Sovereign Nations, Carnal States 9781501718229

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Challenge of a Political Somatics
1. Thinking about the Body Affect and Habit in the Ethics of Augustine, Nietzsche, and Derrida
2. Somnambulist Nation Habit in Hegel's Political Philosophy
3. Decision, Myth, and Intensity Carl Schmitt’s Affective Nationalism
4. Walter Benjamin Toward a Political Somatics
Conclusion. The Dilemma of Somatic Politics
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States Kam Shapiro

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright© 2003 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2003 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2003 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shapiro, Jonathan Kam. Sovereign nations, carnal states I Jonathan Kam Shapiro. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8oi4-4053-X (cloth: alk. paper)- ISBN o-80I4-8852-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sovereignty. 2. Body, Human-Political aspects. I. Title. JC 327.s 5 2oo 3 320. I' 5-dc2I

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Contents

Acknowledgments

IX

Introduction: The Challenge of a Political Somatics

2 3 4

Thinking about the Body Affect and Habit in the Ethics of Augustine, Nietzsche, and Derrida

22

Somnambulist Nation Habit in Hegel's Political Philosophy

62

Decision, Myth, and Intensity Carl Schmitt's Affective Nationalism

97

Walter Benjamin Toward a Political Somatics Conclusion: The Dilemma of Somatic Politics

135 168

Bibliography

175

Index

183

Vll

Acknowledgments

A

great many people have provoked, encouraged, and sustained me throughout the writing of this book. It was in William Connolly's seminars at Johns Hopkins University that I developed and extended my thinking on matters corporeal, and his contributions no doubt exceed the many particulars of which I am aware. I am also grateful to Richard Flathman, whose sharp advice and criticism spurred me on to closer reflection at the outset of the project. Neil Hertz provided important guidance and inspiration in later stages. No less crucial has been the influence and support of many friends and colleagues at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. With the caution that no list can be complete, I would especially like to recognize the following individuals: Jason Frank, Casiano Hacker-Cordon, T. L. Popejoy, Jen Thomas, Julia Toews, Isabella Winkler, Alan Wood, and James Yamasaki.

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Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

Introduction The Challenge of a Political Somatics

Personal and political liberation, insofar as it is possible, must be somatic as well as spiritual. -Brian Fay What is at stake when we speak of "political somatics"? A variety of authors, by no means unified, have taken issue with the "abstract" subject described by modern political theory, the ostensible product of a complex shift in emphasis during the Enlightenment from bodily forms and capacities toward universal principles and judgments. According to standard narratives, the body, once the repository of virtue in the form of proper habits and desires (an ethos), became the instrument or property of a rational, sovereign subject. 1 Traceable to Descartes and reaching its definitive articulation in Kant, this philosophical subjection of the sensate body to a cognitive agent correlates historically with the transformation of the "political body" from a repository of natural or divine forces to an object of secular power and administrative control. In many canonical readings of modern political thought, the sovereign subject and the sovereign 1 This distinction, as we will see, is oversimplified. Many theorists of sovereignty, including Locke and Hegel, saw rational autonomy as a product of extensive somatic organization and training. Kant, it should also be noted, described self-legislation as a philosophically established possibility whose practical realization was by no means certain.

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nation thus emerge as reciprocal, interwoven entities. As the frontispiece ofHobbes's Leviathan suggests, a nation is both made up "of" subjects and stands "for" them as a kind of suprasubject. In this striking illustration, the political body is composed of fully formed individuals who come together in their own image, replacing the loose assemblage of humors and organs of the Aristotelian body politic. 2 The sovereign nation is thus depicted as a political realization of the modern demand for self-identity and self-authorization. Like many political ideals, this image of modern sovereignty has served mainly as an incitement to revision and critique. The combined stories of subject and nation have been rewritten in a variety of disciplines, ranging from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism to Marxism, feminism, and cultural studies. The conceit of sovereignty has been shown to mask a complex set of relations and exclusions that both constitute and compromise individual and collective agency and identity. We are possessed of neither mind nor body-understood as a unified cogito or a universal morphology-but a psyche, an unconscious, a race, class, gender and sexuality, a set of sensory capacities and limits. Moreover, these attributes are themselves entwined with the historically variable technologies, institutions, and conventions that constitute a material culture. In turn, culture has been divorced from organic connotations of territory and biology and has become inextricable from political power, that is, the production, exclusion, violation, and disciplinary subjection of individual and collective bodies. Differentiated bodily forms and capacities are not simply grounds on which the nation rests but are themselves enmeshed with evolving modes of administration, exploitation, and violence. Simply stated, not only are politics somatically invested but somatics are politically conditioned. To speak of political somatics is, most generally, to designate this reciprocal entanglement of politics and bodies. In the texts under consideration here, this entanglement appears in two guises: first, with respect to diverse 2 Hobbes retains the language of organs and humors in his treatment of the grouping of subjects in non sovereign "systems" within the commonwealth. However, he insists that members of such systems confront the sovereign only as individuals. Indeed, it becomes clear in Leviathan that the sovereign individuals who make up the commonwealth must themselves be properly formed by the exercise of sovereign political power.

Introduction

3

modes of embodiment that precede and condition the emergence of political subjects; second, regarding political power as it addresses bodily forms and capacities. With the understanding that they are practically inextricable, my readings move roughly from the first to the second concern. I begin with a discussion of corporeal dimensions of subjectivity as they appear in the ethical thought of Augustine, Nietzsche, and Derrida. The purpose of this discussion is to introduce a set of terms and problems that will simultaneously serve as a basis for further discussion and illustrate the need for subsequent revision and elaboration. Bodily forms and capacities are not timeless foundations, merely forgotten by modern political philosophy, but are shifting sites of theoretical and practical contest. I therefore survey these sites as they emerge in theories of modern sovereignty that engage a variety of technologies, institutions, and practices within which the human sensorium is embedded and through which it is transformed. Finally, I explore the potential value of a focus on somatics for a critique of sovereign politics, drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin. A closer inspection of the political somatics that attend modern sovereignty is prompted by several contemporary concerns. Challenges posed to traditional notions of the "political body" have become all the more acute as the lability of cultural forms is highlighted by accelerated flows of commerce, labor, technology, and media. Under conditions of intensified globalization, not only do increasingly proximate "others" mortify abstract-universalist conceptions of political subjects, but cultural differences themselves appear mobile, fluid, and volatile. In this context, attempts to resurrect a "substantial" model of the political body generate their own problematic assimilations and exclusions. Yet, despite these problems, recent political theory remains defined, in large part, by permutations of Aristotelian and Kantian models of politics, caught between images of organic or rationally administered totalities. Sovereign authority is still anchored by the rational autonomy of a reflective or deliberative subject or a local set of habits and desires that constitute a given culture or "community." A number of contemporary authors have attempted to synthesize these alternatives, reconciling a culturally situated conception of identity and values with the purportedly democratic demand for self-authorization. John Rawls, Jiirgen Habermas, and Seyla Benhabib, for instance, appeal to

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normative principles that are both culturally conditioned and open to critical reflection. The subject is reconstructed in their work as reasonable rather than rational, communicative rather than self-legislating. Yet these advocates of "deliberative democracy," an "overlapping consensus," or even the "public sphere" tend to finesse the issue of embodiment. They do so by implicitly adopting teleological presumptions that render conventional, embodied practices (in Western, secular culture) amenable to discursive reconstruction and critique. My aim here is to examine the means by which problems of embodiment have been elided as well as to contribute to attempts to bring them more fully into view. Some of the problems involved in attempts to mediate rational autonomy and conventional embodiment can be witnessed in the development of Rawls's political philosophy. For the earlier Rawls, we can appeal to rational self-understandings to reform our practical, embodied situation. Even if we do not actually possess the habits and motivations that tend to justice, he argues, we can construct a social framework that would conform to our sensibilities if we did possess them. (Hence those we would presumably rather not consult, such as envy, are simply declared out of bounds in the hypothetical "original position.") 3 Furthermore, he claims, once the basic structure of society is organized accordingly, our habits and motivations will fall in line. The result is a social order characterized by consensus and "strict compliance." We need not dwell here on the variety of forceful arguments made against the Kantian metaphysical basis ofRawls's early work. Suffice it to say that rather than appeal, as Kant did, to a priori reason or "deep tendencies towards the divine," the later Rawls found himself compelled to argue that the sense of "fairness" or "civility" that grounds social reform must itself be facilitated by contemporary institutions and practices. 4 In making the shift to a situated conception of the political subject, Rawls avoids the pitfalls of abstract universalism only to become quickly mired in the sociocultural complexities and differences that plague com3 John Rawls, A Theory ofJustice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Rawls's theory has the virtue of emphasizing structural and institutional preconditions for just habits and desires. 4 John Rawls, "Political Not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affiirs 14.3 (1985): 22325.

Introduction

5

munitarian attempts to circumscribe a discrete cultural "situation" under present conditions. No longer guaranteed by universal reason, consensus and compliance seem to require a kind of cultural homogeneity either sociologically implausible or politically sinister. Discretely bounded "communities" today tend to be of the ethnic or "gated" variety. Rawls argues, however, that even under present conditions of "reasonable pluralism" regarding ideas about justice, and a society characterized by myriad practical conflicts, we-that is, residents of secular constitutional democracies-retain a core set of shared or "overlapping" intuitions concerning a just and fair society. These intuitions, properly articulated, can yield principles to which we can appeal for critical reconstruction of social structures, and thus habits and motivations, through a process he calls "reflective equilibrium." 5 In the latter formulation Rawls's notion of "reflection" is more Hegelian than Kantian, resting on a dynamic interdependence between "basic ideas" and sensibilities that people possess regarding justice and a "basic structure" of institutional arrangements. But whereas for Hegel the mutual constitution of subject and state was grounded in a pervasive historical telos (and ultimately secured, as we will see, by intensive policing), Rawls simply posits-without any metaphysical guarantees-a latent coincidence of structure and sensibility, a coincidence rendered palpable in part through his rhetorical conflations of institutional and ideational structures. That is, he claims that the "fact" of pluralism coincides with common intuitions and ideas proper to a liberaldemocratic secular politics, namely, the qualified beliefs and principled desires characteristic of "civility." Thus, the increasingly mutable character of habitus in modern social life gives rise to a critical distance from everyday practice and a corresponding capacity for autonomy and self-authorship. The key assumption here is that in a "reasonable" society the good has become a "conception" with its own motive force, something quite close, after all, to a Kantian rational imperative. Rather than the inexorable progress of reason, however, this achievement is attributed to a fortuitous historical development:

5 I leave aside questions about what constitutes "reasonable" pluralism, as well as those regarding the international systems on which secular democracies depend.

6

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States This reasonable society is neither a society of saints nor a society of the self-centered. It is very much a part of our ordinary human world, not a world we think of much virtue, until we find ourselves without it. Yet the moral power that underlies the capacity to propose, or to endorse, and then to be moved to act from foir terms of cooperation for their own sake is an essential social virtue all the same. 6

In this gesture-by which "moral power" is deftly replaced with "social virtue" -Rawls resembles a number of authors who struggle to reconcile reflective or discursive autonomy with situated conceptions of subjectivity. Habermas, for example, derives formal principles of discourse ethics from everyday language and then gives them the status of a "regulative ideal." Benhabib similarly invokes "respect" as an ideal in accord with which practices can be prescribed and as "an attitude and a moral feeling first acquired through such processes of communicative socialization." 7 Attitudes and feelings here already harbor the seeds of discursive principles that provide the basis for their reform. 8 Because bodily experience and practice already coincide with deliberation and reflection, the purveyors of these models need not make explicit appeals to teleological presumptions and, in fact, often officially reject them. Thus, Benhabib argues that a secular-universalist communicative ethics, while not "morally neutral," has "a singular cognitive virtue when compared to systems of conventional morality, namely, comprehensive reflexivity." 9 The virtue of this model, and the possibility of "comprehensive reflexivity," of course rests on the presumption that (secular) culture is itself already grounded essentially or primarily in cognition and communication. 10 By setting cognitive "virtue" 6 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 54; emphasis added. 7 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self(New York: Routledge, 1992), 32. 8 For a concise critique of this circular strategy, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 31. 9 Benhabib, Situating the Self, 42. 10 Habermas's historical narrative describes an increasing demand for a "discursive" redemption of norms. See Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon, 1975), n-12. The problem is that, contra Habermas, demand for redemption can never be properly satisfied. I explore this dilemma when I discuss Derrida's notion of an ethics in which we are responsible for making sense of ourselves without having the capacity to do so autonomously. More recently Arjun Appadurai has described the intensification of this demand and the pressures

Introduction

7

against "conventional morality," furthermore, such formulations dissimulate the conventional origin and privilege of this cultural form. Jean-Luc Nancy's term immanentist aptly captures this kind of thinking. 11 For these authors politics is a matter of becoming what we are; they retain the gesture, if not the confidence, of classical humanism. As I argue later in more detail, they also perpetuate a classical opposition of reason and passion (resulting in oversimplified distinctions between "deliberative democracy" and supposedly nonreflective, fundamentalist cultures). 12 While these authors seek a new locus of authority and legitimacy amidst a plurality of languages and practices, others have taken the dislocation of sovereign subjects and nations as an occasion for rethinking politics more generally. These authors have developed a new set of terms that embrace the incompleteness of our reason and the indecidability of our situation. Rather than provide grounding for shared intuitions, their work defers and complicates-though by no means pretends to dispense with-our understanding of the self, community, or value. Variants of this approach can be found in the work of Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard, John Caputo, Julia Kristeva, Nancy, John Rajchman, and perhaps most (in)famously, Derrida (whose work is addressed below). 13 Theirs is not the traditional pluralist imagination that finds politics only at the margin, where discrete genders, races, or cultures make contact with others. These thinkers have shown such categories to be themselves contingent, relational, and contestable. They bring difference to the center, advocating a sort of "marginocentrism" that presumes we inhabit or are inhabited by otherness. Where othit places on shifting modes of self-definition. Michael Sandel's "communitarian" critique of Rawls's Kantian liberalism, locating the redemptive narrative in communities of discourse, retains this emphasis on the cognitive basis of community, which for him is a matter of constitutive self-understandings; see his Liberalism and the Limits ofJustice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 11 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 12 Benhabib, for instance, claims that adherents of "conventional" morality (Arabs and Mormons being her exemplars) "have a cognitive barrier beyond which they will not argue .... They cannot distance themselves from their own position" (Situating the Self, 43). Ll See Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Difftrend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Nancy, Inoperative Community; John Rajchman, "Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity," Representations rs (summer 1986): 42-58.

