T11 Book Reviews

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REVIEWS

Farhad Khosrokhavar, Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah (Flammarion, 2002) This is an important and extremely interesting book. It responds to the keenly felt need after the terrorist events of 11 September 2001 for a sophisticated analysis of Islamic terrorism that adequately counters simplistic interpretations such as Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’. The analysis offered by the Iranian-born, Paris-based sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar in Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah is thought-provoking and should be compulsory reading for all those involved in the ‘war on terrorism’. Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah originates from a series of interviews that Khoshrokhavar conducted in French jails with young Muslim men who had been prosecuted for conspiring to commit acts of terror or for alleged membership in radical Islamic networks. The book’s analysis, however, builds on research into the Iranian experience conducted since 1977, and is inspired by the author’s phenomenological explorations of subjectivity and the sacred. This complex intellectual genesis makes this exploration of contemporary Islamic terrorism ground-breaking: by focusing on the subjective experience of martyrdom, Khosrokhavar penetrates to the fundamental significance of contemporary Islamic terrorism and highlights its seemingly paradoxical links to modernity. The theme of the book is the birth of a form of martyrdom in contemporary Islamism, understood as the politico-religious movement first born in Egypt in the 1930s, which justifies the recourse to violence to impose an authoritarian regime in conformity with what it claims is traditional Islamic law. To establish the genesis of this martyrdom, the book starts with a comparative history of the notion of martyr in the two forms of Islam, Sunni and Shi’ite, with references to the meaning of martyrdom in Christianity and the Sikh religion. It demonstrates clearly that while Shi’ite narratives of Hossein’s death in 680 produced a figure of sainthood to be revered, the notion of martyrdom itself remains absent from Muslim tradition, even in its Shi’ite form: Hossein’s death, although the product of rebellion against earthly oppression, was never promoted as a model to be actively emulated. Thesis Eleven, Number 76, February 2004: 115–144 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd [0725-5136(200402)76;115–144;040113]DOI:10.1177/0725513604040113

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This discussion of the genesis of a modern notion of martyrdom is invaluable in the way it provides the reader with the essential information that is needed to make sense of the complex constellation of contemporary Islamist movements. In particular, it highlights the crucial role played by the doloristic cult of the Shi’ite tradition – ‘the Islam of the oppressed’ – in the contemporary perversion of the traditional polysemic notion of djihad. In its traditional form, the notion of djihad indeed conveyed the community’s duty to defend the land of Islam (dar al islam) which, with the struggle against European colonization, became the duty to expand it. Before the end of the 19th century this duty was only a political, military duty, from which the individual could be exempt. Islamism, however, has individualized this duty by drawing on the mystical sense of djihad developed in the Sufi tradition, that of the individual’s inner struggle against the transgression of divine laws. Khosrokhavar thus shows how re-interpretations of Hossein’s death have been used in contemporary times to fuse these two notions of djihad and give ideological legitimacy to an activist pursuit of martyrdom, alien not only to the traditions of Sunni Muslims but also to those of Shi’ites themselves. The book then highlights the contemporary coincidence of two forms of Islamic martyrdom, the first associated with the subjective despair of young individuals denied autonomy by the fact that their community’s quest for national sovereignty has been frustrated. This form of martyrdom is an attempt at individuation that is born of the partial modernization and detraditionalization of specific Muslim societies, which has engendered radically new aspirations for recent generations, fuelled by the Western media. However, many national communities – or non-existent but desired communities as in the case of the Palestinians – have not been capable of fulfilling these aspirations because of the failure of elites to share the benefits of modernization, a problem compounded by geo-political factors. Khosrokhavar provides detailed analyses of cases of failed national-democratic sovereignty: the Iranian revolution and its war against Iraq; the Lebanese civil war; the two Palestinian Intifadas. Despite their substantial differences, Khosrokhavar identifies a common logic of martyrdom grounded in a profound pathology of subjectivity which encourages young men to seek self-realization in martyrdom and become ‘individuals in death’. This mortiferous form of individuation achieves social recognition through the destruction of a demonized other, in its most general form ‘the West’, which is seen to be exclusively responsible for the denial of sovereignty experienced by the national communities to which these individuals belong. Although Khosrokhavar’s analysis highlights the ways the young generations’ ‘thirst for death’ has been re-enforced and manipulated by social institutions such as the state-sponsored Iranian Bassidje or the Palestinian Hamas, it also demonstrates clearly that the initial driving force is an individualistic impulse indicative of the birth of a homo islamicus novus, that is of a fundamentally new dialectic between the individual and the community, which attests to the

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unfolding modernization of Islamic societies. In Iran, this modernization first performed by the Shah’s autocratic regime paradoxically triggered the secularization of religion and the birth of the revolutionary religious logic of Hezbollah. This new form of religious discourse broke with the holism of traditional Islamic culture by individualizing religious discourse. It also established a unity between the religious and the political, quite alien to the strict dualism of the original Islamic faith, when it conferred on religious scholars leadership of the national community, in a project more inspired by Third World anti-imperialistic revolutionary movements than Muslim tradition. The Islamic revolutionary utopia has now lost its appeal in Iran itself and new social movements led by students, women and intellectuals have totally discredited the cult of martyrdom it gave birth to. Its ideology, however, survives in the Middle East and beyond, relayed by translations of the writings of its major ideological leaders such as Shariati. Its continued influence can be felt in the Second Intifada but most significantly in an even more radical cult of martyrdom stripped of any definite political aspirations. This second form of martyrdom is the major focus of Les Nouveux Martyrs d’Allah and is shown to be motivated by a new utopia, the utopia of an imaginary global Islamic community, a trans-national neo-umma, to be realized in an indeterminate future and in indeterminate ways. Since the events of September 11, 2001, this self-destructive form of terrorism, symbolized by the activities of the loose transnational network of Al Quaida, has presented the West with the riddle of a high level of ‘modern’ technological and operational sophistication put at the service of a seemingly non-modern hostility to democratic pluralism. In his analysis of this particular type of martyrdom, Khosrokhavar continues to focus on its close association with a specific subjective experience which puts it in continuity with the cults of martyrdom in frustrated national communities. Khosrokhavar demonstrates that it is likewise motivated by aspirations to individual self-realization but, in this case, frustrated by the alienation associated with the fragmented urban life of contemporary multicultural Western societies. In this respect, Khosrokhavar demonstrates how, in its logic, this form of terrorism is very close to the phenomenon of sects, which have become particularly predominant in the United States and Japan. Whilst the United States was primarily targeted by Al Quaeda’s terrorism, which initially seems to have attracted members from Saudia Arabia resentful of the American presence in their country, Al Quaeda was also successful in recruiting British and French nationals. Khosrokhavar’s analysis focuses on their specific profile, which highlights the important role played by the Islamic diaspora associated with post-colonial globalization. In this respect, he stresses the genesis of a kind of ‘virtual’ Islamic identity among these alienated members of Western societies, fed by the media reports of the conflicts in Bosnia or Israel, which have encouraged an almost paranoid belief in the existence of a global experience of Muslim victimization. This

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identity is only ‘virtual’ as these individuals, the offspring of the first or second generation of migrants from countries such as Algeria and Pakistan, have not had any firsthand experience of real Islamic societies. This group’s Islamic fervor is shown to be motivated by an acutely disarrayed subjectivity, marked by an absence of communal points of reference. The Islam on which they base their identity is shown by Khosrokhavar to have little reality, certainly not that of a civilization competing with Western culture. Rather, it is a mere pretext and, as Khosrokhavar puts it, Islamism really constitutes the shadowy side of a now global condition of modernity spearheaded by the West. In many ways, it is a perverse version of modern narcissism and the obsessive assertion of an essential Islamic difference which accompanies it constitutes an inversion of modern multiculturalism. Khosrokhavar argues that its quest for an imaginary Islamic neo-umma betrays a desperate search for a new universalism, which in fact actively denies the complexity and specificity of existing Islamic societies. More fundamentally, its emphasis on the individual’s will and preparedness to realize his individuality through suicide actively refuses to acknowledge the social role performed by culture in the expression of human identity. Islamic identity, Khosrokhavar suggests, has in a sense become the new symbol of oppression. His discussion of the phenomenon of conversion among socially marginalized but culturally mainstream (Christian) individuals in Western societies highlights the way the utopia of an Islamic community has perhaps taken the place once occupied by the communist ideal of unifying the world’s proletariat. Reading Khosrokhavar’s analysis, one cannot help but be struck by the profound similarities between Islamic attempts to re-assert a unitary identity in the face of the chaotic pluralism of late modernity and an earlier experience of European history: totalitarianism. What is involved is a similar crisis of social cohesion, triggered by globalization, which has re-created forms of social division at the very heart of established liberal-democratic nation-states. In this respect, as Khosrokhavar argues, Islamism is very much the product of the collapse of the bi-polar world and the disappearance of political projects of universality. Despite its highly publicized appeal among the ‘inner city poor’ of the new global metropolis, Islamism, in its transnational terrorist form, exhibits an overwhelming middle-class character that is not so easily explained away with reference to material deprivation or educational backwardness. This middle-class identity attests to the fact that Islamic terrorism is not a highly differentiated social and cultural phenomenon, but rather a fundamental representative of the global experience of modernization. In this respect, Khosrokhavar’s account of the sociological and psychological profile of the young men associated with Al Quaeda is particularly significant, clearly debunking the myth of their lack of integration: whilst some obviously fit the profile of marginalized inner-city youth, a considerable number are in fact highly literate and educated, as are many Palestinian suicide bombers. There

