The debate between Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, which took place in December 2008, was conceived and moderated by Antke Engel as a ‘Spannungsübung’, that is, an exercise of or in tension. This format was developed by Luca Di Blasi at the ICI Berlin in the context of its inaugural core project Tension/Spannung, which aims at reflecting upon one of the Institute’s guiding ideas: to explore ways of placing different cultures, discourses, and systems into productive confrontations, rather than insulating them from each other or arriving at a violent, pernicious conflict. Spannungsübungen are discussions that seek to identify subtle differences and elicit tensions between and inside differing positions without dramatizing them or forcing them into a rigid antagonism.1 The debate The Power of Tolerance goes in many ways right to the core of the project Tension/Spannung. Not only does it exhibit and work through some tensions between the discussants’ approaches towards tolerance, but the very term ‘tolerance’ – as Brown and Forst conceive of it – also contains tension in several senses of the word.
In this epilogue, we would like to give a background for the discussion between Brown and Forst, individuate differences between them, and reflect upon some controversial aspects of the debate. In particular, we will refer to some ideas they developed in their main books on tolerance – Forst’s Toleranz im Konflikt (Toleration in Conflict) and Brown’s Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire.2 At the same time, we would like to indicate how the debate is fruitful for a critical reflection on the productive potential not only of tension, but also of the figures of multistability and complementarity, on which the ICI Berlin has focused in the past few years. Conversely, we would like to suggest how these figures may be made productive for thinking about tolerance.
1. TOLERANCES
Anyone who deals with the notion of tolerance in some detail will very likely notice sooner or later that this apparently harmless notion is quite ‘elusive’.3 It responds to conflicts and at the same time produces them; it stands for a struggle against power and can be understood as a practice of power; it is mobilized as a demand for recognition, but can also be taken as a manifestation of contempt.4 Tolerance is a concept full of inner contradictions, and it is no wonder that different paradoxes can be connected with it.
The tolerance paradox is probably the most famous one: in order to preserve tolerance, one has to be intolerant towards those who are intolerant. Pushed to the extreme, this leads to an authoritarian ‘zero tolerance’ for the sake of securing tolerance. At the same time, there is the politically opposed, but similarly radical position that in an unjust society, tolerance favours the persistence of social inequalities so that it is necessary – for the sake of furthering freedom, justice, and equality – to be intolerant even towards tolerance. This is the basic idea of Herbert Marcuse’s famous essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’ from 1965, which became highly influential for student activism in the late 1960s.5
To some extent such paradoxes are already present in notions of tolerance used in other fields than those of morality and politics. The biological notion of ‘self-tolerance’, for instance, refers to the capacity of an organism to recognize endogenous substances and distinguish them from foreign substances that have to be repelled. In other words, the immune system is conceived as maintaining the organism’s identity and integrity through intolerance. However, when it becomes too intolerant and lacks in self-tolerance, one arrives at a condition called ‘autoimmunity’: unable to exclude anything from exclusion, the organism becomes completely intolerant and ends up destroying itself.
Despite such paradoxes, the notion of tolerance in biology – as well as in other scientific fields, such as medicine and technology – seems less elusive. It indicates here a degree of indifference of systems to variation, or their capacity to remain unaffected by changing environmental influences. One thus speaks of thermal, physiological, and drug (in)tolerance. In engineering, fault-tolerant design seeks to ensure that a system continues to operate even when some of its components fail or information is lost during transmission. Pain tolerance has to do with the capacity of sensitive living beings to resist pain, while ‘frustration tolerance’ refers to a person’s capacity to tolerate the frustration of its desires, or, in other words, to endure tension.6 In all these cases, excessive tolerance may compromise the system’s identity and integrity – if, for example, pain no longer functions as a warning signal or frustration ceases to be a motivational force – but the notion of tolerance is less paradoxical insofar as it primarily indicates the capacity of something (be it a biological or a psychic system) to maintain its identity and functionality in changing and often adverse conditions. What moral and political notions of tolerance add here is a specific way of symbolizing and internalizing the tension between a system and that which affects it.
The early Stoic understanding of tolerance as a virtue might be understood as the beginning of such an internalization. The Latin term tolerantia was first brought up by Cicero in 46 BCE, and was originally used in order to denominate the capacity to endure pain, be it physical (such as torture) or psychic (such as defeats or strokes of fortune).7 While this understanding is close to that we previously sketched, it also indicates a specific kind of internalization, since tolerance is here understood as a dignified way of relating to oneself under difficult conditions, that is, as a sort of moral autonomy linked to an ethics of self-control. Through a further step, which is arguably connected with Christianity and has a similar structure as Jesus’ command to ‘love thy enemy’, we arrive at a radically paradoxical form of tolerance: the voluntary acceptance of something that one opposes at the same time. Here, tolerance is not simply a matter of self-preservation, adaptation, or indifference to conditions beyond one’s control: it is rather bound to a double, conflicting judgment. Both the ‘objection component’ and the ‘acceptance component’ – to use the terminology that Rainer Forst takes from Preston King8 – seem to imply axiological, emotional, and rational dimensions rather than simply the preservation of a system’s identity and functions in the face of variations. Acceptance, in particular, implies free will – that is, a degree of autonomy – suggesting that one could also decide to change the conditions to which one objects, or at least to attempt such a change.
