Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo sacer: soverign power and bare life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

This is an incredibly dense text, and I hesitate to even attempt to create an abstract for it. I continue only through the faith that it will help me return to the text in the future to further my understanding.

The book begins, as many do, on the cover. There is a picture of the architectural plans for the Auschwitz camp made so famous for brutally killing so many. This is what Agamben refers to as the camp. For him, the camp has replaced the city as the totalizing, “fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181).

Agamben’s text is delineated into three sections, each of which is separated by a movement that he calls “Threshold”. The first is an examination of Sovereignty, relying, at least in part on Schmitt’s definition of Sovereignty as being the one who decides on the exception. The second section is an exploration of the idea of Homo Sacer, the person who can not be sacrificed, but who can be killed. The third section highlights the role of the camp in the biopolitical matrix of the West.

He begins his first section by examining the difference between the two Greek meanings of the word “life”. The first is zoe, or life that is common to all living beings. The second is bios, which is a way of living, life tinted with custom. Our zoe has been replaced by a bios; it has been subsumed through the process of biopolitics.

“In particular, the development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective, without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the “docile bodies” that it needed” (3).

He goes on to say that the, “fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion” (8). This is clearly a response to the Schmittian notion of politics written in The Concept of the Political. This “categorical pair” can be seen in many places, which will be explored later in the book.

The “Paradox of Sovereignty” is then explored. This inconsistency takes place in the nature of sovereignty to be both inside and outside of the juridical order. Agamben then returns to a Schmitt concept and discusses the sovereign’s ability to decide upon the exception. The exception is discussed as being the ban that the sovereign can inflict upon subjects. This ban is, in Agamben’s analysis, evident in a relational form and it highlights the paradox of sovereignty: it can be stated that there is nothing outside of the law, while at the same time the sovereign can place things outside of that law.

This brings us to Home Sacer. This is the person who is the living dead of Agamben’s philosophy. These people have been relegated by the sovereign to be outside of the law, they are people who can not be sacrificed (i.e., they can’t have the privilege of being sacrificed to something greater), but who can be killed. These are the inmates of Guantanamo Bay. These are the undocumented workers who have no legal standing in a society.

Agamben also examines the idea of constituting power and constituted power and eventually relates them to the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves law. Constituted power is power that exists in a structure, i.e., the three branches of government. Constituting power is the potentiality, the power “of the people”. Constituted power is in the state, constituting power is outside of the state.

Homo Sacer and the Sovereign are juxtaposed as representing two sides of the same object: “At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially hominess sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (84).

The ban is examined in relation to the wolf (lupus, wargus). The ban is broken down etymologically to mean both “at the mercy of” and additionally “out of free will” (110). This duality is also juxtaposed with the idea of bare life, bare existence and how that is compared with ideas of human nature. This is where the grey area between being human and being animal appears.

Life is where the political takes place. This is the elevating of the Foucadian concept of biopolitics to its logical conclusion. The body becomes the template for the acting out of discipline by the sovereign. See: habeas corpus. The entire concept of life has been called into question. Agamben highlights suicide, euthanasia and issues of the beginning and ending of life. The idea of “neomorts” is touched on: those people who have, “the legal status of corpses but would maintain some of the characteristics of life for the sake of future transplants” (164). Eventually, we move into a discussion of eugenics and advances in genetic studies.

“If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually hominess sacri” (115).

There is much to this book that I was not able to cover here. It is excellent and deserves another reading.

Schmitt: Political Theology

Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology : four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (5).

The footnote to the above quote highlights the context in which “the exception” is decided upon. It is specifically economic and political situations in which the application of “extraordinary measures” takes place. The sovereign is one who is not constrained by legal structures or mores. This is no Kantian leader.

“...every legal order is based on a decision, and also the concept of the legal order, which is applied as something self-evident, contains within it the contrast of the two distinct elements of the juristic—norm and decision. Like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm” (10). The norm is what creates the milieu in which the law can be achieved, but it takes a decision to institute that law. Decisions are what move history.

In reference to Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution: “This provision corresponds to the development and practice of the liberal constitutional state, which attempts to repress the question of sovereignty by a division and mutual control of competences” (11).

“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (15).

Politics as Old Theology: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts” (36).

Carr: What is History?

Carr, E. H. (1961). What is history? London, New York, Macmillan; St. Martin's Press.

Carr writes about epistemology, about what we know and how we know what we know. He begins his book by exploring the relationship between the historian, fact and knowledge. “A fact is like a sack—it won’t stand up till you’ve put something in it” (9).

