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The Federal Reserve’s decision Wednesday to leave interest rates alone for the first time in 11 meetings raises hopes that it may be at least nearing the end of its rate-hiking campaign to cool inflation. That said, the Fed’s policymakers indicated that they envision potentially two more hikes this year — a more hawkish forecast than had been expected. And even after the Fed has stopped hiking, it’s likely to keep borrowing rates at a peak for months to come. Consumers would still have to bear the weight of higher-cost auto loans, mortgages, credit cards and other forms of borrowing. Still, some people may feel encouraged by the possibility that loan rates might not rise much more. And in the meantime, people with savings accounts are enjoying higher yields than they have in years. Fortunately, that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Though the Fed hasn’t likely reached the top of its rate-raising cycle, it’s getting closer. That doesn’t necessarily mean that relief is on the way, especially with the forecast of possibly two additional hikes this year. “Even once the Fed stops raising interest rates, borrowing rates are still very, very high,” said Greg McBride, Bankrate.com’s chief financial analyst. “Some of these rates are higher than many consumers have ever seen.” McBride noted that credit card rates, in particular, are at or near their all-time peaks, mortgage rates have more than doubled in two years and auto loan rates have reached their highest level in about a dozen years. Even if rates were to hold steady, borrowing costs across the economy will remain much higher than they were in recent years. Some consumers may struggle to continue making loan payments on time as they simultaneously face inflated prices for many goods and services. “That means debt repayment has taken on a renewed urgency,” McBride said. “If you have credit card debt, that is a top priority to get paid down.” Matt Schulz of LendingTree suggested that consumers who have debt should “assume that rates will continue to rise and focus on paying down their balances as quickly as possible,” to err on the safe side. Card users, he said, might consider asking their issuers to offer a lower Annual Percentage Rate (APR), if possible. In a recent report, LendingTree concluded that a majority of cardholders who had asked their card issuers for a lower rate received one. The average reduction was significant — 6 percentage points. “It is well worth your time to make that call,” Schulz said. Right now, the average APR on a new credit card offer is a towering 23.98%, according to LendingTree. “And they’re probably going to still creep higher in the immediate future,” Schulz said, even if the Fed doesn’t raise rates Wednesday. For a typical credit card already in use, the average APR was only slightly lower — 20.92% — according to the latest data from the Fed. Loan rates for new vehicles have stayed constant for the past few months, at an average of about 7%. That isn’t likely to change even with the Fed leaving rates alone for now, said Ivan Drury, senior manager at Edmunds.com. Auto loan rates, Drury said, tend to reflect buyer demand for vehicles more than they do the Fed’s interest rate decisions. Auto sales, while still way below pre-pandemic levels, remain fairly strong, automakers are selling at still-high prices and profits are solid. Unless sales were to slow, companies and dealers won’t likely reduce prices or offer subsidized loan rates. “Everyone seems too content,” Drury said. With loan rates probably unlikely either to rise or fall significantly anytime soon, buyers who need a vehicle may increasingly come off the sidelines. Autos are generally staying on dealer lots for only 35-40 days before being sold. Until they start sitting for 60 days or more, Drury said, automakers probably won’t cut prices. New vehicle prices averaged $47,892 in May, 1.3% below the peak in December. Yet any decline has been offset by costlier loan rates, which have surged nearly a half point over the same period. Prices for used vehicles also dropped somewhat last year but remain comparatively high. The national average in May was $29,387, down about 5% from the May 2022 peak but nearly $9,000 more than the average before the pandemic. (As of May, the average used-vehicle loan rate was about 11%.) “Make sure your credit is in tip-top shape, shop around for financing and have an offer in your back pocket before you go to the dealership,” said Bankrate’s McBride. Ken Tumin, a banking expert and founder of DepositAccounts.com, noted that while yields for savings accounts and certificates of deposit are the highest they’ve been in a decade, the pace of increases is slowing. With the Fed likely nearing the end of rate hiking, any further increases in yields may be comparatively small. “Banks will have reason to slow their deposit rate increases,” Tumin said. Still, it’s worth noting that these accounts are much more rewarding than they were as recently as a year ago. The average online savings account yield is now 3.98% — up from 3.31% at the start of this year and from 0.73% from a year ago, according to DepositAccounts.com. The average yield on an online one-year CD is 4.86%, up from 4.37% at the start of the year and from 1.49% a year ago. McBride suggested that consumers comparison-shop to find the best rates on high-yield savings accounts. He noted that online banks, in particular, are paying yields of 5% or better. “Savings rates are the highest we’ve seen since the financial crisis,” he said. “Banks that need deposits — like online banks — are competing aggressively by paying higher rates.” By contrast, McBride said, “brick-and-mortar banks, who have a surplus of deposits — their rates reflect that. They will intentionally have lower rates, and some of them have no intention of catching up.” Overall, he noted, consumers can enjoy savings rates that haven’t been this high in 15 years. “That’s not a bad place to have money parked,” said McBride. The Fed has clearly achieved progress. Inflation, which peaked above 9% last year, is less than half that level now. Yet the latest inflation readings remain well above the Fed’s 2% target. Many households are still feeling heavy financial pressure as a result. Reducing inflation back to the Fed’s target level will require more time. “That might mean the Fed is going to have to hold rates higher for longer, and it may even mean boosting rates further in the months ahead,” McBride said. The central bank has now raised rates at its fastest pace in 40 years. “That doesn’t mean the Fed is going to start cutting rates or that other rate hikes this year are completely out of the question,” said Jacob Channel, senior economist for LendingTree. “It just means they may be willing to hold rates where they are and let the economy continue to settle without more rate-related prodding in the immediate future.” If the economy does cool, Channel predicts that mortgage rates may end the year closer to 6% than to 7%. (The current national average for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is 6.71%, according to Freddie Mac.) “There’s a very significant cumulative impact (of rate hikes), but it doesn’t hit all right away,” McBride said. For the Fed to leave rates alone, at least for now, “gives them a little bit of time to evaluate the broader economic and inflationary landscape to see if further rate hikes are warranted.”

As the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve is guided by a “dual mandate” obligation which tasks it with simultaneously preserving price stability (low inflation) and maximum employment (low unemployment). The Federal Reserve uses monetary policy to pursue these goals. Rate hikes are an example of contractionary monetary policy that are designed to reduce overall aggregate demand throughout an economy. This, in turn, helps reduce inflationary pressures and bring an economy back to equilibrium; however, aggressive rate hikes can trigger a “hard landing” and bring about a recession if that Fed overshoots its target. The disadvantage argues that this would be the likely outcome if the Fed reverses course and continues down the path of raising interest rates.

For background reading on the mechanics of this argument, consider reviewing the following:

RONNIE LIPSCHUTZ: Well, many, many years ago…one day when I was reading the San Francisco chronicle, I clipped a little phrase. I’ve never been able to find it, but it was something like, one of the emperor Fredricks said, “The surest way to ruin your country is to put it under the charge of college professors.” I have to say that I am now fully convinced of the truth of that statement. But since I have been charged here with taking on the philosophical side of things, I want to make a few points about – in particular the negative arguments – but also I think about the affirmative. I’m not a debater, by the way, so I don’t quite understand what’s been going on. But what I think in particular is a problem is, first of all, we have incommensurate conceptual categories going on here; that the affirmative is taking a very narrow policy question and proposing a change to it. The negative then raises these questions of epistemology and ontology which, in a way, are not obviously confronting the policy question which, and I agree with Erin, is very, very narrowly construed. I mean, there was no question about – well, let me put it this way: that although there was a discussion of the virtues of the alliance with Japan, it was largely taken as a given, and therefore of course that causes a problem, and by taking this epistemological and ontological approach, it is…ships passing in the night. And then, of course, the theory question came up and that, I thought, was problematic for both sides. A couple of things I want to say: the first one is that social constructions can kill. And I think this is a very important thing to remember that, threats can be socially constructed but threats, social constructions have material components, and they are aimed in particular directions. So the fact that something is a social construction or is epistemologically and ontologically questionable does not mean that there aren’t missiles being deployed, and that those missiles are not going to go off. These arguments are, I think, operating at a somewhat different space, and it does raise the question: how is it that we judge what is a threat in the first place? And of course we have nuclear friends and nuclear enemies. You ought to ask the question, “Why is it that Great Britain has nuclear weapons and yet there is nobody, as far as I know, that is planning a war with Great Britain?”. Now I could be wrong about this, since the Pentagon probably has plenty of analysts who have nothing to do.