One could even speak here of contradiction, especially when acceptance and objection are both based on reasons and thereby located in the same field. In this case, it may seem necessary to resolve the contradiction by introducing hierarchies, distinguishing, for example, between reasons and second-order reasons, or between ethical reasons and moral reasons, so that acceptance trumps objection without eliminating it.9 A different and to a certain extent contrary strategy consists in situating acceptance and objection in different registers, understanding the latter, for instance, in a pre-theoretical sense as aversion to suggest an emotional or affective rather than intellectual reaction.
We will come back to these different presuppositions and how they may help to individuate differences between Forst and Brown. Here, we would like to suggest that the notion of tension might be productive in highlighting a peculiar characteristic of tolerance that is more general than paradox or contradiction, less limited to the intellectual realm, and therefore capable of capturing both strategies just indicated. In this view, acceptance foremost involves the internalization of an external tension between a subject and that which disturbs it. This leads to an inner tension even if there may also be a sense of gaining control over the situation. If one understands tolerance as tolerating beings, convictions, or practices that one considers morally or aesthetically wrong or repugnant, one can thus see that the often-proclaimed virtue of tolerance is a call for sustaining tension. On an individual level, the virtue of tolerance calls for enduring tensions, that is, for enduring what one finds painful, distasteful, and even repugnant, rather than eliminating it from one’s field of consciousness or experience. Also, on a political and social level, tolerance is meant to enable a form of integration that does not involve assimilation, but rather sustains differences that may well remain contested and hierarchical. Forst’s book Toleration in Conflict can be understood in this sense as a plea for the possibility of living together in conflict.
However, the notions of tension and of its containment may offer an additional and critical perspective. If tolerance discourse contains tension by calling for an endurance of tension, it also contains tensions in the sense of limiting and stabilizing them. This stabilization may be welcomed insofar as tolerance prevents tensions from turning into violent conflicts, but tolerance may also prevent tensions from becoming productive or being addressed on a more fundamental level. Tolerance discourse can indeed participate in stabilizing, hypostasizing, and even creating the identities that are in a conflict, for which it then offers containment. The productive potential of tension here lies in the possibility of focusing on dynamic configurations in a situation before the establishment of fixed identities and clear conflicts between them; that is, in the possibility of considering the constitution of fixed identities as already a partial resolution of tensions.10
At the same time, the issues of implicit hierarchical power relations and of depoliticization on which the debate focused, apply just as much to tension as they do to tolerance. By offering a means for coping with conflicts at hand, prevailing tolerance discourse can stand in the way of getting to the core of these conflicts, or depoliticize them by making them appear natural, universal, and/or inescapable rather than the result of historically contingent power relations. Even if tension is situated at a different, more dynamic level, similar objections could be made against the focus on the productive potential of tension – at least if one remains on the (essentially aesthetic) level of praising the capacity to endure tension.
2. POWER/LESSNESS: TOLER ANCE AS A MULTISTABLE FIGURE
As its title, The Power of Tolerance, indicates, the central issue of the present Spannungsübung is the connection between power and tolerance, or, to use Brown’s formulation, the ‘complex involvement of tolerance with power’.11 In many ways, there is no disagreement on this point. Forst is just as aware and critical as Brown of the different possibilities inscribed in the notion and discourse of tolerance to veil, reproduce, and stabilize inequality and domination. He notes that already in 1789, H. G. de Mirabeau criticized tolerance because of the presumed hierarchy between the tolerated and the one who tolerates. Hierarchical power relations indeed seem inevitable when someone (a superior power, a majority, etc.) is granting someone (an inferior power, a minority, etc.) certain rights. Even when this form of toleration is understood as a self-limitation of power, it remains problematic: toleration is a ‘presumptuous word’ (Kant) or even an ‘insult’ (Goethe).12
However, for Forst, such hierarchical power relations are not a general characteristic of tolerance as such, but only of one of its conceptions – one that he calls the ‘permission conception’ and contrasts with the ‘respect conception’. As he explains further in his book (Toleration in Conflict), the respect conception ‘proceeds from a morally grounded form of mutual respect on the part of the individuals or groups who exercise toleration’. It does not require that the tolerating parties view the others’ conceptions of the good as equally true or ethically good, but rather that they accept them – in a symmetrical relationship of mutuality rather than hierarchy – ‘as the results of autonomous choices or as not immoral’. In short, according to the respect conception, the ‘person of the other is respected; her convictions and actions are tolerated’.13