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Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

ers find conventional values giving way to deliberative or reflective principles at the intersection of multiple subject positions, these theorists find every orientation taking on a hybrid, partial, and perspectival quality. The ethical and political implications of these different visions, however, are more elusive than they may initially seem. The latter perspective, for example, can also become the basis for a kind of universalism in which what we all share, as Lacan argued, is a sort of difference in common. Eric Santner has written a particularly eloquent account of a universalism based on the "unfamiliarity" we share with others rather than our capacity to generate forms of common recognition. 14 This perspective may seem increasingly compelling as global media and commerce render cultural materials simultaneously encompassing and fragmented. However, as I argue later, appeals of this sort tend to hypostasize difference, leaving us with insufficient tools for a critical engagement with the ongoing material production of selves and others. If advocates of deliberative democracy gloss over the complex linkages between sensibilities, principles, and judgments, some of their critics reduce them to a fundamental opacity at the heart of the subject. For these thinkers bodies or materiality generally provide no secure point of purchase for normative and political inscriptions. Against various forms of rationalism or essentialism, they take up an ontology of excess or lack, thematizing dimensions of human practice and experience that escape or resist discursive representation or a stable set of conventional norms. But what is the nature, so to speak, of this opacity or resistance? And how might such a self-understanding-or interruption of self-understanding-mitigate sovereign responses to a mutable self and society? The danger in such formulations is that they will remain defined by the very terms they oppose. In Christian philosophy, after all, the body has been a traditional name for excess and resistance, the other of the mind, soul, or will. Moreover, while invoked as a figure for the limits of ethical principles, the body has always been the medium of their becoming, an object of diverse ethical and political practices and techniques. It is therefore important to critically reexamine these oppositions, as I do in chapter I. 14 Cf. Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Lifo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, zoo r ).

Introduction

9

The modern nation, in turn, has always been invested in somatics as well as subjectivity, resting not only on belief and consent but on psychic and physical reproduction, education, and discipline. The dislocation of culture and the disruption of stable habits in market societies, moreover, significantly predate the current crisis of sovereignty. A critique of the sovereign nation based on a critique of the sovereign subject can therefore obscure the complex means by which each is secured as well as destabilized. By emphasizing intrinsic limits to sovereign power and comprehensive representation, authors such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, and Michel de Certeau have rendered this dilemma in insufficiently problematic terms. Their critiques of "totalizing" politics can degenerate into polemical assertions of contingency, excess, or disruption, provoking a complementary reaction to any politics based on "nonclosure" or difference. Merely to decry the one in the name of the other too readily becomes a facile gesture. To discover the illogical and the contingent at the heart of a politics of reason or identity does not suffice to dissolve the power of the latter; indeed, it can spur efforts to overcome, repress, or reorganize difference. Such efforts have themselves been the object of a variety of investigations, perhaps most famously in Foucault's excavations of the multiple technologies of power at work within the juridical state. Thus, I am informed by his suggestion that "rather than ask ourselves how the sovereign appears to us in his lofty isolation, we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects." 15 Abstract, rights-bearing subjects, as Foucault demonstrated, are subtended by diverse practices and technologies that shape the somatic conditions in which we come to know and master ourselves. These practices and technologies, moreover, operate largely below the threshold of conscious "ideology" or the dictates of a central political authority. Foucault's notion of discipline or "biopolitics," much like Bourdieu's notion of"habi15 Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 97· Rather than agenealogy of these various forms of power, my focus here is on the way these forces are engaged by influential theories of sovereignty.

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tus," can be mistaken for an instrumental account of political somatics. Although both authors are concerned with the political formation of bodies, each understands that the bodies inherited by politics are riddled with dynamic currents of history and power. Moreover, biopolitical practices and technologies, as Foucault argued, are themselves historically and spatially discontinuous. 16 To find political forms sustained through the conditioning of bodies by architecture, medicine, education, and commerce need not leave the impression of a monolithic or seamless regime of discipline and control. If the body so understood is a "construct," it is one whose refashioning is no simple task. Politics for these authors is not a mastery of such forces and energies but a struggle within them, one that simultaneously inhabits and modulates a variety of economic, cultural, and technological materials. To redeploy Lyotard's terms (themselves borrowed from Wittgenstein), the participant in a language game, the sovereign "user" of political power, "undergoes a 'displacement,' an alteration of some kind that not only affects him in his capacity as addressee and referent but also as sender." 17 To be (political), in short, is to become what one is from a place where one is not (oneself). Rather than invoking a "metadiscourse," this view supposes a politics that cannot be reduced to a central set of principles or "basic structure" of political institutions. Foucault's extensive genealogies of modern subjects are often criticized on these very terms, for failing to yield a set of principles for political reformation, much less a practical program. 18 He is thus blamed for creating what he purports to reveal, namely, the irreducibility of politics to a dis16 While it may render bodies legible as sites of knowledge and manipulation, no "biopolitics" can grasp without remainder the immense tangle of forces-ranging from the microbiological to the global-that condition political reality. A given constellation of forces may be more or less stable in relation to particular discourses, institutions, and practices. However, this stability -and that of relations among different discourses and among different levels of order within each of them-need not indicate a higher, metalevel ordering. Following Deleuze, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that contemporary sovereignty, in seeking increasingly detailed forms of control, ties itself to correspondingly deeper levels of complexity and potential instability. See their book Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 17 Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, r984), r6. 18 This is Habermas's gripe in his atypically unrigorous Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, r990).

Introduction

I I

crete set of basic principles or institutions. Political power in his work appears diffuse and complex, bound up with ongoing and complex practices and techniques involved in shaping and organizing subjects. It may not be surprising that someone seeking an efficient and sensible account of sovereignty would be quick to kill such a messenger. After all, Foucault's notion of power leaves us with a politics at once broad and highly conditional. It thus gives rise to the question of how, or from what position, we are to make clear analytic or moral distinctions among different political systems. For that matter, who will be making these distinctions once the sovereign subject has been called into question? Speaking this way always risks being accused of either nihilist or "decisionist" politics by those who imagine the alternative to rational or deliberative sovereignty to be either acquiescence to processes beyond our control or an arbitrary imposition of values. Thus, the same author is alternately accused of quietism, radical voluntarism, and antihumanism, as has been the case with Foucault as well as inheritors such as Judith Butler. 19 However, as Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Butler, Slavoj Zizek, William Connolly, and others have argued, to insist on the incompleteness or contingency of norms, principles, and conventions is not to deny their power. 20 On the contrary, it is to direct our attention to the diverse psychic and material techniques on which they depend. Their attention to these resources further enhances our understanding of the relative durability and persistence of norms, principles, and conventions as well as their potential volatility. Likewise, the critique of sovereignty pursued in this book aims not to expose canonical models of politics as fictions but to recuperate the practices and sensibilities, the larger material set of "fictions" that support and complicate them. 21 It is not enough, that is, to oppose sovereign models of politics in principle. 22 Having established the 19 See Benhabib, Situating the Self, 215-18. See also Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody," New Republic, February 22, 1999, 95· 20 I discuss Butler, Zizek, and Deleuze in subsequent chapters. For Connolly's arguments along these lines, see his introduction "l'\othing Is Fundamental" in his book The Ethos uf Pluralization (l\linneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 1-40. 21 Gianni Vattimo speaks thus of the material "fiction" of technological domination in The End ofModernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 22 Nor is it enough to "acknowledge" the inevitable violence of one's own suppositions. For what is the value of consciously acknowledging forces that escape conscious reflection generally? Without denying that practices of reflection might have important effects, they do not

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limits of formal criteria in distinguishing the shape of any political regime, an effective critique must itself address the sundry material practices on which these regimes depend and pose alternatives. A nuanced understanding of embodiment is crucial for such a project. At issue is the articulation of a somatics irreducible to the logic of subjectivity in which it is implicated. The body is insufficiently described, I argue, by either essentialist terms (as a stable ground for social forms) or instrumental ones (as the effect of a discursive or biopolitical construction that precedes it). Rather than express either an immanent design or volition, the body emerges through a dynamic convergence of biological and social forces that both enable political "construction" and resist simple authorship. A dynamic conception of embodiment is evident in the work of a variety of authors. Similar notions can be found, for example, in Bruno Latour's "networks," Foucault's account of "technologies of the self," Deleuze's "assemblages," Butler's citational "mattering," Bourdieu's "double objectification of structure and habitus," James Rosenau's similar "two-way flow of macro structure and micro habits," Connolly's "Memory Traces," and Marco Frascari's notion of a "chiasmatic" relation of body and architecture. 23 For these authors the body simultaneously exceeds and enables identity and agency. For it is through the body that multiple, overlapping processes are resolved into coherent experience and action. The body, in other words, is the medium through which complex levels of determination enter into the organization of the intellect and will; it is neither matter nor idea but rather the strategic locus of their exchange. Such a notion precludes a politics "of" the body because there is no such thing. The body, so understood, is not a thing but an intersection of forces and thresholds of organization where the confluence of the material and the inamount to a durable "end of ideology" but rather its interruption, deferral, and complication. Hence, as I argue, it is necessary to supplement appeals to such recognition with other techniques. 23 See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993); Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice; James Rosenau, "Before Cooperation," International Organization 40 (autumn 1986): 849-94; Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture (Savage, Minn.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991). One might also consult Brian Fay, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Elizabeth Grosz. This is, of course, not to suggest that these authors do not differ significantly in their characterization of the mutual conditioning of body and structure or environment.

Introduction

13

telligible is negotiated; it is not a ground but a series of sites, obstacles, and contests. While these thinkers emphasize embodiment as a point of departure from rational or organic models of politics, I begin by exploring the complex somatics already at work in canonical theories of sovereignty. A dynamic conception of the body is especially evident, I find, in their treatments of affect and habit. Both classical and modern theories of ethics and politics have contended with somatic capacities that are neither merely recalcitrant nor complicit with their designs. In the texts under consideration, these terms complicate philosophical and political antinomies, traversing will and causality, foundationalism and antifoundationalism, as well as individual and social registers; they have often been the privileged site of their intersection, where diverse modes of embodiment supplement formal theories of politics. The body that emerges in these readings is a central term in ethical and political struggles over relations between identity and difference, self and other. More specifically, my emphasis on habit and affect becomes the basis for an ontology that complicates these oppositional formulations, revealing their co-presence in tense but not entirely unstable compositions of multiple forces. In the texts under consideration, habit is figured as a realm of the inexorable but also insidious and subtle organization underlying concerted or rational construction. Affect, on the other hand, generally signifies the dispersion of energies and contacts from which the morphologies of habit congeal and into which they dissolve. Habit and affect signify not opposite values to be championed or condemned but constitutive dimensions of politics that compromise such easy postures. Both are at play in a larger conception of "somatics" whereby bodily form, and more or less coherent patterns of action, emerge out of a continuous organization and differentiation of multifarious stimuli and impressions, a process indicated by secondary dictionary definitions of the term. 24 It should become clear, in any case, that my use of all these terms involves significant invention, displacement, and revision. Despite the relative novelty of this terminology, it is my contention that somatics, thus defined, have long been a locus of ethical and political con24 "Somatic cells" are characterized by differentiation and becoming rather than consistent form.

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Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

testation. In chapter I I clarify the terms of such contestation through a reading of Augustine's and Nietzsche's writings on ethics. A juxtaposition of these authors serves this purpose in several respects. While presenting divergent ethical imperatives, both authors eloquently engage the complex entwining of formal rules and conscious intentions with habits and desires. Moreover, their texts not only prescribe analogous somatic techniques but exhibit similar rhetorical devices, illustrating the operation of their own ethics on multiple registers. A focus on their sh;red concern with habit and desire reveals identity and agency as ongoing, complex productions simultaneously limited and enabled by diverse cn poreal techniques. At the same time, it shows how similar modes and tecnniques of embodiment can be put to very different purposes. Where Augustine struggles to surrender this complex agency to an absolute aut! ority, Nietzsche's ethics affirms that which compromises the sovereignty of a conscious, willing subject (pace naive voluntarist readings of the "will to power"). In light of these readings, the chapter concludes with a critical assessment of the role of somatics in Derrida's attempts to theorize an "ethics" of difference or deconstruction. Derrida serves as an imrortant foil insofar as he poses one of the most formidable challenges to any attempt to isolate a term like somatics or the body. Yet his work also provocatively refigures these terms, moving from a deconstruction of somatics to a somatics of deconstruction, or what he calls at one point a "non-pathological passion." While pointing us in a promising direction, however, these authors ultimately provide limited resources for a properly political somatics. What, then, are the political stakes of this emphasis on somatics? I have already suggested it would be wrong to seek a political orientation intrinsic to a body that would only need to be discovered or liberated. In order to formulate alternative conceptions of politics based on these terms, we first have to articulate the somatic dimensions of prevalent political forms. As noted above, the sovereignty of the nation has suffered a crisis parallel to that of the subject. Our postmodern condition, it has been argued, is defined precisely by the evacuation of a site from which the plurality of local and global forces might be apprehended. This is acknowledged as much by those who lament our condition as by those who celebrate it. 25 But this is 25

Claude Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe, and Richard Rorty, for example, base their hopes for