ERIN SIMPSON: They make Powerpoints.

Securitization theory has rightly garnered much attention among European scholars of international relations. Its basic claims are powerful: that security threats are not given, but require active construction; that the boundaries of “security” are malleable; that the declaration that a certain problem lies within the realm of security is itself a productive political act; and that “security” issues hold a trump card, demanding disproportionate resources and silencing alternative perspectives. Securitization thus highlights a familiar, even ubiquitous, political process that had received little attention in the international relations or comparative foreign policy literatures. It gave scholars a theoretical language, if not quite a set of coherent theoretical tools, with which to make sense of how a diverse set of issues, from migration to narcotics flows to global climate change, sometimes came to be treated as matters of national and global security and thereby—and this is where securitization’s critical edge came to the fore—impeded reasoned political debate. No surprise that, as Jarrod and Eric observe, securitization has been the focus of so many articles in the EJIR—and even more in such journals as the Review of International Studies and Security Dialogue. But there are (good) substantive and (not so good) sociological reasons that securitization has failed to gain traction in North America. First, and most important, securitization describes a process but leaves us well short of (a) a fully specified causal theory that (b) takes proper account of the politics of rhetorical contestation. According to the foundational theorists of the Copenhagen School, actors, usually elites, transform the social order from one of normal, everyday politics into a Schmittian world of crisis by identifying a dire threat to the political community. They conceive of this “securitizing move” in linguistic terms, as a speech act. As Ole Waever (1995: 55) argues, “By saying it [security], something is done (as in betting, a promise, naming a ship). . . . [T]he word ‘security’ is the act . . .” [emphasis added]. Securitization is a powerful discursive process that constitutes social reality. Countless articles and books have traced this process, and its consequences, in particular policy domains. Securitization presents itself as a causal account. But its mechanisms remain obscure, as do the conditions under which it operates. Why is speaking security so powerful? How do mere words twist and transform the social order? Does the invocation of security prompt a visceral emotional response? Are speech acts persuasive, by using well-known tropes to convince audiences that they must seek protection? Or does securitization operate through the politics of rhetorical coercion, silencing potential opponents? In securitization accounts, speech acts often seem to be magical incantations that upend normal politics through pathways shrouded in mystery. Equally unclear is why some securitizing moves resonate, while others [are ignored] fall on deaf ears. Certainly not all attempts to construct threats succeed, and this is true of both traditional military concerns as well as “new” security issues. Both neoconservatives and structural realists in the United States have long insisted that conflict with China is inevitable, yet China has over the last 25 years been more opportunity than threat in US political discourse—despite these vigorous and persistent securitizing moves. In very recent years, the balance has shifted, and the China threat has started to catch on: linguistic processes alone cannot account for this change. The US military has repeatedly declared that global climate change has profound implications for national security—but that has hardly cast aside climate change deniers, many of whom are ironically foreign policy hawks supposedly deferential to the uniformed military. Authoritative speakers have varied in the efficacy of their securitizing moves. While George W. Bush powerfully framed the events of 9/11 as a global war against American values, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a more gifted orator, struggled to convince a skeptical public that Germany presented an imminent threat to the United States. After thirty years as an active research program, securitization theory has hardly begun to offer acceptable answers to these questions. Brief references to “facilitating conditions” won’t cut it. You don’t have to subscribe to a covering-law conception of theory to find these questions important or to find securitization’s answers unsatisfying. A large part of the problem, we believe, lies in securitization’s silence on the politics of security. Its foundations in speech act theory have yielded an oddly apolitical theoretical framework. In its seminal formulation, the Copenhagen school emphasized the internal linguistic rules that must be followed for a speech act to be recognized as competent. Yet as Thierry Balzacq argues, by treating securitization as a purely rule-driven process, the Copenhagen school ignores the politics of securitization, reducing “security to a conventional procedure such as marriage or betting in which the ‘felicity circumstances’ (conditions of success) must fully prevail for the act to go through” (2005:172). Absent from this picture are fierce rhetorical battles, where coalitions counter securitizing moves with their own appeals that strike more or less deeply at underlying narratives. Absent as well are the public intellectuals and media, who question and critique securitizing moves sometimes (and not others), sometimes to good effect (and sometimes with little impact). The audience itself—whether the mass public or a narrower elite stratum—is stripped of all agency. Speaking security, even when the performance is competent, does not sweep this politics away. Only by delving into this politics can we shed light on the mysteries of securitization. We see rhetorical politics as constituted less by singular “securitizing moves” than by “contentious conversation”—to use Charles Tilly’s phrase. To this end, we would urge securitization theorists, as we recently have elsewhere, to move towards a “pragmatic” model that rests on four analytical wagers: that actors are both strategic and social; that legitimation works by imparting meaning to political action; that legitimation is laced through with contestation; and that the power of language emerges through contentious dialogue. We are heartened that our ambivalence about securitization—the ways in which we find it by turns appealing and dissatisfying—and our vision for how to move forward have in the last decade been echoed by (mostly) European colleagues. These critics have laid out a research agenda that would, if taken up, produce more satisfying, and more deeply political, theoretical accounts. In our own work, both individual and collective, we have tried to advance that research agenda. So long as securitization theorists resist defining the theory’s scope and mechanisms, and so long as it remains wedded to apolitical underpinnings, we think it unlikely to gain a broad following on this side of the pond. Second, securitization has been held back by another way in which it is apolitical—this time thanks to its Schmittian commitments and political vision. Successful securitization, in seminal accounts, replaces normal patterns of politics with the world of the exception, in which contest has no place. They imagine security as the ultimate trump card. But, in reality, the divide is not nearly so stark. Security does not crowd out all other spending priorities—or states would spend on nothing but defense and “securitized” issues. Nor does simply declaring something a matter of national security guarantee its funding—or global climate change counter-measures, including research on renewable energies, would be well-funded. Nor are security issues somehow aloof from politics: politics has never truly stopped “at the water’s edge.” Securitization considers only the politics of security. Its strangely dichotomous optic cannot see or make sense of the politics within security. In ignoring the politics within security, securitization is of course in good company. Realists of all stripes have paid little attention to domestic political contest, except as a distraction from structural imperatives. But while realism is unquestionably a powerful first-cut, this inattention to the politics within security is also among the reasons so many have found it wanting. As Arnold Wolfers long ago observed, some degree of insecurity is the normal state of affairs. But “some may find the danger to which they are exposed entirely normal and in line with their modest security expectations while others consider it unbearable to live with these same dangers.” And states, he further argues, do not actually maximize security—almost ever. “Even when there has been no question that armaments would mean more security, the cost in taxes, the reduction in social benefits, or the sheer discomfort involved have militated effectively against further effort” (1962:151, 153). A securitization perspective renders all this politics within security inexplicable. And yet, as Wolfers saw half a century ago, it is crucial.

Experts at Oxford University and elsewhere have estimated that the risk of a global human extinction event this century—or at least of an event that wipes out 10 percent or more of the world’s population— is around 1 in 10. The most probable culprits sending us the way of the dinosaur are mostly anthropogenic risks, meaning those created by humans. These include climate change, nuclear disaster, and more emerging risks such as artificial intelligence gone wrong (by accident or nefarious intent) and bioterrorism. A recent search of the scientific literature through ScienceDirect for “human extinction” returned a demoralizing 157 results, compared to the 1,627 for “dung beetle.” I don’t know about you, but this concerns me. Why is there so little research and action on existential risks (risks capable of rendering humanity extinct)?

A big part of the problem is a lack of awareness about the real threats we face and what can be done about them. When asked to estimate the chance of an extinction event in the next 50 years, U.S. adults in surveys reported chances ranging from 1 in 10 million to 1 in 100, certainly not 10 percent. The awareness and engagement issues extend to the academic community as well, where a key bottleneck is a lack of talented people studying existential risks. Developing viable risk mitigation strategies will require widespread civic engagement and concerted research efforts. Consequently, there is an urgent need to improve the communication of the magnitude and importance of existential risks. The first step is getting an audience to pay attention to this issue.

