Introduction
1. Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 94.
2. Reinhard Marx, Das Kapital: Eine Streitschrift (Munich: Pattloch, 2008).
3. Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism? (New York: Verso, 2008), 179–180.
4. Stuart Sim, Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (London: Routledge, 2000), 70–91.
5. These themes have roots reaching deeper into the past, of course. For a significant tracing of an earlier critique of humanism, see Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
6. Marcel Gauchet, Le Débat 50 (May-August 1988): 168.
7. Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
8. Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
9. This issue will be addressed in chapters 5 and 6. Anecdotally, a paper of mine, presented at a conference on Cornelius Castoriadis at Columbia University in December 2000, elicited from Ernesto Laclau the protest that he is not a Lacanian, but has drawn on Lacan only in thinking about the nature of the human subject.
10. Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2004), 117.
11. Alain Caillé, “Préface,” in Camille Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss: L’invention du symbolique: Sociologie et science des religions (Paris: Découverte, 1999), 12.
12. I paraphrase here the formulation of Adriano Rodrigues, “Quelques considérations à propos de la notion de symbole dans les sciences humaines,” Recherches Sociologiques 7, no. 3 (Decembre 1976): 325.
13. Marcel Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, trans. Mary Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 6.
14. See, for example, Thomas Pavel, The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought, trans. Linda Jordan and Thomas Pavel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, trans. Alice L. Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
15. On this point in Ernst Cassirer, see Birgit Recki, “Cassirer and the Problem of Language,” in Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, eds., Cultural Studies and the Symbolic: Occasional Papers in Cassirer and Cultural-Theory Studies, Presented at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Intercultural Studies (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2003), 10.
16. In addition to structuralism, one sees a similarly conscious, though differently oriented reductionist impulse at play in logical positivism and analytic philosophy.
17. Slavoj Žižek, Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch: Zwei Essays über sexuelle Differenz als philosophische Kategorie, trans. Erik M. Vogt (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 1999), 34.
18. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Structure and Dialectics,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 232–241, and “History and Dialectic,” in The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 245–270.
19. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 209.
21. See Dirk Hülst, Symbole und soziologische Symboltheorie: Untersuchungen zum Symbolbegriff in Geschichte, Sprachphilosophie, Psychologie und Soziologie (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 1999), 77.
22. Ernesto Laclau, “Why Constructing a People is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 665.
23. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 92.
24. Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Lacan, Écrits, 675.
25. Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech,” 242.
26. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Lacan, Écrits, 96.
27. Friedrich Schlegel quoted in Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 157. Rüdiger Görner has suggestively renamed the Frühromantik dialectic a Pluralektik. See Görner, Das Zeitalter des Fraktalen: Ein kulturkritischer Versuch (Vienna: Passagen, 2007), 71–89.
28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (London: Heinemann, 1974), 64–65.
30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 88.
31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss,” ibid., 115.
32. Hyppolite and Lacan quoted in Peter Dews, “Imagination and the Symbolic,” Constellations 9, no. 4 (2002): 517.
33. Marcel Mauss, “Real and Practical Relations Between Psychology and Sociology,” in Sociology and Psychology, trans. R. Brain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 10.
34. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 56–61.
37. Durkheim quoted in Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, 223.
38. Mauss quoted in Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss, 96.
39. Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, 252.
40. Daniel Fabre, “Le Symbolique, brève histoire d’un objet,” in Jacques Revel and Nathan Wachtel, eds., Une école pour les sciences socials: De la VIe Section à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris: CERF, 1996), 230. For an illuminating history of the discourse of the gift, culminating in the work of Mauss, see Harry Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
41. Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, 350.
43. Saussure cited in Boris Gasparov, Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). See, more generally, Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), chapter 9.
44. The contrast between Mauss’s “living” symbols and Lévi-Strauss’s “dead” ones was at the heart of Lefort’s influential critique of Lévi-Strauss. See Claude Lefort, “L’Échange et la lutte des hommes,” Les Temps Modernes 6, no. 64 (February 1951): 1400–1417. We will return to Lefort’s criticism of Lévi-Strauss in chapter 4.
45. Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, 60.
46. Fabre, “Le Symbolique, brève histoire d’un objet,” 230. Hénaff argues that in early formulations Lévi-Strauss tied “symbolic effectiveness” to an “inductive process,” whereby meanings became linked and enchained, but this dimension got sidelined as Lévi-Strauss put ever greater emphasis on the systematic and social nature of the symbolic (Claude Lévi-Strauss, 122).
47. Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, 629.
48. Judith Butler, “Critical Exchanges: The Symbolic and Questions of Gender,” in Hugh Silverman, ed., Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture (New York: Routledge, 1993), 141.
49. Rudolf Schlögl, “Symbole in der Kommunikation: Zur Einführung,” in Rudolf Schlögl, Bernhard Giesen, and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Die Wirklichkeit der Symbole: Grundlagen der Kommunikation in historischen und gegenwärtigen Gesellschaften (Konstanz: UVK, 2004), 18.
50. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Weltrepräsentanz und Verkörperung: Institutionelle Analyse und Symboltheorien—Eine Einführung in systematischer Absicht,” in Gert Melville, ed., Institutionalität und Symbolisierung: Verstetigungen kultureller Ordnungsmuster in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 26.
51. See especially Rehberg, “Weltrepräsentanz und Verkörperung,” 33.
53. Schlögl, “Symbole in der Kommunikation,” 13.
54. Daniel Fabre, “Symbolisme en questions,” in Martine Segalen, ed., L’Autre et le semblable: Regards sur l’ethnologie des sociétés contemporaines (Paris: CNRS, 1989), 61. See also Fabre, “Le Symbolique, brève histoire d’un objet,” 250.
55. Vincent Descombes, “L’équivoque du symbolique,” MLN 94, no. 4, French Issue: Perspectives in Mimesis (May 1979): 655–656, 674.
56. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 130, 124.
58. Sven Lütticken, “Attending to Abstract Things,” New Left Review 54 (November-December 2008): 113.
59. Jürgen Habermas, “The Liberating Power of Symbols: Ernst Cassirer’s Humanistic Legacy and the Warburg Library,” The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays, trans. Peter Dews (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 1–29.
60. Lévi-Strauss cited in Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss, 134.
61. Lévi-Strauss cited ibid., 134.
63. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 154–155. See also Hülst, Symbol und soziologische Symboltheorie, 115.
64. Karl Marx, Capital, in Collected Works, vol. 35 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996), 1:85.
1. The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Young Hegelianism
1. François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 46.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1991), 164.
3. Bent Algot Sørenson, Symbol und Symbolismus in den ästhetischen Theorien des 18. Jahrhunderts und der deutschen Romantik (Kopenhagen: Munksgaard, 1963), 16; and Götz Pochat, Der Symbolbegriff in der Ästhetik und Kunstwissenschaft, trans. Märta Pochat (Cologne: DuMont, 1983), 13.
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 226.
6. See Sørenson, Symbol und Symbolismus, 92f. Halmi suggests usefully that whereas the Kantian symbol is analogical but without inherent relation between the object of intuition and the concept, the Romantic symbol is synecdochical. See Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 63–64.
7. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), chapter 6.
8. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.
9. Edward Larrissy, “Introduction,” and Paul Hamilton, “From Sublimity to Indeterminacy: New World Order or Aftermath of Romantic Ideology,” in Edward Larrissy, ed., Romanticism and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), respectively 5 and 12.
10. Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 204.
11. See Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, ed. P. Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 24.
12. Kathleen Dow Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 84.
13. Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
14. I borrow here a formulation from Hans Blumenberg, who described nominalism as the second overcoming of Gnosticism. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).
15. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed. and trans. Douglas W. Simpson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 8.
16. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1:303.
17. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 1:109.
18. See, for example, Manfred Lurker, “Symbol,” in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, 2d ed. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 2:1027.
19. Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer, “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik: Zur Verständigung über die Zeit und ihre Gegensätze. Ein Manifest (1839–1840),” in Walter Jaeschke, ed., Philosophie und Literatur im Vormärz: Der Streit um die Romantik (1820–1854). Quellenband (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1995), 4.1:298.
22. Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, 18–19.
23. Friedrich Schlegel, Geschichte der Alten und Neuen Literatur, vol. 6: Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Hans Eichner (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1961), 394.
24. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, ed. and trans. David Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 155, #857.
25. See the opening discussion in Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 3f. See also Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, 60. I have addressed some of these issues at greater length in “Introduction: A Revolution in Culture,” in Warren Breckman, ed., European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 2007), 1–41.
26. Halmi reminds us that participation here is closely related to “partialness,” a relationship between part and whole, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s claim that “by a symbol, I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents.” See Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, 16.
27. Benjamin cited in Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique, no. 22 (1981), 111. For considerations of various aspects of this theme, see the essays collected in Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (New York: Continuum, 2002).
28. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1969), 207–208.
29. See Gail Day, “Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 1 (1999): 103–118.
30. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856), 5:407.
32. Moritz quoted in Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 162.
33. Moritz quoted ibid., 156.
34. J. W. von Goethe, “Maximen und Reflexionen,” in Werke, vol. 12: Schriften zur Kunst. Schriften zur Literatur. Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. Erich Trunz and Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Munich: Beck, 1994), 471.
35. Sørenson suggests that whereas Goethe’s 1797 essay “Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst” explicitly formulated this contrast, it remained only implicit in Moritz. See Sørenson, Symbol und Symbolismus, 108–111.
36. Ulrike Morgner, “Das Wort aber ist Fleisch geworden”: Allegorie und Allegoriekritik im 18. Jahrhundert am Beispiel von K.Ph. Moritz’ “Andreas Hartknopf. Eine Allegorie” (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2002), 14–15.
37. Goethe, “Maximen und Reflexionen,” 471, 470.
38. Pochat, Der Symbolbegriff, 28.
39. Goethe, “Nachträgliches zu Philostrats Gemälde,” in Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 1 (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1898), 49:142.
40. R. H. Stephenson, “The Proper Object of Cultural Study: Ernst Cassirer and the Aesthetic Theory of Weimar Classicism,” in Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, eds., Cultural Studies and the Symbolic: Occasional Papers in Cassirer and Cultural-Theory Studies, Presented at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Intercultural Studies (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2003), 90.
41. See generally Susanne Lanwerd, Religionsästhetik: Studien zum Verhältnis von Symbol und Sinnlichkeit (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2002).
42. Michael Titzmann, Strukturwandel der philosophischen Aesthetik 1800–1880: Der Symbolbegriff als Paradigma (Munich: Fink, 1978), 113.
43. F. W. J. Schelling, Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: Beck, 1928), 3:576.
44. Sørenson, Symbol und Symbolismus, 248f.
45. Vonessen argues that “allegory, metaphor, cipher, hieroglyph, analogy, trope, representation” were all potentially used as synonyms for “symbol” by the Romantics. See Renate Vonessen, “Der Symbolbegriff in der Romantik,” in Manfred Lurker, ed., Beiträge zu Symbol, Symbolbegriff und Symbolforschung (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1982), 193.
46. Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, ed. E. Behler (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 89–90.
47. Sørenson, Symbol und Symbolismus, 236.
48. Novalis quoted in Halmi, “An Anthropological Approach to the Romantic Symbol,” European Romantic Review 4, no. 1 (Summer 1993): 17.
49. Morgner, “Das Wort aber ist Fleisch geworden,” 36.
50. Manfred Zahn, “Zeichen, Idee und Erscheinung: Symbolkonzepte in der Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus,” in Beiträge zu Symbol, Symbolbegriff und Symbolforschung, 224.
51. Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 46.
52. Cordula Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (London: Ashgate, 2009), 33.
53. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 143.
54. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:245 (translation emended).
55. Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 39.
56. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:397.
57. Hegel quoted in Paul de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 763–764.
58. Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 180.
60. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:360. See also Pochat, Der Symbolbegriff, 67. In emphasizing the inadequacy of the symbolic, that is, the overabundance of meaning in proportion to the sign meant to carry that meaning, Hegel was influenced by Friedrich Creuzer, whose magnum opus Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, published in four volumes between 1810 and 1812, we will discuss in the next chapter.
61. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:79 (translation emended). See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik: vol. 1, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 111.
62. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:301.
63. See the excellent account offered by Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, especially 153–155.
64. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:11.
67. Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 1:391.
68. Titzmann, Strukturwandel der philosophischen Ästhetik, 53. Vischer’s later work develops a more positive approach to symbols, but by then he was strictly interested in the psychological function of symbols. See Pochat, Der Symbolbegriff, 64.
69. Ruge and Echtermeyer, “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik,” 315.
70. G. W. F. Hegel, “The Lectures of 1827,” in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1: Introduction and the Concept of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
71. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 417.
72. See Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 198. I have discussed this in Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 32–41.
73. Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 23.
74. Hegel quoted ibid., 221.
75. Bruno Bauer, “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?” in Hans-Martin Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 201.
76. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” in Collected Works (New York: International, 1975), 3:181.
77. See Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), chapter 7. See also David Aram Kaiser, “The Incarnated Symbol: Coleridge, Hegel, Strauss, and the Higher Biblical Criticism,” European Romantic Review 4, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 134–135.
78. David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 4th ed., trans. George Eliot (London: Thoemmes, 1998), 1:48.
79. David Friedrich Strauss to Friedrich Theodor Vischer, November 13 and December 5, 1841, Briefwechsel zwischen Strauss und Vischer, ed. Adolf Rapp (Stuttgart: Klett, 1952).
80. Quoted in Zwi Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx: The Influence of Bruno Bauer on Marx’s Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 39.
81. Bruno Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist, trans. L. Stepelevich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 97.
82. Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1841), 1:xiv–xv.
84. Ernst Barnikol, Bruno Bauer: Studien und Materialien (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972), 437.
85. Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement, 115.
86. Bauer quoted in John E. Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 322.
87. Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, xvi.
88. Walter Benjamin quoted in Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” 114.
89. Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement, 67.
90. Bruno Bauer, “Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit,” in Ingrid Pepperle and Heinz Pepperle, eds., Die Hegelsche Linke (Leipzig: Reclam, 1985), 496.
91. Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs,” Wigands Vierteljahrsschrift (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1845), 91. Regarding the charge of “substance,” see especially 105–111.
92. Bruno Bauer, “The Genus and the Crowd,” Philosophical Forum 8, nos. 2–4 (1978): 129.
93. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957), xlii.
94. Ludwig Feuerbach, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi(New York: Anchor, 1972).
95. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, xxxv.
96. Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1975), 169–206.
97. Ruge and Echtermeyer, “Der Protestantisimus und die Romantik,” 252.
98. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, 13:90f.
99. See Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, 126–128.
100. Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred Vogel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1986), 54.
101. Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially 68f.
102. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, xxxix.
103. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 90.
104. Graham Ward, “Theology and the Crisis of Representation,” in Gregory Salyer and Robert Detweiler, eds., Literature and Theology at Century’s End (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995), 136.
106. Feuerbach, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” 68.
107. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 360.
108. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, xl.
109. Karl Barth, “An Introductory Essay,” in Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, xix.
110. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, xli.
112. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 416.
113. Bruno Bauer, Die evangelische Landeskirche Preussens und die Wissenschaft (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1840), 59.
114. Bruno Bauer, Hegel’s Lehre von der Religion und Kunst von dem Standpuncte des Glaubens aus beurtheilt (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1842), 198.
115. Douglas Moggach, “Die Prinzipien des Schönen: Bruno Bauers Kritik an Kants Aesthetik,” in Bruno Bauer, Über die Prinzipien des Schönen: De pulchri principiis. Eine Preisschrift, ed. Douglas Moggach and Winfried Schultze (Berlin: Akademie, 1996), 99.
116. It should be noted that here Bauer does not mean “symbol” to designate an artistic image, but rather a coherent doctrine of faith. This was an accepted German usage of the term, as exemplified in titles like Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (1810–12) or Johann Adam Möller’s Symbolik: oder Darstellung der dogmatischen Gegensätze der Katholiken und Protestanten nach ihren öffentlichen Bekenntnissen (1832). I take this point from George Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Culture, Religion, and Politics from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
117. Bauer, Über die Prinzipien des Schönen, 69.
118. Bauer quoted in Moggach, “Die Prinzipien des Schönen,” 100. This passage may serve to illustrate Bauer’s tendency toward the Pragmatisierung of speculative theory, as Ingrid Pepperle writes in Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Akademie, 1978), 141.
119. Bauer, Über die Prinzipien des Schönen, 67.
120. Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie, 148.
121. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Literary Criticism in the Epoch of Liberalism, 1820–70,” in Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ed., A History of German Literary Criticism, 1730–1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 245. A similar judgment is found in Norbert Oellers, “Die ‘Hallischen Jahrbücher’ und die deutsche Literatur,” in Walter Jaeschke, ed., Philosophie und Literatur im Vormärz: Der Streit um die Romantik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1995), 4:141–152.
122. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Black-well, 1990), 18.
124. Gauchet, Disenchantment of the World, 90.
2. The Fate of the Symbolic from Socialism to a Marxism
1. Karl Marx to Ludwig Feuerbach, October 3, 1843, Ludwig Feuerbach. Briefwechsel, ed. W. Schuffenhauer, vol. 2 (Berlin: Akademie, 1985).
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Collected Works (New York: International, 1976), 6:516.
3. The conflict between the later Schelling and his followers and the Left Hegelians is a major theme of my book Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a detailed discussion of Leroux’s support of Schelling, see Warren Breckman, “Politics in a Symbolic Key: Pierre Leroux, Romantic Socialism, and the ‘Schelling Affair,’” Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 1 (April 2005): 61–86.
4. One of Leroux’s staunchest twentieth-century champions, Jacques Viard, complains of a conspiracy of silence against Leroux among Marxist socialists. See Jacques Viard, Pierre Leroux, Charles Péguy, Charles de Gaulle et l’Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). For a good critique of Viard’s eccentric book, see David Griffiths’s review in French History 20, no. 3 (September 2006): 362–363. I am indebted to his review for my reference to Marx’s desire to include Leroux and his supporters in the First International.
5. The German Hegelian Eduard Gans wrote of Le Globe that “everything that belongs to the young and intellectually striving young generation in France was gathered here.” See Norbert Waszek, “Eduard Gans, die Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik und die französische Publizistik der Zeit,” in Christoph Jamme, ed., Die “Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik”: Hegels Berliner Gegenakademie (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994), 111.
6. Pierre Leroux quoted in Horst Stuke, Philosophie der Tat: Studien zur “Verwirklichung der Philosophie” bei den Junghegelianern und wahren Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Klett, 1963), 87.
7. Pierre Leroux, “De l’individualisme et du socialisme,” in Bruno Viard, ed., A la source perdue du socialisme français (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997), 163, 157.
8. Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of Romantic Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 5.
9. For a positive assessment, see George Sand quoted in Jean-Pierre Lacassagne, introduction to Histoire d’une amitié: Pierre Leroux et George Sand. D’Après une correspondance inédite 1836–1866, ed. J.-P. Lacassagne (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), 82. For an assessment that mixes praise for Leroux’s democratic passion and criticism of his mysticism and eclecticism, see Considerant quoted in Beecher, Victor Considerant, 150.
10. I take the word hazy from George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 137.
11. Philippe Régnier, “Les Saint-Simoniens, le Prêtre et l’Artiste,” Romantisme, no. 67 (1990–1991): 38–39. Régnier argues that Leroux’s ideas did go some distance toward changing the aesthetic ideas of the Saint-Simonian leaders before he and other dissidents broke from the group, and he is surely correct in insisting that some similarities continued to exist between the Saint-Simonians and dissidents like Leroux.
12. Leroux, “De la poésie de style,” in Oeuvres de Pierre Leroux (1825–1850) (Geneva: Slatkine, 1978), 1:328.
13. Leroux, “Deuxième Discours. Aux Artistes,” ibid., 1:65.
14. Leroux, “De la poésie de style,” 330.
16. Paul Bénichou, Le sacre de l’écrivain 1750–1830: Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel laïque dans la France moderne (Paris: Corti, 1973), 243f.
17. Leroux, “Aux Artistes,” 67.
18. Ibid., 67. Contrast this interpretation to that of the art historian Neil McWilliam, who argues that Leroux’s theory of the symbol is not mystical, but rests on a natural process of psychological association. See McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 179.
19. Leroux, “De la poésie de style,” 334.
20. Leroux, “Considérations sur Werther et en general sur la poésie de notre époque,” in Leroux, Oeuvres, 1:450.
21. Leroux, Réfutation de l’éclectisme (Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), 245.
22. Bénichou discounts the importance of Creuzer’s influence in Le temps des prophètes: Doctrines de l’âge romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 340. For the opposite argument, see D. O. Evans, Le socialisme romantique: Pierre Leroux et ses contemporains (Paris: M. Rivière, 1948), 147f.; Brian Juden, Traditions orphiques et tendances mystiques dans le romantisme français (1800–1855) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 320f.; and Michel Espagne, “Le Nouveau Langage. Introduction de la Philosophie Allemande en France de 1815 à 1830,” in Jean Moes and Jean-Marie Valentin, eds., De Lessing à Heine: Un siècle de relations littéraires et intellectuelles entre la France et l’Allemagne (Paris: Didier-Erudition, 1985), 269–270.
23. See Jean-Jacques Goblot, La jeune France liberale: Le Globe et son groupe littéraire 1824–1830 (Paris: Plon, 1995), 238f., and Aux origines du socialisme français: Pierre Leroux et ses premiers écrits (1824–1830) (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1977), 47. On the German controversies, see George Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany, 1790–1890: Culture, Religion, Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chapter 3.
24. [Dubois], “Religions de l’antiquité,” Le Globe, August 27, 1825, 775.
25. Leroux quoted in Jérôme Peignot, Pierre Leroux. Inventeur du socialisme (Paris: Klincksieck, 1988), 34.
26. On Creuzer’s theory of the symbol, see Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 216–221.
27. Creuzer cited in Pochat, Der Symbolbegriff in der Ästhetik und Kunstwissenschaft, trans. Märta Pochat (Cologne: DuMont, 1983), 43.
28. Leroux, “De la poésie de style,” 337–338.
30. Leroux, “De l’individualisme et du socialisme,” 163.
31. Pierre Leroux, De l’Humanité: De son principe, et de son avenir (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 129.
32. Constant quoted in Naomi J. Andrews, “‘La Mère Humanité’: Femininity in the Romantic Socialism of Pierre Leroux and the Abbé A.-L. Constant,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (October 2002): 706.
33. See Beecher, Victor Considerant, 152–153; Armelle Le Bras-Chopard, De l’égalité dans la différence: Le Socialisme de Pierre Leroux (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1986), 49–50.
34. Leroux, De l’humanité, 100.
35. Leroux, “Culte,” A la source perdue, 225.
36. In the course of writing this chapter, I discovered a somewhat similar emphasis on the symbolic dimension in two studies of Leroux’s thought. See Miguel Abensour, “Postface: Comment une philosophie de l’humanité peut-elle être une philosophie politique moderne?” in Pierre Leroux, Aux philosophes, aux artistes, aux politiques: Trois discours et autres textes, ed. Jean-Pierre Lacassagne (Paris: Payot, 1994), 295–320; and Georges Navet, Pierre Leroux, Politique, socialisme et philosophie (Paris: Payot, 1994). We will return to Abensour in chapter 4.
37. Leroux, “Culte,” 225.
38. Leroux, “De l’individualisme et du socialisme,” 158.
39. On the physiological metaphor in Saint-Simonianism, see Robert Wokler, “Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 334.
