2013-2014 Lecture Series

[00:00:00] CHANCELLOR:
Good afternoon. You know, chancellors have to do a lot of different things. I just came from a pe- press conference where we announced the new head coach of the basketball team.

And I won’t even, uh, try to recount all the other, uh, interesting encounters I’ve had with ethnographic research over the course of the past twenty-four hours. But I can say completely genuinely, uh, and without my briefing notes, that it gives me very great pleasure to be here for the Tanner Lectures. In fact, when I came here, one of the great attractions of being at Berkeley was to have the Tanner Lectures, uh, as part of my life again.

I had moved to Columbia from the University of Michigan, where, of course, we had had many wonderful Tanner, uh, events. So I’m delighted to ha-have as my official job description the opportunity to welcome you this afternoon for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. This distinguished lecture series is presented annually at each of nine universities, including, of course, Berkeley.

The others are Cambridge and Oxford, and Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Utah. The series was founded in nineteen seventy-eight by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist, cl- Obert Clark Tanner, who was also a member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Utah, which of course explains one of the reasons why Utah is, is, is one of the founding members of this group.

Uh, Tanner was also an honorary fellow of the British Academy. His goal in establishing the lectures through the Tanner Philanthropies was to promote a search for a better understanding of human val– hu-human behavior and human values. He hoped the lectures would advance scholarly and scientific learning in these areas and contribute moreover, m-more generally to the intellectual and moral life, uh, of humankind.

And he defined human values broadly, uh, which allows us, of course, to invite, uh, uh, lecturers from many different disciplines. Uh, the lectureships, of course, are international, uh, as well as national, and they are, uh, ex-explicitly, uh, meant to be inclusive, uh, of multiple kinds of, uh, perspectives, uh, not just disciplinary, uh, but philosophical, moral, ideological, and so on. The lectures from all nine universities are published in an annual volume.

Uh, in addition, Oxford University Press publishes a series of books based on the Berkeley Tanner Lectures. The eighth volume of the series was published in 2013, and the ninth volume went to press this year. Two further volumes are in preparation.

So the Tanner Lecturer is chosen, of course, for, uh, for their distinction in scholarship as well as their, uh, their address of issues related to moral values. Uh, and there is a committee here, a faculty committee, that is, uh, responsible for appointing the Tanner Lecturer. I apparently am chair.

Is that true?

[00:03:01] CHANCELLOR NICK DIRKS:
Good. All right.

(laughter)

But I can, uh, unfortunately take no credit for the choice of Eric Santner, whose work I’ve, uh, followed and appreciated over the years, and I wish I could have. But, uh, I wanna congratulate my colleagues, Professor Martin Jay, Hannah Ginsborg, Jay Wallace, Christopher Kutz, Kinch Hoekstra, Niko Kolodny, and Kevis Goodman for their brilliant choice of Eric as this year’s lecturer. I’d like to call on my, uh, very distinguished colleague, both here at Berkeley and in the Department of History, Martin Jay, who is, uh, the vice chair of the Tanner Lectures Committee, who will introduce our lecturer, Eric Santner, this afternoon.

Marty.

[00:03:46] MARTIN JAY:
Thanks very much, Chancellor Dirks. Uh, we’ve had extraordinarily good fortune with the chancellors who have been, uh, serving during the, uh, 13 or so years that we’ve had Tanner Lectures. Uh, Bob Berdahl and Bob Birgeneau, uh, were great supporters of this enterprise, and we knew that Nick Dirks would, uh, join their company when he came last year when he was still chancellor designate and did not have to come, but in fact showed up.

And so it’s a great pleasure,

(laughter)

uh, to have him, uh, to have him, uh, as our, uh, not merely titular leader. Uh, it’s also a great pleasure to, uh, present to him a copy of the most recent Tanner Lecture, uh, uh, volume, Sam Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife, which was just published, uh, a short while ago by Oxford University Press. Uh, it’s a book that, uh, you may recall, uh, as lectures, but, uh, it’s been much, uh, expanded and, uh, it is available in fine bookstores everywhere, as well as on Amazon.com.

So let, let me present it with, um, our compliments and Scheffler’s compliments. It’s an enormous pleasure to welcome you all to this year’s Tanner’s Le– Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which by my reckoning, uh, is the thirteenth in a series that began back in two thousand and one with Joseph Raz and has included, uh, a roster of distinguished thinkers from many different disciplines in the years since. It’s a special privilege, uh, for me at least, to introduce Eric Santner, the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor of Modern Germanic Studies and a member of the Center of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago as this year’s speaker.

Now, if memory serves, we first met at the landmark conference on Probing the Limits of Representation, organized at UCLA by Saul Friedländer in nineteen ninety, which brought together a wide range of luminaries, including Jacques Derrida, Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg, Perry Anderson, Geoffrey Hartman, and Berkeley’s own Amos Funkenstein. Brought them together to explore the ways in which postmodernist critiques of traditional historiography could meet the challenges of dealing with the monumental ineffability of the Holocaust and the threat of revisionist, uh, denial. Now, Eric, uh, in this extraordinary company, uh, was, uh, one of the stars of the conference.

His paper, I recall, addressed the issues, uh, head-on, focusing on the problematic ways that what he called narrative fetishism could seamlessly absorb traumatic events without really working them through. Now, I’m not going to rehearse this complicated argument now, but want merely to invoke it as a warning against any temptation that I might now have to turn these opening remarks into a coherent narrative of his own remarkable career. For if you want such a narrative, we at least have provided the rudiments of it in the program to the lectures.

Now, my reluctance, I hasten to add, is not because Eric’s career is marked by traumatic events in any literal sense, at least none that I know of, uh, but rather because his work has itself had a consistently unsettling impact on the various discourses it has entered, preventing them from ever easily returning to a comforting narrative of organic and holistic development. In other words, it has functioned very much like what Roland Barthes famously called a punctum in a photograph, which, if I may cite Eric’s own gloss on that term, quote, \”is a rising to consciousness of a non-symbolizable surplus within an otherwise intelligible reality, a sort of stain on the horizon of cultural intelligibility.” What we’re touched by the punctum– when we’re touched by the punctum of a photograph, he goes on, we’ve been touched by a remainder, something left over from our reading of the studium, which of course is Roland Barthes’ term for the conventional meaning produced by the image.

Now, this passage is from Eric’s remarkable two thousand and one book on On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, which followed three previous volumes: The first, Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination, which came out in 1986, and then Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, 1990, and My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, 1996. Maybe I should pause here. I mentioned that Eric was going to be speaking at the tennis tournament to a friend a couple of days ago in Boston, and he, uh, in a, in a way, uh, I don’t know how to put it, panicked because he recalled, uh, his attempt to write a review of, uh, the, uh, Schreber book.

He said it took him about five years. He never got it finished. The book, in, in a way, invaded him, uh, to the point where he was himself overwhelmed by the, the challenge of trying to, to deal with it.

So Eric has occasionally that kind of impact. Uh, the book on the psychotheology preceded three, uh, pro- preceded three others. The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theory, 2005, which he wrote with Kenneth Reinhard and Slavoj Žižek.

On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, and Sebald, 2006, and most recently, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Now, as you can readily see, just from the astonishing range of themes and figures named in the titles and subtitles of these books, it would be foolhardy to fashion Eric Santner’s intellectual trajectory into a fully coherent narrative. Theology and psychoanalysis, literature and politics, film and history, all of these and much more have figured prominently in his work, and he’s imaginatively drawn on a no less heteroclite range of theoretical sources for his arguments.

Schmitt and Heidegger, Freud and Lacan, Rosenzweig and Kantorowicz, Foucault and Benjamin, Agamben and Žižek, and the list could easily be extended. So rather than cohering into a meaningful pattern, there is no simple figure in this elaborate carpet. Instead, the work itself performatively manifests what he calls in that last work, The Royal Remains, borrowing a term of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the unboundaried, unfigurable flesh of the world.

His own work, we might say, itself embodies, not an innocent word here, itself embodies resistance to symbolic containment, aesthetic transfiguration, and narrative wholeness, allowing us glimpses of a messier, intangible something, something beyond our horizon of understanding that defines us as creatures, another word on which he puts a lot of pressure, on creatures unable to discern, however much we may try, the foundation of our existence, rather than mere living, sentient beings who blithely are indifferent to such issues. Well, all right, before I get up a full head of steam here and preempt Eric from explaining what all this means or perhaps how it puts into question the very search for meaning, let me get out of the way and let him give the first of his two lectures on the theme, The Weight of All Flesh on the Subject Matter of Political Economy. Today’s lecture will be devoted to the subject matter, nota bene, of political theology, not economy, but theology today, and tomorrow’s to paradoxologies.

As is our custom, we will have one comment this afternoon, which will be delivered by Bonnie Honig, and two tomorrow by Peter Gordon and Hent de Vries. On the third day, everyone will get a final round, and we’ll open the floor to questions from the audience. And if there is time this afternoon, there may be at the end, we’ll also have a chance to entertain a few as well.

So without further ado, my great enormous personal and well, as we might say, institutional pleasure to present Eric Santner.

(applause and cheering)

[00:11:46] ERIC SANTNER:
Well, that’s kind of an amazing introduction. Um, so thank you very much, Marty Jay. Thank you, Chancellor Dirks, Jay Wallace, and the other members of the Tanner Committee for, um, bringing me here to share s-some new thinking with you.

Um, this– there’s a couple of these remarks about, you know, that my work is like the punctum in a photograph. I now like f-in family photographs, there’s– I, I’m sort of like that a little bit. I’m like, “What, what, why are you looking off to the left?”” Or, you know.

Um, the other thing that what you said about the guy who’s, who’s who struggled to work on, um, My Own Private Germany, I have to say, after Psychotheology, I got an email from, um, someone who said, “After reading your book, I was able to get married and go return to Judaism.” Um,

(laughter)

so sometimes it has other…

[00:12:33] MARTIN JAY:
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:34] ERIC SANTNER:
Um, um, I should say maybe to, to give a sense kind of of the arc of where I’m going in this, I remember having a conversation years ago with, um, Sam Weber about Benjamin, and I was just k-kind of musing on, isn’t it… I- I’m thinking it’s very strange, a strange career, but thinking about the arc of the, let’s say, the two major works, the, the book on German Baroque, um, uh, drama and The Passagen-Werk, the study of, of basically the, the world of commodities in nineteenth century France.

I thought, “Well, how is it that the same person did those two books, um, and what links them together?” And that was really, in a way, the beginning of my thinking of how political theology and political economy, um, belong together. In a certain sense, just trying to think of the coherence of Benjamin’s preoccupations.

And then I started seeing this arc in a number of thinkers I cared about and, e–, and in literary texts I cared about, most importantly Rilke’s, um, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, where these, a, a novel that seems to be about Paris at the turn of the century, the experience of, of urban modernism, but includes reflection after reflection about early modern sovereigns and their, in a way, their, um, their, their suffering bodies, their excessive bodies. So I thought there too, what, what is, you know, what is yoking this, let’s say, um, the, the disorders of political theology and the disorders of political economy under conditions of capitalism? So that’s kind of where I’m situating my work.

So th- actually, the title of today, today’s talk is on the Subject Matter of Political Economy. Right. Subject Matter of Political Economy.

And the prod- and the project really is an attempt to unpack what I see as the ambiguity of this title. My claim is that what is generally studied under the heading of political economy, its subject matter in the conventional sense, demands a special sort of materialism, one attuned to the strange matter or materiality generated by the emergence and sustenance under ever-changing historical circumstances of human subjectivity. So subject matter without a hyphen and subject-matter with a hyphen.

I’m trying to say the subject matter without a hyphen of political economy deman-demands thinking about the subject matter with the hyphen, um, of the same formation, of the stuff at issue in, um, political economy. So if political economy, if political economy has a proper subject matter, I think my argument is that it has to do with an improper surplus of matter, a spectral materiality that drives the pursuit and haunts the science of the wealth of nations. This at least will be my argument.

No doubt a great deal hangs on the nature of this impropriety, the state of being out of place, unowned, and unclean, a cluster of meanings that brings to mind the famous definition of dirt as matter in the wrong place. Freud, one will recall, cited that definition in an essay in which he argued that primitive accumulation in the economic realm is not so much incremental as excremental in nature, that is linked in a fundamental way to the nature of waste, the work of waste management, and the character traits that may be called for in response to its demands. And so this makes tremendous sense that Tony Soprano was involved in waste management.

Um, some years ago, Jacques Derrida addressed the hauntological debt of political economy in his sprawling study, Specters of Marx. The question that interests me here is one that Derrida repeatedly invokes, or to use his favorite metaphor, conjures without fully developing. It has to do with the guardian spirit of his study, Hamlet, and with the historical transformations that link the crisis of sovereignty staged in Shakespeare’s play to Marx’s elaboration of the spectral materiality Marx calls it, I’m taking– this is a translation of his word,

die gespenstische Gegenständlichkeit, sometimes translated as phantasmic, um, objectivity, but I, I’m sticking with spectral materiality. So what links the crisis of sovereignty staged in Hamlet to Marx’s elaboration of this stuff immanent and indeed be vital to the commodity form? The nature of this vitality, this animation, is in my view what is ultimately at issue in the spectral analysis of capitalist modernity, and links this project in, I think, to the larger field of contemporary thinking on the concept of life and so-called vibrant matter more generally.

This is Jane Bennett’s term. I’m going to return to her work at the end of the talk. My hunch is that what is behind the contemporary efflorescence of new materialisms and vitalisms in the humanities, and I’m sure you, you’ve noticed this, um, is not only a new sensitivity to the liveliness and agency of non-human animals, things, actants, and environments.

Their proliferation is also, I think, linked to what Rilke, in many ways the canonical poet of vibrant matter, referred to as the vibrations of money, the flows, fluxes, and intensities of capital in our everyday life. So I think that part of the pressure that’s pushing toward new materialisms is pressure from– that’s coming from this other sphere, not simply from responsiveness to, um, things. Um, What, in a word, links the ghost of a violently deposed king, okay, back to Hamlet, to a central, if phantasmatic feature of economic life under capitalism, to what we might call its virtual real?

To put it in terms I’ve been using in recent work, my question is, what remains of the royal in that domain ac- of activity in which, to use Adam Smith’s famous formulation, we seem merely to actualize our basic human capacity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. What allows for the apparent metamorphosis of at least some part or aspect of the king’s deposed body, some partial object of political theological legitimacy into the substance of the, of value, into the substance of value of commodities, the circulation of which is governed by an invisible providential hand, meaning, um, that the, uh, that the intercourse of these commodities, um, guide themselves. So we’re moving in some sense from a decapitated head to an invisible, you know, another body without organs, um, an invisible hand that’s somehow, you know, busy in the circulation of these commodities, weighing the values.

At some level, the question concerns the shift from one form of fetishism to another, from the fetishism of persons to the fetishism of things. In Marx’s Capital, we find only a few brief rescent– references to the earlier ostensibly premod– pre-modern mode of fetishism. Is in an, is in his initial presentation of the relative form of value and his reconstruction of the commodity form, Marx writes, for example, quote, “An individual A, for instance, cannot be your majesty to another individual B, unless majesty in B’s eyes assumes the fleshly form, die Leibesgestalt, of A, and moreover, changes facial feature, hair, and many other things with every new father of the people.”

In a later passage, Marx cites Hegel’s notion of a reflexionsbestimmung, a reflexive determination, as the key to this sort of relational identity. Quote, “For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because, because he is a king.”

” Marx’s point, M-Marx’s point here is that the king acquires his magisterial, his, his, uh, yeah, his royal flesh comes to enjoy his second glorious body by virtue of his place within a specific set of socio-symbolic relations sustained, or I think one could also say entertained, by way of the l- of the liturgical practices of courtly life above all those of ritual acclamation. I think actually one could think of this, you know, I mean, um, entertainment, you know, in the sense of sustaining, supportive, but also entertaining, you know, sustaining not just, you know, I’m sustaining the symbolic, um, dimension, but also keeping it, you know, sustaining its mood as it were. Um, what is at stake is not simple.

Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Um, as Slavoj Žižek has concisely put it, okay, This is a good quote. Um, what is at stake is not simply the split between the empirical person of the king and his symbolic function.

The point is rather that this symbolic function redoubles his very body, introducing a split between the visible material transient body and another sublime, sublime body, a body made of a spectral immaterial stuff. Put somewhat differently, every symbolic investiture, every investment of a body with an office produces a third bit, a surplus that remains and requires some form, some sort of, of elaboration and management. Okay?

Some form– and management, m-management is, you could say, another word for economy, administering, managing. So I’m trying to argue that political economy is also in the businesses of managing this other dimension. Okay?

So that’s, um, where I’m heading. Yeah. Marx’s theory of the fetishism of the commodity and the labor theory of value on which it is based allow us to locate this immaterial stuff that previously belonged to, let’s say, the body of the king, the king’s two bodies, allows us to locate this stuff in its new thingly location.

And I’m basically arguing that Marx’s critique of political economy is an attempt to track the– the this new– this, um, third materiality in its new thingly location. But the political theology of the sovereign and the various liturgical practices associated with entertaining, sustaining the sovereign are already there doing that kind of work. Now that work is done elsewhere, but it still goes on.

And this is my argument. I will have more to say about the fetishism of the commodity tomorrow. For now, I would like to return to the larger historical question of the shift from the subject matter of political theology to that of political economy, and so from the sovereign form to the commodity form of social mediation, by which I mean the consolidation of social bonds through which one comes to ef-a-affectively enjoy one’s place in the social totality.

Okay, so we come, we don’t only occupy a place in the social totality, we enjoy a place in the social totality. And I think it’s in– I’m trying to sort of tease out of that enjoyment, um, the psychoanalytic notion of, of, of enjoyment of jouissance. That enjoy– the way we enjoy a place in a social, in a social whole involves this other dimension, a link to what I’m calling the third materiality, the third bit.

Okay. Um, my argument is that the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties that Marx discovered in the realm of commodities once belonged to the realm of the king and the court, are composed, that is, of the royal remains of the breakdown products of the political theology of sovereignty. Now, this metamorphosis is registered in its own peculiar way in some familiar m– familiar texts, um, closer to home.

For example, in, in Benjamin Franklin’s famous advice to a young tradesman, counsel that became one of Max Weber’s central proof texts for his thesis about the Protestant origins of the spirit of capitalism. It’s worth noting that in his famous study, Weber’s argument had already blurred the boundaries between spirit and specter. Weber’s central claim was that an irrational kernel of cultic doctrine and practice, one condensed in the notion of the vocational call or Berufung, along with the activity of laboring in a call, Berufsarbeit, formed the impetus of the economic rationality of modern capitalism.

Max Weber famously characterized the manic frugality of this rationality as a peculiar mode of enjoyment, one he named worldly asceticism. So it’s really a sort of economic anorexia, which is a kind of, uh, intense… You could say it’s a kind of worldly asceticism of the body.

Um, but this is basically his thesis about the Protestant ethic, is a w– a weird sort of enjoyment, um, a manic frugality. As Franklin puts it in the passage cited by Weber, quote, “He that kills a breeding sow destroys her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pound, of pounds.”

Now, the strangeness of Franklin’s formulation derives not only from its elevation in the first metaphor of the once derided perversity proper to chrematistics, the art of making money, to the highest virtue. It derives as well from the fact that the metaphor of the murdered crown owes its meaning to a prior displacement, murderous or, murderous or not, of the sovereign of the realm by the coin of the realm, one prefigured by the imprint of the sovereign’s own figure on coins. We can murder a crown in Franklin’s sense, perform economic regicide, only if the political theology of sovereignty has already been largely absorbed by and translated into the terms of the political economy of the wealth of nations.

Only when the stuff of the king’s surplus body has been transformed into that of surplus value, the product of a certain mode of human labor. And again, I’m trying to argue that this certain mode of human labor that, that Marx fi-fixates on and that he elaborates in the labor theory of value pertains not simply to the production of stuff, but also of this strange dimension. Um, Aristotle provides that the canonical account of the fertility of money as unnatural, as a perversion of nature in his efforts in Book One of the Politics to clarify the boundary between the management of the household, economy proper, and the art of gaining wealth, chrematistics.

The latter is presented as having no natural limit and thus as inherently without proper measure, Maßlos. Freud, of course, will make the same claim about sexuality. It is inherently perverse, inherently in excess of teleological function, the reproduction of the family as the basic economic unit.

Like the clinamen of the ancient atomists, human sexuality emerges on the basis of a constitutive swerve, in this case, from a norm that is established only retroactively. Strange matters indeed. Indeed.

So this is Freud– I mean, this is kinda one of the strangest things in, um, in Freud’s– in the Three Essays on Sexuality, they be– he– sexuality begins, he says, with an aberration, but there is no norm from which it is an aberration until after the fact. So it’s, it’s an originary aberration. Uh, um, strange.

In the, in, in the terms Derrida uses in his, in his discussion of Marx, Aristotle would seem to want to exorcise the perverse dimension of chrematistics from the oikos, a dimension that Aristotle suggests only enters human life by way of coined money, an institution first introduced in Greece only a few centuries before Aristotle. That questions of vita– of the vitality proper to human flourishing, in contrast to the perversely vibrant matter of money, are involved are clear from Aristotle’s claim that those bent on the accumulation of money without limit, quote, “are intent upon living only and not upon living well.” Something exemplified in the life of our canonical misers from Plautus’s Euclio to Molière’s Harpagon, Balzac’s Gobseck, and Dickens’ Scrooge.

What these misers all show, however, is that such bare living, living, just living as opposed to living well, can have its own peculiar intensity, intensity and jouissance, and indeed one that brings it into an uncanny proximity with a life to a life of virtue, the one that would perhaps have been unrecognizable to Aristotle. Call it fidelity to the clinamen. So remember these, the, um, the misers don’t enjoy.

They’re, um, they’re manically frugal. Um, so they, they’re kind of virtuous, even though they’re committing a cardinal, a cardinal sin. Now, the boundary zone between human life and the perverse vitality of money qua symbolic medium of exchange takes center stage in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in the guise of the pound of flesh around which the action of the play orbits.

I’d like to dwell on the role of this famous figure– u– I’d like to dwell on the role that this famous figure comes to play in the play, or perhaps better, better on the work it performs in the play’s own narrative and dramatic economy. My hunch is that Derrida’s appeal to Hamlet to draw out the spectral dimension at issue in Marxist thought can be made more compelling if supplemented by reflections on the merchant.

Put somewhat differently, in order to more fully grasp the stakes of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, we could well use the resources of his most problematic comedy. Now, for me to discuss Shakespeare in the midst of an audience filled with people no doubt much better equipped for this task is, is, of course, very presumptuous. But hopefully you’ll regard my efforts less as a case of tragic hubris and more as a bit of pleasantly com-comedic chutzpah-tic.

So I keep the, the genre issue in play there.

(laughter)

Not to mention the Jewish question. There can be no question that the play is deeply informed by the Pauline tradition concerning the notion of the flesh and the larger semantic field in which it figures, one articulated typically as a series of oppositions. Not only flesh and spirit, but also letter and spirit, literal and figural, particular and universal, law and love, and no doubt many more.

What drives the formation of this series of oppositions, along with the various individual and collective dramas associated with them, I want to argue, is ultimately the enigmatic jointure of the somatic and the normative that distinguishes human life, sets it apart from other forms of life, from other life forms. So if the new material, the new materialisms and vitalisms I mentioned earlier are for the most part concerned with overcoming this apartness, this, um, this apparent human exceptionalism, and I’m in a certain sense, I, I’m depending on it. That is, I’m depending on the– I’m, I’m arguing that the kind of materialism that Marx, it– that Mar-Marx draws our attention to is not– is of a completely different order of the vibrant, um, materiality that’s being, um, studied and, and often in, in, in very compelling ways in some of the new materialisms and vitalisms.

And it has to do with it– with something that distinguishes the human, which is the, this coupling, this entanglement, this, um, jointure of soma and the space of meaning. Or let’s say the, the, um, the, uh, inscription of a body in, uh, the space of reason, in a normative space. So I’m just abbreviating this by saying the jointure of the somatic and the normative.

After Paul, flesh, which is, again, flesh for me is the dimension that is, let’s say a kind of, um, inflammation, um, that, that is generated by the jointure of the, uh, the somatic and the normative, and it belongs neither simply to the somatic nor simply to the normative. We need an– we need a new mode of attention, another mode of attention to, um, to grasp it. We have to look at it, you know, awry as it were.

After Paul, flesh comes to figure as the uncanny substance of that jointure of the somatic and the normative as a third element in excess of the somatic and the normative that not only links but also link– leaks into these two domains as the uncanny cause of various inflammatory conditions. Whether such conditions are determined to be autoimmune or not will depend on the, in the end, on how one comes to understand this third element, what I earlier called the remainder of every symbolic investiture. So you could say again, you know, okay, like just to, um, okay, I was– I just underwent a, a, a kind of difficult, uh, I wouldn’t say traumatic, symbolic investiture by being called to hold the Tanner Lectures.

So I’ve assumed an office, you could say, a symbolic mandate. I could tell you there are things happening in my body, um, and there’s, there’s, there’s inflammation going on. And, um, but I have it under control.

Um, I’m trying to deal with it. You don’t see exactly, but in other words, it’s like there’s something– I mean, this is what Freud ultimately meant by castration.

You take a body and you, you, um, uh, invest it with an office, and suddenly that body is now, in a certain sense, cut off from any direct contact with it. It’s no longer simply a body. It’s– there’s something–

You don’t only get an office and a body, you get something else, some other stuff. And Freud’s psychoanalysis is the study of w-what that stuff does in our bodies and in the space of meaning, the kind of weird, um, torsions it generates. And I’m saying that this is what Marx is trying to track in, um, in a more, uh, let’s say, um, political, well, in the sphere of political economy.

But it’s– I think he’s onto something. You know, I think he’s onto the same thing. Um, Okay.

Um, this is a problem when I improvise a little, um, I lose track. Um, Okay, Freud, for his part, stakes his own new science on the hypothesis that this element was the very matter of human sexuality, and that our sexuation comprises the generic site of its emergence, of our life in the flesh. In other words, what I’m calling symbolic investiture that I think we could grasp in, um, you know, in all kinds, you know, just in our, in our lives.

I actually first got interested in this topic when I got tenure and realized it wasn’t simply pleasant. Um, there was a, a, a kind of a new sort of agitation that was injected into my life and, um, um, and it– I didn’t understand it. Um, so I worked on Daniel Paul Schreber, who became a paranoid schizophrenic on the basis of that experience.

Um, um, Now Freud thinks that the reason why Freud uses the word castration is he thinks that sex or, or that human sexuality is the generic site of investiture, of symbolic investiture. That’s where the normative is first injected into the body, as it were, and starts to get hold of us at the generic points of our sexualization, and that’s why he uses the word castration. Um, there are many other reasons too, but that’s, I think, basically the gist of it.

Um, Okay. So to begin, it’s worth recalling that the first metaphor invoked by Franklin to illustrate the fecundity of capital is used by Shylock in his initial negotiation with Antonio. Okay, now I’m going back to The Merchant.

As a usurer, Shylock embodies the perversion of chrematistics and its purity, a perversion that is of course less visible than in the practices of Antonio, the real merchant of the play’s title. The fact that people often think that the title refers to Shylock is echoed in the first question asked by Portia in the famous trial scene, “Which is the merchant here and which is the Jew?”” According to Aristotle, they both belong together as those who pursue a spurious kind of wealth.

There are two sorts of wealth-getting. One is part of a household m—as part of how—is Aristotle— I’m, um, doing Aristotle’s voice. There are two sorts of wealth-getting.

One is part of household management, the other is retail trade. The former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censored, censored, censored. For it is unnatural and a mode by which men gain from one another.

The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it, object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, tokos, offspring, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent.

Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural. So money breeding money. It was Auden who first noted that Antonio would seem to be guilty of yet another perversion of nature and natural fecundity, namely homosexuality.

And indeed, the various forms of lack that seem to lay at the bottom of his melancholy have encouraged at least one reader, Marc Shell, to see him not simply as a sinner or pécheur, one given over to the life of the flesh, but also to a new incarnation of the roi pêcheur, the wounded Fisher King who can no longer fulfill his office as the head of the Grail Society, who can perhaps reign but no longer govern, and so has become dependent on new forms of nourishment that are material and unnatural rather than spiritual and supernatural. As we shall see for both Foucault and Agamben, the king– that the king reigns without governing represents the culmination of a proce- of the process whereby the political theology of sovereignty is absorbed into the political economy of the nation-state and the modes of management adapted to life in commodity-producing societies. So this…

Another th-thing that took me by surprise that, that made me, you know, interest– sort of wanna pursue this, this project was that I was very interested in, in Foucault’s writings on biopower and reading the, I think it’s the 1975 lectures as announced as a series of lectures on biopower and biopolitics. It ends up being a book about a series of lectures about liberalism and neoliberalism, about political economy. Um, and biopower, biopolitics was for Foucault, um, what, as it were, um, the, the, the, the mode of governing that s- that, that supplanted or began to displace sovereignty.

So there’s a sense in which, let’s say, the political theology of sovereignty gets reorganized, at least in part as biopolitics. But then you s– why– then he goes on to study biopolitics under the, under the sign of political economy. So this is another way in which something circulating in the sphere of political theology of sovereignty has seemed to reemerge, um, in this other– in what looks like a different realm and, and, and seems to be concerned with, with different stuff.

But I’m saying it’s in some level the same stuff that is being managed differently, administered differently. Okay, back to, um, uh, a Shylock. Okay, so the play begins really when with Bassanio’s desire to dig out from the mountain of debt in money and love he admits to owing Antonio.

The pursuit of the beautiful, virtuous, and wildly wealthy Portia is his way of doubling down on those debts, of staking everything on one last gamble. And indeed, the entire play is organi-organized around the seemingly inextricable knots tying money and arrows together. Knots tied in turn by a series of oaths, contracts, and covenants.

Antonio agrees to finance the venture, but lacking liquidity, he ends up turning to Shylock, thereby breaking with his custom of generally avoiding the giving or taking of in-of interest on loans. Shylock, of course, doesn’t have the money either, and he, you know, then goes, you know, to a-another friend in the Jewish community who gives him the money, but that’s not my concern. In their initial encounter in the play, Shylock appears to justify the taking of usance by reference to Jacob’s innovative pastoral in-intervention, um, innovation that caused Laban’s ewes to birth the striped lambs that were by prior agreement to be his.

Okay, so there’s a biblical reference of Jacob, um, using the striped rod to generate, uh, striped ewes. When asked by Antonio whether this biblical reference had been, quote, “inserted to make interest good,” that is, whether his gold and silver were in essence so many ewes and rams, and of course, in the play, I mean, um, ewes is also sometimes Jews is spelled I-E-W-E-S. So there’s something also just that sounds, Um, you hear the links.

Um, Um, Shylock re-responds to, uh, uh, to Antonio, “I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast.” In an aside to Bassanio, Antonio characterizes Shylock’s brief commentary as an example of hermeneutic usury, of squeezing out of scripture a surplus sense that serves one’s own advantage. Antonio repeats the metaphor after hearing Shylock’s inventory of insults and curses that he himself had over the years heaped upon him.

Says Antonio, “If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not as to thy friends, for when did friendship take a breed for barren metal of his friend? But lend it rather to thine enemy; who, if he break, thou mayest with better face exact the penalty.” Here, Antonio seems to be engaging in his own bit of Biblical exegesis by alluding to the Deuteronomic stipulation that prohibited Jews from lending to their Jewish brethren.

In fact, I, I, as far as I know, the, the Deuter– in Deuter– Deuteronomy is the first example of a prohibition of usury, um, in ancient texts, but it’s prohibited to, um, to one’s brethren. But it is a prohibition of, of usury. What, what is in the end one of the central ironies of the play is the fact that even after listing the insults he’s had to endure, Shylock effectively turns the other cheek and offers to Antonio an interest-free loan.

He does, of course, insist in merry sport, as he puts it, on the famous penalty. “Let the forfeit be nominated for an equal pound of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken in what part of your body pleaseth me.” Now, at this point in the play, we have actually no idea what part of the body might be involved.

In fact, I think generally the first thought is that he’s basically saying, you know, “You have to put some foreskin in the game.” You know, um, we later learn that it’s, you know, it’s not that. Um, um, that Antonio accepts the offer as a sign that, quote, “There is much kindness in the Jew,” suggests that Shylock’s offer to take no doit of usance was read as a sign of quasi-Christian fellowship as the extension of the narrow particularist sphere of Jewish brotherhood into the universal one of the church.

At this point, a surplus of use, of usance, at this point we might say of Jew-sance, Jew-sance, um, is seemingly replaced by a surplus of kindness, one that provisionally serves as a sign of being of the same kind. In the end, of course, all bets are off, and this economy of kindness is undone in the most exorbitant of ways, in large measure, no doubt, because of Shylock’s own forced forfeiture of flesh, his daughter, Jessica. Keeping with Portia’s famous characterization of the quality of mercy, we might say that Shylock is, in the end, mercifully strained to choose Christian kindness in both senses, to be of a Christian kind and this ostensible kindness of mercy.

As I’ve noted, the figure of the pound of flesh is profoundly overdetermined in the play. Not unlike the anal object in Freud’s understanding, it enters into a series of equivalences consonant with, but also exceeding the Pauline, the Pauline field of terms. They extend from money to child to foreskin, phallus, to the literal and spiritual flesh of the heart, while the cutting of the flesh oscillates in meaning between butchery, circumcision, castration, homicide, and the cruel rigor of the debtor-creditor relation and of contract law more generally.

Indeed, the flesh and its cutting seem to mark the very site and action of the opening of the space of possibility of this series of, of equivalences and the primary process of their associative movement. That is, of the very splitting between and various modes of jointure of the literal and the figural, the concrete and the abstract, the material and the spiritual. It finally offers as us the figure of a value that can be extracted,

(clears throat)

or as I prefer to say, materially abstracted from the living body and be weighed in the balances. And this, I think, is what, again, uh, what Marx is trying to say, that something is materially abstracted from the, the body of the laborer. Something is ma- is abstracted, I mean, it, but it’s materially abstracted.

