Radical Philosophy #135

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philosophy

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006

Editorial collective

COMMENTARY

David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford

The Awfulness of the Actual: Counter-Consumerism in a New Age of War

Contributors

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Kate Soper ..................................................................................................... 2

Kate Soper is Professor of Philosophy at London Metropolitan University. Her books include To Relish the Sublime (with Martin Ryle, Verso, 2001). She is currently working on a project on alternative hedonisms.

ARTICLES

Judith Butler is Maxime Elliot Professor in Rhetoric, Comparative Literature and Womenʼs Studies at UC Berkeley. Her most recent book is Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005)

Commodity Aesthetics Revisited: Exchange Relations as the Source of Antagonistic Aesthetization

Wolfgang Fritz Haug was Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, Free University of Berlin, 1979–2001. He has been editor of Das Argument since 1959. Recent work includes High-Tech Kapitalismus (Argument, 2003). Muhammad Ali Khalidi teaches philosophy at the American University of Beirut. He has recently published a translated anthology of Islamic philosophical texts, Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He also works in the philosophy of science.

Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Production and layout by Peter Osborne and Stewart Martin Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100 Tel: 201 667 9300; Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491 Cover: Flying Machine, 2005

Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com

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Radical Philosophy Ltd

Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom Judith Butler .................................................................................................. 8

Wolfgang Fritz Haug ................................................................................... 18

Orientalisms in the Interpretation of Islamic Philosophy Muhammad Ali Khalidi ............................................................................... 25

REVIEWS Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic, eds, Lacan: Topologically Speaking Philip Derbyshire ......................................................................................... 34 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefweschsel, Band 2, 1938–1944 Roger Behrens ............................................................................................. 37 Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity Howard Feather ........................................................................................... 40 Chris Lawn, Wittgenstein and Gadamer: Towards a Post-Analytic Philosophy of Language Alessandra Tanesini ..................................................................................... 42 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 50 Christopher J. Arthur ................................................................................. 44 China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law Mark Neocleous ........................................................................................... 46 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique Eli Park Sorensen......................................................................................... 47 Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression Shannon Sullivan ........................................................................................ 48 Michael Quante, Hegelʼs Concept of Action B.C. Hutchens............................................................................................... 50

NEWS Women’s Philosophy Review, 1997–2005 Stella Sandford ............................................................................................ 52

COMMENTARY

The awfulness of the actual Counter-consumerism in a new age of war Kate Soper

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t is more than four years since the September 11th attack; there is turmoil, daily death and anguish in Iraq, and no sign of a resolution to the ramifying problems created by the invasion and the subsequent ignominious actions of the occupying forces, or by the ʻinsurgentsʼ whom the illegal invasion has predictably summoned into being. Terrorist retaliation for UK participation and support has claimed its first victims in Britain, and we are promised more to come. This article has been written in a week resounding with lamentation for the near one thousand who perished in a panicked stampede in Baghdad; and with the despairing cries of those thousands who, as their cities descended into chaos in the richest country in the world, were appealing for the means of survival in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The humanly inflicted suffering in Iraq cannot be compared in either its causes or consequences with that ensuing from a terrible wind in the Gulf of Mexico. And yet there are some parallels and connections to be noted: the nonchalant and blundering quality of the Bush administrationʼs responses (one might speak of a malevolent disregard were one sure that the glazed-eyed president had a proper grasp of the unfolding realities on which he is called to act); the evidence that wherever you are and whatever the source of the destruction visited upon you, if you happen to be Arab or black or relatively poor and without a car, then your further deprivations and sufferings will count for far less than if you are wealthy, white and accommodated with the means of private transport. It is salutary, too, to observe how the nation that is keener than any to export its model of civility to other cultures so readily leaves its own citizens to fend for themselves in difficult times. And then there is the role played in every scenario involving US interests by liquid gold: an essential of the American way of life that has been a major – even if not the only – precipitating factor in the war; an asset whose rising price appears to have been of more concern to the Washington elite, and many of those they govern, than the rising waters in New Orleans. But there is also, perhaps, a further link. For as the sea continues to heat in the Mexican Gulf, more storms are forecast, and the insurance companies begin to mutter about global warming, the problems of sustaining the ʻAmerican way of lifeʼ are becoming ever more exposed, not only in the dire troubles they create for others abroad but in the homelands as well. It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that American people as a whole are unaware of or without concern for these developments. The last election indicated the faultlines opening up in their responses, even if these have not as yet had seismic

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Radical Philosophy 135 (Januar y/Februar y 20 06)

effects on party politics. There are those, too, although they remain a minority, who are implacably opposed to what is being done (or not being done) in their name. The anti-war marches and anti-globalization protests in the USA were on a similar scale to those elsewhere in the world, and the beleaguered Left, starved as it has been of signs of support for a countering ethos, has understandably seized upon this promise with enthusiasm and sought to build upon it. One notable instance of this was the broadsheet Neither Their War Nor Their Peace distributed at the 2003 anti-war demonstrations by Retort, a group of around fifty individuals, some with links to New Left Review, who have long been writing and agitating in the San Francisco Bay area. The broadsheet proved influential at the marches, and it has now been expanded by four of the group into an altogether more ambitious analysis of US imperialism and foreign policy in the aftermath of September 11th.*

João Louro, Blind Image no. 66, 2004

Permanent war Afflicted Powers describes itself as a ʻpolemic on the eve of warʼ and associates its argument with the earlier pamphleteering tradition represented by Rosa Luxemburgʼs Junius Pamphlet and Randolph Bourneʼs The State. Depending on its focus at any point, its judgements veer between the despairing and the elated. On the one hand, it tells us, we have seldom been closer to hell on earth; on the other, it hails the peace march as a ʻgreat new fact of politicsʼ and foreshadowing of a ʻdifferent form of lifeʼ. Nor is it inclined to moderation in its symbolic alignment, since it borrows its title from Satanʼs address to the fallen in Paradise Lost. This is an identification with the Satanic sublime that certainly captures the grim defiance of Bushʼs authority and insupportable rule that has inspired its authors. However, given the Arch-fiendʼs insistence that the devilʼs work must always be to pervert any good that evil may promise, the association is risky, especially for anyone committed to a dialectical perspective on history. It is also a trifle dodgy given the competition in the field of diabolical opposition presented by revolutionary Islamic terror. For Afflicted Powers has no intention of lending itself to that particular rebuttal of Western culture, and delivers a strictly secular and socialist plague upon both the US administration and its jihadist counterparts. If this is a work of apostasy it is one that is seeking, dare one say it, some third way out of that dualism, some place of being and talking beyond the ʻgood and evilʼ banalities of both Christian and Muslim fundamentalisms. For the moment, however, we are all caught, it claims, in a new–old temporality, a complex of the atavistic and the newfangled. Or, if preferred, we are shaped by a world in which the hyper-modern is itself seamed with the barbaric and retrograde. Nowhere is this more evident than in American imperialismʼs strategy of ʻpermanent warʼ. War and contemporary capitalism (at least in its US form) are inextricably linked, since, under the compulsion to open up ever new sources of ʻprimitive accumulationʼ, the American state is committed to a continuous round of military inter* Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Mathews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in the Age of War, Verso, London and New York, 2005. 211 pp., £9.99 pb., 1 84467 031 7.

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vention. This argument presides over the extended consideration given in Afflicted Powers to the ʻblood for oilʼ thesis (rejected as lacking the more structural understanding allowed through the ʻpermanent warʼ thesis). It also drives the bookʼs analysis of the role of US foreign policy in precipitating revolutionary Islam, and the ʻnew Leninismʼ of its vanguard terrorism. Petro-capitalismʼs ruin of the secular nation-state; its ʻpermanent warʼ liquidation of any left politics or secular criticism in the Muslim world; and a hyper-modern yet all too regressively bleak urbanization are here presented as the major contributing factors. Unsurprisingly, this optic prompts some of Retortʼs gloomiest forecasts, such as, for example, that it will not really matter to Washington what ensues in Iraq. Even if the war issues in a chaos of factionalized and fratricidal zones, it will have succeeded to the extent that it has facilitated a greater US military presence in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East (and in the process excluded Saudi Arabia from the equation). In short, success in such adventures simply means securing a position for the next phase of imperial projection. American power here figures as unassailable if only because it is content with such narrowly military objectives whatever the collateral damage elsewhere, and whatever the longer-term historical consequences. At the same time, however, and running counter to this pessimism, we learn that the concept of ʻafflictedʼ power is intended to refer as much to the vulnerability of the administration as to the present impotence of the opposition to corporate capital. For the ʻAmerican empireʼ now lives, they argue, in a partly factitious and partly justified fear that has led it to take actions (notably in Iraq) that have brought it close to ʻreal strategic failureʼ. The state itself, then, today is ailing and exposed to its countering forces (more or less identified here with the anti-war marchers), even if this ʻmultitudeʼ has yet to take advantage of its weakness. What is emphasized in the development of this perspective (and this is where the Retort polemic departs most sharply from the Marxism of its precursors) is the unprecedented role of the ʻimage-warsʼ in the maintenance and affliction of political power today. A reworking of Debordʼs theses on the ʻsociety of the spectacleʼ is here invoked to explain how September 11th has acquired such epochal importance and prompted so much irrational and counterproductive reaction to it. For what underlies this, it is argued, is the exposure of the state today to its own ever more concentrated and historically abstracted reliance on the image as the key to social power. In the society of weakened citizenship that the market requires and the state is expected to supply, the control of imagery becomes all-important to the cementing of some quasipolitical community. Power is thus increasingly identified in or with the key monuments, icons, logos, and other signifiers of the ʻimaginary earthʼ – which means it is also vulnerable to an attack that succumbs to the same fantasy and is willing to exploit it at the cost of efficacy or political recognition at any other level.

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Those, therefore, of the Left who have dismissed the Twin Towers attack as engaging in a hopeless symbolic gesture have been in one sense right, since their perpetrators attacked nothing other than an icon; but, in another sense, it is precisely in making the Towers their target that they revealed their sophisticated grasp of the present and the extent of its symbolic governance. And by thereby creating the image that now cannot be shown, this ʻspectacularʼ eruption changed the historical course and set off the relay of events that has created the new global context for us all. In this respect, so it is claimed, the Twin Towers attack represents a catastrophic ʻimage-defeatʼ for the Bush administration, managed in full and cynical awareness that it would do little to unsettle the circuits of capital, but designed precisely to set off the ʻwar on terrorʼ, raise the profile of al-Qaeda, and summon the hydra of suicidal insurgency. In all of this, of course, it has spectacularly succeeded – as the Retort authors put it, the stateʼs reaction to the precision bombings ʻhas exceeded in its crassness and futility the martyr-pilotsʼ wildest dreamsʼ. The outlook of Afflicted Powers is exceptional in combining an orthodox Left refusal to see US foreign policy today as significantly breaking with its earlier patterns, with a less orthodox readiness to take seriously what is distinctive to the current ʻmomentʼ: the altogether more significant role of the ʻspectacleʼ and its often horrendous – and highly material – consequences. The approach certainly helps to explain the exceptional convulsion within the ʻbusiness as usualʼ ethos of American capitalism that was brought about by the Twin Towers attack. It also illuminates the vulnerability of state power generally in an age of increasingly uncontrollable media exposure. (As the Retort authors drily put it, it remains unclear ʻhow the brutalities of primitive accumulation can be properly attended to it the age of al-Jazeera and the torturer with the Toshiba PDRʼ.) And it is an approach employed convincingly in the discussion of US policy towards Israel, where the continued, but increasingly irrational, loyalty of the administration to this one-time ʻMcJerusalem in the Middle Eastʼ, but now failing state, is explained as in part due to ʻrealʼ historical factors, in part to the way in which the USA has been captivated by the mirror image that Israel has provided of its own strategic aims and methods. However, this is now an image so strained that it is possible to believe that the move into Iraq might even have been fuelled by a fantasy-wish to supply a substitute mirror, an alternative image of ʻthe only Middle East democracyʼ.

Consumer ambivalence Yet this argument is also weakened by its overreliance on a monolithic and depersonalized depiction of ʻstateʼ, ʻempireʼ and ʻcapitalʼ, whose strategic needs are often presented as quite abstracted from the interests of their human supports (especially in their role as avid consumers of its goods and services). ʻThe endless accumulation of armed power,ʼ it is said, ʻproposes itself (or wishes to propose itself) as the very basis of the social orderʼ. As hinted earlier, there is a problem of knowing whether such formulations are meant to refer to ʻcapitalʼ only in its US formation or to capital as such, for if the latter, some account needs also to be given of how capitalism thrives elsewhere without the same commitment to permanent war. Such claims also convey the impression of a USA given over to permanent war simply for the sake of it, a war in which even the greed of corporate giants – which is acknowledged in passing – figures as mere contingency. It is not that the impression of hypostatized power is entirely false: US capitalism does seem like that, but there is something evasive all the same in pretending that its runaway success can be analysed or understood without reference to the collusion of its ʻmultitudeʼ of consumers in the building and consolidation of the American empire: a multitude that is surely not entirely distinct from that of the peace marchers, even if the latter do also intimate ʻa different form of lifeʼ. One can sympathize with this evasion, driven as it is by a resistance to seeing

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the Bush regime, its Halliburtons and Cheneys, as being in correspondence with the popular will. Yet realism requires that despite the heady swell of the anti-war movement and the continued and impassioned opposition of the anti-globalization forces, we recognize that Bush has enjoyed massive support for its military programme, at least until recently. It requires us to recognize – despite the analogies drawn in Afflicted Powers between Bush and Hobbesʼs Sovereign – that most Americans fear his reign rather less than that of al-Qaeda. And, above all, it requires us to recognize the complexities and contradictions of a culture in which the mass of people are thoroughly integrated in their role as consumers of the ʻAmerican way of lifeʼ and its capitalist provision of their automobiles, air flights, life insurance and pensions, even as many of them – for differing reasons and in differing ways – are also alienated, exploited and politically disaffected. It is true, as Afflicted Powers claims, quoting Thomas Friedman, that ʻMcDonaldʼs cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglasʼ; but it is also true that it cannot flourish without those who want to eat its hamburgers. This is where the abstract vocabulary of ʻempireʼ and ʻmultitudeʼ seems less than helpful (and indeed the recourse to it is rather puzzling, given that Hardt and Negri scarcely figure otherwise and are said in a footnote – rightly in my opinion – to have been received over-reverentially by the Left.) But the advantage, of course, of this discourse is that it allows a kind of theoretical bracketing off of all those who are neither the anti-globalization and peace movement radicals pressing for a countering ethos nor the faceless agents of a monolithic state machine. And once they have been bracketed off, the radical thinker can also be spared the hugely difficult and embarrassing decision regarding their degree of autonomy and the status of their desire: are they to be theorized as the unfortunate and deluded dupes of the system or as the highly reflexive and freely supportive beneficiaries of it? No one on the Left can be blamed for wanting to avoid answering this troublesome ideological query at the present time, but I also suspect that there is no way in which the Left can adequately come to terms with the current situation without confronting it more directly and taking its measure. I agree with Retort that ʻthe Islamistsʼ rage and contempt for the modern “Life” they go on savaging in their communiqués will never be understandable until what they have suffered – what they have lived through – is taken seriously again.ʼ I agree, too, that the suicidal terrorist manifestation of this opposition is driven by an ʻascetic idealʼ that it is impossible to endorse even as we can understand some of the rationale for it. The task of the Left, then, is indeed to provide an alternative to this abjection and negation. But this demands, I would argue, not only that we take seriously the contest over the management of the ʻspectacleʼ, and acknowledge the newfangled atavism of our age, but also develop a more dialectical understanding of the interaction of government and its public, capitalism and its consumers, both in its forms of mutual reinforcement and its possible lines of fracture. Despite the very great manipulative powers and pressures of the market, this is not simply a matter of the state versus its constructed and victimized ʻmassesʼ. But nor should we assume that it is only in the more extreme reactions of the anti-globalization protesters that all the disaffection with the consumerist lifestyle will be located in the future. There may, it is true, be few signs of it as yet in the USA, but in Europe one might already claim the beginnings of a new consumer ambivalence, both in the sense that other conceptions of the ʻgood lifeʼ are gaining more of a hold among some affluent consumers, and in the sense that there is a more pervasive sense of disenchantment with the supposed blessings of consumerism, compromised as these are by the stress, pollution, traffic congestion, and ill-health that goes with them. Where this newly emergent sense of an ʻalternative hedonismʼ is likely to lead, and how, if at all, it will connect with existing social movements, remains to be seen. But the Left today should not only not ignore it; it should seek to further it by spearheading a much more explicit cultural representation of the non-puritanical but at the same anti-consumerist ʻpolitical 6

imaginaryʼ to which it is gesturing. It might also seek in the process to open up more of a dialogue around both the points of contact and abrasion with the ʻanti-Coca-Cola cultureʼ responses of Islam.1 All this requires more engagement than hitherto with the emergence of consumption as a potential source of subversion. As one theorist has put it: On the one hand, consumption appears as the key contemporary ʻproblemʼ responsible for massive suffering and inequality. At the same time it is the locus of any future ʻsolutionʼ as a progressive movement in the world, by making the alimentary institutions of trade and government finally responsible to humanity for the consequences of their actions.… From the legacy of Ralph Nader in the United States, through consumer movements in Malaysia, to the consumer cooperatives of Japan, to the green movements of Western Europe, the politicized form of consumption concern has become increasingly fundamental to the formation of many branches of alternative politics.… Nevertheless, it is vital not to view consumption as simply important when it is politicized, but also to consider the implications of these movements for our imagination of politics.2

Moreover, the signs of this growing political weight of consumption are not only to be found in the protests and refusals of the Green parties and No Logo generation, but also in the recent, slightly anxious, invitations to the public to view consumption not just as a matter of private expenditure, self-styling and gratification, but as an act of political identification through which the ʻpatrioticʼ consumer signals support for the Western way of life. For to promote shopping, that bastion of private choice, as a civic ʻdutyʼ is an act of contradictory ʻinterferenceʼ on the part of the neoliberal state that cannot but hint at its vulnerability. There are tensions, in other words, to be explored – and exploited – between the collectivizing pressure of a summons to ʻpatriotic shoppingʼ and the promotion of a deregularized global marketplace whose supposed virtue is to allow all individual consumers to exercise a choice untrammelled by compulsion other than private desire. It is true that, stifling their distaste for jeremiads against the commodity, the Retort authors do, in their final pages, turn their attention to the pressures of consumer desire, and offer a sensitive, if fairly standard, critique of consumerism as compensatory for a ʻfundamental meaning-deficitʼ in the modern world. They also offer some interesting reflections on the obsession with digital replay, instant messaging, and other devices of distancing and mediation as attempts to expel ʻthe banality of the present momentʼ. And they suggest that it is precisely this resistance to living in the present that most distresses the Islamic opposition. But this remains essentially a negative critique of commodification, and the promised connections between it and the call for a ʻnon-orthodox, non-nostalgic, non-rejectionist, non-apocalyptic critique of the modernʼ are never quite made. Very little, in other words, is said about what a counter- or post-consumerist order might look like, what alternative seductions to McDonaldization it might evoke, how or why these might begin to win support among the yet unconverted ʻmultitudeʼ, and what their role in any democratically achieved transition would be. The opposition of the peace and anti-globalization movements is eloquently summoned, but only, it seems, in its capacity to expose the awfulness of the actual, rather than as the exponent of a compelling alternative to it. In the end, then, despite the indisputable energy and analytic brilliance of Afflicted Powers, there is a sense that it is still too caught in that somewhat magisterial Leftism that thrills to the sublimity of the absolute, post-revolutionary other to capitalist modernity, precisely because it never has to be represented.

Notes 1. For details on ʻCountering Consumerismʼ, a conference to be held on 20–22 April 2006 at London Metropolitan University, whose aim is to provide a forum for discussion of some of these ideas, go to www.londonmet.ac.uk/research-units/iset/events/conferences.cfm. 2. Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption, Routledge, London and New York, 1995, pp. 31, 40–41.

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Israel/Palestine and the paradoxes of academic freedom Judith Butler In the last few years, two separate debates on academic freedom have emerged in the United States, and both of them have Israel/Palestine at their centre. The first has to do with arguments against the academic boycott of Israeli institutions on grounds of academic freedom, and the second has to do with the new Academic Bill of Rights, sponsored by David Horowitz, which maintains that the classroom should present balancing points of view on political issues and that the faculty should represent a balanced spectrum of such points of view.1 I shall consider both of these debates. In the case of the boycott, a clear paradox emerged in which ʻacademic freedomʼ became the principle under which many people opposed the boycott, arguing that academic freedom involves the free circulation of ideas and scholars across national boundaries and without discriminating on the basis of nationality. The fear that some Israelis who strongly oppose the Occupation might be exempted from the boycott produced the response that there would be ʻlistsʼ distinguishing good and bad Israelis. These conjectured ʻlistsʼ clearly constituted, in the minds of some, discrimination on the basis of political viewpoints. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published their objection in the spring of this year, arguing that the resolutions originally passed by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) ʻdamage academic freedomʼ. As will be remembered, those resolutions called for a boycott against two specific institutions of higher learning, Haifa University and Bar Ilan University. The AAUP noted that the boycott excluded ʻconscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their stateʼs colonial and racist policiesʼ, and on the basis of what appeared to be an ideological litmus test the AAUP concluded that the exclusion, and the standard of judgement it implied, ʻdeepens the injury to academic freedom rather than mitigates itʼ.

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Radical Philosophy 135 (Januar y/Februar y 20 06)

We can see in the AAUPʼs first point that boycotts based on an ideological or political viewpoint are considered abrogations of academic freedom, and that the positive principle at stake is that academic exchange ought to be freely conducted without instating standards of inclusion and exclusion on the basis of political viewpoints. Yet the AAUP, in a second paragraph, makes another point, and this is one that underwrites First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States. They write, since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas. The AAUP urges the AUT to support the right of all in the academic community to communicate freely with other academics on matters of professional interest.

