Post structuralism and the Ethical Turn: Restructuring Practical Reason

Brian Caterino

Postmodernism has often been characterized as nihilistic or

amoral. On this interpretation, postmodernists are advocates of

an asocial individualism that substitutes an aesthetically

oriented notion of free play for more traditional conceptions of

normative community and reject all fixed standards and moral

judgments. Critical theorist Axel Honneth illustrated this line

of argument, when he claimed that postmodern theories share an

aesthetic notion of freedom derived from Nietzsche’s conception

of experimentation on the self:

An aesthetic model of human freedom is what underlies in oneway or another all versions of the theory of the “postmodern.” Apart from not insignificant differences in specifics, they share the fundamental orientation toward an idea of individual self-creation influenced by Nietzsche: here, human subjects are presented as beings whose possibilities for freedom are best realized when, independent of all normative expectations and bonds, they are able to creatively produce new self-images all the

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time.1

Honneth’s judgment, while suggestive of some strains of

postmodernism, is on the whole, misleading. I believe a more

constructive, if critical, approach is necessary. Since the

1980's at least, one group of postmodernists, poststructuralists,

have focused on the major concerns of ethical and political

thought. It can be fairly said that major poststructuralist

theorists see philosophy (or some successor to philosophy)

animated by an ethical impulse: namely the idea of a non-

dominating relation to the Other. Thus while post structuralists

have rejected notions of fused community (as well as atomistic

individualism) they do not reject ethical standards as such. Far

from being a nihilistic rejection of all ethical and political

standards, poststructuralists have proposed a wide ranging

transformation of the ethical and political concepts that have

been based in the modern philosophy of the subject. As Derrida

1 Axel Honneth “Pluralization and Recognition:” On the Self-Misunderstanding of Postmodern Social Theorists” in Peter Beilharz, Gillian Robinson and John Rundell ed. Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity:167 A similar line of argument is often taken by Jurgen Habermas, especially in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

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stated in a 1984 interview, “I cannot conceive of a radical

critique which would not be ultimately motivated by some sort of

affirmation, acknowledged or not.”2 Poststructuralists explore

the limits of subjectivist conceptions of morality and political

community, however, they also attempt to formulate alternative

conceptions of ethico/political life. In this respect post

structuralist thought has taken an “ethical turn.”

The poststructuralist approach to ethics and politics can be

differentiated from postmodernism on several grounds. Without

claiming that these are exhaustive, I want to focus on three

distinguishing features of poststructuralist thought that are

relevant to ethico-political questions:

1) The Critique of Subjective Reason: The term ‘subjective reason’

encompasses a conception of subjects who acquire knowledge of the

world through the perspective of an observer standing against a

world of objects. In this third person perspective subjects take

2”Dialogue with Derrida” in Richard Kearney ed. Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984): 118. The term ‘affirmative’ as used here doesn’t imply acceptance or celebration of a current social conditions, it is compatible with a critical stance. Rather it is meant to draw a contrast with a purely destructive critique

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an objectivating attitude toward the world. The world is

understood as set of external occurrences independent of

consciousness. The third person observer is able to make true

judgments about states of affairs from the standpoint of a self-

contained and self-sufficient consciousness. The objectivating

attitude of the third person however, also severed knowledge of

the world from the perspective of participants who related to

each other through relations of mutual understanding. Here ego

does not encounter the alterity of other persons or of nature,

but only its own consciousness. Subjective reason came to

understand ethics and politics using the model of the egos

relation to itself and not the relation of ego to alter.

Poststructuralists look to an alternative whose origin is

not strictly Nietzschean (though Nietzsche is a strong

influence), but is in found in critics of transcendental

phenomenology such as (the later) Heidegger and Levinas. What’s

distinctive about this alternative to subjective reason is that

it separates action from “thinking”-- or from a more fundamental

relation to the Other. While “action” refers to a sphere of goal

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oriented actions, “thinking otherwise” provides access to

Otherness through exceeding the bounds of subjective reason.

Poststructuralists do not reject subject centered reason in favor

of a theory of plurality of forms of life (as Rorty sometimes

seems to do). Postmodernism sees the alternative to modernity as

simply in an incommensurable set of ‘rationalities.”

Poststructuralists, in contrast, seek to uncover the relation of

ego to other suppressed in subjective reason. Post structuralists

argue however, that the sources of our relation to Otherness

exceeds any form of life.

2) Ethics of Otherness: Post structuralists have avoided the

trap of an asocial individualism in through the development of a

theory of responsibility to otherness. Honneth’s characterization

of freedom as an unbounded free choice would be a reflection of

the subjective reason they wish to reject. Viewing ethics through

the model of the egos relation to itself, conceptions of

subjective reason have interpreted obligation as self-chosen

responsibility, and freedom as self-determination. Here the

subject is an originator of its ethical goals and obligations and

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acts in accordance with these norms.

For poststructuralists however, ethico/political concerns

can never be an elucidated as a form of “knowledge.” They reject

the subjectivist perspective of the isolated actor and the notion

of society as an intersubjective web of relations constituted

through the mutual understanding of participants. The very nature

of ethical avowals always exceed the bounds of a “subject” or a

“community”. Post structuralists argue that the participants’

perspective is characterized by asymmetrical ethical address from

the Other. This ethical address is not freely chosen by subjects,

but given to all speakers of a language in its very use. We are

implicated in relations to the Other which we may disavow but

from which we can never disengage. Responsibility to otherness

exceeds (is prior to) subjectivity. We are accountable before the

other, but the other is not a subject who must give an account to

us.

3) Changing conceptions of the ethical: Post structuralist ethical

thought entails a wide ranging transformation in the fundamental

ethico-political concepts. Our received notions of freedom,

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equality, community and obligation have to be recast in terms of

a nonsubjective responsibility to the other. If the relation to

the Other is encountered through receptivity to the Other, then

we are ethical because we stand before or respond to the call

from the Other. Freedom is not a matter of self-determination,

but of maintaining an openness to the address of the other.

Community isn’t a self-willed obligation nor is a political body

a willed unity, rather it is a form of being together in which we

are obligated before any common will.

Poststructuralist approaches to ethics and politics have a

good deal of merit. They have drawn our attention to important

flaws in modernist conceptions of subjective reason, and they

have called attention to new zones of social and political

conflict, especially those revolving around question of questions

of “recognition” and “difference.” The issues they raise have to

be taken more seriously by critics.

In spite of these contributions, I contend that

poststructuralist theories do not provide a viable alternative to

subjective reason, but not for the reason generally assumed.

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Emphasis on the themes of the “death of the subject” while

possessing a grain of truth are ultimately misleading.

Poststructuralists, at least in their work on practical reason do

not so much reject subjectivity as subordinate it.3

Poststructuralist theorists, overshoot the mark in their critique

of subjective reason. Identifying the drive for mastery inherent

in goal directed activity, they equate all activity with

appropriation.

The theorists I want to examine in this essay, Jacques

Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Francois Lyotard, employ

versions of the non-dominating relation to the Other as an

alternative to grasping reason and each in distinct ways agrees

that grasping reason is insufficient to the call of the others. I

contend, however, that the equation of activity with grasping

reason is in error. There are non-instrumental forms of action,

3 Here I would have to with the notion that postmodern and post structuralist theories lack any positive theory of subject. See for example Allison Weir’s Sacrificial Logics (New York: Routledge, 1996), through her argument is directed primarily against postmodern feminists. The wide ranging and significant debates by feminists on the nature of the self, some of which challenges post structuralism, requires a separate treatment.

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namely forms of communicative action which can incorporate

otherness into its frame of reference. Practical actors have to

take up the world and their relation to it in order to be

subjects. This form of taking up a relationship to the world is

not a mode of grasping, it is a symbolic form of interaction

through which subject relate to one another.

Since poststructuralists subordinate action to the

encounter with other, they cannot adequately deal with the

instituting and disclosing powers of every day action. Lacking a

reference to non-instrumental dimensions of activity, they

interpret norms as forms of cognitive activity which obscure

while socially necessary obscure the character of the ethical. In

pursing this strategy, post structuralists fall prey to the

perils of a two stage ethical and political theory. They have to

either split off ordinary ethics from an ethics of otherness or

they have to argue that ethics only indirectly or paradoxically

enter into normative discourse.

A communicative approach to ethics and politics can avoid

the traps of a two stage theory, and I believe it provides a more

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fruitful approach to the questions of a post subjective theory.

First of all, communicative approaches locate an otherness

internal to intersubjectivity, without reverting to the notion of

subject writ large to unify disparate subjects. Thus they can

argue that otherness is both disclosed and taken up in ordinary

social action. Communicative theories can also develop a basis

for norms that are forms of practical reason. Norms are aspects

of a social world rather than an objective one. Communicative

theories can incorporate issues of recognition and difference and

have the capacity to address issues which poststructuralists

rightly argue are outside the purview of subjective reason, and

finally communicative theories can provide direction on the

restructuring of basic concepts of practical reason.

The role of the other: from Heidegger to Levinas

Although poststructuralists maintain ambivalent relations

toward Heidegger’s political commitments, Heidegger’s critique of

subjective reason, later to include Nietzsche’s work, has been a

central influence on the ethical turn in post structuralism.

Still the work of the later Heidegger (after his “turn”) had more

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impact on post structuralism then Heidegger’s critique of

subjective reason in Being and Time. I think this priority ought to

be reversed. In spite of its limits, Heidegger’s conception of

the self’s practical relation to itself holds more promise for

the development of a post subjectivist theory of practical reason

than his later work.4 Heidegger’s later “turn” (and the

poststructuralists who write in his wake) followed wrong path in

abandoning his notion of practical self- relation for a theory of

founding that took on mytho/poetic proportions.

