logocentric – Page 76

mutual recognition 2/2

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Eds. Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman, 2003. 8-29. Print.

To begin with, self-consciousness did not “see the other as an essential being,” because in the other it saw only itself. Yet it did not enjoy an unalloyed sense of self either, since it found itself “over there” in another (that it did not properly recognize). Now, by contrast, self-consciousness has a clear sense of its own identity and recognizes that the other is something wholly other than and independent of itself. Consequently, it can at last fulfill the condition required for concrete self-consciousness: for it can find itself recognized by and reflected in another that is known to be truly other.

Achieving self-consciousness, as we have seen, requires that I relate to myself in relating to that which is other than me. This means that I must relate to another self-consciousness that recognizes me alone. Self-consciousness must, therefore, be social and intersubjective. We now know that by itself recognition accorded to me by the other is not sufficient to enable me to be concretely self-conscious. To attain that end I must be recognized by another that I recognize in turn as a free and independent other. Genuine self-consciousness thus requires not just recognition of my identity by the other, but mutual recognition by each of us of the other. Self-consciousness must be a “double movement of the two self-consciousnesses” working freely together. In such a movement, Hegel writes, “each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both.”

Mutual recogntion, for Hegel, requires the uncoerced cooperation of the two (or more) self-consciousnesses involved. Indeed, not only must the two self-consciousnesses freely recognize one another; in fact,

they must both recognize that their mutual recognition and cooperation is needed for either to be concretely and objectively self-conscious. In Hegel’s own words, they must “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”

As Williams points out, genuine self-consciousness involves much more than mere desire (though it must also incorporate desire). Whereas desire “seiz[es] upon and negat[es] the object,” genuine self-consciousness requires recognition from the other, which in turn entails “allowing the other to be what it is” and “letting the other go free.” Self-consciousness would like to know only itself in the other and be the sole object of the other’s recognition. Such self-certainty can be achieved, however, only “through membership or partnership with Other.” For one person to have a concrete and objective understanding of himself, he must join together with somebody else.

thought and being

Houlgate, Stephen. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Layfayette Indiana: Purdue University Press. 2006.

Hegel will not argue that consciousness is simply wrong to think of the world as made up of perceivable things or self-conscious agents or forms of social and historical organization. He will argue that the experience of consciousness shows the world not merely to be determined in these ways. When consciousness realizes this, it ceases to be mere consciousness of a world over against it and becomes the thought of the universal, categorial structure immanent in that world and in thought (148).

Hegel’s analysis continues until consciousness discovers that its understanding of its object does not actually correspond to the stated definition of an object of consciousness at all. An object of consciousness is stated to be something known by, but standing over against, consciousness. Consciousness eventually discovers, however, that it actually understands its object to have one and the same categorial structure as itself and so not simply to stand over against consciousness after all. At that point, consciousness realizes that it is no longer mere consciousness but has become speculative thought, or absolute knowing (150).

This experience is not an historical experience that every individual necessarily makes in his or her own life but the experience that is logically entailed by the structure of ordinary consciousness itself. It is the experience through which ordinary consciousness is taken by its own internal logic from its most primitive shape of sense-certainty through perception, understanding, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion to philosophy or absolute knowing, albeit an experience that concrete historical individuals all too often fail to comprehend (150).

Understanding (Verstand) discovers that the inner character of things is not just force but force governed by law —the same lawfulness that governs understanding itself. Understanding thus finds a dimension of itself in the things it encounters and so becomes self-consciousness (151).

Self-consciousness then discovers that the objects to which it relates are not just law-governed objects in nature but other living, self-conscious beings —self-conscious beings who confirm our own consciousness of ourselves by recognizing us but whose recognition of us we in turn have to recognize. In this way, self-consciousness acquires a sense that an individual’s identity does not belong to that individual alone but is constituted by his or her social interaction with others (151).

The aim of the Phenomenology is to teach ordinary consciousness —and philosophers wedded to the convictions of ordinary consciousness— that being is not simply something objective to which we stand in relation but exhibits one and the same logical form as thought itself and thus can be understood a priori from within thought (146-7).

honneth

Honneth, Alex. “From desire to recogntion: Hegel’s account of human sociality” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Eds. Moyar, Dean and Michael Quante, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2008. 76-90. Print.

A subject can arrive at “consciousness” of its own “self” only if it enters into a relationship of “recognition” with another subject. 76

It is unclear why the disappointment over the independence of the object should lead to an encounter with the other and to recogntion (84).
… this subject strives, through the need-driven consumption of its environment, to acquire the individual certainty that the reality it faces is on the whole a product of its own mental activity. In the course of this striving, however, it is confronted with the fact that, as Hegel put it, the world retains its “independence” since its existence is not dependent on the survival of its individual elements.

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful.

Again, one should not be blinded by the poetic power of this description, bu read it precisely. The first thing to note is how the objects which freely float around in this ‘night of the world’ are membra disiecta, partial objects, objects detached from their organic Whole —is there not a strange echo between this description and Hegel’s description of the negative power of Understanding which is able to abstract an entity (a process, a property) from its substantial context and treat it as if it has an existence of its own? — “that the accidental as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom —this is the tremendous power of the negative.” It is thus as if, in the ghastly scenery of the ‘night of the world,’ we encounter something like the power of Understanding in its natural state, spirit in the guise of a proto-spirit —this , perhaps, is the most precise definition of horror: when a higher state of development violently inscribes itself in the lower state, in its ground/presupposition, where it cannot but appear as a monstrous mess, a disintegration of order, a terrifying unnatural combination of natural elements. With regards to today’s science, where do we encounter its horror at its purest? When genetic manipulations go awry and generate objects never seen in nature, freaks like goats with a gigantic ear instead of a head or a head with one ey, meaningless accidents which nonetheless touch our deeply repressed fantasies and thus trigger wild interpretations.

