dimensions of intersubjectivity. I further believe that it is not only genetic but also structural. I believe that to a large degree, over and above linguistic agreement, we shape our

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interaction in our body. This is naturally partly taken into consideration in the pragmatics of language, since the strong significance that the gestures accompanying linguistic agreement have for semantic interaction is also clear to Habermas. But it is not sufficiently emphasized in this theory that, without the support and constant presence of the body, linguistic agreement, to a certain extent, fails. In this respect I believe, in a structural sense, that the bodily side of our behavior assumes a fundamental function in interaction. As far as recognition itself is concerned, I believe that the first form of social recognition in all likelihood consists of preverbal, gestural, mimic expressions and that developed and advanced forms of social recognition structurally speaking are, so to speak, tied back to such preverbal communicative gestures. Every form of social recognition probably requires a symbolic substitute for these bodily forms of recognition. This symbolism, which ranks this bodily recognition among the diverse social forms of recognition, somehow relates to the primary bodily gestures. That is why I would also say it is important to pay close attention to the materiality of recognition if I want to analyze society as an organization of social forms of recognition. Previously I did not see this so strongly. But I believe that even recognition is materiality, socially coagulated materiality, as it were. And this material aspect of recognition, as it were, depends to a large degree on the corporeality of the human being and the bodily dimension of social interaction. OV: What exactly do you mean by this idea of the materiality of recognition . . . ? AH: What I mean is that this materiality of recognition has two aspects. On the one hand, I think, there is the fact, which was been brought forward by Foucault, but also Bourdieu, that it is always sensible to also consider social actions from the aspect of physical presence. That means that all social actions find expression in the structure of the material spaces in which we encounter each other. In this sense, social recognition is something that also has a physical presence in our everyday life. This means that the way in which a nursery is arranged or the way in which the spatial environment of children is set up is an indicator for how the conditions of recognition are constituted. This means that recognition is in any case never just a speech act, nor just simply a form of physical care or affirmation additionally complemented with speech, but rather should be

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taken as also having a physical aspect, to some extent: the media of recognition (die Medien der Anerkennung) have their own physical locality in space. This means that in principle we can also examine our social relations in terms of how relations of recognition and forms of disrespect have physically become materiality. The prison shows precisely how the inmates are disrespected; it shows in its physical structure a specific form of social disrespect, exactly as every pedestrian crossing shows how little the pedestrian is actually valued as a social being. In this respect our overall social environment has a physical presence. This is the presence of recognition and of forms of disrespect. OV: Today there are strong cognitivistic trends that regard human actions as physically determined. Action theorists distance themselves from this deterministic definition of action, and even, in part, from Merleau-Ponty, although they concede that he highlighted important aspects. Your theory of recognition is strongly linked to practical and intersubjective meaning. Can you give your position in this debate? AH: It’s complicated. It depends on how one uses the concept of the human body. In my opinion, the body is not free of intersubjective meaning. Within agreement or interaction, the body, to a great degree, has a significant if not determining function. However, this also means that our bodily gestures and our bodily expressiveness are formed socially, something that Merleau-Ponty, of course, in part also realized. The body is, in this sense, not in opposition to the mind. I would consider this to be the merit of the French tradition, around Merleau-Ponty, to have overcome this old Cartesian dualism of body and mind and to have understood the meaning of the body, perhaps inadequately, but at least in a first attempt, as a medium of the social constitution of meaning. If one looks at things in this way, there seems to me to be a false opposition at play here. The cognitivists you mention possibly use a concept of the body that, to some extent, goes back before Merleau-Ponty. And that, to me, would be fatal. OV: A further difference between you and Habermas is the role of the French philosophical and sociological tradition. Habermas was always oriented more toward the Anglo-Saxon tradition. He has indeed discussed, but also sharply criticized, contemporary French philosophy (Foucault, Derrida). Your

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work is exactly the opposite. You have already said that the French tradition has played a considerable role in the formation of your theory. You have dedicated essays to many French authors: Foucault, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, who have already been mentioned, but also Castoriadis, LéviStrauss, Lyotard, or even Sorel. You have already mentioned your interest in the negative aspects of the social. Are there any other reasons? AH: For Habermas, there are, in principle, two great heroes of the French tradition, if I see it correctly: Rousseau, as progenitor of a theory of the sovereignty of the people, and, of course, Durkheim, as someone who, next to George Herbert Mead, made the first insights into the intersubjective kernel of the social. Everything after this is, for him, jeopardized in a certain way by Nietzsche, on the one hand, and Heidegger, on the other. I have never felt like that, and it may have a biographical and, in this respect, contingent background. When I went through my formative years, i.e. the years in which one comes out of the Gymnasium and begins to study, there was in Germany enormous attention given to French, and not Anglo-Saxon, philosophy. For Habermas, it was exactly the opposite. I think there was an interest in French philosophy in the 1950s, because at that time he wrote something about Merleau-Ponty, but in the center of his interest stood the U.S.A. and England. That wasn’t the case when I began my studies at the university, and an enormous attention to what was going on in French thought was self-evident from the start. This is a contingent reason. I actually think that after that a fascination for two elements emerged that we’ve actually already scratched the surface of. First, there is the much stronger presence of the body, at least as far as German postwar philosophy is concerned. Before National Socialism, this theme was represented very widely in Germany in philosophical anthropology through Plessner and Gehlen. After National Socialism, and above all in the traditions that I grew up in through Habermas, it hardly plays a role. This has fascinated me and was a healthy corrective against the centrality of language in the Habermasian project. Second, there is this simple realism, which does justice to the fact of social conflict, which I have already mentioned. Perhaps something else that plays an important role is the strong capacity of French philosophy, at least in the postwar period in the continuation of the phenomenological tradition, to analyze everyday experience very accurately. The importance that everyday performance of actions and everyday situations possess not only for Sartre but also Merleau-Ponty is quite exceptional.

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Thus, for Sartre, this is almost programmatic, since, in contrast to the German tradition, he actually makes modern life the reference point of philosophy. In Germany there is, through the strong significance of Heidegger, a strong fixation of philosophy on the suburban, so to speak, or the nonurban performance of life. For Sartre, there is a very strong attentiveness to urban and, in this sense, modern processes of life. This strongly characterizes the type of philosophy one does, and won me over to particular traditions of French philosophy at a very early stage.

