Review of Thinking Radical Democracy

Symposium has published my review of Martin Breaugh, Christopher Holman, Rachel Magnusson, Paul Mazzocchi, and Devin Penner (eds.), Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-war France. A well-edited volume has to avoid numerous pitfalls: issues of consistency, varying quality of contributions, and overall coherence. Breaugh et al. have done an excellent job in avoiding those potential problems. My overview:

The essays collected in Thinking Radical Democracy aim to situate the political thought of Rancière, Abensour, and Balibar within a tradition of radical democratic thought in postwar France that conceptualizes democracy as divisive and emancipatory. The book includes chapters on the “forbearers” of the return to radical democracy (the “French” Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Clastres), the critics of totalitarianism (Lefort, Castoriadis, and Debord), and concludes with essays concerning Rancière, Balibar, and Abensour. Despite the many differences between these figures, the authors and editors of the present volume argue that the radical democratic tradition is defined by its threefold exploration of  “politics, division, and democracy.”

It's longer than most reviews for Symposium but there's a reason. One of my goals in reviewing the book was to bring to the forefront how there is an important distinction between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique). I think that, in general, the attempt to foreground the possibilities of politics through first defining the political also opens the possibility that definitions of the political could come to police politics. I outline this problem in the review, so read all the way to the end.

Review of Todd May's Friendship in an Age of Economics

My review of Todd May's Friendship in an Age of Economics has been published by Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. You might already know, given that I briefly recounted the story in the acknowledgements of Egalitarian Moments, that it was preparing for a talk given by May that sparked my interest in the work of Rancière. Here's the gist of the review:

May’s discussion of the politics of friendship provides an account of micropolitical resistance unforeseen by Rancière. Although Rancière considers aesthetics as a form of micropolitics, he does not claim that it is the only possible form of micropolitics. And while May does not explicitly situate Friendship in an Age of Economics through Rancière’s work until Chapter 7, his account emphasizes how friendship, especially what he calls deep friendship, is a relationship between equals. (It should also be noted, given May’s anarchism, that his argument could be formulated as a claim that friendship is a rudimentary form of free association.)

In retrospect I'd probably add that Montaigne is underrepresented in and La Boétie is absent from the book, but that comment has more to do with my current interests than May's.

On Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, Globalectics

I've occassionally mentioned my interest in Negritude, existentialism, and postcolonial theory. Over a decade ago, I was floored when I first read Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, and over the last few years I've taught Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Frantz Fanon in my introductory philosophy courses--they've often been taught under the rubric of "Great Philosophers," as a challenge to the traditional Western canon. This spring, I can add two publications on the topic of African/Africana philosophy and aesthetics.

The first is my review of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Globalectics, which has been published by Society and Space, available here. 

Later in the spring, a review essay on Souleymane Bachir Diagne's African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull Books, 2011) will appear in Comparative and Continental Philosophy.

"Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa" by Jason K. Stearns

(PublicAffairs, 2011)

The "Great War of Africa" has raged at varying levels of intensity in Zaire / the Democratic Republic of Congo since the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 spilled over into the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis. Despite massive loss of life, the fall of one of the century's most colourful dictators and a continent-wide scramble for the resources of one of the world's richest regions, Westerners/Northerners remain surprisingly under-informed regarding the conflict. The Congo war serves as an African analogue to the Great Imperialist Wars of Europe in the 20th Century, but most people barely bother to untie the admittedly daunting knots that comprise it. At best, they pay attention to the snatches of horrific, almost surreal violence that tend to get picked up whenever Western media trains its eyes on the region. The fact that we're too lazy to understand the conflict, but piqued by its horror stories, is a test case in racism and the out and out failure of our analytical capacities. In the Western/Northern imaginary, the Congo war is continuous with the fantasy of the "Dark Continent"; hence the phenomenon of human interest stories about systematic rape and torture with almost zero attempt to put such violence in geopolitical context and examine our own political and economic complicity.

The virtue of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason K. Stearns is to shatter this myth of innate African savagery while giving the at times numbing complexity of the conflict its due. His angle is simpe but brilliant: reconstruct the conflict historically while applying to its micropolitics Hannah Arendt's thesis on the "banality of evil". Through painstaking collection of first-person reports and reconstruction, some of the conflict's greatest monsters are shown to be petty careerists; ordinary people are seen to have commited gross human rights violations through a kind of poltical inertia. The picture of the war which emerges dispels the idea that it was an inevitable product of the African soul. Rather, it becomes via Stearns a product of the human soul in particularly central-African conditions. Stearns humanizes an inhumane conflict, thereby making it harder to brush off and absolve ourselves of moral responsibility. There is something universal about the Congo war, and this should be sufficiently troubling to give it the attention it deserves.

Patrik Ourednik, Case Closed

It all began with a late night hyperlink clicking session, and it ended with reviews of all of Patrik Ourednik's books that have been translated into English: The Opportune Moment (here), Europeana (here), and now Case Closed (Dalkey Archive, 2010).

In a letter to his friend Philip Pendleton Cooke, dated August 9th, 1846, Edgar Allan Poe commented on the popularity of his Dupin stories, such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious — but people think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method. In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.