It is urgent that we consider the limits of the discourse of the other and its assumed association with victimhood, for the discrete borders of these terms break down when considering the violence of the Palestinian suicide bomber, or of the Hutu killing his or her Tutsi neighbor. I will argue that the victimized other has acquired a status beyond critique, that it has become a metaphor for "the good." This is a function of guilt on the part of those who feel responsible for the wounds of yesterday's victims, and of revenge on the part of those who vow never again to be victimized, rendering justice a matter of either self-recrimination or revenge. I am interested in identifying these limits, but we must go beyond a simple deconstruction of victimhood. While a critique of identity politics and its production of the binary logic of victimhood is still relevant, and urgent, it is not my only concern here. The work of Jacques Derrida, as well as that of his contemporaries—proponents of a phenomenological and poststructuralist approach to philosophy—has appealed to me for its attention to unsettling essentialist claims. I have argued in previous work for the usefulness, necessity even, of this kind of destabilizing work for politics—of attending to difference, incommensurability, ambiguity, paradox, aporia, and indeterminacy. Derrida and many of his interlocutors—Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, among others—have provided what is probably the best critique of the dangers of identity politics, for example. But what has come to be known as the "ethico-political" is unsatisfying on another level. There is a strong resistance to making moral claims of any kind in the interests of preserving particularity, historical context, and contingency. Despite Derrida's stance against capital punishment, for example, his conditional/unconditional formula—the calculable/incalculable, determinate/indeterminate—leaves ambiguous one side of the dialectic: calculative decisions are necessary in matters of morals, law, and politics, but can be dangerous or damaging without the incalculable, the unconditional which is purported to give rise to these decisions. This point is purposely left obscure, as anything "calculable" is considered to be a plan, normative programming, or technology, all of which are condemned as problematic because they cannot account for difference. There is no middle ground here—a serious irony given that Derrida's work is generally preoccupied with middle grounds; one either accepts the terms deconstruction sets out—that politics is undecidable—or falls in with the misguided folks who promote a normative approach. Moral judgment has become an unpopular concept and practice since the promotion of a certain ideology concerning cultural difference. Todd May argues that the French thinkers associated with the poststructuralist tradition have been reluctant to engage in moral discourse. Morality has become the undisputed jurisdiction of the political right, associated with family values and prominent in conservative discourse. On the Left morality itself is believed to contain a certain conservative element, May suggests, one that denies difference. Thus, for example, the Left must defend multiculturalism on the grounds that there are no common values among humans. The universalist claims put forward by morality, it is said, fail to recognize diversity that characterizes different people's moral lives. The argument runs roughly like this: since there are no universal moral values, no set of values can claim ultimate superiority over any other; therefore, people should be exposed to a diversity of moral views. Foucault provides a good example of this avoidance of moral discourse. He makes a case against "universal necessities in human existence" and against "speaking for others" (a sacrosanct policy in feminist discourse). No matter that Foucault certainly speaks for the insane, the imprisoned and sexed subjects throughout his work, Herculine Barbin and Pierre Rivière especially. Emmanuel Levinas's work is said to provide no moral theory, but to promote an "ethical relation to the other" as first philosophy. Morals are passé, replaced by responsibility. As I argue later, however, this is a responsibility for the other without judgment, an abstract ethical relation that leaves no room for grappling with moral dilemmas or for the agency and responsibility of the victimized other. It is curious, then, that these philosophers speak in the name of a politics that is purported to be ethical, and yet we are left with theories—beautiful and seductive perhaps—that are of limited use when it comes to political practice and moral judgment. Their work has had a tremendous impact on the ethico-political, a term that captures what is central to both ethics and politics: the demand for deliberation and urgent action in answer to the question "what should I do?" In privileging responsibility, however, they ignore moral judgment, not morality itself. Ethics becomes about one's relation to the other, and one's infinite responsibility to that other; questions about right or wrong actions are avoided. As in discussions of "the political" (rather than "politics"), "the ethical" is abstracted from any reality that might require a moral act. Hence the conclusion of the first chapter of this book: that Levinas leads us to a benevolent but empty regard for an abstract other. My initial enthusiasm about the usefulness of the poststructuralist tradition for political action has waned as I have become more exposed to the actual details of political work, to the energy and persistence of political actors, and to the perplexed expressions of those practitioners with whom I attempt to discuss the political claims of this body of work. I am not referring to the perplexity of the uneducated in the face of difficult intellectual ideas, but to the skepticism of the political practitioner in the face of the often presumptuous, untested hypotheses of the armchair philosopher. Our interest and intervention in political events cannot remain solely on the plane of textual critique. While this book does not engage with the work of these thinkers in a sustained manner, I take their work and the tradition of which they are a part as my point of departure. Since my initial attraction to Derrida's insistence on the undecidability of politics, preceded by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who rigorously defends the contingency of politics, and Simone de Beauvoir, whose marvelous description of the ambiguity of ethics is as relevant today as it ever was, I have wrestled with how to negotiate what is for many the greatest challenge in the politics of the poststructuralist tradition: how to reconcile contingency with the desire for practical solutions. Derrida demonstrates, perhaps better than most, the impossibility of this reconciliation, and therefore often leaves his readers in the frustrated state of wanting more—more reassurance, security, universality, and normativity. It isn't reassurance or security I am searching for, but relevance and utility; a pragmatic approach to moral and political dilemmas that needs no "unconditional" reference point.

A serious philosophical argument often brought against deconstruction, for example by Habermas (1987: 185–210), is that it is subject to the performative contradiction. Simply put, this mistake is made when there is a contradiction between what you say, and the way in which you say it. Thus Habermas claims that when Derrida argues against reason, he has to make use of rational means. ‘Anyone who argues against reason is necessarily caught up in a contradiction: she asserts at the locutionary level that reason does not exist, while demonstrating by way of her performance in argumentative processes that such reason does in fact exist’ (Fleming, 1996: 169). The claim made above – that we can never have complete knowledge of complex systems – falls into the same trap. It looks like an absolute statement about complex things but denies that such a statement can be made. Whether Habermas is correct in his assessment that Derrida argues against reason13 is of less importance now than it is to look at the ‘logic’ of the performative contradiction. The first thing one should notice is that most careful or modest claims will come under pressure from this test. The claim ‘no sentence has an exact meaning’ obviously fails the test, but the claim ‘perhaps some sentences are not perfectly clear’ is also in trouble. If it is correct, then the sentence itself is perfectly clear. If it is not correct, then perhaps all sentences are clear. This point can be made more explicit by examining what kind of statements would pass the test. The claim, ‘When I am rational I will always be right’ passes the test with flying colours! It may not be true, but there is no contradiction between what I say and how I am saying it. I am always right, and I am also right that I am always right, and I can make this claim in an assertive tone of voice. Surely a test that will pass most self-assertive, macho claims and that will fail most modest claims, cannot be all that useful when dealing with complex things. Some reasons for this can be supplied. The performative contradiction is predicated on the assumption that one can adequately distinguish between the performative and the locutionary levels, and, in the terms Habermas uses to criticize Derrida, between logic and rhetoric. However, in order to make this distinction clearly, one would need to take in a position that can characterize what is being said from an external vantage point. In the language of complexity, that would mean that one has access to a framework that is not the result of a strategic choice, i.e. some objective meta-framework. This is exactly what the view from complexity is sceptical about. The argument is that our frameworks are all compromised to some extent; dealing with complexity is a little messy. As Derrida (1988: 119) says: if things were simple, word would have gotten around.14 In a way, the view from complexity acknowledges that some form of performative tension is inevitable. We are playing in what Wood (1990: 150) calls the ‘theatre of difficulty’, and this requires a certain ‘performative reflexivity’ (1990: 132). We need to demonstrate the difficulties we are in; also in the way we talk about them. Our discourse should reflect the complexities. To talk about the complex world as if it can be understood clearly is a contradiction of another kind15 and this is a contradiction with ethical implications. Those who claim to have access to the truth are denying us our critical perspective and, therefore, keep us in a kind of false consciousness by not restoring the world to its original difficulty. It is only by acknowledging that we are in trouble that we can start grappling with the complexities around us. To be subject to the performative contradiction would seem, at least from the perspective of a certain kind of logical argumentation, to be a weak position. Such a position is seen as not being sufficiently rational and thus unscientific and irresponsible. The view from complexity argues to the contrary, that the conditions imposed by the test for performative contradiction feeds off a kind of intellectual arrogance that is in itself irresponsible. We only have limited access to a complex world and when we are dealing with the limits of our understanding, we are dealing with ethics. In Derrida’s (2000: 467) words: ‘There is ethics precisely where I am in performative powerlessness.’ The modest position is not weak; it is responsible.