fichte schelling

Williams, Robert R. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Fichte says that Kant’s theory presupposes a wider inter-subjective human community

According to Fichte, the self cannot give itself the consciousness of freedom; rather the consciousness of freedom is intersubjectively mediated. Schelling qualifies the latent solipsism of transcendental idealism when maintains that the ground of free self-determination must lie partly “within” the subject and partly “outside” of the subject. Schelling’s point in affirming that the ground of freedom is divided is that freedom is social and intersubjective. Hence the ground of freedom cannot be identified with subjectivity alone; the grounds of freedom must be both “in” the subject and yet transcend the subject. Freedom and consciousness of freedom must obviously be the subject’s own doing, yet the subject is incapable of making itself and its freedom into an object and so it cannot be autonomously self-conscious in the crucial sense. Something irreducibly other is required to make the subject available to itself and to arouse the subject to freedom and responsibility.

For this reason self-consciousness and freedom require reciprocal interaction between self and other. Neither self nor other is, by itself, sufficient; consequently, the ground of freedom must be twofold, and yet correlative.

Yet the correlation of the internal and external grounds of freedom, or self and other, is not simply a positive empirical one. Schelling shares Fichte’s tendency to conceive the other in terms of negation. The other is not-I, and I am not-other. Both the other and the self mutually condition each other, but such conditioning is negative. There is no direct presence of the other to the self, or vice versa. The important concept of a doubled ground of freedom makes central the issue of coordinating and ordering the dual grounds of freedom: each self, in its independence, depends on an other that it is not. In spite of its claims to freedom and independence, each seeks security and legitimation from an other whose recognition is contingent and not guaranteed.

Since the parochial self, as self-repulsive negativity, is hidden from itself, it depends on the other for its own critical self-consciousness. that is why self-knowledge for Hegel take the form of Self-recognition in other. The road to interiority passes through the other. The self is for itself only by being for an other, and the self is for an other only by being for itself. The ‘for itself’ formulates not the beginning but the result and telos of the process of recognition.

The natural “solipsism” of desire is a condition that must be transformed and sublimated if the self is to become capable of enduring relationships with others. Hegel’s account of the process of recognition is at the same time an account of the sublimation of desire. In this process desire is fundamentally a desire for the other.

The point to be underscored here is that the other, or the confrontation with the other, both shatters the natural solipsism of the self, and “pulls” it out of its natural solipsism. The analysis of recognition therefore is also and at the same time a story of self-overcoming, through which a enlarged ethical-social mentality or Geist, is attained. (50)

Hegel conceives the individual self in its desires not as a simple, stable, quiescent self-identity but as a complex, restless, self-repulsive, negative identity. This self-repulsing negativity means that the self is not initially present to itself, much less transparent to itself. The immediate self does not yet know what it is. What it is, is still implicit and must become explicit to it.

It can become explicit to itself, that is, discover what it is, only through the mediation of an other. Self-consciousness requires an other to confirm and transform its own self-understanding. The self’s presence to itself is mediated by an other that is likewise a self-repulsing negative identity. But this does not mean tha the relation to the other is inherently or essentially negative.

Rather only the other is capable of satisfying the desire for recognition, which is at the same time a desire for an other. “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” … Believing at first that it has no need of the other, the self makes the discovery that it needs and depends on the very other that it originally deemed “unessential.”

As immediate, each self operates with the presumption of being absolute. According to Hegel, desire signifies a condition of natural egoism in which the self’s satisfaction is the end to which everything else is regarded as merely instrumental and subordinate. Natural egoism is immediate, parochial, and abstract; it excludes the other, difference, and relation. For this reason, the confrontation with the other is experienced as an abrupt self-transcendence, that is, a plunge into a relation that “others” or alters the self. In Hegel’s words: “Self-consciousness is confronted by an other self-consciousness. It has come out of itself. This has a double [equivocal] significance: first it has lost itself, because it finds itself as an other being. Second, it has thereby canceled [aufgehoben] the other, because it does not look upon the other as essential, but rather sees only itself in other.

The presence of the other precipitates a crisis in abstract parochial self-identity. The “shock” or upsurge of the other is immediate and underivable. The encounter with an other calls into question the immediate natural solipsism or naive self-identity. the encounter with the other reveals that naive or parochial self-identity is exclusive. The self achieves its identity by excluding the other. the other constitutes a shock to this naive parochial identity, which works an immediate change. The self now finds itself as other, or as “othered.” The presence of the other signifies a loss of the original naive certitude, and this may be experienced as a loss of self.

The starting point of the process of recognition is the apparent loss of self before the other, or conversely, an apparent loss of the other owing to the inability to see anything but oneself in the other. The second phase is the attempt to cancel the self-othering, which can take two forms: elimination and/or domination of the other, or finding some accommodation with the other. The former involves eliminating the other, or compelling the other to recognize. Either form of violence is self-subverting in Hegel’s view. Hegel believes that the concept of recognition must take the second path. This means that the self may “return” to itself out of its “othered” state, but it can do so only if it abandons mastery and domination. the recognition that is needed cannot be coerced or controlled.

Mutual-reciprocal recognition is possible only if coercion is renounced. The authentic “cancellation” of other-being means that the other is not eliminated but allowed to go free and affirmed. But if the other is allowed to go free, this means that is affirmed, not simply in its identity, but also in its difference. Without the release and allowing of the other to be as other, in its difference, the ‘We’ would be merely an abstract, parochial identity. The release and affirmation of the other is constitutive of the determinately universal identity of the ‘We’. The ‘We’ is not a return to abstract, parochial self-identity of the original self-certain I. It is a determinate universal that reflects both the common identity and individual differences. Releasement of the other is the condition for the other’s release of the self and the self’s “return to itself” from “being-other,” both of which constitute the We qua determinate universal.