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is often a discrepancy between their educational qualifications and their professional activities, which only feeds their sense of being dominated. As a result, they are much more sensitive to the kind of stereotyping and discrimination that their immigrant status invites than other migrants who accept this as the price to be paid for their integration in Western societies. In many ways, these individuals are the product of Western globalization. Often polyglot, they can easily shift from one cultural code to another as their existential difficulties encourage them to use their education to pursue their lives in more than one Western society and to adopt the nomadic lifestyle of a now globalized skilled workforce. Their general malaise is symptomatic of the difficulty of individual self-realization in the fragmented world of highly individualistic modern societies. Although Khosrokhavar does not discuss it in depth, it is also extremely representative of another crisis which seems to accompany the socio-economic changes of globalization, the crisis of masculinity. The problem revealed by this phenomenological account of the subjective experience of Islamic terrorism lies elsewhere, however. It lies in the relationships that are forged between the religious, the political, the subjective and the social. As Khosrokhavar’s concluding comments on the dynamic but profoundly unegalitarian and iniquitous character of modern societies demonstrate, it is centered on the fate of democratic sovereignty in the highly individualized globalized world. The problem, in other words, is the emergence of a totally self-referential form of individualism, which renders social communities incapable of articulating and implementing projects of political sovereignty over the direction of society, without which the goal of individual autonomy, confusedly pursued through suicidal terrorism, remains unattainable. As Khosrokhavar points out, the self-annihilation of Islamic terrorist martyrdom has indeed a profoundly democratic character, which is totally alien to the traditional universe of Islamic communities. The new martyrdom breaks with the elitist aristocratic vision of religion: the concept of a sacred death asserts a fundamental equality. Here Khosrokhavar touches upon the fundamental problem of the anthropological specificity of modernity, which totally transforms the relationships that exist in premodern societies between the religious, the political, the subjective and the social. To conclude, Khosrokhavar’s book very convincingly fulfils its main objective, which is to demonstrate that Islamic terrorism is not a civilizational phenomenon or a regressive appeal to tradition, but in fact an extremely modern phenomenon. Behind this explicitly stated objective, however, lies an implicit one discernible in the more peripheral comments on Islam and the evolution of the Iranian revolution. If I interpret it correctly, Khosrokavar’s book has a greater ambition, which is to refute the widespread belief of a congenital incompatibility between Islamic culture and modernity, or even more positively to argue for the profound relevance of Islam in the modern

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pluralistic world afflicted by a specific pathology of subjectivity. In this respect, Khosrokhavar repeatedly stresses the profound rationality of Islam, its non-dogmatic character; in other words, its inner pluralism. There is much food for thought in Khosrokhavar’s book to warrant its immediate publication in English, and it seems that its fascinating insights (of which this review provides merely a glimpse) would benefit from a more direct engagement with currents in contemporary French social theory that have been particularly fruitful in analyzing the relationships between religion and modernity. Clearly, truly pluralistic conceptions of modernity must do justice to the possibility of alternative paths to modernity. In this respect, the path opened by Gauchet’s work should not be interpreted as closing the exploration of human spirituality conducted by religion but perhaps in fact as the liberation of individual faith from its enslavement in a social logic of symbolic closure. Reviewed by Natalie Doyle French and European Studies, Monash University email: [email protected]

Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc (The Athlone Press, 2000) Luce Irigaray’s To Be Two is an interesting and provocative text, both lyrical and philosophic. It is rich with poetic imagery, assured in its intellectual critique and generous in offering new possibilities for thinking about the relationship between ‘two’. It is a book concerned with how ‘to be two’. I have always admired that Irigaray does not rest with the deconstruction of existing knowledges: she also dares the task of reconstruction, risking both the ossification of ideas that are only a part of a bigger conversation and the deconstructive desires of others. This bravery gives her work both strength and vulnerability. It is, after all, generally easier to knock down a good home than it is to build a new one. The home that Irigaray attacks in To Be Two has been erected by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, but her critique reaches for other targets too. Irigaray is concerned with a relationship between ‘two’ that is true to the concrete specificity of two subjects who do not give up their specificity nor their subjectivity in the encounter. It is a loving relationship that she is concerned with, but one that resists abstraction, possession or the annihilation of the other; that resists turning a subject into an object – of desire, of thought, of submission. It is the difference between subjects that gives them their identity as concrete others of body, heart, words, sensibility, thought and truth. This irreducible difference of the other that I know in this present way assures me of my own identity, my own interiority, as not ‘the same’ as them. If I annihilate, abstract or seek to possess or ‘merge’ with the other, ‘I’ suffer

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because I also diminish myself: my concreteness, my interiority, my difference from them. ‘What makes me one, and perhaps even unique’, Irigaray writes, ‘is the fact that you are and I am not you’. In this, To Be Two forms part of Irigaray’s long running critique of a logic of the same and of her interest in positioning sexual difference as one of the guarantors of the difference that should be recognized in its place. To Be Two is framed by a prologue and epilogue which suggest ways of being with an other and in nature in this present and concrete sense. Irigaray relates the kind of quiet attention needed to appreciate the breath of the world and the wonder of the seasons to the kind of attentiveness needed to see another in the wonder of their difference from you. This kind of knowing takes work, as it is, ultimately, a knowing that accepts its own not-knowing. A stillness is needed to nurture this delicate relationship of becoming. This is a stillness that appreciates the ‘animated silence’ of the earth and can feel the envelope of air that remains between two and of which they both breathe. The air ‘seems a living being, a bridge, a relationship’. Irigaray uses it here to suggest both a substance that remains between two people, a cloud that veils their being in mystery and ensures their difference from each other, and the possibility of ‘being two’ within this cradle; in sharing the air and in attuning the breath to the inhalations and exhalations of the universe. This attentive listening and sensitive attunement to the earth in its rhythms and to the other in their difference is contrasted by Irigaray with the ‘restless, chattering, forgetful . . . universe of death’ in which, ‘all too often, the living move about’. This is the world of consumption, counting and calculation where subtleties and mysteries cannot be tolerated and relationships are reduced to equivalences, exchanges or competition. The din of the marketplace is too great for the kind of listening Irigaray advocates to be possible there. Irigaray flirts with essentialism here in her evocations of a benign and bountiful force (nature) that is contrasted with what can only seem, in this context, an ‘evil’ culture. But I think this is more than a naive materialism at work. Irigaray employs the example of a way of being in what we understand to be ‘nature’ to illustrate the possibilities of knowing that inhere in this attitude. It is not the ‘nature’ of nature that is important but the attitude toward it. Irigaray is also insisting that we are ‘material’ subjects too, but without defining once and for all the nature of that materiality. There is something that matters, a part of us that is also ‘nature’ and that can attune itself to the rhythms of the world. Nature here is a kind of concreteness, a ‘what is’ rather than a ‘what if?’ Attention to this ‘what is’ leads to a respectful and loving relationship with a ‘concrete, corporeal and sexuate subject, rather than an abstract, neutral, fabricated and fictitious one’. Nature here is, perhaps, not outside the human world but a quieter realm within it. Irigaray’s critiques of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas in To Be Two

