The Western Program 2010

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Citizenship and Action

My prospective syllabus for the upcoming "Citizenship and Action" course proposed:

Week 1: Zoon Politikon— “Man,” the Political Animal

6/22—
Introduction to course: What is Political? What is Political theory?

Aristotle, from The Politics, Book III, ch 1-5, in reader

Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” from Vocations of Political
Theory, in reader

Wendy Brown, “At the Edge: the Future of Political Theory,” from Edgework:
Critical Essays on Knowledhge and Politics, in reader

Recommended:
Dominic LaCapra, “Reopening the Question of the Human
and the Animal,” excerpt from History and its Limits
Kelly Oliver, excerpts from Animal Lessons: How They Teach
Us to be Human

6/24—
What does it mean to be political? What does it mean to act politically? What is political freedom?

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, “Of the Origin and Design of Government;”
“Of Monarchy;” and “Thoughts on the Present State of American
Affairs”

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, “What is the Third Estate,” in Sieyes’ Political
Writings, in reader

Kurt Vonnegut, excerpts of speeches delivered at Fredonia College,
Bennington College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from Palm Sunday and
Wampeters, Foma & Gaffaloons, respectively, in reader

Due: First response paper


Week 2: Political Fidelity and Civil Disobedience

6/29—
What is Socratic citizenship? How is group loyalty constructed and maintained? Is
patriotism a form of civic love? Is civil disobedience patriotic?

Plato, The Apology of Socrates

Freud, Group Psychology, selections, in reader

Recommended:
Dana Villa, Socratic Citizenship
John Schaar, “The Case for Patriotism,” from Legitimacy in the
Modern State, in Reader
Charles Taylor, “Why Democracy Needs Patriotism,” in For
Love of Country, pp 119-122
Richard Rorty, “American National Pride: Whitman and
Dewey,” from Achieving Our Country, in reader

7/1—
What makes civil disobedience political as opposed to ethical or moral?

Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in reader

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter From a Birmingham Prison,” from A
Testament of Hope: Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., in reader

Hannah Arendt, “On Civil Disobedience,” from Crises of the Republic, in
reader

Recommended:
George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American
Political Culture
Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
Film: Howard Zinn on Civil Disobedience

Due: Second response paper


Week 3: Political Action and Democratic Participation

7/6—
What principles ought govern political power?

Sophocles, The Antigone

Federalist Papers 1, 10, 14, 49, 51, in reader

Film Screening: Sophie’s Choice


7/8—
Do institutions uphold or bar active citizenship? How? Why?

Sheldon Wolin, Presence of the Past, ch. 1, 6, 7, 10

Recommended:
Herbert Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For;
Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy

Due: Third response paper


Week 4: Citizenship and its Limits: Race in America

7/13—
Legacies of slavery and the Silencing of the Past

Ralph Ellison, “Prologue,” from Invisible Man, in reader

Victor Hugo, “Open Letter Calling for John Brown’s Pardon,” in reader

W.E.B. DuBois, excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk, in reader

Patricia Williams, excerpt from Alchemy of Race and Rights, in reader

Recommended:
Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said
Evelyn Glen, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American
Citizenship and Labor

7/15—
How do identity and difference conspire to contest the boundaries of the political?

Michael Omi, Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s,
selections, in reader

Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How we learned to Love Identity
and Ignore Inequality, excerpt, in reader

Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line,
selections, in reader

Recommended: Michel Rolf-Troillot, Silencing the Past

Due: Forth Response Paper


Week 5: Globalizing Citizenship, Cosmopolitan Patriots


7/20—
World citizenship?

Kwame Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” from For Love of Country, pp 21-30

Amy Gutman, “Democratic Citizenship,” in For Love of Country, pp 66-72

Elaine Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” in For Love of
Country, pp 98-111

Judith Butler, “Universality in Culture,” in For Love of Country, pp 45-53

Recommended:
Kant, Perpetual Peace


7/22—
Is there citizenship without exclusion?

Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,” from
Seyla Benhabib, ed. Democracy and Difference in reader

Nicholas Xenos: “Refugees: the Modern Political Condition,” from Michael
Shapiro, Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, in reader

Recommended:
Kathleen Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: the
Uncanniness of Late Modernity,

Due: Fifth response paper


Week 6:

7/24—
Course conclusion
Due: Final Paper

Five Minutes of Heaven

*Five Minutes of Heaven*, Oliver Hirschbiegel's latest film, takes its title from a remark made by its protagonist, the brother of a man murdered by the IRA in northern Ireland's mid seventies. For this brother, Joe (played by James Nesbitt), the experience of revenge would bring healing solace for the consequent pain he endured. The five minutes following the assassination of his brother's assailant--and nominally before his capture, prosecution and internment in prison--would be heaven.

In the end, Joe fails to slay Alastair (played by Liam Neeson), who succeeds in defending himself against a rather slapdash (perhaps disingenuous?) attack. The audience is surprised to see Alastair, who has been gripped by paralyzing grief and suicidal guilt since his IRA days, shield himself against Joe's vengeful drive. More shocking though is the recommendation Alastair makes to Joe after the failed assault, namely that he forfeit his retaliatory quest and focus instead on raising his daughters to live free of the ressentiment that has defined Joe his entire adult life. Amazingly, Joe takes Alastair's advice. Declaring in the reconciliatory speech act, "You and I are done," Joe relinquishes his acerbity and releases Alastair from his guilt.

Nominally, I suppose, we are meant to take this conclusion to be a theory of transitional justice whereby reconciliation is achieved without the exigency to forgive a categorically unforgivable act. Though an admirable aim, the same problems which would trouble a politics of forgiveness plague this film's alternative. The power Alastair wields, as perpetrator of an unforgivable act, over Joe, the damaged victim, is perpetuated ad nauseum in Joe accepting the terms of reconciliation dictated by him. Alastair has a vested interest in reconciliation after all--it is his insurmountable guilt which must be purged. Besides Alastair, we are meant to believe Joe's children to be the beneficiaries of reconcilition insofar as Joe succeeds at preventing generational inheritance of his own incurbale indignation. And yet, it seems dubious that the incentive to be a good parent would be enough to disabuse Joe of his vehemence, which we are led to believe runs far too deep for forgiveness to be granted.

All in all, though the film invokes important questions, it develops disappointing answers.

kiefer

Sublimity, the Imp of the Perverse

“That which is beautiful,” Kant writes, “pleases universally without a concept” (CJ, 219). Beauty refers to “that object the form of which (not the material aspect of its representation, as sensation) in mere reflection on it (without any intention of acquiring a concept form it) is judged as the ground of pleasure in the representation of such an object—with its representation this pleasure is also judged to be necessarily combined, consequently not merely for the subject who apprehends this form but for every one who judges at all” (CJ, 190). Arendt’s political thinking issues from this interpretation of the beautiful. As opposed to the beautiful the sublime is not a judgment about a particular object at all: “we express ourselves…incorrectly if we call some object of nature sublime…We can say no more than that the object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind” (CJ 5:245). The sublime is to be found, first and foremost, in a formless object “insofar as limitlessness is represented in it” (CJ, 5:245).

There are however, to be sure, certain appearances found in certain regions of nature that incite sublime feelings for Kant: “bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs…volcanoes with their all-destroying violence…the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall of a mighty river” (CJ, 5:261). These are all particular objects, even if their boundaries may seem indeterminate. And yet it is the vault beyond representation, the confrontation with the limit, or the real in Lacanian language, that comprises the sublime. Though the sublime experience of limitlessness is found through one’s judgment in a forceful object of aesthetic intensity, it is nonetheless the painful pleasure of boundlessness felt in the mind that makes that experience sublime. It is the formlessness contained within the form of the aesthetic object that interests Kant. Likewise for Lacan the beautiful (form) symbolized heralds us closer to the “realization” of our desire, the ethical, the sublime (formlessness).

