Search the archive.

One significant and creative “economy” which seems to have somewhat broken away from the traditional, expert-driven protocols has to do with the symbolic and material conditions of the generation termed “millennials” (born between the year 1980 and 2000) as they patch something novel and curious together right under the noses of the institutionalized capitalism that has betrayed them. (And they make the capitalists very nervous indeed). The decimating social, economic, and political consequences of late capitalism and its seemingly open-ended global financial and economic crises, such as that witnessed from 2007 through 2009, have turned the millennials into a generation of “absolute beginners” when pondering their life choices and reaching traditional adulthood markers (i.e., self-sufficiency, marriage, family formation). For instance, access to stable employment, housing, and even health services3 are contingent upon an economic mode of subjectification in which everyone is responsible for managing their own human capital to maximal effect (Fraser 2003: 168). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, henceforth) (2016), despite being the most highly educated generation in history, young people (15–29 year-olds) worldwide navigate between unemployment and poorer-quality jobs (e.g., temporary contracts and low wage jobs) much more so than their older counterparts. Moreover, 15% of young people in high-income countries and 26% in (lower/upper) middle-income countries are not participants in education, employment, or training (NEET) (OECD 2016, International Labour Office 2015). In this regard, the new horizons of possibility and generational pushback against downward mobility embrace aspects of a “sharing” and “post-ownership” economy.4 While the social, political, and economic organizing principles of capitalism are far from being dépassé, the centrality of new and perhaps more ethical economic practices (of the self) surrounding, for instance, the do-it-yourself (DIY) cottage industry movements (often caricatured in Western countries under the guise of the ‘hipster’ or ‘fauxhemian’), are adopted by the millennials to varying degrees of socio-economic synergy, connecting the private and public, the local and global, the system and the lifeworld. Engulfed by digital technologies, globalization, terrorism, and economic downturn we find a metamodern5 structure of feeling (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 2015) and an ontological, epistemological, and practical “oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010: 2). In a broad sense, the social relations of economic activity for the metamodern are rerouted to address discursive orders of (repressive-depressive) capitalist accumulation and economic rationality in the 20th century.

But that is just one creative and itself socially and ethically problematic example of an alternative actualization of economy; it does not stand in any sort of substantial emancipatory relation to those outside of itself and is thus of little value to critical theory. The resources necessary for the empowerment of millennials or, in a wider spectrum the global middle classes, to construct alternatives is not something shared by the vast majority of those subject to the untoward consequences of global capitalism. To begin to develop an ethical posture toward the economic world for our times, we need a broader domain of answers to the question of what is possible for us, possible in the seemingly impossible material realm of the economic, a realm which ethics can only pretend to escape at its own peril if we are to speak meaningfully and critically about our own accountability: Given what seems to be the inexorability of economic accounting in and throughout every aspect of human – and not only human – existence, from the base of the base to the tip of the superstructure, and given also that its operations implicate each of us in loss, cost, debt, death, and other continuous or ultimate reckonings, it is understandable that the dream of an escape from economy should be so sweet and the longing for it so pervasive and recurrent. Since it does appear to be inescapable, however, the better, that is, more effective, more profitable, alternative would seem to be not to seek to go beyond economy but to do the best we can going through…(Smith 1988: 17).

So how can we make sense theoretically of the affective and collective character of narrations of apoliticality? Fortunately, in the aftermath of what is sometimes called the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, we have an increasingly rich array of theoretical resources at our disposal through which the intransigence of narrations of apoliticality could potentially be theorised. Specifically, I want to suggest that the Lacanian notion of fantasy can help shed light on the grip of narrations of apoliticality, while Ahmed’s account of affect is helpful in highlighting the historicity of our affective investments. Lacanian accounts of fantasy have gained some currency in political theory precisely because of a sense that discourse-analytic accounts of the discursive construction of hegemonic formations need to be complemented by a theorisation of how and why such formations are able to win over subjects’ identifications and investments, and thus become largely resistant to counterhegemonic discourses (Glynos, 2001;Glynos and Howarth, 2007,p.148).Such an approach relies on a particular conception of both the human subject and the realm of language (what Lacanians call ‘the symbolic’) as marked by a constitutive lack, which the subject experiences as traumatic and seeks to overcome (Fink, 1995; Glynos, 2001; Stavrakakis, 2007). The logic of fantasy refers to the way in which subjects invest in particular identities or ways of thinking because they offer the possibility of overcoming this constitutive lack via a promise of order, coherence and stability, which in turn allows for ambiguity, uncertainty and vulnerability to be cast out to the margins (Glynos, 2011, p. 59). However, these fantasies of order and stability are in some sense ‘false’, as they are ontologically resistant to achieving full closure (or ‘suture’ to use Lacanian parlance) and so are always in danger of being undermined or contested. And yet because the subject invests heavily in the fantasy of order and stability offered by particular identities and ideological formations, such contestations will often be experienced as traumatic, potentially even undermining the subject’s very sense of self. Of course, these are fairly strong ontological claims about how the subject and power function, and I remain agnostic about the extent to which fantasy and lack structure all forms of power, ideology and subjectivity. However, in the context of the specific problem at hand, I would argue that narrations of apoliticality do often assume a fantasmatic character, and that there are three crucial dimensions of narrations of apoliticality that a Lacanian approach can help illuminate. First, as discussed above, narrations of apoliticality – particularly in their more totalising incarnations – serve to efface and marginalise ambiguity and uncertainty, often by recasting the potentially strange as simply a further instance of the familiar. A Lacanian account of the logic of fantasy might suggest that this happens precisely because the academic left has invested in the fantasy of coherence and order offered by narrations of apoliticality: although they narrate a political situation that those on the left ostensibly abhor, they at least provide a degree of ontological security, a clear frame of reference in which one’s own position of unambiguous marginality is secure. And although this positions the academic left subject as defeated

, that ‘theoretical investment in failure’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006a, p. xxx) can therefore, as Ahmed (2010, p. 178) argues, function as a defence against contingency and the possibility of disappointment. They can even, paradoxically, provide a source of enjoyment or pleasure, via the moralistic pride in marginality they sometimes engender (Brown, 1999; Özselçuk, 2006; Roy, 2009). Consequently, even though narrations of apoliticality are, in principle, underpinned by a desire for a return of politics, if one fantasmatically invests in narrations of apoliticality then the emergence of new forms of politicisation will very likely be experienced as troublesome, even traumatic, as they potentially disturb the deeply sedimented frames of reference that have come to constitute the symbolic universe of the academic left subject.10 This in turn suggests that we should not be surprised that narrations of apoliticality are so persistent and enduring, even in the face of new forms of politicisation and theoretical problematisation. Second, a further crucial aspect of narrations of apoliticality is the often rather underhand, covert way in which they are expressed. Although clearly they are given expression in the official discourse of published academic texts, they are also expressed in fleeting comments, contextualising remarks and ‘off the record’ comments in academic seminars, conferences and conversations. Lacanian analysts have drawn attention to how collective fantasies are often transmitted implicitly, largely because they may be transgressive of official discourse (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, p. 148). There is perhaps something transgressive about narrations of apoliticality in the aftermath of the deconstruction of Marxism and the emergence of the new social movements, as they arguably betray investments in modes of thought and action that, from the point of view of current intellectual fashions, might be deemed outmoded. What this perhaps suggests is that even though intellectually the idea of an epochal withdrawal from politics has been challenged and deconstructed in some quarters, this need not translate into a weakening of the affective pull of such narrations. What happens, rather, is that they take on a rather shadowy, clandestine existence below the radar of ‘official’ academic discourse; again, there may be a certain degree of pleasure and enjoyment (or what Lacanians call ‘jouissance’) from investing in a frame of reference that some might consider to be anachronistic or transgressive of the ‘official’ line on contemporary theoretical fashions. The third key issue relates to the connection between the fantasmatic and the empirical. As indicated, one of the key problems with narrations of apoliticality is not just that they are empirically problematic (in so far as they do not correspond to the complexity of ‘actually existing’ forms of activism) but that, in Lacanian parlance, people become fantasmatically overinvested in narrations of apoliticality. It is perhaps not narrations of apoliticality per se that are problematic, but the strength of the attachment to such narrations. As Jason Glynos (2011, p. 55) points out, this requires a shift in emphasis from questions of empirical correspondence to the mode and strength of subjects’ attachments to narrations of apoliticality and depictions of the apolitical present. Fundamentally, what a Lacanian approach tells us is that an emphasis on empirical (lack of) correspondence, useful as it may be, can only go so far: narrations of apoliticality are problematic not necessarily because of their content, but because any discourse or frame of reference capable of ‘gripping’ subjects that can be invoked without empirical or citational justification should be subject to scrutiny, even if the discourse in question were to correspond well with actual empirical events (Glynos, 2011).This state of affairs is akin to Lacan’s infamous observation that even if a patient’s spouse really is sleeping with multiple partners, this need not render the patient’s jealousy any less pathological (Glynos, 2011, p. 54). The crucial point is that the affective pull of narrations of apoliticality takes on an existence, a life, to some extent independent of ‘actually existing’ political struggles, and the Lacanian logic of fantasy can help us understand this. However, what a Lacanian account perhaps misses is the historicity of our affective investments: Lacanianism is strong on the form and character of our affective investments, but is perhaps weaker when trying to understand precisely why particular objects, discourses and frames of reference become so sticky, so intractable. It is here that Ahmed’s account of the endurance and ‘stickiness’ of our affective investments proves useful. While Ahmed distances herself from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis by moving away from a subject-centred account of affect (Ahmed, 2004,p.11),her account nonetheless speaks to a very similar set of concerns to the Lacanian approaches discussed above, in so far as she is also concerned with making sense of the stickiness and intractability of social norms (Ahmed, 2004, p. 12). In so doing, Ahmed argues that certain affects, particularly negative ones such as hate and disgust, acquire force through repetition. For instance, offensive racial slurs, and their associated affects of repulsion and disgust, are only possible because they reference a particular history of associations between affects and bodies, such that particular affective orientations come to be seen as a natural response to some inherent property of the body or the object (Ahmed, 2004, p. 45). Therefore, through repetition and prior histories of contact, affects come to ‘stick’ to particular kinds of bodies and objects.This implies that the ‘stickiness’ of narrations of apoliticality is not random or arbitrary. Rather, narrations of apoliticality – and their associated affects of gloom, despair, pessimism, resignation and pain – index a particular history of defeats and setbacks for the academic left. Consequently, academic left disappointment with the present is perhaps not just a response to the particularities of the (a)political present, but also labours under the weight of a deeply sedimented sense of despondency in the aftermath of,say,Thatcher,Reagan,Bush,Blair and post-Cold War neo-liberal triumphalism. This in turn means that, to some extent, disappointment and despair have congealed into reflex, instinctive reactions for some radical theorists; perhaps disappointment has become constitutive of the academic left (and the left in general). Following Ahmed, we can say that the historical contingency of the left’s often despairing affective response to contemporary politics has, to a degree, come to be effaced: despair comes to be a necessary and inevitable response to the present, rather than a contingent response to a particular history that could have been (and could be) otherwise.This affective glue or stickiness effaces contingency and so blocks the possibility of alternative orientations towards the present, or at least makes them more difficult (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 92–3).The task, then, is to recover and reaffirm the contingency of our affective orientations, paving the way for the cultivation of an alternative set of dispositions that might weaken the grip of narrations of apoliticality.

