Force and Understanding

Writings on Philosophy and Resistance

Howard Caygill, Stephen Howard, Stephen Howard

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350107885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

For the past thirty years, Howard Caygill has been a distinctive and radical voice in continental philosophy. For the first time, this volume gathers together Caygill's most significant philosophical essays, the majority of which are not freely available and many of which are previously unpublished. Here, a major philosopher is at work, offering rich, rigorous and politically-engaged readings of canonical and lesser-known figures and texts. From Kant and Frantz Fanon to Herman Kahn, founder of the Hudson Institute, Caygill uncovers the untapped resources that the history of philosophy provides for contemporary thought, whilst critically pushing beyond the limits of the tradition. Divided into two parts, the first part of the collection reveals the philosophical backdrop to Caygill's acclaimed study of political resistance, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (2015), whilst the second part sees Caygill further develop his account of resistance through wide-ranging analyses of contemporary culture. Exploring numerous subjects, including Nietzsche, metaphysics, radical politics, and digital resistance, to name but a few, Force and Understanding introduces readers to the orienting themes of Caygill's thought and provides the opportunity to engage with one of the most astute, learned, and critical philosophical minds around.

PART ONE

Conditions

Section one: Starting points

1

Gillian Rose 1947–1995: Art, justice and metaphysics

It is both an honour and a heavy responsibility to give the first memorial lecture for Gillian Rose, especially here, at the University of Sussex, where she spent much of her working life in the School of European Studies as Lecturer and Reader in Sociology. There is something uncanny in speaking of her as past in a place that for me remains haunted with her presence. Arriving at Falmer Station today felt little different from late winter (or was it early spring?) eight years ago, when I came to listen to the series of carefully crafted lectures that later became the book Judaism and Modernity. Those lectures exemplified Rose’s generosity and lack of pretentiousness: she would speak for an hour and then retire to the ‘European Common Room’ to argue with a motley following of students, colleagues and friends from the town, many of whom – like Gillian – are now dead.

Not only Gillian Rose has died but also the unique intellectual circumstances of the University of Sussex of the 1970s and 1980s that sustained the development of her thought. The writings she left from her Sussex period – The Melancholy Science (1976), Hegel Contra Sociology (1981) and Dialectic of Nihilism (1984) – are memorials to that unique institution and cultural moment. And in a sense, Rose’s move to Warwick University was her acknowledgement that the form of life in which she had lived and worked had passed; her later books The Broken Middle (1992), Judaism and Modernity (1993) and of course Love’s Work (1995) were the retrospective flights of her beloved Owl of Minerva reflecting on a world tormented by the shades of Hitler and Stalin – one which seemed, after 1989, to have passed. None of these books would have been possible without the paradoxically liberal climate of political, cultural and, more inconspicuously, religious severity that characterized the institution in those years.

The Sussex University of the late 1970s was not only the last redoubt of student radicalism – with anarchist student occupations shadowing the rise of Thatcher – but was also home to a generation of scholars marked by the direct experience of Nazism, the Second World War and the Stalinist fate of Marxism. The pipe-smoking Professor of Sociology Tom Bottomore, who appointed Gillian, served in Vienna after the war as a member of the Allied Control Council. He brought back with him a passion for German-language social theory and a commitment to Austro-Marxism as a radical democratic socialist alternative to both Stalinism and Social Democracy. Also in the Sociology Department were Gillian’s friends, the melancholy Romanian exile and theorist of totalitarianism Zev Barbu and Julius Carlebach, the criminologist and scholar of modern Judaism who left Germany as child in the 1930s. Other exiled scholars who provided a human link with the traditions of European thought were the Czech Kafka scholar Eduard Goldstücker and the student of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, István Mészáros. The presence of these and others – Norman Cohn, Marie Jahoda – gave the ideas with which Gillian was working a sense of urgency and risk: they were not just academic exercises.

For Rose, the human individual embodiment of the radical, intellectual response to the violent events of the twentieth century extended beyond the professoriat. She found it in her friend Yvette Stone who worked here as a secretary – a woman of the first generation of native modern Hebrew speakers who preferred French and was engaged in an endless re-reading of Proust. Gillian’s account of Yvette in Love’s Work is paradoxically both perceptive and extremely unjust. She also found this direct experience in her friends and students – refugees from Chile, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Northern Ireland. The intellectual responses to this violent century were for Gillian part of the climate in which she lived and worked. Even her next-door neighbours in Richmond Road, Brighton, the modest street near Sainsbury’s where she lived for most of her time at Sussex – who had no idea what she did when she went to work and were puzzled by why she spent so much time reading books out in the garden – confided in her and spoke at length about their experience of the Blitz and the class struggle between squaddies and officers during the Battle of El Alamein.