RECOGNITION AND INSTRUMENTAL REASON OV: Up until now we have mentioned the connections between your theory and Critical Theory, particularly Habermas’s version. I see in your theory a great difference from the first generation, but also from Habermas’s, namely, regarding the question of instrumental reason. It does not play any role in your theory. The concept does not occupy a critical role, the way it does for Adorno, Horkheimer, or Habermas, in the “dialectic of enlightenment” or in the “theory of communicative action.” In an early essay, you criticized Habermas’s concept of work because he reduces work to instrumental action. One can also make the point that the critique of strategic definitions of action has always been present in your work. In various essays you address this topic. For example, in your last text, “Response to Nancy Fraser,” you criticize the difference between culture and economy, just as you once criticized Habermas’s discrimination between lifeworld and system. Although there are many aspects to your work, I see a permanence as well as an intrinsic theoretical intuition at play here. Could one say that your intuition is to avoid explaining the social through instrumental or strategic concepts? AH: This is without a doubt the most complicated question of all because, so far, I have not been able to connect the theory of recognition itself with a theory of rationality so as to make the old distinctions of the Frankfurt School once again plausible at a new level. The way that the Frankfurt School arrived at these distinctions was almost always articulated in the most obvious way in the critique of positivism, which also plays a certain role for Habermas. This is the idea that a certain attitude toward reality is mirrored in the sciences, which bear the hallmarks of an instrumental reason, and that

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in the critique of this attitude of positivism one finds deeply anchored attitudes, which, once critiqued, make other connections to the world explicit. This is, for Adorno, the opposition of instrumental reason and mimesis and, for Habermas, the opposition of instrumental reason and communicative action. So far, I have never made the attempt to understand the conception of social recognition itself in terms of a theory of rationality. But I believe that I can and should do this. The idea then would be to understand the totality of the relationships of recognition as an element of a rationality of the lifeworld, which pervades the relations between people, and to understand as the expression of instrumental reason certain attitudes and scientific worldviews that abstract from or misshape these relations based in the lifeworld. In other words, I think that I should reconnect with the tradition that is related to Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, in which scientism is interpreted as a denial of lifeworld rationality. One would then have to say that this scientism, which plays a role first at the level of the self-understanding of science, also plays a role within society, to the extent that relationships of recognition are displaced or replaced through somewhat instrumental relationships reflecting a scientistic conception toward reality. In short, I should reformulate the old intuition of the old Frankfurt School on a new level, so to speak, in a manner similar to Habermas, but, of course, with different means and in another way. My strong interest in new theories of rationality, like the one proposed by John McDowell, originated precisely from this motif. I would like to understand scientism and its analogies in the social attitudes, in the instrumental contact with others, as being to some extent the negative counterpart of the infrastructure of social recognition. One could then say that scientism in the social sciences denies the lifeworld kernel of recognition; an instrumental attitude toward other subjects denies within society the need for recognition, which is constitutive for us all. So that I would establish, like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas, a parallel between scientism and the instrumental relationships becoming dominant within society. And that may be a reformulation of the theory of rationality and the combined critique of instrumental rationality on the basis of a theory of recognition. The core concept would be that we understand the second nature of our reciprocal conditions of recognition as the core form that human rationality takes.

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In other words, the reliance, which originates in the lifeworld itself, of all of us on reciprocal recognition, this would be the core of a rationality that is increasingly misshaped, covered up, or repressed in modernity through scientistic and instrumental attitudes. This is the resumption of motifs that are applied by Husserl, certainly by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, which one would have to formulate anew in a recognition-theoretical phenomenology. I would operate with the opposition of cognition and recognition and say that recognition is primary in relation to cognition, so that cognition is always to some extent a secondary attitude. And the critique of instrumental reason would then be a critique of the way in which this secondary attitude becomes dominant by comparison with the primary attitude in the social lifeworld. Hence my new interest in Wittgenstein and the proposals developed within that tradition. OV: But, in order to perform this, don’t you require the sphere of instrumental reason, like Habermas and system theory? AH: I think that the question has two aspects. It has a rationality-theory aspect and a society-theory aspect. In other words, this is the question as to how one translates the theory of rationality into the theory of society. The rationality-theory aspect is this: can we differentiate between two different forms of human rationality? And, as was just said, cognition and recognition are perhaps two modes of rationality, and recognition is primary in relation to cognition. The other question concerns the way in which this rationality-theoretical concept is translated into a theory of society. Habermas did this through the distinction of system and lifeworld. I think that this is wrong. I would not describe the complementary phenomenon corresponding to scientism or the instrumental attitude as system, but would attempt to describe it in another way, by combining it perhaps with concepts of institution, in such a way therefore that the concept of social institution becomes stronger again, a little like for Max Weber. And we thus also again find a connection to a stronger tradition of Marxism, since Habermas, of course, with his category of system pushes back some of the strong intuitions of Marxism. I am not at all prepared to pay this price. And I do not intend to pay the price of systems theory either.

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Rather, I would attempt to understand the interweavings of instrumental rationality through the market, through complex exchange processes, through all the adjustment mechanisms about which we have the impression that they have somehow been decoupled from such relationships of recognition; I would like to understand all of this through the category of institution, as a certain type of institution, perhaps using the conceptuality of organization, but not in the conceptuality of systems theory. But to return to the question, I think that you are right: a Critical Theory must also have a theory of rationality at its heart, something I have not developed up until now. And I actually believe that I can only defend the program if I undertake it somehow. The enterprise is very difficult because it requires the formulation of a concept of recognition, which could become the heart of a theory of rationality. And I would start with the fundamental distinction between cognition and recognition, one could also say between communication and exchange; these are all parallel concepts. In exchange, what goes on is not the recognition of the other in the strong sense but only recognition in the epistemic sense. Recognition entails something stronger, namely, the affirmation of the other. Thus I would begin with this fundamental distinction, always proving, actually like Habermas, that recognition is primary in relation to cognition. For Habermas it is rather the case that understanding is primary in relation to strategic action, but I would make these necessary distinctions, leading to the theory of society, via the opposition between cognition and recognition rather than that of system and lifeworld. OV: That means that with this project you go back to the economy . . . AH: Yes. But the economy taken as a secondary sphere that, like Hegel in a way, receives a strong but also an almost pathological character inside our social lifeworld. This does not mean that I believe in a project aiming for the abolition of the economy, but rather in a project aiming to embed the economy within the frame of the social lifeworld, within the frame of the social conditions of recognition. And that would mean that one finds again a connection to particular strands of Marxism, which developed the idea of bringing back the economy within the circle or the horizon of social recognition, for example in the work of Polanyi. There are a number of proposals in this tradition that I find plausible.

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At the moment I am greatly interested in this distinction between recognition and cognition, because I believe that it could be the root of a theory of rationality. I have written an essay about invisibility, which plays with this distinction and suggests that recognition precedes cognition. If I could clarify this, since it is a rather strong thesis, then I believe I would have the means to draw everything else from it. Then, from this perspective, any social theory, which begins with the phenomenon of cognition rather than recognition, is a scientistic denial of sociality. This is the fundamental idea, and one would have to translate it into a theory of society. I think this is the only chance I have to move into competition with Habermas. If I don’t push through all the way to this level, Habermas will always be stronger than I am. I don’t think I can push on to this level, to the level of a theory of language, but I must push through with the help of Wittgenstein, through distinctions like recognition and cognition. Thus the primary lifeworld of the human being is a world of recognition, but it is not a world of understanding. This is not the Habermasian model of understanding. Recognition, not understanding, is primary. And that is, in fact, not at all difficult to show genetically: genetically, it is not language that is primary, but recognition before language. But I believe one would have to show as well that recognition also precedes cognition in a structural sense. Once one has reached this deep layer, then it is perhaps also possible to undertake once more the critique of instrumental reason on the basis of a new formulation.