In his impressive study of Kant’s third critique, *Art of Judgment*, Howard Caygill locates the relationship between the beautiful and the sublime as one best characterized by certain “family resemblances.” “Both involve orientation, in the one a movement toward proportionality [beauty], in the other, a movement toward disproportionality [sublimity],” (AJ, 340). The beautiful is, as we have seen in Kant, a “question of the form of the object, and this consists in limitation,” while the sublime is “devoid of form.” (CJ, 23) The beautiful is “directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life,” while the sublime is “brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed by a discharge all the more powerful,” (CJ, 23). Although ostensibly opposing, both sentiments involve, for Caygill, correlative movements. The mutual implication of the beautiful and the sublime is manifest in their “most important and vital distinction.” The beautiful object “conveys a finality in its form making the object appear, as it were, pre-adapted to our power of judgment,” while the sublime “may appear to contravene the ends of our power of judgment, and to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be as it were an outrage to the imagination,” (CJ, 23). Both the beautiful and the sublime involve a disposition of the power of judgment. Caygill: “in the first objects appear in agreement with its finality, while in the case of the sublime, objects appear to violate (gewalten) the finality of judgment,” (AJ, 340).

These important family resemblances between the beautiful and the sublime intimate those between Arendt and Lacan on the question of judgment. It is within these latter family resemblances that the relation between the political and the psychoanalytic becomes tenable. The beautiful is “life affirming,” and is as such instrumental for Arendt who wishes to assert the initiation to the public-political world particularized individuals assume in judging. The sublime suggests a cinching off of that life insofar as it represents a “momentary check to the vital forces.” This notion is influential for Lacan who wishes to assert the dissolution of the public world in our steadfast pursuit of our private desire. One’s “momentary check,” indeed one’s “outrage to the imagination,” indicates one’s life between two deaths, a space wherein judgments are forged. Just as the beautiful and the sublime should be seen, for Caygill, not as two opposing, but rather, as two inverse correlative movements, so too should we look upon the relation between Arendt and Lacan. The political involves the perception of the world’s beautiful density and richness won through mental traveling, and the palpable pleasurable feeling of being both a participant within and belonging to this density. The ethics of psychoanalysis avows the existence and consequence of the unconscious. In conforming to our desire we attune ourselves to the ethical, and we judge ourselves as such from within the rocky vault, caught, sublime, between two deaths.

Perhaps the family resemblance between the beautiful and the sublime, the political and the psychoanalytic, can best be seen in Kant’s definition of artistic creation. Kant defines beautiful art in terse fashion: “purposefulness without purpose.” Beauty is a product of deliberate human creation, an artifact of man’s conscious activities, and is, as such, purposeful. And yet an object appears beautifully only insofar as it is purposeless, as an outgrowth of a spontaneous and unconscious enterprise. The fact that beauty, for Kant, can never be seamlessly reconciled to purpose is precisely what opens a space for sublimity. Slavoj Žižek puts best the relation of the sublime to the beautiful: “The sublime is to be conceived precisely as the index of the failed synthesis of Beauty and Purpose—a negative intersection to be sure, i.e. an intersection containing elements that are neither beautiful nor purposeful.” Phenomena which arouse in the subject sublime sentiment are in no way beautiful: they are chaotic, formless, “the very opposite of a harmonious form,” and they also serve no purpose, they are monstrous. As such, “the sublime is the site of the inscription of pure subjectivity whose abyss…Beauty…endeavors to conceal by way of the appearance of Harmony.” Whereas beauty figures as the symbol of the Good, the sublime fails to figure; the sublime fails to serve as the symbol of anything. It evokes its “Beyond” by the very failure of its symbolic representation. And yet if the sublime fails as a symbol, what might it evoke? Žižek concludes: “There is only one answer possible: the nonpathological, ethical, suprasensible dimension, for sure, but the suprasensible, the ethical stance, insofar as it eludes the Good.”