Passages such as these serve as important reminders of the rules of the detective story genre. For a detective novel to work qua genre, the author must be able to deploy a series of devices to maintain not only suspense, but she must also be able to give good reasons as to why the mystery unravels. As much fun as the reader might have in the process, the author must have all the loose ends tied up. That is, if we're talking about the genre.

In Case Closed, Patrik Ourednik seemingly takes up Poe's gauntlet, and writes a detective story in which the author/narrator (if we can equate them--or am I falling into Poe's trap?) doesn't know how the web unravels, leaving several intrigues to begin only to be left in suspense by the end of the novel. The story--at least most of it--follows the convergence of two characters, Viktor Dyk, a retiree and failed novelist, and Vilém Lebeda, a police inspector in Prague, who not only is charged with following up on a suicide with a few suspicious circumstances, but also pursues with extra-curricular interest a forty-year old murder case that, while out of Lebeda's jurisdiction, seems to have ties to the members of Dyk's retiree's club.

Ourednik drops a few hints about how the suspicious death and the forty-year old murder case tie together, but he's mostly interested in undermining the expectations of the reader who might just get lured into the intrigues--there's also an abundance of red herrings, if it's even possible to separate between lures and leads. And, given that a group of retirees are at the center of the non-action, there's lots of curmudgeonly behavior, as if Ourednik were attempting to master the aches, pains, and casual bigotry of a cynical post-communist generation. At one point, Viktor Dyk reflects on adolescence:

Adolescents were the worst. Formerly known as youth, the vanguard of our society, striding forth in the footsteps of their fathers, who themselves had only managed to make it as far as the rearguard (13).

Though amidst some pointless retiree-banter (and some of that aforementioned casual bigotry), Dyk leaves us a clue:

"Don't you have something to say, Mr. Dyk?"
"Silence is a form of speech," replied Mr. Dyk.
Mrs. Prochazka looked puzzled.
"And the reverse." He couldn't resist.
"The reverse?"
"Speaking is just another form of silence."

It's the first indication that for all the talk and narration, the mysteries and intrigues may never be unraveled.* By the time we get to Chapter 37:

We are born into a novel whose meaning escapes us, and depart from a novel we have never once understood. Now or never! The author has established with his customary skill that he is equally at home in any genre; he has piled plot twist upon plot twist without so much as a second thought; stacked varying styles side by side; stung readers with bitingly sarcastic asides and trenchant social critique; and generously tossed in a thumbnail psychological sketch. Now or never! No one's understood a thing, and even if they had...

When I read passages like these, I want to point out Simone de Beauvoir's distinction between absurdity and ambiguity. I'll let it pass for now, because this passage--especially the part surrounding what I've quoted--seems to be the master key for interpreting the story. Detective novels have long relied on the ingenuity of the author to unravel the case. And while this is hardly going to sound like praise, in subverting expectations in the genre, Case Closed requires the ingenuity of the reader** to follow the clues.

*

** This might sound like I'm complimenting myself, but I'm not. It's just that you've got to build your own case, which is why I placed the first footnote--given that it's a spoiler--below.
* We'll call this the SPOILER asterisk: I think the statement is also revealing of the failed author Dyk and his role in the intrigues.

A Review of Miguel Abensour's Democracy Against the State

My review of Miguel Abensour's Democracy Against the State has been posted on the CSCP website, meaning that it is forthcoming in a future issue of Symposium. And thus concludes my "contemporary French philosophy" trilogy, which included reviews of Rancière's Politics of Literature (here) and Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy (here).

Given Abensour's anarchist sympathies, I'm quite surprised that this is his first book to be translated into English; some of his books seem like they would fit quite well with what used to be the editorial interests of both Autonomedia and Semiotext(e). Hopefully Polity will commission additional titles, such as his L'Utopie de Thomas More à Walter Benjamin.

Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800

Thanks to insistence of occasional contributor Sean Moreland, I've lately taken some interest in British romanticism. The impetus is a co-authored paper that we are writing on Schelling, Coleridge, and Poe. I've already mentioned the fun I've had reading Poe, but my research on Coleridge has increased my interest in the aesthetics and politics of the British romantics, not only STC, but also Wordsworth, and the now lesser-known John Thelwall.

After reading volume one of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, acquiring a copy of Lyrical Ballads seemed to be the next obvious step. But which edition to acquire was not so obvious, since they are numerous. I did some browsing and settled on Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, edited by Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter, and published by Broadview Press. This edition was slightly more expensive than those of Penguin or Oxford, but it is more useful for the academic who finds himself (or herself) a novice in a new field.

The Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, reproduces not just the first two editions, but also  an excerpt of Wordsworth's 1802 preface, contemporary reviews of both editions, and numerous appendices including: poems by Coleridge that were originally intended to be published in the LB, correspondence and commentary on the volumes, excerpts from contemporary prose and poetry, and a short section on mapping the locations of the poems. 