RECOGNITION, THE PUBLIC, AND SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES: TOWARD A NEW DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THEORY OV: Let us consider for a moment the differences between your theory and that of Habermas. We have so far discussed the themes of “struggle and social conflictuality,” “experience and the pragmatics of speech,” “relationships with French social philosophy,” and just now the question of instrumental reason. Now my question concerns whether in your theory a reformulation of the Habermasian theory of the public is applied and which form this theory would take. AH: For this question I would essentially take my bearings from Habermas’s basic idea. It seems to me to be the best formulated, as far as the normative

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perspective is concerned. As far as the empirical application is concerned, I would have a few differences. Some phenomena would probably also be represented differently, if one were to start out more strongly from the idea of a struggle for recognition in social coexistence. The differences then apply doubly: first to the condition of participation in the democratic public, second to the mechanisms of exclusion and the mechanisms of domination in the democratic public sphere. As far as the conditions of participation are concerned, it seems clear to me that these are only guaranteed if all subjects actually possess the factual capacity—I shall make this explicit with a sentence from Adam Smith—“to appear in public without shame.” This is a formulation that points that out, as basically subjects require different forms of social recognition in order to be able to take part in the democratic will formation. As a result, a number of normative infrastructures are prerequisites for the democratic public sphere, which, to some extent, represent a counterbalance to this democratic public sphere. A counterbalance in the sense also that here the contexts of experience are frequently particularistic and not universalistic, as in the democratic public sphere. Therefore one would have to say that the concept of democratic public sphere has a counterpart in the concept of the social media of interaction, in which subjects can acquire, conserve, and experience those forms of recognition that are necessary to allow them to appear in public without shame. It is a counterpart because these contexts of experience of social recognition are not necessarily universalistic, but rather particularistic in the sense that they do not realize values that encompass the entire society but only aspects of the entire social life. For example, in private relationships, in company contexts, in work contexts, subjects also experience a form of recognition, which is essential for them to be able to participate. This is one aspect. As far as the mechanisms of exclusion from the public are concerned, I would probably begin deeper than Habermas. I am not confident that the democratic public guarantees the articulation of all conflicts and problems or of all value perspectives. On the contrary, I think that one must investigate very precisely whether the democratic public itself has not frequently institutionalized mechanisms that to some extent engender pseudoeffects, that is to say, whether it doesn’t have a tendency to make into central concerns themes and values, which are far removed from the convictions and worries that the majority of the public experience and from which they

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suffer (and hence, whether there is not a systematic mechanism producing the suppression of substantive social problems as a result of the constraints of the democratic public sphere). By constraints, I mean that if one takes into account the institution of the culture industry, which is an essential feature of the democratic public sphere, the latter has a tendency to choose issues from the point of view of where its attention lies, from the point of view of newsworthiness—generally speaking from the point of view of media effects. And this once again suggests that we can discover particular mechanisms of selection that are tangible or become active, which have these repressive effects. In this respect— and you yourself have also attempted to understand this in your work—a sort of internal conflict takes place inside the democratic public sphere, such that those social groups that have been suppressed, or whose questioning or horizon of experience have been suppressed, must continually attempt to gain access to these public media. This conflict about visibility in the democratic public sphere is probably constitutive for a concept of the democratic public sphere. OV: You have just said that the concept of struggle is very important in understanding the dynamic of the public sphere. We have already mentioned the importance of this concept in your theory. How would you regard the figure of “happy slaves”? What I mean by this question is the following: you assume that social actors struggle if their moral convictions are harmed. But there are many social actors who live in exploitative social situations but do not struggle or offer resistance or make demands or even feel that they are harmed . . . AH: I think that this is basically the most difficult problem, and I have yet to tackle it properly. This is partly because up until now I have been working in a dichotomous scheme, that of contempt versus recognition, and have not yet thematized a third category that must be taken into account. This is the concept of misrecognition (Verkennung) or false address. This means that there is not only the phenomenon that particular convictions or particular interests or identity claims are not recognized, but there is also the phenomenon that recognition is given in a displaced manner. The concept of misrecognition (Verkennung) is appropriate here, which—in German at least, I don’t know how it is in French; in English it’s the concept of

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misrecognition—is a problem following on from the old concept of ideology. And there are traces of such a conception along lines that have been considered by Althusser and Lacan. I believe that I must work further on these traces to be able to thematize this problem of the happy slave adequately. Basically, this means that I must place a third, very difficult concept between the concept of recognition in all its facets and the concept of contempt in its different components. It is a difficult concept, because such a concept of misrecognition cannot be adequately developed without already presupposing something, namely, a center of identity, which is not supposed to arise through recognition. This is a huge conceptual problem, I think. And all I can say is that I am aware of the problem, and I don’t yet properly see how one can conceptually solve it. I see a deficit in this place. I also see that a concept like “incorrect, erroneous address,” “illusory recognition” is indispensable. However, I do not see how one can adequately overcome the normative problems linked to this or indeed the conceptual or even fundamental theoretical problems. The happy slave is the one who has found an identity (i.e. feels recognized) at the same time as we, as observers, hold the belief that he should not identify himself with this ascription of recognition. The happy slave is, for example, the black slave—for example, the famous figure of Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom is the case of someone who finds recognition in the patriarchal relationship of a slave society and consequently feels happy on the basis of the acquisition of a somewhat stable and livable identity. It is only we, as observers, who believe that he should not identify with this offer of recognition. That means that basically we suppose for him something like a false identification. The whole problem to be solved here is the meaning of “false.” Conceptually, this is a difficult, but an urgent one. I do not believe that the theories (like that of Althusser) that have developed initial solutions in this direction have actually solved the key problem. Most of those who believe themselves to have solved it assume something like a core of identity, or something like well-established interests of certain groups or individuals, and therefore presuppose an essentialism that we can no longer adopt. We are rather of the opinion that the identity of subjects or the identity of social groups is formed first through social recognition. And, if we no longer have an essentialism, how are we able to say that someone is misrecognized? This is the problem. But I believe that there is a solution, it just has yet to present itself to me.