Here we find a substantive notion of freedom at work, one in which academics are (a) free to exchange ideas, (b) free to move across national boundaries or, at least, have ideas that are free to move across national borders, and, finally, (c) free to communicate with other academics on shared matters of professional concern. Whether the AAUP was right to oppose the boycott is not my concern here. There are intelligent positions on both sides, and I am less interested in settling the question than in thinking about the different conceptions of academic freedom at work in the debate itself. I will begin with two relatively narrow questions and then move in the course of my reflections to the broader politics involved. First, then, what version of academic freedom is at stake here and, more particularly, how are freedom of movement and communication cir-

cumscribed and defined by a particular conception of academic freedom? Second, do debates on academic freedom constitute something of a displacement of political analysis away from both focus on the devastation of Palestinian educational institutions and, in the US and UK, the heightened regulatory powers of the state as well as non-state institutions, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

Lists One of the arguments against those who opposed the boycott on grounds of academic freedom was that there is no effective academic freedom for Palestinian students in the occupied territories: students and faculty at institutions on the West Bank are regularly stopped at checkpoints and fail to get to class; they are often without fundamental material support for schooling, even lacking classrooms and basic supplies, and are subject to sudden closures that make the idea of a completed ʻsemesterʼ almost unthinkable. Indeed, substantive notions of freedom of ʻmovementʼ and freedom of ʻcommunicationʼ are systematically undermined under such conditions. Now this counter-argument does not precisely rebuff the opposition to the boycott based on academic freedom, since it does not address the first principle articulated by the AAUP regarding an ideological litmus test separating those who will be boycotted and those who will not. The argument that the conditions of Occupation more seriously hamper the educational life of Palestinians than any boycott of Israeli academics possibly could seems true enough. But that argument does not answer the criticism that the boycott would be applied differentially on Israelis depending on what viewpoints they hold. It is this last point that provokes defenders of academic freedom, since, in their view, suspending academic rights on the basis of political viewpoint is unacceptable. In fact, the language of the boycott recommends an exemption from the boycott for those who actively oppose the Occupation. Actively opposing the boycott indicates not just a set of beliefs, but an active and ongoing set of practices against the Occupation. Still, the question of who would judge which academics actively (enough) oppose the Occupation, and then distinguish them from those who only occasionally oppose or fail to oppose at all, left open a void into which the fears of a renewed McCarthyism proceeded to gather and foment. My sense is that the boycott drafters sought to keep the question of how such distinctions would be made and enforced deliberately open, leaving it to the discretion of those who implemented the boycott. The effort

not to be overly prescriptive, however, gave way to grave concern over how such distinguishing lists would be drawn up and enforced. Since the boycott language in its most recent version was aimed at institutions, and not individuals or nationalities, the provision that anti-Occupation Israelis would be exempt immediately reintroduced the problem of discrimination on the basis of political viewpoints. This is perhaps ironic since many of the Israelis most vocal in their opposition to the Occupation, such as Ilan Pappe, were also those who were saying ʻboycott me!ʼ But many anti-Occupation Israelis were not of that persuasion. Is there, then, ground for bringing together these various positions that oppose the Occupation and that clearly oppose as well the devastation of Palestinian institutions of higher learning? The question remains: how can we now help to formulate a framework in which competing concerns for academic freedom might be rejoined in a set of mutually supportive political projects? One stumbling block surely centres on the question of whether academic freedom should, like the first amendment of the US Constitution, be understood as one right among several that has to be adjudicated. Omar Barghouti, who, along with Lisa Taraki, helped to formulate the terms of the boycott and is a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, makes clear that academic freedom is sometimes in conflict with basic human rights, and that when such conflicts occur it must be that basic human rights are the more important good to defend. He writes in response to the repeal of the vote in favour of the boycott at the British AUT: Freedom to produce and exchange knowledge and ideas was deemed sacrosanct regardless of the prevailing conditions. There are two key faults in this argument. It is inherently biased – regarding as worthy only the academic freedom of Israelis. The fact that Palestinians are denied basic rights as well as academic freedom due to Israelʼs military occupation is lost on those parroting it. And its privileging of academic freedom as a value above all other freedoms is antithetical to the very foundation of human rights. The right to live, and freedom from subjugation and colonial rule, to name a few, must be of more import than academic freedom. If the latter contributes in any way to suppression of the former, more fundamental rights, it must give way. If the struggle to attain the former necessitates a level of restraint on the latter, then so be it.

Barghouti makes two separate claims here: the first is a call to revise and expand our operative notions of academic freedom; the second is to consider that academic freedom is not, as some First Amendment absolutists might claim, a social good that is always

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more important than most, and so should not be pre-empted by other goods, such as human rights. He makes the first claim when he argues that the anti-boycott movement addresses only the academic freedom of Israelis, but not those of Palestinians. According to this argument, we would expect that he would be in favour of extending the protections of academic freedom to Palestinians as well, and so favour a more inclusive version of the doctrine across national borders and along egalitarian lines. Such a move would address the accusation of ʻhypocrisyʼ that both he and Lisa Taraki have noted characterize the Israeli response to the boycott where the academic freedom of Israelis under the terms of the boycott appears to be more important than the abrogations of academic freedom within the Palestinian territories. In his second point, however, we are asked to understand the place and relative importance of academic freedom in light of more fundamental rights and, indeed, within a broader set of freedoms understood as basic human rights. It is this last that interests me, not only because it asks us to consider the relative place of academic freedom in light of all other human freedoms in need of protection, but because it implicitly suggests that academic freedom only gains its meaning within a broader conception of freedom on the condition that other basic political entitlements are first secured. This latter suggests that academic freedom is essentially linked to other kinds of freedoms and entitlements and comes to make sense as a doctrine only in the context where these other broader freedoms are actively articulated and secured. Whereas Barghouti ends up arguing against academic freedom as the highest good, maintaining that the freedom to produce and exchange knowledge and ideas should sometimes be considered secondary to other, more fundamental human rights, it seems to me that there emerge several other conclusions to his analysis as well. (1) The new formulation of an academic-freedom argument that insists that academic freedom requires and consists in the workable material infrastructure of educational institutions and the ability to travel without impediment and without harassment to educational sites; by linking academic freedom to the right to be free from violent threats and arbitrary detentions and delays, one would effectively be saying that the very idea of academic freedom makes no sense and its exercise is foreclosed by the conditions of Occupation. This would be a way of affirming that academic freedom is essentially linked with other kinds of protections and rights and cannot be separated out from them.2

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(2) When academic freedom becomes a question of abstract right alone, we miss the opportunity to consider how academic freedom debates more generally – and here I would include both pro- and anti-boycott debates – deflect from the broader political problem of how to address the destruction of infrastructure, civil society, cultural and intellectual life under the conditions of the Occupation. As much as rights, considered as universal, have to be imagined transculturally and transpolitically, they also bring with their assertion certain geopolitical presuppositions, if not geopolitical imaginaries, that may not be at all appropriate for the situation at hand. After all, if Palestinians cannot assume that Birzeit University will remain open, that books can be ordered and arrive, that a class can meet, and if they cannot assume this because of the enormous delays and harassment that takes place at the checkpoints and because the economic conditions of Palestine and Palestinian universities are abysmal, then clearly there are no means through which to exercise academic freedom, no means by which to secure mobility, and no abiding material conditions that would make possible the expression and communication of ideas either between faculty and students or between colleagues who teach at different institutions within the occupied territories. Witness the enormous difficulty that Faculty For Israeli Palestinian Peace has had in trying, with MIFTAH, to secure visas for Palestinian academics to come to these events in London, much less in Jerusalem. According to the website right2edu maintained by Birzeit, between 1973 and 1992, Birzeit University was closed on fifteen separate occasions, a time period amounting to over seven years when aggregated. Hebron University had suffered a similar length of closure up until the Israeli army reoccupied the West Bank cities as part its ʻoperation defensive shieldʼ in 2002. Soon after, in January 2003, Hebron University and Palestine Polytechnic University (PPU) in al-Khalil were both summarily closed down by military order (initially for fourteen days). These closures lasted for months – well beyond any plausible security motivation – until in June 2003 Hebron University students invaded and occupied their campus, demanding its reopening. Classes resumed on part of the campus until soldiers reinforced the embargo with an extended military order, closing both institutions for a second time on 30 July 2003. The Universities resumed teaching in August.

The reopenings, however, have not proceeded without continued harassment. Some other facts seem relevant here:

New students enrolling at Birzeit University from the Jenin governorate in the northern West Bank, for example, had declined by 100% by 2004 – that is, ceased entirely.… For the academic year 2002–3, An-Najah University reported that 1574 students were unable to register (over 15% of the Universityʼs student population) due largely to the hazards of and costs incurred from military occupation. From September 2000 to July 2004, a total of 196 university and college students and 38 school teachers and university employees had died.3

Students from Gaza are currently denied access to West Bank universities, establishing a very deleterious situation for thousands of Gazans who have been able in the past to study in the West Bank. The shut-down of travel between Gaza and the West Bank has for many students left only the Islamic University, run by Hamas, as the sole option for education. Can contemporary formulations of academic freedom address these conditions of occupation, and should they? After all, we could say that these are terrible circumstances and ought to be addressed by other means, but that, strictly speaking, these are not matters of academic freedom. If the very capacity to exercise rights of academic freedom, however, is undermined by these conditions, then the inability to exercise a right constitutes a negation of the right in advance; in other words, these rights are, we might say, abrogated through foreclosure and pre-emption. They are not asserted and then restrained: rather, they have from the start no opportunity to be asserted. Or if they begin to be asserted, they are violently denied. If the discourse of academic freedom cannot rise to this occasion, able to condemn widespread abrogation of rights, then to what extent is the discourse and practice of academic freedom involved in shielding such conditions, deflecting attention from them, and thus perpetuating them? So it may seem that I am simply arguing for abstract rights to be reconsidered as material ones, or, rather, that I am demonstrating that the exercise of abstract rights of exchange, production and movement, of both persons and ideas, requires that certain material conditions first be secured. That is, indeed, part of what I am maintaining – but only part. The problem with that kind of analysis is that it continues to think of ʻfreedomʼ as something exercised on the basis of material conditions; it is not yet a material conception of freedom. If someone is unable to travel to the university because of checkpoints, sudden closures, harassment and acts of reckless violence by the Israeli military forces, then it is not possible to say that such a person is free, but under the present circumstances

not actually able to exercise that freedom. The freedom whereof we speak consists in its exercise and maintains no other abstract or metaphysical status apart from the acts and practices by which it is exercised again and again. By this, I do not mean to say that we cannot invoke academic freedom in the abstract to show its absence in certain political conditions: we can and we must. But it makes no sense to value the doctrine in the abstract if we cannot call for its implementation. As an abstraction, it makes sense only in reference to the possibility of its implementation. If the exercise of academic freedom ceases or is actively thwarted, that freedom is lost, which is why checkpoints are and should be an issue for anyone who defends a notion of academic freedom.

‘Balance’ So let me shift focus for a moment in order to consider how the prevailing discourse on academic freedom circumscribes itself, and what kinds of politics it ushers into public discussion and what kinds it shuts out. Of course, in the United States, the conception of academic freedom defended by the American Association of University Professors differs considerably from that version formulated by Daniel Horowitz and those who would heighten political surveillance of the academy. To the extent that, with the AAUP, we consider academic freedom as an entitlement that professional faculty have to engage in self-governance and the free exchange of ideas, then we are already articulating a set of rights and obligations that presuppose a certain geopolitical organization of time and space. We imagine, as it were, an upright and mobile set of individuals equipped with necessary visas bound by their employment relations to exercise certain kinds of prerogatives. Those prerogatives are in place on the condition that institutions exist, endure through time, exist within territories or state boundaries that are governed by open and free exchange, and that all of these supports for entitlement are intact over time. In the same way that rights exist to the extent that they can be exercised, they can be said to exist only to the extent that they can be enforced and institutionally enabled. The question of whether rights can be exercised brings up the problem not only of the capacity, but of the ʻpowerʼ to exercise these rights (a doubleness preserved by the French pouvoir). In this sense, institutional authorities have to persist and abide – and be recognized – in precisely those ways that would allow for the exercise and protection of such rights. If the institutional apparatus is destroyed or attacked or shut down, then the exercise of the right cannot take

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place. This means, quite literally, the right is abrogated through a pre-emptive foreclosure of that exercise. For this reason, the debates on academic freedom make a mistake by thinking that the material devastation of a university or, indeed, the systematic blockage of routes of passage to and from the university are outside the purview of their rights discourse. Similarly, if too little institutional structure makes the exercise of such rights impossible, so too do heightened forms of state surveillance that, in the name of national security, subject various political points of view to excessive scrutiny and fault the perceived proliferation of certain viewpoints with being corrosive of democracy. On the right wing of the political spectrum in the US, academic freedom is linked directly to the ideal of a democracy in which a balance of opinions is desired and regulated. The Campus Watch operation of Daniel Pipes and the new legislative initiatives proposed by David Horowitz define democratic ideals restrictively in order to emphasize not only the need for ʻbalancedʼ viewpoints, but the power of state legislatures to regulate and enforce that ʻbalanceʼ. As a result, the democratic ideal they formulate leads directly to anti-democratic forms of surveillance and regulation. Thus, under the name of academic freedom, this conservative seizure of academic freedom explicitly calls for increased surveillance of faculty viewpoints and activities. If the pro-boycott position tends to demean academic freedom as something that is not as worthy as some other basic human rights, such as the right to an education, to travel freely, to live free of harassment by the Israeli military forces, to attain citizenship and rights of recognition, then the right wing in the US redefines academic freedom in order to support its methods of heightened scrutiny and regulation of intellectual positions. Interestingly enough, the drafters of the boycott proposal issued no lists, even as they were accused of requiring lists to implement their rules regarding who should be exempted from the boycott; David Horowitz, with Daniel Pipes, Campus Watch, and the online journal Frontpage, were the most productive of lists, posting them on the Internet, and trying to cast doubt on the scholarly integrity of scholars on the Left. They especially targeted scholars critical of Israeli policy or those raising questions about the current basis on which Israel claims its legitimacy. I think that we can see in both of these instances a truism about academic freedom debates that exceeds the ones outlined in this brief essay. When we turn to academic freedom arguments as they are currently formulated, we invariably turn away from two related

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political problems: the first is the material devastation of institutional life, and the second is the heightened regulatory and disciplinary apparatus on political or politicized points of view that has become characteristic of the ʻAcademic Bill of Rightsʼ in the United States. I understand that Home Secretary Charles Clarke has issued guidelines from the UK government to higher education institutions on matters of extrem-

ism and intolerance, where what constitutes evidence of ʻintoleranceʼ and ʻsuspicious activityʼ is extremely unclear. That Blair targets viewpoints as incendiary in his own public remarks on the issue seems to echo, if not cite, the Campus Watch approach in the United States. The AAUP clearly took issue with the new ʻAcademic Bill of Rightsʼ, and one can see now how the term ʻacademic freedomʼ has become a central term of debate between liberals and neoconservatives within a politically liberal paradigm for the thinking of academic freedom. But if one is to be able to argue against the restrictive concept of ʻbalance of viewpointsʼ as the salient feature of democracy within the academy at the same time that one broadens the concept of academic freedom outside the classically liberal paradigm, one needs to include as essential to these debates considerations of institutional devastation and heightened regulation, two effects of contemporary power that undermine any substantive claims to democracy and

to academic freedom in these debates. According to Horowitz and company, ʻacademic freedomʼ involves making sure that students have exposure to a balanced set of viewpoints, and that the faculty is hired, in part, on the basis of producing this balance and diversity of viewpoints. Horowitz also argues against considering the political views of faculty as part of any determination of merit. At the same time, though, there is no way not to consider such views if institutions and, indeed, state legislatures are to be charged with the task of maintaining political balance. The Academic Bill of Rights thus seeks to restore political balance to the faculty at large and to the classroom. So though the Academic Bill of Rights argues against scrutinizing politics as part of merit, it mandates precisely this scrutiny, especially on controversial issues such as reproductive freedom, Israeli state policy, Palestinian self-determination. One cannot guarantee a balance of viewpoints unless one scrutinizes viewpoints for the purpose of achieving that balance. Of course, some versions of ʻacademic freedomʼ are designed precisely to protect those viewpoints from scrutiny, since they were understood either to be extracurricular (part of a faculty memberʼs private political views or even public political activism). The claim made on behalf of Horowitz et al. is that the US academy is biased towards the left of the political spectrum, and that this bias needs correction in the name of pluralism and objectivity. Although academic freedom can be a means by which to protect individuals against unfair treatment on the basis of their political beliefs, it is now becoming a way to produce a certain conception of a political environment, thus politicizing the classroom more than ever. If the Israeli Left by and large opposed the boycotts because it differentiated between Israelis on the basis of their political viewpoint (i.e. those who actively oppose the Occupation and those who do not), and left unclear what standard would be used and who would be applying it, something of the inverse is at work in the US context. The conservative version of academic freedom in the US is mandating something called ʻbalanceʼ as a way of compelling change in an academy ostensibly suffused with leftists who produce a skewed notion of objective reality. Whereas the first point of view opposes distinctions among scholars on the basis of political viewpoints in the name of democratic freedoms, the second, despite its commitment to meritocracy, insists upon a tallying of viewpoints as a way of fulfilling its idea of democracy. The conservative view of intellectual pluralism that demands that all perspectives be made available

within a given classroom would prove problematic if not impossible to impose. It would certainly heighten administrative and state control over what gets taught in the classroom. A university would become responsible for making sure that a balance of political opinions is represented by the faculty, at which point political opinions would become a legitimate and obligatory consideration at the time of hire. In the same breath, though, the Academic Bill of Rights seeks rigorously to distinguish between academic merit and political belief, and holds that the latter has no bearing on the former. I am not sure the crafters of this bill can have it both ways. If one were to accept their idea of political balance, would it mean that courses in biology should include creationism as well as evolution? Would it mean that courses on the Holocaust should include the views of Holocaust deniers, and give them equal time? And does it mean that courses in lesbian and gay studies should include homophobic views? Would it mean that courses in conservative political philosophy should include Marx and the Frankfurt School? Indeed, the standards that the government imposes on the media in an effort to establish fair and balanced political reporting seem to provide the model according to which Horowitz and others think perspectives within the classroom ought to be represented. The classroom, however, is not the public sphere, and the faculty member is not the owner of a media corporation whose political interests might need to be checked in the name of public access to information. Moreover, the idea of balance that we see in the media ends up caricaturing political opposition and producing exceedingly reductive notions of what kinds of political viewpoints actually exist. In the classroom, what is clearly required is a pedagogical openness to all points of view that happen to emerge there, but also a critical perspective on how those views get framed, and what forms our contemporary political debates tend to take. Interestingly, the campaign for the Academic Bill of Rights does ask us to consider how censorship functions within the academy. The Bill is not concerned with any form of censorship other than that imposed by what it calls ʻleft totalitariansʼ. The defenders of this bill do not draw attention to new forms of effective censorship at work through funding organizations, like Ford and Rockefeller – which now include the influence of private donors, another area of pressing concern which will have to be addressed another time. When funding organizations or private donors effectively require that academic work take on a certain form, ask only certain kinds of questions, and refrain from certain kinds of politically normative judgements

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about existing states, then no less than the restriction of intellectual and political innovation is at stake. There is a threat to academic freedom from donors and funding organizations from the Higher Education Act in the US as it seeks to monitor all work done on the Middle East to make sure there is no trace of a collaboration with what someone has chosen to call ʻterrorismʼ.4 On 19 October 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) declined a $1.15 million grant from the Ford Foundation, claiming that Fordʼs new restrictions on the political activities of grant recipients were a threat to existing civil liberties. Earlier, the Ford Foundation voluntarily adopted language that would exclude certain grants from consideration on the basis of the political content of scholarly research projects as well as the extramural political activities of applicants. We are witnessing a private funding institution impose restrictions on the field of applications that parallel those recently imposed upon recipients of federal grants; whereas the latter proposes to monitor the activities of researchers in area studies, the former does not make clear how it will ascertain whether applicants have ever or presently do participate in the proscribed activities that they list. As a private institution, the Ford Foundation nevertheless elected to propose Title VI restrictions under other kinds of pressures, and in doing so illustrated the effect that governmental norms on legitimate scholarship have on private considerations of the same. Ford apparently formulated these new restrictions in response to the charge that the Foundation funded some Palestinian groups that attended the Human Rights conference in Durban, South Africa, in the summer of 2003.5 As a result, the Ford Foundation now states among its criteria for grant allocation that grant recipients may not engage in any activity that ʻpromotes violence, terrorism, bigotry, or the destruction of any stateʼ. The Rockefeller Foundation adopted slightly different language, stating that recipients of its funds may not ʻdirectly or indirectly engage in, promote, or support other organizations or individuals who engage in or promote terrorist activityʼ.6 There are at least two features to be noted about these new restrictions. The first has to do with the ambiguity of the terms themselves and the overreaching interpretations to which they could give rise. The second has to do with the matter of whether this policy is enforceable and what means these foundations would use to enforce these new stipulations. Indeed, if universities agree to provide the resources to administer these grants and become co-beneficiaries in

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that sense, will universities have to monitor the speech of their faculty? Will these private funding organizations now engage in information-gathering about the political activities of grant recipients, or rely on federal agencies to do so? Although it may seem reasonable that the Ford Foundation does not want its own funds to be used in support of bigotry, violence, terrorism, it is unclear what is meant by those terms, and whose definitions will prevail when judgements have to be made. The question of whether or not a given research project involves a normative claim about whether an existing state should continue in its present form raises yet another set of issues that I will consider below. The term ʻbigotryʼ, as the ACLU ably pointed out, refers to discriminatory attitudes, statements and actions; it is also a term that is sometimes invoked inappropriately to quell open disagreement on policy issues. There are those who say, for instance, that any criticism of Israel is itself, or effectively, anti-Semitic, assuming that Jewishness and Israel are one. But one might wish a different state for the Jews on the basis of Jewish values. Does a dissenting opinion on the state of Israel, its current boundaries, its constitutional basis, its military and economic policy towards the Palestinians become equated with ʻbigotryʼ? Could one level such criticisms within research, or extramurally, and still be eligible for a Ford Foundation grant? What measure would one use to adjudicate the claim that some or all of these points of view constituted bigotry or discrimination? Even if the terms ʻbigotryʼ, ʻviolenceʼ, ʻterrorʼ, could be rendered unambiguous and invoked in ways that were clearly not intended to quell political expression, and elaborated according to refined criteria of application, the formulation of the final restriction stipulated by Ford is untenable on other grounds, the one that currently maintains that grant recipients may not engage in any activity that calls for ʻthe destruction of any stateʼ. Let us consider that a grant recipient, either as part of his or her research, or in political activity conducted to the side of his or her research, maintains the view that only through regime change in Iran will rights of free expression ever become universally guaranteed in that country. If that person understands by ʻregime changeʼ that one state is to be supplanted by another state, then that person is effectively calling for the destruction of one form of the state in the hopes of bringing about a new and more democratic state. What if, under former conditions of apartheid in South Africa, a grant recipient either in the context of research or in extra-mural activity had called for the replacement of the South African constitution by

another in which equal rights of political participation were guaranteed to all citizens regardless of race? That person would have been calling for the destruction of one state with the hopes of seeing another more radically egalitarian state established in its place. Similarly, if someone were to make an argument for a binational state where Israel and the Palestinian territories now exist, and were to argue, either in research or in extra-mural expression, that the one-state solution has advantages over either the two-state solution or the continuation of the Occupation, that person would be arguing for a new form of statehood for those lands. Indeed, some now claim that such a person with such views is effectively calling for the ʻdestructionʼ of the State of Israel. It would be, minimally, a ʻdestructionʼ of the current law governing rights of citizenship and political participation, and it would be as well the ʻdestructionʼ of the most recently established borders in an effort to make a more encompassing border for a binational state or a new border that would be more effective in securing peace for the region. This

ambiguity plagues public discussion on the Middle East, since even nonviolent political solutions that suggest that the conditions of citizenship in Israel are in need of revision to include entitled Palestinians are accused of ʻdestroyingʼ the State of Israel even when their means are decidedly nonviolent. These positions are regularly confused with those that do call for violent attacks on Israeli property and citizens, but in some important ways the former is a serious nonviolent

alternative to the latter, and is regularly stigmatized as ʻviolentʼ nevertheless. It is perhaps ironic in this context to note that the boycott is understood by many of its supporters as precisely an alternative to violence, an effort to make use of established international institutions and precedents to demand action on behalf of those whose suffering under the Occupation has yet to be adequately addressed.