If Derrida’s uncovering of inherent contradictions and originary violence at the heart of the human condition rules out normative recourse to the notion of performative contradiction, it may also suggests a way out. For the point of insisting on aporias and (not primarily physical but ‘originary’) violence is not a postmodern pleasure in paradoxes, or, even worse, a gay and irresponsible nihilism. Rather, the point is to complicate ethical life beyond the (always too quick) demands of good conscience, to demand that one question oneself while or before questioning others, to insist on the tragic dimension of political life and the need to negotiate ultimately irreconcilable obligations.42 Thus, in an effort to defend Derrida’s normative claims, we could consider the political analysis in terms of the promise, différance, iterability, etc., as outlining an ethics and a politics of what Derrida, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” called the “lesser violence.”43 The difficulties of first defining and then measuring violence are, of course, enormous, especially in light of Derrida’s account of originary violence, and the aporia of undecidability. Provided these difficulties could somehow be met, and further presupposing that unnecessary violence is to be avoided, the attempt to close horizons of the future – that is, to establish a political identity devoid of the need for a repetition from the future and, thus, political (democratic and open-ended) negotiation – could be shown to be needlessly violent, given that identity and future horizons cannot ever be closed. The passage from a quasi-transcendental account to normative claims would then consist in the idea that we ought to refrain from trying to do what is quasi-transcendentally impossible (e.g., a closed political field, identity without relation to otherness), for the attempt to accomplish the impossible would produce “absolute evil” or the worst violence.44 In other words, quasi-transcendental impossibilities only call for their recognition in view of a politics of the lesser violence. I cannot be certain that Derrida would subscribe to this argument, though it has been advanced, and attributed to Derrida, by some of his commentators,45 and can be reconstructed from several Derridean passages. We should not underestimate the difficulties of this consequentialist46 argument, nor should we be mistaken about its scope, about what it can and cannot justify. While it can justify the call for a recognition of originary violence, aporias, and contradictions – aporias that result precisely from openness at the quasi-transcendental level – in order to help reduce violence and invent a new relation to the singular situation, it cannot, I believe, justify the normative claim that this reduction of violence is, in all contexts, achieved by unconditional hospitality and openness to the future to come. Such a claim cannot be decided universally in theory, as Derrida appears to suggest when he names unconditional hospitality a “regulative idea.”47 Let me explain why a universal openness to the future to come and to the personal other does not follow, and why we ought to distinguish here between this normative openness, and justifiable openness as an awareness or recognition of aporias. According to the second argument, it seems, openness to the future and to the other is normatively required because it reduces violence in all contexts. However, both structural considerations regarding futural openness as well as unconditional hospitality, and pragmatic considerations regarding the singularity of the situation lead us to doubt this universality. Not only conditions placed on the other, but also unconditional hospitality can lead to unavoidable violence in breaking with conditional and juridicalized hospitality, and in its tendency to undermine itself. For this reason, it is doubtful that the (quasi-transcendentally necessary) openness that characterizes subjectivities and the political field can give rise to the Kantian ‘regulative idea’ of unconditional hospitality, and that this idea can universally orient, in what Derrida calls a “progressive movement,” the conditions and limits placed on openness to the other.48 If ‘progress’ means, in line with this interpretation, the reduction of violence, it cannot be guaranteed in advance for all contexts that the violence resulting from unconditional hospitality is less than the one resulting from conditional hospitality, laws, institutions, rights, and so on. As Derrida indicates at times, the lesser violence can largely be determined only after the fact, après coup, after an institution has been inaugurated or a decision made. This uncertainty follows precisely from the ineluctable openness and incalculability of the future on which he insists: it is obviously paradoxical to suggest openness to the future beyond expectation as a norm on the basis of the calculation of the future effects of an action. As Derrida himself admits, whether deconstructive affirmation of the future to come ‘succeeds’ “could never be the object of knowledge or of certainty.”49 Such inescapable affirmation may, then, strive to be open to the future in the sense of being attuned to the singular situation and its aporetic demands: “Every action and every political decision ought to invent its norm or its rule.”50 This invention may aim at the reduction of violence, but it cannot be asked to always aim at unconditional hospitality and openness to the other and to the future in the normative sense. Geoffrey Bennington, who has advanced this second interpretation of Derrida’s ethics – although he also appears to maintain what I have analyzed as the argument from noncontradiction – has recognized this paradox, but still thinks it possible to hold on to “something like the categorical imperative in terms of a ‘lesser violence in an economy of violence.’”51 Due to this paradox, Derrida is more consistent when he claims that the aporias and “internal contradictions” besetting unconditional hospitality render its regulative idea inaccessible not only for empirical, but for structural reasons.52 Thus, we should draw a conclusion Derrida does not appear to draw: openness to the other and to the future cannot be stipulated as a normative, regulative idea with universal reach. If invention is to be truly inventive and attuned to singularity, it cannot be limited in advance by a regulative idea, even if the regulative idea is precisely the idea of unconditional openness. For the idea of giving a criterion for the absence or relative lack of criteria is not only paradoxical, it limits the possibility of choice. Rather, political invention must be open to decide against openness: surely, there are singular situations where openness to the other is inadvisable, where a reduction of violence is to be expected not from unconditional hospitality but from (further) conditions, demands, and normative expectations placed on the other, and where political planning, as the projection of horizons, advances democratic hopes – even if such expectations and horizons must, for structural as well as normative reasons, themselves remain subject to repetition from the future to come.