Introduction

15

not a new problem. Since the emergence of differentiated, market societies, encompassing theories of sovereignty have been challenged and supplemented. That the principles and capacities associated with reason and autonomy rest on various cultural-that is, gendered, ethnic, racial, classparticularities and differences whose stability is threatened by a world market would have come as no shock to Hegel. 26 With the emergence of an urban, industrial economy, the political body lost its head and became "social." A corresponding practical shift from a central sovereign authority to a disaggregated "governmentality" has been traced at least to the eighteenth century. 27 As both Michael Hardt and James Rosenau have suggested, it is not so much the obsolescence of the nation as its persistence in the face of challenges to its presumed grounding that demands our attention.28 Thus, critics of nationalism who invoke the sociological implausibility of a homogeneous or stable national culture fail to account for its frequent and violent assertion. 29 Anxieties resulting from cultural antagonism have long driven efforts to consolidate national identity against both external and internal others. As its more sophisticated champions and detractors have argued, the nation persists as an "imagined community" or a "scheme of dissimulations." 30 However, the language of dissimulation or imaginaa radical democracy on the mobile, unstable, and therefore intrinsically contestable shape of social commitments. Fredric Jameson and Paul Virilio, on the other hand, find little room for contest in the dispersion and acceleration of social life proper to late capitalism. In this work I provide terms that devolve to neither of these positions. 26 I expand on this argument below. 27 See Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter JVliller, eds., The Fouwult Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Thus, the symbolic and material bodies undergo a crisis together. 28 At the same time, as Hardt and Negri have argued in Empire, the relative weakening of national states by no means signals the decline of sovereign politics. As disaggregated strategies of rule, sovereignty is not replaced but recast along the complementary axes of a global empire and reactionary ethnospheres. 29 Benhabib, for instance, appeals to the diversity of national populations in her argument for a revised distinction between the rights of citizens and those who are properly members of a shared political culture. See "Citizens, Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World," Social Research 66.3 (1999): 709-44- The same concern applies to the argument made by authors such as Virilio and Jean Baudrillard, namely, that the speed of contemporary media undermines or outstrips the territorial basis of the nation. 30 The former description, of course, is derived from the title of Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991), which deals with nationalism. I borrow the

16

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

tion has to be distinguished from the implication that the nation is simply a representation or "image" detached from practical referents. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, "images" are themselves eminently sensuous, practical, and material. We should therefore examine the techniques, practices, and institutions through which national identity is invested not only in strategies of representation but in the corresponding production and distribution of habits and desires. How have the nation and the body been mutually invested? While the body has often served as a figure for political forms (the "body politic"), I have suggested that political theory also addresses a body implicated in but irreducible to the symbolic. The reference to "carnal states" in the title of this book is meant to invoke at least two things: the role of organic figures in theories of the sovereign nation and the function of diverse somatic techniques in the construction of national subjects. As I hope to show, this slippage between the figural and the corporeal indicates less a weakness in my own thinking than a crucial dimension of the discourses under consideration. 31 Rather than provide an extensive genealogy of these themes or even a concise historical summary-projects beyond the present capacities of the author-I instead focus on their convergence in several exemplary instances. 32 Specifically, I explore the function of habit and affect in Hegel's and Carl Schmitt's accounts of national sovereignty. For these theorists the body serves either as a support for rationally organized social forms or the vehicle of an essentially performative national identification. The first involves a continuous differentiation and organization of habits; the second a singular capture of affective intensities. By focusing on the details of these latter formulation from Nestor Garcia Canclini, who quotes Jose Ignacio Cabrujas to this effect. See Garcia Canclini's Hybrid Cultures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 31 The relationship between figural and material bodies, however, is not necessarily direct. Rather, a diverse set of somatic techniques works to secure different versions of the nationas-individual. At times, of course, metaphor and material march hand in hand, as in Mike Davis's account of the combination of military metaphors and military technologies adopted by the L.A.P.D. in its "war" on crime. See his City ofQuartz (New York: Vintage, 1992). 32 Thus, while several authors have effectively distinguished "socioculturated bodies" from "bodies sociopolitical" to establish a general theory of various "levels" or "tasks" of embodiment, I explore the intertwining of figural, reproductive, libidinal, and disciplinary bodies in these instances. See editors' introduction "Socioculturated Bodies, Bodies Sociopolitical," to The Social and Political Body, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter (New York: Guilford, I 996 ).

Introduction

17

modes of embodiment in either case, my readings also challenge the usual terms by which these two approaches are distinguished. Although Hegel is typically cited as the penultimate theorist of the rational basis of the state, I argue that his philosophy of the subject in fact serves as a support for a politics based precisely on the limited rationality of social relations. Carl Schmitt, on the other hand, is usually charged with an "irrationalist" theory of sovereignty. While such charges are not without basis, they tend to be leveled (and leveling) in ways that obscure the complex conditions of fascism's historical emergence, conditions that Schmitt himself theorizes. For my purposes, then, Hegel and Schmitt exemplify complementary alternatives in two related ways: first, insofar as I thematize different somatic capacities at issue for each theorist; second, insofar as they represent distinct images of sovereignty. Their contrasting models for realizing national sovereignty amid the social and cultural disorder of market societies continue to find expression in current debate. 33 Both models, as these readings show, rely on a complex somatic organization achieved through a variety of practices and technologies. Furthermore, this ground destabilizes the political edifice it supports. Just as Hegel cannot maintain the immanent rationality of the ethical order, Schmitt is unable to secure the autochthony of sovereign decisions. What makes these authors fascinating, however, is their attention to these very problems and the nuances of their struggles to theorize encompassing models of politics in spite of them. Hegel's attempts to sustain an ethically integrated national culture in the face of the centrifugal forces of nascent capitalist society are the focus of chapter 2. Against Kant's formalism, Hegel provides an account of complex processes of habituation that mediate natural inclinations and abstract legislative principles. In Hegel's transposition of an embodied conception of subjectivity onto a theory of the modern state, the organization of habit and affect thus takes on historical and political dimensions. His early political writings confront the explosion of social and economic forces beyond the scope of determination from a sovereign political apex that threatens the capacity of political subjects to ethically circumscribe their 33 Today we frequently find ourselves presented with a choice between managerial liberalism or mythological nationalism. These alternatives are usually mapped onto a familiar series of theoretical divisions between rationalism and romanticism or irrationalism, tradition and authority, or essentialist and voluntarist notions of political community.

18

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

everyday, sensuous life. 34 Hegel depicts this condition in pathological terms that evoke a split between abstract self-consciousness and preconscious somatic mechanisms inscribed in habit. While he posits the healing of this rupture in a rational, normative subject, his narrative illustrates the problematic dependence of reason upon non- or protorational habitudes. I explore the simultaneously necessary and problematic character of habit in Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, where he struggles with the philosophical tensions and slippages involved in theorizing somatic capacities whose rationality is practically conditioned in ways that jeopardize the metaphysics he endorses. While his later political writings are generally read as a more systematic assertion of the Dialectic, his descriptions of material processes of embodiment retain the ambivalence evident in his Jena writings. Problems surrounding the limited rationality of habit take a political form in Hegel's account of the sacrifice of ethical consciousness in the face of the peculiar internal logic of the capitalist system of needs and the dramatic expansion of the disciplinary role of the "police" necessary to counter its multiplied contingencies. The contemporary nation-state still struggles with this tension between normative imperatives, dynamic markets, and the expansion of police power as its mode of government. 35 Schmitt, like Hegel, embraces sovereign authority and power. However, whereas for Hegel the state is immanent in the rational organization of social differences, Schmitt-confronting an increasingly global, speedy, and inorganic culture-abandons a pervasive model of political integration in favor of a definitive sovereign power abstracted from the machinations of civil society. Against liberal conceptions in which the state appears depoliticized as either an extension or subdivision of an encompassing system, Schmitt asserts its absolute primacy in relation to other forms of association. In his essay "The Concept of the Political" he sets out to delimit the modern concept of sovereignty in terms of the "political," while 34 This argument is perhaps most (in)famously made in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso, r985). 35 As I argue below, there is not so much a tension as a complementarity between a set of abstract moral imperatives and a repressive police apparatus in contemporary states, for the production of something akin to Sittlichkeit under modern pluralistic conditions requires a number of violent disciplines and exclusions. Hardt and Negri have argued that the police function proper to the national state has expanded as an international mode of sovereignty. See Hardt and Negri, Empire.

Introduction

19

restricting it to the level of the nation-state. 36 He anchors the sovereignty of the nation in a radical form of inclusion and exclusion, namely, the "friend/ enemy antithesis." It is this "extreme" antithesis that characterizes the political, and it is Schmitt's task to maintain its precedence and autonomy in relation to a variety of social (moral, economic) antagonisms. In chapter 3 I examine Schmitt's distinction between political and social antagonism in the context of a broader discussion of the relationship between norms and ascriptions. While affirming his emphasis on constitutive exclusions disavowed by the liberal state, I find dissimulations involved in Schmitt's attempt to ground national sovereignty in a definitive moment of identification where power is rendered visible, univocal, and unconditioned. Against Hegel's rational authority, Schmitt depicts sovereignty as an essentially performative, myth-making exercise distinguished from both normative and technical rationality. Schmitt's distinction between politics and everyday material struggles, I show, rests on a complicated notion of definitive thresholds of affective intensity. Whereas Hegel describes the sublimation of affective disorders brought on by market forces in continuously regulated habits and customs, Schmitt depicts a cathartic bond that transcends social disorder in an exceptional moment of identification. However, tensions arise between these conceptions and Schmitt's commitment to a decisive sovereign authority. While Schmitt is right to insist on the relative fluidity of multiple desires at work in political identification, his characterization of a constitutive sovereign "decision" is at odds with his own account of historical processes. A closer analysis of these processes reveals the embeddedness of the affective investments that enable nationalism in complex cultural and technological preconditions, as well as a plurality of techniques involved in their mobilization. Fascism, Schmitt understood, benefited from the cultural dislocation Hegel described. Rather than struggle to contain these centrifugal forces, fascism sought to radicalize them. For fascism as much as for a Hegelian state, however, political power required ongoing somatic education by both ideological and police apparatuses. The implications of this reading-supported by recent cri36 Carl Schmitt, The Concept oft he Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976).

20

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

tiques of fascist strategies and techniques-are then brought to bear on recent attempts to appropriate Schmitt to theorize new nationalisms. Nationalism, I conclude, must be understood not only in terms of the subject it asserts but the desires it conditions. In turn, it is crucial to understand how these desires are themselves organized and mobilized under complex and limiting historical and technological circumstances. In order to gain such an understanding, I turn in chapter 4 to Walter Benjamin, in whose work I find an exemplary combination of concepts and techniques for a critical and collective political somatics. In his acute studies of the technological, cultural, and somatic circumstances in which fascism arose, Walter Benjamin describes the simultaneous liquidation of cultural representations and intensified regulation of human bodies. Focusing on the role of what were then new media technologies, he connects these phenomena with changing relations between representation and practice that undermine both critical reflection and spontaneous action. He plots the implications of these changes in human sensory apparatuses in connection with the erosion of traditional forms of community, the emergence of mass culture, and the rise of fascist political movements. Benjamin's reading of fascism illustrates the complex implication of somatic capacities with the diverse historical and technological circumstances described above. However, while illustrating the fascist potential of new forms of representation and changes in urban mass "experience," he explores possibilities for a political somatics freed from the principles of sovereignty. 37 Benjamin's work combines an appreciation of somatic dimensions of modern sovereignty with innovative sociological analysis, a reflexive attention to style and rhetoric, and utopian political speculations. While authors such as Foucault, Paul Virilio, and Donna Haraway have contributed tremendously to our grasp of the diverse modes of embodiment at work in modern sovereignty, Benjamin offers a unique critical alternative. Where Hegel and Schmitt seek to resolve social difference in stable habits or definitive identifications, Benjamin theorizes a political somatics character37 Foucault introduced this notion of nonsovereign politics in his call for rights that would be "liberated from the principle of sovereignty." As I argue with respect to Benjamin, the move beyond sovereignty involves a significant departure from the usual notion of "rights." See Foucault, Power I Knowledge, ro8.

Introduction

21

ized by ongoing critical practice. In some respects, Benjamin thus resembles those authors who reject "conventional" morality. However, the critical orientation he describes is not to be confused with deliberative or rational reflection. Rather, it is characterized by a dynamic blend of stimulation, thinking, and distraction. Benjamin finds this dynamic orientation at work in various forms of collective action that exhibit multiple and provisional rationalities and means. He further speculates that a variety of contemporary media-and film in particular-might facilitate a critical and productive collective capable of refashioning its own ideology and practice. Unlike Habermas, Rawls, and Benhabib, however, Benjamin appreciates the paradoxical nature of Marx's demand that we "educate the educator." For the orientation he endorses must itself be conditioned by diverse forms of somatic education that cannot be derived from basic principles or institutions. His practical proposals and experiments are undertaken without concealing these dynamic contingencies. By connecting his discussion of changing modes of subjectivity to forms of collective action as well as diverse media and technologies, Benjamin provides us with an exemplary political somatics. His work expands our sense of the constellation of forces at work in any political situation and of the necessity as well as the hazards of diverse levels of critique and action. As I mean to show in this work, these constellations are the proper objects of concern for political theory both past and present. Today we are witnessing increasingly open struggles at the convergence of bodies, technology, and politics. The precise stakes of these struggles have yet to be determined, but they can only be very high. Rather than providing us with a clear trajectory, attention to political somatics holds out the promise of a better sense of the terrain. It highlights the scale at which politics becomes a matter both of collective and intimate experience, that intersection of multiple levels of determination in embodied subjects with habits, desires, limits, and capacities, subjects that are neither the sovereign authors nor the blind instruments of their material, psychic, and sensuous life.

I

Thinking about the Body Affect and Habit in the Ethics ofAugustine, Nietzsche, and Derrida

We

can begin to clarify the stakes involved in theorizing an embodied subject by examining the role of the body in the ethical writings of Augustine and Nietzsche. Their juxtaposition is u~eful in this regard, as both authors stress the plurality of the self as a problem for the will and demonstrate the value of the body as a site of ethics. By attending to the complexity of Nietzsche and Augustine's relationship at these levels, we may gain from their difference. In particular, our focus will be on corporeal practices and techniques that supplement ethical imperatives in the organization of a self that exceeds conscious intention. By tracing the coincidence and divergence of each author's conception of and response to the plural, corporeal self, we also gain a vocabulary with which to approach other discourses. An initial move in this direction is pursued with regard to recent discussions of ethics in the work of Derrida, where the place of the body remains a locus of significant contestation. I argue that a certain inattention to the body provokes much of the dismissal of his work and the poststructuralist tradition with which he is associated.