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centre around this difference between the concrete and the abstract attitude toward the difference of an other. Her concern is to conceive of a relation between two that preserves the subjectivity of the ‘two’, a knowing and attentive relationship that does not dissolve subjectivity into ambiguity as per Merleau-Ponty, nor see it as a threat to subjectivity, as for Sartre, for whom the relationship with the other ‘resembles hell’. Her critique of Levinas centres on his conception of the feminine as passivity and of erotic relations as being the antithesis of subjectivity. Irigaray proposes alternative conceptions of the erotic, the caress and the intersubjective. These are grounded in a respect that is absolutely the outcome of the irreducible difference between two and which does not exist outside of language, subjectivity or bodies. They are informed by a perception that rises above blind sensation and ‘feeling’, it is not merely directed toward the increase of the intensity of feelings. This kind of perception thinks about what it feels: perception remains aroused by what presents itself. It cultivates the attention required to discern reality, truth, love, the world, and other things as they are rather than as I imagine them to be. Sensation remains more blindly passive in what is felt and does not discriminate between dream, artifice and what is real or true. (p. 44)

This distinction between perception and sensation is very important to Irigaray’s argument and is, I think, the philosophical analogue of the attentive listening advocated in her more poetic prologue. It is important to Irigaray that relations between two have this kind of thoughtfulness to them: that they are no more about abstraction than they are about blind sensations. Her notion of the caress, contra Levinas for example, would include the ‘exchange of words between those who love each other’, a place for intersubjectivity and the recognition of the subjectivity of the other in the consent from each that should precede each caress. Against what Irigaray identifies as a masculinist assumption of a giving up of subjectivity in eroticism (traced through her critiques of Sartre, MerleauPonty and Levinas), Irigaray insists upon the maintenance of subjectivity in eroticism. But hers is also an argument against the idea of a gain in mastery in eroticism. Eroticism should no more serve the needs of power than it should erase subjectivity. This can only be achieved where the subjectivity of each is recognized and valued both as irreducibly different and as what guarantees my own subject position. The emphasis on consent would seem directed at ways to think about eroticism in order to be fully mindful of the subjectivity of the other. A tendency to absentmindedness in this regard is identified by Irigaray in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas to be the outcome of understandings of the erotic that both subordinate the feminine to the other of the masculine and view eroticism as the annihilation of self and other. The contribution of a feminine voice to the conversation about love, because it comes from an absolutely other specificity and not simply from

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the ‘other’ of man, will be something different: a way to love without losing the self and without losing the ‘two’. The feminine perspective is needed in the conversation about eroticism because, for Irigaray, it has something utterly other to add, something no ‘man’ can see. For Irigaray, sexual difference is foundational and irreducible; in fact, it is sexual difference that safeguards us in our difference from each other. There is a part of each subject, irreducibly feminine or masculine, ‘which is not suited to represent the whole of the human being’. Subjectivity therefore cannot be thought of as a one, or a minus one, it must be thought of as a two: a relationship between genders. Philosophy’s problem to date, Irigaray claims, is that it has been trying to think this ‘two’ in terms of a ‘one’. I am sympathetic to Irigaray’s project here in its desire to open subjectivity up to the speculation of a ‘more than one’, but I am also and always (from Speculum onwards) made uneasy by its insistence upon irreducible sexual difference as the basis of a new understanding. For me, it seems in danger of reifying a system of ordering and enforcing difference that contains at least as much potential for shutting difference down as it does for safeguarding it. I would prefer to read Irigaray’s text here as using the model of sexual difference as a way to begin to think about difference per se: differences between each gender, each subject and each sex. This would be similar in its nonliteralness to the reading of Irigaray’s lyrical evocation of ‘mother nature’, a reading that sees this as a way to begin thinking about different kinds of attentiveness toward others. To divide humanity up into only two seems to sell it a long way short of the richness and complexity we find there. We can instead read Irigaray’s emphasis upon sexual difference as a model for thinking about the irreducibility of the difference of an other, of any other, because ‘I’ am never enough to represent the whole. This seems to me to be a very useful place to begin. It is the earlier chapters of To Be Two that contribute most, in my reading, to the development of this argument. Later chapters elaborate elements raised there including questions of noise and silence, sexual difference, abstraction and attention, and a reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. Chapter Six, entitled ‘I Announce to You that We Are Different’, speaks quite concretely about ‘women’ and ‘men’ in terms of the psychoanalytic account of the origins of sexual differentiation. It is here that Irigaray’s apparent valorization of irreducible differences between the sexes seems most disturbing. But again, a reading that takes this as a model for thinking about loving relations rather than a prescription about men and women as such can find much of value there. Being forced to think, and think hard, about what it is that Irigaray is saying is much of what she offers here, as in her earlier work. Because she offers new ways of thinking along with her critiques of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, we are able to be pushed to find new ways to make use of her constructions. Some of Irigaray’s ideas seem disappointingly enamoured of limiting the conception of the social world to only ‘two’ (which

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is, admittedly, twice as interesting as ‘one’). The possibility of conceiving of a more ‘polymorphously perverse’ social world is not addressed. To be able to come to this point in one’s thinking, however, is the gift Irigaray’s ambitious reconstructions give us here. To Be Two offers a thoughtful, provocative and loving discourse in which an ethics is proposed that might bring to love a new good, a good that is not just for one or the other in a loving union, but which would enable them ‘to be two’. Reviewed by Chris Dew Women’s Studies, La Trobe University email: [email protected]

Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid1970s, trans. Gregory Elliott (Verso, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (Verso, 2002); Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn (Verso, 2002.); Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (Verso, 2002) Responding to Martin Amis’ pompous and a-historical musings on Stalinism (communism equated with Hitlerism, the Left as unconcerned with Soviet repression), Christopher Hitchens comes up, as ever, with the perfect response: ‘Don’t. Be. Silly’. Sadly, though, Third Way post-politics and postSeptember 11 international relations debate make Amis seem the one more in step with the march of the times. At such a time, these four new books from Verso offer a much needed intellectual and political antidote. Dominique Lecourt was a student of Althusser’s and was charged with the no doubt depressing task of clearing out the Althussers’ flat at the Ecole normale superieure after Louis’ descent into madness and criminality. Althusser had earlier advised Lecourt against publishing ‘Dissidence or Revolution?’, a tract written in 1978 and included as an appendix to The Mediocracy. This essay – though often tryingly polemical (as Lecourt admits) – fits nicely with the newer piece as an attack on disillusioned intellectuals who have betrayed their vocation, have been seduced by the media spectacle, and have retreated from politics into hand-wringing cautions about totalitarianism. The target is the New Philosophers who, Lecourt charges, merely redeploy tired Cold War clichés, championing a demobilizing dissidence over revolt (thus inheriting Stirner’s mantle), all in a florid style that clearly indicates ‘the mania for standing out’ (p. 151). The new work, The Mediocracy, again targets Glucksmann and Levy (as well as Luc Ferry and Andre Comte-Sponville) – though, 20 years on, Lecourt locates some general coordinates of an intellectual shift, and, thankfully, the

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tone improves. Regarding the intellectual shift, Lecourt’s term for these treasonous intellectuals – ‘the mediocracy’ – signals their desire that things remain as they are, their lack of audacity, vigour, and scope (compared with the master thinkers who came before them), and their obsession with achieving the status of ‘opinion-makers’ within the spectacle. One part of this shift is the much talked of ‘ethical turn’, in which Lecourt detects a retreat from politics, from the desire to change the world. With some melancholy, Lecourt notes the distance travelled since 1968: ‘we knew that politics could touch and shatter people’s daily lives’ (p. 13). (Nevertheless, Lecourt vociferously rejects the idea that there existed such a thing as a ‘pensee ‘68’.) The mediocracy – unlike Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze – refuses to problematize ‘our’ values, opting for privatization and sentimental appeals against totalitarianism when faced with the manifold tragedies of the late 20th century. Here, all questions of responsibility and all hope for rational historical understanding slip away beneath a noisy but vague humanitarianism. For Lecourt, the key factors in this turn are the return to the fiction of the sovereign subject and the gathering power of the society of spectacle (specifically in its effects on intellectuals: ‘literary and philosophical marketing’ or ‘one-minute-thought’; Deleuze, pp. 57–8). This is all convincing stuff, but it must be said that there is a sustained reluctance on Lecourt’s part to discuss the shape of the politics that he is promoting. Are we talking about Althusser’s politics? Debord’s politics? Foucault’s politics? It matters, yet Lecourt is, in the end, irritatingly blank here. It seems likely that Lecourt would warm to Slavoj Žižek’s description of the notion of totalitarianism in the latter’s Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? as ‘one of the main ideological anti-oxidants, whose function throughout its career was to tame free radicals, and thus to help the social body to maintain its politico-ideological good health’ (p. 1). ‘Totalitarianism’, in fact, ‘relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking’ (p. 3). One instance of this, says Žižek, is the elevation of the Holocaust into diabolical evil – non-political, incomprehensible, enigmatic, and casting a long shadow over every radical project. As ever, Žižek tackles his subject matter in both infuriatingly obscure and brilliantly funny and enlightening ways – putting to work his Lacanian theoretical apparatus (the desire of the Other, the little object, a fantasy, etc.) by way of his trademark film scenarios, jokes, perverse twists and rhetorical questions. Žižek’s approach makes the reviewer’s task rather awkward, and so I will simply work through the three books, confining myself to broad brushstroke comments and highlights. A common theme of Žižek’s recent work has been to champion Christianity over paganism and western Buddhism. Importantly, the Christian tradition allows us something truly new; it enables us to begin again – against a paganism that allots everyone and everything a fixed place. Part of this is Christianity’s notion of the external traumatic encounter (akin to the role of

