The New Critical Theory Series challenges us to think about nothing less than justice and what role theory can or should play in envisioning and actualizing a more just world. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School was inspired by Marxism and the effort to move beyond the inequalities of advanced capitalism to a socialist society. We often forget that in 1920s Europe lively debates about socialism as both a political reality and an ethical ideal were prominent, particularly in France and Germany. Throughout this book we will return, of course, to the moral image of the world that socialism offered so many progressives during the twentieth century; however, before uncovering such details we can move ahead by broadly construing socialism as the ideal that human beings can free themselves from the fundamental alienation imposed by class inequality so as to claim the truth of a grander world: humanity alone brings value into the world. It is humanity, both collectively and individually, that sets its own ends.
Within the ideal of socialism we are reminded that it is up to us to make our own history, no longer needing to project outward our own end-making capability as something that originated beyond us. But, of course the horror of World War II—the terrifying erasure of so many lives during the Holocaust—shook the optimism that socialism had sparked and made it seem like it was no longer a possibility.
Much to this point, some of the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School—such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—came to despair against the possibility of any moral image of the world that could claim even a small degree of freedom from within the virulent bombardment of the phantasmagoria of advanced capitalism. It seemed that the human subject was no longer simply exploited but also blinded by the dazzle of a consumer society that promises everything from perfect bodies made without flesh to the next wave of digital gadgetry giving us virtual reclusion in a space of the interior that has become wholly consumed by the expanse of capital. In this nightmare world of supposed glamour, the individual digs for the remnants of a subjectivity that can only find itself by holding tightly to its own despair and perhaps the thought that there once might have been a different passageway through this life. Even art, which Adorno hoped could hold on to the negativity that might fissure apart the totality of advanced capital, has become a commodity with managed artists whose bodies become a brand and whose talent is turned into a product label. We add to all this the enthusiastic celebration of the final defeat of socialism symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and we are left with renewed tales that celebrate capitalism as the only natural form of production and economic activity available to modern “man” during a time falsely labeled “the end of history.”
As Sylvia Wynter has pointed out, “man” in this story is homo economicus, and all other aspects and conceptions of freedom are rendered irrelevant. Freedom becomes freedom of the consumer to “choose” from an endless array of products. It is an unfettered exercise of the will to partake in the full force of the cash nexus uninhibited that is now celebrated as the victory of democracy. Truly, it is “man” as this homo economicus that dominates the new trends in positive and social political science, where the human subject is atomized into abstraction and categorically defined as simply an economic exchanger and wealth maximizer. Yet, we do not even use big words like man or humanity, not for feminist purposes to remind ourselves that one gender has always stood in for the whole, but because we are intellectually predisposed as individuals in an endless scramble against other individuals, something like a caravan of rats crawling all over each other fighting over a mere crumb of bread in the worst sorts of nightmares ever imagined even by Nietzsche.
Those who hold on to the old ideas of freedom, equality, and justice—ideals, as we shall see throughout this book, that have origins reaching far into the world beyond Europe—are mocked as out of step with the time. After 9/11 those of us who stood by those ideals were even denounced as anti-American and out of touch with the needs of national security. We have now even gone so far that constitutional democracy, particularly as it ensured limits on executive power, seems to be out of sync with the so-called post-9/11 reality. Such security rhetoric bandied about in perfunctory speeches about looming “axes of evil” or invisible terrorist cells constitutes nothing more than a grand metanarrative, one that speaks in sweeping terms of clashes of civilization where the West is identified as the civilization against all others who never made it to our enlightened capitalist reality.1 But, this metanarrative is not only the reigning story of right-wing conservatives, unfortunately those who hold power currently in the United States, but it has regrettably also been taken up in some of what has been called “postmodernism.”2
We are faced with a similar pessimistic affront to the grand ideals of socialism that inspired the Frankfurt School, as we ourselves confront stifling academic reductionism mixed with dangerous relativity and a world of political machinations whose power through capital smacks of the sort of looming populism not itself dissimilar from the fascism that brought about World War II. What follows in this introduction is both an overview of some of the central ideas constituting this book and more importantly a rereading of my work in the Philosophy of the Limit meant to counter incapacitating intellectual and political pessimism, pointing instead to the hopeful future offered by moral images of freedom.
