Bureaucratic Fanatics

Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization

Benjamin Lewis Robinson

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783110595192
• eBook ISBN: 9783110606041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Is justice only achievable by means of bureaucratization or might it first arrive with the end of bureaucracy? Bureaucratic Fanatics shows how this ever more contentious question in contemporary politics belongs to the political-theological underpinnings of bureaucratization itself.

At the end of the 18th century, a new and paradoxical kind of fanaticism emerged - rational fanaticism - that propelled the intensive biopolitical management of everyday life in Europe and North America as well as the extensive colonial exploitation of the earth and its peoples. These excesses of bureaucratization incited in turn increasingly fanatical forms of resistance. And they inspired literary production that provocatively presented the outrageous contours of rationalization. Combining political theory with readings of Kleist, Melville, Conrad, and Kafka, this genealogy of bureaucratic fanaticism relates two extreme figures: fanatical bureaucrats driven to the ends of the earth and to the limits of humanity by the rationality of the apparatuses they serve; and peculiar fanatics who passionately, albeit seemingly passively, resist the encroachments of bureaucratization.

1 Bureaucratic Fanaticism

The critical analysis of bureaucratic fanaticism runs the risk of becoming entangled in the very “confusion” it seeks to diagnose. For if bureaucratic fanaticism is, in bureaucratic terms at least, unaccountable, it is also, as Kierkegaard had already argued around 1848, characteristic of a bureaucratic age that other-than-bureaucratic communications, namely exceptional ones, are no longer credited or creditable. Indeed, they will just be dismissed as “fanatical.” The attempt to make this confusion explicit involves an acknowledgement of, and engagement with, form. To provide a theoretical and historical analysis of bureaucratic fanaticism, other less credible and more insignificant forms of communication, of the sort usually consigned to literature, have to be taken into account.

This book is devoted to literary presentations of exceptional figures who emerge at the extremes of the nineteenth-century bureaucratic project. Despairing of, or over, bureaucracy, these bureaucratic fanatics draw attention to the limits, the internal contradictions, the points of breakdown, excess and dislocation, in short to those moments at which bureaucratization runs into perplexities it can neither resolve nor circumvent. This literature of bureaucratic fanaticism proves definitive for a peculiar tradition of modern literature, which may itself betray fanatical-bureaucratic tendencies, for it takes upon itself to account for what otherwise cannot be accounted for or, failing that, for the limits of accountability.

Exceptions (Agamben, Schmitt, Kierkegaard)

On account of their exceptionality, I take bureaucratic fanatics to be revelatory of more general tendencies in the bureaucratic transformation of modern life. This approach draws on a significant strand of contemporary political theory that departs from the exemplary character of the exception. Taking up Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception,”6 Giorgio Agamben has influentially sought to explain the history of Western politics with reference to the exceptional figure of homo sacer.7 In developing – and legitimizing – the significance of the exception for political theory, Agamben cites Schmitt citing another author:

The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The latter proves nothing; the exception proves everything. The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone. A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity of which theological reflection was still capable in the nineteenth century said: The exception explains the general and itself. And when one really wants to study the general, one need only look around for a real exception. It brings everything to light more clearly than the general itself. After a while, one becomes disgusted with the endless talk about the general – there are exceptions [es gibt Ausnahmen]. If they cannot be explained, then neither can the general be explained. Usually the difficulty is not noticed, since the general is thought about not with passion but only with comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion [mit energischer Leidenschaft].8

Agamben parenthetically names the “protestant theologian” to whom Schmitt refers: he is “none other than Søren Kierkegaard.”9 It is significant, however, that the citation is not written in Kierkegaard’s own voice, but in that of a pseudonym, Constantin Constantius, and that the book in question, Repetition (1846), is explicitly not a theological work but an “esthetic” one.10 Indeed, it is arguably the most literary and, given that its literary character is persistently underlined in the text, certainly the most metaliterary of Kierkegaard’s writings. In the “Concluding Letter,” for example, from which the passage on the exception is taken, the pseudonymous author, addressing himself to “my dear reader,” goes so far as to admit that not only had the young man, whose case and letters to Constantius take up much of the book, been a literary invention but that he even considers his reader to be a fiction (en poetisk Person).11

It is not clear what it means to cite Repetition in the way that Agamben and Schmitt do – especially given that the possibility of repetition is itself the ostensible subject of the book. In taking a passage that, treated on the level of statement as a “direct communication,” seems to expound a theory of the exception, and in lifting it out of a context that foregrounds its indirectness, is it possible that something essential about exceptions, or at least what is said about them in Repetition, is irretrievably lost? Here an impasse between political theory and literary criticism is reached that is not without consequence for the study of politics proposing to depart from the thought of the exception.

The impasse can be indicated in the dialectic concentrated in the ambivalent status of the line: “There are exceptions.” Schmitt and Agamben take up the phrase as if it referred immediately to the concrete political situation that their own theories are supposed to describe. In other words, they do not find it necessary, in this case at least, to problematize the relation between discourse and reality and so, on the assumption of the transparent disclosure of reality it affords, are free to address themselves simply to the concept of the exception or the exception as a concept. The elaboration of the political departing from the exception thus becomes the elaboration of a political logic of the exception. It becomes indeed, as the “logic of sovereignty” that Agamben develops following Schmitt shows, a generalized logic of the exception, of the exception in general. It thus obscures, rather than bringing into focus, the singularity of the exception – if such a thing exists.

