Michael A. Weinstein

Action, Contemplation, Vitalism

Robert L. Oprisko, Diane Rubenstein

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138013087
• eBook ISBN: 9781317747611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a major reassessment of Michael Weinstein's political philosophy. It situates his singular contribution, designated as "critical vitalism, " in the context of both canonical American and contemporary continental theory. Weinstein is presented as a philosopher of life and as an American Nietzsche. Yet the contributors also persuasively argue for this form of thinking as a prescient prophecy addressing contemporary society's concern over the management of life as well as the technological changes that both threaten and sustain intimacy. This is the first full scale study of Weinstein's work which reveals surprising aspects of a philosophic journey that has encompassed most of the major American (pragmatic or vitalist) or Continental (phenomenological or existential) traditions. Weinstein is read as a comparative political theorist, a precursor to post-structuralism, and as a post-colonial border theorist. A different aspect of his oeuvre is highlighted in each of the book's three sections. The opening essays comprising the "Action" diptych contrasts meditative versus extrapolative approaches; "Contemplation" stages a series of encounters between Weinstein and his philosophic interlocutors; "Vitalism" presents Weinstein as a teacher, media analyst, musician, and performance artist. The book contains an epilogue written by Weinstein in response to the contributors.

1
Michael Weinstein’s Posthumous Thought for Our Times

An Introduction

Robert L. Oprisko and Diane Rubenstein

… there can be no encounter with Weinstein’s political thought that is not at the same time a larger encounter with the historical trajectories of twentieth century experience, and by approximation, with the quickly enfolding futures of the twenty-first century.

Arthur Kroker, “Nietzsche for Our Times”¹

This book is a critical affirmation of the work of Michael Weinstein. It has multiple purposes: the proximate project of tracing a line through a philosophic itinerary, sharpening our sense of his distinctive contribution to American political thought. But we also seek to resituate him as a comparative political theorist, engaged with non-Western thought and nations such as Somalia, as a border theorist avant la lettre, and as a homegrown critic of governmentality. This would be the rhizomatic acknowledgment of his nomadic thought as it traverses geographic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries. Weinstein’s oeuvre, a term capacious enough to include his published writings in all their venues—books, print and electronic articles, weekly photography criticism for New City, art catalogues—as well as performance art, music, and teaching, enacted or, more accurately, fleshed out the philosophic personae: border savage, a “Latin in Saxon skin” or the “civil savage as monkey playing in the culture jungle.” Weinstein is a political theorist of the body, first singing it as “electric,” now rapping its digital modalities. These were all manners of reformulating finalist ontology capable of addressing the hatred of existence or ressentiment, all too often the default form of being under neoliberal rule.² The intellectual portraits drawn by the contributors to this volume, former students from the late sixties through to the present, who have not ceased drawing upon his teachings, argue for a reading or rereading of Weinstein as avowed avatar of posthuman/postcivilized thought, a postcursor to Nietzsche’s adage that “We are fully posthumous beings.” As all such posthumous beings, his time has only just arrived, quickened with renewed interest in vitalism/philosophies of life, anarchism, new materialisms calling for attentiveness and care to all aspects of the material world, speculative realisms, thing theory, transhumanism, and the search for new political ontologies.

Weinstein’s conceptual contribution can be designated as critical vitalism. Critical vitalism is an evolution of classical vitalism, concurring in its partisanship for life and lived experience. However, he blends Sartrean and Bergsonian traditions, engaging with the structure of being from the body/self of the individual. The critical element of Weinstein’s vitalist ontology is in his focus on proceptive drive(s) in lieu of propulsive élan vital, as Justin Mueller will detail in Chapter 4.

Critical vitalism embraces life as tragedy. Weinstein details the torment that individuals experience as unified beings often of two or more minds. Weinstein believes man to be trapped in agonic contradiction, seeking both the logical structure of the Cartesian cogito and the freedom brought by rejecting simple narratives and singular structures of Pascal. He writes,

And who am I? I am a contingent being … I know who I am! I am a dependent being, independent of neither organizations nor other human beings … I am relative … My circumstances can only be saved by eliminating them … my own theory of history tells me that the person is more significant than any theory of history. … Agony is not a choice, but the element that defines personality.³