A historical fact is one that has been given a life of its own by society, academia and a combination of contingent and determinant forces that bring it to the forefront of all other facts. On pages 10-1, Carr takes great care to examine a fact that may or may not be turned into a historical fact. The fact was the murder of a gingerbread baker by a mob, and this fact stood simply as that, a fact of history, but not yet a historic fact, until Dr. Kitson Clark came around and cited it. This, in Carr’s estimation, does not mean that it is destined to be a historical fact, but rather that it now has more potential to be a historical fact than it had previous to this citation. Historic fact, however, does not make history, but it is rather made by the subjective judgment of individuals.

Carr then looks at the relationship between the individual and society and claims that it is impossible to know which came first, which was a driver of the creation of the other. He goes on to talk about how the individual and society constantly play off one another, and concludes by mentioning Hegel’s Hero.

The view which I would hope to discourage is the view which places great men outside history and sees them as imposing themselves on history in virtue of their greatness…” (67). Carr then goes on to lovingly quote Hegel’s definition of his Hero’s interaction with his society. In Hegel’s formulation, the Hero “can put into words the will of his age… he can actualize his age (68).

In other words, Carr’s view of history fits nicely with Hegel’s Hero: the “Great Men” of history do not materialize out of thin air, free from determinant conditions and then impose their will on everyone around them. Instead, the Hero interacting with and taking cues from society produces history.

He then moves on to examining history, science and morality. History, in Carr’s estimation, is clearly distinct from other forms of science, specifically the “hard” sciences. One reason for this qualitatively distinct character is the nature of the object to the subject, or the scientist to the subject. While Carr casts doubt on the pure objectivity of even the “hard” sciences, he is much more clear that history is clearly very subjective.

He then goes on to examine values in writing about history, and how the historian must stand at a distance from their subject and not condone or disapprove of personal decisions. The historian’s job is to write about what happened, not tell people why it was wrong or right.

“The serious historian is the one who recognizes the historically conditioned character of all values, not the one who claims for his own values an objectivity beyond history. The beliefs which we hold and the standards of judgment which we set up are part of history, and are as much subject to historical investigation as any other aspect of human behaviour. Few sciences today-least of all, the social sciences-would lay claim to total independence. But history has no fundamental dependence on something outside itself which would differentiate it from any other science” (109).

Carr then moves on to look at causation in history. He looks at, what he calls, two “red-herrings” in history: Determinism in History, and Chance in History.

Carr’s definition of determinism (121) focuses on understanding the causes of effects, and being able to point to an effect and clearly identify the cause as the only way that this fact could have come about. He takes time to parry with those who would focus on Marx and Hegel’s potentially deterministic aspect of their approach to understanding history. He paints these critics as being overly simplistic, and arguing that, because contingency does seem to exist, determinant action can not. He seems to conclude this argument by claiming that, “the fact is that all human actions are both free and determined,” and thus, understanding the causes requires a nuanced approach (124).

He then goes on to look at the causes of the death of an individual. This person, Robinson, went out for cigarettes and was hit by a car. Carr wonders what the real cause of the death was.

Rational causes are causes that can be understood and applied for a purpose, or, read, for a value judgment. If we thought that we could learn something by the fact that Robinson was a smoker and he died going out to buy cigarettes, that would be a rational cause. Since it falls to the realm of chance, we say that it is accidental. Carr is not saying that rational causes are not bound up with value judgments, but simply that our value judgments make some causes rational, and some accidental.

Carr then moves on to look at history as progress. “History is progress through the transmission of acquired skills from one generation to another” (151). Progress does not have a finite beginning or end. Thirdly, progress does not progress linearly.

Then, there is the problemetization of objectivity: in the writing of history, it is akin to claiming that you have more successfully written a history that mirrors the accepted values of the society in which you live. Carr then moves onto the claim that brings the book together: one must understand the past, present and future to understand history. “History acquires meaning and objectivity only when it establishes a coherent relation between past and future” (173).

Kant: The Metaphysics of Morals

Kant, I. and H. S. Reiss (1991). Kant : political writings. Cambridge [England] ; New York, Cambridge University Press.

Kant begins by exploring what constitutes a “Right”. It firstly applies to the relation between one person and another. Secondly, it concerns the will of both people in this relationship. Thirdly, the end that each will intends to achieve is explored. “Every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual’s will to co-exist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is right” (133). The Universal Law of Right: “let your external actions be such that the free application of your will can co-exist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law” (133).

This Right involves and legitimizes the use of coercion. Anyone who attempts to subvert this freedom can be coerced into conforming with the freedom. The governing authority is there to make sure that people conform to the freedom in question.

