Simon Critchley Tough Love: A Response to Richard J. Bernstein’s “Is Politics ‘Practicable’ without Religion?” i’m inclined to agree with what richard j. bernstein writes about The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology in his essay included in this volume. For those readers with some acquaintance with my work, it might seem odd that I have written a book dealing with questions of religion and faith. Elsewhere, of course, I assert that philosophy begins in disappointment, notably religious disappointment—that is to say, crudely stated, the death of God. Nothing in The Faith of the Faithless contradicts this claim. When I talk about faith, it is not at all a matter of belief in the existence of some metaphysical reality like God. My conception of faith—as fidelity to the infinite demand—is not just shared by the denominationally faithless or unbelievers, but can be experienced by them in an exemplary way. Faith is not, then, necessarily theistic. However, and this has also been a constant concern of my work, an atheistic conception of faith should not be triumphalist. I have little sympathy for the evangelical atheism of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens that sees God and religion as some sort of historical error that has happily been corrected and refuted by scientific progress. On the contrary, the religious tradition with which I am most familiar—broadly Judeo-Christian—offers a powerful way of articulating questions of the ultimate meaning and value of human life in
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ways irreducible to naturalism. Thinkers whose company I have long valued, like Augustine and Pascal, raise exactly the right questions, even if I cannot accept their answers. Furthermore—and this is something Rousseau understood better than anyone—when it comes to the political question of what might motivate a subject to act in concert with others, rationality alone is insufficient. In order that a legitimate political association might become possible—that is, in order that citizens might pledge themselves to the good—reason has to be allied to questions of faith and belief that are able to touch the deep existential matrix of human subjectivity. In short, neither traditional theism nor evangelical atheism will suffice. What is needed, as James Wood rightly puts it, is a “theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief. Such atheism, only a semitone from faith, would be like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity” (Wood 2009, 79). For me, if philosophy is inconceivable without religion, then it is equally inconceivable with religion. The idea of the faith of the faithless seems close to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous idea of a “religionless Christianity.” In a letter to Eberhard Bethge from April 1944, Bonhoeffer writes that “We are moving toward a completely religionless time,” where even those who honestly describe themselves as religious “do not in the least act up to it” (Bonhoeffer 1997, 279). True enough, one might say, and perhaps even truer now than in 1944. Bonhoeffer’s question is “How do we speak of God—without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness and so on?” My question, however, is the opposite: it is not a matter of how we speak of God without religion, but rather how we speak of religion—as that force which can bind human beings together in association—without God. So, religion is that force that can bind human beings together in association, and it is association that is the key to my thinking of politics and that I take from Rousseau. It is there in Marx as well, in his call for a Verein freier Menschen, “an association of free human beings,” in Capital, volume one. I could also link this to ideas of assembly, which can be understood from the time of the ancient Greeks in political and
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religious terms as he ekklesia, the collective political sources of the ecclesiastical, or to the idea of he boule, understood as both council and will, a kind of general will.
there is a décalage, a dislocation or displacement, a key concept that I borrow from Louis Althusser, of association and authorization in Rousseau, between association granted by popular sovereignty, the people themselves, and authorization, which seems to require figures like the legislator, the possibility of dictatorship, and the apparatus of civil religion. I try to track these décalages in some detail in a reading of The Social Contract and other texts by Rousseau. By the way, I don’t see Rousseau as a lisping Kant (as Victor Gourevich rightly says), or a froggy Kant. On the contrary, I see Kant as a foggy Rousseau. In my view, Rousseau is a more philosophically and politically self-conscious and radical figure than any of those who follow, perhaps with the exception of Nietzsche. A major concern of The Faith of the Faithless is to get more people, especially students, to take more interest in Rousseau in this year of his 300th anniversary. Allow me a word on décalage as an operational concept in my approach. My argument cuts in two directions at once. First, I want to follow closely at the textual and conceptual level Rousseau’s claim that what is required to solve the problem of politics and law is a civil profession of faith, a civil catechism. I want to show how the problem of politics in Rousseau—the very being of the political, understood as the act by which a people becomes a people—is articulated around what we might call a paradox of sovereignty that draws it ineluctably toward a religious solution. The functioning of Rousseau’s thought is only possible because of the play of a series of décalages, displacements or dislocations. Althusser claims that it is the play of these décalages that both makes possible and at the same time impossible what Rousseau calls his “sad and great system” (Rousseau 1997, 108). The conditions of possibility for Rousseau’s system are at once its condition of impossibility (which of course is a definition of the quasi-transcendental in Derrida’s sense).