The first phases of Heidegger’s work, culminating in Being

and Time, breaks with the assumptions of subjective reason found

in Husserl and the neo-Kantians.5 For Heidegger, writing in the

4. George Herbert Mead developed other aspects of the self namely the notion that identity is formed in the social world through a relation to the response of the other. An interesting discussion of Heidegger and Mead, though theoretically limited at times can be found in Ernst Tugendhat Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1986. An earlier and still useful discussion though superceded by contemporary issues is Michael Theunissan The Other (Cambridge MA: MITPress, 19) 5. For the purposes of my analysis, I use a very rough periodization ofHeidegger’s work into early and late. A fuller discussion would require a more sophisticated analysis of the development of Heidegger’s thought. Some recent attempts in this direction can be found in John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumors of a Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being & Time., Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993; and Reading Heidegger From the Start. Edited

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1920's, these theories were the latest versions of the notion

that transcendental philosophy (as first philosophy) was the

ultimate court of appeal for knowledge. Each of these, in

Heidegger’s interpretation, rests in a version of transcendental

subjectivity which is independent of the acting subject.

Heidegger rejected this conception of philosophy, and in so doing

dismantled the assumptions of a detached subject of knowledge

devoid of any practical commitments and attachments. In place of

the objectivating attitude of an observer, Heidegger advanced a

notion of understanding rooted in our practical engagements and

orientations to the world. Dasein or human being in the world

was the being for whom his/her own being is an issue. Such

questions of identity required subjects to take a stand not just on

what they wanted to be but how they wanted to be, they had to be

taken up through a practical relation of the self to itself. For

Heidegger then, human being regarded its own being not as an

entity but as a question of the meaning of being.

At this stage of his thought, Heidegger does not radically

by Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, Albany, State University of NewYork Press,

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detach action and thinking. He recognizes that subjects are not

originators but, from the start, cast into a social world that

exists prior to their consciousness and existence. . Thus for

Heidegger, acting subjects, we are thrown into the world, in

which we have our being to live, whether we want it or not. Our

identities are not created ex nihilo but come into being when we

actively (and reflectively) choose to take a position toward the

world we live in, rather than unreflectively accepting what is

given.

Heidegger has been rightly criticized for some of the weak

points of his formulation, including its questionable normative

overtones, and its dismissal of the social world as primarily

conforming, which bypasses the constitutive aspects of the

social world in which ego and alter are linked by mutual

accountability.6 Still his notion of practical freedom has been

6. Discussion of Heidegger’s notion of the social world is too extensive to survey here. Habermas’ position in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is typical of those who hold that Heidegger, essentially relies on an individualistic model, and fails to find his way out of the solipsistic dilemmas of Husserl’s thought. On the other side of the argument Hubert Dreyfus in Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's"Being and Time," Division I. (Cambridge, Ma, MIT Press, 1991) interprets Heidegger’s notion of the social world along the lines of sociologist Pierre Bordieu’s notion of habitus. I argue that Heidegger’s theory

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usefully developed in directions antithetical to his own aims.

Heidegger identifies one central feature of the participants’

perspective. In the expressive presentation of the self, ego

fashions its relation to itself though those deeply held values

and commitments which make up its identity, and the unique

relation of one own life history to a common social world. Social

identities and life histories are not just matters of cognition,

they are an element of our practical relation with others carried

out and expressed in our daily engagements with others—and in

that sense how we live.

After Being and Time, however, Heidegger, radically modifies

his earlier position. He moves from a post subjectivist theory,

in which subjectivity has active powers to a position that

subordinates these powers. It is this shift in direction

(sometimes called the turning or kehre) that had the greatest

influence on post structuralist thought. The instituting power of

being shifts its locus from the everyday activity of practical

engagements to an extraordinary engagement with the chaos of represents an incomplete transition from a subject centered theory to a communicative one. Thus he has to make the social world into a background condition

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being. Heidegger devalues ordinary action, reducing it to an

adjunct to the struggles of the extraordinary hero.7The struggle

of great personalities with being and not the mundane struggles

of individual identity become the sources of world disclosure

(that is forms of knowing and acting which guide the thinking of

an epoch). It is not the ordinary subjects relation to his or her

own history that was important but his or her

affirmation/rejection of the world historical “fate” disclosed in

these heroic struggles.

In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger develops a critique of

action-oriented knowledge. For Heidegger, all types of action

are assimilated to the model of the subject pursuing a goal

(productivism). This technological frame of reference

characterized the history of Western thought. To counter this

Heidegger opposes acting to Thinking:

In order to experience the aforementioned essence of thinkingpurely . . . we must free ourselves from the technical interpretation of thinking. The beginnings of that interpretation reach back to Plato and Aristotle. They take

7. Richard Wolin also notes Heidegger’s devaluation of ordinary life. in See Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)

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thinking itself to be a techné, a process of refection in service to doing and making.8

Heidegger equates forms of mutual understanding with

production. Along with Carl Schmitt, Heidegger criticizes the

“public sphere” as an atomistic realm of objectification.9

Heidegger moves further away from his early emphasis on the

subject’s powers, and limits the practical participant’s

perspective to a simple an openness to the meaning of being.

While Heidegger never formulates an ethical theory, his

reflections on the ethical horizons of philosophy draws on this

receptive relation of subjects to the meaning of being.

Heidegger rejects liberal theories of justice (such as contract

theories) because they are based on the self-assertion of the

acting subject. In contrast, he employs a notion of ethos which

is always prior to subjectivity. Ethical communities and social

identities are formed prior to any volitional relations of ego

and alter (which have to be seen as prudential); in contrast, an 8

8. “Letter on Humanism” in Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper, 1977): esp. 173-5.9.Schmitt interpreted the liberal public realm as an area of competing interests in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1985)

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ethos is the dwelling place that receives or permits a non-

objectified relation to being to emerge. Later in his career

Heidegger interpreted justice as a gift or a granting from being

to man. (This asymmetrical relation of addressor and addressee of

ethics was radicalized in Levinas.)

Heidegger focused primarily on the self’s practical

relationship to itself, and often consigned the “with world,” the

practical sphere of morally regulated actions between ego and

alter to a background condition. Conversely, Immanuel Levinas, a

major phenomenological critic of Husserl, focused precisely on

the social realm of ego/alter relations that Heidegger

neglected.10. In so doing, Levinas laid the basis for an even

more radical critique of the ethical foundations of subjective

thought.

Levinas, like Heidegger, rejects Husserl’s philosophical

theory of the subject as monological; Husserl’s theory derived

its conceptions of knowledge, freedom and moral responsibility,

0

10. Levinas first book was critique of Husserlian phenomenology... SeeThe Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, translated by André Orianne,(Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1972)

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from the singular relation of the observing self to the object

world. Levinas also rejects, however, the “dialogical” I-thou

conception of ethics he associates with Buber. According to

Levinas, dialogical conceptions of ethics remain within the realm

of the familiar and the similar, that is, the identical. Here

the relation between I and you is symmetrical. We can each

address each other as equal partners in a common social world.

Levinas however, views the symmetrical relation of ego to alter

in the I-thou relation as resolving itself into a higher lever

unified (and self-identical) “we.” The I -thou relation, like

Hegel’s system of thought (at least for Levinas) requires a

metasubject, Social and political communities are made up of

members of a community who are like “us.” Levinas views these

like a home or family (perhaps in an allusion to Heidegger’s

notion ethics as heimat or true dwelling). Such communities

require symmetrical relationships of participants to one another;

they do not require us to break with our familiar and settled

surroundings to encounter the call of understanding. Based in

mutual benefit, they avoid the crux of the ethical relationship

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which can only be found in a more rigorous and demanding form of

respect for otherness. True moral respect requires that we acknowledge

those who are not like us—those who are different alien and even

threatening to us.

Levinas holds that the proper understanding of the relation

between ego and alter is a form of homelessness, the asymmetrical

relation between ego and an alter who is excluded from becoming

part of a “we.” This alienation, however, cannot be resolved in

the future, it is the essential non-identity of the ethical. The

authentic ethical demand is addressed when we encounter the

suffering of the alien Other, one who is decidedly not like us

and who could never be one of us. Suffering others cannot be

assimilated; they might include the poor, the immigrant, in

short, any person or group that is excluded and oppressed. In

each case the face to face encounter with the Other’s suffering

releases a demand to act with respect for otherness. We ought to

respect others precisely because they are not like us.

The face to face encounter with the suffering indicated a

relation to infinity, an address from the Other that exceeds the

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mundane for the extraordinary...

This was the call of a Deity that could never be named and never

be incorporated into a conceptual system. This conception has

some important implications for any ethical theory.

1) Levinas’ formulation reinforces the notion that the

participant’s perspective must be divorced from action

orientations. The address from the other was something that

comes to us, we did not originate it. Thus while respect for

otherness invoked Kant’s notion of respect for persons, it was

not based in a categorical imperative connected to autonomy or

rooted in a transcendental ego, but in the asymmetrical relation

to the Other.

2) Since the command to respect otherness is given and not

created, moral obligations are heteronymous determined prior to

subjectivity. The Other is the limit to our subjectivity, not a

participant in a common world. On the contrary, the Other is

that which can never be made into a concept or even a horizon of

Being. The standpoint of infinity was an Otherness beyond Being,

beyond everything that “is.” While Levinas focused on the sphere

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of moral relations between ego and alter, his radical rejection

of subjectivity repeats the separation (and devaluation) of

action and thinking found in Heidegger.

3) Levinas’ assumptions lead to a two stage theory of

ethics. A radical gap is opened between the ordinary morality of

eh social group and the ethical standpoint from which the other

addresses us. I think however this separation is mistaken.

Activity and receptivity need not be so radically separated.

While subjects are not the sovereign origin of moral norms or

rules, they must nonetheless have taken up a position on the

validity of these norms. In stressing the receptive dimension of

the ethical call from the other, Levinas neglected the active

stance involved in taking up that call.

I believe that another interpretation of otherness is more

compelling. In responding to the suffering other I do not simply

stand before the law and obey or disobey the ethical imperative

to respect others. I have to take up the attitude of respect

toward otherness and make it part of my own identity. It becomes

an element of what I want to be but also how I want to act in

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relations with others. This world of mutual accountability

reveals a social world that is distinct from the objective world.

It is that aspect of practical life in which subjects mutually

regulate their action and create their social identities. In

contrast subjects who pursue goal-oriented actions take account

of others but are not accountable to others. They regulate

actions with others with regard to the prudent achievement of

desired ends, rather than mutual understanding.

