Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

For though it remains rooted in moral principles, particularly in those serving to define the just exercise of coercive power, political philosophy cannot illuminatingly be described as the application of moral philosophy to the political world. That is because it has to adopt a more reflective stance than is usual in moral philosophy…. Herein lies the autonomy of political philosophy, what makes it more than just a part of the supposedly more general discipline of moral philosophy. You have your moral views, I have mine, and each of us is convinced that he is right, standing ready to show the other the error of his ways. But once we confront the problem of how people like us are to live together, we enter the terrain of political philosophy.⁴

Notice, however, how questions referring to the mainstay of collective life, or bearing on questions of political form, are not even mentioned. In an all-capitalist universe, the political philosopher does not feel the need to comprehensively conceptualize the forms of power shaping present-day inequalities, or the ideologies sanctioning and/or debarring forms of agency to challenge them. Institutionalized patterns of exclusion and domination on the basis of gendering and racialization embedded in the prevalent political order are thus tacitly normalized. By extension, state power and the conditions for its production and reproduction, or the conditions impairing the realization of the ideals of freedom and equality proclaimed in founding documents, are at best muddled and at worst excluded from the purview of political philosophy. Meanwhile, the class structures and forms of corporate and military power structuring and mediating the political situation that serves as the philosopher’s main locus of action, or the fate of citizenship, the increasing corporatization of public discourse, and the whole ensemble of neoliberal practices and rationalities forming the present, are silently brushed aside.⁵ Indeed, most of the time the political philosopher’s gaze is inclined to consider the ever divisive questions of ethical politics and forging a normative basis for stable conviviality within the confines of depoliticized politics. Forging a liberal ethical politics is the overriding concern. It involves, for instance, judging principles of political legitimacy “by the moral values that lie at their basis.”⁶

Another instance of the narrow vision of political theory as an academic field is the privileging of textual commentary over politically engaged theorizing, along with the dehistoricization carried on sometimes in the name of “historical context.” Even if exegetical activity has a fine pedigree, exegetical commentary has become a neutralized, strictly academic endeavor. But such neutralization is historically mediated and thus symptomatic of a particular historical situation. And this neutralization of both form and content in the academic article, often clogged with gratuitous scholarly apparatuses, is a far cry from the venerable genre that is the essay. One corollary of this is how sharpness of tone, not to dwell on polemical arguments, is cast as ad hominem attack tout court and thus curtly dismissed; likewise, tepidness or lack of political nerve are often swept under the rug as the forms of civility that define scholarly engagement and are therefore exonerated from critical scrutiny. No venom is spared, however, when the tone of an interpretation transgresses the consensus of the tepid that increasingly reigns in this hyperprofessionalized world and is found too jarring, or when a political and ideological context is presented to establish specific mediations and homologies between, say, a thinker’s political choices, his historical moment and situation, and the body of theoretical work of which he is the author. Blind peer review is the preferred medium for silencing and chastising in the name of a misplaced sense of scholarly decorum. That such civility emerges out of a rather arcane professorial code that is thoroughly mediated by class, gender, and race is probably not the worst entry point for a would-be sociologist to map its habits and customs.

With characteristic wit, E. P. Thompson once described a version of this bias and how rather aseptic ideals of genuine communication could silence other forms of argumentation: “Burke abused, Cobbett inveighed, Arnold was capable of malicious insinuation, Carlyle, Ruskin and D. H. Lawrence, in their middle years, listened to no one. This may be regrettable: but I cannot see that the communication of anger, indignation, or even malice, is any less genuine.”⁷ Genuine communication, even in the form of an angry polemic, is central for any reckoning with the political world, especially if one seeks to change how it is structured and ordered. The disavowal of any trace of this form of discourse, so central in the traditions of European, Latin American, and Caribbean political thought, is without doubt the upshot of the professionalization of political science, and by extension political theory, in its academic settings. Undeniably, personal and intellectual temperament largely mediates how one responds to the commotions of one’s times. But it does so only to a degree. There is something else at stake. Perhaps the conflation of passion with zealotry is a function of estrangement from political life, of living in times and places in which political life mostly consists of modalities of depoliticized politics, where professionalization and marketization operate in tandem with depoliticization. Be that as it may, nowadays trenchant criticism tends to elicit the specter of arbitrariness and lack of scholarly rigor. Even if there is no malice involved in the chapters that follow, the political impulse animating its sharp tone is part of a larger commitment to a particular form of political theory, political “political theory,” or perhaps even a critical political theory.⁸ In principle, writing and speaking in a more severe style needs no more justification than the equally legitimate tepid prose that has come to define the discipline, let alone polemics or inveighed discourse: from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, through Benjamin Constant’s On Political Reactions and On the Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and The Holy Family—not to mention Juan Donoso Cortés’s speeches or his Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality and the philosophical hammer that is The Anti-Christ—mordant writings have contributed some of the sharpest statements of political theorizing to have taken place across the political spectrum of the postrevolutionary period in Europe. Once accompanied by arguments, sharpness of tone and writing are not only as legitimate as any other scholarly mode but could also be seen as constitutive of political theory as a political activity.