40. Leroux, “De l’individualisme et du socialisme,” 164.
41. On the centuries-long debates about the nature of Christ’s body mystically uniting the two orders of the immanent and the transcendent, the specific nature of the “body” brought into presence in the consecrated host of the Eucharist, and the identity of the Church as the mystical body of Christ, the classic work is Henri du Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et L’Église au Moyen Age. Étude Historique, 2d ed. (Paris: Aubier, 1949). On the use of this symbolic form within medieval theories of kingship, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). On the persistent association of corpus mysticum with the nation in early modern France, see Paul Friedland, Political Actors. Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
42. Leroux to Sand, September 16, 1841, in Histoire d’une amitié, 127.
43. Leroux’s followers Luc Desages and Auguste Desmoulins took up that task in their Aphorismes (1848), which describes a new religion of humanity centered on “prayer and on communion or the act of fraternization.” See Frank Paul Bowman, “Religion, Politics, and Utopia in French Romanticism,” Australian Journal of French Studies 11, no. 3 (1974): 307–324.
44. Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 107.
45. Leroux quoted in Bras-Chopard, De l’égalité dans la difference, 316.
46. Leroux, De l’humanité, 191.
47. Leroux, “De l’individualisme et du socialisme,” 164.
48. Leroux, Pierre, “Aux Artistes,” 73, 80–82.
49. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 249.
50. See Reeves and Gould, Joachim of Fiore, chapter 4.
51. On this point, see Michael Behrent, “Society Incarnate: Association, Society, and Religion in French Political Thought, 1825–1912” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2006), chapter 3: “The Mirror Stage of Society: Religion and the Dilemmas of Republicanism in the Thought of Pierre Leroux.”
52. For a discussion of this socialist tendency, see Edward Berenson, “A New Religion of the Left: Christianity and Social Radicalism in France, 1815–1848,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 3: The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789–1848 (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989), 3:543–560. On this tendency in Considerant, see Beecher, Victor Considerant, 164–165.
53. Leroux, De l’humanité, 303.
55. Leroux, “Du cours de philosophie de Schelling: Aperçu de la situation de la philosophie en Allemagne,” in Discours de Schelling à Berlin. Du cours de philosophie de Schelling. Du christianisme, ed. Jean-François Courtine (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 44, 53.
56. Leroux, “Du Cours de Philosophie de Schelling,” 42.
57. Ludwig Feuerbach, “Zur Kritik der positiven Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademie, 1981), 8:207.
58. Leroux, “Du Cours de Philosophie de Schelling,” 68.
59. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
60. Miguel Abensour also explores the importance of alterity in Leroux’s thought in “L’affaire Schelling: Une controverse entre Pierre Leroux et les jeunes hégéliens,” in Patrice Vermeren, ed., “Victor Cousin suivi de la correspondance Schelling-Cousin,” special issue, Corpus, nos. 18/19 (1991): 117–131.
61. For this point, I am indebted to the discussion of Leroux’s Du Christianisme et de son origine démocratique (1848) in Behrent, Society Incarnate, chapter 3.
62. Leroux, “Du Cours de Philosophie de Schelling,” 56.
63. Limayrac, “La poésie symbolique et socialiste,” Revue des deux mondes (February 15, 1844): 672.
64. Frank Paul Bowman, “Symbol and Desymbolizing,” in French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 155–164.
65. See Leonard P. Wessell Jr., Karl Marx, Romantic Irony, and the Proletariat: The Mythopoetic Origins of Marxism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 71f.
66. Stefan Morawski concludes more generally that both Engels and Marx had quite an extensive conversancy with the aesthetic thinking of German idealism. See Stefan Morawski, “Introduction,” in Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art: Documents on Marxist Aesthetics 1 (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications, 2006), 34f.
67. For a detailed discussion of the background of Marx’s essay, particularly in relation to Romantic painting, see Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
69. See the nuanced assessment in Mcdonald Daly, “A Short History of Marxist Aesthetics,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art, vii–viii.
70. See Morawski, “Introduction,” 14.
71. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Continuum, 1980), 201.
72. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (London: Heinemann, 1973), 59–60.
73. See Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 475.
74. J.-J. Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 132.
75. Bernard Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities, 1992), 26–29.
76. Karl Marx, “Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858,” in Collected Works, 28:47.
77. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Collected Works, 35:93, note 1. Kain cites this passage to argue that Marx believed that the symbolic predominated in ancient and medieval society. See Philip J. Kain, Marx and Modern Political Theory: From Hobbes to Contemporary Feminism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993), 290. Yet Kain’s argument seems beside the point. Marx clearly maintained that the different modes and functions of the symbolic within various societies are all products of the organization of production.
78. Marx, “Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858,” 47.
79. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 95.
81. I take this point from Peter Worsley, Marx and Marxism, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 22–23.
82. Rastko Mocnik, “After the Fall: Through the Fogs of the 18th Brumaire of the Eastern Springs,” in Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (New York: Verso, 2008), 111.
83. Mocnik, “After the Fall,” 115. The locus classicus for the discussion of symbolic efficacy is Lévi-Strauss, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” Structural Anthropology, 186–205.
84. Mocnik, “After the Fall,” 117.
87. Anitra Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (New York: Routledge, 1999).
88. Thomas Hobbes quoted in Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 63.
89. See Carl Wennerlind, “Money Talks, but What Is It Saying? Semiotics of Money and Social Control,” Journal of Economic Issues 35, no. 3 (September 2001): 562.
90. Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money, 8.
91. Hess quoted in Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money, 6.
94. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 226.
95. Marx, “Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858,” Collected Works, 28:91.
96. See Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 63–64.
97. Marx, “Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858,” 82.
100. Ibid., 146. It is hard not to hear in Marx’s formulation an echo of Hegel’s description of the Sphinx as the “symbol of the symbolic itself.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1:360.
101. This point is made in Peter Hitchcock, Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 159–160.
102. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 59–60. For a detailed discussion of orthodox Marxist thought in twentieth-century France, see William S. Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism (New York: Lexington, 2005), especially chapters 3 and 5.
103. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 62.
105. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms, 201–202.
106. Gouldner places Louis Althusser on the side of “scientific Marxism.” Martin Jay recognizes significant differences between Althusser and the Hegelian inflections that typify Western Marxism, but he argues that Althusser should ultimately be viewed as part of Western Marxism. See Jay, Marxism and Totality, 387f.
107. Jay, Marxism and Totality, 371–372.
108. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 9.
109. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 65 (translation corrected).
110. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, 88.
111. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 55–56.
112. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in Signs, 115.
113. See François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 38.
114. Merleau-Ponty, “From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss,” 123.
115. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and Sociology,” in Signs, especially 110–112.
117. See Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, “Introduction,” in Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17.
118. See Nick Crossley, “Phenomenology, Structuralism and History: Merleau-Ponty’s Social Theory,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 51, no. 103 (April 2004), 98.
119. Philippe Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”: Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l’après-guerre (Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1997), 77–129.
120. François Furet, “French Intellectuals: From Marxism to Structuralism,” In the Workshop of History, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 30.
121. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 1:294.
122. Furet, “French Intellectuals,” 38.
123. Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left, 1977), 97.
124. Althusser cited in Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, 174.
125. Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 210–211.
126. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 162. In Lacan in Contexts (New York: Verso, 1988), David Macey argues rightly that this use of the term real to signify something like actual social conditions violates Lacan’s definition of the real as beyond and resistant to symbolization (19). On the general circumstances of Althusser’s interest in Lacan, see Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), chapter 23.
127. The view that the symbolic is excluded is represented by Macey, Lacan in Contexts, 19. I find myself strongly in agreement with Valente’s claim that at the same time that Althusser shifts from agency to ideology, he also shifts interpretive focus from the imaginary to the symbolic. See Joe Valente, “Lacan’s Marxism, Marxism’s Lacan (from Žižek to Althusser),” in Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 158.
128. Valente, “Lacan’s Marxism, Marxism’s Lacan,” 168.
129. Daniel Fabre, “Symbolisme en questions,” in Martine Segalen, ed., L’Autre et le semblable: Regards sur l’ethnologie des sociétés contemporaines (Paris: CNRS, 1989), 61.
130. Vincent Descombes, “L’équivoque du symbolique,” MLN 94, no. 4, French Issue: Perspectives in Mimesis (May 1979): 655–656, 674.
131. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 130, 124.
132. Camille Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss: L’invention du symbolique. Sociologie et science des religions (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 629. On the impure sacred, see, for example, Alexander T. Riley, “‘Renegade Durkheimianism’ and the Transgressive Left Sacred,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 274–304. See, more generally, Michèle Richman, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
133. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994), 24.
134. Steven Best, “The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: Baudrillard, Debord, and Postmodern Theory,” in Mike Gane, ed., Jean Baudrillard (London: Sage, 2000), 1:241.
135. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos, 1981), 149.
140. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos, 1975), 120.
141. Martin Jay, “The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn,” in Gillian Robertson and John Rundell, eds., Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity (New York: Routledge, 1994). We will return to this theme in chapter 5.
3. From the Symbolic Turn to the Social Imaginary
1. François Furet, “French Intellectuals: From Marxism to Structuralism,” in In the Workshop of History, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 30.
2. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Movements of the Sixties,” in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 52.
3. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis, Project and Elucidation: The ‘Destiny’ of Analysis and the Responsibility of Analysts,” in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 88 (translation emended).
4. See, for example, the two articles by Brian Singer, which offer pioneering overviews of Castoriadis’s thought, but do little to bridge the years between the “early” and the “late” years: “The Early Castoriadis: Socialism, Barbarism, and the Bureaucratic Thread,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 35–56, and “The Later Castoriadis: Institution Under Interrogation,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 4, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 75–101. A similar tendency characterizes the two recent French books on Castoriadis: Gérard David, Cornelius Castoriadis: Le projet d’autonomie (Paris: Michalon, 2000); and Nicolas Poirier, Castoriadis: L’imaginaire radical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). Dick Howard shows more sensitivity to the historical complexity of Castoriadis’s development in what remains one of the most valuable discussions of Castoriadis. See Howard, The Marxian Legacy, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). The first book-length study of Castoriadis in English, Jeff Klooger’s Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (Leiden: Brill, 2009), offers a rich systematic presentation and nuanced evaluation, but it shows little interest in historicizing or contextualizing Castoriadis’s thought. More recently, Suzi Adams’s work Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011) argues that in the years after publication of The Imaginary Institution of Society Castoriadis extended his theory of self-creation to all regions of being, not just human regions, in effect articulating a second ontology. I believe that Adams overstates the break between these two phases, but nonetheless her book is a deep and signal contribution to the philosophical literature on Castoriadis.
5. Paul Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis], “Marxisme et théorie révolutionnaire,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 36 (April-June 1964): 1–25; no. 37 (July-September 1964): 18–53; no. 38 (October-December 1964): 44–86; no. 39 (March-April 1965): 16–66; no. 40 (June-August 1965): 37–71.
6. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 2.
7. On the general situation after the German withdrawal, see Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 355–377.
8. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Institution and Autonomy,” in Peter Osborne, ed., A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (London: Routledge, 1996), 9. See also Philippe Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”: Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l’après-guerre (Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1998), 364.
9. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Socialism or Barbarism,” in Political and Social Writings, vol. 1: 1946–1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 79.
10. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Modern Capitalism and Revolution,” in Political and Social Writings, vol. 2: 1955–1960: From the Workers’ Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 296–297.
11. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Content of Socialism, II,” in Political and Social Writings, 2:91.
12. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Recommencing the Revolution,’” in Political and Social Writings, vol. 3:1961–1979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 33.
14. Letter to readers and supporters of Socialisme ou Barbarie, October 28, 1963, reprinted in Cornelius Castoriadis, “Postface to ‘Recommencing the Revolution,’” in Castoriadis Political and Social Writings, 3:81.
15. See Howard, The Marxian Legacy, 225; for Castoriadis, the group’s efforts at a dynamic and dialectical integration of workers and intellectuals in a collective practice of elaboration and action was meant to prefigure future socialist society. See Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie,” 98f.
16. Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie,” 142–155.
