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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 110-127 Transcendence and Praxis:
Events make history. The entire French philosophical world is a-buzz about the question of what constitutes an event. Many thinkers — including, but not limited to, Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, Françoise Dastur, and Marlene Zarader — have undertaken their own inquiries into this matter. Alain Badiou has provided the most developed account of the nature of the event and its political consequences in his epic L'Être et l'évènement[2], which is extended in his nearly completed Logiques des mondes. To say that philosophy should focus on events does not mean that no sustained and focused reflection is worthwhile, as a quick glance at L'Être et l'évènement or Théorie du sujet will reveal. Indeed, Badiou's eclectic work on the event takes the reader through sustained and focused reflection upon such diverse topics as advanced set theory, the cultural significance of St. Paul, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and literary analyses of the work of Beckett. However, it is certainly also true that Badiou develops another, serious, analysis of the event in his many short pieces on timely topics. And he thinks that it is very important that these kinds of inquiries take place. One can well see today that if we let ourselves be intimidated, philosophy would only be a scholastic quarrel between liberal grammarians and pious phenomenologues.[3] According to Badiou, philosophy today must only focus upon events, which are the origin of truths.[4] Truths, then, are eventful, and in this sense circumstantial, even as the quest for truth is infinite. A political point of [end page 110] view is constituted in diverse circumstances. Philosophy can advance in the shelter of that which this point of view comports of affirmation and invites to action.[5] Progress is possible through praxis; praxis is discernable via philosophy (through delimiting goals and directing action toward them); and events are the occasions for philosophical reflection. Today I want to focus on the thought of Denis Guénoun, and bring this focus within the aforementioned frame of the philosophy of the event. This will enact a sort of transfer, since Guénoun does not explicitly discuss the nature of the event at length, as far as I know. Yet he has written much that pertains to this important topic, what I believe may be the most significant theme in contemporary philosophy. I will be drawing primarily upon Guénoun's recent work, Après la révolution[6], though I will also make reference to several other of his recent works: L'Exhibition des mots[7], Le Théâtre: est-il nécessaire?[8], L'Enlèvement de la politique[9], Hypothéses sur l'Europe[10], and Un semite[11]. My claim is that Guénoun can be read as offering an original and important account of the event in his phenomenology of theater and in his other political essays.[12] More specifically, I want to show that Guénoun's account of transcendence in political (re)assembly spanning his recent works discloses the event that institutes the political aspect of our existence and provides for moral direction within it. I will proceed by sketching-out what is meant by three words: revolution, revelation, and revolition. Guénoun begins his recent book, Après la révolution, with the blunt observation that "[s]omething is not going well in world affairs."[13] Indeed, the last few years have not been easy. Violence has erupted in many places: Kosovo, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, the United States, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Liberia have all seen blood shed recently for political differences. One might well ask what such conflicts have to do with revolution. And the answers will vary depending on one's perspective. Guénoun wants to seek an ethical basis for revolutionary politics to address these differences in perspective. Revolution is about radical change. But Guénoun is committed to the position that morally sanctioned revolutionary answers must emerge in a forum that is maintained as an open forum for disparate voices and perspectives. We will begin by examining what he means by revolution. He has explained this most clearly in Après la révolution. The book is divided into five chapters: I. Moral Politics; II. The Coming of the World [La Venue au Monde]; III. Theology of Europe; IV. Violence in Culture; and V. Political Style. [end page 111] The central hypothesis of the first chapter is that the essence of political decision is ethical in nature. Guénoun describes the best-case scenario for moral politics as an open deliberation of the people. The key characteristics here are openness and engagement or participation.[14] This public dimension of the political does not automatically or naively guarantee a consensus arising in a democratic manner. Indeed, what it guarantees is dissent. Though Guénoun does not put it this way, he would agree that the people are not of a mind, expressing a singular will as if from a singular moral and political agency. He stresses that in this public dimension there must be multiple interests.[15] Likewise, the people are not an authority in the sense of possessing some moral or political expertise.[16] But all of this untidiness, inexactitude, inexpertise, and dissent, are the conditions of the possibility of the political, not an impediment to achieving polity. Indeed, the direct, brutal expression of power by a single interest asserting a single, clearly defined standard as truth is impolitic.