To say that ethics is first philosophy is to say that ‘ethics is an optics’.1 This means that my ethical response to my fellow human being is the lens through which all other philosophical questions must be addressed. Levinas's position has affinities with Stephen Darwall's recent account of how we recognize the moral authority of persons from the ‘second‐person standpoint’ (Darwall 2006),2 but for Levinas that authority is not merely of interest to ethics; it ramifies into a basic principle of phenomenological ‘seeing’ and so of philosophical method. According to Levinas this thought has eluded the Western philosophical tradition, which has instead sought to ground ethical relations—my obligations to others—in ontology, an account of what there is. Thus he holds that ‘the terms must be reversed’ (TI: 47): ethics—an account of obligation in its character as obligation—is prior to ontology, knowledge of being. This is a provocative thought that can be understood in many ways, some of which can be quite hard to motivate and defend.3 The best way to understand what it means is to recover the phenomenological problem that provided the context for its dialectical development. More specifically, I will argue that Levinas's idea can be defended if we see how it solves a phenomenological puzzle about responsibility, about that responsiveness to normative distinctions which is a condition on possessing the sort of intentional content we do.4

Thus the project is in a certain sense quite a restricted one. I will not argue (though I think it true) that the phenomenological approach to intentional content is superior to all others—neo‐Hegelian accounts such as those of Robert Brandom, John McDowell, or Robert Pippin, for instance, or the various computational approaches found in the cognitive sciences. To do so would require a different kind of paper. Rather, I will argue that there is a certain internal ‘logic’ to the phenomenological development of the problem, one that ultimately requires something like the move Levinas makes under the heading of ‘ethics as first philosophy’. The argument takes place in three stages. In Section 2, I show how Husserl traces the account of intentional content (an ‘objective world’) to the constitution of the other subject. But he fails adequately to link the nature of the other, so constituted, to the crucial element in the emergence of intentional content, namely, its normative structure. In Section 3, then, I argue that Sartre's phenomenology of the Look addresses this issue by showing how my experience of the other as subject is not originally the experience of an object with certain special properties (such as that of being conscious, as in Husserl) but of myself as being the object of a normative judgment. On this basis, the world I inhabit is itself transformed into a modalized—i.e., normatively structured—world. I then show that Sartre's phenomenology cannot do justice to its own insight without adopting what Levinas calls the priority of ethics over ontology. In Section 4 I address two objections to this conclusion that have arisen within the phenomenological tradition.

Derrida sees every community as inhabited by something like the human or animal body’s immune system. The immune system repels foreign invaders but then, sometimes, disastrously turns its immune system against itself in what is called autoimmunity. Derrida makes a brilliant exploitation of this figure in “Foi et Savoir” (“Faith and Knowledge”) and elsewhere. I owe to Tom Mitchell, however, the recognition that there is something strange about this figure, namely, that it is a figure of a figure, whichever way you look at it.36 The stem mun in immune system is the same as the mun in community. It comes from Latin munus, meaning the obligation owed within the group, as the price of my citizenship, and also as a gift I may give to the community. Immune was originally a social term applying to those, for instance the clergy, who were in one way or another exempt from the ordinary citizen’s obligations. They were immune, indemnified, just as those who took sanctuary in a church were immune from arrest or just as legislators in some democracies today are immune from prosecution for some crimes. Biologists appropriated an entire social and political vocabulary, including the notion of aliens to the community or foreign invaders who must be repelled, to name the operation of the body’s immune system and the catastrophe of autoimmunity. When foreign cells or antigens invade the body, the immune system cleverly assesses those cells and then creates and multiplies antibodies designed to destroy the antigens, thereby securing the body’s immunity. Flu shots create antibodies that are supposed to make a person immune to flu viruses, safe, protected, indemnified, invulnerable. In autoimmunity something goes wrong with the immune system. It starts creating antibodies that attack the body’s own cells, as in diabetes, Crohn’s disease (experts assume), rheumatoid arthritis, or some even more deadly forms of autoimmunity in which a whole organ is attacked and destroyed. Derrida takes this already metaphorical system of terms back from biology and applies it again to the social body, the body of the community and its members. As Mitchell observes, whichever side you look at is the metaphor of the other. Derrida’s strikingly original insight, made with the exuberance and even wildness characteristic of the late Derrida, is the claim that both immunity and autoimmunity are in one way or another characteristics of every community. Therefore community cannot be understood except by way of this structure. “We feel ourselves,” says Derrida, “authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of autoimmunization. It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well as the duplicity of sources in general.”37 Derrida emphasizes that immunity and autoimmunity operate in any community mechanically, spontaneously, inevitably, willy-nilly, not as a result of choices members of the community make or that the community collectively makes. Every community strives to keep itself pure, safe, sacrosanct, uncontaminated by aliens. At the same time, every community is inhabited by a tendency to shoot itself in the foot, as we say, in the act of trying to shoot the invader. Here is Derrida’s careful formulation of the way every community generates its own autoimmune reaction, as well as using its immune system to repel foreign invaders: But the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity. . . . This excess above and beyond the living, whose life only has absolute value by being worth more than life, more than itself— this, in short, is what opens the space of death that is linked to the automaton (exemplarily “phallic”), to technics, the machine, the prosthesis: in a word, to the dimensions of the auto-immune and selfsacrificial supplementarity, to this death drive that is silently at work in every community, every auto-co-immunity, constituting it as such in its iterability, its heritage, its spectral tradition. Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community that would not cultivate its own autoimmunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral survival. This self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism. It is there that the possibility of religion persists: the religious bond (scrupulous, respectful, modest, reticent, inhibited) between the value of life, its absolute “dignity,” and the theological machine, the “machine for making gods.”38 This dense passage could be the object of virtually endless meditation, commentary, and interrogation. Several different figurative, semantic, or lexical systems are superimposed in a characteristically late-Derridean punning or etymologically echoing way. Multiple references to other works, Derrida’s own or that of others, are obliquely made: to the concept of messianicity without messianism and that of spectrality from his own Specters of Marx; to Kant’s work entitled Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason and his notion of the priceless price of human life; to Bergson’s definition of human society as a machine for making gods in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion; to Freud and anthropologists for the role of the phallic in all religions; to the whole vocabulary, crisscrossing biology and human society, of words with mun or mon: common, community, immunity, autoimmunity; to the concept of the machinal as a fundamental feature of teletechno- mediatic-capitalism. The notion of the machinal is here applied to the religious concept of self-sacrificing autoimmunity. It is a feature of the body’s immune system, as of the endocrine system, that it works automatically, on its own, machinelike, without any control by consciousness. Derrida affirms that the self-destructive autoimmunity of any community works in the same way. The words heilig, holy, and sacrificial connect Derrida’s concept of the autoimmunitary to his earlier thinking about religion and about sacrifice as an essential feature of the three “religions of the Book.” Reflections about sacrifice are central in Glas and in The Gift of Death. The essay about autoimmunitary communities is, after all, called “Faith and Knowledge” and is included in a book called La Religion (Acts of Religion in English). The word sacrifice comes from sacer, holy, sacred, and facere, to do, to make. To sacrifice is to do something holy, that is, something in some way related to what Derrida, echoing Jan Patocka, calls in The Gift of Death the mysterium tremendum. The self-sacrificial impulse in any community derives from its exposure to something secret, supernatural, wholly other and from its desire to be saved by being transported to that place, to survive after its self-sacrifice. Central in the passage, therefore, is a definition of a viable community as committed to preserving itself uncontaminated, safe and sound, pure, sequestered, hale and holy, while at the same time inhabited by an irresistible tendency to turn its self-protective mechanisms against itself, to sacrifice itself in an attempt to protect itself against itself and in order to preserve its relation to the holy and to achieve “spectral sur-vival.” Derrida takes for granted here, and throughout the whole essay or collection of fifty two segments that make up “Foi et savoir,” that every community, in spite of its desire for safe self-enclosure, is open to some limitless other, to which he gives various contradictory names, including death and the future, though he, for the most part, scrupulously avoids calling it God or heaven. Every community, whether it wants to be or not, however much it tries to enclose itself in itself, is open to “the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism.” A more recent work by Derrida, the interview in Le “Concept” du 11 septembre, would add the word terror to this list of names for the spectral outside/inside other. The title of the interview conducted by Giovanna Borradori shortly after the destruction of the World Trade Center, but before the invasion of Iraq, is “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” As this name suggests, it is an analysis of the post-9/11 so-called War on Terror. It appropriates from “Foi et savoir” the notion that autoimmunity is a characteristic of every community, for example, the community of so called terrorists and the community of those who call the United States their homeland, in an inextricable interpenetration of the two, terrorists and terrorized. Both, for example, share an interest in having the images of the Twin Towers falling broadcast throughout the world as often as possible and for as long as possible. Osama bin Laden must have rejoiced every time he saw those videos, but our government authorities also rejoiced. They rejoiced because they needed the effect of those images to justify the repressive measures they wanted to put in place. Terror is not stark fear for what has happened but, as Derrida recognizes, for what is certain to happen again at some indefinite time in the future. What is certain to happen, sooner or later, is another “terrorist attack,” as our government authorities, for example the director of homeland security or the director of the CIA, keep periodically telling us, just in case we might start forgetting to live in a state of constant abject terror and so begin wondering where our civil liberties have gone. What is most terrifying is the conviction that the terrorists are not outside, but within, secretly present as antigens, “terrorist cells,” against which it is extremely difficult, in the end impossible, to develop effective antibodies. The other is not outside, but inside, as an uncanny ghostly presence within the house. These terrorists might be anybody: the family next door, someone we see at the grocery store, and, perhaps, even unbeknownst to us, our own selves. As Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Derrida uses the concept of autoimmunity to describe, for example, the way every attempt to repress or forget the posttraumatic terror just brings it back more violently: It follows that all these efforts to attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (in order to deny, repress, forget, to enact its mourning, etc.), these are, these too, so many desperate attempts. And so many auto-immunitary movements. Which produce, invent, and nourish the monstrosity they attempt to bury. What should never be forgotten, therefore, is the perverse effect of the auto-immunitary itself. Repression, in the psychoanalytic sense and in the politico-policing, politico-military, politico-economic sense, we know now that it produces, reproduces, regenerates the very thing that it attempts to disarm.39 This double, self-defeating effort can be seen at work in the war on terror. We spend billions on “homeland security,” while at the same time we sacrifice the lives of thousands of our citizens in the Iraq war, not to speak of the tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens we have killed. We often direct our immunity army—the FBI, the CIA, and the more hidden security forces—against our own citizens or against refugees or immigrants or victims of repressive regimes to whom we ought to owe hospitality. We do this under the authority of the Patriot Act, an Orwellian name if there ever was one, since it is designed to take away the civil liberties of all patriotic United States citizens as well as of the alien terrorists we must be harboring in our midst, like ghosts who have invaded the homeland. The Patriot Act does the “homeland” serious harm and makes it less secure, as in the exclusion of foreign students, scientists, and scholars on whom the successful working of American capitalism depends or as in the failure to prepare adequately for the possibility of Hurricane Katrina because the Department of Homeland Security was so focused on a potential terrorist attack.

Speaking of the hymen, Derrida emphasizes the role of the blank spaces of the page in the play of meaning. Analogically, Derrida himself often devotes his attention to the text in its margins, so to speak. He examines the minute particulars of an undecidable moment, nearly imperceptible displacements, that might otherwise escape the reader's eye. Reading Foucault, he concentrates on three pages out of 673. Reading Rousseau, he chooses a text that is far from "central." Reading Heidegger, he proceeds to write a note on a note to Sein und Zeit.