18. Castoriadis, “Institution and Autonomy,” 7.
19. Castoriadis Archive: (Bbis B) Phi 30/40–5.
20. Castoriadis Archive: Letter to Les Temps Modernes, July 28, 1948 (BbisB) Corr 40/60.
21. Castoriadis Archive: Lefort to Castoriadis, August 12, 1949 (BbisB) Corr 40/60.
22. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 44–45.
24. Ibid., 108. Castoriadis used the term social-historical world to unify the synchronic and diachronic elements that structuralism separated.
28. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Discovery of the Imagination,” in World in Fragments, 245.
29. Castoriadis, “Institution and Autonomy,” 11.
31. On Bachelard and Jung, see Richard Kearney, The Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 105–107; further, see passing references to Jung in Gilbert Durand, Champs de l’imaginaire, ed. Danièle Chauvin (Grenoble: ELLUG, 1996).
32. Later in his career, Castoriadis described Durand’s idea of the imagination as “traditional” insofar as Durand saw in imagination a “dynamic power that deforms copies furnished by perception,” as if, Castoriadis added, “perception could ever furnish ‘copies.’” See Cornelius Castoriadis, “Complexité, magmas, histoire: L’exemple de la ville médiévale,” in Fait et à faire: Les carrefours du labyrinthe V (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 225.
33. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (New York: Routledge, 2004), 10–11.
35. Castoriadis, “Institution and Autonomy,” 10.
36. Castoriadis, T he Imaginary Institution of Society, 127 (translation emended).
37. Castoriadis, “Institution and Autonomy,” 10.
38. See, for example, Castoriadis, T he Imaginary Institution of Society, 104.
39. Sartre, The Imaginary, 184.
40. Robert D. Cumming, “Role-Playing: Sartre’s Transformation of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in Christina Howells, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48.
41. Castoriadis, “Institution and Autonomy,” 10.
42. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 124.
44. Husserl quoted in Kearney, The Poetics of Imagining, 16.
45. Ibid., 16–17. Casey argues even further that, because he makes sensory perception the foundational act of consciousness, when Husserl then treats images as modifications of such sensory impressions, he essentially reduces the presentational features of images to “second-order extensions of sensations.” See Edward S. Casey, “Imagination: Imagining and the Image,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 31, no. 4 (June 1971): 483–485.
46. Castoriadis, “The Discovery of the Imagination,” 245.
47. An excellent recent discussion of Fichte’s theory of imagination is found in Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), esp. 253f.
48. See, for example, Richard Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel, 2d ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1961), 450. Castoriadis cites Kroner and elaborates on Kant, Fichte and produktive Einbildungskraft in The Imaginary Institution of Society, 391n.53.
49. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul Which Has Been Presented as a Science,” in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 22 (translation emended).
50. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27 and 366.
51. I draw this formulation from Thomas Pfau, “From Autonomous Subjects to Self-Regulating Structures: Rationality and Development in German Idealism,” in Michael Ferber, ed., A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 109.
52. Interpreters sometimes overlook this duality, too quickly seeing Castoriadis as an extreme subjectivist. See for example, Glen Newey, “Albino Sea-Cucumber,” London Review of Books, February 5, 1998, 6–7; Lucian Boia, Pour une histoire de l’imaginaire (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1998), 208; and Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 24. For a more nuanced approach to this question, see Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia. A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 170f.
53. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 108.
54. I have discussed this in “Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion,” New German Critique, no. 94 (Winter 2005): 72–105, especially 80–86.
55. Castoriadis, “Institution and Autonomy,” 8.
56. See Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Sayable and the Unsayable: Homage to Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 119–144, and “Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition,” in World in Fragments, 273–310.
57. For information on this course, scholars drew until recently on the brief description in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours: Collège de France, 1952–1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); now see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Institution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique: Le problème de la passivité. Le sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955) (Paris: Belin, 2003).
58. Merleau-Ponty, L’Institution, 34f.
59. Ibid., 35 and again 38.
61. Castoriadis, “Institution and Autonomy,” 8.
62. Merleau-Ponty, L’Institution, 41–42.
63. On the point about Merleau-Ponty and perception, see Bernhard Waldenfels, “Der Primat der Einbildungskraft: Zur Rolle des gesellschaftlichen Imaginären bei Cornelius Castoriadis,” in Giovanni Busino, ed., Autonomie et autotransformation de la société: La philosophie militante de Cornelius Castoriadis (Genève: Droz, 1989), 157, note 22. See also the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre’s L’Imaginaire in Fabrice Colonna, “Merleau-Ponty Penseur de l’Imaginaire,” Chiasmi International: Merleau-Ponty. Le Réel et l’Imaginaire (Milan: Mimesis, 2003), 111–147.
64. For an overly hasty conflation of Castoriadis and Lévi-Strauss based on their allegedly shared view of the symbolic constitution of society, see Richard Kearney, Poetics of Modernity. Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1995), 74.
65. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 59.
66. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 164.
69. Ibid., 127 (translation emended).
70. Lévi-Strauss, quoted ibid., 390, note 39.
72. Castoriadis, “The Sayable and the Unsayable,” 122.
73. Hans Joas, “On Articulation,” Constellations 9, no. 4 (December 2002): 510.
74. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 136.
76. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 164–166.
77. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Weltrepräsentanz und Verkörperung: Institutionelle Analyse und Symboltheorien—Eine Einführung in systematischer Absicht,” in Gert Melville, ed., Institutionalität und Symbolisierung: Verstetigungen kultureller Ordnungsmuster in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 26.
78. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 141.
82. The English and French titles of Schopenhauer’s main work (Le monde comme volunté et représentation) point to the different translation conventions for phenomenology and classic German idealism, for, in the latter, Vorstellung (representation) contrasts with Darstellung (presentation). Another relevant word in the Husserlian tradition, Vergegenwärtigung, is translated as “presentification” in both English and French. Presentification bears directly on the phenomenology of imagination, most famously in Eugen Fink’s “Vergengenwärtigung und Bild. Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Unwirklichkeit,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 11 (1930): 239–309. Undoubtedly with Husserl and Fink in mind, Sartre introduced présentifier as an “indispensable neologism” in The Imaginary, 105.
83. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 329 (the second set of ellipses is Castoriadis’s). Jeff Klooger recognizes the importance of the concept of presentation in Castoriadis’s thought, but also his failure to develop systematically the distinction between presentation and representation. See Klooger, Castoriadis, especially 120.
84. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society., 329.
86. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,” in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 172, see also “The Ontological Import of the History of Science,” in World in Fragments, 342–373. I have discussed this aspect of Castoriadis’s theory in “Cornelius Castoriadis Contra Postmodernism: Beyond the ‘French Ideology,’” French Politics and Society 16, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 30–42.
87. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 307. See also Castoriadis, “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,” 145–226.
88. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Technique,” in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 240.
89. For a discussion and relevant literature, see Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 363.
90. Castoriadis, The Iprompted by a shock or prompted bymaginary Institution of Society, 371.
91. Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,” in World in Fragments, 148. Elsewhere, Castoriadis claims a more radical view than Fichte insofar as he believes that the imagination is the capacity to pose an image prompted by a shock or prompted by nothing at all. See Cornelius Castoriadis, “Imagination, imaginaire, réflexion,” in Fait et à faire, 248–249.
92. Castoriadis Archive: Castoriadis to Jean Finkelstein, May 16, 1974, (Mar)A6.
93. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 102–103.
94. Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 436.
95. Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution, 2d ed. (New York: Guildford, 1992), 116.
96. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 102.
97. Hélène Troisier, Piera Aulagnier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 6; see also Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 338.
98. Castoriadis Archive: Box (Mar) A6. “La psychanalyse, projet et elucidation” first appeared in the journal of the Quatrième Groupe, Topique, no. 19 (April 1977) and was reprinted in Crossroads in the Labyrinth.
99. See especially Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Construction of the World in Psychosis,” World in Fragments, 196–210.
100. On the pre-Lacanian history of the “mirror stage,” see Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., 129–134. In Jacques Lacan (111), Roudinesco argues that whereas Wallon viewed mirroring as a stage in the development of the ego, Lacan transformed the mirror stage into the mechanism whereby the human consciousness comes to exist as such.
101. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, 76.
102. Lacan quoted in Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991), 21–22.
104. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 76.
105. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 3.
106. Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,” 150–151.
107. Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 366. For a detailed discussion of Reinhold’s post-Kantian theory of reflection, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), chapter 8.
108. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 283.
109. Castoriadis periodically expressed dissatisfaction with the notion of primary narcissism. See, for example, his preference for the term autism (The Imaginary Institution of Society, 294). See also Castoriadis, “The Psychical and Social Roots of Hate,” Free Associations 7, no. 3 (1999): 402.
110. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 301.
111. Castoriadis borrowed a metaphor of metabolization developed by Aulagnier to describe the psyche’s powerful attempt to allow only what it can “metabolize” to enter it. Aulagnier, in turn, drew on Freud’s analogies between a cell and a psyche. Given Castoriadis’s strong links to Fichte, it is difficult not to see resonances with Fichte’s argument that imagination internalizes the matter of sensation to the extent that it can determine it, and, to the extent that it cannot, it repels that matter, externalizes it. See Beiser, German Idealism, 253.
112. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 296.
113. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 172.
114. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 163.
115. Ibid., 299. The links to Aulagnier are clear in “The Construction of the World in Psychosis,” 196–210. Among these manifestions of the same is the “self.” Whitebook perceptively likens this to the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception, though here it is the psyche as such and not the synthetic function of the ego that is the source of the “I think” accompanying all representations and making them my representations (Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 172).
116. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 288–289.
117. Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis, Project and Elucidation,” 91.
118. Malcolm Bowie, Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida, ed. John Sturrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 131.
120. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 334.
121. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Done and to Be Done,” in The Castoriadis Reader, 376.
122. Cornelius Castoriadis, “From the Monad to Autonomy,” in World in Fragments, 190.
123. Castoriadis quoted in Fernando Urribarri, “The Psyche, Imagination and History: A General View of Cornelius Castoriadis’s Psychoanalytic Ideas,” Free Associations 7, no. 3 (1999): 385.
124. Joel Whitebook, “Requiem for a Selbstdenker: Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997),” Constellations 5, no. 2 (1998): 143.
125. Peter Dews, “Imagination and the Symbolic: Castoriadis and Lacan,” Constellations 9, no. 4 (2002): 517.
126. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 312.
127. See Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York: Verso, 1987), 234ff. and Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, especially 179–196.
128. Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” 424.
129. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 293. Around a year before his death, in typewritten notes on Whitebook’s Perversion and Utopia, Castoriadis articulated this position with particular clarity: “That Lacan takes «dream-images … as signifiers», that is as inserted in the same «literal or phonematic structures» as the signifiers in language» … is the result, inter alia, of his forgetting that the dream as we «know» it is but the end-result of various stages of transformation, up to and including the «secondary elaboration» which is responsible for its final presentation in the awaken [sic] memory.” A further note reads: “emph that ‘translation’ of unconscious contents is a ‘transposition into words of entities ultimately untranslatable, entities just labeled with words during the analytic process. And this is true whenever we speak, even in common parlance, about something psychical.’” Cornelius Castoriadis, “Notes on Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia (typing begun on Friday, January 24, 1997),” Castoriadis Archive: E bis 5.
130. Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics, 73.
132. Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ’68 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 38.
135. Castoriadis, “The Diversionists,” in Political and Social Writings 3:274.
136. Castoriadis, “The Movements of the Sixties,” in World in Fragments, 50–51.
138. Castoriadis, “La Révolution anticipée,” in Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and Edgar Morin, Mai 1968: La Brèche (Paris: Fayard, 1968).
139. This paragraph picks up on Starr’s discussion of Castoriadis in Logics of Failed Revolt, 21. It is perhaps indicative of Castoriadis’s fate that, even though Starr believes that May 1968 vindicated the sociopolitical analyses of Socialisme ou Barbarie (24–29) and that Castoriadis’s tempered corrective to the paralyzing anxieties of some of his contemporaries was essentially right, Castoriadis in fact gets what amounts to a nod in the opening pages of a book that then devotes lengthy analysis to theorists caught in the impasse structure.