What exactly was it that she did at work – what was the point of Gillian Rose’s reading and thinking? I don’t think she would object to it being described as an exploration of what it means today to be an Hegelian. Her finest book for many of her readers – Hegel contra Sociology – more than any other questions the scission in the Hegelian heritage between ‘left’ and ‘right’ Hegelianism. This was the division already evident on Hegel’s death in 1831 between the Godless, political development of speculative thought that emerged in the form of Marxism and the theological, ethical version which fed into the late nineteenth-century British idealist tradition (and remains a skeleton in the cupboard of Oxford philosophy). One of Rose’s most perceptive early critics, the Hungarian political theorist I. M. Birki, recognized that her book rendered obsolete the artificial separation of political and theological aspects of Hegel’s thought and that this in its turn put on the agenda a radical reassessment of the post-Hegelian tradition of European philosophy and political thought. Gillian herself was clear about the significance of the book and, in her preface to the 1995 reprint, brings together Hegel and those alleged anti-Hegelians – Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – into a shared intellectual and political adventure:

By reassessing the relation between the early and the mature works of Hegel, the experience of negativity, the existential drama, is discovered at the heart of Hegelian rationalism. My subsequent reassessments of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which challenges the tradition of regarding them as radically nihilistic or existential alternatives to Hegel, draw on this exposition of Hegel … the dilemma of addressing modern ethics and politics without arrogating the authority under question is seen as the ineluctable difficulty in Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s engagement with modernity. (Rose 2009)

This holds also for Love’s Work, which addresses the same dilemma of setting an existential drama – the experience of imminent death – within ‘objective spirit’ or social and political institutions. By what authority did she do this; by what authority did she justify her often tough judgements of her life and those who shared it? But even in this last book the question still remains of why turn to Hegel, why continue to be an Hegelian after almost two centuries of Hegelian thought?

The question brings us to the themes of ‘art, justice and metaphysics’. What is it that gathers together these three terms, what is it that they share, and why does it seem so natural to unite them in a single phrase? One of the answers is historical: the trinity of art and beauty, justice and the good, and metaphysics and the true refer to three of the four ‘transcendentals’ of medieval philosophy. The transcendentals denote the extra-categorial attributes of beings – unity, truth, goodness, beauty (adding, in some classifications, thing and something) that are prior to any act of perception: they provide the horizon for meaningful human action or categorial judgement, whether intellectual, moral or political, or aesthetic. In the tradition the ‘transcendentals’ were thought to constitute a system, to be ‘convertible’: the one was true, good and beautiful; the good was beautiful, true and one …

The structure of medieval transcendental philosophy persisted into the modern period in the architecture of Kant’s transcendental philosophy presented in the three critiques: The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was Kant’s critique of metaphysics and ‘truth’; The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant’s critique of the ‘good’, and The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant’s critique of the beautiful. What is striking in Kant – whom Gillian always referred to in Moses Mendelssohn’s words as ‘the great destroyer’ – is that, in the modern, critical age, the true, the good and the beautiful are no longer convertible. The unity of reason is something that has to be justified; we can no longer comfortably move from the true to the good, or in modern terms, from is to ought. What is in question in all three critiques is precisely the fourth transcendental of unity. Kant can no longer repose in unity but has to pursue it – in the transcendental unity of apperception of epistemology, in the unity as universal of morality and in the unity in plurality of the sensus communis that judges the beautiful.

Gillian Rose believed that Kant’s work of creative destruction was constitutive of our modernity and left us the task of rethinking the transcendentals, especially unity. The range of possible and actual responses to the fractures identified by Kant defines for Rose the parameters of modern thought and largely consisted in trying to relocate the transcendental unity. We can seek it in truth, developing a philosophy in which ‘the real is rational’ and in which the claim to truth will inform our moral, political and aesthetic choices. The problem with this position is that it can become ideological and dogmatic – the truth may be that of religion, of atheism, of a political ideology. We are in danger of converting the good and beautiful into an ideology – committing terrible deeds in the name of partial truths and producing terrible works of art in the name of the unity of the nation or of the international unity of the proletariat in socialist realism.

Alternatively, we can convert the one, the true and the beautiful into the good, saying that what we do and how we act are fundamental. This for Gillian was represented by the alternative of pragmatism; it can even combine with the claims for the truth in social theory such as sociology which grounds our knowledge and affects in the scientific truth of the social determination. This is the burden of the argument of the difficult first chapter of Hegel Contra Sociology. A third position with respect to the fractured transcendentals would be to unite them under the sign of the beautiful, an operation carried out as early as Schiller’s influential Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. Here it is the experience of beauty that opens the possibility of unifying the true and the good, but it runs the risk of aestheticizing both truth and politics, making truth a matter of sentimental affect and the good a matter of looking rather than being good.