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That is, Rousseau’s solution to the problem of politics, which goes by the name or, more accurately, as we will see, the misnomer of the social contract, attempts to cover over a series of décalages that make the articulation of that problem possible. Rousseau’s thought— and, for me, this is an important methodological caveat—is a selfconscious play of dislocations and displacements, a reflexive series of contradictions that make both the articulation and disarticulation of that thought possible. Rousseau’s text is thus a sort of machine à décalage of which he was utterly self-conscious and which makes him in my view, along with Nietzsche, the supremely fictive philosopher. I use the adjective “supreme” to modify the noun “fiction” advisedly, but we will come back to that. This play of décalages is one explanation of the multiplicity of possible, plausible, and deeply contradictory interpretations of Rousseau, whether Kantian or Hegelian, liberal or communitarian, not to mention totalitarian. Incidentally, I think all classical philosophical texts from Plato onward are décalage machines, which is why they are able to sustain a number of plausible yet contradictory interpretations. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we define such texts as canonical. If the problem Rousseau is trying to solve in The Social Contract is the problem of politics, then the solution to that problem requires religion. This means, of course, that we have to read The Social Contract and arguably Rousseau’s entire system back to front. That is, the political argument of The Social Contract requires the account of civil religion, which otherwise looks like an addendum to the book. Which is to say that Rousseau’s purportedly purely internal or immanentist conception of the being of politics requires a dimension of externality or transcendence in order to become effective. Or again, a conception of the political based on the absolute primacy of autonomy seems to call for a moment of heteronomy for its articulation and authorization. Second, however, I also want to use Rousseau’s thought in order to show how his conception of the political can throw some light on the present situation, that is, on the darkness of our times. What I mean
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is that if Rousseau’s sad system is a décalage machine, then I wonder whether something analogous might be said of our world, defined as it is by a series of nightmarish intrications of politics and religion: politics of religion and religions of politics, where we have entered nothing less than an epoch of new religious war. Thus, my hope is that following Rousseau’s thinking on politics and religion will somehow allow us to think through and think against our present. So, Rousseau’s text is a décalage machine. Indeed, I think this is the condition for its canonicity. I am not suggesting that Rousseau was unaware of these décalages. On the contrary—supremely self-conscious fictor that he was—he was acutely aware of what he was doing. A system of thought, even and especially Rousseau’s “great and sad system,” is a consequence of the articulation and disarticulation of a series of décalages. This is true of any and every system of thought worthy of the name. Such is my a priori hermeneutic claim. All systems of thought, even anti-systematic systems, are constituted around the articulations and disarticulations of a series of décalages. I think this is what Derrida identified and formalized in the procedure that he called deconstruction. And if you read Althusser closely, you can perhaps see what a good student Derrida was. I will come back to Derrida in conclusion in relation to the question of decision and deliberation.