Dualism in poststructuralist ethical thought Poststructuralists have difficulty with active aspects of

practical activity because, following the later Heidegger, they

have come to see action through the model of goal oriented action

of a solitary subject, and thus separate action from a more

fundamental (extraordinary) encounter with the Other. Since

poststructuralists only see norms as practical imperatives of

goal-seeking actors, they miss the active element of mutual

accountability. The splitting apart of ordinary action and

extraordinary “thinking” leads poststructuralist thought into a

persistent dilemma. If otherness is what is excluded in ordinary

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action poststructuralists are forced into a dualistic ethics.

The clearest version of this dualism has been formulated by

Stephen White in his book Postmodernism and Political Theory. White

draws a distinction between two types of moral/political

responsibility: the responsibility to action and the

responsibility to otherness.11 The former, While contends,

captures the sense used by modernists, while the latter is

characteristic of postmodernist arguments. The responsibility to

act is grounded in the imperative that we act in the world "in a

justifiable way, a moral prudential obligation to acquire

reliable knowledge, and to achieve practical ends in some

defensible manner."12 This imperative is rooted in our being in

the world, with the necessity of both physical survival and the

realization of important values. The latter ethic, the

responsibility to otherness makes a more fundamental claim. It

is rooted in an experience of nonidentity or dissonance. 11.Steven White, Postmodernism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 20-21.2

12. Postmodernism and Political Theory: 20 A similar line of argument can be found I believe in Fred. Dallmayr’s in “Appendix: Life World and Communicative Action” In Polis and Praxis Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1984: 224-53

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Responsibility to otherness is sensitive to the particularity

that is excluded by the workings of conceptual and ethical

activity. Postmodernists generally see in all attempts to fix

responsibility a drive to exclude the claims of particularity

through a homogenizing intent. Otherness is meant to "bear

witness" to that exclusion. In contrast to the harmonizing

claims of responsibility to act, it contains a tragic world view,

according to White, in which the limit of all action is

recognized. Here like Heidegger and Levinas, White reduces

practical activity to a cognitive pursuit of prudent goals and

splits it off from structures of mutual accountability. If on

the other hand, binding norms and forms of solidarity are

interpreted as aspects of a communicative relation of ego to

alter, ethico-political theories can escape the dilemmas of post

structuralism.

Meaning and Difference: Derrida

Derrida’s earliest reflections on the question of the

Other were mediated through his analysis of the trace. The trace

is the aspect of meaning which escapes the grasp of any

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philosophical system. Derrida first developed this argument in

his critique of Husserl, but also employed it in his critique of

structuralism. He argues that the temporal structure of language

undermines any fixed conception of meaning. In Husserl’s

idealist theory of meaning, signs are distinguished from

indicatives. The latter is an expression of a situation in the

empirical world through association and does not, like the sign,

refer to a sphere of pure meaning. This “pure meaning” was

accessible to the solitary subject reflecting on his or her own

consciousness. Here Derrida’s criticism was directed against the

problem of temporality which was suppressed in Husserl’s thought,

and not directly against Husserl’s monological outlook. Derrida

focuses on the notion of meaning as a fulfilled intention. A

fulfilled intention requires in Husserl’s view, a self-present

object. In contrast, Derrida argues that no intentions can ever

be fully fulfilled. Meaning always has to be reproduced and in

the reproduction it is never identical with itself. The notion

that something is present depends on a structure of retention and

protention (i.e., the flow of time that extends from the past to

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the present.). This temporal difference is a both a deferral and

the source of Derrida’s notion of Difference. It contains a

trace of the Other as that which is never fulfilled. Against

Husserl, Derrida bases his theory on the infinite creativity of

language. Language (found in the model of writing) is worked

into a messianic theory of a meaning that is always yet to come.

It bears witness to the promise of understanding that is always

deferred.

The messianic bases of ethical thought

Derrida’s critique of the theory of meaning was not without

its ethico/political implications. For example, in his essay on

the “Ends of Man” Derrida argued that the humanist ideal of the

unity of human nature was ideological. The notion of a unified

“we” presented history as unified process of development a telos

of history, culminating in absolute knowledge. Derrida rejects

any notion of a complete or unified history. The project excludes

the Other (of the West).13 Still he does not develop fully the

specifically ethical aspects of otherness. In later works

313. “The Ends of Man” in Writing and Difference

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Derrida’s ethical reflections carry out the project of developing

the messianic promise (the promise of redemption or happiness)

inherent in his theory of language. He sees this messianic hope

as a pledge or promise of what is yet to come, the trace that

exceeds all positive conceptions of justice or morality.

Consistent with his rejection of a teleological notion of

history, Derrida argues the notion of messianic hope cannot be

equated with any fixed essence, utopian ideal or final goal. Each

of these represent, for Derrida as for Levinas, possible

modalities of the present. Nor can messianic hope be found in

any notion of justified norms that would parallel the Husserlian

(or in Derrida’s interpretation of communicate rationality, the

Habermasian) idea of a fulfilled intention. Thus Derrida argues

there can be no system of rules that govern the relation to the

Other. "No justificatory discourse,” Derrida writes, "could or

should insure the role of metalanguage in relation to the

performativity of instituting language or its dominant

interpretation."14

4

14. Force of Law: The "mystical foundations of authority" in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice ed. Drucilla Cornell,

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Derrida’s argument however, is also directed against

Heidegger’s interpretation of Being. Derrida looks to a granting

“beyond Being” as the basis of affirmation. Meaning always

exceeds Being. Its infinite promise as trace is always possible

yet can never be fulfilled or brought to presence. While Derrida

agrees with Heidegger that justice is granted or received, he

argues that justice originates in the call of the Other not a

dispensation of Being. As Derrida reads it, the later

Heidegger’s analysis of dike (in the Anaximander Fragments),

rests on the notion that Being grants justice to humans, and that

it grants them justice, according to what they authentically

deserve (what truly is).15 For Heidegger, justice orders in

accord with what people truly should be. This conception is still

metaphysical. The unity of Being (and indirectly something

present) remains the basis of affirmation.

Since justice is “otherwise” than being, the messianic

trace in all language, which always invites us, always remains a

promise. While the infinite Other provides a “law,” (not just an

Michael Rosenfeld and David Grey Carlson ( New York: Routledge , 1992)515. See Derrida’s discussion in Specters of Marx

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imperative to act --in that sense it is always ethical), the law

is not determinate. Still every interpretation of justice has to

stand before the law and bear witness.

The insufficiency of institution

Derrida contends that forms of social institution are never

complete, but rather inherently undecidable and unstable. Thus no

norm of legitimation or form of justification is truly or fully

just or regulates action without remainder. All norms are

unsettled in the very process of institution. Derrida’s

reflections on law and justice rest on the dilemmas of

institution. Where law is generally opposed to a realm of

violence or legitimately regulates it use, Derrida hopes to

undercut any firm distinction between (pure) law and violence,

and between justice and injustice. The very pursuit of justice,

he claims caries within it the trace of the injustice that it

claims to exclude. Of course this does not mean that Derrida

rejects any distinction between justice and injustice and good an

evil. The dilemma of institution do not lead to nihilism. Derrida

believes there are better and worse legal systems (though the

29

criteria are not so clear) however no distinction is sufficient

or adequate to a preexisting concept of justice and no

explication can exhaust its meaning of the address of the Other.

We must avoid notions of final or total justice. No instituted

justice is final. Such conceptions lead to totalitarian

solutions.

It is possible to agree with Derrida’s warning against the

illusions of “final” justice without accepting the theory of

language that he uses to ground it. I believe that Derrida

conflates systems of norms and systems of linguistic rules. Just

as words have no meaning outside of linguistic system, a legal

system is a frame of meaning that carries with it is own internal

standards of evaluation, which are valid only within that order

(though each order is not strictly speaking a set of self-

contained internal relations since all frames are incomplete)

Thus norms of justice are not subject any transcendent or meta

standard of their validity independent of context (such as

natural law or human rights). In addition to rejecting meta-

standards however, it also rejects consensual conceptions of

30

normative validity. Standards are given in the frame itself, and

are in one sense “logically” prior to participants’ perspectives.

The equation of systems of norms with systems of

linguistic rules cannot be maintained following a linguistic rule

is an interpretive practice. I ether apply the rule correctly or

incorrectly in which case I fail to understand your meaning. If

I fail to use norm or a moral rule correctly I am subject to a moral

sanction. Norms are not technical or interpretive rules, they

are aspects or our moral freedom to act and which require our

consent. They are bound up with our identities. We are obliged

to acknowledge the validity of the norms we apply.16 Such norms

however, are not cognitive claims about the world, that is about

what is the case, but claims about how we ought to act in concert

with others. Linguistic rules can be correct but not valid in

this sense. Norms require the initiative and acceptance of

participants in taking up moral rules and affirming their

validity.

Derrida’s theory however, has trouble accounting for the

616. Unless we employ a norm. strategically in the case where we obey amoral rule to avoid punishment even if we don’t believe it is valid

31

initiating power of participants. He contends that the

performative dimension of action undercuts the notion of norms as

a justified obligation. Legal and moral institution is always

the result of violence and never some type of normative agreement

but requires a founding violence that represses that which is

outside of its system of rules. The performative contradictions

of violence and legitimacy get caught up in aporias or paradoxes.

The paradoxes of institution

According to Derrida, legal norms are paradoxical. Their

very accomplishment puts their claim to validity at risk. This

differs from Heidegger’s formulation in Being and Time. For

Heidegger the finality of norms and other concepts is questioned

because selfhood is a practical accomplishment. It can and must

to be put at issue and renewed. In the second case (Derrida), the

very possibility of accomplishment is questioned. I want to

consider this difference by reconstructing two of the paradoxes

Derrida employs: the paradox of founding and the paradox of

conserving violence

The first paradox of founding violence might also be called

32

the paradox of legitimacy. Founding violence, the origination

of a regime of legitimacy, can never be justified from the

standpoint of any preexisting legality. From the point of view

of existing legality it is just these challenges that have to be

excluded and made senseless or illegitimate. Yet at the same

time, Derrida argues “it is more difficult, more illegitimate to

criticize this violence.” Founding violence t is external to any

established order, because it cannot be called to the bar of

judgment by any existing law. Founding is a law onto itself. No

one can judge it in advance. Founding is not moral although it

founds a morality (reflecting a Nietzschean element in Derrida's

thought). Thus in Derrida’s view, law is at one and the same

time, fully legitimate and fully illegitimate. This paradox

points to a source prior to law that is interpreted by subjects –

though in an undecidable way.