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the analyst in psychoanalysis or the Party in revolutionary socialism), as opposed to the idea of change as an inner journey of self-discovery: ‘Freedom is ultimately nothing but the space opened up by the traumatic encounter . . .’ (p. 58). In this mode, Žižek reads the Pope – with his stubborn principles, with his acknowledgement of the ethical price to pay – as the ‘authentic ethical figure’ over the Dalai Lama with his vague, feel-good spirituality. In, for me, the best chapter of the book, Žižek tackles the Stalinist show trials. In particular, he examines Bukharin’s ill-fated attempts to hold to a subjectivity that cannot in any way be accommodated within a discourse in which Bukharin’s guilt is ‘the guilt of persisting in the position of subjective autonomy from which one’s guilt can be discussed on the level of facts . . . [T]he ultimate form of treason is this very sticking to the minimum of personal autonomy’ (p. 110). In such a situation, the threat or deed of suicide by an accused cannot have even a sniff of personal authenticity and becomes instead a final and ultra-violent counter-revolutionary plot against the Central Committee. What the highpoint of the terror and the divinization of Stalin signal, for Žižek, are not monstrous genius and complete, unquestioned control but instead impotence/an inability to govern. Stalinism’s excess is also, according to Žižek, a sign that we are dealing here – contra the fascist case – with a ‘perverted authentic revolution’ (p. 127): ‘[The Stalinist terror] bears witness to a kind of “imp of perversity” which compels the post-revolutionary order to (re)inscribe its betrayal of the Revolution within itself . . . the Stalinist confession of guilt conceals the true guilt . . . purges are the very form in which the betrayed revolutionary heritage survives and haunts the regime’ (pp. 127–9). Similarly, Žižek declares that the Left’s difficult task is to face the real ‘emancipatory potential’ (p. 131) of even the worst misery of ‘really existing socialism’s’ reality: that is, something has been lost with the disappearance of ‘really existing socialism’. Such assertions are surely deeply questionable. In the past, Žižek has declared that we need to repeat Lenin in the sense of developing new insights and interventions (just as Lenin did in 1914 and 1917, say) for our new times. This formal adherence to Lenin’s legacy sees Žižek distancing himself from Bolshevik authoritarianism. Despite this, and despite his constant theoretical guerrilla warfare of irony and reversal, Žižek again and again returns to a stronger attachment to Leninism – for instance, a certain relish about the revolutionary price to pay (for example, Lenin wasn’t afraid to accept the harsh consequences of his decisions, and doesn’t a revolution require secret police?) – that is surely still susceptible to the criticisms of the libertarian Left. So, yes, Cold War liberal Sovietology is of little help – blatantly ideological, basking in its own assumed empiricist neutrality, seeing only ‘really existing socialism’ as plagued by the problem of ‘dirty hands’. But isn’t there still much of value in the Left theories of totalitarianism that connect Nazism/fascism with ‘really existing socialism’? And are not the various Trotskyist attempts at

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saving the idea of an ‘authentic revolution’ unconvincing beside the libertarian (the Left Communists, Pannekoek, Ruhle, Mattick, Korsch, Castoriadis, James, for instance) critiques of ‘really existing socialism’ as authoritarian state capitalism? Žižek’s orientation on ‘really existing socialism’ is perhaps best read against his much more convincing critique of a Third Way politics and the post-political condition of which it is a part. Here, ‘tight fiscal policy’ is the only choice, and anti-capitalism and class struggle are wiped completely from the political menu. In such a space, ‘New Right populism is the “return of the repressed”, the necessary supplement, of global capitalist multiculturalist tolerance . . . the Third Way Left gets its message back in its inverted-trueform’ (p. 244). New Right populism emerges with the Left’s retreat, as the only antagonistic force appealing to the working class anymore. In terms of the possibility of intervention against Third Way pragmatism and depoliticization, Žižek champions Badiou’s notion of the Event. According to Žižek, the Event ‘is not only “beyond the reality principle” . . . rather, it designates an intervention that changes the very coordinates of the “reality principle’’’ (p. 167). It is worth, I think, quoting one of Žižek’s examples at length: For example, how did General Pinochet’s arrest in the United Kingdom affect his symbolic status? The untouchable all-powerful eminence grise was all of a sudden humiliated, reduced to an old man who, just like any other common criminal, can be interrogated, has to invoke his bad health, and so on. The liberating effect of this mutation in Chile itself was exceptional: the fear of Pinochet dissipated, the spell was broken, the taboo subjects of torture and disappearances became the daily grist of the news media; the people no longer just whispered, but openly spoke about prosecuting him in Chile itself; even younger army officers began to distance themselves from his legacy. (p. 169) Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do began life as six lectures in

Ljubljana in 1989–90. This second edition includes a 90-plus page foreword that covers many of the new themes and shifts appearing in Žižek’s work over the intervening 10 years (and covered to some degree already): the Event, intolerant Christianity over compassionate Buddhism, the abyss of the Other’s desire, the stronger Leninist note, for instance. Of particular interest, Žižek makes a couple of important self-criticisms. First, he renounces The Sublime Object of Ideology’s ‘quasi-transcendent’ reading of Lacan, which ends up celebrating failure. Instead, the real is now read as ‘that which gets lost, that which the subject has to renounce . . . and, consequently, that which then returns in the guise of spectral apparitions’ (p. xvii). This gets politically inscribed in the following way: ‘class struggle is real in the strict Lacanian sense: a “hitch”, an impediment which gives rise to ever-new symbolizations by means of which one endeavours to integrate and domesticate it . . . but which simultaneously condemns these endeavours to ultimate failure’ (p. 100). Second, a note of political radicalization is struck, Žižek seeking to

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move in a Leninist direction (attacking objectionable relations of production) away from a Lefortian praise of democracy that he now reads as a residue of ‘bourgeois ideology’. As Žižek says, the book’s basic insight in developing a Lacanian theory of ideology ‘is that Hegelian dialectics and the Lacanian ‘logic of the signifier’ are two versions of the same matrix’ (p. xviii). As in his more recent debate with Laclau, Žižek wants to save Hegel from a deconstructive interpretation of his philosophy as the unfortunate culmination of the metaphysics of presence. Against Gasche, Žižek claims that Hegel well understood that reflection always fails: ‘the subject qua subject of the look “is” only in so far as the mirror-picture he is looking at is inherently “incomplete” – in so far, that is, as it contains a “pathological” stain – the subject is correlative to this stain’ (p. 89); and ‘Hegel knows very well that every attempt at rational totalisation ultimately fails, this failure is the very impetus of the “dialectical progress’’’ (p. 99). And, against the Derridean criticism of Hegelian monism: The final moment of the dialectical process, the ‘sublation of difference’, does not consist in the act of its sublation, but in the experience of how the difference was always-already sublated; of how, in a way, it never effectively existed. The dialectical ‘sublation’ is thus always a kind of retroactive ‘unmaking’; the point is not to overcome the obstacle to Unity but to experience how the obstacle never was one; how the appearance of an ‘obstacle’ was due only to our wrong, ‘finite’ perspective. (pp. 62–3)

Dispensing political advice freely as ever, Žižek reads the new social movements as a Left victory (a reading apparently reversed a decade later), but warns against a tacit Left accommodation with liberal democracy and with the thesis of the End of History. The Left must not renounce its past – a past that includes the establishment of those very rights and freedoms today appropriated by liberal democracy, a past in which the Left was the most incisive analyst and critic of ‘really existing socialism’. The Left, argues Žižek, needs to simultaneously avoid the following three ethical fates: the ultra-Left enjoyment of marginalization; the social democratic ‘obsessional ethics of compulsively satisfying the Other’s [voter’s] demands’, thereby remaining within the ‘limits of the possible’; and the perverse Stalinist illusion of serving as an instrument of the big Other of History. A fourth Left ethical possibility exists – ‘to mark repeatedly the memory of a lost Cause’ (p. 272): This, then, is the point where the Left must not ‘give way’: it must reserve the traces of all historical traumas, dreams and catastrophes which the ruling ideology of the ‘End of History’ would prefer to obliterate – it must become itself their living monument, so that as long as the Left is here, these traumas will remain marked. Such an attitude, far from confining the Left within a nostalgic infatuation with the past, is the only possibility for attaining a distance on the present, a distance which will enable us to discern signs of the New. (p. 273)