[17] What is required instead is the translation of the individual, singular agency into the realm of the political.[18] In fact, this is revealed as the essence of the hope for a moral politics: the transcendence of the.[19] This political is not of the political. Guénoun wants to firmly assert this precept: "the meaning [sens] of the political is not political."[20] Political judgment is not a kind of metaphysical adequation, ideally referring to itself. Guénoun maintains that this apparent weakness of the political empowers the arts (under conditions we will discuss later). The discussion of theatre, especially, requires no extrapolation of the political — it manifests political meaning. Pure political reflection, on the other hand, is a false ideal since it cannot be politically significant; ideas have real consequences. What results is creativity, a kind of "political joy," the ek-stasy of the self, transcended and translated.[21] This self-transcendence is the basis of recognizing and striving toward the ought beyond the is. Guénoun is certainly a Leftist philosopher in many ways, but he insists that his position differs from the "Marxist vulgate."[22] Orthodox Marxism, or at least the Marxism appropriated in the socialist regimes of Lenin and Stalin, precludes the open deliberation and self-transcendence Guénoun describes in favor of a hoped-for realization of this political joy — "after the revolution."[23] But this would be to abandon the hope of any truly revolutionary act in the name of a revolution. Another way of seeing this is that it would entail a teleological suspension of the ethical in the political realm.[24] Although Guénoun does not explain his position in this way, it is consistent with his point that things are not going well politically in the world because politics has abandoned its moral ground. We will come back to this point later. [end page 112] So, Guénoun maintains that, while the moral content of political decision is not given in the demeaning sense supposed by political moralizers, it is still recognizable and realizable by the people. Concerning moralizers: until lately, recent French thought has, perhaps, been a bit too quick to celebrate the death of God, symbolically, and to embrace a skepticism of all morality. Recent French philosophy is haunted by the specter of nihilism. One must accept and even welcome the various devastating critiques of modernity, precisely because of modernity's systematic foundations for moral and political judgment. But no matter how necessary the critiques were, one must admit that the unsystematic non-foundational philosophies that emerge from the critiques have been un peu léger when it comes to politics.[25] The poor exchanges of accepting structure or strategy in place of sagesse may have ushered in another poor exchange: accepting a didactic polimos in place of a polymath. We see these problems as the occasion providing the allure of the turn to religion or crypto-religion in many recent French thinkers: Levinas, Marion, Henry, and lately even Derrida. Here perhaps, Badiou and Guénoun, by examining the nature of the event in praxis, might emerge as providing another alternative in contemporary French thought for developing a moral politics without reducing politics to religious moralizing. The world was deeply plunged in 'ethical' delirium. Everyone was busily confusing politics with the hypocrisy of a mindless catechism. The intellectual counter-revolution, in the form of moral terrorism, was imposing the infamies of Western capitalism as the new universal model. The presumed 'rights of man' were serving at every point to annihilate any attempt to invent forms of free thought.[26] Badiou surely means to target this kind of moralizing approach to ethics when he proclaims that "ethics... is only a degraded theology."[27] Now we need to continue our examination of Guénoun's notion of revolution to see how a moral politics can be truly revolutionary instead of lapsing into moralizing. Guénoun greatly simplifies two understandings of after the revolution in concrete terms by saying that these two senses of the phrase are related to the French and Russian revolutions and their effects upon us.[28] He describes these as “two fervors” or “two plots” which form the tissue of our existence today.[29] But he does this to show that we need to “take measure of the retreat of the coming of the world and seek to re-shape it.”[30] That is, we need to find a way for the coming of the world [roughly the title of the second chapter], for the world to emerge as world through our actions. So far, the revolutions that have taken place have been national revolutions of one sort or another. Guénoun is actually much clearer about this in his masterful work, Hypothéses sur l'Europe. But as we peek at that work, let us keep in mind that the moral dimension of politics was shown in the previous chapter of this book to lie in self-transcendence. In Hypothéses sur l'Europe, Guénoun states that "Europe is one of the names for the return upon the self of the universal."[31] He elaborates his account along the way to disclose several concrete models of related, reversible revolutions in European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This return has many guises. [end page 113] After 1800, revolution in Europe was expanded to be a "revolution of and in revolution — total revolution."