The second paradox is the paradox of iterability (or

repeatability). For Derrida, the very attempt to repeat or to

conserve the law is a potential source of subversion of law.

Every founding requires conservation. It must constantly be made

33

anew in everyday life. Thus Derrida argues that the line between

founding violence and conserving violence is blurred, if not

undermined. The boundary is necessary to preserve the aura of

law, yet routinization constantly challenges this aura. Founding

and conserving cannot be absolutely and finally distinguished.

Derrida’s version of these dilemmas can be distinguished

too, from the pragmatic attempts to undermine hard and fast

categories such as the analytic and the synthetic, and the.

Pragmatism reject metaphysically grounded distinctions, (such as

those found in Kant) but accept that such distinctions can have

and serve our purposes for realms of inquiry. For Derrida in

contrast, the paradoxes of law lead us to encounter “another

dimension of language,” based in an "au-dela beyond the sense of

mediation."17 The impasse of reason itself brings out a saving

power. This despair summons up thought of the wholly other, of

the mystical foundation that puts itself above reason and above

violence. It is this experience that we encounter at the limits

of law.

717. ‘Force of Law”: 50

34

Derrida offers an alternate theory of language based on the

originating power of signification. He rejects what he takes to

be the basis of speech act theory: language as a set of

preexisting rules that determine meaning. The performative force

of language the “I will” of a language, is always in a sense sui

generis. It has the creative power to break existing traditions

and norms, and begin meaning anew. Derrida views it as an

appeal, that is, a pledge or a promise. This pledge does not:

conform to any preexisting conventions, unlike all the performatives analyzed by theoreticians of speech acts, but whose force of rupture produces the institution or the constitution of law itself, which is to say, also the meaningthat appears to, that ought to, or that appears to have to guarantee it in return.18

This pledge is the ethical promise to stand before

others.19 Yet it must begin Derrida argues by breaking with

established understanding and conventional meanings. In one

formulation Derrida speaks of this law as “originary sociality”

8

18. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. (New York: Routledge, 1994): 319

19. Derrida’s notion of standing before the other is bit more complicated than I can indicate here.

35

or of the social in itself.20 This affirmation is embedded in

language itself, in the very act of signification. Everyone who

uses language is always already responsible to the Other.

Is Founding sui generis? Critical Considerations.

Derrida’s conception of the dilemmas of institution brings

out the difficulties post structuralism encounters in relating

ordinary action and extraordinary or founding thought. Founding

can only be sui generis and requires an extraordinary institution

beyond ordinary language, on the other hand doesn’t it have to be

initiated within those very structures. Derrida operates with a

limited conception the rule governed character of ordinary

language. Participants in a social world may be bound by rules

but they and not bound up in them. They have the capacity to

reinterpret or change rules without throwing the social world

into an uninterpretable chaos. One way of approaching this

problem is through the question of revolutionary or radical

change. What happens when a new legal order comes into being?

For Derrida, every legal system is self-enclosed and thus must

0

20. The Politics of Friendship

36

exclude those claims to justice which it considers unjust.

Changes in a system of law can never come about internally, but

only from without, from the instituting power of a new pledge or

promise that institutes a new system of rules. But this

instituting power, though it draws on the participants’

perspective in the performance of the pledge is beyond the

ordinary participant’s perspective. It breaks the continuum of

the legal system with a set of rules that are incomprehensible

from the standpoint of the legal system.

This formulation treats the maintenance and transformation

of a legal system primarily from the standpoint of a system of

rules. Thus the deconstructive account of law fails to

conceptualize the participants’ power to initiate change, to

incorporate new perspectives and formulate new forms of

legitimacy. Although this problem has been discussed recently in

postcolonial studies around issues of resistance to domination,

21 I view it not as a question of why resist (as has been argued

against Foucault22) but how we can resist. For example, in her 1

21. For example Spivak and her critics2

37

discussions of colonial domination, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

has been criticized for interpreting domination as a closed

system within which resistance is difficult if not impossible to

conceive. Spivak’s theory, inspired by post structuralism,

cannot explain the capacity of subjects to accept or reject

interpretations imposed by a dominant culture. At the least,

Derrida’s appeal to the messianic call inherent in language is a

proposed solution to the question of why we resist; however, it

is still difficult to see how participants can put up resistance.

They might experience unhappiness, dissatisfaction and even

oppression passively but participants would have no interpretive

resources to judge norms illegitimate. The oppressed cannot

initiate new interpretations but must await them. Yet isn’t an

element of initiative involved in resisting authority?

Participants who resist authority come to view their troubles and

dissatisfaction rooted in unjust relations of authority at the

same time they are participants in the system of unjust rules.

22. See for example Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, chapter and Nancy Fraser Foucault on Modem Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,"Praxis International 1 (1981): 272-87

38

They can do this because they do not simply obey rules but they

can put their own relation to norms at issue. They can

understand their own injustice and initiate a new relation to it

(i.e. resistance). They are not bound by the interpretive limits

of system of legal rule which circumscribe possible terms of

validity. Thus the interpretive capacities of participants

always overshoots the limits of any existing system of legal

rules. Participants have the capacity reflectively to

incorporate new standards and rules into their own perspectives.

Take for example the resistance to and eventual revolution

against England by Colonial Americans. Colonists rejected and

resisted the legitimacy of British rule while still under British

rule. Conceptions of legitimacy were debated by Americans before

they revolted. Their own ability to define the situation they

lived in was not limited by the existing system of rules; rather

they were formed in autonomous public spheres in which elements

of public reason could be developed. Thus while the

justifications they proposed many have been seen as

incomprehensible from a given set of legal rules they were not

39

sui generis from the perspective of the participants. These new

justifications already claimed a virtual obligatory power that

participants could recognize even if they were not backed by the

power of political institution.

Derrida’s interpretation of the American revolution in

“Declarations of Independence” has trouble understanding the

questions of legitimacy that arise prior to the actual enactment

of a new constitution.23 He sees revolution as a founding act

that brings into being a new legal order, and which shares the

dilemmas of all founding acts. However, political founding,

while it may bring a system of law into being, does not institute

the legitimacy of the law which may in fact precede and outlive

any specific regime. However, legitimacy is not a timeless realm

or a transcendental subject. Legitimate norms come to be in the

practical relations of subjects for whom the accountability of

action is part of everyday life.

Refiguring Mitsein: J. L. Nancy and “Inoperative” Community

Although Jean-Luc Nancy draws from many of the same sources

323. Derrida “Declarations of Independence” New Political Science 15 1986: 7-15

40

as Derrida, he develops his conception of ethico-political

community more in terms borrowed from Heidegger than from Levinas

(though Levinas is certainly still an influence). While Nancy

agrees with Derrida’s notion that participants are singularities,

he also tries to indicates, how these singularities might be

linked. Nancy pursues a project which elaborates and reinterprets

Heidegger’s notion of the Mitsein, or the world of being with

others in the direction of a poststructuralist notion of communal

being.

Nancy rejects subject-centered conceptions that view

community as independent, self-sufficient or an immanent unity.

Each of these alternatives assumes an essence that can be

realized or made present. To speak of community as a lost

immanence—a model which he sees in Rousseau, Hegel and sometimes

Marx—is to see the loss of unity as at the same time a loss of

meaning. Nancy rejects the model of immanence: he claims that

community can come into being only through the non-identity of

subjects. If the loss of immanence is constitutive of community,

immanence would paradoxically mean the loss of community.

41

However, for Nancy, community has not been lost, but rather

"community has not taken place." It is not the site of an

immanent unity, but an openness to a community as being-in-

common.

Nancy approaches the problem of political community through

a reworking of Heidegger's notion of Mitsein, This notion refers

to a world with others or of Being-in-common. Nancy goes back

to the early Heidegger to retrace the missteps of Heidegger's

later thought. For Nancy, Heidegger’s attempts to fuse

philosophy and politics in the 1930s resulted in a betrayal of

his basic philosophical instinct.24 In the 1930s, Heidegger views

community as a mission or a "gathering" around a leader or a goal.

This position leads Heidegger toward a mythic notion of communion

inconsistent with the position of Being and Time. While Heidegger

may have forsaken the attempt to unite politics and philosophy in

the later work he still interprets community, according to Nancy,

as a "gathering." Nancy wants to detach Heidegger’s notion of

4

24.For a similar reading see Derrida Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989.

42

being-with others (Mitsein) from any residual connections to an

authentic meaning of Being or to a larger fate of a people or a

nation. 25 Heidegger smothered the instituting power of the

mundane under the encompassing power of an extraordinary fate.

In contrast Nancy returns to a view of the Mitsein as a sphere of

ordinary action, focusing on the “mundanity of decision” rather

than a privileged act.26

Heidegger’s mistake in Being and Time, according to Nancy,

begins with his notion of individualistic notion of singularity.

Heidegger conceives of the unique relation of the self to its own

being, and hence of existential decision as an inner worldly

encounter with Being which is independent of the social world. Of

course Heidegger understood we were thrown in the midst of a

social world the outset, but he interpreted the world “with

others” as a world of anonymous conformity, in which the sphere

of ownness (another term for the unique relation of self to its

own being) is obscured. Nancy want to place this process of 5

25.“The Decision of Existence” in The Birth to Presence (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1993) 836

26.“The Decision of Existence”: 83

43

individuation more squarely in the consent of communal relations

with others, and not of the solitary existential subject. He

reinterprets Heidegger’s notion of choosing oneself (what he

calls decision) as the encounter with the uncertainty of

decision, and not striving for an authentic self within a

communal setting the subject’s singularity is already social.

While Nancy’s attempt to reformulate a vision of the social world

is useful, his line of argument, however, loses Heidegger’s

emphasis on the active relation of putting one’s being at issue.