The self’s return to itself out of self-othering is not simply a restoration of the original parochial and abstract self-identity. It is not a simple satisfaction of desire, a filling of the lack by consumption of the object. Rather the original absolute self-identity of desire is decentered and relativeized by relation to other, while being enlarged and legitimated by the other’s recognition. This return to self in freedom is intersubjectively mediated. The condition under which the self can pass through the other and the other’s freedom and return to itself affirmatively is that coercion and mastery must be given up.

recap

I have opened with 2 rather difficult examples of protest, the QAIA and Danish cartoon incident. Why I’ve cited these, I try to explain, though it doesn’t sound entirely that well thought out just yet. I then move to Hegel and compare the Hegel coming out of Kant with Butler’s Hegel that is more coming from Spinoza country. This is to emphasize the intrusion of the subjective that Hegel adds to the mix. Then things get testy.

First I mention the tension that Butler points to in the P. quoting her regarding the self-identical subject, that “it is its travels, and is every place in which it finds itself.” So on one hand you have a subject in motion, hmm, a subject that is both in motion and at rest, when in motion this is meant to highlight it otherness to itself, that its desire is never sated, can’t be located, a particle in motion rather than at rest, on the other hand though she also points to the subject as also its place, and in Hegel’s P. this place, though temporary, nevertheless is an abode structured such that there is an homology between subject and her external environment, in other words where for the moment, substance is subject.

Butler goes further than the conventional narrative that describes at the moment of mutual recognition another self-consciousness similar to the original self-consciousness, in which they “check each other out” that is, there is recognition of the fact that they are both a self-consciousness, provoking both awe and outrage. Butler freezes the moment before this aggression is unleashed towards the other self-consciousness, establishing a touchpoint in her reading of Hegel which she is turn return to again and again, each time she reworks this touchpoint slightly differently. In SOD this self-consciousness is ‘taken up by the other self-consciousness’ in a moment that could be described as a self-loss on the part of the original self-consciousness. The subject undergoing this sense of loss is for Butler, an ek-static subject, a subject ‘beside itself’ or ‘outside itself’.

For our purposes here, she returns to her Hegelian theme in 1997 in PLP but this time in a very different fashion. Desire now doesn’t transparently lead one down the road of greater self-transparency, instead desire leads to one’s own subjection.

Heteronormativity leads to heteromelancholia. I’m not arguing that one morphs into the other, but that nevertheless, Butler emphasis on self-loss, takes a turn into a more subjective ‘interior’ psyche of the subject. It was here she would unleash in this later work, 2 important theses: Hetero-melancholy, and the ethical self-berating of the Unhappy Consciousness. For our purposes of our Hegelian theme in this chapter, we will take up the Butler’s reading of the Unhappy Consicousness. Nevertheless as will become apparent Butler’s turn to psychoanalysis and Foucault led to a development of a thesis that theorized the subject less as ek-static self-loss, and now as self-berated and subjected.

In her 1997 work here in PLP, Butler was to come into heavy criticism for her uptake of Freud, particularly her critique of Lacan. Butler changed her course from the punitivity of the self-berating subject to her post-2000 work on a subject with a different emphasis from her previous pre-2000 work. It is most significantly Butler’s emphasis on norms and normativity. Butler now distances is her empahsis on a punitive self-punishing subject that only comes into being via an accusation or accusatory interpellation.

Her Precarious LIfe and Frames of War, return her to her work on the ek-static subject, only this time self-loss is more robustly articulated within a normative frame, a scene of address and more emphasis is put on the work of the way in which a constitutive outside is ‘abjected’ in order to render a stable interior. This abject is not only held up for close theoretical scrutiny by Butler, but is attributed various concrete political identities, most notably, AIDS vicitms, Palestinians and Iraqi and Afghan civilians

The fact that the unchangeable consciousness renounces and surrenders its embodied form, while, on the other hand, the particular individual consciousness gives thanks [for the gift], i.e. denies itself the satisfaction of being conscious of its independence, and assigns the essence of its action not to itself but to the beyond, through these two moments of reciprocal self-surrender of both parts, consciousness does, of course, gain a sense of its unity with the Unchangeable. But this unity is at the same time affected with division, is again broken within itself, and from it there emerges once more the antithesis of the universal and the individual. For though consciousness renounces the show of satisfying its feeling of self, it obtains the actual satisfaction of it; for it has been desire, work, and enjoyment; as consciousness it has willed, acted, and enjoyed.

Consciousness feels itself therein as this particular individual, and does not let itself be deceived by its own seeming renunciation, for the truth of the matter is that it has not renounced itself. What has been brought about is only the double reflection into the two extremes; and the result is the renewed division into the opposed consciousness of the Unchangeable, and the consciousness of willing, performing, and enjoying, and self-renunciation itself, which confronts it; in other words, the consciousness of independent individuality in general. (Phenmenology of Spirit para 222)

subjection alterity norms

What is it then, that is desired in subjection? Is it a simple love of the shackles, or is there a more complex scenario at work? How is survival to be maintained if the terms by which existence is guaranteed are precisely those that demand and institute subordination? On this understanding,

subjection is the paradoxical effect of a regime of power in which the very “conditions of existence,” the possibility of continuing as a recognizable social being, requires the formation and maintenance of the subject in subordination. 27

:)Ok, this is the formulation that says all that Butler has been working on towards and which defines her work tout court. She is quoting her favourite quote from Spinoza which is that “desire is always the desire to persist in one’s own being.” This desire to persist in one’s own being “can be brokered only with the risky terms of social life.” And what is this social life but and here we go:

then to persist in ones’ own being requires submitting to a world of others that is fundamentally not one’s own (a submission that does not take place at a later date, but which frames and makes possible the desire to be). Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s “own” being.

Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality. If such terms institute a primary subordination or, indeed, a primary violence, then a subject emerges against itself in order, paradoxically, to be for itself. 28

:)Now here is a great moment in Butler. What would it mean to go beyond the simple boundaries of social existence in order to seek change? Now get this:

What would it mean for the subject to desire something other than its continued “social existence”? If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life’s persistence? The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but that repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm “in the right way,” one beomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened. And yet, without a repetition that risks life —in its current organization— how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization,and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?

A Critical Analysis of Subjection involves:

1) an account of the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place;

2) recognition that the subject produced as continuous, visible, and located is nevertheless haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation;

3) an account of the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned. 29

The analysis of subjection is always double, tracing the conditions of subject formation and tracing the turn against those conditions for the subject —and its perspective— to emerge.

Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?

conclusion to asad and mahmood 4/4

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.

So it is quite understandable that there might be a strong group of sexual progressives who maintain that freedom of expression is essential to the movement, that the lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, intersex movement is not possible without freedom of expression and without recourse to freedom itself as a guiding value and norm. Of course, to posit such a principle of freedom does not answer the questions of whether and how that norm is to be reconciled with other norms, nor does it tell us precisely what is meant by “freedom.”

We have to be clear about what we mean by freedom, since from the beginning freedom has been, not the same as the liberty that belongs to the individual, but something socially conditioned and socially shared. No one person is free when others are not, since freedom is achieved as a consequence of a certain social and political organization of life. The queer movement, conceived transnationally, has also sought to fight homophobia, misogyny, and racism, and it has operated as part of an alliance with struggles against discrimination and hatreds of all kinds. The emergence of a queer politics was meant to confirm the importance of battling homophobia no matter what your identity was. But it was also a signal of the importance of alliance; an attunement to minoritization in its various forms; a struggle against precarious conditions, regardless of “identity”; and a battle against racism and social exclusion.

Of course there is also a now-entrenched tension between identity-based and alliance-based sexual minority politics, and my affiliation with “queer” is meant to affirm the politics of alliance across difference. Broadly put, a strong alliance on the left requires, minimally, a commitment to combating both racism and homophobia, combating both anti-immigrant politics and various forms of misogyny and induced poverty. Why would any of us be willing to participate in an alliance that does not keep all of these forms of discrimination clearly in mind, and that does not also attend to the matters of economic justice that afflict sexual minorities, women, and racial and religious minorities as well?

So let us consider more carefully, then, how the politics of speech enters into this situation and how we might try to think about hate speech in light of a commitment to a left alliance that refuses to sacrifice one minority for another (which does not mean there may not be some serious antagonisms that remain essential to the articulation of this alliance). It is perhaps important to remember the importance of the critique of state coercion and state violence for a robust left political movement, even as we recognize that transnational economic institutions are responsible for differential poverty levels. Can we even think, though, about a politics of the speech act without noting how the state speaks, and what force it exercises when it speaks? Why is there a righteous defense of the political right to insult Muslim minorities at the same time that insults to the Dutch government, any critique of state coercion, constitutes an unacceptable assault on civilization, modernity, or reason itself? When this kind of split thinking happens, freedom of speech not only depends on protection by the state but empowers that state; this, in turn, leads to the situation in which speech against the state is effectively or implicitly censored. Hence, the freedom we think belongs to the individual is actually conferred by the state, so we misunderstand its origin and its meaning.

This is also why, if we want to develop a critical conception of freedom of speech, it will have to be one that legitimates itself outside of state power, that is able to criticize state power as part of its free expression. We have to ask whether “relying on the state” leads to the “augmentation of state power.” If Islam is figured as the religion or the name of the population who will do violence to Dutch civilizational values, then that gives the Dutch state a certain license to do violence to what seems to threaten its own values. That also logically means that “doing violence” becomes a Dutch value. We see the intensification of anti-immigrant activities, the base ideological implementation of the Civic Integration exam, the overt celebration of hateful speech of the so-called autochthonic Dutch against religious minorities as a sign of freedom itself.

The question is not whether hateful speech is part of free speech, but rather, why has freedom in certain European contexts come to define itself as the freedom to hate? What does it mean when the notion of freedom has been twisted to ratify discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and nationalism? The Dutch Civic Integration Examination was one case in point. In 2006, immigrants were required to take an examination that included the mandatory viewing of images of two gay men kissing as a way to test their “tolerance” and, hence, capacity to assimilate to Dutch liberalism.23 Do I want this test administered in my name and for my benefit? Do I want the state to take up its defense of my sexual freedom in an effort to restrict immigration on racist grounds? What happens when seeking recourse to the protective actions of the state in turn augments and fortifies the state’s own power, including its power to articulate a racist national identity? And what happens when lesbian and gay freedoms are instrumentalized to harass religious minorities or to ensure that new immigrants can be denied entry on religious, ethnic, or racial grounds? Under these circumstances, sexual progressives must become “critical” of the state that appears so enthusiastically to be supporting our freedoms. What precisely is it doing with our freedoms? And are we willing to have our claims to freedom instrumentalized for the purposes of a racist reproduction of Dutch national identity through restrictive and coercive immigration policies?

Let me make the point even more precisely, if I can. It is one thing for the state to value freedom of expression and to protect expression, but it is quite another for the state to be the agent who decides whose freedom of expression will be protected and whose will not. Under what conditions does the state decide that a minority is threatened by certain kinds of aggressive speech, and under what other conditions does the state decide that a minority must tolerate being targeted by aggressive speech as a sign that we live in a democracy that savors freedom of speech? Perhaps this is the new meaning for Dutch tolerance: you must tolerate the pain and abuse we will deal you, and that is the proof that you can “integrate” and become part of Dutch citizenship. We have to ask why the state gives free reign to racist speech at the same time that it demands respect for sexual minorities. Is the latter being played against the former? And what would happen if sexual and religious minorities refused to be pitted against each other in this way? What would happen if both of them turned against the nationalist and racist strategies of the state as a joint strategy? If, following gay conservatives, we understand freedom as personal liberty and then base a politics on a libertarian notion of freedom, we sacrifice an important social dimension to the left understanding of freedom. If freedom belongs to the individual, then we can surely ask: which individuals are recognized as individuals?