While Forst suggests in the debate that such a respect conception of toleration remains politically productive insofar as it enables marginalized groups to resist domination by demanding mutually acceptable reasons of justification, Brown remains sceptical about any positive potential of tolerance for emancipatory projects. Instead, she extends and radicalizes the critique of the political discourse of toleration in the ‘Age of Identity and Empire’ – hence the subtitle of her book Regulating Aversion – by highlighting on the one hand that tolerance not only maintains hierarchies between the majority and minorities, but is also part of ‘a domestic governmentality’ that actually produces the identities that it regulates; and on the other hand, that in the aftermath of 9/11, liberal tolerance discourse now functions as a legitimation of ‘Western cultural and political imperialism’ and promotes ‘Western supremacy and aggression even as it veils them in the modest dress of tolerance’:
Tolerance […] emerges as part of a civilizational discourse that identifies both tolerance and the tolerable with the West, marking nonliberal societies and practices as candidates for an intolerable barbarism that is itself signaled by the putative intolerance ruling these societies. In the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, the West imagined itself as standing for civilization against primitivism, and in the cold war years for freedom against tyranny; now these two recent histories are merged in the warring figures of the free, the tolerant, and the civilized on one side, and the fundamentalist, the intolerant, and the barbaric on the other.14
To a large extent, Forst’s and Brown’s projects are complementary in the straightforward sense that they are simply different, do not contradict one another, and can therefore work in an additive manner to provide a fuller and more complex picture of tolerance and its discourses. While Brown’s opening statement suggests this much, Forst’s resists a clear separation of their projects and insists that they must be ‘related precisely where we talk about politics and power’. When projects are so different but nonetheless overlap in some domain, one might expect that they necessarily come into tension and conflict, and that at most one can prevail or, more likely, that both projects need to be modified in order to achieve some kind of synthesis. However, there may be other possibilities, as the phenomenon of multistable figures helps to suggest: one and the same image can be seen under quite different aspects, as in the duck-rabbit figure made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Going further in a similar direction, the complex notion of complementarity developed by Niels Bohr for quantum mechanics asserts that two incompatible and mutually exclusive descriptions – such as wave and particle descriptions for elementary entities – may be equally valid and necessary for a full account, even if they cannot be combined into a single picture.15
In retrospect, it seems to us that the models of multistable figures and quantum complementarity may be productive for thinking both about the power and politics of tolerance and the relationship between Brown’s and Forst’s position on it. Indeed, the aspect of power inscribed in tolerance seems to be just as ambivalent as the general notion of tolerance itself. The title for the Spannungsübung was deliberately chosen to evoke different associations. Depending on how one understands power and tolerance, it can be read both in an affirmative and a critical way. The more sceptical one is towards tolerance, the more a ‘power of tolerance’ connotes a threat. Conversely, an affirmative understanding of tolerance transforms the understanding of its power into something positive.
This instability or ambivalence of the title points to a deeper instability inscribed in the notion of tolerance, which becomes visible, for instance, when one compares the modern, political practice of toleration with earlier understandings of tolerance as a stoic virtue. The power relations seem to be exactly opposed insofar as the former issues from a hegemonic power making concessions to dissident minorities, while the latter indicates the capacity to bear pain and endure a higher power (be it a hostile environment, destiny, or a superior force). In other words, while asymmetries are normally present when talking about tolerance, it is not so clear if tolerance is an expression of superiority and domination or if it indicates, on the contrary, a strategy for dealing with a superior power from a position of subjugation or at least limited power.
Since the Spannungsübung is mostly based on a more political and modern understanding of the term ‘toleration’, the multistable character of power relations in toleration is less evident during the discussion. However, the introduction of distinctions in tolerance, which can be understood as attempts to resolve such ambivalences, are very much at issue. Although Brown is sceptical about Forst’s argument for a politically productive conception of tolerance that avoids the pitfalls of the permission conception, she also makes space for a positive understanding of tolerance by distinguishing between a political discourse of tolerance and a practice of toleration at the level of individual virtue. Indeed, she clarifies from the outset of the discussion that her work on tolerance is ‘not against tolerance; rather, it is intended to be a critique of existing tolerance discourse. And here, critique does not mean being against and does not mean rejecting’.16 Furthermore, she refers to her book’s argument for the utility of ‘cautiously distinguishing an individual bearing from a political discourse of tolerance’ in order to ‘stem the tendency […] to mistake an insistence on the involvement of tolerance with power for a rejection or condemnation of tolerance’.17 In fact, the book also addresses the possibility of a reversed power relationship in tolerance. In a footnote at the beginning of the chapter ‘Tolerance as a Discourse of Power’, she asks:
But what of the tolerance exercised by those enduring sustained oppression or violence, e.g., those who stoically ‘tolerate’ slavery, colonial rule, male dominance, or apartheid? How is this kind of tolerance accounted for by the argument that tolerance is always extended from the hegemonic to the liminal, from the powerful to the weak, from the insiders to the outsiders?