Nancy reinterprets Heideggerian choosing/disclosing oneself

against the grain of Heidegger’s own analysis of freedom. For

“decision” is not really an activity, but the ability to receive

or to be open to the disclosure. In this sense Nancy calls it a

passibility. The existential-ontological dimension of decision

loses its character and in reduced to the essentially incomplete

nature of decision itself. We must decide, but we can never know

for certain the appropriateness of our decision.

For Nancy however, the key to reformulating decision

consists in the fact that it is always part of a social world.

44

Ownness comes to being through “us,” (i.e. the social relation

with others) and not through my relation to myself alone.

Decision is always a mode of the mitwelt27

Nancy interprets Heidegger's notion of fursorge or care-for,

as a notion of non-dominating concern for others. Caring then is

not simply connected to conformity of das Man, but coincides with

his notion of “sharing.” “This shared world, as the world of

concern- for-others,” Nancy argues, “is a world of crossing of

singular beings by this sharing that constitutes them, that makes

them be, by addressing them one to another, which is to say one

by the other beyond the one and the other.”28 It is the between

that binds us rather than the unity that fuses us together.

Nancy interprets care in terms closer to Levinas than

Heidegger. He accepts the spirit if not the letter of Levinas’

criticism of the later Heidegger. Care is not simply passion or

attachment to the familiar, but the affirmation of a radical

alterity that shatters familiarity. For Levinas it the journey 7

27. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1991) 1038

28. The Inoperative Community : 103

45

away from the home, and from the familiar that provides this

encounter. But this journey is a permanent one. It never leads

to new forms of gathering or unity. While Nancy accepts the

fissure in immanence that Levinas claims is necessary for a

genuine care for others, (like Derrida), he rejects Levinas'

reliance on the model of face-to-face relationships. Levinas sees

the encounter with the suffering Other to take place when I

encounter the face of the other. According to Levinas, if the

other remains unseen, it is too easy to dismiss the Other’s

sufferings and stay detached from them. For Nancy, however, it

is this direct encounter which, with Derrida, he thinks is a

reprise of the myth of presence.29 The other can be acknowledged

more clearly in the notion of love.

In love Nancy argues, the self does not transcend itself

toward the Other, rather the Other opens up the self.30 In this

view, love "shatters" the self in its enclosure. Once opened to

love, Nancy argues, the soul of the lover could never return to a9

29. see Derrida's discussion of Levinas in "Violence and Metaphysics"in Writing and Difference:0

30. For Levinas' main statement of this position see Totality and Infinity

46

virgin state. It is permanently opened to an address of the

Other.31 It is this opening that provides the source of

transcendence, but one that is required by the demand of the

other, not the transcendence of the self—a transcendence that

would derive from immanent reasons. In contrast the shattering

of love is the introduction of deferral that is a permanent non-

presence or of difference—but also a singularity.

The difference between Nancy and Levinas can be seen in the

distinctive ways that they interpret the notion of the call of

the Other. In Levinas as we have seen, the call of the Infinite

(which is for Levinas beyond Being) is found in the face of the

suffering Other. In contrast Nancy sees this call as inherent in

language. It is the arche of language itself.

1

31. In his critique of Buber's conception of the I-thou relation, Levinas relies on the argument that the 'I-thou' is a relationship of familiarity of identity with the other. It follows the model of assimilation. It requires a an extraordinary address in order to breakthe membrane of self-enclosure, that latter is found in our relation with the stranger who we can not assimilate. As Nancy interprets Heidegger's being-with, it too has to be distinguished from intersubjectivity or any form of mutual recognition. The respectful concern for the other is always something that has to be prior to thissocial world, it is has to be a mode of disclosure of Being that lets a world appear.

47

The totality of singularities is not closed, but it is a dialogue. But this dialogue is not a logos with a unitary truth. Dialogue is the communication of the incommunicable singularity. "I" no longer hear in it what other wants to say(to me), but I hear in it that the other or some other speaksand that there is an essential archi-articulation of the voice and the voices which constitutes the being in common itself: the voice is always in itself articulated (different from itself differing from itself) and this is why there is not a voice but the plural voices of singular beings.32

It is not dialogue or mutual recognition and that gives

shape to language, but the arche of language, the call to

respond, that gives the form to dialogue. For Nancy, the

community is "like-being." I "resemble" the other, but without

any model of origin or original identity. I do not "recognize"

the other or recognize myself in the other. I simply experience

the other's alterity.

This backdrop helps us to interpret Nancy’s notion of

“inoperative community.” For Nancy, community is not a common

fate, but a common being toward death. We have our finitude in

common, for it is never an isolated event. It is (in part) our

finitude which renders every decision uncertain every fate

2

32.The Inoperative Community

48

unknown. Our fate will never be fully know by us (it will only

really be known after our death or in the context of a community

that surpasses us) nor can a community have a known or fixed

destiny unalterable by individuals. Nancy’s inoperative community

is thus not a fulfilled community. His notion of inoperative

community has several senses: first of all, community is

inoperative because it is not a work or an achievement.

Community is never fully present or completed. It is the horizon

on which our being with others emerges. There can be no singular

being without other singular beings. Thus, in a sense, community

is the “between” that appears against the background of finitude.

Ironically, these singularities lack communion but can

communicate.

Nancy’s conception of community represents an interesting

attempt to address a lacuna in poststructuralist thought. He

develops a notion of the social world as a web of singularities

which both avoids the problem of immanence and attempts to

integrate some of the dimensions of otherness into social life.

I think his notion represents an advance over Derrida’s

49

understanding of the social world as a system of linguistically

structured rules. In contrast to Derrida, Nancy views society as

a discursive community structured through a practical relation

between participants. From this standpoint, he can attempt to

find otherness within community, that is, as the relation between

singularities rather than at its limit. This project could

indicate a way out of the dilemma of a two-stage ethics.

In spite of these advances, Nancy does not entirely succeed

in this project; that is, he does not fully locate otherness

within mundane self/other relations. While I think Nancy is

correct to assert in his analysis of love that the Other is a

condition for the emergence of the self, I believe he would have

been more successful had he retained some elements of Heidegger’s

theory of the practical relation of the self to itself. He then

might have conceptualized the relation of the singular subject

within a community of interpreters. However, his turn to Levinas

and Derrida takes his thought in the opposite direction. In

positing an otherness revealed only through deferral, otherness

is still consigned to a receptive dimension. Nancy loses the

50

dimension of initiative involved in taking up a position toward

the world. As arche articulation, however, the other does not

appear in the reciprocal roles of speaker and listener which both

parties can take up equally, but only in the “I” that is attuned

to the originary articulation of the voice. This privileges

alter over ego. Nancy makes the “voice” (the call of the other)

that articulates the social bond that which both precedes and

exceeds the given.33

Consider the example of caring. While caring requires us

to be open and attentive to the uniqueness of the other, it can

never be fully understood as just attending to the other. It also

requires a care for that we have to take up as an aspect of our own

identity. Both dimensions are aspects of the recognition of

others. Nancy’s stress on the non-identity of participants in

love relationships is well taken, however, without a

consideration of the reciprocity of roles and mutual expectations

that characterize interaction, he ignores the active aspects of

responding to the other in ordinary social life. These too

33."The Compearance" Political Theory

51

contain elements of otherness that are not suppressed. For in

caring for the other and in fact in all our ethico-political

relations with others, our bearing toward others is always

potentially at issue.

For example, my encounter with another person may reveal

moral inconsistencies in my own identity. Where I believe I

treat others fairly, another may call me to account for my

behavior and call my self-understanding into question. He or she

may call attention to aspects of my behavior that reveal latent

prejudices, or perhaps inconsistencies in the way I apply the

standards I profess to hold. These challengers could cause me to

question my own moral commitments, including the reasons I use to

justify my actions. I would then encounter otherness in everyday

life, in my own action orientations to others.

I must put at issue aspects of my identity that have to do

not simply with the aspects that Heidegger identifies (that is,

the aspect that concerns with my own relation to my deeply held

values) but my normative relation others, my understanding of

myself as capable of acting fairly toward others. These aspects

52

of my identity are not just receptive; they reflect the ways that

I recognize myself and others as moral beings. Because these

relations to others can be called into issue, the social world is

never simply a world of the familiar or settled or identical;

rather it contains within its very nature the “homelessness” that

poststructuralists find central to otherness.

Lyotard’s Kantian heading (via Levinas)

In some respects Jean Francois Lyotard’s ethical/political

thought resembles neo- Aristotelian attempts to reconstruct

ancient notions of prudence and judgment. Lyotard works the

perspectives of Levinas into the nexus between Kant and

Aristotle, used by neo-Aristotelians, but gives this nexus a

poststructuralists twist. Like Aristotle Lyotard agrees that

practical judgments are not “cognitive” truth, but “practical”

judgments, he departs, however, from Aristotelians on the nature

of the sensus communis. For Lyotard, the sensus communis is not a

based in a common good but a Kantian-inspired notion of the

sublime; it is linked to a common idea of humanity.

Lyotard takes a structural—not a structuralist—approach to

53

the division between cognitive and moral realms. He makes the

basic unit of analysis the phrase or sentence. Each type of

sentence presents a “universe” that consists of four basic poles:

the addressor or sender, the addressee or recipient, the sense or

meaning, and the referent: 34

These universes of discourse, however, do not form a

totality. They represent incommensurable regimes of phrases; no

regime phrase can be translated into the terms of another nor

share a common measure. Lyotard argues that descriptive phrases

which attempt to confirm or deny statements about the truth of a

proposition are objective. According to Lyotard, cognitive

claims to truth are validated in an intersubjective process of

argumentation.35 Cognitive discourse about the objective world

always requires a third-person perspective, a methodological

withdrawal from the participant’s role. Prescriptives, on the

other hand, can only be grasped from the perspective of

4

34. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minnesota: Minneapolis University Press, 1988), pp. 11, 18.5

35. Here Lyotard follows what he believes to be the position of Karl-Otto Apel and Habermas.

54

participants. They are directives to act rather than claims

about the world. Thus they cannot be true or false, only obeyed

or disobeyed.