His method, as he says to Jean-Louis Houdebine, perhaps a little too formulaically, is reversal and displacement. It is not enough "simply to neutralize the binary oppositions of metaphysics. "We must recognize that, within the familiar philosophical oppositions, there is always "a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms controls the other (axiologically, logically, etc. ), holds the superior position. To deconstruct the opposition is first ... to overthrow [renverser] the hierarchy." (Pos F 57, Pos E. 1. 36) To fight violence with violence. In the Grammatology this structural phase would be represented by all those pages where, all apologies to the contrary, the polemical energy seems clearly engaged in putting writing above speech. But in the next phase of deconstruction, this reversal must be displaced, the winning term put under erasure. The critic must make room for "the irruptive emergence of a new 'concept,' a concept which no longer allows itself to be understood in terms of the previous regime [system of oppositions ] ." In terms of our book, this would be the aspect that "allows for the dissonant emergence of a writing inside of speech, thus disorganizing all the received order and invading the whole sphere of speech" (Pos E 1. 36 ) .

The unexplored terrain that emerged in the 1970s is the world of dematerialized currencies that Derrida believes has somehow transformed literature. Lifting the "curse" on irredeemable monies is tantamount to lifting the curse on signs that operate without reference, a central element of Derrida's linguistic project. The economic transformation of money in 1971 is in peculiar ways tied to the radical politics of the 1960s, as we can see by noting that in France an important suspension of convertibility of the franc occurred in May, 1968, in direct response to the threat of a General Strike. The radical disruption of the social order that seemed to many linked to the disruptions of deconstruction led to or was countered by the ending of "reference" in that most fundamental "sign" in the capitalist system, money. Jean Baudrillard recognizes a relationship between the new kind of rebellion of the left in the 1960s, the demise of the gold standard, and deconstruction, though his way of characterizing this complex relationship is to say that the development of an economic system based on what he calls "uncontrollable play" marked the end of the possibility of "materialist" contradictions, the end of the Marxist dialectic in which changes in means of production generate changes in the social order, so that a new form of resistance (to signs) was needed. He concludes that at a certain point in history, production was "elevated ... to a total abstraction, ... to the power of a code, which no longer even risks being called into question by an abolished referent" (his emphasis).5 Then in a footnote he explains that, "economically, this process culminates in the virtual international autonomy of finance capital, in the uncontrollable play of floating capital. Once currencies are extracted from all production cautions, and even from all reference to the gold standard, general equivalence becomes the strategic place of manipulation. Real production is everywhere subordinated to it. This apogee of the system corresponds to the triumph of the code" (129 n. 9). Baudrillard's comments suggest a peculiar relationship between deconstruction, sixties' radicalism, and the new definitions of money. The end of the gold standard results in uncontrollable play of capital which sounds like the freeplay that Derrida finds in language. In fact, if we read the new "definition" of a currency, it seems very much like a Derridean description of the endless "dissemination without return" of linguistic signifiers to define one sign is merely to put up other signs, and so on, never reaching any end. The dollar is redefined so that it is no longer a "silver certificate," a paper referring to physical objects, but rather simply a "federal reserve note," a note indicating that the Federal Reserve System owes the bearer a dollar. To have a dollar is to be owed a dollar: the sign that represents money actually represents that one has the right to another sign. After the 1970s, the question of what backs up currencies is no longer answered by an image of a huge stockpile of gold, but rather by a reserve system; internationally, this takes the form of the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, in which countries hold "reserve positions" or "s.d.r.s," "standard drawing rights"; they are granted rights to borrow, and those rights back up their currencies. Internationally, a dollar is now defined as a "basket" of so many marks plus so many yen, so many pounds, so many of every currency and similarly a mark is so many dollars plus so many yen, and so on. Defining a currency in terms of a basket of other currencies does rather seem like a system of freeplay of signifiers: searching for the "meaning" of one monetary sign leads only to an infinite sequence of other signs and ultimately circles back to the same sign. Monetary signifiers are defined in terms of their differences from other signifiers, not in terms of any signified. Payment across countries is no longer even mythologized as the transfer of objects; indeed payment in effect no longer exists at all; rather, payment has become the transfer of debt from one country to another. If being given an IOU is a way of deferring payment, the current economic system has made such deferrals permanent. The meaning of economic signs no longer derives from reference but rather from a code. Such changes in economics do not happen all at once and are never complete and uniform across the entire field of economic activity. New economic concepts emerge long before they become orthodoxy, and sometimes such concepts appear first in non-economic texts, as ironic mockery of common practices or descriptions of other social systems or even just imaginary possibilities. In Given Time, Derrida in effect retraces the long process of subtle changes in economic notions which led up to the final dematerialization of money in 1971, by citing from texts published near crucial moments in the history of the transformation of money. Derrida focuses particularly on an ironic story by Baudelaire, "The Counterfeit Coin," published in 1864, and on an account of the economics of "primitive" societies by Marcel Mauss, The Gift, published in 1925. Near each of these publication dates there was a significant change in the way Western governments backed up the money they issued, and elements in these texts reflect those changes. When Baudelaire wrote his story about counterfeit money, there was considerable international anxiety about governments issuing money backed by nothing, particularly the U.S. during the Civil War, which paid its troops with "Greenbacks" that it printed quite freely. In reaction to this anxiety, the official international gold standard was instituted in 1881. The gradual dematerialization that Derrida wants to trace was the undoing of this international treaty.

For the last century and a half, the spectre of communism has been haunting the world. Like any other spectre it can never be suppressed once and for all, even though it often happens that those fearing its menace are able, for a while, to get it out of their minds. And at each of those times they repeat the same orgiastic spectacle of Huttons falling over each other to grab even more riches, to gorge themselves on even more extra helpings from the table, and to take whatever drugs they hope will relieve their indigestion. They all repeat in chorus the same catch-phrases: “Marx is dead,” “History has reached the end of its voyage, and nothing will ever again change,” “Here we are, and here we stay for evermore!” Some really believe that their dream world will last to all eternity. Others, troubled despite everything by a slight inquietude, look around themselves and murmur, “We really have to do something for everyone we keep away from our party: perhaps we should hand out some scraps from our feast to those poor souls.” Meanwhile, among the innumerable victims there are those who cry over their fate, those who take refuge in ever-repeated tales of their glorious struggles in the past but who understand nothing of the causes for their recent defeats, and those who resign themselves to their condition and think “God is with our enemies, there is nothing to do but hope for a softening of their hearts while we huddle at the fence over which they toss their leavings.” But there are also some who calmly call for a meeting of those who can analyze the new situation, take the measure of the strengths and weaknesses of both camps, understand the challenges confronting their peoples, and in this way prepare for tomorrow’s struggles and victories. One hundred fifty years after the Communist Manifesto was put forth we are once again in one of those moments when the gluttons hold their orgy. But this momentary triumph of unrestrained capital is not accompanied by a brilliant new expansive surge for capitalism but by the deepening of its crisis! Thus, the boundless appetite of capital, given full scope of the momentary weakening of its adversary class, in fact shows explosively the absurd irrationality of this system. The inequality that it promotes undermines its possibilities for expansion. It expands consumption in a distorted manner by favoring wholesale waste by the rich, but this in no way compensates for the poverty to which it condemns the majority of workers and peoples, who become ever less successfully integrated into its system of exploitation. So capitalism, by its very logic, reduces them to a marginal status and settles for mere crisis management, which it can do just as long as the social power of its adversaries is not reconstituted. This paradoxical victory of capital giving rise to its prolonged crisis is only apparent if we cool off by reading the Communist Manifesto and recall to our memory the plain reason for this: capitalism is incapable of overcoming its fundamental contradictions. To destroy the conquests of the working classes to dismantle the systems of social security and employment protection, to return to poverty wages, to bring certain of the peripheral countries back to their outmoded status as providers of raw materials while limiting the opportunities of those who have become relatively industrialized by imposing the status of subcontractor on their on their productive systems, and to speed up the squandering of the resources of the planet: such is the program of the currently dominant forces. This permanently reactionary utopia expresses the deepest desire of the gluttons whose arrogant self-affirmation bursts out all over at historical moments like our present one.

The critique of current intellectual fashions that I put forth in this contribution to the sesquicentennial of the Communist Manifesto will accentuate the nullity of this reactionary utopia.