The State then fulfills an important role as the guarantor of the freedom that everyone has come to enjoy, and this involves the use of force and coercion to make sure that everyone remains free. “Experience teaches us the maxim that human beings act in a violent and malevolent manner, and that they tend to fight among themselves until an external coercive legislation supervenes” (137). This is because men will act independently, without a duty to anyone but themselves.

Citizens have three basic rights in this construction of the state and the individual: firstly, they have the freedom to obey only the laws of their own state and no other; secondly, they have civil equality in recognizing no one as being superior to themselves; and thirdly, they have civil independence to owe their freedom to no one other than everyone in the commonwealth. People who have a stake in the system should be given the right to vote and influence this commonwealth. Those who are not capable of such an important intervention should not be given this right (apprentices, servants, minors, women, etc.)

“This dependence upon the will of others and consequent inequality does not, however, in any way conflict with the freedom and equality of all men as human beings who together constitute a people. On the contrary, it is only by accepting these conditions that such a people can become a state and enter into a civil constitution…For from the fact that as passive members of the state, they can demand to be treated by all others in accordance with laws of natural freedom and equality, it does not follow that they also have a right to influence or organize the state itself as active members, or to cooperate in introducing particular laws. Instead, it only means that the positive laws to which the voters agree, of whatever sort they may be, must not be at variance with the natural laws of freedom and with the corresponding equality of all members of the people whereby they are allowed to work their way up from their passive condition to an active one” (140).

People in the State of Nature have an unbridled freedom, a freedom to do and act in any way that they see fit. However, Kant believes that this freedom is not accompanied with duty, and thus that people in nature only act in their self interest. He has a similar view to State of Nature issues as does Hobbes. Kant believes that people, “give up their external freedom in order to receive it back at once as members of a commonwealth” (140). The State of Nature freedom is basically swapped for a freedom in a commonwealth, which is an, “entire and unfinished freedom” (140).

The ruler is the sovereign, and that person is the director of the government. However, while they make the ultimate decision, they are still bound by the law. This leader can not themselves pass judgement, they are not a tyrant, but they can appoint judges to do this for them.

“There can be no rightful resistance on the part of the people to the legislative head of state” (144). “The reason why it is the duty of the people to tolerate even what is apparently the most intolerable misuse of supreme power is that it is impossible ever to conceive of their resistance to the supreme legislation as being anything other than unlawful and liable to nullify the entire legal constitution. For before such resistance could be authorized, there would have to be a public law which permitted the people to offer resistance.” (144-5) The people may, however, refuse to participate in the political process and thus negatively resist.

Then, Kant moves on to talk about an International Right and eventually a Cosmopolitan Right. This will not be looked at in this summary, though it will be noted that it does represent an interesting example of how history moves from a pre-Hegelian perspective: There are ruptures in order (in almost a post-structural sense), and this brings about new orders, or, in Kant’s terms, Rights.

Kant: The Contest of Faculties

Kant, I. and H. S. Reiss (1991). Kant : political writings. Cambridge [England] ; New York, Cambridge University Press.

Kant begins by making a distinction between the higher faculties, i.e. Theology, Law and Medicine with the lower faculties, i.e. Philosophy.

He then goes on to make one of his most important interventions: bridging the rationalist and the empiricist divide that had haunted philosophical debates for years (think Hume/Descarte). He does this by asking if the human race is continually improving and beginning to think about where he should go about finding such information. He claims that it is not possible to have simple, a priori history, for that would require a profit (177)

Kant then goes on to posit that there are three possibilities for the development of society: that we are regressing, progressing or standing still. He concludes that we are not regressing, that we are not progressing, and that if we are standing still, it would be a farce.

He claims that the problem of progress can not be fully explained through experience, but that we do have to start from the empirical position. Kant begins to search for an event that would show the emancipation of the human, the individual. “We are here concerned only with the attitude of the onlookers as it reveals itself in public while the drama of great political changes is taking place: for they openly express universal yet disinterested sympathy for one set of protagonists against their adversaries, even at the risk that their partiality could be of great disadvantage to themselves. Their reactions (because of its universality) proves that mankind as a whole shares a certain character in common, and it also proves (because of its disinterestedness) that man has a moral character, or at least the makings of one” (182).

This morality is comprised of two distinct elements: the, “right of every people to give itself a civil constitution of the kind that it sees fit, without interference from other powers,” and, “once it is accepted that the only intrinsically rightful and morally good constitution which a people can have is by its very nature disposed to avoid wars of aggression…there is the aim, which is also a duty, of submitting to those conditio0ns by which war, the source of all evils and moral corruption, can be prevented” (182).