While cognitive discourses are symmetrical, that is, they

allow for an equality of roles between addressor and addressee

through mutual assertion and response, prescriptives are

asymmetrical. In responding to a command or an ethical demand,

Lyotard argues, one does not give reasons for acting, one simply

obeys or disobeys the command (of God). Once one enters into

justification the actor takes a third person perspective distinct

from that of the actor. The commentator steps out of the

framework within which obligations have meaning that is the

regime of prescriptive phrases, and must instead employ

descriptive phrases. Thus Lyotard asserts:

A phrase is obligatory if its addressee is obligated. Why he or she is obligated is something he or she can perhaps think to explain. In any case, the explanation requires further phrases, in which he or she is no longer situated as the addressee, but as the addressor, and whose stakes are no longer those of obeying, but those of convincing a third party of the reasons one has for obeying.36

6

36. The Differend, p. 108.

55

Here Lyotard’s formulation differed from Derrida. Where

Derrida sees the performative contradiction in all language,

Lyotard discovers conflict among different types of language use.

The non-identity between regimes of phrases he calls the Differend.

Thus while questions of judgment are important to all

poststructuralists, they become even more central to Lyotard.

Obligation: autonomy and heteronomy

Lyotard’s conception (via Levinas) of the ethical as an

address from the other, undermines the Kantian conception of

autonomy. For Kant, the moral subject was characterized by free

will. He or she was not compelled to act by the chain of

empirical causes, but determines his or her will in accordance

with a moral law inherent in each individual. Ethical obligation

is a natural feature of human agency. I have obligations because

I have freedom and because my moral personality implies a

relation to my own self. My duties are really duties to myself.

Lyotard noted that Kant gave priority to autonomy, and he

employed Levinas’ theories to reverse this polarity. It is

56

neither our capacities as agents, persons, or speakers which are

active, but our capacity as hearers that provide obligations.37

Obligation is first of all heteronymous; it is a determination

that comes from outside the ego. The address of an obligation

implicates the ego in a relationship that it did not author or

choose. It is prior to freedom of the will.

Lyotard argues that we need to privilege the pole of

heteronomy, the passivity or receptivity that precedes freedom in

order to provide a notion of the social—a notion that cannot be

produced from the concatenation of autonomous egos. "The

absolute privileging of the pole of the addressee", Lyotard

claims is "the only site in which the social body can hold."38

But the social body disclosed in the act of obligation can never

be fully articulated in any normative claim. It can never be an

object that can be made fully explicit. It is, rather, concealed

by every normative or descriptive claim.

7

37. Just Gaming, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) p. 358

38. Just Gaming, p. 37

57

Given his emphasis on the priority of reception, Lyotard

rejects conceptions of legitimacy. Validity is not "recognized,"

nor can it be “warranted”; it is given in forms of authorization.

Legitimation then is not a matter of validity, it is given by

one's location in a universe of discourse. Because one is

situated in a social world that is circumscribed by a set of

addressor and addressees, one is authorized to speak. Normative

discourse is, for Lyotard, as Derrida, paradoxical. Lyotard,

however, looks to the mediating capacity of judgment rather than

the messianic break. Nor does Lyotard pace the same emphasis on

the founding power of our relation to the Other. Instead he sees

the Other as the limit of (cognitive) intelligibility. Thus he

has to rely on the function of judgment as the mediator between

incommensurable realms.

Political discourse, according to Lyotard is a form of

authorization. It takes the form of a phrase such as “the king

says,” or “the people decree.” In each of these phrases judgment

is authorized by virtue of the individual or group that utters

it. It is a prescription authorized by decree. Legitimation in

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the rational sense is impossible. The incommensurability between

cognition (justification) and obligation cannot be bridged.

The ethical and the political however, are not identical.

Moral obligation does not, in Lyotard's view, require a norm. As

a command or address from the Erignis itself it has no named

addressee, only the command to recognize the claim from the

Other. In contrast, politics requires norms. The latter turns a

prescription to act into a law. “You ought to carry out act x”

is a prescription: “It is a norm decreed by y” makes the

prescription into a law. Yet this very act of turning an

obligation to act into a norm is, for Lyotard, an erasure of the

Differend. For it “normalizes” the Differend and turns it into an

explicit rule. Yet this effacement is necessary if we are to

have community at all. For politics must link us by the claim we

have a common political status. Ethics itself creates no

community; it is the singular relation between an addressee and the

Law itself. Ultimately, then, the relation between the political

and the ethical is matter of judgment; for wise judgment has to

tell us about the appropriateness of a particular act and even a

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particular community in relation to the ethical call. It has to

move between cognitives and prescriptives.

If ethics or the call of the other is not in itself a

source of community, then how can community come to be judged?

Lyotard accepts the notion of the virtual community of spectators

develops in Kant’s third critique. There Kant employs the idea

of a republican political sensus communis. The idea of a

republican community is not an empirical fact, nor a categorical

imperative to act, but rather draws on the aesthetic notion of

the sublime. In Lyotard’s terms, the sublime is the feeling of

difference or non-identity through which we intuit the otherness

of thinking at the limit of thought. The sublime, Lyotard

argued, is "subjectively felt by thought as Differend"39 There

it is a form of fear or exaltation for the transcendent.

For Kant the critique of political reason is an

investigation of the Idea that regulated the social bond. As

critical models, Ideas are indeterminate: as suprasensible, they

have no empirical content. Ideas serve only a regulatory

9

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function: a type of limiting case, which human society can only

approach. They do not determine what I must do; they determine

what may sensibly be said without falling into madness or

senselessness. The idea of a cosmopolitan human community is

such a limit idea. It provides a feeling not for the object

itself that is for a free humanity, but of the Idea of Freedom

itself, as the goal of a free humanity. This is the source of

the sublime feeling that we have for the Idea of Freedom.40 Kant

calls this an inhibited accord. As horizon it is not a possible

empirical object, but that which is, in Lyotard’s interpretation

always other. The Idea of a cosmopolitan society served as a

measure of the horizon of intersubjectivity, but it must be

noted, that intersubjectivity itself is always a horizon and

never a theme of analysis. It provides an a priori sense that

relates each of us to all of humanity.41 as a reflective judgment

that links our private or subjective notions to a communal or an 040 “The Sign of History” in The Lyotard Reader ed Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989): 402141 Kant's notion of the sensus communis has been of interest to many recent political theorists. In addition to Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy see Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment. I follow moreclosely Rudolph Makkreel's reading in Imagination and Interpretation in Kant:158-67.

61

intersubjective perspective. In this sense it is a

transcendental condition, opening up a reflective communal

horizon within which we make evaluations; finally the Idea of

cosmopolitan society orients the “we” of the republican community

towards the notion of a common humanity.

Republican Society

Lyotard’s version of a two-stage ethics separates

practical norms and ethical imperatives as residing in distinct

regimes of discourse; the former is seen as cognitive

legitimation, the latter as the practical relation to the other.

This division, however, misrepresents the nature of norms.

Legitimate norms are not (cognitive) claims about the objective

world, that is claims about the existence of states of affairs,

but rather norms thematize aspects of the social world of

intersubjectively regulated actions. The claims to validity

inherent in norms can be understood from the participant’s

perspective. In the social world “the ego stands within an

interpersonal relationship that allows him [or her] to relate to

him [her] self as a participant in interaction from the

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perspective of an alter.”42 Thus understood, the participant’s

reflection on its own activity is not objectifying. When I

reflect upon my activity from the point of view of the second

person (alter), I can reconstruct from the standpoint of a

participant the activities that I carried out.43 I do not

withdraw from the meaningful relation to the other that

characterizes the social world.

A second problem plagues Lyotard’s attempt to rework Kant’s

theory of judgment. Since Lyotard viewed the sublime as a type of

reflective judgment (as opposed to what Kant would call a determinate

judgment).he reversed the bases of norms and linked them to a

sublime reflective sense, rather than the moral capacities of

singular actors. In so doing he revives some of the limits of

Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant had to resort to the

political sensus communis precisely because he could not conceive

of the social world from the participant’s standpoint. He only

understood the social world through the lens of an objective

2

42 Habermas Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: 2973

43 Ibid.

63

world in which individuals acted in goal-directed fashion. Thus

he could not conceive of the connections of solidarity from the

perspective of empirical subjects but only as a horizon of

thought. But from the point of view of actors who aim

successfully to pursue goals, others appear more as objects

rather than as fellow subjects. Thus our moral capacity could

appear within the (objective) world but only in a practical world

in which a transcendental ego relates to itself. This lacuna has

a bearing on the question of community as well. It cannot appear

either in the objective world or in the moral horizon of the

solitary transcendental ego. It can only appear as the limit of

the isolated ego. Ironically, then, the problems of

enlightenment thought reappear at its supposed end point:

poststructuralist theorizing on ethics and politics.

Thinking otherness through intersubjectivity: From Arendt to Critical Theory

Among those who have been influenced by Heidegger, Hannah

Arendt’s work is significant in developing a notion of the

political sphere that can account for the otherness inherent in

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ordinary communication. I believe that Arendt’s modification of

Heidegger’s position is more suggestive as an approach to the

social world than post structuralism. While Arendt sides with

poststructuralist in maintaining that Kant and Aristotle are

better theoretical guides than Hegel, thus in some ways bypassing

the dialectic of recognition and often limits her understanding

of important aspects of social life, her theory does provides a

way of thinking about the Other that cuts against the grain of

post structuralism and brings aspects of intersubjectivity into

play. Like Lyotard (and to an extent Derrida44), Arendt developed

Kant’s notion of a political sensus communis through the model of

a cosmopolitan idea of humanity.45 Her analysis, however, differs

in several respects from post structuralism. Where Lyotard

stresses the notion of the sublime and the non-identity of the

idea of humanity with the object of history, Arendt stresses the

notion of a communicative community in terms of Kant’s idea of

humanity. She takes up the notion that judgments of taste have

44 See some of Derrida’s recent work as developed in the The Politics of Friendship London: verso books, 1997)545See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy

65

to be communicated to others. This “general communicability,”

Kant holds, is the vocation of “mankind”. 46

The Idea of humanity contains a notion of human sociability

that is not simply the end point of human history, but rather

views the common world as an ongoing process that is renewed

through new forms of institution.(though Arendt might not use

that formulation).47 Arendt uncovers a general structure of

reciprocal accountability to others within this sociability. Here

others can be addressed but also must be heard: addressor and

addressee are on the same ontological level. This brings her

closer to the Hegelian tradition than she might acknowledge.