In my earlier work I renamed deconstruction the philosophy of the limit in order to read Jacques Derrida against a certain reception to postmodernism in the United States which put deconstruction paradoxically on the side of the disillusionment of the possibility of practical philosophy and thus in alliance with the metanarrative of advanced capitalism as the true end of history. Throughout this book we will return to the theme of limitation, as this is crucial to the good news that the future, as what is other to our present social reality, cannot be known in advance and already foreclosed by some grand theory. It simply cannot be known that humanity is fated to live out its relations as homo economicus, that politics is grounded in some iron casting of our historical situation, destining us to the oblivion of being under the victory of technology and the imprisonment of the spirit of justice in local struggles of resistance. Instead, the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant begins with a more humble understanding of the notion of the limit of theoretical knowledge, suggesting to us that the world as we know it is the world as we have represented it to ourselves; there is no beyond that the mind can reach out and grasp, and, as Kant famously tells us, what we know in reality as scientific law is what we have put there.
Many Anglo-American commentators on Kant have focused on how his work effectively justifies scientific validity. Indeed, this is part of the critical project for Kant, but it is merely a small part of a larger architectonic. Kant himself reminds us of the three great questions of philosophy: What can I know? What am I to do? and What can I hope for? Critical philosophy begins with this first understanding of the limit of theoretical reason in that we can never get beyond our own representations and the world as it is given to us by the imagination. It is precisely this critical insight about how the world is knowable to us at all through a secret in the soul that Heidegger argued made Kantian philosophy a radical shift, or a Copernican revolution, in how human beings approach their world.
Indeed, given trends in the history of philosophy it is often forgotten that Heidegger began his own endeavors with a thorough engagement with Kant and a reworking of the concept of the transcendental imagination. One aspect of this book is to recover Heidegger’s ultimate rejection of Kantian practical philosophy as this came to be thought by him as inseparable from the technological domination of a subject-centered universe, a subject-centered universe which for Heidegger eclipsed the true meaning of our freedom by separating us from the unconcealment of Being behind a veil of scientific objectification. For Heidegger, we can think this oblivion, and in a certain sense that is all that we can do without risk of reinforcing the veil that keeps us from our true dignity as the being to whom Being makes itself present. Heideggerian pessimism, in the terms used here, refuses what I am calling the critical insight into the limitation of theoretical reason, and replaces it with a pessimism that forbiddingly resists reform efforts as simply digging us deeper into the grave of a seemingly technocratic destiny in which humanity itself becomes one more project for engineering, social or otherwise.
Yet, Heidegger also opens up the phenomenological tradition of embodiment and fragility as itself a limitation on what can be known. Indeed, this is the second sense of limitation returned to throughout this book. Human beings are not only embodied but also come into ourselves in and through the language and other symbolic forms used to shape our world. Our knowledge is inevitably connected to both our place in the world and to the symbolic forms in which we know it. Both embodiment and the inevitability that our world comes to us in symbolic forms already represented are conceptual facilitators and limitations of how we know and relate to the world. Neither force denies aspirations to universal ideals, but both recognize that we have to proceed through some sort of acknowledgement of how we are to get to those ideals. In the world of Edmund Husserl, the great predecessor of Heidegger, we bracket aspects of our perspectives in order to open them up to other possibilities by seeing them as contingent and limited. In the case of Ernst Cassirer, the human being is in a sense transcendentally limited by a mark of ideality in which the world comes to us in the symbolic forms in which it is both presented (darstellen) and represented (vorstellen). Both the phenomenological and the Cassirerian insight into limitation will resound throughout this book, as such complex understandings can help us come to terms with what limitation means for new critical theory.
But, these limitations are not simply abstract philosophical ruminations. The recognition that the fate of Europe is not the fate of humanity or that the ends of the European white “man” do not represent the ends of humanity gives us a meaningful political, ethical, and deeply philosophical challenge about the future possibility of our shared being in the world. These fissures break open the canonical foundation of how we see the world in an empire, as such challenges were brought on by the actual struggle against colonialism. Of course, there have been good reasons for feminists to celebrate the death of such patriarchal, phallogocentric theoretical traditions since, for as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out to us long ago, such images of “man” eclipsed the feminine “other” as less than a human being. However, if feminism is to offer any meaningful counterperspective, then it must itself return to the critical insight offered by the critique of Eurocentrism, which forces all of us who are Anglo-American and European to come to terms with our own historical situation as exactly what it is: a historical situation, and not the destiny of all of humanity. Otherwise, we are left with mimetic second-wave feminist alternatives harkening back to the very grand narrative presented by Hegel that posited the European “man” as the culmination of the ideal of humanity finally capable of realizing the truth of its freedom within the context of the modern nation state; and such a vision was always conveniently made inseparable from the long and brutal history legitimating the domination of other people who were violently thrown out of this grand narrative of history. What is emerging here is a third sense of limitation where we must knowingly confront the limits of what European philosophy has to offer us without falling back into a self-contradictory relativism; that is, we need to understand the complex relationship of a plurality of symbolic forms and our aspiration to universal ideals in issues such as human rights, and even more broadly construed in the very struggle for liberation.