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OV: Now we come to the last question. In this interview we have spoken much of Critical Theory and particularly of Habermas. You have recently made a statement in an article in which you say that there are presently two alternatives for the further development of the tradition of Critical Theory. The first may be that which Habermas has formulated in the last few years: a discussion with and in political philosophy. The second may be the further development of a tradition of social philosophy concerned with the identification of social pathologies. This second alternative is your suggestion for the present further development of Critical Theory. Can you elaborate on this alternative? AH: The distinction I have introduced is perhaps arbitrary. First of all, I have differentiated the different possibilities of analysis directed at the whole of society, according to whether they utilize as a background principle the idea of the just social order or a successful social order—in the sense of allowing the self-realization for all subjects. This is the background behind this distinction between political philosophy and social philosophy or, one could also say, between the basic categories of injustice, on the one hand, and the basic categories of social pathologies, on the other. I think that the Marxist tradition was much more interested in social pathologies than in social injustices; or, rather, the specific significance of Marx is that he believed himself able to show that social injustice simultaneously represents a social pathology. This means he identified the fact of injustice, which arises with exploitation, as a social pathology, which arises with alienation, as a result of the fact that we are all (and not just the proletariat) alienated from social circumstances, from nature, and from ourselves. If one reads together the early and the late Marx, one finds that this is exactly the point of the Marxist diagnosis, that injustices are accompanied by social pathologies. By social pathology, I then understand social developments or social conditions that harm the conditions of self-realization of us all. In this context, it seems to me that the development of recent Critical Theory is essentially going in the direction of a political philosophy. This was not the case for Habermas in the “theory of communicative action.” There the main interest was directed at social pathologies, i.e. at that which he called, at the time, the “colonization of the lifeworld”—as a central social pathology—while, under the strong impression of Rawls, he went in the direction of a political philosophy essentially interested in the central injustices of our present.

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This is an interesting and important development, but, to some extent, it neglects the actual thrust of all critical theories since Marx: to attempt not only to identify a social injustice but, on top of this, to identify a pathology of social life as a whole. My interest is to reconnect with this tradition, as the case may be, even to show the connection between social pathologies and injustice. In order to be able to do this, the two perspectives should be kept apart, which is why at present I am dedicating myself to the analysis of society as a diagnosis of social pathology, with the help of the concept of recognition. We are able to show that a particular societal development, that of present-day neoliberal capitalism, aims in a direction in which the conditions of self-realization are considerably harmed for us all—through tendencies of commodification, the destruction of private relationships, and so on. Once this perspective has been made visible again, the next step must be to show the connection between social pathologies and injustice. This is to some extent the most difficult of all undertakings. For a while Marx managed to do it, probably with problematic anthropological premises, and the question is whether it can be successful for us today, without having to share the problematic anthropological essentialism of Marx. There are certainly investigations in such a direction. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor always had this sort of thing in mind, but it is a great challenge to want to take this into view. Translated from the German by Jean-Philippe Deranty

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NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1.  Judith Butler, “Accounting for a Philosophic Itinerary: Genealogies of Power and Ethics of Non-Violence” (interview with A. Gomez-Muller and G. Rockhill), Concordia 50 (2006): 53–68; Seyla Benhabib, “Concrete Universality and Critical Social Theory” (interview with A. Gomez-Muller and G. Rockhill), Concordia 51 (2007): 23–41; Michael Sandel, “Liberalism: Politics, Ethics, and Markets” (interview with A. Gomez-Muller and Ronan Sharkey), Concordia 47 (2005): 43–54.

INTRODUCTION 1.  Three major publications of this time period—two of which were New York Times bestsellers—illustrate a significant portion of the political spectrum of the debate: Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism and “the Politics of Recognition” (1992; expanded edition in 1994), and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). 2.  David Scott, “Culture in Political Theory,” Political Theory 31, no. 1 (February 2003): 93. On the few occasions when Rawls discusses “cultural” issues in A Theory of Justice, he generally inscribes them within the second principle of justice; see, for instance, the revised edition of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999), pp. 84–85. In addition to this article by David Scott, see his “Criticism and Culture: Theory and Post-colonial Claims on Anthropological Disciplinarity,” Critique of Anthropology 12 (1992): 371–394. In drawing on his extensive knowledge of anthropology, Scott provides an extremely interesting and novel point of view on contemporary cultural debates in political and moral theory. 3.  Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 2.

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4.  Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 1. 5.  Ibid., p. viii. 6.  Among the numerous accounts of the history of multiculturalism, see the concise and revealing summary provided by Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes in their introduction to Multicultural Questions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): “As a word or a thing, ‘multiculturalism’ first appeared in Canada and Australia in the early 1970s. After belatedly abandoning their ‘whites only’ immigration policies, these young immigrant societies called an official multiculturalism to the rescue in order to juggle the incompatible claims of defeated homeland minorities (both Aboriginal and settler), newly entering Asian and other non-European immigrant groups, and their old European immigrant cores. Interestingly, official multiculturalism was instituted in post-colonial societies that lacked independent nation-founding myths and clear breaks with their colonial past, à l’américaine, thus conceiving of themselves as multiple cultures coexisting under the roof of a neutral state. This could not be so in the United States, the next stage of multiculturalism’s tour de monde, where a strong sense of political nationhood and centripetal melting-pot ideology could only clash with multiculturalism’s ethnicizing and centrifugal thrust. Accordingly, only in the United States did multiculturalism adopt the oppositional, anti-institutional stance that it would retain in its further march towards Western Europe” (p. 3). For the recent debate on whether or not the high tide of multiculturalism is currently behind us, see Christian Joppke’s “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy,” British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004): 237–257 and Will Kymlicka’s “The New Debate on Minority Rights (and Postscript),” in Anthony Simon Laden and David Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 25–59. 7.  All searches were done through the The New York Times historical database on June 8, 2008. The searches in the catalogue of the Library of Congress were performed on the same date. 8.  The data compiled on August 25, 2008 for the number of articles each year is as follows: 728 (1990), 1,329 (1991), 1,217 (1992), 1,376 (1993), 1,402 (1994), 1,563 (1995), 1,873 (1996), 1,797 (1997), 1,818 (1998), 1,493 (1999), 1,516 (2000), 2,020 (2001), 1,807 (2002), 1,418 (2003), 1,866 (2004), 2,926 (2005), over 3,000 (2006), 2,725 (2007). 9.  In addition to some of the criticisms formulated by the authors interviewed in this book, see Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the New Planetary Vulgate,” Radical Philosophy 105 (January/February 2001), http:// www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=9956; Anis Shivani, “From Redistribution to Recognition: A Left Critique of Multiculturalism,” CounterPunch (October 19, 2002), http://www.counterpunch.org/shivani1019.html; Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,”

