Honneth's Freedom's Right (I)

Freedom's Right is Honneth’s grand undertaking to “normatively reconstruct” the principles of freedom and justice embodied in the major institutional complexes of modern society – the sphere of intimate relations, the capitalist market and the democratic public sphere. As can be expected from a critical theorist, Honneth’s aim is normative as well as descriptive. The reconstruction is meant to provide the foundations of a theory of justice which, in turn, can provide critical theory with yardsticks for critique.

The grand scope and ambition is evident in the book's design, which is modelled on that of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Honneth announces his intention to create an updated version of the latter already in the preface. In an amusing aside he complains about how burdensome his undertaking has been compared to that of Hegel, who was still writing in the very beginning of modernity and never needed to pay attention to the complex developments that took place in the two hundred years of history separating him from us (p. viii). Although this remark sounds like a joke, it is significant since it signals that his book will be about history as much as it will be about theory. According to Honneth, a valid normative theory cannot be founded on abstract principles, but must rest on a "reconstruction" of norms that have developed historically and that are already embodied in the major institutions of modern societies.

It's an ambitious book, and for precisely that reason it also invites critical reflexions. In this post, I will try to summarize Honneth's argument. I start with presenting his basic idea of normative reconstruction. I then turn to his argument that the major modern institutional complexes are institutions of "social freedom". Finally, I discuss how Honneth believes that the promise of freedom embodied in these institutions can be betrayed in two ways: pathologies and misdevelopments. In future posts, I plan to follow up on this discussion by adding some critical comments on Honneth's undertaking.




Normative reconstruction and immanent criticism:

The critical intent behind Honneth's normative reconstruction is to show how criticism is possible by appealing to values already embodied in the institutions that are being criticized, and that criticism indeed must appeal to such values in order to be legitimate and socially effective: “the criterion for determining what counts as just can ultimately only be judged in terms of the ideals actually institutionalized in that society” (p. 5). Criticism must, in other words, be an immanent criticism that judges to what extent institutions live up to their own values. The aim of the normative reconstruction is to “examine, by following the historical development of each of these social spheres, the degree to which the understanding of freedom institutionalized within them has already been socially attained” (p. viii).

By seeking to ground criticism on a normative reconstruction of the ideals of freedom that have historically become instittuionalized in modern societies, Freedom's Right marks a departure from Habermas' version of critical theory as well as from early versions of Honneth's own theory of recognition. The yardsticks meant to be uncovered by reconstruction would neither be quasi-transcendental presuppositions immanent to language (as in Habermas) or anthropological constants (as Honneth tended to portray them in his earlier work). Like Hegel, Honneth seeks to draw not on “an external standard” but to “point out ‘reconstructively’ the neglected potential of already existing institutions” (p. 10).

That he views the yardsticks as being historically embedded in the core institutions of modern society doesn't mean that he affirms the existing order in toto. What he seeks to do is rather to trace over time how the three institutional spheres have developed, sometimes approaching and sometimes betraying the underlying principle of mutual recognition and the promise of freedom with which they are associated. There is thus always room for criticism, but that criticism can never be totalized since it must be done “in light of embodied values” (p. 9).


The centrality of institutions

The premise of Honneth's undertaking is that promises of freedom are indeed embodied in central institutions. As he writes: “this project could only succeed if the constitutive spheres of our society are understood as institutional embodiments of particular values whose immanent claim to realization indicates the principles of justice at work in each specific sphere” (p. vii). Freedom and justice are linked since individuals are mutually dependent on each other in order to realize their individual freedom. Individual freedom, in a nutshell, rests on mutual recognition. Mutual recognition in turn can only be guaranteed by institutions. Freedom can therefore only be fulfilled with the help of institutions that “inform subjects in advance about the interdependence of their aims” (p. 65).

But what does Honneth mean by institutions? Mostly informal ones, it seems. He points out that he is not chiefly or only interested in juridical relations “but in practices, customs and social roles” (p. 66). We owe most of our individual freedom “not to legal entitlements granted by the state, but to the existence of a web... of routine and often only weakly institutionalized practices and customs” (p. 67). More important than the formality or informality of the institutions is therefore that they are stable, recognized and hence able to provide clear guidance for action. This is an important clarification which it is important to keep in mind when evaluating Honneth's theory. His business is not to justify existing state institutions; what he does want to show, however, is the necessity of certain normatively underminned practices for realizing what most people in modern societies think of as freedom.


Social freedom

In his book, Honneth focuses on three insitutitional complexes – those of intimate relations, the capitalist market and democratic will-formation (corresponding to Hegel’s well-known triad of family, civil society and state). Why these three? The answer is that Honneth believe that they embody institutions of "social freedom".

What then is social freedom? Honneth tries to argue that a viable ideal of freedom cannot simply be a "negative freedom" (freedom from external interference) or "reflexive freedom" (self-determination in the Kantian sense of being able to rationally decide over one's own choices). Instead it must be a “social freedom” in which the individual recognizes that his or her freedom can only be realized through the freedom of others, or in other words that people are mutually dependent on each other for their individual freedom. Thus in the family or love relationship, we usually don't look on the other as a limitation of our own freedom, but as a precondition for it. To love another person means to be unfree without her, as Hegel pointed out. In similar fashion, we cannot be free in the market economy if we remain totally on our own. The market economy is a system of interdependencies in which we only achieve our goals by engaging in transactions with other people who are also pursuing their own goals. Finally, in the public sphere too we can only realize our own goals by having them recognized by others or acting in concert with them. In all these cases, the institutional complexes create systems in which my own freedom is dependent on that of others. 

According to Honneth, the possibility of social freedom provided by these institutional complexes isn't just an objective part of the way they function. It also needs to be subjectively recognized. Fundamental to social freedom is thus the element of mutual recognition, a notion which has long been central to Honneth’s work. Social freedom thus rests on “the condition that other, accommodating subjects confirm my own aims” (p. 65). The reality of freedom is only given “if we encounter each other in mutual recognition and can understand our actions as a condition for the fulfillment of others’ aims” (p. 124).

That the institutions are recognized as contributing to social freedom is also what legitimizes them and makes them capable of gaining our support. When I engage in, say, the market economy, I can thus legitimize my action by referring to the "promise" of mutual freedom. Similarly, whenever I engage with any of these institutional complexes, I am entitled to do so in the expectation that the promise of social freedom will be fulfilled. Precisely because of this, I am also able to criticize the complex if this promise is betrayed. As Honneth shows, the history of each of the three institutional spheres is also a history of struggles, through which social movements of various kinds have brought accusations to bear on the institutions in order to make them live up to their promises of freedom. By constantly invoking this promise, these movements have also contributed to endowing the institutions with traditions in which these promises have become firmly embedded.


Pathologies

Normative reconstruction seems to presuppose the possibility of separating the empirial reality of institutions from their essential normative core. Although institutions may very well betray this normative core in the course of their development, the core nevertheless remains embodied in them as part of their tradition and thus exists in them as a form of "promise" to which criticism can appeal whenever institutions fail to live up to it. Honneth thus presents us with a high ambivalent portrayal of these institutions as Janus-like. On the one hand they possess a "good" core which remains intact through their history, but on the other they have increasingly come to deviate from that core through their historical development.

How does Honneth analyze these deviations? According to him, they can happen in two ways, through "pathologies" or "misdevelopments".

Pathologies are deviations that are rooted in the institutions themselves. Honneth defines them as “any social development that significantly impairs the ability to take part rationally in important forms of social cooperation” (p. 86). They arise when people one-sidedly adhere to limited ideas of freedom, i.e. "negative" or "reflexive" ideas of freedom. Although such ideas have a legitimate place in modern societies - Honneth writes that they help individuals “assure themselves of their intersubjectively accepted and socially anchored possibilities of retreating from the social lifeworld” (p. 66) - pathologies typically emerge as soon as these types of freedom are asserted alone. An example of this is the pathology of legal freedom, which occurs when everything is interpreted as being a matter of subjective rights (pp. 86-94).