Today we face a planetary crisis. Environmental, energy, food, financial, and social reproduction crises are disrupting the world-system (Ahmed 2010; McMichael 2011; Chase-Dunn 2013; Houtart 2010; Kallis, Martinez-Alier and Norgaard 2009; Foster, Clark, York 2010; Goodman and Salleh 2015; Peterson 2010; Rockstrom et.al. 2009, 2009b; Salleh 2012; Smith 2014; Steffen et.al. 2007). This planetary crisis, we argue, has been triggered by a globalizing mode of civilization that has become hegemonic.2 This mode of civilization is constituted and underpinned by anthropocentric, androcentric, hetero-patriarchal, Euro/Western-centric, modern/colonial and capitalist systems of power. Building on world-systems, decolonial, eco-feminist and posthuman theories, we contend that the “coloniality of power” (Quijano 1991; Grosfoguel 2009; Mignolo 2008; Lugones 2007; Maese-Cohen 2010; Dastile and Ndlovu-Gastheni 2013) has worked to globalize a civilization that exhausts the planet and exploits most of its people, thus unleashing a socioecological blowback that is turning this civilization into its own worst enemy. By “coloniality” we refer to the complex and multidimensional legacy of divisive, exploitative, stratifying and hierarchical forms of power (e.g., Eurocentric/Western-centric hegemony), forms of knowledge (e.g., technoscientific instrumental rationality), forms of (inter)subjectivity (e.g., possessive individualism), forms of human interrelations (e.g., racism, classism, heteropatriarchalism, etc.), and forms of human dominion over land and mastery of “nature” (e.g., anthropocentric property/dominion/sovereignty) that have become entrenched and continue to be reproduced throughout the world as an ongoing consequence of colonization. Coloniality thus entails that the hegemony of colonial forms persists to this day as a legacy that structurally constitutes modernity, even into supposedly “postcolonial” times. Coloniality is the underside of modernity: the historical and structural foundation that has enabled—e.g., through conquest, imperialism, slavery, resource extraction and Western dominance—the rise, hegemony, and globalization of a world-system dominated by modern civilization. This civilization has sought to globalize a political-economic model bent on endless accumulation, consumption and growth on a finite planet (Ahmed 2010; Foster, Clark, York 2010; Goodman and Salleh 2013; McMichael 2011; Steffen et.al. 2007; WPCCC 2010). Now in its “neoliberal” stage, this model reinforces a historically-ongoing coloniality of power premised on linear discourses of “progress,” “modernization,” “development,” and “evolution,” altogether constituting a hegemonic “standard of civilization.” Globalized through (neo)colonialism and (neo)imperialism, this “standard of civilization” has subjugated the global South under the North, and the rural under the urban, thereby stratifying the world into multiple overlapping hierarchies structured along core-periphery asymmetries. The globalization of this mode of civilization wouldn’t be possible without the coloniality of power which has assimilated semi-peripheral and peripheral elites into a Western-centric civilizational obsession with endless accumulation based on the “mastery of nature” (Plumwood 2002; Adelman 2015) and geared towards the aggressive pursuit of “high modernism”3 (Scott 1998)—and its “late modern(ist)” continuation. While settler-colonial elites have been instrumental to the expansion of hegemonic civilization, the colonial de-indigenization and cultural assimilation of Southern elites through centuries of Western domination has increasingly entrenched dominant worldviews and practices throughout the globe. Gonzalez notes; “[i]n the post-colonial period, Southern elites, deeply influenced by Eurocentric ideologies, subjugated their own indigenous and minority populations in order to “modernize” and “develop” them” (2015: 13). Most “postcolonial” elites haven’t broken with this coloniality of power (Dastile and Ndlovu-Gastheni 2013); instead, they often reproduce govern-mentalities aimed at “catching-up” with, emulating, imitating, “cloning” or conforming to hegemonic models enacted in the North’s metropolitan cores (Sheppard et.al. 2009; McMichael 2011; Grosfoguel 2009; Mignolo 2008). In seeking to emulate the North’s unsustainable “imperial mode of living” (Brand and Wissen 2012), many Southern elites have replicated the North’s “eco-destructive, consumerist-centric, over-financialized, [and] climate-frying maldevelopment model” (Bond 2012). This coloniality of power has often consumed the creativity, energy, and “resources” of (semi)peripheries in aspirational attempts to emulate and/or conform to hegemonic models by, for example, aggressively pursuing accelerated modernization, developmentalism, urbanization, industrialization, and massified commodity/consumerist cultures at almost any cost, human or ecological. Playing catch-up with the North inevitably requires the present-day rehearsal, in accelerated, compressed manner, of structurally violent practices that have underpinned the North’s “rise” to planetary dominance—like the transformation of nature (including humans) into exploitable “resources” (Apffel-Marglin 2011) and the systematic reliance on coercive statecraft, ecological imperialism, and (neo)colonialism. Comparable practices, now rehearsed in “updated” forms by elites/regimes of semi-peripheral “emerging economies,” seek to replicate expansive core-like metropolitan centers of accumulation, consumption, and growth, like the grossly unequal BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) megalopolises. To achieve this, emerging economies must resort to internal colonialism and “subimperialism” or “second degree imperialism” (Bond 2014) so as to compel into subservience their “own” peripheries as sources of exploitable natural and human “resources.” Yet in striving to emulate a patently unsustainable Northern “way of life” built on centuries of dispossession, emerging economies face two obstacles: First, the hegemonic barriers imposed by the dominant regime of accumulation controlled by the North which resists any challenges to its hegemony. Second, the planetary boundaries (Rockström et.al. 2009) imposed by the Earth’s finite carrying capacity which is already responding to breaches with destabilizing consequences (Foster, Clark, York 2010). Seduced by the coloniality of power, large “emerging economies”—like BRICS—are on a crash course against entrenched “old” Northern cores—as the latter try to preserve their unsustainable privileges at any cost. Brand and Wissen (2012) note: [G]eopolitical and geo-economic shifts will…increasingly be…ecological conflicts…[Facing] increasing competition for the earth’s resources and sinks, national and supranational state apparatuses seem…willing to support ‘their’ respective capitals…to strengthen their competitive position and…secure the resource base of their…economies…Thus, the hegemony of the imperial mode of living…, [spreading from]…the global North…to the South…explains…an imperialist rearticulation…in the context of multiple crises (555). Increasingly volatile tensions are resulting from the clash between the hegemonic system of accumulation and the planetary boundaries. Geopolitical/geoeconomic conflicts, and grabs and scrambles over “resources” strategic for “development(alism),” are proliferating globally. Such complications can often be traced to the hegemonization of an ecologically unsustainable, socially stratifying and politically volatile model of civilization bent on endless accumulation, consumption and growth on a finite planet. Ironically, the very success in globalizing this civilizational model through the coloniality of power may lead to its autophagous self-destruction through a planetary crisis. Overcoming this crisis requires not only a critique of modernity in its neoliberal capitalist guise, but a transformation beyond the systems of power underpinning the hegemonic civilization. In solidarity with movements for systemic change and drawing on decolonial dialogues we conclude with a blueprint for a just and sustainable transition inspired on indigenous, eco-feminist, and posthuman alternatives. Planetary Crisis: Five converging crises are triggering a planetary crisis of civilization: Ecological Rift. Modern civilization is causing an ecological rift with global biospheric lifecycles, breaching planetary boundaries and overshooting the Earth’s carrying capacity by exhausting and disrupting nature’s metabolic labor (Foster, Clark, York 2010; Ahmed 2010; Rockström, Steffen, Noone et.al. 2009; Salleh 2010). We are breaching four of nine planetary boundaries;4 further breaching seems inevitable as we continue to rely on this civilizational model. This anthropogenic eco-crisis is undermining the natural bases for human existence. The ecological rift derives from the anthropocentrism of the hegemonic civilization, aggravated by modernist drives for mastery of nature and capital accumulation, resulting in gross overconsumption of planetary biocapacity: “humanity…uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste… [I]t now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year” (World Footprint 2014). Most ecological degradation comes from overconsumption and waste driven by the lifestyle of metropolitan centers globally, and of “(over)developed” rich countries. McMichael (2011) notes: the richest countries have generated 42% of global environmental degradation while paying only 3% of resulting costs. Urban areas occupy around 2% of global land yet produce more than two thirds of CO2 emissions. If everybody in the world lived like the average US or Canadian resident, we would need between three and five Earths—if not more—to regenerate humanity’s annual demand on nature; if everybody lived like the average EU resident, we would need 2.5 to 3.5 Earths. Emergent economies seeking to rapidly catch up and emulate Northern lifestyles—like the BRICS—dramatically aggravate this. This “imperial mode of living” propagated from cores and now also semi-cores is socio-ecologically unsustainable and dangerous (Brand and Wissen 2012). Energy/Resource Depletion. Overconsumption is causing a crisis of energy scarcity and natural resource depletion of oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, essential minerals, and water (Ahmed 2010; Zittel et.al. 2013; Sheppard 2009; Evans 2010; “Water Facts and Figures” 2014). Peak-oil may have already occurred in 2005-2008 (Ahmed 2010); the Energy Working Group estimated overall conventional energy peak for 2015 (Zittel et.al. 2013). Mineral depletion is predicted to exhaust 26 of the 37 most important minerals by 2100 (Sheppard 2009). By 2025 the number of people living in absolute water scarcity is projected to rise 50%, with “two thirds of the world’s population…in water-stressed conditions” (Evans 2010). Food System Crisis: Between 2001-2008 global demand exceeded supply and the global stockpile of grain shrank by half (Cribb 2010). “[A]verage productivity growth rates [2.0% 1970-1990]…fell to 1.1% between 1990 and 2007 and are projected to continue to decline” (Evans 2010:3). Modern industrial agriculture and the consumption/waste patterns of global North and metropolitan lifestyles are exhausting soils and sinks globally. Industrial agriculture through land-use change, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is eroding soils, creating topsoil loss, and exhausting nature’s “metabolic labor” (Salleh 2010; McMichael 2011). Agro-industrial methods like monocropping and industrial economies of scale destroy biodiversity and carbon sinks, and degrade nutritional quality (Altieri 2009). Industrial aquaculture has fully exploited or overexploited most of the world’s fish stocks. The food system’s increasingly corporate consolidation multiplies social-environmental externalities through overexploitation of natural and human resources and gross maldistribution. The “globalized” methane-releasing “meatified” modern food system requires unnecessarily long transportation and is heavily dependent on dwindling fossil fuels, making it a major greenhouse gas emitter. All this is triggering a global food system crisis, profoundly impacting semi/peripheral regions (Ahmed 2010; McMichael 2011; Cribb 2010; Evans 2010.). However, further growth isn’t the answer. We already produce excess food—albeit of disappointing nutritional quality, yet much is wasted and distribution is so skewed that “providing the additional calories needed by the 13% of the world’s population facing hunger would require just 1% of the current global food supply” (Raworth 2012: 5). By shifting to agroecology, indigenous/small peasant methods, and permaculture, coupled with equitable, redistributive, communal and local economies we can produce more nutritious food, ensure fairer distribution, reduce waste, regenerate biodiversity, and fight climate change (Altieri 2009). Economic/Financial Crisis. The 2008 global economic/financial downturn resulted from contingent, recent-historical, and structural factors. While contingent factors like the housing market collapse and recent-historical factors like neoliberal deregulation of financial markets are crucial, we underline the long-term structural problems. Most importantly the growing disconnection between (a.) an increasingly financialized global economy, (b.) the “real” economy of human production, and (c.) the “real-real” economy of socio-ecological reproduction based on the Earth’s biocapacity to provide “ecological services” (Kallis, Martinez-Alier and Norgaard 2009). The increasingly financialized capitalist economy is grossly abstracted from the real economy of production based on human labor, and from the real-real economy of reproduction based on the socio-ecologically metabolic labor of communities and the planet. The second structural problem is the exploding global inequality coupled with persistent poverty; this notwithstanding the continuous (albeit slowing) growth of the global economy. Again, the issue isn’t that we need more growth, but that we have an increasing concentration of wealth tied to gross maldistribution and rampant waste (according to Credit Suisse, the top 8% of the world’s population concentrates almost 80% of global wealth). The global economic system is based on a faulty notion of endless accumulation propelled by increasingly financialized debt disconnected from its growing social and ecological debt (Ahmed 2010; Foster, Clark, York 2010; Peterson 2010; Kallis, Martinez-Alier and Norgaard 2009; Salleh 2010). Social Reproduction Crisis. This crisis results from the accelerated exploitation of productive and reproductive labor, leading to massive demographic displacements—so-called “migrations”—from rural to urban, and from peripheries to cores. Overconsumption in cores and now also semi-cores requires constantly increasing absorption of people—especially from semi-peripheries and peripheries—into a global system of production geared towards endless growth. For example, people displaced from their local land bases by the globalization and intensification of corporate and/or state mega-projects, industrial monocrops and resource extraction are often absorbed as cheap migrant labor moving towards the exploding slum-settlements of chaotically growing urbanized centers in emerging Southern economies or towards already established Northern centers of accumulation. There, they are incorporated as easily exploitable, often undocumented labor, crossing dangerous, sometimes lethal, and increasingly militarized Northern borders (e.g., the US-Mexico border, the EU’s Mediterranean) (Robinson and Santos 2014). Demographic displacements are aggravated by environmental/climate degradation, oppression and conflicts—many rooted in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories and hegemonic/imperialist wars. Rural to urban and South to North displacements drain the human, cultural, and social-reproductive capabilities of traditional/rural/peasant/agricultural/fishing communities and Southern regions generally (Gasper and Truong 2014). The social reproduction crisis is gendered and racialized, primarily affecting women, peasants, indigenous communities, and people of color (Salleh 2010; Peterson 2010; McMichael 2011). The critical consequences are threefold: the brain drain, the proliferation of migrant/refugee labor, and the care drain. Racialized rural, peasant, indigenous and traditional communities are eroded by the massive transference or displacement of productive, reproductive, and intellectual labor to cities and to the North. Working-age people are being absorbed, often in violent, exploitative and oppressive conditions, into hyper-productive globalized economies of capital accumulation. Concomitantly, many children, elderly, and disabled are marginalized, left uncared for as socially-reproductive labor erodes. The care drain feeds the new genderization and feminization of labor in manufacturing, especially light assembly (e.g., maquiladoras, export-processing zones, sweatshops). Labor feminization draws from migrant female workers coming from rural communities. Communities of origin, deprived of working age females (and males), lose the reproductive labor needed to care for social needs like education, safety, health, child and elderly care, often becoming reliant on migrant remittances. The care drain also feeds the South to North export of female labor to cover for the scarcity of reproductive labor resulting from the absorption of Northern female labor into the “productive” labor force. Moreover, the growing global sex trade absorbs and exploits economically-marginalized women, especially from semi/peripheries. Add gendered—and racialized—labor exploitation in less visible realms like domestic work, care work, and agroindustry. The social reproduction crisis also embeds a health crisis stemming from acute inequality, environmental degradation, neoliberal erosion of public health infrastructures, and deteriorated access to food, water and resources. This health crisis, on the one hand creates the growth of noncommunicable “diseases of globalization” resulting from consumerist, commodity-based, sedentary and industrial lifestyles (e.g., diabetes, coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, depression, etc.), while on the other hand it perpetuates in the “Third World” communicable diseases such as malaria and cholera, among many others. This health crisis interacts with other abovementioned crises to further complicate social reproduction and to trigger displacement (Harris and Seid 2004; Schreker 2012; McMichael, Barnett and McMichael 2012; Ottersen, Dasgupta, Blouin et.al. 2014; The Global Health Watch 2014). These crises are partly triggered and aggravated by neoliberalism, including its dismantling of social support networks and ecological protections globally since the 1980s, which set the stage for the globalization of corporate and financial capital at the expense of people and planet. Yet the roots of the planetary crisis are deeper. The planetary crisis, we contend, has resulted from the generalization of a hegemonic mode of civilization underpinned by the layered intersection of anthropocentric, androcentric, heterosexist, rationalist, Euro/Western-centric, modern/colonial, racialized, industrialist/developmentalist, capitalist, and ableist systems of power. These ten systems of power constitute the infrastructures of hegemonic civilization. Upon them, complex discursive and institutional apparatuses have been built and reproduced, asymmetrically shaping relations, practices, and cultures, often in structurally hierarchical, violent, oppressive, and exploitative ways. Such infrastructures buttress vitiated relations among humans and with non-humans, thereby producing, reproducing and accelerating the crises. These infrastructures must be critically and materially deconstructed to enable alternative worldviews, lifeways, organizational forms and practices to flourish. Drawing on decolonial, ecofeminist, posthumanist-ecological, and world-systems analysis we describe these infrastructures and how they feedback on each other:5