Arendt’s theory however, also contains a notion of world

disclosure through mundane communication, a dimension missing in

Heidegger and inadequately developed even in the most advanced

poststructuralist theories. For Arendt, the world isn’t revealed

to us in a system of rules or an occurrence of fate from without.

Rather the world is disclosed and hence brought into being

through ordinary action in which subjects are accountable to each

646 Lectures : 47747 Lectures 47

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other. In the place of the idea of a totality, Arendt develops

the notion that the social world is form of acting in concert,

but that acting in concert is always understood in the plural.

In contrast to Heidegger, Arendt interprets the encounter

with the Other through natality rather than being toward death

and in contrast to Levinas’ notion that the other is the one who

appears at the limits of community, Arendt interprets the

appearance of the stranger as one who may become a participant,

who may initiate and bring about something unexpected or

unanticipated. Arendt sees the capacity to begin anew as central

to politics—for example in revolution. Yet this type of radical

initiation/transformation is precisely what many

poststructuralist, as I indicated above, find difficult to

conceptualize. Like many chastened Marxists, poststructuralist

fear that revolutionary movements are dangerous because they

harbor a totalizing intent. However, Arendt’s notion of

initiation may provide a viable conception of non-totalizing

transformation. Her understanding of plurality implies that a

revolutionary change isn’t the creation of a closed totality or a

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metasubject but a community of subjects who act in concert.

I believe that Arendt’s formulations support the contention

that non-identical relations to others are internal to

communicative interaction. This view finds support in Arendt’s

conception of bearing toward strangers.48 Arendt argues like

Levinas that each of us has not only the ability to take the

initiative but also the obligation to welcome the alien. Whether

the other presents us with a challenge or a threat we are

“obliged” to remain open to the stranger and to the possibility

of new beginnings. Arendt however, conceives of the Other as

participant who can become recognized in plurality of

participants, the non-identity of which is an aspect of every

participants’ identity. This provides us I think with a notion of

inclusiveness without assimilation in a common humanity.

Arendt’s insights into the grounds of intersubjectivity are

not always fully developed. Her position needs to be supplemented

by a more consistently developed theory of communicative

848 I’ve drawn this idea from an unpublished essay by Phillip Hansen "Hannah Arendt and Bearing with Strangers"

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action.49 First of all, Arendt’s division between action and

speech could be more properly understood as distinguishing

between two types of action: instrumental and communicative

action. Arendt considers action along the model of work that is

of a purposive rational (and strategic) action on the world. The

notion of communicative action identifies a second dimension of

action: action oriented to understanding.

Thinking Otherness through intersubjectivity II: mutual

recognition and communicative action

I have indicated that an alternative to the postmodernist

interpretation of Otherness can be developed through an

intersubjectively based conception of the self. Certainly

poststructuralist employ a version of recognition of the Other,

but for post structuralism recognition is always asymmetrical,

and exceeds the bounds of ordinary communication. Post

structuralism then rejects the notion that “ethical” is a realm

949 For some cautions see my review of Phillip Hansen Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship in Constellations volume 2 no 1 (1995) pp 148-51.

69

of mutual recognition or mutual accountability. In contrast, a

communicative notion of mutual recognition can be distinguished

in several ways. First of all, a communicative theory interprets

language not as a structural system of rules but as a pragmatic

medium for reaching understanding about something in the world.

It is both a structure of rules that is independent of the

subject and which make practices possible and language is also

those practices that can be employed by subjects for their own

activity and understanding. Habermas notes this dual function

when he writes:

Natural languages do more than open the horizons of the specific worlds in which socialized subjects find themselves.They also force these subjects to their own independent accomplishments—namely to an innerworldy practice oriented toward validity claims, a practice in which projected world disclosing meanings are subjected to an ongoing test in which they can prove their worth.50

Participants have to take up linguistic structures and make

them into their own forms of practical understanding. (Just as

they must also take up and not simply receive dispensations of

050 “Themes in Post metaphysical thinking” In Postmetaphysical Thinking:: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992) 43

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fate). What Habermas calls an ongoing test, I think is better

expressed as an ongoing renewal of meaning (which would include

the possibility of transformations). Subjects have to take up

this relation to others through a relationship of accountability

to others.

Thus what Habermas analyzes from the point of view of

language as medium for mutual understanding I want to consider

from the point of view of the subjects relations to itself

(through its relations to others). Then we have to view the

self-alter relation from the standpoint of a participant who

takes a performative rather than an objectivating attitude. Ego

understands its relation to its self only when it can regard it

from the perspective of alter who is also a participant.

Here communicative theory is distinguished from the

philosophy of consciousness. For the latter, subjectivity is

understood as an inner world in which the subject becomes

conscious of itself by reflecting back on its own

representations. This subject-centered conception has been

effectively criticized by poststructuralist and by other critics

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of foundationalism. Only when ego takes the role of a speaker

who can at the same time become a listener can it come to see

itself as the alter of another ego. These aren’t direct

relations of an individual consciousness to itself, but symbolic

interactions. They are forms of mutual recognition in which ego

come into being though its relation to alter whom it recognizes

as a partner in social interaction.

Communicative theories do not conceive of the self as an

ego that is identical to itself. The identity of the subject is

not a unity but the non-identity of ego and other are linked.

George Herbert Mead cantered this aspect of identify with his

notion that the self is a relation (not an identification) of the

“I” and the “me. Identify encompasses both the generalized

expectations of society and the unique position ego takes toward

to these generalized expectations. When viewed as forms of mutual

understanding the relation between ego and alter is not simply

that of internalized norms or commands to which the ego conforms

or rejects but ego is also part of a web of accountability with

alter in which the interpretive resources of the other and the

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interpretive capacities of the ego are broader than those

provided by a specific society. Thus ego has the capacity to

criticize generalized expectations and advocate new forms of

mutual accountability.

Recognition and justification: the case of human rights

For contemporary neo-Aristotelians, the notion of

“universal” human rights is implausible. Shared conceptions of

ethical life are only possible within the bounds of a particular

social order. Like poststructuralists, neo-Aristotelians they see

universals as requiring an objectivating attitude and an abstract

conception of the self. According to neo-Aristotelians, binding

social relations require orientation to a common good that has a

transsubjective often “objective” good (or some stand in for an

objective good.) The latter however, can never be made an object

of cognitive theory. While poststructuralist agree that forms of

ethical understanding are limited to members of a society in

which a particular form of right and wrong are disclosed, post

structuralist theories are more ambivalent about the desirability

73

of human rights. They employ a very weak form of moral

universalism. The ethical is never simply the common good, but is

revealed through structurally based the call of the other. Albeit

in asymmetrical form. The structure of the ethical is found not

in a substantive good but in the response of ego to the call to

stand before the other. Thus although rights can never be spelled

out in any universal way, one could draw from post structural

thought a notion of the dignity of the Other– a notion that

applies without reserve. Human rights then is an aporia of post

structuralist thought. Some acceptance of human rights then seems

to be both required and impossible to sustain.

The asymmetrical conception of otherness used by

poststructuralists limits their approach to human rights. It

makes the question of binding relations to others into a

permanent mystery, and it leads to the ambivalent stance of

poststructuralist to formal conceptions of rights. The two stage

moral theory leads them into a dilemma regarding the ethical,

moral and political self-understanding of participants. Here

morality can have no explicit “meaning” only the feeling of the

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sublime or the messianic encounter with the other.

Communicative moral theories are not rooted in any

particular notions of the common good. Given the plurality of

modern cultures they doubt the possibility of a global ethos that

could be meaningful for all. While communitarians argue that

there is either a meaningful ethos or a meaningless world of

atomistic subjects, 51communicative ethics argues that morality

can have meaning based in the form of intersubjectivity as such.

The structure of communicative action already contains shared

moral presuppositions inherent in forms of life based on mutual

recognition. They have a normative structure that is independent

of specific forms of life.52

The participant’s moral identity includes not only its

deeply held values, which are formed in a social world and an

ethical community, but the moral relationships rooted in the

presuppositions of intersubjectivity. These define not what or

how I want to be toward myself, but how I want to be toward

151 See for example Beiner, What’s the Matter with Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 252 “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality “ in The Inclusion of the Other:(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998):40

75

others. While the former represent conceptions of the good life,

the latter can be exemplified in conceptions of justice. These

two aspects of ethical life require two different sets of reasons

for action. For while the ego’s relation to his or her deeply

held values are social in nature and can make sense only in

relation to a community of shared values, the accountability of

subjects to one another about an ethos only extends as far as the

particular community. These reasons are not simply self-

interested or ego centered, but they are limited to my community.

Here Habermas would agree with poststructuralist: the community

of the ethos is an “us” (a first person plural). It does not

truly take the second person perspective of alter into account.

53 Questions of justice, however, draw on a structure of

intersubjectivity which employs reasons that could appeal to all

without reference to any particular ethos or notion of the good.

In contrast to poststructuralist, however, communicative ethics

defines an inclusive structure of morality. Within discourse the

stranger as well as the friend is a partner in discussion.

353 “Genealogical Analysis” . I believe however, they could be second person reasons, but only of a limited type.

76

Everyone capable of speech and action can in principle become a

participant in deliberations about justice. This is the basis

for a communicative ethics which can take up Arendt’s insight

into the power of initiation. Such an ethics recognizes the

capacity of participants to forge understanding within the

horizon of language, a phenomenon that post structuralism cannot

explain. Communicative ethics requires both the presupposition of

communicative equality and freedom which provides participants

equal chances to engage in deliberation, and it defines a notion

of universal solidarity. Everyone is a fellow participant in

discussion and a unique individual who is capable of insight and

initiative. He or she commands moral respect on each basis. I

believe that this perspective can provide a broad interpretation

of moral universalism. Thus while communicative ethics is

inclusive it does not reduce or appropriate the other to a

sterile formal universalism.