Perhaps, had Arendt left stranded on her type-writer at the time of her death two different epigraphs, taken from two differing poets, a political theory of the sublime—that is, one indebted to “the suprasensible, the ethical stance, insofar as it eludes the Good”—could have been advanced. Where Cato and Goethe seem, for Arendt, to account for a politics of the aesthetic judgment of the beautiful, Poe and Celan might have stood in for a politics of the aesthetic judgment of the sublime:

Edgar Allen Poe, from The Imp of the Perverse:

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably, we remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arouse the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now most vividly desire it.

Kentridge

The Beautiful Alone is Arrayed Against Mutual Surrender

In his *Psychotheology of Everyday Life* Eric Santner recounts Holderlin's definition of beauty as "The one differentiated in itself." As far as I can tell, the definition has a tortuous genealogy, dating as far back as Heraclitus--Hen Diapheron Heauto--to which Plato refers in the *Symposium*. Beauty as that which is internally divided, self-contradictory, un-sutured, domestically disjoined, aporetic. Of course, such an understanding flies in the face of more conventional understandings of beauty as harmonizing, balanced, and symmetrical. For Holderlin (for Heraclitus), beauty is not equated with aesthetic totalization. But, for Santner, nor is it "a merely melancholic or romantically ironic index of the incomplete aspect of all human endeavors, an aesthetically rendered insistence on the fragmentation constitutive of human experience. Rather it is one of the occassions, one of the ways in which the defenses that keep human beings from inhabiting the midst of life can be disarmed. That is, beautiful objects are disarming not in the sense of releasing us, once and for all, from the too much of excitation that is, at some level, constitutve of human life, but rather in the sense of loosening our defenses, opening beyond our stuckness in an especially rigid and defensive organization of this pressure." In other words, beauty, and beautiful objects, are such because of the way they render us defenseless against the rush of life. In witnessing the writhing tensions that dwell at the center of beautiful objects, we are folded back on ourselves in a way that opens for us a sublime field of freedom.

I submit that, according to this (astonishing) definition, our ever-mulitplying scenes and contexts of post-conflict trauma--from Bosnia and Rawanda, to South Africa and Argentina--are beautiful. Perverse sounding I'm sure this is. Surely, a setting torn by past violence ought correspond with something aesthetically monstrous. And yet, it makes sense for those of us who disparage the rhetoric of harmonizing reconciliation that consumes these contexts. All too often, in the wake of some terrible episode of genocidal mania, a call for apology, forgiveness, and amnesty is made. On the ground, such a limiting mode of reconciliation resolves in the harrowing and deservedly notorious slogan, "fogive and forget." Here reconciliation tends to look more like surrender and assimilation of the victim to his perpetrator. The more radical types will appeal to a politics of reparations. In this case the trouble lies in the fundamental impossibility of quantifying suffering. Reducing pain to a monetary sum means sublimating it into use-value, something which all too often unwittingly reproduces the very logic which impelled the violent episode in the first place.

In opposition to these feeble measures stands one that avows the irreconciliability of certain situations. Here resentment is not thought as some affect debilitating for the reconstruction of a totalizing (and totalized) society built on foundation the of mutual respect. Instead, resentment is affirmed as the very basis of reconciliation itself, understood as the ceaseless striving for an impossible telos of forgiveness. This would be a post-conflict society riven by its internal divisions. The antagonisms which deservedly arise out of the violent conflicts of the past would not be smoothed over but rather confronted and embraced, lived out to their very agonic limit. This would be a beautiful society, inhabiting the very midst of a life held in common by that which divides it from the inside.

This, I maintain, is precisely the beauty Lacan refers to in his seminar on ethics, when he writes,

"The true barrier that holds the subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction, of destruction beyond putrefaction, is properly speaking the aesthetic phenomenon where it is identified with the experience of beauty—beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty that has been called the splendor of truth."