If we move to the different levels of securitisation, are some normatively preferably to others? On the territorial level, we agree with other scholars106 that the securitisation of climate change in terms of conflicts between groups or states and national security conceptions is hugely problematic. On the positive side, this discourse helps to raise attention and is conductive in forging coalitions between actors that would otherwise not have approached the topic seriously, as has happened for example in US debates107 or UN Security Council meetings.108 However, such an argumentation also detracts the attention from the core issues---slowing down climate change through decisive mitigation efforts---to rather ad-hoc adaptation measures and interferences in risk countries that could in the end take the form of military intervention.109 As a consequence, there is an increasing involvement of military and defence actors in climate politics as well as the adoption of concepts from the climate sector into military planning.110 Actors prepare themselves to cope with climate change’s secondary effects instead of preventing global warming from happening in the first place.111 Moreover, using a territorial securitisation and national security conceptions reinforces Othering and friend-enemy conceptions (in line with the original CS argument) and shifts the attention to questions of security between states, thereby losing sight of the one most severely affected, that is poor populations within those states.

In Britain also there has been a move away from radical imagination in the politics of race, towards either highly institutionalized activity designed to measure and correct differential outcomes, or to ethnic particularity that challenges racism faced by a particular group but rarely links this activity to other struggles or a vision of an alternative society. However necessary these forms of organization may be because institutional outcomes continue to harden inequality between groups and mobilization needs to take place where people are, building on the affiliations that make sense to them the loss of a larger vision and set of aspirations diminishes what anti-racist politics can be. Kelly (2002, p. xii) goes on to specify the loss that arises from too exclusive a focus on matters of institutional detail or immediate politicking: Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us. This new revolutionary subject is unlikely to emerge from the mundane techniques of management that have come to typify ‘useful’ research in the field of racism. In response to the formulation of recent research funding in the UK, research in the field of race and racism that connects with ‘users’ has tended towards the technical. Much of this is shaped by the demand that research demonstrate its own ‘impact’, that is, shows its usefulness to an audience beyond academia, often before any findings are made and in order for time and money to be allocated.6 For the field of race and ethnic studies, this demand brings a model of knowledge as technique often management technique. Whether racism is seen to arise from communicational barriers between groups or from flawed institutional practices, the solution is presented as alternative practices do this and others will adapt their behaviour in these ways. If this were the extent of the imaginative failure, things would not be too bad. After all, universities rarely include the most exciting of ideas until the excitement can be rewritten as tradition. Sometimes banishment from the academy can help to get a different and more energetic audience for ideas that aspire to change our world. However, the politics of race seems to be institutionalized in an even more tightly confined logic in the spaces outside the academy. There may be a widespread recognition that racism demands an institutional response, but this is ripped away from any larger political narrative altogether. As a result, the attempts by scholars to address a public also tend to be limited by the narrow demands of such technical or legalistic approaches to what anti-racism can and should be. There is a dilemma here. For scholars who wish to connect with so called practitioners and who, perhaps, consider this world of equalities practice as their ‘public’ research is likely to become focused around these questions of technical organization. Of course, many of us still seek to document and explore the complexity of racism and its impact in the world but the focus for this endeavour becomes segmented by institutional focus and, often, a rush to make ‘recommendations’. Access to research funding in Britain, increasingly the only route to creating space for scholarly work, demands that research delivers this ‘impact’ of immediate and usable advice. At the same time, the ‘public’ of practitioners a group here that is overwhelmingly concentrated in organizations tasked with delivering services to diverse populations, whether through statutory services or the third sector appear to understand the role of the intellectual only as this kind of technical adviser.7 Useful research becomes only this research that can enable alternative and potentially more effective operation of bureaucratic practices of one kind or another. This framing of anti-racist research transforms the kind of politics that can be imagined for this intellectual endeavour. This is anti-racism as a matter of organizational adaptation, not any wider social transformation. Perhaps some believe that transformation occurs through the collective impact of these many small organizational changes that has certainly been the unspoken implication of anti- racist work since the Lawrence Enquiry but, whatever the benefits of improved institutional practices, if these in fact have been achieved, this approach abandons any sense of political movement. We may be producing work that connects with a public, but the aspirations of both scholars and public seem less than they were.

Derrida sees every community as inhabited by something like the human or animal body’s immune system. The immune system repels foreign invaders but then, sometimes, disastrously turns its immune system against itself in what is called autoimmunity. Derrida makes a brilliant exploitation of this figure in “Foi et Savoir” (“Faith and Knowledge”) and elsewhere. I owe to Tom Mitchell, however, the recognition that there is something strange about this figure, namely, that it is a figure of a figure, whichever way you look at it.36 The stem mun in immune system is the same as the mun in community. It comes from Latin munus, meaning the obligation owed within the group, as the price of my citizenship, and also as a gift I may give to the community. Immune was originally a social term applying to those, for instance the clergy, who were in one way or another exempt from the ordinary citizen’s obligations. They were immune, indemnified, just as those who took sanctuary in a church were immune from arrest or just as legislators in some democracies today are immune from prosecution for some crimes. Biologists appropriated an entire social and political vocabulary, including the notion of aliens to the community or foreign invaders who must be repelled, to name the operation of the body’s immune system and the catastrophe of autoimmunity. When foreign cells or antigens invade the body, the immune system cleverly assesses those cells and then creates and multiplies antibodies designed to destroy the antigens, thereby securing the body’s immunity. Flu shots create antibodies that are supposed to make a person immune to flu viruses, safe, protected, indemnified, invulnerable. In autoimmunity something goes wrong with the immune system. It starts creating antibodies that attack the body’s own cells, as in diabetes, Crohn’s disease (experts assume), rheumatoid arthritis, or some even more deadly forms of autoimmunity in which a whole organ is attacked and destroyed. Derrida takes this already metaphorical system of terms back from biology and applies it again to the social body, the body of the community and its members. As Mitchell observes, whichever side you look at is the metaphor of the other. Derrida’s strikingly original insight, made with the exuberance and even wildness characteristic of the late Derrida, is the claim that both immunity and autoimmunity are in one way or another characteristics of every community. Therefore community cannot be understood except by way of this structure. “We feel ourselves,” says Derrida, “authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of autoimmunization. It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well as the duplicity of sources in general.”37 Derrida emphasizes that immunity and autoimmunity operate in any community mechanically, spontaneously, inevitably, willy-nilly, not as a result of choices members of the community make or that the community collectively makes. Every community strives to keep itself pure, safe, sacrosanct, uncontaminated by aliens. At the same time, every community is inhabited by a tendency to shoot itself in the foot, as we say, in the act of trying to shoot the invader. Here is Derrida’s careful formulation of the way every community generates its own autoimmune reaction, as well as using its immune system to repel foreign invaders: But the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity. . . . This excess above and beyond the living, whose life only has absolute value by being worth more than life, more than itself— this, in short, is what opens the space of death that is linked to the automaton (exemplarily “phallic”), to technics, the machine, the prosthesis: in a word, to the dimensions of the auto-immune and selfsacrificial supplementarity, to this death drive that is silently at work in every community, every auto-co-immunity, constituting it as such in its iterability, its heritage, its spectral tradition. Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community that would not cultivate its own autoimmunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral survival. This self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism. It is there that the possibility of religion persists: the religious bond (scrupulous, respectful, modest, reticent, inhibited) between the value of life, its absolute “dignity,” and the theological machine, the “machine for making gods.”38 This dense passage could be the object of virtually endless meditation, commentary, and interrogation. Several different figurative, semantic, or lexical systems are superimposed in a characteristically late-Derridean punning or etymologically echoing way. Multiple references to other works, Derrida’s own or that of others, are obliquely made: to the concept of messianicity without messianism and that of spectrality from his own Specters of Marx; to Kant’s work entitled Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason and his notion of the priceless price of human life; to Bergson’s definition of human society as a machine for making gods in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion; to Freud and anthropologists for the role of the phallic in all religions; to the whole vocabulary, crisscrossing biology and human society, of words with mun or mon: common, community, immunity, autoimmunity; to the concept of the machinal as a fundamental feature of teletechno- mediatic-capitalism. The notion of the machinal is here applied to the religious concept of self-sacrificing autoimmunity. It is a feature of the body’s immune system, as of the endocrine system, that it works automatically, on its own, machinelike, without any control by consciousness. Derrida affirms that the self-destructive autoimmunity of any community works in the same way. The words heilig, holy, and sacrificial connect Derrida’s concept of the autoimmunitary to his earlier thinking about religion and about sacrifice as an essential feature of the three “religions of the Book.” Reflections about sacrifice are central in Glas and in The Gift of Death. The essay about autoimmunitary communities is, after all, called “Faith and Knowledge” and is included in a book called La Religion (Acts of Religion in English). The word sacrifice comes from sacer, holy, sacred, and facere, to do, to make. To sacrifice is to do something holy, that is, something in some way related to what Derrida, echoing Jan Patocka, calls in The Gift of Death the mysterium tremendum. The self-sacrificial impulse in any community derives from its exposure to something secret, supernatural, wholly other and from its desire to be saved by being transported to that place, to survive after its self-sacrifice. Central in the passage, therefore, is a definition of a viable community as committed to preserving itself uncontaminated, safe and sound, pure, sequestered, hale and holy, while at the same time inhabited by an irresistible tendency to turn its self-protective mechanisms against itself, to sacrifice itself in an attempt to protect itself against itself and in order to preserve its relation to the holy and to achieve “spectral sur-vival.” Derrida takes for granted here, and throughout the whole essay or collection of fifty two segments that make up “Foi et savoir,” that every community, in spite of its desire for safe self-enclosure, is open to some limitless other, to which he gives various contradictory names, including death and the future, though he, for the most part, scrupulously avoids calling it God or heaven. Every community, whether it wants to be or not, however much it tries to enclose itself in itself, is open to “the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism.” A more recent work by Derrida, the interview in Le “Concept” du 11 septembre, would add the word terror to this list of names for the spectral outside/inside other. The title of the interview conducted by Giovanna Borradori shortly after the destruction of the World Trade Center, but before the invasion of Iraq, is “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” As this name suggests, it is an analysis of the post-9/11 so-called War on Terror. It appropriates from “Foi et savoir” the notion that autoimmunity is a characteristic of every community, for example, the community of so called terrorists and the community of those who call the United States their homeland, in an inextricable interpenetration of the two, terrorists and terrorized. Both, for example, share an interest in having the images of the Twin Towers falling broadcast throughout the world as often as possible and for as long as possible. Osama bin Laden must have rejoiced every time he saw those videos, but our government authorities also rejoiced. They rejoiced because they needed the effect of those images to justify the repressive measures they wanted to put in place. Terror is not stark fear for what has happened but, as Derrida recognizes, for what is certain to happen again at some indefinite time in the future. What is certain to happen, sooner or later, is another “terrorist attack,” as our government authorities, for example the director of homeland security or the director of the CIA, keep periodically telling us, just in case we might start forgetting to live in a state of constant abject terror and so begin wondering where our civil liberties have gone. What is most terrifying is the conviction that the terrorists are not outside, but within, secretly present as antigens, “terrorist cells,” against which it is extremely difficult, in the end impossible, to develop effective antibodies. The other is not outside, but inside, as an uncanny ghostly presence within the house. These terrorists might be anybody: the family next door, someone we see at the grocery store, and, perhaps, even unbeknownst to us, our own selves. As Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Derrida uses the concept of autoimmunity to describe, for example, the way every attempt to repress or forget the posttraumatic terror just brings it back more violently: It follows that all these efforts to attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (in order to deny, repress, forget, to enact its mourning, etc.), these are, these too, so many desperate attempts. And so many auto-immunitary movements. Which produce, invent, and nourish the monstrosity they attempt to bury. What should never be forgotten, therefore, is the perverse effect of the auto-immunitary itself. Repression, in the psychoanalytic sense and in the politico-policing, politico-military, politico-economic sense, we know now that it produces, reproduces, regenerates the very thing that it attempts to disarm.39 This double, self-defeating effort can be seen at work in the war on terror. We spend billions on “homeland security,” while at the same time we sacrifice the lives of thousands of our citizens in the Iraq war, not to speak of the tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens we have killed. We often direct our immunity army—the FBI, the CIA, and the more hidden security forces—against our own citizens or against refugees or immigrants or victims of repressive regimes to whom we ought to owe hospitality. We do this under the authority of the Patriot Act, an Orwellian name if there ever was one, since it is designed to take away the civil liberties of all patriotic United States citizens as well as of the alien terrorists we must be harboring in our midst, like ghosts who have invaded the homeland. The Patriot Act does the “homeland” serious harm and makes it less secure, as in the exclusion of foreign students, scientists, and scholars on whom the successful working of American capitalism depends or as in the failure to prepare adequately for the possibility of Hurricane Katrina because the Department of Homeland Security was so focused on a potential terrorist attack.