A broader concept Though this last point may well seem polemical, I want to suggest that we have yet to develop a broad enough understanding of what academic freedom is and what concrete threats to its existence are at work in the political present. If those who sought the boycott sought a nonviolent way to make a demand on those institutions that have shown criminal neglect towards the conditions of Palestinian educational institutions under the Occupation, and those who oppose the boycott sought to maintain a view of academic freedom that would maximize the exchange of ideas and oppose forms of discrimination against those who might participate, then both stand a chance of getting their ends met through a renewed movement. This movement would have to consider the threats to academic freedom that emerge not only from discriminatory action on the basis of political viewpoints or facts of institutional membership, but from those infrastructural devastations that make the exercise of academic freedom nearly impossible, and those new regulatory mechanisms that would deform the very meaning of the term in order to regulate political viewpoints in the name of academic freedom itself. It seems to me that in order to make the case in favour of assisting Palestinian universities and showing how the Occupation itself abrogates academic freedom, we have to be able to say that there the freedom of academics to move, to arrive at academic institutions, convene and teach a class, and complete a course of instruction is radically undermined by the Occupation. If being able to move to the university to teach and to transmit ideas is itself thwarted by the Occupation, then surely the Occupation constitutes an abrogation of academic freedom. When we say, as we surely should, that academics should be free to exchange ideas, we tacitly imagine an academic who is free to secure a visa and attend a conference in another country. Do theories of academic freedom maintain, as it were, tacit conceptions or, indeed, overt theories of the border? Do they presume

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national territorialities, and if so how do they function in those cases where the presumption does not exist or, indeed, a settler colonialism pervades the institutional and legal apparatus which governs a shifting and highly politicized border? Do we really want a theory that permits us only to say that academics should be free to engage in international exchange and, so, be able to cross national boundaries to do so, but that academics who do not live in territories recognized as nation-states, as is the case under the Occupation, do not have rights, under the theory of academic freedom, to know that they can, with regularity, arrive at the university to teach a class to which students also are equally entitled to arrive? Although the road from Ramallah is now open to Birzeit, the access from the north is repeatedly blocked, and some universities stand little chance of recovery or assuming the capacity for full-time operations. It is probably important to note that, according to Sari Nusseibeh, who, incidentally, opposed the boycott, nearly seven hundred teachers this year employed by Arab schools in East Jerusalem will be unable to reach their classrooms. With the ʻsecurityʼ wall around Jerusalem now reaching completion, cutting off East Jerusalem from its traditional Arab surroundings, and entry restrictions becoming more stringent, teachers who have neither Israeli IDs nor special permits will no longer be able to reach their places of work. Even with permits, the wall – and the heightened regulatory apparatus surrounding the wall – will make such delays routine, undermining the possibility that teachers and students can actually arrive at the educational sites. With extreme travel restrictions intact between the West Bank and Gaza, the rights of mobility are so severely abrogated that they constitute the main concern of academic freedom itself. Indeed, where one idea of academic freedom objects to the boycott because it would undermine the rights of mobility of those within nation-states, it is very clear that under current conditions Palestinian teachers, researchers and students lack the basic entitlements to travel without which the idea of the university itself cannot be sustained. I have tried here to lay out three different ways of seeking recourse to the doctrine of academic freedom and suggested that these positions do not always broker the differences among them. My point is not to argue in favour of or against the boycott, but to discern the various invocations of academic freedom by both sides of that debate, and to see whether a new possibility for extending the domain of academic freedom claims can emerge from such a consideration. By indexing

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the Academic Bill of Rights, I hope also to have shown the stakes in coming up with a more robust conception of academic freedom, one that considers the material and institutional foreclosures that make it impossible for certain historical subjects to lay claim to the discourse of rights itself. If the defenders of academic freedom attend only to its abrogrations, they will not see the ways it is foreclosed. And if rights of mobility for members of nation-states are to be protected above all else, then academic freedom advocates will not be able to attend to the fate of educational institutions that exist within contested borders, where those contestations actually call into question the viability of the university itself. The rightwing seizure of academic freedom also poses new problems, mobilizing a restrictive idea of pluralistic objectivity as the aim of democracy, thereby aiding and abetting those heightened surveillance powers that work against academic freedom, and freedom of expression more generally. By staying internal to academic freedom debates as they are currently staged, we risk becoming blind to questions of material devastation and to the anti-democratic effects of heightened regulatory surveillance – that is, forms of economic destitution, brutal coercion at checkpoints, and new forms of disciplinary power meant to quell forms of active political dissent. If to enter the debate on academic freedom is precisely to bracket out both the material devastations characteristic of the Occupation and the heightened forms of disciplinary power, both governmental and non-governmental, then what form of political constriction is performed through restricting the discourse of academic freedom to a narrow liberal conception? Either academic freedom has to be rethought so that we can see how the freedom of academics is linked with the broader struggles for substantive freedom during this time, or we will have to ask whether it has become the instrument for modes of state and economic power that seek the erosion of a collective life for some who might otherwise be free to teach and to learn, to think, travel and communicate and, hence, enjoy the benefits and rights of a life that might plausibly be called ʻfreeʼ. If academic freedom remains restrictively liberal, it will not be able to see that the subject who would exercise the rights of such a freedom must first be given rights to travel, be able to pass over borders unobstructed and unharassed. This means that to exercise such rights, we must presuppose an opposition to the security wall, to the heightened military harassment at the borders, and to the Occupation itself. Similarly, if the conservative seizure of aca-

demic freedom is to fail, there must be more robust and substantive ways to relate academic freedom to ideals of democracy that include not only right of free expression but opposition to forms of surveillance that target political viewpoints. Finally, if there is to be a widespread opposition to the Occupation, then perhaps it will require a full-scale boycott. But when and if it does, it will have to make sure to show that the systematic undermining of Palestinian institutions of higher learning is itself an abrogration of academic freedom as well as the ideals of democracy to which it is invariably linked. We will have to leave the scrutiny of political viewpoints outside the formulation, since we have seen how the right wing seizes upon this tactic. Once that is done, it may be possible to radicalize the classically liberal conception of academic freedom with a view that grasps the political realities at stake, and see that our struggles for academic freedom must work in concert with the opposition to state violence, ideological surveillance, and the systematic devastation of everyday life.

posted there arbitrarily deny passage to students and other civilians, as well as regularly engage in various forms of harassment which at times have resulted in the physical injury of students and faculty. When closed the checkpoint effectively brings the working life of the university to a halt. Since March 2002, the situation at the checkpoint has deteriorated further and access to the University has on the majority of days been totally impeded. Following Israelʼs military reoccupation of West Bank towns (including Ramallah) in mid-June 2002, all Palestinian educational life within the reoccupation zones has been brought to a grinding halt by a blanket curfew imposed on the civilian population. The majority of Birzeit students and faculty are confined to their homes with dwindling hope of returning to their academic lives in the foreseeable future. The cumulative effects of these measures over the past 18 months have put the future of Birzeit University at grave risk.ʼ 4. For a longer version of the discussion that follows, see my contribution to Beshara Doumani, ed., Academic Freedom Post 9/11, Zone, New York, 2006. 5. See JTA, The Global News Service of the Jewish People, www.jta.org, for one of many attacks on the Ford Foundation for ostensibly supporting ʻPalestinian causesʼ. 6. See for Ford Foundation www.fordfound.org/about/ guideline.cfm; and for Rockefeller Foundation www. rockfound.org/grantmaking/FundingPrograms.

Notes 1. Horowitz, a former Marxist, is a neo-conservative working on a variety of fronts to combat what he perceives as totalitarian leftism within the US academy: promoting an ʻAcademic Bill of Rightsʼ; writing books, a database on ʻleftistsʼ and ʻjihadistsʼ, and the FrontPage ʻmagazineʼ. FrontPage is primarily a platform for a strong Zionist attack on leftists and especially on academics who may be critical of Israel or the current US war efforts, and to hurl ritual abuse against ʻjihadistsʼ, who seem to comprise any and all people of Arab descent with whom the author disagrees. His websites regularly smear the progressive broadcaster Al Frankenʼs photo as well as disparaging Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old volunteer from the International Solidarity Movement who was killed by the Caterpillar trucks belonging to the Israeli army. 2. Neve Gordon points out in correspondence with me that ʻthis was the conclusion of the World Conference on Human Rights (the Vienna conference) in 1993, where human rights practitioners from all over the world gathered. It was basically the representatives of Third World NGOs that led to the formulation of Article 5 in the Vienna Declaration: ʻAll human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated.ʼ The Third World practitioners argued that one cannot, for example, have freedom of speech without education. http://www. unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/. 3. In an appeal formulated in 2002 by faculty and students at Birzeit, the following situation was graphically described: ʻthe working life of the University has been severely disrupted by an intimidating Israeli military checkpoint on the Ramallah-Birzeit road, which is part of the expanded network of roadblocks preventing communication between all Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank. Even when open the checkpoint allows only pedestrian traffic to pass; Israeli soldiers

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Countering Consumerism: Religious and Secular Responses 20 - 22 April 2006 An international and interdisciplinary conference linking the themes of ‘Spirituality’ and ‘Consumerism.’ The Conference will provide an opportunity to review ideas about the ‘good life’ and to explore both the common ground and the sites of tension between secular and religious responses to contemporary consumer culture. Speakers include: Jackie Ashley, Zygmunt Bauman (tbc), Colin Campbell, Tim Cooper, Rt Revd Graham Cray, Peter Harvey, Jean Lambert MEP, Ziauddin Sardar, Kate Soper and Elizabeth Wilson. The conference is organised by the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption Phase Two research project on ‘Alternative Hedonism and the Theory and Politics of Consumption.’ Deadline for Final Call for papers: 28 February 2006 Venue: London Metropolitan University, Graduate Centre, 166 – 220 Holloway Road, London N7 8DB For more information about this conference and details of how to register please see our website.

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Commodity aesthetics revisited Exchange relations as the source of antagonistic aesthetization Wolfgang Fritz Haug Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair…

This line from Shakespeare figures in a longer quotation in Marxʼs Capital, in the chapter on hoarding. The sentence to which the footnote with the Shakespeare quotation is attached, reads: ʻJust as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too, for its part, as a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions.ʼ1 However, this is not a complete description of what we find in the Shakespeare quote, which is taken from Timon of Athens and reads in full: Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair; Wrong right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant. What this, you gods? Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides; Pluck stout menʼs pillows from below their heads; This yellow slave Will knit and break religions; bless the accursʼd; Make the hoar leprosy adorʼd; place thieves, And give them title, knee and approbation, With senators on the bench; this is it, That makes the wappenʼd widow wed again: Come damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind.

Gold, in Shakespeareʼs accusation, not only extinguishes determinations, but replaces them with their opposite. Some old order, in which everything finds its place according to inherent merits, is repressed by a new order in which money commands. But now Shakespeare seems to be beside the point, because money may command but not in the binary perverting logic of changing all things into their opposites. We understand why Marx stresses the extinction of difference or the indifference effect. The perverting power ʻto make black whiteʼ recurs in Capital, where Marx speaks about adulteration of

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Radical Philosophy 135 (Januar y/Februar y 20 06)

bread, referring to the origin, in the history of philosophy, of the term ʻsophisticationʼ in the Platonic critique of the Greek Enlighteners, the Sophists: In fact, this kind of ʻsophistryʼ understands better than Protagoras to make white black, and black white, and better than the Eleatics how to demonstrate before your very eyes that everything real is merely apparent.2

Speaking about commodity aesthetics is one way to shed light into some of this sorcery.

Theoretical foundations My point of departure is the Marxian analysis of the exchange relation. Marx discovers an apparently circular structure of this everyday practice: a commodity is destined for sale; that is, the value that it represents must be realized – the realization problem. What moves the buyer to exchange money for the commodity is the use value. But the use values must be realized too and they are, as Marx says, ʻonly realized in use or consumptionʼ (CI, 126). However, purchase and use are normally separated in both space and time. As a rule, use takes place after sale (if one excludes commodity samples). This leads to the following circle: the realization of use value is the presupposition of the act of purchase, and the act of purchase is the presupposition of the realization of use value – as in the story of the shoemaker from Berlin–Koepenick, who couldnʼt get a work permit without a residence permit, and no residence permit without a work permit. The shoemaker forced his exit from this circle by imaginary violence: he went to the costumierʼs and rented the uniform of a Prussian colonel, came back into the city hall of Koepenick and ordered them to give him the permits. But where is the exit from the mutual presupposition/circle of buying and selling?

The astonishing thing is that this chicken-and-egg aporia is ʻforgottenʼ by Marx and left unsolved. He displaces the question to a further apparent problem, which lies in the fact that every owner of a commodity only acts for himself while producing for others. ʻBut the same process cannot be simultaneously for all owners of commodities both exclusively individual and exclusively social and generalʼ (CI, 180). To show how this second circle is overcome, Marx introduces the concept of a ʻgeneral equivalentʼ as a genetic prestage of money. The ʻequivalent commodityʼ – gold, for instance – is, on the one hand, a specific use value; on the other, it is always in the form of immediate exchangeability, and thus represents the social nature of private products. But where is the exit from the first circle? ʻOrdinary language offers an answer …: The buyer buys a specific commodity, since he promises himself [to obtain] from it the use value he desires.ʼ3 What sets the purchase in motion is the use-value promise. But on which ground should I promise myself that others will meet my needs? The answer seems obvious: what makes me expect use value are the aspects offered by the commodity. This leads us to scrutinize two poles of the usevalue promise: one of subjective activity and the other of the objective data of appearance, which motivate the former. In our perception of such ʻappearancesʼ we may be additionally influenced by their intersubjective interpretation (for instance, through ʻsales talkʼ). The relation of exchange, however, is an antagonistic one. In the literal sense of the Greek antagonizomai, exchange action is always opposed action, in so far as those who exchange represent opposite interests. The use-value promise functions, in this antagonism, as a means of power. The ʻforcing effectsʼ of this power operate within myself. In this sense, Werner Sombart spoke of ʻinner compulsory meansʼ. How do they work? To understand this, we have to take into account the ʻnormalʼ role of the ʻimaginaryʼ in our motivational structure. In this structure drives and needs are articulated with (and condensed within) images: ʻimaginingʼ ourselves we assume the glance of what George Herbert Mead has analysed as the generalized (anonymous) other. Whenever we act we ʻfill outʼ these imaginary spaces. Here, ʻimaginaryʼ does not mean ʻunrealʼ. As psychoanalysis and phenomenology have shown, we entertain an imaginary relation to reality. The use-value promise deploys its real-imaginary power by affecting our self-image. Like the shoemaker from Koepenick, the commodity goes to the costumierʼs, though the uniform into which it changes in most cases is not military but a civil one; more often it is

the uniform of intimacy. Never is it more in disguise than when it is naked. Deploying its imaginary powers, the commodity borders on illusion or even deception. In deception, the appearance of a use value becomes a deceptive appearance, detaches itself from its ʻreference to realityʼ as a mendacious illusion. The other person is meant to take appearance for being and to fall for the ruse. Deception realizes itself as selfdeception on the part of the other. To the extent that the relation of exchange is antagonistic, the boundaries of property have the effect of a filter of appropriation, which, like a windowpane, only lets through specific information and sense data (the visual). The experience that not ʻbeingʼ but ʻappearanceʼ sets off the act of purchase must sooner or later lead to the fixing of the ʻappearance of use value through abstraction of its realityʼ as a special object of work, and its intentional processing by ʻpurposeful activityʼ.4 ʻThe aesthetic in its broadest sense – sensuous appearance and the sense of the use-value – here detaches itself from the thing. Domination and separate production of this aesthetic aspect turn into means for the end of money.ʼ5 That Marx forgot this first aporia may be due to the fact that commodity aesthetics under early industrial capitalism did not yet have the significance that it acquired almost immediately after his death, since the 1880s. In 1968, Theodor W. Adorno concluded: ʻFar exceeding what was forseeable in Marxʼs day, human needs have now become functions of the production apparatus.ʼ6 In The Poverty of Philosophy, however, Marx says: ʻproduction precedes consumption, supply compels [erzwingt] demandʼ.7 Nonetheless, Marx wastes no time on the thought of how this compelling of demand is effected. In the Grundrisse, he touches on this question, where he reflects on the relation of entrepreneurs to the workersʼ world as one of consumers: the capitalist seeks here ʻall means to encourage them to consumption, seeking to give the commodity new charms, to persuade them of new needsʼ. Marx holds ʻthis side of the relation of capital and labourʼ to be ʻan essential moment of civilization … on which the historical justification, but also the present power of capital, depends.ʼ8 But why doesnʼt Marx analyse how this ʻcivilizationalʼ effect is reached by capital? The reason seems obvious: the forms in which commodity aesthetics had detached itself from the ʻbodyʼ of the commodity were, in the second third of the nineteenth century, still marginal. At any rate, they interested Marx and Engels primarily as an everyday matter, to which they pointed in order to make their project of ideology-critique plausible to common sense: ʻWhilst

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in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historiography has not yet won this trivial insight.ʼ9 Against Marxʼs assumption that the mutual relationship within capitalist development between productive forces and the creation of new needs leads, under corresponding social relationships, to the development of personality, Hannah Arendt argues: ʻA hundred years after Marx we know the fallacy of this reasoning; the spare time of the animal laborans is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites.ʼ10 Whoever speaks thus exempts his or her own hermeneutic community from the rule, without remarking thereby that the statement is weakened. Consumerism, which Adorno locates entirely in the process of late capitalism, where he sees needs as being ʻtotally controlledʼ,11 seems for Arendt to lie in human nature, since the necessary detour via the analysis of mediations is sacrificed to an anthropological short-circuit. The analytics of commodity aesthetics has to discover these mediations.

Modes of effectivity Deception is fraud, as such widely disseminated, but always as ʻabuseʼ or ʻexcessʼ. The normal form is more important. The deception which is no deceit happens in the imaginary. An aesthetic mirror is held up to the senses by commodities or in connection with them. The Archimedean point of commodity aesthetics lies not in the commodities themselves, and not at all in their use value, but in the needs or desires of the prospective buyers. Those images to which their appetites are fixed ʻstickʼ. Instead of an Archimedean point, one may therefore speak of an Archimedean ellipse of commodity aesthetics, which runs around the body of the commodity. Its two focal points lie outside it: the organizing focus forms the interest of valorization (Verwertung), the material one condenses the ensemble of desires which burn inside the human material. In the manifest aesthetic message, therefore, everything revolves around the addressed human subject. But this subject is only the environment of a system that revolves around itself. Thus, the centrality of the subject is imaginary, or the imaginary aspects of the subject become central. Normally, a commodity owner who wants to sell his or her commodity uses the appearance of use value in the fashion of Sombartʼs inner mode of compulsion, in order to put the otherʼs desire under his or her spell and to push the wish to appropriate to the point of becom-

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ing overwhelming in the other person. All conceivable forms of promise and enticement are directed towards the needs of the potential exchange partner. The latter is supposed to get what (s)he wants, but no longer able to will what (s)he wills. This ʻsupposed toʼ refers first to the conscious intention and strategy of ʻmarket interestsʼ (Max Weber). This intentional character is taken to be real by manipulation theories without testing it. Like all strategy, the strategic imaginary of the commodity aesthetics may miss its goal. This restriction is overcome by the periodic recycling of commodity aesthetic patterns which is driven by the feedback of success or failure. In this sense, Brecht compared the cinema box office with the film critic: the financial hit stays in the repertory and finds imitators; the flop disappears and any similarity to it is avoided. ʻThat counts as correct which has already been photographed once and ʻmade itʼ, and that counts as good, which raised a fee.ʼ12 It is sufficient that the market actors hold on to their programme of profit maximizing to give this permanent effect of selection the weight of a subjectless process. As the bearer of use-value promise, aesthetic abstraction lies at the base of many techniques relevant to sales. Among them are: the shaping of the body of the commodity, the particular elaboration of its ʻskinʼ, its representation on the package, its decoration in display, its mise-en-scène in the television spot. The aesthetic abstraction of the commodity thus becomes the precondition of an aesthetic specification that is apt to the claim of property rights. One of the classic examples is the idea that a producer of mouthwash hit on a hundred years ago of twisting the neck of the bottle in which his product was sold into a (technically senseless) form which was clearly distinguishable from that of other bottles. The automobile, a serially mass-produced item, became almost from the start normalized as that sort of brand-name item of which the physical appearance represents both the use value and the brand name. Such an aesthetically specified use item in the possession of a corporation can be conceived of as an aesthetic monopoly of use value.13 Copyright laws for such combinations of aesthetic form and linguistic signs were created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These laws founded the property rights of words and shapes. Apart from the ʻself-promotingʼ (Wenick) attires of the particular material configuration of the body of the commodity (which can also be submitted to property rights), the specification is easier to grasp in the combination of figurative appearances (here, of the packaging) and semiotic designation, which distinguishes the

aesthetic as an appeal to meaning and sensuousness. The aesthetic monopoly of use value grants its possessors two new possibilities for maximizing profit: (1) that of monopoly price, (2) that of regeneration of demand. The latter, which has been described as ʻplanned obsolescenceʼ (Packard), may be more accurately described as aesthetic innovation of a commodity. Its effect is the aesthetic ageing (obsolescence) of still functioning products of an earlier shape.14 What explains the drive for aesthetic innovation and obsolescence is the leisure of the new and the demand for conspicuousness (Veblen) or distinction (Bourdieu), regularly followed by a paradoxical mass conformism of distinction. From the standpoint of the producer, the production of distinction is by intent the production of conformism. For those consumers who want distinction, every such conformism motivates anew the desire for a distinctive escape. This craving sets the following cycle in motion and follows it itself: every attractive symbolic or aesthetic distinction is followed – or pursued – by a mass conformism to this distinction, which is then extinguished by this conformism, named general fashion. Craving for aesthetic difference then seeks once again to escape this mass conformity. This process constantly remodels the needs addressed by commodity aesthetics. The offers are not simple answers to needs, but rather reformulate the latterʼs demand. Every demand is ʻunderstoodʼ as a market demand and related to something purchasable. The excessive desire, whose satisfaction is not purchasable, did not get its due, but its ʻviewʼ – to vary Walter Benjaminʼs famous dictum from his essay ʻThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionʼ. Since wishes are related to commodities, the expression of wishes is drawn into the aesthetics of these goods. These wishes are thus forced through all conceivable filters and amplifiers by specialists and sent back to the realm of need. Starting with the body of the commodity, concentrating on its surface, transfigured on the packaging and situated in display and decoration, commodity aesthetics turns into dream movies. The television spots feed into the imaginary spaces of the addressee, functioning like recognized identity moulds to be filled out by commodity consumption. Commodity aesthetics thus overdetermine what G.H. Mead analysed as the role of the ʻgeneralized otherʼ, by delivering the image or model to be reproduced by consumers. The basic pattern can be seen in an advertisement in a womenʼs magazine, in which Jean-Paul Sartre read the ʻextraordinary sentenceʼ ʻBold or Discreet, But Ever More Yourself.ʼ Sartre translated this as follows:

ʻPurchase like everyone, in order to be like none.ʼ He added: ʻHerein lies the manipulation.ʼ15 The thesis of manipulation is not false but one-sided. It remains fixed in an actor who is represented as quasi-omnipotent instead of being represented in the process in which, because of the never quite foreseeable reactions of the addressees amidst competing appearances, the manipulator is also included. In the self-organizational form of this process, the tendency which had its beginning in the chicken-andegg aporia of exchange developed into a powerful catalyst which brings everything cultural to react with the commodity world. This then combines with the subjects that shape their identities in the endless loop of a perpetual commodity aesthetic recycling, from which, to be sure, the cultural forever again reemerges. It does so in the double sense of escaping again and proceeding anew from. On the one hand, the boundary between advertisement and entertainment is blurred; on the other, the aesthetics of entertainment is penetrated by commodity aesthetics. Again, the border between cultural industry and everyday life is transcended in both directions. The resulting real–imaginary merger has been described as a ʻpromotional cultureʼ (Wernick), though it may be more contradictory. Brecht described this tendency, in his American exile, as an overall expansion of the pragmatic expressivity of selling.16 In the ambience of consumptive passivization, the activity returns in the form of ʻthrilling consumptionʼ, as the English director Paul Anderson represented it in his 1993 film Shopping: consumption as destruction and devouring of oneself.