140. Castoriadis, “Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul,” 36.
141. Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,” 155.
143. Castoriadis, “Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul,” 26 (translation emended).
144. Cornelius Castoriadis, “General Introduction,” in Political and Social Writings 1:31.
145. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 172.
146. Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,” 169.
147. Castoriadis, “Complexité, magmas, histoire,” 212.
148. Here, one can note some discrepancy between the copious and careful reading notes in Castoriadis’s archive and the often blunt and sometimes unnuanced criticisms that he leveled against many thinkers in his published work.
149. Claude Lefort, “An Interview with Claude Lefort,” Telos 30 (1976–77): 192.
150. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 23.
4. Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology
1. Paul Bénichou, Le sacre de l’écrivain 1750–1830: Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel laïque dans la France moderne (Paris: Corti, 1973), 243f.
2. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 222.
3. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Institution of Society and Religion,” in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 329.
4. See also Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Revolution Before the Theologians: For a Critical/Political Reflection on Our History,” in World in Fragments, 72.
5. Pierre Rosanvallon, “Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France,” in Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Present, ed. Samuel Moyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 36.
6. See the account in Marcel Gauchet, “De Textures au Débat ou la revue comme creuset de la vie intellectuelle,” in Marcel Gauchet, La condition historique: Entretiens avec François Azouvi et Sylvain Piron (Paris: Stock, 2003), 158.
7. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn, 2004).
8. Pierre Rosanvallon, “Le politique,” in J. Revel and N. Wachtel, eds., Une école pour les sciences sociales: De la Vie section à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris: CERF, 1996), 300.
9. Pierre Rosanvallon cited in Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, “French Democracy Between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 76, no. 1 (March 2004): 107–154.
10. Jeremy Jennings, “The Return of the Political? New French Journals in the History of Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 18 (Spring 1997): 148–156, and, more broadly, “‘Le retour des émigrés’? The Study of the History of Political Ideas in Contemporary France,” in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk, eds., The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 204–227.
11. On the general role that Furet played in the intellectual reorientation of those years, see Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), especially chapter 6.
12. See especially Claude Lefort, “Interpreting Revolution with the French Revolution,” in Democracy and Political Theory, 89–114. Moyn has correctly pointed out that Furet in fact drew some of his chief political concepts from Claude Lefort. See Samuel Moyn, “On the Intellectual Origins of François Furet’s Masterpiece,” Tocqueville Review 29, no. 2 (2008): 1–20.
13. Gauchet, “De Textures au Débat,” 167.
14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 122.
15. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1843–1844 (Moscow: Progress, 1973), 3:156.
16. I discuss this in some detail in Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chapter 7.
17. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 502.
18. See especially the lead essay in François Furet, Interpreting the Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
19. Marcel Gauchet, Le Débat 50 (May-August 1988): 168.
20. Olivier Mongin, Face au scepticisme (1976–1993): Les mutations du paysage intellectuel ou l’invention de l’intellectuel democratique (Paris: Découverte, 1994), 17.
21. Gianni Vattimo, “The Trace of the Trace,” in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 79–94.
22. Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Nora, “Aujourd’hui,” Le Débat 50 (May-August 1988): 157.
23. Jean-Claude Monod, “Le ‘problème théologico-politique’ au XXe siècle,” Esprit, no. 250 (February 1999): 179–192.
24. Gauchet and Nora, “Aujourd’hui,” 147.
25. Claude Lefort, “An Interview with Claude Lefort,” Telos 30 (1976–77), 185.
28. See, especially, Claude Lefort, “L’expérience prolétarienne,” Socialisme ou Barbarie 11 (November-December 1952): 1–19, reprinted in Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Genève: Droz, 1971), 71–97.
29. See Claude Lefort, “Préface,” in Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, 14.
30. Claude Lefort [Montal], “Le proletariat et le problème de la direction révolutionnaire,” Socialisme ou Barbarie 10 (July-August 1952): 18–27.
31. See Philippe Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”: Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l’après-guerre (Lausanne: Payot, 1998), 50–52.
33. Lefort, “Préface,” 14.
34. Hugues Poltier, Passion du politique: La pensée de Claude Lefort (Genève: Labor et Fides, 1998), 19.
35. See Lefort, “An Interview,” especially 179–185. For excellent recent accounts, see Poltier, Passion du Politique; Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005). Samuel Moyn’s forthcoming book A New Theory of Politics: Claude Lefort and Company in Contemporary France will offer the most detailed historical reconstruction of the development of Lefort’s thinking. For the time being, see especially Samuel Moyn, “Marxism and Alterity: Claude Lefort and the Critique of Totality,” in Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Elliot Neaman, eds., The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 99–116.
36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 151.
37. I cite the translation of this passage from Lefort as emended by Bernard Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1992), 178. See Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 218.
38. Lefort, “Introduction,” in Democracy and Political Theory, 2–3.
39. I paraphrase terms used by Pierre Rosanvallon in an excellent discussion of these categories. See Rosanvallon, “Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France,” 36.
40. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 215–216.
41. Marcel Gauchet, “Changement de paradigme en sciences sociales?” Le Débat 50 (May-August 1988): 168–169.
42. Within the scholarly literature, Poltier’s Passion du politique in particular emphasizes this holistic orientation.
43. Claude Lefort, “L’idée d’être brut et d’esprit sauvage,” Les Temps Modernes 17, nos. 184–185 (October 1961): 275.
45. Claude Lefort, “How Did You Become a Philosopher?” in Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90.
46. Marcel Gauchet, “Freud et après,” in La condition historique, 174.
47. Slavoj Žižek, “The Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia: An Interview with Éric Laurent,” in Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, eds., Interrogating the Real (New York: Continuum, 2008), 21.
48. Numerous commentators have remarked upon Merleau-Ponty’s interest in psychoanalysis, including Gauchet in “Freud et après,” 175. As Gauchet notes, it was within Merleau-Ponty’s circle that Lacan and Lefort came to know each other personally. Samuel Moyn explores these relations in greater detail in his forthcoming A New Theory of Politics. I am grateful to him for sharing a draft of chapter 1.
49. See Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 219. In this context, the most relevant works by Piera Aulagnier are La Violence de l’Interprétation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975) and Un interprète en quête de sens (Paris: Payot, 1986). Aulagnier has not yet attracted much scholarly attention, despite her importance in the recent history of French psychoanalysis. For useful discussions, see Hélène Troisier, Piera Aulagnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); and Topique: Revue Freudienne 39, no. 74 (2001), an issue dedicated to her in the journal she founded.
50. See Howard, The Specter of Democracy, 303, note 14.
51. Poltiers, Passion du politique, 187.
52. Claude Lefort, “La politique et la pensée de la politique,” Les Lettres Nouvelles, no. 32 (1963): 19–70
53. Claude Lefort, Le Travail de l’oeuvre: Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
54. Oliver Marchart formulates this view well in Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 93: “The role of power is precisely to institute society by signifying social identity—and only by relating to this representation/signification of identity can people relate to the space in which they live as a coherent ensemble.”
55. Hent de Vries, “‘Miracle of Love’ and the Turn to Democracy,” New Centennial Review 8, no. 3 (2009): 244.
56. See Lefort quoted in Dick Howard, The Marxian Legacy, 2d edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 221.
57. Claude Lefort, “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” in John B. Thompson, ed., Political Forms of Modernity: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 194.
59. The quote comes from Poltier, Passion du politique, 184; see also Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, 84–86.
60. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 222.
61. Lefort, “Le Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Réalité Politique,” Psychanalystes: Revue du College de Psychanalystes 9 (October 1983): 41.
62. Claude Lefort, “L’Échange et la lutte des hommes,” Les Temps Modernes 6, no. 64 (February 1951): 1400.
63. Ibid., 1402. Dosse claims that “both the proclamation of a program [in Lévi-Strauss’s Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss] and Claude Lefort’s critiques provided the rational kernel for all the debates and polemics that developed in the fifties and sixties around the structuralist banquet.” François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 31.
64. Claude Lefort, “Société ‘sans historie’ et historicité,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 12 (July 1952): 97.
65. Ibid., 110–111. The term mise en forme appears on pages 95 and 108.
66. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Institution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique: Le problème de la passivité. Le sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955) (Paris: Belin, 2003).
67. Poltiers, Passion du politique, 184.
68. For an account that too readily equates Lefort’s and Lacan’s concepts of the symbolic, see Saul Newman, “The Place of Power in Political Discourse,” International Political Science Review 25, no. 2 (2004), especially 150.
69. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 2002), 276, note 52.
70. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 222.
71. Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, 124.
73. Howard, The Marxian Legacy, 212.
74. Lefort cited in Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics, 188–189.
75. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 222.
77. See Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), chapters 21–23.
78. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 75.
79. Report from Séminaire “politique,” July 23–August 2 1980, Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 527.
80. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 117.
81. Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Semeia 23 (1982): 80.
82. In addition to Caputo, see Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, ed., Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); and Kevin Hart, “Jacques Derrida: The God Effect,” in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (New York: Routledge, 1998), 259–280.
83. On Derrida’s relationship to Benjamin, see the subtle discussion in Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. 266–87.
84. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 136.
85. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 75.
86. Hent De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 24.
87. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” Religion, 25–26. See Schmitt, Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988) 36. For a subtle, albeit strongly Derridean discussion of the differences between Derrida and Schmitt, see De Vries, Religion and Violence, esp. 353–70.
88. Lefort, “The Death of Immortality?” in Democracy and Political Theory, 274. Ironically, Lenin railed against Christianity’s “corpse-worship” in a 1913 letter to Maxim Gorki reprinted in Lapham’s Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 38.
89. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Both Lefort and Gauchet played an important role in Kantorowicz’s reception in France, where people have tended to read him not only as historian but also as a political theorist. For example, Gauchet acknowledged that even though Kantorowicz only cursorily recognized the relevance of the theologico-political doubling of the king’s body for the modern myth of the state, nonetheless his book offers a “veritable red thread of the history of political representations in Europe.” See Marcel Gauchet, “Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps: Christianisme et politique,” Le Débat, no. 14 (July-August 1981): 136. On Kantorowicz’s reception among French medievalists, see Alain Bourreau, Kantorowicz: Stories of a Historian, trans. Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
90. Flynn, The Political Philosophy of Claude Lefort, 126.
91. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 225.
92. Claude Lefort, “Reversibility: Political Freedom and the Freedom of the Individual,” in Democracy and Political Theory, 169.
93. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 255.
94. Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” in John Thompson, ed., The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 304.
96. See Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Dunn ends her study with Albert Camus, but the polyvalent meaning of regicide seems to continue in Lefort, not to mention figures like Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Foucault.
97. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 255.
98. I advanced this argument in “Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion,” New German Critique, no. 94 (Winter 2005): 94–95. More recently, a similar observation may be found in Camille Tarot, Le Symbolique et le sacré: Théories de la religion (Paris: Découverte, 2008), 608–609.
99. My emphasis on the tensions between these three figures contrasts with the depiction of a harmoniously unfolding refinement of a single theory from Castoriadis to Lefort to Gauchet in Natalie Doyle, “Democracy as Sociocultural Project of Individual and Collective Sovereignty: Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, and the French Debate on Modern Autonomy,” Thesis Eleven 75 (November 2003): 69–95.
100. Marcel Gauchet, “Un parcours, une generation,” La condition historique, 22–27.
102. Ibid., 24. The interviews in La condition historique describe a growing distance between Gauchet and Lefort, beginning with tensions over this 1971 article, which Gauchet claims was mostly his creation and furnished Lefort with some of his key ideas about the political institution of society (see especially 160).
103. Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet’s 1980 magnum opus is partially available in English as Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Gauchet has consistently maintained that the histories of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neurophysiology are particularly sensitive registers of the modern upheaval in forms of subjectivity. This is a theme that will not be pursued here. For Gauchet’s own description of these intersecting histories, see “The Democratic Malaise: An Interview with Marcel Gauchet,” Thesis Eleven 38 (1994), especially 138–146. For a comprehensive assessment of this side of Gauchet’s work, see Samuel Moyn, “The Assumption by Man of His Original Fracturing: Marcel Gauchet, Gladys Swain, and the History of the Self,” Modern Intellectual History 6, no. 2 (2009): 315–341.
104. Marcel Gauchet, “La leçon de l’ethnologie,” in La condition historique, 64.
105. On Clastres, see the special tribute issue of Libre 4 (1978); and Samuel Moyn, “Of Savagery and Civil Society: Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Political Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 1 (2004): 55–80.
106. Claude Lefort, “Dialogue with Pierre Clastres,” in Writing: The Political Test, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 214.
107. Marcel Gauchet in Pierre Colin and Olivier Mongin, eds., Un monde désenchanté: Débat avec Marcel Gauchet sur le désenchantement du monde (Paris: CERF, 1988), 72.
108. Gauchet quoted in Samuel Moyn, “Savage and Modern Liberty: Marcel Gauchet and the Origins of New French Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 4, no. 2 (2005): 169. This paragraph draws quite heavily on Moyn’s detailed account.
109. Gauchet, “La leçon de l’ethnologie,” 70. As Behrent has noted, Gauchet’s first published discussion of religion, in a 1971 article on monarchic sovereignty, treats it merely as an ideological tool for power. See Michael Behrent, “Religion, Republicanism, and Depoliticization: Two Intellectual Itineraries—Régis Debray and Marcel Gauchet,” in Julian Bourg, ed., After the Deluge (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004), 331.
110. Gauchet, “La leçon de l’ethnologie,” 75.
111. See Gauchet, La Condition Politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 13.
112. Colin and Mongin, Un monde désenchanté.
113. Gauchet quoted in Behrent, “Religion, Republicanism, and Depoliticization,” 329.
114. I am not alone in detecting this. See, for example, Geneviève Souillac, Human Rights in Crisis: The Sacred and the Secular in Contemporary French Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005), chapter 1. In the interview that concludes Antoon Braeckman, ed., La démocratie à bout de souffle? Une introduction critique à la philosophie politique de Marcel Gauchet (Louvain: Peeters, 2007), Gauchet is asked whether his work is marked by a “certain Hegelianism” (153). Among the essays in the volume, see also André Cloots, “Marcel Gauchet et le désenchantement du monde: La place significative de la religion dans les transformations de la culture occidentale,” 34.
115. See Marcel Gauchet, “La dette du sens et les racines de l’état: Politique et religion primitive,” Libre 2 (1977): 10–11.
116. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 25.
117. Gauchet here used the term introduced by Karl Jaspers to describe the transformations of the first millenium BC. See Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1949). See also S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of the Clerics,” Archives européennes de sociologie 23 (1982): 294–314, and S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York, 1986).
118. Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, 51.
121. See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 192f. on the secular corpus mysticum and 210f. on the “body politic.”
122. Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, 143.
124. Marcel Gauchet, “Le christianisme et la cité moderne: Discussion entre Marcel Gauchet et Pierre Manent,” Esprit (April-May 1986): 99.
125. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Fait et à Faire,” in Fait et à Faire (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 65, and “La démocratie comme procédure et comme régime,” La montée de l’insignifiance (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 240. More generally, see “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 267–289, and “The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary,” in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 84–107.
126. Marc Augé, Génie du paganisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1982); Jean-François Lyotard, Instructions paiennes (Paris: Galilée, 1977). See, more generally, Martin Jay, “Modern and Postmodern Paganism: Peter Gay and Jean-Françoise Lyotard,” in Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Diele, eds., Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 249–262.
127. Johann Arnason weighs the merits of Castoriadis’s autonomy model and Eisenstadt’s Axiality (without mention of Gauchet) against the state of historical research in “Autonomy and Axiality: Comparative Perspectives on the Greek Breakthrough,” in J. Arnason and P. Murphy, eds., Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and Its Aftermath (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001), 155–206.
128. Marcel Gauchet, “Droits de l’homme,” in F. Furet and M. Ozouf, eds., Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (1780–1880) (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 685–695.
129. See Steve Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: The Historians’ Feud (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 86.
130. I take the title of the lead essay in Furet’s Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
131. Gauchet quoted in Behrent, “Religion, Republicanism, and Depoliticization,” 337.
132. Marcel Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie: Parcours de la laïcité (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 8.
133. Tarot, Le Symbolique et le sacré, 605–606.
134. See the exchanges between Marcel Gauchet and his interlocutors in “La sortie de la religion: Des totalitarismes aux droits de l’homme,” in La condition historique, 317–335.
135. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, 16, and La Démocratie contre elle-même (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), xvii.
136. Marcel Gauchet works out his interpretation of the Third Republic in L’avènement de la démocratie, tome 2: La crise du libéralisme, 1880–1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). Volume 1 of L’avènement de la démocratie provides a general overview of the rise of democratic autonomy from roughly 1500 to 1900. Volume 3 focuses on the “short twentieth century.” The “real revolution” in that century of extremes, according to Gauchet, occurred not in communism or fascism, but rather in the democracies, which completed “the work of five centuries” by finally instituting a new form of “human organization.” Consistent with Gauchet’s anxious reading of this process, he cautions against celebrating this new form, which he warns is itself “fraught with problems.” See Gauchet, L’Avènement de la démocratie, tome 3: À l’épreuve des totalitarismes, 1914–1974 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 14. A concise recent formulation of Gauchet’s interpretation of the decades since the 1970s may be found in the small book La Démocratie d’une crise à l’autre (Nantes: Defaut, 2007).
137. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, 65.
138. For Gauchet’s discussion of Renouvier, see ibid., 47f.
143. See “Du religieux, de sa permanence et de la possibilité d’en sortir. Régis Debray, Marcel Gauchet: Un échange,” Le Débat 127 (November–December 2003): 3–19.
144. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, 114.
145. Gauchet, “Ce que nous avons perdu avec la religion,” Diogène 195 (July–September 2001): 314.
146. I pick up here on a formulation in Behrent, “Religion, Republicanism, and Depoliticization,” 342.
147. Gauchet, “De Textures au Débat,” 160.
150. Miguel Abensour, Lettre d’un “révoltiste” à Marcel Gauchet converti à la “politique normale” (Paris: Sens and Tonka, 2008), 10.
151. Abensour’s major essay “‘Démocratie sauvage’ et ‘principe d’anarchie’” is now available as an appendix in Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, trans. Max Blechman (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 102–124.
152. Abensour, Lettre d’un “révoltiste,” 12–13.
153. James Ingram, “The Politics of Claude Lefort’s Political: Between Liberalism and Radical Democracy,” Thesis Eleven 87 (November 2006): 33–50.
5. The Post-Marx of the Letter
1. Louis Althusser, “The Crisis of Marxism,” in Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies, trans. P. Camiller (London: Ink Links, 1979), 225.
2. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 5.
3. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 30.
4. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “Post-Marxism Without Apologies,” in Ernesto Laclau, ed., New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 97–132.
5. See Malachi Hacohen, “The Limits of the National Paradigm in the Study of Political Thought: The Case of Karl Popper and Central European Cosmopolitanism,” in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk, eds., The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 247–279.
6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 14.
7. Ernesto Laclau, “Theory, Democracy, and Socialism,” in Laclau, New Reflections, 236.
8. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 67.
12. Ernesto Laclau, “Building a New Left,” in Laclau, New Reflections, 178–179.
14. For discussions, see Don Forgacs, “Gramsci and Marxism in Britain,” New Left Review 176 (1989): 70–88; Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993).
15. See Leonardo Paggi, Le strategie del potere in Gramsci: Tra fascism e socialism in un solo paese, 1923–1926 (Rome: Riuniti, 1984); Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, trans. David Fernbach (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980).
16. Chantal Mouffe and Anne Showstack Sassoon, “Gramsci in France and Italy—A Review of the Literature,” Economy and Society 6 (1977): 53.
17. Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge, 1977), 1.
18. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism, 232–233.
19. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 461.
20. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 120.
25. Laclau and Mouffe translate point de capiton as “nodal point,” but Žižek’s term quilting point better conveys Lacan’s image of upholstery gathered and anchored by a button.
29. Laclau, “Theory, Democracy, and Socialism,” 210.
30. Edward P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978). On the heated debate provoked by The Poverty of Theory, see Dworkin, Cultural Marxism, 219–245, and, of course, Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (New York: Verso, 1980).
31. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 117.
33. Martin Jay, “The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn,” in Gillian Robertson and John Rundell, eds., Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47, note 36.
34. Baudrillard quoted ibid., 35.
36. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” 179.
37. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 64
38. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (New York: Verso, 1999), 259. Galilée published Derrida’s text in French in 2002 with the same title.
39. Laclau, “New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time,” in Laclau, New Reflections, 83.
41. Laclau, “Theory, Democracy, and Socialism,” 236.
42. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 75.
43. Laclau, “New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time,” 83.
44. Laclau, “‘The Time Is Out of Joint,’” in Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996), 77.
46. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (New York: Verso, 2001), 141.
49. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” 191.
50. Laclau, “‘The Time Is Out of Joint,’” 70.
51. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 180, note 31.
52. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 121. See also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (New York: Routledge, 1997).
53. Lacoue-Labarthe, “‘Political’ Seminar,” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, 98.
54. François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 164–178.
55. See Diana Pinto, “The Left, the Intellectuals, and Culture,” in George Ross, Stanley Hoffmann, and Sylvia Malzacher, eds., The Mitterrand Experiment: Continuity and Change in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 217–228.
56. See Natalie Doyle, “The End of a Political Identity: French Intellectuals and the State,” Thesis Eleven 48, no. 1 (February 1997): 46.
57. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 2:274.
58. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
59. Steven Kaplan, Farewell Revolution: The Historians’ Feud (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 86.
60. Michel Foucault, Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 44.
61. Régis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey (London: New Left, 1981), 87. For an interesting approach to the media cycle, see Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
62. Foucault, Politics Philosophy Culture, 44–45.
63. Report from Séminaire “politique,” July 23–August 2 1980, Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 527.
64. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 335–336.
66. Chun, British New Left, 109.
67. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism, 110–136. See also Chun, British New Left, 110–127.
68. Anderson quoted in Chun, British New Left, 124.
69. Antony Easthope, British Post-Structuralism: Since 1968 (London: Routledge, 1991), xiii. A similar point about the American reception is made by Jean-Philippe Mathy, “The Resistance to French Theory in the United States: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry,” French Historical Studies 2, no. 19 (Fall 1995): 331–347.
70. Easthope, British Post-Structuralism, xiii. The pioneering film studies journal Screen played a major role in this mediation. For a superb example of this British leftist appropriation of Lacan, see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1977).
71. Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism, 161.
72. See the remarks of Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 219. This envy is a recurrent theme in Stefan Collini, Absent Minds. Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006), especially chapter 11.
73. See Norman Geras, “Ex-Marxism Without Substance: A Rejoinder,” in Discourses of Extremity: Radical Ethics and Post-Marxist Extravagances (New York: Verso, 1990); and Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘ True’ Socialism (New York: Verso, 1986).
74. See Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse. Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 15.
75. Laclau, “Theory, Democracy, and Socialism,” 198.
77. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Paris: Minuit, 1984); Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon 1980); Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
78. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” 195.
79. Ibid., 196. The links to pragmatism are explicitly thematized in Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Richard Rorty, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Routledge, 1996).
80. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” 196.
81. See Laclau, “Theory, Democracy, and Socialism,” 232.
82. Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 19.
83. Claude Lefort, “How Did You Become a Philosopher?” in Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 91.
84. I take these examples from Eley, Forging Democracy, 463–467.
85. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” 186.
86. Barthes quoted in Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Metheun, 1979), 140.
87. Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” in John Thompson, ed., The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 305–306.