230 Deconstruction and the “Political” The question of deconstruction’s relationship to contemporary politics has always been somewhat of a sore point. Most are by now familiar with the criticisms leveled against it for its deficiencies in this regard. These critiques have mostly centered on the issue of deconstruction’s inordinate focus on questions of textuality and reading—an issue best dramatized perhaps by Derrida’s oft-cited, controversial maxim, “There is nothing outside the text”—“il n’y a pas de hors texte.”24 Deconstruction’s detractors have alleged that this well-nigh exclusive preoccupation with semiotic themes, with the figuration and involutions of texts, has functioned at the expense of more worldly and practical concerns. The world might be crumbling all around us, they charge, but Derrida seems more interested in the contingencies of this or that phoneme—the amusing fact that in French Hegel’s name is the phonic equivalent of “eagle” (“aigle”). As those familiar with Derrida’s work know, in Glas (“dirge”) this chance homonymic equivalence gave rise to a rumination of some three hundred pages on analogous linguistic slippages and fissures.25 One of the first to raise such charges of practical-political irrelevance against Derrida’s negative semiotics of reading was Michel Foucault. In his response to Derrida’s unsparing critique of Madness and Civilization, Foucault pilloried deconstruction as nothing more than an idiosyncratic variant of the classical method of “éxplication de texte.” As Foucault observes with palpable condescension, deconstruction practices an “historically determined little pedagogy” characterized by “the reduction of discursive practices [which for Foucault, of course, are sources of “power”—R.W.] to textual traces: the elision of the events produced therein and the retention only of marks for a reading; the invention of voices behind texts to avoid having to analyze the modes of implication of the subject in discourses; the assigning of the originary as said and unsaid in the text to avoid replacing discursive practices in the field of transformations where they are carried out.” Thus, according to Foucault, Derrida offers us little more than an interpretive practice that “teaches the pupil that there is nothing outside the text” and “which conversely gives to the master’s voice the limitless sovereignty which allows it to restate the text indefinitely.”26 As the progenitor of deconstruction, Derrida is the master ventriloquist who in sovereign fashion determines which textual meanings become unraveled and how. Foucault’s major fear is that, in the hands of deconstruction, the critique of power and domination, one of the key outcomes of May ’68, would be supplanted by an exclusive orientation toward politically pointless textual analysis. Nor is Foucault the only critic to have challenged Derrida in this way. Edward Said has contended that Derrida’s highly formalized obsession with the abstruse terms of “archewriting”—that is, with “nonconcepts” such as the trace, grammatology, supplement, différance, dissemination, and so forth—ends up by “muddling . . . thought beyond the possibility of usefulness.” Said continues, The effect of [deconstructionist] logic (the mise en abime) is to reduce everything that we think of as having some extratextual leverage in the text to a textual function. . . . Derrida’s key words . . . are unregenerate signs: he says that they cannot be made more significant than signifiers are. In some quite urgent way, then, there is something frivolous about them, as all words that cannot be accommodated to a philosophy of serious need or utility are futile or unserious.27 231 Said’s reservations are akin to Foucault’s. Derrida’s preoccupation with an esoteric, negative semiotics of écriture remains self referential to the point of otherworldliness: in his hands, the world itself is eclipsed in favor of acts of interpretive bravado that are meaningful only to a loyal coterie of devotees. Other critics on the left have accused deconstruction of representing a linguistically sublimated version of 1960s radicalism. In their eyes it represents a form of ersatz praxis: instead of unmasking the ills of contemporary society, one exposes the traces of “metaphysics” or “presence” in the theoretical texts of Plato, Lévi-Strauss, Rousseau, Husserl, Levinas, J. L. Austin, and so forth. Nor has Derrida’s wellnigh exclusive orientation toward the works of European male thinkers endeared him to proponents of multiculturalism.28 Even former wholehearted supporters such as Gayatri Spivak have railed volubly against deconstruction’s long-standing refusal “to open onto an ‘outside’ constituted by ethico-political contingencies.”29 Needless to say, Derrida has not taken well to such criticisms. He believes that on the whole the political implications of his work have been seriously underestimated and misunderstood. Here, however, one might enquire as to how one could, from a strict deconstructionist standpoint, actually distinguish instances of misunderstanding from understanding in general. After all, when a theory is predicated on the maxims of dissemination and “iterability” (the implacable march of “signification”), claiming “all understanding is merely a species of misunderstanding,” one would like to know on what basis the founder of deconstruction can plausibly claim to have been misunderstood.30 In an era when the claims to “authorship” and other “transcendental signifieds” have been deconstructed, with what right can an author claim to have been misinterpreted?31 In his own defense Derrida has always insisted, “discourses on double affirmation, the gift beyond exchange and distribution, the undecidable, the incommensurable or the incalculable, or on singularity, difference and heterogeneity are also, through and through, at least obliquely discourses on justice, [ethics, and politics].”32 And in response to one critic’s accusation that “deconstruction is so obsessed with the play of difference that it ultimately ends up indifferent to 232 everything,” Derrida insists that “deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness but an openness towards the other.” Via such openness it seeks to “reevaluate the indispensable notion of responsibility” in ways that are fraught with ethical and political consequences.33 Elsewhere he does not shy away from immodestly insisting, “Deconstruction is justice. . . . I know nothing more just than what I call deconstruction.” And further: “Deconstruction is mad about this kind of justice. Mad about the desire for justice.”34

I have been involved for over 10 years with a large group of male industrial workers and their families in a town in the northwest of Spain. The area has been in ongoing restructuring since the 1980s and early retirement, lay-offs, and long-term unemployment have become the norm. Women have increasingly found temporary jobs in the service sector and younger generations are generally unemployed, have precarious jobs in contract firms or have migrated. Historically, labour struggle structured through class-based unions has been ubiquitous here, and has yielded what people voice as ‘conquests’ (universal public services such as health and education, and political rights through parliamentary democracy). Today, the situation is one of generalized uncertainty and hesitant forms of resistance. As years have passed I have observed three distinct processes: (1) the waning of a workingclass faith in unions and union mobilization, (2) the multiplication of forms of activism that target concrete issues, and (3) a creeping hopelessness demobilizing younger generations. In this context, old-time unionists who have shifted their struggle toward social activism tend to analyse situations in terms of local connection with larger processes expressing structural logics. Analysis produces the design of a strategy and tactical mobilizations that they strive to explain in an endless pedagogy of struggle. Knowledge and theory become instruments of change and are understood as stemming from everyday life experience. In contrast, younger people – with the exception of a small group of young, unionized industrial workers – tend to present the local situation as an aggregate of concrete personal experiences. A few build collective supports based on social networks, a practice that they sometimes abstract as a theory of solidarity that challenges the state and capitalism by opening spaces where alternative provisioning processes put people instead of profit as the aim. Their theory is also based on their experience, on political and social mobilizations (15M, Indignados, Anti-Foreclosure Platform) and miscellaneous readings that encompass a wide range of perspectives including political economy, political ecology, anarchism, de-growth, social and solidarity economy, and commoning. Both groups stress the need to be aware of and respect the multiple social positioning of those that suffer from capitalism. In practice, however, the older group tends to produce a coherent model and to design a unified oppositional strategy, while the younger group is explicitly unwilling to do so. As a result, the local practice of social activism is a succession of short-term targeted actions often subjected to the tensions of endless idiosyncratic strategies. Demoralization is recurrent and is expressed in the small numbers and high turnover of younger people in activist groups. If we factor history in, it is difficult to describe the situation of the present younger generation as ‘worse’ than that of their predecessors. Yes, they are massively unemployed or in precarious jobs, but ‘stable’ industrial jobs in the 1950s and 1960s in Spain under fascism did not provide a much better livelihood. The present-day welfare state and universal public services, however shrunken, are much better than the previous non-existent ones. One major difference is the lack of expectations for a brighter future on the part of the younger, better-educated generations. Another major difference is their unwillingness to produce or adopt a coherent oppositional ideology that could become counter-hegemonic. The remains of an old debate: The hegemony of form With this in mind, I interrogate the fierce criticism and ultimate abandonment of the concept of ideology as an instrument for struggle by those who would like to change the existing structure of power and economic distribution. I suggest that (a) distrust of the concept’s validity stems from the domination of a neoliberal conceptual tool-kit in particular as it has been instituted by the rise of the Austrian school and its hegemony in neoliberal thought. This has resulted in (b) an incapacity to imagine an alternative project that does not ultimately rest on the basic formal premises of neoliberalism: individualism (or singularity), freedom and exchange. The Austrian school developed as a coherent ideological model during the 1940s and 1950s (Hayek, 1948; for an account of the emergence of the Austrian school see Foucault, 2004) and became established as a powerful economic model in the 1990s (Harvey, 2007). Its major innovations emerged from the ‘socialist calculation’ debate that dated from the early 20th century (Hayek, 1938; Lange, 1936, 1937). What was at stake in this apparently technical debate was an epistemological issue of import: could society exist as a coherent whole and the knowledge about it be gathered and organized to meet a particular end? Or was reality an emergent result of the interaction of ‘dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’ (Hayek, 1948: 77), and hence could not be organized to advantage? Although in a first round the debate seemed to have been won by the ‘socialist’ camp, in a second round the Austrian school imposed its views and eventually became hegemonic. The point I wish to make here is that the triumph of the epistemological premise for eliciting knowledge that the Austrian school proposed as being the only possible way to capture the reality of imperfect market competition has permeated our lives, becoming an hegemony of form. The debate hinged on how to achieve market coordination. The ‘socialist’ side maintained the parameters of neoclassical market theory (perfect knowledge, competition, equilibrium and efficient allocation) but focused on the problems of calculation and planning. In contrast the Austrian school introduced the discovery of tacit knowledge as key to the model of market operation. This important shift from the neoclassical model stemmed from the awareness that real market situations were based on imperfect knowledge.4 It then assumed that competition was a creative process that elicited knowledge about possible demand. Hence, ‘the problem is how subjective, or tacit, knowledge, necessarily fragmented and dispersed, can be socially mobilized’ (Adaman and Devine, 1997: 59). Hayek argued ‘that the mobilization and coordination of this incomplete and contradictory knowledge occur through the actions of entrepreneurs, competing against one another in the market process, discovering and learning what is and is not possible’ (Adaman and Devine, 1997: 59). This creative dynamic not only required entrepreneurship but also a constant effort at innovation, that is, of creating difference that would momentarily provide monopoly advantage in the market.5 In the 1980s and 1990s scholars in the West (Adaman and Devine, 1997; Elson, 1988) attempted to counter the Austrian economic school’s expanding hegemony in a context of increasing hardship of the population subject to structural adjustment programmes. They revisited the parameters of the original debate about market coordination in socialism in an attempt to reconfigure them while vindicating their worth for a new socialist project.6 The Austrian school’s underlying assumptions about the form of eliciting knowledge from discrete and dispersed social agents, which was the crux of that debate, are in my opinion similar to contemporary efforts to theorize an alternative to capitalism that would support a unified political struggle and durable transformation. In its central methodological assumption about how to elicit tacit knowledge through exchange, a process that will then be expressed in prices which will guide further action, this model contains some formal significant parallels with certain practices of present day (de)mobilizations and the critical theories that sustain them. The basic premise of the Austrian school is the existence of dispersed (independent and autonomous) individuals possessing largely ‘tacit’ knowledge (i.e. pre-conscious or unconscious knowledge; M. Polanyi, 1967). It is this methodological (formal) premise which, I suggest, is enacted by present-day anti-capitalist and social justice mobilizations and may be at the source of their incapacity to produce a coherent and robust counter-hegemony. The emergent aspect of knowledge about the world that results from free market interaction and supports the economic model appears to me similar in its form to post-structuralist epistemological and political models such as the ‘sociology of emergences’ (Santos, 2004a) or the virtual ‘constituent power’ of a multitude of desiring subjectivities (Negri, 2009). While this anti-authoritarian view of the world is extremely attractive to radical activism it seems to lack the capacity to become counter-hegemonic precisely because it is based on a form that is like the one that supports the system it seeks to transcend. I am not saying that this is an intentional or even conscious move, on the contrary, in my opinion it expresses the hegemony of form. In the post-structuralist mobilization/activism theories, the political project is created through a process of permanent discovery as a result of the free interaction of subjectivities, knowledges, and world(view)s. The creative, innovative and democratic aspect of this emergent politics is opposed to Western ideologies and institutions of modernist liberal politics. In particular, this new form of politics is premised on eliciting difference as opposed to the ‘enlightened’ aim of eliciting equality, a shift that parallels the move from neoclassical to Austrian models of the economy. The shift is subtle but can be found in the premise that the forces of political change should arise from autonomous – equal but essentially different – entities or ‘singularities’ (be it individuals or quasi-corporate groups such as ‘communities’) that, to push the metaphor further, could be described as adopting an ‘enterprise form’ (Foucault, 2004: 154) and interacting in a ‘market-like’ arena (e.g. a ‘forum’) where they create social value. However, in these oppositional political models cooperation rather than competition is the relationship that produces social value in the exchange arena, and this is a major difference. To use Lazaratto’s words, common goods emerge ‘as a result of co-creation and co-realization of the cooperation of ordinary subjectivities’ in the event-driven arena (Lazaratto, 2006: 129). These new models eschew the old revolutionary ideologies that were premised on designing a whole (brave) new world on the basis of understanding existing relations as a connected totality that needed to be challenged in its entirety. According to Santos (2004a: 243), ‘There is no unique theory to guide the movements, because the aim is not so much to seize power but rather to change the many faces of power as they present themselves in the institutions and sociabilities. At this level, the novelty consists in the celebration of diversity and pluralism, experimentalism, and radical democracy.’ These movements are understood as able to open up spaces where the plural visions of alternative (better) worlds can emerge and be expressed. Through their punctuated practices they challenge in myriad ways the hegemony of capitalism and provide content for the critical theorization of political struggle. While these oppositional movements are undoubtedly a form of struggle which produces results and unleashes counter-hegemonic forces, I suggest that their fragmented expression (in practice and theory) and their unwillingness to unify the struggle around an ideological project blocks their ability to overhaul our globalized society. Why is this so? My hypothesis is that the event-driven pluralistic political model, while considered revolutionary by its promoters, may be the paradoxical expression of a hegemonic neoliberal ‘power informing society’, the power of form (Foucault, 2004: 154).