another hermeneutic principle that i accept, this time from Paul de Man, is that not only do authors not have any privileged access to what they write: they might be structurally blind to what takes place in the texts that they write. So, a priori, if Bernstein identifies a series of décalages in my book, then it is not for me to deny that. For good Hegelian/Freudian reasons, I accept that I am probably blind to the antithetical attraction that ties me to certain Schmittian assumptions and which permits a dialectical inversion of my position. I accept that I am arguing for a kind of perverse mirror image of what Schmitt is arguing for. It is indeed grotesque to look in the mirror, even and especially when one can’t stop looking. I am also, despite what Bernstein says, Freudian enough to accept that I have no particularly privileged
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access into my consciousness. On the contrary, I think we are structurally self-deceived, which is what Jacques Lacan called méconnaissance or misrecognition at the level of the constitution of the ego. Because of this basic self-deception or transcendental opacity at the level of the subject, this is why we need other people. This is also why love is so important, which is perhaps the most important theme of The Faith of the Faithless. Oddly, Bernstein did not mention the question of love. For me, accepting that I don’t know what I’m doing and that I might be doing the opposite of what I intend means that I think The Faith of the Faithless is a book about love. Although hate may be older than love, as Freud says, this is the first book where I have tried to think about love, particularly mystical love, as the evisceration or attempted excoriation of the self so that something new might come into being, a kind of absolute spiritual daring that consists in giving what one does not have, and receiving that over which one has no power—these might be elements in love’s definition. As to my relation to Schmitt, I am drawn to his work as I am to Milton’s Satan. He gets all the best lines. In chapter three of The Faith of the Faithless on mysticism, which it might be fun to discuss, I assay or work with certain assumptions developed by Schmitt’s political theology and see how far they might be pressed in the opposite direction. As I said, the book is subtitled “Experiments in Political Theology,” and I see the various chapters that move around the triangulation of politics, religion, and violence as essays in the sense of an older English notion of “assay”: attempt or experiment. If I knew what I was going to write I wouldn’t write it. Writing is experimental. It always has been for me. I take responsibility for what I write, but in a crucial sense I do not know what I am doing. Again, this is why we need others, why love is so important. Going back to Schmitt, I take the opposition, the anthropological opposition, between authoritarianism and anarchism from The Concept of the Political and see how far it can be pressed by contemplating a politics without original sin, what I call, following Norman Cohn,
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“mystical anarchism.” So, Bernstein is right, at least in chapter three, that I produce a kind of radical inversion of Schmitt that is—rightly— Schmitt’s dialectical reflection; just as Schmitt was Mikhail Bakunin’s inverted reflection (Bakunin coins the concept of political theology); just as Schmitt in the 1950s sees himself and his conception of the political, the theological, and sovereignty in the mirror of Prince Hamlet, that is, in the mirror of indecision. (This is the topic of my next book, which begins with Hamlet and the crisis of sovereignty in Schmitt and Benjamin.) Also, on original sin, I am deeply conflicted between the conviction that we need to keep hold of this concept as an explanatory category, which is how I read John Gray, whom I take seriously (as you should all do), as much as I am drawn by those who wish to reject it, like the thirteenth-century radical female mystics, especially Marguerite Porete and Hadewych of Antwerp. This whole question would have to be fed through my attempted reading of Saint Paul, which I found revealing (and which Bernstein did not mention), and also through my attempt, which is crucial to my approach, to reconstruct Heidegger’s existential analytic of thrownness and projection or existentiality and facticity as a translation of Pauline categories, especially sin original. But I will come back to Heidegger and Paul a little later in my presentation.
i think bernstein conflates political theology with religion, and it is indeed difficult to achieve a strict distinction here. Political theology is more of a diagnostic category for identifying those fictions of the sacred that every political regime (and in politics there are only regimes, including liberalism) uses in order to buttress political authority. One of the changes I am calling for in The Faith of the Faithless is a historical sociology of political forms that would show the dependence of those forms on religious conceptions. I talk about the institutions of the American republic in that regard in chapters two and three, and even talk about money, flags, and the rest of the symbolism or glory of a political regime, which are not irrelevant in my view and are part of the problem in the European Union right