It's a lot of material, but very useful. For my purposes, I was interested in how Wordsworth's contemporaries received the poems. For I was initially hesitant to make the jump from German to British romanticism because I had understood Wordsworth to be, as he is now often presented, a nature-poet. Reading Rancière in advance of the Lyrical Ballads had challenged that characterization, and the contemporary reviews, reproduced in this volume, confirm that his contemporaries did not miss the political aspect of Wordsworth's concept of nature, from the hints of Rousseau, to the way that his experiments in ascertaining "how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure" undermined the accepted hierarchies of aesthetic, moral, and political attitudes of the time.

I found the 1798 edition to be more compelling, but this could be due to reading the 1800 edition soon after. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the playful aspect of beginning the later edition with Wordsworth's "Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables Turned," which introduce the Lyrical Ballads by asking the reader not to read it. And I couldn't complete this short review without noting the apt characterization (in the 1800 edition's 'Argument' prefacing The Ancient Mariner) of the mariner's act as a demonstration of "contempt of the laws of hospitality."

2011 in Reviews

With 2012 beginning, what better time to look back at 2011 in reviews:

Thomas Muntzer, Sermon to the Princes (Verso)

by Matt McLennan

"Engels's classic study "The Peasant War in Germany" - where, it should be noted, Engels rides roughshod over the theological aspects of Muntzer's movement and paints him as a crafty political figure using religious rhetoric to push his agenda forward. Certainly there is much politicking to be found in his writings - Cf the scathing attacks on Luther - but reading him I'm not convinced that the theological and political elements can be so easily separated." 

Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press)

by Devin Shaw

"Given that music criticism is a mixed bag, it's hard not to appreciate a well-acclaimed historian taking on the biography of a  complex man so often portrayed as simple, naive, and childlike. Kelley's aim is to dispel precisely that story, first found in William Gottlieb's profile published in Down Beat in September 1947 and popularized through the efforts of Lorraine Lion's press release that accompanied his first record from Blue Note."

David Sedaris, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (Little, Brown, and Co.)

by Matt McLennan

"Animal fables are generally awesome on account of how grown up and gruesome and darkly humourous they can be. One might even say that animal fables are "fucking metal" at the best of times. Cf also Vikram Seth's "Beastly Tales", and raise your hammers high. Humourist David Sedaris has recently thrown his contribution to the genre into the ring, and it does not disappoint." 

Lisa Shapiro, ed. The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (University of Chicago Press)

by Devin Shaw

"I can't always say that I like reading the winding paths of philosophers' correspondence. That being said, I recommend The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes to the reader who is looking for a different and not often noticed side of early modern philosophy and letters."

Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon (Verso)

by Matt McLennan

"Through humour, sadness, love and ire, the force of Badiou's personality shines through in virtually every eulogy, giving body to the austere rigour of his own philosophical work."

Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence (Semiotext(e))

by Matt McLennan

"The essays collected expand upon his central argument, which defines "primitive" societies by their refusal of the State. Taking such societies seriously, for Clastres, means recognizing that they are not embryonic or proto-societies, but rather full-blown political totalities which have constituted themselves in a very conscious and deliberate way so as to prevent the rise of inequality, (non-sexual) division of labour and, ultimately, since these are its very substance, the State." 

Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (Yale)

by Devin Shaw

"From what I can gather, Warhol represents a world that Danto felt at home in, and, for all its self-obsessed pathos, more than likely the world that he feels nostalgia for. Warhol or not, that's not a world I want to glorify, let alone live in."

Patrik Ourednik, The Opportune Moment, 1855 (Dalkey Archive)

by Devin Shaw

The Opportune Moment, 1855 "tells the story of the failure of an utopian commune founded by Italian anarchists in Brazil. It opens with a letter by one of the protagonists (who I will call the epistolary narrator), to his unrequited love, many years after the failure of the new society. At once it becomes clear that Ourednik is writing, in a way, a historical novel and satire." 

Patrik Ourednik, Europeana (Dalkey Archive)

by Devin Shaw

"it strikes me the book is a critique of its own rhetoric and "expressiveness," an 'auto-reductio ad absurdum' of the attempt to quantify historical change and void the subjectivity of historical agents....Nevertheless, those final few pages, with their critique of the smug arrogance of late twentieth century chroniclers of political power, are edifying enough to warrant a trip through the 20th century of Europeana."

John Nichols, The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism (Verso)

by Devin Shaw

"Given that the first chapter and the afterword situate the history of socialism within contemporary debates, the book might just be the general starting point for reconsidering the history of American radicalism. Given that the Democrats have largely abandoned many of the concerns that allied them with the working class and the civil rights movement, in favor of a politics of progressive verbiage, it may well be, as Nichols writes, "that the only word of the left that still has any meaning is 'socialism.'" "

A Review of Stiegler's "New" Critique of Political Economy

My review of Bernard Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy is up on the CSCP website. I argue that

Despite his claim of commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s Contributions to a Critique of Political Economy (1859), Stiegler does little more than replace Marx’s class analysis and revolutionary critique of capitalism with an analysis of how technology leads to short-term thinking.

While you are brushing up on Stiegler, don't forget to revisit a classic piece of criticism, Peter Gratton's review of Taking Care of Youth and the Generations on the NDPR.