But how does Honneth think that these pathologies come about? Are there any systematic causes behind these tendencies to assert one type of freedom alone? Honneth seems to suggest that the rise of pathologies is a result of the shift to a more complex society, “found at a higher stage of social reproduction” (p.86). For instance, people can be so overwhelmed by the “rapid increase of options for action” that they “cling fast to their legal claims”, leading to pathologies of legal freedom (p.87). Later on, Honneth specifies that he believes that the “major factor” behind the increasing tendency to rely on legal freedom is “the increasing legal codification of spheres of life that were previously organized in a largely communicative manner” (p.89), i.e. the process that Habermas referred to as juridification in The Theory of Communicative Action. This process leads people to “take up an objectifying stance toward their highly individuated interaction” with the result that “subjects are forced to abstract from their concrete experiences and recognize their needs only to the extent that they fit into the schema of generally typified interests, thus undermining overall communicative life” (p.90).

These remarks are interesting since they provide a glimpse into how Honneth addresses alienation, the phenomenon whereby human beings no longer recognize themselves in their own products which thus appear to possess their own independent being. An aspect of this is that people become unable to recognize their own freedom in institutional structures. Although Honneth discusses these processes in his book Reification, he never really provides a sociological explanation in that book of why reification occurs (a problem that I have addressed here). Here, however, he does provide at least part of the sociological explanation that is missing in that book - although the explanation is admittedly sketchy and doesn't really go beyond Habermas.

While this discussion of the social background to the "pathologies" is interesting, it is also slightly problematic. To begin with, if the social cause of legal pathologies is located in juridification or in a broader trend to growing social complexity, then what becomes of the claim that they are rooted in the institutions of freedom themselves? To trace them back to any internal processes within these institutions seems reductive (in relation to this, see Freyerhagen's criticism of the distinction between pathologies and misdevelopments; Freyerhagen 2015). Furthermore, if social complexity is really the cause of the pathologies, then there would be no remedy again them and alienation would have to be defined as a feature of modern society as such, rather than of the capitalist system.

In any case, while negative and reflexive forms of freedom are clearly important, Honneth believes that they must be kept from going to excesses. To keep them in their proper place, well developed institutions of social freedom are necessary - in other words, institutions regulating intimate relations, the market economy, and the political public sphere.


Misdevelopments

According to Honneth, the major instutitions of social freedom - those regulating intimate relations, the market and the public sphere - yield no pathologies. Instead they suffer from misdevelopments, meaning that the causes of the problems are external rather than internal to the institutions themselves. To Honneth, pathologies are in fact only a rather minor part of the problems faced by modern societies. Most of the book is instead taken up with the misdevelopments.

Here I think we should pause and reflect a bit on what the distinction between pathologies and misdevelopments does to Honneth's theory. One of the chief functions of this distinction is to provide a theoretical basis for arguing that these institutions are not bad in themselves, despite the fact that actual practices in these institutions may well fail to live up to the values embodied in them. The misdevelopments are certainly deplorable, but they are not the fault of the institutions. They are rather “anomalies” (p.129) for which the institutions are not responsible.

What then are the misdevelopments from which the major institutional complexes suffer? The sphere of intimate relations and the family is being hollowed out by the capitalist market. The political public sphere suffers from problems such as mistrust of public institutions and apathy, obstacles for the participation of all citizens, as well as the tension between the democratic constitutional state and the capitalist market.

So we can see that when it comes to the misdevelopments affecting intimate relations and the public sphere, Honneth to a considerable extent locates the "bad" external influences as having their root in the market economy and its tendency to encroach on these other institutional complexes. To rectify at least some of these problems he proposes that limits to the economic sphere must be determined, so as to prevent “the colonization of neighboring spheres of social freedom” (p.154). An important point the he makes is that the democratic public sphere has a key role in counter-acting misdevelopments not only in its own sphere but also in the other two institutional complexes, since the realization of social freedom in this sphere depends on “free” conditions in the other two. The public sphere, he writes, “can only live up to its principles of legitimacy if it learns... the necessity of supporting struggles for social freedom in the two other spheres” (p. 254f, also see pp. 330-335).

An important remaining question is, of course: if the market economy is a major cause of the misdevelopments affecting intimate relations and the public sphere, what causes the misdevelopments in the market economy? By definition, these causes would have to be external to the market economy, but where then do they come from?

But that is a question that will have to wait to my next post!


References

Freyerhagen, Fabian (2015) “Honneth on Social Pathologies: A Critique”, Critical Perspectives 16(2): 131–152.

Honneth, Axel (2014) Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Karatani's The Structure of Empire

Here are some impressions after reading Karatani Kōjin's Teikoku no kōzō: Chūshin shūhen ashūhen (The structure of empire: Centre, margin, submargin), which is a follow-up on his Sekaishi no kōzō (published in English as The Structure of World History). Although covering much of the same terrain as the latter, the new work's substantial historical discussions centered on China and Japan are a welcome addition to the older work. The new book also introduces a theoretical novelty, namely the distinction between two kinds of nomadism (an idea that also plays a central role in Yûdôron, a companion piece on Yanagita Kunio and nomadism which also appeared last year). Finally, the new book is notable for its carefully celebratory description of empire, which is shown to contain utopian elements..

Karatani starts of by presenting his work as an attempt to grapple with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. To start with Hegel is necessary, he states, as an antidote to the general lack of awareness that we are trapped within the closed circuit of nation, state and capital, a triad which he describes as a Borromean knot in which the three components mutually supplement each other and make any attack on any single one of them unlikely to succeed. Even large protest movements such as the recent insurrections against Mubarak and Morsi in Egypt only ended up strengthening this closed circuit rather than overcoming it. Being a work in which the interconnection within the triad are firmly grasped, The Philosophy of Right is thus more relevant than ever (Karatani 2014:12ff).

Unlike most Marxists, who in their attempts to overturn Hegel by "turning him on his head" ended up in a problematic base-superstructure model that left them little choice between either an economic reductionism or assserting the "relative autonomy" of the superstructure, Karatani uses a model focusing on four modes of exchange, which he believes are equally basic and irreducible:

• A: Reciprocal exchanges within a community, a norm that lives on in our time in the idea of the nation.
• B: The exchange of "plunder and redistribution" typical of feudal lordship and basic to modern states.
• C: Commodity exchange, which is central to capitalism.
• D: Egalitarian sharing through associations between free individuals (singularities) that transcend the community.

While A-B-C are all integral parts of the closed circuit of nation, state and capital, D is external to it. It lacks any historical emodiment except as a recurring utopian element in millennarian movements and modern social movements, but Karatani sees it as a viable model for a possible communism which would also be a Kantian world republic.



Figure 1: Karatani's four modes of exchange

From nomadism to capitalist nation-states

Like in his recent book on Yanagita Kunio, Karatani distinguishes two types of nomadism (yûdôsei), which is a clear novelty compared to The Structure of World History. The nomadism of the earliest bands of hunters-gatherers preceded the emergence of settled communities (A), whereas later forms of nomads - such as the pastoral nomads of Central Asia or Arabia - moved between the settled communities, managing the traffic between them and in the process furthering the rise of trade, markets and empires. The latter form of nomadism thus paved the way for the present dominance of capitalist nation-states and in no way acts as a counter-force to them. Unlike some thinkers like Delezue & Guattari or Amino Yoshihiko, Karatani refuses to see anything liberatory about such nomadism, insisting instead on the need to direct attention to the earlier nomadism of hunters-gatherers as a model for the primordial freedom that subsequent religious and social movements have sought to "repeat" in the form of associations (D).

The rise of settled communities is thus an important watershed to Karatani. By itself, however, it didn't lead to an abandonment of the egalitarianism of hunters and gatherers. Settlement created the possibility of concentrating wealth and power, but this was avoided through the system of reciprocal gift-giving which regulated relations between communities. Settlement forced people to conduct exchange in order to get hold of necessities, but this exchange was generally hostile in character. Outright war was avoided through ceremonial gift-giving, which - once peace had been established through the gift - could be accompanied by barter-like exchanges like in the Kula ring. The hostility could also be sublimated and expressed in the exchange itself, as in potlatches. These exchanges prevented inequality within the communities by forcing chiefs to exhaust their wealth through compulsory generosity. Chiefs were therefore unable to become kings. By creating these systems of reciprocal exchange, societies thus preserved the equality of earlier nomadic societies while preventing the rise of the state. By contrast, strict reciprocity had played a much less prominent role among hunters and gatherers, who instead shared or pooled things without regard for reciprocity.