A legal framework that is derived from a constitution is what shall protect humans, and this will produce, “an increasing number of actions governed by duty” (187). How can this be achieved? By working from the top down: education is the key to making people more dutiful, and the authority of the state can provide this.

Badiou: Ethics

Badiou, Alain. (2001). Ethics : an essay on the understanding of evil. London ; New York: Verso.

Ethics are everywhere in modern society. Nearly every profession has an ethic that their professionals must uphold. Institutions, be them small county legislative boards or international and monstrous, like the IMF, have codes of conduct. “With respect to today’s socially inflated recourse to ethics, the purpose of this essay is twofold:”

“-To begin with, I will examine the precise nature of this phenomenon, which is the major ‘philosophical’ tendency of the day, as much in public opinion as for official institutions. I will try to establish that in reality it amounts to a genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such.

-I will then argue against this meaning of the term ‘ethics’, and propose a very different one. Rather than link the word to abstract categories (Man or Human, Right or Law, the Other…), it should be referred back to particular situations. Rather than reduce it to an aspect of pity for victims, it should become the enduring maxim of singular processes. Rather than make of it merely the province of conservatism with a good conscience, it should concern the destiny of truths, in the plural (3)”

The structure of the book proceeds from the subject (Does Man Exist?) to the object (Does the Other Exist?). It then explains how our current discourse of ethics edges towards nihilism (Ethics as a Figure of Nihilism). The final two chapters represent an argument for a different construction of ethics (The Ethic of Truths) and the sorting out of one of the problems with this argument (The Problem of Evil).

In the section that deals with the subject, Badiou begins by examining three thinkers who rejected the universal in favor of the particular. Foucault, Althusser and Lacan are all highlighted as people who looked towards the construction of language, towards processes, and contingency for their clues as to the formulation of theory. Badiou is clear that these thinkers are not indifferent to suffering, as some would claim because of their lack of focus on objectivity. No, “the truth is exactly the opposite: all were—each in his own way, and far more than those who uphold the cause of ‘ethics’ and ‘human rights’ today—the attentive and courageous militants of a cause” (6).

The current, modern construction of ethical is then examined. It is understood to be a priori, negative determinations of evil. He then highlights some of the themes of this project of ethics: a general human subject is posited, politics is subordinate to ethics, Evil is that from which Good is derived and that ‘Human Rights’ are rights to non-Evil (9).

This ethic has become unethical. It is characterized by universal self-interest, a lack of (truly) emancipatory politics and competition. It calls into question what man is, or whether s/he exists. This ethical project identifies people as victims. It reduces man to the level of an animal. It identifies man as the source of evil. It prevents itself from thinking singularly through its negative determination of Evil.

This is not the way to be faithful to ethics or to a situation. To be faithful means, “to treat it right to the limit of possibility. Or, if you prefer: to draw from this situation, to the greatest possible extent, the affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of the situation” (15).

Badiou rejects this negative and victimizing view of humanity. However, he ends the section with a play-critique from an ethicist: the ethic doesn’t begin with the subject, it begins with the other.

Does the Other Exist?

Badiou begins by looking at Lévinas’ view of the other and determines that a strictly Western, Greek origin of the term will not suffice and that rather a Jewish origin will be more helpful. “The Law, indeed, does not tell me what is, but what is imposed by the existence of others” (19).

This “other”, however, should not be seen as a simple “not-self”, but rather a radical Absolute Other, or, according to Badiou, the ethical name for God. “This means that in order to be intelligible, ethics requires that the Other be in some sense carried by a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite experience” (22). The ethical obligation stems from this radical alterity which is not bound by space and time, i.e. God.

But, since God does not exist (25), what are we left with? We are left with an infinite alterity which is what is there. The differences that we experience between distinct groups of people exist, but that is not what brings together. What brings together is truth, or rather, what deposes difference: in my terms, common experience.

“The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural—or, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world” (28).

Ethics as a Figure of Nihilism

“Ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death” (35). Badiou then proceeds into the realm of bio-ethics, biopolitics, etc.

“Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that our societies are without a figure that can be represented as universal, ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition for the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our “Western’ position—the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life—or again, that dooms what is to the ‘Western’ mastery of death” (38).

The Ethic of Truths

“If there is no ethics ‘in general’, that is because there is no abstract Subject, who would adopt it as his shield. There is only a particular kind of animal, convoked by certain circumstances to become a subject—or rather, to enter into the composing of a subject” (40). Ethics is a process whereby the subject needs something to have happened, the subject needs an event that goes beyond the universal and identifies the subject in the particular. The subject has to be honest with the event, and respond faithfully to it. “I shall call ‘truth’ (a truth) the real process of a fidelity to an event: that which this fidelity produces in the situation” (42).