Augustine's Divided Will Augustine presents the problem of a plural, corporeal self in terms of the divided will, the caprices of which he traces to its severance from divine 22

Thinking about the Body

23

guidance. Before the Fall, if only for the briefest moment, the body was the harmonious instrument of a single will, united with that of God. Augustine insists on this pure voluntarism, which is also complete subjection and obedience, in his wonderfully detailed account of life in Eden. On Augustine's reading of the Genesis myth, the first sign of man's fall and the first effect of his punishment for transgression was the uncontrollable arousal of the genitalia-hence the fig leaves and retreat from God's sight. Prior to the Fall, Augustine asserts, Adam's members all obeyed his pure (spiritual) will and he was not subject to any countermanding desire. 1 From the moment that Adam partook of the forbidden fruit, however, a gulf opened between the two wills: the one divine, the other corrupt. Augustine's account of this transition is crucial for the theology he sought to promote. 2 Serious and perhaps insurmountable problems arose from the need to assign Adam's transgression to one side of the rupture. Augustine takes the position that when he sinned, Adam possessed a wholly spiritual will at one with God's. To prevent responsibility for original sin from contaminating a God imagined as both omnipotent and benevolent thus became a task that would pursue Augustine to the limits of his rhetorical talents. As a Manichean, Augustine once advocated a Gnostic dualism that attributed the existence of sin to a substance opposed to God. Rejecting the notion of substantive evil as a blasphemy against God's omnipotence, he later noted that "the refutation of heresies causes what your Church thinks, and what sound doctrine holds, to stand out." 3 In his effort to ward off Manichean dualism, Augustine reduces all inclinations of the body and mind to problems of the will. When Adam's organs rescinded their membership, this did not signal the presence of different, conflicting natures within him, as the Manicheans would have it, but rather the perverse play of a will that had no guidance. Linked to this assertion is a dualistic rhetoric not of mind and body but of a "divided" will. "Whence comes this monstrous state? ... Mind commands body and it obeys forthwith. Mind gives 1 In fact, Augustine argues that when Adam was in full control, in principle it must have been possible for him and Eve to procreate without breaking the hymen, a possibility he deduced from the outlet that must exist for the menstrual flow. See Saint Augustine, City ofGod (New York: Doubleday, 1958), bk. 14, chap. 26. 2 For a closer reading of Augustine on the Adamic myth, see William S. Babcock, '~ugus­ tine on Sin and Moral Agency," in The Ethics ofSaint Augustine, ed. WilliamS. Babcock (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 100-ror. 3 Saint Augustine, Confessions (New York: Doubleday, 1960), bk. 7, chap. 19.

24

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

orders to itself, and it is resisted." 4 Clearly this formulation is vulnerable on a number of points. It may appear belied, for example, by the story of Adam's arousal, where his member appears to have a will of its own. Desire, it would seem to many, is not strictly a problem of bad intentions. Granting the body a distinct ontological status, however, is intolerable for Augustine lest it appear that in speaking of "the two wills" he merely shifts his dualism onto another plane-an accusation made against him by the Palagians. We should understand the dismembering of the subject not as a proliferation of forces, Augustine insists, but rather in terms of the imperfection of commands. "[The mind] does not will it in its entirety: for this reason it does not give this command in its entirety." 5 Desire or sin, in the Augustinian view, indicate neither force nor substance but a lack at the heart of the self With this interpretation he holds at bay a multiplicity that otherwise threatens to overwhelm not only a univocal Being but also, as he argues, the minimal concession to difference characteristic of dualism; for "if there are as many contrary natures as there are conflicting wills, there will now be not only two natures but many of them. " 6 As children of Adam, we are torn by a host of conflicting dispositions and inclinations. Augustine interprets this condition as an-archic, as a lack which is also a unity at the heart of the subject, the ambivalence of "a single soul [which] wavers between different wills. " 7 In this way he answers the blasphemies of ontological pluralism. However, the ethical dilemma persists; although we are powerless to become moral without divine intervention, we bear the full responsibilit~r for our immorality. Rather than simply resigning himself to this paradoxical condition, Augustine documents in his Confessions a struggle to attain to grace and thus participate in the healing of his cleft will. It is to the movements of his negotiation of paradox that we now turn. In this movement the aporetic relation of law and practice shifts from its location in an absolute structural inhibition to appear in a series of finite, practical intransigences. To will completely for Augustine is to will in accordance with the rigors of a strict moral order. The ethical task he confronts is thus to surrender 4

5 6

7

Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 9· Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 10.

Thinking about the Body

25

his imperfect, complex agency to an absolute, univocal authority: "Who am I, and what am I? Is there any evil that is not found in my acts, or if not in my acts, in my words, or if not in my words, in my will? ... This was the sum of it, not to will what I willed and to will what you willed." 8 Creating the intimacy requisite for a compelling model, Augustine begins the Confessions with a vivid account of his own struggles with a promiscuous will. As a young man he had been content to pursue his wayward inclinations, but in the course of his conversion he came to experience his aeolian desire as a torment against which he petitions a submission to divine guidance. Nonetheless, despite his convictions, he found himself unable to abstain from sins of word, act, and will. It was not enough to know the way he sought. His old tendencies continued to find insidious, maddening ways to perpetuate themselves. In the course of seeking out the cause of this resistance, he explains, he encountered the recalcitrant stumbling block of habit. "For in truth lust is made of a perverse will, and when lust is served, it becomes habit, and when habit is not resisted it becomes necessity. " 9

Augustine on Habit: From Metaphysics to Ethical Practice Habit is the force that chains a dog to his vomit. -Samuel Beckett Habit serves a complex function for Augustine. On the one hand, it signifies the deeply entrenched character of human desire, its resistance to moral commands. Its power makes of sin not a single moment but a tendency and even a "necessity." At the same time, habit returns the apparent necessity of desire to its basis in an act of will. "It is the resisting force of habit," Augustine observes, "that has led 'some foolish persons' to suppose that there is another, evil soul in human beings which compels us into sin." 10 For Augustine, we have noted, desire, or the body, is only corrupt Ibid., bk. 9, chap. r. Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 5· 10 Babcock, "Augustine on Sin," 98.

8 9

26

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

insofar as it is invested bad judgments. Habit is the persistence of such judgments, the echo of perverse willing over time in sublimated form. In the broadest sense, habit (consuetudo) is the medium of sin itself, the mode by which the first act is carried by future generations, confounding their conscious will. For Augustine, as for Aristotle, habit is a "second" nature. 11 By interpreting the divided will by way of habit, Augustine avoids the Manichean conclusion that the body is itself evil. It is not the body itself that is sinful but man's misbegotten fascination with corporeality and earthly contingencies. Anyone, then, who extols the nature of the soul as the highest good and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil is as carnal in his love for the soul as he is in his hatred for the flesh, because his thoughts flow from human vanity and not from divine Truth. However, unlike the Manicheans, Platonists are not so senseless as to despise earthly bodies as though their nature derived from an earthly principle. The Platonists attribute to God, the Maker, all elements together with their qualities that make up this visible and tangible universe. Nevertheless, they think that our souls are so influenced by "the earthly limbs and mortal members" of our bodies that from these arise the diseases of ... the passions which comprehend the whole defectiveness of human behavior.... We conclude, therefore, from their own admission that it is not only because of the flesh that the soul is moved ... but that ii: can also be agitated by these same emotions welling up within the soul itself. ... Man's will, then, is all-important. 12 Habit, to paraphrase Beckett, is the chain that holds man to his finite senses. According to James Wetzel, habit for Augustine ultimately signifies the burden of time itself To join God and be liberated from habit is thus to be liberated not only from desire but from finitude, or, as he puts it, "only error has a history." 13 11 According to John G. Prendiville, "The Development of the Idea of Habit in Saint Augustine," Traditio 28 (November 1972), "consuetudo secunda natura is a saying of the ancient world, traceable from Aristotle, through Cicero to Macrobius, Basil, and Augustine" (76-77 ). 12 Saint Augustine, City of God, bk. 14, chap. 5· 13 James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 137.

Thinking about the Body

27

Augustine describes habit as a "misplaced love" that persuades men to seek "partial truth, and to neglect Truth itsel£" 14 This is not enough, of course, to resolve the ethical dilemma stated earlier. On the contrary, Augustine has a very hard time distinguishing his love of the soul from a "carnal'' love: "It remains for us to consider the qualities of the divine nature; and on this subject nothing is more difficult than to divert the eye of the mind from following the habit of bodily sight." 15 On one level, habit simply reinforces Augustine's insistence on the will as the origin of evil. However, by acting as a middle term between the corrupt will and the innocent body in Augustine's text, habit also works to ameliorate the fate of original sin. As the initial quote suggests, habit can be a locus of "resistance." 16 An example of the complexities involved in cultivating habits can be found in Augustine's praise for the maidservant who raised his mother, Monica. In order to train her wards to resist drunkenness, she deprived them of water for long periods of time. "She thus forestalled a bad habit, and she added these words: 'You drink water now because you cannot get at the wine. When you come to be married, and are made mistresses of storerooms and cellars, water will be distasteful to you, but the habit of drinking will persist."' Not surprisingly, this exercise did not prevent Monica from acquiring a taste for wine in later years. However, Augustine describes the later sin as itself the result of an incremental habituation, traceable to a failure to resist "a sort of excess of those youthful spirits which blow off in absurd actions and which parental firmness usually suppresses in our childhood years. Thus, by adding to that daily little bit each day another little bit-for 'he who contemns small things falls by little and little'-she had fallen into the habit of greedily drinking her little cups almost full up with wine." 17 The Augustine of the Conftssions treats habit as a field of ongoing ethical struggle. A liminal realm where human virtue moves from the impossible to the arduous, its deeply problematic character is evinced in the 14 See Prendiville, "Development of the Idea of Habit," 45· Wetzel attributes Augustine's ethics to a stoic interpretation of Platonic philosophy whereby wisdom is attained by a transcendence of the changing world and an embrace of the "incorporeal God" ( r I). 15 Quoted in Prendiville, "Development of the Idea of Habit," 49· 16 Saint Augustine, City of God, bk. 9, chap. 8. 17 Ibid.

28

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

vacillations of the language that treats it. Indeed, some of the most eloquent and entertaining passages deal with the power of those habits (virtually) irresistible since the original foible. My lovers of old, trifles of trifles and vanities of vanities, held me back. They plucked at my fleshly garment and they whispered softly: "Do you cast us off?" and "From that moment we shall no more be with you forever and ever!" and again, "From that moment no longer will this and that be allowed to you forever and ever!" What did they suggest by what I have called "this thing and that," what, 0 my God, did they suggest? May your mercy turn away all that from your servant's soul! What filth did they suggest! ... But now by far less than half did I hear them .... Yet they did delay me, for I hesitated to tear myself away and shake myself free of them, and leap over to that place where I was called to be. For an overpowering habit kept saying to me, "Do you think that you can live without them?" But now it asked this in a very feeble voice. 18 Bearing his garment of flesh, Augustine understood that an ethics which posits a life without sin as an end in itself is an impossible vanity. 19 Ethical commands are in and of themselves insufficient to produce a moral subject where the will is divided. This much is the basis for Augustine's critique of the Pelagians, against whom he asserts the necessity of grace for salvation of the will. 20 Grace, however, cannot provide for human ethics. Here on earth supplementary practices are required to support moral injunctions. What is crucial here is that these practices are understood to be both limited and enabled by the ambiguous register of habit. Implied in Augustine's discussion of habit is a limited, imperfect access to the will by way of the body, a sort of mediation of the divided self. In tracing the development of Augustine's treatment of habit, John Prendiville documents an increasing emphasis on the personal character of ethical struggle over the Saint Augustine, Confessions, bk. 8, chap. I I. Compare this Manichean prayer cited by Prendiville: "The vain garment of the flesh I put off, safe and pure; I cased the clean feet of my soul to trample confidently upon it" ("Development of theldea of Habit," 44). 2 For a discussion of their differences, see Peter Brown, The Body and Socie(y (New York: Columbia University Press, I988), chap. '9· 18

19

°

Thinking about the Body

29

terrain of habit (despite a continuing insistence on grace as the basis of salvation). He cites passages suggesting that habits might be cultivated against other habits: The drunkard has been baptized; all his past sins of drunkenness have been forgiven him; but his enemy, the habit, remains. The desire for drink then rises up, solicits the mind, brings dryness to the throat, sets an ambush for the senses, wishes even, [if] it were possible, to penetrate the wall itself, to come at him who is shut in there, to draw him away captive. It fights. Then fight back. 0, if only it did not exist. If it has grown because of a bad habit, then it will die because of a good one .... If you do not consent to it, and are never intoxicated, it will become less and less every day. For your subjection is its strength .... You have not toiled to nourish your adversary; toil to conquer him. And if you have not strength against him, pray to God. 21 Whereas Prendiville elaborates a variety of ethical techniques endorsed by Augustine to supplement grace, I focus on Augustine's most extended engagement with his own habits, namely, confession itself. Augustine's elaboration of confession can be read as a study in the ethical exploitation of the dynamics of the body. By turning to confession Augustine sought not to turn away from but to exhaustively expose man's voluptuous, transgressive nature to the gaze of moral judgment. "For in your sight I have become a riddle to myself, and that is my infirmity." 22 Through an exposition of his confessional strategy, Augustine was able to turn riddle and infirmity into an incitement to religious piety. Confession is the flesh become word, a kind of inversion of the Creation. Reading Augustine's account, one is first struck by the terrific difficulty involved, demanding as it does the conscious avowal of even the most minute sensuous motives in a self riddled with enjoyment. The paradoxical character of habit is such that what is most familiar requires the least attention and is most difficult to recover. To invert this logic was the challenge art21 Prendiville, "Development of the Idea of Habit," 83; elsewhere he states that "the strength of the consuetudo wrporum is so strong that it must he fought with an equally strong habit in the opposite direction" (48). 22 Saint Augustine, Conftssions, bk. ro, chap. 33·