88. Slavoj Žižek, “Beyond Discourse-Analysis,” in Laclau, New Reflections, 249–260.
89. Strikingly, despite Žižek’s intense engagement with recent French thought and the fact that his first book, Le Plus Sublime des hysteriques: Hegel Passe (Paris: Point hors ligne, 1988), first appeared in French, his impact in France has been very limited. See Jagna Oltarzewska, “‘So much depends on circumstances’. Žižek in France,” Études Anglaises: Revue du Monde Anglophone 58, no. 1 (January-March 2005): 53–67.
90. Žižek, “Beyond Discourse-Analysis,” 249.
91. See, for example, Laclau, “Building a New Left,” 180.
92. Ernesto Laclau, “Preface,” in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), xii.
93. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 126.
94. See especially Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). For an excellent critique of Althusser’s use of Lacan, see Joseph Valente, “Lacan’s Marxism, Marxism’s Lacan (from Žižek to Althusser),” in Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., Cambridge Companion to Lacan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 153–172. See also Elizabeth J. Bellamy, “Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be Political?” Diacritics 1, no. 23 (Spring 1993): 28–29.
95. Laclau describes the concept of “subject positions” as “our immediate prehistory,” a “subtle temptation [that] haunted the intellectual imaginary of the Left for a while,” in “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” in Emancipation(s), 20.
96. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2–3
97. For particularly clear versions of this account, see Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 29; and The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996), 94f. In thus periodizing Lacan’s career, Žižek draws heavily on Jacques-Alain Miller. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Spring 2003): 457, note 3. Žižek discusses the impact of Miller on his thought in “Opening the Space of Philosophy,” in Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 33–34.
98. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 133.
99. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 180.
100. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 133.
105. See, for example, Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 125.
106. Žižek, “Beyond Discourse-Analysis,” 251.
107. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 252.
108. Ibid., 253. This criticism persists in Žižek’s later work. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 171–172; and the dialogue between Žižek, Judith Butler, and Ernesto Laclau, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), 171–172.
109. Žižek, “Beyond Discourse-Analysis,” 254.
110. See Laclau, “Theory, Democracy, and Socialism,” 235, and Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 77. See, further, Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 67.
111. For an illuminating overview of Mouffe’s ideas, see Nico Carpentier and Bart Cammaerts, “Hegemony, Democracy, Agonism, and Journalism: An Interview with Chantal Mouffe,” Journalism Studies 7, no. 6 (2006): 964–975.
112. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 57, 191–192.
113. Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 86.
114. A sharp contrast between the projects of Mouffe and Laclau is drawn in Mark Anthony Wenman, “Laclau or Mouffe? Splitting the Difference,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 29, no. 5 (2003): 581–606. While Wenman’s careful differentiation of Laclau and Mouffe’s positions, even within the pages of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, is illuminating, he overstates the differences. Wenman argues that, although Mouffe pursues a laudable pluralism, Laclau succumbs to the fantasy of totality, which leads to a theory that violates personal freedom (601). We will examine Laclau in detail in the next chapter, but, with regard to Mouffe, it can be said that the logic of equivalences remains central to Mouffe, as does her partisan preference for certain kinds of social struggles. Indeed, Wenman’s emphasis on value pluralism downplays the conflictual and agonistic nature of Mouffe’s democratic theory.
115. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 148–149.
6. Of Empty Places
1. Slavoj Žižek, “The Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia: An Interview with Éric Laurent [1985],” in Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, eds., Interrogating the Real (New York: Continuum, 2005), 21.
2. Slavoj Žižek, “Beyond Discourse-Analysis,” in Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York: Verso, 1990), 251.
3. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 6–7.
4. Slavoj Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek Interview,” in A. Long and T. McGunn, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2, no. 2 (1997): 133.
5. Ernesto Laclau, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), 281.
6. Žižek, ibid., 223, 326.
7. Laclau, ibid., 289; see also Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005), 232–239, and “Glimpsing the Future,” in Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart, eds., Laclau: A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 314–315.
8. Ernesto Laclau, “Preface,” in Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, xii.
9. See especially Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2004), 83; Thomas Brockelman, “The Failure of the Radical Democratic Imaginary: Žižek Versus Laclau and Mouffe on Vestigial Utopia,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 29, no. 2 (2003): 183–208; Linda Zerelli, “This Universalism Which Is Not One,” in Critchley and Marchart, Laclau: A Critical Reader, 98.
10. Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 289.
11. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 2002), 3; see more generally, M. Kovac, “The Slovene Spring,” New Left Review 1, no. 171 (1988): 115–128.
12. Parker, Slavoj Žižek, 34.
13. See Slavoj Žižek, “Opening the Space of Philosophy,” in Glyn Daly and Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 28.
14. An interview that Žižek gave to the journal Ornicar? in 1986–87 suggests an active and even hieratically organized society. See Žižek, “The Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia,” 21–25. By contrast, in conversation with Glyn Daly, Žižek paints a picture of a chaotic, improvised grouping that was little more than a front for Žižek and some of his friends. See Žižek, “Opening the Space for Philosophy,” 36–37.
15. Žižek, in Butler and Stephens, Interrogating the Real, 21. The comment includes a reference to Claude Lefort’s L’Invention démocratique: Les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981).
16. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 72.
17. Žižek, For They Know Not, 88. The following discussion compresses my treatment of this subject in Warren Breckman, “The Return of the King: Hegelianism and Post-marxism in Zizek and Nancy,” in Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Elliot Neaman, eds., The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual and Cultural History (New York: Berghahn, 2009). A shorter version appears as “Die Rückkehr des Königs: Radikaldemokratische Adaptionen eines hegelianischen Motivs bei Jean-Luc Nancy und Slavoj Zizek,” in Ulrich Johannes Schneider, ed., Der französische Hegel (Berlin: Akademie, 2007), 205–218.
18. Žižek, For They Know Not, 196.
19. A more orthodox interpretation would likely suggest, as Taylor does, that the concrete universal is the “manifestation of the necessity contained in the idea concerned, and it is moreover a necessary manifestation, that is, [it] can be seen as posited by [the idea].” See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 113.
20. Žižek, For They Know Not, 82.
21. Hegel quoted ibid., 82
23. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 44.
25. Žižek, For They Know Not, 189.
26. Given this perspective, it is not surprising that Žižek would eventually argue that the “true politico-philosophical heirs of Hegel are authors who fully endorse the political logic of the excess constitutive of every established Order,” chief among them Carl Schmitt. See Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 113.
27. Žižek, For They Know Not, 189.
30. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 1–2.
31. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 48.
32. Slavoj Žižek, “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,” New Left Review, 1, no. 183 (September-October 1990): 62. Žižek’s insistence on an alienated state diverged not only from the civil society dissidents but also from the classical Marxist idea that communism overcomes the separation of state and society. On the latter, see Paul Thomas, Alien Politics: Marxist State Theory Retrieved (New York: Routledge, 1994).
33. Žižek, For They Know Not, 268–269.
34. There has been substantial controversy over the extent to which Hegel’s monarch really is rendered powerless. For the debate among Hegel’s contemporaries, see Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For one instance of the debate in the twentieth century, contrast Eric Weil, Hegel et l’État (Paris: Vrin, 1950) to Bernard Bourgeois, Études hégéliennes: Raison et décision (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), especially chapter 4.
35. Žižek, For They Know Not, 269.
36. See, for example, Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 211–212. Žižek here repeats phrasing from the conclusion of his essay “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,” 62.
37. Slavoj Žižek, “Formal Democracy and Its Discontents,” in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 168.
38. Žižek, For They Know Not, xviii.
39. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 453.
40. See Žižek, “Opening the Space of Philosophy,” 28–30.
41. Parker, Slavoj Žižek, 115.
42. Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
44. Rex Butler, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2006); Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006).
45. The phrase is from Slavoj Žižek, “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 542–566.
46. Adam Kotsko, Žižek and Theology (New York: Clark, 2008), 5–8.
47. Here I have benefited from Adam Kotsko, ibid., 38–42; and Jodi Dean, “Žižek Against Democracy,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, 1, no. 2 June 2005): 154–177.
48. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 232–236.
49. Jacques-Alain Miller quoted in Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004), 111.
50. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 221. Žižek links the formalism of liberal democracy to the formalism of Kantian ethics, but this is a dimension I cannot explore.
51. Žižek, For They Know Not, 276, note 52; see also Tarrying with the Negative, 221.
52. “Opening the Space of Philosophy,” 41.
53. Ernesto Laclau, “Theory, Democracy and Socialism,” in Laclau, New Reflections, 219 and 229.
54. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” in Collected Works, 1843–1844 (New York: International, 1975), 3:175–187.
55. Laclau, New Reflections, and Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996).
56. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 58.
57. This argument is scattered throughout Laclau’s New Reflections and Emancipation(s).
58. See Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 68, 58; see also Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” 288.
59. See Laclau, “New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time,” in New Reflections, 63, and “Subject of Politics, Politics of the Subject,” in Emancipation(s), 53.
60. The centrality of Lacanian categories is taken for granted in Anna Marie Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 1998); for a position arguing that certain key Lacanian concepts, particularly jouissance, are underdeveloped in Laclau’s work, see Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Encounters of the Real Kind: Sussing Out the Limits of Laclau’s Embrace of Lacan,” in Critchley and Marchart, Laclau: A Critical Reader, 201–216; and, more recently, Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 66–108. Laclau challenges Glynos and Stavrakakis in “Glimpsing the Future,” 298–304.
61. Ernesto Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s), 40, see also “New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time,” 84, note 5.
62. Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” 40.
63. Ernesto Laclau, “Power and Representation,” in Emancipation(s), 90.
64. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 113.
65. Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity,” in Emancipation(s), 28.
66. Ernesto Laclau, “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” Critical Inquiry, 32, no. 4 (Summer, 2006): 647.
67. Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” 42.
68. Laclau, “Power and Representation,” 103; he repeats this formulation in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 211.
69. See, for example, Laclau, “New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time,” 64f.
70. Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 210.
72. Laclau, “Power and Representation,” 93, see also Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 85.
73. See also Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” 291.
74. Slavoj Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” Critical Inquiry, 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 559.
75. Laclau, “Why Constructing a People,” 675.
76. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 166.
77. Ernesto Laclau, “Democracy and the Question of Power,” Constellations 8, no. 1 (March 2001): 12.
78. Žižek, For They Know Not, 276, note 52, see also Tarrying with the Negative, 221.
79. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 184.
80. Žižek, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 93, see also 258.
82. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, “Preface,” in The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), x.
83. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 355.
85. Žižek, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 100.
86. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Collected Works, 3:146–174.
87. The question of liberal democracy appears early in Žižek’s work. See Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 221; see the more decisive formulation in Žižek, “Preface,” x. The second quote comes from Slavoj Žižek, “The Rhetorics of Power,” diacritics 31, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 96.
88. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 72.
89. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 238.
90. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), 154.
91. Certainly, despite Laclau’s own criticisms of Derrida, it must be said that Laclau’s recent efforts to rebut the charge of Kantian formalism by insisting that politics is not the struggle to fill “a transcendentally established place, but the constant production and displacement of the place itself” within the immanent order of the “discursive structure” reinforce his ultimate proximity to poststructuralism. See Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” 282–283. In that piece Laclau addresses not Žižek but Rodolphe Gasché, whose essay, “How Empty Can Empty Be? On the Place of the Universal,” opens Critchley and Marchart, Laclau: A Critical Reader.
92. See The Ticklish Subject, 135
93. I have discussed this theme in “The Uses of ‘Creatio ex nihilo’: On the Postmodern Revival of a Theological Trope,” Ideas in History 4, no. 2 (2009): 39–61.
94. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 112.
95. Žižek, For They Know Not, 101, 217, see also The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996), which contains a section titled “Against Historicism.”
96. Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 71. In contrast to Žižek, Laclau has not held these two terms firmly apart. See, for example, his discussion of “radical historicity” in “Building a New Left,” 192.
97. Žižek, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 112.
98. Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction,” in Slavoj Žižek, ed., Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, a Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 (New York: Verso, 2002), 4.
99. Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 207.
103. Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” 564.
104. I borrow this formulation from Dean, “Žižek Against Democracy.”
105. Žižek, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 257–258.
106. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). The most penetrating study of this aspect of his thought is Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008).
107. Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 3.
109. Schelling quoted in Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 21.
110. Ibid., 6; see also Žižek, “A Symptom—of What?” Critical Inquiry, 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 489.
111. Schelling quoted in Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 75.
112. Žižek repeats this point in The Ticklish Subject, 172, and in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 92.
113. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 184; for an earlier formulation, see Tarrying with the Negative, especially 220.
114. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 187.
116. Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 203.
118. On oppositional determination, see Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 120; on the impossibility of directly embodying the universal, see especially The Ticklish Subject, 100–103; also in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 316.
119. Žižek, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 320.
120. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 116.
121. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, 297–298.
122. Žižek, On Belief, 104.
123. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 159. See also Tarrying with the Negative, 171.
124. Dominiek Hoens and Ed Pluth, “The sinthome: A New Way of Writing an Old Problem?” in Luke Thurston, ed., Re-Inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2002), 13.
125. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 75.
126. Hoens and Pluth, “The sinthome,” 12.
127. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 75.
128. R. Harari, “The sinthome: Turbulence and Dissipation,” in Thurston, Re-Inventing the Symptom, 48. The Žižek reference comes from Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 81.
129. Jamie Murray, “Sinthome Law: Theoretical Constructions Upon Lacan’s Concept of the Sinthome,” Law and Critique, 16, no. 2 (2005): 219–220.
130. The most extended discussion of this is found in Slavoj Žižek, “Does the Subject Have a Cause?” in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994).
131. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 226.
132. See respectively, Parker, Slavoj Žižek, 78; Russell Grigg, “Absolute Freedom and Major Structural Change,” Paragraph 24, no. 2 (2001): 118; Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey, “A Ticklish Subject? Žižek and the Future of Left Radicalism,” Thesis Eleven, 80, no. 1 (February 2005), 94–107. For an effort to rebut these worries, see Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics, especially 184f.
133. This is implied by Žižek in a piece that criticizes Schmitt in terms reminiscent of his critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of antagonism. See Slavoj Žižek, “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” in Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso, 1999), especially 27f.
134. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 39.
135. Žižek, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 119.
136. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 226. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
137. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, 187.
138. Butler and Laclau, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 145, 289.
139. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute; or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2000), On Belief, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
140. On the periodization claim, see Kotsko, Žižek and Theology, 21; Žižek, For They Know Not, 29.
142. Žižek, For They Know Not, xxix. See John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
143. Žižek, For They Know Not, xxix.
144. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 2.
145. Žižek discusses this formula in many places. In my description I am drawing on Kotsko, Žižek and Theology, 49.
146. Kotsko focuses his discussion on the works of the early 2000s, but the “death of God” theme is present much earlier in Žižek’s work, as in this quote from Metastases of Enjoyment, 46. See also Tarrying with the Negative, 170: “When God becomes man, he identifies with man qua suffering, sinful mortal. In this sense, the ‘death of God’ means that the subject verily finds himself alone, without any guarantee in substantial Reason, in the big Other.”
147. Kotsko, Žižek and Theology, 83.
148. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 170–71. Again, Kotsko’s examples are all from the works of the early 2000s, but Žižek’s invocation of the “Holy Spirit” also reaches back to his earlier works.
149. Kotsko, Žižek and Theology, 98.
151. See chapter 2. See, generally, Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 107.
152. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 152.
154. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 121.
155. John Milbank, “Materialism and Transcendence,” in Creston Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 399–400.
156. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 157.
157. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 160.
159. Ibid., 237. This comes in a chapter that ends with yet another double contrast that pits Derrida’s “hauntology” against Žižek’s “ontology,” Kant’s regulative ideal against Hegel’s concrete rational order. Yet, ironically, Žižek’s formulation of the leader’s relationship to his subject’s squabbles resembles nothing so closely as Kant’s paean to Frederick the Great in “What Is Enlightenment?”
161. Slavoj Žižek, “Schlagend, aber nicht Treffend!” Critical Inquiry, 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 210–211.
162. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 238.
164. Žižek, “Preface,” x.
165. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, 11.
167. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 162.
169. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 154; Žižek, “Resistance Is Surrender,” London Review of Books, November 15, 2007.
170. Žižek, On Belief, 84. See also Žižek, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 326.
171. I draw these two examples from Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 133.
172. Žižek, “Schlagend, aber nicht Treffend!” 193.
173. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, 311.
174. Žižek, in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 100.
Epilogue
1. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), 404.
2. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2010), 258–259.
3. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 408.
4. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 215.
5. See Miguel Abensour, “L’affaire Schelling: Une controverse entre Pierre Leroux et les jeunes hégéliens,” in Patrice Vemeren, ed., “Victor Cousin suivi de la correspondance Schelling-Cousin,” special issue, Corpus, nos. 18/19 (1991): 117–131, “Postface. Comment une philosophie de l’humanité peut-elle être une philosophie politique moderne?” in Pierre Leroux, Aux philosophes, aux artistes, aux politiques: Trois discours et autres texts, ed. Jean-Pierre Lacassagne (Paris: Payot, 1994), and Le procès des maîtres rêveurs (Arles: Sulliver, 2000).
6. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 42, note 5.
7. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 55–60 (translation corrected).
8. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 24. See also the very useful article by Joseph J. Tanke, “Why Rancière Now?” Journal of ‘Aesthetic Education 44, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 1–17.
9. See especially F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
10. F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 48.
11. See the chapter “Romanticism, Postmodernism, and Democracy” ibid.
12. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” part 2, October, no. 13 (Summer 1980): 62.
15. Geoges Gusdorf quoted in Donald A. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 295.
16. Michel Foucault, “L’homme est-il mort?” Dits et écrits, vol. 1: 1954–1969, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 542.
17. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 4.
18. George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market (New York: Wiley, 1987).
19. David Harvey, “Postmodern Morality Plays,” Antipode 24, no. 4 (1992): 316.
20. Jameson, “How Not to Historicize Theory,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 577.
21. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 405.
22. Norman Geras, “Post-Marxism?” New Left Review 1, no. 163 (May-June 1987): 56.
23. Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 95.
24. Jacques Rancière, “Communists Without Communism?” in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, eds., The Idea of Communism (New York: Verso, 2010), 174.
25. Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 5.
26. Among David Harvey’s many works, see, most recently, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010).
27. See the survey of such work in the final chapter of Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism? (New York: Verso, 2008).
28. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 380.
29. See the spirited text by Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), especially 177.
30. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 409.
31. Douglas Kellner, “The Obsolescence of Marxism?” in Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, eds., Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perpspective (New York: Routledge, 1995), 26.
32. Stuart Sim, Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (New York: Routledge, 2000), 164.
33. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Crisis of Marxism, The Crisis of Politics,” Dissent (Spring 1992): 221.
34. Of course, within the history of twentieth-century Marxism, there was a lively debate over the question of totalizing theory. The classic analysis is Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
35. Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword to the Paperback Edition,” in Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2011), 473.
36. Douzinas and Žižek, The Idea of Communism. See also Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism (New York: Verso, 2011).
37. Pierre Badiou, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2007), The Meaning of Sarkozy (New York: Verso, 2010), and The Communist Hypothesis.
38. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 235–236.
39. Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review, no. 49 (January-February 2008): 37.
40. Badiou quoted in Daniel Bensaïd, “Permanent Scandal,” in Democracy in What State? trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 23.
41. Badiou writes of the communist hypothesis that “it is in fact mainly negative, as it is safer and more important to say that the existing world is not necessary than it is to say, when we have nothing to go on, that a different world is possible.” See Badiou, The Communist Hypotheis, 64.
46. See, for example, Žižek, “Afterword to the Paperback Edition,” in Living in the End Times, 475.
47. See ibid., 473; and Žižek, “How to Begin from the Beginning,” in Douzinas and Žižek, The Idea of Communism, 211.
48. Bosteels reports that at a 2009 conference in London on the idea of communism, Žižek was almost entirely alone in his statism (Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism, 223). To be fair, Žižek insists that “the true task is to make the state itself work in a nonstatal mode.” That remark, however, prompts me to recall an anecdote from Castoriadis. When he heard a conference participant call for the debureaucratization of the state, Castoriadis retorted we might as well try to demilitarize the army.
49. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 200.
50. Žižek, “How to Begin from the Beginning,” 198.
51. Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), 130.
52. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 418–419.
53. One could track this out in various directions, including Žižek’s vociferous critique of Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York: Verso, 2007), which argues for an anarchist politics that remains at a distance from state power. See Slavoj Žižek, “Resistance Is Surrender,” London Review of Books, November 15, 2007.
54. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 118.
55. Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism, 51–52.
56. Žižek, “Afterword to the Paperback Edition,” in Living in the End Times, 481.
57. Žižek, Living in the End Times, x.
59. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 63, 67.
60. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 446.
61. Kurt Andersen, “The Protester,” Time, December 26, 2011/January 2, 2012, 58.
62. Occupy Wall Street’s international connections are neatly summarized in Ishaan Tharoor, “Hands Across the World,” in What Is Occupy? Inside the Global Movement (New York: Time, 2011), 25–33. The numbers for the global protest on October 15, 2011, come from Andy Kroll, “How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started,” in Sarah van Gelder and the staff of Yes! Magazine, eds., This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2011) 21.
63. For a thoughtful and sympathetic consideration of the movement’s prospects as of early 2012, see Michael Greenberg, “What Future for Occupy Wall Street?” New York Review of Books 59, no. 2 (February 9, 2012): 46–48.
64. Žižek’s response to the Arab upheavals was positive and supportive, but also skewed toward his concerns. See, for example, “Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?” Guardian.co.uk, July 15, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/01/egypt-tunisia-revolt (last accessed August 8, 2011). For an interesting panel discussion that debates, among other things, the anticapitalist dimension of the Egyptian Revolution, see “Round Table ‘Meaning of Maghreb’—Žižek, Habashi, Amin, Harvey, Bauman, 18th May 2011,” Zagreb, Croatia, Kasama, http://kasamaproject.org/2011/07/12/zizek-habashi-amin-harvey-bauman-on-the-arab-spring/ (last accessed July 28, 2011).
65. Slavoj Žižek, “Don’t Fall in Love with Yourselves,” in Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, Nikil Saval, Eli Schmitt, and Astra Taylor, eds., Occupy: Scenes from Occupied America (New York: Verso, 2011), 69. In the same volume, Jodi Dean likewise forces Occupy into the recently emerged language of the “communist hypothesis,” describing the movement as the “expression of communist desire … a politics that asserts the people as a divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common” (88).
67. Jeff Sharlet, “By the Mob’s Early Light: The Ritual Significance of Occupy Wall Street,” BookForum 18, no. 4 (December/January 2012), 7.
68. David Graeber, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture,” in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Oakland: AK, 2007), 378.
69. See, for example, David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK, 2009).
70. Kroll, “How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started,” 18.
71. For a recounting, see Stephen Gandel, “The Leaders of a Leaderless Movement,” What Is Occupy? 34–39.
72. Graeber quoted in Dan Berrett, “Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe,” Chronicle of Higher Education 58, no. 9 (October 21, 2011), A6. For Graeber’s reflections on vanguardism, see “The Twilight of Vanguardism,” in Possibilities, 301–311.
73. See David Graeber, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
74. Graeber, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” 406.
75. David Graeber, “Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction,” in Possibilities, 113.
76. Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber, “Introduction,” in Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle, eds., Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations//Collective Theorization (Oakland: AK, 2007), 20.
77. Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” Boundary 2, 26, no. 3 (1999): 22.
79. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), 408.
80. Howard, The Specter of Democracy, 17.
82. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, trans. David Ames Curtis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 119–120.