The Problem of Evil

Badiou has already explained how an a priori justification of the concept of Evil is problematic. He then goes on to explain where we must begin to examine the existence of Evil. “If Evil exists, we must conceive it from the starting point of the Good. Without consideration of the Good, and thus of truths, there remains only the cruel innocence of life, which is beneath Good and beneath Evil” (60).

He goes on to claim that, of course there is Evil (look at the Nazi’s), but that the Evil only exists because of truths, and that these truths, though they create Evil, do their best to wipe it out. The process works like this: there is an event, a realization, cognitive disequilibrium, which brings about the seed of truth. Then, there is fidelity and exploration of this event. Finally, there is the truth that is created through a process, that is always in a state of yet-to-be. This allows for the three terrors of Badiou: terror (through simulacrum of truth), betrayal (of fidelity), and disaster (the identification of a truth with total power).

Conclusion

“This maxim [an acceptable concept of ethics] proclaims, in its general version, ‘Keep going!’ Continue to be this ‘someone’, a human animal among others, which nevertheless finds itself seized and displaced by the eventual process of a truth. Continue to be the active part of that subject of a truth that you have happened to become” (90-1).

Also:

“The ethics combines, then, under the imperative to ‘Keep going!’, resources of discernment (do not fall for simulacra), of courage (do not give up), and of moderation (do not get carried away to the extremes of Totality)” (91).

Fun Quote:

“Our century has been a graveyard of positivist ideas and progress” (84)

Schmitt: The Concept of the Political

Schmitt, Carl, & Schmitt, Carl. (2007). The concept of the political (Expanded ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

For Schmitt, the political is threatened by plurality and liberalism, and threatens to undermine the state and create a world whereby “humanitarian” can be used to justify the heinous. The political is necessary for us to understand where divisions are drawn; it is a necessary classification to clear the air of any foggy relativism brought about by the “perhaps” of liberalism.

Schmitt begins by looking at a number of different concepts that have clear, binary categories into which they can be divided. Economic can be divided into profit/loss. Ascetics can be divided into beautiful/ugly. Religious can be divided into good/bad. For Schmitt, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (26).

Going on,

“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible” (27)

Schmitt has a problem with liberalism:

“Liberalism is one of its typical dilemmas…of intellect and economics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary… The concern here is neither with abstractions nor with normative ideals, but with inherent reality and the real possibility of such a (friend/enemy) distinction” (28).

Liberals do not understand or embrace the friend/enemy distinction, and this is problematic. Liberals would rather engage in economic competition with what should be their enemies. However, when it comes down to the task of making war, a real possibility in the affairs of states, the liberal will be baffled because they do not know who their enemies are. For the liberal, they have only amenable competitors. “War is the external negation of an enemy” (33).

The political friend/enemy distinction makes it clear where one’s loyalties lie:

“Their pluralism consists in denying the sovereignty of the political entity by stressing time and again that the individual lives in numerous different social entities and associations. He is a member of a religious institution, nation, labor union, family, sports club, and many other associations. These control him in differing degrees from case to case, and impose on him a cluster of obligations in such a way that no one of these associations can be said to be decisive and sovereign” (40-1).

The concept of Humanity is problematic for Schmitt. Firstly, “Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet” (54): it is problematic because it does not allow for the friend/enemy distinction. Schmitt goes on:

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in the ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat” (54).

Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. (1956). The birth of tragedy and The genealogy of morals ([1st ed.). Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday.


The Genealogy of Morals is broken down into four sections: 1.) Preface; 2.) “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad”; 3.) “Guilt,” “Bad Consciousness,” and Related Matters; and 4.) What do Ascetic Ideals Mean?

He begins the preface by deriding those who continuously are looking for more and more knowledge to solve their problems because they do not spend time to examine themselves. “Our treasure lies in the beehives of our knowledge” (149). He then goes on to snidely make the claim, “As for the rest of life—so=-called “experience—who among us is serious enough for that? Or has time enough?” (149).

This book is a snide, rude and polemical attack (both polemic and attack are different translations for its subtitle) that attempts to use a distinct methodology to write history. As opposed to other authors who focus on the fact of history, be it material or ideational, this account focuses on cultural symbols as the starting ground for building and telling a historical story. Etymology plays an important role in explaining concepts. Symbols, mostly religious in nature, help Nietzsche tell his story about the trajectory that morality has taken throughout history.