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For Žižek, in the third of his books under review here, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, much of the Left has failed to live up to this ethical possibility when faced with the September 11 crisis: schadenfreude, hysterical defensiveness, and the ‘ethical catastrophe’ of the following Left tendency on those events – ‘Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarise with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism’ (p. 51). On the other side is what Žižek calls the ‘liberal-totalitarian emergency of war on terror’ (p. 107) – a good counterweight to the newly fashionable phrase ‘Islamo-fascism’. Here, torture becomes a legitimate topic of discussion; al-Qaeda members fall between the gaps as ‘unlawful combatants’; humanitarian aid and war become intertwined; and ‘terror’ gradually becomes an ideological quilting point, ‘the hidden universal equivalent of all social evils’ (pp. 110–11) that links reactionary fundamentalists and Leftist protestors. The most important task becomes avoiding the truncated choice of ‘fundamentalism versus democracy’. This is not, argues Žižek, a clash of but a clash within civilizations: thus Jerry Falwell’s and Pat Robertson’s readings of September 11 as a product of American hedonism and liberalism; thus Žižek’s penetrating contention that we are not seeing a contest of McWorld versus Jihad because ‘Jihad is already McJihad’ (p. 146) – contemporary fundamentalist Islam is a product of modern global capitalism. This sort of choice in which (following Stalin) both options are worse is a pervasive feature of a post-political age where (after Agamben) we are all becoming Homo sacer – excluded from political community. The two sides – Bush and Bin Laden – belong to the same field, together the ‘them’ who ‘we’ must oppose. Against the common despairing post-political practical conclusion to all this – a withdrawal into privacy – Žižek champions a new collectivity: Today, more than ever, the lesson of Marguerite Duras’s novels is relevant: the way – the only way – to have an intense and fulfilling personal (sexual) relationship is not for the couple to look into each other’s eyes, forgetting about the world around them, but, while holding hands, to look together outside, at a third point (the Cause for which both are fighting, in which both are engaged). (p. 85) Žižek’s analysis is often brilliantly acute: from his discussion of the terrorist/thriller movie fantasies that existed prior to September 11 (‘in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise’ [p. 15]); to the needed American response – a move from ‘a thing like this shouldn’t happen here’ to ‘a thing like this shouldn’t happen anywhere’ (p. 49); to the Israeli refuseniks as a miraculous interruption of a cycle of violence – an authentic ethical act that treats the Palestinians as neighbours in the Judaeo-Christian sense of the word. Some of his conclusions are also surprising and/or questionable. For

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instance, he calls for the intervention of an international (even NATO) force in the West Bank and Gaza, and for Europe to ‘move quickly to assert itself as an autonomous ideological, political and economic force, with its own priorities’ (p. 145) as a counterweight to America. Sometimes, too, his critique of liberal democracy and liberalism, his praise of the radical risk entailed by the Event, and his love of reversal and hyperbole can propel him towards uncomfortable conclusions that sound all too much like a politics of heroic blood and combat. Here, contemporary cultural studies gets read as largely mere radical chic; and the Frankfurt School is casually dismissed as secretly simply on the side of Western liberal democracy. In a similar way, Žižek’s analysis of Pim Fortuyn as an intersection of Rightist populism and liberal political correctness is important – thus indicating the falsity of a simple-minded opposition between the two forces – but what are we to make of the following? ‘Should we not, therefore, be striving for the exact opposite of the unfortunate Fortuyn: not the Fascist with a human face, but the freedom fighter with an inhuman face?’ (p. 82). Is this not some signal of Žižek’s own Leninist passion for the real when faced with an unpromising political situation? As such, should we not confront Žižek with Laclau’s and Lefort’s ‘bourgeois’ reservations? If Žižek is, to an extent, right that Laclau ends up too much on the side of a pragmatism without a project, weak on a utopian dimension, perhaps Laclau is right in contending that Žižek’s discourse ends up split between a sophisticated Lacanian analysis and an unreconstructed Leninism that is strong on the rhetoric of refusal and reversal of perspective but much less convincing in political terms. Reviewed by Chamsy el-Ojeili Open Polytechnic of New Zealand email: [email protected]

Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Phoenix, 2002) Completed just before the events of September 11, 2001, Bernard Lewis’ book diagnoses the fatal decline of the Middle East with brilliance, prescience, and assuredness. This is a sobering and disturbing account of the descent of a once great geopolitical region into the abyss. There was a time when Islamic civilization was impressive. It was a sophisticated world civilization. Its influence stretched from the borders of China to Spain. As Lewis remarks, it was polyethnic, multiracial, international, and intercontinental. It absorbed the learning of Greek antiquity, synthesised this with Persian and Syriac influences, and added its own advances in mathematics and music. Islam was also a paradox. Its social assumptions were

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feudal and patriarchal, yet it spread across vast distances and tolerated other religions and religious-social communities to a high degree. At its best – represented by Sufi Islam and the Central Asian falasifa – the Islamic sense of world-order was suffused with great beauty and intelligence. Medieval philosophers like al-Farabi and Ibn Sina – or the Andalusian-Spanish philosopher-Sufi-mystic Ibn al-’Arabi – are of real intellectual interest. But, past its best days, Islam reverted to a theocratic mind-set shaped by its origins. Mohammed was the ruler of a state – consequently, Islam always has had difficulty recognizing the separation between church and state, or between secular and religious law. Conversely, Islam lacked the sense of divine or pantheistic natural law that provided the foundation for the Greco-Roman idea of a constitutional state and the corresponding GrecoWestern determination to struggle against despots. Where Roman-style Christianity developed virtue ethics (Catholicism) and iconic-aesthetic ritual (Orthodoxy), mainstream Islam did little more than posit a set of repressive rules. When 10th to 13th century Islam incorporated Hellenism, Islam became unorthodox and interesting. What would have been a renaissance in the context of the Latin West or the Greek-Byzantine East was actually a driver of enlightenment in Islamic states. But this proved to be the exception, not the rule, in the Muslim world. Through repeated renaissances, the West has constantly re-engaged with an anti-theocratic, anti-despotic Hellenic imaginary. These renaissances time and again have laid the ground for the separation of thought from dogma and church from state. By the time of Constantine, Roman society had been through Greek revivals, literary enlightenment, and what amounted to the first great religious reformation separating what is Caesar’s from what is God’s. In contrast, since the time of Islam’s medieval intellectual golden age, these types of movements have been disturbingly absent in the Islamic world. Militant or fundamentalist or theocratic assertions of a repressive legalitarian faith have been substituted for renaissance, reformation and enlightenment. The tragedy of Islamic civilization is well illustrated by the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. In a dramatic burst of energy, Islamized Turks from Central Asia conquered Syria, Anatolia, the Balkans and North Africa. Their challenge to Europe was comparable to that of the Arab Muslims who had once commanded Andalusia. The Ottomans ruled Hungary for a century and a half, and also came close to conquering Austria. That was in the 13th to the 16th centuries. By the beginning of the 17th century, the peak of Ottoman power had already passed. As Lewis notes, in 1606 the Ottomans were forced to negotiate a peace treaty with the Austrians on neutral territory on the Danube, and not as always before in their capital, Constantinople. Hungary was lost to the Ottomans in 1686. The story of Ottoman decline, though, is not one to be measured in terms of fighting power. The real decline is to be measured in terms of the Empire’s lethal incomprehension of modernity. Like Islamic states today, the