Memo: The "S" Word

To: Joshua and all other interested parties
re: The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism (Verso, 2011)

Not so long ago-- before the #occupy movement, but still it was July-- you posted a short piece called "Every time the Left Sins God Sends Another Working-class American to the Tea Party." You argued that the American Left needed to appropriate the American history of radicalism and socialism without leaving it to the right:

Many Leftists articulate American working-class needs by using overly intellectual rhetoric. The Left does not need to dumb down information, just break it down. Many Leftists use other countries' revolutionaries and revolutions as symbols of liberation and outright ignore American equivalents. What about heroes of struggle such as Thomas Paine,John Brown, and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones? What about celebrating movements such as the BOSTON TEA PARTY?

Particular aspects of this kind of discussion always worry me, especially appeals to the War of Independence and the Tea Party. I wrote, in a comment:

We cannot, and should not, attempt to out-jingoize the Right (which isn't your point, but the issue could be lurking there). The radical left has a much stronger history with abolitionism, the IWW and union activism (Eugene V. Debs, anybody?), and the Harlem Renaissance, than the transfer of power from the British to American bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the symbolic reference points take on gravity from organization rather than the reverse.

Like I said, things were different then. While I never took the Tea Party seriously (which is much easier to do when you're not surrounded by it), that astro-turf bus tour has been quickly forgotten behind the strength of the Occupy movement. But that doesn't mean that our discussion has  become academic. What of the American history of socialism and radicalism?

It turns out we're not the only people thinking about it. John Nichols' The "S" Word  is an important re-examination of American socialism. The book is structured chronologically, with Chapter 2 dealing with Tom Paine, Chapter 3 with the abolitionism of Abraham Lincoln, Chapter 4 with the successes of socialist governance in Milwaukee, Chapter 5 with the anti-war movement during World War I, and Chapter 6 on the contributions of socialist thought and practice on the civil rights movement.

But let's not make any mistake. Chronological or not, the book opens with two chapters that ought to shame Republicans for their (mis-) appropriations of Thomas Paine or Abe Lincoln, who were much more open minded than contemporary Fox News conservatives, who proposed and considered ideas that were much more socialist than most Democrats would mull over today.

From there Nichols turns to the local electoral successes of socialists, primarily in Milwaukee. But his larger point is that many of the ideals we on the left work with have a much longer history than is commonly assumed.

There is nothing new, nothing "modern," about this understanding of the need to cross lines of race, creed, ethnicity and gender in order to make a fundamental change. Joseph Weydemeyer, the follower of Marx and Engels who advocated "true socialism," organized the American Workers League in 1853 with the stated purpose of uniting workers "without respect to occupation, language, color or sex" (179).

You read the number correctly: 1853. Nichols argues that avowed socialists have worked for over a century and a half toward transforming the lives of Americans against some of the most fierce political opposition (see the chapter on the opposition to World War I).

I don't want to carry on too long, given that this was supposed to be a short memo. Let me say a few more things in shorthand. The primary weakness of Nichols's book can be summarized like this: too much love for Edward Bernstein's followers, and not enough for John Brown. Meaning that Nichols heavily favors electoral action, and does not discuss what the historical significance of revolutionary violence, or non-statist political organization, might mean (which is in part understandable given that the right currently holds a monopoly on extra-state violence). Also, he makes numerous appeals to American socialism as an  American tradition and not just a foreign imposition--but we really need to be careful with this kind of rhetoric, for it appeals to many of the shared assumptions of a country built on settler colonialism (though Nichols does not ignore this issue; see p. 70).

However, these criticisms should not overshadow the merits of The "S" Word. Given that the first chapter and the afterword situate the history of socialism within contemporary debates, the book might just be the general starting point for reconsidering the history of American radicalism. Given that the Democrats have largely abandoned many of the concerns that allied them with the working class and the civil rights movement, in favor of a politics of progressive verbiage, it may well be, as Nichols writes, "that the only word of the left that still has any meaning is 'socialism.'"

Patrik Ourednik's "Europeana"

Patrik Ourednik's Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (Dalkey Archive, 2005) is an unusual book. It's not quite a brief history of the 20th century, and it's not quite a novel. However, it does discuss the 20th century, and it is told by an unreliable narrator, who sometimes jumbles disparate topics and misreports events.

In fact, this book is all about the narrator, and the rhetoric of the narrator, which is dispassionate, detached, and more concerned (if we could even say "concerned") with accounting for the century in statistics and numbers than recounting a story of the century. I think it's necessary as well to say "the narrator" rather than "Ourednik" because I don't think that the book provides any clue into Ourednik's own stance on the 20th century until the final sentence of the book. And, if I tell you what that sentence is, it will probably deflate the exercise or experience of reading it. 

And while you are reading it, you are going to wonder why you decided to. For the Europeana century is marked primarily by war, genocide, and body counts. And statistics. The first few sentences set the tone:

The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans. 

The next 120 pages continue in the same vein--the statistics, the quick leaps between events (in the above, how did we jump from the Second to the First World War?), and detached cynicism. The book is more than a criticism of the idea that human history is a story of progress, it's also a critique--or at least, I think, on the basis of the end of the book that I can't discuss, that it is a critique--of the attempt to "survey" or "look over" history from a standpoint that is able to definitively account for it. As Ourednik states in an interview with Context (also published by Dalkey Archive):

The primary question wasn’t to know what events, what episodes were characteristic of the twentieth century, but which syntax, which rhetoric, which expressiveness belonged to it, in what sense was it redundant, etc.  