Her answer is to refer back to the distinction between an individual and a political understanding of tolerance:
[T]olerance as an orientation or capacity, which is what the dominated or suffering subject exhibits, is different from a regime of tolerance and especially from the positive political valuation of tolerance as a feature of pluralist or secular societies.18
While Brown’s analysis of the political discourse of tolerance seems compatible with Forst’s permission conception, the other sides of their distinctions – Forst’s respect conception and Brown’s notion of tolerance as an individual ethic or virtue – make it clear that these are quite different ways of resolving tolerance’s inner tensions. Before exploring these differences and their implications, we would like to highlight how these distinctions, rather than distinguishing separable regimes of tolerance, can turn tolerance into a multistable figure. Brown notes that her distinction implies neither that the two sides are unrelated nor that one is always benign and the other always oppressive, and Forst emphasizes that there can only be one concept of toleration and that the conceptions of which he speaks are different interpretations of its elements.19 In the language of multistable figures, we could say that the conceptions form different aspects under which tolerance can be seen, especially since Forst also indicates that rather than being characteristic of different regimes of toleration, these conceptions exist simultaneously, come into conflict, and contribute significantly to debates about toleration.20
For instance, although tolerance was initially used more in an ethical and individual than in a political sense, there was already in early Christianity a tension between tolerance in the sense of patiently bearing what cannot be changed and tolerance as forbearance towards others (which can be further developed in the direction of a permission conception). Soon thereafter, ‘the Christian Church changed from being a persecuted church into being a tolerated church’ and ultimately became a ‘persecuting church’.21 Interestingly, it turns out, as Forst’s chapter ‘The Janus Face of Christian Toleration’ highlights, that the same arguments for toleration can quite easily mutate into their opposite in this process, even in the hands of the same author (Augustine).22 It seems to us that such a ‘Janusfaced’ or ‘multistable’ structure is quite a general characteristic of tolerance: different conceptions coexist not only during the same historical period, but also in the same context and for the same actors, with the result that the situation can be seen under quite contrary aspects and lead to opposite conclusions.
The conceptions themselves thereby become unstable. Even the permission conception, which would seem to be a clear demonstration of power, could be seen more ambivalently as an indication of power facing its limits. When a superior power limits itself in an ostensibly deliberate and moral way, can one not always suspect this tolerance to be an expression of a power that recognizes its limitations and decides that it might be better to limit itself for reasons of self-preservation? Here, one might be tempted to generalize again what Forst relates especially to ancient times: ‘in the Roman Empire, toleration was chiefly a function of insight into the limits of imperial power, and at the same time into the strategic possibility of maintaining it’.23 The power asymmetry no doubt persists, as does the critique of tolerance discourse for its implication in governmentality. However, another aspect emerges here within the permission conception, namely the seemingly opposite view of tolerance as the individual, ethical virtue of enduring what one does not have the power to change. Not only did this earlier understanding never disappear – even if a political notion predominated since early modernity – but it also supplements the permission conception by decorating the tolerant with virtue and moral superiority. And one can always suspect such claims to virtue and morality of being reactive or retroactive strategies to endure better – and draw benefits from – what one cannot change, at least not without the risk of worsening the situation.24 One can see in them a variation of Aesop’s famous fable about the fox and the grapes: while the fox declares undesirable what it cannot achieve, the tolerant accept what they find undesirable. Reasons are found to be content with a situation that cannot be changed, and in the case of tolerance, a necessity is indeed turned into a virtue, as the German version of the phrase ‘sour grapes’ goes: ‘Aus der Not eine Tugend machen’.
Pushing in this way the multistability of tolerance with respect to power and morality could seem to suggest that invocations of morality and virtue in the practice and discourse of tolerance can always be seen under the aspect of veiling powerlessness in order to prevail in a game of power. What risks getting lost here is the possibility of criticizing hierarchical power relations, inequality, and injustice on moral grounds. It is indeed difficult to see how one can unmask all actions supposedly based on moral reasons as strategies of power without ending up with a view of society as a mere field of power relations where the most powerful groups enforce their own rules and values. And even if this were the case, we are not, as Hume already knew, forced to accept or even affirm it. Tolerance is an interesting notion here because it seems to be situated not only between the individual and the political sphere, and between morality and law – the term Toleranz or tolerance, for example, exists neither in the German nor in the US constitution and its amendments25 – but also between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of the famous ‘Is–Ought’ problem. It provides the possibility of living on in conditions that one does not necessarily affirm: that is, of accepting the existence of something without legitimizing or affirming it.