Commodity aesthetics and art If one considers commodity aesthetics with the criteria of classical aesthetics, nearness and distance are strangely foregrounded. If morality and aesthetics explain our ʻtastes and sentimentsʼ, as David Hume claimed,17 then commodity aesthetics with its ʻtechnology of the beautifulʼ does this even more. And if Hume describes the effect of every kind of beauty as ʻa peculiar delight and satisfaction, as deformity produces painʼ, no matter ʻupon whatever subject it may be placʼdʼ, then it becomes clear that commodity aesthetics does just this, namely it both depicts ʻdelight and satisfactionʼ via the emanation of commodity beauty, and also it serves to excite them. Above all, it ties the anticipatory appearance and promise of ʻdelight and satisfactionʼ to the commodity. Hegel destroys this false harmony: ʻBut Kant has already made an end of this reduction of beautyʼs effect to feeling, to the agreeable, and the pleasant, by going

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beyond the feeling of the beautiful.ʼ18 In fact, Kant defines the beautiful as ʻthe symbol of moral goodʼ, which thus lays ʻclaim to everyoneʼs consentʼ, building on general consensus, ʻwhereby oneʼs temper is aware of a certain … raising above the mere receptivity of a pleasure through sense impressions.ʼ19 This claim, which seems to exclude commodity beauty, is further developed by Hegel: ʻBeauty … must be true in itself.ʼ No one would ever assert this of the beautiful appearance of the commodity; no one except commodity aesthetics itself. This beauty appears, rather intuitively, to us as something inherently untrue. Its reception is at least ambivalent. The commodity also falls short of the following criterion of the freedom of the contemplating subject of all ʻinterests, aims and intentionsʼ which it ʻwills to assert … in face of the being and properties of thingsʼ.20 The commodity also apparently misses the Kant–Hegelian criterion of emancipating things from the servitude of utility. Commodity aesthetics illuminates precisely the interest in useful things. And yet this demarcation does not hold in other respects. Without doubt, what Hegel says about the work of art is true of commodity aesthetics as well, namely that ʻthe beautiful thing in its existence makes its own Concept appear as realized and displays in itself subjective unity and life.ʼ21 To say that the beautiful commodity in its aesthetic existence lets the concept of its use value appear as realized, and shows in itself subjective unity and liveliness, is to describe a typical television spot. Whether it be cleaning agents, cars or packaged nibbles, a scene of happy life as end-in-itself is unfolded around whatever is advertised. Not only artistic beauty, but also that of the commodity ʻis the Idea as the immediate unity of the Concept with its reality, the Idea, however, only in so far as this its unity is present immediately in sensuous and real appearance.ʼ22 It is the real imaginary of the ʻgood lifeʼ of commodity consumption. Its untruth is not to be grasped formally. It is only susceptible to that critique which genetically reconstructs the mediations. Kantʼs dictum that there is ʻno science of beauty, but only critiqueʼ23 is doubly true of commodity aesthetics. Commodity aesthetics stands in a parasitical relation to all art, in fact to all symbolic forms in general, and to all ʻideological powersʼ (Engels). By living off of them, it devours their possibility. In a certain sense, commodity aesthetics becomes an aesthetic parody in the ʻuse of forms in the age of their impossibilityʼ (Adorno). In principle, the ʻoverwhelming objectivity of the commodity character, which sucks up all human residuesʼ, consumes all the comprehensibility of art, even (as the Benetton commercials have shown)

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that which is absolutely irreconcilable. One part of art reacts to this by resisting comprehension, another precipitates itself into the ʻaleatory … as a desperate answer to the ubiquity of semblanceʼ.24 Another part of art reconquers comprehensibility by giving form to the parody. That commodity aesthetics encloses the very horizon of art from which only single artworks momentarily break away is evident in the eternal return of the new. Nouveauté is aesthetically the result of historical development, the trademark of consumer goods appropriated by art by means of which artworks distinguish themselves from the ever-same inventory in obedience to the need for the valorization of capital, which, if it does not expand, if it does not – in its own language – offer something new, is eclipsed. The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded reproduction.25

Günter Anders, directly countering Adorno, believed that Brecht broke out of this circle in that he ʻrestored the original gesture of speakingʼ under the condition of constantly being addressed by the media. Brecht ʻreckons with humans who have been formed by these means and is writing now against these meansʼ. Brechtʼs ʻprofileʼ can be only seen ʻcorrectlyʼ, continues Anders, if one takes into consideration ʻthe nowadays most massively advancing “false address” as a foilʼ, whose interpellation Brecht takes up and refunctions – through estrangement, introducing distance.26

Commodity aesthetics as motor of globalization The world order of the market sends ahead as its messenger the beautiful appearance of its commodities. Their image excels their reality by far and at great distance. The corrugated-iron huts in the favelas are overshadowed by television antennas. Television is hooked up long before the eventual arrival of a water supply. The expansion of transnational hightech capitalism into pre- or semi-capitalist societies here finds its most powerful motor. ʻIs there a more globalizing activity from within than commerce?ʼ asks Benjamin R. Barber. He quotes the promotion slogan ʻOn planet Reebok there are no boundaries.ʼ He omits mentioning that insolvent poverty may form an insurmountable limit for commodities, and that those globalizing activities are a spooky trade for the majority of people. Not for the commodities, only for their aesthetic casting are there neither borders nor limits (or at least almost none). For the larger part of the worldʼs population, the promises of commodity aesthetics have no realizable counterpart. This virtuality, however, does not impair the power of those promises, but

rather enables them to exert their influence. Exactly where the aesthetic use-value promises of the world of commodities arrive without commodities, they thereby promise another world. Commodity aesthetics not only extends its border further and further into the realm of cultural industries whose products become less and less distinguishable from it, but this border also loses its meaning in the immense poverty belt around the globe compared to the glamour with which both branches of the illusion industry dazzle. For those without access even to commodities of subsistence, the commodities of the entertainment industry serve as propaganda movies on the mode of life. Commodity aesthetics is being permanently chased through the filter of market acceptance. The thrust by which it globally casts its spell over people, particularly the have-nots, can be explained by its dialectical structure and function. It embodies the not-yet-reality of the realization of value. In all regards, it obeys the logic of the reverse. It longs for buyers and yet only speaks about happy people. The unhappy glance into the world of commodity aesthetics as into a paradise. What it features as the main thing, the Different, is indifferent to the interest ruling through it, given the egalitarianism of money that recognizes only differences of quantity. If capital has learned to ʻnegotiateʼ – that is, to ʻincorporate and partly reflect differences, which formerly it tried to bear down,ʼ as Stuart Hall says – a sharp restriction, similar to the aesthetic abstraction of the commodity, has to be observed: only the cultural representations are involved; the power relationships are not negotiable. Aesthetic representatives of the damnés de la terre migrate into the sphere of symbolic redemption, and

this is not unimportant for how those who are represented see themselves. Commodity aesthetics finds its Archimedean point in the desires it serves, selectively amplifies and reorients. Autà tà prágmata are irrelevant, the actual disposition of things, acts or personal situations. Desires count as interfaces for use-value promises in the mode of the illusion or the imaginary space. The perspective aims at inducing the decision to buy. Commodity aesthetics rules through presented wishfulfilment, filling people with wishes. In rich societies where capitalist consumerism has already colonized the patterns of living, its gospel is confronted with weary and desensitized people, whose imagination is regularly sobered up by the ʻfulfillingʼ of these desires, which ʻleaves so much to be desiredʼ. In the capitalist centres, the consumer ʻstrolls around the displays like a bored TV viewer who plays with the remote controlʼ. When, on the other hand, commodity aesthetics enters the shanties of a pre- or semi-capitalist world, where it is longingly swallowed, the North fills the South with desires by delivering to its masses who live in poverty ʻdes irréalisables … à réaliserʼ, to quote Sartre. Under such conditions the meaning of poverty changes; it turns into the presence of an absence. In the exclusion from the consumption of the typical commodities of transnational high-tech capitalism, the poor keep them present as something missing. What Marx says, in the Grundrisse, about the ʻcivilizing influenceʼ of capital, acquires a vicious glamour along the North–South axis. Now we can see why Marx is attracted by the Shakespearean logic of opposites, though, on the textual level, he only speaks about the logic of indifference: the pursuit of abstract wealth becomes the source from which modern appearance is streaming. Capitalʼs indifference towards use value, which is from its standpoint of only transient relevance, expresses itself in its most fantastic staging. The abstraction from use value appears as aesthetic use-value promise. Marx compares capital to a eunuch acting as the pimp, procuring a commodity for each desire: indifference proclaiming difference. Real-abstraction as illusionary concretion-for-others. Recently, in the huge catalogue for the exhibition ʻIn the Designer Park: Living in Artificial Worldsʼ, at the Matildenhöhe Museum, Darmstadt, Gernot Böhme argued that the frequent marginalization of the commodity itself in commodity aesthetics proves that one can no longer speak of the centrality of the use-value promise. Therefore he prefers Baudrillardʼs concept of a valeur/signe whose function would be what Bourdieu

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has described as social distinction and inclusion in a ʻdistinguishedʼ group. With this argument he seems to fall back into misunderstanding use value as a kind of technical norm. Such a technical conception holds valid only for some technical products (in terms of material quality and quantity). These items are determined for productive use, mostly, and they are elementary. More complex productive products, such as machinery, have their own commodity aesthetics. The closer we come to consumptive use, the more inappropriate are technical approaches to use value. They suppose a Homo oeconomicus outside of every culture and its ways of life. However, use value is a cultural reality, and its destination is to satisfy human needs, as Marx is right to insist, ʻwhether they (the needs) arise, for example, from the stomach or from imaginationʼ. Böhme argues that ʻcommodities are no longer presented in their use value, but as elements of a lifestyleʼ and ʻin the context of this way of using them [Gebrauchszusammenhangs] the aesthetics of commodities become importantʼ. But this argument is self-defeating: no longer as use value, but in the context of being used; no longer aesthetic use-value promise, but the aesthetic of commodities being staged in the context of some lifestyle use.… It is like the psychoanalytic joke about the Bavarian mother who, when the doctor had diagnosed an Oedipus complex in her son, took the latter aside and comforted him with the words: ʻOedipus-shnoedipus, everything is fine as long as you love your mother.ʼ So when in commercials imaginations of satisfaction enter the scene at the price of marginalizing the commodity, they do so in the very right of commodity aesthetics. Böhme, who makes me say a lot of stupid things, observes a recent shift in commodity aesthetics – its expansion into the production sphere: Restaurants … are open towards the kitchen … and in the car industry the promotion sector merges with the last stage of the assembly process: this is the transparent manufacture of the Volkswagen Company in Dresden. If until now the production sphere was associated with oil and dirt, with proletariat and alienated labour, here the genesis of a car – of the luxury car Phaeton – before the eyes of the client turns into an aesthetic event.27

Yet, before we generalize too quickly, let us remember: commodity aesthetics is parasitic. It would not be the first parasite to be enormously productive in appearance. Better we use the plural: appearances. The market is split, as is society, and so is commodity aesthetics. The Chickeria and its lifestyle imaginations

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form only a segment. And Volkswagen doesnʼt make the billions it is supposed to in the luxury sector. However, this sector can deliver a certain imaginary surplus, since every commodity aesthetics tends to culminate in images of happiness that constitute a use-value promise that surpasses every possible use value.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (CI in text), Penguin/New Left Review, 1976, Harmondsworth, p. 229. 2. Ibid., p. 358. 3. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Warenästhetik und kapitalistische Massenkultur (1): ʻWerbungʼ und ʻKonsumʼ. Systematische Einführung, Argument Verlag, Berlin, 1980, p. 44. 4. Capital 1, p. 284. Cf. Haug, ibid., pp. 48ff. 5. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology and Culture, International General, New York–Bagnolet, 1987, p. 106. 6. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?ʼ, in Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2003, p. 117. 7. Kark Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1976, p. 137. 8. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin/ New Left Review, Harmondsworth, 1973. 9. The German Ideology, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975, p. 62. 10. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p. 133. 11. Adorno ʻLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?ʼ, p. 117. 12. Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1934–1955, trans. Hugh Rorrison, ed. John Willett, Methuen, London, 1993, entry for 2 December 1941. 13. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Robert Bock, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 24ff. 14. Ibid., pp. 39ff; Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology and Culture, pp. 11ff. 15. Jean-Paul Sartre, interview in Der Spiegel 29, 1968. 16. Brecht, Journals, 27 December 1941. 17. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, vol. I, § 43. 18. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegelʼs Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, pp. 107–8. 19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, A254. 20. Hegelʼs Aesthetics, pp. 111, 113. 21. Ibid., p. 114. 22. Ibid., p. 116. 23. Kant, Critique of Judgement, A174. 24. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Athlone Press, London, 1997, p. 108. 25. Ibid., p. 21. 26. Cf. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Philosophieren mit Brecht und Gramsci, Argument Verlag, Berlin and Hamburg, 1996, ch. 5; English edition, Brill, Amsterdam, forthcoming. 27. Böhme, in K. Bucholz and K Wolbert, eds, Im designerpark: Leben in künstlichen Welten, Hausser, Darmstadt, 2005, p. 993.

Orientalisms in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy Muhammad Ali Khalidi The recent death of Edward Said has reignited the debate as to whether his landmark work Orientalism still has something to teach us about the study of Arab-Islamic civilization. In this article, I will argue that Saidʼs central thesis in Orientalism has a direct explanatory role to play in our understanding of the work produced in at least one area of scholarship about the Arab and Islamic worlds, namely Arab-Islamic philosophy from the classical or medieval period. Moreover, I will claim that it continues to play this role not only for scholarship produced in the West by Western scholars but also within the Arab world itself. After recalling some traditional varieties of Orientalism in the study of Islamic philosophy, I will go on to isolate some neo-Orientalist theses and positions. Then I will identify what I call ʻoriental Orientalismʼ in the study of Islamic philosophy, which originates in the Arab world itself. In conclusion, I will speculate as to why Orientalism persists in scholarship about the Islamic world, more than a quarter of a century after Said first unmasked it. Finally, I will distinguish two accounts of Saidʼs interpretive stance and attempt to justify a particular reading of his philosophical framework.

Traditional Orientalism Traditional Orientalism is not difficult to find among the first European scholars who studied Islamic philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It can be summarized in the form of a few salient theses that were prevalent among such scholars as Ernest Renan, T.J. de Boer, W.G. Tennemann, and others. For the sake of brevity, I will outline three. Renan is well known for having considered the Islamic philosophical corpus as entirely derivative of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. The view held by him and others was that Islamic philosophy was Greek philosophy in Arabic letters. As he put it: ʻThis philosophy was written in Arabic, because this idiom had

become the learned and sacred language of all Muslim countries; that is all.ʼ1 In Renanʼs view, although the Arabs imparted a national character to their religious creations, poetry, architecture and theological sects, they showed little originality in philosophy. Indeed, ʻThe true Arab genius, characterized by the poetry of the Kasidas and the eloquence of the Qurʼan, is absolutely antithetical to Greek philosophy.ʼ2 Rather, Greek philosophy was introduced to Arab-Islamic civilization thanks to a combination of Persian and Syrian Christian initiative. T.J. De Boer expresses a similar viewpoint in The History of Philosophy in Islam: Oriental wisdom, Astrology and Cosmology delivered over to Muslim thinkers material of many kinds, but the Form, the formative principle, came to them from the Greeks. In every case where it is not mere enumeration or chance concatenation that is taken in hand, but where an attempt is made to arrange the Manifold according to positive or logical points of view, we may conclude with all probability that Greek influences have been at work.3

Among these early students of Islamic philosophy in the West, departures from Greek philosophy were often considered misunderstandings rather than innovations; they even attributed to Islamic philosophers a failure to understand the Greeks, rather than consider that they might harbour different views from their illustrious predecessors. Moreover, this attitude took on a racial dimension in Renan, as when he contrasted Aryan rationalism with Semitic religious sensibility, charging that the Arabs are inherently incapable of producing original philosophy and have inherited what rationality they have from the Aryan Greeks. Though not absent in recent Western scholarship, this attitude is less common among scholars writing in the twentieth century. Still, clear traces remain. To cite just one example, E.I.J. Rosenthal claims that

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the reason Fārābī views democracy more favourably than Plato is that he has missed the irony implicit in Socratesʼ mock praise of democracy. The possibility that Fārābī holds different views from Plato on independent grounds is scarcely even considered. In fact, when Rosenthal allows himself to speculate that Fārābī may have differed from Plato, he holds that ʻit is not impossibleʼ that he has taken his views from Aristotle – despite the fact that Aristotleʼs Politics was almost certainly not known in the Islamic world during the classical period, and never reached these philosophers.4 Apparently, even a nonexistent Greek text is a more likely source of ideas than the creative faculties of the Islamic philosophers themselves. Another early Orientalist thesis is that philosophy held a marginal place in Islamic culture as a whole, and was restricted to a small group of elite freethinkers. Some scholars who admit the originality of these thinkers nevertheless maintain that their innovative contributions were largely disregarded since they never went further than a minuscule audience. Renan is again the locus classicus: ʻThe philosophers in Islam were isolated men, ill regarded, and persecuted…ʼ5 The claim is sometimes supported by the esotericism of the Islamic philosophers themselves, since the major figures in the tradition clearly held that their views and doctrines should be revealed only to a class of intellectuals who alone could grasp their subtleties and abstruse deductive arguments. But one should not take this as an indication of the actual influence of philosophical ideas, since their indirect impact took many forms. First, numerous Arabic terms were coined expressly to denote philosophical concepts, including such ubiquitous terms as kamīyyah (quantity), kayfīyyah (quality), wujūd (existence), dhāt (essence), jawhar (substance), and so on. Second, given the seamless links between philosophy and natural science, including medicine – which was firmly grounded in notions of form and matter, the four elements, substance, essence and accident – philosophical doctrines and theories penetrated the culture at large thanks to the centrality of medical theory and practice. Third, many establishment figures in Islamic history formulated their mainstream attitudes, at least in part, in reaction to the views of the philosophers. Such central thinkers as al-Ashʻarī, al-Ghazālī, Ibn H.azm, al-Shahrastānī, Ibn Taymīyyah and Ibn Khaldūn frequently occupied themselves in responding to the philosophers, in the process borrowing their concepts and inheriting their problematic. Finally, philosophical views on such matters as the best form of government, the relation between faith and reason, and the nature

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of God, among others, were often taken up without acknowledgement. A third thesis prevalent among traditional Orientalists is that philosophy in Islam was dominated by the struggle between revelation and reason, and obsessed with the dichotomy of intellect (caql), on the one hand, and tradition or revelation (naql), on the other. This feeds into the conception of Islamic philosophy as a defensive enterprise, embattled and encircled, rather than one that fashioned its own intellectual space. This amorphous thesis is hard to refute briefly, but anyone with a passing acquaintance with the content of Arab-Islamic philosophy will know that there is much more to this diverse tradition than a cultural war with orthodoxy. These philosophers did not see themselves as involved in a struggle as much as in an attempt to examine the relationship between revelation and reason, an enterprise they often shared with the theologians – despite their differences of opinion. Moreover, it is not even accurate to say that the theologians were uniformly more literalist or orthodox than the philosophers, as the philosophers themselves were often at pains to point out.6 To the extent that the problematic of intellect and revelation did figure in the work of the Islamic philosophers, it did so no more than in medieval Christian philosophy, or indeed in early modern European philosophy. One need look no further than the ʻLetter of Dedicationʼ to Descartesʼ Meditations for a vivid impression of the fragile tension between the theologians and philosophers in seventeenth-century France.7 A more recent twist to the traditional Orientalist tendency in the study of Islamic philosophy is provided by the work of Henry Corbin. Corbin opposes the three theses that I have identified as being distinctive of traditional Orientalist interpretations of Islamic philosophy: its alleged derivativeness, marginality, and conflict with religion. But he continues to view Islamic philosophy as monolithic and essentially different from Western philosophy. Moreover, like some of the traditional Orientalists I have discussed, he links the ʻessenceʼ of Islamic philosophy to certain ethnic characteristics and culturally uniform traits. Corbin concurs with Renan in regarding the genius of the Muslims as residing primarily in the spiritual rather than the rational realm.8 But rather than conclude that Islamic philosophy is therefore unoriginal, he takes the spiritual dimension as its defining characteristic, setting it apart from other philosophical traditions: ʻIn Islam, above all, the history of philosophy and the history of spirituality are inseparable.ʼ9 More importantly, he regards this allegedly dominant spiritual ten-

dency as a positive attribute, valorizing it and setting it up as the main contribution of Islamic philosophy. For him, Islamic philosophy represents a system of thought dominated by mysticism, a critique of rationalism, and an attempt to transcend the logical methods inherited from the Greeks. Corbin also characterizes this philosophy as ʻOriental philosophyʼ, trading on the ambiguity in the Arabic adjective ishraqi (which is usually translated as ʻilluminationistʼ rather than ʻeasternʼ or ʻOrientalʼ). Therefore, although Corbin dissents from traditional Orientalists in that he regards Islamic philosophy as being original, he concurs with them in considering it to be essentially different in nature from Western philosophy, and in holding that it is stamped by the ethnic character of the thinkers who were instrumental in its development (in his case, Persians not Arabs). Corbin writes that Islamic philosophy is fundamentally a prophetic philosophy: ʻA prophetic philosophy presupposes a type of thought which does not allow itself to be bound either by the historical past…, or by the limits imposed by the resources and laws of rational Logic.ʼ10 In addition, this type of philosophy is esoteric and its ʻesoteric meaning is not something one can construct with the support of Logic or a battery of syllogismsʼ.11 Moreover, he insists: ʻThe significance and continuance of philosophical meditation in Islam can be truly grasped only so long as we do not attempt to see it, at any price, as the exact equivalent of what we in the West have for our part called “philosophy” over the last few centuries.ʼ12 Though Corbin views Islamic philosophy positively, his interpretation distorts it by portraying it as exclusively mystical and anti-rationalist in nature, and represents it as being essentially alien and difficult to communicate to outsiders.13

Neo-Orientalism These views, at least in their extreme versions, have declined in prominence, but there is another attitude, very much in the spirit of Orientalism, that continues to play a central role in the study of Islamic philosophy. Though it may not appear overtly Orientalist in character, and may indeed seem opposed to traditional Orientalism, the net result of this attitude is to alienate and exoticize Islamic philosophy and to downplay its role as philosophy. Before describing the trend I have in mind, I will distinguish it from another tendency with which it is sometimes confused. Some scholars proceed from the notion that philosophy in the Islamic world was so persecuted that the outward meaning of the text remains hidden and can only be divined through a close reading

by experts. Oliver Leaman seems to regard this as the pre-eminent manifestation of Orientalism in the current study of Islamic philosophy, attributing it to Leo Strauss and his followers. As Leaman puts it: The assumption is that Islamic philosophy should not be regarded as philosophy primarily, but more as a code which needs to be cracked in order to discover the opinions of the philosophers. It is seen as a form of literature which disguises the real opinions of its writers, and it is the job of the interpreter to find out what these real opinions are, to pierce the layers of concealment and uncover the genuine beliefs of the author.14

Leaman regards this as ʻOrientalism at its worstʼ, adding that, It implies that the philosophers in the Islamic world could not really be thought of as philosophers just like philosophers everywhere else, but should be regarded as capable only of a lesser and inferior activity, using philosophical language to present unoriginal views in convoluted ways.15

But it seems to me that this misunderstands the intent of Straussianism. Although the Straussian mode of interpretation that Leaman criticizes gives rise to an overly narrow view of Islamic philosophy and has often led to gross distortions, it is only fair to add that the method is typically applied across the board. That is to say, Straussians read Fārābī in this manner no less than Plato or Machiavelli. This makes it difficult to maintain that their method of interpretation is particularly Orientalist in character, since Strauss and his followers regard persecution to be a hallmark of all philosophical writing and consider philosophy to be engaged in a constant struggle with religion, in Christendom and the Islamic world alike. As such, they claim that philosophers in both traditions needed to hide their true views, which can only be discerned by reading between the lines and divining what these philosophers were really trying to say. In short, it does not seem useful to characterize an attitude as Orientalist if it is equally applicable to the Occident. At best, the attitude is Orientalist in practice because in the case of Islamic philosophy this method is more widespread and is applied to the exclusion of others. At one point, the Straussian mode of interpretation was dominant among those who studied Islamic philosophy in the United States. This meant that this became by far the most common way of reading these texts in the West, which led ultimately to an exoticization of the texts. The overall effect of the dominance of Straussʼs method when it came to Islamic philosophy may have led to a kind of Orientalism in practice, even though