Political Responsibility self-consciously hinges on a political approach to critical and political theory, which combines dialectical historicism— and thus places emphasis on the primacy of the situation in the formal architecture of any substantial political theorization—with an argument about the need to carefully distinguish the historicity of philosophical and political concepts, even while prioritizing political contexts. What this book ultimately offers is the priority of a political interpretation of political thought and, by extension, of the problematic of responsibility in it. While some readers may want to skip this discussion, the overall argument of the book becomes more intelligible (and credible) in light of it, as it makes explicit the principles and benchmarks informing it. Obviously, it would be quixotic, not to say at once presumptuous and naive, to pretend to shatter all these conceits with the stroke of one’s pen. Better yet, a discussion about interpretative principles is bound to be abstract if not entirely misguided: the critical import of the precepts that follow can ultimately be discerned only in their execution, not on the basis of a rather formalist elucidation, which at worst lends itself to unnecessary posturing and, at best, only gain purchase in their actualization.⁹ But the impetus to spell these out comes from a sense that current discussions within North Atlantic political theory have increasingly assumed a somewhat naive reading strategy that is hardly self-reflective about the conceptual axioms, periodizations, and historical accounts it draws upon. If nothing else, elucidating the interpretative approach the book stages dispels the specter of arbitrariness often associated with politically minded inquiries like the present one, which has an explicit commitment to retrieve a form of writing that resists quietist detachment.

The historical reconstructions and interpretations offered in this book openly prioritize a political interpretation of political theory, which is taken not only as the point of departure but as the ultimate interpretative horizon. This may seem obvious enough, but it is not. The study of political theory, mostly if not exclusively the interpretation—including contextualization—of texts is often carried on by way of literary, historical, or philosophical practices of interpretation that frequently eschew the political, economic, and ideological mediations found in an argument and text. The chapters that follow grant priority to a political interpretation of political theorizing in which the historical context—social and cultural, economic and political—is no mere add-on. Rather, historical context is understood as an indispensable aspect of any interpretation of eminently political works and interventions. Questions about why certain thought forms emerge or reemerge when they do, or what historical determinants generate certain political horizons, or underline, sanction, and mediate them, are central to the approach to interpretation defended in these pages.

A decisive aspect of any interpretation is an examination of both the diachronic moment and the synchronic aspects of a body of work in relation to the predicaments of power that sometimes occasioned its composition or, in other instances, provided the context that made possible the salience of a particular theoretical position. Interpretation is, accordingly, historical and contextual, but not in the commonly received senses of these two terms. It is historical insofar as it avows its own historicity and contextual inasmuch as it operates in discursive, ideological, and political contexts.¹⁰ A discursive context can be, but need not be, philological; in a more contemporary vein, an academic controversy could be what initially prompts reflection on a question. Still, even if controversies along academic or philological lines can undoubtedly provide the immediate point of departure for an inquiry and yield their own unique insights, in the present work the approach to historicization privileges different and arguably politically more meaningful levels of historical context. In this reckoning, political theory ought to be concerned with the contemporary world, the historical forms of power at once enabling and constraining it, and the fortunes of political life and its forms in contemporary predicaments of power. By extension, it needs to be equally concerned with the implications of these processes for a theoretical endeavor seeking to map and apprehend them. But historicizing a text and an authorship also involves historicizing theoretical forms and forms of theoretical reflection, as chapter 1 seeks to do concerning that postmodern phenomenon and symptom called Theory and its mediating role in the advent of the turn to ethics and its depoliticized sense of responsibility.

One can historicize a text in terms of at least three levels of inquiry: the political, or that which pertains to the immediate situation the thinker in question responds to; the social, or that which pertains to larger social forces, ideologies, and discourses that posit questions of racialization, gendering, socialization, and status; and the historical as it pertains to the modes of production in their slower temporal and spatial eventuation and the continuous changes in social destinies in that vast dialectic of continuity and discontinuity that is humanity’s history.¹¹ Herein, these three levels are kept in mind, especially the first and third, with due attention, specific to the particular imperatives and demands of different historical periods and circumstances, paid to the second. The problematic of responsibility, as such, and the thinkers articulating it, will be placed in the contexts of these levels and horizons of history and thus critically pondered. Equally historicized will be the forms and figures of thought—philosophy, historical criticism, Theory—that emerged either in tandem or coeval with the problematic of responsibility, or which served as its condition of possibility.