Such an understanding of tolerance resonates with the ‘respect conception’ favoured by Forst and exhibits the kind of depoliticization criticized by Brown. We arrived at it by conjuring up a debate in which the discussants resisted engaging in (though it was at times broached) the debate between Foucauldian discourse analysis and Habermasian discourse ethics. This debate may by now seem ‘tired’26 precisely because it tends to end up in a multistable figure endlessly oscillating between the mutually exclusive alternatives of seeing society as fully governed by power and envisioning it as regulated by moral norms. The model of multistable figures or complementarity (in the quantum sense) may be useful here to suggest the possibility that one neither needs to decide between the alternatives nor find a synthesis, but can affirm both alternatives despite their incompatibility. This is a possibility to bear in mind while exploring ways of resolving an alleged incompatibility or of better understanding its source in concrete cases. We would therefore like to return to the question of how Brown and Forst partially resolve what looks like an inherent inner tension in tolerance through distinctions and specifications of different kinds. Here, multistability may enter at another level that goes deeper than the possibility of seeing the concept and practice of toleration under different aspects.
According to the ‘perceptual conception’ of tolerance proposed by David Heyd’s introduction to the volume Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, multistable figures are helpful for thinking about the relationship between objection and acceptance:
[T]o be tolerant one must be able to suspend one’s judgment of the object, to turn one’s view away from it, to treat it as irrelevant, for the sake of a generically different perspective. It is a kind of a Gestalt switch, which, like the rabbit-duck case, involves on the one hand a choice, sometimes an intentional effort, and on the other hand an ‘image’ that is always exclusive of its competing image at any given time.27
Although Forst uses the figure of a ‘Janus face’ in reference to Christian toleration, he criticizes Heyd’s theory of a gestalt switch – which treats the sets of reasons for objection and acceptance as ‘qualitatively distinct and irreducible to any common ground’ – because it ‘incorrectly assumes that the negative reasons are disabled in the process’.28 However, this question and that of where a common ground may be situated, if at all, seem to be precisely at issue in debates on tolerance.
3. DE/POLITICIZATIONS, OR: WHAT IS AT ISSUE?
In following the debate, it is not easy to identify precisely the point of difference between Brown and Forst. On the level of concrete political and ethical positions, for example, there seems to be no relevant difference between the two. Furthermore, as we already indicated, both understand tolerance as an ambivalent term. Finally, and also as already indicated, both are equally critical of a form of tolerance that follows from what Forst calls the permission conception, which implies not only that they are similarly attuned to the importance of (veiled) power relations, but also that they are invested in a form of moral normativity.
At the same time, there is also a sense of a deeper tension or even incompatibility, which comes from more than the difference between their projects. In fact, it arises from the common terrain of overlap between their projects, namely their critique of tolerance when it functions as a practice of power in the political realm. This tension is perhaps best approached through a detour by focusing first on the other side of the distinction used to resolve tolerance’s ambivalence, that is, on how they conceive of good forms of tolerance. Here, the manner of drawing the distinction is quite different: while Forst proposes another conception of tolerance – the ‘respect conception’ – Brown limits the field where tolerance can be beneficial, restricting it to the individual and the non-political. This difference turns out to also have significant implications in the domain where their critiques seem to overlap.
Let us begin with Brown and, more concretely, with the term ‘aversion’ that appears in the title of her book. Remarkably enough, the term hardly appears in the book itself, but upon closer inspection the notion of aversion plays, in fact, an interesting role. The notion of aversion suggests an unconscious (negative) emotion, and such an emotional and aesthetic dimension is central precisely when Brown concedes that a less problematic or even positive understanding of tolerance is possible. The few times that Brown accepts a positive understanding of tolerance, this use is not only limited to the non-political, but also to a non-rational, aesthetic, or emotional sphere of aversions: ‘a friend’s irritating laugh, a student’s distressing attire, […] the repellent smell of a stranger, a neighbor’s horrid taste in garden plants’.29 In certain cases, we cannot prevent having specific sentiments of provocation and irritation, but we can and should control the expression and articulation of these impulses. If we are able to do so, we are, according to Brown, tolerant in a positive sense: ‘the world is surely a more gracious and graceful place if I can be tolerant in the face of them’.30
What is striking here is not only that this limitation is at the same time an extension – since according to Brown this (positive) tolerance can probably be attributed to ‘every sentient animal’31 – but also the fact that good tolerance is attributed to a domain that is quite insignificant in the common usage of the term ‘tolerance’, which, to say the least, is not limited to morally completely irrelevant practices or habits. And with this shift, Brown’s positive notion of tolerance seems in fact exactly opposed to Forst’s, which requires a rational dimension: that is, a dimension that distinguishes – at least according to a traditional view – human beings from animals. This requirement is already suggested by Forst’s specification that there must be a ‘normatively substantive objection’ in order to be able to speak of tolerance (in contradistinction to indifference),32 and it becomes particularly clear in one of the many paradoxes that Forst addresses in his book, namely the paradox of the ‘tolerant racist’. If, as Forst maintains, tolerance requires both objection and acceptance, one might argue that the more that people object to convictions, practices, or other groups of people without acting against them, the more they are tolerant. A ‘tolerant racist’ would thus excel in the virtue of tolerance. In order to deal with this paradox, which is structurally similar to the famous debate between Schiller and Kant on whether or not morality requires a battle against inclinations, Forst argues that one must formulate ‘minimal conditions for objection judgements’.33 Only once these conditions are met can we speak of tolerance as a virtue. In other words, acceptance and objection are necessary but not sufficient, and what it also needed, according to Forst, is that the objections are based on some rational reasons that are ‘sufficiently “defensible”’.34 Otherwise, so the argument goes, the persistence of what one rejects for moral or political reasons would be accepted and even encouraged. So although some people might act in a ‘tolerant’ way, if their objections do not seem to be acceptable as somehow rationally or intersubjectively justifiable, they do not deserve to be called tolerant in the sense of a virtue.