In the primordial scene, which Girard (1986) has described, the society is constituted on the basis of the lynching mob, whose mimetic desire, whose envy and egoism, culminates in sacrificing the scapegoat. With terror, though, we confront the opposite situation in which the mimetic desire does not establish but rather destroys the ‘society.’ Here everybody, and not only the scapegoat, is threatened with destruction. This paradoxical subject is Nietzsche’s radical (or ‘suicidal’) nihilist. Hence Nietzsche’s definition: ‘a nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be’. If the supreme values cannot find a place in this world one can just as well destroy it. Thus, the radical nihilist wills the total collapse of the socio-symbolic order. However, the point is that spite or ‘radical nihilism’ has a shared genealogy with other forms of nihilism. Hence Nietzsche’s full definition of a nihilist reads like this: ‘A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist’ (Nietzsche 1967: 318). If supreme values are themselves devalued while, at the same time, this world is preserved, we encounter the situation described by the second part of the definition: passive nihilism, or, a ‘world without values’ (Deleuze 1983: 148). If, on the other hand, one, despite realizing that one’s values are not realizable, still desperately clings to them, we confront the situation of the radical nihilist: values without a world. Thought in this way, the relationship between radical nihilism and passive nihilism constitutes a disjunctive synthesis. And today this ‘synthesis’ repeats itself in the tension, or rather false antagonism, between post-politics and terrorism. The passive nihilism of post- politics expresses itself as an inability to think of the antagonistic element in politics; hence the emptying out of its constitutive dimension, ‘the political.’ However, this blindness is itself constitutive; it is what constitutes post-politics as a form of politics, a politics in which already recognized groups negotiate interests without challenging the existing hegemonic relations. Politics as game playing without the possibility of changing the game, as a form of hyper-politics. Passive nihilism of post-politics consists in an impossibility of putting a distance to the actual reality, in the impossibility of sublimation in the sense of sustaining the gap between the actual and the virtual, reality and the Real, by maintaining a space for objects considered ‘impossible,’ by giving ‘value to what the reality principle does not value’ (Zupančič 2003: 78). And when the virtual collapses into the actual, politics disappears, the radical questioning of the social becomes impossible. Insofar as politics involves ‘the ongoing critique of reality’ (Bauman 2002: 56), post-politics signifies the foreclosure of politics. In this sense, post-politics brings with it an internal perversion of democracy, a ‘post-democratic’ politics that eliminates real dispute by assuming that everyone is already included in politics and that remaining problems can be dealt with through expert systems (Rancière 1999: 116). Despite its hegemony, however, the lack, or rather the suppression, of antagonism does not make post-politics a peaceful order. Post- politics brings with it a paradoxical violence, the violence of a society bent on neutralizing dissent, rooting out all radicalism, negativity and singularity, a violence that puts an end to the idea of violence as such and therefore can only be met by hatred (Baudrillard 2002: 92- 3). a violence cut off from its object and turning back against that object itself – against the political and the social. It’s no longer anarchistic or revolutionary... It’s not interested in the system’s internal contradictions; it targets the very principal of the social and the political. [...] It answers the systemic exclusion our society practices by even more exclusion, cutting itself off from the social world by indifference or hatred. (Baudrillard 1998: 66) Just as previous forms of violence mirrored the level of conflict, hatred mirrors the level of post-political consensus (Baudrillard 2002: 92). As if the culture of passive nihilism, its zeal for security, leads to the loss of immunity; like redundant ‘anti-bodies’ that turn against the organism in which they live, hatred ‘has something of self-aggression and auto-immune pathology about it’ (Ibid. 93.). Hatred is today’s radical nihilist ‘fatal strategy’ against passive nihilism. So, the lack of antagonism in post-politics is countered with an excess of antagonism, a (self)destructive will to nothingness. Thus, today’s ideological arena looks like a battle ground between un-antagonistic politics and ultra-antagonistic fundamentalism: terrorism. As if when politics is depoliticized, spite is politicized. So, it seems, ours is a ‘one-dimensional society’ in which the distinctions have disappeared, the opposites are united in a nihilistic disjunctive ‘synthesis.’ The threat is, therefore, Janus-faced. Contemporary terror and the war against terror both are part and parcel of the movement from politics to post-politics. And it is in this movement, which is also the movement of nihilism, that distinctions such as reality/representation, biology/politics, terror/war against terror tend to disappear today. After all, the ‘cancelling out of differences’ is a nihilistic principle par excellence (Deleuze 1983: 46). The power of nihilism is a power that pours everything into indifference (see Baudrillard 1994: 159, 163). Bin Laden’s terrorism has so far forced the Western democracy to ‘betray itself’ but this did not, as Ulrike Meinhof envisaged, ‘make the masses rise’ and ‘allow contradictions to escalate’ (Meinhof p. 279). Why? The answer is post-politics, which cancels out differences, upon which politics is based: an obscene system in which dialectical polarity no longer exists, a simulacrum, where acts disappear without consequences in indifferent ‘zero-sum signs’ (Baudrillard 1994: 16, 32). Contemporary terror is post-political in the sense that it is a product of indifferent forces rather than political antagonisms. It is ‘viral’: it emanates in the form of metastasis, bringing with it transparency (disappearance), a flattening process characterized by the exacerbation of indifference and the indefinite mutation of social domains (Baudrillard 1990: 7, 50). Hence the obscene indistinction between terror and the war against terror, which, for all their enmity against each other, resemble twins: they share the same logic on the basis of contradiction and disparity, simultaneously expressing convergence and divergence, similarity and difference, without, of course, perfect identity. Both depict a world of either/or and world politics as a clash between McWorld and Jihad. Both speak in absolutes. Both fetishize their own ‘way of life’ (religious orthodoxy, and security as a new religion). And finally, both have their own priests. Which is why Baudrillard had asked years ago: ‘Why does the World Trade Center have two towers’ (1988a: 143)? Like the twin towers of the WTC, terror and the war against terror mirror each other, confirming the irrelevance of distinction and opposition in a postmodern world. The obscenity of terror is the obscenity of post-politics itself. Terror exists in order to hide that post-politics itself is terroristic in spirit. The apocalypse that was unimaginable to Dürer is a world in which McDonald’s can campaign against obesity, the politics of security can fight against terror, the war against terror can claim to bring democracy to the people it tramples, the ‘victim’ goes berserk and kills even more people than terrorists, and so on.