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fully met by Augustine: "Lord, I truly labor at this task, and I labor upon myself. I have become for myself a soil hard to work and demanding much sweat.... It is no matter for wonder that what I am not is far distant from me; but what is closer to me than I myself?" 23 Throughout the Confessions Augustine vividly recounts both his intense attachment to the pleasures of his senses and the obscurity of their logic. One of many such difficulties he encounters after his conversion is a tendency to feel sensual pleasure when listening to Christian music and singing. Although he would like to divorce concupiscence from his appreciation of God's messages in musical form, he finds that "this sensual pleasure, to which the soul must not be delivered ... often leads me astray. . . . Thus in such things I unconsciously sin but later I am conscious of it ... and at such times I would prefer not to listen to a singer." 24 Such difficulties are commonplace in the Confessions and attend even the most basic function of eating and drinking, where sustenance and enjoyment commingle blasphemously. Augustine's body is for him a lost instrument whose proximity he nonetheless cannot shed, and he suffers under this paradox. His attempts to articulate his desire are repeatedly thwarted by the immersion of the will in the body or, in his terms, the preoccupation of his soul with the senses. Even his own rhetoric conveys this dogged catachresis: "No doubt, therefore, memory is the mind's stomach, as it were, and joy and sadness are like sweet and bitter food. When they are committed to memory, they are as it were passed into the stomach and they can be stored away there, but they cannot be tasted." 25 Memory, the terrain of confession, harbors both cognitive and somatic registers. Confession does not rid the soul of desire but exposes it, a task which requires eternal vigilance, frustrated even where the self is presumably close at hand. Its labor, furthermore, is self-perpetuating, both goaded Ibid., bk. ro, chap. r6. Ibid., bk. ro, chap. 33; emphasis added. One can observe similar difficulties when Augustine expresses concern over the tendency to yield to our desires in dreams (bk. ro, chap. 30), or when he attempts to distinguish pleasure from necessity with regard to food and drink: "Often it becomes a matter of doubt whether it is the care needed by the body that seeks help or a deceitful desire for pleasure that demands service" (bk. ro, chap. 31 ). 25 Ibid., bk. ro, chap. 14. In his reading of memory, Augustine also describes the power of sensation being distributed to different organs and "purposes" (see book ro, "Power of Sensation"). 23 24

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and resisted by the conflation of language and sensuous experience. The words of confession, unlike those of the Creation, are decidedly corporeal. 26 Thus, in seeking to bring forth the bile of the self that it might be exorcised, confession can only amplify itself since the contempt and disgust for the flesh which provoke it are only multiplied by introspection. 27 This difficulty is most evident in the seductive rhetoric of the text itself. As we saw in the case of music, Augustine's depiction of conversion as incorporation or inscription oflanguage on the body is problematized by the affective resonance of words, which carry not only thought but the agonies and ecstasies of the flesh. Augustine is everywhere at pains to distinguish corporeal delight from the operations by which he instills faith in himself "What, therefore, do I love when I love my God? ... By my soul itself will I ascend to him. I will pass beyond that power of mine by which I adhere to the body and fill my body's frame with life. Not by that power do I find my God." 28 Yet the rhetoric Augustine employs to describe his conversion often belies such a simple antagonism. His progressive subjection to God's will, purportedly a flight from the sensuous body, is characterized in voluptuous, even erotic, terms: "You have sent forth fragrance, and I have drawn in my breath, and I pant after you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace. " 29 Conversely, despite his assertion that sin is a lack in the will, he invests it with rich associations that evoke not exhaustion but repulsion toward "lust's itchy sore." No fool, Augustine is aware of the precariousness of his metaphors. He insists that the ecstasies of the soul are beyond comparison with those of the flesh. 30 When confronted, he inevitably retreats to the fundamental mysterious26 A discussion of the incorporeality of the word of God, the vehicle of His will, can be found in Cor~;fessions, bk. II, chaps. 5-7. 27 Ibid., bk. 9, chap. 4· Augustine imagines that if only other sinners could have witnessed the regret he expressed after converting, they might, while reflecting on their own sin, "have been troubled and vomited it all forth." 28 Ibid., bk. ro, chap. 7· 29 Ibid., bk. ro, chap. 27. 30 In another passage his ambivalent remarks on habit are met with further qualifications: "But now it asked this in a very feeble voice. For from that way in which I had set my face and where I troubled to pass, there appeared to me the chaste dignity of continence, serene and joyous, but in no wanton fashion, virtuously alluring, so that I would come to here and hesitate no longer" (bk. 8, chap. II).

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ness of the divine. Still, the tension in his formulations is palpable. Augustine is committed to formulating human morality in terms of an imposition of spirit upon the wayward flesh: "Your love pierced our heart like an arrow, and we bore within us your words, transfixing our innermost parts." 31 Nevertheless, the purportedly spiritual vessel of God's word appears intensely cathected in his text, confirming the persistent conflation of will and desire. Ethics for Augustine demands arduous work on the body. This should not be all that surprising, for we learned from the beginning that moral commandments alone are insufficient to render a moral subject from the hard soil of a child of Adam. From this perspective, Augustine's supplements to moral imperatives-the rhetorical incitement of disgust with the body and desire for God-can be seen as necessary evils for one who promotes a relentless subjection to a moral authority. It is necessary, as his text demonstrates, for the supposedly anarchic resources of immorality to be cultivated and exploited to ensure adherence to moral laws. 32 The power of Augustine's confessional technique lies in its ability to marshal these resources to enhance the abjection before God he promotes so effectively. What makes his text exemplary is that precisely those devices which make it such an authoritative call to moral subjection poignantly highlight the tensions involved in such a project. While confession thus manifests Augustine's success in harnessing ascetic practices to spiritual paradox, it remains haunted by its implication in a paradoxical mobilization of affect in the service of a spiritual will. What Augustine makes explicit in his voluptuous rhetoric is that the enunciation of sin, its linguistic expulsion, is simultaneously its return at the level of physical experience. 33 For the body is neither exhausted nor expelled by its articulation but turned back upon itself. Words that celebrate purity and castigate evil draw on other corrupt resources that can only be attacked Ibid., bk. 9, chap. 2. The same problem applies to Pascal's wager. Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, contra Elster, that "to move from the decision to believe, which reason can induce, to a durable belief that can withstand the intermittences of consciousness and will, one has to invoke other powers than those of reason." The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 48. 33 Freud's "Talking Cure," as described in his early "Studies on Hysteria," also demands that patients not only narrate but relive their past experiences as they described them. 31

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with yet another set of weapons. Thus, confession, in its attempt to expose what escapes conscious experience, constantly runs up against its own limits. Indeed, these limits become yet another imperfection to be confessed; a vicious circular logic driven by the paradoxes of a divided will. Through the practice of confession, the excess of desire over command is to be brought under a habit that unites desire and obedience in a self-making between freedom and subjection. Confession thus appears as a kind of involution of habit, whereby desire is set against itself. The genius of Augustine's text is that the ambiguity of this very process, witnessed by the compromising language of the Confessions, becomes a renewable ascetic resource. Indeed, it remains one of the most effective techniques ever formulated, evinced by its persistence in both religious and secular therapeutic practice.

Nietzsche: The Corporeal Will However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. -Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak As we can begin to glimpse in this epigraph, Nietzsche's account of a plural self bears a complex relation to that of Augustine. On the one hand, his depiction of the self as a bundle of drives defies Augustine's monotheological reduction of that plurality to a play of the Same and its lack. Nietzsche abides by Augustine's suggestion that dualism is an impoverished model of the capricious play of the will, which for him does indeed indicate a plurality of forces ("our organism is an oligarchy"). 34 His ontological pluralism can even be witnessed on a cosmological level in his affinity for the polytheism of the Greeks. However, while Nietzsche gives ontological value to the workings Augustine figured as a lack, both emphasize the subject's general ignorance of its own condition: 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), second essay, sec. 1.

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Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and, in the strictest sense, positive faculty of repression that is responsible for the fact that what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it (one might call the process "inpsychation") as does the thousandfold process involved in physical nourishment -so-called "incorporation. " 35 Reading Nietzsche alongside Augustine, it quickly becomes apparent that whatever their antagonisms, they share a common tropological bias. When describing the complexities of the self, each evokes a body invested with numerous, often intransigent, directions operating below the threshold of the intellect. Nietzsche clearly provides the metaphorical body he constructs with a rather different weight than does Augustine. Whereas Augustine brackets the sensuality of his rhetoric in a hierarchical opposition to the spirit, Nietzsche gives the corporeal a more thorough endorsement: "The body is a great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call 'spirit'-a little instrument and toy of your great reason. " 36 All the conflicts Augustine attributed to the division of the will are figured as internal to a morass of overlapping corporeal forces. "What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us ... and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides.'m Morality is not something which impinges upon the disorder of drives from the outside; rather, it can only be another arrangement of those forces, for there is nothing else, no "outside" to what Nietzsche calls the body: "In the tremendous multiplicity of events within an organism, the part which becomes conscious to us is a mere means.'' 38 Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, I 966 ), pt. I, sec. 4· 37 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R.]. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), bk. 2, no. 109. As this quote indicates, Nietzsche assigns consciousness to the weak, "reactive" side of competing forces. For an authoritative explanation of these terms, see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 38 Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, I968), no. 674. 35

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The ascetic ideal that Augustine espouses, though it may pretend to an incorporeal realm, is itself propelled by the excitement of various affects. My conclusions above merely echo Nietzsche's pronouncements in this regard-and rather crudely by contrast.

Dynamics of Habit and Affect Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature. -Blaise Pascal, Pensees Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this. -Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science It is very important to understand what is meant here by "affect" and the "body." It is not enough if we take Nietzsche to argue that our moral categories are simply metaphors for biological drives. These forces themselves only appear as metaphors that cannot be presumed to reflect an underlying structure: Anger, hatred, love, pity, desire, knowledge, joy, pain-all are names for extreme states: the milder, middle degrees, not to speak of the lower degrees which are continually at play, elude us, and yet it is they which weave the web of our character and our destiny. These extreme outbursts-and even the most moderate conscious pleasure or displeasure, while eating food or hearing a note, is perhaps, rightly understood, an extreme outburst-very often rend the web apart, and then they constitute violent exceptions, no doubt usually consequent on built-up congestions:-and as such, how easy it is for them to mislead the observerP 9 39 Daybreak, no. Irs; emphasis added. C£ the following: "Pleasure and pain are very rare and scarce appearances compared with the countless stimuli that a cell or organ exercises upon another cell or organ" (Will to Power, no. 676).

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In his language of drives, Nietzsche goes beyond a metaphorics of the body to corporealize metaphor. To simply attribute moral agency to discrete, recognizable sensuous inclinations, he argues, is to project the categories of the intellect onto the body and thus misrecognize a complex causality that exceeds stable principles. Affects for Nietzsche do not indicate an underlying substance of which they are the simple expression. They are "hints," as he puts it, from the interactions of forces inaccessible to consciousness.40 Yet for Nietzsche the body signifies not only play or excess but organization. Behind what appears constant or stable are a host of mediating processes which exceed yet also structure and enable the taxonomies of the intellect. This is most explicit in his posthumously published "On Truth and Lies," where he describes perception as a series of metaphors. Not only consciousness but experience in all its forms involves "lying," that is, metaphor or condensation:+ I Reasoning or representation is thus not opposed to but entwined with and dependent upon the parallel function of a complex somatic organization: "This same compulsion exists in the sense activities that support reason-by simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and elaborating, upon which all "recognition," all ability to make oneself intelligible rests." 42 Furthermore, these different registers interpenetrate; the habits of one register influence those of another.43 Nietzsche thus describes the body as a set of overlapping forces out of which emerges a highly conditioned regularity, or what Deleuze 40 See Will to Power, no. 524. Samuel Butler defined the self as "a nebulous and indefinable aggregation of components and parts which war not a little among themselves-this clash is the source of our awareness of our existence." Life and Habit (London: Triibner, '878), n 41 :-.lietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (London: Humanities Press International, 1979), 79-100. 4 2 Nietzsche, Will to Power, no. 521. 43 See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), no. 193, on the influence of waking experience by dreaming habits. Nietzsche is not consistent in his depiction of these interactions, which at times appear rather mechanical but at others seem quite fluid. One can easily come up with examples of different connections. When trying to remember a name or a line of thought, we resort to looking up or down or perhaps to the side. Sometimes this is not enough; we might need to distract ourselves from "trying" to recollect altogether, say, by getting up and drinking some water or exercising, taking a nap, showering, etc. One or another of these activities may become a familiar technique, a habitual way of activating other habits, and so on.

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terms a "unity of domination." 44 One can picture a sort of quivering coherence, a form within which multiple directions are contained in a kind of centrifugal resonance. Stable compositions signify not equilibrium but tension and inequality among different quanta. This is the ontological valence of the "will to power," indicating not simply a psychology but something tantamount to a biological principle. "The will to power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos." 45 In his polemics on the smallness and lateness of consciousness, Nietzsche anticipates the conclusions of both psychoanalysis and contemporary neuroscience. As Freud argued and recent experiments suggest, the priority of consciousness in a complex process of organization performed on various internal and external stimuli is only posited retroactively. Freud describes preconscious perceptual and cognitive organization in terms of the "primary defense" exercised by the pleasure principle. 46 In turn, recent experiments have attempted to quantify this retroactive temporality. 47 By locating thinking and agency in the body, Nietzsche not only anticipates later findings but follows a longstanding tradition. Lucretius, for example, identified free will with the linking of different parts of an organism by way of the clinamen. Interestingly, he finds this process indicated by the gap

44 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 40. Following Deleuze, Brian Massumi describes the play of the "virtual" in the actual, the reality of which, he claims, has been borne out by recent experiments in cognitive science. Thus, the relation of the virtual to the actual is one of excess, but not necessarily resistance. Rather, the virtual conditions as well as potentiallY destabilizes the actual. See his article "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique 31 (fall 1995): 83-109. 45 Nietzsche, Will to Power, no. 635. 46 Lacan has explained that consciousness is subtended by a "primary defense," that is, by the unconscious organization of perception by the pleasure principle. Furthermore, he has claimed that secondary processes of testing and adjusting responses are also preconscious. Indeed, "all thought by its very nature occurs according to unconscious means." Jacques Lacan, "Pleasure and Reality," in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, I9S9-I96o, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 31, 32. 47 For some recent physiological accounts of the priority of unconscious processing, see Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (New York: Touchstone, 1996). He describes the interaction of internal and external stimuli, as well as motor and perceptual processes, in the region of the brain know as the amygdala (see esp. chap. 6). He also confirms the primarily censoring role of consciousness with regard to the will (1 57- 58). See also Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion (New York: Viking, 1998), esp. chap. 9 on retroactive narrativity and the "backward time-referral" in the "half-second delay."