Thus it strikes me the book is a critique of its own rhetoric and "expressiveness," an 'auto-reductio ad absurdum' of the attempt to quantify historical change and void the subjectivity of historical agents. Sure, your patience will be tested by the statistics, the body counts, and the repeated references to Nazism (which appears over and over and over in the narrative, sometimes leaving the reader feeling as if nothing happened in 20th century Europe other than World War II). Nevertheless, those final few pages, with their critique of the smug arrogance of late twentieth century chroniclers of political power, are edifying enough to warrant a trip through the 20th century of Europeana.

(See also my review of Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855)

The Weekend in Reviews

Sure, it's a long weekend in the US and Canada. But don't let that get in the way of checking out a few notable book reviews. 

First, here's Hasana Sharp, author of the forthcoming Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (see here) reviewing Michael Mack's Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (Continuum, 2010). One of the highlights:

As a Spinoza scholar, I was most interested in Mack’s interpretation of Spinoza’s principle of conatus, the striving by which each being aims to preserve and enhance its life.  He suggests that the conatus gets taken up by later thinkers not only as a doctrine of self-preservation, or as the ultimate source of all human (and nonhuman) motivation, but also as a critique of how self-preservation can be narrowly construed so as to yield self-destruction (and, in his concluding discussion of Freud, a “loss of reality”).  Mack reads Spinoza’s conatus as a principle of self-sustainability that can only be actualised by virtue of a contribution to the well-being of the other forces with which one is intertwined (Chapter 2).

And the verdict:

Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity highlights a number of fertile connections to Spinoza and adumbrates modern thought and culture in new ways.  It suggests several avenues for future research and goes some way toward correcting the false portrait of Spinoza as an uncompromising rationalist who has little appreciation of the imaginative fabric of cultural life.

Then, at Marx and Philosophy, Mirko Hall reviews Uwe Steiner's Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010):

There are many critical introductions – e.g., from Cambridge, Polity, Routledge, and Totem – available on Benjamin. What makes this book particularly valuable is the discussion of people, texts, and contexts that are sometimes relegated to the periphery of Benjamin Studies. Steiner does not fetishize later canonical writings (such as the artwork essay, the notes on the Parisian Arcades or the theses on the philosophy of history). He also explores lesser texts that involve Benjamin’s earliest investigations into the essence of language and the practice of literary translation and criticism. These fields are extremely important, because they allowed him to recognize the continued afterlife of cultural artifacts. Steiner also emphasizes the importance of occasionally marginalized thinkers, who are invaluable for understanding Benjamin’s intellectual outlook: Germanist Norbert von Hellingrath, essayist Carl Gustav Jochmann, art historian Alois Riegl or author Paul Scheerbart. There is a strong interest in Scheerbart, who provided Benjamin with significant political impetuses for his techno-utopian visions.

And don't forget my review of Rancière's The Politics of Literature here.

Politics of Literature Review

My review of Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Literature, which I wrote during our sojourn in Paris, is now available at the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books here.

Patrik Ourednik, The Opportune Moment, 1855

It was a late night hyperlink clicking session that led me to Patrik Ourednik. I don't know exactly where it started, but it ended with me acquiring two of his books: The Opportune Moment, 1855 and Case Closed, both translated by Alex Zucker and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Here's some brief background on Ourednik, which I've taken from Context (a journal published by Dalkey Archive as well):

Patrik Ouredník was born in Prague‚ but emigrated to France in 1984‚ where he still lives. He is the author of eight books‚ including fiction‚ essays‚ and poems. He is also the Czech translator of novels‚ short stories‚ and plays from such writers as François Rabelais‚ Alfred Jarry‚ Raymond Queneau‚ Samuel Beckett‚ and Boris Vian. He has received a number of literary awards for his writing‚ including the Czech Literary Fund Award.

I started with The Opportune Moment, 1855, which tells the story of the failure of an utopian commune founded by Italian anarchists in Brazil. It opens with a letter by one of the protagonists (who I will call the epistolary narrator), to his unrequited love, many years after the failure of the new society. At once it becomes clear that Ourednik is writing, in a way, a historical novel and satire. Here are the opening lines (also from the DA website), which convey that 19th century epistolary mood:

Madam, however strong my distaste at the thought of deferring to your whim after so many years, I have not found within myself the courage to resist it, and am left with no choice but to submit, albeit I do so at the expense of my repute. To oblige you means to confess to my love for you, that transient conflagration, that involuntary clouding of the senses, which renders less persuasive all that I have professed and proclaimed; and as much as you know it, in your selfishness you ask of me a sincerity which I could not show anyone else. For if in life I have resisted your God and his depraved demands, if I have resisted unfreedom and shallowness, if I have faced ridicule and human baseness always with calm and determination—I have lost my struggle with love; and what is more, my love has been embodied by you, a woman unworthy of true emotion. Still today, when I find in you nothing which would be worth attention, when I marvel at the fact that I ever could have loved you, still today a word from your mouth knocks me defenseless to my knees, returning me to the days of immaturity and youthful fumbling, to days past and past perfect, to the juvenile schoolboy who carried out directions and instructions he did not understand. But the schoolboy in the end revolted and made up his mind to submit only to that which appeared sensible and good to him, whereas the aging man takes pen in hand and hastens to satisfy your vanity. 