There’s so– there’s– in other words, there’s a conversion, an ontological conversion, transformation that happens at that site that can’t be fully captured in strictly, let’s say, um, in the language of, of, let’s say, of, of, of economic theory. You need this, you know, what, what, uh, Derrida calls hauntology, and that’s–

(coughs)

And so M-Marx reaches for this notion of gespenstische Gegenständlichkeit. There’s something weird happening here. Um, so what is weighed here is no longer that which makes a king a king, the partial object of political theology, but something in or of the body that has been invested not with royal office, but with economic value in a mercantile society.

Now, there would seem to be little room for reflection about sovereignty in the play, little concern with the transformation of the king’s two bodies into the people’s two bodies and the management of the latter by way of political economic calculations. There is no time to go into detail about this, but I want to suggest that part of what makes the trial scene in Act Four so riveting is that the tran– that, is that this transformation is very much at work in it. That is that the, the transformation of the political theology of sovereignty into the political economy is…

That transformation is, uh, is happening in the trial scene, in the play throughout, but it’s very concentrated in the trial scene. The repeated allusions to the Book of Daniel in the scene already place the pound of flesh at issue here in relation to Daniel’s famous in-interpretation of the writing on the wall of the Babylonian king’s vision. This is from the Book of Daniel.

This is the interpretation of the matter. Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingship and brought it to an end. Tekel, you have been weighed, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.

Peres, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. Furthermore, Okay, so there are two. There’s- There’s, uh, the Book of Daniel is everywhere in, in that scene, and the Book of Daniel has its central moment in this annunciation, what you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.

But you– what has been weighed in the balances is the sovereign, um, as sovereign. Um, but it’s in the midst of a scene that is dealing with weighing a pound of flesh in a, uh, um, a civil suit, um, let’s say a kind of a realm of a commercial economy. Furthermore, as, as Julia Lupton has beautifully shown, the shifting status of the Duke over the course of the scene underlines the tension between the two kinds of normative pressure I’ve been examining here.

Okay, so the normative pressure associated with the sphere of sovereignty and the normative pressure associated with political economy. The tension between the political theology of sovereignty and the political economy of an emergent mercantile nation comes to a head where, by means of a legal ploy, Portia, appearing in the, in the disguise of a doctor of laws named Balthazar, and Balthazar is a name that’s everywhere in various forms in the Book of Daniel. She suddenly shifts the judicial juridical coordinates by which Shylock’s petition is to be adjudicated, a ploy that has been referred to by various critics as out-Jewing the Jew.

(sigh)

One will recall that Portia, in, in the guise of Balthazar, um, acknowledges the force of Shylock’s claim and does so in words that closely mirrored his own early appeal to the sanctity of contract, of commercial contract, on which the life of Venice depends. This is Portia. There is no power in Venice can alter a decr- a decree established.

’twill be recorded for a precedent, and many an error by the same example will rush into the state. It cannot be. It is precisely at this point that Shylock first characterizes Portia as a Daniel come to judgment.

Within moments, however, Portia comes up with her surprising and surprisingly literal reading of the contract. This is also where she’s thought of as out-jewing the Jew, uh, like her literally, terribly literal reading of the contract. According to which Shylock must not only extract exactly one pound of flesh, but must do so without shedding a drop of blood.

The bond doth give thee here no jot of blood. Take thy bond. Take thou, take thou thy pou-pound of flesh, but in the cutting, but in the cutting it, if thou dost shed one drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice confiscate unto the state of Venice.

It is Gratiano here who now claims Portia as an upright judge and second Daniel. As Lupton points out, this novel and actually kind of questionable legal argument marks a shift from commercial to criminal law, one that promises to give Shylock, as Portia now puts it, something like a surplus of justice, justice more than thou desirest. The surplus marks a return of the political theology of sovereignty at the very point at which the political– at which political economic reckoning was poised to win the day.

So all of a sudden, in a way, the Duke comes back to life. He’s kind of sitting there somewhat impotent. “I can’t, there’s nothing I could do,” and suddenly comes back to life when, uh, when Portia shifts the juridical coordinates from commercial to, uh, to criminal law.

So the Duke shifts from being a sovereign who reigns but does not govern to one who reigns in forceful excess of governing. And one could also say that the mercy he finally gives is an example of, let’s say, the sovereign, um, uh, uh, issuing a state of exception, suspending the law, sort of the, the, the good face of the state of exception. I suspend the law and grant you mercy.

So the sovereign has come back to life in a way re-reclaimed, in a way the vitality that had been in the pr-, that, that had been, that, that looked like it was being ceded to political economic calculations. I’m tempt– I’m thus tempted to say that what would appear to be a merely clever legal tactic on the part of Portia, her claim that is that Shylock is allowed to cut a pound of flesh but drop no jot of blood, alludes to the virtual reality of the element at issue, to the bloodless flesh as a little piece of the real that now goes into the composition of the king’s body, now into the substance of value.

And then the play is hovering between those. The trial proceedings thereby signal the conflictual beginnings of the metamorphosis of the subject matter, with a hyphen, of political theology into that of political economy, of a partial object of political theological legitimacy now found to be wanting into what Marx would identify as the spectral materiality of the commodity, the value materially abstracted from the body of the worker and transferred as so and so much flesh to the product of labor qua commodity. In The Merchant of Venice, a play written in the midst of England’s transformation into a mercantile society, the way of all fle– the ways of all flesh, long exemplified by the rise and fall of kings, begins to be registered as the weight of all flesh, the rise and fall of the value of the majestic substance of value.

(laughter)

Take a little, little break. I don’t remember when I started. Do you remember when I started? Ooh.

[00:55:07] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
No.

[00:55:10] ERIC SANTNER:
So how long, when should I stop?

[00:55:13] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
When you’re done.

[00:55:15] ERIC SANTNER:
Okay. All right. To return to Derrida, one will recall that he introduces the first chapter of his Marx book with a citation from Act One of Hamlet, in which the hero takes on the mandate of his father’s ghost to set right what has been put out of joint by precisely the murder of a crown.

Derrida, for his part, justifies the recourse to Shakespeare, not only by noting Marx’s own tendency to cite the poet, but above all, by the, by the, by underlining the famous opening lines of the Communist Manifesto. “ein Gespenst geht um in Europa, das Gespenst des Kommunismus.” This is Derrida now.

As in Hamlet, the prince of a rotten state, everything begins by the apparition of a specter. Derrida quickly goes on to propose a grand récit of such apparitions, one, And then he goes on to basically say that all of European history is a series of displacements of this spectral dimension. Um, he says, “The ghostly would displace itself like the movements of this history.

Haunting would mark the very existence of Europe. It would be the space and the relation to self of what is called by this name, at least since the Middle Ages. Paraphrasing somewhat, the claim is that the European economy, its domesticity, its oikos, has always been troubled by an alien presence, something unheimlich immanent to its very constitution.

Against this background, I, uh, in certain sense, I guess what partly what I’m trying to say is that, that the uncanny, what we’ve studied on, you know, under the name of the uncanny, w- that we have to hear in the unheimlich, the heimlich, the oikos, that is the uneconomic, das Unökonomische. Um, that first, you know, deeply worried Aristotle and that, uh, and that becomes in a new, very different context, the, the, um, Marx’s focus in Capital. Um, he’s interested, I would say, in das Unökonomische, the uneconomic in political economy that he thinks political– classical political economy can never fails to grasp.

So you need something, a radical, a new thinking. Um,

(clears throat)

for Derrida, what ultimately distinguishes the spectral historicity of Europe from other histories of the European spirit comes down to the dimension of a peculiar c- of, of the, of a peculiar carnality of the surplus, the dimension of the flesh. So this is Derrida’s, you know, for those of you who b- you know, just wanna hear some good Derrida language, um, from the specters of March, uh, Marx. The specters of Marx.

As soon as one no longer distinguishes spirit from specter, the former assumes a body. It incarnates itself as spirit in the specter. The specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit.

It becomes rather something that remains difficult to name, neither soul nor body, and both one and the other, for it is flesh and phenomenality that gives to the spirit its spectral apparition. And as Dar– as Derrida emphasizes, this thing that remains so difficult to name appears in the context of Hamlet and in medieval and early modern sovereignty more generally with or in the body of the king. It is, I would suggest, the very thing that leads to the strange doctrine explored by Ernst Kantorowicz in his deservedly famous study, The King’s Two Bodies: An Essay in Medieval Political Theology.

So my argument, I argued this in, in the last– in my last project, was that the King’s– Kantorowicz’s work was a work of tracking this spectral dimension in its various doctrinal and, and, uh, uh, doctrinal forms, um, in early– in late medieval and early modern Europe. And what I tried to do in that last book was to track its, let’s say the– its, you know, where it goes into modernity, and there I focused mostly on sort– on biopolitics and psychoanalysis, and here I’m trying to shift my attention to political economy as another site in which this, this stuff is, is, uh, insists. Okay, um.

Okay, um, so my focus here, rather than on biopolitics, um, And biopower is on political economy as a site in which the– this, this new weight of every citizen, of every citizen subject. Every citizen subject now, in a way, carries a new weight as the bearer of the principle of sovereignty. With popular sovereignty, what was concentrated, let’s say, at the site of the court and the king, has been dispersed, disseminated, and we all, in a certain sense, get inflamed, um, with this dementia or become responsible for it, acquire a new kind of responsibility, um, that I think we often, um, interpret as, you know, a responsibility for taking care of our well-being, our bodies, um, keeping fit, being healthy, you know, this sort of– these, all these things that look, you know, like perfectly, like, good things to do.

Um, I think there’s a, another preoccupation pulsating in there, and that has to do with the fact that we’ve been injected with an, a kind of a dimension that we have to take care of and manage, economize, um. okay, so my focus here is on political economy as, as a site in which this weight begins to ta- to be taken into account by precisely efforts to weigh it, reckon with it, subject it, subject it, as it were, to double-entry bookkeeping without ever really grasping the real nature of the double involved.

So the next time you go on the scale, um, and you’re obsessed with, you know, with your weight, um, there may be some 21 grams there that you can’t really, um, figure out. Are, are they there? Are they not there?

Um, Foucault would eventually group both politics and, and bi– and political economy under the heading of governmentality, the set of institutions and practices that emerge when the sovereign begins to reign without governing, when we might say they all seem to acquire the status of the, the Fisher King, Le Roi Pêcheur. So I can–

(coughs)

I, I, as you could gather, I continue to think that psychoanalysis, that is above all psychoanalysis, Freudian thinking, that takes the changing nature of this double, this, these, um, haunting these transformations into account by attending to the individual and collective fantasies that provide subjects with the means to negotiate their sense of self, place, and value within this new historical landscape. Indeed, I think that much of what Freud theorized under the heading of unconscious mental life consists of just such negotiations. I think one–

I’m, I’m gonna use the word negotiation a lot, and I wanna hear this, you know, neg-otium. You know, that this not being quiet and, you know, that this– a negation of, of something. At these negotiations, activities that at least in part continue to make us into the sort of busybodies that caused him to, to develop his new science in the first place.

We might say that both political economy and psychoanalysis are in the business of attending to and managing, albeit in quite different ways, our busy bodies. So I’m saying that there’s, I, I really… I’m trying.

It’s a silly word, I know, a silly phrase, but, you know, busy body, but I think I’m trying to capture the, I’m trying to get a sense of, of the business. What the business our busy bodies are in the business of, of doing. Um, And I think it’s not– it– I think Freud developed a kind of an attunement to this kind of excitation, agitation, which is really a kind of constant f-form of busyness, of work.

It’s not the pulsing of the heart. It’s not the, the, the, the transforming molecular structure, cellular structure of our, uh, structure of our bodies, nor is it simply thinking, like ruminating. It’s something in between.

It’s something that’s neither simply somatic nor simply that belongs to the space of reasons. It’s a kind of agitation, but it’s a kind of something is being done. Something is being done.

Okay, um, now I, I– 10, 10 minutes, I promise. So I’d like to conclude by making some further remarks about what distinguishes the matter or materiality I’m atten– I’m at– I am attempting to track in the transition from the political theology of the sovereign form to the political economy of the commodity form of social mediation, from what seems to be at issue in the, in some of the new materialisms that have appeared over the last years under var– under a variety of different names.

Now, I’m thinking here less in terms of right or wrong and more in terms of a difference in subject matter insofar as these new materialisms are intent on dispensing precisely with the subject matter, hyphen, the spectral materiality proper to human subjectivity, one with its distinctive flesh and phenomenality. So I’m saying if you, if you let go of this kind of distinctiveness, You lose the subject matter. Um, at least the subject matter that I think Marx was, um, attending to and that Freud was attending to.

You might open to all kinds of other stuff, but you lose this, and and this I think is important. Jane Bennett, for example, presents the notion of flesh, uses this word according to the perspective o- of what she calls vital materiality this way. Quote, vital materiality better captures an alien quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical cha-character of the fractious kinship between the human and the non-human.

My own body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners. The crook of my elbow, for example, is a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria.

The its outnumber the mes. In a wor– in a world of vibrant matter, it is not enough to say that we are embodied. We are rather an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of micro- me– microbiome me’s.

The moral and political wager of this, of this work is that an awareness of such, of such diverse tribes and populations of its and me’s, a kind of multiculturalism at the cellular level, cellular level, and that’s kind of how I see it. It’s kind of multiculturalism extended to, you know, the molecular and, and the cellular, will inhibit us from producing and consuming in the same violent and reckless ways, um, that has characterized modern industrial post, uh, modern industrial and post-industrial industrial societies heretofore. That is, developing a sensitivity, a mode of responsiveness to this, to these different tribes.

To all this, this plethora of, of vital materiality will inhibit us from simply treating things in an instrumental way. You know, will it, will, will break up- will, will i-i-interrupt instrumental reasoning once we come, once we become attuned to this vibrant materiality. As Bennett puts it, being mindful, quote, “That the human is not exclusively human, that we are made up of its,” will continue to the formation of the newish self that needs to emerge, the self of a new self-interest.

And I hear this as a nice, uh, you know, kind of a nice coming together of Adam Smith and Deleuze. Um, sort of the newish self that needs to emerge, the self of a new self-interest. Um, the vital materiality that interests me here is one that, as Freud put it, composed not of multiple single or multicellular its, but rather something he called “It,” precisely because it remains so difficult to name.

And recall Derrida’s remarks on the thing with the king that remains so difficult to name, neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. So I think it’s important that Freud didn’t say it’s, um, he said it, id, es. To put it simply, the intensities that occupied or better preoccupied, and here I guess, you know, in the sense of an occupation, preoccupied, you’re already busy.

You know, that preoccupied the crook of the elbow among other body parts of Freud’s hysterics were caused not by tribes of bacteria, but rather by a complex disorder of the tribe to which these hysterics belonged. A disorder that in one way or another congealed as the uncanny cause of their desire, the uneconomic dimension of their libidinal economy.

[01:08:39] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um,

[01:08:41] ERIC SANTNER:
Bennett’s reading, uh, two pages. Is that all right?

[01:08:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Ten page.

[01:08:44] ERIC SANTNER:
Bennett’s reading of Kafka’s famous story about the creature named Odradek, the title of Kafka’s story. Now, Odradek has been, I know, trotted out a million times, and so, you know, I’m sorry. Bart- Bartleby and Odradek, you know, you can’t avoid them, so I’m gonna make use of both of them.

Sorry. Um, so the title of, uh, of the story, of Kafka’s story, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” “The Cares of the Father of the Family,” “The Cares of the Family Man.” Um, Bennett’s reading offers, um, offers an example of what can get lost, in my view, in the– what I see as the homogenization of alterity performed in the name of multiplicity and he-heterogeneity, something that is stated almost explicitly at the conclusion of her reading of the text.

Quote, “Odradek exposes the continuity of watery life and rocks. He– it brings to the fore the becoming of things.” For Bennett, Odradek is co-

Kafka’s name for self-organizing matter, for spontaneous structural generation in the interstices is between inor- between inorganic and organic vitality. Quote, “Wooden yet lively, verbal yet vegetal, alive yet inert, Odradek is ontologically multiple. He, it is a vital materiality and exhibits what Gilles Deleuze has described as the persistent hint of the animate in plants and of the vegetable in animals.”

Now, I’ve discussed this text in detail elsewhere, so, um, um, as a figure that needs to be understood in the context of the afterlife of political theology, so I won’t go into de-detail, into detail here. But it’s crucial to underline that what what gets lost if one ignores that afterlife, if its specific its specific form of vital materiality with respect to a text written in the midst of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a swarm of independent and at times tribally Conceived nation-states. Um, as many scholars have noted, the word Odradek, which Kafka’s narrator suggests might have Germanic or Slavic roots, seems to signify, on the basis of family resemblances to words from those two language groups, um, a figure of radical rootlessness and non-belonging.

You can think of Odradix or Odadresse. And at some point, Odradek says, you know, he’s asked, “Well, where do you live?” Um, “Kein fester Wohnort.”

You know, no fixed abode, no fixed address. Um, and I think one could also u-ultimately see Odradek as, as exemplifying, you see, matter in the wrong place at some level and as mattering in the wrong place. All this suggests, I think, that Odradek’s ontological statelessness, this is what Bennett emphasized, the kind of ontological unlocatability, cannot be separated from the sense of political statelessness evoked by the linguistic and historical overdetermination of its name, If it even is a proper name.

It was precisely through the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the state of statelessness came to be, as Hannah Arendt argued, the political symptom par excellence of modern Europe. And it was the part– And it was the particular tribe to which Kafka, along with Freud and Shylock belonged, a tribe associated, of course, with the peculiar hybrid language between Germanic and Slavic, that came to embody a kind of foreignness that had no natural fit within any state.

This was a tribe whose members could never be fully naturalized, absorbed without remainder, and indeed thought by many of its own members to be, at its core, passionately detached from any historical nation-state. One might think of it as the tribe whose very form of life, in some sense, mattered in the wrong place. It is then not so much a newish self forged on the basis of vital materiality and a new sense of self-interest that Kafka’s text helps us to envision, but rather the uncanny dimension of the Jewish self that he himself no doubt experienced as profoundly linked to a series of other dilemmas.

Perhaps most important of these was the dilemma of a writerly existence, an existence lived in passionate detachment from other social bonds, and one apparently incompatible with being a Hausvater, the head of a household or oikos. We might say that Odradek is, among other things, a figure of un-un-uneconomic man par excellence, a paradoxical busybody serving no apparent use. If you’d say it’s like this is busybodiness, sort of incarnate, you know, or wooden, whatever it is, whatever the substance is.

Half a page. In a short fragment, Kafka linked the busyness of such bodies, their form of life, to that of manic bureaucrats whose official duties and writings, whose office work has been cut loose from its erstwhile source of purpose and legitimation. This is this wonderful Kafka fragment.

They were given the choice to become kings or messengers. Just like chil-children, they all chose to be messengers. For this reason, there are only messengers.

They race through the world, and because there are no kings, they all call out to one another proclamations that have become meaningless. They would happily put an end to their miserable life, but because of their oath of office, they don’t dare. Against this background, and remembering Kafka’s own office writings, Amtliche Schriften, they’ve been published as Amtliche Schriften, official writings, as an insurance official busy with issues of workmen’s compensation, compensation for the injured flesh of laboring bodies, Kafka’s own literary writings might best be characterized as the traumatic dream protocols of officious busybodies.

And I’m calling— I’m trying to develop a new sense, uh, you, you, you need German to say this. I’m calling Kafka’s writings, “Traumamtliche Schriften.” “Traumamtliche Schriften.”

So we have Traum, trauma, and Amtlich all in one. German is a wonderful language. And I’m saying this is a genre that’s especially tuned to the subject matter with a hyphen of political economy.

It’s a genre that, as I will argue tomorrow, can be characterized as paradoxological. Okay, doxology. I’ll hope– Hopefully–

Okay, that’s an enigmatic signifier, and hopefully it’ll get under your skin, you know, start to swarm a little bit, maybe become, you know, some micro-me’s, some its, um, become a site of, of teeming signification, something that, uh, Bonnie Honig will address in her response to me. Thank you very much.

(applause)

[01:15:36] MARTIN JAY:
Thank you, Eric, for that remarkable first lecture. Um, another one tomorrow, uh, on paradoxologies, uh, to come. Uh, sometimes we have a break, but I think we really have the momentum going, so I want to continue.

Uh, at the back of Eric Santner’s most recent book, there are several glowing blurbs, including one from Slavoj Žižek, which is so over the top it would only embarrass Eric to cite. Instead, let me turn to another, no less laudatory, but without the rhetorical overkill.

[01:16:05] ERIC SANTNER:
But, but can I just say, somebody, uh, on Amazon, somebody wrote in rating the book, said, “The blurb is so absurd that I’m not even gonna bother reading the book,” and gave it one star.

[01:16:16] MARTIN JAY:
So, just be- beware of having Žižek do anything on your side. But let me turn to another, no less laudatory, but, uh, which lacks the rhetorical overkill. Quote, “To read any work of Eric L. Santner is to enter a crowded, glorious, and alien world.

A brilliant, uh, uh, contribution to democratic and literary theory, political theology, secular studies, and aesthetics, The Royal Remains is a generous and humane book that is quite simply a must-read.” Now, the author of that blurb is Bonnie Honig. Bonnie Honig, who is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, and as it happens, our first commentator for Eric’s lectures.

Now, despite the risk that this might seem, uh, like, uh, stacking the deck, we were happy to run that risk because we recall with great fondness the wonderful role that she played some ten years ago as a commentator on Seyla Benhabib’s Tanner Lectures on Another Cosmopolitanism when she was still on the faculty of Northwestern, where she taught for many years. She’s the author of quite a number of extraordinarily interesting books, beginning with Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, which came out in nineteen ninety-three, and Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton, two thousand, uh, one, Emergency Politics: Paradox and Law, uh, Democ– Law and Democracy, also Princeton, two thousand and nine, uh, and Antigone Interrupted, uh, Cambridge, uh, University Press, two thousand and thirteen.

She’s edited or co-edited a number of important collections, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, uh, Skepticism, Individuality, and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman, and finally, The Oxford Handbook of Political Thought. She’s currently at work on a new project called Public Things, which urges us to conceptualize democracy as more than a wan proceduralism.

In a recent interview, she was characterized as an optimistic agonist, uh, an optimistic agonist, which seems to me like a perfect description of the ideal commentator on a Tanner Lecture by Eric Santner. So let me present Bonnie Honig.

(applause)

[01:18:31] BONNIE HONIG:
Well, thank you very much. Can you hear me? All right?

Yeah. Um, it’s very nice to be back in Berkeley. I’d like to thank the Tanner Committee for inviting me to reply to these lectures and for putting me in such good company.

Um, and I’d also like to thank Eric for offering such fertile thoughts to think with. Eric and I have been talking theory for a very long time, And it’s a pleasure to be here for this event. I’m going to get right into it because I know we’re running a little late.

In this sequel to the book, The Royal Remains, Eric Santner’s The Weight of All Flesh asks what becomes of a prior political theology of sovereignty and finds what I think should be called a theopolitical economy that is the source of a vital and vibrant materiality. Hamlet was his Shakespeare play of choice in The Royal Remains, but now it’s The Merchant of Venice because of the debt around which the play turns and the pound of flesh that secures it. That pound of flesh is Antonio’s flesh promised to the Jewish moneylender, Shylock, in surety for the loan to Antonio, whose ship has not come in, but whose real purpose is to float Bassanio’s boat.

Santner rightly notes that the pound of flesh represents many things: money, foreskin, phallus, circumcision, castration, and more, but most important of all for Santner, it’s “the figure of a value,” I’m quoting, “that can be extracted, materially abstracted from a living body and weighed in the balances. Unquote. What’s weighed here is no longer that which makes a king a king.

That is to say, it’s not one of the king’s two bodies, the partial object of political theology, but rather, quote, something of the body that has been invested not with royal office, but with economic value in a mercantile society, unquote. Thus, for Santner, The Merchant of Venice is, quote, the beginning of the metamorphosis of the subject matter of political theology into that of political economy, unquote. And sure enough, we encounter here not a king, the king of political theology, but rather a duke, one with quite limited power, and the debt in question is flesh itself.

So in short, we have here a kind of emergent biopolitics of debt. Even though he said he’s not doing biopolitics, I think the political economy as he describes it is engaged in a kind of biopolitical frame. Now, the pound of flesh in Merchant is for Santner a synecdoche for the new busy bodies of late capitalism that psychoanalysis is, he says, uniquely able to address.

That’s Marx’s term, of course, busy bodies. Uncannily, by the way, Benjamin Franklin, whom, uh, Santner cites, wrote under the non-du plume Busy Body, published a column under that, uh, above that name. Um, so it’s hard to dispute the usefulness of psychoanalysis, especially when reading Santner, who puts it to such good use, but it has its limitations, and these are connected, though not limited to its insistence on the human exception.

Santner concludes his lecture by distinguishing his own interest in the flesh as the matter of theopolitical economy from those new post-humanist materialisms like Jane Bennett’s that also focus on the flesh, but in order to undo the human exception. Santner moves too quickly past Bennett, I think. They’re close in many ways, and this is clear already in lecture one and will be even more so in, uh, tomorrow in the second lecture.

Both reject the idea that the secular world is disenchanted. Both look for sites of hidden enchantment. Both find them in overlooked vibrations that both might well call, as Santner does, a surplus of immanence.

Both favor interrupting contemporary economic imperatives that instrumentalize the human. Both approach human flesh as an alien thing. In Bennett, it’s host to vibrant worlds that are non-human, like the bacteria that live on us, and that should, she says, knock us off of our human pedestal.

We’re more its than mes, she says. Santner, though, treats flesh as more spectral than vibrant. He calls it ectoplasm in The Royal Remains, but he wants to preserve the human exception that Bennett wants to undo.

And perhaps for this reason, he, unlike Bennett, is drawn back into the disenchantment thesis that he says he wants to reject, and also back into thinking in more spectral rather than vibrant terms about flesh, or what he calls vibrant ends up being more spectral than vibrant. This becomes clear when he allies the vibrancy he tracks with the undeadnesses of a world catapulted into perpetual motion by the need to cover over the void left yawningly open by the removal from the ontological and political scene of the king of political theology. Quote, “It’s the business of the sovereign,” he’ll say in his second lecture, reprising the theme of the royal remains, quote, “To cover the void in two fundamental senses, to veil it with his or her glorious body, and to stand surety for it as a primordial debt.”

Unquote. The primordial debt is a figure of lack, too Lacanian for Bennett. In Santner, though, we’re marked by that lack and by the fetish for that missing king who once veiled it, the one with two bodies.

Our fetish for the king is transformed, he now argues, into the fetishism of things, which Marx himself diagnoses as filling a metaphysical need. Instead of the liturgical support of the king’s two bodies, we’re now enmeshed, liturgically and laboriously, twenty-four seven, you might say, in a biopolitical administrative governance aimed at covering over the disenchanting loss of the meaning-securing sovereign. I want to develop my critical engagement with all of this.

I realize I skipped an enormous amount. There was an enormous amount in there, but I’m going to critically engage all of it by turning to another text, um, about the possibilities of post-theological meaning and about flesh. Tons of flesh.

This text fits very well with Santner’s categories, but elaborates them differently. The text is Melville’s Moby-Dick. And as I read it, it pits the political-theological, or what’s left of it in the form of the legless Captain Ahab, against the political-economic in the form of the mercantile, unadventurous Starbuck.

But Melville offers a third option that we might call democratic and doesn’t appear in Santner’s analysis. And it appears in the book, in the novel twice, at least two times that I’ll note, and both times the key to that democratic option is flesh, animal flesh. One other reason I turned to Moby-Dick is in quest of Melvillian resources with which to combat a lot of left theory’s love for Bartleby, that other Melvillian hero.

Bartleby, desiccated and incapable of agency, stands for Agamben and Santner in the next lecture, and others, as a great figure of resistance. But I think democratic theory should prefer Ishmael. By contrast, the hero of Moby-Dick, who is exactly the opposite of Bartleby, life-loving, fundamentally egalitarian, happy to work with others, good-natured, and good-willed.

In short, he’s the perfect faculty colleague. The one who’s always helpful. He’s the opposite of the Bartlebys who always prefer not to.

I turn now to Moby Dick, which I’ve come to see as the American Merchant of Venice. Both texts are about the changing meanings of the flesh in the metaphysically evacuated context of an emergent mercantile economy. Like Merchant, Moby-Dick is about a man who’s been wronged and seeks satisfaction by exacting flesh from his opponent.

Both texts explore the loss of faith and the faith and the fury that may result. Both texts oppose their main characters with counterparts who get a charge out of them. Melville’s Ishmael and Shakespeare’s Antonio both suffer from the same– from some form of ennui at the beginning of each text.

Listing in the doldrums of desirelessness, both men respond to their melancholy by putting themselves in danger. Too close to a vengeful man who’s been wronged, and whose quest for satisfaction vibrates through the lives and bodies of those around him. If I had any sense, I would have said something like Eric said about my chutzpah in talking about these texts in front of you people.

But I don’t have any sense, and that’s probably why I’m doing it. Okay, so by exposing himself through the bond of debt to the tender mercies or not of the Jew Shylock, the moneylender, Antonio relieves his sadness by upping the ante so that he, and not just his ships, are at risk. Ishmael puts himself at risk on a ship in order to relieve the itch that is the symptom of confinement, his symptom of confinement to land labor.

This, he says, is his, quote, “substitute for pistol and ball,” unquote. The flesh differs, though. In Merchant, it is Antonio’s own human flesh that is on the line, while in Moby-Dick, though Ishmael risks his life, it is the flesh of the whale that is on the line, white and teeming with signification.

The move to animal flesh, so in other words, a site that is not the persons or things to which Eric’s confining his attention in these lectures, the move to animal flesh highlights the loss with the passing of political theology, if Santner is right, of a way to manage confrontations with the void. Animal sacrifice was once a way to manage this traumatic encounter. In Moby-Dick, Ahab tries to resurrect this practice or something like it when he chases the whale hoping to make meaning rather than money out of his flesh.

Ahab has lost his pounds of flesh and seeks restitution, his bond, in the tons he blames for his injury. Moby Dick bit off Ahab’s leg in a symbolic castration that binds these two creatures together in a kind of pact like a circumcision. Ahab, that is, is the figure of lack.

The bite has left him aimed– maimed, sorry, and, and- and aimed, and desperate not only for vengeance, but for the sort of world in which injury can be repaid and an injured man can be made again whole. His is a political-theological world in which a man can pile, quote, “Upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage felt by his whole race from Adam down.” Unquote.

[01:28:15] ERIC SANTNER:
For Starbuck, Ahab’s opposite, the whale is only a commodity, flesh to be sold at market, and the sea voyage nothing more than a commercial venture. “Ahab’s quest for vengeance is madness. It endangers ship and crew, and it makes no sense, and worse yet, it’s blasphemous,” Starbuck says.

Starbuck doesn’t mind the chase. Quote, “I am game for his crooked jaw,” he says, “nor the risks and for the jaws of death too,” Captain Ahab,” he says, “though only if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow.” Quote, “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance.”

Vengeance will not fetch much in our Nantucket market.” Unquote. “You can’t put a price on vengeance,” Starbuck rightly says.

To Ahab, that makes it priceless. To Starbuck, that makes it worthless. Unlike the rest of the crew, Starbuck is unmoved by Ahab’s speeches and unmotivated by the gold doubloon nailed by Ahab just a few pages earlier to the mast to invis– invigorate the crew to try to be the first to sight the elusive whale.

This now murdered coin is a fetish that doesn’t speak to Starbuck. He likes his coins the way he likes his blood, in circulation. So Ahab will appeal to him differently, quote, “Come closer, Starbuck, thou requirest a little lower layer,” unquote.

And then we get the pasteboard mask speech which fails, and then appeals to prudence and gloriance which– glory, which also fail until Starbuck finally yields. Now, I’m gonna skip the details of all of that because I think we have the basic picture, and I wanna get to a third site of flesh in Melville, and this is the key one, the one that I think doesn’t have an analog in, uh, Santner’s account. And it comes in chapter ninety-four in a chapter called “A Squeeze of the Hand.”

The men are assigned the task in that chapter of liquefying by hand the globules that remain in a whale’s melted flesh. This isn’t Moby Dick, it’s a different whale. Ishmael describes the scene as one of incredible community jouissance.

Quote, “Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze all the morning long. I squeezed that sperm till it’s spermaceti, sperm, flesh oil. I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it.

I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget, that at last I was continually squeezing their hands and looking into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say, “Oh, my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities or know the slightest ill humor or envy? Come, let us squeeze hands all around.

There’s a lot more. That’s just a little. Jason Frank has a great reading of this chapter, C.L.R. James style, in which he says the men here experience a kind of democratic absorption.

But if we attend to the flesh and not the mind, then we can see still more. First, that it may be the encounter with whale flesh, with the sperm, the spermaceti, and not just the experience of collective work that enchants the crew into a democratic spell, as we just saw in Ishmael’s passage. Second, that the whale flesh in Moby Bi-Dick teaches a democratic lesson, and it is this.

If Ahab longs for a lost political theology and Starbuck too readily re-replaces it with a dead political economy, the whaling incites the men to expose the fragility of sovereign power. The whale is not incidental here. It is essential because the whale’s anatomy is uniquely able to upend traditional understandings of sovereignty as a head that rules over the body of the people, and here’s what I mean.

The spermaceti whose globules the men squeeze come not from the body, but from the head of the sperm whale. Or better, with sperm whales, the head is the body. The very whale that has long emblematized sovereignty itself precisely as singular head ruling over unruly body, the Leviathan that from Job to Hobbes licenses the rule of God over man and head over body, turns out to be a creature in which precisely this separation between head and body is not clear.