According to Karatani, this means that the origin of the state cannot be found in factors internal to settled communities, such as rising wealth and class differences. The decisive factor must instead be searched in the role of nomads, whose mobility made them the key mediators between communities. Often making their living out of trade, they turned on communities that threatened the trade lines and conquered them, a process that helped them establish huge empires. Wars of conquest were thus crucial in the formation of states. Such wars turned chiefs into kings who were no longer bound by compulsory reciprocity to the conquered subjects. Furthermore, the creation of empires extending over a plurality of communities made laws necessary, since mere custom was no longer sufficient to regulate the relations between them. Standing armies and imperial bureaucracies become possible when people no longer needed to be treated like equals.

To maintain themselves, however, the empires had to embody what Karatani calls the “imperial principle” (teikoku no genri), a Utopian aspect expressed in popular millenarianism as well as in the idea of a universal monarchy. This allowed the empires to transcend boundaries between particular communities, to be cosmopolitan and tolerant of diversity and to receive active support from peoples under its rule. This means that it was not enough for them to simply offer protection in return for submission (B) - they also had to partake to some extent of the utopia of D. Universal religions helped them do this, as he illustrates through a discussion of St Augustine, who argued that the state was not simply an "organization of robbers", since it has had a redeeming side to it, namely its potential to grow into a City of God where people would not be driven by self-interest but by “love of the neighbor” and “love of God” (ibid. 94-100). Helped by this imperial principle, the empires became centres of civilization, whose scripts, laws and religions shaped the cultures of their subject populations as well as their peripheries. The discussion of empire is substantiated in several chapters dealing with the history of China, the Mongols, Russia, the Ottoman empire and the Mogul empire.

However, even while the empires (dominated by B) were flourishing, the nucleus of a "world-economy" (dominated by C) formed in what Wittfogel calls their "submargins". These were distinct from the "margins", i.e. those areas that were geographically closest to the empires and politically dependent on them. Submargins were located far enough from the empires not to be immediately threatened by them but close enough to be exposed to the imperial civilization which could be selectively imported and wedded to a social structure that, in comparison with the empires, was more pluralistic and lacking in a strong central power - factors that were favorable to the rise of trade and a strong merchant class. This could be seen in feudal Europe which became the birth bed of the modern capitalist economy, not because it was more advanced that the Eurasian empires but because it was peripheral to them and (from an imperial perspective) more "barbaric".

The idea of imperial centres and their margins and sub-margins (which plays a prominent role already in Karatani's earlier work) performs a crucial theoretical function to him, helping him make better sense of history than the old classical Marxist stage theory. However, we can also note that Karatani is not so much discarding this theory as rescuing it in a modified form. In his version history is still made to progress from a stage in which A predominates to one where B is dominant until B in turn is supplanted by one in which C is predominant, namely present-day capitalism. This, however, is not a developmental ladder to be climbed by each society in isolation (first the European countries, then the Third World...). Instead, he brings in a spatial dialectics centred on the interplay between the empires, mostly located in Asia, and their margins and sub-margins. Doing so helps him get rid of that old anomaly, the notion of an "Asiatic mode of production", which was the way empires had tended to be conceptualized from the standpoint of the old stage theory.

It also provides the theoretical tools for properly grasping the spatio-historical place of feudalism. Feudalism isn't characteristic of all pre-modern societies, but above all of the submargins where the remnants of older clan-based social systems tend to be stronger than in the empires. Thus European feudalism was rooted in the clan-based systems of the peoples that had been sub-marginal to the Roman Empire. Their legacy of was evident in the fact that strong elements of reciprocal relations remained within the ruling stratum. These, however, disappeared with the rise of capitalism and the formation of absolutist states. The absolutist states differed from empires since capitalism was an integral part to them. They formed when the absolutist monarchs allied with the rising bourgeoisie to buttress their power and used this power to protect the flow of capital from interference by feudal lords and the Church. Even later when these absolutist states become imperialist, they didn't become empires in a strict sense. Following Arendt, Karatani argues that imperialism is merely the expansion of the nation-state, the rule of one nation over others. Hence it lacks the universal aspect of the “imperial principle” and invites resistance in the form of national liberation movements.

Japan as submargin

Karatani demonstrates the fruitfulness of his concepts of empire and submargin in a chapter on Japan, whose history can to a great extent be explained by reference to its submarginal status. Thus Japan's backwardness in relation to the Chinese empire was expressed in its clan-based feudal social system, which persisted despite superficial cultural and organizational imports from China (as seen in the persistence of bilinearity, the ineffectuality of the Ritsuryôsei, etc.). Unlike imperial "margins" like Korea, the "sub-margin" Japan was free from direct military threats from China for most of its history, a fact that encouraged Japan to set up its own "miniature-empire", emulating China instead of subordinating itself to it.

Within Japan, however, there were regional differences. As the historian Amino Yoshihiko has pointed out in a number of works (e.g. Amino 1998), medieval Japan was far from a homogeneously feudal country in the European sense, dominated by a warrior elite ruling over an agricultural peasant population. Although such a portrayal has a measure of truth when applied to eastern Japan, the western parts and especially the capital region around Kyoto was more diverse, involving a separate hierarchical ordering with the emperor at its apex that linked together "non-agriculturalists" such as artisans, performers, traders, religious practitioners and outcasts. Karatani adheres to this portrayal, arguing that feudalism developed mainly in the submarginal east while imported “imperial” elements were more prominent in Kyoto and western Japan (Karatani 2012:239).

Nevertheless, on the whole Karatani believes that Japan's "success" in modernizing was rooted in a feudal past more or less similar to in Europe. This past helped it develop capitalism and achieve a rapid modernization that enabled it to escape colonization by the West. The idea that Japan modernized successfully because of structural similarities to Europe goes back at least to the 1960's when the anthropologist Umesao Tadao argued that Japan resembled Western Europe more than China because of its fringe position on the Eurasian continent and its feudal past (Umesao 2003). Karatani admits that this thesis lost popularity after the capitalist development of China, but he still chooses to adhere to it (ibid. 238).

If Japan is seen as similar to Europe, however, how should one explain the absence in Japan of an absolutist state? Karatani argues that something akin to European absolutism was in fact set up by the warlord Nobunaga, who not only established a form of absolute rule for himself but also actively furthered Japan’s participation in the world-system of capitalist trade. The Tokugawa shogunate, however, was different: although possessing power comparable to that of European absolutist regimes it preferred to set up a facade of feudalism, pulled out of the world-economy and opted out of military and technological development, i.e. it deliberately chose to pursue a policy quite different from the European absolutist states. Of course, the reason that it had the leeway to do this was that it was relatively safe from invasions, unlike the European states. But in the end, it proved impossible for the Tokugawa regime to stop the process of capitalist development and nation-state formation. Japanese capitalism didn't start to develop after the Meiji Restoration, but much earlier despite the efforts of the Tokugawa state to suppress it (ibid. 247-252).


The decline and return of empire?

With the rise of the European "world-economy", the old empires went into decline. Although they largely managed to resist being colonized, their old margins - e.g. vassal states like Korea - fell prey to colonization. To Karatani, however, the empires are not simply remnants to be discarded. "They contain something important that is lacking in the modern world-system. Hence, the principle for overcoming the modern nation-state and capitalism must in some way or another resurrect the empire” (ibid. 156). What Karatani refers to here is of course the "imperial principle". This principle, however, can only be resurrected by first negating it, i.e. “sublating” it, as he puts it using the Hegelian term. Such attempts at sublation could be seen for instance in Kang Youwei's attempt to revive the Qing empire by orienting it to the ideal of datong ("great unity"). China's Marxist revolution too, Karatani suggests, can be seen as an attempt to sublate and thereby resurrect the imperial tradition (ibid. 168ff).