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the intention of the Straussians was to apply their method to all philosophical writing. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Strauss and his followers did not see the Islamic philosophers as different in this respect from non-Islamic philosophers. There is another, more pervasive, tendency than the Straussian one among scholars of Islamic philosophy, which is more properly Orientalist in character. Although related to the attitude that Leaman identifies, it is importantly distinct from it; indeed, many of its practitioners are staunch opponents of Straussianism. There is a prevalent predisposition among those who study medieval Islamic philosophy today to regard their field of scholarship as an exercise in editing and comparing manuscripts, ascertaining their order of composition, paraphrasing texts, tracing lines of influence, and so on. Although such scholarly work is important and should not be neglected, it cannot be a substitute for the more substantive endeavour of critical engagement with the texts. And engagement means reading the texts as works of philosophy: assessing their arguments, uncovering their underlying assumptions, and understanding their overall projects. That is not to say that one school of reading should dominate

in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy, but those who study it ought to engage in the kind of interpretive enterprise that one finds in other areas of the history of philosophy. To be sure, there is no broad consensus today on what the method of history of philosophy ought to be when it comes to the Western tradition. But what characterizes most works of scholarship in the history of philosophy is a serious attempt to assess the intellectual strengths and weaknesses of the texts. Such work is conspicuously absent in the contemporary study of the history of Islamic philosophy. Strictly speaking, what passes for scholarship in Islamic philosophy today is usually neither what one would consider history of philosophy, nor indeed what is thought of as intellectual history. That is to say, there is also little attempt to reconstruct the historical context of these texts, to situate them in their intellectual milieux, to relate them to the social, political and religious debates of their time, and so on. Interestingly, some of the most prominent contemporary students of Islamic philosophy have diagnosed this problem lucidly, but do not appear to have taken the steps necessary to overcome it. For example, Muhsin Mahdi writes: One of the strangest criticisms that continues to be made by some of the representatives of the older, historical, and philological tradition of Islamic studies in the West has to do with the validity of attempts to think or rethink the thoughts of a philosopher such as Alfarabi, Avicenna, or Averroes. This means that one can treat their thought historically, biographically, sociologically, and so forth – that is good scholarship. But to think philosophically when dealing with the works of these philosophers, that is said not to be scientific. This view makes no sense of course.16

After saying that the ʻconcentrated analytical and interpretive ethosʼ is lacking in the study of Islamic philosophy, Mahdi adds that when he began seriously studying Islamic philosophy, ʻThis seemed to me to be the task of the new generation of students who occupy themselves with Islamic philosophy: they must start with understanding the predicament in which they find themselves and figure a way out.ʼ17 But he never explains why ʻthe new generation of studentsʼ did not in fact carry this out. Similarly, Dimitri Gutas, a scholar who represents an opposing camp among scholars of Islamic philosophy, issues an indictment of ʻArabist historians of philosophyʼ who have failed ʻto present the results of their research, first, to historians of philosophy in a

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systematic and rationalized way that will exploit the common points of reference and contact, and second, to their colleagues in Arabic and Islamic studies in a way that will make manifest the relevance of Arabic philosophy to Islamic intellectual life in general.ʼ18 Again, Gutas puts his finger on the problem, but does not hazard an explanation as to why this task has not been undertaken. Both scholars, central figures in the contemporary study of Arab–Islamic philosophy, seem to shift onto others the burden of initiating a change in the way the subject is studied. Although both Mahdi and Gutas are surprisingly silent on what makes their discipline unwilling to engage with the philosophical content of the texts under study, we can speculate as to why the unphilosophical manner of interpretation continues to dominate in the study of Islamic philosophy. The main impediment to philosophical engagement with these texts is the fact that Islamic philosophy is generally not studied in departments of philosophy in the West. Those who are engaged in studying it are either trained outside philosophy departments, or, if not, are employed outside them. Many (if not most) have appointments in departments of Middle Eastern (or Near Eastern) languages. This reduces the opportunity, either in their research or teaching, to engage with these texts as philosophical texts. Moreover, for the student who wants to specialize in medieval Islamic philosophy in the West today, it is almost impossible to do so within a department of philosophy. This presents formidable institutional obstacles to a philosophical examination of the works of medieval Islamic philosophy and goes a long way to explaining why such forms of scholarly engagement are conspicuously absent. Indeed, it also shows why, despite their keen awareness of the problem, Mahdi and Gutas do not themselves appear to take the necessary steps to address it. One should not leave the impression that every single piece of scholarship on Islamic philosophy has this character; indeed, one could cite notable exceptions to this attitude. But it does suggest that serious structural impediments make it difficult to get around the prevailing tendency that I have identified as ʻneo-Orientalistʼ. While these scholars identify the problem and characterize it accurately, other writers seem to miss the point entirely in describing the Orientalist tendency in studying Islamic philosophy. In an article on ʻOrientalism and Islamic philosophyʼ in a standard reference work, Ubai Nouruddin criticizes Western scholars ʻwho are more interested in finding something new in the Islamic sciences than in attempting to understand the transmission of the corpus of human knowledge

from one people to anotherʼ.19 Nouruddin adds that some scholars ʻexpend much effort in finding faults within the Islamic philosophical system, rather than using their impressive abilities to develop a better understanding of the amalgamation and legacy that have been left by the Islamic philosophers.ʼ Needless to say, exclusive attention to ʻunderstand[ing] the transmission of knowledgeʼ and ʻunderstanding the legacy left by the Islamic philosophersʼ is closely related to what I have been characterizing as the neo-Orientalist attitude, which is interested merely in tracing lines of influence and producing reverential paraphrases. By contrast, a thoroughgoing assessment of what is ʻnew in the Islamic sciencesʼ and an objective examination of the ʻfaultsʼ of Islamic philosophical theories would indeed be closer to the critical practice of the history of philosophy. The fact that Islamic philosophy is studied neither as history of philosophy nor as intellectual history has led to its being viewed as a collection of ossified artefacts of a bygone civilization rather than as a set of ideas that are worth engaging with intellectually. The effect of this dominant, mainly philological, tendency is Orientalist for two main reasons. The first is that it regards Islamic philosophy as essentially different from Western philosophy, in that it is not worthy of active philosophical appraisal and evaluation. Though many of the practitioners of this type of reading seem to think that they are doing their subject matter a favour by treating it with such reverence – as though they dare not intrude upon the philosophersʼ arguments – the outcome is to exoticize and alienate the texts. Another reason that this tendency is Orientalist in character is that it leaves the impression that Islamic philosophy, more so than Western philosophy, is inaccessible to a wider public and can only be read and studied by those who have the requisite mastery of a number of languages, religious traditions, and so on. This, in turn, is partly responsible for the continued exclusion of Islamic philosophy from the Western canon.

Oriental Orientalism Some recent work on Islamic philosophy by ArabIslamic writers can also be classified as Orientalist, despite the apparent oddity of applying the label to thinkers from the ʻOrientʼ, which is why I am calling it ʻoriental Orientalismʼ. The main proponent of this attitude is the Moroccan scholar Muh. ammad ʻĀbid al-Jābirī (Mohammed ʻAbed al-Jabri), whose influential writings on the so-called ʻArab mindʼ have generated considerable debate in the Arab world and also received some attention in the West.20 One finds

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in Jābirīʼs work a thoroughgoing reductionism that considers what he calls ʻArab reasonʼ to be a unified whole whose only mode of thought is the ʻanalogy of the unknown after the knownʼ (qiyās al-ghāʼib ʻalā al-shāhid).21 Jābirī writes: This irresponsible practice of analogy has become the invariable element (the constant) that regulates the movements within the structure of Arab reason. This element stops time, suspends evolution and creates a permanent presence of the past inside the game of thought and inside the affective domain, thus feeding the present with ready-made solutions.22

This move to reduce an entire intellectual tradition to a single manner of reasoning, which is stagnant and inert by nature, is strongly reminiscent of Orientalism of a traditional sort, and Jābirī does little to dispel this initial impression. He supports his reductionist thesis by saying that ʻtheoretical thinking in a given society at a given time constitutes a particular unity endowed with its own armature inside of which the different movements and tendencies blend in, so to speak.ʼ23 But despite his attempt to justify this thesis by saying that a similar kind of unity of thought could be attributed to, say, Greek philosophy, Jābirī regards Islamic philosophy to be inferior to Western philosophy in its static and inert character. He puts this quite unequivocally: ʻIn other words, what we call “Islamic philosophy” did not enjoy a continual and renewed reading of its own history like Greek philosophy or like the European philosophy from Descartes until now.ʼ24 Though he acknowledges that Arab-Islamic thought in the realm of science did evolve and produce innovations, he claims that these advances in the sciences did not have an impact on philosophy. Explicit discussions of the ʻArab mindʼ or the ʻstructure of Arab reasonʼ are nowadays somewhat rare in serious Western scholarship – despite the persistence of such assumptions in political consciousness and in popular discourse. Therefore one is dismayed to find these phrases so casually deployed by a contemporary Arab thinker with such weak justification. But Jābirīʼs oriental Orientalism goes further, in at least two ways. First, his readings of classical Islamic philosophy are concerned only with what he calls its ʻideological contentʼ to the exclusion of its ʻcognitive contentʼ. By his own admission, he has no interest in the arguments and theories of these philosophers, but is rather focused on ʻthe ideological function (socio-political) to which the author or authors of this thought subordinate the cognitive material.ʼ25 Jābirī is not only dismissing the substance of Islamic philosophy in favour of its alleged

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socio-political role, he is also attributing a similar view to these philosophers themselves, namely that the substance of their work is unimportant compared to the socio-political function that they wanted it to perform. Indeed, the cognitive material contained in these texts is, according to him, highly repetitive and not innovative in the least.26 Echoing traditional Orientalism, he writes: ʻAll the Muslim philosophersʼ creative activity centred around one problematics, which is usually referred to as the problematics of ʻreconciling reason and transmission.ʼ27 He regards philosophy primarily as a ʻmilitant ideological discourseʼ dedicated to the service of science and defending rationalism against a kind of irrationalist religious traditionalism.28 For reasons that seem to have more to do with contemporary polemics in the Arab world and debates with proponents of political Islam, Jābirī relegates the entire Islamic philosophical corpus to a single ideological function. A second aspect of Jābirīʼs reading, which is quite literally Orientalist in character, is the claim that there is a split among Islamic philosophers between those in the Eastern provinces, whose work was dominated by a kind of anti-rationalist mysticism, and those from the Western regions, who exemplify progressive rationalism and are the most effective representatives of the ʻmilitant ideological discourseʼ that he favours. On his account, the split occurred as a result of the contributions of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna): ʻWith his Eastern philosophy, Avicenna consecrated a spiritualist and gnostic trend whose impact was instrumental in the regression of Arab thinking from an open rationalism… to a pernicious irrationalism.ʼ29 That was the fate of philosophy in the East, but luckily rationalism asserted itself in the Islamic West, according to Jābirī.30 He speculates as to why the West became rationalist while the East stagnated in a kind of irrational philosophizing, but the explanation rests on a facile reading of the relationship between philosophy and science.31 Not surprisingly, the chauvinism that emerges in Jābirīʼs privileging of the Arab-Islamic West over the inferior East has met with a degree of resistance in some discussions of his work in the Arab world, and his response has been unrepentant. In some instances, it has served merely to exacerbate the problem: I wish that all those who accuse me of being prejudiced [taʼas.s. ub, chauvinism] in favour of the rationalist West and against the mystical East (as they put it) would recognize that Ibn Sīnā, with whose philosophy I said, and repeat, Ibn Rushd made a break, is himself from the ʻfar eastʼ, from Bukhārā,

the land of the Persians. He [Ibn Sīnā], the gnostic physician al-Rāzī, and al-Ghazālī all belong to an ʻeastʼ that lies far beyond the area that extends from the [Atlantic] Ocean to the [Persian] Gulf, whose beating heart is: Egypt.32

This response is more incriminating than Jābirīʼs original attempt to distinguish West from East, in that it seeks refuge in a kind of ethnocentrism that pits Arabs against Persians, insinuating that the ethnic origins of Ibn Sīnā, Ghazālī and al-Rāzī were responsible for their alleged irrationalism. This is quite literally an Orientalist reading of Islamic philosophy, since it defines an ʻOrientʼ within the Orient, whose borders lie somewhere to the east of Mesopotamia. We have come full circle back to the cultural essentialism of traditional Orientalism, but unlike Renan, Jābirī attributes to Persians rather than Semites an incapacity for logical thought, and unlike Corbin he does not view this allegedly Persian irrationalism in a positive light. Jābirīʼs reading of Arab-Islamic philosophy is literally Orientalist both in attributing the deadening influence on Islamic philosophy to Persia and central Asia, and in a more extended sense: namely, in its reversion to a one-dimensional view of Islamic philosophy as being incapable of evolving and as fulfilling a single ideological function. Ironically, Jābirī himself accuses an earlier generation of Arab scholars of being insufficiently critical of Orientalism in the study of Islamic philosophy, but his critique is often bizarrely anachronistic and ultimately misses the mark. He berates Mus. t. afā ʻAbd al-Rāziq and Ibrāhīm Madkūr, Egyptian scholars writing in the 1930s and 1940s, for lack of sensitivity to the concept of ʻOrientalismʼ as it is currently used, without ever acknowledging the fact they were writing several decades before Edward Said published Orientalism (1978). Although Saidʼs name goes unmentioned in Jābirīʼs essay, he accuses these scholars of not going far enough in criticizing Orientalist readings of Islamic philosophy. He charges that they still talk in terms of reinserting Islamic philosophy into the Western tradition, rather than showing it as surpassing medieval Latin philosophy.33 Presumably, it surpasses it only in terms of its ideological content rather than its cognitive content – since he elsewhere regards all medieval philosophy as of a piece.34 Yet rather than trying to demonstrate that Islamic philosophy is somehow superior, we would be well advised to take a leaf from the work of the earlier generation of Arab scholars whom Jābirī excoriates. Their call to reinsert Islamic philosophy into the Western canon serves as a refreshing reminder that

what we term the ʻWestʼ is more shot through with external influences than conventional taxonomies would have us believe.35 As Edward Said observed in Culture and Imperialism, we all need to situate our history and tradition in a ʻgeography of other identities, peoples, cultures, and then to study how, despite their differences, they have always overlapped one another, through unhierarchical influence, crossing, incorporation, recollection, deliberate forgetfulness, and of course, conflict.ʼ ʻThe fact isʼ, he concludes, ʻthat we are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of.ʼ36 The hybridity of the Western philosophical tradition and its interpenetration with Islamic philosophy is a more useful interpretive framework than the antagonistic one that Jābirī espouses.

Bacon or Foucault? I have outlined three genres of Orientalist interpretation of Islamic philosophy: a traditional sort dominant in the heyday of Orientalism, a more covert variety that continues to prevail in the study of Islamic philosophy today, and a home-grown version that is manifest in the work of at least one contemporary Arab scholar. In doing so, I have argued that the latter two modes of interpretation are genuinely Orientalist in Edward Saidʼs original sense, in regarding Islamic philosophy as essentially different from Western philosophy and in presenting it as a monolith with a single overriding character. The persistence of Orientalist discourse in contemporary scholarship and its incidence even in the Arab world itself calls for a word of explanation. In the conclusion to Orientalism, Said writes that ʻdespite its failures … Orientalism flourishes today.ʼ37 He adds that, ʻIt is … apparent, I think, that the circumstances making Orientalism a continuingly persuasive type of thought will persist: a rather depressing matter on the whole.ʼ38 Said predicts the persistence of Orientalist discourse presumably because of the intransigence of the power relations that he identified as informing Orientalism in the first place. Despite the demise of colonialism of a traditional variety, the web of power relations that continues to govern the relationship between the West and the Middle East still largely reinforces and is reinforced by Orientalist discourse. The phenomenon can be glibly summed up in the slogan ʻKnowledge is power.ʼ But, rather than rest with this glib slogan, I want to suggest that there are in fact two readings of this phrase, which might be identified respectively with Francis Bacon and Michel Foucault. On the Baconian understanding of the slogan, knowledge is instrumental

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in the projection of power, its perpetuation, and sustenance; it both feeds and is fed by the exercise of power. However, on the Foucauldian view, there is no such thing as knowledge beyond what various systems of power disseminate as their vision of reality. In my view, Said is more of a Baconian than a Foucauldian on this score. That is to say, he is interested in the way in which the academies and the think-tanks conspire in the projection of power – namely by misinterpreting, misrepresenting, misinforming, and omitting what does not fit into their world-view. Despite his obvious debts to Foucault, Said generally sees power-laden discourse as a distortion of a fuller and more accurate picture, not just as one more assertion of a will to power, whose only possible response is another. As he puts it in the introduction to Orientalism: Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power.39

At the end of the work, he explains that ʻone way of opening oneself to what one studies in or about the Orient is reflexively to submit oneʼs method to critical scrutiny.ʼ40 Elsewhere, he has written that a ʻfull intellectual processʼ involves ʻhistorically informed research, as well as the presentation of a coherent and carefully argued line that has taken account of alternatives.ʼ41 The possibility of non-coercive interactions that lead to more nuanced, responsive and empathic interpretations is precisely what makes me think that Said does not embrace the more nihilistic aspects of Foucault – and is what makes him hold out hope for more meaningful intellectual engagements between the West and the Middle East based on a more equitable power relationship. For the sake of completeness, I should add that some interpreters of Said have considered him to be propounding a kind of cultural relativism. Indeed, there is evidence in his work that may suggest as much. in a well-known passage in Orientalism he writes: It is not the thesis of this book to suggest that there is such a thing as a real or true Orient (Islam, Arab, or whatever)… On the contrary, I have been arguing that ʻthe Orientʼ is itself a constituted entity, and that the notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically ʻdifferentʼ inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence proper to that geographical space is equally a highly debatable idea.42

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Yet rather than betraying a kind of simple-minded relativism, I take this as an admission that no single account of ʻthe Orientʼ (or indeed of a subject as large as Islamic philosophy) could claim finality or comprehensiveness. That is not to suggest, however, that there could not be better and worse accounts of such subjects as Islamic philosophy, Arabic calligraphy or Mamlūk architecture. What renders some accounts better than others is not a simple matter to determine, and is likely to be domain-specific. I have been arguing in this article that an account of Islamic philosophy that analyses its central arguments and interrogates them is superior to one that merely indicates the provenance of its principal theories. Different standards and guidelines are undoubtedly more suitable when it comes to different subject matters and disciplines. In all cases, the accounts that we consider to be accurate, perceptive, and marked by superior understanding are likely to be ones that are not warped by being in the service of hegemonic power or colonial domination. Finally, one might wonder why, given this explanation for the persistence of Orientalism, which is premissed on asymmetries of power, a species of Orientalism finds its home in the writings of an Arab scholar, based in the Arab world, writing on ArabIslamic philosophy. I will conclude by suggesting that these very same power relations do not just infect scholarship in the West, but have repercussions for the way that Arab scholars view their own intellectual traditions. Many contemporary Arab intellectuals seem to feel the need to set up their own version of the enlightened West within Arab-Islamic history largely because of an overwhelming sense of defensiveness and inferiority vis-à-vis the West. In addition, they sometimes seem wholly fixated on their differences with political Islam and regard this as the pre-eminent confrontation of their time, distorting their own intellectual traditions in order to fight this cultural war, at least partly because that is the confrontation that looms largest in the mind of the West. This is not an attempt to blame our own Orientalist discourse on the West, but rather a suggestion that the power relations that continue to define the Westʼs relationship to the Middle East have a ripple effect that influences not just Western discourse but Arab discourse as well.

Notes I am grateful to Tarif Khalidi, Diane Riskedahl, Peter Hallward and an anonymous referee for comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank audiences at the Conference in Homage to Edward Said, Université Paris 7–Denis Diderot, September 2004, and at the Civilization Sequence Program Forum at the American University

of Beirut, February 2005, for helpful feedback. The research and writing of this article were made possible in part by a summer grant from the University Research Board of the American University of Beirut. 1. Ernest Renan, Averroès et lʼAverroïsme, Calmann Lévy, Paris, 1882, p. 90; original emphasis (my translation). 2. Ibid. 3. T.J. De Boer, The History of Philosophy in Islam, trans. Edward R. Jones, Dover, New York, 1967 (1903), pp. 10–11. He also writes: ʻThe earliest Muslim thinkers were so fully convinced of the superiority of Greek knowledge that they did not doubt that it had attained to the highest degree of certainty. The thought of making farther and independent investigations did not readily occur to an Oriental, who cannot imagine a man without a teacher as being anything else than a disciple of Satanʼ (ibid., p. 28). 4. E.I.J. Rosenthal, ed., Averroesʼ Commentary on Platoʼs Republic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1966 (1956), especially pp. 293–4. 5. Renan, Averroès et lʼAverroïsme, p. 173. 6. For instance, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) points out: ʻthe Muslims are unanimous in holding that it is not obligatory either to take all the expressions of the Law in their apparent meaning or to extend them all from their apparent meaning by interpretation.ʼ Ibn Rushd, The Decisive Treatise, trans. G. Hourani, in Medieval Political Philosophy, ed. R. Lerner and M. Mahdi, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1963, p. 170. 7. Descartesʼ Letter, which is addressed to the Dean and Faculty of Sacred Theology at the University of Paris, betrays a great deal of anxiety both about being accused of innovation (hence his insistence that his arguments are not new), and about venturing with reason into the province of faith (to which he responds by saying that faith is made stronger if the anti-religious arguments can be rebutted with rational ones). 8. There is an almost diametric opposition when it comes to the way in which Renan and Corbin make the link between ethnicity and philosophical style. For Renan, Greek philosophy penetrated Islam thanks to the ʻPersian spirit, represented by the Abbasid dynastyʼ (Averroès et lʼAverroïsme, p. 91), which was rationalist in character, in contrast to the ʻlyricism and propheticism of the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsulaʼ (ibid., pp. 90–91). For Corbin, it is the Persian influence (mediated largely through Shīʻism) that is central to the anti-rationalism and esotericism of Islamic philosophy. He writes: ʻthe fate of philosophy in Islam … cannot be studied independently of the significance of Shiismʼ, which he considers to have arisen and flourished in a distinctively Persian cultural milieu. Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, trans. Liadain Sherrard, Kegan Paul, London, 1993 (1964), p. 4; see also pp. xvii, 19–21, 207. 9. Ibid., p. xvi. 10. Ibid., pp. 24–5. 11. Ibid., p. 25. 12. Ibid., p. xv. 13. Corbinʼs exegesis of Islamic philosophy abounds in Arabic and Persian terms that are supposedly untranslatable and can only be fully grasped by those who know the relevant languages. 14. Oliver Leaman, ʻOrientalism and Islamic Philosophyʼ, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman, eds, History of Islamic Philosophy, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 1145.

15. Ibid., p. 1146. 16. Muhsin Mahdi, ʻOrientalism and the Study of Islamic Philosophyʼ, Journal of Islamic Studies 1, 1990, p. 93. 17. Ibid. 18. Dimitri Gutas, ʻThe Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: An Essay on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophyʼ, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29, 2002, pp. 5–6. 19. Ubai Nooruddin, ʻOrientalism and Islamic Philosophyʼ, in E. Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge, London, 1998. 20. I will confine myself for the most part to quoting from the English translation of a selection of his work, Mohammed ʻAbed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique, University of Texas Press, Austin TX, 1999. Despite problems with the translation (which however was approved by the author), the pieces collected in this edition are generally representative of Jābirīʼs extensive corpus in Arabic, chiefly his four-volume Naqd al-ʻAql al-ʻArabī and al-Turāth walH.adāthah. Where necessary, I will also make reference to some of Jābirīʼs untranslated writings in Arabic. 21. al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy, p. 19. 22. Ibid., p. 22. 23. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 24. Ibid., p. 39. 25. Ibid., p. 36. 26. Ibid., pp. 38–9. 27. Ibid., p. 38. 28. Ibid., p. 55. 29. Ibid., p. 58. 30. Ibid., p. 60. 31. See ibid., pp. 121–2. Indeed, even before Ibn Sīnā supposedly distinguished the mystical East from the rational West, Jābirī finds fault with the work of Fārābī (in the east) whose account of the virtuous city is allegedly too closely bound to his historical circumstances to be of much use (see e.g. ibid., pp. 56, 104), and whose neoPlatonism is not sufficiently rigorous (see, e.g., ibid., pp. 96, 99). 32. H.asan H.anafī and Muh.ammad ʻĀbid al-Jābirī, H.iwār al-Mashriq wal-Maghrib: Talīhi Silsilat al-Rudūd walMunāqashāt, Cairo: Maktabat Madbūlī, 1990 (my translation). The reference to Egypt is included presumably because these remarks occur in an exchange with an Egyptian writer. 33. Muh.ammad ʻĀbid al-Jābirī, ʻAl-Istishrāq fil-Falsafah Manhajan wa Ruʼyatanʼ, in Al-Turāth wal-H.adāthah: Dirāsāt wa Munāqashāt, Markaz Dirāsāt al-Wih.dah alʻArabīyyah, Beirut, 1991. 34. See al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy, p. 41. 35. Here and elsewhere, I deploy the term ʻWesternʼ not as an essentializing adjective, but merely as a convenient label for the educational curricula, academic institutions, and so on, of contemporary Western Europe and North America. 36. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, Knopf, New York, 1993, pp. 330–31. 37. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978, p. 322. 38. Ibid., p. 326. 39. Ibid., p. 24. 40. Ibid., pp. 326–7. 41. Edward W. Said, ʻThe Politics of Knowledgeʼ, Raritan 11, Summer 1991, pp. 17–31. 42. Said, Orientalism, p. 322.