As we discover when Tashtego, one of the crewmates, falls into the head of a dead whale as he mines it for flesh to get the flesh to melt it, and is smothered by sweet per-spermaceti. Ishmael reports on that with a great deal of flowery prose, which I’ll also skip for now. Um, so pictured as whale flesh, the move to the flesh doesn’t just transfer sovereignty to the vibrating people, as Santner does, it dethrones the head’s rule over the body.

Either Hobbes’s frontispiece image or the metaphor of Leviathan has to give way. Melville adds to the democratic stew when he has Ishmael make clear that the whale’s topographic anatomy is known best not by scientists or by ship surgeons, both of whom publish on these things, but by whale hunters, ordinary people like himself. He reports that same Leviathan that Ishmael– that Hobbes relies upon to be all-seeing and powerly s- powerfully surveillant is described by Ishmael as possessing eyes that sit at such a distance from each other, where human ears are located, he says, that the whale can’t see what is straight ahead of it, nor what is directly behind it.

Rather than stand as a marker of Hobbesian sovereign will and force, the whale, as any ordinary whale man could tell you, Ishmael says, is therefore subject to a, a, quote, “helpless perplexity of volition,” unquote, when it is surrounded by ordinary men. In sum, Melville’s Leviathan, like that other one, makes the people possible, the crew come together around the flesh, but it’s a different people, the motley and audacious crew of the Pequod, not the obedient and more uniform cives of Hobbes, and a different possibility. It’s also a different third flesh I’ve identified here.

Eric says that the flesh that he wants to talk about is the inflammation generated by the jointure of the somatic and the normative. Um, but I’m proposing in opposition to this, that this flesh, um, that looking at the animal flesh shows us how we need not just a new orientation towards the flesh in order to understand it, but actually calls for democratic theory, which seeks not just to analyze it, but maybe to mobilize it. So Melville, in other words, took a new orientation towards that flesh too, and didn’t just analyze it, but he sought to democratize it.

Or maybe better, I should put it like this. In the transition from political theology to political economy, Melville tracks or points to a possible restance, a remainder produced by their clash and obscured by Santner’s arrangement of them in a sequence, and that restance might be democratic. Now, in conclusion, the action in concert in the squeeze of the hands scene points to that third fleshly option between political theology, Ahab, and political economy, Starbuck.

The men working at the flesh pots of the Pequod are busy bodies, and they busy themselves with each other’s bodies and with that of the whale. To return to Benjamin Franklin’s bromides cited by Santner, they have killed a sow, the whale whose flesh they work to liquefy, and they’re working in the shadow of a murdered coin, the doubloon nailed to the mast. Thus, they may be said to be released for a kind of jouissant absorption precisely by the very forfeit of futurity that Benjamin Franklin feared.

That was his point. Don’t murder the coin, don’t kill the sow, because otherwise you give up futurity. And this willingness to give up futurity is what they learn from being around Ahab.

That’s his lesson to them, is to give up on futurity for the sake of jouissance. As I suggested with Melville and with and against Hobbes, this third and lowest layer of the flesh may point to a democratic future, but a different kind of futurity, a different possibility. If so, it’s personified by Ishmael and the crew, and offers a counter to Melville’s other much-celebrated protagonist, Bartleby, who will appear briefly in lecture two, the one who dies at work, by contrast with Ishmael, who works to die.

For Agamben, on whom Santner will in the next lecture draw, and for Santner him himself, Bartleby represents a refusal, a work stoppage that can be allied with the Jewish Sabbath, an unplugging from the system and the culture of debt that feeds on our flesh. Ishmael and the crew, enjoyers of the flesh, unplug, unplug too. They leave the land where life– They leave land where life is deadening, but they board ship hoping to plug into something else, in quest of a future that eludes the more ectoplasmic, soon-to-be-starved, fleshless Bartleby.

In the end, Ahab hijacks or maybe fulfills the crew’s democratic potential, but he doesn’t completely obscure it. We spend too much time in their company and under their tutelage to miss the fact that they show us a way out of the ontology of landed sovereignty. Hobbes’s frontispiece, it will be recalled, represents the sovereign, big head, peopled body, corporeally cascading into rolling hills where his genitalia ought to be.

Opening the sovereign figure’s head to our view, the Pequod’s crew shows us the flesh that might alter our possibilities and invites us to leave behind the land surveyed by the sovereign. Democratic agency depends not just on working our way out of the problem of sovereignty, but also back into it, perhaps even squeezing hands as we work our way through its lumps and globules. The alternative to the Sabbath of inoperativity to which Agamben turns, and Santner too will cite in tomorrow’s lecture, is, I would argue, instead a kind of Sabbath power, not powerlessness, constituent, not, as Agamben says, destituent power.

In addition to the weekly Sabbath, which requires that we unplug from the everyday, after all, the idea of the Sabbath also includes land and debt sabbaticals, which are not passive unpluggings, but are instead active redistributings of resources that aim to undo the accretion of inequality over time. Some activists have recently been inspired by these ideas. Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee project claims for itself the legacy of the biblical jubilee, the Sabbath of Sabbaths, for example, when it buys and forgives debt.

Thus, they replace the debt sanctuaries that once lacked in sovereignty. In the UK, sanctuaries like Whitefriars and the Mint once served as places into which– once secured places into which no bailiffs were allowed and protected the lives and sometimes the assets of those imperiled by debt, fated to live as bare life in debtors’ prisons. In our own time, these sanctuaries no longer exist, but debt imprisonment does.

So, following Santner’s route from political theology to political economy as a kind of biopolitics of debt, I’m proposing we add another step, a counter-politics of debt democratization that I would call in political theological terms, Sabbath power.

[01:39:33] BONNIE HONIG:
This draws on the counter-narrative of political theology I developed in Emergency Politics, where political theology do-doesn’t just underwrite absolute sovereignty, but also sovereignties that are more democratic. This alternative political theology focuses less, less on the ruptures of divine miracle, like Schmitt, and more on miracle’s dependence on popular receptivity, subscription, and so on, more like Rosenzweig.

[01:39:57] ERIC SANTNER:
Against Shylock and Ahab, those extractors of pounds of flesh, against Bartleby, the anti-flesh anti-hero, democratic theory would do well to embrace the history of resistance and roads not taken, which point beyond the covenant of the flesh, circumcision. Among these could be Korach, who argues, uh, with Moses in the desert against his consolidation of sovereignty and the increased privacy of his relationship with God, and the biblical Ishmael, the first one, who’s left to starve in the desert as a castaway, but who lives when God sends water to rescue him from the dryness of the land.

[01:40:34] BONNIE HONIG:
If I and others turn to Sabbath practice as a resource now, it may be because with pe- political theology’s passing, if we accept Santner’s premise, we lose not just the magic of the sovereign, but also the sanctuaries and refuges that vented sovereignty when it was more fleshed out. To take up their work, it’s necessary for us, we busybodies, to poke our noses into other people’s business. Randomly buying and forgiving debt is just one example.

Such actions may even excite the flesh of those who engage in them, hence Hannah Arendt’s insistence on the often thrilling pleasure of action and concert. That’s a whole other archive of excitement. Psychoanalysis then, I would say, in response to Eric’s claims, offers a, but not the only, useful lens with which to understand much of what we need to busy ourselves with.

In its attention to, quote, the individual and collective fantasies that provide subjects with the means to negotiate their sense of self and place, unquote, it risks neglecting the also important task of generating new fantasies or choosing the best ones for democratic futures. Ishmael understood the power of a good story to charge us up. So do Strike Debt and the new materialists.

They know that to be recharged for new forms of life requires unplugging from our old patterns of discernment, consumption, indebtedness, and plugging into new ones, a new metabolization. That said, what they risk missing are the unconscious and e-enigmatic registers of human existence, the royal remains and human disinvestitures that Eric Santner has made it his unique business to track. I’m saying he’s a busybody too, and for this, we are all in his debt.

Thank you.

(applause)

[01:42:28] MARTIN JAY:
Thanks very much, Bonnie, for that brilliant response. Uh, there’s an enormous, uh, uh, wealth of, uh, of issues that are bouncing around. Eric, you wanna take a few minutes to respond now?

And then I, I think we probably won’t have time to go beyond that today, but, uh, I wanna give you the final word before we close.

[01:42:47] ERIC SANTNER:
Um, I mean

(cough)

I mean, I think that, um, I mean, one way of responding would be to say that I think that, um, I mean, what I don’t deal with at all in, um, in this material is, um, you know, like, uh, uh, okay, if this is all true, like it was, so what do you do? Um, um, sort of what, what sort of practices, um, does one– it– How does one differently engage with this dimension of flesh? And, um, and I think that the way I, I heard Bonnie’s response is that it’s possible to do something, um, with it as exemplified.

I’m not– I, I can’t say if this is getting it right, getting Melville right, but, um, the way Bonnie presents the, um, the crew of the Pequod, and particularly in the, um, the squeeze, the squeezing together. Basically, what does, what does it mean?

Any, anytime someone, if I’m in a crowd and someone’s, you know, on a bus and they say, “There are m-more people com-coming on, could you please squeeze together?” Um, I’m gonna hear that completely differently. Um, and…

Um, I was not gonna convert into, you know, and I’ll just have to say, it’s democratic politics. You know, I’m sorry, I’m practicing. Um, I mean, I, I do think that this is, you know, th-that Bonnie’s thinking is, um, is, you know, is, um, uh, it’s,

it’s, it’s a way of envisioning new practices of, of, of delving into this dimension. Now, I’m, I’m not fully sure that the way that she presented, presented that delving into this dimension, um, changes the subject, um, or the subject matter that I’m calling the flesh. This is what I’m unsure of.

Um, and maybe one thing to say was, I mean, what, what, what’s, what’s, um… Wha– A thought that comes to mind, for example, is, okay, so we’re– It’s ve-

It’s a very compelling set of thoughts bringing Moby-Dick and the Leviathan, you know, into this tension. But the unplugging from landed sovereignty, um, you could say is, you say, it’s the move toward the mercant– you know, maritime mercantile economy and globalization. Um, and that is…

I don’t see that as a, um… I see that as a– I see that as another dimension of the transformation I’m talking about from the political theology of sovereignty to political economy, where sovereign states, sovereign landed, so– landed sovereigns over landed states, um, lose their power, but to, to whom?

Um, you know, to other kinds of managers. Um, for example, I mean, we know that in, um, when we… Who– where is the state of exception active now? I mean, okay, there are obvious cases, you know, states of emergency.

But you could say the real figures who declare the state’s states of exception are, you know, the International Monetary Fund, um, who could suspend contracts, compel states to suspend the law and, you know, tear up contracts, pension contracts, all kinds of things, basically suspend, suspend laws. And in other words, they’re over the sovereign, but this is only works because landed sovereignty has– is no longer the, um, the dominant form of sovereignty. So, um, um, so the sovereignty of debt over our lives, Um, so let’s say sovereign debt means not only that-

That, you know, the debt of sovereign states, but also the sovereignty of debt over our lives. Um, I think that is, um, um… Um… I, I don’t think that, um, that, um… I, I think that probably-

Uh, uh, the way that happens is in part precisely through the unplugging from the land that’s, that takes place in, you know, this maritime mercantile economy. So it’s not clear to me that the, um, that, you know, the, the whales… Now I, I, in– The way you’ve read it is, is, you know, it’s, um, it’s very compelling, but I’m, but there’s some, it, it feels that it, um, it has to, um, deplete, let’s say, the political, economic, uh, some of the political, economic context of the activity of, of whale, of, you know, the whale hunting and the kind of, um, and where, where that itself fits into the story, you know, the story that I’m telling.

So that’s, um, that, that’s, that’s one thing. Um- The other thing that maybe I’ll talk about a little bit more tomorrow is I th-

I think one of the fundamental things I’m trying to g-get– that I’m trying to get at is when I’ve talked about this, um, the flesh as this, um, let’s say this carnal, um, say carnal prosthesis, you know, prosthesis that, um, emerges at the, you know, at the jointure of, of the somatic and the normative. I think that it’s, um, there’s a kind of– there’s a, uh, there’s a missing link. Let’s say there’s a gap, a void at that space, and I– you, you cite that, you know, tomorrow’s talks where the, the sovereign covers that in the sense of covering it up and standing su-surety for it.

And, and this– And what that suggests is that there’s something about, let’s say, you know, if I wanna call it the human condition, where something that doesn’t work is converted into a debt. In other words, a void is converted into a debt, a, a primordial debt.

Um, something is owed. There’s some-something missing becomes something owed. Who is responsible for filling it?

And I think at some level, Freud, even though you, you know,

(cough)

he’s at some level a, a primordial debt thinker, and his theory of the super– his notion of the superego is really a theory of, um, the, in a way, the, um, the loan shark we live with, you know,

(laughter)

um-

(laughter)

In, in our heads, um, I think that what, what he’s ultimately trying is trying to– and I think this is even more so with Lacan, is to in a way, um, undo the, the debt drive from the drive. In other words, so it’s, in that, I mean, in his languages, it sounds like, you know, which, which would you prefer, the debt drive or the death drive? But, you know, it’s like, phew, I don’t know, which is, you know.

It’s hard. It’s a tough choice. But, but I think that Freud is after, and I think Lacan too, somehow, um, turning this agitation into a kind of like letting it, u-uncoupling it from debt drive, from the very, from the idea of, of making whole, of, of…

And I think that allows, I think that is what opens for, let’s say, a different conception of repairing the world. Um, and, uh, which is not making whole. And it may be that, that these, that this, these, um, the squ– I’m not sure if the, this, you know, this, the, um, the squeezing of hands, of digging into the, um, the, the body head, you know, the head flesh of the whale is a practice that effectuates such a transition, um, collectively, psychically from, you could say, death drive um, to drive and a kind of, um, a, I’d say drive-driven democratic practice.

Um, and so you, you, you keep, let’s say, um, death- You have a democratic jouissance, um, that is not a death-driven, um, mode of enjoyment.

[01:51:53] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:51:54] ERIC SANTNER:
Um, and so, I-I mean, tomorrow I’ll, I’ll talk more about… I’ll try to talk more about practices, you know, um, as opposed to, um, you know, sort of conceptualization. And, um, and I think that, um, I, I’m tempted to say that what I called– what I referred to by this enigmatic signifier, paradoxology, which is, you know, doxology in the sense of, of liturgical praise of God.

You know, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, highly, high– holy, holy, holy is like the, the core doxology of s- of the Christian tradition. Um, that, that doxology, um- um, basically, you know, Weber argued that the protest- that the Protestant ethic converted everyday life into doxology. Work is doxology.

What are you working for? Um, ad, ad maiorem gloriam Dei. You know, so for the, for the greater glory of God.

That’s what work is. Um, and, um, it sounds to me like what– the way you describe, um, the activity, the, the mo– the ways in which the crew engaged with one another, let’s say more under the, the, the leadership of Ishmael rather than Ahab or Starbuck is, I would say, move is I, I, I’m tempted to call it paradoxological-

[01:53:25] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:53:25] ERIC SANTNER:
practice. Um, there’s something certainly glorious about it. Um, but it’s not– it, it, it’s, it’s been unplugged from both, let’s say, the, the, the subservience to the impaired sovereign, the Roi Pêcheur.

You know, the fisher– He needs fishing, for God’s sakes. You know, it’s like the fetish, you know.

(laughter)

You know, the sovereign, the, the ill, the wounded sovereign. Um, but nor is it, um, fully captivated, captured by Starbuck. And so there, so to say the, the glory of the lost glory of the sovereign and the new glory of the substance of value.

Mm-hmm. Um, that maybe that this is a, a paradoxological-

[01:54:09] BONNIE HONIG:
Mm-hmm.

[01:54:10] ERIC SANTNER:
engagement. So that’s what, and, and that will, I think, what that, what I mean by that, I think will become clearer, but I think this is anticipating, you know,

(clears throat)

the next set of discussions. I think that that’s how I would think about it. Yeah, that’s it.

[01:54:23] MARTIN JAY:
Um, do you wanna respond at all to that?

[01:54:26] BONNIE HONIG:
I think you said he should have the last word.

(laughter)

[01:54:31] ERIC SANTNER:
Okay. Well, if we have another two or three minutes, I’m just gonna say that, uh, uh, that’s a very helpful response, but, uh, the thing that sort of went missing in it was, um, the s-, the the thing that we could call animal, um, the animality of flesh and the flesh of the animal. Um, so I think you’ve done a lot to work on, in a way, the kind of animality of the flesh, but less in thinking about how thinking about the flesh of the animal would push us towards a different void—

[01:55:04] BONNIE HONIG:
yeah, or the same void, or in a different way. And, um, so certainly one of the things that got me thinking about Moby-Dick as a resource through which to think through both the positives and the limitations of the conceptualization that you offered, was your framing of things. Right.

Not only in terms of political theology and commerce, Ahab and Starbuck, but also in terms of persons and things which, uh, erases or evacuates the domain of the animal.

[01:55:34] ERIC SANTNER:
Right. But I don’t think that, um, I, I don’t know that digging through the flesh of, you know, this killed, this dead whale is, um, about the animal. Um, I mean, I think that what is– I think a new s- Let’s say you could say a new social bond seems to be effectuated in the squeezing of hands, but it’s not by opening to the animal.

I don’t see that. Um, it’s not by opening to the vibrant matter of animal life. That’s what I don’t, that’s what I just don’t see.

Um, it’s this absorption. I mean, it seems, uh, you know, um, the, the, the social bond effectuated in all that squeezing is not, I, I don’t think something that’s, that is, that takes place on the basis of opening to the animal as, as a kind of alterity to, you know, as a, as a, as a singular kind of alterity to the human. It seemed, I mean, it’s, um, it’s– first of all, it’s incredibly violent.

It’s a scene of violence. It’s, it’s of great, of jouissance, but it’s also a scene of death and, and violence and ultimately, um, uh, exploitation and appropriation of the animal to be converted into what? Into candle, into candles to, you know, to enlighten us, you know.

To, to, you know, to, to lighten, to light our way as, as humans. Um, so there’s something I, I… and I- it’d be very hard for me to imagine, maybe I’m wrong, um, I haven’t read enough of Jane Bennett.

But it’d be very hard for me to imagine, um, her endorsing your reading of, um, of, um, of that scene as an opening to animality. So I think you’re doing something different.

[01:57:42] BONNIE HONIG:
Mm-hmm.

[01:57:43] ERIC SANTNER:
And but I, but I don’t think it– for me, I don’t think it, uh, it’s… I don’t think that, that, that inmixing of the hands, the, the human bodies and the whales and the flesh of the head of the whale is, is a, a Deleuzian becoming-animal.

[01:58:04] BONNIE HONIG:
I agree.

[01:58:05] ERIC SANTNER:
So we agree with that. So I don’t know exactly what, um… I guess this remains the o-

You know, the question that we’re gonna have to continue thinking about is, um, what is, um, what, I guess, what is the animal adding? Mm-hmm. And because you’ve talked about the animal really in ways that that that all have to do with signification of the animal in human life, in human, in political practices and social practices.

Um, as a, a, a, a, a placeholder of the Leviathan or a mutation of the Leviathan, it’s the space in which a new democratic politics, um, gets, you know, it’s squeezed out of the flesh, but it’s not, And you could say to some extent it’s, it’s living off, maybe absorbing, you know, the, the, you know, the, the, um, the a- The, the now departed animation of the animal.

But I don’t see it as, um, as opening to the animal. It’s really– It’s not opening to the animal, it’s opening the animal, opening the animal.

Mm-hmm. Um, and that’s something I don’t… I guess I just, I’m not getting fully that- Mm-hmm.

What’s different? So, We’ll talk.

(laughter)

Talk among yourselves.

[01:59:27] MARTIN JAY:
On that note of pessimistic and, uh, uh, agonism, uh, we close for today. I’d like to thank, uh, both Eric and Bonnie for extraordinarily stimulating couple of hours, and this will continue. The conversation is still to be continued.

The wound, as it were, is still open. Uh, tomorrow, uh, Peter and Hent will get a crack at Eric after he speaks on paradoxologies. Uh, same place, same time.

Thank you very much.

(applause)

[00:00:00] SPEAKER 1:
Okay, I’d like to, uh, get, get us going because we have a very rich and, uh, lengthy program today. I had the great pleasure of introducing Eric Santner yesterday. I’m not gonna duplicate that.

You, uh, have an opportunity in the program to read about his extraordinary accomplishments and the number of books he’s written, and, uh, we don’t want to waste the time that we have. Yesterday’s lecture was on… the subject matter– It says here political theology, but I guess it was political economy. Yeah, somehow we got that confused, so our apologies.

[00:00:30] MODERATOR:
Uh, although political theology lurks behind political economy, so maybe a Freudian slip of some note. In any event, today we’re going to be hearing a lecture on, uh, a title that he will, of course, explain, Paradoxologies. And I will turn the floor over to him, and we’ll introduce our two speakers, uh, two commentators, uh, after, uh, his lecture.

Uh, and once again, if we have enough time at the end, we hope we’ll get, uh, some questions in. But, uh, certainly tomorrow we have a very, very long period for questions. So those of you who are frustrated today, please come tomorrow and, uh, fire away.

So Eric Santner.

(applause)

[00:01:15] ERIC SANTNER:
Uh, thank you again. Um, and, uh, I don’t know if, if, if people, um, remember from, um, yesterday from Bonnie’s, um, comment, she realized that or she dis- that, um, my last name Santner is an anagram for Tanners. Um, so I, I always knew that my family wasn’t my real family.

Um, I’m finally– I’m glad I finally found them. Um, and there’s even an endowment.

[00:01:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Wow.

[00:01:49] ERIC SANTNER:
The shift from the fetishism of persons, above all, that of the singularly and carnally representative person, the sovereign, to that of things, takes place in the context of a long process of secularization that, so the story goes, drains the shared institutions of the public sphere of transcendental resources of legi- of legitimation and disenchants the world more generally, evacuates from the relations between persons and between persons and things, the last vestiges of otherworldly animating spirits, be they divine or demonic. The critical thrust of Marxist theory of fetishism, of the fetishism of the commodity is, of course, to demonstrate just how wrong this story is. Max Weber, who first introduced the concept of the disenchantment of the world, formulated his own critical skepticism on this matter with the concept of the spirit, and indeed, we might say, specter of capitalism.

For Weber, the Reformation contributed to the disenchantment of the world, think of the devaluation of priestly sacraments, at the price of injecting into it a proliferation of harassing voices that never ceased to remind the faithful to keep busy, essentially never to cease to economize, and all for the greater glory of God. For Weber, the Protestant ethic effectively transforms work itself into doxology, the liturgical praise and glorification of God. It is, I would suggest, Marx’s labor theory of value that first opens the horizon within which Weber’s argument unfolds.

For Marx, however, it is not that secular society remains secretly bound to transcendence, but rather that our ostensibly disenchanted world vibrates with a surplus of immanence that profoundly informs our dealings in the world, makes us into biddy– busybodies trying to discharge an excess of demand, an excessive Arbeitsanforderung, to use Freud’s locution for the pressure of the drives, that keeps us driven even when we are ostensibly idling, keeps us negotiating even in the midst of otium. This is what Marx means when he claims that although the commodity, quote, appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing, if looked at in the right way, it shows itself to be a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. Ein sehr vertracktes Ding, voll metaphysischer Spitzfindigkeit und theologischer Mucken.

But is, but it is not so much we who continue to engage in metaphysics and theology, but rather our busy bodies. So it’s our bodies, in a sense, that are engaging in metaphysics and theology, and Marx is trying to explain just how we are supposed to understand that. For Marx, it is commodity and so value-producing labor rather than labor as such, or a religiously inflected work ethic that is fundamentally doxological.

Both the Marxist critique of political economy and the Freudian engagement with libidinal economy are, although at ra-rather different levels, ultimately in the business of intervening into precisely this business, this busyness, this uncanny mode of stress. The Freudo-Marxist concept of stress I’m developing here is no doubt continuous with other approaches to ideology and efforts to isolate its sublime object. I hope, though, that by focusing on the afterlife of political theology and secular modernity, essentially its mutation into political economy, it will be possible to shed new light on these old matters.

Now, before we can say any more about the mutation of fetishism in the transition from political theology to political economy, we need to get clear about the nature of the disavowal of the unknown knowns at work in the first form, the fetishism of persons. What is it that is both affirmed and denied in the fetishistic activity, above all in the liturgical labor that, so to speak, congeals in the virtual reality of the king’s second sublime body? It is not, I think, simply the knowledge that the sovereign is really, after all, just another mortal being, nor is it simply knowledge of the trick of the reflexive determination noted by Marx.

That is, the king is a king because his subjects treat him as a king and not because he is already a king. Bringing together the political-theological problematic of the state of exception and the psychoanalytic concept of the partial object, Slavoj Žižek offers a concise formulation of what I think is really at stake in the phantasmatic, virtually real physiology of the royal personage. Quote, “The emergence of this sublime body is linked to the illegal violence that founds the reign of law.”

Once the reign of law is established, it rotates in its vicious circle, posits its presuppositions by means of foreclosing its origins. Yet, for the synchronous order of law to function, it must be supported by some little piece of the real, which within the space of law, holds the place of its founding foreclosed violence. The sublime body is precisely this little piece of the real which stops up and thus conceals the void of the law’s vicious circle.

So weit Žižek, as they say in German. For Žižek, the little piece of the real, what Lacan famously called objet petit a, holds the place of the anarchic dimension of the space of juridico-political normativity. As I’ve emphasized in my– as I’ve em-emphasized in my first talk, what I am calling the flesh, the virtually real stuff of which the sovereign sublime sublime body is composed, emerges out of the entanglement of the somatic and normative pressures that constitute creaturely life, the creaturely life specific to human being.

Now, by creaturely, and this is something that, um, we already got into a bit in, in the discussion yesterday, um, um, with Bonnie, who was pushing me, um, to, um, undo somewhat the exceptionalism, I’m going to try to now, you know, give another formulation of, you know, my ex– this exceptionalism of the human, which I still want to call creaturely. So it’s, it’s, it’s a strange sort of exceptionalism. Um, by creaturely, I do not mean s– I do not simply mean nature, living things, sentient beings, or even what the religiously minded would think of as the entirety of the vibrant matter of God’s creation, but rather a dimension specific to human existence.

It signifies a mode of exposure that distinguishes a human being from other kinds of life, not simply to the elements or to the fragility, vulnerability, and precariousness of our mortal finite lives, but rather to an ultimate lack of foundation for the historical forms of life in which human life unfolds. This is what Žižek means when he speaks of the law’s anarchic dimension, its rotation in a vicious circle. It is a rotation around a gap that opens at the jointure of the somatic and the normative, life and forms of life.

This gap, this crucial missing piece of the world to which we are ultimately and intimately exposed as social beings of language, is one that we first acquire by way of our initiation into these forms of life, not one already there in the fact of our biological being, we could say of our animal being. We could say that the vulnerability of biological life becomes potentiated, amplified, by way of exposure to the radical contingency of the forms of life that constitute the space of meaning within which human life unfolds, and that it is ultimately only through such an anarchic potentiation that we take on the flesh of creaturely life. Creaturely, creatureliness is thus a dimension not so much of biological as ontological vulnerability, a vulnerability that permeates human being as that being whose essence it is to exist in forms of life that are in turn contingent, contested, susceptible to breakdown, in a word, historical.

The normative pressure that suffuses human life always includes an excess, a too much of pressure that indexes the contingency of the norms in question. We are not simply answerable to one another according to the relevant norms of our social being as recognized bearers of normative statuses. We are also always subject to sur- to a surplus or to surplus or supplementary negotiations that, to use Žižek’s, Žižek’s term, orbit around the void of the law’s viciou-vicious circle, the lack of any ultimate grounding or authorization of these normative statuses.

It is these surplus negotiations that give flesh to a form of life, infuse the bindingness of its norms with a dimension of psychosomatic passion. It is in this sense that we don’t just have entitlements, we enjoy them. Our investiture with normative statuses, and this is what Lacan ultimately means by entering the symbolic, being invested with normative statuses, always involves a dimension of libidinal investment of the subject and by the subject.

It might, in the end, be more accurate to say that the gap at the jointure of the somatic and the normative is act- is always really re- a redoubled gap. It concerns the lack of ultimate foundations of the normative order, its lack of anchorage in the great chain of being, but it also concerns the jointure itself, the missing link between the somatic and the normative, a sort of blind spot at the point at which the latter emerges, as one now tends to put it, from the former. The overlapping of these two gaps provides the site of the fleshly surplus enjoyed by humans as distinct from other living things.

And again, I would say that the Freudian theory of castration is an attempt to capture this, this gap at the jointure of the somatic and the normative, but for Freud, sexuation is the generic site of this jointure, and thus for him, it has to always be linked to, um, the s- the, the sexed body. The political theology of sovereignty implies that the sovereign incarnates and so represents our ontological vulnerability for his subjects, and thereby allows them, in some sense, to avoid the void or to appropriate a term coined by Charlie Bernheimer some years ago, to participate in a void dance, an apotropaic dance around the void, kind of like avoidance, you know, a void dance, a void. Um, it is the business of the sovereign, that is, to cover the void in two fundamental senses, to veil it with his or her glorious body, but also on the basis of that veil, very glory, to stand surety for it as, as for a primordial debt.

The royal flesh, and this is the ess– essence of the fetishism of persons, marks a kind of wound or tear in the fabric of being by covering it in these two senses, which means that the royal virtues are always at some lev– always at some level serve to sustain the virtual reality of the sublime royal flesh. My concern continues to be the ways in which what had been, to a large extent, precariously localizable in early modernity, invested within the sphere and physiology of the traditional master or sovereign, disperses into the texture of the social space at large, into the life of the people, and so into the very soul of the modern citizen-subject. Marx’s theory of the fetishism of the commodity is, I am suggesting, above all, a contribution to an understanding of that process of dispersion.

For Marx, it is above all political economy that, as it were, inherits the royal remains, the dispersed and now popularized flesh of the king’s sublime body, and its functions as glorious guarantor covering the missing link at the anthropogenic jointure of the somatic and the normative. Political economy circumscribes the domain which not on– the domain in which not only the production of– the production process of the wealth of na– of the nation, but also of the people’s two bodies, is managed, kept in business, in busyness. The theory of the fetishism of the commodity serves as a kind of warning not to lose sight of the gespenstische Gegenständlichkeit, the spectral materiality of the people’s second sublime body, the virtually real product of commodity-producing labor.

The labor theory of value is ultimately a theor- a theory of the production of the spectral flesh of the sovereign people, a process that depends in turn on an exchange of a decapitated head for an invisible hand in ceaseless motion. This motion, the imperative of capital accumulation, is, I’m suggesting, the political economic version of what Zizek characterized as the law’s vicious circle, its rotation around an anarchic kernel of foreclosed origin. Another way of putting it would be to say that political economy converts the fundamental dynamic of the drive into the debt drive, a ceaseless effort to redeem or indemnify a lack at the origin of the norm-normative order to which we are, so to speak, joined at the hip among other erotogenic places.

And I, I would s-say here also that I think s- Freud conceived of the cure, psychoanalytic therapy, as an attempt to release the drive from the debt drive. Uncouple, that is, in a certain sense, um, unculpabilize the analysand from the labor of, of participating in the social project of covering the void, um, you know, paying off the primordial debt, which means opening up the drive proper.

We can think of the king’s sublime body as the congelation of a certain kind of labor, as the substance of the royal value produced by that labor. The elaboration of this value takes place above all by way of the litur– of the li– the liturgical practices, literally the public work or work of the people, in and through which the sovereign is acclaimed, sustained, entertained as sovereign. Such practices performan– performatively enact the Reflexionsbestimmung, the reflexive determination of sovereignty noted by Marx.

By, as it were, fleshing out the conceptual operation of that reflexive determination, this work produces a virtual reality that can then take on a life of its own. This is why insight into the conceptual operation, the structure of a reflexive determination, say, well, we know the king is a king just because the subjects treat him as a king. He’s not really a king.

Um, so no, you know, aha, so now he’s not a king. Um, no, it doesn’t work. Um, so insight alone fails to produce cri– the critical effects one might expect.

This was at bottom Freud’s insight with respect to the therapeutic effects of insight into the logic of an analysand’s symptoms by way of interpretation and analytic construction. For the most part, these effects simply failed to materialize. So you report, okay, this is what your problem is.

This is what your symptoms mean. They say, “Oh, wow, that’s true, that’s true.” And you just go on doing, living the same way.

Why did, why does that happen? They fail. These sorts of things fail, insight fails as an intervention into the relevant materiality of– into the subject matter at issue.

The business of a neurosis, its specific– the specific mode of busybodiness that constitutes it, requires an intervention into the labor process itself, something that Freud, for good reason, called working through. So I think this is kind of the key to the thing, you know, what does he mean Durcharbeiten? Working.

It’s a kind of work or counter-work to another kind of labor Now, these days, um, there seems to be, uh, an overall preference, um, for a good hour of working out over, you know, uh, you know, the old fifty-minute hour of working through. Um, so, uh, a-a-and I think they’re related actually. It’s like the fifty-minute hour of working through has been replaced by an hour or so of working out.

It’s cheaper. Um, over the last decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of liturgy. Not so long ago, a special issue of the journal Telos even proposed the notion of a new liturgical turn in political and social theory.

A good deal of this new work has concerned itself with ways to reanimate liturgical practices heretofore relegated to the religious sphere to find in liturgical traditions resources of resistance against the flatness of secular life artificially pumped up by what are generally characterized in, in these writings as pseudo-liturgies as the pseudo-liturgies of capitalist modernity. Among the more recent contributions to this literature, Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory stands out for a number of reasons. First, he avoids the simple, and I think facile, opposition between ostensibly genuine and patently fake liturgical practices by focusing on the dimension that both attempt to cultivate, namely glory.

He furthermore situates his investigation against the backdrop of what he, like so many other contemporary thinkers, sees as the global neoliberal absorption of political thought and action by forms of economic rationality and behavior. What Agamben develops under the heading of the archaeology of glory turns out to be a rich resource for the analysis of this development. Finally, and more generally, the liturgical turn allows us to revisit various questions previously explored under the heading of ideology.