SUBVERSIVE UNIVERSALS Any elaboration of an alternative image of progress must inevitably face up to the problem of universalism – the idea that certain values, ideas and goals may hold across all cultures.31 Capitalism, as we have argued, is an expansionary universal that weaves itself through multiple cultural fabrics, reworking them as it goes along. Anything less than a competing universal will end up being smothered by an all-embracing series of capitalist relations.32 Various particularisms – localised, specific forms of politics and culture – cohabitate with ease in the world of capitalism. The list of possibilities continues to grow as capitalism differentiates into Chinese capitalism, American capitalism, Brazilian capitalism, Indian capitalism, Nigerian capitalism, and so on. If defending a particularism is insufficient, it is because history shows us that the global space of universalism is a space of conflict, with each contender requiring the relative provincialisation of its competitors.33 If the left is to compete with global capitalism, it needs to rethink the project of universalism. But to invoke such an idea is to call forth a number of fundamental critiques directed against universalism in recent decades. While a universal politics must move beyond any local struggles, generalising itself at the global scale and across cultural variations, it is for these very reasons that it has been criticised.34 As a matter of historical record, European modernity was inseparable from its ‘dark side’ – a vast network of exploited colonial dominions, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, and the plundering of colonised nations’ resources.35 In this conquest, Europe presented itself as embodying the universal way of life. All other peoples were simply residual particulars that would inevitably come to be subsumed under the European way – even if this required ruthless physical violence and cognitive assault to guarantee the outcome. Linked to this was a belief that the universal was equivalent to the homogeneous. Differences between cultures would therefore be erased in the process of particulars being subsumed under the universal, creating a culture modelled in the image of European civilisation. This was a universalism indistinguishable from pure chauvinism. Throughout this process, Europe dissimulated its own parochial position by deploying a series of mechanisms to efface the subjects who made these claims – white, heterosexual, property-owning males. Europe and its intellectuals abstracted away from their location and identity, presenting their claims as grounded in a ‘view from nowhere’.36 This perspective was taken to be untarnished by racial, sexual, national or any other particularities, providing the basis for both the alleged universality of Europe’s claims and the illegitimacy of other perspectives. While Europeans could speak and embody the universal, other cultures could only be represented as particular and parochial. Universalism has therefore been central to the worst aspects of modernity’s history. Given this heritage, it might seem that the simplest response would be to rescind the universal from our conceptual arsenal. But, for all the difficulties with the idea, it nevertheless remains necessary. The problem is partly that one cannot simply reject the concept of the universal without generating other significant problems. Most notably, giving up on the category leaves us with nothing but a series of diverse particulars. There appears no way to build meaningful solidarity in the absence of some common factor. The universal also operates as a transcendent ideal – never satisfied with any particular embodiment, and always open to striving for better.37 It contains the conceptual impulse to undo its own limits. Rejecting this category also risks Orientalising other cultures, transforming them into an exotic Other. If there are only particularisms, and provincial Europe is associated with reason, science, progress and freedom, then the unpleasant implication is that non-Western cultures must be devoid of these. The old Orientalist divides are inadvertently sustained in the name of a misguided anti-universalism. On the other hand, one risks licensing all sorts of oppressions as simply the inevitable consequence of plural cultural forms. All the problems of cultural relativism reappear if there are no criteria to discern which global knowledges, politics and practices support a politics of emancipation. Given all of this, it is unsurprising to see aspects of universalism pop up throughout history and across cultures,38 to see even its critics begrudgingly accept its necessity,39 and to see a variety of attempts to revise the category.40 To maintain this necessary conceptual tool, the universal must be identified not with an established set of principles and values, but rather with an empty placeholder that is impossible to fill definitively. Universals emerge when a particular comes to occupy this position through hegemonic struggle:41 the particular (‘Europe’) comes to represent itself as the universal (‘global’). It is not simply a false universal, though, as there is a mutual contamination: the universal becomes embodied in the particular, while the particular loses some of its specificities in functioning as the universal. Yet there can never be a fully achieved universalism, and universals are therefore always open to contestation from other universals. This is what we will later outline in politico-strategic terms as counter-hegemony – a project aimed at subverting an existing universalism in favour of a new order. This leads us to our second point – as counter-hegemonic, universals can have a subversive and liberating strategic function. On the one hand, a universal makes an unconditional demand – everything must be placed under its rule.42 Yet, on the other hand, universalism is never an achieved project (even capitalism remains incomplete). This tension renders any established hegemonic structure open to contestation and enables universals to function as insurrectionary vectors against exclusions. For example, the concept of universal human rights, problematic as it may be, has been put to use by numerous movements, ranging from local housing struggles to international justice for war crimes. Its universal and unconditional demand has been mobilised in order to highlight those who are left out of its protections and rights. Similarly, feminists have criticised certain concepts as exclusionary of women and mobilised universal claims against their constraints, as in the use of the universal idea that ‘all humans are equal’. In such cases, the particular (‘woman’) becomes a way to prosecute a critique against an existing universal (‘humanity’). Meanwhile, the previously established universal (‘humanity’) becomes revealed as a particular (‘man’).43 These examples show that universals can be revitalised by the struggles that both challenge and elucidate them. In this regard, ‘to appeal to universalism as a way of asserting the superiority of Western culture is to betray universality, but to appeal to universalism as a way of dismantling the superiority of the West is to realize it’.44 Universalism, on this account, is the product of politics, not a transcendent judge standing above the fray. We can turn now to one final aspect of universalism, which is its heterogeneous nature.45 As capitalism makes clear, universalism does not entail homogeneity – it does not necessarily involve converting diverse things into the same kind of thing. In fact, the power of capitalism is precisely its versatility in the face of changing conditions on the ground and its capacity to accommodate difference. A similar prospect must also hold for any leftist universal – it must be one that integrates difference rather than erasing it. What then does all of this mean for the project of modernity? It means that any particular image of modernity must be open to co-creation, and further transformation and alteration. And in a globalised world where different peoples necessarily co-exist, it means building systems to live in common despite the plurality of ways of life. Contrary to Eurocentric accounts and classic images of universalism, it must recognise the agency of those outside Europe, and the necessity of their voices in building truly planetary and universal futures. The universal, then, is an empty placeholder that hegemonic particulars (specific demands, ideals and collectives) come to occupy. It can operate as a subversive and emancipatory vector of change with respect to established universalisms, and it is heterogeneous and includes differences, rather than eliminating them.