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now. However, more normatively, it is a question of approaching religion as a force that might bind a polity that interests me, and what kind of civil profession of faith that might be involved in that. So, I see political theology as more of a diagnostic category and religion as more normative. On the question of fiction that Bernstein discusses, I am trying to see whether there might be (again, experimentally) a transposition of poetic categories into politics, following a suggestion made to me by Alain Badiou some years back when he read my little book on Wallace Stevens. As Bernstein says, for me fiction is no bad thing. I see politics as a theory of fictions and use Edmund Morgan’s work—which is Humean and debunking—as a guide. My license for speaking of fiction is derived from Hobbes when, in the introduction to Leviathan, he compares the commonwealth to “an Artificiall man” (Hobbes 1991, 10). If God said during creation, “let us make man,” then the art of politics is the fiction of an artificial man complete with an “Artificiall soul” that will animate the “Body Politique” (1991, 9). Politics is an art, not a science. I see Rousseau as being much closer to Hobbes than is usually imagined (maybe it’s a little bit analogous to my relation to Schmitt). In a key passage from The Geneva Manuscript that doesn’t make it into The Social Contract, Rousseau writes, But although there is no natural and general society among men, although men become unhappy and wicked in becoming sociable, although the laws of justice and equality mean nothing to those who live both in the freedom of the state of nature and subject to the needs of the social state; far from thinking that there is neither virtue nor happiness for us and that heaven has abandoned us without resources to the corruption of the species, let us endeavor to draw from the ill itself the remedy that should cure it. By means of new associations let us correct, if possible, the lack of a general association. Let our violent interlocutor himself be the judge of our success. Let us show him in perfected
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art the redress of the evils which beginning art caused to nature (Rousseau 1997, 159). What is being imagined here is an art of politics. Such an art attempts to show “in perfected art” the reparation of the ills that “beginning art caused to nature.” The logic of Rousseau’s argument recalls Derrida’s analysis of the pharmakon, which means both poison and cure. Rousseau insists that we must endeavor to “derive from the evil the remedy which will cure it.” The art of politics is not or a work of genius, but the imagining of what Rousseau calls “new associations” that will remedy the lack of a general association. That is, given that we live in the aftermath of the catastrophe that “beginning art caused to nature”—namely the development of society away from a state of nature toward a state of war and violent inequality—the cure is not a return to nature but a turn to art: an art of politics that is capable of shaping new associations. Art against art, then. I then link the idea of perfected art to the idea of a supreme fiction in politics, as a fiction we know to be a fiction but in which we still believe. Let me motivate this a little, as it might also allow us to approach another of Bernstein’s worries. The concise, near-geometrical abstraction of The Social Contract is a political fiction. It is the formal articulation of the fiction of popular sovereignty understood as association without representation, which is, for Rousseau—and I think he is right—the only form of legitimate politics that can face and face down the fact of gross inequality and the state of war. The being of politics is the act of association without representation. This fiction requires, in turn, other fictions: those of law and religion, which I trace in detail in The Faith of the Faithless. The fiction of politics has to be underpinned by the authority of a quasi-divine legislator and the dogmas of civil religion. For Rousseau, the binding of a political collectivity has to be the self-binding of the general will, and this requires the ligature of religio. Such a religion has to be inculcated through mores, shared beliefs, civic values, and what can only be described as political rituals: pledges of allegiance, national anthems, honoring the war dead,
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the sacredness of the flag, or whatever. Such is the necessary armature of any theologia civilis of the kind examined above. For Rousseau, the fiction of politics cannot be sustained without the fiction of civil theology. So, is my conclusion simply that we cannot and should not enter into discussions of politics without acknowledging the dimension of fiction, particularly legal and religious fictions, in constituting and legitimating political life? That would seem to be what lies behind the skeptical—indeed Humean—historical approach adopted by someone like Edmund Morgan. The latter’s entire approach is drawn from the opening words of Hume’s “Of the First Principles of Government,” where he writes: “Nothing appears more surprizing [sic] to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few” (Hume 1994, 16). Given that “FORCE” (Hume capitalizes the word) is always on the side of the governed, one might ask “by what means this wonder is effected.” How, indeed, is the “wonder” of government brought about? Hume is clear: “It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular” (1994, 16). The many submit to the few who govern through opinions that are very often at odds with fact, myths of origin, providential narratives of progress, historical narratives of victory or defeat, or whatever. That is to say, the entire operation of government is dependent on fiction. This Humean approach has much to recommend it, particularly at the level of description, diagnosis, and critique of the kind that we find, for example, in Emilio Gentile’s work on the religions of politics, especially fascism (Gentile 2007). Politics requires fictions of the sacred and rituals of sacralization for its legitimation, and these fictions need to be exposed for what they are. Any empire’s new clothes need to be stripped away in order to see the old, rotting flesh of the state in the full light of day. At this level, the student of politics