“Contexts, of course, are personal and social as well as technical and intellectual,” writes intellectual historian Anthony Grafton.¹² It could be added that even if each of these can be conceived historically, merely adducing historical context, or the historicity of a particular context, is in and of itself hardly enough, as establishing a relevant context is already an act of interpretation that needs to be argued for. Contexts, therefore, need to be specified; here, as the occasion requires, different contexts will be pondered in relation to the three levels of inquiry that are privileged in the historicizing practice that the book stages. Levels of inquiry that are adduced by closely following the primacy of the situation to which a thinker responds, the concepts she forges, and the historical moment and intellectual matrices that defines it. For one thing is to identify conceptual structures, mapping and describing them along with their mutations, but another interpretative strategy is to identify causal relations between conceptual articulations and the moment of emergence of thought forms. Causality, as such, is, of course, ultimately elusive. But tracing the emergence of thought forms that concatenate within larger processes of historical eventuation, part of broader constellations signaling transmutations, continuities and discontinuities, is not only entirely possible but necessary to adequately grasp the predicaments of power to which one responds. Theoretical texts are thus understood as either tacitly or explicitly responding to a particular situation and/or as symptoms of a particular historical moment. Works thus bear not only their own internal logic, along with immanent sediments from prior articulations, which ought to prevent any facile slicing of them, but also their forms of thought are mediated by the social and political contradictions to which these respond.

Interpreting the history of political thought also entails making a clear distinction between, on the one hand, how concepts are produced, reformulated, and integrated into political controversies and, on the other hand, how the interpreter forges a narrative of this conceptualization and eventuation, its continuities and ruptures. It also requires establishing an equally clear heuristic distinction between political concepts and philosophical concepts, and how neither can be subsumed under an undifferentiated interpretative protocol that casts both as political interventions. Philosophical concepts, however mediated in the work of a politically driven thinker, nevertheless enjoy a relative autonomy, as these hardly move on par with the political concepts that are part of the same constellation within a given political theorization.¹³ Even when all concepts acquire their determinations historically, there is less tolerance for equivocation in philosophical concepts, as these bear an internal imperative to cogency and bindingness that, while historically mediated, enjoy a relative autonomy.¹⁴

Yet, however autonomous, philosophical concepts bear historical sedimentations both from previous philosophical systems—frequently their original locus, as the idea of the “subject” in early modern philosophy—and sometimes, albeit less frequently, from the historical moment of their emergence; in contrast, political concepts—sometimes mediated by philosophical homologues—carry even more political, spatial, and temporal presuppositions. And both have to at once be immanently criticized and historicized. Even if “what the subject feels to be its own autonomous achievement, the achievement of objectification, revels itself in retrospect…to be permeated with residues of history,” as Adorno observed, the ways these historical residues permeate the objectification of reason has to be carefully historicized.¹⁵ And to understand what such subtle interpretation entails, it is necessary to invoke a constitutive tenet of Pierre Bourdieu’s “Realpolitik of reason” and its account of “the historicity of reason.”¹⁶ Proclaiming the historicity of reason is not to indulge in sociological reductionism. Instead, it is an enabling, critical practice. In Bourdieu’s formulation: “By endeavoring to intensify awareness of the limits that thought owes to its social conditions of production and to destroy the illusion of the absence of limits or of freedom from all determinations which leaves thought defenseless against these determinations, it aims to offer the possibility of real freedom with respect to the determinations it reveals.”¹⁷ From this perspective, it should be a truism to acknowledge how the “truth content” of a work goes beyond the author’s intention. But this insight should be a point of departure, not of arrival. It demands interpretation, and only scrupulous handling of the text and the historicity of its thought forms articulates the truth content of a body of work. Interpreting the immanent logic of these forms, and the situation to which these respond, requires “moving beyond the monadological enclosedness” in which these are often shrouded by prevalent approaches to the historicity of thought.¹⁸

This seminal insight on the historicity of reason was already lucidly formulated in Adorno’s 1960 lecture course “Philosophy and Sociology.” Reason may lack the spatial and sociohistorical presuppositions of political concepts, say, freedom or equality, but that hardly means it is devoid of social and historical determinations. And that includes critical reason, which formulates a concept of truth that critically reflects on these determinants in order to transcend them. From the perspective of critical reason, spirit and society are grasped as thoroughly mediated and thus embedded in humanity’s natural history. “Spirit,” which Adorno identifies as “the quintessence of human consciousness: at once the universal consciousness of the species, the specific social consciousness and the consciousness of determinate individuals,” constitutes “a moment” that is dialectically “intertwined with the life process” of humanity as a species.¹⁹ Spirit, accordingly, is not independent, insofar as it can only exist within a “material life process and its presuppositions refer to it,” but at the same time its claim to produce something independent, qua consistent and nonarbitrary, is justified.²⁰ That is its moment of autonomy and its legitimate claim to bindingness.²¹ But once this autonomy as objectification is absolutized, it becomes an ideological untruth, as the unreflective autonomization of objectivity severs it from its moment of dependence. Autonomy then becomes hypostatized, and reason abstract, thus renouncing its critical vocation.