Ideology is a concept that I think still remains too attached to the ideational, to thought and image, to the ways in which people make sense of the world, while the concept of liturgy focuses our attention on the practices in and through which they consolidate the value, and so at some level, the valor, the glory, the splendor of their social being. Now, the concern with the fate of politics and modernity is not new. Weber, Schmitt, Arendt, Adorno, even Heidegger argued that forms of economic technical administration and management of life were becoming hegemonic in the modern world.

That homo economicus was becoming fully, was coming to be fully displaced or absorbed. Um, I’m sorry, that homo economicus was coming to fully displace or absorb homo politicus. Some of the names of this hegemony, names signaling an ostensibly post-political age, are familiar.

Arendt called it the social. Adorno spoke of the administered world. Heidegger used a nearly untranslatable, untranslatable, untranslatable as word, das Gestell.

More recently, Alain Badiou has coined the term democratic materialism. And one can think of Nietzsche’s notion of the last man, um, as basically the, the post-political man, whose life is just about the management of life, the optimization of life called happiness. Agamben, for his part, follows Foucault’s lead by framing investigations, um, as one into the forms of governmentality, you know, Foucault’s word, that ostensibly supplant the juridico-political field of sovereignty and modernity.

So now a brief section on Foucault. Foucault formulated this transformation in a number of different ways and a v– and on a variety of different levels, levels, perhaps most notably as the emergence of two new forms of power that he characterized as, first, the anato-a-anatom-a-anatomopolitics of the human body, and second, the biopolitics of the population. Regarding the former, Foucault speaks of discip– a disciplinary physics of power that supplants what had once been thought of as the magical effects of the king’s touch.

Quote, “The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power, a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations.” So you hear, like already, a dispersion of, um, something that is concentrated in the body of the king into a field of experts, who, in a way, now touch the, the, the, the, the multiplicity of bodies, um, or of, you know, in the population. With respect to the biopolitical administration of population, the body of the king figures equally as Foucault’s key point of departure.

In his lectures in ni- in- at the Collège de France in 1975, ’76, for example, he opens his account of the post-revolutionary embourgeoisement of the nation-state, and so the emergence of the defining sphere of modern political economy, civil or bourgeois society, with remarks that could have been taken from Kantorowicz’s King’s Two Bodies. “What makes a nation,” he writes, “is the fact that its members,” quote, “all have a certain individual relation,” both juridical and physical, with the real, living, and bodily person of the king.” ” It is the body of the king in his physical-juridical, hyphenated, in his physical-juridical relationship with each of his subjects that creates the body of the nation.

When he says in this, you know, the physical-juridical, this is… I’m saying the somatic normative, the, the jointure of the somatic and the normative. Although he, of course, never puts it this way, as I see it, Foucault’s investigations lead us to conclude that the threshold of, of modernity is marked by the massification of the physical juridical flesh of the king.

Its dispersion into populations, which for that very reason, must be placed in the care of biopolitical administration. What this means is that whenever he speaks about the object of biopolitics, man as species, populations, he is also, although never explicitly, addressing, addressing the fate in modernity of the royal remains of political theology, the dimension of the flesh in its new modern form, masses of busy bodies. Biopolitics is always mass politics in the sense of dealing with the massive presence of a sublime object, the virtual reality of a fleshy mass now circulating in and agitating the life of the people, which means in turn that political economy, the domain that Foucault came to see us as a central site of biopolitical administration, acquires a s- a, a certain sacramental dimension, the aspect of a mass.

It is no surprise then that Marx would discover metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties in the midst of our life with commodities. In another series of lectures concerned with the shift from classical sovereignty to biopolitical forms of administration, we say from reigning to governing, Foucault writes, quote, “When it became possible not only to introduce population into the field of economic theory,” but also into economic practice, when it became possible to introduce into the analysis of wealth this new subject, this new subject-object,” and he hyphenates, “this new subject-object with its demographic aspects,” but also with the aspect of the specific role of producers and consumers, owners and non-owners, those who create profit and those who take it.” When the entry of this subject-object of population became possible within the anal- within the analysis of wealth, with all its disruptive effects in the field of economic reflection and practice, then I think the result was that one ceased analyzing wealth and a new domain of knowledge, political economy, was opened up.

Okay, so it’s only with this subject-object injected into the population that a new domain of knowledge, political economy, was opened up that is in excess of the analysis of the wealth of nations. And, um, what Foucault is saying here, I’m suggesting, is that the subject matter of political economy includes an uneconomic, uneconomic subject matter, hyphenated, the disruptive force of which derives precisely from its uncanny materiality, its status as gespenstische Gegenständlichkeit. The thrust of Marx’s critique of politi-political economy is precisely that classical political economy fails to grasp this subject-matter, that it remains a science of immanence that fails to grasp the strange excess or surplus coursing through the field of immanence.

Okay, so there’s– so the critique of political economy is an attempt to draw our attention to this strange surplus. Foucault calls it the subject-object. I’m calling it the subject-matter, hyphenated.

There’s something in excess that belongs neither to the field of immanence, nor is it simply a link to transcendence. It’s something else, and we need new language to, to, um, hold this dimension, keep it in play, um, and not allow it, you know, to, to fall simply into the field of immanence or to say it’s a link, it’s, it belongs to transcendence. There is another passage in the same series of lectures that helps to capture a crucial aspect of Fu- of Foucault’s engagement with the subject matter of political economy or what he refers to as its subject-object.

Addressing the history of the institution police, Foucault recalls that beginning in the 17th century, that word ref-refers broadly, quote, “To the set of means by which the state’s forces can be increased while preserving the state in good order.” Now, of course, in 18th and 19th century Germany, Polizeiwissenschaft in German,

(breath)

um, comprehend-comprehended the ray– the array of matters we now refer to as public policy. That’s what Polizeiwissenschaft was. Foucault goes on to note the use in various sources, quote, “Of a rather strange word for describing the object of police, namely splendor.”

Quote, “What is splendor?” “It is both the visible beauty of the order and the brilliant, radiating manifestation of a force.” “Police, therefore, is in actual fact the art of the state’s splendor as visible order and manifest force.”

You never knew this is what, what the police really were worried about, didn’t you? One might say that the fundamental charge, or better surcharge, of Polizeiwissenschaft was the protection and administration, not so much of the Herrschaft of the state as its Herrlichkeit, not so much its rule as its glory. It is precisely this strange subject-object of governmental administration that is central to Agamben’s book, The Kingdom and the Glory, which is translated in German as Herrschaft und Herrlichkeit.

Now, the first half of, of Agamben’s book… I’m, I’m trying to read, like, a scribble, so well, so, um, I’m, I’m gonna, I, I’m trying to cut a bit. The first half of Agamben’s book, um, concerns itself, consists of, of a study of the semantic history of the word oikonomia in the early church, the aim of which is to show that the dilemma I have dre-addressed, um, in terms of the jointure of the somatic and the s– and the normative, is what concerns the fathers of the church, of which concerns the church fathers with respect to divinity. The identity and difference between God’s being and His providential action, between His substance and salvific prac-praxis.

The argument is that the church fathers elaborated this jointure relation precisely as an administ– an adminis-administrative or economic one. So the, the first half, it’s, it’s like it’s, it’s mind-numbing in its philological exhibitionism, um, but it is an attempt to, to kind of, um, to show that this problem of the jointure of the, of, of, let’s say, substance and practice of, of, of being in action or what I’m calling, you know, the, uh, the somatic and the normative, um, is what the concept, the ele- the, the notion of the Trinity, the economy of the Trinity was meant to solve. Um, and so ultimately, the Trinity, elaboration of the Trinity for the Church Fathers was characterized as an oikonomia, as an, a-as, as a kind of economy.

So much of the book is dedicated to reconstructing the efforts by the Ch-Church Fathers to elaborate the Trinitarian paradigm as, um, of this economic administrative machine to guarantee the unity and difference of the Father qua transcendent substance or being of God on the one hand, and the Son understood as the visible hand of God’s redemptive action in the world on the other. The details of these efforts, along with those of the monarchian, Arian, and various Gnostic challenges they were meant to overcome, need not concern us. They largely serve to prepare the reader for Agamben’s most significant insights, namely the role, namely that, that the pole of the machine associated with the salvific governing of men and things has, as Foucault said of the police at the beginning of the seventeenth century, largely been dedicated to the cultivation of splendor, glory, Herrlichkeit.

So the, the e– the, the oikonomia, um, f– um, for, uh, for Agamben, as elaborated by the church fathers, is ultimately, uh, culminates in a f– in, in a, a, a theory of, of glory. That what is ultimately managed in the o– in this oikonomia is divine glory. Now, over the course of his Archaeology of Glory, Agamben draws on the work of several 20th-century scholars, all of whom to a greater or lessic, uh, greater or lesser extent, home in on the intimate r-relation of liturgical doxology, the ritual pla-praise and glorification of God that constitutes so much of the cultic activity of the church, and the acclamations that have historically ac-accompanied the investiture of rulers, whether ancient emperors, Christian kings, or closer to the historical experience of some of these same scholars, the German Führer.

And as Agamben reminds us, Nazi Germany produced some of the most famous acclamations in the modern period, most notably “Heil Hitler!” and “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer!” These are acclamations.

Um, or you could say, um, Nazi doxology. Now, among the people he draws on centrally are Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson, and Ernst Kantorowicz. What this archaeology of glory turns up is, as Agamben puts it, an archaic sphere in which religious and juridical action and speech become somewhat indistinguishable.

A sphere he had, he had explored up to this point with respect to the semantic field of the sacred. Quote, “If we now call glory the uncertain zone in which acclamations, ceremonies, liturgies, and insignia operate, we will see a field of research open before us that is equally relevant at, and at least in part as yet unexplored. This field is framed by two fundamental, end of quote.”

This field is framed by two fundamental questions. First, why does power, heavenly or earthly, need glory? And second, what are the modes of, what are the modes and relations of production, circulation, and consumption of glory?

Perhaps the most, most important sou-source in Agamben’s own efforts to get this new field off the ground is Eric Peterson’s nineteen thirty-five book, The Book of Angels: Their Place and Meaning in the Liturgy. It’s really, it’s a short little book. Just it’s, it’s been reissued in English translation.

It’s a wonderful little book. Just, um, Peterson argues that the liturgy, the people’s work, that makes up the Holy Mass, is best understood as, as the church’s striving to participate in the hymnical glorification of God, the doxologies, that for Peterson constitute the very being of the angels. Quote, “The angels, their authentic being is not grounded in their immobility, but in their movement, which they manage with the beating of those wings that Isaiah first describes with an unmatched power of perception.

To this beating of wings, there corresponds a distinctive gushing forth in word, in call, in song of the holy, holy, holy. In other words, the authentic being of these angels is grounded in this overflow into word and song, in this phenomenon.” End of quote.

It is for this reason that knowledge of God, theology, culminates in praise of God in liturgical doxology. Quote, “For what use are all the liturgy– or are all the virtues of the angels if their praise, their most authentic life, that for which alone they exist, that through which their innermost form of being is set to vibrate, is not attainable by human beings? Das, wodurch ihre innerste Seinsform in Schwingungen, Schwingungen gerät.

What Peterson above all emphasizes is the public and so fundamentally political character of the cultic, a, of the cultic activity of this doxological labor aimed at reproducing the frequencies that constitute the vibrant matter of angelic being. Peterson will ultimately want to claim that the peculiar theopolitical dimension of the liturgy elevates the church above all political theology by precisely appropriating the core political dimension of doxologies, their resemblance to the acclamations of rulers. By taking part in heavenly worship, one sustained by angelic, angelic doxologies, the earthly church converts political theological acclamation into Theopolitical glorification.

And this leads Peterson to the, to the strange claim that Christianity knows no political theology, only Judaism and Islam. Because the, um, the, the church basically scoops up the, um, the acclamations of the earthly city and, and absorbs them into the heavenly city. Um, Kantorowicz published his own study of ritual acclamations immediately after the war and some ten years before the publication of The King’s Two Bodies.

The study, Laudes Regiae, a study in liturgical acclamations and medieval ruler worship, focuses on the history of acclamation central to Carolingian political theology. This earlier work can, I think, be seen as a first attempt to grasp the nature of the labor that would congeal into the suppli– sublime flesh of the king’s royal physiology. This comes across above all in the treatment of the coronation of Charle– the, the coronation ceremony of Charlemagne in Rome.

Regarding this rite of royal investiture, Kantorowicz argues that the laudes are essentially constative utterances lacking in performative force and yet somehow crucial. They don’t do anything, and yet they’re indispensable. Quote: “The laudes acclamation, representing the recognition of the king’s legitimacy, was an accessory manifestation, impressive by its festal and solemn character, but not indispensable.

For legally, liturgical acclaim added no new element of material power which the king had not already received earlier by his election and coronation. By means of this chant, the church professed and publicly espoused the king in a solemn form.” However, the weight of his profession, of this profession or espousal cannot be measured by legal standards.

As I have been arguing, the weight at issue is that of the virtual reality of the flesh that enters into the composition of the king’s sublime body. The laudes, then, are king-creating powers of a special sort. Those that, to paraphrase Marx once more, flesh out the reflexive determination of the, of the being of the king and thereby cover it.

Kantorowicz seems to suggest that the vibrant matter of this flesh ultimately composed– is ultimately composed of, or at least transferred to the king by way of the sonorous mass of acclaiming voices. Quote, “The shouts of the Romans and the laudes as they then followed one after the other without a break, seemed to have formed one single tumultuous outburst of voices in which it is idle to seek the particular cry which was constitutive and legally effective. “” We might say then that what Kantorowicz later elaborated under the heading of the king’s second body is a sublimate of just such a sonorous mass, a congelation of its vibrant doxological matter.

And to anticipate what, what does Marx really do? He lis– I mean, think, remember, he listens to the chatter of commodities. He listens to what the commodities are acclaiming to one another.

And think again of, if, for those who were here, of the, um, the little Kafka fragment that I read. The sounds of the messengers yelling back and forth to one another. Um, but the king is not there, and yet they can’t stop their acclamations, their pr- you know, proclamations.

So I’m trying to link this, and, and in a certain sense, this is, what does Freud do? Freud listens. But what he’s, what he’s listening for is something that you could say are voices from the past, but voices that have congealed into a, a, a, a kind of habitus, a, a way of, uh, of moving through the world, of comporting oneself in the world.

Agamben’s fundamental insight at that is that there is no political theology of sovereignty without a theological economy of glory. No constitution of Herrschaft without the doxological production of Herrlichkeit. No Herrschaft that is not at some level entertained, unterhalten, by Herrlichkeit.

What at first appears to be a superstructural feature of a ruling state apparatus is thus essentially a strange economic base, one that produces the glorious flesh, the subject matter of the social bond. It involves a mode of production organized according to the circular logic of reflexive determinations. To put it in terms of what we might characterize by way of an allusion to Freud as the economic problem of Christianism, we could say we glorify God because he is glorious.

The glory that God’s creatures owe to God and produced through cultic praise is already an essential attribute of God. The earth is full of the glory that the faithful must return to God by way of doxologies. This work would thus appear to be a mode of God’s own self-glorification, a peculiar sort of divine auto-affection that makes use of creaturely life as its instrument or tool.

So you could hear it already, you know, the anticipation of what, of Marx’s definition of capital, self-valorization of value. So here we have the self-glorification of God that uses human doxologies as its instrumental cause, and for Marx, it’ll be the self-valorization of value, self-valorization. We have valor, self-valorization of value that needs the instrumental cause of the doxologies taking place in commodity-producing labor.

Commenting on Karl Barth’s efforts to capture the paradoxical logic of doxological labor, Agamben writes, “The circularity of glory here retains its ontological formulation. Becoming free for the glorification of God means to understand oneself as constituted in one’s very being by the glory with which we celebrate the glory that allows us to celebrate it.” This is like the reflexive determination gone mad, you know, just rotating.

One begins to see the obsessional pattern and rhythm here, doxology’s resemblance to what Freud characterized as the self-amplifying dynamic of the superego, and so the key to the economic problem of masochism. The ego is in some sense under constant pressure to live for the greater glory of what? Well, for the superego, to fatten its status precisely as superego.

So we could say the superego is in a certain sense where the, where the real flesh is. And the ego is working, it is working all the time producing the superego. Readers of Max Weber will recognize the patterns from his analysis of the spirit or specter of capitalism.

As Weber shows, the paradoxes of glory converge with the logic of predestination in Calvinism, according to which not only the dispensation of grace, but its withholding as well, serve as manifestations of divine glory, which in turn calls on us to respond with acts of thanksgiving and glorification. Now, if there is a superego dynamic, that is it. As Weber puts it, quote, “All creation, including, of course, the fact as it is, as it undoubtedly was for Calvin, that only a small proportion of men are chosen for eternal grace, can have any meaning only as means to the glory and majesty of God.

There is nothing that does not testify to the glory of God, and for that very reason, we must dedicate our lives to the further glorification of God.” For the reformers, a Christian life was dedicated to God’s glory to live and work ad maiorem Dei gloriam. As Weber argues, work itself thereby becomes a form of what we might call the doxology of everyday life.

To use Peterson’s terms, our work must cease ceaselessly resonate as a response to a calling with the vibrating being of the order of angels. Now, readers of Robert Walser’s little novel, Jakob von Gunten, might recall Jakob’s characterization of the life of his fellow students at the Institut Benjamenta, where they are training to become valets, butlers, valets. As if trying to name the angelic purity of the labors– of labors approaching a zero degree of content, Jakob writes, writes, It’s “Wir vibrieren.”

We vibrate. And, and with a, a strange jouissance, wir vibrieren. Against this background, Agamben’s own philosophical and political project, and they are inseparable for him as far as I could see, emerges as a fundamentally paradoxological one.

It consists of various attempts to induce a general strike in the doxological apparatus, our glory-producing labor, which he sees as the striving to capture in a separate sphere a fundamental inoperativity, a sabbatical otium, marking the absence of a purpose and destination proper to human life. It is a matter of suspending our incessant negotiations, of unplugging from what keeps us in the business of being busybodies, of vibrating in the sense I’ve been elaborating here. What is at stake in the doxology, in the doxologies and ceremonials that seem merely to accompany power is, he suggests, a fetishistic disavowal of what does not work.

We could say, of what does no work. In human life, they present so many manic attempts to capture, incorporate, inscribe in a separate sphere what he calls the inoperativity that is central to human life. The flesh wound that can’t be countenanced is not, as Freud would have it, at the place of the missing maternal phallus, but rather of a missing task or telos proper to human life.

Quote, “The oikonomia of power places firmly at its heart in the form of festival and glory, what appears to its eyes as the inoperativity of man and God, which cannot be looked at.” And this, of course, Freud says what cannot be looked at is the, in the fetish, is the missing maternal phallus. Um, but for, for Agamben, it’s a, an, a lack of a, of a telos proper to human life.

Human life, he– I continue with the quote, “is inoperative and without purpose, but precisely this absence of aim makes the incomparable inoperativity, operosità, operosità of human– of the human species possible. Man has dedicated himself to production and labor, and labor because in his essence, he is completely devoid of work because he’s, he is the sabbatical animal par excellence. What is here translated as operativity, o-o-operosità, might better be rendered as busyness or even busybodiness, a neologism al– that also, I thinks– I think captures much of what Heidegger is after in his phenomen-phenomenology of everyday Dasein and his exis-existential mode of falling.

It is, and you think of all the, the attributes, chatter, distraction, sort of busyness, Geschäftigkeit, um, Besorgen as opposed to really Sorge. Um, so constantly, you know, running errands, basically like those messengers, um, without the king. It is, I would suggest, this mode of busyness that calls forth Bartleby’s famous, and I would say paradolo- paradoxological, “I prefer not to.”

So the “I prefer not to” is not a preference, not– It’s not “I prefer not to” work, it’s I prefer not to be a busy– not to do that work, that, that surplus work. Those, um, I prefer not to engage in the doxology of everyday life.

Um, now Bonnie yesterday in her response, um, you know, offered another term that– another, another kind I, I’d say of, of para-of paradoxological intervention, which would be a way of manifesting, um, not Sabbath inoperativity, but what you call Sabbath power. And, um, and she gave an example of that in, um, in her reading of Moby Dick.

So what I have been calling the flesh covers, for Agamben, what the tradition has thought under the heading of eternal life, which he suggests is the name of this inoperative center of the human, of this political substance of the Occident, that the machine of the economy of glory, glory ceaselessly attempts to capture within itself. Recalling Žižek’s formulation concerning the reign, um, the reign of law, glory, we could now say, is one of the names of the substance that, as he puts it, stops up and thus conceals the law’s vicious circle. What Žižek calls the illegal violence that founds the reign of law is for Agamben, a manifestation of the struggle to capture the inoperative center of the human.

What both thinkers are homing in on is what I have been calling the subject matter of political economy. It is the matter at issue in what, in the materialist tradition inaugurated by Marx, is referred to as class struggle. So in other words, I’m saying that class struggle is… can be thought of, I mean, obviously it also means a struggle over the, over the, the mode– the, the, the, the, the, um, the means of production.

But I wanna say that we have to think of it also as a struggle around the, um, the doxological machine. Um, this other kind of… this other mode of production, this other kind of production process intervening into that. It is, it is one I think that will never fully shed those metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties that Marx discovered in our life with commodities.

The task then is not, as Derrida has already argued, to exorcise the spectral materiality, the surplus of immanence at work in the commodity, but rather to find new ways of elaborating it, giving form to it, perhaps even formalizing it. And this I, this is how I understand Lacan’s so-called mathemes. I think that Lacan’s mathemes are an attempt to formalize this doxological labor that, for him, is what unconscious mental activity is at work, is, is at work doing.

Um, it’s a way of formalizing it. My s– my own sense is that literature as well as literary criticism and theory offer us rich, uh, uh, rich and crucial sites of such elaboration. And I, you know, I tried to do this a little bit with my reading of, um, of, uh, Merchant of Venice and Odradek and Bonnie, I think, did this with her reading of Moby Dick.

I think that literature and, and thinking about literary language, what literature can do, I think is, is an incredible resources for what I’m calling paradoxological thinking. Um, okay. Uh, what, what do we say?

Um, oh, I have… I could sp– I have a little time, right? Five?

Um, Really? I kind of started now. Okay.

Um, all right. Um, all right, I, that maybe I’ll just stop. I was…

I, I have, you know, a few pages about, um, I obsessively returned to Benja- to the, the, the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem about Kafka, um, and I, I do that here again. Um, but I guess the, the main point, the, the… One of the disagreements between them, um, has to do whether or the, um, Scholem says that the, um, what, what makes Kafka’s universe, um, what’s particular to Ka-Kafka’s universe is that there is, um, there appears– there’s revelation but at the zero, zero level of content.

He calls it das Nichts der Offenbarung. He says revelation gilt aber bedeutet nicht. It’s v–

It’s, it’s valid, it has validity but no meaning. And, um, and he argues that Benjamin completely mi- you know, just misunderstands this. He just doesn’t get it.

And Benjamin, on the other hand, is arguing that this residue of, let’s say, the theology– of the theological has been fully absorbed into the life, into the everyday life of the people as lived at the foot of the Castle Hill in the novel “The Castle.” In other words, they have been– they’re busybodies. Um, and, um, Benjamin therefore thinks that a p– that engaging with Kafka’s text in the right way and seeing all, seeing the ways that there are hints in Kafka’s work of an intervention, of a transformation of this busybodiness, um, a kind of Umkehr, a conversion, which Benjamin, um, refers to as turning life into Schrift, a kind of a, uh, an attempt to, in a certain sense, return this busybody, well, spell it out.

Spell it out. Spell it out of the body. Spell it out of the body.

Spell the spell out of the body. Um, so, um, this is, I think, you know, the gist of, of their disagreement. So in a certain sense, the disagreement is Scholem wants to hold onto a dimension of transcendence, and Benjamin s- is, is thinking more in terms of a surplus of immanence that has to be spelled out.

And so it’s a post-theological reading of Kafka that nonetheless takes into account, takes cognizance of this excess, of this agitation, but one that, that can no longer be addressed in s– in, in theological terms, but needs a new, a new language, a new mode of engagement. And, and recalling that Benjamin wanted to think of himself, thought of himself as a literary critic, I think he ultimately thought that literary criticism proper is the practice of converting this, the, the transformation, the turn of this surplus of immanence into writing, of spelling it out of, of our everyday life into a kind of writing. Okay, I’ll stop there.

(applause)

[00:58:34] MODERATOR:
Thanks very much, Eric. Lots of mysteries still to solve in the next, uh, hour and a half, uh, or an hour and fifteen minutes, and then on to tomorrow. Uh, Peter Gordon is our first, uh, commentator, and it is a particular pleasure to introduce him this afternoon.

Uh, he introduced himself to me back in 1988, uh, when he was about to graduate from Reed College and was shopping around for a graduate program in European intellectual history. Luckily, we were able to attract him here to Berkeley, and a few years later, he became Dr. Peter Gordon with a splendid dissertation on Martin Heidegger and Franz Rosenzweig. It soon became his first book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, which was in fact proudly published by the UC Press, uh,

Weimar Now series in two thousand three, and then quickly became the winner of no fewer than four major awards. Since that time, Peter has rapidly established himself not only as a leader in the field of European intellectual history, but also as a lucid and respected contributor to current debates in continental philosophy. Just this past spring, in fact, he served as visiting professor of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he gave lectures in French on Adorno.

His second book, second also prize-winning book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, published in two thousand and ten, cemented his reputation as a gifted interpreter of difficult ideas, understood both in their historical context and on their own terms. He’s also emerged as one of, uh, his generation’s most industrious intellectual impresarios, with no fewer than four edited or co-edited volumes published or in press, and so he tells me, yet another, uh, on the– in the planning stage. And he is also finishing, uh, a manuscript himself, uh, on the vexed issue of secularization, which has become, as you know, an absolutely central question for historians as well as philosophers.

Peter Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History and Harvard College Professor, and that latter title is given for excellence in teaching in the Department of History and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Now, this means, and this is my own sort of private way into this, uh, that he now occupies, roughly speaking, the position of H. Stuart Hughes, who was my own doctoral supervisor more than forty years ago. So the son has now displaced the father’s father.

This is a genealogical tangle that only a psychoanalytic critic like Eric Santner could attempt to explain. Or, and I think this is probably more fruitful, he can focus his attention on Peter’s response to his lectures, which somehow I think will be a more fruitful thing to do. In any case, it’s a special pleasure to cede the floor to Peter Gordon for this afternoon’s first comment.

(applause)

[01:01:48] PETER GORDON:
Thanks very much, Marty. Um, I wanna begin by thanking the Tanner Committee, uh, for their invitation, and Eric Santner in particular for his stimulating lectures. Uh, I’ve known Eric for many years now, and his uniquely searching intellect never ceases to impress me.

It’s therefore an honor to comment on his lecture today, though I must confess it’s also a challenge, in part because the species of theoretical discourse to which Eric has contributed lies at some remove from my own habitual terrain. Whether I can offer constructive insights into Santner’s project is an open question. What I can do, perhaps, is make explicit some of the underlying premises of that project, and maybe in doing so, I can mark the point at which our paths diverge.

It may help to sketch in a rather flat-footed way some of the broader streams of contemporary theory in which Santner’s work is situated. Now, if I understand him correctly, Eric, I hope he doesn’t mind, I’ll call him Eric. I know him very well.

Eric stands somewhere in the contested field defined by the recent intersection of post-Marxism and political theology, with the added complication that his work borrows freely from both psychoanalysis and modern literature. He participates in, but also extends, the new post-Schmittian trend that articulates a critique of bourgeois normativity by alerting us to the spectral persistence of political theological powers within the mechanisms of liberal democracy. His effort draws much of its inspiration from Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 masterpiece, The King’s Two Bodies, which detailed the complex passage of the Christological distinction between the corpus naturale and the corpus mysticum into the medieval political theological doctrine of double sovereignty, as illustrated most famously perhaps in Shakespeare’s Richard II, and of course, ritualized in the slogan, “The King is dead.

Long live the King.” “Kantorowicz himself proposed the” ingenious idea that the theme of an eternal sovereignty survived the age of the monarchs and took up a new home in the emergent early modern and modern discourses of popular sovereignty. This idea also inspired the theoretical inquiries of Santner’s last book, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty from two thousand and eleven, and it’s a project he now continues in his presentations for the Tanner Lectures yesterday and today.

Now to be sure, Santner dissents from the classical literature on political theology in many respects. I don’t wanna emphasize… I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna suggest at all that he’s in agreement with Schmitt.

For Schmitt, political theology furnished a critical instrument for revealing the occluded, but constitutive moment of authoritarian decisionism internal to liberal structures of power. Schmitt was keen to reveal this quasi-theological dimension because in his view, its presence showed that political power, even in a democratic regime, cannot rest itself free of an authoritarian core in the manner that l-liberal apologists imagined. When Schmitt said that modern concepts of the state were secularized theological concepts, this dictum aimed to expose the myth of a purely secular liberalism.

To mark the theological provenance of secular political concepts was implicitly to criticize the self-professed autonomy of liberal rationalist theories of state. For Kantorowicz, the rationalist pretension in Kant’s self-leg-legislative ideal, we could say, is thereby exposed as the modern precipitate of a medieval metaphysics. Authoritarianism, in other words, turns out to be the animating core of the modern liberal doctrine of self-authorization.

And the theological genealogy of modern political concepts thus calls into question the legitimacy of the modern age, to use Blumenberg’s phrase. Now, Santner approaches this argumentation from the left. He performs a critique of the persistent political theological structures that, in his view, continue to underwrite modern capitalism.

At the same time, Santner follows Marx in claiming that the fetishistic hold of the commodity is due to its metaphysical or quasi-theological form. Then, uniting the political theological critique of modernity with the critique of political economy, Santner concludes syllogistically that we can only understand capitalism if we trace out the continuities that link modern political economy back to the political theology of the Ancien Régime.

(clears throat)

Now, the union between these two modes of critique produces what I take to be a certain dissonance in Santner’s argument. It’s not insignificant, of course, that political-theological critique insists on the autonomy of the political as the privileged sphere of human meaning. In the closing pages of his nineteen twenty-two monograph on political theology, Schmitt explicitly condemns Marxism as a symptom of a metastasizing economic reason that threatens authentic political existence from all sides.

Historical materialism, meanwhile, denies precisely the autonomy of the political, and even condemns its theoretical isolation as another specimen of bourgeois fetishism. It’s therefore unclear if one can sustain the bond with Marxian theory while also declaring the distinctively medieval idea of Christological kinship as the unique structuring force behind all modern social order. Now, to be sure, Santner departs from both Schmitt and Kantorowicz insofar as his argument must characterize the theological inheritance of modernity as something illicit.

In homage to the Marxian critique of commodity fetishism, Santner wishes to expose not the theological logic that constitutes all sovereignty, but merely a theological mystification that, I take it, should ideally be overcome. Originally, the political theological critique of liberalism was meant to expose the impossibility of any modern political order that tried to suppress its dependency on quasi-divine decision. The Marxist critique, by contrast, and I take it Santner as well, aims to dissolve the last residues of enchantment.

The alliance between political theological analysis and Marxian criticism is therefore perturbed insofar as historical genealogy in the mode of political theology works to solidify the very continuity between past and present that materialist criticism aims to disrupt. What political theology sees as an eternal structure of theological authoritarianism in all social arrangements is, from the Marxian perspective, a mystifying and historically contingent ideology that humanity could, under proper conditions, leave behind. Now, one could ask whether that dissonance is productive or disabling, and that’s a question to which I have no certain answer.

Still, I think it’s worth noting that for Santner, theology itself retains something like an eternalized hold in the logic of modern capitalism. Appealing to Max Weber, Santner writes that the logic of cap– of Calvinism informed the Protestant ideal of work dedicated to the glory of God. Though Santner does not mention that according to Weber’s argument, it was not the logic of Calvinism per se, but rather its specific social-historical modification by later Calvinist preachers that enabled the sacra-sacral-sacralization of capitalist action.

This point reminds us that theology never enjoys the self-identical immunity from time that its apologists claim, but is instead subject to human transformation and reconstruction. To occlude history in political theological analysis grants too much power to the Schmittian view of modernity as fatal, fatally enthralled to an eternal God. Even religious doctrine, in other words, has a social history, and there’s no one thing that we could call religion or theology.

Santner invokes, of course, not just Marx, but also Weber, so as to affirm the continuity between early modern religion and modern capitalism. Now, Sander is keen to note that this continuity describes a trial of secularization that is not a trial of disenchantment. The theological structure of the commodity reminds us, he s- he claims, that disenchantment has never happened, and that secularization has the meaning of transfer rather than dissolution.

Secularization for Santner, and these are his words, is mutation or transition. And here the argument follows not just Derrida’s hauntology, but also Weber himself, who observed that the theological idea of a calling or beruf has not disappeared entirely, but rather prowls around in our lives like the ghost of a once-living belief. For s- for Santner as well, theology haunts capitalism like an inheritance or as an afterlife.

Theology, in other words, has never yet gone away. It merely underwent a process of diffusion into the capillaries of the capitalist marketplace. The result is that peculiar disorder of the modern economic order, which Santner characterizes in a pathologizing language that one might expect to find not in the economist’s lexicon, but in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

Our ostensibly disenchanted world, Santner claims, vibrates with a certain surplus of demand. We are driven to work, or more precisely, it is our very bodies that are overburdened with busyness and stress. Now this, if I understand Santner correctly, is our current predicament.

Now, I think we might worry whether this very original interpretation of contemporary life misses the rationalist universalist structure of historical materialist criticism itself. We might even worry that Santner’s analysis has not taken sufficient care to inoculate itself against the Schmittian critique of modernity, and it thereby and it therefore permits the anti-modernism of that inheritance to vitiate the rational universalist logic of Marxian critique. Specifically, and this is my chief claim, one could argue that throughout his theoretical adventure, Santner discerns only the theological mystifications of bourgeois society, but not its cognitive and political gains.