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Ottomans – when they did recognize the power of modernity – thought that they could buy this power. After repeatedly losing land wars with Austria and Russia, the Ottomans responded by importing foreign weapons, training and tacticians. Strikingly, this made no difference at all to their long-term decline. Their mistake was to interpret modernity as the command of arms. Modernity in fact is defined by the command of knowledge. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman officials noted the presence of Portuguese, Dutch and English in Asian waters. As Lewis notes, Ottoman efforts to counter European oceanic power were ineffectual (pp. 14–17). The Ottomans did not invest in ocean-going fleets. They were blind to the fact that the most successful modern power is oceanic, global and projected from the seas, not the land. In the mid-16th century, the Ottomans drew up plans for a Suez Canal, and for a canal between the Don and Volga rivers. This, Lewis surmises, was an effort to extend their limited sea power beyond the Mediterranean to the Black, Red, and Caspian seas. The problem, though, was not just that these schemes were abandoned when they became difficult. The real problem was that they were based on an outmoded preColumbian episteme. They defined the world in pre-modern schemas of sea command. In this the Ottomans were like the Venetians, who, for all their brilliance, could not give up their Mediterranean-style galleys and could never make anything of Vasco da Gama’s historic sailing around Africa. The Ottomans worried much more about the 18th-century Russian annexation of the Crimea, and Russian control of Black Sea navigation, than they ever did about Western seaports on the Arabian Gulf. The Crimea had been Turkish Muslim territory dating back centuries. The oceans were an unknown quantity. That was the rub. European domination of the oceans was not just a matter of military might or commerce, but also of knowledge. As Archimedes long ago demonstrated against the Romans, knowledge is power. Islam was the warrior religion par excellence. It understood territorial conquest. The Ottomans learnt how to subsume and accommodate multiple religions and states over vast swathes of territory. But they entirely lacked the modern or Western trait of speculative curiosity. They lacked what the classical Greeks had called theoria. Greed, the drive for power, and mercantile motives drove the Europeans into the oceans. But so did theoretical curiosity. Centuries of renaissance, reformation and enlightenment taught Westerners to value knowledge above law, religion and tradition. At the same time that the Dutch and Flemish were figuring out how to project maps onto a globe, Islamic judges were still prohibiting journeys to Christian Europe (p. 41). The Muslim law doctors resisted the learning of infidel languages and the establishment of permanent diplomatic missions abroad. Through the 17th and 18th centuries, the Ottomans relied on the Empire’s minorities (the Greeks especially) to study medicine in the West. Likewise they entrusted their diplomacy to the ever-curious Greeks.

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In the 19th century, when the Ottomans finally did send Muslim students abroad, the initial motive was to master the secrets of Western warfare (p. 48) – shades of the September 11 terrorists who studied engineering and computing in Western universities. In this world-view, the only Western knowledge worth having was that useful for the art of war. It is remarkable how self-defeating this is. There is no sign that instrumental Islam ever understood that the real strength of Western military power in a global context is its naval supremacy, or that its military power is based on knowledge, and not vice versa. This misconception is bad enough, but what makes it worse is that the Islamic world has never understood that Western wealth also is based on knowledge. Just as knowledge equals power, so knowledge equals productivity. This is not just packaged, formulaic knowledge. The richest states in history – ancient Athens and Rome, medieval and Renaissance Venice, golden age Holland, and Victorian Britain – were all knowledge-intensive. All displayed exceptionally high levels of interest in and appetite for artistic creation, scientific discovery, or intellectual speculation. The latest addition to their ranks – the United States – exhibits the same characteristics. The popular, even pervasive, contemporary myth in the Middle East is that the West oppressed, exploited and aggrandized its way to wealth and power. In fact, such episodes usually cost it dearly. Extracting ‘gold’ from colonized domains can never match the administrative or political outlays involved. This pitiless calculus destroyed the Romans. Spain vegetated for centuries under its weight. The British gave it up before it bankrupted them. The great wealth of states does not come from land but from knowledge. Yet, somehow, the myth persists that Western powers – even in their most gasoline populist moods – have not learnt this through and through. As long as resource-grabbing imperialism is blamed for the woes of the Middle East, and the fires of resentment against Western productiveness are fanned, the principal wealth of the region will remain lucky wealth like that of oil. Oil is not the prize of the Middle East. It is its greatest curse. It papers over the region’s systemic lack of industry. When the oil runs out, fortunate states like Saudi Arabia will join the ranks of their poor neighbours. Nowhere in the region is there any underlying knowledge economy to drive economic growth and stave off escalating unemployment and poverty. Indeed, those fighting ‘imperialism’ have adopted ignorance – in the guise of religious fundamentalism – as a badge of pride. Today, what passes for modernity in the Middle East is perverse. It dangerously blends imported modern technology and archaic ideology, lazy oil wealth and minimal industry. The region has falling per capita income. The total exports of the Arab world, excepting oil, are less than that of Finland (p. 52). The Middle East’s most famous export now is terror. The United Nations’ ‘Arab Human Development Report 2002’ makes disturbing reading. It portrays long-term declining rates of private and public investment. In the

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first half of the 1990s, when South Korea’s real wages grew by 50 per cent, the region registered stagnant or declining real wages. In 1998 the entire region had three (per million population) technology creation patents awarded to it. Finland had 187, the United States 289, and Japan 994. It had two websites per 10,000 persons compared with 30 for Latin America; 10 per cent of females were in some form of tertiary education compared with 49 per cent in Europe; 38 per cent of the region was illiterate compared with 1.4 per cent in Eastern Europe and the CIS. The authors of this report understand the conditions of freedom required for a knowledge society, and the power of such a society. Yet they can also assert that Israel’s illegal occupation of Arab lands is one of the chief obstacles to regional progress. That occupation may be unjust. But, both on the part of the Israelis and the Arabs, the conflict over Palestine elevates land into a metaphysical value that checkmates progress. The fetish of land helps us understand why the economic problems of the region are not just economic but also intellectual. The region has never experienced renaissance or reformation. Its only enlightenment was in the 10th to 13th centuries. As long as land remains the icon of progress, the mentality of the region remains feudal. Women today in the Middle East still live in gilded or desperate subjection. Monarchies, dictators, theocrats, patrimonial bosses and military chiefs dominate the politics of the region. Its diplomacy is a mix of court intrigue and bullying. Petitioners are mistaken for citizens. The signs of political degeneration are legion. It was the rich scions of America’s two-faced ally, Saudi Arabia, who funded Osama bin Laden. University graduates-turned-killers dream of distant medieval glories dressed up in crude religious garb. No Islamic equivalent of Christian Democracy or Christian Socialism exists. The best achievement of the region, Turkey’s semi-democracy, practises a murderous nationalism on its Kurdish population. All normal routes to reform are closed. There is an iron-clad case for a Palestinian state. But how is such a thing possible when Yasser Arafat’s notion of state finance is to personally hand cash to his cronies like a neo-feudal boss? England had an exchequer independent of the king in the 12th century. Nine centuries later, this is still news to a political movement that wants statehood and international support. No political settlement of the Palestinian question is possible without rational state building. Likewise, no attempt at a ‘soccer-democracy’ in Iran will be successful unless there is in place a plausible model of a modern constitutional and procedural state. It is for this reason that the Americans conceived the strategy of a ‘revolution from above’ in Iraq. The rationale of a reconstructed Iraq is to provide a regional prototype for an industrious state that does away with patronage. This means lawful and honest administration. It means business enterprise based on knowledge not on the lucky extraction of natural resources. It means a constitutional state that fairly treats all religious, ethnic and regional

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groups. It means global traffic in goods, services, and ideas. But, above all, it means renaissance, reformation and enlightenment. This latter expectation is very difficult to achieve. Revolutions from above can work. The United States’ occupation of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan after the Second World War are cases in point. But these occupations had their limits. They produced quietistic, eunuch states – states that are responsible, procedural, rational, but unimaginative and unassertive. These are infinitely better than despotic and totalitarian states. But they are nonetheless missing something important. There is no comparing the exceptional intellectual talent that came out of aggressive inter-war Germany with the ordinary talents of contemporary pacificist Germany, a state scared of its own shadow. The inter-war talent fled to the United States. One of the problems of today is that the Middle East will again avoid renaissance, reformation and enlightenment. For a while it seemed as if the Ottoman Empire was open to real reform of itself in the 19th century. But it is interesting to note what happened then. One of Bernard Lewis’ most interesting observations is about the ambiguous role of secularism in Middle East reform politics. Ottoman liberals seized on secularism as a kind of easy enlightenment (pp. 107–129). It was the only European ideology ever to be really successful amongst Ottoman Turkish and Arab intellectuals, largely because it was anti-Christian (p. 116). The ideology of secularism was of French inspiration (pp. 116, 126). The educated elites of 19th-century Constantinople were predominately francophile in sentiment. Ottoman reformers drew their ideals from French models. Secularism was a kind of French bastard enlightenment. It allowed postrevolutionary French society with its Catholic majority to evade the question of reformation, both in the original Roman sense of the separation of church and state, and in the subsequent Protestant sense of privatizing religion (i.e. making it an inner experience). The ideology of secularism allowed, for instance, the French Communist Party to substitute itself for an unreformed church aspiring to control both state and spirit (through ‘ideological state apparatuses’). The near farcical set piece of the French Communist Party atheist mayor vs. the local reactionary Catholic priest is the product of a society that equates enlightenment with neo-religious atheism, and that has thereby avoided the principle questions of both enlightenment and reformation. The ideology of secularism offered the Ottomans and their 20th-century successors in Iraq, Syria and Turkey a way of having enlightenment without renaissance (classical revival, neo paganism, etc.) or reformation. At first glance, this looked good. The ‘tri-colore’ of nationalism, socialism and republicanism was the harbinger of the secular state. Reform movements arose that spoke a Franco-European political lexicon. But the states that were shaped over the long term by these movements were dictatorial or dysfunctional. Typical of the slide from reform to dictatorship is the case of Michel Aflaq,