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is involved in the exposure of the fictions that sustain government and the philosophical analysis of politics is an historical and analytical labor of demythologization. I then introduce Wallace Stevens’ category of the supreme fiction (which he borrowed from his teacher Santayana). Paradoxically, a supreme fiction is a fiction that we know to be a fiction—there being nothing else—but in which we nevertheless believe. A supreme fiction is one self-conscious of its radical contingency. For Stevens, it is a question here of final belief. “The final belief,” he asserts, “is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly” (Stevens 1989, 189). As he writes elsewhere, “final belief / Must be in a fiction” (Stevens 1967, 187) and the hope of a supreme fiction is to furnish such final belief. In his most important and difficult poem, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens attempts to articulate the conditions for such a fiction, but only offers notes toward it, something indeed like musical notes. He writes of the supreme fiction that it is not given to us whole and ready made, but that “It is possible, possible, possible. It must / Be possible” (1989, 230). My hope is that we might begin to transpose this possibility from the poetical to the political realm, or indeed to show that both poetry and politics are realms of fiction, and that what we can begin to envision in their collision is the possibility of a supreme fiction. This requires that we begin to think about politics as radical creation, as the possibility of “perfected art,” which might repair “the ills that the beginnings of art caused to nature.” The cure for inequality is not a return to nature, which is a common misreading of Rousseau, but a turn to art: an art of politics that is capable of conceiving and shaping “new associations.” To choose a nicely tendentious example; this is what Marx attempted in his 1843 “Introduction” to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right where, it seems to me, he gets close to the idea of a supreme fiction. For Marx, the logic of the political subject is expressed in the
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words “I am nothing and I should be everything” (“Ich bin nichts, und ich müßte alles sein”) (Marx 1994, 67). Beginning from a position of nothingness, or what we called above with Althusser “total alienation,” a particular group is posited as a generality, which requires “the total alienation of this total alienation” in the act of political association. Marx’s name for the supreme fiction is “the proletariat,” which he qualifies as communist—that is, as rigorously egalitarian. If politics is the moment of association without representation, then it requires the alienation from alienation, or the shift from the structural inequality under conditions of capitalism to what Marx calls in volume one of Capital “an association of free human beings” (Marx 1990, 171), what Errico Malatesta calls “free organization” (Guerin 2005, 535). This is the supreme fiction. To borrow a line of thought from Badiou, what is lacking at the present time is the possibility of such a name, a supreme fiction of final belief around which a politics might organize itself (Badiou 2005). What is lacking is a theory and practice of the general will understood as the supreme fiction of final belief that would take place in the act by which a people becomes a people or by which a free association is formed. What is lacking is an understanding of how the fiction of political association requires the fictions of law and religion for its authorization and sacralization.
if politics is a realm of fictions, of the proliferation of fictions, then the supreme fiction would consist in the shift from nothing to everything, a creative construction of a universal out of a void in the existing situation. Bernstein seems to imagine that politics is a kind of evaluative activity that we can construct at a certain theoretical distance and for which we should have pre-established criteria, such as rational argumentation. I am not so sure. Politics is the shift from 0 to 1, from nothing to something, that happens now and then. Maybe it happened down the road from the New School at Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Maybe not. Time will tell.
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I think Bernstein and I differ on how we see politics. Bernstein emphasizes arguments, and he thinks that I emphasize passionate affirmation (though what I admire about him is his boundless passion). But this trade-off between argumentation and affirmation is not the whole picture. What is needed in our thinking about politics is not so much political philosophy, which often feels to me like a contradiction in terms, particularly when it comes in its Rawslian variety. What we need is, rather, at least four things: 1. A scrupulous historical investigation into the genealogy of political forms and the analysis of their mechanisms of legitimation, authentication, and sacralization, and how those mechanisms generated inequality. I see historical analysis as the exposure of the contingent articulation of political forms. I see that as the enduring lesson of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, or indeed, in another register, Marx’s Capital. 2. We then need a strong formal analysis of the conditions under which a legitimate politics might be constructed, which is what Marx didn’t provide, and which Rousseau attempted in The Social Contract. 3. We need a detailed local ethnography of social life that would try to identify how that formal model might become operationalized in a specific context. For that, we need an account of habit, morals, les moeurs, as Rousseau said, local traditions and local conditions. This is the kind of analysis that Rousseau attempted to do in his text on the government of Poland. 4. Then, finally, when we are done with the genealogical, formal, and ethnographic research, it becomes a question of argumentation and persuasion of the most lucid kind, what the Greeks called peitho, which I am working on right now in relation to Attic tragedy, particularly in Euripides. So, I am not ruling out argumentation at all, but it is not a kind of deus ex machina, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Persuasive argumentation is parasitic on the other three elements I mentioned: historical analysis, formalization, and
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ethnography. In answer to what I would see as Bernstein’s residual Habermasianism, there is no philosophical ground to politics, nor should there be. Nor is there any discourse principle (or whatever) that we can appeal to. This doesn’t mean that we have empty hands, but there are no guarantees here. Such is perhaps my residual Derridianism.