Gillian Rose began and ended her reading and teaching of modern European thought with the fractures of transcendental philosophy. She insisted on staying with the fractures, with the brokenness. She placed herself in a tradition begun by another of Kant’s contemporaries – Heinrich von Kleist – who drew the ultimate consequences of the critical philosophy: the modern age is one of fracture and loss of transcendental horizon and has to be shown to be such. Gillian counted Kleist’s Marionettentheater and Michael Kohlhaas among her favourite texts which she constantly returned to – the one exploring the destructive effects of consciousness on grace and beauty, the other the destructive effects of the single-minded pursuit of justice. Kleist developed a form of writing which showed that the unity of reason was shattered and that now reason itself was the site of a personal, existential drama; in the words of Judaism and Modernity, there is a ‘trauma within reason itself’.

Kleist’s combination of ‘existential eros’ and ‘philosophical logos’ provided a model of authorship which Gillian adopted and pursued further. It provided an analytic of despair, a response to the brokenness of the ‘unity of reason’ that did not seek to restore a transcendental unity to it – whether through ideology, through action or through art. Instead, the task of philosophy is limited to rehearsing the traumas of reason – to ‘tarry with the negative’ and to work through its brokenness in an interminable analysis. She found the model for this authorship in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a work which ends – in the spirit of Kleist – on Golgotha, one of the most equivocal, broken moments of the Christian tradition. She did not find in Hegel the unification of reason on the basis of speculative thought – the alleged ‘real is rational’ of the Philosophy of Right – but interpreted this phrase in conformity with Hegel’s own gloss in his lectures that the ‘real is often broken and bad’ – extending perhaps the brokenness and badness to reason itself. So Gillian’s Hegel was less the triumphant unification of the good and the beautiful under the rational unity of philosophy’s absolute than a staging of the traumatization of philosophy by the attempt to think the absolute.

This reading of Hegel brings him very close to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, whose authorships are also dedicated to working through the trauma of a broken reason. Kierkegaard’s ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ in the demand of faith marks a limit to philosophy, an inconvertible moment which traumatizes the unity of reason and seems to evacuate the good and the beautiful of any content. Nietzsche’s death of God, announced in the marketplace by the madman in the Gay Science, totally disorients reason and introduces the parodic tragic drama of Zarathustra that followed. For Rose it made no sense to read Kierkegaard as offering the opposition of faith to Hegelian reason, or Nietzsche the innocence of becoming to the cynical experience of Hegelian metaphysics: they were all authors of the trauma of reason.

Gillian Rose had a passionate distrust of innocence, claiming in Love’s Work that she was not an innocent child, and by implication disbelieving anyone who thought they were. This sense of responsibility for the trauma of reason led her to criticize very forcefully what she saw as an attempt to find in Jewish thought a refuge from the trauma of reason. She saw this as characteristic of a contemporary current of thought which appealed to Jewish thought as the Other of the modern, Christian nihilist tradition without knowing very much about it. In the wonderful opening to Judaism and Modernity she wrote:

Yet, suddenly, in the wake of the perceived demise of Marxism, Athens, for a long time already arid and crumbling, has become an uncannily deserted city, haunted by departed spirits. Her former inhabitants, abandoning her justice as well as her reason, have set off on a pilgrimage to an imaginary Jerusalem, in search of difference or otherness, love or community, and hoping to escape the imperium of reason, truth and reason. (Rose 1993, 1)

There is no escaping Rome to either Athens or Jerusalem, but what is left is the task of working through the heritage of law, philosophy and prophesy. Gillian did so in philosophy, but while paying due libations to the claims of the others. For her it was not possible to inhabit Athens without being mindful of Rome and Jerusalem.

In Rose’s work there is no attempt to re-establish the convertibility of the one, the good, the true and the beautiful, but rather the constant effort to stage their brokenness. It was more difficult for an author to do this than to claim the spurious authority of any one of them and to convert. The transcendental unity of reason which might have grounded the true, the good and the beautiful is a broken middle, one that does not occupy a particular site – neither Rome, Athens nor Jerusalem – but which is always restless but vigilant.

I would not want to leave you with the impression that the author of this difficult thought of the broken middle regarded her work as a sad or even tragic philosophy. It was certainly one of its time, but to be an author for Gillian was more an ecstatic than a melancholy condition. This is evident in the drama of reason at its limit that is played out in Love’s Work. That author recognized her Guardian Angel in Klee’s Angelus Dubiosus not the tragic, traumatized Angelus Novus of Walter Benjamin or the angry angels of Simone Weil and Levinas. The dubious angel is one of those burly Kafkaesque angels, a very Rosean

hybrid of hubris and humility – who makes mistakes, for whom things go wrong, who constantly discovers its own faults and failings, yet who still persists in the pain of staking itself, with the courage to initiate action and the commitment to go on and on, learning from those mistakes and risking new ventures. The dubious angel constantly changes its self-identity and its ...