This philosophy emphasizes the contingent nature of the individual and the groups, societies, and relationships that are formed by collectives of individuals. For Weinstein, everything is situated and positioned in time and space. Nothing is meaningful without context, without seeing how it is experienced relationally. This is the vital element—the requirement that life cannot be understood as such but must be lived. As Camus asserts in The Myth of Sisyphus, life’s meaning must be constructed through constant and continuous confrontation and revolt.⁴ Critical vitalism embraces the passion for life, freedom from devotion to singular abstract narratives, and revolt against philosophical suicide while embracing the failure (as real lived experience) to achieve and maintain ideal situations. Its foundation in historical and temporal contingency reinforces the finitude of perfection.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Action,” pairs two essays from students framing Weinstein’s career at Purdue University: Arthur Kroker (from the Vietnam War era) and Robert Oprisko, a post–9/11 student of the most recent cohort. To remain within the Nietzschean parameters of Arthur Kroker’s essay, there is only one sense in which Weinstein is a “last man.” Weinstein is the last remaining political theorist in the political science department. Upon the graduation of his last student, Justin Mueller, there will be no more graduate program in that subfield. There is a disquieting if perverse irony that it is Weinstein’s own ruthless examination of the failed project of American’s founding logics of political subjectivication that best explains this trend in American political science departments. It will thus be in the spirit of Nietzsche that we designate the essays that follow the “Purdue School.”⁵

These two essays that comprise this part are poised as a polarity representing two dissymmetrical ways of approaching the Weinstein corpus. The first is an inward meditation, effectively translating Arendtian “negative being,” Nietzschean “suicidal nihilism,” and Heideggerian “fully completed nihilism” into the quintessentially American philosopher (Weinstein) in his most American of books, The Wilderness and the City. As such, this chapter presents a narrative of the death of life philosophy in American modernity. Oprisko’s chapter, while equally attentive to the nuances and theoretical challenges of Weinstein’s work, is an example of what Fredric Jameson would call “cognitive mapping,” detailing affinities as well as tensions with theorists working from a Bohrian epistemology such as Karen Barad, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Gilles Deleuze. What both introductory essays share is an appreciation of Weinstein’s revolutionary approach to metaphysics and ontology.

The second section of the book, “Contemplation,” stages a series of theoretical encounters between Weinstein and other theorists, American, European, and Mexican, who have proved critical interlocutors in the formulation of his life philosophy. These essays demonstrate Weinstein’s methodology of “love piracy”: extracting the precious bits that can be useful to his project without subjecting himself to the superegotic injunctive to take everything else that went along with it. This practice is congruent with what Barthes and other French theorists have referred to as “bricolage”: it is what Guattari calls “being an ideas-thief” and what Deleuze, borrowing from Guattari, references as theory as a “tool kit.⁶” What emerges from these engagements occasioned by writings such as Wilderness and the City, The Polarity of Mexican Thought, Finite Perfection, Culture/Flesh, or a dedication found at the beginning of the 2006 book on Oliver Wendell Holmes is a singular American philosopher who is also a thinker of the border.

The third section, “Vitalism,” comprises essays that address pedagogy in the larger sense of institutional practices. This takes the form of an extended meditation on a concept, “defensive life,” found in Culture/Flesh remotivated in relation to the political and classroom realities of the nineties. There is, in addition, a collective portrait and appreciation by one of Weinstein’s earliest undergraduate students. Two essays further demonstrate Weinstein’s pedagogic role as public intellectual as they take up different media (use of the Web, blog posts, his band performances and lyrics) in the context of non-Western societies (Somalia, Islam). A concluding essay reflects upon the Weinstein seminar experience as an instance of Guattarian transversality.

Arthur Kroker, in “Nietzsche for Our Times: Three Meditations,” specifies the singularity of Weinstein’s intellectual contribution: at once, a political philosopher charting modern individualism’s ambivalent trajectory, an existentialist on questions of human autonomy and freedom, a finalist ontologist on matters of social justice, a tragic thinker attendant to melancholy, and finally, a passionate dissident advocating for the marginalized, invisible, and excluded. This would make Weinstein’s deconstruction of the individual in its American philosophic vernacular a contribution to the history of ideas as well as metaphysics. But Kroker—and, by extension the authors in this volume—argues that its import is neither past nor present, but in a Nietzschean futural mode, it is a stunning truly American account of the death of the social, as American society swerves between anhedonia/cultural fatigue/acedia and war fever. Rather than the creative cultivation of either Jamesian “inner tolerance” or “unillusioned individualism” (which might be one of the modern gifts of Freudian psychoanalysis), American society is a site of unrelenting hostility, anger, appeals to injury, and forms of ressentiment. Kroker brilliantly heralds Weinstein as the interpreter of “backlash,” whatever its ideological tendency, as reposing upon what is disavowed concerning the form of American life philosophy: the necessary tropological foundation of USA power. And he situates this “prophetic” thought beyond the two death drives of “transhumanism and anger politics.”

Weinstein does not only stage and enact the philosophic eclipse of the modern individual; for he embodies his finalist ontology, as expressed by Kroker’s testimony from 1967 antiwar politics that allow interlocutors to fully experience “the life of the mind, how that is, two thousand years of metaphysics—in depth, patient, critical, necessarily undermining, often syn-optic, philosophic thought—could be summed up in the grain of a voice and in the political vision that that voice urged its intently listening audience to consider, and once considered, to begin to act on the fateful results of that consideration.”⁷ Other students from this time such as Kathy Ferguson will note that this activated passionate engagement ironically began at an engineering school more known for its instrumental use of reason.

Robert Oprisko dives into Weinstein’s tragic finalist ontology in his essay “Strings: A Political Theory of Multidimensional Reality.” Oprisko’s “unfaithful interpretation”⁸ of Weinstein’s oeuvre from the late 1960s through the early 1990s peers into the void of finalist ontology and finds, within that nothing, everything. Using Weinstein’s methodologies of love-piracy, agonic doubting from Tragic Sense of Political Life, and aspectival totalization from (Post)modernized Simmel, Oprisko argues that international relations theory, political philosophy, and ontology are intimately and irrevocably intertwined. Buried deep within all of them is the Heideggerian mitsein, the being with, which presupposes Nancy’s being singular plural. In an effort to showcase critical vitalism, Oprisko weaves Weinstein’s tragic interpretation of sociopolitical structure with Karen Barad’s Bohrian epistemology, Alain Badiou’s set theory, and Slavoj Zizek’s philosophy of failure to produce a unified theory of politics that links the individual to the international, the finite with the infinite, and the particular to the universal. Oprisko’s focus on processes and action provides a glimpse of Weinstein’s dialectic between the ontological and the ontic, the agonic contradiction that provides the motivation for much of his work.

The next section of the book, “Contemplation,” shifts from the synoptic evaluations of a life philosophy to microreadings of specific interlocutors. Justin Mueller’s essay, “This Flesh Belongs to me: Michael Weinstein and Max Stirner,” presents the existentialist-phenomenological underpinnings of Weinstein’s “critical vitalism”: a “process-oriented” theory for “concrete durational human beings.” Drawing upon some well-known figures such as Henri Bergson, Miguel de Unamuno, and William James as well as some lesser-known ones such as Samuel Alexander and Josiah Royce, Weinstein also critically engages with a “minor” figure of nineteenth-century continental thought, Max Stirner, familiar to most through Karl Marx’s line-by-line critique of his masterwork, The Ego and Its Own, in The German Ideology. Mueller honors Weinstein’s deep theoretical debts to both Bergson (intuition) and Unamuno (agonic doubting) in the elaboration of a new methodology that could account for our polemical nature as desirous and finite beings. Max Stirner’s concept of “radical self-possession” or “Ownness,” which replaces most if not all of the transcendental signifieds—“God, Law, Morality, Rights, Mankind, Society, the State, Freedom”—is built upon a notion of the Unique, der Einzige, that has been misunderstood by twentieth-century theorists as either a new regulatory ideal or a negative liberty. Nor is it the self-possession of contract theory. “Ownness” concerns the attempt to free oneself from what is alien to it, ghosts or residues or “spooks.” Mueller demonstrates how Weinstein has translated Stirner’s ideas into a Nietzschean idiom that can at times be read as a critique of Stirner. However, by reading Weinstein against Weinstein, using his work on Justis Buchler’s “proception” (as the “composite, directed activity of the individual”) and on love (“sacrifice in the service of love”), Mueller aligns Stirner’s with Weinstein’s larger project.⁹

Stirner frames the “post-ontological role for pleasure”¹⁰ in Jonathan McKenzie’s “Weinstein’s American Philosophy: Intimacy and the Construction of the Self.” “Ownness” is that which the philosophic self must hold on to in erotic life. McKenzie offers a rereading of Weinstein centered on the concept of intimacy as “a privatist ph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Michael Weinstein’s Posthumous Thought for Our Times: An Introduction
• PART I Action
• PART II Contemplation
• PART III Vitalism
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Notes on Contributors
• Index