The political theorist thus falls into the position of an “ordinary reviewer” (en almindelig Recensent) who, Constantius concedes, cannot be expected “to be interested in the dialectical battle in which the exception arises in the midst of the universal.”12 And this remark is all the more significant since Constantius, the self-proclaimed and hyper-reflexive observer, is a theorist par excellence. By reading the book in a manner that seeks to reduce it to a set of generalizable assertions, the dialectical battle staged in Repetition is overlooked. In a manner characteristic of Kierkegaard’s indirect treatment of “existential” concepts, the passage on the problematic exposition of the exception in fact rehearses the dialectical tension between the problem and its exposition with which the pseudonymous author claims to have been concerned all along.

Read with attention to the “literary” markers that characterize its context, the phrase “there are exceptions” does not describe an ontological situation – no more than any other line of Repetition. One cannot ascertain from the text the existence of exceptions (any more than of repetitions) nor indeed arrive at the indisputable conditions in which it would even be possible to say, “There are exceptions.” On the basis of what is said in Repetition, there can be no (political) science of exceptions, if such a science depends on the assumption of their existence, but only a literary-critical “venture in experimenting,” to cite the subtitle of the book, that acknowledges and operates with the ontological uncertainty of the category it examines. Such a literary approach is able to elaborate the wrestling, or the rupture, that the thought of the exception involves: “The whole thing is a wrestling match in which the universal breaks with the exception, wrestles with it in conflict, and strengthens it through this wrestling.”13

The relevance of literature for political thought is not limited to providing compelling examples in the form of literary types or prescient scenarios. It concerns the exception – the exception to political theory. And if literature concerns what is excepted, or excepts itself, from the domain of political theory, it is not by that means rendered apolitical nor absolved of complicity in the political context out of which it emerges. Rather it becomes, on account of its exception to theory, all the more relevant and indeed revelatory for thinking through politics and interrogating concepts of the political. Kierkegaard’s Constantius compares the “very dialectical and infinitely nuanced” attempt to think the exception to a curious, in fact impossible, biopolitical operation: “it is just as difficult as to kill a man and let him live.”14 Literature is the site in which such a difficult undertaking, one that is not without political consequence, can plausibly be ventured.

This study in literary criticism engages political theory not in order to contribute to or criticize a given theory, but with an eye to the ruptures that emerge when theory is put to the test of the exception in literature. In this way certain otherwise unseen, or overlooked, limits and aporia of what is called the political, and what is taken to constitute political practice, come to light. For bureaucratic fanatics are distinguished from the “exceptional” figures in political theory insofar as they are not exhaustively defined by the norms that exclude them. They exhibit a singular mode of existence of their own, albeit only a “literary” one – or only in literature.

Bureaucracy as a Vocation (Kant, Weber)

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, and with increasing intensity in the wake of the French Revolution, the question of fanaticism, of that distinctly modern type of fanaticism that in German is called Schwärmerei, was at the center of heated debates in the German public sphere. The term, coined by Luther, had, since the Reformation, referred to suspicious and specious claims to transcendence. Throughout the Enlightenment it was used polemically to refer to its intellectual and political enemies, disparaged for their excessive and irrational behavior. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, it was no longer possible to ignore reason’s own propensity for a certain kind of fanaticism. The heated claims raised by figures opposed to the Enlightenment about the inhumanity of reason on account of its cold, calculated, heartlessness, were, paradoxically, supplemented by the preponderance of an exalted and infectious passion for rationality that was disposed to indulge in inhuman acts and ultimately presented a threat to humanity as such.

Kant’s critical project can be broadly construed as responding to this atmosphere of disappointment and disaffection with Enlightenment reason. For it is concerned with reconciling the finitude of human existence with the dangers of a capacity for reason that at once defines and transcends it. Although Kant does not systematically take up the question of Schwärmerei, the term in his critical work refers persistently to a pathological affection for rationality, a desire to fulfill or realize in the world – in what would be an inhuman or superhuman project – a dream of reason. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant defines Schwärmerei as “a delusion of being able to see something beyond all bounds of sensibility i. e., to dream in accordance with principles (to rave with reason)” (ein Wahn […], über alle Grenze der Sinnlichkeit hinaus etwas sehen, d.i. nach Grundsätzen träumen (mit Vernunft rasen) zu wollen).15

It is not by chance, therefore, that the earliest published traces of the critical revolution in Kant’s thought are to be found in an attempt to engage the problem of Schwärmerei in a curious book entitled Dreams of a Spirit Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766).16 The method proposed in the title, to elucidate dreams of the visionary variety by means of the dreams of metaphysics, in fact serves to amplify the perilous proximity that Kant is interested in negotiating between the rationalist and the visionary accounts of the world. The ambivalence of this approach would be remarked upon by Mendelssohn in his brief review of the book: “the jocular profundity with which this little work is written leaves the reader at times in doubt as to whether Herr Kant wants to make metaphysics laughable or spirit-seeing credible.”17 This ironic procedure ena...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgement
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Bureaucratic Fanaticism
• 2 A New Kind of Schwärmer: Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas
• 3 Architecture of the Office: Melville’s Bartleby
• 4 Abstraction of the Earth: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• 5 Poverty of Agency: Conrad’s The Secret Agent
• 6 State of Embarrassment: Kafka’s In the Penal Colony
• 7 Society of Security: Kafka's The Metamorphosis
• Epilogue: Guerrilla / Gardener Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K
• Bibliography
• Index