[32] This is socialism, "another name for the redoubling produced by the return upon itself of the revolutionary process"; and when intensified, it eventually led to the reification of a nationalism in this expanded form, the fascism we know as national socialism.[33] Thus, fascism and socialism are interdependent reciprocal models of a return upon itself that is Europe. The tragedy of the 20th century is that national socialism and nationalized socialism [national-socialisme et socialisme national] face off and make war, pretending to leave to the world no space other than the things devastated by their battles.[34] However, Guénoun implies that we can escape this tragic situation of the last century, if the right voice could emerge to reveal the way. But this way can be announced only when the promise of revolution is divorced from blind nationalism. The new way for the world to emerge requires the overcoming of nations. A new revolutionary sort of singularity has to emerge that is trans-national, a moral self-transcendent nation that is concerned about a world rather than obsessed with itself. This is what Guénoun calls a "world-politics" that is post-colonial and post-national. This new trans-national singularity must emerge with an aim of world-becoming rather than the old models of nation-building or world-building after the manner of the production of a product.[35] The way toward becoming-world of the world must be revealed for a new form of revolution to occur. Revolution requires revelation. Philosophers of the event have a great deal to say about the advent as well as the event. Perhaps this is why Paola Marroti told me this summer that she thought that all of the philosophy of the event could be reduced to a new messianism. She seems to have a point when we hear that the word Guénoun chooses to assign to the voice of revelation is the prophet.[36] Yet, in spite Marotti's allegation, and though Guénoun's words clearly have a resonance in his Jewish tradition, I maintain that there is no religious dogmatism in Guénoun's work, nor, I believe, any crypto-religion of the sorts alluded to above.[37] The moral direction of revolutionary politics requires a different sort of revelation — one a little less apocalyptic. Guénoun says the prophet "augurs, but divines nothing."[38] The prophet merely “solicits a sense” of the future.[39] The revelatory function of the prophet is pre-diction, not pre-vision.[40] One might [end page 114] say that the prophet is a sayer, not a seer. The prophet foretells the future to reveal a new perspective — speaking of the future to effect a transformation. This revelatory role is revolutionary in a new sense because it avoids both the certainty of a mechanistic causal revolution propelled from the past as well as the foreclosure of the future that leeches the value from the present — the two senses of revolution described above. The prophet foretells the future without certainty or despair, and allows us to take measure of the impairments of genuine praxis.[41] Guénoun asks how various singularities, and not only individuals, could play a prophetic role. In particular, he focuses upon the revelatory role of a society that transcends itself. It seems paradoxical that it requires a nation to be trans-national. But if it is to establish a morality, the transformation of the nation state must come from within, an overcoming of the self-interest to reveal a way of becoming-world. Yet Guénoun says that a very special kind of society would be required to accomplish this. A traditional nation, defining itself for itself, could not be revelatory. Specifically, he considers two apparently promising present-day societies: the United States and Europe. The United States is a nation that is in many ways trans-national or post-national. It has established itself by assimilating a variety of nations and traditions. Guénoun thinks there are many problems with the United States' political position, and in very many ways is totally opposed to its role in world affairs. But the United States is the nation that has given the most cohesion to the coexistence of the principal races, nations, cultures, religions, and languages of the world in its own (post)-national state. The United States is the most worldly nation [la plus mondiale] that exists, and this should come as no surprise, has become a sort of delegated figure of the world, representing or holding the place of the world engaged in its own becoming-world, its worlding [mondialisation].[42] And in this way, it is important to acknowledge that the trans-national aspect of its assimilation of others has a tremendous promise in terms of its produced diversity (at least of a certain sort) and its resilience. And, to be sure, Guénoun makes no secret of its peril. He states that it is this power of assimilation that has allowed the United States to assume its position of dominance and maintain a cultural and economic hegemony in the world today. It has accomplished this in a unique way — by manipulating the image. To say that it is through the manipulation of images that the United States has achieved its hegemony is not to [end page 115] devalue or discount the use of brute force and the loss of lives involved. But the United States is not the Roman Empire; and its imperial tactics are not Roman. The manipulation and proliferation of the image, not the use of physical force, is the main instrument that establishes and maintains its power. This is the essence of the post-industrial and post-colonial malaise that, Guénoun says, plagues the world today. It is the source of the soulless banality of reproduction so that the image is proliferated until