In the first essay, Nietzsche examines the roots of good/bad and good/evil. He uses etymology to derive the base of good as being noble and the base of bad as being common, plebian. Good is synonymous with activity, health, strength, etc. Bad is a synonymous with the antonyms of the terms in the previous sentence.

Nietzsche also uses the priestly class as a tool for the development of his history. The priestly class derived from the noble class and stood above the slave class. However, because of their natural constraints, they were never able to engage in the “good” that the noble class so enjoyed. They were impotent in battle, constrained by moral law, and thus lashed out against the nobility.

He writes that the Jews created the slave revolt in morality, which is a revolt that begins by saying, “no” to the other, the one who stands in opposition. All of the action on the part of the slave is reactionary; they require an object to stand against themselves (171).

The weak are weak, but they claim superiority because they do not act as vengefully as the strong. However, the strong act as they do because they must, just like the bird of prey attacks, kills and eats the lamb. The bird of prey is not castigated because it is naturally inclined to eat lamb, no, it is understood that this is a natural expression of the circle of life.

In the second essay, Nietzsche addresses guilt and bad consciousness. He claims that humans are distinct from other animals in that they are able to make promises to one another. This is the beginnings of a system of credit and debt. Those who owe others and who can not pay are punished.

Additionally, because we have an understanding of those who came before us, our ancestors, we feel like we owe them for our existence, though it is impossible to pay them for this. This is one reason that we construct a god that we can worship and to whom we can offer gifts. Gods were also invented so that the spectacle of punishment did not go unobserved. It’s all much more complicated than that, but that’s all I’ll say for now.

In the third essay, Nietzsche explains that it is human nature to avoid a void and to search move towards a goal. Will eventually becomes to be represented by the ascetic ideal, which is represented by poverty, humility and chastity. The Ascetic ideal is the way forward, the remaining essence left over from the classical period for the philosopher.

The book, as stated earlier, is written as a polemic, or an attack and does provoke the reader in many places. Nietzsche looks as if he embraces cruelty, misogyny, anti-Semitic thought, war, etc. However, it may be more helpful to read him as providing a descriptive reading of history using a genealogical methodology, with hyperbole thrown in for show. If he is read from this perspective, he provides an account of history that is critical of modernity and liberalism in the sense that they attempt to obscure realities of the interaction of beings operating within nature. They search for knowledge and have forgotten about experience.

Polanyi: The Great Transformation

Polanyi, Karl. (2001). The great transformation : the political and economic origins of our time (2nd Beacon Paperback ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

“Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way” (3-4).

Polanyi begins by examining the 100 years peace in Western Europe from 1815-1914. He makes a clear point that this peace is largely based on economic organization, and that the transformation and commodification of land, labor and money/capital created a situation where society had to negatively respond to market forces. This societal response against the market, referred to as the double-movement by Polanyi (defined on 79, 136), caused for or allowed the rise of fascism in Europe and the horrors of WWII (Polanyi was writing just after WWII).

The cause of the double movement can be traced to the “Satanic mills” which ground men into masses (35). These mills, or industrialization and the commodification of land, labor and money, i.e., the self-regulating market, were created as a project to improve the aggregate material welfare of Britain, though Polanyi makes the clear case that this was not improvement for all (42).

He traces the origins of markets (and here we must make clear that he is talking about self-regulating markets working under the conditions of the commodification of land, labor and capital), and does not agree with Smith that they were organically created by the self-interest of members of a community, but by long-distance trade (61) and then further facilitated by the intervention of the state (66). This involved an explicit effort to embed society into the logic of the market, as opposed to the market being embedded in society.

This was initially attempted without the creation of a large labor class, and the Poor-laws and Speenhamland laws were enacted to protect those who had no land after the commons were enclosed. “In 1834 industrial capitalism was ready to be started, and Poor Law Reform was ushered in. The Speenhamland Law which had protected rural England, and thereby the laboring population in general, against the full force of the market mechanism was eating into the marrow of society” (106).

This was the creation of a labor class, and the first official commodification of labor in Britain. Polanyi goes on to describe the commodification of land and capital, and subsequent double-movements created by the self-regulating market interacting with society.

Polanyi concludes with a chapter entitles “Freedom in a Complex Society”. Here, he argues that a system of economics should not be based on self-interest (257). Also, that market systems should no longer be self-regulating, and that land, labor and capital should not be commodities but should be regulated (he talks about regulation earlier in the book and how markets and regulation were created in tandem). He wonders why markets do not seem to promote freedom, as they claim. He separates institutional freedom from moral/religious freedom.