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between will and action, now measured at around half a second, for an example of which he cites the initial bracing of racehorses prior to their bolting from the gate. 48 Samuel Butler may have been most articulate and vehement on this point. He also associates thinking with interrupted motion, citing an experiment involving a lesion on a frog's brain. Not only will the frog's body react to a burn by scratching the affected area with its leg, " 'but if that foot be cut off, after some ineffectual efforts and a short period of inaction,' during which it is hard not to surmise that the headless body is considering what it had better do under the circumstances, 'the same movement will be made by the foot of the opposite side.' " 49 Finally, it should be noted that Nietzsche's ontological pluralism by no means ends at the skin but extends to larger categories of organization. "The concepts 'individual' and 'species' equally false and merely apparent. 'Species' expresses only the fact that an abundance of similar creatures appear at the same time and that the tempo of their further growth and change is for a long time slowed down, so actual small continuations and increases are not very much noticed." 50 Appearance is thus a misrecognition, but one based on permutations of resemblance, tempo, and duration. What are the thresholds at which differences congeal into identities? To also imagine these as variable and contingent, at once beyond and within us-this is the challenge Nietzsche's ontology poses for any project of knowledge or mastery.

Working on Habits and Affects It follows from the above that moral categories are themselves bound up with complex somatic preconditions. In the Genealogy ofMorals Nietzsche traces the "breeding" of a moral animal through a long history of somatic conditioning. The regularity of cause and affict, he argues, is the result of John Gaskin, ed., The Epicurean Philosophers (London: Everyman, 1995), 127. Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: Trtibner, r878), r 14. This delay is also taken by George Herbert Mead to indicate the "thinking" that mediates reaction or imitation. See Ruth Leys, "Mead's Voices: Imitation as Foundation; or, the Struggle against Mimesis," Critical Inquiry 19 (winter 1993): 296. 50 Nietzsche, Will to Power, no. 521. 48 49

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a long habituation. 5 1 Yet habit is already operant in affect. 52 Or, to put it another way, affects are organized by I into habits throughout the body at a variety oflevels. "Judgments," he writes, already inhere in "pleasure" and "displeasure." 53 Bodies, for Nietzsche as for Augustine, are not generic measures of the world; rather, they carry with them a history of past experiences and judgments. His position might instead be compared to that of Marcel Mauss. As the anthropologist Talal Asad explains, Whatever may be the intellectual appeal of a phenomenology of the body, it seems to me that Mauss's approach also runs counter to the assumption of primordial bodily experiences. It encourages us to think of such experience not as an autogenetic impulse but as a mutually constituting relationship between body sense and body learning. His position fits well with what we know even of something as basic and universal as physical pain, for anthropological as well as psychological research reveals that the perception of pain threshold varies considerably according to traditions of body training-and also according to the pain history of individual bodies. 54 To understand Nietzsche's interpretation of morality, then, it is not enough to supplement moral imperatives with a disciplinary regimen. Training is not equivalent to mastery, as Augustine well knew. Religious interpretations of the world, Nietzsche argues, involve not only inventing but thematizing, appropriation, and even "guessing": The distinctive invention of the founders of religions is, first: to posit a particular kind of life and everyday customs that have the effect of a disciplina voluntatis ... and then: to bestow on this lifestyle an interpretation that makes it appear to be illuminated by the highest value.... Actually, the second of these two inventions is more essential. The first, the way of life, was usually there before, but alongside other ways of life See Will to Power, no. 670, "The Belief in Affects." This is an insight that I refer to later in my discussion of Carl Schmitt. 53 Nietzsche, Will to Power, no. 670. 54 Tala! Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), n; emphasis added. 51

52

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and without any sense of its special value. The significance and originality of the founder of religion usually consists of his seeing it, selecting it, and guessing for the first time to what use it can be put, how it can be interpreted. 55 "Interpretation," in these terms, is neither a creation ex nihilo nor an arbitrary superimposition of meaning on indifferent nature. Rather, it appropriates and redirects existing patterns of organization, facilitated by a kind of resonance of new terms with existing customs. 56 Nietzsche's genealogical method, as Foucault has argued, serves to illustrate the similarly fortuitous character of normative "interpretations" of contingent and diverse formations rather than reproduce an actual sequence of historical events. 57 The conception of the founder as a virtuosic guesserwhich can be traced to Oedipus and makes an appearance in Rousseau's great legislator-is also explored below in the discussion of Carl Schmitt's sovereign "decision." While he traces the origin oflegislation to discipline and training, Nietzsche describes a body that is itself regulative, legislative, judgmental, and yet fundamentally dynamic. By implication, one cannot intervene in the causes of ideas without altering complex, interactive processes. Corporeal self-making does not begin ex nihilo but is always conditioned by the shape and history of its medium. How does this dynamic conception of the body shape Nietzsche's own ethics? Nietzsche's rejection of the will as autonomous agency fundamentally alters the tone of ethical thinking and is often taken by those who would equate ethics with self-knowledge for a kind of anti-ethics. 58 One can, of course, find support for the latter assertion in selected passages: "Moral actions are in reality 'something other than that' -more we cannot say: and all actions are essentially unNietzsche, Gay Science, no. 353· One might draw an analogy to the phenomenon known as a "dwell-time fracture" -seen as the cause of several airline a~~idents-whereby a steel part cracks when it vibrates at a frequency that matches the patterned distribution of microscopic deposits created during its original manufacture. 57 See Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 58 This is Alasdair Macintyre's reason for choosing Aristotle over Nietzsche. See his book After Virtue (\!otre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 55

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known. " 59 However, as we saw with Augustine, the displacement of notions of will onto corporeal ground with a corresponding forfeiture of selfknowledge does not prevent interventions in the constitution of the sel£ Nietzsche does not do away with ethical impositions but changes the terms in which they are thought. More is gained from an appreciation of the way he shifts the terrain of ethical discourse than from accusations that he has left its hallowed ground in the legislating subject: It goes without saying that I do not deny-unless I am a fool-that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged-but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently-in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to foe! differently. 60 With Nietzsche, our discussion of ethics eschews the atmosphere of a moral high ground and we find ourselves mired in affect. If we present the difference between the ethical positions of Augustine and Nietzsche in terms of their affective disposition toward a largely consonant picture of the human condition, we might be tempted to call Nietzsche a philosopher of good digestion. Indeed, he at times calls himself a physician who wants to rid us of our dyspepsia, inherited from the likes of Augustine, for whom the riddles of the self are a torment to be disgorged before the eyes of God. 61 An extension of this analogy might seem obviated by the famous doctrine of the "eternal return." Like Augustine, Nietzsche encourages a sense of responsibility for the disorder of the self: "Nothing is more your own than your dreams! Nothing more your own work!" 62 The eternal return, however, is not a repetition of the Same (original sin) but the return of a world without univocal cause, an affirmation of the eternal return of the burden of creation. His ethics seeks not to reject but to embrace a self Nietzsche, Daybreak, bk. 2, no. I I6. Ibid., no. IOJ. 61 Augustinian confession, in its interminable iteration of passing desires, is perhaps the paradigmatic emblem of the man "'who cannot have done' with anything" (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, second essay, sec. I). 62 Nietzsche, Daybreak, bk. 2, sec. 128. 59

60

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which can only follow its own capricious orders and is always subject to the chance and necessity of the cast of the dice: "A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (his deeds and misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some tough morsels. " 63 Lest we get the impression that Nietzschean ethics simply consists of celebrating the play of the body's orders, we should recall that the thinker himself was far from being free of gastric distress, and the banner of eternal return was not always light. No advocate of complacency, he insisted on the necessity for work on and modification of the self-more Augustinian in this respect than might be indicated by the ontological discussion drawn from his earlier work. A change of feelings must not be read as an affirmation of pleasure or some other state as an end in itself but in terms of the active transformation of sensibilities, dispositions, and so forth, which, like all ethics, requires work on the body: "But up to now the moral law has been supposed to stand above our own likes and dislikes: one did not want actually to impose this law upon oneself, one wanted to take it from somewhere or discover it somewhere or have it commanded to one from somewhere."64 Nietzsche emphatically does not reject the notion of ethical striving, but instead changes the status of ethical laws. While he differs from Augustine insofar as ethics is conceived in terms of a self-imposed order rather than one which issues from a higher authority, he shares with him an emphasis on both the limits of the will and the body as a site of ethical labor. Moreover, the tactics he employs, although given a different status and couched in terms not of a negation but of a change of affect, are very much like those of the saint: As I went on alone, I trembled; not long afterwards I was sick, more than sick, I was weary of the unending disappointment with everything we modern men have left to inspire us.... How was I going to be able to endure this greatest of privations?-I began by forbidding myself, totally and on principle, all romantic music, that ambiguous, inflated, oppressive art 63 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, third essay, sec. r6. In this passage Nietzsche confirms the physiological status of the indigestion he speaks of, but he also hints that "with such a conception, one can, between ourselves, still be the sternest opponent of all materialism." 64 Nietzsche, Daybreak, bk. 2, sec. ro8.

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that deprives the spirit of its severity and cheerfulness and lets rampant every kind of vague longing and greedy, spongy desire. 65 In the course of his work, Nietzsche moved beyond the relegation of the will to the status of one or another drive and spoke of his ethics in terms of the multiplication and control of perspectives. 66 He understood this notion-while not a search for an Archimedean point outside the play of forces-as being served by strategies indebted to Augustinian practices and even enabled by their historical precedence. 67 "The bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about that, but an illness as pregnancy is an illness. " 68 This is the ambiguous value of ascetic ideals, namely, that the same practices which supported a negation of the body will give birth to its profoundest affirmation: The three great slogans of the ascetic ideal are familiar: Poverty, humility, chastity. Now take a close look at the lives of all the great fruitful, inventive spirits: you will always encounter all three to a certain degree. Not, it goes without saying, as though these constituted their "virtues" ... but as the most appropriate and natural conditions of their best existence, their foirest fruitfulness. 69 Nietzsche, like Augustine, seeks to alter the constitution of the self by struggling with base desires, only for "other reasons than hitherto." A command of the forces of the self is sought not in order to escape them or subject them to a universal law but in the name of their selective affirmation to the end of aesthetic self-creation: "One thing is needful.- To 'give style' to one's character-a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who 65 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 21 r. 66 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, third essay, sec. r2. 67 See Nietzsche, Gay Science, no. 359· 68 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, second essay, sec. 19. 69 Ibid., third essay, sec. 8. The "reversal" of ends to which ascetic techniques are employed gives credence not to dialectical evolution, Nietzsche argues, but to the contingent value of the techniques themselves, which can be subjected to a series of directives that obey no particular logic: "The form is fluid, but the 'meaning' even more so" (second essay, sec. 12).

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survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye." 7 For some,7 1 all the talk of delighted self-affirmation-even if the product of extensive labor on the self-still smacks too much of the strong stomach, the healthy body of a pitiless overman, and this does not miss the point entirely: "And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut and cut through, how can you one day create with me?" 72 However, Nietzsche's call for hardness is by no means an endorsement of insensitivity; rather, it is a hardness which vitrifies. It is so that one can allow oneself pain and be able to tolerate even weakness and the fragility of self-creation that one must become hard. To affirm the self is to grant to affirming only an ephemeral, fragmentary existence. As we have seen, the body is itself composed of a diverse play and organization. As a work of art, self-creation is a labor whose materials are limited, conflicting, and vacillating. When we intervene, we alter mechanisms we do not fully understand: "One is much more of an artist than one knows. " 73 Nietzsche conditions the will so that it might bear the weight of responsibility for its own risk, since willing can only be a partial, uncertain affair in a universe without a single design to secure either its origin or its destination: "An experiment and hazard appeared to me to be in all commanding; and whenever the living commands, it hazards itsel( " 74 Rather than heroic, Nietzsche's view of agency might better be termed "tragic." Because it takes place in a universe governed by forces at once partaking in and beyond human control and understanding, human action in Greek tragedy, as J.P. Vernant argues, involves both reasoning and "wagering. " 75 Solitude, courage, and hardness all find their value in making possible what is most fragile. That Nietzsche's aestheticization of agency extends to the political realm has long been a simple accusation. However, we can glean from the

°

70 Nietzsche, Gay Science, no. 290. 71

For perhaps the strongest version of this critique, see Luce Irigaray, .Marine Lover of

Friedrich Nietzsche (1\iew York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 72 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On Old and New Tablets." 73 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and FiZ'il, no. 192. 74 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On Self-Overcoming." 75 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greae, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

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discussion above that the language of aesthetics should not evoke the unconstrained creative power of a master artist. There should be some sense, at this point, as to what sorts of obstacles stand in the way of an instrumentalist reading of Nietzsche on the will. Mark Warren has clarified the problem in a review of various treatments of Nietzsche's politics. 76 While Nietzsche often limits his discussion of politics to instrumental reasoning, Warren argues, this hardly represents the political implications of his language of aesthetics and self-creation as developed above. Some possibilities for such an extrapolation should already be evident. It could be argued-and Nietzsche sometimes suggests-that the same forbearance counseled for a multifarious self extends to alterity in general. Indeed, for Nietzsche the latter is crucial to the former. 77 More generally-and significant for the concerns of later chapters-the same dynamic relation of habits and moral interpretation found in a multiplicitous organism can be applied to the more general relation of macro political structures and the host of micro preferences, dispositions, beliefs, desires that they both presuppose and influence. Of course, this need not prescribe a particular appropriation of Nietzsche's writings for political projects. Recall that political "instrumentality" involves more guessing, interpreting, and thematizing than some readers allow. No less than Augustine, Nietzsche constructs an ethics that takes into account its own constraints. Whereas for Augustine those restraints are perpetually exposed to incite struggle against them, Nietzsche conditions magnanimity toward the limits of every will to power-even the will which 76 Mark Warren, "Political Readings of Nietzsche," Political Theory 26 (February 1998): 90-111. 77 See Daybreak, no. '37 ("why double your ego"), where Nietzsche recommends that one cultivate a distance from one's own experiences and not simply those "below." See also Beyond Good and E vii, where Nietzsche notes that a master I slave morality can inhere in a single soul (204). Pity, Nietzsche argues, is only tolerable among friends, who can maintain this distance (153, zo6). To give style to one's character is not to demand that it become the fashion for others. One makes oneself hard against resentment of what is other than the ego. Otherwise, a reactionary demand for "new idols," a substitute for divine order, can result. The state, with its absolute laws, interpreted by Nietzsche as such a formation, is sought by those who cannot tolerate their own imperfect commands. On this point it is also worthwhile to mention La can, who, like Nietzsche, interprets the violence of the ego's external aggressions as a deflection of hostility to internal difference. See his essays "The Mirror Stage" and "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977).