society is saturated. Dominance is achieved through this hegemonic manipulation of images. Baudrillard, of course, also has much to say about this. It is his position that the image has become more real than real — hyperreal. In the hegemonic saturated society of Western post-industrial culture, we prefer images to reality. And if one can manipulate the images, one determines reality. Hence, we have seen Baudrillard's provocative claims that the Gulf War [the first one, at least] did not take place. He did not mean that there was no conflict, no fighting, and no bloodshed. But the meaning of the war was carefully constructed within pre-established parameters that reify the hegemony. Indeed it was a Baudrillardian moment par excellence when the reporters were embedded within the military forces in the second Gulf War. Why not let the media attack instead of the army? They control the images. Guénoun, however, like Badiou, and perhaps unlike Baurdillard, thinks that it is still possible for us to change. He argues passionately against the suburban lifestyle idealized by western capitalist culture. It is a lifestyle that is ravaging our planet and subjecting the poor to untold miseries — purchasing a contrived comfort of the few at the expense of the suffering of many, many people. The suburban dream is a dream that has been dreamt, but is dirempt of any moral sensibility or style. It manifests the meaning of the political in its bad architecture, its disposable commodities, its bad arts, etc. Style is, for him, political and ethical life.[43] Guénoun's prize example of this problem is the automobile, which, he thinks, is "indefensible," a "monstrosity" and even "a model of counter-productivity that cannot be equaled."[44] Invented to facilitate and emancipate, it makes things more difficult — it enslaves. Conceived for fluidity, to make life more fluent, more rapid, more circulating, it paralyses, provokes a general occlusion, a gigantic social thrombosis.[45] The auto is more and less than a convenience. It is "murderous madness" that destroys the social morale and the moral ground of politics.[46] It leeches the quest for beauty from our daily lives, no matter how cultured we might be. The most delicious person, nourished in medieval art and Gregorian chant, reading Proust morning and night, can enter into a fury and bark obscenities out his window because of a red light or a barricade.[47] [end page 116] Some of Guénoun's analysis seems at first to be wonderfully, hopelessly French. That is, it might appear to be more relevant to a specific culture than to Western cultures in general. His example of the urban monstrosity of La Defense will not move non Parisian readers [yes, there are literate non Parisians] the way he intends. Readers from Auxerre, let alone Aukland, will conjure no vision of this blight, save perhaps for the postcards showing some pretty lights in the distance behind the Eiffel Tower. Yet the conclusions he draws are generalizable. The demoralizing horrors of urban life are a part of the Western culture that seeks to proliferate like a computer worm. The specific sites will vary. But these problems are similar, and Guénoun accurately describes the essential similarity as a problem of style. It is important to note that Guénoun does not make the rather callous bourgeois mistake of focusing on trivial inconveniences of Western culture. He is not ignoring war, poverty, ecological disaster, and extreme forms of human suffering or claiming that these are less important than the problems of the proliferation and mass-production of images. He is acutely aware of these problems of our time, calls attention to them, and is trying to address them. But it would be a huge mistake to try to address these problems without addressing the conditions that produce them. And for Guénoun, that means addressing bad political style. The bad political style that extols the reproduction of images is, he maintains, the source of cultural violence. Bad political style is not a small matter. Bad political style is fraught with violence. Bad political style involves suspending the ethical for a politics of self-obsession. When the United States attacked Iraq, it did so ostensibly to ward off a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Of course, we are still waiting for a single shred of evidence that there existed any such weapons. Since then we have seen the sons of the deposed Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay, hunted down and killed, their mutilated bodies displayed for the world to see. One expected their heads to be placed on pikes outside Baghdad. Let us not beat around the Bush: the invasion must be recognized for the imperialistic act of aggression that it was. The code name for the invasion was Operation Infinite Freedom. Operation Infinite Liberty would have provided the better acronym, OIL — the real weapon of mass destruction the Iraqis have. OIL is not a thing; it is a process. It is, after all, the remains of lives lived long ago. OIL is death. As such, it is arguably the most precious commodity for industrial society. Its presence determines an entire value structure. A calculus of the exchange value of OIL is indicated, whereupon our civilization has determined an acceptable ratio of body bags per barrel. Fittingly, the body bags are themselves petroleum products. [end page 117] Now, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion, the United States is in the business of nation-building. We are not very good at it. But the goal should not be to fiddle with the specific policies of nation-building to create a puppet nation to maintain the hegemony of the United States as supreme nation. Instead the goal should be world-building, world-becoming, worlding. Our liberal ears may redden at the realization that this is a positive and necessary from of globalization.