The fourth iteration of limitation was a deliberate attempt to provide a strong reinterpretation of the significance of certain strands of practical philosophy found throughout the work of Jacques Derrida. Here, the philosophy of the limit meant to turn around the idea put forward by Derrida that the limit of what can be known is also a condition of knowability. Derrida is, of course, engaging most specifically with Heidegger but also with other thinkers like Wittgenstein. Often, this reflection on the constitutive aspect of knowability has been used to reinstate a dangerous positive understanding of the unknowable that gets translated into a strong notion of what this means for practical political philosophy in that it provides some kind of normative limit on what we can hope for in the future. But, this goes exactly in the opposite direction of my own reading of the philosophy of the limit which argues strongly against naturalistic or positivistic reductions of either social or psychic life that would give us a strong theory of the subject capable of limiting our aspirations to justice. In other words, I argued that the unknowable, or what Derrida often refers to as the beyond, renders a certain kind of pessimism, at least theoretically unjustifiable, because this beyond cannot be shown to be either illusory or fully accessible to us in the present. Limitation, then, actually keeps open the impossibility of knowing what is impossible, leaving certain positivistic or naturalistic conceptions of humanity incapable of concretely postulating what we cannot hope to achieve. Much of the academic shifts across disciplines to rational-choice theories and risk-management calculations turn us back to “naturalistic” conceptions of human beings that are purportedly knowable and by allusion suppose to tell us what we can hope to aspire to in the big ideas of justice and freedom. Ultimately, I suggested that Derrida, and the experience of deconstruction, undermines this appeal to strong notions of human nature claiming to stand in as the truth of what we can expect from each other and society at large.
In my continued defense of the philosophy of the limit as a defense of the possibility of our increasingly ethical being in the world, the heart of this book contains a steadfast defense of the role of aesthetic ideas in political theory. Such a work is in no way meant to undermine the importance of critiquing hegemonic meanings and symbols that dominate our life. But, as Nietzsche tells us repeatedly, the idea of genealogy originates in an act of imagination or fabrication. A Nietzschean genealogy, in other words, is not a positivist account that ever reaches beyond the fundamental Kantian insight that the world is given to us in the reproductive imagination and then received and reworked by us in the productive imagination. Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche is that he remained too Kantian in his acceptance of the will and of the imagination as being at the very heart of the transvaluation of all values. However, to argue for the place of aesthetic ideas does change some of the claims and justifications that can be made for such ideas and ideals.
Once deconstruction and some major texts of Derrida are read in the ethical light I advocated in The Philosophy of the Limit, we are left with our responsibility to not only critique the status quo but also practically and theoretically reconfigure the great ideals of justice, freedom, and equality. Of course, this works against scientific notions of Marx that argued that we must stay within an analysis of the primary contradiction and develop social movements based on an articulation of what reality offers to us and not on idealistic or ethical hopes for a future. And yet, the irony is that many great thinkers were still imaginatively writing for liberation throughout what has now become known as the Third World, and the reality of socialism—no matter how corrupt—is still a force in the world. There was, in other words, an alternative to capitalism that was almost assumed as something that could be reconfigured and reworked by the new Left of my generation. I should say, from the beginning of my own activism, which included membership in several Marxist-Leninist organizations, I strongly opposed the view of Marx that reduced the aspiration for a just world to the scientific necessity of collapsed capitalism. Much ink has been spilled as to whether Marx ever gave up his ethical aspirations and the influence of both Kant and Hegel on his work which he returns to in Capital. But, there is a tenor of thought in the young Marx which speaks to the larger project of German idealism as one trying desperately to call forth a moral image of the world, especially when he suggests, “The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being.”3 Although German idealism is clearly a Eurocentric tradition, it is perhaps time for us to reconsider the moral image of humanity that its great thinkers defended as we try to reassess what European philosophy has to offer as well as its limits in the larger discourse of how we come to know ourselves in our world.