Today China rises economically again, but that doesn’t mean the return of the “East” as an empire. Instead it means simply that China is today functioning as part of a pluralist capitalist world-economy like other capitalist nation-states (p. 145). Karatani believes that the resurgence of national liberation movements within China is a sign that it has jettisoned its old "imperial principle" and instead become similar to the "imperialistic" European national states of a century ago. What China needs today, Karatani believes, is not to pursue neoliberal capitalism but to reconstruct empire. If China opts for further neoliberalization, social unrest and ethnic conflicts will exacerbate and it will risk disintegration (p. 171).

In the last part of the book, Karatani repeats his prediction, familiar from previous books, that today's predominance of large regional blocs – of which China is one – in combination with environmental degradation and an intensified struggle for resources will lead to world war, and that the only way to escape this fate is the establishment of a Kantian world-republic. Interesting in this connection is his explicit assertion that the models of such a world-republic found in Kant and Augustine are rooted in the idea of empire (p. 197). Like in previous books, he argues that the traumatic possibility of a new world war will make the formation of such a world-republic inevitable, since it will compel states to voluntarily renounce war and imperialistic ambitions (one of his models here, surely, is Japan and the firm popular support enjoyed today by its "peace constitution"). Powerful states can play a crucial role in creating world-republics, he believes. By voluntarily renouncing war as a “gift” to the world, other states will be compelled to reciprocate the gift, and thus a world-republic of peace can be established (p. 208f).


Critical remarks 

Many of Karatani's assertions are stimulating and thought-provoking, and - as part of that - they also invite criticism. Below are some of my critical comments: 

1) A notable shift in Karatani's recent works is his interest in early nomadic bands before the rise of settled communities. Here he admits that societies existed where none of his four modes of exchange had yet come into being. Can they then really be fundamental to explaining societal change?

2) The shift of attention to early nomadic bands destabilizes Karatani's theoretical edifice in yet another sense as well. In his texts until now, Karatani has claimed that D is a repetition "on a higher level" of A (along the lines of a Hegelian sublation or a Freudian "return of the repressed"). Such passages also exist in this book (e.g. p. 29). Now, however, we also find suggestions that D is a resurrection of an even more egalitarian and "communist" stage prior to the emergence of A represented by early bands of hunters and gatherers (this claim is explicitly made in Yûdôron). But how can D be a resurrection of A on a higher level if A didn’t even exist in these bands? To put it in a nutshell: is D supposed to resurrect the reciprocal gift-giving of A or the pooling of the early nomadic bands?  Karatani himself is aware of this ambiguity, which he addresses explicitly in interviews published after the appearance of the book. Thus he nowadays refers to the primordial nomadism (gen-yûdôsei) of hunters and gatherers as U (the "U" standing both for the German prefix Ur- and the yû of the Japanese word yûdô) (Karatani & Satô 2014:20; also see Karatani & Akashi 2014); the ambiguity is also pointed out by Kobayashi Toshiaki in his recent book on Karatani; Kobayashi 2015:258ff). Can this ambiguity be resolved? A possible solution is hinted at when Karatani states (2014:49) that A is instituted in order to stop inequality from arising once peoples abandon nomadic life - a formulation that suggests that A itself arises as an attempt to preserve the equality of nomadic society and that A is thus already a repetition of that equality.

3) Karatani argues that his typology of four modes of exchange is superior to those theories (e.g. the Frankfurt School) who argue for a relative autonomy of culture or other parts of the superstructure. Instead of relativizing the key role of the economy, he claims to widen the concept of the economy to include modes of exchange in his sense. However, in widening the “economy” to include all forms of exchange, isn’t he just redefining what used to be seen as parts of the old superstructure into exchange, and, if so, how is that better than talking about the relative autonomy of the superstructure? Karatani still needs to conceive of some form of “relative autonomy” for the different forms of exchange.

4) We can note, however, that not all parts of the superstructure are included among the forms of exchange. For instance, he doesn’t have much to say about culture in the sense of language, discourse or ideology or how such cultural phenomena should be understood in relation to his four modes of exchange. Doesn't this risk leading to a belittling of the role of such factors in history? The neglect of language is surprising considering how central it has been as a concern in Karatani's early writings, in which language figured as one of a prime form of exchange with its own form of autonomy.

5) In addition, Karatani often seems to end up rather close to the position he criticizes - namely the "Frankfurt School" position of asserting the relative autonomy of culture. For instance, when he describes D as a return of the repressed or as a non-yet-conscious anticipation of Utopia “coming from the future” (p. 39), he seems to be relying on culture as a realm autonomous from historically existing economic exchange, much in the manner of Ernst Bloch.

6) In connection with this, is it really reasonable to call D a form of economic exchange when it is always represented as“coming from the future” (e.g. in the great universalist religions) and existing as “not yet conscious” rather than actually existing in historical form (p. 39)? Isn’t this culture rather than economic exchange?

So, does Karatani succeed in his struggle with Hegel? Can he break out of the "Borromean knot" and, if so, how? To be sure, he introduces a world-historical logic that, unlike Hegel's, points beyond the closure of the status quo thanks to the element of D. But here an objection arises: what is D? If it has never existed historically except as an ideal in universal religions and some social movements, isn't it then merely a Schein that co-exists with the system rather than offering a genuine possibility of exit from it? As Karatani himself points out, religious and social movements have often started out as critical of the established order only to be reabsorbed into it at a later stage. Indeed, the universal religions used by Karatani as his primary illustrations of D were indispensible parts of the ideological appratus that helped legitimize the empires. Karatani's intention is of course not to portray D as an ideological supplement to the existing order. But if it is instead taken as an ideal to be actually realized, won't it then fall victim to Hegel's criticism of the utopianism of abstract freedom? Karatani seems to rely on Freud to escape this accusation: by using the analogy with Freud's idea of the return of the repressed, he tries to argue that D is both external to historical reality (since it must always appear to come "from without", destabilizing the existing order) and internal to it (since it repeats a repressed content, namely the primordial freedom of the early nomadic bands that existed before the rise of settled communities).

Freud, then, plays a crucial role as a resource to Karatani in his struggle with Hegel. The death drive and the associated idea of compulsive repetitions that destabilize the system are turned against the Hegelian dialectics. While the latter operates through the concept, i.e. the conscious mind, the compulsive repetition Karatani hopes for relies on a form of historical unconscious. The key role played by Freud here is interesting. We can recall that even to Slavoj Zizek, who likes to portray himself as a great defender of Hegel - and who has criticized Karatani for criticizing Hegel unfairly (Zizek 2004, 2006) - it is the inability to theorize the death drive that reveals the limitations of Hegel's dialectics (ibid. 2012).


References

Amino, Yoshihiko (1998 [1982]) Higashi to nishi no kataru Nihon no rekishi, Tokyo: Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko.

Karatani, Kōjin (2014) Teikoku no kōzō: Chūshin shūhen ashūhen, Tokyo: Seidosha.

Karatani, Kôjin & Satô, Masaru (2014) ”Karatani kokkaron o kentô suru”, Gendai shisô Vol. 42-18 (January): 8-29.

Karatani, Kôjin & Akashi, Kengo (2014) “‘Toransukuritîku’ kara ‘Teikoku no kôzô’ e”, Gendai shisô Vol. 42-18 (January): 46-69.

Kobayashi, Toshiaki (2015) Karatani Kôjin-ron – Tasha no yukue, Tokyo: Chikuma shobô.

Umesao, Tadao (2003) An Ecological View of History: Japanese Civilization in the World Context, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press.

Zizek, Slavoj (2004) “The Parallax View”, New Left Review 25 (Jan – Feb): 121-134.

Zizek, Slavoj (2006) The Parallax View, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Zizek, Slavoj (2012) Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso.

The Boy and the Beast - and the claustrophobia of Shibuya

The Boy and the Beast (or Bakemono no ko in Japanese, dir. Hosoda Mamoru, 2015) left me feeling dejected and low-spirited at the end, despite the happy ending. Why?