In terms of the problematic of responsibility, the authors and texts under consideration here are interpreted as crafting an idea or concept of responsibility, sometimes entire scenes of responsibility, that even if relatively autonomous from their immediate occasion are responses to particular situations that are mediated by larger if not always universal trends. It is thus important to reconstruct these historically mediated situations in order to map out the traveling and circulation of a concept, like responsibility, the displacements and sedimentations that texts and arguments undergo in those voyages, especially once these ideas find a berth in a very different political situation from the one that prompted the initial articulation, to which these now emerge as a response, and the spatial and temporal presuppositions the concept bears, acquires, and loses as it gains new meanings and determinations.²² That is precisely what chapters 2, 3, and 4 set out do to with the concept of responsibility. For, in their historical eventuation, political concepts conform horizons and expectations that simultaneously reveal and conceal, express or silence aspects of a political situation.

Naturally, studying the continuities and discontinuities in a political and ethical concept is a complex, multilayered endeavor. Here the focus is on two aspects that are particularly relevant for a critical conceptualization of responsibility in history. One can begin by considering an aspect eloquently articulated by Marc Bloch and Carlo Ginzburg. It relates to what Ginzburg calls “the gap between the resilience of words and their shifting meaning” and how to best approach the complex interpretative problems that tracking the transmogrifications of words and concepts elicit.²³ Ginzburg pertinently notes how words do not move on a par with customs, let alone change with them, even when they remain contiguous with the objects, patterns, or processes the words once designated. Second, there is the aspect most cogently raised by Adorno apropos of his critique of idealism and Heidegger: the importance of tracing and confronting conceptual sediments that are historically constituted.²⁴ Overall, the aim is to understand the changing content of words and concepts—in the case of this study the word and concept responsibility—their philosophical and historical sediments, along with the spatial and temporal, social and political presuppositions that have granted political and social content to different formulations.

Accordingly, a relevant concern is that of either echoing the terminology used by the source or author in question or of grafting upon it terms foreign to the author or her milieu. The first track is mostly unproductive, as it could easily miss the changes in meaning that the word undertakes, even if one’s inquiry is restricted to a particular author. The second track is not entirely devoid of pitfalls, not least of which is the imposition of a word that was not even in existence when the author in question was writing, but it is the most promising point of departure, one adept at tracing variations, especially once comparisons are undertaken by recourse to a heuristic concept, which is, then, revised and recast in light of what the interpretation affords.²⁵ Against any superficial analogies or homologies, the interpretative task is constrained by the primacy of the object of inquiry and its historically constituted determinations. It seeks to register variations in the social and historical context of a concept and its temporal and spatial differentiations.²⁶ From this perspective, one could start with an “anachronistic” concept, with the aim of registering variation, continuity, and innovation, rather than establish abstract analogies on the basis of false or vague terminological equivalences.²⁷ This interpretative strategy also entails identifying levels of meaning in a body of work and reconstructing as much as possible the different audiences to which it was addressed, as Lucien Jaume has argued in his commanding study of Tocqueville.²⁸ Equally important is Christopher Hill’s analogous suggestion, forged as part of his study of the revolutionary period of seventeenth-century England: “But if we need not be shackled to the words of men and women of the seventeenth century, we must take their ideas seriously, even when they strike us as silly.”²⁹

These concerns are particularly important for any mapping of responsibility: as reflection on responsibility long precedes the coining of the word. Roger Crisp has offered a rather blunt yet pungent observation that bears on the question of responsibility: “Just because there is no word in Homer that can systematically be translated as ‘guilt’ does not mean that Homeric characters cannot feel guilty.”³⁰ The same could be argued about responsibility. That, evidently, need not mean that the more individualist modern sense of responsibility, and the institutional apparatus necessary to conceptualize it, which became fully eventuated and crystallized in the modern period, is to be conflated with prior understandings of responsibility, which were less subjective and more objectively codified in terms of the different valences of citizenship, its social textures, political institutions, and customs.³¹ Quite the contrary, what it does is to invite a temporally and spatially differentiated historicization of both moments, thus breaking free from one of the conceits of moral philosophy: namely, its “belief in its own unconditionality by making no reference whatsoever to any historical moment,” something found in Kantian and non-Kantian idealist conceptions of ethics.³²

The challenge is, all in all, to avoid the anachronism of collapsing past connotations with present-day ones. Accordingly, one can begin by anachronistically posing responsibility as a concept in order to then register its variations and its spatial, political, and sociological presuppositions, while also registering when it actually emerged, alongside the historical conditions of possibility for its emergence and the attendant force field of experiences that was a precondition for a subjective sense of responsibility to crystallize historically. In the end, the more subjective connotations of responsibility betray continuities with older, more objective connotations, amidst the discontinuities between the two. This could be plainly seen in the changing valences of ideas of accountability and imputability in different historical articulations of responsibility as shown in what follows.