Here it may be instructive to recall the dialectical character of Marxian critique itself, which is simultaneously a theory of truth and a theory of illusion, a theory of disenchantment and a theory of mystification. This is already evident, of course, in the famous lines from the Communist Manifesto, where we’re told that the bourgeoisie has played a revolutionary role in history precisely because it has, quote, “Drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor in the icy water of egotistical calculation. For exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

” End quote. The bourgeoisie, Marx concludes, has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe, and it has liquefied the fixed or fast-frozen, frozen relations of the ancien regime. In fact, it’s only with bourgeois modernity, Marx claims, that the holy is profaned, such that we can at last face with sober senses our real conditions of life.

Now, this admittedly rhetorical passage underscores the key principle in the Marxian theory of history, according to which the cognitive and social advances of bourgeois society are historically indispensable and indeed irreversible. In the passage from feudalism to capitalist modernity, our civilization undergoes a trial of disenchantment and value differentiation, one that separates out civil society as an intermediate field of transaction, formally distinct from both the affective structures of the family on the one hand, and the legal political structures of the state on the other. With this theory, which borrows a great deal, of course, from Hegel’s, uh, philosophy of right, Marx thereby distinguishes himself as a child of the Enlightenment for whom the historical achievements of bourgeois society cannot be dismissed.

(coughs)

Still, and of course, Marxism also contains a theory of mystification. As Eric reminds us in the critique of commodity fetishism from volume one of Capital,

(coughs)

Marx describes a syndrome of theological and metaphysical attributes that overburden the commodity structure in the same manner as a fetish that is endowed by its maker with an illicit power. Marxism, in other words, is both a theory of mystification and a theory of demystification, and it’s both of these at once. And it must be both at once, since it comprehends the structure of historicized social relations in a dialectical form that resists one-sided mythologies of both apologetic rationalism and religious fatalism.

Its critical stance is also, of course, self-reflexive. Marxism absorbed the historical principle of demystification into its own critical practice. By making the profanation of social relations the historical precondition for Marxism.

Marxist theory itself, that is, the critique of political economy, becomes an historical possibility only once the economy has emerged as a distinctive sphere. Now, as I understand him, Eric wants to trace out not just the transition from political theology to a political economy. He also wants to trace out, trace out this transition as a theologico-political complex that emerges as the theological is sublated into the economic.

The relation, in other words, is not one of replacement, but infusion. The energies society once invested in the body of the king and the glory of this worldly sovereignty are distributed today into the bloodstream of the ex-exchange economy, and this results in what Santner calls the vibrations of commodity fetishism. The ambiguity in this argument, in my view, derives from its attempt to effect an un-unlikely synthesis of Marxian critique and political theology.

The homage to historical materialism borrows from political theology a strain of anti-modernism that denies the moment of enlightenment that belonged to historical materialism as its rightful inheritance. To be sure, no historical materialism worth that title can simply endorse progress without recognizing with Benjamin the suffering that makes progress possible. And this is precisely why Marxist historical materialism exhibits a dialectical structure.

Without reducing either the of these two movement movements, it articulates both a theory of mystified social relations and a principled view that rational c-critique can help to dismantle just that mystification. It comprehends both a critique of Enlightenment ideals and a drive to realize the Enlightenment’s own unrealized ideal of a life beyond the Ancien Régime. In Habermasian terms, we could say the ideals of bourgeois society are at once ideological and more than ideology.

This, incidentally, was also the dialectical core of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, where he understands bourgeois legal political emancipation as both freedom and unfreedom, both a release from mystified feudal tutelage and a reinforcement and naturalization of capitalist tutelage. Marx’s unqualified endorsement of Jewish emancipation is otherwise unintelligible. Now, in this respect, I fear that Eric incorporates only one moment of the Marxian narrative with the result that secularization is structured in his argument not as a dialectic, but only as a reinforcement of capitalist unfreedom, a reinforcement that is solidified to such a degree that it only reveals itself in our theoretical language with metaphors of embodiment of the biological and the somatic.

The somatic stress of capitalism as an experiential order gains in drama with the distress we may feel, um, and I felt it yesterday, when Eric reminds us that our own bodies are in fact teeming with microorganisms. Um, but we’re in Berkeley, things are organic. Maybe, you know, th-that’s not bad, maybe.

Um,

(cough)

Still, the irony of such language is that it does everything to suggest not the social contingency of oppression, but its carnal finality. The proposal that we break from this condition of somatic unrest becomes nearly inexplicable, except as a radical break that recapitulates the shock of theological revelation, but only in the inverted form of a sudden awakening from religion. The unfortunate consequence is that theological critique becomes not just a precondition, but something like a substitute for economic transformation.

The critique of political economy re-reverts back, you could say, to the left Hegelian critique of religion that Marx had tried to overcome. Now, a paragan– a parenthetical remark before I conclude. I wonder whether Santner’s reconstruction of Marxism hasn’t also missed the emancipatory and rational content of religion itself.

For Santner, religion names only the idolatry that was the original object of religious criticism. But the line of critical theory that runs from Adorno and Horkheimer through Habermas would remind us that there may be more rational and emancipatory content, both in bourgeois and religious principles, than Santner allows. Disregarding this content, the political theological critique of political economy runs the risk of consuming its own energies, leaving us with little more than the quasi-therapeutic discourse of unplugging from our too busy lives.

So now to conclude, whatever our views on theology, we would do well to remember that the left Hegelian critique of theology may be unnecessary, but it’s surely not a sufficient condition for the dismantling of the commodity form. To fix our attention to an excessive degree on the theology behind capitalism is, to paraphrase Adorno, to reify the critique of reification itself. It misreads social and economic pathology as psychopathology, and leaves the former intact even while it devotes itself, with great eru erudition of course, to theorizing the extravagant neuroses of the bourgeoisie.

I’m struck by the fact that in Eric’s remarks, the critique of commodity fetishism has been split off from the critique of economic exploitation. A sign perhaps of the diremption in bourgeois experience, and perhaps in the experience of theorists like us, between the realm of exchange that we all inhabit here and, uh, that other realm of labor occluded from our eyes or exported overseas that makes this exchange possible. I’m tempted to say that this theoretical de-demarche symptomizes what has happened not only in the history of capitalism, but also in the history of readings of capital.

If the exploitation of labor is dispatched to the margins of theory, the idea of fetishism is itself fetishized. That is, it’s dissociated from the economic injustice it was meant to explain. At the end of the day, though there’s never, of course, an end of the day for such discussions, my fear is that this line of argumentation may turn us away from the critique of political economy and may ally us once again with the left Hegelians who confined their energies to the critique of religious consciousness.

But that’s where Marx ca– first came in.

(applause and cheering)

[01:23:24] MODERATOR:
Many thanks, Peter. Uh, our third speaker, our third commentator is Hent de Vries. When Hent de Vries first visited Berkeley, my recollection was a talk, uh, that, uh, I think I sponsored back in 1989.

It would not have seemed likely that he was as prescient a canary in the mine as he has turned out to be. That is twenty-five years ago, the revival of the time-honored conversation between philosophy and religion seemed a long shot, uh, with only a few indications of how vibrant it would become in our own time. Hent de Vries’s dissertation for the University of Leiden, which came out in that year, in 1989, in German, under the title “Theologie in Pianissimo: Zur Aktualität der Denkfiguren Adornos und Levinas”, was finally translated into English as Minimal Theologies in 2005.

I’ve always liked the, uh, German title, Theologie in Pianissimo, a bit better, but both, I think they do their job. In the interim, he published two other major works, uh, which should need to be translated, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion of 1999, and Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to, uh, Derrida, which came out in 2002. In these texts, he explored with great hermeneutic sensitivity what Kierkegaard had once called the horror religiosus in all of the ways that phrase can be understood.

Drawing on his matchless command of both German and French theory, as well as his familiarity with the Anglo-American tradition, and you know, when you come from a small country like Holland, uh, it gives you an enormous advantage in the struggle to avoid the provincialism of the great intellectual powers. Uh, drawing on his familiarity with all of these traditions, he became a leading voice in the international discussion of such subjects as political theology and the limits of secular reason. By the time he came to serve as chair of the Future of the Religious Past, which was an interdisciplinary program sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, something that had a budget of over five million euros and which led to five very hefty collective volumes.

Now I gather there are two more en route. What had begun pianissimo had clearly ended on a fortissimo note. And as his role chairing the Future of the Religious Past demonstrates, Hent has also been a very avid institution builder.

He held the Chair of Metaphysics and its history in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam from 1993 to 2002, and was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, ASCA. Uh, Hent was also Directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Since 2003, he’s held a joint appointment as professor of the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University.

Since 2007, he holds the, uh, Russ Family Chair in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and the Sciences at Hopkins, and is now also director of its Humanities Center, and will soon, in fact, take on the role, uh, this takes, I guess, five years to do it, uh, of director of the School of Criticism Theory at Cornell. He’s gonna do it for the next five years. And currently, he’s completing several book-length studies, including a trilogy on the subject and politics of global religion in an age of new media.

So what began pianissimo is indeed fortissimo, and I’m delighted to have him, uh, deliver the third response to Eric Santner’s lectures. Thank you.

(applause)

[01:27:07] HENT DE VRIES:
Good afternoon. I would like to thank the University of California at Berkeley, the members of the Tanner Lectures Committee, Professor Santner, and my two fellow commentators for this wonderful occasion to be here at Berkeley. My greatest appreciation, as always, to Professor Martin Jay for his kind words.

I feel deeply honored to be part of this week’s conversation and the fresh as well as provocative thinking. It has already begun to inspire. The first set of my comments this afternoon will focus mainly on the second rich and suggestive lecture which we have just heard, as this is my primary assignment today.

I will not repeat Professor Santner’s subtle reasoning, telling examples, and overall claims, but instead prefer to begin in medias res and address, so as to eventually also challenge, a few premises underlying his beautifully articulated lectures. That these lectures are an integral part of a larger body of thought and writing, and one for which I have the highest respect, not least since it analyzes problems with which I often felt I was familiar, only to realize that these can be recast in a stunningly original register that forces me at least to revisit so many of my own long-held assumptions and all too hastily drawn conclusions. All this goes without saying, and so does my appreciation of the unique kind of writing and singular idiom that we have all come to recognize as Professor Santner’s signature style across a large and increasingly inf-influential body of work, if I at least can still say so.

What I would like to discuss and question, however, is something else. It is the guiding thought that organizes these talks and indeed much of Professor Santner’s published work. Namely, that there is such a thing as a, quote, “afterlife” “of political theology in secular modernity,” end of thought.

Quote, “Whose distinctive, if not necessarily metaphysical or theological features we can try to delineate. Here, for example, in the vestiges of a political economy, indeed, a going about our business more broadly, somatically and normatively, that has come to determine much in our forms of life, whether we realize and appreciate this or not. Now, to put all my cards on the table upfront, I’m not quite sure how one would develop this thesis more fully than Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx and elsewhere has done.

When he replaces ontology, including the historical materialism, determinism, and humanism of the late, no less than early Marx, with the haunting meandering of concepts and practices with no further fundamentum in re. And also, I’m not sure that the semblance of a move beyond it is not a relapse into the dogmatic, dogmatic image of thought. Yet another reification, or as I would like to say, representationalist naturalism, precisely the one perhaps also one seeks to avoid.

Santner is certainly right when he surmises that the vibrant matter, problematic does not quite cut it. But I’m not sure that his alternative, namely that of creaturely life, fares any better. Whereas the first vibrant matter aims to capture relatively– a relatively re-recent sensitivity to the liveliness and agency of non-human animals, things and environments, together with the flows and fluxes and intensities of capital in our everyday life.

The second creaturely life, if I’m not mistaken, names what goes lost or resists the seemingly irrevocable processes of which these tendencies and intensities are a result. Neither one of them, however, comes to terms with the true formal, if second, call it belated, sometimes retarded nature of the virtual real of which Santner speaks in this context as well. Nor, I would add, does it offer an answer, much less a challenge to the potential havoc it wreaks, while it remains blind, deaf, in any case unattuned to the potential liberation at once material and spiritual.

That virtual materiality, accompanied by the whole archive and apparatus of tradition, including that of religion, offers as well. I would add here that there is perhaps nothing partial about this redemptive metamorphosis that Santner traces, as it is not some part or aspect or partial object that is surre-surreptitiously salvaged in the substance of value of commodities. But as it happens, often tradition in toto.

This, it would seem, in the current day and age, is the total social fact, perhaps even the very fact of reason, that we have barely begun to fathom in its pragmatic depth and in its widest of reaches. I’ve been, with this, both more and less than a shift from one form of fetishism to another, from the fetishism of persons to that of things. More and less than the transition from pre-modern to modern, or say postmodern and post-secular sovereignties as well.

There can currently be no point in locating the immaterial stuff of sovereignty, royal and other, in some new thingly location, and be it one highlighted by the labor theory of value. Precisely from a theological point of view, sub specie aeternitatis, as it were, all things and locations, like all ideas and movements, are at least now or increasingly equally close and distant in their roles as stepping stones and stumbling blocks, from their being salvageable or redemptive. And whatever re-remains of the category of substance in the reality and understanding of value, its abstractive quality cannot perhaps be one of congelation.

If one says that the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties that Marx discovered in the realm of commodities once belonged to the realm of the kind– of the king are composed, that is, of the royal remains, of the breakdown products of the political theology of sovereignty, one is, as it were, I think wrongly assuming a solidity and divisibility where in fact there is none. And lest we forget, it is one thing to say that modern or contemporary political formations are fully describable in terms of the archive and apparatus of what preceded them. It is another to assume that the present is somehow, somewhere, sometimes pieced together with parts, including body parts of the past.

I will skip here part of my remarks, um, as they would dwell, um, here somewhat on the first lecture and, um, speed on to, um, the discussion of today’s topic, paradoxological thinking. What is precisely paradoxological thinking, notably in the modes of engagement with glory that Santner develops here? Or what, as in Kafka’s case, are exercises in paradological– paradoxological thinking?

Are they, as- thinking in paradox or in paradoxes? But which one? Or which ones exactly?

There is no doubt that Professor Santner’s second lecture introduces an enigmatic signifier by adopting this very terminology, and one that, as he says, gets under the skin. But why and how does paradoxicality illuminate the subject matter at hand, most notably its fragile ontological

[01:36:32] ERIC SANTNER:
status,

[01:36:33] HENT DE VRIES:
or should we say, the complete lack thereof. As an apparent contradiction, paradox introduces a however slight disjunction between the position or method adopted, and that very same position or method when taken as such, as true value as it were. That is to say, as an indisputable principle or end term envisioned, rather than merely as a ladder that one discards.

Once one has climbed up, straight up, high and long enough to see and move well beyond, on a different, call it imminent plane, and to do so perhaps with a newly acquired plainness, speaking in the plainest of terms, albeit this time with a profitable or salutary surplus of imminence, so to speak. In Santner’s words, the reversal of perspective that it has brought about involves, and I’m quoting, “An effort to reach into the doxological machine, the machine that sustains the religious structure of capitalism, and to pull its plug, if even for a fleeting moment of sabbatical inoperativity, in which perhaps something new might be spelled out by precisely spelling out the spell cast by the doxology of everyday life.” End of quote.

Interestingly, Santner equates this motif of inversion, indeed nothing short of a, of a conversion or Umkehr, with the Benjaminian figure of the metamorphosis of life into Schrift, into scripture. Although the reasons for this iden- identification remain somewhat unclear in the finale of these marvelous lectures. For is this to say that everyday life only thus becomes legible once again and awakens from the dreamless sleep into which it was lulled by the siren song of prehistorical myth.

A myth that had reasserted its power in the dubious glory of the Christian theological resonance machine of religion as capitalism, of which William Connolly, in an altogether un-Benjaminian register, I should add, had spoken so compellingly. Needless to say, to associate spelling out the spell with a turn to Schrift, to scripture. Call it the turn or return to language at its deepest, and that means also its plain as well as literary rather than liturgical or doxological level, opens indeed up a whole new field of study, namely the literary practice and theory of the paradoxological, that might come to supplement, even if it does not necessarily supplant the Foucauldian-Agambenian archaeology of glory with its obsession with bio- or encultic or pastoral power.

I will come back to that in a moment. But paradox and paradoxology, and now that we’re discussing this, we should explain why Santner insists on this peculiar designation in this particular context. Paradox or paradoxology may further signify something near aporetic.

That is, the espousing of the coincidentia oppositorum of two contrasting viewpoints. Think of Wittgenstein’s dual aspect theory of seeing, the theory of dual aspect seeing, of the duck and the rabbit that now you see, now you don’t. That is of two visions that one may both need and want to subscribe to, even though one cannot hold them simultaneously in one single moment, just as one cannot mediate or negotiate between the two.

Indeed, paradoxology thus defined implies that the very alternation does not yield a metamorphosis, mutation, substitution, translation, transformation, or transfer of one into the other ever, and no matter how often we may be tempted to take one for the other or to reduce the other to the one. Like the logic of the presupposition, that of supplanting one perspective by the other is simply not de rigueur. And at the same time, it is a register that is constantly evoked in these two lectures.

But then to add a third moment, paradoxology is not just the speaking in paradoxes. It is also the expresses– the expression of statements that seem self-contradictory, self-contradictory, absurd or false, but that at a deeper or more factual and speculative level contain a possible truth. Paradoxology, thus conceived, is speaking truth to the power of doxology.

Para, the praise that surrounds, announces, and anoints and or baptizes sovereign, whether royal or popular power. Besides, like parapraxis in Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it does not speak to this power directly, but quite literally changes the subject and, as it were, slips right beyond it. Belittling, as it were, the sovereign lord, Signorelli, as Freud keeps forgetting this name, and who or whatever takes its place.

To say this has several consequences. If Agamben and earlier Benjamin and via him, Kafka, are indeed right, as Santner suggests at the end of his lecture, should we not ask whether the question of power, let alone bio-, cultic, and post-pastoral power is perhaps not the key to the political, just as it offers neither the first nor last word on the theological. In other words, is it not towards a rethinking of so-called weak or even soft power in Jean-Luc Marion’s recent terms of impouvoir.

That is, assuming the lack, contingency, and fragility at the very foundation of sovereignty, whether royal or popular, whether reigning or governing, that all these thinkers, and I suspect Santner himself, must somehow be well on the way. And if so, would this not be yet another lesson that the theological, religious, and political archive and apparatus may continue to teach us of its enduring afterlife, so to speak? Is this not the very paradox of the doxology of everyday life that Santner discusses with reference to Weber, and that consists in the fact that even the democrat– democracy– that even democratized materialism of busy, self-interested bodies, Paardje Alain Badiou, may yet become a testimony ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

Such that even the progressive withholding of divine grace, of there remaining a minimal rather than royal theology, still, no, indeed more and more counts as the very proof of what it would seem to negate. Just as on Santner’s reading of Foucault, the subject matter of political economy includes an uneconomic subject matter whose disruptive force derives from elsewhere, and whose theological roots can be extended and moved back in time all the way to the semantic field of divine o-oikonomia. So also Santner’s suggestive analysis of creaturely life is one that seems to push thinking indelibly in the direction of theology, which is that of the observed ultimate lack of foundation for the historical forms of life in which human life unfolds.

The lectures and much of the published work then are what I would like to think of as theoretical or perhaps even spiritual exercises in or of ontological vulnerability, through which a distinctively human precariousness, including that of its biological life, becomes, as Santner says, potentiated, amplified by way of exposure to radical contingency. However, how then this anarchic potentiation of our forms of life and the very space of meaning that they constitute, our natural history, as Wittgenstein, Witt- Benjamin might say, can in turn be historical, is far from clear. The anarchical as that which opens up to historical life forms precisely by exposing us to them, is radical and ineradicable, ontological and generic, neither ontic nor empirical.

And if this is the case, neither human existence nor language, neither, for that matter, the somatic nor the normative, nor even their inflammatory point of intersection may be its sole or even privileged locus. This much, then, one would have to grant the new materialisms. But of course, it is also the deepest of theological insights.

What materialism no less than the archaeology of glory in its Foucauldian-Agambian variety, and perhaps even the psychotheology of everyday life get wrong, is the belief, the small, nonsensical hope that one could ultimately avoid and overcome, undo or provenize, indeed miraculously work through the archaic sphere in which religious and juridical, juridical action and speech have and will always become indistinguishable. The more important question to ask then is not, quote, why does power, heavenly or earthly, need glory? End of quote.

But why would glory, divine or human, need power at all? Indeed, the modes, modalities, and moods of glory may well be the via regia of everything, of everything. The very thing in itself, or das Ding, that cannot be produced, just as it cannot be circulated or consumed.

They reveal a more or rather less than ontological weight that Santner argues with Kantorowicz’s Laudes Regiae, quote, “Cannot be measured by legal standards,” end of quote. Or more broadly, one that is non-criteriological and hence not just that of flesh. This brings me to my conclusion, which, however, I will only read if you, uh, do not tell me otherwise.

If there is, as Santner writes, a missing task or telos proper to human life, if this is our fundamental vulnerability, exposure, and answerability to the world and everything, everyone in it, our ontic ontological lack or flesh wound, as he adds, then it must follow that neither inoperativity, the sabbatical otium, What does not work, nor, for that matter, its virtual opposite. Think of Bonnie Honig’s Power Sabbat and the functional equivalents that one could think of as well. Neither inoperativity nor its virtual opposite could be it.

That is, that which is central to human life. It seems metaphysically as well as empirically false to claim then, as Agamben does and Santner endorses, that man is in essence completely devoid of work because he is the sabbatical animal par excellence. There’s good reason why the Bible pairs and contrasts six days of work with one day of Sabbath, and does not, like capitalism, eliminate the distinction between workday and holiday, workday and Sabbath, does not endorse sabbatical power.

We are precisely not asked to be either operative or inoperative all the time, as if one or other mode, modality, and mood could all by itself be again the center of the human, the political substance of the Occident. Paradoxically, this bipolarity is of the essence. But then such dual aspect of our one and multiple being, the difference matters little, also means that generically in our species and specific being, we are neither this nor that in essence or par excellence.

Put otherwise, we may well be generically indebted, and in this sense, there may be a sovereignty of debt over human life and its possibility as Heidegger’s language of thrownness, falling, and originary guilt indeed aptly captures. Without this meaning that indebtedness is moral or financial or even genetic per se. Emmanuel Levinas once said that behind the weight of capital, there lies a weight in being.

Without any further ontic determination or determinism. And we might call this the very value of value, its self-va-valorization, its conatus essendi, as Levinas often said. Proceeding well and being well in advance of any distinction or intersection of either the somatic and the normative that we may and perhaps must subsequently come up with.

The very concept and meaning of being is certainly one of those later belated determinations not to be taken for granted. In that sense, the late Richard Rorty was somehow right. Ontology is and must be seen or redefined as cultural politics.

That is, in ways and words that we must then also own up to. Paradoxology in its ongoing engagement with the tradition of political theology, political economy, and one would hope and expect much else instead, dispenses with the residual humanism and, if you like, ontological existentialism that, like royal or popular sovereignty, are merely some of the values we find among the theological remains. But it does so in the full knowledge that such dispensation partly reinstates and reaffirms what it does correctly and justly loosens up.

Santner’s paradoxologies are a brilliant exercise in that they bring out this dialectic, which is the very term, by the way, that comes to mind here, at least if taken in its open-ended and in this sense, negative Adornian understanding, and also the very concept in the Hegelian-Marxian archive and apparatus that is strangely absent in the lectures that we have just heard these two days. How such eminently rhetorical dialectic, which is both abstract and singular, indeed, deeply and movingly personal. Re-reading one’s own existence translates into concrete political subject matters, inducing a general strike, contributing to class struggle, and the like, remains, I think, an open question.

But it is a question for which we are now, thanks to Professor Santner’s strikingly original exer-ex-exercises in paradoxol-paradoxological thinking, much better prepared. Thank you.

(applause)

[01:53:05] MODERATOR:
Thank you very much, Kent. We now have many, many gauntlets thrown down, and Eric has, I guess, about fifteen or so minutes today, and then we got another crack tomorrow at addressing the, uh, extraordinarily complex welter of questions that have been, uh, uh, put to him by the three commentators. So Eric, do you wanna sit there and do it or-

[01:53:24] ERIC SANTNER:
Yeah.

[01:53:25] MODERATOR:
Or you wanna come up here?

[01:53:26] ERIC SANTNER:
Can we, um,

[01:53:26] SPEAKER 6:
maybe stand up?

[01:53:31] ERIC SANTNER:
I have a lot of papers that I, I might need to refer, I might need to refer to, so I th- I’m gonna try to, um…

I, I actually ha- I’m not really sure what to do at this moment, ’cause I have, um, some pages prepared that I was going to read tomorrow to open up the seminar, which was largely, um, which was g- uh, in which I would– I focus largely on Peter’s response, Um, and then from there, you know, try to, um, ramify out into the other two responses. Partly, this is just the, you know, the, the contingent, you know, result of the contingent fact that Peter sent me his remarks pretty early, and I had, you know, I had a long ti-

I had a longer time to think about them. And also, I feel, um, I mean, with respect to, you know, in, uh, you know, with today, I feel, um, I have a, a clearer sense of, um, you know, the differences or the, you know, the tensions between, you know, um, what I’m doing and what Peter is, is proposing than I do between what I’m doing and what, and what Hent has argued. Um, so I don’t, I don’t think I f–

I have a f– really a full handle on, um, certain aspects of Hent’s critique, but much, a much better handle, I think, on, um, Peter’s. But I would, I would like to, you know, to talk about that more tomorrow as a way to open up the broader seminar. For now, I, you know, um, maybe I could just, you know, um, say, you know, take a few stabs, um, here and there.

Um, I mean, I’ll try to, you know– And with respect to Peter, I think that, um, my main response, and I’ll, and I’ll get into this tomorrow, um, has to do with the claim that that I ultimately returned to, uh, a critique of theological consciousness, a kind of, you know, left Hegelian position, um, you know, before Marx arrived on the scene. Um, and I, I– at, at some level, I think the whole my…

You know, the whole argument was in some sense that is– that we can’t simply focus on consciousness, that that’s not the– that’s, that’s, that’s precisely what Marx and Freud are telling us, that, um, and which is why I talk, uh, a lot about the body, about the carnal, about, um, the flesh. That, um, the hold of, um, uh, cer- Uh, um, the, you know, in this case, the hold of, of our, um, uh, the hold of commodity fetishism, the hold of, uh, of the way we move, the way we enjoy, um, take pleasure, enjoy our entitlements and so on, in a particular form of life, um, are, are not, um, grounded in propositional attitudes that are either, that are, um, immediately available to consciousness or become available to consciouss- consciousness through good, you know, a lot of digging, um, where we say, “Well, okay, these are really what our commitments are, and we now to revise– we now need to revise those commitments.”

And m- my sense is that, is that that’s a lot of what Peter’s language sort of suggests, that, um, Rational critique is, um, a way of, you know, um, getting clear about what our, our commitments are, even our implicit commitments are, um, and the ways in which they, um, they, uh, implicate us in oppressive political and economic structures and then revise them. And what I’m trying to say is that there are, um, levels of, I don’t know if you wanna call it commitments that are not, that, that aren’t available in the form of, of thoughts, um, or judgments or, you know, propositional attitudes. It’s, this is what I, you know, this is the way I sh- I see the world.

And that’s also why I’ve tried to move away from ideology And, you know, to move toward this notion of lit- of liturgical, ’cause I wanna say that a lot of, let’s say, of, of, uh, of, of our commitments are, um, you know, to use Rumsfeld’s, you know, they’re not, um, um, known unknowns, they’re not, um, unknown unknowns, they’re not known unknowns, they’re unknown knowns. They’re things that we’re committed.

That are, that we are, um, that we bind ourselves to, but not in a way that’s available to consciousness. And I think that’s what Marx was trying to get at with commodity fetishism. Nobody is consciously a commodity fetishist.

Nobody… You know, we know that’s a commodity. There’s nothing, you know, no metaphysical subtleties or theological niceties and things.

Um, but we do it nonetheless. Well, where do we do it? Well, we do it, um, in our comportment, in our way of moving through the world and in, in, um, in the modes in which, um, we’re busy.

Um, and so I think that, um, rational critique, um, or, uh, well, maybe I just have to hear more about what, you know, what Peter means by that. But I think that th-the sort of the revolution in thinking that Marx and Freud introduced was that there are other levels at which critique has to intervene and that it, tha-, and that isn’t, that it, that it, that we need a new thinking, or as Freud would say, we need a robust notion of the unconscious and more importantly, of what work, of working through. In other words, you have to do something.

Uh, you know that, let’s say that if what we want to call a rational critique is, is a certain kind of doing, it’s not just, um, conceptual analysis. It’s a kind… There’s some way in which, and that’s why I think, um, literature, the engagement with literature and clearly the other arts are crucial, ’cause I think this kind of other work is something that, um, involves, um, um, sapience and sentience together.

And, um, so that, uh, you know, unbinding oneself, um, is not, um, is, is a, well, I think unbinding oneself is, um, needs to be under-grasped as a, yeah, as a kind of working through. Um, which also involves, I think, spelling out through writing, through thinking, through events like this, um, the ways in which, um, we are in our activities endorsing, um, uh, um, um, um, um, uh, endorsing things that, that are, that, that we have, that we, that we, we have no awareness of. Um, so, so part of–

And, and, uh, okay, maybe I’ll, uh, I’ll end that with w- You know, my remarks on Peter, and I’ll– maybe I’ll, I’ll, I’ll say this again tomorrow. There’s this famous joke that, um, is very popular among, um, Lacanians, um, particularly in Ljubljana.

Uh, um, um, and let me just read Žižek’s, um, version of the joke. Um, Okay, a man who believes himself to be a kernel of grain is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a kernel of grain, but a man. However, when he is cured, convinced that he is not a kernel of grain, but a man, and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling and very scared.

There is a chicken outside the door, and he’s afraid it will eat him. “My dear fellow,” says the doctor, “you know very well that you’re not a kernel of grain, but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?”

(laughter)

So in a certain sense, uh, my feeling is that, that Peter is, um, is saying that, um, right, you know, we need to know that we’re not a– you know, let’s really learn that we’re not a, a, a, a grain of, you know, a seed grain. We’re not a kernel.

Um, there’s nothing, you know, let’s– And let’s, you know, empower ourselves with that. But we need to tell the, you know, the chickens don’t know that.

And so, in a certain sense, we need to find out where the chickens are. Like, w-who are the re– where are the relevant chickens? And how to, how to, you know, in a way tell the chickens that we’re not a kernel.

And that I think is not… I don’t think that simply falls under the heading of rational critique. Um, in other words, the, the, the, the, the… Um, and, and I think at some level, you know, Marx and Freud were, um, understood that, um, these… Let’s say these commitments, I’m a colonel and, you know, I’m a colonel and not a man, um, are not simply here, but they’re in the chickens.

Um, and, and so that any critique is a critique that is, um, um, um, in a way, going internally and discovering the, um, the, the, the bindingness of the, um, the chickens out there. Um, so it’s both here… It’s–

So there’s, it’s a strange typology. That’s why I think psychoanalytic thinking is, you know, involves a strange typology. What is inside is really the, um, the, the hold of something out there, and you can’t simply intervene in here.

But that’s the way you first, in a way, get clear about, you know, the fact that you’re in relation to, uh, you know, these chickens. But that’s just, you know, that’s just the beginning. I’ll talk more about that, um, tomorrow, um, um.

Um. Um. Um, I, I, mean, there, I have a number of…

I, I’m not really sure, um, what to say with, um… there’s so many things that Arendt brought up. Um, I have to say the things that I really connected to that I thought, uh, that were ki- You know, kind of wonderful were, um…

I mean, I love the way you linked, um, what I was doing to parapraxis because I think in a certain sense, and this gets at, I think, something that, um, Peter was saying. Peter was saying that, um, in the end, uh, you know, that my somatic line, the language of the, of the somatic is a, is is in a way, involves a kind of, um, carnal finality, you know, uh, you know, that, um, rather than contingency. Now, the first thing I would say is that I’m trying to say that the, what I’m calling the carnal has a, a considerable degree of plasticity.

Um, not flexibility, but plasticity. It’s not, um… So the, the dimension of carnality that I’m talking about is precisely not biological endowment given once and for all.

It’s, it’s precisely something that’s historical, but it’s historical in its, it, it has– one has to, um, grasp the nature of this, um, of this, of this dimension of the carnal that’s neither, um, simply a fiction, you know, a set of metaphors so that they’re not metaphors of the carnal, but nor are they simply, you know, biological endowment. That’s the whole, that’s what makes this so difficult. That’s what makes, I think ultimately what makes Marx so hard really to understand, the labor theory of value, ultimately easy to misunderstand.

And I think Moishe Postone’s book is a brilliant book because it, it, it explains why Marx is so often– the labor theory is so often misunderstood. Um, because he’s not talking about just work. He’s talking about, about value-producing work.

And when I’m saying value-producing work, Producing work is doxological. And the question is intervening there. Um, so, um, now–

And the other thing that, um, that Peter says is that, um, the only way out of this, out of the, you know, the, um, let’s say the, the captivation by commodity fetishism would be through a kind of radical break. You know, almost, you know, what– something like Badiou calls a truth event. Um, and I think, I think much more modestly in terms of, let’s say, a parapraxis.

But once a parapraxis has to be seized upon, I mean, they happen all the time. They’re breaking out all the time. So there are breaks happening all the time.

But what, you know, but if they’re not seized upon and elaborated and unpacked and spelled out and cultivated in a way, then nothing happens. They just, you know, they’re just a blip. And so I, I actually think that thinking about, um, the b- the, um, you know, well, like you said, you know, s-

the Signorelli, the, you know, the par- the, the parapraxis of forgetting the name of the painter, um, is a case where there’s a kind of, you know, Freud, um, experienced a break. Now, he turned it into, you know, as, you know, Jonathan Lear puts it, he turned it into a lucky break.