Ok - det story first. The nine-year old boy Ren is full of resentment against the world after his mother's death and runs away from home to live as a street kid in Shibuya. Trying to escape the police, he loses his way and ends up in the supernatural world of the bakemono (monsterlike beings portrayed as mixtures of animals and humans) that exists in parallel with the normal, human world. In contrast to grey, murky Tokyo, the bakemono world is a sunny and magnificently beautiful pre-modern town. Significantly, while Ren is isolated and surrounded by anonymous masses in Tokyo, in the bakemono world he is constantly talked to and talking back. The bakemono world is a world of communication and human contact.

Ren becomes the disciple of Kumatetsu, a bearlike bakemono who is strong but uncouth and short-tempered. Ren - who is now known as Kyûta - settles down in Kumatetsu's untidy house where they spend their time quarrelling and scolding each other. "Grasp you inner sword!" (Mune no naka no ken o nigirunda), Kumatetsu shouts at the bewildered Kyûta, who doesn't know what to make of this strange injunction and simply shouts back at his teacher. Despite Kumatetsu's inability to provide intelligible guidance, Kyûta grows into a skilled fencer by imitating him. Meanwhile, two friends - the pig-like Buddhist monk Hyakushûbô and the monkey-like Tatara - help educate the boy. As Kumatetsu becomes a father-figure for Kyûta, he himself develops a sense of responsibility, becomes a more skilled teacher and acquires more disicples. When Tatara admiringly talks about how skilled Kyûta has become as a swordsman, Hyakushûbô says that Kumatetsu has grown too: "It's hard to tell who is the master and who is the disciple".

As Kyûta becomes a teenager, the film's atmosphere changes, much of the playfulness disappears and the stage shifts back to Shibuya. Kyûta finds his way back to the human world, where he meets a kind girl, Kaede, who teaches him to read. While discussing Moby Dick she tells him that the whale is not evil in itself - the evil is just the projection of Ahab's own hatred. Kaede is a very proper girl - a trait shown when she asks a group of noisy teenagers to leave the library (later Kyûta has to help her since the teenagers wait outside the library to take revenge on her). Kyûta also manages to find his dad. He decides to leave the bakemono world, but in a fit of rage he runs away from his dad and in the night he meets a terrifying apparation with a black hole in its chest. He realizes that it is himself and that the hole is the inner "darkness" which the bakemono have told him that all humans develop. When he finds Kaede, she manages to calm him by giving him a red ribbon which she says was a bookmark from a book that she loved as a child.

Meanwhile, the time has come for Kumatetsu to face his rival, the equally strong, boarlike bakemono Iôzen. The fight takes place in full public view in a gigantic arena and will determine who will be the next leader (sôshi) of the bakemono. The present leader, a rabbit-like bakemono, has decided to retire and become a god or kami. In contrast to the Kumatetsu, Iôzen is a wellbred, aristocratic figure who is popular with the crowd, has many disciples and lives in an elegant residence surrounded by a bamboo forest. Kumatetsu is on the verge of losing when Kyûta comes back. His spirits raised, Kumatetsu defeats his opponent but is then pierced from behind by a flying sword that is controlled by Iôzen's human son Ichirôhiko – who until now has concealed his humanity but who like all humans has an inner darkness in the shape of a terrifying black hole - and only barely survives. Kyûta and Ichirôhiko meet for a final battle in Shibuya. Ichirôhiko transforms himself into a seemingly invincible flying whale, but Kyûta defeats him with the help of Kumatetsu, who decides to sacrifice himself in order to become an "inner sword" that can fill up the hole in Kyûta's chest. Instead of killing his enemy, Kyûta gives him the red ribbon that he himself had gotten from Kaede. The end is happy – Kyûta is celebrated by the bakemono, gets his girlfriend, reconciles himself with his dad and Kaede persuades him to start studying at a university. He quits fencing but continues to carry his "inner sword" for the rest of his life.

To me, this ending left a bad aftertaste and even a kind of claustrophic feeling. Firstly, part of this feeling comes from the use of "Shibuya" as a metonym for the human world, or at least for the human world as experienced by Japanese youth. Here is certainly the place to ask: who is excluded by the use of such metonyms? Shibuya, for those who don't know, is a popular shopping and entertainment district in Tokyo which is a centre for youth fashion and culture. Unlike, say, neighboring Shinjuku, it is a place that produces the impression of a world divorced from work and from problems related to aging. It's a place above all for young people with money to spend.

Secondly, the film is so preoccupied with the "inner darkness" of Kyûta that not much attention is paid to society. It seems to find nothing wrong with the mainstream society of which the young rebel ends up becoming a well-functioning part.

But if there is nothing wrong with "Shibuya", what then is the need for a parallel world? After all, the function of such worlds in fiction has usually been to address some deficiency in the real world. What is it that the bakemono world offers Kyûta that cannot be found in "Shibuya"? The answer is: an object with which to fill up his "inner darkness". When Kumatetsu turns himself into an "inner sword" he becomes such an object - an introject in the form of a father figure. Is a "father" then what is lacking in "Shibuya"? The preoccupation with fathers in the film is rather startling considering that, biologically speaking, it is not the father but the mother that Kyûta is missing. In present society, the film seems to say, "fathers" are missing despite the presence of biological fathers, and that's why Kyûta needs to travel to the parallel world to find a non-biological father.

Why is it a father - Kumatetsu - that Kyûta seems to need and why not a mother? A look at the role of women in the film shows that it is caught up in traditional gender stereotypes: fighting is the business of men, while women are associated with literature, healing and the power of love. Kaede is not an unimportant figure - she is the one who provides Kyûta with an ideal of to strive for in life and steers him back into mainstream society - but she depends on Kyûta for protection both against bullying teenagers and against the rampaging Ichirôhiko. It is also significant that she is part of the human world, not the bakemono world, which is overwhelmingly masculine. What the latter world provides is a place where boys can grow into "men" in an unabashedly traditional sense, a place where they can be real fighting men. Such places, the film seems to say, are missing in today's mainstream Japanese society. At this point, the suspicion arises that the bakemono world may  be a code for the criminal underworld. That would explain a lot of things - not just the prominence of violence and katanas, but also the central role of masculinity.

At the same time, the film does not one-sidedly affirm this masculine, martial world. Instead, it operates with an idea of a reconciliation between the masculine and the feminine. This reconciliation comes about through Kyûtas's successful socialization, which enables him to unite the best of the bakemono world and the human world - the fighting spirit of Kumatetsu and the gentleness and orderliness of Kaede. We can note in passing that orderliness plays an important structuring role in the film. While there is a good, attractive disorderliness - symbolized by Kumatetsu - this disorderliness has to be overcome (an act symbolized by Kyûta's cleaning up of Kumatetsu's untidy house and Kumatetsu's own development into a responsible father figure). Even worse is the purely evil disorderliness symbolized by the noisy teenagers in the library and their bullying of Kaede - a disorderliness that, unlike Kumatetsu's, is unredeemable and must be subdued by force. On the other hand, there are also "good" and "bad" forms of orderliness. While Kaede stands for the good variety, Iôzen stands for the bad - an orderliness that looks splendid from the outside but that coxists with arrogance. What the film does is to unite two "goods" (Kumatetsu and Kaede) while rejecting two "bads" (the teenagers and Iôzen). The union of the goods (the "complex term" to speak with Greimas) is symbolized by the "inner sword" which enables Kyûta to preserve his fighting spirit even as he adapts to mainstream life, while the union of the bads is personified in Ichirôhiko who wrecks havoc with the world out of resentment at seeing his admired father fall victim to the plebeian Kumatetsu.

Let me now return to the setting. There are works of fiction in which the idea of a parallel world is deployed above all for escapist purposes. That is not necessarily bad, since in such works there is at least an awareness that the real world which one is escaping is not perfect. This film is not an escapist work. It recognizes that problems exist in real society - such as the lack of father figues - and attempts to portray how a possible resolution or reconciliation might look. This, however, is where the feelings of claustrophia set in, because the reconciliation is too premature to have persuasive power. It happens on a purely individual level, through Kyûta's coming of age, without the rest of society having to change one iota. The film seems to want to say: I don't want to change society, only to help you become harmonious parts of it - and my solution is to offer you a sojourn to a world of human contact, where you can develop with a father figure as a model, try out your powers under the surveillance of benevolent adults and establishes ties of friendship and love that allow you to realize the importance to responsibility. It's a little bit like an NGO that seeks only to help delinquent youngsters to "return to society" (shakai fukki, as it is known in Japanese) without breathing a word of criticism against the society it returns them to.