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New Left Review 225 (September/October 1997): 28–51; and the opening chapters of Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001). Joppke and Lukes provide one of the best summaries of the various criticisms of mainstream multiculturalism in their introduction to Multi­ cultural Questions. 10.  Quoted in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 87. 11.  Ibid., p. 88. 12.  See Philippe Bénéton, Histoire de mots: Culture et civilization (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1975). Bénéton’s work draws on the groundbreaking research by Lucien Febvre in Civilisation, le mot et l’idée (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1930) and Émile Benveniste’s excellent article, “Civilisation: Contribution à l’histoire du mot,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 336–345. 13.  See Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003) and Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris: Galaade, 2005); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 14.  On both of these points, see Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 15.  Raymond Geuss has argued, in an analysis that engages directly with Elias’s interpretation, that the term Kultur was, in fact, relatively absent during the period between 1800 and 1870; see Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 29–50. 16.  As Martin Jay explains in The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. xv: “the notion of a specific school did not develop until after the Institut was forced to leave Frankfurt (the term itself was not used until the Institut returned to Germany in 1950.” For a poignant critique of some of the myths surrounding the history of the “Frankfurt School,” see Neil McClaughlin’s “Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory,” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 24, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 109–139. 17.  See Herbert Marcuse’s account of the early definition of the concept of critical theory: “Wenn ich mich recht erinnere, wurde der Begriff von den Mitgliedern des Instituts zu dem Zweck benutzt, die traditionelle marxistische Theorie kritisch zu prüfen, ihre Tragfähigkeit une Reichweite zu untersuchen, eine Anstrengung, die angesichts der strukturellen Veränderungen des kapitalistischen Systems für unerlässlich erachtet wurde. Der Begriff bezeichnet die Wendung der analytischen Arbeit

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von der ökonomischen Sphäre hin zur gesellschaftlichen Totalität. Wir waren der Meinung, dass es in dieser Entwicklungsphase nicht eine einzige gesellschaftliche Dimension, ob materiell oder geistig, gab, die nicht unter dem Einfluss der herrschenden Klasse und ihrer politischen und kulturellen Strategien stand” (Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996], pp. 124–125). 18.  See Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 194: “The conception of theory was absolutized, as though it were grounded in the inner nature of knowledge as such or justified in some other ahistorical way, and thus it became a reified, ideological category.” 19.  Ibid., p. 200. 20.  Ibid., pp. 200–1. 21.  Ibid., pp. 210–11. 22.  “There is . . . no theory of society, even that of the sociologists concerned with general laws, that does not contain political motivations, and the truth of these must be decided not in supposedly neutral reflection but in personal thought and action, in concrete historical activity” (ibid., p. 222). 23.  Ibid., p. 227. See also ibid., p. 229: “A consciously critical attitude, however, is part of the development of society: the construing of the course of history as the necessary product of an economic mechanism simultaneously contains both a protest against this order of things, a protest generated by the order itself, and the idea of self-determination for the human race, that is the idea of a state of affairs in which man’s actions no longer flow from a mechanism but from his own decision.” 24.  See Herbert Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in Negations: Essays in Crtitical Theory (Boston: Beacon, 1968), p. 143. 25.  See Jay’s comments in The Dialectical Imagination, p. 54: “Culture, Horkheimer and his colleagues argued, was never epiphenomenal, although it was never fully autonomous. Its relationship to the material substructure of society was multidimensional. All cultural phenomena must be seen as mediated through the social totality, not merely as the reflection of class interests.” 26.  Marcuse, Negations, p. 103. Norbert Elias went to Frankfurt to work as an assistant to Karl Mannheim, who headed the Sociology Department at Frankfurt University; see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 111. 27.  Marcuse, Negations, p. 103. The rest of the passage reads as follows: “Freedom, goodness, and beauty become spiritual qualities: understanding for everything human, knowledge about the greatness of all times, appreciation of everything difficult and sublime, respect for history in which all of this has become what it is. This inner state is to be the source of action that does not come into conflict with the given order.” Also see p. 122: “the injection of cultural happiness into unhappiness and the spiritualization of sensuality mitigate the misery and the sick-

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ness of that life to a ‘healthy’ work capacity. This is the real miracle of affirmative culture [affirmativen Kultur]. Men can feel themselves happy even without being so at all.” 28.  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 152–153. Also see p. 131: “To speak of culture was always contrary to culture [Von Kultur zu reden war immer schon wider die Kultur]. Culture [Kultur] as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture [Kultur] within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion of culture [Kultur].” 29.  Ibid., p. 123. 30.  See the opposition between the culture industry and culture “in the true sense” in Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 98–106, as well as “Cultural Criticism and Society” in Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 22: “If cultural criticism, even at its best with Valéry, sides with conservativism, it is because of its unconscious adherence to a notion of culture which, during the era of late capitalism, aims at a form of property which is stable and independent of stock-market fluctuations. This idea of culture asserts its distance from the system in order, as it were, to offer universal security in the middle of a universal dynamic.” 31.  See Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, p. 21: “If it can be said that in the early years of its history the Institut concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic substructure, in the years after 1930 its prime interest lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed, as we shall see, the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was called into question by Critical Theory.” 32.  Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 36. On the ensuing pages, Freud details the various features of civilization (Kultur). Consider, as well, the lengthy definition provided by Freud in The Future of an Illusion (New York: Anchor, n.d.), p. 3: “Human culture [Kultur]—I mean by that all those respects in which human life has raised itself above animal conditions and in which it differs from the life of the beasts, and I disdain to separate culture [Kultur] and civilization [Zivilisation]—presents, as is well known, two aspects to the observer. It includes on the one hand all the knowledge and power that men have acquired in order to master the forces of nature and win resources from her for the satisfaction of human needs; and on the other hand it includes all the necessary arrangements whereby men’s relations to each other, and in particular the distribution of the attainable riches, may be regulated.” 33.  Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1966), p. 3. It is true, of course, that Marcuse calls into question the

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undue universalization of this definition, which suggests that all culture is necessarily repressive (see ibid., p. 34–35). His analysis therefore aims at demonstrating the historicity of culture in order to draw out the possibility of the historical emergence of a nonrepressive civilization. It is important to note, moreover, that culture in the aesthetic sense of the term plays a central role in his theorization of a nonrepressive civilization. 34.  Ibid., p. 8. In an important essay from 1965, Marcuse refers to the traditional understanding of the opposition between culture and civilization in order to highlight significant historical developments in the role of culture in society: “The higher culture still exists. It is more available than ever before . . . but society has been closing the mental and physical space in which this culture could be understood in its cognitive substance, in its exact truth. Operationalism, in thought and behavior, relegates these truths to the personal, subjective, emotional dimension; in this form they can easily be fitted into the Establishment—the critical, qualitative transcendence of culture is being eliminated and the negative is integrated into the positive. The oppositional elements of culture are thus being reduced: civilization takes over, organizes, buys and sells culture . . . the integration of cultural values into the established society cancels the alienation of culture from civilization, thereby flattening out the tension between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ (which is a real, historical tension), between the potential and the actual, future and present, freedom and necessity”; “Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture,” Daedalus 94, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 195–196. 35.  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 55. 36.  Ibid., pp. 111–112. Also see the following passages: “The issue is not that of culture [Kultur] as a value, which is what the critics of civilization [Zivilisation], Huxley, Jaspers, Ortega y Gasset and others, have in mind” (xv); “In every product of the culture industry [Kulturindustrie], the permanent denial imposed by civilization [Zivilisation] is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims” (141). 37.  Horkheimer seems to have this in mind when he refers to culture “in the narrower sense of the term”—which is indeed very broad—while he is discussing “the oldest and most important set of philosophical problems: namely, the question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals, and the changes in the realm of culture in the narrower sense (to which belong not only the so-called intellectual elements, such as science, art, and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, leisure activities, lifestyle, etc.)”; Max Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p. 11. 38.  See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 37:

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“As Raymond Williams demonstrates, ‘art’ and ‘culture’ owe their modern meaning of spheres separate from the reproduction of social life to the eighteenth century.” 39.  Given the critical orientation of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is important to remind ourselves of the explicit goals stated in the introduction: “The accompanying critique of enlightenment is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination” (p. xvi); “We are wholly convinced—and therein lies our petitio principii—that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought” (p. xiii). 40.  See Habermas, The Structural Transformation, pp. 49 and 50: “A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body”; “The public sphere as a sphere which mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion, accords with the principle of the public sphere.” 41.  The German expression used by Habermas, bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit, has a very broad meaning. Öffentlichkeit can refer not only to the “public sphere” but as well to “the public” or “publicity.” Bürgerlich means “civil,” “civic,” or “bourgeois,” from the root Bürger, meaning “bourgeois,” or “citizen.” Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit therefore refers not only to a sector of society or a set of public institutions but also to the overall civic principle of publicity. 42.  This is not to suggest that Adorno and Horkheimer—as is sometimes assumed—had a purely negative view of the commercialization of culture. On the contrary, seeds of certain features of Habermas’s analysis can be found in Dialectic of Enlightenment; see, for example, p. 157. 43.  Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 113. 44.  At a terminological level, it is important to note that Honneth rejects the categories used by Nancy Fraser to classify his project: “Fraser wants to understand our disagreement mainly as a debate about the consequences of the ‘cultural turn’; . . . she accuses me of analyzing market processes in terms of ‘cultural’ recognition. . . . I do not see myself as a representative of the cultural turn in the social sciences”; Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution of Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), p. 248. Without taking sides in this debate, it is nonetheless clear that Honneth’s concern with the question of recognition is largely distinct from the earlier Frankfurt School preoccupation with the issue of culture in the aesthetic or civilizational sense. 45.  Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, p. 4. 46.  Ibid., p. 16. 47.  Fraser, Justice Interruptus, p. 16. In Fraser’s most recent work, she has emphasized the importance of a third major category of justice claims—political representation—in addition to socioeconomic claims for redistribution and cultural claims for

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recognition. See, for instance, her article “Abnormal Justice,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2008): 393–422. 48.  Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 20. 49.  Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), pp. 132–133. 50.  See, for instance, Cornel West’s essay “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October 53 (Summer 1990): 93–109, where he describes his work as a form of “prophetic criticism”: “I call demystificatory criticism ‘prophetic criticism’—the approach appropriate for the new cultural politics of difference—because while it begins with social and structural analyses it also makes explicit its moral and political aims. It is partisan, partial, engaged, and crisis-centered, yet always keeps open a skeptical eye to avoid dogmatic traps, premature closures, formulaic formulations, or rigid conclusions. In addition to social structural analyses, moral and political judgments, and sheer critical consciousness, there indeed is evaluation” (p. 105). 51.  It is interesting to note in passing that a significant number of theorists identified with communitarianism have themselves decried the use of such a label to classify their work. 52.  Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. x. 53.  Ibid., p. xi. Also see ibid., p. xi: “Liberals who think the case for rights should be neutral toward substantive moral and religious doctrines and communitarians who think rights should rest on prevailing social values make a similar mistake; both try to avoid passing judgment on the content of the ends that rights promote. But these are not the only alternatives. A third possibility, more plausible in my view, is that rights depend for their justification on the moral importance of the ends they serve.” 54.  Not all groups can be classified in terms of the opposition between national minorities and ethnic groups. The most striking example highlighted by Kymlicka is the case of African Americans; see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 24.

1. CRITICAL THEORY TODAY

1.  On these subjects, see Gabriel Rockhill, Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (Paris: Hermann, 2010), as well as the following works: Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilization Process, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Normon Hampson, The Enlightenment (New York: Penguin, 1991); Albert William Levi, Philosophy as Social Expression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany

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1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Theodore Ziolkowski, Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) and German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Paul Gerbod, “L’université et la philosophie de 1789 à nos jours,” in Actes du 95e congrès national des sociétés savantes (Reims, 1970), vol. 1: Histoire de l’enseignement de 1610 à nos jours (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1974); André Laks and Ada Neschke, eds., La naissance du paradigme herméneutique: Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Boeckh, Droysen (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990).

2.  The first representatives of the Frankfurt School tended to identify the historic emergence of critical theory with the Hegelian (and above all Marxist) heritage rather than the Kantian tradition or the century of the Enlightenment; see, for example, Herbert Marcuse, “Philosophie und kritische Theorie,” Kultur und Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1965) and Max Horkheimer, Traditionelle und kritische Theorie: Fünf Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005). What interests me here is not the history of critical theory from the viewpoint of its proponents in the twentieth century, nor the role played by this or that individual philosopher in the tradition of critical theory (if that were the case, I could have appealed to the writings of Habermas on Kant). On the contrary, what interests me is the set of historical reconfigurations—which go back well into the eighteenth century—from which the project of a critical theory in the broad sense of the term (namely, a critique of traditional philosophy with the goal of redefining the social role of philosophical discourse) has come about. Such reconfigurations are, moreover, linked in diverse ways to what Reinhart Koselleck called the “reign of critique” in Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

3.  See, on this point, the description of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment proposed by Peter Gay in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 127–203.

4.  I have explored this issue in greater detail in Gabriel Rockhill, “La différence est-elle une valeur en soi? Critique d’une axiologie métaphilosophique,” in Miriam Bankovsky and Alice Le Goff, eds., Théories de la reconnaissance et philosophie française: Vers la reconstitution d’un dialogue (forthcoming).

5.  For a detailed analysis of this paradox, see Gabriel Rockhill, “L’écriture de l’histoire philosophique: L’éternal retour du même et de l’autre chez Lévinas,” Philosophie 87 (Autumn 2005): 59–77.

6.  Emmanuel Lévinas, “Philosophie, justice et amour” (interview with R. FornetBetancourt and A. Gomez-Müller), Concordia 3 (January 1983): 59–73. This article is partially reproduced in Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Continuum, 2006).

7.  Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), pp. 52, 100/Ethique et infini (Paris: Fayard/France Culture, 1982), p. 97.

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8.  On the face as a kath’auto manifestation, see Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 51, 64–5, 67/Totalité et infini (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 43, 60–61.

9.  By way of example, see the feminist critique of Lévinas formulated by Luce Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Fill Gillian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

10.  See Lévinas, Entre Nous. 11.  Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 158 (translation slightly modified)/Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 246–247. Also see Otherwise Than Being, pp. 157–158/Autrement, p. 246: “The entry of the third party is the very fact of consciousness, assembling into being, and at the same time, in a being, the hour of the suspension of being in possibility, the finitude of essence accessible to the abstraction of concepts, to the memory that assembles in presence, the reduction of a being to the possible and the reckoning of possibles, the comparison of incomparables. It is the thematization of the same on the basis of the relationship with the other, starting with the proximity and the immediacy of saying prior to problems, whereas the identification of knowing by itself absorbs every other.”

12.  One only needs to reread the first pages of The German Ideology, where the references to the camera obscura are found, in order to see to what degree it is not a question of making ideology into a simple issue of ideas and representations. As Marx and Engels recalled several times, it is, above all, a question of showing that “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour” (Moscow: Progress, 1976), p. 42.

13.  See, for example, the World Report 2008, published by Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org): “The United States now has both the largest incarcerated population and the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, with a rate five times that of England and Wales, seven times that of Canada, and more than 10 times that of Japan. The burden of incarceration falls disproportionately on members of racial and ethnic minorities. Black men are incarcerated at 6.5 times the rate of white men, and 11.7 percent of all black males age 25 to 29 are in prison or jail” (pp. 545–546).

14.  Louis Althusser, Sur la reproduction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), p. 221.

15.  Regarding this last point, I am thinking of François Hartog’s Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003).

16.  Concerning the question of the veil, see the excellent study by Pierre Tévanian, Le voile médiatique (Paris: Raisons D’Agir, 2005).

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17.  This expression unveils, paradoxically, a puzzling truth: war is founded on terror insofar as it is the terrorization of the public that allows for the justification of wars without justification.

18.  See Alfredo Gomez-Muller, Sartre: De la nausée à l’engagement (Paris: Félin, 2005). On the same theme, one can also read my study, “Sartre et le colonialisme: La critique de l’universel abstrait,” in Alfredo Gomez-Muller, ed., Sartre et la culture de l’autre (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), pp. 99–124.

19.  Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 132 (translation slightly modified).

20.  “For those of our townsfolk who risked their lives in this predicament, the issue was whether or not plague was in their midst or whether or not they must fight against it” (ibid., pp. 132–133).

21.  Philippe Bénéton, Histoire de mots: Culture et civilisation (Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Politique, 1975), p. 26.

22.  Concerning this point, see the excellent article by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall entitled “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263.

23.  The quixotic adventures of Herzog’s unhinged heroes—from Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo to Grizzly Man—sometimes blur the line between the plague and its resistance by pushing iconoclasm to its extreme limit, where it abolishes the very norms that allow for the recognition of iconoclastic acts: the pursuit of an “insane” cause reveals the capacity of a subject to go to the limits of himself and his projects while taking his distance from spectators (with the evident exception of the spectators of Herzog’s films).

24.  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 237/Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p. 262 (translation slightly modified).

25.  Lucien Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), pp. 28–34/Sciences humaines et philosophie: Pour un structuralisme génétique (Paris: Gonthier, 1966), p. 23–28.

2. CONCRETE UNIVERSALITY AND CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY This discussion took place in Paris on June 16, 2006. It was transcribed by John Rosania and later reviewed by the authors.

1.  Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York and London: Polity and Routledge, 1992), pp. 148–178.

2.  Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 83.

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3.  Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 109.

4.  This is a reference to the lecture presented on May 15, 2006, at New York University in France, “The Struggle Over Culture: Equality and Diversity in the European Public Sphere,” organized by the research group Politique et culture as part of the lecture series Le Débat transatlantique sur les sociétés multiculturelles.

5.  This is a reference to the lecture discussed in the previous note.

3. G  LOBAL JUSTICE AND THE RENEWAL OF THE CRITICAL THEORY TRADITION This discussion took place in Paris on December 12, 2006. It was transcribed by Caitlin Vavasour and later reviewed by the authors.

4. ACCOUNTING FOR A PHILOSOPHIC ITINERARY This discussion took place in Paris on March 13, 2006. It was transcribed by Caitlin Hammer and later reviewed by the authors. 1.  Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), p. 131. 2.  Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001), p. 23. 3.  See the discussion of the kath’auto manifestation of the other qua face in Totalité et infini (Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), a manifestation that undoes the form of the manifestation but is a manifestation nonetheless: “Le visage d’Autrui détruit à tout moment, et déborde l’image plastique qu’il me laisse, l’idée à ma mesure et à la mesure de son ideatum—l’idée adéquate. Il ne se manifeste pas par ces qualités, mais kath’auto. Il s’exprime” (p. 43); “La manifestation du kath’auto, où l’être nous concerne sans se dérober et sans se trahir—consiste pour lui [Platon], non point à être dévoilé, non point à se découvrir au regard qui le prendrait pour thème d’interprétation et qui aurait une position absolue dominant l’objet. La manifestation kath’auto consiste pour l’être à se dire à nous, indépendamment de toute position que nous aurions prise à son égard, à s’exprimer . . . L’expérience absolue n’est pas dévoilement mais révélation: coïncidence de l’exprimé et de celui qui exprime, manifestation, par là même privilégiée d’Autrui, manifestation d’un visage par-delà la forme. . . . La manifestation du visage est déjà discours” (pp. 60–61, also see pp. 218–219). 4.  See Alphonso Lingis’s footnote on pp. 24–25 of the 1969 edition of Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press): “With the author’s permission, we are translating ‘autrui’ (the personal Other,

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7 . L I B E R A L I S M   /   203

the you) by ‘Other,’ and ‘autre’ by ‘other.’ In doing so, we regrettably sacrifice the possibility of reproducing the author’s use of capital or small letters with both of these terms in the French text.” 5.  This is a reference to Judith Butler’s lecture on March 13, 2006, at the Institut Catholique de Paris, “Violence, non-violence: Sartre et Fanon,” organized by the research group Politique et culture (NYU in France) as part of the lecture series Le Débat transatlantique sur les sociétés multiculturelles.