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REVIEWS

Mathematiquerie Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic, eds, Lacan: Topologically Speaking, The Other Press, New York, 2004. 350 pp., £19.50 pb., 1 892746 76 X. Late in her biography of Lacan, Elisabeth Roudinesco gives us the quietly moving image of Lacan in his dotage, playing with pieces of string and seemingly drifting further into some private world from which communication was all but impossible. His jouissance now seemed tied to a repetitive topological manipulation even as his always radical scepticism about the possibilities of symbolic transmission finally destroyed the plinth from which his thirty-year monologue was pronounced. Considerably less affecting, the collection under review rehearses as philosophy what might have been regarded as the consequences of pathological physiology, even as it raises some interesting issues about more general aspects of Lacanian, and other, fetishizing of the mathematical. After the infamous Sokal affair it may be necessary to tread a little warily around questions of the misuse of science in certain philosophical contexts. Sokal and Bricmont got Deleuze and Derrida wrong and failed to engage properly with Latour or even Feyerabend and Kuhn. But the discussion of Lacanʼs and Kristevaʼs fundamental misunderstanding of imaginary numbers and set theory now reads as unobjectionable: Lacan and Kristeva simply got the maths wrong as they shifted notions, say, of the square root of minus one or the continuum into a metaphorical register, applying misappropriated notions in an analogical way. For Lacan especially, whatever his expertise in Freudian theory and semiotics – indeed the whole panoply of disciplines from which he borrowed and stole – mathematics clearly had a fascination that often outshone his capacity for understanding the simplest requirements of mathematical manipulation, let alone the radical developments in twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics. His fascination seemed to lie in the capacity of mathematics, as he (mis)understood it, to solve his philosophical difficulties with ideas of communication and transmission, and in a curious way to reinstate a Cartesian solution to his ongoing Heideggerian problematic of truth: mathematics as formula would allow for a form of truth as revelation and therefore the transmission of truth without the need for interpretation. Certainty would emerge as mostration, which is no more than saying that the

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letters of certain formulae would function as the site of aletheia – Heideggerʼs primordial revelation. The problem of errancy in Lacanʼs teaching – the fact that his concepts always seemed to go astray in their dispersion and appropriation – would be solved by the transference of letters without meaning: self-sufficient marks that showed. As becomes clearer with the publication of more and more of the seminars, Lacanʼs trajectory is one of ever more intense scepticism and mistrust: one ungenerous version would be that it sketches out an arc of growing paranoia and conceptual violence, as first the lures of totality and authenticity are undercut, and then the possibility of symbolic articulation undergoes dislocation, even as Lacanʼs own drive to speech become ever more untrammelled. The drive to speech is accompanied by a growing conviction that speech is useless, or can only perform its true task by revealing its limit and inadequacy: the site of the self-undoing of language is the site of the revelation of truth, which is only that truth lies outside the compass of language. So far, so deconstructionist, and in a way this is Žižekʼs Lacan (demonstrated ad nauseam): the prophet of the revelation of the real at the point of the failure of language, the moment of its torsion and tension, where the unsayable warps the fabric of the saying and thus indicates its negative presence. But accompanying this relatively commonplace linguistic pyrrhonism is a conviction that there is a way of showing how the world and the subject are, of doing more than merely indicating, which actually provides something that might be truth. Here, then, is Lacanʼs engagement with a certain formalism and the language of mathematics and, at different points in his career, with topology. The formalism we can see developing early with the idea of the bar in the relation signifier/signified, and then the extension of this writing to the formulae for metaphor and metonym in ʻThe Agency of the Letterʼ (1957), where such formulae are called algorithms, suggesting that they are means of deriving further results, or indeed could produce certain calculations with appropriate values inserted. About the same time, he constructs the various schemas and the notorious

graph of desire. The idea of the matheme emerges; for example, the classic $ a, which marks the relation of the barred subject to the object a. What this formalism does is to indicate a non-conceptual ostension and precision, and to suggest that the clarity and operability of the mathematical is at work here. To call something a graph is to claim more than labelling something a diagram: graphs visually present relations between variables, which can be specified also in terms of the solutions to equations. Algorithms like those that underlie the working of computers are means to calculate certain outputs from certain inputs. What even the most cursory examination of Lacanʼs inventions shows is that they share none of the properties of their mathematical homophones. The letters of his algebra are ill-defined; there is no definition of a well-formed formula; the rules of combination are never spelled out, and there is no presentation of permitted operations. Sometimes Lacan will act as though elements of his ʻalgorithmsʼ can function as though they were part of a standard algebra – as when, in the paternal metaphor, he eliminates terms as one would in a standard equation. Other times he stipulates that the bar, say, is not a ratio, but something else – yet the scope of such changes and the effects on previous formulae are unclear. With the graphs, their complexity is such that no information can be read off them without a massive apparatus of explanation: the ʻgraphsʼ are résumés of information, no more than diagrams, visual transcriptions, highly dependent on symbolic articulation. Similarly, the mathemes intended to replace teaching through words, with its inevitable misunderstandings, and to provide the basis for a full formalization, only ever operate as shorthand: in the absence of any fully developed rules and axiomatization – the articulation of a powerful mathematical system, in other words – they are merely aides-mémoires. At one level all this is obvious and in a sense would be irrelevant if Lacan did not make stronger claims for what he was doing. Drawing diagrams, giving nifty and sharp illustrations, using a symbolism and setting up some definitions of how those symbols work – in short, filling out a symbolic discourse with visual material – is part of what the soft sciences do – biology and geology, for example, have huge recourse to illustrative modelling with no scientific ill effects. But Lacanʼs suspicion of the visual and the symbolic

is so powerful and the demand for a revelation of truth so strong that he must make harder claims – hence the trade on the Cartesian notion of the mathematical and the masquerade that he has somehow produced an equivalent. One would have to come to the conclusion though that his is a mathematiquerie, a curious parody of mathematics. The tarrying with topology confirms these points. Topology, as the developing study of transformable surfaces, seemed to suggest itself to him as an investigative tool for thinking the relations between inside and outside quite early – certainly the 1955 Rome Discourse mentions the torus as… well here is the problem. What is the torus, how does it relate to the problem of inside/outside? Is it a model? Is it the way in which inside and outside of the ʻpsycheʼ are mappable? Is it a useful analogy? In the early work, such a surface and the other surfaces Lacan will investigate – the Moebius strip, the Klein bottle, the cross-cap – seem to be models for thinking sites of inscription and avoiding traditional accounts of subjectivity and their spatial metaphors. But Lacan later hardens his view: these topological figures ʻare not metaphorsʼ, he will insist, but structures. This seems to indicate a shift from the logic of representation to the presentation of structure, or, in terms of the trajectory we outlined, to the revelation of the truth of the subject in the forms of topology. But this immediately proves to be an impossible project. To make the topological forms in any way functional as ʻstructuresʼ of the subject they

need to be supported by an apparatus of interpretation: the very self-evidence that is the mark of their mostration turns out to be a construction of language. When Lacan shifts his attention to knot theory, the connection between the two topological universes is never really worked out, and the reliance on linguistic explanation is, if anything, increased. Yet this is hardly a surprise. The rather quaint view of mathematics that Lacan (and many of his epigones) holds is that the systems that mathematicians

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develop reveal the world rather than describe it. But as the early-twentieth-century debates on the foundations of mathematics showed – and it is perhaps something that Badiou should take note of – that even the most powerful axiomatic systems still require an interpretation before they connect to the world. The very controversies that surround quantum mechanics and the relation of its formalism to the world – the status of the Copenhagen interpretation, the notion of operationality as the criterion of truth and so on – all point to the epistemological and ontological problems still haunting some of the most sophisticated mathematical apparatuses yet devised. The dream of mathematical self-evidence only cashes out at the level of symbolic manipulation, and here self-evidence really is a question of emptiness: at the point of application, other considerations apply, and the problem of interpretation and error returns. Lacan really does not avoid the analytic–synthetic problematic, whatever the blurb writers might claim about him advancing ʻa 21st century teaching that obviates symbolic logic and its positivist assumptionsʼ. As might be expected, these considerations are not to the fore in the volume of essays under review here. For the most part written by non-mathematicians, the essays start from the assumption that Lacanʼs topological work is coherent and unproblematic, and

they are redolent of the characteristic (and unwarranted) triumphalism that seems to be a sine qua non of contemporary Lacanian writing. Oddly, given his otherwise difficult reputation, it is Jacques Alain Miller who writes most cautiously about Lacanian mathematics, and, whilst never abjuring the validity of the mathemic project, he comes closest to raising a sceptical eyebrow at the more hyperbolic claims of Lacan and his followers. This may have something to do with his having actually been a mathematician before his headlong flight into gauchisme and then his capture by and of the Lacan apparat. Juan David Nasío goes a long way to specifying Lacanʼs topological practice, and to unifying the distinct moments of what

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we could call Lacanʼs writing project: the invention of signs and diagrams. But in clarifying or cleaning up Lacanʼs messy theoretical production he tendentially produces an empty system, and this only by throwing out the whole Borromean apparatus. Several of the other essays treat various topological figures with great verve, though occasionally insisting that ʻLacan could do without topology, because he made use of it: topology was his practiceʼ (Metzger), which comes close to having your cross-cap and eating it too. Jeanne Lafontʼs execrably translated essay seems to contradict Raglandʼs point by point on the questions of mostration (revelation), truth and representation. Duff translation spices up Millerʼs essay too, but at least his grasp of the limits of the project and his command of the philosophical archive make his paper interesting reading. The American contributions, mostly from literary or humanities scholars, tend to have the most elastic conception of what constitutes ʻtopologyʼ as well as the most inflated claims for the problems such an approach can resolve. Ragland tendentiously reads the ʻmaverickʼ mathematician Spencer Brown in parallel with Lacan without much grasp of the formerʼs complex axiomatic system – significantly she quotes from the authorʼs discursive preface rather than doing any work on the ʻlaws of formʼ themselves, giving the lie to her own claims (after Lacan) on the particular truth power of the structure – yet quickly escapes to standard Lacanian reflections on the registers. Milovanovic, Dravers and Watson do various sorts of literary and legal work but really fail to do much topological work at all – though often invoking the novelty and power of just what it is that they do not do. ʻThe authors collected here are world renowned Lacanian topologistsʼ – and it could be argued that this collection does what most research programmes do, if we were to grant a Lakatosian legitimacy to the Lacanian project: that is, take the basic tenets of a paradigm and develop them in a heuristically positive direction. But against that could be countered the view that the fundamental incoherence of its basic account of the world coupled with a radical inconsistency of development and deployment, makes the Lacanian topological project, as yet another avatar of the claim of psychoanalysis to epistemological primacy, deeply flawed. Philip Derbyshire

Dear mammoth… yours, the great cow (and giraffe) Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, Band 2, 1938–1944, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2004. 662 pp., €44.90 hb., 3 5185 8423 5. The second volume of correspondence between Adorno and Horkheimer is, like the first, an outstanding editorial achievement. Each letter has an appendix with explanations, biographical notes and references to the projects that the authors were working on at the time; a twenty-page appendix, a bibliography and an index of names completes its near-700 pages. (The appendix contains correspondence between Adorno and Paul Lazarsfeld, Adornoʼs letter to Jean Wahl, three drafts – ʻNotizen zur neuen Anthropologieʼ, ʻChaplin und Hitlerʼ, ʻContra Paulumʼ – and ten ʻmemorandaʼ.) The modest blue cover lets the reader know that this is not only the latest in a series of what will probably amount to five heavy bricks of correspondence, but also a contribution to Adornoʼs Posthumous Works, which is projected to run to over thirty volumes. The book begins with Adornoʼs last weeks in England, as he worked on In Search of Wagner. Other significant events include Horkheimerʼs role as adviser for the American Jewish Committee; the beginning of Adornoʼs research at the Princeton Radio Research Project (directed by Paul Lazarsfeld); Horkheimerʼs coordination of empirical social studies with the Public Opinion Study Group of the University of California at Berkeley; the consolidation of the Institut für Sozialforschung in the USA (or, at least the attempt to find a place in the American scientific community); and, as part of this, the extension of Studies on Authority and the Family into an elaborate research project on anti-Semitism, which provided the empirical data for the ʻElements of Anti-Semitismʼ in Dialectic of Enlightenment (other parts were later included in The Authoritarian Personality). On a personal front, these years saw the suicide of Walter Benjamin in 1940 fleeing the Nazis, and the emigrant community life in Los Angeles, where Adorno supported Thomas Mann in his Dr Faustus project and wrote Composing for Films with Hans Eisler. Other important figures there included Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Günther Anders, William Dieterle and Institute members Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal. There were realignments, notably the controversy and final break between the Institute and Erich Fromm at the beginning of the 1940s. In the early years of the Institute it was Fromm who dealt with questions of the relation of

materialism and psychoanalysis; later it was Marcuse. After the break with Fromm it was Adorno himself who outlined a theory of needs, and engaged with psychoanalytical questions of childhood. The end of the period covered in this volume sees the completion of Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in a limited edition, as a hectographic typescript of the Institute, in 1944, and reprinted by Querido of Amsterdam in 1947. ʻThose who do not wish to talk about capitalism should not talk about fascismʼ – Horkheimerʼs statement is as instructive as it is famous. Yet it is disturbing how little in this era of national socialist terror and war, the period in which the concept of a Critical Theory was developed, Adorno and Horkheimer actually wrote about politics. They also wrote very little about National Socialist Germany; nor did they problematize the anti-communist climate in the United States. Even though the correspondence deals with problems of emigration and their research at that time focused on anti-Semitism, the Nazi terror against the Jews is not thematized. The concentration camps are mentioned only briefly; concrete politics provide only a distant background, even when, for instance, on 8 February 1938 Adorno wrote to Horkheimer from London: I have already written so much that—together with all my other notes—the Institute could edit a respectable posthumous publication, if I was unexpectedly sent to the gas chambers [!]. That we are concerned with the very thought of being sent to the gas chamber is hardly amazing. Although it is very difficult to get a picture of the situation, given the contradictory information we receive, I would consider the recent development in Germany in the most negative sense: The only choice left is between a stabilization of the worst, or, the unavoidable prospect of war.

The activities of the Institute in exile in the late 1930s and early 1940s are nonetheless political in the broader terms of the work undertaken: the philosophical and sociological investigation of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism, and their relation to developed capitalist society. This involved, on the one hand, empirical social research, and, on the other, a speculative

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negative philosophy of history. American society and its mass culture are the empirical background, but the theoretical foundation is, of course, historical materialism – though by now this is far from the Stalinist version – as well as an affirmative view of class struggle. This needs to be considered in relation to the activities of the Committee on Un-American Activities, which Adorno and Horkheimer never mention in their correspondence, although friends and colleagues were suspected of being communists. Adorno and Horkheimer began their cooperation with two open questions. What is the condition and definition of a form of empirical social research that is not purely positivistic, but critical? And, how can Hegelian idealist dialectical logic be translated into a theory of history that does not ignore what Horkheimer later called the ʻeclipse of reasonʼ, namely the catastrophe of modern society that induced a negative logic of historical progress? Whereas for Lukács, writing two decades earlier, the answer to both questions lay in the concept of concrete totality, for Adorno and Horkheimer it became clear that a systematic approach to the whole was only possible through ʻphilosophical fragmentsʼ – the working title of Dialectic of Enlightenment before it was demoted to its subtitle. On 12 June 1941 Adorno wrote to Horkheimer about Benjaminʼs ʻTheses on the Philosophy of Historyʼ: ʻA certain naïveté in the sections that discuss Marxism and politics is, once more, unmistakable.ʼ Notwithstanding this, Benjaminʼs ʻlast conceptionsʼ before he committed suicide effectively turned into the hidden philosophical framework of Adorno and Horkheimerʼs project. In a long letter to Adorno two weeks later, Horkheimer writes: Like you, I am happy that we have Benjaminʼs theses on history. They give us much to think about and Benjamin will be in our thoughts. By the way, the identity of barbarianism and culture, which both of you asserted using identical words, was the subject of one of my last conversations with him in a café by Montparnasse railway station. There I (or he) argued that the beginning of culture in the modern sense coincides with the postulation of ethical love [sittliche Liebe]. The suggestion that class struggle is universal oppression, and the disclosure of history as empathy with the rulers – these are insights that we should consider as theoretical axioms.

Yet whereas in Benjaminʼs view the need for practice is still the central point of the theory, claiming that revolution – supported by a ʻweak messianic forceʼ – is still possible, Adorno and Horkheimer turn this conception of history into an exclusively negative

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dialectic of progress. That is, where Benjamin stressed the idea of standstill as revolution – in his wonderful image of revolution as ʻgrabbing at the emergency brakeʼ – Adorno and Horkheimer describe such historical stagnation not as a revolutionary turn, but rather as the final descent into barbarism. This connects to their presumptions about the development of the capitalist economy: for them, capitalism – in the United States as well as in Europe – was fully ensconced as a stable monopoly-capitalist bloc. (Remarkably, in the 1940s Adorno did not agree with Franz Neumannʼs Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942) – he refers to it derogatively here on p. 395 – but later he recommended it in his Frankfurt lectures as one of the best books written on Nazism.) Their negative philosophy of history emerges clearly in Adornoʼs letter from 30 July 1941: Maybe one can say that the old concept of superstructure is no longer valid, i.e. that it is essential for this era that it no longer has an ʻideologyʼ, and that therefore questions concerning consciousness gain a dignity that they did not possess for as long as the culture had to conceal something which today is unconcealed … there is nothing harmless anymore, and already in the smallest thought an explosive force is inherent, such that one has to repeal thinking all together … This would be the perfect counterpoint to the assumption that there is no economy anymore.

Horkheimer termed this ʻthe open transition from the class-phase to the racket-phase of societyʼ. In 1942 Adorno and Horkheimer developed a ʻsociology of racketsʼ. This project remained unrealized, but parts of it appear in Horkheimerʼs article ʻOn the Sociology of Class Relationsʼ (1943) and Dialectic of Enlightenment. There are important notes in the letters for a book on ʻracket-theoryʼ: It should be demonstrated that the idea that the proletariat consists in rackets was previously something that served the enemies of the proletariat, indeed, furthermore, the idea that domination in general was at all times racket-like, is suitable for quenching every impulse to exchange the present society for another … That history is a history of class struggle means that history is a history of rackets, fighting amongst each other and against the rest of society. But where those rackets reproduce themselves in the lowest levels of society, they are the most terrible; the terror, executed by the lowest, is the worst. (30 August 1942)

This connects with Adornoʼs ʻNotes on the New Anthropologyʼ (1941), where he claims that the individual is over:

The new anthropology, i.e. the theory of the new type of human, developed under conditions of monopoly- and state-capitalism, is explicitly contrary to psychology. The individual is the central concept of psychology. This concept is in critical respects out of date, or at least perforated. The concept belongs to liberalism and to a world that ranged between the poles of freedom and competition. Both have disappeared. The representatives of the new type are no longer individuals, i.e. the uniformity, continuity and substantiality of the single human has disintegrated. The concept of repression [Verdrängung] no longer exists. Contemporary ʻmen of the crowdʼ repress very little (in the same way as with the decline of the family sexual taboos have died off). The ego-instance [Ichinstanz] that causes repression is absent.

conflict with Paul Lazarsfeld in the context of the Radio Research Project is striking because it outlines the bigger conflict between Critical Theory and positivism in empirical research. In September 1938, Lazarsfeld wrote unambiguous and harsh words to Adorno: My objections can be grouped around three statements: (1) You donʼt exhaust the logical alternatives of your own statements and as a result much of what you say is either wrong or unfounded or biased. (2) You are uninformed about empirical research work but you write about it in authoritative language, so that the reader is forced to doubt your authority in your own musical field. (3) You attack other people as fetishistic, neurotic and sloppy but you yourself clearly exhibit the same traits.

Adorno was naturally irritated by this critique, but in the end the Radio Research Project was a success, and he used a lot of material later in his Introduction to the Sociology of Music. More material will be available with the forthcoming publication of Adornoʼs work on a theory of radio. Of course, this is not only a correspondence between colleagues, but also between friends. Though they write using the German polite form of address, they use forenames, and, moreover, a whole zoo of nicknames. Adorno is ʻTeddie, the great bull or cowʼ; his wife Gretel, who wrote several letters, or transcribed them, is the ʻgiraffeʼ and ʻgazelleʼ; and Horkheimer is the ancient mammoth. Sometimes Horkheimer draws a little mammoth, instead of a signature; some of them are reproduced in the edition. But, and this is the only small criticism I would make of the edition, in so far as we find some drawings attached to the letters, and, furthermore, in so far as a lot of correspondence is written on postcards, the absence of images and facsimiles is annoying. However, even just typographical emphasis reveals how funny this correspondence can be: Horkheimer to Adorno, New York, 21 February 1938: Mass culture – later called the culture industry – transforms all of everyday life into an advertisement for the system as totality: ʻIf the advertisement has destroyed experience, it has also simultaneously made experience a means for the mere advert.ʼ The result is: ʻThe boundary between the individual and reality begins to tremble.ʼ Adornoʼs concept of a new anthropology and Horkheimerʼs sociology of the racket were the theoretical framework for empirical research. Adornoʼs minor

CABLE IF NICE FLAT WITH GRAND PIANO NEXT TO METROLINE UNACCEPTABLE NOISE-WISE HORKHEIMER

Adorno replied to Horkheimer, from SS Champlain, 22 February 1938: UNFORTUNATELY UNSUITABLE COS VERY NOISE-SENSITIVE = MANY THANKS

One really wants to know what the postcard picture looked like – ʻThe Keyholeʼ at the Copley Square

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Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts – on the back of which Adorno wrote on 2 July 1938: Dear Max, this from the first stage of our journey, we are in New England but very jolly – hopefully you are doing well in the wild as well as golden west, and the stocks are climbing. Long live the dialectic! Please, bring along a scalp of a beautiful film actress. Your faithful Teddie Cordial greetings from Gretel too.