While this conception might be comprehensible and convincing in some cases, an important question arises: who decides whether or not ‘minimal conditions for objection judgements’35 are present, and who is in a position to distinguish when arguments are irrational and when they are rational? If we follow this conception, are we not dividing people into two groups, those whose objections we consider sufficiently rational, so that we call them tolerant when they accept others to whom they object, and those whose objections we consider ‘grossly irrational’36 so that we cannot understand them to be tolerant and consequently we may even feel justified in not being tolerant towards them? Ultimately, these questions are related to the notion of reason, however it is understood. They recall the questions we raised at the end of the previous section. We are again confronted here with the possibility of suspecting specific (power) interests and implicit exclusions behind supposedly rational and intersubjective procedures, and of interpreting what presents itself as symmetrical and neutral – and in this sense depoliticized – as a way of masking political interests.
Brown criticizes the discourse of tolerance precisely for its depoliticizing effects. ‘Depoliticization’, she writes, ‘involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and political solutions, as personal and individual, on the one hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other.’37 Given such a critique of depoliticization, it may seem paradoxical that Brown’s only positive notion of tolerance is almost completely separated from any political or moral dimension. However, the question of good tolerance turns out to be also a question of the limits of (de)politicization. Is depoliticization necessarily negative and politicization necessarily desirable? While any form of depoliticization can always be suspected of supporting inequality and injustice, unlimited politicization tends to transform our understanding of society and the human world into a mere political battlefield.38 Brown is not only highly sensitive and critical about hidden forms of depoliticization: in her opening statement, she also seems to allow for the possibility that there is a ‘best sense’ in which ‘tolerance, rightly understood and rightly practiced, would de-politicize’ issues such as the headscarf and gay marriage ‘by expanding the sphere of private and individual choice that is to be respected as non-negotiable in the public sphere’.39 The terms she uses when noting that a ‘tolerant individual bearing’ in many circumstances makes the world ‘a more gracious and graceful place’ might be read in this direction. ‘Graciousness’ and ‘gracefulness’ are terms that go back to the Latin term ‘gratia’. This is interesting insofar as it relates to a (hierarchical) understanding of tolerance by indicating a sphere beyond justice and a positive attitude towards someone found guilty; at the same time, all objections have completely disappeared with grace, and in this sense it is no longer a case of tolerance. This is the reason that the terms ‘graceful’ and ‘gracious’ can evoke the possibility of a realm outside the sphere of endless power struggles and legal disputes, and part of the power of tolerance – the reason that the notion of tolerance does not completely disappear despite all legitimate suspicions and critiques – lies perhaps precisely in the ‘power’ to evoke a ‘gracious and graceful place’ beside or outside power and beyond tolerance.
However, to evoke a place is not the same as helping to realize it, and Brown’s ‘depoliticization’ of good tolerance is in fact fully consistent with the critique of tolerance for its inherently depoliticizing function. For in this case, the only positive form of tolerance possible is one in which there is nothing to depoliticize, that is, when it operates in circumstances without ‘inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and political solutions’. This is where Brown’s distinctions conflict most clearly with those of Forst, even if they seem to overlap in their critique of the permission conception. For within the political field, the difference between permission and respect does not even register in Brown’s way of resolving the ambivalence of tolerance.
What this retroactively indicates is that Brown’s and Forst’s critiques of the permission conception also differ. Forst mostly seems to worry that permission is not properly justified by moral reasons, but is rather given opportunistically, say, in the interest of conserving power. As a result, the permission is not reliable and can be withdrawn just as quickly as it is given, maintaining thereby a clear hierarchy of power. The aim of the respect conception is to find a proper, moral justification for acceptance, one on which the parties involved can reciprocally agree in a process of mutual deliberation – a process to which minorities with lesser power are also entitled and which can be considered a political process in the best sense of the word. The claim is that one can arrive at a ‘foundation of toleration which is immanent in the social and theoretical conflicts over toleration’ – a foundation that is independent of any ‘external norms or values’ and based solely on the ‘fundamental right to justification to which all human beings as human beings […] have a claim’.40
Establishing such a procedure for acceptance is not Brown’s concern, and while she may be sceptical about its feasibility, she does not seem to have issues with this project. Her focus does not lie on questioning the justification of rejection so that it can be turned into acceptance, but rather on the negative judgment of objection that remains even after the tolerant have recognized the moral justification of acceptance. For Forst, what is productive about tolerance in the respect conception is precisely that it can lead to an agreement of mutual tolerance without requiring the parties involved to give up their ethical values and convictions. For Brown, this may be fine in the private field, but in the field of politics characterized by power imbalances, the effects of toleration in which she is interested are much the same as in the permission conception. These effects are indeed primarily linked to the ‘objection component’ and to the way it produces and regulates identities. It is this order of politics – rather than the deliberation over what is or is not rejected – that is ‘disavowed’ and ‘buried’ by tolerance according to Brown.41 For even if one extends the right of justification to the objection component (and abstracts from the problem, which we already highlighted, of how and by whom the minimal moral threshold is determined), it is hard to see what kind of political process could occur once the conditions for the respect conception of tolerance are realized.
