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Introduction
POLITICS OUT OF HISTORY
What, other than anarchy or free fall, is harbored by the
destabilization of constitutive cultural or political narratives? When
fundamental premises of an order begin to erode, or simply begin to be
exposed as fundamental premises, what reactive political formations
emerge--and what anxieties, tensions, or binds do they carry? These
studies examine political theoretical practices in an era of profound
political disorientation. They are concerned with how we navigate
within the tattered narratives of modernity, and especially of
liberalism, in our time. Working from the presumption that certain
crucial collective stories in modernity have been disturbed or
undermined in recent decades, they presume as well that such stories
remain those by which we live, even in their broken and
less-than-legitimate-or-legitimating form.
I do not argue
that the constitutive narratives of modernity are behind us, nor that
they have been superseded by other narratives. Rather, in casting
certain critical features of modern regimes as troubled yet persistent,
I suggest that their troubled condition has significant political
implications for contemporary practices of political justice. For
example, while many have lost confidence in a historiography bound to a
notion of progress or to any other purpose, we have coined no political
substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from
and where we are going. Similarly, while both sovereignty and right
have suffered severe erosions of their naturalistic epistemological and
ontological bases in modernity, we have not replaced them as sources of
political agency and sites of justice claims. Personal conviction and
political truth have lost their moorings in firm and level
epistemological ground, but we have not jettisoned them as sources of
political motivation or as sites of collective fealty. So we have
ceased to believe in many of the constitutive premises undergirding
modern personhood, statehood, and constitutions, yet we continue to
operate politically as if these premises still held, and as if the
political-cultural narratives based on them were intact. Our attachment
to these fundamental modernist precepts--progress, right, sovereignty,
free will, moral truth, reason--would seem to resemble the
epistemological structure of the fetish as Freud described it: "I know,
but still . . ."1 What happens when the beliefs that bind a
political order become fetishes?
From each of the narratives, considered more fully below,
that have
grown unstable in our time, certain key political signifiers emerge
that provide the terms through which the chapters of this book are
organized: morality (as the basis for political values and judgments),
desire (as potentially emancipatory in its aim), power (as logical in
its organization and mechanics), conviction (as the basis for knowledge
and political action), and progress (as the basis for political
futurity). My purpose with these terms is not simply to counsel their
rejection or replacement; rather the aim is to develop a critical
understanding of their binding function in a certain political and
epistemological story, of how this function has been disrupted as the
story itself begins to stutter and fragment, and of what kinds of
troubling political formation such a disruption provokes.
However, this undertaking is not only retrospective and
critical: these
studies also consider what political and intellectual possibilities
might be generated from our current predicament. When a disintegrating
political or cultural narrative seems irreplaceable, panicked and
reactionary clutching is inevitable; when this perceived
irreplaceability refers to a narrative or formation actually lost,
melancholy sets in. So these analyses seek to attenuate reactionary and
melancholic responses by considering possible alternatives to what has
been destabilized: I ask how we might conceive and chart power in terms
other than logic, develop historical political consciousness in terms
other than progress, articulate our political investments without
notions of teleology and naturalized desire, and affirm political
judgment in terms that depart from moralism and conviction.2 These
speculations
do not, of course, result in comprehensive or stable
substitutes for their predecessors. Rather, they mark partial and
provisional orientations for a different inhabitation of the political
world; they limn a different genre of political consciousness and
political purpose. And their wellspring is not simply redress of
incoherence; rather, they issue from an appreciation of the need for
reprieve from a low-lying despair in late modern life, a despair about
the very capacity to grasp our condition and craft our future.
Two seemingly opposite effects attend the emancipation of
history (and
the present) from a progressive narrative and the dispossession of
political principles and truths from solid epistemological and
ontological grounds. On the one hand, there is certain to be a wash of
insecurity, anxiety, and hopelessness across a political landscape
formerly kept dry by the floodgates of foundationalism and metaphysics.
On the other hand, out of the breakup of this seamless historiography
and ground of settled principles, new political and epistemological
possibilities emerge. As the past becomes less easily reduced to a
single set of meanings and effects, as the present is forced to orient
itself amid so much history and so many histories,
history itself emerges as both weightier and less deterministic than
ever before. Thus, even as the future may now appear more uncertain,
less predictable, and perhaps even less promising than one figured by
the terms of modernism, these same features suggest in the present a
porousness and uncharted potential that can lead to futures outside the
lines of modernist presumptions. This book lives in those
paradoxes--simultaneously taking the measure of our anxieties about
what we have lost and kindling possibility from what those losses may
release us to imagine.
The stories constitutive of modernity
are many, complex, and vary significantly by time and place; those that
more narrowly undergird the doctrines and practices of liberalism are
no tidier. But a few stories crucial to both, generating both the
building blocks of the political and its temporality, may be capturable
in a few broad brush strokes.
Teleological and Progressive History.
The conviction that history has reason, purpose, and direction is
fundamental to modernity. This belief has a temporal dimension:
modernity itself is imagined to have emerged from a more primitive,
religious, caste- and kin-bound, inegalitarian, unemancipated, bloody,
unenlightened, and stateless time. And it has a corresponding
geographic and demographic dimension: Europe is presumed to be at the
heart of this emergence, with other parts of the globe (to various
degrees) lagging behind. Modernity is incoherent without both of these
dimensions, as is liberalism, the signal political formation that
operationalizes each dimension as a foundational political truth.
But modernity is not only premised on the notion of
emergence from darker times and places, it is also structured within
by
a notion of continual progress. A fundamental Enlightenment precept,
the thesis that humanity is making steady, if uneven and ambivalent,
progress toward greater freedom, equality, prosperity, rationality, or
peace emerged in a variety of explicit formulations in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. For Hegel, the world was growing ever more
rational; for Kant, more peaceful; for Paine, more true to principles
of natural right; for Tocqueville, more egalitarian; for Mill, more
free and reasonable; and for Marx, perhaps, all of the above.3 Today,
however,
it is a rare thinker, political leader, or ordinary citizen
who straightforwardly invokes the premise of progress. In the
Euro-Atlantic world, intellectuals of both Right and Left proclaim the
"end of history" or an era of "posthistoire." And even as much
contemporary political rhetoric in America crows over the benefits of
technological advances and the country's growing wealth, it also refers
repeatedly to ground lost--economically, morally, and socially--and
harks back to a Golden Age in the past. "Family values" talk from all
parties conjures an imagined past of happy, moral, and intact families,
free from the corruptions of popular culture, libidinal selfishness,
illegitimate children, and working mothers. Similarly, welfare state
liberals treat growing disparities of wealth in America, and the
retreat from half a century's commitments to state amelioration of
poverty, as the abandonment of principles once taken as untouchable and
as the very signature of progress. Even the iconoclastic left critic
Gore Vidal locates the "golden age" of America in the years 1945 to
1950 (approximately the same period invoked by Bob Dole as the last
time that America was wrapped in rich moral fabric).4 In
that slim postwar half decade, Vidal argues, intellectual life
expanded, the arts flourished, the economy boomed, and the promise of
an accomplished and prosperous polity seemed realized. Then came the
Korean War, Harry Truman's national security state and its accompanying
debt, McCarthyism, and the general unraveling of American promise, an
unraveling whose trajectory still traces the course of our lives today.5
What makes Vidal's mytho-historical account signal for
our time is the
figuring of corruption and decline of a once-great polity. That theme,
of course, is not new: it framed Thucydides' telling of the
Peloponnesian Wars, and Machiavelli's account of the demise of ancient
Rome and decline of quattrocento republican Florence. But this
pre-modern narrative of history's movement, theorized explicitly as
cyclical by Aristotle and Vico, gave way in modernity to a forthrightly
progressive story, one promising steady improvement in
the human
condition. Modernity itself is premised on the imagined breaking of
medieval fetters on everything from individual happiness to knowledge
to freedom to national wealth. For the most part, only modernity's
critics (who are also critics of liberalism)--Burke, Rousseau,
Nietzsche--have questioned or challenged its forward movement. That
intellectuals and politicians are now gazing backward to glimpse better
times suggests an important destabilization of the presumption of
progress and of the claims and hopes that issue from such a
presumption.
It is not only liberal democracies that appear
to have lost the thread of progress in history. In postcommunist
states, the "triumph of liberalism" heralded by Western pundits in 1989
was short-lived; within eighteen months, intense civil and
constitutional conflicts revealed that neither liberalism nor triumph
appropriately
named what was unfolding, that there could be no simple resumption of a
modernizing narrative temporarily interrupted by fascism, post-World
War II Balkanization, and forty-three years of state communism. This
collapse of expectations resulted not only from the wars in the former
Yugoslavia and in Chechnya, not only from the rise of racism, ethnic
conflict, and anti-Semitism across Europe in the wake of 1989. It
resulted as well from the obvious impossibility of postcommunist
states' participating in the wealth enjoyed by First World nations,
from intensely corrupt political formations such as the Mafeeya in
Russia, from the devastating consequences for the majority of the
population (and especially women) of dismantling the welfare state
institutions and employment guarantees of the communist period, and
from the limits of "liberalization" or "democratization" in redressing
any of these developments.
Like its counterparts felt by
politicians and the public at large, contemporary academic doubt about
the modernist narrative of progress issues from a variety of points on
the political spectrum. While some hold that history's long march has
come to an end as liberalism has triumphed around the globe, others
argue that this march was always a fiction, and still others insist
that something called "postmodernism" heralded the end of progress,
totality, and coherence even if history had unfolded progressively up
until that point.6 The tension among these views leads to a
question about the nature of the relation between an erosion of the
progress narrative in life and in thought. Certainly the relation is
not straightforwardly causal, in either direction, but neither is it
wholly contingent. Yet it is clear at the very least that recent
changes in the character of world history--including all that travels
under the rubric of globalization, the emergence of significant
nonstate national and international actors, the end of a bipolar
international order, and the ambiguous development of identity-based
political formations--have catalyzed popular and intellectual
historical consciousness. One could also say this: the common
instigators of the intellectual and political challenges to progress
are certain concrete historical phenomena that include, inter alia,
the
contemporary character of capitalism and the contemporary character
of liberalism. Various recent studies in political economy suggest that
capitalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, while
displaying certain continuities with earlier forms (e.g., the drive for
profit and the ceaseless spawning of new commodities and social
effects), nonetheless has taken a qualitatively different turn.
Included in the shift from "organized" to "disorganized" capitalism are
a national deconcentration of capital and a dispersal rather than
concentration of production; a decline in the importance of cartels,
unions, and collective bargaining; a growing separation of banks from
industry; a decline in the absolute and relative size of the working
class (defined as manual workers in manufacturing and extraction); a
decline in average plant size; a decline in the importance of
individual wealth-holders; and a decline in industrial cities and
industry-centered wealth.7 None of this suggests the
diminished dominance of capital; to the contrary, the phenomenon
loosely termed "globalization" signifies the ubiquity of capitalist
social relations across the globe and the penetration of capital into
nearly every crevice of every culture. But the steady geographic and
demographic concentrations of wealth, capital, finance, and production
that have characterized capitalism for the past two hundred years
appear to have given way to more fragmented, dispersed, intricate,
transient, and even somewhat ephemeral formations. Thus, Marx's most
important condition for the development of the contradiction that would
finally break capitalism--relations of production that would "simplify
class antagonisms . . . [such that] society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other"8--now seems as empirically
remote as it is metaphysically alien.
Liberalism has undergone a parallel transformation, from
a political
order in which the universal rights of man were the unquestioned
premise of social justice and social change to one in which both the
standing of universalism and the relationship of rights to freedom have
been widely challenged. How the disruption of the status of the
universal in liberalism undermines the progress narrative is captured
in a general questioning (if not outright rejection) of assimilationist
and integrationist formulations of social change and the adoption of
identity-based justice claims and local nationalisms.9 Moreover,
perceived
stratifications and exclusions in liberal orders along lines
of race, class, gender, and sexuality not only challenge egalitarian
civil and political enfranchisement as the primary criteria of justice;
they also expose the formal equality promised by liberalism as severely
compromised by the character of a (white, bourgeois, male,
heterosexual) hegemonic subject. An understanding of liberal
universalism as not simply containing a history of excluded others but
as having a specific normative content--heterosexual and patriarchal
families, capital, and "property in whiteness"--erodes the credibility
of its classic story of progressively widening its scope of freedom and
equality, extending the goods of enfranchisement and abstract
personhood to more and more of the world's populations. In short,
liberalism's sharp encounter in recent decades with its constitutive
outside and constitutive others disturbs its universalist premises and
promises--and disturbs as well the story of emancipatory and
egalitarian progress on which much of liberalism's legitimacy is
pinned.
The Emergence of the Sovereign Subject and
Rights-Based Freedom.
The fiction of the autonomous, willing, reasoning, rights-bearing
subject convened by modernity is articulated in liberal democratic
constitutions and a host of other liberal institutions. Liberalism
presumes sovereign individuals and states, both as units of analysis
and as sites of agency. Individuals are cast as sovereign insofar as
they devise their own aims and direct and are accountable for their
actions. The sovereign state, similarly, is one presumed capable of
managing its collective internal affairs and asserting its interests in
the external world; these capacities are what justify the state
technically and legitimize it politically in an order in which "the
people" are said to rule.
Both state and individual
sovereignty require fixed boundaries, clearly identifiable interests
and identities, and power conceived as generated and directed from
within the entity itself. In late modernity, none of these requirements
is met easily, given a globalized economic order, unprecedented
migrations of peoples across national borders, and relatively new forms
of social power that increasingly undermine the notion of the self-made
and self-directed individual or state subject. As the global economy
grows ever more complex and integrated, both the state and the
individual are increasingly frustrated in their sovereign intentions by
forces beyond their control and often beyond their comprehension as
well.10 Faced with a plethora of transnational economic
actors, forces, and movements, in the late twentieth century the idea
of a unified, pursuable national economic interest became largely
comic, despite the fact (and vastly complicating the fact) that
national economies remain politically and economically significant. And
migrations of peoples have reached such proportions that the strenuous
legal and political efforts to distinguish, for example, "true
Americans" or "native Hawaiians" from alien others can only be read as
a symptom of this disintegration of sovereignty, this erosion of
inside-outside boundaries around a state or people presumed cohesive,
unified, and sovereign.11
Sovereignty is especially
troubled by ever more intricate yet disseminated forms of social
power--what Michel Foucault identified as the proliferation of
disciplinary and regulatory discourses in our time. Amid the variety
and complexity of speech and institutional practices that not only
position but form us, the self-made, autonomously willing, sovereign
subject all but vanishes. How is it possible to sustain the conviction
that we devise and pursue our own ends when we are so patently the
effects of such powers? How, too, does the figure of a unified,
coherent, and agentic state appear severely compromised by the
distinctive military, counterintelligence, bureaucratic, welfare, and
market forces that assault it? How is this figure of the state even
undone by the historically unparalleled density and relative autonomy
of what is often regarded as the state discourse, the law?
Within liberal discourse, the usual alternative to a
belief in
sovereign subjects is a systems framework in which power is conceived
as operating according to certain logics and laws that produce and
locate subjects, whether they be states or individuals. There are many
versions of this narrative: Marxist, Parsonian, and Habermasian theory,
international balance of power theory, psychoanalysis, and so on.
However, like the sovereign models, system-based formulations of power,
which presume lawlike behaviors and analytic totality, have come under
attack on numerous fronts. Foucaultian genealogies, philosophical
antifoundationalists, theories of post-Fordist capitalism, and recent
challenges to both orthodox international relations theory and
psychoanalysis--each contests the fiction of the totality and the
axiomatic laws of movement on which both the principles and the
particular content of such systems are premised.
When
sovereignty is eroded, can the rights rooted in the presupposition of
sovereign entities--ranging from subjectivity to statehood--remain
intact? What stable, bounded source confers them? What stable, bounded,
self-identical subject employs them? What independent, emancipatory
force can they continue to claim? From the French Revolution onward,
the liberty promised by liberal doctrine has essentially been defined
through rights, and the expansion of the quantity and purview of rights
is equated with the expansion of freedom. The presumably universal
reach of rights in liberal constitutional orders has also implied
historically that a quantitative increase in rights generates a
quantitative increase in equality. These equations have been disrupted
from at least three directions. First, the proliferation of rights in
liberal democracies in the second half of the twentieth century has
been figured by many, across the political spectrum, as a development
less of freedom than of an increasingly administered society--a civil
society of bureaucratic agencies and a civic currency of proceduralism
and litigiousness. Second, the anti-statist, libertarian Right has, of
late, claimed for itself the freedom-as-rights discourse, as have those
reacting against what they claim to be special rights or protections
afforded to disenfranchised minorities. Both kinds of claims make it
extremely difficult for liberals and leftists to argue that rights
unequivocally pave the road to enhanced freedom and egalitarianism.
Third, liberals have developed an increasing appreciation of an aspect
of rights that was formerly considered primarily by Marxist legal
scholars: the acontextual formalism of rights means that rights, though
universally distributed, often yield greater inequalities in
societies in which individuals are unequally situated. In some cases
they are as likely to entrench existing powers as to redistribute power.12
Thus,
not only the ontological and epistemological basis of rights but also
their concrete function in promoting freedom and equality has been
significantly challenged in the last quarter century.
The
troubling of narratives of progress, sovereignty, and freedom and
equality secured by rights disturbs the constitutive premises of
liberalism from within. But there has also been a disturbance in
liberalism's constitutive outside, in the external terms that define
and legitimate it. For most of the twentieth century, liberal
legitimacy has been secured not only by various elements of social
contract discourse but also by differentiation from the imagined
opposites to liberalism. It has taken its identity in relation to the
naturalized inequalities of feudalism at its historical rear, the
intolerable repressions of state communism at its twentieth-century
side, and even the utopian dream of a perfected liberal order ahead. In
recent decades, however, the remnants of feudal order in the present
have shown through more clearly: individual (and hence popular)
sovereignty turns out to be a heady conceit; the contemporary state
appears less and less autonomous of the market it claimed to set free;
and perhaps most important, the ostensible universality of the state
and of liberal civic-political culture has been exposed not only as
bourgeois but as relentlessly raced, gendered, and sexed--as shot
through with stratifying and subject-producing social powers. This
exposure makes even liberalism's promise of abstract personhood
problematic, insofar as the aim of treating individuals in abstraction
from their social attributes appears both ambiguous with regard to the
powers constitutive of subordination and impossible to achieve. There
is thus a blurring of the radical break that liberalism heralded
between itself and feudalism, putatively achieved in the former's
abolition of ideologically naturalized stratifications among
ideologically naturalized social groups.
Communism's global
collapse in the late 1980s eliminated another crucial touchstone for
liberalism's identity, literally removing the opposition against which
contemporary liberal freedom could be figured. But in a second, more
subtle way during the past quarter century, liberalism lost its
moorings in anticommunism. Many of the least defensible elements of
twentieth-century communist states, leaving aside overt and routinized
political repression, have lately made their appearance in ours:
overgrown state size, power, and reach; groaning apparatuses of
administration intermixed with a labyrinthine legal machinery;
expensive and extensive welfare systems that routinely fail their
client populations; inefficient and uncontrolled economies; lack of
felt sovereign individuality; and chronic urban housing shortages. I do
not mean to deny the important differences between market and state
economies, nor between one-party rule and constitutional democracies.
But the stark opposition between communism and liberalism has
been attenuated in recent years, an attenuation whose causes are not
limited to the recent collapse of communist regimes.
What is
the effect on liberalism of these transformations in its historical and
global location and historical self-understanding? What happens to
liberalism's organizing terms and legitimacy when its boundary terms
change--when its constitutive past and future, as well as its
constitutive others, lose their definitive difference from liberalism's
present and identity? What is (nineteenth-century) liberal justice
without a narrative of progress that situates it between an
inegalitarian and unemancipated ancien régime and the fulfilled
promise
of universal personhood and rights-based freedom and equality? What is
(twentieth-century) liberal democracy without communism as its dark
opposite? What is liberalism out of these histories, indeed out of
history as we have known it, which is to say, out of a history marked
by the periodicity of this particular past-present-future and by the
temporality of progressivism?
This predicament is too recent and our acquaintance with
it too new for thoroughgoing answers to such questions. Here, Politics
Out of History works
primarily in a diagnostic vein. If the legitimacy of liberal democracy
depends on certain narratives and foundational presuppositions,
including progress, rights, and sovereignty, what happens when these
narratives and assumptions are challenged, or indeed simply exposed in
their legitimating function? What kinds of political cultures are
produced by this destabilization of founding narratives and signal
terms? What kinds of politics do these narratives produce in their
destabilized or broken form? How does their disintegration affect left
and liberal political aims, possibilities, sentiments, and discourse?
How do we live in these broken narratives, when nothing has taken their
place? And how do we conjure an emancipatory future within a liberalism
out of history? If the fabric of (universal) justice premised on the
(universal) man of the liberal dream is in tatters, on what do we pin
our hopes for a more just society? And without the belief in
progressive history carrying liberalism toward whatever this
reformulated aim might be, what is the engine of historical movement
that would realize these hopes?
While vital and vibrant progressive political challenges
to current practices of inequality or unfreedom can be
built on the basis of partial rather than totalizing critiques and
political aims, on the basis of provisional and strategic rather than
millenarian and teleological political thinking, we currently live in
the shadow and sometimes paralyzing disorientation of the historical
and metaphysical losses thus far identified. Consequently, despite
ubiquitous contemporary critiques and qualms about rights-based
justice, most legal theorists and political activists cling to rights
advocacy, less engaging with or refuting than simply refusing these
challenges to their work. Similarly, most radical and reformist actors
remain wedded to progress, even when its credibility is in question,
because they imagine all political hope to be invested in a progressive
narrative. "Without a notion of progress," my students invariably
lament, "what is the point of working for a better world?" As the
discussions below of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Jacques
Derrida will suggest, the equation of progress with political optimism,
as well as the equation of a critique of progress with nihilism or
despair, may be quite mistaken. Benjamin, in particular, works to sever
a redemptive politics from progress, and Derrida's Benjaminian streak
moves him to seek political possibility in an order of space and time
that is enchanted by spirits other than those of meta-history in
general and progress in particular. Indeed, Benjamin and Derrida even
suggest that attachment to progress results in a certain political
conservatism (an identification with the historical victors who
represent progress) and a certain failure to "break" with a current of
history that does not contain all political possibility.
But
I am getting ahead of my (nonprogressive) story about the condition and
possibilities of our political time. Here is a more methodical
précis
of what follows. In chapter 2, "Moralism as Anti-Politics," I probe one
particularly acute symptom of our current predicament: the righteous
moralism in so much contemporary political discourse, which I render as
a symptom of the political disorientation and political impotence
resulting from the troubled narratives identified above. The chapter
also examines the anti-intellectualism that political moralism
produces, arguing for a mutually vitalizing distinction between
political and intellectual life. It is in this spirit of shamelessness
about intellectual inquiry shaped by political concerns but unmoored
from an obligation to specific political entailments that the remainder
of the book proceeds. Chapter 3, "The Desire to Be Punished,"
considers, through a reading of Freud's theory of masochism, the
problem of political desires in subjects whose identity is rooted in
social injury, and who can no longer count on the magic of progress to
redeem that injury. It queries how the desire for freedom, equality,
and political participation can be shaped in subjects who are not only
produced through subordination, suffering, and exclusion but are also
politically identified with that production and, absent a faith in
progress, cannot imagine release from that identity. Chapter 4, "Power
without Logic without Marx," considers the problem of conceiving social
and political power in terms other than sovereignty or systems. Through
a close reading of selected works by Marx, this chapter asks what
happens when the logics of scientism, dialectics, and laws of history
are shed from Marx's theorization of power, as it considers how power
in a postfoundational materialist modality might be conceived without
reliance on those logics. It also explores how a reconceptualization of
temporal logics (in the form of a critique of progress) inevitably
entails a reconceptualization of spatial ones (in the form of a
critique of logical entailment and causality). This link is evident in
Foucault's overt effort to think about power in spatial rather than
temporal terms, an effort that results in a focus on power in
disciplinary and regulatory modalities; but it can be seen as well in
the intertwining of spatial and temporal logics of power in Marx
himself.
Chapter 5, "Politics without Banisters: Genealogical
Politics in Nietzsche and Foucault," makes use of the two philosophers
to develop a genealogical alternative to progressive and teleological
historiography as it is now embedded in contemporary democratic
politics. Genealogy is treated not merely as a method of historical
inquiry and political analysis, but as an intellectual orientation
potentially generative of new political directions. Chapter 6,
"Democracy against Itself," begins by examining the fraught relation
between theory and democracy and then revisits Nietzsche's thought to
consider the possibility of deploying his severe critique of democracy,
and of politics generally, to enrich democratic practices. In
considering what the singular relationship between critical theory and
a democratic political form might be, this chapter speculates about
strategies for working against the moralizing and anti-intellectual
tendencies in contemporary democracies that are identified in the
second chapter. Chapter 7, "Specters and Angels," attempts to craft a
fruitful form of historical-political consciousness from the
post-Marxist critiques of progress advanced by Walter Benjamin and
Jacques Derrida. It centers on the problem of conceiving futurity at
"the end of history," that is, in the wake of a progressive
understanding of modernity.
None of these studies offers a
full-fledged replacement for the waning terms and narratives of
modernity. Rather, each examines a few strands of the condition that
this waning has produced, attempting to open thought and discern
possibility where anxiety, paralysis, and reaction too often dwell.
Each avows the mourning as well as the confusion that conditions our
work as we attempt to mine potential from the losses of our time.
Neither purely despairing nor purely hopeful, each study bears the
mixture of heaviness and hope carried in a history that, in the wake of
metaphysics and metanarratives, may finally become our own.
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