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the Greek Orthodox Christian who founded the multinational non-confessional Baath (‘resurrection’) Party. Aflaq studied at the Sorbonne in the late 1920s, and took back with him to Syria and Iraq an odd mix of Leninism, fascism, trans-national nationalism, the mysticism of struggle and anti-Western sentiment. This pan-Arab secularism was a perverted parody of nationalist, socialist and republican sentiment. Such a parody is created when the broader and deeper threads of Western civilization – in particular its high regard for knowledge – no longer inform the ‘tri-colore’ of 19th-century ideology. The Middle East today produces many distinguished exiled and internal critics with high ideals. But their social criticism remains trapped in the ‘tricolore’ mould. There is no reason to expect that their ideas in power would not repeat the tragic cycle of the past. This has nothing to do with the honesty or courage of these critics. It has everything to do with the causality of cheap enlightenment. Cheap enlightenment produces secular states that have a pseudo-faith to propagate – nationalism, ‘Arab socialism’, Saint-Simonianism, or just simply the republican glory of l’état. Without the context of renaissance and reformation, republicanism turns into a republican praetorian guard, and the nation into a death camp. Secularism also makes bad enemies. Invariably, pseudo-faiths come into conflict with various strains of fundamentalism. Were not the anti-semitic, anti-industrial Action Française or the Gaullist-era radical right antirepublican Catholic terrorist sympathizers in France a genus of this, as much as today’s Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalists? These populations can’t and don’t distinguish between law and faith, and fight back against the secular state in the name of their religion. Without the forces of renaissance or reformation to discipline it, this religion only knows the pseudo-enlightenment of a technological magic imaginary – terror is just a species of this – and ever-depleting intellectual resources. If the West has a responsibility for the fatal course of the Middle East, it is because of the French ideology. This ideology was a result of the French themselves evading the major questions of modernization. That evasion was then passed onto the Middle East where it was amplified by local motivations and constraints. The interesting question will be whether the Americans can do any better than the French? The American strength is that they have never dodged the religion question. In some ways, America today is the most religious nation on earth, and yet it is firmly anchored in the experience of renaissance, reformation and enlightenment. It is this triumvirate – and not technology, money or missiles – that are the true drivers of modernity. There is no guarantee that the Americans can successfully translate their historic experience into a very different geopolitical environment. The understandable temptation will be to construct a moderately efficient procedural state in Iraq, and leave it at that. But a real sustainable future for the Middle East requires not only rationalization, and the end of corrupt, dictatorial patrimony, but also the kind of

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knowledge-intensive society that only comes out of the rich, deep experience of renaissance, reformation and enlightenment. Nobody of course can deliver such a thing ‘from above’, but some of the conditions for it can be encouraged in this commanding manner nonetheless. It is for this reason that reconstruction should not only mean civil administration but also the implantation of models of universities, art schools, theological colleges and scientific publics that can prod the historicallysleeping forces of renaissance, reformation and enlightenment to awake. Peter Murphy Victoria University of Wellington email: [email protected]

Peter Wagner, A History and Theory of the Social Sciences: Not All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Sage Publications, 2001) The stakes are high in Peter Wagner’s A History and Theory of the Social Sciences: Not All That Is Solid Melts into Air; at issue is the viability of the sociological project itself. As he sees it, its viability has been called into question from opposite ends of the theoretical spectrum, as divergent perspectives coalesce around the idea of ‘the end of the social’. On one side, many postmodernists have abandoned any attempt to render the social world intelligible in the face of its complexity and lack of evident reason or order; their radical critique of the tradition’s epistemological and ontological premises has led to an emphasis on diversity and singularity, and fuelled an exodus into other modes of inquiry. On the other side, the proponents of rationalist individualism allege that there are no social phenomena, only individuals and their rationality. This (increasingly pervasive) current of thought also rejects many of the longstanding premises of the sociological tradition, but in their case it is in favour of an asocial, individualist mode of theorizing. Against both, Wagner insists on the possibility of maintaining the sociological project, on the condition that it is put on a new footing. To secure its viability, he argues, it is necessary to rethink rather than abandon some of its most deep-seated assumptions. And to this end, he has provided us with a penetrating historical contextualization of the tradition’s development, which guides an original and highly productive project of theoretical and conceptual renewal. As Wagner sees it, the renewal of the sociological project depends upon the renewal of the theory and analysis of modernity. The idea of the advent of an era of postmodernity cannot be sustained, because the ‘imaginary significations’ (Cornelius Castoriadis) of modernity – autonomy and mastery – are far from exhausted. And the supposedly salient features of postmodernity – plurality and indeterminacy – are, despite the postmodernist

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caricature, characteristic of modernity. But in the face of the important but ultimately untenable postmodernist questioning of modes of interpretation and investigation, the very possibility of analysing entire societal configurations and their historical transformations hangs on furthering the opening up of social thinking that was begun with the shift from the idea of ‘modern society’ to that of modernity. And in the face of postmodern disinterest, modernity is the concept that is being used to move the social sciences back to a conceptually informed diagnosis of the present. Wagner’s contribution to this broader project of renewal is already impressive. In his groundbreaking A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (1994), he opened up new avenues for the substantive analysis of the plurality and indeterminacy of modernity with his interpretation of its successive phases as ‘mutations of liberalism’. This history is recalled often here, as the context in which he situates the development of the social sciences. An initial phase of ‘limited liberalism’, based on the exclusion of women and workers from the realms of freedom and responsibility, had a certain coherence in the early 19th century. This coherence was disrupted later that century in a period of ‘disembedding’ in which individuals were uprooted from their established social contexts by the dynamics of industrialization, struggles for the extension of suffrage and the emergence of the ‘social question’. In response to this ‘first crisis of modernity’, a new set of relatively stable practices and orientations – in which nations, class and state were the main conceptual and institutional ingredients – were created, which accommodated the increased demand for participation (primarily through universal political rights and access to consumption), but channelled it in such a way that the viability of the social order was not put into question. Increasingly, however, the boundaries and institutions of ‘organized modernity’ are being eroded, and we have since the 1960s been witnessing a further period of deconventionalization and disembedding – the ‘second crisis of modernity’. This work of comparative historical sociology was not undertaken without the theoretical reflection that Wagner sees as an essential component of the renewal of the theory of modernity, but this part of his project received its most systematic development in Theorizing Modernity: Inescapability and Attainability in Social Theory (2001). His objective in this densely argued work was to develop a theoretical framework which was fully adequate to the plurality and indeterminacy of modernity, and it revolved around two main contentions. First, that the widespread attempt to derive a particular institutional structure from the imaginary significations of modernity – in institutions like democracy, science and the market – must be replaced with an understanding of modernity as a situation, or a ‘condition’, which throws up inescapable ‘problématiques’ of social life – including the question of the certainty of knowledge, the viability of the polity, the continuity of the self, the accessibility of the past and the transparency of the future – which are open