This subservience to mainstream society is what makes the film so different from, say, Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi), which similarly portrays a young child who finds her way into a supernatural parallel world in which she has to go through a number of trials in order to return to the human world. In Miyazaki's film there is nothing that suggests that Chihiro's adventures in the other world will make her a harmonious part of mainstream society. Quite to the contrary, her stay in the other world opens up her eyes to wrongs performed by humans, such as pollution and the destruction of rivers. There is even a suggestion of a critique of capitalism in the film's portrayal of Kaonashi, who seems to believe that money can make up for the absence of friends, who starts to devour people, and whose appetite only grows the more he devours - a metaphor for endless capital accumulation. Chihiro's adventures in the other world seem almost like a training for the struggles she will have to fight in the future to rectify the human world. In Spirited Away, then, the parallel world is deployed as a device for groping for ways to overcome the real social ills without the film portraying the reconciliation as already achieved.

Capitalism?

That The Boy and the Beast ultimately reduces the bakemono world to a kind of service station for the injured young hearts of the human world amounts to a spectacular castration or devaluation of the idea of a supernatural parallel world. Instead of threatening or destabilizing the human world, it is given a purely supportive role as a place for healing teenage hearts and helping them onwards in life on the road to becoming good members of society who like to read books and study at the university. Here, I think, is the explanation to why the happy ending doesn't feel happy. Surely, Kumatetsu would have deserved better than to be a mere catalyst of Kyûta's successful socialization into mainstream society.

The harmony between "Shibuya" and the bakemono world also suggests a nationalistic idea, namely that despite its modernization, Japan is still a "land of the gods" - that beneath the everyday, grey surface, it is still a glorious and colourful land of supernatural beings who stroll about with katana. According to this idea, Japan has not lost its national essence, which lives on in the hearts of young Japanese, just like Kumatetsu lives on in Kyûta's heart in the shape of an "inner sword". As Spirited Away shows, the idea of a "land of the gods" can be given an inflection that turns it into a criticism of the state and of capitalism. This can also be seen in historical phenomena such as the Ee ja nai ka-movement or the idea of a rectification of the world (yonaoshi) that informed many of Japan's millennarian movements. This, however, should not blind us to how often the idea of the "land of the gods" has been mobilized to prop up the legitimacy of the state, the emperor or of mainstream society. Dear Hosoda Mamoru, couldn't you please have moved away a little further from that latter legacy?

Žižek's Hegel (3): Why should we tarry with the negative? (and other important questions)

Zizek (by Luca del Baldo)

In my previous post, I showed how Žižek avoids ending up in a conservative reading of Hegel's injunction to recognize "the rose in the cross of the present". The task of reason, according to this reading, is not to overcome present suffering (the negative, the cross), but to tarry with it and finding wisdom (the rose) in the suffering, and thereby to reconcile itself with it.

Žižek demolishes the assumptions on which this conservative reading rests, firstly, by stressing that dialectics only works retrospectively, from the standpoint of an already achieved reconciliation. There is thus no "logic" in dialectics that compels us to submit to the suffering of the present, to the "negative". It is only once reconciliation is achieved that we become able to recognize the negative as a condition of possibility and affirm it - but as long as we are still caught in the midst of an unreconciled present, there is nothing at all in Hegel's dialectics that says that we must affirm the negative.

This means that the distance separating Hegel from Marx isn't as big as is sometimes thought. It is, for example, impossible to use Hegel to argue that the proletariat should put up with capitalism instead of fighting against it. As long as capitalism is experienced as a "negative", Hegel would agree with Marx that the task is to change the world, rather than just interpreting it.

There is also a second way in which Žižek attacks the conservative reading. He shows that even when reconciliation occurs, it doesn't need to imply any submission to the status quo - it can be a reconciliation with the world that includes one's efforts to change it. The reconciliation doesn't neutralize the contradictions, which continue to be operative in propelling history onwards even as they are "sublated". Again, this can be made easily comprehensible if we use the example of the struggle against capitalism. Might we not say that, to militant activists, the only way to make the existence of capitalism tolerable is to actively struggle against it? In other words, the struggle against capitalism is the very form into which its contradictions are sublated. Reconciliation is achieved in a way that doesn't neutralize the suffering brought about by the "negative", but it does sublate this suffering into a new form, namely that of the anti-capitalist struggle.

Both of these arguments demonstrate that, from a Hegelian perspective, there's never any need to put up with what we experience as "negative". To be sure, once reconciliation is achieved we will be able to see the constructive, enabling role of this negative, but not even such insights imply that we must seek to preserve the negative. The negative is constructive precisely in the sense that it invites us to overcome it.

But Žižek's interpretation in turn raises new questions. One question is why he urges us to "tarry with the negative". If there is no need to put up with the negative, what is the point of tarrying with it? Why should we bother to tarry if history always keeps changing anyway? Žižek clearly agrees with Hegel that it is only through the negative that we arrive at reconciliation. It is only by facing up to the negative that reconciliation - including reconciliation in the midst of change - becomes possible. But how is it possible for Žižek to argue this when he has already denied that there is any logical or historical necessity driving reason towards reconciliation? If there is no such necessity, then wouldn't it be possible to have reconciliation without affirming suffering?

Žižek does provide a simple answer to these questions, but in providing this answer he takes leave of Hegel in important respects and relies rather heavily on Lacan instead. His point appears to be that tarrying with the negative, in the sense of facing up to it, has a liberating psychological effect. The process leading to this liberation - which is one aspect of the wisdom symbolized by the "rose" - is not a logical one, but it isn't enitrely contingent either. There is an unconscious, psychological logic or mechanism at work behind it. Rather than miring us down in the status quo, it is what enables us to move forward and paradoxically "opens up the space for real change" by removing blockages (ibid. 322).

Tarrying with the "negative" is thus, paradoxically, not for the sake of putting up with it, but in order to lessen its grip on us and liberate possibilities for action. In emphasizing this, Žižek emphatically parts ways with interpretations such as Waszek's and reveals himself as being with Marx after all: the point really is to change the world rather than just interpreting it, although, more than Marx, he seems to be thinking that the road to change is only opened by constantly reinterpreting the world - by constantly performing new acts of re-totalization in relation to the present. Or even more explicitly:

To avoid a fatal misunderstanding: this crucial dialectical move from epistemological obstacle to ontological impossibility in no way implies that all we can do is reconcile ourselves to this impossibility, i.e., accept reality itself as imperfect. The premise of psychoanalysis is that one can intervene with the symbolic into the Real, because the Real is not external reality-in-itself, but a crack in the symbolic, so one can intervene with an act which re-configures the field and thus transforms its immanent point of impossibility. ‘Traversing the fantasy’ does not mean accepting the misery of our lives – on the contrary, it means that only after we ‘traverse’ the fantasies obfuscating this misery can we effectively change it. (ibid. 477)

If this sounds abstract, Žižek also provides an illustrative example: 

Take the role of the wife in a marriage in which patriarchal values continue to have a subterranean existence: the wife has to serve her husband, but in the context of a free and equal relationship; this is why the first act of rebellion is to openly proclaim one’s servitude, to refuse to act as free where one is de facto not free. The effects of such refusal are shattering, since in modern conditions, servitude can only reproduce itself as disavaowed. (ibid. 995 n60)

This idea that an ostensible affirmation of the negative can serve as a kind of shock that liberates us explains much that appears provocative in Žižek's writings. Take, for instance, his excursus on the political equivocality of the Slovenian post-punk group Laibach in The Metastases of Enjoyment, which "staged an aggressive inconsistence mixture of Stalinism, Nazism and Blut und Boden ideology".