5. THE PRESENT IN THE LIGHT OF THE LONGUE DURÉE This interview took place in Paris on March 23, 2007. Transcribed by Natacha Mba, it was translated from the French by John V. Garner and later revised by the authors. 1.  Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic, 1974); The Modern World-System, vol. 2: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic, 1980); The Modern World-System, vol. 3: The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s (San Diego: Academic, 1989). 2.  The expressions longue durée and moyenne durée (which appears later in the interview) have been translated into English, in Braudel’s works, as “long-term” and “medium-term,” though a more literal translation would require the more cumbersome “long duration” and “medium duration” –trans. 3.  Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1961).

6. A  PRISONER OF HOPE IN THE NIGHT OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE This discussion took place over the telephone on April 15, 2007. It was transcribed by Emily Rockhill and later reviewed by the authors. 1.  Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 39.

7. LIBERALISM This dialogue took place in Paris on May 21, 2004, and was later corrected by the authors.

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8. CULTURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES This discussion took place in Paris on May 22, 2007. It was transcribed by Apolonia Franco Elizond and later reviewed by the authors. 1.  See the revised edition of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999), pp. 84–85: “As far as possible, then, justice as fairness appraises the social system from the position of equal citizenship and the various levels of income and wealth. Sometimes, however, other positions may need to be taken into account. If, for example, there are unequal basic rights founded on fixed natural characteristics, these inequalities will single out relevant positions. Since these characteristics cannot be changed, the positions they define count as starting places in the basic structure. Distinctions based on sex are of this type, and so are those depending upon race and culture. Thus if, say, men are favored in the assignment of basic rights, this inequality is justified by the difference principle (in the general interpretation) only if it is to the advantage of women and acceptable from their standpoint. And the analogous condition applies to the justification of caste systems, or racial and ethnic inequalities.” 2.  John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 4. 3.  This is a reference to Will Kymlicka’s lecture on May 21, 2007, at the Institut Catholique de Paris, “Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity,” organized by the research group Politique et culture (NYU in France) as part of the lecture series Le Débat transatlantique sur les sociétés multiculturelles. 4.  See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5.  This is a reference to the lecture discussed in note 3. 6.  See Will Kymlicka and Baogang He, eds., Multiculturalism in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

9. T  HE CRITICAL THEORY OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND THE THEORY OF RECOGNITION This interview took place in Frankfurt in October 2001 and was conducted by Olivier Voirol for the collection of essays by Axel Honneth that he edited and translated into French as La société du mépris: Vers une nouvelle Théorie critique (Paris: Découverte, 2006). Since we did not have the opportunity to interview Honneth ourselves, we are very grateful to both Honneth and Voirol for letting us print the English version of their dialogue, which touches on many of the central themes of this collection.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy as well as the Director of the Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Her publications include Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (1986), Situating the Self (1992), The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996), Transformations of Citizenship: Dilemmas of the Nation—State in the Global Era (2000), The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002), and The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (2004). She has also coedited and contributed essays to Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (1994) and Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein (2004). Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author, most notably, of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004), Undoing Gender (2004), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009). She has also contributed essays to Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (1994), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000), and Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (2009). Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (1989), Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (1997), and Scales of Justice: Re-imaging Political Space for a Globalizing World (2008). She is also the coauthor, with Axel Honneth, of Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (2003), and a contributor to edited collections such as Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (1994) and Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein (2004).

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Alfredo Gomez-Muller is a professor of Latin American Studies at the Université François-Rabelais in Tours and a member of the Centre de Recherches sur l’Education et la Culture dans le Monde Ibéro-américain (CIREMIA). He is the author of Anarquismo y anarcosindicalismo en América Latina (1980 and 2009), Chemins d’Aristote (1991 and 2005), Alteridad y ética desde el descubrimiento de América (1997), Ethique, coexistence et sens (1999), Sartre, de la nausée à l’engagement (2005) and La reconstrucción de Colombia: Escritos politicos (2008). He has also edited La filosofía y la crisis colombiana (2003), La question de l’humain entre l’éthique et l’anthropologie (2004), Sartre et la culture de l’autre (2006), and La reconnaissance: Réponse à quels problèmes? (2009). Axel Honneth is professor of philosophy at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main and Director of its Institute for Social Research. He has published numerous critical essays and books on social theory and its history, including The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1993), The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (1996), Suffering from Indeterminacy: A Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (2000), Anxiety and Politics (2003), Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2007), Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (2008), and Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (2009). He also is the coauthor of Recognition or Redistribution? Changing Perspectives on the Moral Order of Society (2003) and the coeditor of Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment (1992). Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen’s University and a visiting professor in the Nationalism Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author Liberalism, Community, and Culture (1989), Contemporary Political Philosophy (1990; second edition 2002), Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (1998), Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship (2001), and Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (2007). He is also the editor of Justice in Political Philosophy (1992) and The Rights of Minority Cultures (1995). Gabriel Rockhill is assistant professor of philosophy at Villanova University, program director (based abroad) at the Collège International de Philosophie and Research Associate at the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CNRS/ EHESS) in Paris, France. He is the author of Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (2010) and Pour un historicisme radical: Entre esthétique et politique avec Jacques Rancière (forthcoming). He coedited and contributed to Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2009) and Technologies de contrôle dans la mondialisation (2009). He also edited and translated Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics (2004) as well as Cornelius Castoriadis’s Postscript on Insignificance (forthcoming).

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Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996), Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (2005), The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (2007) and Justice: What’s the Right Think To Do? (2009). His writings also appear in general publications such as the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and the New York Times. Ronan Sharkey is Maître de Conférences in the philosophy faculty of the Institut Catholique, Paris, where he teaches moral philosophy and philosophy of language and is director of the undergraduate program. A specialist in moral philosophy and in the later thought of Wittgenstein, he the author of a number of articles on moral philosophy and on applied ethics and coeditor of La méta-éthique: Textes clés, due to appear in 2010. Olivier Voirol is a researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main and junior professor of social theory at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He has edited Visibility/Invisibility (2005), coedited Mediation (2008), and published articles on critical theory, recognition, social invisibility, media, and the culture industry. He is responsible for the series Critical Theory with Editions La Découverte (Paris) and writes regularly for Réseaux—Culture, Société, Technologie. Immanuel Wallerstein is a senior research scholar in sociology at Yale University and the founder and director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at the State University of New York in Binghamton. His numerous books include The Modern World-System (3 vols), After Liberalism (1995), Utopistics, or Historical Choices for the Twenty-first Century (1998), The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (2001), Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (2001), World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (2004), European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (2006). He is also the coauthor, with Etienne Balibar, of Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (La Découverte, 1992). Cornel West is Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University. His publications include Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982), Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture (1988), The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989), The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (1991), Race Matters (1993), Keeping Faith (1994), Democracy Matters (2004) and Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir (2009). He is also coeditor and contributor to Post-Analytic Philosophy (1985) as well as a cultural performer whose activities range from audio commentaries on The Ultimate Matrix Collection to a series of CDs (Sketches of My Culture, 2001; Street Knowledge, 2003; Never Forget, 2007).

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