Responsibility is characterised by humility and a desire to learn. When encountering the other, one is called on to receive newness as a gift—new eyes to see the existing world—rather than with the inherent defensiveness of a master (host) with something to preserve. Responsibility requires sacrifice of surety and conservation. It opens the self, the home, and the world to the uncertainty of change that the new arrival presents. One does not, as host, deserve or possess a right to exploit and to unilaterally determine the conditions for another’s being. Instead, one is called on to understand one’s own responsibility as the scope of action that one can engage to respond to the other while preserving the other’s alterity. The responsibility is to act without dominance, arrogance, or self-preservation in response to the other. As such, in the Anthropocene, the only anthropocentrism that is acceptable is the recognition of a human’s unique responsibility for hospitality as a precept for encounter. Although Derrida notes that perfect hospitality is unattainable, responsibility is not. He advises that one acts responsibly when one locates the impetus for action in the context of the transient moment of welcome. Put another way, Derrida (2000) determines that “it is in the name of unconditional hospitality [which gives its meaning to all welcoming of the foreigner] that we must try to determine the best conditions, that is to say some particular legislative limits, and especially a particular application of the laws” (p. 7). Hospitality becomes the process by which the world addresses the key questions of the Anthropocene, including: What will the future look like? How should we conduct business, work, and live? What role will technology have in this? What forms of production and communication of knowledge are suitable for the Anthropocene? Finally, what narratives do we need in order to better understand the planetary role of humans as actors that afect the entire Earth system? (Trischler, 2016, p. 322) In society, and in the education leading up to full participation in citizenry, hospitality becomes the milieu for a constant mediation between self and other, guided by absolute alterity, and animated with humility. This act of mediation, although itself imperfect, is responsibility; and it becomes the fertile ground for ethical law, policy, and action. What does it mean to know, where is here, and what is now? Derrida (2000) states “Nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’hospitalité” and repeats, in English, “We do not know what hospitality is.” (p. 6). In follow up, he asks two questions that shed light on how to consider “knowing”: “will we ever know?” and “is it a question of knowledge and time?” (p. 6). This suggests that the epistemological implications of hospitality are subject to infuences of time and place, and that “knowing” is a necessarily incomplete action. To begin, alterity and humility offer good points of departure in comprehending the epistemological structure of hospitality. The other presents at the threshold of the host’s home and immediately provokes an epistemic challenge: Is the host a master of her home? Does she possess a certain knowledge of what is good and normal? In the model of knowing which asserts the host as master, there is an assumption that the stranger, the other, is less knowledgeable and might beneft from instruction. One can directly perceive how this imbalance in knowing would produce hierarchies, imperialisms, and inculcations. The host possesses the arrogance of certainty. This epistemological structure lies at the heart of many of the abuses of xenophobia and exploitation of both society and the natural world. Hospitality, on the other hand, inverts the assumption of knowledge, if not the imbalance of power. Within the paradigm of hospitality, the other presents at the threshold of the host’s home and presents an opportunity for learning. As noted previously, the guest is an opportunity to see an existing home anew. The guest is a teacher and the host is vulnerable to the exposure of new learning. The guest maintains her alterity—the host can make no claim of complete understanding or of superior knowledge. Instead, the host, with humility of attitude, becomes hostage to the other. Referring to Levinas, Derrida (2000) suggests that “the exercise of ethical responsibility begins where I am and must be the hostage of the other, delivered passively to the other before being delivered to myself” (p. 9). It is through this positionality, and only through the encounter with otherness, that one learns. A second consideration which relates to this epistemological structure of knowing, and to the incompleteness of knowing, is the way in which hospitality occurs in time and place. Derrida (2000) observes “if we do not know what hospitality is, it is because this thing which is not something is not an object of knowledge, nor in the mode of being-present” (p. 10). Because it exists in a tension, in an aporia, and in the double bind of acting towards an impossibly perfect welcome, hospitality is not a relic of history. It is not a codifiable known that can be categorized and ofered clear nomenclature. It is instead a movement, a gesture toward the horizon of the yet unknown and of the always unattainable. It is a movement now toward a future that is yet to come. Derrida (2000) contends: what we call hospitality maintains an essential relation with the opening of what is called to come [à venir]. When we say that ‘We do not yet know what hospitality is,’ we also imply that we do not yet know who or what will come… (p. 11) Hospitality presents a tension between the act of welcome in the present moment and the “essential relation” with what is to come. In the same way, there exists a tension with the question of place. Hospitality exists at the threshold. Yet, for there to be a threshold, there must be both an inside and an outside. As Derrida (2000) states, “to take up the figure of the door, for there to be hospitality, there must be a door. But if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality” (p. 14). The impossibility of hospitality is that it must overcome itself. It is both the obstacle to and the condition for freedom, for knowing, and for ethical action. This tension should not result in paralysis, but instead compel a relentless drive for what is to come, for what can be overcome at the threshold, and for responsibility.

The tragedy, for it is a tragedy of destiny, is that the two antagonistic terms of this antinomy are not symmetrical. There is a strange hierarchy in this. The Law is above the laws. It is thus illegal, transgressive, outside the law, like a lawless law, nomos anomos, law above the laws and law outside the law (anomos, we remember, that's for instance how Oedipus, the father-son, the son as father, father and brother of his daughters, is characterized). But even while keeping itself above the laws of hospitality, the unconditional law of hospitality needs the laws, it requires them. This demand is constitutive. It wouldn't be effectively unconditional, the law, if it didn't have to become effective, concrete, determined, if that were not its being as having-to-be. It would risk being abstract, utopian, illusory, and so turning over into its opposite. In order to be what it is, the law thus needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or pervert it. And must always be able to do this.

For this pervertibility is essential, irreducible, necessary too. The perfectibility of laws is at this cost. And therefore their historicity. And vice versa, conditional laws would cease to be laws of hospitality if they were not guided, given inspiration, given aspiration, required, even, by the law of unconditional hospitality. These two regimes of law, of the law and the laws, are thus both contradictory, antinomic, and inseparable. They both imply and exclude each other, simultaneously. They incorporate one another at the moment of excluding one another, they are dissociated at the moment of enveloping one another, at the moment (simultaneity without simultaneity, instant of impossible synchrony, moment without moment) when, exhibiting themselves to each other, one to the others, the others to the other, they show they are both more and less hospitable, hospitable and inhospitable, hospitable inasmuch as inhospitable".

In his first publication focused explicitly on education, “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How it Ends,” Derrida challenges the image of the philosophy professor presupposed on each side of the debate over the reforms. He makes this challenge by questioning the coherence of the teaching body, in three ways. First, Derrida exploits the ambiguity in the phrase “teaching body [corps enseignant].” More commonly referring to the faculty as a whole, Derrida uses it to speak also of a professor’s physical body, and he suggests that the inability to decide the proper referent between these two uses follows from the teacher’s representative function. He makes this point by discussing his own position in the system: A repeater, the agrégé-répétiteur should produce nothing, at least if to produce means to innovate, to transform, to bring about the new. He is destined to repeat and make others repeat, to reproduce and make others reproduce: forms, norms, and a content. . . . With his students he must therefore make himself the representative of a system of reproduction. (WP, 75) In its ideal, the répétiteur’s sole job is to transmit philosophical knowledge generated elsewhere in the system. Lying at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, his individual body is irrelevant, fully absorbed into this structure of representation (and I use the male pronoun here to mark the fact that while there were female philosophy teachers at the time, the ideal remained male, something that Derrida here does not call into question). However, in a move resembling his early strategy of deconstruction, Derrida elevates this marginal figure to stand for all professors in the system. He argues that traditionally understood, all teaching functions according to a classical logic of signification, being the transmission of signified content by means of signifiers. All teachers are thus “repeaters” of a sort, even those supposedly the source of new philosophical knowledge. Further, Derrida displaces the traditional opposition by challenging the view that the individual teacher’s body is fully absent from the scene. Rather, he speaks of this body’s “erasure” and “withdrawal.” Both present and absent, the individual teacher retains a measure of sovereignty (at the end of the essay Derrida speaks of his body as “glorious,” evoking the Sun-king [WP, 90]), and so his body resists disappearing fully into the workings of the system. That is, no repeater ever purely repeats, for as an individual body he is always the site of an alternative teaching. The reference of the “teaching body” thus remains indeterminate, reducible to neither the individual nor the system.

Second, Derrida destabilizes the dominant understandings of the philosophy professor by arguing that there is a further division at work in the individual répétiteur’s body. This division arises from the fact that teacher is charged with transmitting material he no longer believes in, content he has criticized at length in his research, and with dispensing “technical advice in the name of a jury and canons that in his eyes have been discredited.” Derrida argues that this double structure carries over to the seminars the répétiteur teaches at the École, since there “he tries to help the ‘candidates,’ all the while introducing, like a long stream of contraband, premises that no longer belong to the space of the general agrégation, that even undermine it more or less underhandedly” (WP, 77). In addition, the students themselves frequently share the same attitude, believing that the material they must study for the test is already outdated. At best, Derrida suggests, the two “exchange complicit winks” (WP, 76), agreeing to play by the rules of a suspect system in order to succeed.