The narrator then recalls the desires and reasons to attempt to create a new society in rural Brazil, his conflicted feelings over his paramour, and the shortcomings of the commune and his youthful enthusiasms. This particular participant is the founder that searched out its location and returned to Europe to propagandize for its creation, who nevertheless fails, due to his delay at sea, to arrive before the settlement self-destructs. All that is left, aside from the deserted settlement, is a journal that is given him by the Brazilian policeman. 

The journal takes the reader back to 1855, and is told by an Italian anarchist named Bruno (who is not the same as the epistolary narrator, who, as far as I can tell, is referred to by Bruno as "Older Brother"). The journal is split into two parts, the first describes Bruno's trip across the Atlantic, the second of the decline of Fraternitas settlement. During the trip across the Atlantic, Bruno captures the hopes and anticipations of the voyagers, their squabbles, and, unwittingly, their exploitation at sea by the ship's captain (for example, when the captain chooses to land temporarily at Cape Verde rather than the Canary Islands, one of the voyagers "didn't see why we hadn't filled up on fresh water when we were in the Canary Islands, where it was free"). In the squabbles, many of the limitations of their enthusiasm are revealed: the group argues over whether non-Europeans should be admitted to the group, they seem oblivious to the problems of being settlers in relation to indigenous peoples, etc. 

After this section, there is a six month gap in the journal, and it resumes as the Fraternitas settlement collapses, and narrator becomes completely unreliable (that's all I can say without spoiling anything).

With novels such as The Opportune Moment, 1855, I find it impossible to ignore considering the political subtext. A story of a failed utopian project suggests, of course, that  Ourednik views all political change with cynical eyes, meaning that all attempts at change end in defeat (but, then, why translate the book? We've got plenty of cynics and conservatives in the English language). 

Or, it could accent the importance of the hopes opened by such a project despite their flaws. If the epistolary narrator is any indicator, Ourednik opts for the latter possibility. In his letter, the narrator rejects the smug liberalism of his former lover, choosing to resign himself to the absurdity of life rather than to the absurdity of bourgeois world.

Arthur C. Danto," Andy Warhol"

Arthur C. Danto's Andy Warhol (Yale, 2009) is a philosophical biography of the most famous representative of American pop art. A biography is more than appropriate for the pop artist who was himself an  icon, because, as Danto notes, Warhol "invented, one might say, an entirely new kind of life for an artist to lead, involving music, style, sex, language, film, and drugs, as well as art" (47-48). Nevertheless, Danto avoids the temptation of filling the book with lurid prose, focusing on Warhol's philosophy of art.

Perhaps it has something to do with Danto's own intellectual/biographical trajectory, but Warhol stands out for him as the artist who reconfigured the central questions of the philosophy of art. In brief, Danto's account goes like this: the long-standing and traditional question of the philosophy of art was "what is art?" The question, and more importantly, the solution (art has something to do with beauty) had been largely unchallenged until modernism and the avant-gardes, and more specifically the anti-aestheticism of Dadaism. Modernism turned the question into an aesthetic self-interrogation,  and Dada used their art to ridicule the decadence of the ruling classes who had led Europe into the first world war.

Modernism and Dada, according to Danto, only challenged the solution to the question 'what is art?', while Warhol transformed the question:

The new form of the ancient question was this: given two objects that look exactly alike, how is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object (62)?

Enter the Brillo Boxes, and drumroll, please:

Andy's various challenges to what philosophers and others have said that art is pale in comparison with the grocery boxes. Since he has found an example of a real object and a work of art, why can't anything have a counterpart that is a work of art, so that ultimately anything can be a work of art? That means at the very least a new of era of art in which artworks cannot be discerned from real things, at least in principle--what I have called The End of Art (65-66).

Danto immediately answers the obvious challenge that Marcel Duchamp's readymades caused this kind of havoc for art by arguing that the "one thing that has to be said about the Brillo Boxes is that they are beautiful" (66). The irony, though, is that choosing Warhol over Duchamp gives us a new question, but the old answer: the line might not be drawn in principle, but the work of art still has something to do with beauty.

That, however, might not be as important as the politics that Danto derives from Warhol's work. Warhol, he says, "celebrated ordinary American life" in his work (of course, one would have to exclude much of the underground film work, but I digress). Warhol the painter, celebrates "what every American knows." His genius, in Danto's view, rested in his ability to pick potent images that reflected what was on the American mind:

He represented the world that Americans lived in by holding a mirror up to it, so that they could see themselves in its reflection. It was a world that was largely predictable through its repetitions, one day like another, but that orderliness could be dashed to pieces by crashes and outbreaks that are our nightmares [...] It is a world of little people--us--with the imperfections that gnaw at us and explain why we are not loved the way we would like to be, but imperfections that afflict even the stars and celebrities who take their own lives, even though we envy them for their beauty, their success, their supposed success (126-127).