the next questions we need to ask, and once again rousseau can be our guide, are questions of scale and identification. Namely, how big? And, linked to this, how big must a polity be in order to ensure some robust form of transferential identification, what we usually call patriotism, what Jay Bernstein used to call “political love.” This is a difficult question for those of us on the left, but an essential question it seems to me, a question that Richard Rorty raised powerfully against the vapidity of those he saw as the Foucauldian left. There is no politics without patriotism. But what is a patrie? Is there a patrie? In one passage, Rousseau speaks about “la mere patrie,” the mother-fatherland, which is a felicitous, and less patriarchal, turn of phrase. The problem here was diagnosed by Hegel at the end of his brilliant essay on natural law from 1802–1803, where he says what has to be avoided is “the shapelessness of cosmopolitanism” and “the void of the rights of man, or the like void of a league of nations or a world republic.” These are abstractions that lack ethical vitality, and indeed they simply function as mechanisms of ideological control in the time of contemporary capitalism rather than any resistance to it. Capitalism is indeed rootless cosmopolitanism. Opposition to it requires something else. If one is not—like the older Hegel or indeed the very late Marx—a crypto-Bismarckian apologist for the state, as Bakunin would put it, then the question of scale comes back with a vengeance. I don’t have an answer to this question, but some of the experiments in the book, in particular those that pick up the so-called heresy of the free spirit, Marcionism and, more recently, forms of Gnosticism try to address these questions. I remain interested in what we might call the intimacy of revolt.
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in preparing this paper for the conference at which it was delivered, I feared that the idea of political theology would get something of a New-School-angry-secularist-brigade-kicking, and to some extent my fears were justified. Bernstein writes toward the end of his paper, “I fail to see that we need political theology to grasp the significance of this fundamental characteristic [he is talking about utopianism here] of human beings.” To be clear, we don’t need political theology in some abstract way. One can completely ignore it and stay steadfastly naturalistic and postmetaphysical in one’s dogmas. We can all live without political theology. It’s fine. But, to adapt a thought of Giorgio Agamben’s from The Power and the Glory, theology may constitute a privileged laboratory for the observation of the working and articulation of the governmental machine. I tend to agree. For example, it is illuminating, after reading Agamben, to think about the way in which the ecclesiastical concept of glory or even the Christian doctrine of le corps glorieux (mystical body of Christ) finds its “secular” translation in the glory of democracy, whether conceived of as society of the spectacle in Guy Debord, a theory of communicative action in Habermas, or the flesh of democratic space in Lefort. For me, political theology is illuminating and allows for the dawning of new aspects in our familiar political concepts. It is part of the genealogical task. But if you don’t want it and you don’t need it, as one of my spinning instructors in Brooklyn says to me, “you ain’t gotta have it.” Bernstein asks me with regard to my earlier work: What does politics as the creation of interstitial distance within and upon the surface of the state have to do with religion? Well, nothing necessarily, and those arguments are in different books, Infinitely Demanding (2007) and The Faith of the Faithless (2012) respectively. I bring the political arguments of Infinitely Demanding back into The Faith of the Faithless through the polemic with Slavoj Žižek, as he attacked Infinitely Demanding via an attack on the very idea of protest and resistance and affirmed a centralized statism. (Incidentally, why do not OWS folk realize that Žižek is really not their ally at all? He loathes them for being mere Western liberals. Žižek critique of Infinitely Demanding was called “resistance