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to multiple interpretative and institutional responses. Second, that the pluralization of perspective that is demanded by and consonant with this conception of modernity can profitably be achieved by bringing a number of divergent perspectives into an intelligible and productive relation to each other. More concretely, he argued for a tri-polar approach, and in particular for theorizing within the space defined by the poles of ‘modernism’, the ‘critique of modernity’, and ‘postmodernism’. These contentions play a crucial role in A History and Theory of the Social Sciences. However, his primary focus here is to explore the ramifications of his project of theoretical renewal for the specifically conceptual level of theorizing. The first half of this collection of essays, initially published as standalone pieces, sets the central modes of sociological theory building and concept formation against their historical – and especially political – contexts. Its interpretive power stems in large part from his understanding of the relationship between theory and history. The social sciences, he insists, developed neither independently of their historical context, nor in a linear and unequivocal relation to it (p. 4), but as (changing and competing) responses to the enduring socio-political problématiques generated by the modern condition. Against this background, ‘classical sociology’ and the political discourses of ‘the crisis of classical liberalism’ at the turn of the 19th century makes sense as responses to the first crisis of modernity. The social sciences’ contribution to the ideas of societal planning and the ‘rationalistic revolution’ of the golden age of capitalism during the 1950s and 1960s appear as participation in the subsequent ‘organization of modernity’. And the postmodernity debate is seen as symptomatic of the second crisis of modernity – what postmodernists refer to when they talk about the all-pervasiveness of simulacra and the disappearance of reality is the fact that, in this second period of disembedding, many more people have become aware of the always already transformed nature of society. This is not a purely historical exercise, though. Its aim is to separate what in the key concepts of the social sciences is historically contextual and should be superseded, and what points to the problématiques that social theorizing still need to address. And it is in this capacity that it forms the background to the project of rethinking the central concepts of the sociological tradition that occupies the second half of the book. Here too, Wagner’s deeply historical approach proves very fertile. His emphasis on historical contextualization, this time applied to the origins and main interpretations of the tradition’s core concepts, allows him to identify with notable clarity the restrictive assumptions with which they have been burdened. The choice of concepts to be treated in this manner reflects not only the main developments within the sociological tradition, but also the imperatives of his own theoretical strategy for its renewal. His analysis of ‘choice’ and ‘decision-making’ is motivated by the rapidly spreading influence of

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rational choice theory. His distinctive (and in some respects surprising) analysis uses an interpretation of the polysemy of these terms to throw into relief its reductive logic. Action and institution have been core concepts of the tradition from its inception, and along with culture, society, polity and modernity (which have the additional distinction of being collective concepts that both postmodernist and individualist perspectives have considered untenable), are also more constructively linked to his theory of modernity. A single argument runs across his treatment of these concepts. The historical context of the emergence and development of sociological thinking has been conducive to an overemphasis on (actual or desired) coherence and equilibrium, and this bias has been built into its core concepts as (usually unacknowledged) presuppositions. As a consequence, the analyses in which they have been deployed have presumed a coherence that did not (always, or in equal measure) exist, and have been unable to deal effectively with the shifts in the nature and degree of coherence in different phases of modernity. They have, in short, been inadequate to the indeterminacy and openness of modern social relations generally, and the disembedding and deconventionalization that is characteristic of contemporary social relations. It is urgent, therefore, that these premises be dislodged, and to this end more open formulations which will allow the coherence which has largely been presupposed to be made the subject of empirical analysis must in each case be constructed. The singularity of Wagner’s central argument has not, however, precluded rich substantive detail in his analyses, nor prevented him from marshalling a multiplicity of theoretical resources and insights for his constructive proposals. The concept of ‘action’ has been burdened with premises about social order, ‘institution’ with the assumption that coherence, agreement and equilibrium are the norm. Sociology has also regularly worked with strong assumptions about the boundedness and coherence of culture and its consistent capacity to determine social action and institutions. And it has been unable to deal with temporality. The sociological concept of the ‘polity’ has assumed some need for, and/or tendency towards, a neat coherence of social identities, social practices and modes of collective rule-setting. In conceptualizations of modernity, the bias towards coherence has taken the form of a belief that there is a single definitive institutional structure of modernity. However, Wagner argues, the sociological tradition’s precipitous and undue emphasis on coherence is most pronounced in the concept that is most truly its own. The emergence of the social scientific concept of society from within 18th century moral and political science discourses has had a lasting influence. The new meaning, denoting the structure of the new connections between human beings arising from political and economic developments, has remained tied to a strong interest in theorizing the form and feasibility of moral-political order. Coupled with a widespread tendency to conflate ‘society’ with the newly relevant boundary of the nation-state, these

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circumstances fed into the identification of society with the integration of a multitude of diverse parts into an effectively bounded whole and ontological premises of holism. The insights that emerge in response to this critique range widely. Some commentators have responded to recognition of deep-seated tensions in the idea of society by arguing for a ‘sociology without society’ (Touraine). But Wagner pulls back from proposing the abandonment of the concept, not because he doesn’t consider the gravitational pull of premises of coherence to be highly problematic, but because calls for the dropping of the concept of society are increasingly coming not from reflection on its restrictive assumptions but from dubious arguments about its decreasing empirical reference, in the form of either rational choice theory’s ‘there is no such thing as society’, or in the idea that there is nothing between the individual and the global system that is characteristic of the growing discourse on globalization. Wagner’s worry that many globalization theorists are mistaking the transformation of institutions for their decline or disappearance lies behind the subtitle of the book. On the other hand, his insistence that the degree and form of the overlap or cleavage between social identities, social practices and modes of collective rule-setting be treated as an open (empirical and interpretive) question acquires a more dramatic hue when he acknowledges that a certain overlap between them may be a precondition for (re-)establishing political agency. Wagner is circumspect on the ramifications of this point, but he insists that it is necessary to go beyond ‘the unsurpassed limit of political sociology’ to rethink the very idea of the need for coherence. But the theme that returns repeatedly in his constructive proposals for rethinking these concepts is the necessity of building into them a recognition of the pervasive and inescapable role of interpretation in human affairs. Taking up the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, he argues that action must be analysed in the context of the ‘situation’ in which it takes place, insisting that such situations are established by the constant, multifaceted and shared interpretive efforts of actors. He spells out some similar conclusions about culture that were less explicitly drawn by the interactionist tradition; beliefs are actualized in particular situations which are always in need of interpretation, and it is through the work of (interpretive) appropriation of the ‘past’ in the minds of present beings that ‘history’ acquires its openness. And in his final chapter, he returns to his main theme, that modernity is a ‘condition’ which poses a series of inescapable problématiques that are given different interpretive and institutional contents through struggles over the situation-grounded appropriate meaning in different sociohistoric situations. In his earlier work (and, to a considerable extent, in this book) Wagner’s thematization of the plurality and indeterminancy of modernity has focused on the historical dimension. But he has now expanded what in A Sociology

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of Modernity was, in principle, a recognition of the cultural diversity of modernity (it incorporated a comparative perspective on Europe, the Soviet Union and the USA) into an explicit and central theme. And to pursue it, he connects his work explicitly with ‘civilizational’ theory and its idea of multiple modernities, co-determined by civilizational legacies. In fact, Wagner’s affinities with civilizational theory are extensive. Like him, its proponents have thematized the historical and cultural variety of modern constellations, and have made the task of refashioning theoretical premises and conceptual infrastructures in a manner consonant with this theme central to their work. And there are also marked convergences in the direction of their detailed elaboration of these themes. This convergence of a growing number of theorists around a broadly shared set of thematic, perspectival and conceptual innovations bodes well for the renewal of the sociological project. The thematization of the historical and civilizational multiplicity of modernity, and the opening up of the theoretical and conceptual means for understanding and expressing it (perhaps best thought of under the broader heading of ‘polymorphous modernity’) is one of the most productive trends in contemporary social theory. Already, it has been able to outflank postmodernism on its own terrain of new levels of pluralism and indeterminacy, and to offer more penetrating insights into the analysis of contemporary social constellations. And it is, as Wagner points out, the most effective antidote to the unacknowledged return of assumptions about coherence that is involved in the spreading discourse of ‘globalization’, to the extent that it presumes that exchange-oriented ‘individualization’ is the universal trend to which all collective arrangements have to adapt. Although Wagner’s contribution to this project of sociological renewal has been huge, there is room to argue with him on detail. To my mind his own premises and language call for a more extensive exploration of the sociological re-appropriation of the hermeneutical and phenomenological philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that he mentions only in passing. Wagner would probably defend this absence in terms of the marginality of such modes of thinking within the sociological field. But the role of interpretation in his account of the modern condition is only the most conspicuous point of connection with these philosophers. More particularly, this current of thought has something to offer the further development of his multi-polar interpretive strategy. In the work in which it was elaborated, there are already hints that its present formulation is not without difficulties. Wagner himself notes that any attempt to relate the inescapable problématiques of modernity to a multiplicity of perspectives is necessarily formulated in one specific language, irreducible to any of the interpretations it aims to relate to one another. It could be added that his proposal to relate the three perspectives has its own presuppositions about modernity and about the possibility of bringing divergent perspectives into a meaningful relation. In short, he is adopting a meta-perspective. In the phenomenological and

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hermeneutical tradition he refers to, there can be found a philosophical elaboration of such a meta-perspective that would not only be consonant with Wagner’s own presuppositions, but enrich the project which is based on them. But we can only admire the magnitude of his achievement. Wagner has succeeded not only in establishing the viability of the sociological project, but in opening up enormously rich interpretive veins in the quest to understand our current condition. Reviewed by Glenda Ballantyne Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe University email: [email protected]