Roger Behrens

Anticipation or hyperdialectic? Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity, Ohio University Press, Athens OH, 2004. xix + 233 pp., £36.50 hb., 0 8214 1592 1. R.D. Laing describes the fetishistic image as connoting the perpetual being beyond itself. This book attempts to move beyond the philosophical manifestation of this state of affairs, the dead ends demarcated by polarized conceptions of immanence and transcendence and their self-defeating girations. It does so via two of MerleauPontyʼs central themes – ʻchiasmic intertwiningʼ and écart (ʻsplitʼ subjectivity). Whilst the weight of the bookʼs argument rests on the assumption of the validity of these ideas, this is always within a horizon of their affinity to the work of Derrida. Hence, chiasm and écart are taken as methodologically valuable in that they donʼt violate the latterʼs strictures on the ʻmetaphysics of presenceʼ. The danger here is that, whilst these concepts might play an important role in Merleau-Pontyʼs critique of rationalism and positivism, it is also a crude move to suggest that anything which serves as a potential vehicle of presence – utterance as expression, institution, intentional objects (the sense of praxis), the lifeworld and wild logos, the structures of experience, and so on – might be sidelined in the appropriation of Merleau-Pontyʼs oeuvre, so that he risks becoming a sort of Derrida avant la lettre. Reynolds acknowledges this fetishistic appropriation of Derridaʼs ideas in the academy and how the employment of différance can lead to an absolute alterity that fetishizes difference. However the irony of Reynoldsʼs observation is that his move away from discussion of lived experience (Lebenswelt) deprives

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us of a means of understanding this phenomenon as an everyday feature of academic life. MerleauPonty himself does present us with such a structure. In Sense and Non-Sense he notes that capitalism is the concrete expression of a phenomenology of mind – that its ideological imbrication shapes the mute or background content of utterances – and he returns to Marxʼs notion of fetishism in his discussion of Sartrean alterity at the end of The Visible and the Invisible. The carnal intersubjectivity of the lifeworld provides the exteriority or ʻwild logosʼ through which the world can be known – in this case in its fetishistic structures – whereas if we followed Reynoldsʼs critique the commodified aesthetic would appear as a failure to grasp deconstructive technique rather than as an expression of the being of capitalism. Although Derrida is keen to distance himself from Husserlʼs transcendental intuition, vestiges of phenomenology remain in, for instance, Of Grammatology, as Reynolds notes. The trace as a temporal deferment of presence – which delineates the logic of a text in the way the content of binary oppositions is undermined by a challenge to their metaphysical assumptions – echoes the point of articulation between the fertility of utterances and the mute, sedimented content of language in Merleau-Ponty. However, deconstruction can only mime the path of the trace rather than articulate (intertwine with) it. Ironically, it needs to be said that the trace owes more to Husserl and the language of conscious perception than does chiasmic articulation, as Trân Duc Thaoʼs influence in moving MerleauPonty away from transcendental intuition in favour of a constituting lifeworld demonstrates. However, Derridaʼs performative notion of arche-writing, which expresses a difference between authorial intention and the outcome of communication, is similar to the distinction between aim and intention (sens) in Merleau-Ponty; both signify a deferment of intention or idealization. The situatedness of this process of understanding, as Gasché notes, is overlooked by Derrida, for whom meaning appears to unravel according to an internal binary logic, as in the process of supplementation. Hence we get the transformations of meanings such as those derived from culture and nature into their opposites but without any apparent mediation. Reynolds goes on to draw a parallel between deconstruction and Merleau-Pontyʼs use of the idea of difference, which can also be seen as a form of deferment. However, whereas in Derrida difference takes the form of mutually generating polarized binaries, arguably for Merleau-Ponty difference is closer to Lacanʼs idea of lack. In Signs Merleau-Ponty uses the metaphor of

chiaroscuro to indicate the phenomenological way of proceeding to elucidate meaning. Difference is here characterized in terms of what remains unsaid, the shadow that remains to be filled in, foregrounded. Whilst this has some similarities with the reversals of deconstruction, the idea of reversal in Signs seems to owe more to a gestalt model – the figure-ground idea broached in the Phenomenology of Perception. Reversals are a feature of chiasma and as such are brought about by articulations of lived experience in ʻfertile languageʼ. Reynolds shows that, unlike Derrida, MerleauPonty is concerned with the way meaning is stabilized and suggests that his explanation rests on the natural attitude and the tendency of human beings towards habitual behaviour. While this is no doubt true, it hardly constitutes a theoretical explanation, and indeed Merleau-Pontyʼs own account places the referentiality of language within the context of the lifeworld which is the domain of sedimented meanings but also living or operative language. The articulation of these further entrenches meaning within culture and, following Husserlʼs account in ʻThe Origin of Geometryʼ, brings about a process of inscription based on the structural affinities of the sedimented meanings. What is the structure of the chiasma though? How does it interrupt or reverse the order of signification? Reynolds fills in some of the background here by investigating the twin, linked moments of the constitution of meaning, the operative and the thematic. The operative undermines the tendency towards idealization represented in the thematic by rendering its knowledge incomplete and open-horizonal. Merleau-Ponty airs this problematic in Sense and Non-Sense when he observes that the Marx of the Manuscripts saw the specificity of the human as lying in that ʻmanʼ through ʻhisʼ activity becomes an object for himself. This operative moment of meaning is hence the structuring, intersubjective framework through which we become aware of our activities as an objective reality. Constitution doesnʼt indicate a form of presencing as Reynolds notes, because this is always deferred, interrupted by the constitutive moment. Intersubjective structuring represents the activation of culturally sedimented meanings which instantiate an excess of meaning over what is visibly said, thematized. The effect here is the opposite of the Derridean case where a surplus of meaning volatilizes signification. What kind of object is human activity and what does it tell us about the nature of subjectivity that it can be an object for itself? From Signs through Prose of the World on to The Visible and the Invisible,

it is clear that we experience ourselves not only in introspective mode (production of idealizations, etc.) but also as an exteriority, from which the famous exemplar of touching/touched dehiscence is drawn upon by Reynolds to indicate the écart of subjectivity, its exteriority to itself. Reynolds is at pains here to point out that there is no temporal deferment in the Derridean manner here; it is not as though we touch ourselves and then feel the touch. Rather, there is one event which is composed of the two aspects of sensing. Hence we can conclude that the other, alterity, is chiasmically constitutive of the self. The self-knowledge we take to be primordial is always already mediated by alterity. It can never be ʻownedʼ because it is culturally generic. Conversely, everything that supposedly exists externally ʻfor meʼ is in fact mine, its appearance for me in my perspectival field depends on its being first an ʻunfamiliarʼ element of my ʻsplitʼ subjectivity (écart). This marks a sharp breach with the radical polarized alterity found in Derrida and Sartre. The reflexive possibilities of écart are noted in Prose of the World where it is argued that in an unfamiliar text we experience not so much absolute incomprehension but an aspect of the self – a pattern of events – which is already ʻin the worldʼ. The disorientation and confusion of such encounters is a product of defamiliarization, reading from the outside, so to speak. This element of understanding (reversal) is in fact taken up by Merleau-Ponty in his discussion of aesthetics and reading in the above work. He stresses the importance of the naive approach, coming to a subject as if new to it, having to learn its rules from scratch. This open-horizonal strategy puts everything up for grabs, breaks up the preconceived and (as argued recently in Patersonʼs review of Watsonʼs Shitkicks and Doughballs in RP 124) engenders a reliteralization through which the latent, sedimented content of language is revealed, within oneʼs horizon. Consequently, the terms ʻarselickerʼ or ʻmonsterʼ become the fertile language of articulation, also moments of being: the former as perhaps the self-abnegatory parasite and the latter as deformed-yetstrangely-familiar humanity. Literalization represents their actuality or ʻexpressionʼ. The shattering of conventional modes of reception by chiasmic horizonal interruption interweaves with Merleau-Pontyʼs conception of dialectic, the hyperdialectic. Itʼs suggested that this formulation of transcendence marks a kind of poststructuralist moment announced in The Visible and the Invisible which Reynolds seems to characterize, to use a cliché, as a ʻwork of the breakʼ towards a more Derridean,

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irreconcilable view of linguistic oppositions. However, the criticism of Hegelian dialectic appears earlier, in Prose of the World, where it is argued that we have access to the contents of history from an openhorizonal perspective and hence are able to recuperate, say, Descartes from the transformative conceptual labours of Hegel by the chiasma of our own situating. In The Visible and the Invisible this moment appears in the terminology of ʻbounded wholesʼ. The temporal deferment of a ʻnowʼ moment in some ways produces a more convincing statement of the redemptive. Rather than produce unmediated positions the chiasm enables us to grasp, via a naive reading, some interesting phenomena relating to the mode of presence to us of the past. For example, in Proust eating the madeleine evokes childhood; when I listen to Oasis I can ʻhearʼ John Lennon; Coldplayʼs Politik echoes Pachelbelʼs Gigue; and so on. I can put together the sediments because they are already part of me, as the écart of

subjectivity, and so I have direct contact with them but only as interrupted by my own situatedness. In his treatment of Derridaʼs On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness Reynolds shows how the intersubjective intertwining of self and other can dissolve Derridaʼs implacable oppositions: whilst genuine forgiveness involves forgiving the unforgivable, responsibility and guilt leaks across these boundaries. He also foregrounds the problems Derrida encounters over the disembodied nature of deconstruction. On the other hand, sometimes he seems to have abandoned the spirit of the hyperdialectic in favour of the anticipatory even whilst describing it: ʻAside from the recourse to terms like “being,” this passage reads very much like Derridaʼs deconstructive prescriptions, or at least an embodied version of them.ʼ On the contrary, being isnʼt incidental: chiasm and écart are ontogenetic processes. The prose of the world is the chiasmic language of the world. Howard Feather

Language-play Chris Lawn, Wittgenstein and Gadamer: Towards a Post-Analytic Philosophy of Language, Continuum, London and New York, 2004. xviii + 161 pp., £60.00 hb., 0 8264 7529 9. The approach to language and philosophy taken in this book is not one to which, I think, Wittgenstein would have been sympathetic. I do not mean this as a criticism of Chris Lawnʼs valuable monograph. I make the point because Lawn, like many before him, has clearly tried to extract philosophical theses from Wittgensteinʼs early and late work. Yet Wittgenstein explicitly warns us against trying to advance theses in philosophy. Still, it is not really possible to write about Wittgenstein without attributing at least some views to him, and thus Lawnʼs approach is somewhat inevitable. I am more concerned, however, with the nature of some of the theses that Lawn attributes to Wittgenstein. Lawnʼs starting point is an outline of two broad pictures of language. The first is the view that the only function of language is to represent or designate. The simplest version of this picture would treat the whole of language as a concatenation of names that get their meanings from the things (concrete or abstract) that they name. The second is the view that language has primarily an expressive function. The simplest version of this picture takes verbalizations like ʻouchʼ, which

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express rather than represent pain, as paradigmatic of the whole of language. Like Charles Taylor, to whom he attributes the distinction between the two views, Lawn argues for the superiority of the second approach and bemoans the dominance of the first in the history of philosophy. Also like Taylor, Lawn associates a monological view of language with the first picture and a dialogical view with the second. Thus, because of the dialogical character of his philosophical hermeneutics, Lawn firmly situates Gadamer in the expressivist camp. He is more tentative about Wittgensteinʼs placement, but claims that in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he subscribed to a designative view of language, and that in the later work he moved toward the expressivist camp without fully relinquishing the designative approach. It is for this reason, Lawn claims, that Wittgensteinʼs work fails to take into account the historical dimension of language. Having set up the contextual background for his exploration, Lawn proceeds to argue for his placement of both Wittgenstein and Gadamer on the expressivist side and to offer a discussion of some similarities and differences in Gadamerʼs and Wittgensteinʼs positions

on language. He follows this discussion with two final chapters that are dedicated respectively to Gadamerʼs and Wittgensteinʼs interpretations of Augustine, and to a discussion of their respective positions on the relation between ordinary and poetic language. With regard to Augustineʼs views on language, Lawn successfully shows that Wittgensteinʼs reading is very crude, while Gadamer is more attentive to the subtleties in Augustineʼs thinking. With regard to the issue of poetic language, Lawn describes Gadamerʼs view of poems as ʻeminent textsʼ, and discusses the tragic significance of Wittgensteinʼs aphoristic style. As I mentioned above, I am rather sceptical about Lawnʼs interpretations of some of Wittgensteinʼs pronouncements about language. For instance, Lawn only briefly defends (at the beginning of Chapter 4) the claim that the early Wittgenstein subscribed to the designative picture of language. Yet this claim is far from uncontroversial. Much of the recent debate on the Tractatus has focused precisely on whether the lesson of the book, for Wittgenstein, is that all attempts at formulating a designative theory of language end up in nonsense. Lawn unfortunately does not address these questions. I also have reservations about Lawnʼs interpretation of the later Wittgensteinʼs writings on language and rule-following. I shall mention two of them here. The first and broadest reservation concerns the very attempt to situate Wittgenstein in one of two camps, both of which attribute to language one function only: to represent or to express. Throughout the Philosophical Investigations, instead, Wittgenstein insists on the multifarious nature of language. He likens it to a toolbox which contains tools that serve a variety of different purposes. He also warns us against a craving for generality which pushes us to believe that we can encompass the whole of language with one theory. For him, the whole project of producing a philosophical theory of language was seriously misguided. He might have been wrong about this, but I think it is reasonably clear that this was his attitude. My second reservation concerns Lawnʼs reading of Wittgensteinʼs pronouncements on language and rules. Lawn thinks that there are tensions in Wittgensteinʼs writings on these topics; he thinks he can detect a line of thought according to which Wittgenstein

subscribes to ʻa brittle calculus model of languageʼ, according to which ʻlanguage games are no more than (blind) repetitive re-enactments of the already givenʼ. Lawn does not claim that Wittgenstein wholeheartedly subscribes to this view. Rather, he takes this to be the view to which, perhaps unwillingly, Wittgenstein is, at least in part, committed. I must confess that I do not recognize this picture of Wittgenstein, and in this, as Lawn himself acknowledges, I am not alone. Some of the theses Lawn attributes to Wittgenstein are precisely the views that Wittgenstein explicitly puts forward only as temptations which we must ultimately reject. Wittgenstein acknowledges that he is not immune to these temptations, but it seems to me to misunderstand the dialectic of the Investigations to think of these temptations as theses Wittgenstein (perhaps unwillingly) endorses. It is also surprising that Lawn does not try to provide much textual evidence for his unusual interpretation. He bases his conclusions on the claim that for Wittgenstein ʻ[r]ule-following excludes interpretationʼ. Lawn takes this claim to mean that for Wittgenstein to follow a rule is a matter of mechanical, calculative

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application. He offers as textual support for this interpretation a couple of remarks from the Investigations. One is the passage in which Wittgenstein deploys the metaphor of rules as rails laid out to infinity. Since this picture is presented by Wittgenstein as embodying a tempting thought that we must nevertheless resist, it offers little comfort to Lawnʼs interpretation. The other is the passage in which famously Wittgenstein writes that ʻthere is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretationʼ. This passage does not preclude the possibility that some rule-following involves interpretation. Wittgenstein simply shows that rule-following cannot be interpretation all the way down because to grasp an interpretation of a rule is a matter of following a further rule about how to follow the original rule. Thus, if to follow a rule requires that we interpret the rule, it also requires that we interpret the interpretation of a rule, and the interpretation of the interpretation of the interpretation of the rule and so forth ad infinitum. Lawn takes this passage together with Wittgensteinʼs claim that we obey rules blindly as evidence that rule-following is a mechanical activity. I take it as evidence that for Wittgenstein, all reflective understanding (interpretation) presupposes some prereflective apprehension of rules. In this regard, Wittgenstein is much closer to Heidegger and Gadamer than Lawn allows for. In support of this alternative orthodox interpretation, and against Lawnʼs, one can also point out that much of the discussion of rulefollowing in the Investigations is directed against the view that the ʻoughtʼ of rules can be modelled onto the behaviour of an ʻideally rigid machine that can only move in such and such a wayʼ. When Wittgenstein writes that we follow rules blindly, he does not mean that we behave like mechanical automata. Lawn appears to be on much surer footing in his chapters on Gadamerʼs hermeneutics, and he is surely right to point out that Wittgensteinʼs lack of interest in the temporal dimension of the development of language is a serious weakness in his approach. Lawn also suggests that their common use of the notion of ʻspielʼ points to a similarity in Wittgensteinʼs ʻlanguage-gamesʼ in the Investigations and Gadamerʼs ʻplayfulnessʼ in Truth and Method. I am a little unsure about the depth of this similarity. Nevertheless, much illumination can be gained by thinking about the connections and differences between the practice of hermeneutics and Wittgensteinʼs unusual approach to language. Lawn is to be complimented for opening up this avenue of thought. Alessandra Tanesini

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Volume 50 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 50, Frederick Engelsʼs Letters 1892–95, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 2004. 658 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 885315 626 3. This book of Engelsʼs letters is the last volume of the Marx–Engels Collected Works to be published. It provides an opportunity, therefore, to raise some broader issues about this attempt to collect the complete works of Marx and Engels, which is in truth not complete! The Collected Works is divided into three separate parts: volumes 1 to 27 contain all of Marx and Engelsʼs works except Marxʼs economics; volumes 28 to 37 contain the economics; and volumes 38 to 50 contain the correspondence. This way of organizing the works was originally the idea of David Riazanov, who got out some of series I and III in his Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) before he was liquidated. So this Collected Works is not original in using this division. The same idea is being used in the new MEGA currently under way, but that has also a fourth part consisting of Marxʼs notebooks. This fifty-volume edition comprises 1,968 works, approximately half of these published in English for the first time. In addition there are 3,957 letters, most of which have hitherto never been published in English. Over the thirty years it has taken to complete the edition, world-historical events are mutely marked by the change in printer from the USSR to the USA! This Collected Works is the most complete in any language and is a most valuable resource for scholarship. (The notes and cross-referencing are generally first rate.) However, there is something odd about publishing a Collected Works of two authors who wrote together only at the very beginning and the very end of their careers. Moreover, the fact that Engels put out many editions of Marxʼs Capital raises the issue: to just whom do these ʻbelongʼ? Take as an example the publication here of Capital Volume III (MECW 37). Engelsʼs text is presented unchanged; then the results of consultation of Marxʼs manuscript are given in notes, even where what is involved is the decipherment of phrases Engels had declared ʻillegibleʼ! This is a curious way to edit Marxʼs text, but no doubt is justified in so far as this Collected Works is also Engelsʼs, so that his editions have been treated with the same respect as Marxʼs original work – with more respect in fact, for it is often hard to disentangle the original from Engelsʼs additions, and, as in the case

of this volume, sometimes impossible, for Engels often ʻforgetsʼ to say what he changed, added and omitted. But this indicates an underlying incoherence in the whole project of putting out a Collected Works of two people at once, and flows from the now overthrown assumption that they were of one mind. Clearly any attempt to issue Marxʼs own Collected Works would have to go back behind Engelsʼs noble but inadequate efforts to edit Marxʼs publications and manuscripts. This inadequacy was partly the result of the ordinary limitations of editing work, especially where Marxʼs nearly unreadable hand was concerned, and partly the result of a more or less conscious attempt by Engels to ʻimproveʼ Marx, often prejudicial to Marxʼs meaning. The absurdity of the peculiar editorial procedure used in this version of Capital Volume III is illustrated by the famous chapter on ʻThe Trinity Formulaʼ. As we were given it by Engels, it opens with three ʻfragmentsʼ which Engels said he had found in various parts of the manuscript. Engels was right that Marx intended these to form part of this chapter, but the recent publication of Marxʼs 1865 manuscript shows clearly that Engels put them in the wrong order. The Collected Works could hardly ignore this, but instead of giving us the correct text they have left Engelsʼs work intact, and tried (unsuccessfully in fact) to indicate the true order of the material in a note, following the principle that Engelsʼs edition is sacrosanct. A crucial case in which Engels appears to have inserted a sentence without notice here relates to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It has often struck readers that the ʻcounter-tendenciesʼ listed by Marx are so powerful that it is not at all clear whether the tendency itself always wins out. The one place in which the text says something amounting to this is on page 228: ʻBut in reality, as we have seen, the rate of profit will fall in the long run.ʼ This sentence is not in the manuscript and must have been added by Engels without notice. Another editorial disaster occurs with Capital Volume I. The English translation, edited by Engels, was made from the third German edition. Subsequent to that the fourth German edition appeared with additions inserted by Engels, notably passages from Marxʼs French edition. It is standard practice for new printings of Engelsʼs English edition to add these passages from his fourth German edition. But here (MECW 35) the process failed. On page 37 Engelsʼs Preface to the fourth edition lists five places where he put in additions from the French, and here the editors give the corresponding pages to this edition. Unfortunately in only one of the five is the addition both correctly made and indicated. Nothing at all has

been done in two places; and, catastrophically, these are the two substantial ones. An addition of four pages is indicated at ʻpp. 582–83ʼ, but at the relevant spot on page 583 nothing appears. An addition of two pages is indicated at ʻpp. 621–22ʼ but these pages give the old third edition material instead of substituting for it the new fourth edition expansion. In sum, this version of the English translation is neither the original 1887 text, nor a properly updated one. It is often said that this Collected Works is tailored to the ideological requirements of its original sponsor in Moscow. An entry in the index to Capital is a prime example of this. The term ʻDictatorship of the Proletariatʼ is honoured by two mentions. But in the text the term is in fact absent. Furthermore nothing remotely relevant appears on the pages in question. One might have thought that it could be taken for granted that a Collected Works on this scale would provide every word that Marx himself published. Alas that is not the case here. The reason for this failure to issue the complete Marx is that Marx himself published no fewer than three versions of Capital Volume I, significantly different from each other, namely the two German editions and the French. When I was discussing this matter with Maurice Cornforth of Lawrence & Wishart in 1970 he told me that there would be an entire volume in the Collected Works devoted to variations in Volume I. At some stage this plan was abandoned. This means that there are two lots of missing material that Marx himself published, which are essential for any serious research into the development of his thought, not to mention for their intrinsic interest. First, the French edition is virtually a work in its own right, since Marx himself said that he rewrote it in the course of correcting Royʼs translation. The material from it that Engels inserted into the third and fourth German editions (plus an extra sentence in the English edition) do not give all the extra material available. Second, there are significant differences between the first and second German editions; these include not only additions (which we have of course) but also deletions, for example the very last paragraph. Again the Collected Works has not seen fit to translate these deletions and variations. The best-known case of this relates to the first chapter, which was entirely rewritten for the second edition. Absent from the Collected Works therefore are the original first chapter and the even more important Appendix on the Value-Form. Turning now to the book under review, this volume of Engelsʼs last letters contains much of interest. There are letters on historical materialism, continuing a theme begun in volume 49. There is testimony to the

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enormous work undertaken to edit and publish Capital Volume III, which finally appeared in December 1894. There are numerous letters on the progress socialists were making in elections. Lots of Engelsʼs energy was taken up mediating between the French and German parties, whose relations were prickly. Curiously the editors nowhere mention Engelsʼs death and funeral (he died on 5 August 1895). The publishers are to be congratulated for their achievement in bringing to a successful conclusion this enormous undertaking. Christopher J. Arthur

Force decides China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, Brill, Leiden, 2005. xi + 375 pp., £51.68 hb., 90 04 13134 5. One of the outcomes of the recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the ongoing war on terror has been a surge of interest in international law. International lawyers have been at the forefront of debates about the legality and legitimacy of the actions, and others have turned to international lawyers looking for ways to challenge and criticize the actions by the US and the UK. Witness, for example, the popularity of Philippe Sandsʼs book Lawless World (2005). In these debates much is taken for granted about international law: that its contours are well established, that it keeps states in check, that it protects human rights, and that all in all it is a ʻgood thingʼ. Most of the criticisms of international law have merely sounded a sceptical note, seeing it as a moralistic gloss on power politics, or as ineffective, or in need of fundamental reform in order to give more power and credence to international institutions such as the UN. China Miévilleʼs book takes a very different approach: it explores international law through an analysis of the legal form itself. In so doing it aims to develop a Marxist theory of international law through an imminent reformulation of the work of Evgeny Pashukanis. This distinguishes the work from other left critiques of international law such as those found in critical legal studies or even Marxist works such as Chimniʼs International Law and World Order (1993). Pashukanisʼs importance lies in not relegating law to the ʻsuperstructureʼ but, rather, in reading the