Institutions must regulate the market; there must be bureaucracy. “No mere declaration of rights can suffice: institutions are required to make the rights effective” (264). Additionally, Polanyi acknowledges that this will lead to greater inefficiencies, but, in one of his more striking lines, claims that, “An industrial society can afford to be free” (264).

He concludes his final chapter by examining his other form of freedom: religious/moral. He claims that there are three truths about Western man: knowledge of death, knowledge of freedom and knowledge of society. First, man knew death and resigned himself to this. Then, man knew freedom through Christ and resigned himself to this. Now, man must know freedom through society and resign himself to this.

Great lines from the book include:

“No less a thinker than Adam Smith suggested that the division of labor in a society was dependent upon the existence of markets, or, as he put it, upon man’s ‘propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another.’ This phrase was later to yield the concept of the Economic Man. In retrospect, it can be said that no misreading of the past ever proved more prophetic of the future” (45).

and

“While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate State action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not” (147).

Hegel: Reason in History

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1953). Reason in history, a general introduction to the philosophy of history. New York,: Liberal Arts Press.

Reason in History is a compilation of notes taken by some of Hegels students. It is an attempt to understand Hegel’s approach and method through his teaching, filtered by students, as opposed to through his other works, like Phenomenology of Spirit. That being said, it is occasionally a difficult read, as the notes from different students are roughly spliced together.

Firstly, the Robert Hartman introduction is very thorough, dense and may want to be approached after you read Hegel’s text. Hartman explains the dialectic process of Hegel, how the thesis leads to the antithesis, how that then leads to a synthesis, or something new, and then how that synthesis negates something in itself and thus becomes the new thesis.

The key for Hegel’s thought is that sense certainly leads to consciousness, and then that this consciousness leads to an acknowledgement of the other, and thus a negation of the self. This then leads to the interpretation and acknowledgement of the is and the ought, which causes the tension which eventually leads to a synthesis. This is all much more thoroughly fleshed out in Phenomenology of Spirit.

Hegel begins by identifying three types of writing history, and eventually makes a case for him using the Philosophical History as the method for his writings. The first two types of writing history are the Original History and the Reflective History.

Original History was practiced by historians who, “transferred what was externally present into the realm of mental representation and thus translated the external appearances into inner conception—much as does the poet, who transforms perceptual material into mental images” (3). These historians, “transform the events, actions and situations present to them into a work of representative thought” (4).

Reflective History is broken down into four parts: 1.) Universal History: present the totality of a country’s history; 2.) Pragmatic History: make this historic narrative practically important; 3.) Critical History: evaluation of historic narratives and examination of their trustworthiness; and 4.) Fragmentary History: refer to the whole of a people’s history.

This brings us to the Philosophical History method: the thoughtful contemplation of history (10).

He then moves on to describe the structure of the dialectical process of history and he sets history in motion. Firstly, the thesis is the Idea, the a priori estimations that are made sans empirical evidence. This is the thesis, the ought, the noumenal. The Idea, operating through Thought, produces Reason, or, in Hegel’s words, “Reason is Thought determining itself in absolute freedom” (15). Then there is the State, or Nature, resting squarely on an empirical foundation, on a posteriori adjudications. These two stand in contrast to one another, and they bring about the synthesis of Spirit, which is the, “substance of history” (20).

“World history in general is the development of Spirit in Time, just as nature is the development of the Idea in Space” (87). Understanding this is vital to understanding Hegel more generally. The Idea develops in Space, which is actually what we would think about as space/time. It is a specific development at a specific time and space. However, this gets translated and begins to move through history when the Spirit develops in Time. However, according to Hartman (xxii), this Time is Time of Consciousness, or a universal Time that operates above and beyond our specific Space/Time.

Thus the Spirit emerges from the synthesis of Idea interacting with Nature, what is interacting with what ought. Then Spirit, like the Phoenix, arises from its own ashes refreshed and renewed and becomes the Thesis. Spirit also contains within it all of its previous iterations, and thus learns from the past and progresses into the future towards greater absolute freedom.

Freud: Civilization and its Discontents

Freud, Sigmund, & Strachey, James. (2005). Civilization and its discontents. New York: Norton.

As Louis Menand points out in the introduction to this well known work, Freud did not believe in the perfectibility of man (14). Freud takes a step slightly outside of his realm of psychology and attempts to explain how civilization must always be a mitigating factor on human instincts generally, and human aggression more specifically. This conclusion about human nature in relation to society allows Freud to speak very negatively about communism.