Yet there is a second aspect to any historicization of a concept that bears more directly on responsibility as a philosophical concept as opposed to social and political thematizations of it. In this view, the first step is to avoid two commonplace philosophical conceits: that which posits the identity of language with its concepts and objects as something given and the temptation to invent new words, which merely occupy older places without adequately grasping the historical composition of the traditional languages the neologism in question seeks to displace, let alone the historical constraints on the possibility creating a new one. These concerns found acute expression in one of Adorno’s early writings, “Theses on the Language of the Philosophers,” where he was already critically engaged with Heidegger. There he writes: “Heidegger’s language flees history, but without escaping it.”³³ The pretension of escaping history creates the expectation that there is a freedom—that is, the freedom of the philosopher—from historical constraints, which is nothing but an illusion. It is as if the thinker’s compulsion to bestow reality with a new language is not historically mediated or even a historical upshot.

Adorno therefore considers the need for self-reflection in terms of the history of philosophical thought, its constraints and possibilities. The dialectical critical theorist, accordingly, engages with the historical sedimentations found in the concepts she inherits, the sediments of words, and the historical ruination conforming to these sediments, while avoiding any collapsing of the distance between the words of a thinker and those of the interpreter. Adorno further writes: “Today, the philosopher confronts the decaying of language. His material is the ruins [Trümmer] of the words, which bind her to history; her freedom is only the possibility to configure words according to the constraints imposed by the truth contained in them. It cannot be assumed that words are already given in advance or that they can be invented anew.”³⁴ Such truth, as Adorno insisted throughout his intellectual life, is thoroughly historical.³⁵ And that is why, according to him, the critical philosopher could only proceed dialectically; something that later on he would characterize as a critical practice of immanent transcendence by way of tarrying with the contradictions and sedimentations embedded in words and concepts. Once dialectically understood, philosophical terminology is thoroughly historical.³⁶ That terminology bears not only the sediments of prior determinations in other systems of thought; philosophical terms also constitute thought’s “historical intersections,” as Adorno once stated; indeed, as such, “each philosophical term is the hardened scar of an unresolved problem.”³⁷ This sedimentation is primarily conceptual: even if mediated by the objective historical moment of its emergence, philosophical terms are often articulated as part of a larger problematic that bestows them with meaning. In, say, German idealism, the subsequent development of a term responds to its rigorous necessity, and this has a relative autonomy from the prevailing political, social, and economic trends, even if mediated by them.³⁸ The relative weight that conceptual and historical mediations have on any invocation of, say, necessity, is something to be scrutinized according to the specific difference, the particular determination, of the formulation in question.³⁹ Ultimately, what is crucial from this dialectical perspective is to discern the content or meaning of a concept in terms of its historicity, qua concept, and the objective realities it seeks to grasp by relating to the intentions of the thinker deploying it and its determination in the overall architecture of a philosophical endeavor.⁴⁰ Critique demands not only the study of concepts and the historical sediments these bear from prior philosophical systems but also thinking about identity and nonidentity in the basic relations between concepts and their referents, the objects concepts grasp and seek to comprehend. Always suspended in these mediations, critical theory refuses hypostatization.⁴¹

One last word about the interpretative approach here undertaken: with the partial exception of Adorno, there is no attempt to offer a sustained reconstruction of an entire authorship. Yet, instead of arbitrarily slicing and dicing texts, this book seeks to scrupulously historicize prevalent notions of responsibility and argue for a political concept of responsibility. In so doing, each chapter emphasizes something different: the historical process mediating the ethical turn that nowadays firmly accompanies this concept (chapter 1), the advent and eventuation of historical and contemporary meanings of responsibility (chapters 2–4), and the articulation of a critical conception of responsibility (chapter 5), whose political valences needs to be recast as part of a larger commitment to a political ethic (chapter 6). Each chapter, accordingly, emphasizes something different, which alters the balance between the conceptual/theoretical and the historical/political, sometimes unevenly—yet what remains in place is that in both cases the interpretation is political. While authorial intent, in the narrowly construed way, is not the overriding concern here, the reasons that motivate a thinker to intervene in a predicament of power are taken seriously. In a way, the intention guiding the specific interpretations offered here has been to craft rigorous interpretations in which theoretical coherence is not sacrificed for historical detail.

Political Responsibility thus avows more historically differentiated accounts of how the restructuring of political space is central in the situations in which predicaments of power emerged and that a thinker confronts. An account of continuity and discontinuity needs to be avowed in order to rigorously challenge hypostatized and undifferentiated stories of ethical responsibility. Only then can one critically avow the mediations of bindingness and contingency in the predicaments of power a political thinker confronts and seeks to address, how he conceptualizes the particular situation that prompts the need to respond, and how the response is theoretically conceived. It is in terms of these contexts that engagement with texts—the actual reading of them—is pursued here. Or, to borrow Michael Hofmann’s perfect depiction of the meaning of reading as a critical activity: one reads “to question, to cross-refer and compare, to doubt, to go behind the back of words, to tap for hollowness and cracks and deadness. One reads not with a vise or glue, but with a hammer and chisel, or an awl.”⁴² Interpretations emerging out of these very precise but subtle touches, real and imaginary at the level of the page, risk fallibility while seeking to unearth historical and conceptual sediments in words along with the conceptual and historical constellations these conform.