The first reaction of enlightened Leftist critics was to conceive of Laibach as the ironic imitation of totalitarian rituals; however, their support of Laibach was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling: ‘What if they really mean it?... (ibid. 1994:71)

Žižek then argues that Laibach frustrates this totalitarian fantasy “precisely in so far as it is not its ironic imitation, but overidentification with it – by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, overidentification suspends its efficiency” (ibid. 72). By appealing directly to the disavowed "illegal enjoyment" holding together the community, the group succeeded better in weakening the hold on people of the "racist fantasy" on people than rational argumentation of the Habermasian kind.

The translation of the racist fantasy into the universal medium of symbolic intersubjectivity (the Habermasian ethos of dialogue) in no way weakens the hold of the racist fantasy upon us. If we are to undermine this power of fantasy, a different political strategy is needed, a strategy that is able to incorporate what Lacan called 'la traversée du fantasme', a strategy of overidentification, which takes into account the fact that the obscene superego qua basis and support of the public Law is operative only in so far as it remains unacknowledged, hidden from the public eye. What if, instead of critical dissection and irony which reveal their impotence in the face of racism’s phantasmic kernel, we proceed a contrario and identify publicly with the obscene superego? (ibid. 71)

To take just one more example of how Žižek tries to deliver liberating shocks to the reader: in the early part of Less than Nothing, he explains that Hegelian dialectics means "opting for the bad". Whereas Hegel is usually understood as having criticized the abstract freedom of the revolutionary terror in France in favour of the concrete freedom of the modern rational state, Žižek states that the proper dialectical choice would be to opt for the "bad choice" of revolutionary terror. There was simply no way to choose the "rational state" directly in France, without first passing through the abstract freedom of the terror, which was needed to do away with the falseness of the ancient régime, clearing the ground for a reestablishment of concrete freedom on a higher level. Taken at face value, this is a dubious statement, which is inconsistent with what Žižek elsewhere says about dialectics being purely retroactive and non-teleological. The point of this argument, however, is hardly to make a serious statement about either Hegel or the revolution. Rather, I suspect that it must be found in his wish to deliver a liberating shock that will reconfigure the symbolic field. Žižek's seemingly radical and provokative endorsement of Lenin and the terror of the October Revolution (ibid. 2004a) can perhaps be interpreted in the same way - as a détour, a way of opening up the road to the good by endorsing the bad.

So why should we "tarry" with the negative? Because it liberates us. By affirming it we break its hold on us and become more able to participate in change. Reconciliation is the name of that kind of freedom. Hegel was right that reconciliation can only be reached through tarrying with the negative, but the process whereby this happens is not logical but rather psychological.


Objet a and the limitations of Hegel

Žižek, then, is clearly not a defender of the status quo. Instead, it is precisely for the sake of challenging this status quo that he urges us to tarry with the negative. Dialectics itself cannot lead us beyond the present, but that doesn't mean that there is no room for praxis, for trying to bring about social change. The point to which dialectics delivers us - the Aufhebung or negation of the negation - is also the "shocking" point at which we confront the fact of our freedom, the point where dialectics can no longer guide us.

What are the political implications of this stance? While Žižek avoids the conservative identification with the “rose in the cross”, at the same time he says that the meaning of our acts will never be apparent until in retrospect. If successful, the radical act will transform all yardsticks whereby to judge it anyway. Žižek himself raises the question what this means for the possibility of emancipatory political interventions: "Does it mean that we are condemned to acting blindly?". His answer is to emphasize freedom: “what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility of factoring in the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of freedom?” (ibid. 263).

The problem with this answer seems to me to be two-fold. Firstly, it leaves the more basic question why we should change reality at all in the dark. Nothing in Žižek's argument about Aufhebung, the retrospectivity of dialectics or its compatibility with a certain form of contingent political action says anything about why the negative arises in the first place - yet this is where we find the source of the suffering and discontent that drives history onwards. Secondly, the use of the word "freedom" in the answer is, I feel, slightly misleading. It suggest an element of decisionism or arbitrariness in his philosophy, which gainsays the fact that, to him, the choice of a radical political stance is determined by something that isn't arbitrary at all. Badiou calls it fidelity to the truth-event. For Žižek, it is rather fidelity to desire, to jouissance, to what gives him enjoyment. Here his language becomes Lacanian rather then Hegelian.

Žižek's answer to what drives history onwards is that, ultimately, what irks us and drives us to act is the Lacanian objet a, the fantasy object through which the subject stages its desire and which arises because of the constitutive lack or void in the symbolic order, as a means to fill this lack and give it body where the word fails. Resisting integration in the symbolic order, it cannot be exposed to public view or acknowledged by the subject. All we can do is to close in on it through a variety of interventions in the symbolic order. 

To Žižek, the limitation of Hegel is shown by his inability to think this object (as well as related concepts such as the death drive; ibid. 2012: 455ff, 480, 492f, 500, 600). This is a crucial point in Žižek's argument because it marks the point where dialectics itself seems to fail. By resorting to Lacan and the notion of the objet a, he appears to acknowledge that there are certain things that cannot be mediatized properly, that fall outside the order of dialectics and that both negate and sustain it from the outside. On the one hand, this object serves as his explanation for why history moves at all, but on the other the "structure" necessitating this object must also constitute an obstacle to dialectics, a hard element resisting that persists across history and resists dialectical totalization.

This results in an uneasy tension in Žižek (which to some extent mirrors that between Hegel and Lacan). On the one hand, he is a Hegelian, which should mean that he should seek to grasp things "concretely" by searching out the way all things are mediated through the whole. On the other, he emphasizes the “reality of the mask”, the fact that fiction often counts for more than reality and that this happens when the fiction is built into or constitutive of the wider social order (just as for Marx commodity fetishism persists even after its illusory character has been revealed) (e.g. ibid. 44ff, 516ff). The primary model for this latter strand in his thought is Lacan and his stress that some fictions are needed to hold the symbolic edifice together, in particular the fiction of the objet a which stands in for and covers up the lack or inconsistency in that edifice. This in turn is reminiscent of the Kantian operation resorted to in order to construct a free, moral subject or to a public sphere of equal citizens - namely the bracketing of the wider social and natural context in which we are entangled. In order for me to act as a free subject or equal citizen, I need to disregard entanglements of causality. To function as an equal citizen, I need to disregard things like social embeddedness - in other words, I need to grasp myself as an abstract entity. Grasping myself "concretely" by paying attention to all aspects of my social being - personal affairs and loyalties, the real inequality of status and power that separates me from others, emotions and psychological problems etc. - would have made it impossible for me to participate in these fictions. It is this tension in Žižek that explains why he so often, in a way that is unusual for a Hegelian, states his support for fictions (for the “positive’power of ‘blindness’” etc.; ibid. 279). In this support for fictions, bracketing and the "mask", Žižek comes surprisingly close to Karatani Kôjin, a Kantian Marxist whom Žižek once criticized from a Hegelian standpoint (ibid. 2004b). It's quite interesting to see that they actually have quite a lot of things in common, and that both point to the unconscious (trauma in Karatani's case and objet a in Žižek's) as a phenomenon that escapes Hegel and functions as limitation to Hegelian dialectics.


Critical comments: Žižek and Adorno

I have stressed two elements in Žižek's reading of Hegel (see the first part of my review). First, that reconciliation is just the negative from another angle, and, secondly, that dialectics only works retrospectively, the appearance of logical necessity only being imposed after the fact, in moments when reconciliation is already achieved. How do these two elements hang together? They work together best in moments when the subject achieves a form of reconciliation with the past - when, looking back at past suffering and obstacles, it realizes that they were conditions of possibility.