Once it has been determined through mutual justification that there is no morally justifiable reason for rejection, does not the paradox of the tolerant racist persist precisely by soliciting (ethically or scientifically rationalized) justifications for objections so that one can excel in the virtue of tolerance? Once the immorality of rejection is established, why only tolerate? Would not morality demand that one aims at the disappearance of objection, and if tolerance is to be understood to require an objection component, should not tolerance as a virtue strive for its own abolishment? To put it in Goethe’s words, as quoted by Forst: ‘Tolerance should be a temporary attitude only; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to insult.’42 This view is consistent with Brown’s distinction between two moments of tolerance:
[T]hough tolerance of homosexuals today is often advocated as an alternative to full legal equality, this stance is significantly different from promulgating tolerance of homosexuals as an alternative to harassing, incarcerating, or institutionalizing them; the former opposes tolerance to equality and bids to maintain the abject civic status of the homosexual while the latter opposes tolerance to cruelty, violence, or civic expulsion.43
Brown’s project aims at the former, but she acknowledges the relevance of the latter, which relates to Forst’s project. Struggling against violent rejection in the spirit of the respect conception could be considered as a historical condition for worrying about abjection persisting through tolerance. What is more, the political process of reciprocal justification remains necessary if one wants to ensure that the rejection of rejection is morally grounded (rather than based on a particular ethics that seeks to prevail through power or is caught up in the paradox of embracing everything by rejecting all rejections).
While this debate focuses on examples where the interlocutors can assume consensus over the absence of sufficient moral reasons for rejection (of homosexuality, gay marriage, and the headscarf), public debates about tolerance often concern issues where it is not so clear whether they should lead to rejection or acceptance. Different basic rights intersect and collide here in a way that makes it appear unlikely or even impossible that conflicts or processes of justification will ever come to an end. It is especially here that we are confronted with the deeply multistable character of tolerance and its critiques. The practice of female circumcision or genital mutilation might be such a case. Tolerance can appear intolerable here because of its acceptance component, that is, because it would result in accepting violence against young women. Merely objecting to this practice, in other words, seems insufficient, and only a juridical prohibition seems acceptable. At the same time, tolerance can also appear intolerable because of the objection component, which tolerance would sustain and perpetuate. Even taking female genital mutilation as an example may appear as a problematic continuation of an occidental, colonial discourse; in other words, arguably more than in the debates of the headscarf, different ‘progressive’ feminist and postcolonial perspectives collide and attest to the possibility of adopting contrary standpoints against tolerance.44 Seeing such a gestalt switch in critiques of tolerance may help to appreciate the importance of mutual respect that Forst underlines in the respect conception of tolerance. It may contribute to opening a space that allows for the articulation and negotiation of mutually incompatible ethical convictions – a space that seems necessary for the political process of reciprocal justification, but that at the same time is depoliticized insofar as it is imagined to be governed by reason rather than power relations or social hierarchies.
While the paradox of a non-political condition for politics may lie at the core of the Habermas–Foucault debate, the Brown–Forst debate highlights other questions. One way of specifying the way in which their positions may be complementary is by asking about the necessity of tolerance for political processes of reciprocal justification. From a pragmatic perspective, it may seem more realistic that the parties involved can come to an (at least temporary) agreement when the alternatives include the possibility that the practice in question is tolerated – which both parties may see as a sort of bad compromise, but one that allows them to maintain their ethical positions – rather than being limited to rejecting a practice versus dismissing the validity of objections against it. Once this political battle is decided – and for those cases where the outcome is tolerance – one can then engage in the next political project of politicizing tolerance and working towards its self-dissolution by addressing the objection component.
While Brown does not appear unsympathetic to such a repartition of projects, she also questions the necessity of tolerance and seems to suggest that freedom of speech and opinion would suffice in order to negotiate rights.45 Following her critique of tolerance, one might be led to viewing toleration in politics not only as a phase that should be overcome, but one that could be avoided altogether. Such a short-circuiting of toleration may be less pragmatic, but one could indeed imagine engaging in the process of mutual justification without having toleration as one of its possible outcomes. However, justification takes time and seems to require that the (ethical) objections to be negotiated should be maintained during the process. In other words, the right to justification may be incompatible with a simultaneous readiness or demand to let go of ethical objections. To the extent that the process of mutual justification is circular or ‘recursive’,46 and only ever comes to provisional conclusions, the temporal sequence and rhythm of justification and deconstructing objections is crucial. In this case, the two projects would be mutually exclusive and so remain equally necessary in the foreseeable future.