If for Beauvoir and Sartre the situation is conceptualized in relationship to their accounts of freedom, thus progressing from the initial solipsistic accounts of the forties to the more robust political and social theorizations found in later writings, a more contemporary interpretation has to further conceptualize its historical constitution, the mediation of historical sediments in the constitution of political situations, which are, in turn, politically constituted. Analogously, one needs to construe critical mappings of the historical articulations of particular situations and, what is more important, the theoretical figurations stemming from them, to think of forms of immanent transcendence, which is one of the dialectic’s leitmotifs.⁴⁴ Such constructions entail the recognition of how even “pure forms still bear the traces and marks of the content they sought to extinguish,” as well as the dialectical mediation between situation and responses and how an author’s intentions are quite inseparable from the situation to which he responds, the scenes in which he seeks to intervene and thus act.⁴⁵ A situation is both spatial and temporal, and it is nowadays mediated by a vast array of constraints—cultural, economic, political—that mediate subjective responses to any given situation, their antinomies and contradictions.

In Notebooks for an Ethics Sartre further writes about how in a political situation there are fissures and openings, occasionally even accidents and unintended consequences, that can be seized upon and capitalized, something he casts as the “indeterminate stability” of “a historical structure.”⁴⁶ If nothing else, this insight relates to the dialectic of the new and the situation; it relates to how to immanently transcend the situation by way of determinate negation, something that demands a strong sense of political responsibility intimately related to the responsibilities incurred in action in a situation and the consequences of such action. For the sustaining of political orders, or the creation and enactment of new ones, entails a sense of political responsibility whose actual form and content can be pondered in relation to the situation to which a political actor responds. This is a situation that one’s intervention, in turn, mediates and grants meaning by re-cognizing it. The situation’s temporal and spatial presuppositions and contents, both of which bear on how the logic of the situation enables and constrains modes of political responsibility and of thinking’s political responsibility, ought to be equally grasped and re-cognized. The political actor “cannot avoid making decisions or choices; things will not give him any ready-made answers,” as Beauvoir once put it; rather, “each new situation” brings with it anew the question of ends and the responsibilities of discerning the necessary means to achieve these without compromising or overwhelming them.⁴⁷

Yet what is perhaps even more relevant here is how Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s formulations intimate a recasting of the role of contingency and chance, of historical discontinuities, and how their avowal, in and of itself, is hardly sufficient to pose the question of immanent transcendence or, more accurately, the transformation of the situation. This theme is further echoed elsewhere, when Sartre muses on the tricks played by the historical narratives that constitute one’s situatedness: “The historical illusion is a double one: on the one hand, retrospective, on the other, prefigurative.”⁴⁸ What leads to this illusion is a fundamental misunderstanding of a series of mediations, that of the presence of the past and of objective situations and subjective dispositions. Action is therefore always situated, which prompts a sense of realism and sobriety about transcendence.

Even while the language of “illusion” is rather quaint for Theorists, this provides an entry point to recast the role of mediation, as distinct from prefiguration in cognitively mapping one’s situation. Roberto Schwarz’s comments apropos of literary characters and authors capture another aspect of the mediations of situations, intellectual responses and political actions, understood from the perspective of the primacy of the objective situation in political theorizing: “The critical spark does not leap forth from one spot alone, and to stipulate abstract disjunctives is not always more radical and productive than discerning relations. The form of which we are speaking here is entirely objective, by which we mean that it foregrounds subjective intentions.”⁴⁹ These formulations, in short, seek to articulate the historical processes that are constitutive of the situation, their mediation and nonidentity, with the subject that cognizes the situations and construes its representations. Naturally, nonidentity cannot be hypostatized.⁵⁰ It is not about positing a changing situation and a stable subject; rather, both the situation and the subject are mutually mediated and thus constituted. Rather than loosening up the concept of the situation, this insight into its historical constitution renders it even more binding: a bindingness that equally holds for the ways the logic of the interpretation is represented in different scenes and predicaments, theoretical and political. Scenes of power respond and contribute to constructing situations, as political predicaments concentrate social relations and historical processes that contribute to the intensification of the logic of the situations in which these predicaments arise and that they, in turn, represent.

