Adventures of the Symbolic

Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy

Warren Breckman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231512893
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: French History

Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism.

The post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, uncannily echoing the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. Hegel and Marx denounced the Romantics for their otherworldly and nebulous posture, yet post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, Breckman traces a fascinating reflection of Romantic themes and resonances, and he explores in depth the effort to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that does not privilege materialist understandings of the social. Engaging with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek, Breckman uniquely situates these important theorists within two hundred years of European thought and extends their profound relevance to today's political activism.

CHAPTER ONE

The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Young Hegelianism

IS STRUCTURALISM A PRODIGAL CHILD of German Romanticism? If we follow hints from Pierre Bourdieu and François Dosse, the answer would seem to be yes. Thus, in his major work on the history of structuralism, Dosse follows Roland Barthes in suggesting that Saussurean linguistics heralds a democratic model insofar as the conventional nature of the sign establishes a homology between the linguistic contract and the social contract. “An entire lineage here refers to structuralism’s enduring rootedness,” writes Dosse. “Poetry, according to the Schlegel brothers, was supposed to be a Republican discourse, and there is indeed a debt to German Romanticism, which had argued for a notion of art as a structure freed of mimesis.”¹ In a similar vein, Pierre Bourdieu writes: “proceeding, in accordance with [Friedrich] Schelling’s wish, to a properly tautegorical (in opposition to allegorical) reading which refers the myth to nothing outside itself, structural analysis aims at laying bare the structure immanent in each symbolic production.”² The attempt to link structuralism to Romanticism hits a snag the moment we recall a distinction made by Kant, whose role in the Romantic theory of the symbol was instrumental. For Kant, a symbol creates visibility—it appeals to sensual intuition. In thus defining the symbol, Kant broke with the conceptual vocabulary of eighteenth-century rationalism, which had defined the symbol as an abstract sign that serves discursive knowledge.³ So, complained Kant, “The use of the word symbolic in contrast to the intuitive kind of representation has, of course, been accepted by recent logicians, but this is a distorted and incorrect use of the word: for the symbolic is merely a species of the intuitive.”⁴

As Bengt Algot Sørenson, the great student of Romantic symbol theory, suggests, the idea of the symbol almost immediately forked off from Kant. Kant, after all, believed that the symbol makes concepts visible by analogy, not by participation in or identity with the conceptual object, which itself remains sensuously unpresentable; the sensual and the intellectual are permanently divided. Ultimately, the role of the Kantian symbol is to lead us toward clarity on our concepts, as when Kant famously declares that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.”⁵ Goethe, inspired by Kant but not satisfied with the restriction of the symbol to an analogical function, insisted that the symbol touches the object itself.⁶ Romanticism, as we shall see, did not decisively settle on one side or the other of the alternatives posed by Kant and Goethe, but oscillated between the notions that the symbol presents the unpresentable and that it participates in the object it presents. Complicated as the history of this idea immediately becomes, we can agree with Tzvetan Todorov that Kant and the Romantics who followed resubstantialized the idea of the symbol.⁷

One of Saussure’s inaugural gestures, let us not forget, was to separate the symbol from the sign, and what is really meant when mid-twentieth-century structuralism speaks of the Symbolic is the system of signs. So in fact structuralism is not so much Romanticism’s distant heir as its overcoming, achieved, ironically, by resurrecting the eighteenth-century association of the symbol with the conventional sign. When we turn to what is known—somewhat problematically—as postmodern or poststructural thought, the connection to Romanticism looks more promising. There is, for example, the revival of interest in the “sublime” pioneered by Jean-François Lyotard, whereby the attempt to “present the unpresentable” comes to define a general condition of communication in an epoch shadowed by the figure of a radical heterogeneity that disrupts all efforts at closure, totalization, and seamless narrativity.⁸ Scholars are quick to point out the gulf separating the Romantic from the postmodern sublime. For example, Edward Larrissy describes postmodern sublimity as “ironic, self-conscious, lacking in metaphysical confidence,” and Paul Hamilton asserts that “the Romantic trope of sublimity recasts failures of understanding as the successful symbolic expression of something greater than understanding; Postmodernism rereads this success as indicating only the indeterminacy of meaning.”⁹ Yet, the relationship of postmodernism to Romanticism seems to go beyond this latter-day act of demystification, for the experience of indeterminacy is not at all alien to Romantic thought. While Kant seemed confident that the symbolic could lead us toward an intellectual comprehension of that which cannot be presented, Romanticism did not produce a similar sense of certainty. The Romantic quest to “say the unsayable” ensured that truth is a goal we never reach; Andrew Bowie writes of the Romantic sensibility that “all we can assert is that our experience of truth is of an ongoing insufficiency which yet sustains the continuing demand for a better account.”¹⁰

If we can agree with François Dosse that Romanticism broke with mimetic theories of art, this did not produce a Romantic theory of a self-enclosed and endlessly self-referential discursive system. Rather, the break from mimesis led to a new appreciation for the constitutive role of representation, for the power of language to reveal or disclose a world. Of course, this could and did produce an exalted sense of the imagination’s autopoietic power and of an artistic freedom operating beyond existing rules. Yet it also produced a refined and sometimes dizzying sense of irony. Work by the young Friedrich Schlegel often reads like an uncanny primer for Jacques Derrida; Schlegel’s ironic claim that “it is equally fatal for the mind to have a system, and to have none” anticipates Derrida’s habit of placing words under erasure in order to warn readers that he is using concepts that he can neither fully accept nor do without.¹¹ Further, Derrida did not believe that one could ever neglect the associations that belong to the intuition that underlies the signified meaning: one cannot assume that the signifier communicates an intended meaning without carrying traces of other associations. “In other words,” writes Kathleen Dow Magnus, “by Derrida’s assessment, the transition from the symbolic to the sign-making imagination can never be complete.”¹² The fact that Derrida makes this point about signs and symbols in an essay directed against Hegel suggests the need for a refinement of my description of structuralism.¹³ Perhaps it is more accurate to say that structuralism is the second overcoming of Romanticism.¹⁴ Generations earlier, Hegel had already, after his own fashion, campaigned against the Romantic symbol in favor of the sign.

The status of the symbolic was one of the important divisions between Hegel and his Romantic contemporaries. The symbolic expressed the Romantics’ paradoxical quest for the unity of the perfectly individual with the fully universal, their contradictory combination of yearning for the fullest possible presence of meaning and their fascination for the inexpressible, unapproachable, and inscrutable. The symbol, to cite Friedrich Schelling, creates an “inner bond uniting art and religion,” and, further, the symbol establishes the philosophy of art “as the necessary goal of the philosopher, who in art views the inner essence of his own discipline as if in a magic and symbolic mirror.”¹⁵ Hegel, by contrast, judged the symbol to be inadequate for philosophy. How, he asked in the Aesthetic, is the idea supposed to take form in the symbolic?¹⁶ Even stronger is his insistence in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy that “whoever hides thoughts in symbols has no thoughts at all.”¹⁷ The linguistic sign was, in Hegel’s view, the privileged medium of the science of the concept. It is a commonplace among theorists of symbolism that all symbols are signs, but not all signs are symbols.¹⁸ Hegel’s distinction between the symbol and the sign hinges on the sensuous or intuitive dimensions of symbolism. According to him, a symbol conveys its meaning through the presentation of some quality or qualities it has in common with that meaning. By contrast, the specific virtue of the sign is precisely its arbitrariness. Because its capacity to convey meaning depends only on convention and agreement, the sign can be purged of the naturalness and intuitiveness that linger in the symbol. It can shed the symbol’s ambiguity and become the transparent medium of spirit’s self-determination. The tension between the sign and the symbol opens the heart of the conflict between Hegel and the Romantics.

Hegel’s impulse toward desymbolization came to exercise a powerful influence upon the Left Hegelian movement that emerged into public discussion with the publication of David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1835. Strauss’s initial campaign against Christian belief rapidly grew more radical in the writings of figures like Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno and Edgar Bauer, and Karl Marx. From the outset, this attack on religion was not without profound political meaning, particularly within the restorationist Prussian context, where the state staked its legitimacy on its Christian mission; in the hands of Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, the political dimension became more explicit and ever more insistent. Still, even if Marx declared the critique of religion finished in Germany in the year 1843, the arsenal developed by the Left Hegelians had an enduring effect on social and political criticism, not least that of Marx himself. Compelled by the attempt to free humanity from religion, radical Hegelians like Arnold Ruge, Theodor Echtermeyer, and Friedrich Theodor Vischer sharpened Hegel’s opposition to the Romantic sensibility. Ruge and Echtermeyer’s polemical manifesto Der Protestantismus und die Romantik (1839–1840) is emblematic of this. Claiming that philosophy must now form a party against the dead past in the name of the true present, Ruge and Echtermeyer declare the Romantics to be the “living dead.”¹⁹ Against the Romantic taste for the “indeterminate, the ungraspable, the twilight, and the flitting,” they pitted the “self-conscious spirit, that seeks to firmly appropriate the divine.”²⁰ Ruge and Echtermeyer were much blunter than Hegel in linking Romantic aesthetics to the reactionary politics of the post-Napoleonic era and connecting spirit’s struggle to overcome the heteronomy of the divine with the struggle for political emancipation.²¹

The main tendency of Left Hegelianism was opposed to Romanticism and, by extension, Romantic ideas about symbolic form. Nonetheless, as this chapter will show, there were subtleties in the way this critical distance from Romanticism played out. To explore these, this chapter will discuss the divergent tracks taken by Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness radicalized Hegel’s emphasis on the potential transparency of language and meaning, thereby tying the emancipatory project to a radical process of desymbolization. Feuerbach’s position was more conflicted. Although he developed a radical hermeneutic that had a tremendous impact on the development of left-wing thought, Feuerbach’s naturalism led him toward a stance in which the Hegelian schema of the subject’s appropriation of meaning contended with a resistant natural kernel that called for the reintroduction of symbolic representation as the only mode of signification appropriate for this unsayable and unmasterable element. This was a position that conflicted with main tendencies in Left Hegelianism, and even in Feuerbach’s thought itself, and it eventually drew criticism from Karl Marx. Yet, in pointing to the irreducibility of the symbolic dimension, Feuerbach anticipated possibilities for conceptualizing the link between philosophical meaning and emancipatory politics that resonate with radical theory in the period of Marxism’s collapse.

The Symbol from Classicism to Romanticism

The symbol held something of an absolute status for the Romantics. Nicholas Halmi has emphasized that Romantic symbolist theory was less concerned with identifying and interpreting particular symbols than with “establishing an ideal of meaningfulness itself.”²² This is an intuitively persuasive claim. The notion of the symbol carried far too much weight in the Romantic mind to be merely a rhetorical figure. Indeed, it seemed to speak directly to an acute sense of need. It was, after all, a time of crisis, when revolutionary upheaval cast existing convictions into doubt. Everyone, wrote the young Friedrich Schlegel, was caught up in this process of fermentation, whether he liked it or not, yielding to it or struggling against it.²³ The experience of the age—its politics, its social transformations, its dominant modes of analytic rationality inherited from the Enlightenment—produced a widespread sense of division and dualism. It is symptomatic of such a time that Novalis should describe philosophy as “homesickness—the desire to be everywhere at home.”²⁴ Such a sensibility placed tremendous strain on existing modes of aesthetic and linguistic representation, which had already become sources of anxiety for Enlightenment thinkers. In the tempestuous climate opened by the French Revolution, eighteenth-century semioticians’ emphasis on natural signs that consist in mimetic representations, or causal relations, but lack metaphysical content seemed both complicitous in the political, artistic, and epistemological ancien régime and of questionable service in the emerging new order.²⁵ Under such circumstances, the symbolic seemed to promise a more adequate mode of representation, one that better addressed this desire to overcome dualism. This is certainly the function that Halmi focuses on when he describes the Romantic symbol in terms of its claim to unify being and meaning through the sign’s participation in the ontological order of the thing it represents.²⁶

Where Halmi dispassionately searches for the genealogical sources of this emphatic ideal of the identity of sign and thing, critics of Romanticism have focused on its fantasmatic or mystifying dimensions. So, for example, Walter Benjamin valued Baroque allegory precisely because its evident reliance on arbitrary conventions accentuated the gap between meaning and being; Romantic symbolism, he argued by contrast, rested on a dream of fusion and identity, whereby the gap between signifier and signified is to be transcended by what Benjamin called “the idea of the unlimited immanence of the moral world in the world of beauty.”²⁷ Paul de Man considered all writing an attempt to come to grips with the insurmountably temporal nature of our condition, and he judged allegory especially suited to revealing this situation. Allegory, writes de Man, “designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.” The symbol, by contrast, “postulates the possibility of an identity or identification”: within this view, the central feature of Romanticism is “a conflict between a conception of the self seen in its authentically temporal predicament and a defensive strategy that tries to hide from ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Post-Marxism and the Symbolic Turn
• 1. The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Young Hegelianism
• 2. The Fate of the Symbolic from Romantic Socialism to a Marxism in extremis
• 3. From the Symbolic Turn to the Social Imaginary: Castoriadis’s Project of Autonomy
• 4. Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion
• 5. The Post-Marx of the Letter: Laclau and Mouffe Between Postmodern Melancholy and Post-Marxist Mourning
• 6. Of Empty Places: Žižek and Laclau; or, The End of the Affair
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index