Let us adopt Tiemstra's idea of calling this kind of sanction behavior "shunning." We find shunning most explicitly developed in the customs of certain Mennonite groups. The fundamental question of this paper will be whether there is indeed a moral duty to shun certain regimes because of their immorality. I begin with a formal definition of shunning: An individual or institution A shuns another individual br institution B when A, in part or totally, refuses to engage in social, economic or political interaction with B (avoids B) as a witness against flagrant, willful and persistent immoral behavior by B. Note that shunning is distinct from avoidance behavior motivated by considerations of self-interest. Thus a nation is not shunning when it bans the sale of strategic materials to an enemy, nor is an individual shunning if he refuses to associate with another out of fear that he will be "led astray" by the latter's vices.

In positioning the neighbor as the monstrous other, Žižek reads the neighbor against Lacanian structures of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real. More specifically, Žižek distinguishes between Imaginary others, which are our mirror-like relationships of mutual recognition; The Symbolic Big Other, which is “the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our coexistence”, and finally, The Other qua Real, which is “the impossible Thing, the ‘inhuman partner,’ the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible” (“Neighbors” 143). To understand the radical Otherness inscribed in the element of the neighbor it is crucial to understand how these three Lacanian dimensions are connected. For Žižek, the neighbor as the Thing means that, “beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be gentrified”(ibid). Žižek designates the figure of the neighbor as the ultimate object of desire in its intensity and impenetrability—the neighbor that disturbs, tortures, and is always too close. Importantly, between the Imaginary Other and the Impenetrable Real Other must step in the Symbolic Other that gentrifies their chaotic dimensions: In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a “normal human fellow” cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves—there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order (“Neighbors” 143-4). The neighbor is fittingly given a more unsettling dimension as the impenetrable Other, the enemy whose radical ambiguity and traumatic character do not prepare the ground for a possibility of an authentic encounter. Consequently, the impossibility of such encounters brings about the alienation of social life, which is woven into the practices, rituals, and social texture of everyday life: Even if I live side by side with others, in my normal state I ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others. I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external “mechanical” rules, without sharing their inner world (Žižek, Violence 59). “Sometimes alienation is not a problem, but a solution,” indispensable for peaceful coexistence (ibid). Brutality feels at home in Višegrad, and the ethnic cleansing of this city was an ordinary affair, writes Maass. “Bosnia makes you question basic assumptions about humanity, and one of the questions concerns torture. Why after all should there be any limit?” (51). At the beginning of the war, paramilitary Serb forces came to town, rounded up unarmed Muslim men, and loaded them into refrigerated meat trucks. An older Muslim man who was forced to push the corpses into the river managed to escape, and later gave his testimony. The Serbs took these men to the railing of the Višegrad bridge, the man confessed, forcing them to lean forward, at which point they would either slit their throats or shoot them. They threw them all into the river. ... They ordered me and a man who was even older than me to walk toward the bridge. We came across the body of an old man with a mutilated head. They ordered us to drag him toward the bridge. As we were dragging the old one, his skull was falling open and the brain came out. We dragged the body to the bridge and they ordered us to throw it into Drina. There were two more bodies on the bridge. They had their throats cut. We were ordered to throw them into the river as well. On one of the bodies, four fingers on the left hand were freshly cut off (9). This is the neighbor When confronted with neighbor-on-neighbor violence whom do I save? The neighbor? Myself? Who do I attack? If I attack, am I just another neighbor? As a journalist, Peter Maass is not supposed to get involved in the events he covers, so he stands aside and watches a man on the verge of execution because it is a prudent thing to do. Is this much different from the “Serbs who prudently kept quiet as their Bosnian neighbors were shot or packed off to prison camps?” (21). A tragically misplaced ethical conviction? Perhaps. What about brutal acts of torture about which we know but choose to ignore? The atrocious reality of the death camps, tortures, and mass executions does not reside in the immediate reality of the violence, but in Maass’s blindness to this accumulated atrocity—the fetishist disavowal (i.e., how this violent event appears to him, not the violent event itself). In an act that suspends symbolic efficiency of witnessing torture and suffering, the watcher relies on a gesture of fetishist disavowal: “I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know. I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know it” (Žižek, Violence 53). This disavowal involves a violation of his spontaneous ethical proclivity, brutal repression, and self-denial. For Levinas, what would make this event ethical, is precisely Maass’s proximity to the Other, for his proximity makes him answer for his responsibility to the neighbor. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas takes into account the self-referential face of the neighbor. To encounter the face and claim that a face can “guarantee itself,” is to acknowledge the face as the nonlinguistic point of reference between the ‘big Other’ of the symbolic order and the neighbor-as-Other (202). For Žižek, however, the human face is always already caught up in the symbolic order, engaged as that which gentrifies the reality of the neighbor (“Neighbors” 146). The neighbor is therefore never revealed in the face of the Other, but in his/her defacement: “Far from displaying ‘a quality of God’s image carried with it,’ the face is the ultimate ethical lure…The neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is in his or her fundamental dimension a faceless monster” (ibid 185).