Herein the interpretations of authors and themes plead for the need to conceptualize the political situation in which any given body of work emerges as a response, which, of course, it also mediates and thus further constitutes. This complements the collective undertones of the primacy of the situation and the fundamental differences between this approach and other contending views—say, genealogy, deconstruction, or the Cambridge School. The situation is here formulated as a particular moment in a historical process that precedes and outlasts it, but whose lineaments are present and discernible in it. Situations, once again, are irreducible to the historical processes that constitute them, even if historical processes and their enabling constraints significantly structure the logic of particular situations. In how a particular thinker conceptualizes the situation, one can see the desire for its transformation or truncation or both. These situations in which predicaments of power unfold are constituted and mediated by a variety of imperatives, which, even if considered relative, or semiautonomous, levels of a totality, are traceable to fields of power that are thoroughly mediated by prevalent logics and forms of power in their nonsynchronous synchrony.⁵¹ “The situation” is dialectically conceptualized as a constraint and an enabling condition “whose rigid limits are at one with the very force of the perceptions it enables.”⁵²

Accordingly, this characterization has the opposite effect of reductionism or automatically reducing political life and its theoretical representations to mere epiphenomena. Once rigorously carried out, it provides an account of the relative autonomy of the different levels at work in the totality that at once constitutes the situation and is further constituted by it and inherently enlarges the scope of interpretation and critique. For the expansion of interpretative and critical possibilities is intrinsic to this form of critique, as is the imperative to articulate the relations and intersections between the different levels that mediate a situation.⁵³ In Jameson’s apt formulation: “The very great merits of the concept of the situation are indeed almost exclusively operative in the field of retrospective and historical interpretation, it allows one to cut across the sterile opposition between determinism and individual will.”⁵⁴ This is nowhere more necessary than in the dialectical intersections between the individual and the collective that the historical trajectory of the concept of responsibility suggests. Political theories, therefore, can be cast as responses to historically and spatially differentiated political situations in which continuities and discontinuities, breaks and overlaps, silences and avowals can be discerned and apprehended not only as mutually mediated but also in relation to how a body of work relates to (and with) the situations to which it responds, as well as how it responds to the responses of contemporaries. The situation is, at any rate, always collective and inscrutable for political theorizing, regardless of whether or not the thinker in question avows it. “Because there is nothing that can avoid the experience of the situation,” to invoke Adorno’s formulation, “nothing counts that purports to have escaped it.”⁵⁵

At these intersections political theory is best seen as a risk that is forever without a permanently transcendent ground—that is its freedom—but that nevertheless demands critical reflection to discern the actual and the possible from the realm of fantasy in sizing up predicaments of power mediated by obdurate forces, at once contingent and necessary, that are constitutive of political situations in their objective contradictions.⁵⁶ Once conceived in this way, political theory cannot afford to bypass careful attention to the sediments of past situations that remain binding in the present and the need for cognitive shifts to more accurately and realistically apprehend them: sediments and innovations, accidents and continuities, closures and fixtures in the interstices of a totality that is always cognitively construed. But to think about the situation in this way hardly reverts to only thinking about it as a tragic predicament (like Weber) or stoic realism; rather, it is a question of navigating the intersection of ethics and political life politically. If reifying labels prove ineluctable, perhaps a more fitting characterization is that of a Hegelian-Marxist political realism that refuses to mute the utopian moment while avowing and re-cognizing historical sediments that can either be constraints or enabling conditions or sometimes both.⁵⁷ The defining features of this dialectical form of political criticism consist of exploring and dissecting the vectors and movements inherent to the objective situation and the theoretical forms brigaded to grasp and confront it. This is a realism of determinate possibility, not closure; the realist disposition that Beauvoir once described as “the attempt to capture and utilize precisely those forces capable of building the future,” along with a sober recognition of the forces impairing it.⁵⁸ The goals of critical political thinking consist of mapping situations and following the interventions, risks, and misplacements of political action and ideas; political theory understood as solitary endeavor, as collective predicament.⁵⁹

The chapters that follow explore different aspects of the problematic of responsibility, its history and current fate. The abovementioned critical historicism is immediately put to work in reference to the ethical turn in a chapter titled “Historicizing the Ethical Turn,” whose emergence it critically maps by bringing into sharper relief its historical and political determinants. It starts with an overview of the basic lineaments of the turn to ethics as conceived by a variety of contemporary critics. This is followed by an examination of the ethical turn by way of an account of its main conceptual and ideological tenets and an exposition and elucidation of its main critics. But the bulk of the chapter seeks to go beyond just mapping the contours of the turn to ethics. It also offers a historically grounded account of the ethical turn’s emergence, thus interpreting the historical and political sedimentations found in its conceptual armature and its historical determinants and political conditions of possibility. This chapter, accordingly, ponders the emergence of the turn to ethics and traces its historical origins in relation to the legacies of 1968 in Europe and the traveling of intellectual traditions embedded in this experience to the United States, the emergence of American Theory, and how it converged with the radical depoliticization and conservative backlash of the 1980s and the restructuring of the political field.

After elucidating the turn to ethics, its conceptual and historical lineages, and the intellectual and historical conditions of possibility for its emergence, the chapter that follows, “Responsibility in History,” zones in on the concept of responsibility as conceived in the history of European and transatlantic political thought. This historicization of responsibility, however, goes beyond commonplace genealogies accorded to this concept. It rather seeks to grasp how the idea of responsibility precedes both the word and the concept. Similarly, this chapter explores the emergence of the problematic of responsibility in terms of a constellation of concepts—duty, accountability, personation, obligation—that have often accompanied not only the concept of responsibility but many of its adverbial and adjectival usages. In these evolving constellations, the concept acquired political determinations that had specific historical and spatial presuppositions—the city, empire, realm, nation—denoting its locus of action and the centrality of limits in these theorizations of political responsibility, which current ethical invocations either truncate or disavow.