Having rescinded its previous programmatic interference with market-produced existential uncertainty and insecurity, and having on the contrary proclaimed that the removal, one by one, of the residual constraints imposed on profit-oriented activities was the prime task of any political power that cares for the well-being of its subjects, the contemporary state must seek other, non-economic varieties of vulnerability and uncertainty on which to rest its legitimacy. That alternative seems to have been recently located (first and most spectacularly, but by no means exclusively, by the recent US administration) in the issue of personal safety : current or portending, overt or hidden, genuine or putative fears of the threats to human bodies, possessions and habitats – whether arising from pandemics and unhealthy diets or lifestyle regimes, or from criminal activities, anti-social conduct by the ‘underclass’, or most recently global terrorism. Unlike the existential insecurity born of the market, which is if anything all too genuine, profuse, visible and obvious for comfort, that alternative insecurity with which the state hopes to restore its lost monopoly on the chances of redemption must be artificially beefed up, or at least highly dramatized to inspire a sufficient volume of fears, and at the same time outweigh, overshadow and relegate to a secondary position the economically generated insecurity about which the state administration can do next to nothing, nothing being what it is particularly eager to do. Unlike in the case of the market-generated threats to livelihood and welfare, the gravity and extent of the dangers to personal safety must be presented in the darkest of colours, so that the non-materialization of the advertised threats and the predicted blows and sufferings (indeed, anything less than predicted disasters) can be applauded as a great victory of governmental reason over hostile fate: as a result of the laudable vigilance, care and good will of state organs. In France, the Chirac versus Jospin presidential duel of 2002 degenerated as early as in its preliminary stages into a public auction in which both competitors vied for electoral support by offering ever harsher measures against criminals and immigrants, but above all against immigrants who breed crime and the criminality bred by immigrants. 2 First of all, body, personal possessions, home, neighbourhood). On 14 July 2001 Chirac set the infernal machine in motion, announcing the need to fight ‘that growing threat to safety, that rising flood’ in view of an almost 10 per cent increase in delinquency in the first half of the year (also announced on that occasion) and declaring that a ‘zero tolerance’ policy was bound to become law once he was re-elected. The tune of the presidential campaign had been set, and Jospin was quick to join in, elaborating his own variations on the shared motif (though, unexpectedly to the main soloists, but certainly not to sociologically wise observers, it was the extreme right-wing voice of Le Pen that rose to the top as the purest and so the most audible). On 28 August, Jospin proclaimed ‘a battle against insecurity’, vowing ‘no laxity’, while on 6 September Daniel Vaillant and Marylise Lebranchu, his ministers of internal affairs and justice, respectively, swore that they wouldn’t show any tolerance of delinquency in any form. Vaillant’s immediate reaction to the attacks in the United States on 11 September had been to increase the powers of the police aimed principally against the juveniles of the ‘ethnically alien’ banlieues , the housing estates outside Paris where, according to the official version (the version convenient to the officials), the devilish concoction of uncertainty and insecurity poisoning Frenchmen’s lives was brewed. Jospin himself went on castigating and reviling, in ever more vitriolic terms, the ‘angelic school’ of the softly-softly approach, which he had sworn never to belong to in the past and never join in the future. The auction went on, and the bids climbed skywards. Chirac promised to create a ministry of internal security, to which Jospin responded with a commitment to a ministry ‘charged with public security’ and the ‘coordination of police operations’. When Chirac brandished the idea of locked centres for confining the juvenile delinquents, Jospin echoed the promise with a vision of ‘locked structures’ for them, outbidding his opponent with the prospect of ‘sentencing on the spot’. No reminder is needed that little if anything has changed since. More than to anything else, Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s successor, owed his convincing electoral success to playing on popular fears and the desire for a strong power able to arrest and fight back against the further fears bound to plague the future. He goes on using the same game to chase away from the newspaper headlines the news of the unemployment figures relentlessly rising under his presidency and the relentless fall in the incomes of the majority of the French. To do that, he resorts to the tested expedient of collapsing the issue of existential security into that of street violence, and street violence into that of the newcomers from the poor regions of the planet. A mere three decades ago, Portugal was (alongside Turkey) the main supplier of the ‘guest workers’ the German burghers feared would despoil their homely townscapes and undercut their social compact, the foundation of their security and comfort. Today, thanks to its sharply improved fortunes, Portugal has turned from a labour- exporting into a labour- importing country. The hardships and humiliations suffered while earning bread in foreign countries have been promptly forgotten, 27 per cent of Portuguese have declared that neighbourhoods infested with crime and foreigners are their main worry, and the newcomer politician Paulo Portas, playing a single, fiercely anti-immigration card, helped a new right-wing coalition into power (just as Pia Kiersgaard’s Danish People’s Party did in Denmark, Umberto Bossi’s Northern League in Italy, the radically anti-immigrant Progress Party in Norway – and virtually all the mainstream parties in the Netherlands; in other words, in countries that not so long ago sent their children to faraway lands to seek the bread their homelands were unable to offer). News like this easily makes it to the front page (like the panic-mongering, xenophobic title aimed at ruffling feathers, ‘UK plan for asylum crackdown’, in the Guardian of 13 June 2002; no need to mention the banners on the tabloid front pages … ). The main bulk of the planet-wide immigrant phobia stays hidden from Western Europe’s attention (indeed, knowledge), however, and never makes it to the surface. ‘Blaming the immigrants’ – the strangers, the newcomers, and particularly the newcomers among the strangers – for all aspects of social malaise (and first of all for the nauseating, disempowering feeling of 3 while countries too poor to attract significant numbers of neighbours desperately seeking a livelihood, like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary or Slovakia, turn their wrath against the usual suspects and stand-by culprits: local but drifting, shunning fixed addresses, and therefore perpetual ‘newcomers’ and outsiders, always and everywhere – the Gypsies. A permanent state of alert: dangers proclaimed to be lurking just around the next corner, oozing and leaking from terrorist camps masquerading as Islamic religious schools and congregations, from immigrant-populated banlieues , from the underclass-infested mean streets, the ‘rough districts’ incurably contaminated by violence, the no-go areas of big cities; paedophiles and other sex offenders on the loose, obtrusive beggars, blood-thirsty juvenile gangs, loiterers and stalkers … Reasons to be afraid are many; since their genuine number and intensity are impossible to calculate from the perspective of narrow personal experience, yet another, perhaps the most powerful reason, to be frightened is added: one does not know where and when the words of warning will turn into flesh. Contemporary menaces, and particularly the most horrifying among them, are as a rule distantly located, concealed and surreptitious, seldom close enough to be directly witnessed and very rarely accessible to individual scrutiny – for all practical purposes invisible. Most of us would never have learned of their existence were it not thanks to the panics inspired and boosted by the mass media and the alarming prognoses composed by experts and swiftly picked up, endorsed and reinforced by cabinet members and trade companies – hurrying as they do to turn all that excitement into political or commercial profit. As we, ‘the ordinary people’ occupied with our individual small-scale daily affairs, know of those awesome but faraway dangers only indirectly, it is possible, indeed much too easy, to manipulate our – public – attitudes; to play down or silence the dangers that promise no political or financial gains, while grossly inflating, or even inventing, others, better suited to politically or commercially profitable exploitation. But as Moazzam Begg, a British Muslim arrested in January 2002 and released without charge after three years spent at Baghram and Guantanamo Bay prisons, rightly points out in his book, published in 2006 under the title Enemy Combatant , the overall effect of a life lived under virtually incessant security alerts, such as warmongering, justifications of torture, arbitrary imprisonment and terror, is to ‘have made the world much worse’. Whether worse or not, I would also add: not a bit more secure; most certainly, the world today feels considerably less secure than it did a dozen or two dozen years ago. It looks as though the paramount effect of the profuse and immensely costly extraordinary security measures undertaken in the last decade has been a deepening of our sense of danger , of risk , and of insecurity . And little in the present tendency promises a speedy return to the comforts of security. Sowing the seeds of fear produces rich crops in politics and trade; and the allure of an opulent harvest inspires seekers of political and commercial gain to break open ever new lands to fear-growing plantations … In principle, security concerns and ethical motivations are at cross-purposes: the prospects of security and the intensity of ethical intentions are at loggerheads . What casts security and ethics in principled opposition to each other (an opposition excruciatingly difficult to overcome and reconcile) is the contrast between divisiveness and communion: the drive to separate and exclude which is endemic to the first versus the inclusive, unifying tendency constitutive of the second. Security generates an interest in spotting risks and sorting them out for elimination, and for that reason it targets potential sources of danger as objects of ‘pre-emptive’ exterminating action, unilaterally undertaken. The targets of this action are by the same token excluded from the universe of moral obligation. Targeted individuals and groups or categories of individual are denied human subjectivity and recast as objects pure and simple, located irrevocably at the receiving end of action. They become entities whose sole relevance (the only aspect taken into consideration when their treatment is planned) to those applying the ‘security measures’ on behalf of those whose security is presumed or declared to be under threat is the threat they already constitute, may constitute, or may credibly be charged with constituting. Denial of declared immaterial, if listened to at all. The incapacitation of the humanity of the targets of action goes far beyond that passivity ascribed by Emmanuel Levinas, the greatest French ethical philosopher, to the Other as the object of ethical responsibility (according to Levinas, the Other commands me by his weakness , not strength; he gives me orders by refraining from giving them; it is the unassumingness and the silence of the Other that trigger my ethical impulse). Using Levinas’s vocabulary, we may say that casting others as ‘security problems’ leads to an effacing of ‘face’ – a metaphoric name for those aspects of the Other that put us in a condition of ethical responsibility and guide us to ethical action. Incapacitating that face as a potential (unarmed, non-coercive) force evoking or awakening the moral impulse is the hub of what is understood by ‘dehumanization’. Inside the ‘universe of moral obligations’, Moazzam Begg’s three-year imprisonment without a crime, and torture administered to squeeze out of him an admission of guilt to (retrospectively) justify it, would be an outrage and an atrocity. Deprived of ethically significant ‘face’ by the fact of being classified as a security threat and thereby evicted from the universe of moral obligations, Begg was however a legitimate object of ‘security measures’, declared by the same token to be ethically indifferent or neutral (‘adiaphoric’ in my vocabulary) by definition.

Derrida’s account of hospitality begins at the threshold of an encounter: on one side resides the sovereign host and on the other side, the foreign other. This threshold is defined not in the mere opposition of these two agents, but rather at the moment of a decision. The host must decide how she will welcome, if at the all, the foreigner as a guest into her home. Therefore, the foreign other’s arrival plays a constitutive role by allowing the host to recognize herself as a sovereign, as the deciding agent. With this recognition, the host can either allow the other access to herself, to her home, or ban the other to the outside. The decision rests solely with the host whether or not the other will be allowed into this relationship. What should appear as a familiar and politically potent scenario of host and guest inaugurates the paradigm of ethics for Derrida. The possibility of ethics takes place with the decision of the host, as sovereign, to allow the guest into a hospitable relation.2

Traditionally, the decision of the host finds refuge in the laws set for hospitality. In an interview entitled Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility, Derrida explains that traditional hospitality belongs to the same logic as gift-giving. In other words, the laws of hospitality function within the economy of an exchange.3 The gift of traditional hospitality must be accompanied with a gift that recognizes the hospitality such as a greeting card, beer, or perhaps even the simple exchange of a name. The laws of hospitality, therefore, prescribe that the host’s decision follows from the logic of a reciprocal exchange. Within this exchange the host’s sovereignty is not only affirmed in the moment of decision at the threshold, but also confirmed with the gift. The gift reinscribes the host as master, as the one who demands, and commands, tangible recognition of her position as the self-identifiable opposite of the guest.

In his remarkable book Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Erik Olin Wright described three possible paths into a post-capitalist society. The Marxist path historically favored a radical break with capitalism in the shape of revolutions. In the light of the tragic consequences of the revolutions of the 20th century, this approach has lost all emancipatory credibility: totalitarian terrorism claimed millions of victims and the statist economy of real socialism simply did not work, least of all for the “labor force.” Social democracy’s path of reform has lost credibility as well, since the interventions of governments and unions did not really succeed in changing the balance of power. For Wright, it is clear that both revolution and reform have exhausted their possibilities. But what could an alternative strategy of transformation look like? Wright proposes that we start taking civil society seriously and “build new forms of social empowerment in capitalist society’s niches and margins” (2010: 303). In other words, he wants us to engage in alternative ways of living that are both attractive and viable, to build “real utopias” in the here and now that anticipate the future and make ever more societies actually move in this direction

Even though this strategy is partly rooted in anarchism, Wright is wary about a radical distancing from the state. What if, he asks, the emancipatory alternatives developed in societal niches actually threatened capitalism? Then the state would intervene, and smash these alternatives to save capitalism. This is why we need to form intelligent alliances with state actors. Contrary to what Marxist theory too simplistically claims, the state must balance very different interests, of which capitalism is just one. In fact, the state could itself develop an interest in introducing an unconditional basic income (UBI) to reduce unemployment and social exclusion in the face of digitalization and automation. Wright argues that a UBI, though it may at first serve capitalist interests, could take on a dynamic that erodes capitalism in the long run: A tax-financed unconditional basic income provided by the state would ... enable workers to refuse capitalist employment and choose, instead, to engage in all sorts of non-capitalist economic activities. ... UBI would underwrite a flowering of the solidarity economy, noncommercial performing arts, community activism, and much more. Unconditional basic income thus expands the space for sustainable socialist—socially empowered—economic relations. (Wright, 2016) Regardless of how plausible Wright’s proposals may be in detail, they show that our quest for new forms of living together must involve responding to three basic questions: Is the envisioned alternative desirable in normative terms? If so, is it practical, self-sufficient, sustainable, and does it prevent non-intended effects? And finally: Is it feasible, are there realistic strategies to enforce and establish it? Which groups of actors could have an interest in this to happen? How can we win them over? What kinds of resistance must we expect? All taken together, these questions form a little manual for transformation.

A more direct ground for the scope of basic income beneficiaries can be found in Levinas’ concept of hospitality39 The hospitality is expanded further and presented by Jacque Derrida. The hospitality is unconditional hospitality. Unconditional hospitality differs from Kantian universal hospitality, that is, conditional hospitality which deprives the other of the right of residence. It can be pointed out that it is not realistic to insist on unconditional hospitality in the situation where even conditional hospitality is difficult. Derrida also mentions the impossibility while requesting for unconditional hospitality:

A nation-state, no matter what its identity is, even if it were a democracy, or whether the majority there is right or left, will never be able to open itself to unconditional hospitality or to the right of unreserved protection. It would never be “realistic” to expect or require such a thing from a nation-state.40

Critiques of modern statecraft reviewed above have often been used to justify working beyond the state to create political economic change. This is a reasonable response. While in agreement with critiques of the ills of modern statecraft, crucial to our argument is that states operate in many ways and that there is analytical and political utility to differentiating modes of statecraft. Here, we lightly describe ‘modest’ statecraft, a mode that does not presume to know what citizens ought to want and be, but is instead focused on enabling possibilities (see Lawhonet al., 2021,2023). It is, thus, based on, and produces, a fundamentally different relationship between the citizen and the state than conventional welfare. In what follows, we explain why providing cash, and providing unconditionally, exemplify modest statecraft.

Welfare has typically provided material goods rather than cash because recipients are, explicitly or implicitly, framed as morally delinquent and, therefore, not trusted to spend money appropriately. Arguments for giving cash, rather than providing material welfare, invert this frame. Many cash transfer pro-grammes in the global south explicitly refuse the label of moral delinquency: poverty is instead seen to result from a grossly unequal (neo)colonial political economic system (Hanlonet al., 2010). There is, thus, no longer a need for a paternalistic state to guide recipients towards the right material goods. In stark contrast to colonial, developmentalist and orthodox socialist positions that reify the authority of experts to direct economic activity, the politics of cash transfers assumes that recipients are better able to assess their needs than the state and responsible enough to adjudicate how best to meet their own needs with available resources (Ferguson,2015; Hanlonet al., 2010).This position, on both counts, forms a sharp contrast to Marx’s derogation of surplus populations (Ferguson,2019).