That is, he developed psychoanalysis. In a certain sense, he developed psychoanalysis, out of it, which is a, a theory of how these breaks are breaking out all the time and could be seized upon, elaborated. Um, you could, you know, you, you know, to use Bonnie’s terms, you could squeeze them, squeeze something out of them together.

Um, and so there is… So I would say, yes, there is an, a notion of break that’s, that may be, you know, that I guess I am, um, committed to. But it’s not, um, I don’t think it has to be thought of in the, you know, as, as, um, uh, uh, you know, in apocalyptic terms.

In a way it’s, it’s in the micro level. And that’s why I think I’m ultimately, you know, I ultimately think that reading is a site in which these break reading and writing, a certain kind of reading and writing that, um, literary, literature and literary criticism, a certain way of doing it, um, has, um, you know, is really valuable, I mean, is really crucial. I would say at some level, um, I think what I’m trying to do is, like, re, um, reanimate, m-

You know, my field for myself, at least. You know, why, I mean, why literary criticism? What, you know, what literary criti-criticism can do.

And I think the, the, this— I think that what Benjamin, the way Benjamin talks about the conversion of, let’s say, the, the, the Kafkan busybodies, the way that the, that, um, that the surplus of immanence has become, has dominated the lives of the, the, the, the, the villagers at the, you know, at, in the village at the foot of the Castle Hill, that there’s a way of engaging with that text. and the dimension elaborated in that text, um, a way of, of… And that Kafka is already doing this in the writing of it, but the reader and the critic then takes this further.

I mean, I think that’s what, that’s why I think literary criticism, you know, has a future as what I’m calling paradoxological, um, thinking or paradoxological work. And I fully accept this idea that these are kind of spiritual exercises. Um, but they’re spiritual.

I would almost w- I wanna say they’re spectral. They’re spiritual exercises, but only in the sense, if you ke- if you, like, keep in mind that the dimension is a d- is this dimension of the flesh.

And it may be that spiritual exercises are insufficient, but acting in concert in, maybe even in the ways that Bonnie was talking about in her talk, um, are equally necessary that there is a, you know, that let’s say it’s a collaborative ongoing, you know, back and forth or even, you know, for Arendt thinking in solitude and acting in concert. The- these sorts of spiritual exercises that I’m, that I say could happen in literature and literary criticism and, um, what do , what do you wanna say?

The seminar. Um, um, that, that, that, uh, you know, that they need both. So I’ll stop there.

But I’ll, I’ll say, I th– I’ll, I’ll get us started tomorrow by reading my, you know, the longer comments to Peter.

[02:11:32] MODERATOR:
Okay. This is, uh, not an apocalyptic, but a micro break in our conversation, and we will continue tomorrow. Please come back.

Uh, lots of questions, uh, many answers. Uh, we hope the questions and answers will come together. We’ll find out tomorrow.

So be here at 4:10, and, uh, thanks very much to our speakers this afternoon.

(applause)

[00:00:00] MODERATOR:
Welcome, yikes, uh, to this third day of the Tanner Lectures. Um, I’ll be serving as the moderator for today. Professor Martin Jay has already introduced this year’s Tanner Lecturer, Eric Santner, and the three respondents, Bonnie Honig, Peter Gordon, and Hent de Vries, so I won’t do so again.

If you want to remind yourself of or read more about their remarkable work, there are program notes, um, in the program leaflet, notes on the speakers In the program leaflet. Uh, today’s program, uh, will differ from Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s, uh, sessions in assuming more of a structure of a seminar. Um, first Professor Santner will offer a response to commentaries offered on Tuesday by Bonnie Honig and on Wednesday by Peter Gordon and Hent de Vries, and then I’ll invite all four to an open discussion of the many questions that have been raised this week.

And after, uh, that open discussion, we’ll have a period of question and answers from the audience. And then we hope you’ll join us, uh, for a reception, um, Um, and that door will open up, and you will find, uh, refreshments. But first, let me invite Professor Santner, uh, to the podium.

Thank you.

[00:01:16] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Can I just do it from here?

[00:01:17] MODERATOR:
Yeah. Uh, can you just do it from there? Are you… It depends if you’re audible.

[00:01:21] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Am I off? Am I… The light is on. Shouldn’t it be on?

[00:01:25] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
We can’t hear you. I can’t hear you amplified.

[00:01:26] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
(student background chatter)

You can now…

[00:01:27] MODERATOR:
Yes. Yeah?

[00:01:28] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Okay. Wow. There we go.

Okay. Yeah, because it’s a seminar. Um, so f-first of all, I wanna thank the Tanner Committee again, the University of, of California at Berkeley, and, um, particularly the friends on the committee, um, Marty Jay and an old acquaintance, Jay Wallace, um, along, along with everyone else.

Um, I, I realize that one of the things that, that makes this,

(clears throat)

this, um, this discussion, you know, interesting but difficult, is that we’re talking about– Uh, the question is: How do you change someone’s mind about what it is for things to change? You know, it’s like we’re talking about d-you know, like historical change, um, big historical changes, big historical shifts.

And, and we’re talking about changing, you know, people’s minds about what that kind of change is. And then which also raises the question: What is the difference between these kinds of change? Like, what does it really happen to ch– when you change your mind?

Ca- and, and part of me wonders, you know, and, and, um, honestly if, like, uh, an academic forum like this, you know, a Tanner lecture and then responses and then, you know, something like this, is actually a kind of place where you do change your mind, or if it’s a place where you kind of, you know, this is what I think, this is what I think, this is what I think, thank you. And, and so that it’s, um, so it’s really unclear what changing one’s mind, I think it’s unclear what it is really to change one’s mind. And for me, it’s, uh, more complicated because I’m trying to also engage with the psychoanalytic understanding of changing one’s mind, which is not, you know, “Oh, I used to think that, that, now I think that.”

It’s about changing the structure of your mind in a way. And in t-talking about Marx, we’re talking about changing the fundamental coordinates of, you know, of social and political life. And so we have these different levels of what it is to change, and I think that the, um, I think sometimes we’re also not always clear.

I think it hasn’t always been clear in the last days whether we’re talking about the same kinds of change at, at different moments. Um, historical change, changing one’s way of moving through the world, um, changing one’s comportment vis-à-vis others, um, or changing one’s mind. Now I thought that, now I think this.

Um, I think it’s kind– I think it’s an important topic. You know, like I,

Yeah, I think there should be a seminar on just, I mean, a, a, a research group on what it, what we mean when we say changing one’s mind. Um, I’m going to begin by just reading some. Um, I, I w– I, I wrote some things primarily in response to Peter.

Um, as I said, he, you know, he was the most conscientious, and he sent me his, um, his remarks really early. And so I had more time to reflect on, on his remarks. And also I felt like it, um, it, it was– I think the, the sense of the tensions, you know, were clearer for me.

So it, it gave– It, I think it gave me a, an easier, um, place to begin, and hopefully I could then move out and, and talk about, um, the other responses. So Peter suggests that my energies, the energies that I’ve invested, you know, that I’ve– the intellectual energies

(clears throat)

of my presentations, uh, remain confined, as with Left Hegelians, to the abolition of theological consciousness, to the change, you know, an intervention into theological consciousness. That my rep- that my approach thus regresses to a pre-Marxist level of analysis. Um, uh, eh, the other dimension of this, of changing is like, um, it’s like when, you know, when I read that or heard that, it’s like, “Ow.”

You know, there’s a part of me that thought, “Ow.” Sorry. And, and then I thought, “Well, so okay, so…”

In a sense, like what, you know, like what… What is that defensiveness? Uh, what am I being defensive about?” It’s like, well, w- if it– maybe it’s true and maybe it’s good, you know?

Um, or no, maybe, You know, in other words… But the immediate response is, “Ow, that hurts.” “Why?” You know, um, and then it’s very hard then not to say, ”

Oh, Yeah? You know?” I’m gonna try, I’m gonna try not to do that, but if, it, it might a little bit.

Sorry.

(laughter)

Um,

(coughs)

So m-my, my central point, the point that I was, I, I was trying to make, and I think this– I take this to be Marx’s view and Freud’s view, is that much of what frames, orients, and governs our ways of being in the world, our sense of belonging to, of enjoying a place in the world And again, in enjoyment, I want to hear the resonances of what Lacan called jouissance, which is a dimension of passionate attachment and a sense of libidinal implication in one’s place in the world. Um, that much of this is just not read– is not really, um, a matter of consciousness, theological or otherwise. But this also doesn’t mean that somewhere hidden in the recesses of the mind, there’s a repressed archive of meaningful thoughts, beliefs, propositional attitudes that one can, with enough critical focus and attention, draw out into the open and expose to the light of reason.

See as misguided, perhaps one realizes one’s, one’s holding mutually incompatible commitments and ultimately sort that out. Now, it’s a fundamental legacy of the Enlightenment that one can and ought, in principle, to do that with one’s cognitive and practical commitments. Indeed, doing so is just what it means to live responsibly, you know, in a shared space of, of, of, you know, reason-giving, uh, creatures.

Um, and I say this would be the realm of what, um, uh, Peter calls rationalist critique. And, and so there’s certainly a, a place for that. I mean, that’s certainly what we mostly do, um, when we try to change, when we try to change each other’s minds, I think.

Um, you point out that, that someone is holding mutually, you know, materially incompatible commitments. You point that out, and, and if they’re, um, responsible, they’ll, in a way feel compelled, um, they don’t have to, but they’ll feel a kind of pressure to abandon one of those commitments and to say no that, you know. And what they’re doing is, you know, that this is, um, you know, sort of Robert Brandom’s reading of Kant.

What they’re doing in, in when they do that is, is engaging in the transcendental synthesis of apperception. They’re unifying, they’re, they’re unifying their, um, their mind. Um, now, uh, Marx and Freud, um, however, swerve from this Enlightenment legacy in ways that I don’t think al- can always get recuperated, um, not just rationally, but, um, in this, in this picture that I’ve given, but dialectically in the way that, um, that you were pushing.

And I think this is what Derrida, I think tries to argue with respect to the specters of Marx, that they can’t be– that there are things that can’t be fully, um, the way he puts it, exorcised. Um, but I think maybe another way of putting that is that there’s, there’s some way in which there are remainders that, um, that don’t get, um, that aren’t… That we can’t just say they’re dialectically aufgehoben.

They’re aufgehoben, they’re saved, but, you know, like, in your jingling around, you know, not, um, as remains, not as fully integrated. Um, And my sense is that, um, um… Here, I also wrote, um, I, “To put it somewhat differently, I worry that Peter’s complaint, and this is another bit of language that I think we also use a lot that I find interesting, is w-

I worry. Um, that, um, uh, I– There’s something in– about, you know, in our intellectual life, and it’s, you know, it’s like, I worry that you’re not being dialectical. Um, and I find it’s like, why, why, you know, like, don’t worry.

You know, like, what is this worry? You know, it’s like, like, just point to that, look, there’s a problem here, I think, you’re thinking. But I’m actually– what, what are we saying when, like, when we say, “I, I worry about this”?

Um, I’m so I’m saying it, but I’m not– I-I’m become a little suspicious of that language. Like, what do we… I’m sorry.

Um, But my sense is that this, um, um… so put it d– to put it differently, um, I’m concerned that Peter’s complaint about my reading, that my reading of Marx remains un-un-undialectical, um, has something to do with the disagreement of the nature of the unconscious and what it means to know not what one does. Um, um, I have all kinds of little like so I’m trying… There’s no doubt a much larger topic here, namely the relation of the Freudian unconscious to the Hegelian Marxist tradition of dialectical thinking.

Uh, and I think Slavoj Žižek is the one who has probably, you know, dedicated more time and energy, um, to elaborating that relation. Um, and you could gauge the difficulties of that project by s- by looking at his enormous productivity. Um, in a certain sense, um, I mean, he is one seriously busy body.

Um, you know, uh, but I think part of what he’s trying to do, uh, which keeps him working, is trying to say that one can bring together the, um, the notion of the remainder in the, uh, you know, um, that Freud, um, Miller, and Lacan elaborates and Hegelian dialectics, and I’m not sure it works. Um, and that may be why he’s so productive. Um, there’s another yesterday at, um, on the, on the way to dinner, um, Peter and I in the, in the the taxi were talking more about this and, and he said, “No, no, you, you, you,” um, that, that I misunderstood when he said, uh, when he was criticizing me, um, for, you know, just thinking about theological consciousness.

He said, no, he means, um, even when it’s somaticized. And he said that, um, that– so, so he was… In his view, um, the unconscious could be grasped as somaticized meaning.

And I think that’s, um, you know, that’s, that’s– I, I think that’s probably mostly what– how people understand, um, the unconscious as kind of somaticized meaning. But I think it’s, I think it’s not right.

I mean, or I think it’s, it’s, it’s– I think it misses something. Um, and, um, and I think that’s why Lacan, a-as crazy and difficult as Lacan is, he does point to something.

He c- he keeps on pointing to something, um, that, um, Jean Laplanche has picked up with the notion of the enigmatic signifier. So when, um, the unconscious is not, um, experiences of meaning that somehow, that are incompatible with other c- other meanings to which we’re committed, that we then want to hold onto but can’t hold onto them while synthesizing, you know, a unity of mind, so we somehow repress them into the body. I don’t think that still sees what is the, the repressed as a ki– as a set of meanings, as a set of, um, commitments, beliefs, um, in a way, propositional attitudes.

And with the notion of the signifier or the enigmatic signifier, I think we get something else, which is, um, signifying to, but not signifying what. It’s like taking in an address, something that has a commanding, that, that, that, that assumes a commanding force in one’s life, but it’s not because it’s meaningful, it’s because we, we don’t know what it means, and yet it’s seized us. It’s gotten under our skin.

And the unconscious is, in a certain sense, the ongoing struggle to make it, to make it make sense. So it’s like your mind continues interpreting. Um, or the, uh, the work of interpretation persists.

But it’s not like there’s some set of meanings there. And I think that this is in part, part of the debate between Scholem and Benjamin about Kafka. And I, I, I mentioned this the other day that, um, this, this crucial formulation that Scholem comes up with i-is that he says that, that Kafka’s world is dominated by a sense of revelation at the zero degree of its content.

Revelation still appears, but it has no content. So he’s… What he’s talking about, what has come to be called this, the, um, the, the, the zero degree signifier.

This is what, you know, Le-uh, Lévi-Strauss talks about, you know, with mana, the zero degree signifier, a signifier in excess of signification. And, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, Scholem then says this revelation is present in a way in Kafka’s world in which it is valid but doesn’t mean. Um, “Es gilt, aber bedeutet nicht.”

So we have “Geltung ohne Bedeutung,” validity without, without meaning. And I think what gets under the skin, um, what gets s-somaticized is something like validity without meaning. It’s not another meaning.

It’s some insistence that this, um, has to be made meaningful, but it’s not meaningful. Um, and in a way, one could,

(throat clears)

and an obsessive compulsive is, in a certain sense, someone who f-takes full responsibility for it, for making it make, for making it meaningful, um, as almost as a, as an individual, as a primordial debt, um, that one has to pay off with constant, constant elaboration, busyness, elabor– you know, work. And, um, okay, um, so, m- in my sense, Freud’s fundamental project was to show that unconscious mental activity involves a level of embodied mindedness in which what is at stake is not so much the discharging of responsibilities in the normative space. Now, that’s pretty stressful.

Just, you know, that’s a good– that’s– we mostly live with that kind of stress. Um, I’m failing to be, you know, um, I, I’m failing to be, you know, to live up to my mandate, you know, as a Tanner Lecturer. Stressful.

You know, it’s like str– okay, but that’s– we could understand that stress. But that’s not the stress that Freud was interested in. You know, it’s like saying, “Oh no, you’re good, you know,” you’re good enough.

Don’t worry.” Don’t… You know, that’s not what psychoanalysis does.

But it’s a quasi– It’s, it’s concerned with the quasi-somatic pressure, um, generated when a body takes up residence within such a space and becomes joined to it at the hip, as, as I put it. A different kind and set of negotiations begins, a different form of thinking, one that, one that does not and cannot enter into the transcendental synthesis of apperception, to use Kant’s term for the subject of our cognitive and practical commitments in the space of reasons.

A new dimension opens up that belongs neither to the sciences of immanence, and I would include the, the natural and the social sciences, nor to those of transcendence, and we could say theology, and maybe in some sense also philosophy. Among Freud’s discoveries was, was also that one cannot engage with this dimension, this level of busyness, simply by way of critique, simply by way of interpretive insight. This is what led him to develop his notion of working through.

One form of work or elaboration must, in other words, be put into play if one is to g- if one is to get traction in the field of those pressurized debt-driven labors at work, um, a-at work in our dreams and symptoms. Um, So life lived under this sort of surplus pressure, this pressure in excess of the normative pressure to follow the rules binding reason-giving creatures, is what I mean when I speak of our lives as busy bodies. Um, I’m just trying to see, you know, my little scribbles on the side if I wanna…

So one thing that makes– Oh, so here I could say, um, for those of you who’ve, who, who know Freud’s interpretation of dreams, probably the most difficult thing to understand, he, he… the first dream he presented is the famous dream of Irma’s injection. Um, where basically, you know, he runs in the middle of the day, Freud runs into a colleague whom he calls in the dr-, in, in the dream Otto. Um, and Otto, in conversation, indicates to him, sotto voce that, um, uh, a patient of his, uh, which is a, who is a mutual acquaintance, is not doing very well.

And Freud goes home and, and, you know, feels kind of, huh, what, what is he, what is he saying with that? What did he… So, you know, he feels that he was reproaching him for failing, at, for living up to, you could say, the normative pressures of his profession.

Actually, the pressures of profession he was in the midst of inventing. So it’s even, you know, it’s more complicated. And then he goes and he has this dream, um, where a bunch of other friends and doctors turn out to be responsible for Irma’s problems, um, but he is beyond reproach.

And he, you know, he wakes, he… Well, first of all, before he even goes to sleep, he writes up the case study, and he says, “No, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do.” So he feels beyond reproach.

Well, clearly his, some part of him didn’t feel that that th- You know, got rid of the pressure, so he had a dream. And in the dream, he calls this a wish fulfillment because he ends up being without reproach, you know, in the dream and once he finishes interpreting the dream.

Now, you know, there’s something that kind of, you know, wow, that’s, uh, you know, he– it’s a, it’s a tour de force of, of interpretation. But do you realize why do you need…

There’s nothing psychoanalytic. There’s, there’s no sex. There’s no, um, there’s nothing unconscious.

It’s basically he was worried that, that maybe he was failing professionally. You don’t need Freud to, you know, k- You know, to help you with that.

And so there’s something very odd about the interpretation, which is why throughout the rest of the book, He keeps on coming back to the dream, and he keeps on, you know, hitting a new level of the dream. And at finally, the last time he talks about it, he– is where he comes up with the notion of the navel of the dream, which he says the dream thoughts gather in a kind of intensity. I also want to say they squeeze together, uh, um, around, you know, in a particular density at which they reach into the unknown.

And he says, “You know, I’m going to stop there.” Um, so we don’t really know fully what, you know, um, how much further he could– he would actually have been able to say. But, um, I think that that’s the point at which you could say psychoanalysis really begins, um, in that density.

Not with simply, “Oh, I failed to be…” Um, I’m worried that I’m not a good enough, you know, doctor.” Y-you know, uh, you could say…

Y-you could go to counseling for that, that’s fine, or talk to friends, but there’s some of you just don’t need Freud for that. And so, um, so th-there’s something about that first dream interpretation that I actually think, um, seems to be in agreement with, I think the way Peter was reading, um, is reading the no– you know, the unconscious. So Freud actually kind of sometimes, you know, um, talks that way.

Now, it was Marx’s insight that the busyness that Freud would discover in the lives of, of his patients, um, let’s say the hard work of, of sustaining a neurosis. It’s hard work, um, But it’s satisfying work, f-you know, um, f-f-you know, for certain, u-until it stops being so, and that’s when people, you know, seek out help. You know, it’s not that your work isn’t satisfying, it’s that your neurosis isn’t satisfying.

Um, so Marx’s point,

(coughs)

this is not simply personal, but rather social, that the crucial subject matter at issue in this pressure, this demand for work, these excitations… And excitations is a word that comes from excitare, being summoned out. So for Freud, excitations are kind of interpolations, and they seem to be coming from within.

And I think what, what Marx sort of– Mar– the way Marxist thought pushes on Freudian thought is to see the interpolations as belo- as in a way belonging to the field of, you know, what Lacan called the Other. Um, which is why he then say the unconscious is the discourse of the other. The, the excitations are, are coming from with- a within that is not inside you.

And Lacan developed this notion of, of ex-ex-extimité. Sort of an, an, e- An externality that is most intimate to you.

And I think this is, and I think one, you could say, Marxism puts that, the pressure on Freud then to move toward Lacan, I would say, where this, the excitations don’t simply belong to you, um, though they seem the most intimate thing about you. Um, so the excitations, um… Okay, and then, uh, and this is where I, you know, I was, I, I, that joke about the chicken, you know, um, would come in.

It’s like the, um, the ex– You’re a kernel of, you’re a kernel of corn, you’re a kernel of grain. You’re a kernel of grain. It’s like, um, okay, I’m not a kernel of grain, but do the chickens know?

In a certain sense, what, where in the other, where in my practices, where in my engagement in the world, where in the world are the chickens I need to stop being chickens who want to eat me, you know, as a, as a, as a colonel? I know some of you weren’t there to hear the joke, but it’s… I can’t…

I won’t tell it again. It’s, um, it’s not so important. Um, but for Žižek, um, what the joke does, and I think he’s right about this, and I followed him on this, is it lays bare the logic of Marxist theory of commodity fetishism.

The chickens in this case are the commodities talking among themselves and the labor conveyed or transmitted in all that chatter. So I know I’m not a commodity fetishist, but the commodities don’t know that. Um, and so there’s something about the structure of, of, of the commodity form that is constantly generating, you know, you know,

(laughter)

they’re kind of out there, the chickens. And, and Marx sort of lent his ear to those transmissions, the trans… And he actually, you know, there are these passages in “Capital” where he says, “Let’s listen in on the commodities talking to one another.

This is what they’re saying to one another.” Um, and I think this is much in the same way in which Freud lent his ear to, um, to the, the symptoms of his analysands. There’s a kind of chatter going on.

Um, now what Marx ultimately heard in, when he lent his ear to the commodities were, um, what the commodities, the way in which the commodities were chattering among themselves, what they were engaged in was a, was, I would say, doxology. That is, they were, they were caught up in the, in the process of the self-valorization of value. Glorification, valor, valorization, the self-valorization of value, which is, which follows the same logic that I traced, um, yesterday in, um, uh, in, um, in religious doxologies, The glorification of God as God’s own, as God’s self-glorification, which we nonetheless have to glorify to amplify God’s glory, which in principle can’t be amplified.

So there’s, there’s… And, and Marx actually uses the, um, the, they, that, these, the formula of the Trinity to describe the logic of capital. He says that the Father, in this case, how does money become capital?

He says the Father, you could say capital, actually only becomes capital when it throws off surplus value, the Son, and thereby only becomes the Father through the Son. Um, so in a way, the Father begins that capital, throws off surplus value, but really only becomes capital through the Son and the way that surplus value glorifies value, amplifies it. Um, And he says this.

He uses the formula of the Trinity. Um, so again, when I talk about our busy bodies, I’m not simply, and this is, and the other place where I kind of said ouch was, um, when, when Peter said that, um, I, I have a kind of a, a qu- you know, basically a kind of, It’s a therapeutic discourse that, that leaves everything intact. Ow.

Um, um, so again, when I talk about our busy bodies, I’m not simply talking about the fact that people work a lot and perhaps need to relax, take a day off, meditate, go into therapy, or, or even observe the Sabbath. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would put it. Um, and for all I care, we could go on, you know, happily working out as a mode of stress f– relief, right?

You know, rather than working through. Um, but the point is to get– is rather to get clear about where and how we, or better it, is busy and to what, if any, end. What is the real subject matter of this business?

What chickens are we feeding, sustaining, and, uh, entertaining with it? Um, so this, I think, is the question that Marx tries to answer with his labor theory of value. Um, we are not simply making useful stuff.

We’re not really busy just making more and more good stuff,

(coughs)

stuff that better satisfies needs and wants. We’re also engaged in a process of social mediation that no longer takes place in overtly social terms and fashion. We are no longer in capitalist modernity, um, in bourgeois society, at least officially.

We’re no longer recognized as individuals by virtue of the place we occupy in a hierarchically ordered social totality and tradition. We enter the social totality, come to enjoy our place in it by virtue of being individuals, which means making something of ourselves by freely engaging in productive labor of some sort. Or as neoliberalists now tend to put it, self-investing our human capital, and therewith co-constituting an entrepreneurial sociality in which we do not simply enjoy recognition, but more importantly, take part in the glories of value’s capacity to self-amplify, to self-valorize.

Um, now, what Moishe Postone, um, so co- has compelled– so compellingly, um, brought out in his reading of Marx is that this socially mediating, and I would add doxological, role of labor in commodity-producing societies is self-occulting. That is, we don’t see it, it doesn’t appear to be socially mediating. It’s just work.

It’s just useful work. Um, in my terms, the work of social mediation, it largely takes over from political theology. What I’ve encapsulated, um, with the notion of the fetishes of, of persons is, for the most part, invisible.

In other words, there seem to be no chickens out there. As Postone puts it, because labor in capitalism accords the social character to itself, it appears simply as labor in general, stripped of the aura of social meaning accorded to, to various labors in traditional societies. Paradoxically, precisely because the social dimension of labor and capitalism is reflexively constituted and is not an attribute accorded to it by overt social relations, such labors– such labor does not appear to be the mediating activity it actually is in this social formation.

It appears rather only as one of its dim– as one of, uh, only as one of its dimensions. It appears, uh– I’m sorry. It appears only as concrete labor, a technical activity that can be applied and regulated socially in an instrumental fashion.

The same occultation takes place on the side of the commodity. It is, as Benjamin puts it, deprived of its aura. But Marx’s point is that the aura has precisely not disappeared, but has only entered more deeply into the fabric of the object and thus requires its analytic reconstruction, the spectral analysis of what is at work in the commodity.

And I think what he discovers, what is at work in the commodity is a kind of doxological business. This is Postone. The object of objectification, the object, the process of the objectification of labor in ca-capitalist society is also a process of the paradoxical secularization of the commodity as a social object.

Although the commodity as an object does not acquire its social character as a result of social relations, but rather is intrinsically a social object, and then says, in the sense of being materialized social mediation. Because of this, it appears to be a mere thing. The fact that the commodity is itself a materialized social mediation implies the absence of overt social relations that imbue objects with the supra-thingly social or sacred significance.

As mediation, the commodity just is a supra-s-thingly, a supra-thingly thing. The external externalization of its mediational dimension results, therefore, in the appearance of the commodity as a pure material object. So I’ll end in a second.

The claim here is that precisely as materialized social mediation, the thing that was once with the king as the virtually real substance of his sublime flesh, and in relation to which one enjoyed one’s communion with, with the nation, is now with the commodity as its spectral materiality. It is in this way that Marx produces, that I think Marx produces what Peter characterizes as the unlikely synthesis of political theology and the critique of political economy, which thereby, of course, comes to be understood as more than a science of the wealth of nations. This, this is, as I’ve argued, also the point Foucault makes when he speaks of a new and turbulent subject-object that emerges in the period of transition from royal to popular sovereignty.

It is precisely when the thing is no longer with the king, but circulating in the life of the people as a biopolitical surplus of imminence that the field of political economy opens. Okay, um, I’ll– maybe I’ll just stop. Um, Oh, let me just, yeah, let me just, let me just say, say one more, one more thing.

Toward the end of his response, Peter argues that I not only undervalue the cognitive and political gains of bourgeois society, but that I actually overemphasize the dimension of unfreedom it generates. In my argument, he writes, this unfreedom has become reinforced to such a degree that, quote, “It only reveals itself with metaphors of embodiment, the biological, the somatic.” “The irony,” he continues, “is that such language does everything to suggest not the social contingency of oppression, but its carnal finality.”

Now, if anything, I’ve– I think I’ve shown, or at least I’ve tried to show that the dimension that I’m calling the flesh, that Marx calls gespenstische Gegenständ-Gegenständlichkeit, and I take it that this is Peter’s ultimate target, here, manifests actually a considerable degree, a strange, difficult, but considerable degree of plasticity. Now, if I had time, I would argue that much of what Catherine Malabou, who’s actually here now, I’m on campus, it’s, it’s a shame that we can’t be in conversation. I would argue that much of what she has written about with respect to neural, neural plasticity ultimately concerns this dimension rather than the tissues of the brain.

That the crucial domain of plasticity in historical change is not to be grasped through the cognitive sciences or, you know, neuroscience and the notion of the, of brain, of, of neural plasticity. But there is a plasticity, um, and again, it’s not about change, about… It has to do with some d-, some, Some, some deeper sense of what it means to change a mind, to change one’s mind, one’s mindedness.

Um,

(sigh)

I would say that the real change in individual and collective life must engage this very plasticity, this dimension of plasticity. So I’ve been working hard to try to draw out. Now, I haven’t. You know, I think Freud has his own view of what that change consi-

(coughs)

what that change might look like, and, and, and he uses the notion of working through the transference. He created an experimental space for elaborating, experimenting with intervening into this plasticity. Um, Marx, I think, um, has drawn out the, um, the, uh, the, the way in which this plasticity, um, actually, um, you know, is, is fundamental to social bonds.

That this plasticity is, is in a certain sense where, where we are already being squeezed together in some sense. Um, the problem is I don’t think- It’s, it’s unclear what notion of social practice, revolution, reform, what notion of social, of social practice would be a, uh, a, you know, a mode of intervening into that, you know, that that that social plasticity.

Now, I don’t offer anything about that. I don’t offer any– I’m, I’m not–

I don’t feel like I have a lot to offer about that. I think that, um, what Bonnie– I think that Bonnie’s work on democratic politics and the way she talked about the, um, in a way the, the, the squeezing together in, you know, o-of the crew on the Pequod in the scene she, she discussed in, um, in Moby-Dick, um, is, you know, a kind of a, uh, you know, a-at least a thought experiment, a literary thought experiment of how we might think of the kind of practices that engage with this dimension of plasticity. But I think that real change happens, or at least the kind of change that I think Marx ultimately cared about is a change in this dimension and intervening in this, in this dimension.

Um, now this leads me to just my conclusion, one concluding thought about Peter’s remark that I ignore what he refers to as the emancipatory and rational content of religion itself. Words that recall Hermann Cohen’s religion of reason from the sources of Judaism. My failure to appreciate, quote, “the rational and emancipatory content both in bourgeois and religious principles,” leads me, he suggests, with a, with the, I think, rather trivial sounding, quote, “quasi-therapeutic discourse of unplugging from our too busy lives.”

Okay. So my response is basically trying to say that’s not what I meant. Um, he goes on to say that my excessive attention to the theology of capitalism is to reify the critique of reification itself and misreads social and economic pathology as psychopathology, and leaves the former intact even while it devotes itself to theorizing the extravagant neuroses of the bourgeoisie.

Now, that would be true. Un-, uh, okay, now my, my project here has been a continuation of work largely begun in my study of Freud and Rosenzweig, a book I called On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. And there, the whole point of the book was what we usually, what we often take to be psychopathologies, um, in involve the field of the other.

Um, that is, they’re not just personal. Um, in that work, I tried to show that the choice between the potentially emancipatory forces of a religious approach to what inhibits change in individual and collective life, and a therapeutic approach to those blockages, an approach that demands a robust theory of the unconscious and the process of working through, is a false choice. After completing The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig himself wrote a kind of philosophical self-help book, one that, based on his remarks here, I wonder whether Peter would also feel compelled to characterize as quasi-therapeutic.

Now, Rosenzweig didn’t publish the book, and maybe he didn’t publish the book because he thought that. I, I, you know, I think it’s an open question. I don’t think so.

My own sense is that both Freud and Rosenzweig agreed that changing the world and oneself involves responding, no doubt with the degree of what Bonnie calls Sabbath power, or what I think Benjamin called a weak messianic force, to what is proximate, to what the Judeo-Christian tradition called the neighbor. Interestingly, Rosenzweig’s sometimes used the word der Nächste and sometimes das Nächste, suggesting that proximity has to do with the urgency of a need or demand. What…

And he also cites here, um, Goethe’s phrase, “Die Forderung des Tags,” sort of the demand of the day, um, rather, and not simply spatio-spatio-temporal nearness. What I’ve been arguing here is that this urgency of the proximate, of the neighbor, and you could also think of here of of, you know, Levinas’s thinking of what is, what is the urgency, what is the demand legible in the face of the other to which I’m held hostage or however, you know, he, he, he puts it. What I’ve been arguing here is that this urgency concerns a dimension of agitation, excitation, and struggle that keeps us in the busi-business of being busybodies animated, or better, undeadened by what Marx called spectral materiality.

Okay, thank you.

[00:42:30] MODERATOR:
Perhaps we’ll open it up to discussion. I don’t know, Peter, if you want to open, uh, start or, uh, whether, um, Bonnie or Hent would like to start.

[00:42:42] PETER FENVES:
Um, we need to use the microphones. We’ll use these. Mary, I think you wanna go first because it’s more\u2014

[00:42:50] AVERY GORDON:
Fine.

[00:42:53] BONNIE HONIG:
I’m… Yeah, sure. Uh, maybe, maybe why don’t we go in the order that we offered our comments, if that makes sense, because you have yours ready?

[00:43:02] AVERY GORDON:
All right. All right.

[00:43:06] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
I’m gonna mediate.

(thud)

I’m gonna supply an in-between

(laughter)

Keep these two apart. Um-

[00:43:17] AVERY GORDON:
No, together.