[48] And the United States, at present, seems unlikely to assume this ethical responsibility in its politics. Indeed, Guénoun says that this would be a "prodigious marvel" — even a sort of "historical miracle" in spite of its trans-national nature.[49] It is not likely to transform its protectionism into prophecy, its mastery into justice, or its power into morality. Its trans-nationalism is a post-national nationalism that has produced a new form of imperialism rather than moral revelation. Europe is another untraditional trans-national singularity that Guénoun considers for the likelihood of assuming a prophetic role. And, by contrast to the strip mines and strip malls of the United States, he thinks at present Europe may present the only open way to revelation — if one exists today. Guénoun argues that this is more likely for three reasons: i. Europe has recognized itself as a trans-national society and is reforming itself to overcome old style nationalism in favor of world-oriented policies. Of course, as we have seen in the example of the United States, this does not guarantee that a moral revelation will arise. And there are certainly forces at work to keep it bound to an anti-American posture that would remain reactive rather than revelatory. Nonetheless, the promise is there. ii. Europe invented the idea of the common world and even the common economy. It is the birthplace of much of the high art that is copied and mass-produced elsewhere. The hope is that the banding together of a European Union could provide a new vista based upon cooperation attending to cultural differences rather than eliminating them. There is, of course, a precedent of European colonialism! But the thought here seems to be that this was tied to the old style nationalism. iii. Europe is a society of nations. This means that there exists that starting point for the transcendence discussed above, a means to measure the trans-national perspective that could emerge through the maintenance of internal differences. Though Guénoun stresses that there is nothing certain about the promise of trans-national revelation in Europe, he sees it as the most promising option we have today. The similarities with the trans-national character of the United States reveal the contrasts. Both are involved in world-making, but the United States interprets this as a new form of nationalism. Europe seems more open to critique rather than developing a hegemony. Europe is more open to difference, internally and externally. [end page 118] Europe thrives on its own discord, which might produce the kind of revelation that opens a world. And though Guénoun does not exactly say it this way, when considering the promise of the two cultures to provide a fecund place for revelation, the difference between European culture and American culture might be summarized symbolically as the difference between the politics of the salon and the saloon. One question that comes to mind is the usual problem of any revelatory philosophy that recognizes some ought from a place mired squarely in the is: is he immune to the otherwise ubiquitous forces that have duped the rest of society? From what place did Hegel describe the grand march to the Absolute? From what perspective did Marx describe the emergent classless and free society to be achieved by the dictatorship of the proletariat? From what perspective does Guénoun reveal the cause of violence in our society as the proliferation of images — is he not susceptible to these problems? In other words, does Guénoun fancy himself to be a prophet? He denies this one way or another, acknowledging the limitations of his observations on many occasions. But he does so explicitly in one footnote where he instructs the reader not to think that "the author of these lines poses himself as a prophet." He goes on to say that such a charge is "crazy" and "not worth a single line of refutation." This footnote takes six lines….[50] The role of the prophet is to reveal the future, but the revelation is not an act willed by a single person or a single nation — not Guénoun, not France. It is the act of a new form of singularity that transcends itself acting beyond its interest, while implicating an identity for this transcendence. The prophet is implicated as prophet by the act that reveals a future beyond the intention of the prophet.[51] Prophecy is a voice that one finds rather than wills, at least in the usual sense of will. One re-cognizes it rather than cognizes it. III. Revolition The role of will, or volition, in praxis may be complicated, I hope, in a productive way, when we take into account what Guénoun has said about revolution and revelation. If the essence of a moral revolutionary act is that it be auto-transcendent and reveal a new world, the agent could not have willed the act. So this seems to leave us in the lurch about the likelihood of some trans-national singularity coming along to play the prophetic role. For the will of such a revolutionary society should be very much like Rousseau's general will. It is not the will of a specific singularity that exists and then, secondarily, wills an act. Instead, the general will spontaneously arises in the people thus defining the people as a people. [end page 119] Remember that the meaning of the political is not itself political in any pure sense, for Guénoun. In other works, Guénoun's analysis of theatre shows that theatre is a reassembly of the political assembly. That is, theatre is a political act insofar as it is the act of reassembly. However, it is important to note that there is no original assembly of which theatre is a representation. Denis Guénoun's L'exhibition des mots describes theatre as involving a "reassembly of spectators."