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affirms those limits-for "a little revenge is more human than no revenge."78 If we were tempted to sum up Nietzsche's ethical position (and must we not hazard an occasional assertion, even if we hear a voice against it?), we might call him a hypocritical essentialist, and this in two senses: first, because his language of forces is in tension with his critique of any attempt to represent essential causes; second, because this hypocrisy is itself inevitable and essential. Nietzsche thus defends the hypocritical decisions of an oligarchy against the clamor for autarchy. However, his work provides not only an affirmation of this condition but a survey of practices which sustain it. For the sake of clarity, we can divide Nietzsche's ethical strategies into two moments. Genealogy, as a theoretical practice, serves to move the site of ethical becoming to a domain anterior to the will by recovering the priority of the production of habits from a system of ethical commands.79 Having brought the discussion to this level, Nietzsche goes on to elaborate possible strategies for a revaluation of the will in terms of a perspectival affirmation which operates on the somatic register. 80 Nietzsche's discussion of the body can itself be placed on two related registers: it operates both as a critical ontology and relatedly as an ethical problematic. As a critical ontology, the body signifies a dynamic relation of play and aggregation. On the reading above, the Will to Power refers to the tendency to aggregation/repetition operating in a variety of connected levels, a multifarious process that was subsumed by the term habit. 81 What Nietzsche calls "affect," on the other hand, might be said to denote the plural, irreducible drives that comprise any organism and resist uniform expression in a coherent identity, the play within habit, or the diversity and possibility of any particular composition. Finitude-or "exhaustion," as Nietzsche also calls it-is as relentless as repetition. Adopting his language of affect and habit, we might imagine the human sensorium as the site of that impossible meeting of irresistible Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Adder's Bite." Nietzsche's genealogy performs this recovery of the "original" meaning of promising in terms of the infliction of pain and its effects on memory. 8 Foucault takes up this double strategy of a critical ontology and an ethic of experimentation in "What Is Enlightenment?" in Rabinow, ed., Foucault Reader, so. 81 Hegel, as we shall see, also describes this spontaneous organization operating in the natural and biological realm. 78 79

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force and immovable object. In light of this condition, Nietzsche first thematizes the complex set of habits which enable ethical perspectives and then specifies techniques of work on the body for an ethical orientation that affirms the multiple possibilities suggested by his ontology. Since Nietzsche's ethics affirms the fundamental hypocrisy of a self possessed of many wills, and since that affirmation is applied on the body, the practices by which it is accomplished are themselves diverse, ranging from the epic to the humble, local, and varied. 82 As he also makes clear, techniques of modulation must also pass through a variety of registers. Perhaps the starkest contrast that can be drawn with Augustine is Nietzsche's love of finitude: I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitterness.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred back doors through which I can escape from enduring habits. Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia. 83 Nietzsche's affirmation of brief habits should not be reduced to a simple principle of "moderation." Or, rather, it is a principle that cannot be accomplished without also destroying itself by becoming another enduring habit. Duration is not strictly avoidable, nor is its destruction the aim of ethical struggle. Rather than simply liberate the play of affect, Nietzsche seeks the multiplication of habits, of possible configurations of experience and action. To this end, he elaborates various techniques of modulation, particularly as they are applied to the body, as well as the conditional character of their effects. Indeed, as he argues, his principles can themselves been seen as one technique, whose effects are conditioned by this greater Sl Hence Nietzsche's concern with diet, climate, and so forth. The moral philosophy he engages has overlooked the "little" things (Ecce Homo, sec. 10). See also Daybreak, no. 149, "Little Deviant Acts." 83 Nietzsche, Gay Science, no. 295.

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reality. 84 In an article considering the relevance of Nietzsche's "brief habits" for contemporary culture, Peter Van Ness compares Nietzsche's formulations with those of Pascal, an Augustinian who was critical of the enduring habits inculcated by "generalized confession." 85 As such connections illustrate, Nietzsche and Augustine are entangled in a way that makes any attempt to decisively articulate their difference risky. In their struggles over a common body, these Siamese twins illustrate its importance as a site of the production of values. Taken together, they thematize the difficulty and importance of habit for any ethical becoming.

Derrida: Deconstructing the Body We are now (not entirely) in a position to undertake an assessment ofDerridean ethics. In particular, our concern is with the complex relationship it bears to Nietzsche, especially regarding the body. If we are less than acutely suspicious of drawing a comparison between Derrida's ontological language and Nietzsche's, we share that good faith with one whose own critical acuity is formidable, to say the least. Derrida explicitly ties his translation of "being as discourse," guided by the principle of differance, to Nietzsche's language of multiplicitous forces: "Thus, differance is the name we might give to the 'active,' moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces, that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science." 86 Derrida's own critique of metaphysics resonates on anumber oflevels with the opposition we have staked out between Nietzsche and Augustine. My presumption here is certainly not to elaborate the entirety of that still ongoing critique but to focus on several points that relate directly to the previous discussion of ethics. Of course, even this limited project requires at least some brief summary. 84 In chapter 2 I make the same case for Hegel's "theory" of right, which he connects directly with ethical "dispositions." How might this insight become the basis for a rethinking of political techniques? This is the subject of chapter 4 on Walter Benjamin. 85 Peter Van Ness, "Pascal on Habit," Philosophy Today 35 (winter 1991): 402-12. 86 Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in Margins ofPhilosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, rg8z), 18.

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Derrida's work sets itself off against the privilege granted by metaphysics to a series of central principles whose identity is summed up by their commitment to presence: "It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence-eidos, archi, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth." 87 Stated in linguistic terms, metaphysics is the privileging of a transcendental signifier which acts as an "absent center," simultaneously suturing and escaping the relational play of signification. The modern "rupture" of metaphysics-associated with the names Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger-with which Derrida aligns himself is characterized by a reincorporation of the center into the structured relation of a system of differences which simultaneously subverts its status as center and de-centers the structure in which it participates, thus giving license to the irreducible play of signification. We witnessed an analog of this earlier in Nietzsche's interpretation of spirit, will, or ego as another manifestation of the battle of drives rather than a force which opposed and structured them from the outside. Differance thus signifies what is effective but cannot be ontologized. Using the language of today's physics, we might describe differance, or the trace, as a gluon, "an unobserved, massless particle with spin," 88 a contemporary relative of the clinamen. However, in contrast to Nietzsche, Derrida repeatedly displaces even the language of "forces" or other terms with corporeal implications. We will examine the significance of this difference in some detail below. Derrida does a great deal to forestall any simple interpretation of this "rupture" of the metaphysics of presence. We should not be given to understand that we are through with presence or it through with us, any more than that presence ever was what it used to (pretend to) be. We can get a glimpse of the difficulties involved in light of our earlier discussion by connecting the latter to Derrida's discussion of Levi-Strauss's notion of "bricolage": R? Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play," in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences ofMan, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972 ), 249· 88 Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, rev. ed., s.v. "gluon."

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The Bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses "the means at hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their origins are heterogeneous-and so forth. 89 The work of the bricoleur is distinguished by Levi-Strauss from that of the "engineer," who constructs his discourse "'out of nothing,"' whose agency is unmediated by limiting conditions. The distinction is homologous to that between Augustine's and Nietzsche's characterization of the nature of ethical (specifically, ascetic) construction. Levi-Strauss's conclusions were the same as Nietzsche's, namely, that the notion of the engineer itself as well as all work undertaken in his name is itself the product of bricolage. That is, that agency itself is the complex product of materials having their own directing forces. 90 As Derrida notes, this revelation collapses the distinction between the engineer (metaphysician) and the bricoleur (ourselves) that it was supposed to illustrate. 91 What has happened to Derrida's departure from metaphysics, and how can we think in terms of metaphysics itself? At the end of the early essay cited above, he leaves us with several things: a nod to Nietzsche; an assertion of the irreducibility of (the impossibility of 'choosing' between) two "interpretations of interpretation" -now stated in terms of the history of a "dream" of full presence and an "affirmation" of free play-and a reference to a future "labor" from which many (himself included) avert their eyes, "as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity." 92 This conclusion, though it invokes Nietzsche on Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play," 255. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, "It is not the negative which is the motor. Rather, there are positive differential elements which determine the genesis of both the affirmation and the difference affirmed." Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 55· 91 Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play," 256. 92 Ibid., 265. 89 90

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several registers, sounds rather un-Nietzschean. It seems a kind of retreat from the monstrous oligarchism of a plurality of forces, a refusal of any endorsement of perspectives rather than their selective affirmation. Some have argued that Derrida's discourse effects a kind of passive nihilism in its rhetoric of differance. 93 Diffirance, after all, is the name of that nonprinciple which forecloses any attempt to discern a governing, central principle behind a play of presence and absence. Derrida's use of the term enacts by a metonymic chain of (un)equivalence the irreducible difference it would betray should it capture it in a coherent representationY 4 His language, it might seem, seeks to escape its own violence through self-effacement. Against this charge, Derrida has insisted that the impossibility of choosing between presence and free play is simultaneously the necessity of an interpretation which can "choose" neither since there can be neither full presence nor totally free play. 95 The materials of bricolage, neither designed to fit together into a prescribed whole nor plastic enough to allow unlimited creativity, are the only means at our disposal. The "dream" of presence in the above quotation should be taken not as naive faith but along the lines of Wittgenstein's "dream of our language" as fundamentally ingrained in our experience, which is conditioned by the materiality of language.96 Derrida's take on the paradoxical condition thus outlined is YJ This is a critique put forth by Jiirgen Habermas and refuted by Christopher Norris with regard to the potential effectivity of a discourse which deconstructs the boundaries of effective, or "serious" language. See Norris, What's Wrong with Postmodernism? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), r87. 94 Cf. his claim that differance is "not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions." Derrida, "Differance," z6. 95 See, e.g., the afterword to Limited Inc. (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), where Derrida explains: "I never proposed 'a kind of "all or nothing" choice between pure realization of self-presence and complete freeplay or undecidability.' ... Above all, no completeness is possible for undecidability" (ns-r6). 96 C£ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), par. 358: "But isn't it our meaning it that gives sense to the sentence? (And here, of course, belongs the fact that one cannot mean a senseless series of words.) And 'meaning it' is something in the sphere of the mind. But it is also something private! It is the intangible something, only comparable to consciousness itself How could this seem ludicrous? It is, as it were, a dream of our language." Elsewhere Wittgenstein likens language to a set of tools like the ones Levi-Strauss describes, which both limit and enable meaning.

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apparent in his critique of Levinas's "pre-ethical" demand that interpretation be suspended in the face of the infinity I infinity of the face of the Other. Against the search for a beyond-representation that could avoid the totalization (betrayal) of the Other on which the subject depends for its subjecthood, Derrida advocates a perpetuation of discourse which admits of its own paradoxical, finite conditionY 7 Language, he claims, "can only indefinitely tend toward justice by acknowledging and practicing the violence within it." 98 In his later work Derrida also describes this acknowledged violence as a "lesser violence." Following Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, Derrida emphasizes that while we cannot simply "have done" with Presence, Consciousness, and Subject, we can come to understand that it is "not-all." 99 His own texts are acute and relentless in their employment of a variety of (rhetorical) techniques100 to bring the other of presence to our attention. Under the rubric of"iterability," he intervenes in specific cases to show that not only the subject as such but every interpretation, every judgment, is a production haunted by bricolage. Derrida's elaboration of iterability concerns the indeterminate and opaque conditions which surround an utterance and subvert any claim it might make to the status of an expression of the Same. A certain enigma attends each utterance insofar as there is no constant-that is, "conscious" intention or completely circumscribed context-which can be appealed to in order to calculate without remainder either its origin or its destination. Every use of a word or an expression involves some bricolage, some transportation of signifying materials of heterogeneous origin. This insight, of course, is not unique and finds support in a number of 97 Derrida argues that this unavoidable presencing is at work when Levinas imagines an "empirical" encounter with the face of the Other: "But can one speak of an experience of the other or of difference? Has not the concept of experience always been determined by the metaphysics of presence?" Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 152. 98 Ibid., I I7. 99 Derrida ultimately rejects Heidegger's rendering of this "not-all" as the "authentic" which escapes all representation. Although Derrida claims that representation cannot be suspended, he ultimately returns to a kind of primary "experience" that resembles Heidegger's location of the authentic not in representational thinking but in affect (Angst). 100 One such technique I haven't mentioned thus far is to put the grammatical forms that beguile us with their logical copulas sous-rature (under erasure) so as to problematize this most fundamental form of metaphysical presumption.