Some critics have questioned the relationship between my first two books, Beyond Accommodation and The Philosophy of the Limit, and my explicit defense of an aesthetic idea in the imaginary domain throughout my later work. There is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding among such critics on the role of aesthetic ideas in political philosophy that turns me now to offer a fuller justification. My project in those early works was to pave a way for the defense of aesthetic ideas, by arguing against what is now called postmodernism as it is often situated in contrast to the possibility of affirmative political philosophy. Some of the resistance to any kind of affirmative political philosophy stems in its most significant form from a pessimism brought about through Heidegger, which in my reading was certainly taken seriously yet ultimately challenged in the work of Derrida. Simply said, it is up to us to accept our responsibility, knowing that in a deep sense we cannot theoretically justify an escape from such responsibility by reliance on a theorist like Derrida, who at times has been read to undermine moral agency. For example, the structure of such an understanding of différance would be that the moment we pose ourselves to an “other,” what we are proposing cannot be communicated because in this very moment of posing, the self as an “other” is already ensnared in an explicit appeal through which it communicates. Thus, différance on this reading undermines any theory of the subject including moral subjectivity.
But this, of course, would imply that moral and ethical responsibility stands and falls with the theory of the subject. Indeed, my argument has been that Kant already argued against the possibility of such a theory of the subject. It is Kant who first introduces the conception that the “I” is an “other.” For Kant, it is always a question of the form of time in general which distinguishes between the act of an “I” and the ego to which the act is attributed: an infinite modulation, no longer a mode. The form of interiority for a subject necessarily “in time” means not only that time is internal to us but also that our interiority constantly divides us from ourselves; in this sense, it splits us in two, which is a splitting in two that never runs its course since time has no end for us as finite human beings. We cannot know ourselves as free subjects in the sense of a theoretical knowledge. Although Kant changes his position in his justification of the force of practical reason, it is always the case that the faculty of desire is not and cannot be rooted in any theoretical ground of the subject as one that is so definitively constitutive of it that the possibility of the practical point of view, and with it the standpoint of practical reason, is obliterated.
The mere glimmer that remains in a moral image of justice shows us both how grim the world appears for a moment and how much it can itself become “other” from that moment. We can certainly heed Adorno’s warning with all of its passion that any aesthetic idea or configuration of justice will risk the distortion and indigence it seeks to escape. At times, Adorno himself undoubtedly stepped back from affirmative, practical, political philosophy, seeing it as impossible to reconcile in the glaring phantasmagoria of advanced capitalism. But, he also stood against a universalization, or globalization, of pessimism as a philosophical truth, and as such suggests to us, “It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite.”4 So, even in Adorno the insistence that we must come to terms with the full force of the internalization of how we have become subjected and the objects of a society of total commodification, we do so not merely by holding on to consummate negativity because in a sense that negativity can never be grasped or configured without another standpoint.
We need to distinguish more carefully, then, the double message of searing critics suggesting that advanced capitalism eats up the remnants of our subjectivity as it not only gets into our heads but also renders us simply momentarily knocked down. There is a difference between the critiques of life under advanced capitalism from more sweeping forms of philosophical pessimism such as those put forth by Heidegger, which would swiftly reject the possibility of practical philosophy as only some sort of optimistic window dressing ultimately infected with the sort of ensnarement that keeps us concealed from our being in the world. Such a message of pessimism has its momentary place in the perpetuation of a world dominated by a barrage of technology and the worst forms of naturalized positivism that deny any remaining dignity to human beings and their aspirations. However, despite the bold banner of such pessimism claiming that the world of advanced capitalism has eaten up the ideal of freedom itself, we must remember the lessons of limitation and realize that what else but this grand ideal of freedom could lead us out of such a labyrinth of wayward capitalist distractions and leave us ever still with the possibility of generating moral images of our freedom in the world.
See, generally, Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
1 have argued elsewhere against the designation of an identifiable period such as the “postmodern”; see, for instance, Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), “Introduction: What is Postmodemism Anyway?”
Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction” [1844], in Collected Works, vol. 3, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, 182 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), cited from Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), xi–xii.
Theodor Adomo, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 1978), 247.