Derrida’s examination of unconditional hospitality belongs to a discourse demanding that hospitality be extended—without anticipation, prejudice, or identification—to an unexpected visitor, foreigner, guest, immigrant, or stranger. This absolute openness to the newcomer on the principles of the heart, however, involves ethical risks and limitations inherent in the neighbor. Žižek locates the neighbor in its violent brutality over against Freud’s traumatic intruder (a thing that hystericizes us and disturbs the balance of our way of life). The presupposition to be resisted here, Žižek warns, is the ethical gentrification of the neighbor, “the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-Thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates” (“Neighbors” 163). That one must be radical in offering hospitality to the other stems from Derrida’s belief in overcoming violence and exclusion via pure openness and unconditional hospitality toward the Other. I am opposed to this Derridean notion of ethical hospitality. Crucial here, however, is an ideological shift from a neighbor in the simple sense, to the neighbor in its radical otherness. The neighbor in its radical otherness disturbs; the neighbor “remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes” (Žižek, “Neighbors” 140-1). Therefore, my meditation on the figure of the neighbor is a corrective move against unconditional hospitality that accentuates the limitation of ethical universality. This logic is implied in the critique of Derrida’s “opening without horizon,” and contextualized in representations of the Bosnian genocide in Peter Maass’s Love Thy Neighbor. 1 Ethnic cleansing, neighbor-on-neighbor violence, and dehumanization of the Other read as the portrayal of humankind at its worst. Complicating Derrida’s notion of ethical hospitality are narratives of mass atrocities within which lurks the neighbor—the unfathomable abyss, the radical otherness in all its intensity and inaccessibility. Against the Ethics of Unconditional Hospitality An act of hospitality can only be poetic. – Derrida2 Stories orbiting the questions of ethics, violence, and the Bosnian war have faded from our public consciousness. Today, Bosnian political developments and survivors’ accounts of the atrocities receive occasional press coverage, largely through reporting about war crimes trials at The Hague (i.e., Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić’s trials for war crimes during the wars in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia). At the most basic level such questions about war and religious conflict highlight a revived sense of urgency within the context of ethics and violence. Furthermore, breakdowns of economic and familial structures, systemic violence, and human rights violations reflect a distinct scene shift that characterizes modern wars; a politico/ideological move from inter to intra-national conflict. Chaos, violence, and death that ensued in Bosnia in 1992 add to the complexity of intra-national conflicts, and more specifically highlight the atrociously orchestrated neighbor-to-neighbor violence. These systemic implementations of violence are never ahistorical or abstract, but always already part of concrete intersubjective, political, and ideological contexts within which they are mobilized. It is in this light that I revisit Derrida’s notion of ethical hospitality—the ideology that teaches us not to objectify the Other—and the vulgarity of Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, the traumatic intruders, the neighbors. Derrida’s incalculable hospitality, the opening without horizon of expectation to the newcomer whoever that may be, is an aporia at best and an impossible demand at worst. Conditional hospitality is inscribed in the very possibility of unconditional hospitality and the opening to the “absolute arrivant,” the foreigner. He elaborates upon this newcomer who is not even a guest, who: surprises the host—who is not yet a host or an inviting power—enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations, families and genealogies. The absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity. (Aporias 34) It is precisely Derrida’s unconditional hospitality which remains conditioned by the histories, languages, and “the conditional laws of the right to hospitality,” imposed on the newcomer (On Cosmopolitanism 22). The possibility of impossible hospitality is therefore, purely theoretical and conceptual; conditioned by political inequalities, economic exploitation, injustice, war, homophobia, xenophobia, racism, and so on. Accordingly, the absolute arrivant without a name or identity, the foreigner, can always violate and extinguish these laws of hospitality. Within the unconditional hospitality to otherness, inscribed in the element of the foreigner are the unpredictable violent “visitations” that demonstrate the limit to incalculable hospitality. Although unconditional hospitality and exposure to the other requires the suspension of all discrimination, there is always a possibility that the foreigner will be the enemy of the host. Because such possibility exists, unconditional hospitality remains merely conceptual; it is impossible to require that the host not decide who does or does not enter the house. Unconditional hospitality is, therefore, a self-contradictory concept; it deconstructs itself precisely by being put into practice (“Hospitality” 8). Unconditional hospitality requires a host to open the door to a foreigner who might bring harm. This aporia of hospitality is necessarily political. The laws of political (conditional and exclusive) hospitality refer to the cultural and ideological structures, which preexist the subject, and interrogate the event of the contact with the other, the foreigner, the stranger. The premise of unconditional hospitality, however, is that the neighbor, someone whom I know from within, cannot be my enemy. Nevertheless, gross violations of hospitality, including massive atrocities and human rights abuses are occurring not between strangers, but between neighbors.3 The neighbor is one such figure of the Other toward whom my relationship is that of familiarity, common language, and proximity. Underlying Derrida’s unconditional hospitality is fear of the Other—the fear of the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness that transgresses, compromises, and disturbs from within. The neighbor. Fear Thy Neighbor What’s the moral difference between slitting a man’s throat or slicing off his balls? – Maass 51 To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (“I recognize you as...rational, good, lovable”), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. – Žižek, “Neighbors” 138-9

One recent fiscal policy proposal to address unemployment is a “job guarantee.” This proposal would essentially require that the government be willing to hire workers at a fixed real wage at all times.1 Thus, the government would provide a safety net for workers in the form of a job should the worker be willing to work for the wage offered by the federal government. This proposal would therefore provide workers with employment opportunities when workers have difficulty finding a job, which might especially be true during recessions.

A job guarantee program is one in which government promises to make a job available to any qualifying individual who is ready and willing to work. Qualifications required of participants could include age range (i.e. teens), gender, family status (i.e. heads of households), family income (i.e. below poverty line), educational attainment (i.e. high school dropouts), residency (i.e. rural), and so on. The most general program would provide a universal job guarantee, sometimes also called an employer of last resort (ELR) program in which government promises to provide a job to anyone legally entitled to work.

Nevertheless, there are numerous potential alternative ways in which state governments might implement what could be thought of as variations or hybrids on corporate or personal income taxes or on indirect taxes. To consider one example: in addition to its more traditional corporate income tax that mostly piggybacks on the federal government’s tax-base-definition rules (called the “Business Profits Tax”), New Hampshire also levies another business-entity-level tax (called the “Business Enterprise Tax”).172 This Business Enterprise Tax is levied on all business entities conducting substantial activity in New Hampshire—including both corporations and partnerships—on a base consisting of “the total amount of interest paid, dividends paid or accrued, and wages paid or accrued” within New Hampshire.173

For the purposes of assessing tax cannibalization, the key question in considering alternative forms of taxation is the extent to which these alternatives do or do not replicate the flaws in the federally defined corporate and personal income tax bases that result in vertical distortions. New Hampshire’s Business Enterprise Tax bears some resemblance to both more traditional corporate174 and personal175 income taxes. But New Hampshire’s Business Enterprise Tax most likely does not replicate at least some of the flaws in the federally defined corporate and personal income tax bases that result in vertical distortions.

Although we cannot further elaborate the specifics here, imagine (hypothetically) a proposal for a state to reduce its corporate income tax rate and to then make up for the lost revenue by levying something similar to New Hampshire’s Business Enterprise Tax. As we discussed previously,228 a proposal of this sort could lessen tax cannibalization to the extent that the proposal would successfully reduce the ways in which the state’s taxes previously piled on to the flaws in the federally defined corporate income tax base that invite vertical distortions. But, again, the revenue benefits from this would largely end up with the federal government rather than with the acting state.

Because this tax cannibalization primarily harms the federal government, rather than state governments, state policymakers have little incentive to reform their tax systems to alleviate this tax cannibalization. There is great potential for state-level tax reforms that could patch some of the holes in the federal and state corporate and personal income tax bases. We yearn for state governments to operate as laboratories of democracy by devising improved approaches to taxation. But none of this is likely to happen unless the federal government acts to better coordinate the tax policy incentives of state and federal governments. Under the current structure of federal tax law, state governments lack motivation to implement reforms that would alleviate the tax cannibalization problem.

Two decades ago, Professor Daniel Shaviro concluded that “the interaction between taxation and federalism is more important than ever,”14 and we argue that this conclusion holds even more so today. As economic transactions become increasingly global, the harm from misaligned tax policy grows ever greater. We argue that tax cannibalization is a major cause of dysfunctional fiscal federalism in the United States, and that the federal government can and should act to alleviate this problem.

Ensuring people have the opportunity to work and earn a good life is a shared value across the country. But, the federal jobs guarantee approach raises a number of concerns. And voters seem to be wary of it. In our polling, only 9% support a new program that guarantees a full-time government job—36 points less than those who support a new program where government works with business to create more good-paying jobs in the private sector. Among just Democrats, the divide was starker: 14% support a federal jobs guarantee while 59% want government to work with business to create private sector jobs.