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juridical relation as a relation between two wills which mirrors the economic relation. Miéville uses this to build an argument concerning international law and the shaping of modern capitalism. The essence of the argument lies in Marxʼs insight into the imposition of particular contents into the legal form. Capitalist and worker meet each other as equal subjects of law. In this meeting there is an antinomy of right against right. But ʻbetween equal rights, force decidesʼ. This is not the same as saying that between equal rights, the state decides. In his essay ʻInternational Lawʼ (reproduced as an appendix to the book), Pashukanis excoriates bourgeois jurisprudence for the amount of ink spilt on whether the lack of an overarching sovereign authority means that international law is not law, an issue that remains central to current debates about international law. Coercion is clearly necessary for law, but an overarching and abstract coercion is extrinsic to the legal form itself. For Pashukanis, law developed out of the commercial relations between tribes which were not under a single sphere of authority. In other words, law itself, in its earliest and embryonic form, is a product precisely of a lack of such an authority. To say that international law historically predates domestic law is not to make any claim about the ontological primacy of the international sphere. It is, rather, to suggest that because law is thrown up by, and necessary to, a systematic commodity-exchange relationship, it was between organized groups without superordinate authorities rather than between individuals that such relationships developed. This means two things. First, that what Miéville calls proto-international law predates capitalism and the bourgeois state. When the bourgeois state becomes the central subject of the relations is when the ʻinternationalʼ is born. But the form of the relations already existed. And, second, this means that for the commodity-form theory, international law and domestic law are two moments of the same form. Central to this is a colonial disempowering of non-Western subjects by independent sovereign powers. For Miéville, colonialism is not just a relation of content. Colonialism is in the very form of international law. Present at the end of the fifteenth century and now central to international law, this ʻcolonialism-in-equalityʼ – which allows that Grenada has exactly the same right to intervene in the United States as the United States has the right to intervene in Grenada, as Jorg Fisch once put it – is predicated on global trade between inherently unequal polities with unequal coercive violence implied in the very commodity form. The question, then, is not so much

the international law of colonialism, but the colonialism of international law. The outcome is a compelling argument concerning the role of force in law or, better still, the role of law as force. Force and law are often counterposed; this is why so many have recently sought recourse to ʻlawʼ to stop the use of ʻforceʼ. But Miévilleʼs argument shows not only that every use of force can be (and has been) defended from a legal point of view. He also reminds us that force is intrinsic to the legal form; that law is constituted by relations of violence. In pursuing this line Miéville weaves a rich argument concerning the history of international law, from states, markets and the sea, to ʻcivilizationʼ, imperialism and sovereignty, and incorporates or critiques the work of a wide range of writers from Grotius to Schmitt. There are some aspects of the book with which one might wish to argue. As well as using Pashukanis to make sense of international law, Miéville aims to use international law to make better sense of Pashukanis. But one might question whether this actually takes place in the book. Debates about Pashukanisʼs work have long centred on whether his work can account for the rise of administration, administrative law, and labour law. Miévilleʼs discussion of these is not as original as he thinks: it reiterates some of the main contours of the debate, restates the importance of work by Geoff Kay and Jim Mott, and ignores other contributions that have ploughed the same field. There was also scope for broadening the argument out to perhaps explore more examples from recent debates in international law. The first section of the Introduction is called ʻInternational law has become importantʼ – a quotation highlighting the importance of the attempt by international lawyers to make sense of the legality of the British governmentʼs war on Iraq. But one might point to other events which show just how important international law has become. For example, the House of Lordsʼ first judgement concerning the Pinochet case, on 25 November 1998, was broadcast live on CNN, on the BBC and on radio across the world, and on the following day was on the front pages of most national newspapers. It may have made a more compelling book (and been more convincing to non-Marxists) if popular cases such as this had been discussed. But these are minor criticisms of what is an important book. By far the most compelling Marxist theory of international law, it is also a significant contribution to Marxist theory of the law more generally. Mark Neocleous

Unreconciled and unconsoled Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, Routledge, London, 2004. 239 pp., £60.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 0 415 33599 X hb., 0 415 33600 7. Benita Parryʼs influential and invigorating contributions to the field of postcolonial studies now appear in a very welcome edition. Together her essays demonstrate the consistency in her arguments throughout the rapidly developing period of approximately fifteen years during which they were written. As polemical and creative interventions in an unstably demarcated discipline, Parryʼs essays argue for a materialist and critical treatment of topics such as globalization, anticolonialism and ʻpostcolonialismʼ, whose concrete, historical and conflictual dimensions have often been neglected and replaced by textualized inquiries. Postcolonial Studies is divided into two sections, each introduced by a new essay that sums up the fieldʼs achievements and perspectives, while positioning it within a contemporary debate over global capitalism. The first part consists of theoretical, meta-critical essays, of which several have justly achieved canonical status, while the second part contains critical readings of metropolitan, high-imperialist novels, within an overall discussion of the imperial experience and its inscription onto the Western imagination. The book concludes with an extended version of an earlier published article, in which Parry, using a more anecdotal mode, restates her critical position, which seeks to remain ʻunreconciled to the past and unconsoled by the presentʼ, a position that was inaugurated by Marxist critics such as Trotsky, Benjamin and Adorno. In the first, theoretical section, which in an overall perspective attempts to counter the poststructuralist debacle within postcolonial studies, Parry argues – in essays like ʻProblems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourseʼ, and ʻResistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativismʼ – for the importance of staying true to the fieldʼs original concerns with concrete historical confrontations. She advocates a renewed discussion of nationalism, anti-colonialism and liberation movements, and the endeavours to channel and reformulate those antagonistic and revolutionary energies that are capable of resisting colonial exploitation. In the second section, Parry goes on to develop a series of analytical case studies of novels by Kipling, Conrad, Wells and Forster, in which she demonstrates a sensitive attention to the asymmetrical

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relationship between the social and the literary within an ideologically inflected horizon. Unlike many other postcolonial critics, Parry has the virtue of searching for ʻa Marxist criticism which understands literature as interacting with and internally marked by other social practicesʼ, which to her implies ʻan insistence that textual significance cannot be properly experienced or adequately explained without engaging with narrative structure, diction and linguistic usageʼ. In ʻThe Content and Discontent of Kiplingʼs Imperialismʼ, Parry proposes an analytic procedure which, in a dialectic of dismantling and reconstructing, actively attempts to emphasize the more concerned, uncertain and troubled voices within the landscape of the imperial imaginary, a method that makes it possible for her to read Kiplingʼs fictions as expressions of imperial ambivalence, despite authorial or authoritative intentions. Elsewhere, Forsterʼs seemingly conventional fictive forms, whose ʻvital harmonyʼ is often seen as opposed to the more traditional characteristics of aesthetic modernism, like representational ʻruptureʼ or ʻcrisisʼ, signal to Parry an ʻanxiety about the impasse of representationʼ. By detecting signs of A Passage to Indiaʼs self-reflexive admission of its formal incapacity to bring an ʻalien realm into representationʼ, Parry sees a subversive or negative dimension in the novel, which undermines the textʼs unity, and thereby opens up a much more heterogeneous and discursively playful mode of representation. It is Parryʼs attention to the specific semiosis of the literary imaginary that allows her to observe ʻdefiant materialʼ aporias in the selected texts, which reject Western epistemological categories of representations, thereby indicating an aesthetic postponement of finality and formal totality that promises an as yet ʻunrepresentable futureʼ, beyond the disorientations of negations and impasses within a colonial world. This emphasis on the dimension of future prospects as an inherent strategy within contemporary criticism is evident throughout the collection, for example in her well-argued criticism of Homi Bhabha in ʻSigns of the Timesʼ. Bhabhaʼs pessimistic discourse theory, according to Parry, excludes the possibility of constituting a ʻprinciple of hope animating political action in the interest of constructing a different futureʼ, something one is able to find in the socially engaged manifestos of anti-colonial and liberation movements. Although aesthetic postponement, as a mode of negation, indeed constitutes one of the vital concepts in her readings of metropolitan fiction, Postcolonial Studies would perhaps be more rounded if Parry engaged more extensively with problems of contem-

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porary, anti-colonial aesthetics. Her urgent call for a more antagonistic position within the theoretical debate of postcolonial studies seems to be accompanied by a more hesitant stance towards a sustained investigation of the role of the literary in anti-colonial fiction. She refers only in passing to anti-colonial literature, like Aimé Césaireʼs poetical construction of self-representation, while other postcolonial literary writers, who subscribe to a more conventional realist mode, receive a rougher treatment. While she generally endorses the critic Abdul JanMohamedʼs attempt to read African fiction from a counter-discursive position, through an emphasis on historical, material circumstances, she criticizes his readings for being committed to ʻmimeticismʼ, thereby neglecting the ʻpolyphonyʼ of a literary text in which ʻemergent discourses initiating new modes of address to construct not-yet-existing conditionsʼ can be located. Within this perspective one does, however, sense the contours of Parryʼs grappling with an anti-colonial poetics, one that emphasizes the radical potential of innovative forms of expression. Eli Park Sorensen

Being-responsiblefor-one’sunconscious Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 2004. xxiv + 245 pp., $59.95 hb., $19.95 pb., 0 8166 4473 X hb., 0 8166 4474 8 pb. How can psychoanalytic theory be transformed into a social theory that accounts for the psychic dimensions of oppression? This is the challenging question that Kelly Oliver asks and skilfully answers in The Colonization of Psychic Space. According to Oliver, individuality and subjectivity cannot be explained apart from their social contexts; hence psychoanalytic theory must also be social theory. And in turn, social theory, especially that which confronts issues of oppression, must reckon with the role of the unconscious and processes of repression and sublimation in social life. Hence social theory needs psychoanalysis. How, then, to bring the two fields together? Oliverʼs goal in this book is not merely to apply psychoanalysis to social situations of oppression, because doing so tends to leave intact concepts such as melancholy, desire and

abjection that initially were formed with regard to relatively solitary individuals. What is needed instead is a transformation of psychoanalytic concepts that will allow us to rethink the notions of the individual and the psyche as thoroughly social. Only then can forms of oppression such as racism, colonialism and sexism be adequately understood and challenged. The Colonization of Psychic Space contains four parts: ʻAlienation and Its Doubleʼ; ʻThe Secretion of Race and Fluidity of Resistanceʼ; ʻSocial Melancholy and Psychic Spaceʼ; and ʻRevolt, Singularity, and Forgivenessʼ. In Part I, Oliver examines existentialist and psychoanalytic notions of alienation with the goal of distinguishing between what she calls originary and debilitating alienation. Originary alienation is inherent to the human condition, and it occurs when human beings find themselves living in a world that is not of their own making. This form of alienation is very different from debilitating alienation, which occurs in oppressive situations that posit a person either as incapable of making meaning or as a being whose meaning is less than fully human. Using the work of Frantz Fanon to challenge Marx, Sartre, Heidegger and Lacan on the issue of alienation, Oliver criticizes the notion of originary alienation as the perverse privilege of European subjects who generally do not experience debilitating alienation. Even worse, the notion of originary alienation tends to cover over the fact of debilitating alienation, and the abstract anxiety of the former can operate as a screen for the latter, camouflaging anxieties concerning racial and sexual difference. Building on her previous arguments – in Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (1997) and Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001) – that violence is not necessarily constitutive of subjectivity, Oliver challenges the idea that (debilitating) alienation is a universal feature of the human condition. She argues instead that it is a social phenomenon produced by oppression and colonialism that undermines, rather than constitutes, the subjectivity and agency of the alienated. Part II continues the transformation of psychoanalytic concepts by focusing on projection and affect. In contrast to a psychoanalytic notion of projection that would enclose the process within the ego, the socialized version of projection developed by Oliver is fundamentally related to economic, material and bodily conditions that link subject and object, colonizer and colonized. Fanon again plays a key role. Oliver uses his analysis of affect in a colonial situation to show how the anger and perverse desire of colonialists are projected on/into the psyches and bodies of

the colonized. This projection (or abjection) allows the colonizer to establish rigid boundaries between self and other. What is needed in its place is a fluid notion of human being that challenges fixed borders, rigid ownership and sovereign subjects. Along with Fanonʼs analysis of the shifting meaning of the veil for Algerian women, the fiction of Julia Alvarez allows Oliver to show how identity and subjectivity need not be built out of rigid and exclusionary borders. Power is fluid, which means that the debilitating effects of domination on the oppressed sometimes can be used as tools of resistance. While Parts I and II focus on racism and colonialism, Part III turns to the effects of sexist oppression on women. Womenʼs depression is often seen and

treated as an individual illness, but many times it is a manifestation of culture-wide patterns of sexism. Oliver develops a notion of social melancholy to account for the characteristics of womenʼs clinical depression (ʻlack of activity, passivity, silence, moodiness, irritability, excessive crying, lack of sexual appetite, and nervousnessʼ), which are remarkably similar to those of stereotypical femininity. Social melancholy as manifest in depression operates in very different ways from the traditional psychoanalytic notion of melancholy. Freud, for example, characterizes melancholy as the internalization of a lost love by means of the incorporation of that love into the individualʼs ego. Oliverʼs concept of social melancholy, in contrast, attends to the social factors that contribute to depression by characterizing melancholy as the internalization of the loss of a lovable self. This problem tends to afflict mothers in particular, since very few positive representations of mothers as active, meaning-creating beings are available in the Western world. Maternal melancholy also has negative effects on female and male children, who can become masochistic and sadistic, respectively, through identification with a depressive mother. Oliver argues that whether the result of racism, colonialism, sexism, or some other form of oppression, debilitating alienation and social melancholy require a social form of sublimation in response. In traditional

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psychoanalysis, sublimation is the process by which an individual makes meaning by translating affects and drives into words or some other form of signification. But, as Oliver claims, ʻthe ability to sublimate has everything to do with social context, support, and subject positionʼ, which is why a social theory of sublimation is needed. Without sublimation, repression and depression (social melancholy) are the likely results. It is significant, then, that women and other oppressed peoples have been denied social support and space for the meaningful expression of their bodily drives and affects. Part III concludes with the claim that social sublimation necessarily involves revolt against the established order. Part IV continues by developing the idea of revolt against society that creates a sense of belonging to it. For Oliver, ʻEntering the social order requires assimilating the authority of that order through a revolt by which the individual belongs to the world of meaning.ʼ The revolt of social sublimation, then, is more of a relocation of social authority than a complete violation of the social order. In contrast with much of existentialist philosophy, revolt does not necessarily result in an individualʼs alienation from the social. It instead can help produce a community to which a person belongs as a singular meaning-maker. Central to this process is forgiveness. Being able to revolt in such a way that one is accepted into a social order presupposes that one will be forgiven for contesting it with her singularity. For Oliver, forgiveness is more of a psychical feature of the oppressed than an action on the part of the oppressor. Forgiveness does not primarily concern forgiving the perpetuators of colonialism, racism and sexism, but rather restoring a kind of confidence in the oppressed that they can creatively assert themselves in singular, individual ways which will be welcome (or ʻforgivenʼ) even though it challenges the established social order. What is particularly significant about Oliverʼs notion of forgiveness as part of the process of social sublimation is that it operates unconsciously. While language and other forms of signification are the vehicles through which forgiveness occurs, forgiveness is not a conscious operation. And, to the extent that intersubjectivity presumes conscious subjects in relationship with one another, forgiveness also is not intersubjective even though it is social rather than individualistic. Forgiveness is best described as a movement of affective energy between bodily beings that transforms them in ways of which they are not consciously aware. It is a mode of acceptance that legitimizes a personʼs access to the social.

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The final result of Oliverʼs psychoanalytic social theory of oppression is what she calls a radical ethics, which entails being responsible for oneʼs unconscious. While Oliver does not elaborate this important idea here as much as I would have liked, it is clear that, on her account, adding the unconscious to an account of social or political forgiveness (such as that of Derrida) does not mean the abandonment of accountability or responsibility. For responsibility to be really radical – which is to say, really ethical – we must think of ourselves as responsible for our unconscious wishes, desires and fears, especially as they revolve around issues of race and racism, sex and sexism. We might not be able to know fully or control our unconscious lives, but we can and should be responsible for their effects on other people. How do I unknowingly contribute to the debilitating alienation and social melancholy that others experience? How am I responsible for the forgiveness that does or does not occur in other peopleʼs lives? These admittedly are difficult questions of accountability and answerability, and attempting to answer them is likely to be an endless task. But it is a task that is necessary to the overcoming of domination and oppression. Just as psychoanalysis needs to be a social theory if it is not to cover over oppressive power relations, a truly responsible ethics and politics must reckon with the role of the unconscious in the creation and maintenance of domination. Shannon Sullivan

§113 Michael Quante, Hegelʼs Concept of Action, trans. Dean Moyar, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. 216 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 521 82693 4. Michael Quanteʼs Hegelʼs Concept of Action is a sustained effort to survey a nexus of seemingly incongruous concepts: Hegelian thought and contemporary ʻanalyticʼ philosophy. Its methodology is shaped by a commitment to demonstrate that, on the one hand, the contemporary philosophy of action provides the theoretical terms by which much that is mysterious in the Hegelian dialectic can be explained, and, on the other, Hegelʼs approach to agency can be correctly understood to anticipate and even clarify much of what is at issue in this philosophy of actions. With Brandom, McDowell, Davidson and Chisholm among its most essential sources and disputants, it approaches agency in terms of concepts of personality, subjectivity, inten-

tionality, attribution, universality and infinity, as well as crime, responsibility and the mind–body problem. This work is best read with the Philosophy of Right open beside it. While offering no novel theses, it strives to unpack the logic of Hegelian agency from a contemporary perspective. Quanteʼs primary thesis is that the concept of ʻmoralʼ (subjective) agency presented in the Philosophy of Right is central to the Hegelian dialectic in general. It is in that work that a genuine agent-theoretic perspective, contributive to a rigorous understanding of the dialectic of selfhood in the Phenomenology of Spirit, can be found. Rather than utilizing the dialectic to justify the objective movements of history in which human beings are implicated, Quante isolates the human person as a particular moment of the universal viewed from the anonymous position of the historical dialectic. Quante emphasizes the importance of explanations of personal agency (and thus personal identity) in terms of internally descriptive intentions and freely volitional agency (and not merely ʻpurposive activityʼ). In other words, rather than examining agency within the objective determinations of an external account of the dialectic of persons and deeds, he analyses the dialectic of internally descriptive attributions of intentional action. The ʻmoralityʼ of an action, then, is not merely some contingent aspect, but its most vital internal determinant. Most of the book is dedicated to unpacking a single quotation from Hegelʼs Philosophy of Right (§113) in which the ʻdeterminationsʼ of an action are: (a) the action is known by the agent to be its own, (b) obligation is the relation between an action and its concept, and (c) the action has an essential relation to the will of others. For Quanteʼs Hegel, agency is understood primarily in terms of intentional action as a realization of a subjective and freely chosen end, answerable to its own internal universal obligation, and known to be exposed to the judgement of others. Each instance of intentional agency is an exercise of the subjective will in which there is a conceptual unfolding of a free decision that accompanies (but does not ʻcauseʼ) such agency. An explanation of intentional agency must involve a description that includes the perspective and self-understanding of the agent at the time of the performance. Quanteʼs book, perhaps like Hegelʼs philosophy, is dominated by various dichotomies through which a dialectical account of agency, legality and morality is played out. In Hegel these are intertwined in a logic of reflection, not separately spread out, as in Kant. The ʻtransitionalʼ dichotomy marks a passage from legality

(in which the agent is taken to be a ʻpersonʼ whose conduct can be described without emphasis upon any internal perspective) to morality – in which the agent is taken to be a ʻsubjectʼ for whose action a description of internal perspective is laden with motives, intentions, opinions and reasons. This passage, he insists, should not be understood as a theoretical movement from one extensive concept describing a substantial entity (the legal ʻpersonʼ) to another (the moral ʻsubjectʼ), but rather as distinct perspectives on a single activity of a subjectivity of will. Interestingly, in order to elucidate this transition, he effectively utilizes the notions of crime – as a disavowal of absolute principles of right that produces only emptiness of rational content – and punishment – as punitive form of justice in which the criminal is ʻhonouredʼ inasmuch as the emptiness of his/her crime becomes an expression of rational will. Legal punishment raises the criminal act to a certain dignity, one might say, because it bestows on it a significance it does not itself possess. For students of contemporary ʻcontinentalʼ critiques of Hegel, Hegelʼs Concept of Action confirms suspicions that Hegelʼs later ʻconservativeʼ work offers insights into the dialectical nature of subjectivity. Between the Hegel of the anonymous forces of history and the Hegel of ʻmoralʼ initiative, there is little to choose from if one is committed to anti-Hegelian notions such as non-dialectical negation, sentient bodies, the multitude and supplementarity. This book strips the dialectic of the mysticism Marx discerned in it, but without offering an equally compelling interpretation that would avoid contemporary critiques and without conceiving the terms of an alternative relevance for the Hegelian project. Although the bookʼs scholarly apparatus is very impressive, it has a few shortcomings. First, by either ʻcontinentalʼ or ʻanalyticʼ standards, its composition is unnecessarily turgid and repetitive in a way that is hardly likely to inspire the readerʼs excitement. Second, some of the distinctions and formulations fail to clarify the interest of competing theoretical positions, leaving it unclear whether a particular notion will resurface significantly in later passages. Third, although the argumentation fulfils promises made in the introduction, the lack of a conclusion might abandon the reader to wondering whether he or she has actually grasped the workʼs intended achievement. It merits repeating that this bookʼs primary contribution is a close textual reading that might enable us to adjust traditional interpretations without offering altogether new perspectives. B.C. Hutchens

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NEWS

Women’s Philosophy Review, 1997–2005

I

n August 2005 the editors and editorial board of the Womenʼs Philosophy Review (WPR), the journal of the UK Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), decided to cease publication, at least for the foreseeable future. WPR grew out of the Women in Philosophy Newsletter that had been circulated to members of SWIP for many years under the editorship of Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford. In the summer/autumn issue of 1997 (no. 17), it was transformed into an ISSN-registered, peer-review journal in acknowledgement of the need for a ʻproperʼ journal dedicated to feminist theory and philosophy. In particular, as its new editor, Christine Battersby, wrote in the first issue of the transformed journal, WPR aimed to correct the comparative neglect of feminist philosophy in mainstream philosophy journals. Along with interviews with women philosophers and feminist theorists, review essays of feminist literature on major philosophical figures and areas of philosophy, the journal published regular guest-edited special issues. Soon WPR was commissioning the most significant interviews with women philosophers to be published in the UK. Outstanding examples include Alessandra Tanesiniʼs interview with Judith Butler in WPR 18 (1998), and Penelope Deutscherʼs interviews with Monique David-Ménard, Barbara Cassin and Claude Imbert in WPR 24 (2000). The journal also published substantial articles, opinion pieces and news and conference reports, providing readers internationally with a diverse and extremely lively resource in an otherwise inhospitable publishing climate for feminist philosophy and related gender theory. Rachel Jones and Helen Chapman took over as editors in 2000–2001, and WPR remained consistently strong, fulfilling its unique function in philosophy in the UK, until the end. So what went wrong? Like so much else in British intellectual life over the past fifteen years, WPR suffered ultimately from the interminable pressure exerted on individuals and institutions by the ever-growing becomingadministrative of academia and by the RAE – the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of turn-of-the-century British university life. Ironically, the RAE was originally one of the spurs to the transformation of WPR into a journal that could ʻcountʼ in its great reckoning. But by reducing intellectual productivity to that sanctioned by – and, worse, produced for – the publishing industry, the RAE has effectively prevented individuals from investing time in (and institutions from supporting) the sorts of activity that keep a discipline alive, rather than allowing it merely to exist. Moreover – as discussed at the most recent SWIP meeting in October – some of the longer-term effects of the RAE may only now be beginning to emerge. Although (again, ironically) it is impossible to quantify, the tendency towards conservatism in philosophy encouraged by the RAE seems to have actually reversed the growth in the numbers of female PhD students in philosophy evident in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Women in all areas of the discipline also report a discouraging dearth of young women students interested in philosophy and gender, who would replace the current generations of women philosophers in the UK and who could have been the future editors of WPR. However, the demise of WPR has been partly responsible for a welcome rejuvenation of a regrouped and freshly organized SWIP. A conference and general meeting is planned at Birkbeck College, London, for Friday 28 April. The problem of the inhospitability and unattractiveness of philosophy to young women graduates is high on the agenda. Stella Sandford For membership of SWIP email Meena Dhanda: [email protected]. Details of the conference will be published in RP 136. 52

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