Communicative ethics can meet the objections of

poststructuralist and neo Aristotelians that against

universalistic theories of justice. These revolve around the

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claim that impartiality entails a third person perspective that

regards the other from the observer’s perspective.

Universalism’s abstract generality denies any recognition of the

other, and lose touch with the identity of participants and

substitute disembodied norms which lack connection to the

solidarity of participants54.

While it does seek an “impartial” standpoint in relation to

the value of any notion of the good, communicative theory does

not suspend the participant’s perspective. Poststructuralists

conflate the objective world and the social world. In the

former, descriptions of state of affairs presuppose a world

independent of these descriptions. Coming to agreement about the

truth of an assertion in the objective world means that the truth

conditions of such a statement can be fulfilled. They are not

directly tied to reason for actions. The social world is a world

of legitimate reciprocal expectations. We have access to the

social world not as observers, but only as participants in that

454 See for examples o f this line of argument Michael Sandel Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Beiner What’s the Matter with Liberalism

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world, that is, through our preexisting practical frame of

knowledge. Here descriptions of the world are not independent of

our meaningful participation in the world that is of our

intentions, our practices. etc. The validity of a norm consists

in the justification of the claim that a norm is worthy of

recognition by participants and thus that they ought to adopt it

as a maxim of action. It is also a moment in the practical

realization of the norm. A norm becomes part of my practical

understanding of myself and my relation toward others.

While practical discourse may bracket specific claims to

act it can never, however, suspend the participant’s perspective

as a whole. Practical discourse could not take the standpoint of

things in an objective world and at the same time continue to

understand others as others. Rather in discourse we thematize

specific types of claims for examination. Within moral discourse

the notion of impartiality refers only to exclusion of a specific

set of reasons for action as relevant: those associated with

theories of the good. It claims that we must find sufficient

reason for norms of justice within the general structures of

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communicative action. Moral discourse does not imply that we

must suspend our meaningful relations to others or suspend, as

Rawls’ (first version of the) theory of justice argues, any

relation to our particular identities. For the participant in a

discourse does not hide his or her preferences behind a veil of

ignorance, he or she still has knowledge of these preferences and

identities. Rather it is the case that these concerns are not

the theme of theories of justice.

Mutual recognition and basic concepts: Communicative power, freedom and equality

Hannah Arendt already provided a route of entry into the

communicative concept of power by distinguishing between force,

or violence (Gewalt) and power (Macht). Force, is a type of

strategic action that can be understood as action oriented to

successfully bring about some goal or desired state of affairs in

the within a social context. Strategic action requires taking

into account the conduct of other persons whereas work on nature

does not. Successful strategic action requires the others be

induced (through rewards) influenced, coerced (through threats or

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sanctions) or controlled through structural control of

alternatives, to carry out a course of action that serves some

externally defined goals. Power in this sense is as Weber noted

is the probability that one can assert one’s own will even

against opposition. I would however, use the broader term

resistance. Thus it includes not just political and social power

but administrative power. Strategic action, however, is not

consensual in the sense I have employed the term here. It does

not depend on processes of mutual accountability in which

individuals are accountable to others (in strategic action we

simply take account of others) For this reason Arendt calls force

“wordless,” indicating that the strategic action does not reveal

a horizon of a social world in which individuals act in concert.

Thus force, for Arendt, is non-political and opposed to

(communicative) power. The latter, communicative power, comes

into being in public and consensual relations of addressors and

addressees. Only in these consensual interactions can

participants form the political will to “act in concert.” Arendt

locates the binding power of consensual action, in this

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“uncoerced” force. It brings subjects together in action oriented

to agreement.

Understood properly, a communicative concept of power does

not fall prey to the objection, leveled by Foucault (and taken up

by his followers) that a communicative theory separates, in an

idealistic fashion, power for a pure realm of action unaffected

by power. Critics argue that power is seen negatively by

idealistic theories. It prevents rather than enables actions

Communicative theories separate two different types of power,

both of which can have an enabling power. Foucault’s theory, even

with some later modifications interprets power as strategic or

expressive. Foucault is not able to grasp within the boundaries

of his theory, the ways in which consensual action has an

enabling dimension.

We do not have to accept all facets of Arendt’s analysis

(such as her lack of attention to administrative power and to the

legitimate use of force) to see the value of her distinction

between two types of power. Rather, I propose to rework it a bit

to make more visible its potential for comprehending forms of

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domination not always apparent in traditional theories of power.

For purposive models of action, domination is a systematic

restriction on the expressive or purposive freedom of an

individual. By getting alter to act so as to accomplish ego’s

purposes, rather than those alter would pursue if it could choose

freely, alter becomes an object or instrument for ego’s purposes.

Weber for example followed this line of analysis when he

described the loss of freedom in modern society. Forms of

bureaucratic rationality and increasing scope of political and

administrative power put increasing restrictions on individual

freedom to act. Of course this model also analyses the

inconspicuous means of control and domination that come into play

when subjects internalize dominant social mores themselves

instituted by power. Then the subject experiences domination not

as a matter of coercion but as his or her own free choice.

However, the normative dimension of domination already

suggests that the purposive model is not sufficient to explain

all forms of domination. While domination no doubt includes

systematic limitations on the pursuit of social goals, it must

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also include the restriction of forms of communicative action; it

must impinge on the world of legitimate reciprocal expectations

and norms. For subjects of domination lose the freedom to

interpret for themselves their own identities, needs and

expectations they share in common with others, i.e., their own

abilities to act in concert. Structures of domination can

restrict communicative action, for example through the

devaluation of indigenous or acquired modes of reason or the

invalidation of certain norms or practices. Of course these

restrictions are accomplished by strategic forms of power that

block the free flow of interpretations. Mutual expectations form

when all parties who can contribute and assent to procedures or

norms are replaced by an asymmetrical relation between oppressors

and oppressed in which the oppressor has the power to define the

forms of reason or the validity of norms; this is achieved

through the political control of public processes of reasoning

and institutional control. These may equally impact on processes

of socialization and self-formation. Individuals may only learn

restricted patterns of reasoning and acting toward others,

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including a limited and asymmetrical repertoire of expectations.

The oppressors’ power to control public forms of discussion may

make it difficult for dissent to arise.

The basic feature of communicative freedom is the ability to

take up the world in a certain way that is to be able to

interpret and take up a position toward the world. This

distinguishes it from purposive notions of freedom, which view

freedom as the ability to achieve a goal. Both negative freedom,

that is freedom from interference, and positive freedom, which is

the freedom to develop one’s capacities through self-realization,

have been interpreted as forms of purposive freedom – although

the developmental concept also includes forms of expressive

freedom. In the first, subjects are free to pursue goals without

explaining themselves to others, in the latter subjects are free

to realize inner drives and demands.55 In contrast,

communicative freedom is not a goal oriented activity. It

consists in the ability to take up the world (in a performative

attitude) with others in relations of mutual recognition and

55 Of course this expressive freedom has a social and a communicative dimension.

85

mutual understanding. In this respect it is more than just the

openness to the Other. Communicative freedom consists in the

ability to engage in mutually accountable processes in which

participant can make claims which can be backed by reason and can

ask others to account for their actions. Each has to be able to

put forward reasons and contribute to discussion.

The notion of communicative freedom extends beyond the

ability to reason with others in discourse or to form mutual

expectations. It includes the ability to interpret (and

initiate) one’s own life and develop a unique identity. This

aspect of freedom can incorporate some of the expressive

dimensions of the developmental notion. Communicative freedom

implies that we can freely put our own sense of ourselves at

issue, to have the ability to interpret and to shape our own

experiences and feelings and needs. Here for example my freedom

may include not only forms of affirmation but alienation from

commonly held beliefs or norms in my society. I may be alienated

from or cynical towards social practices. In each of these I

take a position not just toward the validity of norms, but how

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they bear on the lives of participants, especially their

integrity and dignity. In this way it merges with the third

dimension of communicative equality.

Recent discussion of the “politics of recognition” have

brought to the fore significant and often neglected dimensions of

communicative equality. These include not just the equality of

all participants to contribute to the formation of social

practices and norms, but the equal respect accorded all by virtue

of their capacity to initiate action. In a well-known article,

Charles Taylor pointed to the modern notion of dignity that is

accorded each individual who can “authentically” relate him or

herself to deeply help values and identities.56 Modern subjects

cannot rely on tradition or custom for identity but must only

accept those ideals they can give themselves. This new way of

looking at the self puts the modern notion of self-determination

in a new way. While the new conception of the self that Taylor

identifies does draw from the expressivist notion of self-

realization, that is, a self-expressing its inner nature, he

656 Charles Taylor “The Politics of Recognition”

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reinterprets it as a relation of the self to itself. This is a

communicative relationship of a subject to itself as one who

initiates his or her own relation to the world.

Here identity requires recognition by others in one’s

community. Recognition is both the recognition of the other’s

goal or aims as potentially worthy, and acknowledgment of the

integrity of individuals and cultures. That is, notions of dignity

protect the integrity of the self’s communicative relation to

itself and others. The notion of “authenticity” that Taylor

develops, then, has implications for communicative equality. On this

interpretation equality would not consist simply in equal access

to goods or to “resources” or to property, that is the equal

ability to realize goals, but it would mean the equal respect for

the integrity of individuals and cultures.

Many of the contemporary challenges to liberal and

socialist notions of equality are centered on the “struggle for

recognition” by subaltern individuals and groups.57 Such

757 For this idea see Axel Honneth The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1996) , especially chapter 6 “Personal Identity and Disrespect” 131-40.

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challenges shift the locus of analyses of domination. They locate

domination not just in the unequal distribution goods, but in the

repression of individual and group identities. This lack of

recognition leads to loss of integrity and disrespect. Of

course, in the long run, questions of identity and rights have to

be interwoven. Finally, the recognition of differences and

respect for the identity and integrity of individuals and

cultures has to take place within the context of equal human

rights and universal justice. Unique notions of the good cannot

violate the premises of a theory of justice that has to apply to

all potential participants.

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