In other words, what social forms of individuality establish the recognizability of some persons as individuals and others not? If such an individual liberty exists only to the extent that it is protected by the state, then the state exercises its prerogative to protect in some instances and to withdraw all protection in others. Let’s remember, then, that the libertarian notion of the individual corresponds to a certain version of state power and economic property, and, whereas in early versions of libertarianism the state is supposed to remain minimal (or privative) in order to maximize economic freedom, that is surely not the case in the present instance in which the state differentially protects rights depending on whether that protection suits its national aspirations, even its national self-understanding as “European,” against the new immigrant communities from North Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

In the context in which the state makes use of liberties in this way (differentially exercises its prerogative to protect or retract individual liberties, decides who will count as an individual whose rights are worth protecting, and who will not), we have a different situation. In such a case, “freedom of speech” presupposes that there will be no open public criticism of the state or its inconsistent and racist actions (after all, the state is the protector and the adjudicator in this scene). This means, implicitly, that only those modes of freedom of expression will be protected that in turn protect the state, unless also protected is the open criticism of the state’s racist speech. If the fortification of the state against established and new immigrant communities involves depriving them of freedom, questioning their own rights of assembly and expression, if it casts its own Muslim population as a threat to the value of freedom, then it protects one claim of freedom only through the intensification of unfreedom, through the augmentation of the state’s own coercive mechanisms. If independent filmmaking is to remain a critical practice, separate from and willing to criticize state power, then one has to analyze closely the situation in which film becomes the cultural means through which the state’s anti-immigrant practices are implemented and rationalized. The film industry then becomes the culture industry for the state, and it loses its standing as “independent” or, indeed, as “critical.” Under these conditions, we lose the independence from state authority implied in the term “independent film,” and that medium becomes a form of embedded reporting, taking on, even ratifying, the perspective of the state. As such, it becomes another visual instrument, like the cameras in Abu Ghraib, which stage and fortify the vicious embodied action of the civilizational mission, linking its propaganda against Islam with the torture and human rights violations in Iraq and Guantánamo. Of course, the right to insult and the right to produce provocative art become rights that the state defends, but when it defends those rights differentially and for specific policy purposes, those rights become suspect. If those rights are to have legitimacy, they cannot be justified through recourse to their utility in rationalizing a the deprivation of certain rights to religious practice and belief, in other words, certain rights of expression. There may be no legal way to “manage this risk,” but that is no reason why this instrumentalization should not become the focus of critical analysis and political opposition. To understand when and where the claim of free speech is robust, we have to ask, “If we point this out, and maintain a critical and public relation to this particular prerogative of state power, is our speech still protected?” If it is still protected, then free speech is an active part of democratic contestations and political struggles. If it is not, we must militate against its restriction, differential application, and instrumentalization for nondemocratic ends. If the prerequisites of a European polity (and this could be either the nation-state or the European Union) require either cultural homogeneity or a model of cultural pluralism, then, either way, the solution is figured as assimilation or integration into a set of cultural norms that are understood as internally already established, self-sufficient and self-standing. These norms are not considered changeable according to new demographic shifts, and they do not seek to respond to new populations and new claims to belonging. Indeed, if the core norms are already established, then one already knows what Dutch culture is, and one is closed to the idea that it may become something else, something different; indeed, one refuses the recognition that it already has become something different and that the change is, in fact, irreversible.

When freedom of expression comes to mean “the freedom to express an unwillingness to undergo change in light of contact with cultural difference,” then freedom of expression becomes the means through which a dogmatic and inflexible concept of culture becomes the precondition of citizenship itself. The state to which we appeal to protect the freedom of expression is the state that will close its doors to whomever it does not want to hear, whose speech is unwelcome within its borders. Within this framework, the freedom of personal expression, broadly construed, relies upon the suppression of a mobile and contestatory understanding of cultural difference. Such suppression makes clear how state violence invests in cultural homogeneity as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize coercive and discriminatory state policies toward Muslim immigrants. When the acts of one member of a group or some small number of members of a group are taken to be the defining actions and beliefs of the group itself, then that is not only an unjustified generalization but also racism, and it must also be opposed. Surely, there is an ongoing clash or antagonism between those who feel that their values of sexual freedom or freedom of expression are threatened by some minority religious beliefs and ways of life, but these are differences to be worked out through cohabitation and struggle, through participation in public discourse, through cultural and educational projects, allowing modes of separateness to coincide with modes of belonging (and not trying to close the fissure between the two). These are surely better strategies than appealing to a state that makes use of the defense of “freedom” to reassert its national purity—its racist conception of culture—as the precondition of reason, modernity, and civilization, and to halt all public criticism of the way it polices its borders and patrols its minority populations. A racist discourse can recast itself as the necessary groundwork of morality, reformulating its own hatred as moral virtue. Some crucial part of freedom of speech involves “speaking out,” which means, invariably, speaking out within specific scenes of address: speaking with and from and to one another. This implicit sociality in all address demands the recognition of freedom as a condition of social life, one that depends upon equality for its actualization. At stake is a rethinking of the processes of minoritization under new global conditions, asking what alliances are possible between religious, racial, and sexual minorities (when these “positions” are less identities than modes of living in relation to others and to guiding ideals). Then perhaps we can find constellations where the opposition to racism, to discrimination, to precarity, and to state violence remain the clear goals of political mobilization.

response to mahmood 3/4

she points out that within Islam, the religious subject’s relation to the representation of Muhammad constitutes a relation that is indissociable from one’s own sense of self.