[52] This word, rassemblement, is fascinating. It has the connotation of putting-together, a gathering, with overtones of seeming [semblant]. And what else is theatre? But it gets even better than this. For Guénoun alludes here also to an assembly, and he tells us that this gathering in theater has a political aspect insofar as this reassembly is fundamentally related to a political assembly. But he is not pedestrian enough to reduce theatre to the political. The assembly, then, is not a fundamental reality that the reassembly of theatre represents.[53] It is the creation of a new space — what I called elsewhere a play-space — that involves a ground for the political, the place or identity that provides a "home" or a "subject" for transcendence, what I have called a play-ground. Guénoun playfully writes the political parenthetically in the subtitle and in the text.[54] He is investigating the political aspects of theatre, alluding to how the political figures into theatre as divergence rather than representation in the form of metaphysical adequation. This is the (political) idea of the theater: to reassemble the city, to publicly reunite in the agitation of its desire for community, to invite it to sit in place of the political assembly in order to open the political to a thing other than itself.[55] This reassembly must not be seen as the imitation of the political assembly. Theater is not like the political. It is precisely in the manner that it is unlike the political that it is political — instituted in a new sense. The opening of the assembly must be to lead the community to consider the fundamentally non-political of the political. To lead it to observe that the political does not have its foundation in itself, but that it is the respondent to another thing…. The political is not its own proper horizon.[56] So, the gathering together — the reassembly — of theater is an institution of the "we," of the community capable of praxis. And it is so precisely insofar as it manifests a mundane space — the play-space — where the event of transcendence occurs. This "we" is a reassembly in the sense that there is a reality — an assembly — that inevitably intrudes upon it, and which is [end page 120] necessary to make the transcendence meaningful. And this assembly manifests itself in concrete political praxis that is only possible due to the critical space of the sort we see in the play-space, though of course it need not be theatre alone that provides this reflexive, critical space. So what we have here in his analysis of theater is a re-assembly without an origin. If the bad political style is to be avoided, we must account for volition without an appeal to an original assembly that is merely reproduced. Theatre reveals a people reassembled as a people without the claim that they are imitating another assembly of themselves or any other assembly. But it is in a sense a reassembly. Likewise, this reassembly of people expresses a will. But there is no origin for this will other than the act of reassembly that constitutes the people as a people. Guénoun accounts for this reassembly as an instituting act very clearly: "It is the act by which a people is a people. It is the act of assembly (it constitutes the political reunion of assembly)."[57] He states that reassembly is the principle of every revolutionary act.[58] He goes on to stress that this reassembly is no formal metaphysical construct. Metaphysics is always a matter of bad form. That is, formally speaking, it doesn't matter. The reassembly of the people is a concrete act.[59] That is, a sovereign people is a reassembled people, and assembled in the flesh — moral and political, and that must be a physical assembly.[60] I think this is a fine account of the constitutive, creative auto-transcendence he described earlier — and I think situating it in a concrete act of reassembly gets at the heart of the nature of the event of political praxis. So I would like to coin this new term re-volition: the will of the act of reassembly — a will to return to political assembly with no origin, a will to return to collective agency with no origin, to will to exceed the agency willing — a will to revolution. And I think that this re- of reassembly will give us new insight into what it means to say that we are living after the revolution. Just as the will to reassemble is without origin, when we are united as a people in this kind of creative act, we are reassembled as a people — the people of the phrase the will of the people — after the revolution. Many questions remain. The central problems of the world today have to do with globalization and urbanization. How can the politique de monde effectively address these problems? Is there some moral promise to globalization? On the other hand, there are horrible problems associated with globalization. But isn't globalization itself a politique de monde? Is the mondialisation itself a guarantor of the moral basis of politics? Political decisions must be made — but how? There is no pure past or future to look toward to serve as a foundation for political (moral) decision. There is no pure vista upon history to reveal either the past or the future [end page 121] as a guide. History is not a thing to be seen; it is lived. Our decisions are the site of the emergence of history — of the transition from a past to a future. Political (moral) decisions are historical incisions in temporality. Praxis becomes discernable as it cuts time into past and future, thus parsing time into history. The cutting is the present. Praxis presents the present by obliquely delimiting a past and a future. The past is implicated as that from whence the praxis occurs. The future is implicated as that toward which the praxis occurs. Past and future are fundamentally related to praxis as its provenance and its destination, but they are inadequate to direct it for several reasons. First, there is no single past or future — not even for one act. History involves multiple pasts and futures rather than a single monolith. Secondly, these pasts and futures are contingent and malleable — far from impassable value standards. Third, every event creates a surplus of meaning that is not exhausted by those involved in the event, nor by any interpretation of the event. Finally, these pasts and presents are not the construct of a sole agent. One acts, but never in isolation. We can, perhaps, by reflecting upon the event of reassembly, with its unique transcendence that institutes and implicates without origin, move toward discerning revolutionary praxis. If Guénoun is right, these will be originary acts without origins. We will reassemble as a people and express a will that was never "inside" to be reproduced. We could be part of defining acts of revolution, revealing a world through our revolition. What does that world look like? Find a prophet and ask him.
This article was presented as a paper, "Theatre, Transcendence and Praxis: Denis Guénoun's (Political) Assembly," at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, September 17, 2003. [1]. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L'Œil et l'esprit. Gallimard: Paris, 1964: 61-2. This essay, the last one to appear in his lifetime, was originally published in the inaugural issue of Art de France in 1961. The English translation appears in James M. Edie, ed., The Primacy of Perception. Trans. William Cobb. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964: 179: "There are, in the flesh of contingency, a structure of the event and a virtue peculiar to the scenario. These do not prevent the plurality of interpretations but in fact are the deepest reasons for this plurality. They make the event into a durable [end page 122] theme of historical life and have a right to philosophical status." This was not my translation. All other translations in this essay are mine unless otherwise noted. [2]. Alain Badiou, L'Être et l'évènement. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1988. [3]. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, draft, 3rd version, ms.: 1. [4]. Alain Badiou, Circonstances, 1. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003: 8. It is interesting that one of Merleau-Ponty's provisional titles for the posthumously published project called Le Visible et l'Invisible was L'Origine de la vérité. [5]. Ibid., 9. [6]. Denis Guénoun, Après la revolution. Paris: Éditions Belin, 2003. This work will be cited as AR. [7]. Denis Guénoun, L'Exhibition des mots. Une idée (politique) du theater. Marseille: Éditions de l'aube, 1992. This work will be cited as EM. This work has been reissued in an expanded form. It will also appear as part of the first book length English translation of Guénoun's work, Theater, Assembly, and the Play of Politics (trans. and ed. by Duane H. Davis), which will include the work cited in note 8 below. [8]. Denis Guénoun, Le Théâtre: est-il nécessaire? Paris: Éditions Circé, 1997. [9]. Denis Guénoun, L'Enlèvement de la politique. Une hypothèse sur le rapport de Kant à Rousseau. Paris: Éditions Circé, 2002. This work will be cited as EP. [10]. Denis Guénoun, Hypothéses sur l'Europe. Un essai de philosophie. Paris: Éditions Circé, 2000. This work will be cites as HE. [11]. Denis Guénoun, Un semite. Paris: Éditions Circé, 2003. This work will be cited as S. [12]. Guénoun is an accomplished playwright, actor, and director who had his own company for many years. His analysis of theater is an informed description. Because of this, I suggested this term, phenomenology of theatre, to Guénoun, and he did not object to it. But it is not the case that he explicitly calls attention to the phenomenological tradition nor that he is bound up with whatever metaphysical baggage the reader may think is associated with this tradition. Cf. my translator's introduction to Theater, Assembly, and the Play of Politics. [13]. AR 7. [14]. Ibid., 9. [15]. Ibid., 17. [end page 123] [16]. Ibid., 13. [17]. Ibid., 19. [18]. It would be interesting to connect John Sallis' fascinating recent work on translation with this aspect of Guénoun's project to flesh out some valuable political dimensions of Sallis' work. This cannot be accomplished here. [19]. Ibid., 20-31 passim. [20]. Ibid., 27. [21]. Ibid., 31. [22]. Ibid., 23. Guénoun is fond of this term. He employs it in several of his works. By the way, from my perspective, here Guénoun and Badiou may be more akin than either would probably admit. [23]. Ibid., 24. [24]. It is perhaps by looking at the atrocities of these socialist regimes, allegedly indicated by a revolutionary telos, that, surprisingly, we may see the common Schellingean influence on his students, Kierkegaard and Engels. [25]. To be fair to the Straussians, their position is more complicated than this. They also include Elvis and the Beatles. Or, perhaps we must simply observe that Leo Strauss never once mentioned Osama bin Laden in his exoteric writings.... [26]. Alain Badiou, Ethics. Trans. P. Hallward. New York: Verso, 2001: liii. [27]. Alain Badiou, Circonstances, 1: 8. [28]. He does more of this sort of concrete historical modeling in HE. This is a truly masterful work — unfortunately we will have the opportunity to see only a glimpse of his use of such concrete reasoning in this essay. [29]. AR 36-7. [30]. AR 36. [31]. HE 23, 357ff. There are certainly some parallels to the ontology Merleau-Ponty was beginning to develop at the end of his life. Merleau-Ponty was attempting to displace traditional subjectivity in favor of a reversibility of the flesh — being folding over onto itself. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. I have elsewhere argued that, though Merleau-Ponty did not use this language, one can radically reconstrue subjectivity as a reversible subjectivity rather than dismiss it altogether. Cf. my "Reversible Subjectivity. The problem of transcendence and language," in M.C. Dillon, ed., Merleau-Ponty Vivant. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. [end page 124] [32]. HE 182. [33]. HE 183. [34]. HE 186. Cf. also Phillips E. Young, "The Ineradicable Danger of Ambiguity at Ch[i]asm's Edge," in Duane H. Davis, ed., Merleau-Ponty's Later Works and Their Practical Implications. New York: Humanity Books, 2001: 101-37. Young has also persuasively demonstrated the totalitarian danger common to some forms of socialism and fascism. [35]. AR 62-3. [36]. AR 68ff. [37]. Perhaps this would be a suitable topic for another essay — it is very complicated. For now, let me say only this: Guénoun is a brilliant writer who exploits a variety of cultural references expertly for rhetorical, stylistic effect. [As I hope it will become clear below, I do not mean this in any pejorative sense.] Thus, as an effective writer, he will use metaphors and their magic to accomplish his goals — and thus he sometimes trades upon religious values. For example, cf. EM 25: "Their cooperation evokes these religious offices, where the choir — the chorus — is composed of parishioners; meanwhile the officiating person lends his voice to the all-powerful discourse of the Other." Also cf. HE passim, where he deals explicitly with religious history and philosophy of religion. But cf. especially HE 219-30, the section called Lieux [places], where Guénoun relates God and place [Dieu and Lieu]. [38]. AR 68. [39]. Ibid. [40]. One is reminded of Marcel's overtly theological model of hope, which he contrasts with optimism and pessimism insofar as it leads to action rather than precluding it. However, the ground of Guénoun's prophecy is not divine, unlike for Marcel. [41]. AR 70. [42]. AR 118. [43]. AL 119. [44]. Ibid. [45]. Ibid. [46]. Ibid. 120. [47]. Cf. Gary B. Madison's outstanding and very provocative essay, which expresses very forthrightly why this bitter pill for some of us to swallow [end page 125] may be necessary, "Merleau-Ponty and the Worlding (mondialisation) of the World," in Duane H. Davis, ed., Terrorism, Terror, and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenological Ontology (forthcoming). [48]. AR 71. [49]. Ibid. [50]. I could not help but smile when I read this passage. I was somehow reminded of the scene in Monty Python's hilarious film, Life of Brian, where the mob is chasing poor Brian, whom they think is the son of God. Brian's sandal slips off, causing him to have to stop and allowing the mob to catch up with him. Frustrated, he faces them and insists, "Look: I'm not the messiah." One of the mob observes, "Only the true messiah would deny his divinity." Brian, exasperated, capitulates in hopes that they will leave him alone: "All right then, I am the messiah." The mob joyously shouts in unison, "He is the messiah!" It is not necessarily a sign of our jaded cynical society that we distrust prophets. In fact, even Plato was suspicious of prophets. Socrates refers to muddle-headed Euthyphro pejoratively when he includes him in that class of people which he, as a philosopher, wanted nothing to do with — "you prophets...." One might be tempted to see Guénoun's denial of being a prophet as at the same time a confession that he wants to be considered to be one, if only to deny it. This would be a bit like Sartre's refused Nobel Prize. But like Brian in the film, no matter what he does in this situation, he may be guilty by acclaim. Perhaps it is the risk one takes by saying something at all. [51]. I am reminded of the hermeneutic impliciture of Calvin O. Schrag's Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. [52]. Denis Guénoun, L'exhibition des mots. Marseille: Éditions de l'aube, 1992: 7. [53]. In a recent conversation with Guénoun, he surprisingly told me that he thought there were allusions to a transcendental political assembly, and that his more recent work on theatre — just appearing — tries to avoid that. I think that everything would depend upon how one construes the role of the transcendental. So long as it is not a priori and necessary, I do not see why a transcendental grounding is improper — but that may be a new use for the term transcendental. [54]. Ibid., "une idée (politique) du théâtre." [55]. Ibid., 54. [56]. Ibid., 53-4. [end page 126] [57]. EP 15. [58]. EP 17. [59]. EP 40. [60]. EP 16.
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