Žižek's interpretation is in a way self-evident and straightforward. It is clear that to Hegel, totality is not a harmonious stage arriving at the end of history, when all contradictions have been resolved, but this very history itself. It is with this history, with all its contradictions, that reconciliation has to be sought. There is thus no question of overcoming and leaving behind the contradictions. On the contrary, they are essential moments in the whole that needs to be affirmed. This can be illustrated by Hegel's own explanation of the dialectic: 

The higher dialectic of the concept consists not merely in producing and apprehending the determination as an opposite and limiting factor, but in producing and apprehending the positive content and result which it contains; and it is this alone which makes it a development and immanent progression. (Hegel 1991:60)

To point out that Aufhebung leaves the contradiction in place, that it resolves nothing, is thus not new. Adorno too says in a lecture on Hegel that "the so-called synthesis is nothing but the expression of the non-identity of thesis and antithesis" (Adorno 2008: 30).

Retrospectivity is also not a new theme in the interpretation of dialectics. Robert Fine (2001), for instance, reminds us that Hegel's dialectics serves only the purpose of comprehending the present, having nothing to do with historical prediction. In Marx's Capital too, dialectics is not so much a tool for predicting change as for comprehending capitalism (as fact that has led some commentators to argue that change must take a form of breaking with the dialectic; e.g. Postone 1993).

What, then, is new in Žižek's interpretation, and why does it provoke?

To begin with retrospectivity, the provocative novelty seems to be Žižek's stress on the fact that "necessity" is nothing but a retrospective construct that is imposed on history in moments of achieved reconciliation and which has nothing to do with the real historical processes, which are open and contingent. History thus appears in a kind of unstable double exposure - as necessary or contingent or both at once. This seems to distinguish him quite clearly from both Hegel himself and from Marx, who both tended to view history from a standpoint of an assumed (future) reconciliation which led the contingent side of the process to fall out of view.

From the point of view of how to interpret dialectics, the interesting point here would be that Žižek delimits the validity of dialectics. If dialectics is the motion whereby thought creates "necessity", then the open and contingent processes of history seem to fall outside dialectics. Change happens unrelated to the latter. Foucault knew that, although he tended to focus on the contingent side of history, neglecting the process whereby a retrospective necessity is created. Perhaps there is more of a similarity between Žižek and thinkers like Adorno and Jameson, who both move very much inside the created dialectical totality, trying to break out of it by criticizing it immanently. To both of the latter thinkers, history exists as a force that breaks in on the dialectic, disrupting it from the outside. Although it cannot be captured through our concepts, it can be known through its indirect effects, namely in the way it "shocks" and wrecks havoc with our concepts. The difference between Žižek and Adorno would seem to lie in the value they accord to moments of reconciliation. While Žižek tends to simply assume the desirability of reconciliation, Adorno is much more skeptical, tending to be concerned above all with what is suppressed or forgotten in such moments of reconciliation (the non-identical).

This difference can be clearly brought into view if we turn to the second major element of Žižek's Hegel-interpretation, namely the idea that Aufhebung is nothing but the negative from another angle. While a stimulating thought and undoubtedly useful to capture important aspects of Aufhebung, doubts can be raised that this was what Hegel meant. It is telling that Žižek usually illustrates the idea with his own examples - such as the Rabinovitch joke or Adorno's antagonistic definition of society - rather than with Hegel himself. The one Hegelian example that he discusses at length, that of the abstract freedom of Jacobin terror being sublated into the concrete freedom of the modern, rational state, doesn't fit this interpretation of Aufhebung very well. The modern, rational state wasn't just Jacobin terror "from another angle".

What, then, is the point of this idea? One, surely, is to prop up Hegel's 'critical' credentials by showing how his dialectics never absorbs what he called the "tremendous power of the negative" into any higher synthesis. If the synthesis is simply the negative itself, then it follows that dialectics never impairs or diminishes its force.

But does this attempt to rescue dialectics succeed? I think one way to measure this is to look closer at Žižek's criticism of Adorno. What Adorno says is, in nuce, that although Hegel pays attention to the negative, he ultimately sacrifices it by reincorporating it into a positive dialectics. According to Žižek, however, Adorno's criticism presupposes a wrong image of Hegel:

What if, in its innermost core, Hegel’s dialectics is not a machine for appropriating or mediating all otherness, for sublating all contingency into a subordinated ideal moment of the notional necessity? What if Hegelian ‘reconciliation’already is the acceptance of an irreducible contingency at the very heart of notional necessity? (Žižek 2012:262)

Žižek's rebuttal of Adorno may seem ingenious, but I question its cogency. Even granted that to Hegel necessity is only imposed on history retrospectively in moments of reconciliation, it is imposed, and when it is the contingent elements are sublated, incorporated as meaningful moments in a bigger totality in which, to speak with Žižek, the “obstacles”are affirmed as positive presuppositions. This means that in such moments, whatever remains meaningless or disruptive of meaning - in other words, what Adorno called the non-identical - is screened out. Recognizing the contingency of this process is not at all sufficient to do justice to non-identity, since this contingency falls out of view as soon as reconciliation is achieved.

Žižek, to be sure, might reply that any moment of reconciliation is only temporary, and that each such moment is bound to be disrupted by history, by things that are "non-identical" to it. There is nevertheless in Žižek a tendency to try to look at the present from the vantage-point of reconciliation, priviliging it as the standpoint which we "should" try to reach. His interpretation works best in those moments of reconciliation in which we retrospectively affirm past obstacles, but this retrospective affirmation is possible only to the extent that we are happy with the present. What is missing is an awareness that any reconciliation that remains partial - that overlooks the continuing presence of the non-identical - is ideological. In contrast to Žižek, Adorno never affirms the present. Since he deliberately chooses to look at the present as un-redeemed, it follows that he never justifies the negative either. "'I have seen the world spirit'", he writes about Hitler's robot-bombs, "but on wings and without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel's philosophy of history" (Adorno 1978: 55).

It would be unfair, of course, to reject Žižek's attempt to find critical inspiration in Hegel simply because he fails to do justice to non-identity. Adorno is notoriously unclear about how his "negative dialectics" can be wedded to any meaningful political action. In the absence of such action, doesn't his philosophy amount to a de facto acquiescence to the status quo? Žižek at least manages to enlist Hegel for radical social change by showing how we can reconcile ourselves to the negative by struggling against it. In such moments of reconciliation, we affirm the present, like Hegel, but this present is itself not static. It too is riven by contradictions and longings (“adventurous”, as Bloch called it). This is why being part of the present, being reconciled with it, also means participating in change, being part of the movement through which change happens.

I will let the last shot go to Adorno, however. Moments when we feel reconciled with ourselves and the world in the midst of struggle may feel wonderful, but there is also a danger to them. Even such moments can be ideological to the extent that they disregard or suppress non-identity. Happiness can be brutal. What is needed is not just to change society, but also to avoid replicating the badness we are fighting. Avoiding brutality and insensitivity doesn't have to imply quietism or withdrawal from political action. There are also other options. Maybe there are forms of reconciliation that are so angelic or playful or so close to the condition of peaceful death that they oppress no one. Adorno, in some of his most memorable passages, spoke of such a utopian condition - which he described as one in which we could be different without fear and in which powerlessness would not invite violence - but at the same time portrayed it as so distant and hard to realize that it could only function critically, as a painful dream spurring us to relentlessly criticize the present. But isn't play - a mode of relating to reality that Benjamin was more appreciative of than Adorno - one possible way to at least at times and in part approach that utopian condition? Isn't this perhaps also the kind of reconciliation that Žižek has in mind, and that would fit in with his appreciation of fiction and his portrayal of dialectics as a kind of parallax view that constantly oscillates between necessity and contingency? If nothing else works, isn't there also the stoic option, of which even Adorno might approve, of trying to change the world to the best of our abilities even as we renounce the moments of reconciliation, at least until the time comes when play will again become possible?


References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1978) Minima Moralia, London: Verso.

Adorno, Theodor W. (2008) Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966 (ed. Rolf Tiedemann), Cambridge: Polity Press.

Fine, Robert (2001) Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt, London: Routledge.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. Allen W. Wood, tr. H. B. Nisbet), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Postone, Moishe (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2004a) “What Is To be Done (with Lenin)?”, In These Times, January 21, http://www.lacan.com/zizeklenin34.htm (accessed 2011-10-07).

Žižek, Slavoj (2004b) “The Parallax View”, New Left Review 25 (Jan – Feb): 121-134.

Žižek, Slavoj (2012) Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso.