Criminal Translation (version 2)

The idea of criminal translation can define a symbolic field for the expression of a contemporary idiom. This would advance the commodity form through a reflection on the process of  logistical revolution. The idea of translation crime would define a gravitational center around which an ephemeral discourse would orbit.  This is a blind spot which conditions the representational customs of this epoch. The proposed discourse here would advance the non-existence of the Other into more radical orders of absoluteness.    

This shall implicate a constellation of concepts which are widely distributed. In Kantian parlance, the symbols are gauged by degrees along continua of the synthetical and analytical, the a priori and a posteriori. The analytical is the depth at which symbols are buried in the grounds of primal repression.  This is the reification which is the basis for normal expression.  The analytical is repressed or unconscious contingency.   This is symbolic difference that remains unfelt as its composition lies beyond a threshold of trauma.  Though as it slides towards the pole of the synthetical, then the raising consciousness of contingency implies a sublime disturbance of symbolic expression. This disturbance is the agony of political antagonism. 

Walter Benjamin outlined a schematic model for a translation of the real, which directs the sense of a cosmopolitan intellect. This practice of translation would be endlessly self-disavowing, the action of a body which disavows itself as another. This impossible translation which cleaves to the indistinction of the material and the abstract. The locus classicus for this practice was Holderlin’s rendering of Antigone into a strange German which mimed the syntactic and phonological patterns of the ancient Greek. The translation assumes an uncanny contiguity with the original, and this contiguity is a non-relationality of the real. This translation would stage the exposure of what is most foreign in the other language. 

The practice that Benjamin describes can be named a “literary translation” as opposed to an “industrial translation”.  These two practices enter into dialectical opposition as they move between the Piagetan phases of assimilation and accommodation. 

Industrial translation strives to maintain the universal identity of the content or the signified. The principle is to reproduce a meaning which is identical to the meaning of the original.  The form of expression gets left to indifferent variability, such that it assumes no reflection or resemblance with the original form of expression. Summarizing this point, industrial translation assumes the identity of content and the non-resemblance of expression.    

The Chinese translator Yanfu (1854-1921) functions as a cultural mediator who personifies the practice of industrial translation. This is a practice where the universal identity of content is conceived on the model of scientific objectivity.  What is required today may be a literary translation of Yanfu, that would  express his contingent function so to de-reify the hegemonic paradigm of industrial knowledge which he undergirds.  The figural image of Yanfu can disturb the normative values of industrial translation with the opacity of the idiomatic real. 

Translation courses at universities in mainland China still adhere to the normative values that Yanfu popularized in the late 19^th century, with his model of balancing the three elements of “xin, da, ya”: fidelity to the original meaning, clear expression in Chinese, and classical elegance according to the aesthetic values of ancient Chinese.  Benjamin’s conception of a literary translation forms an antithesis to this industrial concept of translation.  Some recent scholars have proposed that Chinese modernists of the May Fourth generation initiated a revolt against Yanfu’s paradigm of translation, and that they introduced models which approximated Benjamin’s literary theory.  This should come as no surprise, because the dialectical pattern we are outlining here has the ubiquity of a signatura rerum. 

This dialectic of literary translation and industrial translation resonates with a Marxian history of class dialectic. The industrial paradigm of translation expounded by Yanfu evidences the values of bourgeois universalism.  This attempts to eliminate the traces of the original idiom for the sake of idealized exchange values.  This implies a value of objectivity which blurs together scientific knowledge and commodity exchange.  The “literary translation” responds to this conflation of science and commodity, where it is rendering conspicuous not what the later attempted to repress, but rather the ironic futility of that attempt to repress nothing other than the contingency of the real.

These opposed models of translation can be dialecticed in a manner which makes them mutually incriminating.  On one hand, there is the elimination of the idiom of the original language, and the assertion that meaning is universally intelligible independently of any particular language.  This universality defines the very concept of scientific objectivity in a nominal sense. Scientific knowledge is by definition whatever can be translated perfectly from one language to another.  But considering the particular case of Yanfu, here we are concerned with the ideological disturbances of this scientific ideal.

Zizek describes how the expression of objective  knowledge in any language inevitably generates obscene residues which are highly idiomatic.  There are these idiomatic obscenities which are implicated with any scientific vocabulary.   But besides these Zizekian considerations, there are the more familiar problems concerning the validation of objective knowledge.  In the late 1800s, Yanfu translated the canonical works of English liberalism which were authored by Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Bentham, Smith, and Mill, as well as Montesquieu.  His persona has become integral to the civilizational ideology implicated with these works.  

When Joseph Needham began his studies of ancient Chinese sciences, he noted how Yanfu’s translations had introduced industrial epistemologies which repressed those legacies of knowledge. This repression can be interpreted as a kind of  “Oedipal” crime in how it nullifies a paternal legacy of ancient Chinese sciences. Yanfu was a comprador Oedipus who murdered his ancestors through acts of translation.  He initiated a long cycle of ancestor murder in China which has lasted over a century, and which perhaps even continues today despite appearances. This crime involves a double concealment, with the erasure of both the original English idiom and the paternal legacy of the ancient Chinese sciences. This was achieved by translating Victorian liberalism into a classical style of Chinese.  This is something interesting, how classicism can murder antiquity.    

Yanfu reproduced the regime of bourgeois universalism in a way that involved a multifaceted reification whose complexity may evade rigorous accounting.  His persona functions today as a critical mediator in the reification of contemporary capitalism. This is not just about Chinese capitalism, but rather contemporary capitalism per se. Perhaps his mediatory function could be disrupted through the retranslation of his translations back into the English language. For instance, we might want to consider retranslating his renderings of Spenser and Bentham into English.  This would aim to produce ironic literary renderings of his industrial translations.  How might Victorian positivism sound in classical Chinese?      

Yanfu attempts to assimilate the discourse of Victorian industry into a classical style of ancient Chinese. This was a way to naturalize the industrial revolution. This classicism buries earlier legacies of ancient Chinese culture and projects a bourgeois past which excludes the sciences of the Song and Ming.  The problem for a literary translation today is to denaturalizes this assimilation so that its strangeness becomes conspicuous. 

Benedict Anderson examined how the international translation of genres has facilitated the integration of global markets. This process is conspicuous in the news media where concepts have been replicated in a homogenous manner in different languages so that the displacement of references and the evacuation of contexts brings a disintegration of reporting into nonsense.  Anderson introduced an abstract analysis of these processes where the reification of a universal content serves as a condition of exchange. 

The criminality of industrial translation gets reflected in the inverse criminality of literary translation. A dialectic of mutual incrimination.  This is a familiar scene where the universality of bourgeois exchange comes into conflict with the particularities of the national.  In philosophy, this scene can be allegorized where the universalism of Kantian thought provokes the resistances of Herder and Fichte. There are notable Chinese variations on this encounter. Especially dramatic is the encounter between the universalist utopianism of Kang Youwei and the patriotic philology of Zhang Binglin. Bourgois universalism was first opposed with philology, which then gave way to the resistance of literary modernism. 

First there is the bourgeois crime of denying what is other in the others.  But then there is the literary crime of a singularity which escapes from the normality of the law. 

This dialectic of translation crimes can be perceived from the vantage of a longue durée. This is a drama where local idioms struggle with the hegemonic codes of economic universalism, and these struggles cast negative reflections into neighboring languages. Litearary translation passes through the relays of this interregional ventriloquy, this itinerant speech of the trans-subaltern.  This dialectic culminates in the eruption of a Pentecost as local struggles accumulate into a general disturbance of hegemonic universalism.       

Zizekian practice aims to rewrite the past, and this kind of translation must be attempted under conditions which become increasingly turbulent.  The expression of history assumes trinary formal patterns, such as the Marxian class struggle of aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletarian. Zizek is interested in a recursion or retroactive transformation of the past.  Zizek has written much about this. But the turbulence increases when we introduce trinary forms which are non-Marxian. The concern here is less with the reality of the past per se, and more with the formal efficacy of images which can make time pass. This is a touchy problem, where time passes in fits and starts.

Historians in the Hispanic world have introduced a Viconian  cycle of capitalist history which proceeds from growth to crisis to reconstitution.  This defines “growth” not in a linear numerical sense,  but rather as an augmentation of symbolic form which is like a cultural essence of genuine capital expansion. Columbus’s discovery of America is said to have initiated such a growth phase.  Then that growth phase reached its limit with the eruption of the religious wars and the onset of the crisis of the 17^th century.   Then that phase of crisis subsided with the Enlightenment, which was a phase of cultural reconstitution. Then the Napoleonic conquests initiated another phase of growth, which in turn succumbed to crisis with the outbreak of WW1. 

This Hispanic model is based in a world systems paradigm which is quite unlike a Marxian history of class struggle. It’s relatively more scientific and objective, while the Marxian history is avowedly more political and subjective. What interests us is the turbulent complementarity between these paradigms.

The Hispanic model is avowedly more objective, though it leaves us with a practical scenario which is readily subjectified.  Our present time can be situated within the crisis phase of the twentieth century.  What is practical is the idea that the exit from this crisis would enter a phase of cultural reconstitution. This assumes that it would be impossible to move from the present crisis into a new phase of growth. Reconstitution would have to be the next phase. The horizon of the future for us would lead towards a cultural reconstitution, which would be comparable to the Enlightenment of the 1700s.  What we are in now is the terminal crisis of the culture that was composed in the 1700s and which grew in the 1800s.  The next step must be a phase for the composition of a different culture.  

This model starkly contradicts the economic histories which celebrate the last 80 years as a phase of rapid growth.  Instead, the twentieth century would be considered as a period of crisis, where some traumatic compulsion has merely mimed the genuine growth of the 1800s.   This repetition had the appearance of originality due to some technological upgrades where cars and planes replaced trains and steamships, internet replaced telegraphs, movies replaced novels… this was not genuine cultural growth because it was only a mirroring of the past that was an imaginary simulation.  This is a quintessentially Lukacsian argument.  

Genuine growth was not possible during the 20^th century, because the symbolic form of 19^th century capitalism had already exhausted its limits when the crisis erupted in WW1.   And the wars which are presently raging are evidencing the same signature patterns of that crisis, namely the contradiction between the universality of capital and the particularity of the nation.   

This Hispanic history has another practical advantage in how it highlights just how radically flawed most of our contemporary thought is.  It opens an original vantage for criticizing capitalism, where the problem is its flawed conception of the process of growth.  This model is not opposing capitalism per se. This model can assume an engaged vantage which remains deeply progressive in a historical sense, and it could even possibly seize the mantle of progressive capitalism itself. Now we are talking about “capitalist realism” in a sense which moves far beyond anything that Mark Fischer suggested.      

There is a particular sense here in which the term “crisis” becomes synonymous with “war”.  This is something like the outbreak of WW1 as described by Lenin and Luxemburg, where the libidinal sap of capitalist society overflows its symbolic infrastructure.  Or a scenario where capitalism mobilizes resources into circulation which it fails to coordinate, and this excess of mobilization reaches some threshold of traumatic regression. This is like the Heideggerian critique of technology as reconstructed by Lyotard and Nancy. 

The present crisis has not subsided because capitalism has been able to reform itself, so that it has continued to mimic the growth patterns of the 1800s.  This is how we understand the “neo-” in neoliberalism,  which stands for the axiomatic division of private and public.  That separation has been the key reformation, the reform which has enabled the crisis to continue, and which postponed the coming enlightenment.  What is essential to the crisis is a deficiency of alterity or symbolic difference.  The neoliberal reform has been able to establish some minimally sufficient degree of alterity.  Only when the symbolic implies real difference can there be genuine growth.  Otherwise there is just this traumatic reflex which mimes the growth patterns of the past.    

The Enlightenment introduced new forms of symbolic differentiation which have since been exhausted, and the present crisis can only be resolved through the articulation of original symbolic forms, which can restore the sense of real difference. Neoliberalism has begun this articulation, it is the beginning of the coming enlightenment, it indicates directions for the evolution of institutions.  The problem is how to translate this articulation forward, and horizontally through regional variations. 

A Marxian history of class dialectics can be superimposed onto this world systems model. This requires the assumption that classes do not congeal into separate groups, but rather there is just a profound antagonism which effects the substance of the human species called “culture”.  Marxian history then can be approached in a formal manner, as a formal contradiction in the structural distribution of values.  This is a contradiction between a vertical and naturalist distribution of artistocratic values and a horizontal and nominalist distribution of bourgeois values. 

Marxian history concerns this formal value contradiction in the idea of culture, between a vertical classical distribution and a horizontal anthropological distribution. At a methodological level, this dialectic is between emic and etic procedures of investigation.  Aristocracy defines culture as an esoteric initiation which can only be known subjectively from the inside.  Whereas the bourgeoisie assigns culture an objectivity so that it can be known from an external position which is scientifically neutral. This antagonistic disjuncture is the ubiquitous remains of Marxian history. Then we understand translation as a process of passing through and beyond this formal antagonism. 

This pattern of splitting effects the process of production, and it concerns the formal determination of labor and commodity. This returns us to the complementary contradiction between industrial translation and literary translation.  This is an antagonism where they struggle to capture each other through overcoding and redefinition.  These two forms of translation are attempting to translate each other, which is to say, incriminate each other.  The struggle is over which sort of crime is under investigation. 

Today’s society is haunted with the Nachtbild of the bourgeoisie as it was composed during the 1700s and 1800s.  This image of class has been recalcitrant because it is linked with the libidinal satisfactions of the last experiences of genuine growth in capitalism.   This conception of class received condensed expressions in the post-WW2 period, particularly in the ego psychology of Abraham Maslow. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was repeated by Hannah Arendt in her Human Condition, and it resonates with psychoanalytic discourses that distinguish need from desire.  This is a pattern of conceptual discourse where some unconditioned necessity must be fulfilled as a condition of liberal culture.  This is a naturalist and realist schema of culture as a privilege which depends on  the adequacy of some economic base.

There arises a need to articulate culture in a way that can avoid getting captured back into these hierarchical schemas.  Such a circumvention may require a dialectic which includes an affirmation of need as deprivation.  The problem is how to circumvent this conception of need as this neutral precondition, such that one must have their “basic needs” satisfied in order to participate in liberal culture.  This normative model can be obliterated through a dialectic which asserts a deprivation or non-satisfaction of needs as the origin of desire.  From this vantage we can reconsider the negativity of castration in the theories of psychoanalysis.  (pace Deleuze and Guatarri)

The events of circa-1989 in Eastern Europe had complex resonances in East Asia.  As martial law was ending in Taiwan, the independence movement on that island became a mainstream feature of the political system.  The most prevalent leader of that movement was a maritime insurance lawyer by the name of Chen Shuibian. He was elected to the legislative Yuan in February 1990, as Mayor of Taipei in December 1994, and president of the republic in May 2000.  As independence politicians like Chen entered into mainstream politics, they implemented plans which they had devised during the martial law period when their movement was underground.  Among the early initiatives of the independence movement was the nationalization of properties that the Kuomintang had bestowed upon venerable mainlanders. 

In the district of Shilin, Taipei, there was a wooden structure of a Japanese modernist style which had been donated for the residence of the Confucian scholar Qianmu. The independence movement succeeded in nationalizing the building in the spring of 1990, and the ninety-year-old scholar was forced to move into a high rise apartment.  Like other Confucianists, Qian appeared as a living link with lines of initiation from the late-imperial period.  He was the last living proponent of a strain of Song learning which had resisted the influence of the Ming reformer Wang Yangming. 

Throughout the twentieth century Confucianists such as Qian were routinely attacked as purveyors of obsolete feudal dogmas.  Mu’s writings were criticized as unscientific and lacking scholarly rigor, and it was asserted that his work is not in tune with the currents of modern culture.  Though of course the Kuomintang had pitched Taiwan as a sanctuary for ancient Chinese traditions that were being persecuted on the mainland, and so it was natural for their regime to support someone like Mu. But when the Taiwanese independence movement came to power, that state support for Chinese tradition was withdrawn.  When Qianmu passed away in August 1990, his family attributed his death to the disruptive move. The leaders of the independence movement were compelled to make public apologies.  

Gnostic Oedipus: Psychology at the End of History

Introduction

In the opening chapter of his book “Maps of Meaning” (1998), the psychologist Jordan Peterson refers to Francis Fukuyama’s ideas about the end of history. This minor reference situates the emergence of Peterson’s theories within the triumphant days of liberal globalism when the planetary integration of human cultures was a pervasive topic in academia. Most of the chapters in this book are dealing with Jungian research on comparative mythology, and the syncretic integration of narrative patterns from ancient cultures. The book includes frequent references to the literary critic Northrop Frye, who was a professor at the University of Toronto, as Peterson is today. Frye’s work has complex connections with the theories of Marshall McLuhan, who is remembered for the expression “global village”. This sets up an intellectual puzzle of connecting-the-dots between Jungian psychology and liberal globalism. 

Peterson has ascended to notoriety as an iconic intellectual in recent years following his spectacular refusal to address students with their preferred gender pronouns. Now his lectures are shared around the world, including on media platforms here in China. There is obviously something in Peterson’s psychology which attracts this diverse global audience. Looking back at his earlier book, its discursive positioning appears prescient in its responses to globalization, and precocious in its tonality of crisis which has since become more prevalent. 

This psychology is responsive to conditions of crisis, as its models of subjectivity assume an initial condition named as “the unbearable present”. This assumes a condition of despair, where it is taken as a given that “something must change”. This might be a practical assumption within the context of a clinical psychology, where patients have already reached a point where they are seeking professional assistance. But when these messages are shared on social media, then the target of the address becomes equivocal. The message becomes one of a general and impersonal injunction that “you must change your life”, as Rainer Maria Rilke once felt interpolated by a statue of Ares. 

This tonality of outrage, which speaks to a condition where things have gone too far, might resonate with a contemporary Zeitgeist. But more important perhaps are the unique ways that Peterson’s subject responds to this sense of crisis. This psychology is offering what we might call “resources for reification”, or for defending against the fragmentation of the symbolic.  

But now we are getting ahead of ourselves. How does globalization imply a fragmentation of the symbolic? In the 1990s, Fukuyama’s liberal discourse on the end of history had amassed significant following in academia. But after the events of 9/11, he along with many of his followers shifted towards more conservative outlooks. In the early years of the millennium there was commonly said that “history had returned”. Edward Said quipped that it was not the end of history, but rather the end of Fukuyama. But the idea that history was returning may have overlooked a more disturbing possibility, that the events of 9/11 were symptomatic of the ending of history, and indicative of what that condition implies. 

Peterson produced a psychology which responds to the negative implications of the ending of history, or what was called “globalization”. It’s important to appreciate how these terms are interchangeable, that the event of globalization implies an ending of history. This coincidence of these terms was explained by Michel Tournier and more recently by Etienne Balibar. We’ll consider this topic in more detail later, but for now let’s just say that “history” in this sense defines a labor of integrating the human species, and as the fruits of that labor have manifested in the category of “globalization” then the idea of integration which motivates that labor has lost its attraction. The hopes that were once invested in the idea of universal history have been especially disappointed by the realities of migration. 

The ramifications of this disappointment are difficult to gauge. The idea of universal history served to unify a vision of universality in the manner of what Kant called a “regulative ideal”.  Cooperation was possible with the belief that it was participation in a project that would lead to a harmonious coexistence among the nations of the world. But then as the volumes of migration increased, the dream of unity was interrupted by a reality of uncanniness and estrangement. Peterson’s psychology responds to the conditions of “value ambivalence” which are caused by the process of globalization.        

His psychology reifies a universal structure of Judeo-Christian culture. This culture would be something natural, and so not contingent upon variations in history or geography. Or more exactly, he locates the origins of this culture in ancient history, so that its patterns can assume durability through time and space. And he makes elaborate arguments about how these cultural formations are consistent with the biological structures of the nervous system.  Much of his book argues for the reification of this culture as a universal norm, and this argument responds to the fragmentation of subjectivity in globalization. 

We might even say that he attempts to motivate a labor of reification. This initiative involves a romantic passion, and even a religious passion, which focuses upon a conservative model of revolution. Many pages of this book are devoted to articulating this model. Some commentators have puzzled over the idea of conservative revolution, as though this term were oxymoronic. This perplexity demonstrates the parochial biases of liberal academia, which assumes a progressive monopoly on the idea of revolution. Prior to the French Revolution, or even in the early twentieth century, revolutions commonly assumed a conservative character, which is to say that they were motivated by the idea of reestablishing ancient traditions. This form of revolution features conspicuously in ancient patriarchal cultures such as Confucianism and Islam. The anthropology of traditional revolutions has received attention from scholars (Arjomand, 2019). There is nothing inherently oxymoronic or even paradoxical about the idea of a conservative revolution.    

This idea appears counter-intuitive because the modern age has identified itself as an epoch of progressive history. This forward movement of developmental time would imply that conservative revolution would be nonsensical. This illustrates how Peterson’s idea of a conservative revolution is symptomatic of an end of history, which brings the exhaustion of this normative assumption of universal progress. Although, as we shall consider later, his work also implies this normative direction of progress, a direction which becomes ironic as it approaches its telos where it abolishes itself. This irony is symptomatic of ending of history scenarios. Peterson’s work crosses a limit where progressivism reverses into traditionalism, or in psychological terms, “regressivism”.      

Let’s return to the question of why Peterson’s work has been so popular around the world. It would seem that the discipline of psychology has unique advantages for responding to the crises of globalization. This is because this discipline can assume a first-person perspective which avoids the complex problems which emerge with the realities of globalization. It can assume a narrow focus on the motivation of the individual which can ignore ontological problems concerning equivocal borders and the constitution of groups. Peterson is able to articulate his key concepts in extremely simple ways, so that the normal individual is essentially embedded within one single community, and that community is constituted by a single value hierarchy. This embedding resists the fracturing of subjectivity into ambivalence under conditions of globalization. 

This psychology deals extensively with problems of ambivalence, but such ambivalence only arises when the community is damaged, and so the normal condition has been disrupted. Basically, the community is damaged by the neutral objectivity of scientific thinking. This objective thinking has no “subjective valences” and makes the traditional values of the community become obsolete. This is the basis for his socio-political criticism, which emerges from occidentalist cold-war and end of history rhetoric. The problem with “totalitarianism”, which is also the problem with political progressivism, is an over-zealous attachment to scientific objectivity, which has destroyed the traditional values of Judeo-Christian civilization. This situation calls for “revolutionary heroes” who would rearticulate the values of science so to reconstitute the symbolic basis for this ancient cultural tradition.  Revolutionary reification.   

At the core of this psychology is a reifying conjunction between a concrete first-person and an abstract Judeo-Christian community. This normative idealism avoids the problems which arise when individuals have affiliations which multiple communities or attachments to conflicting traditional values. It avoids consideration of how the integral “oneness” of any community can be problematic, like the way Levi-Strauss illustrates the Winnebago village from different perspectives. But most important is how this psychology avoids the ontological difference between the universality of a global community and the particularities of local communities.    

This latter problem should be understood as the definitive contradiction which is implied in the ending of history scenarios. This is the problem which liberal capitalism struggles to repress at all costs. The integration of global markets requires the idea of a universal value hierarchy which unites all human subjectivity. This is the value of money and the form of exchange-value. Today’s popular psychologies are challenged with this formidable problem of merging the values of various particular communities into this universal community of financial value. This is the problem of naturalizing the normativity of a global community based on the values of finance which can subsume local communities into its regime of symbolic exchange.    

This is a process of subsumption or assimilation, or it might also be considered as a sublimation. The particular communities must be dissolved and then get reborn as organs which are integrated into the universal community. The progress of this integration has been underway throughout the longue durée of “universal history” as it was explained by Immanuel Kant. Peterson’s psychology is situated around this singular limit where this progressive development bears the fruit which is called “globalization” which triggers its terminal crises. This exhaustion manifests in ambivalence between the particular realities of globalization and the abstract ideas of universal history. This ambivalence emerges from what Karl Polanyi called “disembedding”. Peterson’s psychology operates a reification, which conflates the universal and the particular, in order to re-embed subjects into community, and thereby repress this eruption of ambivalence.     

Peterson’s psychology attempts this reification through the projection of a mythical community. As subjects position themselves within the symbolic regime of this imaginary “global village”, this implies the subordination of their everyday use-values (the values of labor and consumption) to the universal values of financial exchange. And as these Marxian terms suggest, this psychology implies  profound structural contradictions. This is where the symbolic resources of Jungian Gnosticism become function in processes the representation of these structural contradictions. Among his favorite gnostic figures are the looping uroboros dragon, as well as the ambivalent Miltonian-Blakean archetype of “the adversary” which is a kind of diabolical doppelganger. These figures could represent various contradictions within this psychology, the most conspicuous being the progressive scientific labor which its traditionalism reacts against.   

Peterson’s principal message to his followers is that they should “clean up their lives”, and struggle to ascend up the hierarchy of natural values. As this message reverberates around the world, it would seem plausible that it is motivating the immigration which exasperates the crisis of globalization. Subjects who seek out a higher symbolic position in the world are disembedding themselves from their communities and thereby exasperate the problems of value ambivalence. Peterson is participating in the expansion of capital by integrating more populations into the “global village”.  So his discourse is structured like an uroboros dragon: advancing the contradictions of liberal globalism which lead to the conservative psychology of reification.

The idea of the global village was based on a kind of Jungian idealism which inherited the Kantian ideas of universal history.  This idea continues to motivate modern subjects, while it remains unable to accommodate the realities of globalization. So globalism has taken flight from those realities into a mythical psychology of the individual. The ontological problems of community become the psychological problems of the individual, who must adapt to the realities of globalization through the projection of an imaginary global community. If it becomes obvious that such a community does not exist, then the subject must assume the role of the “revolutionary hero”, who performs “self-sacrificing” actions to restore this ancient community. The hero must depart on a mission, where they tarry which ambivalence, and extract from it the categories for new values. We shall consider the hypothesis that these “new values” are connected with finance, and the heroes are bringing their local communities into alignment with the global regime of exchange.         

The breakdown of progressive history is not simply its cessation, but rather a shattering of the symbolic which implies the reversibility of historical time, and the emergence of traditionalisms, primitivisms, naturalisms. Uncanny descriptions of these reversals appear in the later works of Ernst Cassirer. His earlier writings had flirted with the romance of mythic community, but then he was forced to reconsider the problem in the context of Nazism, which he was not well prepared to do. The contradictions in Peterson’s follow familiar patterns, which are comparable with countless other thinkers. Various nineteenth positivists would be interesting to consider in this respect, particularly Auguste Comte and Herbert Spenser, though we won’t be able to delve into such analysis here. 

The wreckage of progressive history on the reef of globalization leads to the splitting of subjectivity, between progression and regression, global and local, male and female, adult and child etc. Peterson’s model of the global village functions like a gnostic catholic church which absorbs these fragmentary doubles into a universal communion with the holy Geist of financial capital. This is a bourgeois religion which centers on the archetype of an alchemist-hero, a founding father of bourgeois modernity who gets expressed through a distinctly Jungian narrative of history. This father suffered during the medieval ages, when he was persecuted by the church and the aristocracy. In those days he was an agent of chaos, given over to indulging his perverse maternal attachments. His Great Work was pursued in obscurity, in revolt against the church patriarchy. At the dawn of modernity this hero deposes the church and becomes the patriarchal authority of modern science. This gnostic-bourgeois version of the Oedipal drama would recapitulate at the individual level. 

This regime of financial capture operates through the dual fantasies of incest and parricide commonly associated with the Oedipal complex. Much of the interpretation of Peterson should turn around the understanding of this complex. Alenka Zupancic has linked this complex with the Godelian paradoxes of symbolic completeness and self-reference. The counting of the symbolic order somehow requires a splitting so that the subjects can count themselves. This splitting manifests in the form of the jokes where someone accidentally counts themselves or forgets to count themselves. Peterson has unique ways of counting himself into the psychological models that he produces. 

His magnum opus Maps of Meaning (1998) stages a scene through a distinctive structure of the narrative voice. The writing switches sporadically from objective scientific discourse to personal testimony and confession, so that the models get anchored subjectively into history through these bursts of affected speech. Within these weaving patterns we can locate the Celtic knotting of a gnostic Oedipus. 

Peterson openly admits his disdain for politics of any variety. Like economics, the discipline of psychology is bourgeois in its first-person individual perspective. As we have mentioned, this conveniently avoids the messy ontological problems associated with the constitution of communities. This general anti-political sentiment gets expressed in various ways. One of his often repeated points is that activists refuse to undergo “apprenticeship”, because they remain attached to maternal fantasies, and so they do not join the financial community of the global village in the capacity of laborers. This summarizes his social criticism and his position on history, that people should give up infantile attachments to political concerns, and seek out apprenticeship, subject themselves to a paternal master, so they can integrate into the monetary economy. 

This criticism encounters problems with the empirical discernment between the infantile condition “maternal attachment” and the adult condition of “paternal apprenticeship”. The problem is that this distinction is subjective. What is called paternal apprenticeship in some context might be called maternal attachment in another perspective. The objective criterion which distinguishes them is that paternal apprenticeship generates flows of money while maternal attachment does not. This little piggy went to the market, this little piggy stayed home. Aside from the flow of money, any pattern of behavior could be counted either way. The Toronto gnostic church of the global village articulates these value-codes in ways that are highly reversable, so that when the trade winds change, then embedding becomes disembedding, attachment becomes detachment, childish becomes adult etc.  These are the alternations of gnostic Oedipus, between his status as hero and criminal. Petersons codifies money as paternal and politics as maternal, but this could easily reverse, for example in times of war when the state requires political commitment from its subjects.   

This general reversibility of values deserves special attention. There is a traditional reification or embedding which assumes that “virtues” are essentially different from “vices”.  But in reality, these two values can be applied to the same character trait.  If someone saves a baby from a burning building, we might say they behaved courageously. But in another context, the same character trait might manifest in behavior which is considered reckless or arrogant. Someone who is considered patient might alternately be considered indecisive or lazy.  And so on. Some patterns of Chinese behavior have been considered patronizing. These include making judgments, offering advice, paying for things, offering assistance etc. But the analysis of these behaviors opens onto aporias of hospitality and the gift.

Value ambivalences may get resolved through local customs. When Chinese bosses present gifts to their Chinese employees, then there is usually no ambivalence. But when they present gifts to non-Chinese employees, then there may arise ambivalence between the values of generosity and control. This illustrates how the process of disembedding leads to value ambivalence. The inconsistencies between varying local customs are necessary due to the asymmetries of inter-regional integration of the world economy. There are two possible strategies for the management of ambivalence. The obvious solution would be re-embedding, so that subjects only exchange with people in their locality, and this traditionalist solution was favored by Karl Polanyi. Perhaps any possible alternatives to this re-embedding solution would require accepting that values are necessarily going to alternate, and to articulate subjectivity so that it assumes a dynamic relation with values.

A dynamic relationship with alternating values requires higher degrees of formal abstraction than are common for most people. Values would depend on fluctuating contexts, where subjects are constantly getting substituted with our own doppelgängers. Naomi Klein recently published a book introducing this problem, describing how she has been replaced on social media by the writer Naomi Wolf. Her case is related to the contradictions in Peterson’s work. Klein has always been identified as a “progressive” writer, but as her work progresses to the end of history then it seems she gets replaced with a “regressive” writer by the name of Wolf. The ending of history could manifest as a Lewis Carol structure, but where his work was limited to amusing language puzzles, this is a disconcerting adventure where everyday existence slides into a cybernetic reversibility.         

If globalization is understood as the problems which emerge from disembedding, then attachment and detachment become elementary concepts. These terms are trans-generic and trans-categorial, in that they are psychological, ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, and ontological.  Discourses on affective and intensive attachments displace discourses on values. Each person has signature patterns of attachment and detachment, and these are implicated with their embeddedness, which is the structural conjunction of the inner world and the outer world. Embedding and attachment must be considered as degrees of depth, and degrees of intensity. We could distinguish between customary categories of attachments: political attachments, financial attachments, social attachments, sexual attachments. If these can be detached, then there must be an ordering of priority into hierarchies of intensity and depth. These are ordinances of sacrifice.    

Peterson understands psychology as a strictly subjective discipline, dealing only with the mechanics of individual motivation. The discourse operates through virulent conflations and mechanisms of reification.  The criticism of conflation hinges on gauging the suitable locations for the interruptions of the real.  This problem emerges in Freud’s later studies on the fetishistic patients who proved resistant to interpretation.  The analyst could not simply confront the patient with objective reality, because that results in a power struggle between alternate fetishes. Peterson’s psychology can be criticized by locating it within a universal history of disembedding, where the term disembedding would name an event of the real. 

The critique of his psychology could be proceed through the articulation of genre, the attachment to genre forms under conditions of disembedding.  Specifically, the genre of “myth” should be rearticulated as a distinctly sexual genre (which is to resist the Jungian attempt to desexualize it). The positivity of this genre of “sexual myth” would be distinguished from a genre of economic allegory. Then these two genres would operate as two events events of the real: a sexual real and a non-sexual real. 

Freud had interpreted Greek myth as a representation of sexual fantasies. Considering the  origins of this genre in Hesoid and Homer, then this articulation of the genre would seem plausible. This was a modern scientific way to inherit the category of myth, to read it as sexual fantasy. Whereas Jung wanted to articulate the genre of myth so that it would integrate into the supposedly more universal trans-cultural genre of religion. Then the genre would lose both its Greek specificity and its sexual specificity. This follows from the Jungian desexualizing of the concept of the libido, which rearticulates the libido as a cosmic power that emanates from the divine. Today in retrospect, this “desexualization of  the libido” can be identified as a distinctly bourgeois regression which reverses the advancements of Freudian science.

Freud had articulated myth together with sexuality. This redefined a new genre for the modern age, the genre of sexual myth. But then Jung decided to articulate the genre of myth together with religion.  This was an attempt to recreate an ancient kind of “experience” which had been lost through the course of modern development. Freud had taken the power of myth and relocated in the scientific category of human sexuality. Jung took that Freudian category and invested it back into the idea of divinity. This reestablishes the traditional form of alienation that was criticized by Feuerbach, where the essence of the human species has been projected into the alienating other of the divinity.

Peterson redefines myth as a struggle against sexuality. Sexuality would be figured a maternal abyss which exerts the temptation of incest. The process of mythic experience would be a labor of separating symbolic subjectivity from the abyss of incestuous sexuality. This gives myth a distinctly patriarchal form, which is constructed as a damn of the symbolic against the dangers of sexual chaos. This resumes the traditional opposition of patriarchal religion to feminized sexuality. This instrumentalizes myth as a screen which defends against the abyss of sexuality. 

Peterson’s mythic hero undertakes the construction of symbolic categories. When the values of the social hierarchy slide into the ambivalence of the sexual abyss, then the hero needs to construct the new categories. This model has some consistency with Alenka Zupancic’s idea of the sexual as something which resists all attempts at categorization. Peterson’s myths are structured paradigmatically in the manner of what Lacan would call paternal metaphors. The structure of metaphor functions as a barrier against the abyss of the sexual.  Whereas the thinking of Zupancic can penetrate further into the real through the negativity of the no/name of the father. Peterson’s paradigmatic myths may be vulnerable to the negativity of sexual chaos.              

Allegory could be defined as a desexualized genre, which can express the eruption of an economic real. Michel Serres explored how Aesopian fables were used in the early modern period to expose the dark side of capitalist economy. He suggested the repetition of this deployment of the genre for the critique of cybernetic globalism. This was the tradition of Bernard Mandeville, whose fables revealed the ironies of industrial development, and who is remembered for his famous formula was “public virtues, private vices”. Mandeville was arguing for the acceptance of hypocrisy for the sake of its economic advantages. His thinking was aligned progressively with the liberalism of the Enlightenment. There is a parallel logic at work in Peterson’s Jungian theories.  This logic could be uncovered through a translation of his metaphors into allegories. This path of translation is also one of ruination.   

Peterson defines the concept of myth in a strangely utilitarian way, as the symbolic programming of evolutionary adaptation. This conception of myth is distinctly social-Darwinist.  It’s not clear whether this articulation of the genre of myth was Peterson’s original idea. This instrumentalizes myth as a tool of evolution. And we could also say that this redefines myth as a sexual organ, as it would function in evolution as an organ of sexual reproduction. But at the same time, this could also convert myth into an industrial instrument of economic exploitation.      

Michel Serres repeats an extremely dark fable from La Fontaine, the fox and the wolf. The fox was wandering through a field at night and came upon a well. Peering down into the well, he glimpsed a piece of cheese at the bottom. So he got into the bucket and lowered himself down to the bottom. But then he was disappointed to discover that he’d seen only the reflection of the moon in the water.  Later that night, a wolf poked his head over the well, and the fox invited him down to have some cheese. As the wolf lowered himself down, the fox ascended in the other bucket. 

1. History

Hesiod uses the term “anomie” for the sort of mythic negativity which modern audiences would refer to as “chaos”. A few centuries later, Herodotus uses the term in an anthropological way, to describe the disintegration of political order among the Medes.  Peterson invokes this idea as the loss of social hierarchy, where subjectivity slides into an entropic apathy due to a lack of motivating values. Hierarchy is what provides subjectivity with motivating goals, whereas anomie then would be the loss of motivational hierarchy. This way hierarchy gets defined as the essence of community.

It’s significant that anomie was expressed as a political idea for the first time in the book that established the genre of history. Peterson’s forays into comparative mythology are aimed at universalizing a Hellenistic opposition of cosmos and chaos, through its projection back onto the ancient “near eastern” civilizations which influenced the Greeks. This kind of projection is invited by the repetition of icons around the ancient Mediterranean, particularly the monstrous images such as sphinxes and gorgons. A paradigmatic translation of cultures attempts to assimilate the regional variations of these figures into the Greek model of culture which is structured around the opposition of cosmos and chaos.

The problems with this paradigmatic translation of culture begin to emerge with the variations in these icons. It turns out that the sphinxes of Egypt and Babylon were typically male, but when the Greeks adopted this monster in the fifth century, this figure apparently underwent a sex change marked by the addition of breasts. This transformation is among the anthropological controversies surrounding the “orientalization” of Greek culture during this period. On closer inspection, it would seem that postmodern conservative thinking such as Peterson’s does not draw so much from the high “golden age” of Athens, or from the “archaic” Homeric age that fascinated Nietzsche, but rather from the pastiche mélange of pan-Hellenistic imperialism following the Alexandrian conquests, and then its further remixing by the Romans and subsequent empires.

This defines a historical hermeneutic for the interpretation of a postmodern conservatism. This would be defined as the inheritance of a syncretism that assimilates the iconologies of subjugated cultures into the paradigmatic structures of imperial metaphor. The sphinx was a mysterious monster that arrived from Babylon and Persia, which represented the foreignness of those oriental cultures. The Greek Sphinx then gets conflated with the unknown alterity of other cultures, with the ambivalent confusion of heaven and earth, human and beast, which demands articulation into the stable categories of symbolic knowledge. The Greek hero encounters the monster and discovers some knowledge which revolutionizes the community. This is the formal pattern of an imperial culture which attempts to subsume local cultures into its symbolic universe. “Knowledge” then would imply this subsumption. 

In the earlier near eastern cultures, the sphinx had a different sex, but also different structural connotations. There it would have adhered with a more standard model of what Victor Turner called “threshold myth”. It would have been part of more stable cultural forms, where traditional knowledge does not get revolutionized.  People might have tarried with the ambivalence of the Sphinxes at some junctures in their lives, especially the passage through puberty, or when assuming some office. The threshold myth would be a rite of passage from one station in life to another, which was defined within the symbolic order of the culture. 

When these monsters were adapted by the Greeks, then they became the oriental opponents of the “heroes”. This way the threshold myths were translated into the open frontiers of the encounters with other cultures to the east. This “hero archetype” remain conspicuous today in the public iconology of the celebrity entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who would daringly face the abysmal uncertainties of the digital future in order to develop the software platforms that will run the symbolic regimes for the global village of tomorrow. Techno-futurism inherits Hellenistic hero mythologies as it advances on the “digital frontier” in quest of new markets. Peterson’s mythic psychology emerged in the 1990s and remains saturated with the historicity of that decade.

To historicize Peterson’s work in this way requires positioning it within the broader evolution of modern thought. To situate this psychology at the “ending” of history requires that we consider a narrative cycle from its beginning.

Walter Benjamin pointed out how medieval histories were merely chronologies. There was no narrative explanation for events because mortals were unable to access the mysterious workings of Providence. They only recorded the events and the dates. But then this form of history was transformed through the rise of humanism in the Italian Renaissance. The status of humanity was ascendent, and so mortals could attain more insights into the providential plan, and they could even serve as agents who would consciously execute the plans of God. This placed historians into a role where they were effectively divining the will of God and relaying His providential plan to the rest of their people.

The Salamanca theology was pivotal in the articulation of early modern historiography.  Beginning with the Dominican Francesco di Vitoria (1480-1546), and continuing with the Jesuit Fransisco Suarez (1548-1617), this school of late Scholasticism assumed a functional role in the direction of colonial empire, where the will of man was articulated into alignment with the will of God. The codification of this alignment relied on Catholic allegories, as well as formulations of the mysterious Baroque sciences that were evolving from Thomistic theology. A science of providence was required to decipher the will of God as it was manifested in nature, so that the mission of the empire could be articulated objectively. For example, an often repeated formula stated that the amount of the silver in the Peruvian mines was proportional to the ugliness of the Peruvians, because “a homely bride requires a great dowry”.

This sort of “metaphysical direction” became tenuous during the Enlightenment, leading towards Kant’s declaration that “the queen is opposed on all sides”. Nietzsche described Kant as a “cunning theologian”, and his universal history can be understood as a secular reproduction of the Salamanca school’s idea of providence. This was Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of Kantian universal history. This speculative history was responding to the structural problem of secularizing the idea of providence, and it was an attempt to articulate a historical discourse which could motivate human development.     

Following the Enlightenment, the question had to be reposed, what could humans know about the will of God? This was the question of historical action. Kant begins from the empirical observation that humans had not actualized the full potential of their inherent nature. So the question arises about why nature (aka God) would have invested the species with this potential if it were never to be actualized. This was taken as proof that a full actualization must have been intended, and that there must be a plan for this full actualization. In this way, the idea of universal history rearticulated the idea of providence as a longue durée process of the actualization of the natural potential of the human. 

This idea of universal history institutes human labor as the essence of history because it’s through labor that the species develops towards its “telos”, which is the actualization of its full potential. Each generation undertakes this labor, advancing the species as far as they can, and then the next generation takes over where they have left off. It seems unlikely that Kant would have considered this “full actualization” as an achievable objective. Instead, it would seem to function in the capacity of those “regulative ideals” which are constructed only for “prudential” reasons. 

Universal history is the projection of human destiny into the future, which can serve as a guiding fantasy that inspires contributions to an imaginary future greatness. Such a fantasy operated in the idea of Providence throughout the last millennium, as it was assumed as a pretext for the labors of crusaders, missionaries, and colonists; while today it’s traces remain in the guiding discourses of multinationals, activists, and educators.  

This sort of guiding idea is something which cannot be verified. Though Kant continued baroque speculations in the Salamanca style, in deciphering the mysteries of nature. For instance, he noted how driftwood floats naturally up to the arctic, so that the Inuit can build fires, even though there are no trees growing there.  This speculation might seem to invite ridicule, though there is something mysterious about the physics of Brownian movement and the processes of diffusion which are essential for organic life.

Just a few weeks ago, I was sitting right here in this chair, scrolling around on Chinese social media because the VPNs were down, when that scowling visage of Jordan Peterson manifested, commanding me to clean up my pathetic life. This provoked speculation about the mysterious forces which were carrying his messages through the networks, and then I became inspired to initiate the labor of reading his book and typing this essay.    

We can assume that the idea of universal history has functioned in the motivation of labor over the previous centuries. But this function gets disrupted at the point where this labor starts bearing fruit, as the idea of universal history gets displaced by the inconsistent realities of globalization. This term “globalization” names a successful integration of planet-wide institutions through the liberalization of trade which approaches what Kant referred to as the “world republic”. One could say that we are already living in a liberal utopia or dystopia depending on the perspective.   

Peterson defines the “normal” subject as one guided by goal-directed behavior, whereas the ending of history implies the loss of this direction. This ambivalence corresponds with what Rene Girard called the “mimetic crisis”, where the loss of social distinction (i.e. based on the value of labor) leads to a confused panic which raises the risks of sacrificial violence. This need for sacrificial violence arises from a loss of symbolic distinction. Sacrificial violence would restore symbolic distinction. The breakdown of symbolic distinctions also leads to Agamben’s bare life, which somehow implies the need for sacrifice. The telos of history assumes a negentropic function, as it provides a basis for values and symbolic distinctions, so there can be a coordination of behavior through the rational divisions of labor and social roles. Peterson’s psychology is responding to this crisis with a program for reconstructing value hierarchy on the basis of a naturalized and universal human culture.    

Peterson’s psychology projects the myth of a global village that would restore symbolic distinctions. These distinctions could be arranged vertically or horizontally. The need for vertical hierarchy was emphasized by Rene Girard (“difference of degree”), whereas the need for horizontal opposition was emphasized by Carl Schmitt (“friends and enemies”). Peterson’s thinking is closer to Girard in its ideal of harmonious universalism based on a shared hierarchy of human values. His psychology does not consider the horizontal relations between communities that was emphasized by Schmitt, and this reflects an oversight which has generally compromised the legacy of Kantian idealism. As Schmitt explained, this leads to an absolutization of enmity which is conspicuous in Peterson’s writings, where other cultures are considered simply unknowable and therefore fearsome, so that the foreign can only be assimilated or destroyed. There is no place in Peterson’s psychology for any ongoing relationship with the foreign or the unknown.     

A structural distinction arises between the threshold and the frontier.  The threshold opens between two symbolic fields, whereas the frontier opens onto the absolute unknown. Schmitt would attempt to codify a threshold by drawing a distinction between friend and enemy. But Peterson’s liberal globalism confronts an open frontier at the end of history.  So he attempts to tame the frontier of the ending of history by codifying it with the symbols from the cultural archive of threshold myths. Through repeating some mythic behavior, some ancient traditions can be restored, and this would dispel the ambivalence of values.  This way of thinking projects a traditional iconology onto the unknown, staging a mythic role-play, which dispels the uncanniness of uncertain identities. Next let’s consider how this mythic staging draws on uniquely Christian legacies and how these legacies are implicated in the process of globalization. 

2. Transgression

Peterson figures the ambivalence of globalization as an injured father who must be saved by a heroic son. The authority of the father must be restored in order to dispel the ambivalence which threatens the community. This process of salvation involves a pharmacology from gnostic and romantic sources, where this heroism would be contaminated with the ambivalence that it resists. The heroes of the ancient Greeks were considered both divine and human, and this mixed ancestry implied the curse of “hamartia”. This word hamartia appears translated in the English versions of the New Testament as “sin”. A Jungian syncretism would understand the exceptional powers of mythic heroes to derive from their sinful afflictions. In the context of globalization, this could mean the powers to overcome ambivalence would be drawn from ambivalence. Or perhaps that the process of salvation would be a transformation where subjectivity internalizes ambivalence as a new habitus.   

The patristic fathers drew a distinction between sin and inequity, which is rarely considered by modern interpreters. These terms were rendered into the Greek of the Septuagint as hamartia and anomia.  For example, Psalms 50 reads:

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy great mercy;

And according to the multitude of thy compassions

blot out my transgressions (anomema)

wash me thoroughly from mine inequity (anomias)

and cleanse me from my sins (hamartias)

For I am conscious of mine iniquity (anomian)

And my sin (hamartia) is continually before me 

Philo the Jew provided the explanation of this distinction, where hamartia (sin) would be the transgression of local customs, and anomia (iniquity) would be a condition of general indifference to all customs everywhere. This explains why blasphemy was unforgiveable, because it would be the attitude of anomie towards the universality of the holy spirit.  This could distinguish two orders of heroism:  a relative heroism which “sins” against local customs, and an absolute heroism which is “anomic” towards any customs.

The stories in the gospels present a community whose values are sliding into ambivalence. For example, there is the scene when Jesus was accused of working on the Sabbath. This called for a heroism (hamartia) that would restore the local nomos of the community by connecting it with the universal nomos of the holy spirit. This defines the sense in which a conservatism can be revolutionary, as it would revolutionize the customs of a local community by realigning them with the universal norms of humanity. This could mean bringing the local customs of the community into a new alignment with the evolving norms of global finance. In Marxian terms, the “local customs” would be the use-values of labor and consumption, whereas the global norms of the holy Geist would be the exchange-values of finance.  Today’s heroes would be leading the waves of financialization, by integrating populations into the evolving technologies of exchange (i.e. “fintech”).     

The term anomia becomes more prominent in apocalyptic literature, where it embodies the forces of evil which govern this world, rule the children of darkness, and fights against the forces of righteousness and the children of light of the future of the world.  Postmodern conservatives like Peterson invoke this mythic idea of anomia to stage a contemporary anti-politics as an apocalyptic struggle of good and evil. This would cast politics as the evil of anomia which blasphemies against the holy spirit. Anomie would be the iniquity of the absolute heroes who transgress against the universal norms of exchange-value.         

3. Adaptation

Peterson articulates a Kantian heroism for the end of history that would seek to discover new symbolic values in the sexual abyss of nature. Such a heroism is exemplified by the microbiologist Lyn Margulis, whose work has various homologies with Peterson’s psychology. Like him she resists against the over-extension of scientific objectivity and attempts to narrate through the subjective figures of Greek myth. Though unlike him she espouses a scientific realism which leaves little room for the paradigmatic structures of metaphor. She claims that the contemporary world is hampered by the traditional Linnean division of the animal and plant kingdoms, and she undertakes a progressive activist labor in raising awareness of the uncanny bacterial world.

Where the bacterial is commonly treated with disdain, mere “parasitic germs”, Margulis argues that it’s more the reverse, that these monstrous bacteria are hosting us. They have no distinct sexes or species but rather share a diverse pool of genetic codes which mixes freely in a utopian fashion. As Freud pointed out, they are immortal, they are never born and never die, but just continue multiplying endlessly. They are the common ancestors of all organic life, and yet they are still alive. We are continually sustained by these living ancestors. And perhaps even more bizarre, the various systems of our physiology were apparently assembled through some ancient integration processes between different classes of bacterium. Margulis even suggests that consciousness originated through a process of bacterial assembly. This implies a kind of reification, where the mythology of our superior civilization would eclipse the bacterial labor to which everything we enjoy is owed.    

Where Peterson describes the assembly of Judeo-Christian culture through agonal contests between local cults around the ancient Near East, Margulis describes the assembly of the respiratory system through agonal struggles among classes of bacteria in the later Mesozoic period. This scientific discovery of the bacterial bears the signatures of a strange destiny, where the scientists stand like Oedipus before the sphinx. And this time the answer is likely not going to be “Man”, but rather “Sphinx”, which is to say “Bacteria”. Participation in the bacterial could be a transgression that gives other meanings to the iniquities of patricide and incest. There are different magnitudes of transgression, which would consider the nomos at different scales. What appears anomic at the human scale might be in accordance with the nomos of the bacteria. 

Perhaps the most audacious aspect of Peterson’s work is where he defines “myth” as an evolutionary program of sociocultural adaptation. Myth would be the cultural capital which affords the sort of providential prudence which was expounded by the Salamanca theologians. This instrumentalizes “myth” as a tool of evolution, and thus makes it a flashpoint for contests over the evolutionary direction of human development. Peterson maintains the hegemony of occidental culture by keeping the mythic structured according to metaphoric paradigms. The formal structure of metaphor establishes a fortified island of patriarchal civilization in the abyss of female sexuality. Though Peterson’s definition of the term might conflict with the claim that “myth can only be understood mythically”, which implies a Protean ontology that is sui generis and therefore undefinable.     

In the context of these arguments, it might be prudent to reconsider the category of art. Early modern thinkers considered art as a supplement that would improve nature, which implies a kind of contest between the artificial and the natural. We can discover this pattern of agonal struggle in Peterson’s writing.  

Peterson begins his magnum opus Maps of Meaning (1998) with a chapter on neurology, where he attempts to mythologize the divisions of the brain, following a civilization versus barbarism model. He describes a nervous system with multiple subsystems, which are competing for control over the muscle action, in order to satisfy their particular needs. This repeats the discourse of Paul in Romans, about the harmony of the different organs of the body, but now it’s transposed into a scientific discourse on the body of the individual. The struggle ends with a Hobbesian contract, where the nervous system gets unified under a civil regime of cortical governance. The frontal lobes assume an execute function that would arbitrate between the needs of the various neural sub-systems. Discourses on neural governance can also be found in the writings of Denis Dennett and Thomas Metzinger.

Such neuro-mythic speculation opens a mise-en-abyme, that ultimate figure of regression, where the mythic and the natural reflect into each other. This regression is another uroboros loop, where the mind slides into the reveries of its own private Leviathan fantasy. At times it would seem that Peterson’s psychology might be doomed to this endless reflection of art and science. This necessitates an escape which arrives through the interruptive force of his famous paternal injunction, “clean your room!”  This stereotypical outburst of an obsessional male would seem to situate us in the normative domestic scene of a middle-class suburban household.  This would be a paternal metaphor on the paradigmatic model of industrial order, “get back to work!”. 

But other interpretations of this patriarchal injunction might be possible. This expression might alternately assume the opacity of the non/nom of the father. This would be like Badiou’s “naming of the void”, a pure indexing of a nominal condition which resists any conceptuality or iconology. A naming of the contemporary which erupts as some bestial exclamation from the opaque depths of physiology. A no/name of the father which reverberates in the singular opening of the contemporary world.  Where the paternal metaphor would remain chained within the rotating circuits of the symbolic/imaginary, this no/name would touch upon the disturbing abgrund whose repression is the condition of that paradigmatic consistency. A disturbance of the real which is the origin of any categories. 

This would be a myth of a real which lies beyond the limits of mythology. This sort of negative mythology was expressed as the Dao in Chinese philosophy. This would be the real as the myth that cannot be told, the myth that stands as the ground of all myths, or that can only be told under singular conditions, like an accidental eruption of repressed anomalies, which would bring the myth of history to an end, while perhaps preparing the ground for other myths.

Peterson tends to treat myth like an archive of cultural codes. Then it would serve as a cultural capital that could afford the prudential planning for the course of a wise evolution. But instead we might define myth as a category of kairotic event, like a seismic tremor that shifts the structural order of the symbolic. Not like some app on a smartphone that can be tapped at any moment according to the capricious volition of a consumer. But rather a mythology that remains in a condition of indeterminate suspension up until the maturation of some destined scenario which causes it to issue forth.  

Aesop was a mute Ethiopian slave who petitioned the god Isis for the power to speak. She granted his wish in a perverse  way, so that whenever he opened his mouth to speak a flood of fables would issue forth. These fables are repeated everywhere, in all lands, in all languages. Like a universal nomos of the holy ghost.

Liberal Modernity

The idea of liberal modernity is overdue for a restaging. But this will have to proceed in a rather tenuous modality, which cannot be just not a straightforward description of actuality, but rather an articulation of potentials which are nascent in contemporary conditions. This becomes a dramaturgical thought-experiment in discursive deontology would fabulate the evolutionary future of the political. The problem concerns how the liberal legacy could transform itself so as to negotiate through the present impasses. It’s a problem of argumentative personas and the partitioning of the rhetorical field. The problem is not just what arguments should be made, but the portrayal of contestants and audiences, and the dramatic atmosphere in which these debates take place. Special attention must be given to the efficacies of indirect discourse, especially where audiences become indeterminate on social media, and to the evolving structuration of group consensus.

It was Rousseau who articulated the enduring core of the modern predicament, when he elaborated the contradictions between amour propre and amour de soi. Perhaps the destiny of modernity would be to know itself as an alteration of these argumentative personas. The basic pattern is the dynamic where the atomization of economic individuals leads to the backlash of traditional collectivism. Individualism was at the foundation of liberal thought in the Enlightenment and was still championed by Max Weber in his debates with Emile Durkheim. But by the later twentieth century the discourses of liberal modernity were shifting towards communitarian rhetoric. There was a mimetic convergence with traditionalist and socialist adversaries. Individualism became unfashionable for various reasons, and this trend has continued through to the current generation who are influenced by the likes of Charles Taylor, who seeks out “deeper and richer moral sources” that can support “human flourishing” in secular culture.

There is no reason to debate the need for deeper moral sources in secular culture. This statement serves as a deontic condition for entering the debate that would screen candidates from any political factions. Then the main controversy concerns where those deeper moral sources might be sought. The decisive factor which distinguishes argumentative roles are attitudes towards the historical. The shibboleth-question could be formulated thus: what do the moral sources of culture have to do with history? And perhaps the only answer which qualifies a liberal would be, “nothing whatsoever”.

Wherever the advances of reason have provoked the backlashes of antirational traditionalism, that dynamic has gone by the name “dialectic of the Enlightenment”. Little has be written about the evolution of that dialectic through regional variations. There is no question that this hackneyed model is in need of rearticulation to account for changing conditions. Over recent decades there has been an erosion of the visions of historical progress, and due to this attrition the discourses of traditionalism have gradually annexed the genre of history. Today the historical future no longer holds the kind of attraction that it did up until the late twentieth century. Due to the many disappointments of unfulfilled promises, modernizing visions of history are increasingly met with cynicism. This ongoing exhaustion of historical progress was recently described in Age of Anger (2017) by Pankaj Mishra. As this trend continues, it could completely decimate the mainstream liberal politics which remains entrenched in progressive visions of history.

So what becomes of liberal modernity once it has dispensed with the progressive historical orientation? It would seem that a reformation may become necessary, where the symbolic discourses would be restructured so that the history tout court would belong entirely to traditionalism. The success of Enlightenment reasoning over the last few centuries has depended on the self-historicization of reason as a progressive movement, although that historical tendency can be seen as a compromise with the legacies of the aristocracy. The critical project of Kantian reason was launched from a decidedly non-historical vantage, and then his later followers among the German Idealists were tempted into a historical galvanization that would motivate the modernization of government, industry, and education. That proved to have been a Faustian bargain which may be approaching an inevitable termination. The resistance to historicism has persisted in liberal movements such as neo-Kantianism, analytical philosophy, and psychoanalysis. And of course Marxists have always been infuriated by the anti-historicism so prevalent in classical and neoclassical economics.

The reformation of modernity requires a nominalist labor that would redefine the concept of history. The term would have to be stripped of its fetishistic iconicity and redeployed as a denotation of projective space-time. This has to do with the concreteness of the Husserlian “natural attitude”, and also the Heideggerian movement of “gathering”. The word concrete derives from the Latin con-cresere, “grown together”. History would be redefined as a growing together of communities which projects away the alterity of other times and place. This is a mimetic convergence of the same which depends on a projection of the different. When something is perceived concretely, then it’s conflated into the bodily habits of the perceiver, like the readiness of the tools which are Vorhanden. History would denote the immersion of subjectivity into the organic networks of communal everydayness.

To perceive a person concretely is to recognize them sympathetically as a fellow-human, and to identify them with group affiliations. They are recognized as a child, Caribbean, left-handed… whatever. Concrete perception mobilizes nebulae of experiential traces which are mimetically projected into objects where they become active in the preconscious for guiding behaviors and expectations. These traces provide the iconic resources for conceptual identities. Concreteness assumes a customary terrestrial orientation of bodies where perception is tacit and contextual. This articulation of presence extends into narration and causal explanation and finds its anchoring in grievances and responsibilities. Liberal modernity should be redefined as an abstraction which stands in contradiction to this “historical” consciousness.

With the recent disclosure of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” there were resounding calls for the “cancellation” of this philosopher from curriculums of the university. Perhaps these calls were indicative of a crisis where liberal scholars may have sensed their own intellectual unfitness for debating this adversary. Or even worse, perhaps they were disturbed by their own uncanny resemblances with this Teutonic thinker. Perhaps they felt a disturbing intuition that Charles Taylor’s calls for “deeper moral sources” were beckoning the liberal scholars along a path that could lead them to the Black Forest. This uncanny mimetics might have triggered a projective scapegoat mechanism to eject Heidegger back into the historical epoch of fascism where his supposedly fanatical ideas would no longer disturb the righteous discourses of up-to-date academia.

There is no reason for modernity to abandon the quest for “deeper moral sources”. The decisive controversy concerns where exactly those sources are to be sought. The name of history should designate one possible receptacle for the sources of morality. Such a projection would become the defining move of everything that liberal modernity resists. But then where would it locate its own moral sources? Here there is a need for further nominalist labor that would have to redefine the concept of morality. But notice that nominalism implies an abstraction which already resists the concreteness of the historical. Perhaps this nominalist breaking away of abstract contemplation from historical concreteness could itself become the new source for a new morality.

Nominalism is the idea that the meaning of words can be pragmatically reassigned, and this breaking with customary signification implies a kind of violence. Taken to its extremes, this becomes the formal abstractions of logic and mathematics. This violent abstraction could be identified with the core of the enlightenment reason which remains once various progressive conceits and other illusions have worn away. After the exhaustion of historical progress, what remains of the enlightenment would be this disturbing abstractive reasoning, which erupts in the nominalist liberty to reassign the meanings of these terms “history” and “morality”. The violence of reason would shatter the concrete perception of historical gathering. That violence could be considered “deep” in a psychoanalytic sense which touches the primal core of the mind.

Millennial Ironies

(some conceptual parataxis, not arguments, just possible statements, and disjunctions between them)

There is a certain irony in late modern poetry which awaits interpretation. It’s diminutive impassivity could be mistaken at first glance for witticism or cuteness, while on further consideration it refers to disturbing negativity verging on the hysterical. It signals an obstinate refusal to choose from among the infinite possibilities for market transaction, and the odor which issues from the burning of the overwhelming potential of money through the pockets. This is a scene where the signifier gets immolated by the infinite possibilities of the liberal markets and vaporizes into the artificial flow of imagery. Then to put a further twist on this, there is the culpability of critical reason which is charged with the deconstruction of the signifier. This is poetry that dramatically stages the extinction of subjective agency in the avalanche of technical contingencies, along with the culpability of reason for the murder of the primal signifier. This should be taken as mise-en-scene, which does not assume a history of the decline of symbolic efficacy. This is rather the self-staging of self-affectation in late modern poetry. 

What appears most conspicuous in this poetry is a relentless play of ironic reversals.  Yet this work ultimately manages to assert some classical ideals of virtue. The controversial issue here is how “postmodern irony” can be effective in the servicing of classical ideals. This performance involves several layers of dissimilation as it attempts to contravene both the customs of grievance and the values of commodification. And its aspiration to the impersonal refuses any celebration of heroic individuality.  Then what sort of virtue might this poetry promote? One could paraphrase Ian Hacking by saying that it performs a suffering involved in the “taming of contingency”. And while this poetics emerges in the later twentieth century, the virtue it promotes is not restricted to the conditions of that epoch. 

This poetry deals with traumas of contingency which belong to the annals of modernity disturbance. That archive would include Wordsworth swooning amidst the crowds of London, and Simmel stupefied by the motorcars of Munich. But notice how these earlier shocks affected the perceptual faculties of the organic body on a concrete level, whereas our problem concerns a more abstract and even spiritual kind of inundation. The Leibnizian monadology bears witness to a traumatic experience which is more relevant for the concerns of late modernity, where the peculiar division of bodies and monads responded to the liquidation of estates during the crisis of the 1600s. The insistence on optimization reaches an ascetic refusal of all possibilities (“that’s not it!”).     

A spectrum of sufferance is evidenced in 1980s pop culture, especially in musical genres like new wave, heavy metal, punk, and techno. These genres might be associated with complexes such as masochism, primal murder, or incest. Though it’s wiser to assume that each audience could interpret any genre according to their own affective dispositions. These structures of feeling belong to an epoch of the ending of history, where undirected time raises social entropy as an aesthetic problem. This condition results from an economy where the idea of the “developed world” serves as a guiding value for the “undeveloped nations”. This relational world structure was reproduced in a feedback loop between promotion and investment. The “developed” condition posed a threat for a primal repression that had assumed the temporality of progress, and various aesthetic styles emerged as responses to this undoing of primary repression. A millennial poetics was manifested in songs of Leonard Cohen from the mid-1980s, and in films like Pump Up the Volume. 

In the late 1960s, Laplanche and Pontalis posed the question, “doesn’t primal repression found humanity?”. Perhaps the very posing of this question announced a challenge for capitalist development.  If humanism was the great obstacle for development, then its overcoming required the undoing of primal repression.  Herbert Marcuse’s notion of “repressive desublimation” moved towards such a hypothesis.

Primal repression is like the formatting of a hard drive, which determines the structuring of information processing.  The mind has a reflexive capacity to reformat itself according to different structures.  Neurologists have described the economic trade-offs between versatility and processing capacity. A mind which has a relatively invariable topology gains advantages from being more accustomed to the consistency of its self-organization. This is like a conservative librarian who religiously adheres to the Dewey decimal system, which gives them the ability to quickly retrieve whatever books are requested. Yet this invariance becomes a disadvantage when new genres of information appear, since the existing system would lack appropriate categories. Conversely, a liberal librarian who is inclined to spontaneously alter the filing system would make the opposite trade-off:  they are able to create suitable categories for new kinds of material, though they may have difficulty retrieving information which is requested.   

This computational metaphor provides an approach to ontology.  When categories are taken as more permanent and fundamental then they are hardwired into the functioning of the mind. The mind has greater efficiency when thinking in terms of these fundamental categories. Heidegger favored a course of mental development where the basic neurological processes would move along the axis of Being and beings.  Whereas a certain reading of Hegel would prioritize an axis between contingency and actuality.  When Lacan introduces the Vel in his eleventh seminar, that idea has implications for this fundamental partitioning of thought. Conservatism that would emphasize some fundamental binary division between concepts, figures, or numbers. Whereas the Spinozist lesson of the poststructuralists was to establish the oneness of the middle as such before considering the identity of the sides which it divides.  Then the elementary articulations of twoness would be defined in temporal and spatial terms.   

Jean Piaget divided the learning process into the phases of assimilation and accommodation. On the first encounter with new material, the mind of a learner is overwhelmed by inconceivable and unpresentable alterity. The mind does not possess suitable concepts, figures, or numbers which could give the other an adequate symbolic expression, so there is a hackneyed expression where some familiar symbols are deployed to stand for the unrecognizable qualities of what has just manifested for the first time. This assimilation carries a sense of inadequacy because the other is not well expressed. This sense of inadequacy sets into motion a reformatting of symbolic differentiation, which is the accommodative secondary phase of learning. This pedagogical theory can be reinterpreted as an après coup where time figures itself in the double mirroring of a mise-en-abyme. There is an inverse reflection of the past in the future. There is an earlier time when the other is the same, and a later time when the same is the other.     

Consider the “example” of learning the sounds of a new language.  In earlier attempts at speaking, the learner reproduces the sounds of their mother tongue. The foreign sounds are assimilated into the familiar sounds. The phonetic distinctions of the new language have not yet discernible, and the muscles of the vocal tract have not yet developed to produce them. The learner perceives the new sounds as inarticulate noises which can be represented only through assimilation into the repertoire of already familiar phonetic distinctions. This is also basically what it means to speak with a foreign accent. 

The concept of language devolves from the experience of particular languages. And today this conception gets shaped by the status of English as an international language.  This implies a repression of sensitive regional contingencies, so that concepts of language are shaped by regional language politics. Then the virtual potential of language, which inheres universally in the physiology of the species, undergoes varying regional repressions. The releasing of this potential would require a conception of language that is not bound up with the particularities of recent experience. The virtual idea of language moves the linguistic into non-identity with itself, and this pushes the very articulation of conceptuality off-kilter, bringing the erasure of sociopolitical identities, and dissolving the concrete immediacy of language as an anchor of territorial identity in perceptual belief.

A certain deconstructive argument is exemplary in its capacity to undermine the conditions of primary repression. This argument posits that the concepts of time and space are implied within a “common root” that is shared by the distinctions active/passive and self/other. Self and other change roles in a rhythmic alteration between passive and active, and all metaphysical concepts emerge from these rhythms.  In terms of concrete experience, these rhythms emerge in dialogue, sports, industry, politics, and sexuality. The contemplation of this deconstructive argument quietly undoes primary repression behind our backs and exposes thought to the contingencies of its own conditioning.  Thought loses the particularity of its own orientation within the symbolic and sets out on the adventure of discovering a radical neutrality.    

Alenka Zupancic explains how speech is only possible from particular positions within symbolic relations.  This means there can be no neutral speech that would issue from nowhere, anywhere, or everywhere. A speaker must assume a symbolic position that would relate them with other speakers, some of whom being the same in some way, and some of whom being different. The symbolic relation would divide the possible speakers into the same and the different. This division of roles in language coincides with the division of sexual roles. In terms of logical expression, the slide into the neutral neutralizes the powers of affirmation and negation. The neutral is where affirmation and negation become indiscernible. This is what Lacanians would call the failure of the symbolic relation. This could be understood as a general ethical failure to establish any kind of interpersonal rapport.     

The question that eventually arises is whether there can be a symbolic division of the neutral. This is the route suggested by Blanchot when he distinguishes the neutral from the neuter. The drawing of such distinctions would require the initial failure of all symbolic distinction, such that other and self are dissolved into an anonymous murmur. There would have to be some registration of this ethical failure where the capacity for symbolic expression. The style of modernist novels called the flow of consciousness, or even the traditional narrative convention of free indirect speech, might provide some basis for this symbolization of the non-symbolic. Then from within this anonymous murmur, the question becomes how the neutral itself could undergo a symbolic division.  

When Zupančič explains the sexual distinction, she takes up a line of thought from Joan Copjec, who read the pattern of Lacanian sexuation into Kantian philosophy. The female side of symbolic form gets expressed through the mathematical sublime, which opens beyond the antinomies of containment. This is the undecidability about whether the universe has limits in time and space. This could be associated with disciplinary knowledge that emphasizes containment such as earth sciences, contextual linguistics, and the maternal analysis of Melanie Klein.  Whereas the male side gets expressed through the dynamical sublime, which opens beyond the antinomies of volitional determination. This could be associated with the Baconian power-knowledge where instrumental intentions take themselves as the causes of industrial development. Then there would necessarily be some correlation among these “sexed” disciplines. 

This sexual division of disciplinary knowledge would draw a symbolic distinction within neutrality, such that both kinds of disciplinary knowledge are objective. But this was not the distinction that Blanchot proposed between the neuter and the neutral. That point might be articulated as one between an Other-neutral and a neuter-neutral. The neuter-neutral would be an infantile fantasy of an impossible asubjectivity which would inhabit the omniscience of nowhere. Inclinations towards this position tend towards destructive impotence. This position of the neuter-neutral is “infantile” in the sense that it requires mourning or sublimation.  Through that process of mourning it can be transformed into the Other-neutral.  This Other would be an empty third which separates the female logic of containment from the male logic of causality.

A labor of subtraction is required to keep this Other vacant, to prevent it from sliding back into the neuter-neutral, or to prevent it from becoming the site for the return of a deity which would guarantee identities.  Kojève was responding to this problem when he elaborated his theory of the juridical third which was modelled on the Platonic statesman.  That is the form which authority would assume after the end of history. This juridical neutrality stands a process of dying that would coincide with the mourning or sublimation of the neuter-neutral.  The historical struggle for recognition would be a struggle for the occupation of this infantile position of the neuter-neutral. And the passage beyond the end of history would be the success of the mourning  or sublimation which transforms that position into the emptiness of the third which separates the male and female positions.

This leaves problems about whether the neuter-neutral could ever be completely absolved into the Other-neutral.  This coincides with the problems surrounding the ending of history.  Obviously this cannot be understood as a single event which happens once and for all. There is the question of whether this labor of sublimation has anything to do with historical chronology, or whether this should be approached as a mise-en-scene of self-affection or group-affectation. The term neuter-neutral would work metonymically as a name for whatever polite modernity cannot tolerate. This could explain why sexuation entered the discourse of modern philosophy under the heading of the sublime. The sublime was classified among the “figures of classical rhetoric”, but in truth it was always a category for the mourning of lost antiquity.  Longinus was already a proto-modern in this sense. 

The neuter-neutral would be a category of unmourned infantile attachments which include traditionalist fantasies of antiquity.  These are distinctly modern reveries of a lost past.  This could refer to numerous legacies and traditions which are associated with the glories of the ancients. This topic concerns the pathological tendencies associated with traditionalism. This is where psychoanalysis has emphasized the figure of the primal father. The term “infantile attachment” has often connotated maternal attachment, but the neuter-neutral dissolves the distinction between maternal and paternal, such that phantasies of the maternal phallus may arise. 

This moves towards a dialectical strategy for dealing with the politics of traditionalism. Tactless liberals attempt to assume the greatest distance possible from traditionalist pathologies.  They want to deride their enemy from a safe distance. This a projection of the neuter-neutral into the other. But perhaps symbolic relations are conditional on access to the neuter-neutral.  This means that a sexual division would reemerge afresh from their submerging into that abysmal neutrality. For this reason, traditionalism should be approached where it is bound with liberal modernity in the most compromising ways. Resisting the inclination towards projection, this would mean seeking out the speculative identity of liberal friends and traditionalist enemies. 

For example, the legacy of theodicy provides opportunities for the discovery of such speculative identities. This is the traditional genre of Christian writings which attempt to account for evil in the world.  The supposedly modern notion of the free will has its origins in theodicy.  Here we find liberal modernity compromised by the darkness of antiquity. It’s at sites such as this that a labor of mourning can proceed through the play of millennial ironies.

Vocational Hazards

(For Avital Ronell)

The etymology of the word “career” suggests the sort of uncontrolled movement that would naturally culminate in a crash, such as when a vehicle “careers” into a collision, and yet there is a pervasive normative assumption that careers are supposed to proceed smoothly and even according to some kind of plan. When a career goes careering off course, this means that volition has skidded into antinomic impasses where the pretenses of life-direction are disturbed. The problem of the subjective crediting of work is never ending, because whenever we attempt to attribute work to some subject in a rigorous way, then this gets complicated by various regressions, ultimately into the crediting of the dead and the unborn.

Work is customarily credited to subjective agencies, whether those are agencies of selfhood or others. There is a common custom where the credited receive an endowment of salary which stands for some virtuous suffering which was essential to a work-process. But the ongoing crises of modernity continues to complicate this subjective attribution of industry. Marx breached this issue when he derided the way that “sterile” capital usurped the credit for industrial production from the laboring proletarians. The recognition of work of work gets stopped on some unitary signifier like “Steven Spielberg”, though we know that “his” movies are produced by the people who he directs. Marx implicitly raised the question of what credit a famous director deserves, and that question opens onto regressions back to the sources of goodness beyond the chance conditions of someone’s birth in the eternal fecundity of nature. The name is supported by symbolic mediations in a way that can halt this regression into the abyss of material origins. Then the crashing of the name reveals the workings of those symbolic mediators which had brought it into existence. The career crash could traverse these transferential fantasies of the subjective crediting of work, which is analogous to the cultic values which are generated in religion.

The subjectivization of production has involved sympathy with the iconology of reason. Motivated by humanistic narcissism, Kant attempted to decouple the freedom of reason from the mechanism of the understanding. This was an attempt to establish a humanist exception to the determinism of nature. Reason would become a bit of divinity which endows the human with a free will, making them both creditable and culpable for their deeds. But insofar as reason may be identified as a source of mythic misrecognition, this commences an estrangement of subjectivity from the process of work. The discussion surrounding AI carries an allegorical significance, which is that it symbolizes the return of the understanding, which suggests a termination of the romantic age when the rhetoric of romantic reason had more often prevailed.

In his book Metahistory, Hayden White explained how Marx had incorporated the determinism of economics into his thinking, such that the development of capitalism was counted as a natural process which adhered to laws on par with those of zoology. This gives the faculty of the understanding a duplicity, where it is at once the study of deterministic processes, while it also participates in the affairs of res extensa where, in a Baconian manner, it assumes active agency in the causation of industrial development and perpetrates the violence of its analytical abstraction. Those chains of deterministic causality may hold the temptation of economic masochism, so that the rational cogito would passively fall down into the murky contingencies of res extensa. The blessings of God’s symbolic mediation fall onto the Cogito, and yet that agency may be haunted by a mysterious temptation to abandon itself to the meaningless ricochet of billiard balls. Such abandonment is suggested in many ways, whether as “going with gut instincts” or “stepping outside one’s comfort zone”.

Whyte portrayed Marx as a Manichean thinker who was split between English determinism and German dialectics. Though this would not privalege the dialectic, which was more a figment of bourgeois idealism which emerged in the mediation of courtly subjectivity. So we get a Vel between the English understanding of the material, and the German dialectic of the symbolic. Whyte insisted that the asymmetry between these two dimensions is such that they can never enter into a dialectical relation with each other. A transposition of this encounter into world systems would have dialectical reason concentrated in the financial sources where exchange values predominate, whereas the empirical understanding would participate at the peripheries where use-values prevail. This model evolves towards a Leibnizian dialectic of the infinitely small, where the values of utility and exchange are drawn together.

The crashing of a career brings a manifestation of truth, like what Heidegger said about the breakdown of technology. But instead of truth, it’s more interesting to consider the Hegelian category of the actual. The appearances (Schein) of non-actual professionalism are dependent on the wrong grades of contingency, such as those which might be deemed parochial, ethnocentric, biased, prejudiced etc. Such appearances are fragile as they easily reverse into their opposites. But as the old adage says, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”, there is dissensus over which contingencies are universal. This is the dissensus of Laclauian hegemony. There are appearance of the actual which conceal their symbolic mediations, like someone who doesn’t mention that their grandmother paid for their apartment. The real independence of the actual implies the value of durability which that of Darwinian survival. Though actuality only assumes its existential gravity subjectively when a sense of the problem is awakened by some disruption of appearances.

When subjects are habituated to contingency, then they become less interested in qualities, because expect appearances will reverse into their opposites. Contingency flickers with the fluctuations of symbolic mediation. The term assumes a negative connotation like it has in the actuarial professions, where it can mean either the risk of something bad happening or a recourse which is taken when something bad happens. The course of actualization proceeds through a subtraction of mere contingency, and the degrees of actuality would be the inverse of those of contingency. For example, if someone has attained some position due to their family connections, then their career is less actual wherever it is restricted by that dependency. Unions and professional societies establish regimes of symbolic mediation which provide security in exchange for the adherence to some contingent norms and technical standards. Compare the east Asian model of the “golden elevator”, where parents enroll their offspring into exclusive kindergartens, on the assumption that they will ascend together with their classmates into the offices of administration. Institutional mediation involves invisible symbolic structures which vary according to local conditions. It is natural to seek out the disruption of institutional mediation as a matter of professional fitness, as in the managerial trope of “getting out of one’s comfort zone”.

The actuality of work would imply its independence from the localized contingencies of symbolic mediation. The term should assume a high degree of synthetic abstraction, which corresponds with its cosmopolitan ambitions. This is to say that actuality mustn’t become a reflection of some humanistic models of adulthood. Actuality would be like the freedom of work, such as the way “action” is conceived in Arendt’s Human Condition. That work belongs to the post-cohort in a way that is somewhat trans, as she was certainly aware of Kojève, and yet what she produced ended up rhyming with Maslow and the ego psychologists. I am tempted to read this book as an exercise in Ciceroan argument for the greater glory of Wirklichkeit, which argues for an elementary division of labor which inheres universally in nature. Then the question becomes how the book belongs to the symbolic mediation of the ancient Mediterranean world, and how that implies some restriction on its actuality. In this respect she doublessly qualifies as a Straussian intellectual, though she has never been discovered by the Republican Party presumably for reasons of her identity. For Hegel, of course the universal coincided exactly with the history of the west, and in that sense he furnished our civilization with a career plan. But through the course of the intervening two centuries, with the ongoing deepening of encounters between cultures, the contingencies of this Europhilic romance of reason become conspicuous. Which hegemonic particularities of bourgeois culture are likely to have survived?

The particular weakness of neoliberal institutions reflect the incapacity of the university discourse to satisfy the needs for a master. The neoliberal bureaucrat suffers from a kind of imposter syndrome, where they become acutely aware of how they are not primal fathers. This frustration leads to the spectacular iconology of the midlife crisis which was iterated in the career-crash films of the 1990s. The idea of the actual participates in the exteriority the great outdoors, the wide world, and other reverie-genres of the primal fathers. The superficial artifice of the bureaucracy becomes disrupted by some return of nature or chaos. There are common criticism that neoliberal economies are overly regulated as compared with the truly free markets in the golden age of the laisse faire. These criticisms come from nearly any political factions, whether from libertarian realists who are invested in guns and gold, or the ecologism of the gentle souls like Rousseau who by chance enter into the primitive and eternal sustenance of nature. Cynicism towards the financial elite often harbors a resentful wish that a coming crash will expose the hollow vanity of the immaterial wealth. At the extremes of the political spectrum there is an absolutization of the rights of actual work against the parasitism of “the business and leisure classes”. The movie Triangle of Sadness (2022) undertakes a transversal of such fantasies as it explores how the crashing of a luxury cruise would not lead to some absolute actuality that was behind the fantasy as some political “realists” might imagine, but rather would just shift around the existing conditions of institutional mediation.

The ideal of actual work enters into symbolic exchanges with violence, such as that described by Elaine Scarry in Bodies in Pain (1989), where neoliberal torture campaigns were driven by a symbolic lack, which perhaps was a lack of work which has been conflated into the fantasmatic reveries of the primal fathers. But perhaps neoliberalism is not ultimately motivated by a lack of actual work, but rather by an absence of actuality which could be satisfied with thing-presentations. The real absent work then would be a work of thing-presentation, and the faculty of the understanding might be held culpable for this shortfall in the production of these presentations. How might this culpability of the understanding affect the orientation of the gaze?

The actuality of work implies its capacity to recover from crashes, while there may be discontinuities in who performs it. The subject always exists as a bastion of contingency, whereas the universal value of the work process itself stands for the actual. The work process is actual which can be performed independently of any particular conditions of symbolic mediation, so that the subjects who perform this work would recognize their conditions of operation everywhere, such as those “teachers of man” mentioned by Xunzi who would continue to practice their vocation throughout the “four seas”. The actuality of the work process is what survives the crash, though the subjects who are performing it could change. When there is a crash, the activity of work gets disrupted, and yet its actuality implies a Protean plasticity which allows it to migrate to new positions within the bureaucracy. When the Covid epidemic struck there was a triple partition between those who were laid-off, those who were forced to continue working under dangerous conditions, and those who continued working on-line from remote locations. This revealed how exposure to this particular disaster was distributed according to divisions of labor. This has to be packaged as one particular incident within a dossier on the impassivity of disaster.

It’s been suggested that masochists use pain to reduce their bodies to a degree-zero of materiality, which implies a destruction of symbolic mediation. The individual body of an organism is bound into its correlations with the symbolic institutions, and it pursues freedom through a primary masochism which has motivated centuries of libertinage and libertarianism. There is a masochism of revolutionary machismo which is aroused by the shaking of dependency on symbolic mediation. This is where primary masochism can be understood as an occupational hazard, but which assumes the value of pharmacological ambivalence. When things are going smoothly at work, there is the danger that one might fall under the hypnotic gaze of managerial transference, like how poor Thais might accept that they owe their great fortune to their king. But then troubles arrive with the toxicity of the troublesome employee who shows up with shit caked into their hair, just in order to verify the actual value of what they are delivering. The stench of toxicity operates as a proof of actuality in a world bereft of the universal.

When Leibniz and Wolf contracted the faculty of the understanding, that instituted a regime of cruelty. The cruelties of this regime are magnified when the understanding gets mistaken for the private property of an individual. Leibniz was not possessed of his own understanding, but rather with the Understanding in its universal operation. The maturation of modernity follows the shifting in our disposition towards that faculty. Classical and modern education are both aimed at instilling this understanding into individual but the process of education becomes convoluted due to the uncertain locus at which this faculty operates. The main idea of modernity was to live in accordance with symbolic operations, but there has been insufficient investigation into the disjunctions which are inherent in those operations, which are destined to devastate actuality. As subjectivity awakens to its alienation from the understanding, there eventually arises the limit-question of whether any actual relation with these cognitive processes is even possible.

How does an individual come to believe that it possesses an understanding, rather than opposite? This is an illusion that the understanding is something that the subject “has”, in the way that someone has a body or private property, rather than the way someone has a headache, a nightmare, or a difficult situation to deal with. There is some mysterious charm where they surrender themselves to the possession of this faculty which somehow imposes itself so that they mistake its thoughts for their own. This subjective recognition of thoughts is a murky process which involves a duality of capability and culpability. Related genres of literature here include the theodicy and Augustinian confession as they were appreciated among the philosophes of the Enlightenment.

The gaze of the understanding recognizes all human artifacts as a its products. All the various existential dangers which emerge in our contemporary world could be attributed to the maloperations of that faculty. To identify the understanding as the culprit in this way, this takes a subjective stance vis-à-vis the opaque historicity of language and thought. The understanding travels like an ark which carries lines of signature going back beyond Kant and Leibniz, to the Renaissance, late scholasticism, and the Categories of Aristotle. This genealogy withdraws the faculty of the understanding into the organic concreteness of historicity which thickens around the advent of technology. This name “understanding” would refer to an ancient potential which has actualized in the modern age as technological capitalism. This potential was transmitted through Thales, Parmenides, Archimedes…. and has been actualized in the great urban centers of the modern world. The question becomes whether the actuality of technological capitalism leaves some dissatisfaction which stirs a desire for some counter-actualization of that same potential.

The faculty of the understanding operates the Vel of distinction between nature and artifice where it regulates the economy of passages across that division. Classical European learning treated the artificial as mere imitation of nature, and this prevailed up until the advent of Kantianism. However, the Neoplatonists had portrayed the artist as a demiurge who could create in an absolute manner as did divinities, and this opened paths that Kant and his followers would later pursue. The third antinomy had already received treatment by Proclus in his letter to the cynical engineer. The acute sensitivity of the Vel is due to its correlation with primary repression. The process of actualization implies some crossing of the Vel, and so it is also intricately conditioned by the contingencies of primary repression.

Modern societies are contracted through the natural laws of evolution. These are the cybernetic regulations of the pleasure principles as it was transcendentalized by Wordsworth and Spenser. This arch normative principle is at work in the generic norms of institutional iconicity, such as the bell-curves distributions which represent predictability and the meeting of expectations. These are the pure formalities of categorial representation. This is how modernity has succeeded in raising nature up to a respectable Leibnizian stature, where it can operate according to eternal laws that were established once and for all, and become approximated in formal calculations. The great coup of evolutionary universalism inheres in the attribution to nature of its own inherent preestablished harmonies, as this dispenses with the need for any process of creation, much less miraculous interventions. The formidable normalizing power of biology has been able to support countless disciples with its iconic grip on the existential. Economic liberalism has grounded its powers of competition in this science of life. The regime operates impassively through the retroactive positing of natural laws as normative iconologies, so that the most superficial of appearances can operate subliminally as intractable paradigms of nature. Though the yet incomplete saturation of these ideas leaves open the question of counter-actualizations.

The career crash becomes a temptation where it holds the chance of counter-actuality. Rousseau underwent a number of tumbles, and there is evidence that these may have caused the subtraction of his identity, and left him in an exceptional condition of existence. Some oneness was subtracted, and what remained were raw potentials of nature available for idyllic play. When Rousseau fell, perhaps he fell out of his organic embodiment, which could have knocked his conditions of primary repression out of their customary orbit. Montaigne underwent similar falling experiences. Now we get to the interesting question about how such apparently accidental falls might have affected the processes of work. Work is organized according to a bi-dimensional condition, where there are divisions of labor among populations, and divisions of organs at the individual level. If work remains in constant disarray, then perhaps that is due to discordances between these private and public dimensions. That is the instability of the non-actual, such that precarious work has already been de-actualized by the threat of immanent traumatic shocks. With the case of Rousseau, these shocks liberated the desouvrement of his botanical investigations which indulged in the bucolic and the Sabbatical, but which alternately might have turned in other directions such as the carnivalesque, orgiastic etc. The career crash induces a surge of investiture, which is to say that it liberates flux from code, and that can send subjects departing for adventure.

Any bureaucracy might allegorize the maloperation of the understanding. Institutional normality assumes fixation on iconologies in order to screen out unruly facticity. This explains how the woke concern for justice has emerged as remarkable geopolitical ideology, where the complaint of injustice serves as a master signifier or anchoring point which nullifies alterity into the oblivion of its contradictory contingencies. Any bureaucracy might undergo a woke conversion, which has immediate implications for core operational issues such as staffing. Though these hegemonic iconologies are destabilized through the contingencies of translation, such that international movements are inevitably confused with the resistances which are localized in places such as Iran or Russia. This explains why the course of actualization must proceed through the Leibnizian dialectic of the infinitely small. The subjects are eager to bow before the pleasure principle, and yet its territories have disintegrated into the extimacies of the tangential, which leaves the subjects to erect little shrines here and there in the hopes that they might orient the administration of their estates according to its natural auspices.

Kant sought out the liberty of reason above and beyond the categorial rotations of the understanding, but this humanist idealization reverses into irony and allegory. Reason was a name for a primal father, a demiurge exempted from the laws of nature, but then the spread of liberal equality spells the disenchantment of this romantic faculty.

On the Chinese Ending of History

“If we want things to stay as they are, then things will have to change.”  -Prince Don Fabrizio（The Leopard, 1958, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa）

There are two obvious reasons why the ending of history is be due for reconsideration. For one thing, the newly emerging historical vantages could open original perspectives on this old theme. And the recent translations and studies of Alexandre Kojève which have been complicating the interpretation of his ideas. These works are exposing his Russian background, his Dostoyevskian side, his formalism, his phenomenology, and the origins of his thought in the proto-soviet eschatology of Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Fedorov. It turns out that Soloviev had already developed the distinctive Russian reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology in the late 1800s. Taking up this more nuanced Kojèvian theory, let us explore the prospects for a historiography from a 2020s vantage..

There is evidence to suggest that our present time belongs to the period that began in 1914, and that we are still within the limits of the twentieth century. This would break with Hobsbawm’s historiography of the “short 20th-century”. According to Kojève, these epochal definitions have economic and ethical implications. As we assume an orientation within any epoch, then we are automatically assigned a slave-task, which is the work of progressing beyond the limits of that epoch. If we succeed in progressing far enough, then we might eventually reach a condition which is post-historical. But there is no reason to assume that would necessarily be possible for us. In the late twentieth century, some perhaps manic individuals (such as Francis Fukuyama) announced the onset of a post-historical condition, but those declarations have since proven premature at best.  

Our ability to conceive the post-historical is restricted by its modal obscurity. The inherent obscurity of any historical condition – its historicity – means that it cannot be determined from within. This problem relates to the paradoxes of self-reference associated with Gödel. Any historical “ending” would have to imply some continuity as well as some beginning of something else. But we can’t predict what is going to end, what is going to continue, and what is going to begin. And this uncertainty is not simply due to our lack of knowledge, but rather because the ending depends on what our slave-work might be able to achieve. The ending of an historical epoch would be conditional on the performance of its slaves.  

Kojève provides elaborate directions for what this slave-work would have to accomplish. This requires the production of a narrative that would reflect the epoch to itself. This would bind the epochal time to itself, while liberating another future existence which is somehow spatialized instead. This temporal binding and spatial unbinding would proceed through an allegoresis that would figure the thresholds of the age. The beginnings and endings of the epoch would have to be allegorized. The spirituality of the age would have to be projected iconically. The epoch is not delimited simply by events, but rather by the filmic projection of iconic responses to those events. Next, let us consider how some iconic reflections could mark the limits of the twentieth century.

Alfred Korzybski was an intelligence officer for the Russian army during the Great War. He first travelled to the US for the sake of arms procurement, and would later emigrate there permanently. After the signing at Versailles, he wrote a book claiming that the war had ended the childhood of humanity and begun its adulthood. From today’s perspective, that judgment would seem to have been premature. We might agree that the war indeed may have brought some youthful innocence to an end, but what it began has since proven not been an adulthood, but rather more like a troubled adolescence which continues through until today. 

Jean Piaget is another potent icon of the twentieth century. He responded to the Great War with a passion that was hope teetering on the verge of despair. That emotional universalism has defined the liberal hegemony of our age. According to Piaget’s model of education, when a student is first introduced to new content, the process of learning begins with an initial phase he called “assimilation”, and at the end of that phase there commences a secondary phase he called “accommodation”.

With some irony, we might say that Piaget’s response to the war commenced an assimilation of the essential consequences of industrial society. This is to say that he expressed those consequences in hackneyed terms that were more suited to previously learned content. The new events were assimilated to old familiar models. This is the natural course of education, since the conceptualization of new content requires time. The Assimilative phase gradually proves inadequate and runs into contradictions, undergoes a dialectical attrition, and eventually there is forced a deeper reformation of symbolic forms, so that the new content can be adequately “accommodated” within the structure of expression.

If the Great War initiated the assimilation of the negative consequences of industrial modernity, then perhaps today we have accommodated those consequences into the structure of symbolic expression. Today we understand that industrial modernity creates a dynamic where liberal capitalism provokes nationalist reactions. This simple formulation makes our epoch recognizable to itself, from its origins in the late 19th century through until the present day. This was allegorized on the news last week when the images appeared of Ukrainian soldiers poking their heads out of trenches. The authenticity of such images might be considered questionable. These might be considered something like a cinematic production, where such historical icons are spoon-fed to audiences for purposes of ideological manipulation. Though even if that were the case, then it would only reinforce their significance as allegorical markers of epochal truth. The important questions are of a slavish form: what has been learned over the last hundred years? What sort of work has been accomplished? 

The Great War has remained something of an enigma for historians, and perhaps we still await the revelation of its true significance. Though there would seem little reason to debate the efficient cause of the war. The Ottoman Empire was withering because they were unable to industrialize, and as they withdrew from the Balkans that left a power vacuum.  And then Serbian nationalists were vying with the Austro-Hungarian empire for sovereignty in the region. But then what happened next? Why did Germany invade France? We haven’t received any decent explanations that would link these events together into a causal narrative. It would seem that a starting gun was fired, and then some atavistic war-fever took possession of the nations of Europe. The cause for the war was that something elusive which we might call acknowledgement or status recognition or honor. This would explain some details, such as why Thailand sent soldiers to Europe, when they were not even a colony of any European country. 

Patriotic histories have naturally focused attention on the myths of victory, so the jubilation of 1918 and 1945 has obscured the origins of 1914. Following Walter Benjamin, we might refer to these as “mythic truce dates”, where this fetishization of final victory has obfuscated the reality of origins. As Kant pointed out, these truces are temporary suspensions of the cycles of vengeance and retribution. They do not represent the advent of a “permanent peace” that would require a transformation in human nature. Regimes are often eager to declare the end of struggles because those endings are the mythic basis for Hobbesian sovereignty. This is the sovereign who articulates a present peace from a past war. This kind of ideology becomes obstinate when populations are eager to escape from a traumatic past. The Hobbesian social contract can imply a kind of trauma screen, where the good master becomes a charm that dispels the existential horrors of the past. Though this ideology becomes ambivalent as the sovereigns affirm historical existence again in order to mobilize populations for work and war.      

The year 1914 marks one beginning for our epoch, and there is a second beginning which falls somewhere around 1972. Where 1914 marks an eruption of turmoil, 1972 would mark the initiation of the neoliberal conquest. These two years are like intricately interlocking puzzle pieces. The nature of neoliberal activism has been obscured by the passions of leftist resistance. Just this name “neoliberalism” should be highly instructive. The original liberalism of course was the movement of Victorian market expansion in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. That wave of provoked the nationalist reaction that began in the 1860s with the Bizmarckian unification of Germany. That set into motion the particular dynamic which erupted in 1914, and which calmed down again after 1945.  Then 1972 would mark the initiation of a second cycle of liberal expansion, which has now provoked its own nationalist backlashes. As the character of neoliberalism became apparent, it was criticized by leftists for its supposed injustices. That was an anti-modern reaction which repeated the vicious cycle and the familiar dynamic is erupting again in similar forms of violence today.

Today neoliberalism has been studied extensively, and yet the results of this research remain inadequately disseminated. If this particular movement is not sufficiently understood, then political action may be destined to assume the same mythical polarity which led to the Great War. Presently, there is the spectacular contest between the US and Russia/China, which is like a bad rerun of axis and allies. In order to break this cycle, it might be necessary to appreciate the distinguishing accomplishments of neoliberalism. As Deleuze might say, we need to realize the difference that repetition could make in order that our reactions might be acted.       

Neoliberalism was an activist movement which succeeded in achieving several notable objectives. The most notorious of those accomplishments was the privatization of public corporations. This was decried by the left as another appropriation of the commons comparable to what happened in England in the 1700s.  While that interpretation might be correct, that wave of privatization should assume other significance today. The outbreak of WW1 was possible only because industries were under certain forms of monopolistic control. This meant that industrial companies could easily become the instruments of national military operations. It was just a matter of convincing a few robber barons of their patriotic duties or tempting them with some war-related profit schemes, and then an entire national economy could be shifted into a total war mode.

Today’s capitalism still has a monopolistic structure in some respects. Immanuel Wallerstein proposed that capitalism is always monopolistic by necessity. But today’s monopolies certainly have a more heterogeneous and differentiated form. And this is largely due to the privatizations and anti-trust legislation that was passed in the 1980s and 1990s. The principal objective of neoliberal activism was to impose an axiomatic division between the public and the private so that governments would be restricted to a regulatory role in the economy. Today, this axiomatic division stands as the principle obstacle to a complete war mobilization, so has been the saving grace of neoliberalism.

Today the drums of war are beating, and the atavistic signals of military mobilization are surging through the media. We might identify neoliberalism as a critical cause of this bellicosity. But, if those activists had not intervened to establish the autonomy of private business, then it seems plausible that today’s politicians would automatically mobilize everyone into a condition of total war again. Neoliberalism then assumes a pharmacological ambivalence, such that it might hold the solutions to its own adverse consequences. Total war might now be structurally impossible due to the formal status that private businesses now have in the juridical domain. The largest corporations have assumed their own kinds of sovereignty, such that they can operate independently of the will of officialdom. They are compelled to covet their autonomy, as they are chartered to pursue the interests of stakeholders, the most important being their shareholders, who are often scattered around the globe in multiple political jurisdictions.

There is no doubt that war poses a great menace at the present moment.  But it’s important to appreciate why it is not erupting and engulfing everyone as it did in 1914. The neoliberal axiomatic division of public and private would be a difference that repetition makes. And in Deleuze’s terms, this difference has a “good sense”, such that it implies pedagogical progress. Liberal capitalism has learned a lesson, which is to say that it has accommodated the reality of its environment. This accommodation required reformations such as those infamous “structural adjustment” programs implemented by the IMF.

This defines the coordinates for a historiography wherein we might begin to situate some recent events. Perhaps we could say that the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine was where the fevers of Slavic nationalists have crossed the temperature of murder. But this time there is a structural division between public and private, and so the mobilization for total war would have to follow more complex courses if it is even possible. If there are going to be formal war declarations between the great powers this time, then those will occur at still higher temperatures. This time around the drive of liberal progress is continuing on its habitual course of industrial development despite the fact that the Slavic nationalists are killing again.

Whether total war is still even possible today remains an open question. Kojève says that war occurs during the historical time of the struggle for recognition and that it would be impossible in a post-historical phase. And he wrote quite a lot about what that latter condition might be like. He famously proposed Japanese snobbery as a model for a society of post-historical masters. This implies a Zen indifference to the need for self-preservation, and a self-esteem that reaches the point of anomic individuality. There would be no mutual recognition of individuals, and thus a condition of anomie in this sense. Social rapport would become an imaginary self-reflection, and institutions would operate on ritual formalities. This model has consistency with common stereotypes about the workings of Japanese society. There is an urban legend about the three roommates who lived together in Tokyo for years and years, and then long after separating one of them confides to another that throughout their long cohabitation they had always secretly disdained the third roommate. This urban legend is also suggestive about the disquiet that might stir beneath the surface of this snob-master society.

Another notable feature of the Kojèvian post-history is its spatial ontology. The slave-work of allegoresis would transpose historical narrative into geohistorical figures. The narrative causality of historical time would have to give way to spatial continuity. This nullifies narrative causality into nonsense. This can be understood as a natural process of entropic diffusion that moves towards equilibrium. Neoclassical economics has oriented institutions in this direction, so they evolve towards natural equilibria which ironically are constructed artificially. World systems theorists have interpreted history as a series of center-periphery distributions, the ending of history would be the diffusion of the center. This accounts for the contemporary idea of a “multipolar world”.  

The driving mechanisms of history often feature the value of “honor”. The ending could imply that this concept would undergo a formal redefinition, so the struggle for recognition gets diffused. The term “honor” belongs to a class of anthropological concepts which have been dubiously universalized. These are terms which emerged within some particular socio-cultural milieu, and then were abstracted and generalized so they could be applied universally. This would also include terms like shaman, taboo, and fetish. The universalization of these concepts is implicated with the planetary integration of markets, and with the articulation of global exchange values. These terms obscure local particularities and impose hegemonic norms.

Using Piaget’s term again, we might say these anthropological terms have thus far been merely assimilative, where something known is used to represent the unknown. The ending of history might imply that these terms would have their conceptual content evacuated. They would become markers of the spatial frontiers onto the unknown. They would imply the vagueness and opacity of an occultural anthropology.

The concept of honor is obviously related with terms like dignity, privilege, nobility, majesty, and glory. These terms assume their modern sense following the construction of Versailles by the Sun-King Louis XIV. This was the moment where the European aristocracy underwent a kind of symbolic castration. They had previously assumed the right to bear arms and even to kill with impunity, such that the nobility were each possessed of their own autonomous sovereignty. But the advent of Baroque absolutism and the Enlightenment meant that they were subjugated by the monarchical state. This symbolic castration was the progress of history towards the formal equality of bourgeois individuals. Kojève articulates this dialectical progress in more complexity, where he distinguishes between equality, equivalence, and equity. Leaving these distinctions aside, the point we need to make here is just the basic Lacanian one, that this formalization leaves an unsublimated remainder.  

To consider the significance of this remainder, we need consider the Weberian model of class. Weber proposed that modern classes were entirely a result of economic rationalization. It often gets overlooked is that these classes are not primarily social but rather economic. These classes emerge through the instrumental pursuit of increased productivity, and so they are strictly divisions of labor. And as such, they exist in a perfectly objective and empirical way, where someone’s economic class is just their salary and the formal function they perform in production. Everyone living in the modern world always have clearly defined economic classes. Social and political classes only arise as imaginary reflections of these economic classifications. These secondary classes are generated by the forces of re-enchantment that react against rationalization. They are expressions of instinctual atavism.  

Weber pointed out that while economic classes can be quickly redefined, social classes take time to congeal into stable articulations. Rapid technological progress implies the rapid alteration of economic classes and social classes may remain undefined. This can lead to hysterical reactions where sociopolitical classes are reasserted at the expense of economic rationality. But then those reactive sociopolitical classes become vulnerable to getting overwhelmed by properly economic classes which remain committed to rationalization.   These processes were investigated by Pierre Bourdieu, where a social habitus evolves slower than the economic infrastructure.

Honor might be considered a quintessentially reactive affect. As the spread of economic rationalism levels social hierarchies into formally equivalent individuals, this brings a disorientation of instinctual sociality. Individuals struggle to maintain imaginary reflections of their positions within social hierarchies, and those reflections depend on affirmation from others. This is why “dishonor” became so catastrophic. As social positions were only fragile reflections, their negation could induce an existential crisis which could only be resolved through some dramatic performance. Nobility in the Kojèvian sense simply means indifference towards self-preservation. The duel (le point d’honneur) was a performance of this aristocratic disregard for self-preservation. And here the anthropological significance of Japan in Kojève’s thinking becomes more obvious. The Japanese nobility of course were the Samurai, who were ready to demonstrate the most irrefutable proof of their disregard for self-preservation by committing suicide at any moment.    

The ending of history hinges on the atavistic residues in the age of formal equality. The neoliberal post-history has been criticized as a condition of anomie or individual isolation. If perpetual peace requires that there is no struggle for recognition, then that condition may be necessarily anomic in some sense. But the question remains about whether anomie might harbors some disquiet that threatens to erupt back into historical violence. A post-historical condition might be reached, but then some disquiet might threaten to set history into motion again. This is the structural problem which the emerging Chinese phase of capitalism might be able to solve.

Historical time moves according to dialectical progress, whereas post-history requires the stabilization of that same dialectic. Chinese capitalism must achieve that spatialization of history. This solution can be expressed with the terms 土 and 流, which represent spatial-instinct and temporal-capital. The lives of the migrant workers would be an allegory here. The migrant workers undergo an ordeal where they get alienated by capital in the urbanized coastal centers (流), where they are classified as “floating populations” (流动人口). They are driven to make this sacrifice in order that they can return to their village (土).

Any Chinese village might have its own distinct dialect, and someone might wait years for the chance to speak that dialect again. There are people who have never even visited their village, and yet they learned to speak the dialectic from a parent. The community within the Chinese village is a reproduction of bourgeois equality. Bourgeois equality was originally modelled on the gentlemen property owners in the Italian republics during the Renaissance. In bourgeois capitalism, workers were motivated by the prospect of joining this community of equals. But that model failed because the community remained too exclusive, or it disappeared into an empty formal equivalence. Chinese capitalism has surpassed this bourgeois model, because it offers an equality which is more universally and concretely incarnated. This model works on an articulation of urban and rural which rebalances against the neoliberal articulation of the private and the public. 

Capitalism has always followed an evolutionary course where it learns to accommodate the opposing forces of anti-capitalism. Those opposing forces are the residues of atavistic spatial instincts. The Chinese accommodation can be distinguished from what we might call Christian accomodation. The latter would be a heresiological conversion of sinful sedition into sovereign sanctity. The original model of course would be Christ, but more specifically this was the cult of St. Francis as an sanctioned reproduction of late medieval heresy. This moral ambiguity of the Italian Rennaisance is expressed in the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son, where conversion would bring “more joy in heaven” than all the other faithful combined. This also explains the importance of the “great criminal” in European culture.

A figure like Donald Trump illustrates this outlaw sovereignty of bourgeois capitalism. But this model became tenuous as its contradictions became harder to ignore. Christendom comes apart at the seams as its inherent contradictions become too conspicuous. It could be explained in detail how these contradictions in Christianity relate to the bourgeois antinomies described by Georg Lukacs, though I won’t delve into that problem here. The point here is just to suggest that historical time is somehow based on these Christian contradictions, and that Chinese capitalism transposes them into the spatial circuits of rural-土 and urban-流.   

Finally, let’s consider some empirical examples that manifest the contradictions which are implied by this emerging Chinese capitalism. One conspicuous trend at Chinese universities these days is the growing investments in design departments. This is evidently related to the migration of capitalism into east Asia, and the transfer of human capital. This trend also indicates the ascent of luxury value in consumer markets. These design schools are staffed by Europeans. This reflects a regional division of production where design is concentrated in these European countries. The Chinese are attempting to move their companies upstream along the supply chain towards the sources of valuation in the conception of original products. They are attempting to end their reliance on European designers, which means hiring them to teach at their design schools.

There is a common complaint among these European design professors that their students are unable to appreciate the value of craftsmanship. This failure of translation demonstrates a formal aporia at the Chinese end of history. The problem is that the universities exist in the inverted dimension of 流 where production has been industrialized, and so exchange values reign supreme. That dimension has no place for craftsmanship, which could exist only in the more authentic dimension of the village. At the university, craftsmanship appears as painfully alienated from the formal equivalence of exchange values, such that it associates with the hardships of the poor who belong to the age of historical struggle. Irony arises here because the highest valued luxury products can only be produced by craftsmanship.

The Chinese post-historical condition is getting disrupted by the market-value of craftsmanship. This term threatens to pull them back into an historical struggle for recognition, since this is the value of the luxury products that consumers would often desire. So Chinese capitalism has not yet reached the end of history in this sense.

Let us mention another value that Chinese post-history still fails to metabolize. The value of historical authenticity runs into a similar translation impasse. A few years ago, the city wall of Nanjing underwent a reconstruction, but then there was disappointment when UNESCO refused to authenticate the site. Preexisting ruins had been combined with new materials such that the difference was indiscernible. And it would seem that this was not simply a matter of carelessness. Rather it would seem that the Chinese post-historical condition negates the material traces of historical experience, or else it requires that historical archives are reproduced anew.

Perceptual Dynamics

The late-Ming novels of the “gods and ghosts” genre can provide a paradigm for culture. These are not the literati novels like Dream of the Red Chamber, which deal with sensitive amourous situations.  They are tales about heroes who die young and gloriously in battle, and then their souls are left to peregrinate, since they are not integrated into any familial systems of ancestor worship.

The wandering ghosts become a problem for villagers, and this leads them to initiate “demon wars” aimed at subduing these itinerant spirits and converting them into the objects of local cults. The obvious examples include Journey West, Water Margins, and Investiture of the Gods. These novels appeared in the later years of the Ming, and there are interesting questions about the underlying socio-historical causes of this pattern of literature.

Scholars have explored how these books are outgrowths of temple cults, but the broader mysteries surrounding the historicity of this literature remain basically unexplored by anyone writing in English at least. I shall not be delving into those mysteries here, rather I just want to outline a formal model of culture based on the structure of this literature.

Modern culture is afflicted with a  pathology called the dialectic of the enlightenment. The problem has been an overly idealistic initiative to rationalize.  This is naïve optimism about what rationalization might achieve, and an ignorance of its consequences. Reason ends up provoking backlashes of anti-rationalist traditionalism.  

I don’t want to abandon the quest of reason, and its rather just that reason must learn to anticipate its own consequences.  Disenchantment implies re-enchantment are two sides of the same process.  When Max Weber talked about vocations, that was the reenchanting backlash inherent to his own disenchantment.  Lacanians have examined this process, where the “university discourse” gives rise to an imbalance of signifiers and signifieds.  We can’t exactly decide which side is excessive and which side is lacking.  The symptom tends to be an unruly superego, where the rationalist gets haunted by some “master unsignifieds”. 

The late-Ming novel provides a model for overcoming this impasse of modern culture. The narrative generates an excess of what we might call “unsignifieds”: these wandering ghosts of these heroes who are lacking the institution of proper cults. This is followed with the generation of the cultic signifiers that would express them. 

Rationalism has to become speculative or reflexive, so that it engages more actively and assertively in the dialectic of enchantment. Thought has to reflect into the process, and to reframe its past as this cultural work. 

Chinese literature offers a paradigm which centers on the relativity of community order. The scenario where a community is disturbed by some demonic others which must eventually be subdued, which means worshipped as gods.  This is a paradigm of dialectical uncanniness, where the problem is to convert the demons into gods.  This model of culture is obviously different from the enlightenment in many respects.  But these models are complimentary in a way that can be combined into a new dialectical conjuncture.   

Some original values might express a new dialectical conjuncture of the enlightenment and the late-Ming:  the demonic is figural, where the divine is literal. The demonic is religious, where the divine is secular.  The demonic is sexual, where the divine is intellectual. The demonic is private, where the divine is public. The demonic is transcendent, where the divine is immanent.  These are new values which arrive from the sublation of these two traditions. 

These are some codes for orientation.  These are codes for the direction of etiquette or rhetoric.  As well as practical labors in education, management, or government.  The operativity of these codes would be tenuous. That is to say, often verging on the inoperative.  They only operate at a level which is supple and abstract enough, so they can avoid reifying into concretion.  But they also must remain concrete enough to provide practical bearings. 

So, we are proposing a new code of culture.  This cultural code would imply some essential margins of conceptual indeterminacy.  The elementary code of order and disorder undergoes periodic reversals. And it’s the performance of that reversal which is most essential to this idea of culture. 

In Chinese tradition, the Jade Emperor is represented by the fixed pole star. That master signifier does have a certain vulnerability, and so he is not exactly transcendent.  But where exactly does Chinese tradition open itself to the immanence of primary process?  It seems that absolute creation and destruction are largely relegated to the chthonic phases before the beginning of history , with strange monstrosities like Pangu and Shennong.  

When a thinker like Francois Julien attributes the category of immanence to Chinese thought, that attribution should be qualified carefully.  We need to consider how these categories of immanence and transcendence can be implicated with relations of political authority.

The first figure of the Enlightenment who I want to introduce into the dialectic is Thomas Hobbes.  His model for the social contract is where the immanent composition and decomposition of master signifiers receives its first decisive expression.  Hobbes forms a trinity with two other figures, which are Freud and Vico.   We should consider the Hobbesian social contract as a model for unconscious primary processes.  And all the essential criticisms of the early “Hobbesian” enlightenment were articulated by Vico, who explained the way that “nature” undergoes dynamic evolution, and how the natural contract evolves through social dialectics, and the socio-symbolic is reproduced by the work of rhetoric.

So, when the Hobbesian enlightenment enters into its dialectical conjuncture with the late-Ming novel, it must arrive having already integrated the critiques of Freud and Vico.  Enlightened modernity must arrive in its dialectical rendezvous with Chinese culture in a well-composed form, so that we can avoid the boring cliché dialogues of “east and west”.  We have to avoid having the Chinese express criticisms of the west that were already made by Rousseau and Comte.  Then Chinese culture can provide something truly original. 

The development of the intellect brings the realization of increasingly radical immanence. This is how thought comes to orient itself in time, such that the past is distinguished from the future. What was considered transcendent, external, objective, positive, and alien in the past, then becomes immanent, internal, subjective, negative, and familiar in the future.  This is the time-code of the modern intellect: the time where givenness is always passing into positedness.

The past was the time when thought was restricted to the secondary process, because the primary process was forbidden or taboo. The primary was projected into a transcendent beyond which was guarded by the category of the sacred. But as thought enters the primary process, then this brings a great disaster:  the disaster of the implied conventions of conceptual form. What is ultimately at stake in primary process is the constitution of the master signifiers.      

The primary and the secondary are not two separate components of the unconscious, but rather two attitudes towards the unconscious.

The secondary relates to the unconscious as associative and works by representation and assimilation into normal categories.  The primary is the Abgrunding of representation in the void. It is the origin of the forms through which concepts and numbers are distinguished. The source of the very likeness of the one with itself. What makes the one one-like? 

Now we can redefine “cultural difference” as the tensions between alternate patterns in primary processes.  The sense of any simple statement implies a host of obscure symbolic processes – this we take as the main point of Wilfred Sellars.  The basic operators of logic, such as identity, difference, negation, and continuity, these involve anomalous idiosyncrasies. They are not merely formal, as they are implicated with models of space, time and relation, and these can get anchored in value-bearing contingencies. There is no reason to assume that these contingencies could be categorized as historical, geographical, or social.

It’s the category of the economic which turns out to be the most cosmopolitan.  Economy turns out to be a protean idea which is associated with the emergent vanguards of modernity. Translations turn on varying articulations of the economic. If we are talking about literary translations, then it’s the foreign idea of the economic that should be translated.  Thought orients itself according to varying expressions of the economic through the cycles of modernity. 

Hegel and Marx should be read as economists, and not under the classical category of “philosophers”. They developed a way of criticizing classical economics, which they said was overly dependent on the faculty of the understanding – the faculty which identifies the intellectual labor of the Bugerlict Geselschaft. When they said “Vernuft”, they meant that the categories of the understanding should become immanently constructed. This sublation of understanding into reason provides the direction for the advancement of economic thought into the speculative. 

Jean Piaget introduced a pedagogical code of assimilation/accommodation, which has homologies with primary/secondary process. 

The distinction of primary and secondary must not be reified into concreteness. This distinction only operates at the most abstract order of conception, where the two terms are integrated together. Their distinction can be drawn on several levels. They are distinguished experientially as affect/emotion.  Aesthetically as tragic/comic. Politically as sovereign/subject.

The value of taste would be the robustness of their integration, which avoids having them split into antinomic pairs. This is the taste of the master signifier. In each instance, we look to enforce a double articulation that supports their robust integration. 

This double articulation asserts the coincidence of the primary and secondary, and that coincidence is essentially hypocritical. This confusion of producer and product, which bends them into a circle, so the product produces the producer in turn. This circular reflection we could call an autopoiesis.

This autopoietic vision would inform approaches to the inter-cultural. A kaleidoscopic vision that is structured in a way so that it reflects the primary and secondary into each other. A perceptual dynamic, where perception is structured by a Piagetian action-schema, where every object is simultaneously assimilated and accommodated.

This schema responds to the conditions of capitalism. The operation of capitalism is simple:  it separates people from the conditions for what it calls their “self-actualization”, and then it regulates their opportunities for accessing those conditions.  It creates a potential difference (an “alienation”), and then it harnesses the energy aimed at overcoming that difference.    

In this sense, labor is similar to other sources of energy in nature, except that its potential difference is constructed through ideological artifice. The children must internalize some ideals that will inspire them through pedagogical and industrial development. They must internalize their own inadequacies. This scenario has always provided a source of comedy.

The perception-schema must be oriented on the problem of motivation:  is motivation a primary or secondary process?  Which means: is it immanent or transcendent? Sovereign or subjective?  Etc.

This alternative we take as the antinomic splitting which animates today’s society. The power of animation only works if the sides are held together, so that we reach a ludic margin of indifference between the primary and the secondary. This sublates the psychological distinction between autotelic and telic motivations. Modern Chinese culture has demonstrated a precocious talent for sublating this distinction, likely thanks to Cai Yuanpei.   

The “secondary” is subordinated to a more elemental construction of basic forms. The secondary takes its ontological conditions as given, such that logical forms, values, and existential conditioning are taken as transcendent. 

This distinction of primary/secondary has analogies with Heidegger’s distinction of ontological/ontic.  But the articulation we propose carries more radical implications. It doesn’t end up in existentialism or historicism because existence and history already imply the construction of some transcendental “fictions”.  This term “fictions” refers to the symbolic composites as defined in the Bentham-Lacan school. The primary is the abyss where those fictions have been deconstructed. 

Though we are not advocating deconstruction, but rather a perceptual dynamic that would assemble these two registers and reflect them into each other. The vitality of the primary and the order of the secondary would be forced into a kaleidoscopic collision. 

Wang Yangming’s dialectic of Qi and Li provides a useful reference point. We can posit a late-Ming dialectic of the savage and the civilized. One eye sees the savage, and the other eye sees the civilized. 

This vision becomes kaleidoscopic or iridescent as it gets drawn into the dynamics of geohistory and psychopathology. This action schema implies the basic conceptual form of capitalism, which turns between expropriation and accumulation. 

One eye beholds a colonizer, while the other beholds a refugee. One eye beholds a citizen, while the other beholds a native. Perception plays a Lewis Carrol game of parasites and hosts, where ambivalent flows of migration multiply into cascades…   

Enlightened Romance

What we’ve called “theory” is an activity which hasn’t reached maturity yet, and so it still remains undefined. It’s a youthful pastime which continues to imitate the patterns of established practices. It still continues to mimic the practices in academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences such as philosophy, history, and anthropology. The process of its maturation involves the sublimating of that disciplinary knowledge into original forms which are responsive to the problems of the contemporary world. And as it reaches maturity, then it naturally becomes an occupation which is independent from the university. Though in some ways, due to its annoying precocity, it has already been cast out as an orphan.

The ongoing trials of theory can be expressed in the form of a Bildungsroman, a self-fashioning of intellect for the 21st century. The ending of this narrative cycle would be a neural economy which is independent of academia. In its youth, theory has parasite on pedagogical institutions, and its maturity is a departure from any educational pretext. This autonomy implies an independent grounding in the depths of the wider world, but this means transforming the world and lodging itself into its new mature position.

The action of theory is diametrically opposed to the structure of wage labor. This is necessarily the case, because there can be no proportionality between its work and its results. This labor proceeds across the most varied dimensions, some of which are extremely obscure such as the Freudian dream-work. There is essential uncertainty in the attribution of this work to particular teams or individual laborers. This has always been the case for intellectual work, but this uncertainty gets exasperated in the age of the “hive mind”. Further complicating the problem of work-attribution, the product of theoretical work is defined as an “effect”, which is a change in behavior, and these effects are never well represented with traditional academic commodities such as books, lectures, or conferences.

This incommensurability with market economics is essential to the narrative form of the Bildunsroman, and even to literature generally speaking. Theory assumes the role of a protagonist on the model of Don Quixote, a man possessed with a poetic past and alienated from the values of industry. Theory is a name for intellectual traditions which have no place in industrial society. And as such it belongs to a category of antiquated errancy which also includes religion.

Kant complained that humanity was “crooked timber”, a species of prodigal heirs, and stones which masons have habitually refused. The masons proceeding to construct industrial society according to some designs they imagine are heaven-sent, but the results of their work leave residual surpluses and lacks. Theory was an orphaned child, cast out and exposed in the wilderness, and which is prophesied to return eventually to assume its proper position of nobility.

This familiar narrative has taken some distinctive twists. Industrial society has cast out two orphans – theory and religion – and they have engaged in a contest over their respective rights to posterity. These are two conglomerations of displaced traditions – stones that the builders of modernity have refused. They compete for the right to fill the spiritual vacancy in industrial society.

This contest has passed through various phases. Hegel made an early criticism of “positive religion”, where he argued that modern Christianity was aping the flaws of Enlightenment science. This has never received adequate attention from scholars. But then, in his more mature work, when he proceeded to argue for the superiority of philosophy over religion, that phase of his argument would fail, because philosophy was, like religion, another ancient tradition that wasn’t suited to the modern world. But since that golden age of German Idealism, theory has evolved as a species indigenous to industrial modernity and provides an antidote to its inherent pathologies. To express this in sino-mythical figures, we could say that the chosen one Liubang would have to defeat the false pretender Xiangyu.

One day, the evil priests of religion had seized a castle which belonged to the philosopher-kings of antiquity. A Pharisee had taken Socrates by the throat as a hostage. Outside, the theorists were commencing a siege. The priest shouted to them, “you touch that wall, and your philo-father goes into this boiling cauldron!”. At this the theorists laughed, “Well, considering that you are likewise his children, why not toss that old man into that pot, and then tonight let us gather united as siblings to enjoy some merry bowls of Socratic Soup!” Horrified at this humor, the priests bolted from the fortress, and fled downwards into the depths of a cavern. But the band of theorists were hot on their tails, singing the old songs of philosophy. It was four-sides philo-songs! Soon those priests would bid adieu to their Holy Whore of Babylon.

These two suitors are bidding for the power to influence industrial development, to fill the spiritual absence left by the management of capital. Theory has emerged along a series of desirous swells, where it’s first great insurgence was Marxist praxis, and that was followed by Surrealism and then Structuralism. There have been dozens of smaller eruptions, but none would be visible beside the magnitude of these three greatest waves.

Theory was named as such in the 1970s, its popularity grew into the 1990s, and then its status within academia has waned over the first decades of the new millennium. Predictably, it has been broadly rejected by the industrial management, who favor a model of Neo-Taylorist specialization in knowledge production. But it’s not simply that managers have completely rejected theory. The story has played out differently in various regions and according to the micro-conditions within particular institutions and departments. The need for theory has been sporadically recognized again and again, but that recognition has yet to occur at the broad systemic scale which is perhaps its destiny.

The antagonism of theory and religion is really an instance of a broader antagonism of socialism and religion. This conflict has shaped the geopolitics of each region of the Earth in different ways. In the middle east, the west enlisted Wahhabism in its fight against socialism during the cold war, and that alignment precipitated the rise of terrorism after the fall of socialism. In Latin America, there emerged a strange compromise between religion and socialism called “liberation theology”. And following the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe there have emerged religiously-infused enthno-nationalisms, which began feuding in the Balkans in the 1990s, and that has recently erupted into a more intense war in Ukraine. But it’s in China that socialism has been most successful, and perhaps that is because religion barely exists there. And so it is in China that theory is poised to achieve its next cycle of victories.

Though admittedly, “theory” is not exactly a hot topic among Chinese academics, where the term still connotes a negative opposite of “practice”. But what was nominated as theory in western academia in the 1970s might not always be recognized as such. The term can be taken as a name for something of the real, something that returns in various guises, and which pertains to the structure of desire in industrial modernity. What I am calling “theory” in China today is emerging as a response to an institutional demand for “transferrable skills”. Systemic conditions are driving a rearticulation of liberal education as a “foundational knowledge” for the twenty-first century. The students won’t be hearing about Foucault or Baudrillard, though the names Rousseau and Comte to pop up occasionally. This does not involve learning any content in depth, at least not for the foreseeable future.

So, this next phase of theory emerges as a solution to the problem of teaching “transferrable skills”. This means essentially the same as information processing skills. When this becomes the teaching assignment – “teach them how to process information” – then the choice of content becomes highly flexible. The education system has evolved to a point of nearly complete indifferent regarding content. When the system only cares about the “outcome”, which has been defined as a “skill”, then there is a content-neutrality which implies radical liberties. And in the context of a regime that is often censorious, these liberties are frequently charged with affects.

In order to have a lesson, there must be some content. But the managers are indifferent about what that content is, so long as it is not petitioning for the independence of a certain island-state, or exposing injustices committed against a certain Turkic minority. So, given these two restrictions, what sort of content might one choose? Let’s say, for example, an article from the Irish Times about the resurgence of the Manx language on the Isle-of-Man. And what would be the criteria for such an aleatory dice-roll? This is about abstract formal patterns in historicity. And it concerns sympathetic experiences and worldviews. This is an ancient art of Baroque folding, like when Ricci gave them Epictetus and told them it was the Gospel.

So here we find Hegelian history on the move again, but this time it must be completely pas de loup. And there are very clear reasons why it must be the ideas of that particular Swabian, though those ideas are assuming highly original forms which might be irksome for some pedants. Today the dialectic must cut diagonally across the coordinates of any idealism, which is an utterly unworkable residue of the Enlightenment. The principal error in the original Hegelian dialectic was the finality it assigned to the conceptual. On this next round of theory, the dialectic must become decidedly romantic, where that finality of the conceptual shifts into the figural.

There are specific reasons why today’s theory must bear the signature of that particular Swabian, and not the signature of, say, a certain other Swabian. The institutional form of “eastern Marxism” bears an absence with the shape of Hegelian dialectic. This is because the eastward migration of Marxism was precisely the subtraction of Hegelian dialectic. When Marx’s writings were translated in the 1920s by Qu Qiubai, the dialectical passages were rendered into classical Yin-Yang patterns which imply an ancient collectivist metaphysics. This is to say that Eastern Marxism remains “collectivist” because it is missing the bourgeois individualism of the Enlightenment, and Hegelian dialectic is the symbolic form which is predestined to fill that absence. As Zizek has pointed out, this scenario is indeed somewhat Wagnerian.

Categorial Others

The conceptual doesn’t ground itself. It has to be grounded in alterity, which is its foundation in the categorial. This other is the concept’s own essential groundlessness, which it cannot tolerate insofar as it remains a concept. The categorial is identical to the conceptual, except with the addition of a reflexive awareness of its own groundlessness. The conceptual is representable in its extension, while the categorial is the intensive or sensitive thresholds where that extension collapses. The categorial would be the navels of representation. This difference allows the operations of evaluation which are involved in the exercise of sovereign power. The categorial withdraws into the indeterminacy which is left open for the sovereign arbitrage. The categorial is where the absence of conceptual foundations loses its secrecy and enters into the open where it gets expressed in a reflexive mode of knowledge. The inherent absence of conceptuality becomes an object for knowledge. This is how the categorial becomes at stake in a patrimonial tradition, which is the customary legalism of the superegoic, which operates in pure antithesis to the conceptual reasoning of the official public discourse. The Chinese legal system has a doubling, where the outward expression is a Napoleonic civil code (法治), which is sometimes discernible for some esoteric tradition (法制). And these two terms are exact homonyms, so there can be perfect ambivalence when they are expressed in speeches. The categorial law (法制) is the ancestral ground of the conceptual law (法治). 

The virtual polis has been named as the republic of letters and the lettered city. The whole ordeal of subjectivity is the disappearance of knowledge into the black holes of this virtual object. The categorial is how the flesh gets caught under the laws of the city.  In this way the power of the law operates through its secrecy, its ineffability, which affords it the power to determine the conditions of the conceptual.  The categorial is the generic or the virtual image of the conceptual. And it constitutes the core of conceptuality as a wave of indetermination. If we are discussing the category of travel, then we are possessed with this category, and anything that appears can be drawn into its basins of attraction.  The same goes for education, technology, economy, romance… the categorial is the similarity between the forms of these dominions of existence.  We need to approximate the image of the category in general. The imagery of the generic easily appears indiscrete or even lude, as it exposes the shameful redundancy of the modern world.  

The categorial is a supple difference, which cannot be located according to symbolic coordinates, as it participates int the invisibility of alterity. The categorial abstractions are never constructable. They are either found or inherited. They operate only insofar as they assume a natural disposition. Kant inherited his table of categories, and then Hegel’s believed it was possible to derive the categories through rational demonstrations. The evolution of Kantian philosophy has been inhibited by its reticence to open the table of categories, which would be to admit the contingency of its patrimonial origins. The polis refers to an assembly of categorial articulations.  The categorial is the figural margins which contain the polis.

Categories in this sense would perform a function, which is the figuration of the limits of the conceptual, which is also the limits of the polis. The concepts are never so rational, that is just how they are presented in the operation of discourse. Categories are the irrational containers of rational concepts, and they mobilize the process of conceptual division. The conceptual is the order of identities which is menaced by its own origin which is this cosmic chaos of the categorial. Concepts exist according to categorial conditions. The liberal bourgeois world is officially ruled by the conceptual, such as a civil code for example. The conceptual is about likeness, similarity, identity. The categorial is about difference, singularity, strangeness. The conceptual fields are structured by the movements of the categorial.

This movement could be figured as a manifestation of the other. This is a “symbolic other”, but in a very particular sense. The symbol has to be identified as capital, but capital as it exists concretely in a material form, which basically coincides with urbanism. The symbolic other then exists in the exterior milieus of the city, the hinterlands. The other would inhabit the areas which are outside the primary circuits of capital exchange. This assigns an existence to the symbolic other. The movement which Lacan called a march of signifiers, would be driven by the force of this other. The direction of the current has to be discovered. The time image indexes formal patterns in the passage of time. The integrity of the cyclical contrast with the fragmentation of the secular.  Time becomes personified as organic metaphor, if this mixing of tropes is permissible. The metaphorical life which is expressed here is that of capital, with the imperative to mercantile or financial growth.  The imperative to growth is an instance of the signifier, whose generic function is the signaling of reproduction. The growth phases eventual lead to crises as growth inevitably gets out of control. The problem is that the growth phases don’t reach any conclusion on their own. This reinterprets Heidegger’s conception of the essential blindness of technology. The accelerated circulation of commodities becomes increasingly disruptive and drifts out of step with the binding of natural needs. Accumulation has become possessed as its mechanisms are caught in feedback loops and thrown into overdrive. Then there is the sense that things have gone too far, and gradually the condition of crisis becomes an existential fact which is taken reflexively in the production of new social relations. Crisis could be understood as a transcendental apprehension of a condition where the mechanisms of accumulation are running out of control.

It’s the disfunction of the accumulation mechanisms which awaken society to the existential problems of collective order. Those problems are traditionally addressed with politics and economics, but the industrial crisis of accumulation led to the category of the social, and so Kant was not aware of this category. Sustainability is a more recent category which responds to the crisis of accumulation. The existential question arises about when this particular crisis of ours began. And the answer would probably be WW1. The last positive growth phase of capital was the Victorians, and the twentieth century was just an elaborate series of disavowals which deny the crisis which ended Victorian capitalism. Then capitalism should not be judged by its present form, which is just running up against its limits over and over again, as so many variations on the WW1-scenario. This epoch is dominated by a contradiction where capital accumulation runs into contradictions with the operation of the state. Passing beyond the end of this age then would mean absolving this contradiction between the political and the economic.

Oliver Cromwell appears as the original icon of crisis capital, the one who arrives as the crisis reaches its zenith. Cromwell and Trump share a resemblance as they belong to the family of the interrupters. “We interrupt the regular programming…” A new alliance emerged during the Glorious Revolution and the Dutch occupation of England. It’s through these great tectonic movements that categories are formed in the personas of antiquity. Kant’s tables were notably Aristotelian. Perhaps the most significant attribute of antiquity is integrity, or we could say that modernization is the sacrifice of antiquity. This would reduce modernity to the spreading of symbolic disjunction.

The enlightenment was the solution to the crisis of accumulation of the 1600s, when the thirty years war shattered Europe into an obscure myriad of unstable territories. The Enlightenment was a solution to the crisis, and it built up towards the crescendo of the French Revolution, where the solution had been worked through, and at which point capital crossed into a new phase of expansion. The points where the economy “takes off” are where this abstract mechanism reaches a schematic consistency, which is precisely that of the conceptual. The conceptual is what structures and programs the mechanisms of market expansion, so it’s a way that the material gets fragmented into its abstract objectivity.  The last great cycle of growth was launched with the Napoleonic conquests of Europe, and their continuation elsewhere, such as by Bolivar in South America.  Bolivar was both a Benthamite and a letrado. His continuing significance in Latin American politics is due to his monadic integrity. Commentators have mentioned his Christological character. He sits on the cusp, just before subjectivity was fragmented by discipline. He appears in fragmented interpretations that were constructed by different regimes in different countries. Compare the fragmentation of Sun Yetsan, who lived a century later, and is today celebrated as the founding father of the both the republic and the people’s republic. It was the practical exigencies of expansion in the later 1800s which brought discipline into the calculations of power. And what discipline means, before anything else, is the fragmentation of the monadic. Antiquity or tradition is the survival of monadic form in modernity. That fragmentation may have been concealed during the phases of genuine growth, but then becomes conspicuous as the crisis begins. Cubism was the original art of mechanical fragmentation, while such an art is still required more than any others today.

The capital expansion of the 1500s entered into crisis with the revolt of the Dutch Republics against the Spanish. When we speak of Protestantism, the figure which appears should be the Dutch sailors who charted a route to China along the north coast of Russia. Though that route wasn’t successfully navigated, it illustrates the intention which appears at the breaking points where the mechanisms of accumulation are getting out of control. This is the historical meaning of clinaminic divergence, which we might call the unruly movement of the other. The instruments are capital are devised so to subjugate the others within the mechanisms of accumulation. Homo economicus is the human ceded to the dimension of objective determination. Capital requires a species which is scientifically knowable, which is determined by the laws of causality, and so it endeavors to elect one. The management of an economy requires that future returns can be calculated to some critical extent. This homo economicus isn’t capable of responsibility. The divergence of the clinamen would be the action which breaks the laws of nature, where the Dutch snuck past the Czar to open a spice route through the Arctic. Action becomes an arch-category that would stand above the others, such that it’s the least determined in the conceptual. This kind of action would be neither a cause nor an effect, but rather an image, which would drive ontological assemblies along spontaneous courses which are not predetermined.   

The conceptual is a realm of determination, while the categorial is a realm of freedom. They share a metabolism which is multiple, and whose movements are either cyclical or secular with the process of capital expansion. The discernment of the cyclical and the secular arises as a practical problem of perception. These concepts are articulated so that the categorial pertains more to the cyclical, whereas the conceptual pertains more to the secular. The great flaw of capital is that a phase of expansion never reaches some conclusion on its own terms, and so the problem which capital poses for evolution is to devise schemes for the conclusion of growth phases. For the last century, we have been witnessing only an empty facsimile of growth. This growth is merely conceptual, which is to say metrical and linear. This is a fetishistic fixation on a phase known as “growth”, which refuses the natural passage into the other two phases. Today’s capitalism is like a sovereign which refuses to yield to the course of natural alternations, which would mean giving way to the next phase in the course of nature.

Lacan in Flight

Alenka Zupančič

Lacan in Flight

“I do not want to say that the text wrote itself” – Alenka Zupančič

If we read Alenka Zupančič in close conjunction with poststructuralism, we find some interesting patterns that emerge in the consistency between these doctrines. The parallax between these doctrines can generate a virtual dynamic. The following shall attempt a projection of this dynamic through a series of figures with the title Lacan in Flight. 

Her writings have raised a series of problems concerning movement, and yet these have not yet been addressed explicitly as such. Her latest book presents the figure of a “march of signifiers”, and her previous book introduced an image of a conveyor belt. Though much of her writing has involved a rhetoric of stasis, here we shall attempt to assemble these tropes into a series which approaches flight. Flight here is a figure, which stands for an ontological modality, which is that of the virtual.

The naming of the father can be transposed into the trope of allegory. This trope of allegory is notoriously morbid in its proximity to the textual, where it implies a mutual approach of the linguistic and the figural. Allogories can mark the borders of symbolic categories. Though I’m not aware of any psychoanalytic writers who discuss allegory explicitly.   

Lacan looks at postructuralism the way Abraham looks at Isaac. This is an other who is there in flesh, and in a kind of flesh which has been conceived as part object, organ, lamella, drive, libido, instinct, real, phantasm, object a and lalangue. Poststructuralism arrives in the objectile-flesh, which thwarts the propriety of the symbolic.

Poststructuralism would personify the underside of language, which haunts language through all the tropes of alterity, which would be figured as intruders, leakages, possessions, and the endless inventory of alienations. Remaining ambidextrous here, the other could be arrested as getting recognized as the party to some exchange. The underside of language would name a party within an exchange, where this party would be under some ethical mandate to forgo the blessings of subjectivity. These are bonds of responsibility, which are connected with bonds in the financial sense. Poststructuralism names a bondage to the asubjective, which would be like a apotheosis of political responsibility in the 20^th century. Its like a generic summation of all political responsibility, which would imply the forgoing of subjective interested. Or like a Kantian duty which has somehow inverted itself.     

Poststructuralism is also a name for the missing link which must get abandoned in the passage between two phases. This is a seasickness, like the passage through puberty, or the passage from nature to culture, or the passage between the reigns of sovereigns. Symbolic representation implies an exclamatory leap through the middle which cannot be accounted for, and which leaves an inherent nonsense in all accounting. Poststructurlism would be the duty to become that which cannot be accounted for.

Slovenian psychoanalysis assumes the mandate of bringing this virtual object under subjective direction, and this Herculean labor will involve determining the virtual as “enjoyment”, which is a name for the surplus value in commodity circulation. If we declare that the father is the one who successfully appropriates responsibility for commodity circulation – as its cause, its effect, and its proprietor – then maybe this declaration could be written on the tomb of Jacques Lacan. He was a manager of this troublesome virtual object, which had entered through structuralism, and then possessed a generation of French intellectuals. Perhaps Lacan’s arguments could be summarized, as saying that this troublesome object was the property of the fathers.

The Slovenian analysts then could be considered as managers. Though they are not exactly neoliberal managers, they are something which is parasitical on neoliberal institutions. They would swear a mandate to uphold the exclusion of the middle. Their creed is directed against the Parmenides who was depicted by Milan Kundera. The question of poststructuralism is how to escape from their dualistic binds. Lorenzo Chiesa proposes an agnosticism, where it would be either atheism or evil genius. This might be a step towards the recovery of that middle. It would set about bringing that middle back into the fold.

The middle is the leviathan on which the poststructuralists would cross the seas, but such crossing must circumvent the Lacanian coastguards. And there are many interesting possibilities for circumvention, because these coastguards are apparently blind to geospatial objects.    

One of the great virtues of the Slovenians has been their cultivated ambidexterity. This is something which they could teach to poststructuralism. They uphold a mandate that arguments should have direction, and even that the direction must follow a sociopolitical logic. Hence their blindness to geospatial objects.  

AZ takes a distance from the dynamic tendencies of the British school. But there is the question of whether psychoanalysis itself has not always been implicated in its own dynamics. For example, it would seem that the pairing of London and Paris could be considered as a repetition of the earlier pairing of Budapest and Vienna. Such geospacial records imply a hyperbolic excess of singularity, which has the power to overturn and transform symbolic mandates.  The actuality of geospace carries this ontological excess which leaves lacunae of lack in the field of knowledge. Geospatial knowledge is so limited, so there is no temptations of any certainty. And this is emphatically actual (not virtual) – we are talking about actuality that overloads the symbolic with detail, and forces it into a mode of hyper-contingency. This space ruins knowledge with the equality of its openness, which receives all the singularity of habits. This conception bears no essential connections with the concept of enjoyment.   

The Slovenian analysts have conceived the virtual object as enjoyment, and on the model of surplus value in Marxism. This chains the body-without-organs into a sociopolitical frame likely modelled on Frankfurt school theories. The irresistible problem which defines poststructuralism has to be the uncontainability of the idea quo problem. This is the idea which gets sounded in seminar ten on enjoyment, where Lacan recounts the Devil’s Elixir by ETA Hoffman.

This concerns a generational politics of Parisian intellectuals.  Lacan was active before the war, during the heydays of the avant-garde. This makes him what is called an uncle. The poststructuralists were his rebellious sons and daughters, nieces and nephews.  Their mandate was to drink the devil’s elixir.     

The categories of geohistory and the regional are never well determined because they imply a dynamism which crosses borders. But this is not to say that they imply the impossibility of symbolic expression. This is the dynamism of the dark pulsion which parasites on the linguistic, such that its symbolic expression is esoteric.  Though this is a mutual parasitism. Poststructuralism stands as a personification of this unsymbolic force within the ancestral geohistory of European philosophy. Now let us transpose this into a Lacanian framework.

Entering the symbolic field of the Other implies the abandonment of something, which could be either knowledge or existence. If the subject clings to the positivity of knowledge, then they become the “non-dupe errant”, the one who refuses to be duped, and who upholds knowledge at the cost of their existence. Or alternately, the subject assumes a positive existence through the acceptance of some lack of knowledge. This acceptance of lacking knowledge abandons a certain kind of place for the alterity of the Other. Existence comes at the cost of a subjection which implies this epistemological lack, which is where the Other could exist. Or else knowledge would come at the cost of a subjection which implies a lack of existence, as it takes the place of the Other.

This Cartesian subject undertakes a decision on the position of symbolic lack, or on the form of subjection to the lack of the Other. There are different places which can be opened for the Other’s lack, and these empty places are the basis for symbolic relations, and they may imply social mandates.  

If the purpose of Lacanian analysis is to discover the absence of the Other, then there are different places where that absence can be discovered. There is a necessity that empty places be available for the big Other, and the process of analysis is geared toward discovering the possibility for those empty positions. And although the big Other does not exist, this place of its absence is not exactly empty. That place is occupied by the little other, one of the names of poststructuralism.

Michel Serres says that being left-handed has more consequences than gender.

When Zupančič addresses the topic of sexual assault and the recent waves of related activism, there she has been arguing on the side of knowledge. The argument moves epistemically, as opposed to existentially. She describes how systemic violence has been mistaken for subjective violence, and how this confusion prevents knowledge of the systemic workings of capitalism. This epistemic direction aligns with the conventional idea of objectivity in the enlightenment as pursued by the likes of Marx and Freud.   

While on the topic of sexual assault she argues epistemically, on climate change she reasons in an existential manner, expounding a logic which is conspicuously Heideggerian. She proposes that the awareness of climate change provokes some existential anxiety, which is disavowed through a jaded disaffection for environmental concerns. This Heideggerian argument carries a number of notable risks, though I won’t go into details here. Broadly speaking, it runs the risk of doing what poststructuralism had criticized Lacan of doing, which is mobilizing existential negativity as an instrument of sacerdotal power. But ambidexterity would absolve this risk, because this ability to change directions ensures that there can be persistence without fixation.

Michel Serres was thankful that a certain teacher had taught him the secrets of ambidexterity. Though he also emphasizes that students should never be allowed to use their left hands for writing. Every activity should be performed with both hands, except that writing should only be done with the right.

Chirality is a frontier in political economy, where the idea of disciplinary education assumes a corporeal depth which exceeds the flesh. Serres was optimistic that the keyboard was establishing a balance which had never previously existed at any time in history, though it would seem that the smart phone may be shifting the balance back towards the dextral. This politics of direction implies a seamless integration where the singular can assume its proper place within the frame of the universal.

The left hand has been left to languish for much of history, like an empty shadow which accompanies the alpha-manus. Serres admits that the right hand should be assigned this duty where it alone MUST do the writing, while the left hand never seems to carry any similar burdens of necessity. The left hand draws the bow of the second fiddle once the capacities of the alpha-manus have been exhausted.

Zupančič’s existentialist argument for climate activism could meet with a variety of criticisms, as it implies an anthropology where awareness of finitude would be a necessary cause for angst. She moves beyond this problem in her book on Antigone, where she draws a distinction between Heidegger, for whom our attitude towards death opens the metaphysical dimension of freedom, and Lacan, for whom enjoyment is a representation of death which disturbs us, and this liberates us to assume different attitudes towards death. If enjoyment liberates us to assume different attitudes towards death, then there would be no need to feel anxious about the way that climate change might be affecting our existential finitude.

This raises a question of whether there is any place for existential authenticity in this Lacanian theory. If we are free to adjust our attitudes towards our mortality, then how could one attitude be deemed more authentic? The idea of authenticity contradicts the idea of freedom, which produces a variation on Kant’s third antinomy.   

The climate crisis turns on this question: is the incremental increase in the burning of hydrocarbons a matter of natural necessity, or could it be affected by human will? This is an existential expression of the climate crises. Though the news coverage often favors an epistemic expression of the crisis: are humans are responsible for climate change?  

Th climate crisis is perplexing because it lacks subjective coordinates that could make it an object of human will. This impending catastrophe would be caused by the everyday habitual behavior of everyone, and so no one in particular has responsibility. The attribution of responsibility requires the singling out, whereas in this case everyone is equally culpable. Then the crisis would belong to the dimension of determinate necessity, along with the other animal habits, which can be known objectively but which do not imply the existential truth of authentic being.

The infamous psychologist Jordan Peterson once proposed that overcoming addiction requires the discovery of something which is more enjoyable than the addiction. Perhaps Deleuze would agree that Peterson has discovered the idea of the virtual.

The drift of psychoanalysis into the virtual is a waning of identity. But this is not a drift of psychoanalysis away from its essence. The actuality of psychoanalysis is one possible approach to the problems of subjective fate which arise in industrial modernity. But as it become buried, then it gives up the ghost of its virtual idea, such that its actuality becomes a cypher for all the actualities which might have responded to this problem. It comes to stand for the virtual possibilities which are implied in the those historical conditions. Death in this sense would be the process of becoming-allegorical, such that psychoanalysis would become the personifications of its main ideas, such as enjoyment, fate, and death. But this drift is never going to be linear or straight. As the movement sinks into the archive, then perhaps Freud is gradually replaced by Sophocles.

Antigone assumes the role of an undertaker who would bury her brother, and this mandate runs counter to the archive fevers that would seek to exhume. Burial delivers the dead into the unbearable lightness of the singular.

The subject returns as the obstinacy of symbolic mandate and its others, through the enigmatic power of the other’s desire. There are mythical siblings who can occupy different places, and there are times when its uncertain which is the king and the beggar. Kundera suggested that metaphors could be fatal. If we refuse the uncertain fate of metaphorical bondage, then there’s not much to say. Her heart murmured, as the Euro crossed parity.

Lacan’s figure of a “march of signifiers” can easily be projected onto social movements. This kind of march was discussed by Elias Canetti in his great classic Crowds and Power. The whole idea of the symbolic turns on the division of mandates.  The Eleatic idea that movement is impossible then would be an axiom of the power of the state.

The mandate is troubled with its inherent doubling, and there are two basic responses to this problem. Psychoanalysis accepts the ontological duality, and transposes into the division of statement and enunciation. Poststructcuralism attempts to overcome the double by cleaving to the middle. They are Parmenedians in that they assume a symbolic mandate of bringing difference into consistency. Whereas psychoanalysis is more investigative and thus committed to the singularity that it discovers. If doubling is the symptom, then poststructuralism attempts to absolve it, whereas Lacanians choose to live with it. Psychoanalysis seeks to impose responsible subjectivity, which is the burden of the double.   

The separation between enunciation and statement provides a model of psychopathology. Poststructuralism refers to this problem with the term “transcendence”. Examples of transcendence would include the community of victims proposed by Francois Laurelle. It seems that enunciation is the darker sibling or the left hand, or such as the Maenads who are stirring in the shadows of the stately and radiant Apollo.

AZ stages a disagreement between Claude Lefort and Hans Blumenburg over the fate of immortality in the modern age. The debate is over whether modernity reserves a place for the idea of immortality. This is essentially a debate about the symbolic place of the Other in modernity.  Lefort says that immortality may return through a sublimation of singularity, and this apparently implies a conquest of space.  Blumenburg proposes that this conquest of space would be a negation of authentic historical existence, and so modernity wouldn’t admit the idea of immortality.

The choice of these two figures – Lefort and Bloomberg – leaves us with a riddle about how they might be connected.  And the obvious answer would be that they are both outspoken defenders of liberal modernity. Lefort was associated with Ramon Aron and other Arendtians who may have been CIA operatives leading the transition away from socialism in Eastern Europe during the Mitterrand years. While it was two decades earlier that Bloomberg took the side of Reinhard Koeselleck, where they opposed the traditionalist arguments of Carl Schmitt and Karl Lowith in the name of liberal secularism. So both of these men – Lefort and Bloomberg – were both participants in their different ways in the early campaigns of neoliberalism. This means that any subtle inconsistency between their arguments might illustrate the generic fissures in the origins of neoliberalism.

The guiding problem in her new book is to explain why Antigone has resonated so profoundly over the recent centuries. Formulating the problem in this way positions the argument abstractly, and this dispenses with any need to take sides any of the debates. This neutral modality follows from the earnestness of her earlier question, “What is the sex you speak of?”

It seems that Antigone might agree with Lefort, and that the twentieth century demonstrates some sympathies and inclinations which are held in common with this alliance. Zupančič’s new book can be read as a deconstruction of the origins of neoliberalism in the twentieth century which Badiou famously called the century of the real.    

The fantasy of immortality deserves attention as one of the most contentious problems in modern philosophy. It was Arendt who proposed the idea that modern democracy was associated with an agonal Greek culture, where the adversaries in a contest would compete for the sake of immortal fame. One has to appreciate how sublimation plays an important role in Arendt’s Human Condition (1957), where it’s the process of sublimation which leads to the work in a Rilkean sense. As this Arendt’s philosophy was translated into French, it seems the idea of sublimation was reposed in a hyper-reflexive manner. This way the materiality of work gets lost in the reflexive recoiling of singularity on itself. The materiality of the work was lost in a Parisian abstraction which mediated the transition into the age of the service economy. 

Among the most troubling problems which emerge is the idea that immortality can be achieved through reproduction. She introduces another dimension beyond reproduction, which is called creation. Zupančič proposes creation occurs beyond the limits of tribal reproduction. This is logical, because when there is reproduction, then there is no need for creation. Creation occurs in the absence of reproduction. This distinction intersects the entire idea of labor, where mandate of nature becomes divided between these two categories.

There is no reason that a social bond would necessarily imply immortality but only durability. It seems that Sade was trying to dispel the illusion of immortality, by demonstrating the limits of durability.  This would link Sade with recent trends in literature, such as Karl Ove Knausgård. This is work which is motivated by the desire to discover the limits of life. Literature then is where love becomes possessed with the problem of how to limit itself.  How much of Modern literature might be subsumed under the direction of this Sadean mandate? This second death is undefinable, because it stands for the excessive being of the virtual. And the same goes for the first death, which could be that of an individual, family, race, or species.    

Psychoanalysis investigates pathologies which originate from a transcendence of the mandate. This is where a mandate splits into registers which become alienated from each other. This is the mutual alienation of statement and enununciation. These are two forms of transcendence, which are epistemic and existential transcendence. Statements are epistemic, whereas enunciations are existential.

The guiding problem of poststructuralism was to eliminate the double articulation which was affiliated with transcendence. Transcendence was their name for the immortality of the undead. The problem was how to make the symbolic stand alone, without the need for superegoic supplement. Once we can state the problem in this form, then the solutions become possibilities.

One solution is a model of translation that was proposed by both Walter Benjamin and Lun Xun around the same time. This solution is perfectly modern, while it is also planted more deeply in antiquity than any tradition. And its quite elegant, as it can be reduced to the idea that being was fragmented by the accidents of nature.   

The concept of the symbol of course derives from the symbolon of the classical Greeks. This was a physical object, which was made from common materials such as wood, clay, or cloth, and which was used to embody a contract formed between two individuals. At the time the contract was initiated, the object was broken apart into two halves, each of which bearing the inscription of the conditions.  When the contract was filled, the two pieces were brought together into a consistency which evidenced the mutual rights of each party. 

The splitting between enunciation and statement could be accounted for through an evolutionary frame, and more specifically as resulting from an experience of evolution which has turned excessively reflexive. We are talking about a Parisian splitting, like in the work of Pierre Klossowski.  

There is a disjunction between the categories of evolution and instrument. This is about how evolutionary lines of thought inevitably get caught up in problems of instrument, as it becomes synonymous with the organ. This is a flaring of the death drive quo entropy, because as physical instruments have been used, then they remain as a material residue which the will of the subject encounters as an objection. This alienation has nothing to do with capitalism. The problems of evolution are haunted with the resistant materiality of the instrumental. This material resistance is a spatial entropy, which symbolic mandates negate through the imposition of timelines.   

In evolutionary terms, we could say the signifier emerged as an instrument that was used for the social action of sexual reproduction. We could probably say that sexual reproduction is always a social concern in the broader animal world, and with the instrument of language this natural need assumes the materiality of the signifier. The signifier is indeed material. This evolutionary model of language would explain why the signifier carries an unruly understand of drive-pressure. The operation which we have defined as signification then is only a limited aspect of the reproductive function. What we call language is then a sub-system within the reproductive system. 

The most primordial expression of language then would consist of “order words” that express the command to reproduce. Signification then emerged as the signaling of the necessity of reproduction. This shifts the perception of the human species so that it becomes assimilated with biological norms which repeated throughout nature, such that language then would be the functional equivalent of the peacock’s tail.   

The term “mandate of nature” was an idea among the literati of the Song and Ming dynasties in ancient China. This idea can be distinguished from the monotheistic notion of a providential plan.

Perhaps we are reaching agreement that what is pathological in an insidious way, such that it must be ferreted out, is the fantasy of immortality. This is to say that pathology in general is where a symbolic mandate fails, and then it becomes a spiritual will to reestablish itself.   

There is a question of whether fantasies of immortality might not coincide with fantasies of stasis. Stasis is never a possibility under the basic conditions of physical reality. This was the sense of Galileo’s “and yet it moves”. The fantasy of stasis results from the fact that no movements are conscious at that moment.

The parallax that concerns us here arises between a subjective and an intensive way of life. The Lacanians are like customs agents, who are there to deny that an intensive life could have any symbolic mandate. The poststructuralists respond with questions posed in the singular: who, when, and where. Mandates are assumed according to regional localities, demographics, and developmental phases. And the psychoanalysts don’t seem to know which country or century they are in.  

The term “division of labor” was popularized by Max Weber. Durkheim thought about social divisions as solidarities, and he made a distinction between organic and mechanical solidarities. If we say that a division of labor implies a functional solidarity, then we require a second order of divisions, which would be the disjunctions between orders of functional solidarity. When a mandate of nature gets counted as one, then that leaves a disturbing remainder.  

Counting a mandate as one imposes a structure of functional solidarity on the participants. And there are two functions which we are talking about here, and they are reproduction and creation.

Then we are talking about an encounter between Oneness and Being. Oneness would name the function of reproduction, whereas Being would name the function of creation. This can be projected topologically, such as an inside-outside or surface-depth relation. The operation of reproduction happens inside and on the surface, whereas the operation of creation happens outside and in the depths. Each of these orders would relate to the other as a potential source of dangerous entropies and fatal attractions.