(laughter)

[00:43:19] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
No. Um, so I, I prepared a few comments and, um, they’re mostly, uh, an effort to, uh, respond to the response that, uh, Eric gave initially to my comment on the first night, and also they, I think, helped to make clear what I think the differences are, uh, between our approaches to some shared problems. Um, I was thrown off a little bit during the first lecture because I kept hearing that, uh, it was time for Eric to have the last word.

So, so

(laughter)

I kept giving him the last word, and then I was told, “Oh, there’s time for a comment.” And so I was a little bit, um, less, uh, agonistically engaged than I would normally have been. Um, so which is not to say I’m going to attack you or anything.

It’s just, um, to say that I, I had things to say, and I-

(coughs)

didn’t seem that it was the moment to say them, so I’ll say them now. Um, so, uh, The first thing that I thought would help, uh, clarify a little bit would f- was for me to just try to get a sense of what exactly is the question here. One possibility is that there are some new inflammations of the flesh that are in some way explicable by attending to the transfer of political theology into political economy, and that would motivate these explorations.

So how would we know if that was the source, as it were, that transfer? Whether a hundred and fifty years after Marx, when political economy has changed so much, how would we– how– What would give us the sense of confidence that that transfer is the cause or the proximate cause of these inflammations?

Or whether it’s something else that’s causing the stress that seeks out liturgical relief. So I was reading this morning in the newspaper a story about work conditions, um, for truck drivers for UPS. Maybe some of you saw it.

But they have constant surveillance cameras in the backs of their trucks. They’re monitored in terms of how long it takes them to step out of the truck to p-find the box, to leave it at the door, to get back to the truck. Um, there’s, uh, uh, apparently they’re at a hundred and fifty percent efficiency rate in delivery than they were ten years ago.

They’re paid better. The union negotiates with the company about what they’re allowed to use that surveillance data a for, in other words, only for heightening efficiency and not for other kinds of things. Um, and basically the story is, uh, written in the wrong genre.

It’s a very happy-sounding story about, uh, how you can squeeze every bit of hyper-efficiency out of a body. Um, and, um, and the ge– the sort of strangeness of the genre struck me because it could have been a story about the terrible anxiety that these truck drivers experience, um, but they have a union, and so I, uh, uh, and, and the union seem- seems to me in the story to create the possibility not just of a hyperanxiety, which I’m absolutely sure is there, um, and that is in quest of some relief. But, um, also there seemed to be some sense of pleasure and pride in their capacity to, um, be hyper-efficient, which is a pleasure and pride I’m not unfamiliar with.

So, um, that hyper-efficiency where you just feel like you could do anything, you know? You write three papers in three weeks, and you’re like, “I can do it,” and then you crash. But, you know, first you just feel that great pleasure.

Um, so the pleasure of being very productive, um, doesn’t need to be sickness. It might be, and I know, I know Eric knows this. Um, but what I’m struck by, um, in Agamben is how the essentialization of man as a sabbatical animal, as a sabbatical creature as such, suggests that it is fundamentally a sickness to orient around productivity.

Um, I think that is the effect of Agamben’s move to Sabbath, um, as quintessentially human and as the involving only unplugging, not also empowerment and agency, but only destituents. So that’s one set of thoughts around that first formulation of the question. And I think obviously it’s problematic.

That set of problems around Agamben’s essentialization of the human as a sabbatical creature is carry– would be carried over into Eric’s adoption of that. Um, the second way of thinking about the question is, is the problem instead or in addition, how better to cover over or experience the gap between the somatic and the normative than via the flesh? Right now, the flesh is the name for the gap.

It’s also the name of what covers the gap. And so maybe the question is, is there a better way to experience the gap or to cover it over? And so I’m going to go back to Moby-Dick for a minute, just to make clear what I think is at stake here.

In Melville’s Moby Dick, that is the question that drives Ahab, how to expose that gap which he feels betrays his, uh, theological expectation of full meaningfulness, um, and see what’s on the other side. That’s the speech about the pasteboard mask. Everything’s covered by a pasteboard mask.

I’m going to strike through that mask. He wants to see the gap. And the same desire may drive Starbuck, too, who seems less driven, but he’s driven too, because although he’s in it for the profit, he’s willing to die for a profitable hunt, so there’s something powerful there.

And he finds a useful sublimation in commercial adventurism. It has a bit of the old. Melville calls the people on the little whaleboats knights and squires, so it has a bit of the aristocratic, and it has a bit of the new market and money life, too.

It’s got a bit of everything. Now, in the terrain between these two responses to the gap, one theological and one economic, and perhaps even in the agonistic tension between them, emerges a third thing, which is touched by both, but contra Erik, reducible to neither. And that is what I’m calling the democratic.

Touched by both the theological and the economic, but reducible to neither as such. Which is to say, it could be overcome by the, you know, you could have a kind of fundamentalization of the democratic. It’s, it, that could happen.

You can have a marketization of the democratic. That’s happening. Um, but conceptually, it’s distinct.

The democratic marks not a lack, but an excess, and it’s the site of emergent forms of collectivity that in this novel and in the examples I also gave of strike debt and land and debt sabbaticals, positions the flesh as a democratic resource or agent, and not just as the stuff of sacrifice, which is what the flesh is for Ahab, I argued, and not just as the stuff of market exchange, which it is for Starbuck, I argued, though it is these things, too. And as democratic stuff, it has a charge of its own. The flesh, whale flesh, both dethrones Hobbes’s Leviathan figure, which as a figure discourages the jouissant collectivizations that Ishmael craves.

It dethrones by exposing the king figure as having no head, so it can’t be the head of us all. Or it shows that he’s all head, and so he can’t incorporate the people in the way this– that he’s promised to, one or the other. And finally, the dethroning happens because Melville shows that ordinary men can undo Leviathan’s decisionism and force him into that helpless perplexity of volition when they surround him with their hunting boats.

Now, all of this is to say, I’m reminding you of this because I think I can say more clearly than I did the first night, that if in Kantorowicz the king has two bodies with which to cover over the worrying gap of– left by the evacuation of metaphysics, in Melville, the king is shown to have always already had a third body, the supplement that secures and attenuates the sovereignty that Hobbes meant only to secure, and that third body is the oft-invoked Leviathan from Job’s– Job to Hobbes and more. Melville then, having established that, goes on to work that supplement to show that it is the source of an undoing of the very sovereign form and figure on which both theology and economy depend. Whaling was, uh, Represented the capacity of the new American country to be an American empire in the first half of the nineteenth century.

It carried the promise of globalization. It wasn’t just a market, uh, activity. It was that kind of market activity.

But that same figure, Leviathan, will also subvert them through dethroning and then also by way of the fleshpots, a term I used quite deliberately and in the written paper went on about at length, which is to say this is Melville exciting us back into Egypt, where the Israelites in the desert are said in Exodus to be longing for the flesh pots of Egypt, and Melville returns them to the flesh pots by way of whaling. Working with the flesh leads the men into a homoerotic pleasure stew that is not, I know this is a crazy leap, the Sabbath Schalet that Heine celebrates too for its perfumed power to transport us out of the dog life of the everyday and into a different world of enchantment, which is not just political-theological. In Heine, which is a different Sabbath than Agamben’s, in Heine, the Sabbath poetry begins with the enchanted tales of transformation of the Arabian Nights.

That is, this is not a Sabbath of destituent power. It’s a Sabbath in Heine of metamorphosis. In any case, the key in Melville, I think, is the perfume.

Um, so I’m responding now to Eric’s response to me where he said, you know, well, that’s that whale flesh, it’s a commodity. It’s just a commodity. So you can respond partly by saying, well, you know, as you just did, Marx knows that commodities are very magical.

They talk. We can, you know, they, they transform us. But you can respond further by saying, it is a commodity, but it’s never only or fully reducible to the commodity form.

Um, so the perfume of the sweet per-spermaceti, Ishmael r-says about it, quote, “I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma.” That’s his line when they’re having the squeeze of the hand scene. And it gets un- under the skin of the men at the flesh pots and brings them into a connection that’s more charged or differently charged or recharged than what they can get from Ahab and Starbuck.

And they get a lot from Ahab and Starbuck. If there is release here in the novel from the temptation of pistol and ball, which is what Ishmael says he’s going in quest of, that release comes in at least three varieties: Ahabian political theology and ressentiment, Starbuck’s brave market adventurism, and Ishmael’s community of equals. You can’t, I would argue, choose among them.

They’re enmeshed in each other in the ways that I’ve just described. And the third, the democratic, acquires some of its charms from the first two in their nearness, but it is also a third thing. So I’m emphasizing this because, again, Eric said it again.

And again, now, I don’t think this is just doxology or practice by contrast with a diagnostic or analytic account that is prior. It is, this third flesh is, part of the necessary account or analysis because it is positioned agonistically between the two forms that he treats as exhaustively transferent, the political, theological, and the political, economic. The juncture between them is flesh, he says.

I’m suggesting the juncture between them is democratic, too, that there’s this third thing in play that could be absorbed, or it could do some absorbing. Always emergent, always at risk of being overwhelmed and not just staged or birthed, however inadvertently, by the agon between these two, theology and economy. Of course, these two, I’ll add, are not just one thing either, but themselves essentially contested and not always complete, hence my reference in my first lec– in my reply to the first lecture, both to the democratized and contestatory political theology tradition of Korah and to the democratization of political economy as instanced in practices of land and debt sabbatical by groups like Strike Debt now and by other civilizations in previous eras.

I mentioned the Jubilee practice of the ancient Israelites. We can also think of the debt forgiveness of Solon. These conjugations of Sabbath highlight the character of sabbatical practice as constituent, not destituent power.

Action in concert that puts people into each other’s debt, subjects them to ties that bind, and this may also irritate them. But it doesn’t only do so, since such concerted inaugural action makes us feel our power, and that, while possibly also a source of anxiety for some, is also a source of pleasure. The sort of pleasure that Arendt and Nietzsche both associate with self-forgetting, with getting over yourself.

Hence, Arendt’s theme throughout her work, which was for love of the world, and it’s Ishmael’s theme too. So thank you.

[00:57:39] SPEAKER 1:
I mean, the first thing I was– I completely– I mean, that I think what you’ve just done is an exercise in, um, demonstra– I mean, I think that, I think what you’ve shown is, I, I mean, I’ve never, I never, um,

[00:57:59] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
meant to give the impression that, um Or I understand, I have the impression that that there, there’s a zero-sum game, that we either have political theology or political economy, and that the, let’s say, the plasticity of the flesh is then, you know, without remainder, um, um, fully absorbed. It’s… I’m say, the, the political theol-theological mode of, let’s say, flesh management was highly precarious.

[00:58:31] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[00:58:32] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
The political economic mode is highly precarious. Kinds– which is why it has to be, with why there’s so much busyness. And it’s, I think that, um, showing that there is, um, Um, there are other things to do, um, in, in and with, um, this dimension.

I, you know, I just don’t, I don’t see that as a, um… I see that as, you know, uh, uh, you know, a continuation of this, um, of the thinking of, of, you know, working through and thinking within and, and of this dimension. So, um, I think that’s great.

[00:59:15] MODERATOR:
Welcome aboard. Uh-huh.

[00:59:18] AVERY GORDON:
Yeah.

[00:59:20] MODERATOR:
Uh, do you want to respond?

[00:59:21] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
That’s fine. Yes, I’ll just, um, um…

(noise)

I, I do feel that, um, we somehow run the risk of, um, repeating certain moves, um, and, um, uh, I’m tempted to do the same thing. Uh, I might even feel that I would read to you some of the things that, uh, I, I was not able to say, um, yesterday for lack of time. Um, and I will just offer you one little bit.

But, um, since Eric, um, um, quite frankly, um, indicated that, um, he wasn’t quite sure where I was going, uh, what I was aiming at or, um– And while I’m fully convinced that that has partly to do with the fact that, um, um, I set myself the task to, uh, read, reread his text, as it were, uh, on its own terms, but also against the grain, uh, offering– following a model of, uh, Adorno’s immanent criticism, as it were. Uh, I would like to do two things.

Uh, on the one hand, um, at the risk of, uh, seeming to take back what I expressed yesterday and, and, and still fully mean in terms of my great appreciation and admiration and fascination with the project. I will, I will say bluntly what I think I was saying, uh. And then I’ll backtrack as you, uh, if there’s a chance to respond, and then I would like to, uh, offer one little exercise in, um, in, in a close reading of the text where I feel that, uh, the, uh, the concepts or the line of the argument or, uh, quote-unquote the metaphors, uh, that’s actually not a quote of yours, but that’s something that came up in the conversation, somehow seemed to me not to work together, uh, as well as they, uh, should.

And, um, Uh, I should, as a, uh, disclaimer perhaps say that, um, although I’m deeply fascinated by the project, uh, in reading Eric, uh, as in reading, uh, Slavoj Žižek and, and, and, and some others, I’ve always stumbled over the fact that, uh, for tragic reasons, I have virtually, um, no, um, attunement or, um, uh, hermeneutic sensibility, um, when it comes to psychoanalysis. Uh, I’m happily married to a psychoanalyst.

(laughter)

That may have something to do with it, but, uh, I think it, it, it, it predates that. Uh, so, but I think it also means for me that I’m constantly asking myself, um, why is it that one, uh, would not be able to get everything out of the project, um, by, uh, exploring the, the theological archive or for that matter to, um, uh, explore the, uh, the literary archive?

Uh, I would, I would feel that, uh, you know, uh, so, uh, no matter uh how much one appreciates and, um, acknowledges the uh immense contributions of, of, of Freud’s work and, and of psychoanalysis, uh, my, my wager in reading you, um, and in processing this would be to say, well, uh, yes, definitely that’s the case, but, uh, I’m not convinced at all by the lectures that, um, we would not be able to discuss the subject matter, if we were going on at, um, uh, alone, helped by theology and, let’s say, literary criticism. So that, uh, doesn’t mean that one could not get there also through Freud, and especially as you read Freud in, in, in, in, in marvelous ways. But the claim that, you know, we w- w-will not get from, let’s say, Marx and the whole problem of spectral materiality if we don’t work it through with the help of Freud, that’s a claim I, I don’t, um, um, fully, um, um, accept it.

Now, in medias res again, once more, I had two major difficulties, I think, with the, uh, the project. Um, one, it seems to me in the end, deeply steeped in, uh, a secularization narrative of some sort. Uh, you spoke about paradoxical secularization, and then also now you spoke about, uh, the thing that was once with the king is now elsewhere.

And I think that’s, uh, a major assumption of much of, uh, you know, um, nineteenth and twentieth century, uh, theorizing and, and philosophizing that, uh, is, um, I think ultimately, um, uh, false. Is ultimately, uh, not warranted by the facts and, uh, not by the concepts, uh, uh, and, and, and pictures that we, uh, we use. It presupposes a, uh, a before and the after.

It presupposes, uh, the assumption that there is, uh, a relationship between cause and effect, with there being more in the cause than there is in the effect, there being a proper set, propor– a certain logic of proportionality or, uh, preposition, uh, presupposition between the two. And in speaking especially about, um, the haunting or, uh, the specters or the remainings of the religious archive, I simply don’t see why we would accept that. That’s why I took issue yesterday with the, the logic of the, the partial object.

Uh, and I think it’s a misunderstanding when Derrida speaks about, um, remainders. He doesn’t means… He doesn’t mean bits and, and, and pieces or parts.

He means, uh, a, uh, remaindering that has no solalo solidity or, or divisibility, which, which means that if something of, um, the, the royal body of the, um, the, the theological political, um, still haunts us. It does so not, uh, in a reduced minimal version, but, uh, in total. That’s why I made the reference also to, uh, Paul Verhoeven’s, uh, Total Recall.

Um, there is a sense in which we should think about global religion as, uh, the whole damn phenomenon being right there at all times and, uh, potentially being, um, um, an emancipatory phenomenon and potentially being, uh, its, its, its, its opposite. The second thing that I, uh, took issue with was the, um, um, uh, what I called somewhat, you know, um, violently, uh, the residual humanism or the residual, um, um, naturalism of… That seems to me to underlie the whole project.

Because no matter how much one, um, uncouples the flesh from a particular body, from a, uh, concept of the, um, the biological, if you like. Nonetheless, it is a massive metaphor, and, uh, I think as we also discussed yesterday, um, in, in, in the taxi, uh, I see huge difficulties, um, that are very similar, um, um, between your project and, um, the one that Claude Lefort worked, uh, within his, uh, essays on the theological-political, the permanence of the theological political, when he draws on the later Merleau-Ponty and develops some sort of an, uh, heretical, erotical politics with the notion of the flesh, where it’s also very clear that, uh, at the end of the day, the notion of the flesh there means exactly what it means for the later Merleau-Ponty in, uh, The Visible and the Invisible that is l’être brut. It’s like the, it’s the pure being with, um, uh, no hint of,

(coughing)

um, the flesh, um, given that one cannot simply, um, remove the, uh, organicism or the or-organistic metaphors from the, uh, notion of the flesh. Now, to give one example, I think in, in, in more precise terms, um, why that is perhaps a problem in, in, in the lectures and in the project as a whole. I would like to read one, uh, brief, uh, passage, uh, because I think it was, um, quite crucial to the, uh, whole discussion of the do-doxological, uh, argument.

So this is what I found myself formulating and, and struggling with in, uh, a longer footnote that I hope I can, um, read because it’s kind of finely printed. But if we follow Santner’s remarkable suggestion that, quote, “What Kantorowicz later elaborated under the heading of the king’s second body is a sublimate of a sonorous mass, a congelagen– a congelation of its vibrant doxological matter, end of quote, then it becomes all the more clear that the body and its flesh comes neither first nor last. In the catalogue, archive, and apparatus of theologoumena that the discourse of sovereignty in its monarchical and republican, republican variety continues to draw on.

Unless, of course, one takes the sonorous mass of acclaiming voices, the language of angels, of which Erik Peterson speaks, as somehow itself a body and not just embodied. That is to say, as the underlying vibrant matter of the flesh, its substantive, substantive part itself. The timbre and rhythm of jubilant voices in their very tonality and sonority would themselves have attained the role of a vibrant, vital, indeed spectral materiality, namely that of the flesh, without there being even a body, a human body in sight.

But then, would that not lead to one further step on the path taken precisely by the new materialists who altogether jettison the first and second human and spiritual body, without whose serial incarnation, it is assumed by Santner, no body politic worthy of mentioning could ever be conceived, much less maintained, or, in Santner’s diction, fleshed out? And a further passage, I think, confirms this reading. Speaking of the archaeology of glory, Santner writes, quote, “Agamben’s fundamental insight is that there is no political theology of sovereignty without the theological economy of glory.

No constitution of Herrschaft without the doxological production of Herrlichkeit. What at first seems to be a superstructural feature of a ruling state apparatus is essentially its economic base, one that produces the glorious flesh, the subject matter of the social bond.” ” End of quote.

And here as well, I would say, the divine or theological conception of glory conditions what seemed to condition it. It forms, informs, and forms itself in the very matter or mattering of whatever subjects and citizens as living and working humans can further be and eventually become. The subject matter, the flesh, tight as it is for center to the human form, to the eminently and however contingent and forever vulnerable human forms of life, exposed to the lack of their world, would thus again seem to come second.

Crudely put, it is the explanandum, not the explanans, at all. Belated, constituted after the fact, as it were, the human body and its flesh could therefore hardly be claimed to play a pivotal role in the general economy of things. The point of departure or return of any analysis that tracks the transition, if it is one, from royal to popular sovereignty.

Indeed, a critique of sovereignty across the spectrum of political formations and the formation of life that sustains them would have to begin and end elsewhere. In the questioning of power, in its practice, no doubt, but also in its concept. There are, no doubt, glorious examples in the theological archive and in the present day and age that such inquiry needs, um, that such inquiry, um, need not and must not play the power game of old, nor follow the theoretical fixation on political or biopower or cultic and pastoral power, or as Frans Santner puts it, of doxological power per se.

And I was thinking in this context of, um, um, the example taken from Erik Peterson’s book, a book that I highly, uh, uh, appreciate. And as a matter of fact, I think I was responsible for the fact that it came out in an English translation, uh, in, in, in my Stanford series, uh, the Theologische Traktate, the theological treatises, uh, tractates, which I highly, um, um, commend. But, um, I was also thinking, well, you know, um, this is not the only way in which we think about angels.

Think of, uh, Wim Wenders’, uh, Der Himmel über Berlin, uh, Wings of Desire, or his, um, In weiter Ferne, so nah, uh, far away and so, um, near. Uh, there it is very clear and I think theologically, uh, sound that the angels are indeed listening, attuned to the sonorous mass of this kind of ethereal, eternal sounding. But it’s also clear that there is an absolute disjunction between their, uh, spiritual existence and their being embodied.

Uh, there has to be like a fall to earth at the moment where they actually acquire flesh, and at that point become somehow politically operative, if you, if you, if you, um, uh, if one could say. There is no transition. There is a, as I said, a duality, um, of in, in the optics.

There are two different perspectives that one cannot think of in terms of, uh, a transition, a secularization, a transformation, a mutation, a substitution. All of the metaphors that are, I think, organizing the, uh, the text, uh, in place. And at one point you cited, um, Karl Barth, I think, who, you know, could be summarized, uh, the Kirchliche Dogmatik in, in how many volumes is it by, you know, God is up there and, and, and you are below, right?

And I think that’s a fundamental insight that, um, perhaps some of the theological, um, Um, political archives that, uh, we are interested in, uh, have, have sought to keep in, in, in place. And that I think also, and I’ll stop here, uh, in the very discussion between Scholem and Benjamin, uh, takes, uh, such a prominent place. Because what else, um, would it mean that, um, there is this zero degree signifier that, uh, has, has validity but no meaning, right?

Um, I think that is something that, um, uh, one would wish to keep in place. It’s the mystical postulate of authority, if you like. I think it’s also something that Agamben strangely keeps in place in his far more generic discussion of, uh, the question of, uh, the question of the relationship between authority and, uh, and– or power and glory in his little text on Foucault, uh, What Is an Apparatus?

And, uh, it is something that I would say ultimately would invite an analysis, uh, perhaps even a psychoanalysis, um, in the direction of, uh, a more ontological questioning, a more generic questioning. Perhaps engaging more fully, um, the metaphysical and theological niceties that, that, that Marx, uh, speaks of, and that I seem to feel is somehow overwritten in your text with, uh, the residual humanisms or, uh, naturalisms that, uh, I feel one would not necessarily, um, want to keep in, in place or leave unquestioned.

[01:16:00] HENT DE VRIES:
Thank you. Um, I, I guess, um, I mean, there’s so much, um, you know… I really appreciate all of these challenges.

Um, oops. Um, and I can’t– I… I mean, there’s a lot to take in.

Um, but I guess I d– I would, uh, um, agree with you, um, that, that, um, I, um– and maybe this is why you have this problem with psychoanalysis, is that, um, it, it, it, it, it, it can’t think without some, um, grappling with embodiment, with the body.

[01:16:49] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:16:50] HENT DE VRIES:
Um, what you’re calling naturalism. Um, but it’s about a, um, psychoanalysis. This is fundamentally about, you could say, a s– an, an imminent swerve within the natural, a clinamen of, let’s say, the, um, the, the atoms of the natural, um, that generate, um, a th– What I’m calling this third dimension that is neither, um, the space of meaning, nor is it simply natural.

But it’s, it’s– It is nonetheless, um, there in one’s embodied being. And, and, and, and in a sense, this is what I find problematic about Derrida.

[01:17:34] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:17:35] HENT DE VRIES:
And, and, um, that it’s, that, in a certain sense, the, um, the insistence in a certain sense on the, um, on the, on the, on the, o-on, on the, the privileging of, I would say, the textual or the, um, the trace, um, which is, um, uh…

[01:18:00] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Let me put it this way. I would say that psychoanalysis is, I would say, the science of the, the impact of the trace on, on, you know, on, on, on, on, on the living being. The, the, um, being hooked to, um, the, the, the, the, the trace that, you know, that in, in Derrida, but a, a living being, and that’s when you get psychoanalysis, and that’s what, what Derrida doesn’t get.

[01:18:29] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:18:30] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
And so I think there’s a, um, there are just things you can’t think. um, with, with Derrida, and I think that’s, um, the limitation of his notion of the spectral in Specters of Marx.

[01:18:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um,

[01:18:45] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
and, um, so it’s not so much a, you know, I wouldn’t put it as… I wouldn’t think of it as re-residual humanism or residual naturalism. It’s, um, it’s, it, it’s, it’s about residue. Mm-hmm.

Um, but it’s a, um, you know, it’s a, it’s, it, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s trying to think the notion of the remainder as something that, um, that, um, that insists in our embodiment. And, and you could say that’s why, you know, um…

Well, I mean, that’s why psychoanalysis is because it is not philosophy, and um, and it’s not natural science.

[01:19:36] HENT DE VRIES:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:19:37] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Um, and it’s a very odd thing. Mm-hmm. And it’s a very– it’s hard to, really, actually fully give a clear sense of what the what, what, what is the nature of psychoanalytic concepts. And I think that’s the problem I’ve, I’ve clearly run into here with the notion of the flesh.

[01:19:51] HENT DE VRIES:
Mm-hmm.

[01:19:52] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
What sort of a concept is it?

[01:19:54] HENT DE VRIES:
Mm-hmm.

[01:19:54] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
And I think it’s a very pr– it’s, it’s, it may not fully be a concept.

[01:19:58] HENT DE VRIES:
Mm-hmm.

[01:19:59] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Um, it may be a, just a, a direction of thought, or a direction– you know, an attempt, a kind of, um, you know, almost like a, a parapraxis of- Mm-hmm, biological language, um, that one has to, you know, seize and, and, and cultivate. Right. Um, um, So, uh, if you say why psychoanalysis rather than, you know, the, than sticking with the literary and the theological archive.

With the philosophical archive, I guess I would just say is that I haven’t found. I mean, for me, the closest in the, in the theological archive that I’ve come to finding a, um, an attunement to this dimension is in Rosenzweig. Mm-hmm.

And Rosenzweig, um, speaks of Eros and Thanatos in, um, in The Star of Redemption. I mean, he’s writing this at the same time, or this published at least at the same time that Freud is developing his notion of the death drive. Mm-hmm.

Um, so I mean, But for me, I still n- in order to sort of pull out of Rosenzweig the implications that I think he was getting with the notion of the meta– in, in a way, the, um, some insistent dimension that is in life, but that’s more than life. But nor is it simply said a soul thing. He calls it the meta-ethical.

Um, he’s, he’s– he feels compelled to use the language really of psychoanalysis without-

[01:21:36] HENT DE VRIES:
Mm-hmm.

[01:21:38] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
-thinking about psychoanalysis. Although he does in his diaries have an entry in 1922 highly praising Freud and particularly, um, Totem and Taboo. Um, but now, okay, so re-with respect to…

I, I– the partial object is not a part of the body. No. Um, the partial object is a, um, is a, um, a, a s–

In a way, a phantasmatic, um, a, a virt- a virtual real. Um, but the, um– It’s a missing bit of the world that we, um, elaborate phantasmatically on the basis of our bodies. Um, the orifice is what look– you know, the– our, our body parts, let’s say.

[01:22:29] HENT DE VRIES:
Mm-hmm.

[01:22:30] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
And I think that if, um– But these are more than metaphors. These are or– these are things that organize our, um, our, our, um, I would say that, that, that, that inform, you know, almost every aspect of everyday life. Um, and s- um, and certainly our engagement with other, you know, yeah, our eth-

let’s say our ethical and, and political practices. So I think when one can’t just simply say those are, you know, res-residual organic metaphors, or at least that’s what, you know, I think that a, um, what, what psychoanalysis commitment is. Um, now I just wanna say one more thing about the, the sonorous mask.

For… I would say the… What I found so… Maybe I was just too seduced by the, uh, you know, the beauty of the link that I saw in the passage from the Laudes Regiae, um, the way I thought it would li- it linked up with “The King’s Two Bodies,” where he talks about the king creating powers of the sonorous mass of voices.

[01:23:38] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:23:39] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
It’s… And he says, um, it becomes difficult to, to establish what are the, the, you know, the, the, the juridically constituting and, and what is not, but it’s nonetheless indispensable. Mm-hmm.

And it’s… And so I wanna say that the, um, the, the king’s second body, the sublime body, is something made up of, of, I would say, congealed doxological labor Mm-hmm which is voices, acclamations. Um, and so, and

And I think that’s what I was also trying to get, get at with, um, talking about the enigmatic signifier. It’s, it’s really a kind of vocal object- Mm that gets under the skin.

[01:24:25] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:24:26] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
That, um, you know, and, and the fact that, you know, that, uh, the, the most extreme case of psychic disorder is, you could say, is the hearing of voices. And so there is something about the flesh that what I’m calling the flesh is, involves, you know, Lacan called the voice one of the partial objects. The gaze is one of the partial objects.

Yes. Um, so I think that, um, I, I… I mean, I, it’s, um, it may be that, um, that Peterson and others from the theological archive are sufficient for getting at this dimension without or the, or, you know, or g-naturalistic or, you know- Mm-hmm you know, the, any, any, any naturalism.

But, um, he also talks about the, the cult itself as, um, vibrating with the angelic voices. Now, uh, clearly there’s some… This, this is just a metaphor.

[01:25:36] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:25:36] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
But, um, I think it’s more than a metaphor. Um, I– But the thing, what is more, what is the more?

[01:25:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:25:44] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
And I think, again, that’s the problem of, I think, um, um, this, this… Not just, well, let’s say psychoanalytic concepts. It’s this more than a metaphor, not yet a concept.

[01:25:56] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:25:57] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
And I think that’s, you know, that’s what clearly generates a lot of problems, but I think it’s worth the risk.

[01:26:03] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:26:05] BONNIE HONIG:
So for— forgive me for having run out like that, I mean, it was a, you know, it was a motivated lapses. I’m sure there’s, there’s a psychoanalytic account of—

[01:26:13] MODERATOR:
Get the microphone.

[01:26:13] BONNIE HONIG:
Oh, yeah. What was, what was happening there? Um, look, look, I,

(cough)

I you know, there’s, there’s, there’s a joke about beating the dead horse where people say after a while, they say, “Look,

(cough)

the horse is on the ground and it’s not moving.” So um,

(laughter)

I, I, I don’t necessarily wanna rehearse the, the entirety of, of, of my own, um, uh, uh, response to you from before. Uh, you, you clarified a great deal, I think, And what’s at stake, uh, between us. Um, it was helpful that we both clarified in the, in the taxi yesterday this-

This, this, this issue about, um-

[01:26:51] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Do we have this taxi online or-

(laughter)

[01:26:54] BONNIE HONIG:
We should have a taxi transcript. That’s, that’s definitely right. Uh, Look, the, the, the, the, core of my, my claim, uh, occurred in a passage which I should, I should also explain was not in the text that I sent to, uh, Eric so early.

And it, it was this, that I’m struck by the fact that the critique of commodity fetishism has been split off in Santner’s analysis from the critique of economic exploitation. A sign perhaps of the diremption in bourgeois experience and in, in the experience of theorists like us between the realm of exchange we all inhabit here and that other realm of labor occluded from our eyes or exported overseas that makes this exchange possible. One’s tempted to say that this theoretical démarche symptomizes is what has happened not only in the history of capitalism, but also in the history of the readings of capital.

If the exploitation of labor is dispatched to the margins of theory, the idea of fetishism is itself fetishized, that is dissociated from the economic injustice it was meant to explain. That, that one paragraph, which I realize sounds rather hard-hitting, I mean, I consider Eric a friend, but, uh, that, that wasn’t in what I originally sent him. So, so, uh, it, it probably clarifies a great deal what was at stake and what– when I, I c-

I suggested that his argument recapitulated the form of the left Hegelian critique of religious consciousness. Not, of course, a critique of consciousness, and Eric very helpfully explained why it’s, why the, the, the object in question is not consciousness at all. Um, it’s, it’s something somatic, right?

That’s clear in, in his talk of the somatic, of busy bodies and, and so forth. Um, but it seemed to me apparent from his presentations over the last two days, that, uh, he was recapitulating something like the Left Hegelian concern with being captive to theology, because the suggestion was that we suffer from a kind of embodied spell. That is, that we suffer from a kind of spellbound somatic condition, one which was best described with recourse to, uh, uh, the lexicon of political theology.

Now, one of the difficulties under-understanding, uh, uh, Eric’s presentation was that he wanted to explain that spellbound somatic condition as, as existing somewhere between what he calls the normative and the soman– uh, and the somatic. Uh,

(cough)

so the question is, what is that space between the normative and the somatic? Um, Eric refers to it as a third dimension. Uh, in his, uh, responses here, he referred to it as embodied mindedness.

Now, that’s a very, very perplexing term for me, embodied mindedness. Uh, you know, a, a, a very stolid And I think unobliging rationalist might say that embodied mindedness sounds a little bit like wooden iron.

Um, I don’t think it does sound like that. And I, I think what’s clear is that, uh, uh, Eric wants somehow to, to resist, you could say, both rather mean-spirited charges that I presented in my paper. One, that, that, that, that he had somehow eternalized this condition into something that looks like carnal finality, And that’s a very charged phrase.

And then on the other hand, uh, he wanted to insist that this is not a problem of consciousness. So we’re, we’re operating here in– with something, the pineal gland, whatever you like, something in that, in that interesting space in the history of metaphysics between, uh, between mindedness and embodiment. And I think, Eric, you very helpfully explained that rather than carnal finality, what we’re talking about here is a body- is embodiment which exhibits a certain plasticity, a certain responsiveness to history, to our sociality, so that our very embodiment, uh, is an embodiment of our sociality, of, of our history.

And hence, this seems to me the only way to make sense of, of your insistence throughout both presentations on the history of theological doctrines themselves. Say, Calvinist doctrine, say, med-medieval doctrines of the king’s two bodies, and how those doctrines themselves imprint themselves on, eventually, at the end of the day, uh, the modern, uh, pathologized bodies, busy bodies that we all have and that we all are. Um, now I, I take that to be the project.

