en

Andrew Gibson

2009

OpenAlex

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes †This essay is dedicated to the memory of Guy Lardreau, 1947–2008. It is a brief, general, and simplified early version of one argument in my Logics of Intermittency: The Anti-Schematics of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (in preparation for Edinburgh University Press). Save where indicated, all translations are my own. Guy Lardreau, Fictions philosophiques et science-fiction (Paris: Actes Sud, 1988), p. 71. Bensaid characterizes Badiou's and Rancière's concept of truth, politics, and the subject as ‘intermittent’, if to some extent critically. See ‘Alain Badiou et le miracle de l’événement' in Résistances: Essai de taupologie générale (Paris: Fayard, 2001), pp. 143–170, 154–155. The larger outline of my own Levinasian case in Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London: Routledge, 1999) now seems open to question, if not a great deal of its detail. Those like Simon Critchley and myself who argued for a Levinasian ethics in the mode of ‘atheist transcendence’ failed to recognize that, without the theological sanction, Levinas's ethics simply falls apart. For Critchley's argument, see ‘Il y a – Holding Levinas's Hand to Blanchot's Fire’ in Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed.), Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 108–122. For my own recent position, see ‘Ethics’ in Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (eds.), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 287–295; and Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Obviously enough, the essay was written before the present financial crisis confirmed one at least of its assumptions. However, the culture of plenitude is not yet by any means necessarily at risk. Whether profound intellectual shifts begin to take place will depend on how the situation develops, and how compelling the logic of ‘management’ appears to remain. Jacques Lacan, Seminar Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), trans. with notes by Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 200. Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 261. Ibid., pp. 194, 201. Ibid., p. 180. One good example of this ‘double logic’ would be the Stern Report on climate change, which asserted that the avoidance of catastrophe is smoothly compatible with apparently unlimited economic growth. What is unimaginable within the terms of the Report is that a priority other than ‘growth’ might conceivably come to preoccupy a significant number of contemporary minds. ‘D'o[ugrave] je parie sur l’événement', in Lardeau's phrase. Guy Lardeau, La Veracité (Paris: Verdier, 1993), p. 314. The Report's conception of catastrophe requires Benjamin's as its corrective. Françoise Proust, De la résistance (Paris: Cerf, 1997), p. 103. This paragraph is constructed as a ‘cynegetics of semblance’; on which important concept, see Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, L'Ange (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1976), pp. 17–41. The chapter in question was written by Lardreau. For a relevant and important account of the politics of contemporary jouissance, see Slavov Žižek, ‘The Politics of Jouissance’, Lacanian Ink 24/25 (Winter/Spring, 2005), pp. 126–135. In ‘L'inadmissible’, Jacques Rancière exactly captures the spirit of the privileged enclave by way of an analogy with an Imperial Rome growing ever more efficient at banishing both the thought and the reality of those denied access to its wealth and splendour. See Aux bords du politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 1998), pp. 128–147, especially at pp. 136–137. It is by no means insignificant for the analogy that the Rome of ‘L'inadmissible’ has properly incorporated its own plebeians. For an account of Badiou on this theme, see Beckett and Badiou, pp. 76–79. As in Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997). Alain Badiou, Saint-Paul et la fondation de l'universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), p. 16. For this argument, see Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 55. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (eds.), The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception, Recent Critical Essays (London and New York: Norton, 1979); Book X (1805), L. 935–940. Badiou, Le Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), p. 197. Cf. his presentation of Joan of Arc as an exception to a ‘miserable epoch’, ‘L'Insoumission de Jeanne’, Esprit 238 (December 1997), pp. 26–33 (p. 28). Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. and annotated Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 67–68. A binary opposition that needs to be deconstructed about as much as that between Manhattan and Chad. See Françoise Proust, Point de passage (Paris: Kimé, 1994), pp. 33–34. For relevant accounts of the French Revolution, see Kant, ‘Réflexions’ in Théorie et pratique, D'un prétendu droit de mentir par humanité, La fin de toutes choses et autres textes, introd., trad., notes, bibliographie et chronologie par Françoise Proust (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), pp. 127–174, 141–142; and The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. and introd. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 153–156. For the concept of transcendental freedom, see Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 484–490, 535–537. For a connection between this concept and the idea of reason in the third Critique, see Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer (ed.), trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), no. 91, pp. 331–336. For Proust's account of practical reason as an experimental production of the real that discovers its principles with each specific new case, see for example ‘Introduction’, Théorie et pratique, pp. 5–40, 5–8. The Analytic of the Sublime does not develop a conception of a historical sublime along with the sublime in nature. For Proust's argument for extrapolating from the one to the other, see Point de passage, pp. 41–42. Proust, Point de passage (Paris: Kimé, 1994), p. 62. Proust, Kant: le ton de l'histoire (Paris: Payot, 1991), p. 9. Ibid., p. 35. Proust, La Doublure du temps (Paris: Perroquet, 1993), p. 12. Proust, Point de passage, p. 41. Proust, Kant: le ton de l'histoire, pp. 12–13. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 35. Lacan, Seminar VII, pp. 234–235. In L'Histoire à contretemps: Le temps historique chez Walter Benjamin (Paris: Cerf, 1994). This is the text to which the whole of the ensuing discussion of Benjamin substantially refers. Proust, La Doublure du temps, p. 14. Ibid., p. 8. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 37. Ibid., p. 50. Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 79. Quoted in Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’ in Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins 1979), pp. 111–140 (p. 130). The Poems of Tennyson, Christopher Ricks (ed.) (London: Longmans, 1969), p. 526. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 110. See also editor's note. Ibid., p. 139. See also editor's note, pp. 138–139, from which the translation is taken. Ibid., p. 568. Ibid., pp. 72, 176. Ibid., p. 395. Ibid., pp. 397–398. See Proust, L'Histoire à contretemps, passim, for instance at p. 10. Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), Vol V, pp. 490–491; quoted in Peter Osborne, ‘Small-Scale Victories, Large-Scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin's Politics of Time’ in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds.), Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 59–109 (p. 59). Ibid. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, ‘Introduction’ in Benjamin and Osborne (eds.), Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, pp. x–xiii (p. x). This discussion avoids the Benjaminian concept of messianism. But Howard Caygill is surely right to think of Benjamin's messianism per se as an archaic vestige that ‘signifies the proximity of a lapse into dogmatism’. See Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge. 1998), pp. 149–152, especially at p. 149. As such, messianism functions as a release from Benjaminian ‘saturnine melancholia’, as opposed of course to ‘left melancholia’, which he excoriated; on which distinction, see Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 14. For myself as for Badiou, any thought of the event will everywhere proceed according to the secular presumption. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Agamben is quoting from G. Burdeau, Traité de science politique (Paris: Librairie générale du droit et de jurisprudence, 1984), Vol 4, p. 173. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., pp. 12, 175. Cf. Coetzee's audacious recent declaration that our attitude to animals is an indication of how little we have escaped the shadow of Auschwitz. It bears witness to the persistence of a murderously exclusionary principle of thought which may in turn concern Africans, Jews, and animals. See Elizabeth Costello (London: Vintage, 2004), passim. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 180. For Benjamin's distinction, see ‘Critique of Violence’ in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings Vol 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 236–252, passim. Antonio Negri, Il potere costituente: Saggio sulle alternative del moderno (Milan: SugarCo, 1992), p. 31; quoted in Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 43. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid. I have capitalized in ‘Law’ to emphasize the Agamben/Kafka relation proposed here. Ibid., p. 51. Orwell grasps it, too. It is now possible to see that this, in fact, is the stark lesson of 1984, not any historically specific and limited critique of totalitarianism. See Proust, L'Histoire à contretemps, p. 97. Franz Kafka, Der Proceß, Malcolm Pasley (ed.) (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1990), p. 11. The word literally signifies a ‘State of law’ or, better, ‘State of rights’; a State in which citizens share civil liberties and are protected from any arbitrary exercise of State power, as contrasted with a police state. One might of course assume that a naive Josef K. has failed recognize a change in the regime of the State. But nothing in the novel indicates such a change, rather than an insidiously reversed vision of the Rechtstaat itself. Ibid., p. 303. This is Benjamin's point in the eighth of the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which, translated from Françoise Proust's translation, quite simply becomes ‘the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule’. Benjamin sees himself, however, to be addressing a ‘state of exception’ that is to some extent conscious of itself as such, or as a ‘state of emergency’. See Proust, L'Histoire à contretemps, p. 10; and Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, pp. 255–266 (p. 259). See Lardeau and Jambet on the need to extend the concept of the axiom beyond the realm of mathematics to philosophy and history, L'Ange, p. 19: if the Real declares a limit to any given thought, the axiom decrees its regularities. On the proposal and resistance to it, see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/europe/france-and-spain-block-asylum-camp-plan-535311.html By no means all the examples are ‘highbrow’. There have been some powerful indictments of the logic of contemporary plenitude in popular fiction. See for example some of the late work of J. G. Ballard, or the recent work of John Le Carré, notably The Constant Gardener, The Mission Song and A Most Wanted Man. For which see Lardreau, La Veracité. ‘Negative philosophy’ is not nihilism and should not be confused with it. Note also the relevance of Lardreau's argument that Deleuze is precisely the right philosopher for the culture of plenitude, and that it is no accident that he should be so popular within it. See L'exercice différé de la philosophie: [Agrave] l‘occasion de Deleuze (Paris: Verdier, 1999). Cf. also my brief discussion of Jambet's treatment of the concept of the ‘imaginal world’ in esoteric Islam. See ‘On Not Being Forgivable: Four Meditations on Europe, Islam and the “New World Order”’ in Holly Campbell and Marian Eide (ed.), Forgiveness (forthcoming South Central Review); accessible at eprints.rhul.ac.uk/255. See Judith Balso, ‘Être present au present: L'hypothèse communiste possible pour la philosophie, nom impossible pour la politique?’ (presentation at the conference ‘On the Idea of Communism’, Birkbeck College, University of London, March 19–21, 2009, forthcoming in translation). Though the point, here, is equally aimed at those endless, melancholy-inducing reproaches to melancholy from the left, founded as they are on the presumption of a saving value to positive action and immediate readiness which one might have thought history had sufficiently blown to bits by now; except, of course, that what is at stake here is not really history or progress, but the psychic reassurance of the political subject. That the essay ends with a key Coetzeean word is as deliberate as the fact that it ends with the first-person plural. ‘Care and gravity’ do not exclude laughter, may even be inseparable from it. But they do determine its type.

article

Textual Practice

Astrobiology | Epistemology | Geography | History | Intermittency | Meteorology | Philosophy | Physics | Turbulence