NOTES
1 Together with Marc Jongen, Luca Di Blasi initiated the first Spannungsübung in May 2007 between Vittorio Hösle and Boris Groys on the power of reason (Boris Groys, Vittorio Hösle, Die Vernunft an die Macht: Ein Streitgespräch, ed. by Luca Di Blasi and Marc Jongen (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011)). He also conceived of the Spannungsübungen with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Gianni Vattimo on hermeneutics in 2007 and with Vittorio M. Lampugnani and Hans Kollhoff on architecture and urban planning in 2010.
2 Rainer Forst, Toleranz im Konflikt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), in English as Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present, trans. by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). There are a number of other publications by Brown and Forst related to their debate, including Forst’s The Right to Justification (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) and Brown’s ‘Civilizational Delusions: Secularism, Tolerance, Equality’, Theory & Event 15.2 (2012). For further references, see the ‘Notes on the Contributors’ at the end of this volume.
3 Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. by David Heyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
4 Cf. Forst, Toleration in Conflict, pp. 14–15.
5 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance’, in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 95–137.
6 The notion of ‘frustration tolerance’ was initially developed by Saul Rosenzweig in the late 1930s to designate the capacity ‘to withstand a given frustrating situation without distorting the so-called “objective” facts of the life situation’. Rosenzweig conjectures that the hypothesis of areas of low or high frustration tolerance might ‘provide a working definition of the difference between the psychotic […]; the neurotic […]; and the normal individual – in whom a relatively high frustration tolerance would usually be found throughout the personality’. See Saul Rosenzweig, ‘A General Outline of Frustration’, Journal of Personality 7.2 (1938), pp. 151–60 (p. 153).
7 Cf. Forst, Toleration in Conflict, p. 37.
10 On the distinction between ‘tension in’ and ‘tension between’, see Christoph F. E. Holzhey, ‘Tension In/Between Aesthetics, Politics, and Physics’ in Tension/Spannung, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010), pp. 13–45.
11 Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 9.
12 See also Rainer Forst, ‘“To Tolerate Means to Insult”: Toleration, Recognition, and Emancipation’, in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, ed. by Bert van den Brink and David Owen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 215–37.
13 Forst, Toleration in Conflict, pp. 29–30. In this book, Forst distinguishes altogether four conceptions, adding also a ‘coexistence conception’, which is already horizontal insofar as ‘those who exercise tolerance are at the same time also tolerated’ (p. 28), and an ‘esteem conception’, which involves ‘esteeming convictions and practices of other communities as ethically valuable’, albeit – if one is still to speak of toleration – ‘with reservations’ (pp. 31–32).
14 Brown, Regulating Aversion, pp. 6–7.
15 The concepts or models of multistable figures and complementarity were two central topics of the ICI Berlin during the past years. Regarding multistable figures as models, see Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potentials of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2014).
16 See p. 13 in this volume.
17 Brown, Regulating Aversion, pp. 13–14.
19 Forst, Toleration in Conflict, p. 17.
22 Ibid., §5 ‘The Janus face of Christian toleration’, pp. 47–70 (p. 48).
24 Cf. Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 27: ‘If tolerance poses as a middle road between rejection on the one side and assimilation on the other, this road, as already suggested, is paved by necessity rather than virtue; tolerance, as Nietzsche would say, becomes a virtue only retroactively and retrospectively.’
25 Cf. Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 11.
26 Cf. Brown in this volume, p. 13.
27 See David Heyd, ‘Introduction’, in Toleration, ed. by Heyd, pp. 3–17 (p. 11).
28 Ibid., p. 11 and Forst, Toleration in Conflict, p. 20 n. 11.
29 Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 13.
32 Forst, Toleration in Conflict, p. 18.
37 Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 15.
38 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick addresses a similar tension through the notions of ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’. Cf. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–51.
39 Cf. p. 21 in this volume.
40 Forst, Toleration in Conflict, p. 451.
41 Cf. Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 14.
42 Quoted from Forst, Toleration in Conflict, p. 3.
43 Brown, Regulating Aversion, pp. 10–11.
44 Alternatively, one could say that the notion of ‘progressive’ becomes unstable in debates on tolerance. Cf. Brown’s observation that critics of tolerance cross party lines and that it is not only the Christian Right that objects to ‘excesses of tolerance’: ‘there are also progressives who assail a tolerant multiculturalism for its hesitation to condemn cultural practices such as female genital circumcision or, as in France the wearing of a hijab by Muslim girls’ (Regulating Aversion, p. 207 n1).
45 See pp. 17 and 42 in this volume.
46 Cf. Forst, Toleration in Conflict, pp. 451–53.