The “self” at issue is not a discrete and bounded individual, but a relation to an animated image; the self has to be understood as a set of embodied and affective practices that are fundamentally bound up with certain images, icons, and imaginaries.

In Mahmood’s terms, “the power of an icon lies in its capacity to allow an individual (or a community) to find oneself in a structure that influences how one conducts oneself in this world… a form of relationality that binds the subject to an object or imaginary.” Now one might conclude that Mahmood is suggesting that blasphemy against the image of Muhammad is thus an injury to Muslim personhood, and that the law that seeks to distinguish between injurious conduct and incendiary expression misunderstands not only the ontology of personhood but also the character of the injury. The twin conceits of state neutrality with respect to religion are that (a) religion ought to be protected as a private issue and that (b) no religious beliefs should drive public law or policy. And yet, if religion becomes inextricably bound up with personhood, and injurious conduct against persons is legally proscribed, could not this new conception of the ontology of personhood mandate a change in legal reasoning and judgment? 🙂 This I think would be Butler’s preferred way forward.

Interestingly enough, Mahmood does not take this tack, but counsels against the domain of juridical redress as an appropriate and effective venue for taking up the challenge of the Danish cartoons. Instead, she uses the language of “moral injury” to distinguish the issue from the ways in which it is conceived by reigning legal vernaculars. Indeed, she is quite explicit about the policy implications of her analysis:

“[T]he future of the Muslim minority in Europe depends not so much on how the law might be expanded to accommodate their concerns as on a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the majority Judeo-Christian population that undergird the law.” 🙂 Butler now is shaking her head. Get ready, she’s comin atcha!

Moreover, this turn to the cultural and ethical domain is conditioned by an argument that the law is so pervasively secular that any effort to seek redress for injury through the law would strengthen the very instrument through which secularism asserts its hegemony and defines the proper domain of religion.

If the task is to change sensibilities, we need to know how that can be done. Of course, Mahmood is right to point out that the terms of existing law ought not to constrain our understanding of the cultural and ethical dimensions of this issue. On the other hand, is it right to understand law as radically distinct from questions of sensibility?

After all, does law (civil rights law, for instance) not function on certain historical occasions to change sensibilities, to foster new parameters for equality and justice, including new sentiments, or are we being asked to understand “sensibilities” as definitionally extrajuridical? Are there not legal sensibilities at issue here?

This final call to change does not tell us in what way change might or should happen, which leads me to wonder whether we are being asked to take the foregoing analysis as precisely the kind of cultural and ethical intervention that is needed. If that is the case, several questions still emerge: do we understand the “cultural and ethical domain” to be radically distinct from law? and on what basis do ethics and culture constitute an alternative and separable domain or set of domains? Mahmood calls for “comparative dialogue” as well as a kind of “thinking” that happens in “unaccustomed ways,” but what would be the institutional venues for these activities? Though these practices are considered distinct from “political action,” are they for that reason not political strategies.

Mahmood specifies that we have to cleave judgment from description in the context of discussing religious fanaticism, presumably because our judgments tend to overwhelm our descriptions. And yet, how would we then return to the question of judgment after having made that initial separation? What form would some more fully informed judgment take? To enter into political action surely requires some kind of judgment about what is the case, and what should be the case. We have to consider whether politics is being allied with “law” or legal solution in this discussion, and what a politics might look like that did not model itself on juridical decision and action.

When Mahmood makes the decision to turn away from law and politics, does she not inadvertently overlook the possibility of a politics, including a political judgment, that might not be constrained by legal norms or practice?

Does “ethics” distinguish itself from politics as part of the effort to find an alternative to legal solutions in this matter? And does her argument now invest with neutrality the sphere of culture and ethics that has been wrested from law? Is this finally an apologia for anthropology itself? The final line invokes “the academy” as one of the few places where such tensions can be explored. Are we left, then, with academic exploration, comparative work, and dialogue as the cultural, if not culturalist, alternative to law and politics? This is a strange conclusion given how engaged with thepolitics of law the essay is, but perhaps we are meant to be persuaded that this is a domain from which we should all finally retreat. This final set of moves strikes me as curious, given that Mahmood has offered quite a few strong and well-argued political judgments throughout the essay: the pervasive secularism of European law; the misunderstanding of racialization; the widespreadignorance and hatred of Islam; the necessity to expose the secular production and deformation of religious practice. These are strong political positions. Even exposing the contradictions of secular law is clearly a strong critical move that seeks to combat a sustained and consequential hegemony within the law. Is Mahmood really operating to the side of politics and judgment?

Can she give an account of the place of politics and judgment in her own analysis, indeed, in the argument she gives about why we should work to the side of both politics and judgment?

In a final coda, Mahmood raises the question of whether “critique” can take account of its own “disciplines of subjectivity, affective attachments, and subject-object relationality.”

At this point, it seems clear that the model for thinking about the Muslim relation to the image of Muhammad sustains certain analogies with the practice of critique itself. Both seem to be embodied and affective practices, modes of subjectivity that are bound up with their objects and, hence, relational. Is this a generalized account of subjectivity or one that pertains to specific kinds of practices of the self? This is not precisely a point pursued by Mahmood, but it does raise a question about the status of critique.

In the end, she holds out for a notion of critique that relies on the suspension of the kind of closure characteristic of political action. So critique appears to be neither judgment nor action, but a certain invested, affected, way of thinking and living that is bound up with objects or, indeed, an imaginary, and this way of thinking—and what it thinks about—is not usual, not customary. Inasmuch as secularism has established the domain of the usual and customary, there can be a critique of secularism that calls that taken-for-grantedness into question. I take it that this would be part of what Mahmood would accept as “critique.”

response to asad and mahmood 2/4

Blasphemy is viewed in secular liberal society as a constraint on free speech, but why is it contextualized exclusively in this way? Is it that the normative question of whether or not we will censor drives from the start the way in which we conceptualize the phenomenon? If we were to conceptualize the phenomenon differently, would different kinds of normative issues come to the fore?

Is there an idea of the human implied by prohibitions and protections related to speech, and if so, how does this idea serve to distinguish between what is called the religious and what is called the secular?

… free speech is produced precisely through the circumscription of the public domain and its protections and, most importantly, it is presumed to belong to a subject who exercises free speech as a right.

This subject owns itself and its free speech, and it exercises speech freely as a “property” of its own personhood. As self-owning, the subject possesses its own personhood and exercises that personhood freely; free speech is a paradigmatic example of this self-owning subject.

In this way, the claims to free speech are embedded in a certain ontology of the subject, and it is this ontology that is challenged by theological claims that assert the subject or self’s dependence on or participation in a transcendent power. The theological claim seems, on the surface, to contest the secular ontology of the subject.

And whereas Islam, according to Asad, offers no punishment for disbelief and in no way mandates belief, it opposes any efforts to coerce belief or disbelief. Belief itself is not a cognitive act, not even the “property” of a person, but part of an ongoing and embodied relation to God. So any attempt to coerce someone away from his or her belief is an effort to break a relation to a transcendence by which one is sustained. It is not, in these terms, a quarrel between beliefs or an attack on an idea, but an effort to coerce the break of a bond without which life is untenable. As Asad puts it,

“what matters, finally, is belonging to a particular way of life in which the person does not own himself.” The outrage against the cartoons articulates an objection to “something that disrupts a living relationship.”

The legal imaginary of liberal law, which protects free speech against blasphemy, makes the claim that the charge against the cartoons is blasphemy. This immediately makes the issue into one of whether or not free speech should be curtailed. On the other hand, to situate blasphemy —or in this case, isā’ah, insult, injury—in relation to way of life that is not based in self-ownership, but in an abiding and vital dispossession, changes the terms of the debate. It does not provide an immediate answer to how the question of prohibition or censorship should be legally decided, but shifts us into a mode of understanding that is not constrained by that juridical model. In other words,

to understand blasphemy as an injury to a sustaining relation is to understand that we are dealing with a different conception of subjectivity and belonging than the one implied by self-ownership. (I am tempted to say that this mode of subjectivity functions as a critique of self-ownership within secular hegemony.)

The public outcry against the cartoons is also a way of refusing and parochializing the specific property-driven ontology of the subject that has come to support the claim of free speech.

In this case, to change the framework within which we seek to understand blasphemy makes it possible to see that what is at stake is not so much a question of whether speech should be free or prohibited as a way of conceiving a mode of living outside of selfidentity and self-ownership. The cartoons are injurious not only because they fail to understand this way of life but also because they deploy the iconography of Muhammad to direct the viewer toward a repudiation of that way of life.

To claim that someone or anyone can “own” the image is to seek recourse to a framework of property that is implicitly criticized by the living relation to the icon.

So the critical question that emerges is whether ways of life that are based on dispossession in transcendence (and implicit critique of self-ownership) are legible and worthy of respect. It is then less a legal question than a broader question of the conditions of cohabitation for peoples whose fundamental conceptions of subjective life divide between those that accept established secular grounds and those at odds with secular presumptions of self-coincidence and property.

It would seem that we are being asked to understand this battle as one between, on the one hand, a presumptively secular framework tied to an ontology of the subject as self-owned and, on the other hand, a nonsecular framework that offers an ontology of the subject as dispossessed in transcendence. This explanation, however, asks us to assume that there is a certain generalized secular ontology of the subject, and that secularization has effectively succeeded in establishing that ontology within the parameters of law and politics. I have questions about whether the secular and secularization are as monolithic as this, but I will defer them in order to follow through with this argument. For if we accept that secularization is the way that religious traditions “live on” within postreligious domains, then we are not really talking about two different frameworks, secularism versus religion, but two forms of religious understanding, intertwined with one another in various modes of avowal and disavowal. Indeed, the binary framework crumbles further when we consider modes of secular criticism that take place in religious contexts (for example, the discourse ofthe current pope) as well as modes of religious reasoning that recur within secularism (for example, Protestant commitments to the distinction between public and private life that have become essential to modern liberalism).

response to asad and mahmood 1/4

The point is not simply to expand our capacities for description or to assert the plurality of frameworks, although it is doubtless a “good” to know the cultural range of moral discourses on such questions if we are to be thoughtful and knowledgeable about the world in which we live. Nor is the point to embrace a cultural relativism that would attribute equivalence to all moral claims and position oneself as an outsider to the normative issues at hand. Rather, it seems most important to ask,

what would judgment look like that took place not “within” one framework or another but which emerged at the very site of conflict, clash, divergence, overlapping?

It would seem a practice of cultural translation would be a condition of such judgment, and that what is being judged is not only the question of whether a given action is injurious but also whether, if it is, legal remedies are the best way to approach the issue, and what other ways of acknowledging and repairing injury are available.

In my view, the point is to achieve a complex and comparative understanding of various moral discourses, not only to see why we evaluate (and value) certain norms as we do, but also to evaluate those very modes of evaluation. We do not merely shift from an evaluative position to a descriptive one (though I can see why taking a descriptive tone might work to defuse polemics on all sides), but rather seek to show that every description is already committed to an evaluative framework, prior to the question of any explicit or posterior judgment. We may think that we first describe a phenomenon and then later subject it to judgment, but if the very phenomenon at issue only “exists” within certain evaluative frameworks, then norms precede description—as is surely the case when we think about the presumptive cultural and moral frameworks brought to bear on the discussions of blasphemy against Muhammad as well as those frameworks, mainly Muslim, that were not brought to bear. … secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized).

… the point is to try to clarify why so many Muslims were outraged, and why something other than an attack on free speech by religious populations was at issue.

… secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized). This last is a strong normative claim, and I want to suggest that it becomes possible to consider the injustice of this situation of hegemonic secularism only when we pass through a certain displacement of taken-for-granted modes of moral evaluation, including certain established juridical frameworks. A certain critical perspective emerges as a consequence of comparative work. An inquiry that understands that competing and converging moral discourses require a mode of cultural analysis, perhaps anthropological, affirms cultural difference as a constant point of reference in the effort to “parochialize” certain absolutist and monolithic conceptions of normativity that serve, implicitly or explicitly, forms of cultural ignorance, racism, conquest, and domination— or, as Asad puts it, the “European revulsion against Muslim immigrants and Islam.”
Asad effectively poses the question,

why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the art of killing in the name of the secular nation, or democracy, does not?

He points out that this kind of discrepancy or schism may well constitute a “tension” at the heart of the modern subject. And this is a useful and persuasive argument, in my view. But clearly something more is at stake. We would not be alarmed by the kinds of comparisons made explicit in Asad’s questions if we did not ourselves undergo some moral horror or shock at the obvious inequalities demonstrated by the comparison. Asad’s questions derive their rhetorical force from a sense that it is unacceptable to respond with righteous outrage to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of religion and with moral complacency to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of the nation-state. There are many reasons why one might oppose various forms of death dealing, but it is only on the condition that we do, in fact, oppose violence and the differential ways it is justified that we can come to understand the normative importance of the comparative judgment that Asad’s work makes available to us.

Asad’s work not only provides new modes of description and understanding but also makes an intervention into evaluative frameworks and norms of evaluation themselves. By showing how normative dispositions (mainly secular and liberal) enter into stipulative claims (concerning objectionable violence and grievable death) that circumscribe the domain of “understanding” contemporary cultural and military conflict, Asad facilitates a critique of this parochial and consequential circumscription of operative evaluative frameworks.

Through a certain kind of comparative interrogation, one framework is interrupted by another, and thus opens up a new horizon for judgment. On the On the basis of this comparative and interruptive work, we can conclude that there is no reason to assume that justified violence, when it happens, is the sole prerogative of states, and that unjustified violence, when it happens, is the exercise of illegitimate states and insurgency movements. Such a conclusion not only has consequences for how we proceed normatively but also constitutes itself as a strong normative claim.

If Asad’s comparative questions upset us, as I think they do, that is because we become aware of the contingent conditions under which we feel shock, outrage, and moral revulsion. And since we can only make sense of why we would feel so much more horror in the face of one mode of death dealing than in the face of another through recourse to implicitly racist and civilizational schemes organizing and sustaining affect differentially, we end up feeling shocked and outraged by our lack of shock.

The posing of the comparative question, under the right conditions, induces new moral sentiments that are bound up with new moral judgments. We realize that we have already judged or evaluated the worth of certain lives over others, certain modes of death dealing over others, and that realization is at the same time a judgment, an evaluation, namely, that such differential judgments are unjustified and wrong.

For Benjamin, the principles of homogeneity, substitutability, and continuity that come to structure temporality and matter under conditions of capitalism have to be actively interrupted by the way in which the premodern erupts into the modern. Would this notion of critique not be useful to those who seek to show how the progressive conceits of secularization are confounded by animated anachronisms, fragments from the premodern that disrupt the claims of modernity, and prove central—and potentially fatal—to its operation?

As a mode of living and even a mode of subject constitution, critique is understood as a “practice” that incorporates norms into the very formation of the subject. The subject does not own itself, but is always dispossessed by the norms by which it is formed. Is this conception of no use to the critique of secular presumptions?

Even in Kant, it is important to note that critique is not precisely a judgment, but an inquiry into the conditions of possibility that make judgment possible. That inquiry is, and must be, separate from judgment itself. The Kantian position is that our ways of knowing are structured prior to the possibility of our judgment, and that these form conditions of possibility for any judgment. Kant, of course, sought to understand the universal and timeless features of cognition in his effort to articulate the preconditions of judgment, but it is surely possible to transpose a Kantian procedure onto a historical scheme, as Foucault sought to do. When that happens we can ask, how is our knowledge organized by specific historical schemes prior to any possibility of judgment, and how do our judgments rely upon those prior organizations of knowledge? If this is right, and if this constitutes a certain historical transposition of the Kantian project of “critique,” then

critique would be an inquiry into the ways that knowledge is organized prior to the specific acts of knowledge we perform, including the kinds of judgments we make. In this sense, following Kant, critique is prior to judgment and perhaps closer to Asad’s project than would at first appear.

When we ask what historically formed schemes of evaluation condition and inform our shock and outrage over suicide bombing and our righteous coldness in the face of statesponsored violence, it seems to me that we are trying to delimit the historical conditions of possibility for affective and evaluative response. Asad and Mahmood both have tried to show how secularism functions tacitly to structure and organize our moral responses within a dominant Euro-Atlantic context, and in so doing they seem to be asking us to call into question the taken-forgranted ways that such schemes inform and move us.

Comparative work, perhaps anthropology itself, seeks to displace us from that taken-for-granted set of presumptions, ones that assume a certain process of secularization as yielding universal truths, and that therefore parochialize a very specific, sometimes lethal, tradition within the West.

It seems to me that critique designates the process of trying to delimit knowledge, indicating not so much a completed or successful action as an ongoing task to fathom and describe the various ways of organizing knowledge that are tacitly operating as the preconditions of various “acts” of knowledge. This incomplete effort to delimit and name the conditions of possibility is not itself a judgment; it is an effort to fathom, collect, and identify that upon which we depend when we claim to know anything at all. The ways to do this are various:

through tracing internal contradictions, through comparing and contrasting alternative cultural lexicons for similar concepts, through offering a historical account of how a set of culturally specific assumptions became recast as universal and postcultural.

If this is one set of critical practices, how different is “critique” from Asad’s own critical procedure, finally?