I’m, I’m again confused because, um, I would have thought that that conformed to, um, uh, a rather simple-minded understanding of what Freud would call hysterical symptomatology. That is, that we suffer– that we exhibit, um, somaticized, um, uh, signs of repressed desire and so forth. So, so on a, uh, I think you called this a conventional understanding of Freud.

It’s definitely my understanding of Freud, and it, it probably is very simple-minded. But I would have thought that one thing that Freud is talking about is the way that we do somaticize desire, right? Or, you know, somaticize anxiety, which is why I had to rush out of the room, right?

[01:32:51] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Um- But what would desire be that would not have a somatic dimension?

[01:32:56] BONNIE HONIG:
Oh, I think it can. But let, let, let me… I’ll just, I’ll just finish here.

Um, uh, the, the other analogy, uh, that Eric made in his, in, in his paper was to the Heideggerian idea of comportments. Now, as I understand the Heideggerian idea of comportments, uh, Heidegger is saying that in our c-comportment, we exhibit our Seinsverständnis. That is, we can read metaphysics off our practices.

Something about the way we comport ourselves in the world, uh, manifests our understanding of being. Uh, we flesh out meaning in lots of ways. Hysterical symptoms are ways of fleshing out meaning.

But that does imply, at least I thought it implied, that the way to get clear on what’s what’s pathological is not simply to fix on what you might call the brute Ding an sich of the body.

[01:33:53] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
it would be to try to decode It would try to be to figure out what the s- what the signification is that has become encrypted, that has become enigmatic, and, and indeed make it less enigmatic, which is to say address it within the space of meaning. Now, if that’s the case, it sounds once again as if we are concerned with a pathology that looks like our s- our, spellboundedness to a kind of theology.

That is, that we suffer from a kind of hyper-enchantment that has manifested itself in our bodies. And that is why I said it sounds as if, uh, your argument is recapitulating the left Hegelian critique of theology. Um, so to bring this to a close, I actually wanna back away from all the detail of that and ask a very flat-footed question.

And l-l– I’ll begin it with a confession. Um, that passage I just read out loud, which is,

(coughs)

it, it sounds like a, a, a, a very militant kind of charge that a Marxist might articulate. And I, I, I was astonished to find, you know, after, after, after, uh, after listening to your presentations, that I felt more Marxist than I’d ever felt before. Because I was worried about precisely the way in which, uh, it seemed that the only thing we were now concerned about with capitalism was the way that commodities had become, uh, enchanted or continued to be enchanted.

And it, and it could be that this was based upon a very, a very simple brute misunderstanding of what your project is. I took it to be a kind of extension of a Marxian critique of our current condition. Uh, and I could very well be wrong about that.

So that, that ultimately, at the end of the day, that leads me to want to ask again a very simple-minded question, which is, what is it that you take your project to be? Because I think that’s the basic thing I’m still unclear on. At the end of the day, I don’t know what the question is that you’re, um, wanting to answer.

I, I– Uh, along the way, there’s… I mean, the, there’s really, there’s, there’s very interesting analysis here, and I think you and I have a lot to talk about, about our different readings of, of Freud, but also of Rosenzweig and, and so on and so forth.

But I– It’s that simple question that I want to ask.

[01:36:21] HENT DE VRIES:
Yeah. No, it, um… Maybe I could begin by saying that I, um, I, I didn’t talk about economic exploitation because I think that it’s somehow, like, it doesn’t–

(clears throat)

It’s kind of like a no-brainer. Like, I mean, you don’t need Marx to think about economic exploitation. You don’t need Marx to think about globalization.

You don’t need Marx to think about the marginalization of labor to, um, to, you know, to Bangladesh. I just think these are kinds of things that I just don’t think The Marxist analysis, the val- the labor theory of value is really, um, that we need the labor theory of value to, to to note those things and to argue about, about those things. I guess in part I, I would say that yet this–

I’m, I’m not engaged in a Mar- I would say, in a Marxist project. I’m…

I am reading Marx as a thinker of what Postone calls materialized social mediation. And for me, that’s a– He’s a, he’s a, uh…

Now, Merleau-Ponty said that there is only one philosopher of the flesh, and that’s Freud. Otherwise, it’s unavailable to philosophy, he thought. Philosophy can’t think this dimension.

So there was only one, one person who did, and that was Freud. And I want to say Marx did, too.

[01:37:52] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
And so what I’m, what I’m– if you want to see what the project is, it’s an investigation of this dimension that I’m that you say is just, you know, perplexing and you don’t, you know, you have trouble grasping. And I say, “Well, that’s why I’m working on this, because it’s hard. It’s–

That’s exactly what makes it a project.” Um, and so I’m, um, I find that, um, Marx’s… You know, I’ve kind of, you know, chewed on this bone of spectral materiality, gespenstische, Gespenstische Gegenständlichkeit, because I think it’s central to grasping this thinking with and of this dimension.

Now, I don’t think that’s the only site. I mean, I’m using Marx as a thinker of that. I’m interested in Marx as a thinker of that.

And there’s a lot of Marx that I’m obviously letting go and not, um, you know, not, not in-in-integrating into this, into this thinking. And, and it… And that may make it precisely, you know, um, unappealing to a Marxist. And I could un- you know, I’m not a Marxist.

Um, so that’s fine with me. Um, but I, um, I-I… Let me put it this way. I’m trying to be– The project is, I say, I’m trying to be, um, to, to further develop the philosophy of the flesh.

That’s what I would say, that’s the project. And I take the resources for that where I can. And sometimes it’s a literary work like The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which for me is, in a way, the richest literary archive I know for thinking about this.

And there’s even, um, when he was, um… when Rilke was thinking about, um, you know, in the early stages of the project, he was in Paris. And in correspondence with Lou Andreas-Salomé. And a number of the letters they exchanged, um, went li– you know, almost verbatim into the novel.

And he was also at the time a, um, uh, working a-as a s– uh, first he wrote a monograph on Rodin, then he was hired by Rodin to be his kind of business secretary. And he tremendously admired, um, Rodin’s work ethic And, and among the things he said, he wrote to, um, Lou Andreas-Salomé was, “I need to find, um,” he says, “Die Zelle meiner Kunst,” the cell of my art.

And he, at the end of the letter, he says, um, “If only I could make things out of anxiety.” Dinge machen aus Angst. Now, one could read that as, um, you know, that he’s feeling anxious and he needs to make things.

But I wanna say he wants to make them out of anxiety, out of the object of anxiety that he experienced in a palpable– I think he had a sensorium f-for the flesh. And Malte Laurids Brigge is largely, I would say, uh, um, a, uh, a, a, uh, um, an un– an unfolding, a, let’s say, a, a, let’s say, a spiritual literary exercise of this sensorium. And what grabbed my attention in the novel, and this may have been sort of what, you know, the, what, you know, threw me off a t- off a track or maybe put me onto something, was how much he, in the novel, Malte felt this, um, resonance between the, um, in a way, the too much fleshiness of the bodies he was encountering on the streets of Paris.

There are all kinds of bodies that are, in a way, too big for their skin. Their, their protrusions, e-excesses growing out, um, that the novel suggests are linked to conditions of modernity. But the novel is also, also, there are tremendous resonances between those descriptions and the descriptions of fourteenth and fifteenth, fifteenth century sovereigns who are in the midst of crisis, crises of their sovereignty.

In a way, the mel– You know, I would say the m-the melting of the second body. And he– what he describes is, in a way, the dissolution of the king’s two bodies in these figures. And the novel makes a very strong case in literary fashion for, um, s- experiencing these resonances as, um…

Well, okay, let me put it this way. I turned them into a story, into a n- I, I saw a narrative arc.

And this is, I know what you, what the, the problem that you were having in part that, um, w-what justifies the claim that the, um, the flesh in a way is transferred, migrates, mutates. Why, um… And I can’t, um… You know, I, I’ve tried to enlist, you know, some big guns to help me, you know, make that case, like, uh, Agamben, Foucault, Žižek, and others.

For example, you know, when, when Foucault says, you know, the ph- the physical juridical presence of the king, um, in relation to which each subject enjoys his status as member of the nation. Um, and says that this physical juridical st– um, presence of the king is, in certain things, is dissolving and being absorbed by other forms of power, um, which, you know, disciplines biopower and so on, and then eventually political economy.

I took this to be a, a very, um, suggestive and, and f– and, um, you know, fruitful way of tracking this dimension. Of being, let’s say, not just a philosopher of the flesh, of being a, um, a, a, a, uh, in part a philosophical g– you know, archaeologist of the flesh. Which I think is what Agamben is to, to some extent.

And so I f– I also clearly feel an affinity with Agamben that no one here else does. Um, so d– I think maybe to, you know, to answer, I think this is like the, uh, the crucial And I think it’s really a great fundamental question of what the hell am I doing?

You know, what is this project about? And I think that, um, uh, um, well, let, let me actually just say, like, the, the f– my first encounter with this dimension was when I worked on the Schreber case. And Schreber, Daniel Paul Schreber was unable, I’m sorry to use naturalistic metaphors, was unable to metabolize his symbolic investiture.

That is, he was unable to, um, affectively, psychically, um, um, identify with his status. And what he experienced instead was that his body was transforming into something else. That its flesh, his flesh was undergoing a mutation.

That the, the f- the, in a way, the, the failure of the symbolic, um, um, mandate, the symbolic investiture to get a grip on his sense of who he is, um, generated this re- th-this, this, this residue that became too much, and he then had to develop a, a theological story. Mm-hmm. A political theological story of what it all meant.

Um, And, um, so that in a certain sense, it’s like, uh, it’s the, the, the, the e- the experience of a failed investiture and an amplification, intensification of the body. And Schreber basically developed a, a kind of a religious doctrine around it, around that, you know, I think you could say the somatic and the normative in its failure To join up.

And his being became all about the inflammation, and he tried to, in a certain sense, d- um, um, create something out of that inflammation. And what he created was this very strange text.

You know, the Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken. That, I think for very good reason, has claimed the attention of first of, of, um, Otto Gross, and then Jung, and then Freud, and then on up, you know, through Canetti, Deleuze, um, uh, uh, Foucault and, you know, and many, many others, and then me. Mm-hmm.

And so in a sense, I would say I– that’s, that’s– You wanna say I got my start with Schreber, you know?

[01:47:50] HENT DE VRIES:
Um- Die Wurzel.

[01:47:51] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Yeah. Die Wurzel, right. Of the, of basically the this, this project of becoming, you know, what Merleau-Ponty said about Freud, although I’m not sure Freud would have fully identified with that, of being a philosopher of the flesh, which is in a certain sense, and he said, there is– philosophy is not a philoso– flesh is not a philosophical thing.

It’s not a really avail– But he said th-there was one who did it, and I’m trying to, in a certain sense, like, you know, continue. That’s, so that’s my project.

[01:48:26] MODERATOR:
Perhaps with that, um, we can open things up to the audience. This is being taped, so it’s important to, uh, talk into the cordless microphone, which Ellen has and will be carrying around.

[01:48:41] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Jay?

[01:48:43] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
He’s coming.

(laughter)

Great. Thanks.

[01:48:56] JAY:
Uh, I, I found this discussion really, really extremely helpful, and I just… I guess I just wanna follow up ’cause I… It’s, it’s, it’s clarified a lot, but I still– I’m still not sure

I, I completely understand one aspect of the project. I mean, uh, as I was listening to you in the first couple of days, I was also wondering where is the political in this, uh, discussion of political economy? And, and I understand from what you’ve been saying today that, uh, a lot of, you know, conventionally political topics are ones that you view as important.

They’re just someplace else. That’s not what, uh… You’re not talking about oppression or social change, um, or those sorts of things i-in themselves.

Um,

(cough)

your, your topic is, is a different, more kind of genealogical one, uh, and, and interpretive in some ways, and it seems extremely interesting, uh,

(cough)

just on its own terms. But, but to go back to something you were saying yesterday, the, the working through, the kind of therapeutic strain in your interpretation of political economy and the emphasis on working through in durcharbeiten, um, um, which, you know, has echoes of a kind of process that you go through to overcome some condition that you’re in, something like neurosis, or at least incrementally improve your situation. Uh, and it would it, you know, maybe be helpful to me to hear…

This is the flat-footed question is, uh, what’s, what’s the goal of that process, uh, in relation to political economy, um, in light of what you’ve said today? I take it, you know, if we go back to the chickens, it’s, you know, it’s not to change the social relations, uh, between us and the chickens or between the chickens amongst the chickens. Uh, it’s not a political goal in that sense, I, I wouldn’t think.

[01:50:40] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Um, but yeah- No, I wouldn’t. It’s not–

[01:50:43] JAY:
But is it supposed to be disenchantment? I mean, that, that seems, uh, you know, do we, we just discover that we’re not the… Uh, and we, and we somehow break the news to the chickens as well that we’re not the grain, um, that we took ourselves to be that-

Yeah. That, that can’t be it, really. Um, I, I hope we don’t stop vibrating ’cause that seems like the only thing that’s kinda interesting.

[01:51:05] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Okay.

[01:51:06] JAY:
Right. But so, so, so But what is the goal of the pro– I mean, what’s the end of this Durcharbeiten?

[01:51:11] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Well, the-

[01:51:11] JAY:
And, and, and just one other kind of ancillary question. Um, are there forms of this kind of, this kind of process of working through that are gonna be, you know… Uh, and it sounds like a, a very difficult exercise.

I mean, a very bourgeois exercise, that your one example of it is literary criticism. I’m sort of wor-worried about the UPS workers or, or the people like them who don’t have a union. I mean, how do they work it through, and, and what’s the goal of that process for them?

Maybe that’s, that’s just not anywhere in the ballpark of what interests you, but, um, it might help to understand the project. Yeah, a little bit more about that aspect of it.

[01:51:47] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
No, I mean, it’s, it’s, I, I, again, I think I am interested in cha– in, in the concept of change, you know, in the notion of change, but I’m trying to understand what are the, um, what do, you know, where does change, where does change happen and where does just innovation happen? Um, and, um, I think it’s In a certain sense it’s… Well, let me, let me…

I’m trying to think of the best way to, um… I would say I am int- I am interested in social and political change, But I don’t think I have a, um, a c- a clear vision of how, um, what kind of practices, um, um, touch on the dimension that I’ve been elaborating, you know, the dimension of the flesh as a, as a crucial site where change — where plasticity, um, is possible.

Let’s say where the possibility of new possibilities might emerge. Um, but I do think that, um… I mean, I know that, you know, I don’t want to, you know, say too much about it ’cause it seem, it seems so speculative.

But I think that, and, um, one of the things that from everything I’ve read about the, um, the, the, the, the first phase of, of the Tahrir Square, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, um, demonstrations. Well, first of all, it started out as demonstrations, and then it became a community of sorts, and it became a kind of form of life. Um, and in, to some extent, the Occupy movements,

And I think if you could hear Occupy also in the German sense of Besetzung, which is also Freud’s word for cathexis, libidinal cathexis. I think that part of what was happening was an e– a, um, an experimentation of, you know, squeezing together, which means not only were… Obviously, what brought the people together into Tahrir Square was getting rid of Mubarak.

Um, but once they were there, all kinds of other things were happening, you could say, in the microphysics of community. And what was happening, I think, was, um, a, a coming alive of this plasticity. It’s, it’s, it’s, it– the, the plasticity of social bonds was becoming available for, um, to experience.

And I think that’s– I mean, I think that’s in a certain sense what made it, um, more than a demonstration, you know, more than a- A-and what made it also, um…

Well, it made it, it turned it into a kind of ex-experimental form of life, um, in which I think, you know, the, um, the s- the stuff, the flesh of social bonds was being remolded. Now, what happened? What happened to it?

Um, did that, um, did that, um, uh, uh, let’s say, becoming plastic again, of the plasticity just disappear? Was it a fantasy? Is that not a, um, a, um, a, uh, uh, viable, um, mode of poli- of political action to basically create a, a community, you know, a form of life in the middle of the city?

Um, or at, you know, in the Occupy movements, you know, which you would call the, the Cathexis movements, um, the New Cathexis movements. Um, I think there too, part of what was happening, and, you know, and, uh, new gestures emerged, you know, like, all kinds of new, you know, um, you know, I would say, you know, forms of life were ex- were being experimented with that had to do not just with, um… I would say it– that what was happening there was, I think, what Peter, you know, what, what I called unplugging and making the plasticity newly available.

And now I, I, I think that’s all. I understand what Bonnie was saying about what was happening, you know, on at least in for certain moments in, let’s say, the, um, the, the, the democratic jouissance of the, um, of, you know, the, uh, the whale flesh scene was in a way, so related to that. Um, now the, the question is, like, so there’s, in other words, you know, an emergence, you know, demo– you know, let’s say emergent community, emergent forms of sociality.

Now, I’m interested in, let’s say, the emergence, but I don’t… It’s not that I ha- I have some clear sense of, like, what to do or the right, you know, the right, um, modes of organization.

That’s just not, uh, you know, that’s just not my project. But my project is, um, to kind of, you know, bring our attention to the, uh, you know, the, the, the, this s- this, this kind of social plasticity, which for me, um, the, you know, uh, the various thinkers I’ve enlisted in, you know, in developing this notion of the flesh, They… I think they help bring into view then this plasticity as a site of emergent, you know, social, social practices or, or, you know, modes of, of, you know, uh, new, new ways of being in– having in common.

So

[01:58:13] MODERATOR:
… So Marty, and then there was a question in the back. Uh, Marty, then you.

[01:58:18] MARTIN JAY:
E-Eric, it seems to me you’ve given us a very interesting, um, analysis of meaning and its other, or meaning and its various others. And you’re in a way a, a terrific adept of meaningfulness, showing us the ways in which, uh, the theological, the, uh, libidinal, the political,

[01:58:36] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
the literary, and God knows what else, the economic, all have a kind of, uh, analogical similarity. Not exactly the same, there remains so, but it is a very, uh, imaginative sense of, uh, the, uh, kind of transferability of meaning. But then there’s always the other meaning, whether it be the other that you’ve described as validity, which has a uh, positive ring to it, uh,

[01:58:59] MARTIN JAY:
or the, uh, the navel,

[01:59:01] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
the, uh, the, uh, blind spot, the, uh, rather negative space where we go at our peril because we’re unable really to imbue it with meaning. So there’s a kind of interesting ambiguity in that other meaning. Now, it reminded me a lot of Bataille’s notion of the difference between the general economy, uh, which includes all of this kind of messiness, and a more restricted economy, which is like that vicious circle that— right, you describe in, uh, I guess it’s Žižek’s terms.

[01:59:29] MARTIN JAY:
Žižek, yeah.

[01:59:30] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Exactly. So the vicious circle is something we wanna somehow get beyond. Now, in that, there is a kind of, in a way, performative project of elucidation.

Uh, you don’t like the self, uh, occultation that you claim, uh, Pistone sees as the, uh, effect of commodity fetishism. But you don’t wanna be occulted, you wanna get beyond that and see something, uh, uh, understand it.

[01:59:53] MARTIN JAY:
No, I think Mo- Moishe is actually saying that the self-occult– Uh, he’s trying to get us to see the self, to see the self-occultation,

[02:00:01] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
But, but to see beyond it. Yes. Yes, and that…

But my point is that I think your, your own project has that as its telos, that it’s a, an illuminating project. You want us to see something we’re not seeing, to get beyond– Right, our own blindnesses.

So in a way, there’s a kind of tension between that project, which extends meaning, as it were, uh, which has a kind of hermeneutic optimism, which tries to elucidate what has previously been occluded, hidden, veiled, in some way helping us politically. That, and on the other hand, the pessimism about ever getting, uh, into that blind spot, right, or navel, or whatever. So, but I— what I want to ask you is how you conceptualize your own, as it were, tension.

Maybe this is why you got inflammation because you’re going in two directions. Uh, but you know, in a way it’s, uh, you know, we think of psychosomatic, it’s normosomatic. You know, you get, I mean, you’re giving us this kind of normosomatic, um, tension.

Right. I, I, I want you to sort of think a little bit more about whether or not it will ever become more than a tension. Will it ever be resolved in the direction of elucidation, greater meaning, or is it always going to be, and this is why it’s different from Bonnie’s Sabbatarian semi-optimistic alternative, always mired in the pessimism of the inevitable dark spot, uh, blind spot, the navel, uh, whatever you wanna call it.

Yeah. And yet validity. Yeah.

No. I mean, um… Oh, it’s, it’s

(laughter)

a wonderful question, and I th– I , I guess I’m… At some level, I think that the, um, you know, «Wo Gefahr ist, da wächst das Rettende auch.

» You know, that, that precisely these, these, this, these dark spots are also the p- The spaces…

In other words, the place where we’re most stuck is also where real change happens. In other words, um, Jo-Jonathan Lear is a great… I, I, uh, he’s, he’s a great elucidator of psy- of, uh, of psychoanalytic, um, uh, uh, processes, of, of what happens, of what working through is.

And he often uses the sa- he often uses the same case, Maybe it’s multiple cases of the same kind of thing, where someone is only able to ex- is only able to experience, um, things as disappointment, and is always, always manages every achievement in some sense, you know, turns into a disappointment. And so no matter– so you could say, “Oh, well, you should, you know,” you could change this, you could change that, and, and really good things happen, but nonetheless, there’s a stuckness in a, um, say, a hermeneutics of disappointment. Now, it’s not…

You can’t just say to this person, “Don’t you see?” You’re always experiencing things as disappointment. Let go.

You’ll see that, you know, you could, you know, life is, you know, full of wonderful things, and look at all the things you’ve, you’ve achieved. Don’t be so, so disappointed. And the person says, “Yeah, you’re so right.”

And then they go on, you know, feeding the chickens again. I know I’m not, I know I’m not living a life of disappointment, but just, you know, whatever my chickens are, they don’t know. And so I could even turn that discovery.

Look, I even understand why, you know, that I experienced my life as disappointing, but I failed to do anything about it. What a shit am I, you know, that I can’t do it? So there’s some way in which how do you change that?

And I think that it’s like, what kind of stuckness is that? And, um, so it’s a stuckness that clearly generates a kind of hermeneutic monotony, but it’s not itself based on some misunderstanding, that and that you could, you know, then just clarify. And so the intervention can’t just be into the, let’s say, a hermeneutic stuckness can’t just be simply hermeneutic clarification.

Some other process is involved, and that’s, you know, what ostensibly the, um, the clinic we were working through or this weird kind of, of, of, you know, these suddenly interruptions of that and, you know, where you suddenly, you know, something breaks in that pattern and in the analytic situation, you could seize on that and sort of– you could say bring that into the space of meaning. But not as like some misunderst– Okay, now I see I misunderstood it.

It’s something about the break, you know, the these, um, these, these eruptions of, I, I would say the, you know, the being absorbed by some bl– you know, some eni- Some enigma. Not a, a false view of things, but some, some in a way addiction, you know, to, um…

I know, it’s just very hard to say what it, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s something that sends you on a certain course in the space of meaning, but it’s not itself like a meaningful… You could say it’s something that has validity but not meaning. Um, so you’re caught in, it’s the way you’ve gotten your foothold in a meaningful life, but it’s also– keep– it’s also restricting the space of meaning, restricting the possibility of meaningfulness.

[02:05:34] MODERATOR:
There’s a question in the last row on that side, and then still on that side. I’m sorry, I’m just pointing at you, uh, on this-

[02:05:43] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I have one, then I could hand it off to him.

[02:05:44] MODERATOR:
Okay.

[02:05:46] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, so I’d like to continue with, uh, Professor Gordon, Um, With his line of questioning and critique, is I also have the thought that there are aspects of the project that remind me of the young Hegelians, while at the same time you’re using, um, Marx, and you’re deploying various elements of materialism or new materialisms or a third materialism. Um, and I, I think I understand aspects of that move, and I understand you’re taking recourse to Freud, and you’re emphasizing the body in a different way. But I s-

I still think that beyond the, the Marxist aspect of his critique, whether or not he or we are Marxists, about the conditions of possibility of, of this form of… these forms of busybodiness or the question of labor, et cetera. The… And so the, the way that I’d like to put it a little bit differently is, like Professor Wallace asking, what is the political aspect of this project?

I’d like to ask what is the historical aspect of the project? And you said that you’re trying to articulate a philosophy of the flesh, and I’d like to know if, if you’re giving us a philosophy of the flesh, in what, in what way is it historical? Um, is this a historical account of, of the flesh and of the body?

And if so, in what way is it? And I understand that you’re turning to Foucault and Agamben and these various people to account for a certain kind of change. So I’m, in, in anticipating an answer, I was like, I’m, I’m assuming that you’re going to take recourse to Foucault.

But even in his account, in The Birth of Biopolitics or Security, Territory, Population, where you’re accounting from, for the, the shift, uh, with the rise of mercantilism in, in early modern capitalism, the displacement of political sovereignty, um, from, you know, the monarch. Whether it goes to the, the political body, the social body, or what happens to it. The…

Later on, I read it more that, like, economic production is, is, um, part and parcel of what, uh, retains sovereignty or, like, gives the state sovereignty. So I understand aspe- but aspects of, of that, of their account, but I, but their… your relation, the, the, this philosophy of the flesh, the relation of this philosophy of the flesh to those accounts is very, um, elusive for me. I, I can’t make the connection myself.

Um, and it was to, to end my, my question-

[02:08:27] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
No, well, I- I’m trying to make the connection for you. That’s kind of it.

[02:08:30] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Wonderful. Yeah. Thank you.

And so, and with the question of the emergence, you’re, you said you’re thinking the emergence. I’m wondering where the emergence here, how we account for historical change, and I guess this also has to do with the question of what kind of project it is. But what is the, the historical element of your philosophy of, of flesh?

[02:08:48] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Well, I mean, I thought that, I mean, it’s precisely the historical element of it, um, f- that has been, you know, um, has been put under so much pressure, um, here that is being challenged. I mean, so I think that the whole everything I said what really in the last two days was about the historical dimension of it in the shift from political theology of sovereignty to the, to the political economy of, you know, commodity producing societies. So I’m not really sure.

I mean, I feel like that’s basically what I’ve been s-talking about, is the historical dimension of this, um, the, let’s say, the flesh management. you know, fle- basically flesh economy, you know, flesh administration. Um, and that, um, sort of what is, um, what institution, what institutions, what is the, um, what institutions are, as it were, surcharged with, um, the care of the flesh?

And, um, and my argument was that, um, that this– we could notice historical shifts in the institutional loci, you know, loci of, of, of the, of the, you know, of the charge of this, you know, of, of, of who, what, how, how this dimension is, is, is managed. Um, so, um, so I’m not really sure what to say. But, you know, I– let, let me just finally say in the end that, you know, as I’m approaching sixty, I’m fine to be a young Hegelian, you know?

Like, better that. Um, may I always be a young Hegelian. Um…

[02:10:41] MODERATOR:
There are six minutes. This gentleman had a question, and I guess I didn’t,

[02:10:45] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I did, but I can go next if that’s all right.

[02:10:49] MODERATOR:
This– behind Jay and then in the back. And then we can talk more informally.

[02:10:56] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Okay. Uh, well, I think maybe I’m, uh, just gonna be beating a Peter’s dead horse again here a little bit. But I’d like to press you just a little bit more on the question of the normative commitments of this project.

Um, you talked about, um, change, plasticity, emergence, and so on. And, uh, frankly, those concepts strike me as kind of empty unless one can sort of specify normatively, normatively the, the direction of the change. And what’s the change for?

What’s the change supposed to accomplish? I mean, from a political point of view, uh, clearly it’s very often politically just as important to focus on the preservation of values and institutions and practices to which we are attached and, and committed and want to remain committed. What else does it mean to be committed?

So, um, so that’s my question, I guess. What, what it– what, what’s the change for? Yeah.

What is the sort of normative commitment that’s, that seems to be… And I guess I’m, I’m really interested in this because I get the feeling that this project is very powerfully and urgently animated by a normative, ethical, moral commitment, but I don’t know what it is.

[02:12:07] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
Right. I, it’s, I, I guess maybe, I know that’s a really wonderful question that I’m not sure I, um, I’ve thought hard enough about, but I think you’re right that it’s there.

Um, and I guess at some level, it’s trying to understand a concept of freedom that takes into account this, the, um, our life in the flesh. What does the concept– What does freedom mean that, that, um, that, uh, tries to take fully into account this dimension as a site of, let’s say, of, of stuckness and plasticity?

That’s, I would say, the, the, the normative dimension of it.

[02:12:56] MODERATOR:
One last question, um, in the back right in front of, uh, next to the gentleman who asked the second question. Sorry.

[02:13:07] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I’m actually not sure what I’m gonna ask now. Um, I would– Um, so I’ll ask two things quickly. One is whether the…

So I, I hear you saying the historical account of the f- of the flesh, of the category. But I’m wondering if you’re also speaking to the historicity of the concept of the idea of the flesh, or if the flesh is sort of a transhistorical bridge for you that gets you across these different epochs of management. And I hear, hence, objection about the secularization thesis as well as Blumenberg’s objection to Schmitt precisely in that question of, of whether the flesh itself is actually subject to deep historical transformation rather than sort of mere epiphenomenal transference to different historical regimes of management, and where you come down on the historicity of, of your particular concept.

Um, but my second point was going to be, um, about the, the method actually that you use to approach your question, and just if you could clarify more sort of the, the approach to thinking that you have in bringing this question to bear. Um, because I see you drawing elements of phenomenological traditions of thought, psychoanalytical traditions of thought, moving across discourses of political economy and literature, but I see the, the way in which you group them together to be primarily sort of analogical or associational in terms of the way you pit those discourses in relation to one another. And I wonder what sort of is the ambit of that kind of analogical gesture—

[02:14:28] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
What is the gambit?

[02:14:29] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah. So what’s, what’s, what is it that you hope to produce with this tapestry of texts? Is it a phenomenological account of the flesh in your invocation of Merleau-Ponty as sort of a, a limit category of experience?

Or is it a different kind of a, a claim? I just— And I struggle sometimes because for me, I see deep incongru— incongruities between these discourses that you are moving very quickly through to link in sort of a broader narrative.

And, uh, it’s hard for me sometimes to see Foucault and psychoanalysis linked so closely when I think they have, you know, very deeply different accounts of the body and the flesh. And so all these terms. So I’m wondering what…

It seems like that’s a very deliberate gesture on your part, this kind of associational production of a set of linkages, um, that maybe operates at one level and not another. So if you could speak maybe a little bit to that sort of methodological approach, and then also to the question of, of the histor– the deep historicity of the concept of the flesh would be great.

[02:15:20] PROFESSOR SANTNER:
It would be great, wouldn’t it? Um, I, I agree. Um-

Yeah, I, I, I– it’s very hard for me to, um, answer the question of methodology ’cause I, I, I think that at some level you’re right, there’s something, um, associative. In a certain sense, I think what I, you know, at some level I think what I’m doing is allowing these various, um, theor-theorists to free associate, um, allowing them to free associate and to see what kinds of family resemblances emerge out of their, out of their, out of these associations, and to see if they converge on something. And in my view, they do.

And, and I’m trying to, to draw that out. Um, so I think it’s less–

(laughter)

I think it’s some, to some extent, it’s less me That’s, uh, that’s, that… For example, like when Foucault then suddenly, you know, uses subject-object hyphenated, um, I’m kind of, you know, saying, “Well, you know,” say more about that.”

You know? Like, “That’s interesting,” you know. Like, “Why do you do that?”

Now, he doesn’t exactly say why he does it, but I’m kind of, in a certain sense, like, drawing out of the texts his associations. Like, but in other words, it’s, it’s–

I’m trying i-in a certain sense to put the texts, to allow the text to, to, to, um, um, uh, elaborate more on these strange bits that seem to stick out and that you could read past. And suddenly that there, that maybe that’s where, where, where actually the, the real claim is. Um, but it’s a claim that really forces the thinking in a way, it, in a way, it, it, it, it, it does maybe then appropriate a dimension of their thinking that they wouldn’t fully identify with consciously.

Um, so I would say that, that, you know, in terms of methodology, that’s what comes to mind. That there’s a, um, um, um, I’m trying to, to, um, intuit and maybe this, you know, there is a certain phenomenological dimension of this too. Um, family resemblances of conceptual moves and, um, and historical claims that for me, that, that what allows them actually to, um, resonate together in spite of what looked like fundamental, um, you could even say methodological, um, uh, uh, ki– you know, um, uh, antagonisms, there is a re– I’m trying to f– to sh– to, to create a resonance chamber in which the sonorous mass, um, could, you know, could emerge and, and, and become available to, uh, you know, to my own kind of scrutiny.

Um, and I think that is, I think to some extent, you know, the way, um, Marty described, you know, what, you know, what I’m doing. But that– I think that’s another way of, of trying, uh, trying to say it. So I know, like, all the time, you know, uh, people say, “Well, how could you possibly bring those two people in the same room?”

You know? “They’re not– They can’t possibly, you know, talk to each other.”

Well, but they could, they could fantasize together. You know, they could dream together. And I’m, I’m trying to, you know, to work with that material.

With respect to phenomenology, I think there is, I mean, a kind of– I, I ha– this is, you know, more autobiographical. I, I mean, I st– I learned German in order to read Husserl and Heidegger.

I had a great teacher in college who turned me on to this stuff. He never finished this dissertation on Husserl, didn’t get tenure, but he was, you know, a great inspiration. And, and, and, and I think that I, I…

There’s something about being kind of trained even in a pro– you know, in a pro– in a, in, in a small way in phenomenological, um, sort of exam– you know, so phenomenological introspection, let’s say, that I have tried to bring together with psychoanalytic thinking. Um, and I think the convergence ha– between phenomenological, um, investigation and psychoanalysis, um, is around this concept of the fold, this, this, this stuff of the flesh. Um.

[02:20:11] MODERATOR:
Perhaps we can associate on that side of the wall, but please join me in thanking our four scholars.

(applause)