From what I can gather, Warhol represents a world that Danto felt at home in, and, for all its self-obsessed pathos, more than likely the world that he feels nostalgia for. Warhol or not, that's not a world I want to glorify, let alone live in.

Pierre Clastres, "Archeology of Violence"

(Semiotext(e), 2010)

In 1977, at the time of his death by road accident, Clastres was compiling materials for his third book. Only 43, he had by then inaugurated a groundbreaking political anthropology in the wake of his fieldwork in South America. Having studied under Claude Levi-Strauss and, later, Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, Clastres went on to severely if respectfully critique the structuralism of his early master and influence the authors of Capitalism and Schizophrenia considerably. He is now an essential reference for ethnologists as well as more radical French theory kids. He is also somewhat erroneously considered an exemplary "anarchist" anthropologist. Not in any obvious way concerned to put forth specific political programs (though his sympathies may certainly be detected), Clastres devoted his career to rigorously describing and theorizing what he termed "societies against the State".

Semiotext(e) has reissued Clastres's posthumous volume, Archeology of Violence, originally published in France in 1980. The essays collected expand upon his central argument, which defines "primitive" societies by their refusal of the State. Taking such societies seriously, for Clastres, means recognizing that they are not embryonic or proto-societies, but rather full-blown political totalities which have constituted themselves in a very conscious and deliberate way so as to prevent the rise of inequality, (non-sexual) division of labour and, ultimately, since these are its very substance, the State. In brief, since the State is a permanent possibility in human society, primitive societies constitute themselves as elaborate machines for warding it off. Accordingly, Clastres roundly rejects Marxist anthropology and other historicizing / economizing discourses (cf. his polemical essay "Marxists and their Anthropology"). It is the political, rather than the economic or the biological, which constitutes the horizon of primitive social life. According to Clastres, so-called "primitives" are actually very shrewd politicians. Even where one detects exoticizing tendencies in his turns of speech, Clastres is genuinely trying to take the people he is studying seriously.

While the general line of his argument is already trotted out in his earlier works Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians and Society Against the State, the main contribution of Archeology of Violence is to have examined "primitive" war as a tactic for keeping the State at bay. The almost universal bellicosity of tribal populations in the ethnographic record is thought by Clastres to reflect a centrifugal / atomizing tendency which at once asserts the group as a unified totality, and ensures maximum political dispersion between groups. Of particular interest is the final essay, in which Clastres examines the role of the warrior class in such societies. Since they serve the greater social interest of warding off the State, but also risk inaugurating the State via the quasi-monopoly of violence they engender, warriors become trapped in a social logic whereby their glory can only be secured by ever grander and more individualistic military exploits - thus rendering the warrior a being doomed to die. "Primitive" society is evidently sufficiently complex and canny to recognize and regulate tendencies within tendencies, machines within machines. Very Deuleuzo-Guattarian.

This brings me to my last point. Since Clastres's writing is wonderfully clear, and since he reiterates his positions in the book a great many times, the long introduction by de Castro really puts the cart before the horse. True, Clastres was influenced by and influenced Deleuze and Guattari. This is a very crucial and fascinating aspect of his work. Starting things off with D&G speak risks clouding things, however. Interested readers would do well to read the introduction last, since it does offer some great insights but ultimately gets bogged down in segmentarity, lines of flight and other such concepts.

Alain Badiou, "Pocket Pantheon"

(Verso, 2009)

Badiou's book collects eulogies to certain recent-contemporary giants of French intellectual life. All are beautifully written, most shed light on Badiou's own philosophy, and some are excellent introductions to their subject matters.

The eulogy to Derrida is probably the best in the collection, precisely for how it combines humour, clarity and sympathy in its reconstruction - I hope you'll pardon me here - of deconstruction. Also particularly notable are the entries on Sartre, Althusser and Lyotard. The impression is reinforced that for Badiou, there are no problems of a strictly or abstractly philosophical importance; for a philosophical "interventionist", in a constrained but important sense the philosophical is the concrete. This accounts for his rooting of interpersonal sympathies and dissonances at a level of abstraction that is often surprising and counter-intuitive. Through humour, sadness, love and ire, the force of Badiou's personality shines through in virtually every eulogy, giving body to the austere rigour of his own philosophical work.

Though highly interesting, the book is more for browsing than reading cover to cover, a supplement to one's studies at best. For example, the discussion on the Kantianism/Spinozism of Francoise Proust means nothing to me at this point; as a North-American student of French theory, there's a fair bit regarding more minor personalities that eludes my grasp. The main attraction for me was the prospect of reading Badiou on his philosophical contemporaries, both allies and rivals. I was rewarded with the usual aesthetic experience of his writings, but also a clearer picture of his self understanding vis a vis French intellectual life. I hesitate however to recommend this text for systematic study. If you're curious about, say, Sartre's influence on Badiou, by all means turn to the essay in this book. We must, however, pick our battles.