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is surrender,” which says it all. He is an authoritarian Leninist. OWS cannot be shoehorned into some atavistic idea of communism.) Maybe this link between Infinitely Demanding and The Faith of the Faithless would be a way of talking about my enduring commitment to Emmanuel Lévinas, at least as I imagine him, and the difficulty of separating the ethical from the religious, where both describe a relation to the other in terms of transcendence. This might be one pass at your closing immanence/transcendence question. But I will come back to this in closing. This brings me to the question of faith. At the core of The Faith of the Faithless is a conception of faith as fidelity to the infinite demand. This is where Infinitely Demanding and The Faith of the Faithless complement each other most closely. As Bernstein rightly points out, my argument is for faith as a declarative act, an enactment of the self that proclaims itself into being in relation to a calling. So, faith is enactment in relation to a calling. But what calls the caller is beyond my power and institutes a constitutive powerlessness in the subject. This is what I am trying to work out in The Faith of the Faithless through my reading of Heidegger, which you did not mention, but which is very important to me and of which I am even a little proud. But the point is that faith is subjective commitment in relation to the infinite demand, say the prohibition of murder that I discuss in relation to Walter Benjamin. Although the source for the discussion of this prohibition is theological or more properly Biblical, it implies nothing theistically transcendent. Transcendence for me is a human fact, it is what I used to call the Faktum des Anderen (the fact of the other) as distinct from Kant’s Faktum der Vernunft (the fact of reason), the heteronomous opening of autonomy or hetero-affectivity. Transcendence is an everyday experience in a world of immanence. So, Bernstein is right to smell a dirty humanism that Schmitt would have despised. I am still a dirty humanist, although my humanism is more Beckettian than anything, as when Beckett says, “It’s human; a lobster couldn’t do it.” Being human is nothing to be proud of. Maybe being a lobster is more worthy.
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this brings me to bernstein’s closing remarks on immanence and transcendence and where I stand on this. I see Spinoza as a wonderful temptation. In Gustave Flaubert’s Temptations of Saint Anthony, the Devil’s final appearance to the desert saint is in the form of the Spinozist God. Seeing the Spinozist God, Flaubert’s Anthony—and Flaubert too no doubt—says he wants to “flow like water, vibrate like sound, gleam like light, to curl myself up into every shape, to penetrate each atom, to get down to the depth of matter—to be matter.” But instead of seeing the radiant face of Christ like the tortured saint, Flaubert disintegrates into the void like Madame Bovary on her back in the woods, rifled by a man’s organ, her eyes burnt by the fire of a star. But perhaps that’s too poetic. In other words, I think that immanence is a deeply theological category, as it is in Spinoza, as it is in Antonio Negri’s wonderful Franciscan-Spinozist monism, as it is in Gilles Deleuze, for example think of his final text from Two Regimes of Madness, “Immanence: a Life,” where, at the point of death, he talks about life “as the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete beatitude.” Beatitudo is Spinoza’s word at the end of the Ethics. It is the immanentization of theological blessedness, which is why Deleuze was comically correct to call Spinoza “the Christ of philosophers.” I see the temptation of immanence as the temptation that the divine is no longer separate from the world, but identical to it in the form of matter. This is heresy, of course. And heretics, like Giordano Bruno, a proto-Spinozist, must be burned. So, I think there is a glorification of immanence in much philosophy and politics; consider of the work of William Connolly or Jane Bennett or all those countless and cheerless Deleuzians in the universities of the Mid-West and the London suburbs. I don’t see transcendence as absolutely distinct from immanence, but as the social interruption of immanence that occurs in rending of the subject by the other. I see transcendence in terms of our undoing of one another by one another, as bound up with the experience of love. I also talk about transcendence and immanence in relation to Kant’s moral theology (Critchley 2012, 84 ) which is another immanentization of the transcendent that wants to avoid the threat of fanati-
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cism, on the one hand, and a motivation-less moral deontology on the other. Kantianism is another moment in the historical economy of the sacral, through the sacralization of the moral law and the moral law’s marking of the subject. That said—against my intentions and accepting what I said above about constitutive décalages and absence of authorial self-transparency—perhaps I do give what Bernstein calls “a sophisticated defense of a robust philosophy of immanence.” It’s not for me to say. I’d love to be a Spinozist, but I rather fear that I am more of a one-sided Pascalian: wretchedness, boredom, and anxiety without God.