Freud begins his exploration by talking about an “oceanic” feeling that is common to all people, and that many tend to relate to a belief in God. This feeling is related to the feeling of being in love, a point where the boundary between the ego and the object seems to fade away. He then moves on to discuss the separation of the ego and the object, or the outside, which happens in infancy. “In this way [the separation of ego and object] one makes the first step towards the introduction of the reality principle which is to dominate future development” (10).

Freud then goes on to discuss the pleasure principle. “The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed we cannot—give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other” (63). He also explains how religion acts as a constraint on human instinct and aggression, a helpful transition for explaining how the state does the same.

Civilization is then defined by Freud: “…describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (73). Humans became civilized through processes that embraced order, cleanliness and beauty. The individual must become subsumed to society, the individual is condemned as “brute force” and the community is exalted as “right” (81).

Freud also picks apart the Biblical claim that one should “love your neighbor as yourself” by positing that, “…the element of truth behind all this…is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (103-4).

Communism is critiqued because it attempts to destroy the regime of private property, and thus bring about a society where humans can interact free from avarice. However, Freud claims that, “…I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion” (106). And that, “Aggressiveness was not created by property” (106). There is still the tension that arises from sex, as well as other psychological tensions that do not arise from relations based on private property. Freud quips that, “One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois” (108).

The meaning of the evolution of civilization is thus: “It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species” (119). Civilization exists to curtail the instincts of man, and it does this, “by weakening and disarming [him] and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city” (121).

Freud ends by positing this question: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (154).

The text is generally sexist, and grand statements are consistently proponed. Additionally, the critique of Communism looks like a straw-man argument and doesn’t deal with any of the substantive critiques of industrial society presented by Marx (among others).

Baudrillard: The Spirit of Terrorism

Baudrillard, Jean, & Baudrillard, Jean. (2003). The spirit of terrorism ; and, Other essays (New ed.). London ; New York: Verso.

This is a short book, a glorified pamphlet, if you will, of four essays: The Spirit of Terrorism, Requiem for the Twin Towers, Hypotheses on Terrorism and The Violence of the Global. I will look briefly at what he says, will take part of my analysis from a professor of mine (who probably wouldn’t want to be named) and then make a brief conclusion.

Baudrillard looks at 9/11 as an event; as something that is meaningless and shatters the globalizing, totalizing violence of our current international system. 9/11 partially becomes an event because it does rupture the homogenizing violence of globalization.

“We may dismiss from the outset the hypothesis that September 11 constituted merely an accident or incident on the path to irreversible globalization. An ultimately despairing hypothesis, since something very extraordinary occurred there, and to deny it is to admit that henceforth nothing can even constitute an event, that we are doomed to play out the flawless logic of global power capable of absorbing any resistance, any antagonism, and even strengthening itself by so doing—the terrorist act merely hastening the planetary ascendancy of a single power and a single way of thinking” (51).

It is also an event because it invokes the spirit of terrorism. The “Spirit of Terrorism” is “a death which is symbolic and sacrificial—that is to say, the absolute, irrevocable event” (17). The terrorist, “have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power. They have even—and this is the height of cunning—used the banality of American every day life as cover and camouflage” (19).

He then looks at how this event ruptured our construction of images. “The role of images is highly ambiguous. For, at the same time as they exalt the event, they also take it hostage” (27). The image was ruptured, partially because the material was brought back to the image. The video of people jumping from buildings, the smoke billowing down the streets channeled by buildings, these made a Manhattan Horror Film real.

Since the modern image was ruptured and brought to face reality, the question of how to respond to such an event becomes problematic. How can you have a meaningful response when the very idea of meaning is problematized? For Baudrillard, it seems as if 9/11 brought about a sense of relief that the singular event could still rupture the ever-growing influence of hegemonic cultural ideals.

Another interesting note is a quote that allows Baudrillard to be snarlingly reviewed by the NY Times. The review says this (on the back of the book):

“First prize for cerebral coldbloodedness goes to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard… It takes a rare, demonic genius to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought about by boring modern architecture.”

The quote that they are referring to is this:

“The violence of globalization also involves architecture, and hence the violent protest against it also involves the destruction of that architecture. In terms of collective drama, we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them—the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel” (41)

No one would discount the coldbloodedness of this statement, though the NY Times may have taken it out of context. Baudrillard is pointing to the violence of the global, specifically through looking at how that violence can be portrayed in architecture. He certainly does not feel like the WTC was destroyed, in fact, he believes that, since it has moved from material space to the ideation space, it has transformed. “By the grace of terrorism, the World Trace Center has become the world’s most beautiful building—the eighth wonder of the world!” (48).