The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes

For my introductory philosophy courses, such as 'Great Philosophers' this semester, I always teach Descartes' Meditations. However, for my 'Fundamental Questions' course I've been using The Good Life, edited by Charles Guignon, and he includes selections from The Passions of the Soul rather than the Meditations or the Discourse on Method. Which means that rather than concluding with the problem of Cartesian dualism I was beginning my lectures with his attempted resolution.

Discussing this material reminded me that I had wanted last year to read The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, edited by Lisa Shapiro (University of Chicago Press, 2007; it is part of their series "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe"), as a companion to Descartes' published work. This month, I finally did, and it was well worth the effort-- not the effort of reading their correspondence, but of fitting it into the reading stack. They prove to be a lively and engaging pair. Elisabeth refuses to accept Descartes' attempts to dodge her objections to his dualism, and he proves willing enough to eventually draft an early version The Passions of the Soul to answer her questions, only to, of course, provoke more objections and questions. Elisabeth, for her part, seems to approve of the Cartesian perspective in general, although she seeks to overcome the dualism between mind an body, and to work out (with Descartes) an ethics that can help her with both personal and political situations. Along the way, they discuss Seneca, Epicurus, and Machiavelli. If not for anything else, there are unlikely moments for those accustomed to Descartes' published work, such as his admission that "the Schools are right to say that the virtues are habits," or his verdict on Machiavelli: after noting the faults of The Prince, he notes that "I have since read his discourses on Titus Livy where I noticed nothing evil."

I can't always say that I like reading the winding paths of philosophers' correspondence. That being said, I recommend The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes to the reader who is looking for a different and not often noticed side of early modern philosophy and letters.

Gratton on Nancy's "The Truth of Democracy"

Peter Gratton's review of Jean-Luc Nancy's The Truth of Democracy is up on the CSCP website, in advance of its publication in Symposium (here).

Much in the way that I work with Rancière, Gratton takes Nancy as a starting point for thought, as a kind of provocation: in this case, about democracy, which has been used and abused by anti-democrats, and yet still is "unrivalled as a name for political aspirations the world over." He highlights the way that Nancy critiques the notion that democracy could name the activity of sovereign and autotelic, showing how politics-- democratic politics-- is a politics in common, that is organized as a distribution (partage) that is not organized through calculation or administration (Peter notes a similarity between Nancy and Rancière on the term partager and 'equality').

I am drawn to this review, in addition, because Gratton identifies several of those features that had frustrated me about Nancy's work when I was writing about it years ago (for my MA, to be precise). One of the most frustrating is his recourse to Heidegger's highly tenuous 'history of metaphysics'. Here's Peter again:

In this way, Nancy, like Giorgio Agamben and Heidegger before them both, accede to a view of history that mirrors the rise and fall of Western metaphysics: Heidegger’s analysis of das Man is mistaken for a sociology, and the societal ennui of Western Europe, no doubt powerful, is said to be mirrored across the world. [...]

It is puzzling that Nancy takes for granted that the impasses of democracy in Europe and the U.S. are a mark of the political the world over, which itself would be a direct result of impasses in Western metaphysics. But if the age of such world pictures is over, as Nancy himself argues here, what of this picture Nancy himself projects? The truth of democracy, if there is such a thing, should first take on this archaic European supposition, which is itself a haunting superstition, indeed a sovereign imposition, denegating the truth of democracy as such.

I agree wholeheartedly with Peter's conclusion. A few comments of my own: reading this review it struck me that in opposition to Nancy, Rancière would reject this identification of the destiny of metaphysics and democracy, especially because Rancière poses egalitarian logic as a direct challenge to 'political philosophy' of, for instance, Plato and Aristotle. Nor does politics have to take place in a European framework. Which is why, perhaps, people have been drawing connections between the recent uprisings in North Africa and elsewhere and the work of Rancière (myself, Peter, and Scu at Critical Animal) or Fanon (here) and not Jean-Luc Nancy.

David Sedaris, "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary"

(Little, Brown and Company, 2010)

Animal fables are generally awesome on account of how grown up and gruesome and darkly humourous they can be. One might even say that animal fables are "fucking metal" at the best of times. Cf also Vikram Seth's "Beastly Tales", and raise your hammers high.

Humourist David Sedaris has recently thrown his contribution to the genre into the ring, and it does not disappoint. I'll be honest that I expected "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk" to be more benignly funny than it turned out to be; In retrospect I feel bad about giving it to my betrothed as a Christmas gift, since it's kind of like having given her a case of the shudders. A good many of the stories are downright grotesque and extremely violent.

The reason I wholeheartedly endorse this book is that throughout it Sedaris hilariously skewers modern culture and attitudes, more specifically those of the US. The animals who populate his stories are for all intents and purposes human beings; more specifically they're people adopting attitudes and ways of being that are instantly familiar. For example, the judicious, narrow-minded chicken and the new age, positive thinking lab rat are just two sides of the American prosperity gospel coin: though one echoes Tea Party provincialism and the other yoga-lite young professionalism, both testify to the attitude that anyone suffering misfortune must have deserved it in some way. Both are cruelly shown how much their attitudes are really worth.

Dark humour and irony aside, I should also emphasize that there are moments in the book that are just plain beautiful. The title story is a case in point. Sedaris is a versatile and economical writer who continues to deliver.