a penultimate point related to bernstein’s presentation and an old chestnut: decision versus deliberation. I agree with him that this is a falsely sharp opposition. I would begin to finesse this distinction by recalling Derrida’s critique of Schmitt’s decisionism in Politics of Friendship, which presupposes a virile and potent political subject, a subject who can, who is capable, who is defined by Heideggerian Seinkoennen. It would be helpful to recall Derrida’s idea of the other’s decision in me, la decision de l’autre en moi, which I would want to see as the formal universality of a criterion of action that is not subsumptive or reductive of alterity. In The Faith of the Faithless and Infinitely Demanding, I try to transform this idea of the other’s decision in me into what I hope is a useful and interesting conception of conscience, understood as the mark of a radical powerlessness in the human being, a powerless power. So, what am I saying? I am saying, yes, I am some sort of decisionist in politics and yes, politics is about invention in relation to that which is indiscernible in a situation, an event. This is the condition for newness, for novelty in the world. But such a decision is not divorced from deliberation or from the exercise of political judgment. Decisions without deliberation are blind, deliberations without decisions are empty. We need both decision and deliberation. I will add, however, that the emergence of a new political movement, such as we witnessed in the fall of 2011, is a kind of obscure decision, whose deliberative justification and rationalization follows afterward. There is always a
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moment of obscurity in the emergence of a political movement and the decision to take part or not. Rational transparency is the a posteriori of the a priori of a happening. A final word on Arendt. Obviously I have my differences with Santa Hanna della Scuola Nuova, as I like to think of her, which could well be summarized in terms of her differences with (or rather her withering and misplaced polemics against) Rousseau and what she mysteriously calls “the social question,” in On Revolution. Against Arendt, I still think that the general will or some notion of the generic, as that indiscernible event in a situation around which a people can organize, is essential. I am not so much of a plurality guy and I don’t know if I am convinced by plurality politically (ontologically it would be otherwise; perhaps being is plural or multiple. I have no problem with that) other than as an apologia for actually existing American liberalism. I am cautious about what I would see as the crypto-theological glorification of plurality based on the Athenian variant of the supreme fiction. Theologically, the space of appearance as the appearance of plurality is the gloria of liberal democracy. I’m not sure I buy it.
Acknowledgments This is the text of a response to Richard J. Bernstein’s paper given as part of a conference on Political Theology at the New School for Social Research in November 2011. In order to retain the freshness and spontaneity of the debate, I have not sought to disguise the text’s oral, improvised, and informal origin. The book of mine under discussion was The Faith of the Faithless. Experiments in Political Theology (London and New York: Verso, 2012), which was published some months after the debate and which no one at the conference, apart from Bernstein and one or two friends, had the chance to read in draft. This is the reason I allow myself to quote from the book at length. references
Badiou, Alain. 2005. “Politics: A Non-expressive Dialectics.” http://blog. urbanomic.com
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Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1997. Letters and Papers From Prison. New Greatly Enlarged Edition, edited by Eberhard Bethge. New York: Simon and Schuster. Critchley, Simon. 2012. The Faith of the Faithless. London: Verso. Gentile, Emilio. 2007. Politics as Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Guérin, Daniel. 2005. No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism. Edinburgh: AK Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1991. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, David. 1994. Political Essays. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. London: Penguin. ———. 1994. Marx’s Early Political Writings. Edited by J. O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1988. Marx-Engels Werke. Band 1. Berlin: Dietz. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, Wallace. 1989. Opus Posthumous. Edited by M. J. Bates. New York: Knopf. ———. 1967. The Palm at the End of the Mind. New York: Vintage. Wood, James. 2009. “God in the Quad.” New Yorker, August 31.
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