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philosophical accounts of metaphor, as well as in Wittgenstein's account of the process by which one learns to use language through successive examples in various contexts, to none of which the meaning or use of language is reducible. The presence of subject, rule, and law accordingly does not legislate but accretes from these repeated examples, substitutions, and metaphors. 101 Every utterance thus has a certain performative status insofar as it extends its own materials beyond the history of their employment, transforming the contextual boundaries of a term with each application. 102 Derrida's less sophisticated critics exaggerate this insight-familiar to many through hearsay-and accuse him of denying any sort of coherence to the use of language. His argument, however, is not that there are no constraints but rather that these constraints are contestable, not inherently fixed, and thus established only by the suppression of contestation, that is, violently. Meaning is not perpetually deferred, but we ought to recognize the power invested in or wielded by those with the last word. There may be some suspicion of this slippage between bricolage and work on the self. Despite the endorsement of Nietzsche's language of forces, which for him are tied to physiological references, Derrida speaks not of the body but of the play of "discourse." However, the notion of bricolage can be extended to all levels of judgment, positing, and so forth, just as Nietzsche extends the notion of judgment to the biological and interpretive. Derrida himself has argued that the violence he ascribes to presence applies not only to words but to all manner of institution and embodiment, themselves never established without remainder. 103 Whether Derrida's account of the judgment jibes with Nietzsche's claims that life is will to power remains to be seen. 101 This is demonstrated in Wittgenstein's discussion of ostensive definition. Philosophical Investigations, 9· 102 As W. V. Quine explains: "If the crux of metaphor is creative extension through analogy, then we have forged a metaphor at each succeeding application of that early word or phrase." See Quine, "Afterthoughts on l\letaphor," in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), r6o. Judith Butler has described this process more extensively in work which I discuss in later chapters. I also treat Michel de Certeau, who applies this insight to the practices of "everyday life," where movement through a variety of supposedly rule-governed spaces involves a certain kind of "poetics." 103 Richard Beardsworth emphasizes this point in his reading ofDerrida's politics. See his book Derrida and th,; Political (New York: Routledge, 1996), esp. chap. r.

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Derrida's is a language which brings to the fore the violence in all discourse. However, some have argued that while it may acknowledge this violence, it stops short of practicing what it preaches, that it all too successfully elides the violent, vulnerable work ofbricolage, as indicated in the above quote regarding monstrosity. 104 Michael Haar presents a version of this argument based on what he perceives as a lack of attention to the crucial role of affects, or Stimmung (to which we have given some attention) in Derrida's appropriation of Nietzsche. Derrida's language, he claims, employs a "hyper-Nietzschean" strategy in its refusal to provide any positive ground for itself. 105 The forces to which Nietzsche gave substantive valuethe "play of the earth," or "phusis" -are reduced to mere "effects" in Derrida's account of differance and the play of the trace. Nietzsche's language, on the contrary, is itself possessed of "force," or affect, which precedes and invigorates the realm of signifiers, thereby enabling play. Derrida's writing, Haar concludes, lacks the superabundance of the "pure yes ... the unlimited Yeah and amen" whose necessity is also that for a "pre-ethical responsibility." 106 With Derrida we no doubt think differently, but what has come ofNietzsche's exhortation to feel differently? In his later works Derrida has moved beyond an affirmation of discursive violence to a discussion of the ethics which subtend his own discourse. In fact, he characterizes this strategy in terms of the cultivation of sensibilities. Deconstruction, he suggests, "is justice" because it evokes an "experience" of the undecidability that renders every judgment and every command aporetic, a violence, and an experiment. 107 Furthermore, with this experience of aporia comes "ethicopolitical responsibility" insofar as it calls for a decision which cannot be 104 It should be emphasized that such charges differ significantly from those of, say, Habermas, who demands of Derridean language that it base itself in a ground protected from its own charges of violence. 105 Michael Haar, "The Play of Nietzsche in Derrida," in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 6o. 1° 6 Haar, "The Play of Nietzsche," 68-69. 107 See Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15-16. Cf. Derrida's citation of a previous article, where he states that "the interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible." "Force of Law," 30.

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circumscribed by statute or context. 108 This experience of an aporia corresponds to the impossibility of acting in harmonious accord with the commands of a higher will, the impossibility of simply "following" the law and displacing all responsibility to its "imperatives." However, in light of our earlier discussion-where it was granted that decision, though paradoxical, is inevitable-we are left with a double question: How is the metaphysician's decision now distinguished from that of the deconstructionist-where both are led to the inevitable position of imposing boundaries, however unwitting or witty their performativity-and how is it conditioned by the responsibility that comes with an experience of aporia? Put differently, how does recognition, or acknowledging violence, condition judgment itself? Haar concentrates on the Nietzschean abundance which might render one friendly to the play of the other. As we saw, however, Nietzsche's affirmation of the eternal return is conditioned by attention to the fragility and ambiguity of such an affirmation. Like Zarathustra's ape, Haar misreads Nietzsche's teratism as happy benevolence rather than an active dis- and re-membering. Where Haar would establish an affective grounding to ethical practice, Nietzsche understands the implication of affect in a variety of techniques whose effects cannot be guaranteed. It is possible to draw a comparison between Haar's position and that of Levinas, who similarly invokes a "pre-ethical" ground for ethical practice. Glossing over Nietzsche's emphasis on care and the fragility of willing, Haar imagines an unconditional positivity which leaves us with meager resources for a confrontation with the limits of affirmation. If Haar invokes Nietzsche's thematization of affect only to reduce it to a state of "pure" affirmation, how does this relate to Derrida's discussion of the "experience" of deconstruction? What is the nature of this experience and how does its corresponding demand for responsibility resemble or differ from Haar's affirmation? At first glance it may appear that Derrida falls prey to a similar rendering of aporia as a ubiquitous potential in all discourse which is universally and equally violent. Echoing Levinas and recalling Wittgenstein's brief lecture on ethics, Derrida refers to the "infinity" of responsibility, its excess beyond the limits of ethical principles in 108 Jacques

Derrida, "Towards An Ethic of Discussion," in Limited Inc., n6.

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terms of a "mystique." 109 This mystique is not simply granted its irreducibility, however, but is pursued in relation to historically specific regimes of justice. 110 Insisting that his conception of responsibility transgresses the nihilism that would forsake the just/ unjust dichotomy, Derrida appeals to practices that resemble Nietzschean genealogy, "and so the task of recalling the history, the origin and subsequent direction, thus the limits, of concepts of justice, the will and right, of values, norms, prescriptions that have been imposed and sedimented there, from then on remaining more or less readable or presupposed." 111 This strategy is coupled with the assertion of deconstruction's force as a call to the beyond of presence that produces a critical disturbance, a force that one might be tempted to equate with Haar's rendering of Stimmung, that is, a disruption of"sedimented" values and practices, that is, habits.

Fleshing Out Deconstruction We pause, again finding ourselves in a place visited several times already in this chapter alone. Invocations of the somatic register that attends any discourse are not in and of themselves enough to provide a trajectory for ethico-political intervention. Rather, the effective specification of an ethical position can be enhanced by (some delineation of) those strategies and technologies that condition its realization at the somatic level. Thus far it has simply been asserted that Derrida's textual practice thematizes its own somatic effectivity. Some clues to a richer account of the place of affect in a developing Derridean ethics, however, may be found in Derrida's response to the critical essays in the volume to which Haar has contributed. In his essay "Passions" Derrida distinguishes the specificity of his "sense" of responsibility from two general readings of the ethical force of deconstruction: as a simple endorsement of irresponsibility or amorality and as a reactionary, "dogmatic" return to the responsible, moral subject. 112 We Derrida, "Force of Law," 19-20. Derrida does so with regard to the problem of immigration in The Other Heading, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) and Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 111 Derrida, "Force of Law," 19. 112 Derrida, "Passions,'' in Wood, ed., Derrida: A Critical Reader, 14. 109 110

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have already encountered a critique of these oppositional formulations in Derrida's account of the complex interaction of presence and play in all deciding. What is of interest here is the way he links this critique to a certain kind of sensibility. He does so by way of a reading of Kant's account of moral "sensibility" that parallels our previous discussion of the paradoxical role of the body in Augustine's discourse. To speak of responsibility in terms of affect, he notes, confounds classical notions of ethics as a reflective break from habit: Furthermore, would it be moral and responsible to act morally because one has a sense (the word emphasized above) of duty and responsibility? Clearly not, it would be too easy and, precisely, natural, programmed by nature (the well-known Kantian problem of"respect" for the moral law) in the Kantian sense, a problem of interest to me only for the disturbing paradox that inscribes in the heart of a morality incapable of giving an account of being inscribed in an affect (Ge{Uhl) or in a sensibility of what should not be inscribed there or should only call for the sacrifice of everything that would only obey this sensible inclination. 113 Derrida is interested here in a kind of sensibility which breaks from a Kantian logic that opposes "pathological," affectively invested interests to those which issue from moral imperatives. Refusing the antagonism between morality and passion, Derrida explains that "what I am looking for here, passion according to me, ... would be a concept of passion that would be non-'pathological' in Kant's sense." 114 What could this mean? Kant renders the dichotomy between pathology and morality in terms that oppose actions which issue from principles to those tied to a "natural" trajectory or drive. 115 Contrarily, we find ourselves struggling to formulate an account of ethics which presupposes the inextricability of pathos and morality or law. However, this presumption is not enough in and of itself to distinguish between kinds of ethical sensiIbid. Ibid. 115 Kant also reduces pleasure to quantity and duration, thus disallowing distinctions between kinds of sensuous motives. See his Critique ofPractical Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993), where he compares pleasure to money in terms of its interchangeability (22-2J). 11.1

lH

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bility. Indeed, it precludes making any such distinction a priori. Hence, one cannot distinguish in advance the metaphysician from the deconstructionist. In principle, there is no difference. Differance, rather, is a matter of practice. The question thus becomes less whether Derrida can provide for such a sensibility than whether he provides us with an example of or a disposition toward one. That is, finally, or only for the time being, what are the effects of Derrida's texts or his techniques? The answer to the first question should be clear. If Derrida provides for an ethical sensibility, he does so negatively. In the "Passions" essay Derrida is typically rigorous in his insistence on the irreducibility, the nonphenomenalizability, of his "sense" of responsibility. Moreover, he not only declares but performs this deconstruction through a careful dispersal of available examples of responsibility. In his hands it remains beyond us, as secret as our dreams, for which we nonetheless remain responsible. Concerning the second question, might not this explain the vehemence of many critics of "deconstruction," namely, the danger they (rightly) imagine it poses to vehemence itself? Are not many of the attacks against him prompted by a vehemence and a righteousness that seeks to preserve itself? As it happens, Augustine (another enemy of the self-righteous) makes an appearance in Derrida's text at this point as one who maintained the irreducibility of the "secret" even when acting "in its name." 116 One cannot, of course, help but make something in its name; a simulacrum is inevitable. 117 Nonetheless, with Derrida as with Augustine-as well as Kant, who also rejected attempts to conflate God with sensuous impressions 118-this secret (trace) is preserved. But what is the value of the secret? (a Nietzschean question). Two answers appear in Derrida's text: the secret, if it points back to the something other, "impassions" us; however, when it comes to the secret, there is no "guaranteed value to bearing witness." 119 1t is tempting to combine these two statements with another: there is no guaranteed value to passion, or to Derrida, "Passions," 21. As Derrida has said, one must "reaffirm by choosing. 'One must' means one must filter, sift, criticize; one must sort out several different possibilities that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret." See Jacques Derrida, Specters ofMarx (New York: Routledge, 1994), r6. 118 Cf. Prendiville, "The Development of the Idea of Habit," 57; and Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 2 3. 119 Derrida, "Passions," 24-25. 116 117

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the results of the unsettling performed by the secret, or deconstruction itself There is no guarantee to the value of gaps in the relation between passion and the law in general, for passion, as we have seen, enables as well as exceeds the law. Now, who wants guarantees? Not Augustine, certainly. Only the proud think they can attain grace through their own acts. Still, Augustine was hardly inactive. Restless with the paradoxes of his call to obedience, he formulated a complex system of ethical practices designed to enhance the injunctions they could not exhaust. By means of this system he was able turn paradox into an incitement to its own overcoming. Derrida, for that matter, isn't exactly lethargic himself Each reading he offers both reiterates the injunction of the secret and moves us in another place to find it in its absence and look further. By shifting and displacing privileged terms-differance, trace, khora, the gift, friendship, and justice-he stays one step ahead of those who would reinscribe his discourse in a "pathological" system. Furthermore, Derrida's passion is hardly ineffectual, as evidenced by the scope and variety of his readership and the application of his formulations to so many current discourses in law, popular culture, architecture, and so forth. It would be extremely difficult, however, to posit the effectiveness of his discourse in a set of authoritative injunctions, and this difficulty itself perhaps makes his work an example of what it cannot simply describe, an "oblique offering." Like Kant and Augustine, Derrida refuses to flesh out the secret, as it were, to give it ontological value of the sort developed in Nietzsche's language of forces and the body. Yet would it not also be wrong to forget the obtuse violence Derrida's offering sometimes elicits? And might it not be precisely Derrida's rigor on this point that provokes such violent reactions? From what we have seen thus far, must he not also be responsible for this? In his later work he has certainly tried to live up to this responsibility, to respond that is, to his critics. 120 However much his rhetorical brilliance delights, it may also suffer from a lack of respect for the pervasive and insistent crudeness of the passions it struggles against. 121 120 SeeJacquesDerrida, "Biodegradables," trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 15-4(1989): 8r2-8r. 121 This, certainly, is suggested by the recent critique of Derridean "politics" launched by Mark Lilla, who repeatedly describes Derrida's language as "cavalier." See his essay "Derrida's Politics," New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998, 36-41.

6o

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States

Again, there can be no guarantees as to the value of even Derrida's texts, or of examples as exemplary in general as he himself explains. This is apparent in his often sharply conflicting endorsements. Perhaps his rhetoric is not immune to pathological uses. Nietzsche's certainly wasn't. Pathology in this case is not opposed to a plane beyond the reach of affect but is associated with particular configurations of discourses and practices always taken to be somatically invested. From our reading of Augustine and Nietzsche, we developed a nascent distinction on the basis of such configurations. Using Nietzsche as our model, we ventured a statement of a certain sensibility or disposition which was then linked with corresponding practices. This link could be extended to our present discussion ofDerrida. Nietzsche, with whom one suspects Derrida shares a certain sensibility, not only invoked but elaborated-in a variety of ethical practices indebted to ascetic tradition-an economics of passion that takes care against its pathological possibilities. Thus, proceeding by analogy, the choice between forsaking moral categories or dogmatically asserting them that Derrida rejects in his account of responsibility can be seen as homologous to the alternate extremes of either enduring habits or pure spontaneity. Derrida, like Nietzsche, professes a love for finitude. He writes, "I do not see ruin as a negative thing.... One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it hasn't always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite." 122 Where he links this pre