The next chapter, titled “Ethical Reductions,” focuses on Emmanuel Levinas’s theorization of responsibility and its different reinterpretations in the transatlantic ethical scene. It opens with a critical account of Levinas’s highly influential formulation of responsibility, which is followed by discussion of the creative appropriation of his thought in the writings of two different thinkers of the liberal left: Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida. The central contention of this chapter is that the phenomenological temptation of formulating a quasi-apodictic ground for a concept of responsibility runs through Levinas’s writings, as well as through those of his heirs, as a sediment found in the ways in which phenomenological reductions and pleas for a transcendental ground—however refashioned as “quasi-transcendental”—pervade these bodies of work. The result of these appropriations is a series of antinomies that ensue from an attempt to theorize responsibility as a formal commitment to others anteceding the scenes of power that render such a commitment political, as these bodies of work abstractly posit an intersubjective relation outside of any social relation. These antinomies are then recast, in each individual case, as contradictions stemming from the ethical reductions involved, which either truncate attempts to transcend a liberal-capitalist political form or are insufficient to thematize a political sense of responsibility. In these accounts, responsibility reverts to intrasubjective personalization and thus becomes depoliticized.

Accordingly, this chapter is followed by the book’s last chapter, titled “Political Ethic, Violence, and Defeat,” where the most significant lineaments of a political ethic of responsibility are formulated and argues for the need to recast responsibility politically, as the need to respond to predicaments of power. The argument is situated within the tradition of political ethic (poliética) found in the writings of Bertolt Brecht, Antonio Gramsci, Niccolò Machiavelli, Max Weber, and Simone Weil, each of whom reckoned with defeat and sought to respond to violent predicaments of power: Machiavelli to the besieged Florentine political scene; Weber in the immediate aftermath of World War I and the German revolution from the top; Brecht to Nazism, interwar capitalist convolutions, and Stalinized communism; Gramsci in the context of defeat and imprisonment in Fascist Italy; and Weil at the onset of Hitler and during the Spanish Civil War. Political literacy and sober realism emerge as important corollaries of the political ethic therein defended. The chapter emphasizes two aspects of political responsibility: responsibility for sustaining a political order, with its internal imperatives, and responsibility for bringing about a new political order and the challenges and demands, including the ineluctable economy of violence, built into it. Overall, this chapter offers an argument about the centrality of the concept of fidelity for a political theory of responsibility that is attentive to the forms of power involved in the violent production of superfluous forms of suffering.

In writing this book I have sought to treat the problematic of responsibility by engaging with scholarship that enables fresh interpretations and avoids the well-worn phrases and well-trodden paths in North Atlantic critical and political theory—something that requires not only rewriting received narratives but also articulating historical contexts and logics hitherto downplayed or ignored. Part of what I do in this book is offer different historical accounts than those that have become sedimented commonplaces in much of North Atlantic thought. Accordingly, some chapters demanded deep scene setting in order to accomplish the goal of re-cognizing the history of the problematic of political responsibility and thus formulate it in a way underexplored up until now. Although I have tried to cast as wide a net as possible, I have sought, above all, thematic coherence and have tried to organize the argument of this book with a critique of the ethical turn as the pivot from which I then conceptualize a political ethic of responsibility. And, while trying to avoid the usual roll calls defining writing done for the profession, I have tried to record my intellectual debts throughout the text, even if in some cases no amount of notes can adequately convey it. Similarly, I have provided scholarly evidence, textual and historiographical, for my contentions and interpretations, while only recording those disagreements that I deem intellectually and politically relevant. In doing so, I have sought to make scrupulous use of the existing scholarship in the different fields and intellectual niches my inquiry interlopes, while deliberatively avoiding Byzantine disputes and refraining from unnecessary mudslinging and wrangling. Conversely, my refrain from recording disagreements with figures that enable my inquiry should not be taken as sign of uncritical reliance.⁶⁰ Following a similar precept, I have left out any reference to scholars whose works I cannot productively engage.

Obviously, noting how self-conscious many of these choices are hardly endows them with an aura of infallibility or insulates them from criticism. The possible risks and rewards of undertaking an ambitious interdisciplinary inquiry are plain enough. For interdisciplinary endeavors to think critically about political life they need to remain to some degree unencumbered by the disciplinary conventions and protocols of North Atlantic political theory, even if these demand forms of interloping in fields that the scholar in question cannot claim specialty in, much less the intimate knowledge of the lifelong specialist, let alone the linguistic and philological skills that define one. In writing, as in much else, there is always a gap between intention and effect, between what one sets out to do and what one is able to write. Paraphrasing something Wallace Stevens once paraphrased: what ultimately remains is the satisfaction of having really attempted to write a book that irremediably lies beyond.⁶¹