11 Political and/or Literary Community: From Class to Messianic Cosmopolitanism

11.1 Singularity – a European mission?

Among the concepts that frequently cross the various roads of the humanities at the outset of the twenty-first century, one seems to do so in a particularly insistent way: singularity. From its rich disciplinary background and complex theoretical genealogy, meticulously traced by Derek Attridge in The Singularity of Literature (2004) and Timothy Clark in The Poetics of Singularity (2005), in what follows I shall single out only the explosive relation between singularity and community. In recent debates, the latter concept was at least seriously reexamined, if not exactly replaced by the former. If the idea of community acquired its prominence in the wake of the transition from Literary to Cultural Studies, then the idea of singularity took center stage, conversely, through the deconstruction of “culturalism.” The latter was critically targeted for the reimplementation of the imperial cosmopolitan model that was now to be unworked through literature in favour of an emancipating model. In the conclusion of his book Europe, or the Infinite Task (2009), Rodolphe Gasché elucidates this new connection as follows:

After this model, the closed communal horizon saturated by particularities is pierced by “hospitality to the foreigner” (342) in order to open its every “here and now” to unforeseeable alterity (Gasché 2007: 308). Gasché claims that such unlimited hospitality characterized European culture from its very nascence. If a European type of universality is unimaginable without singularity, this is because welcoming the radical stranger is inherent to European cultural heritage. Emerging in the culture of ancient Greece as the cradle of Europe, the idea of a universal humanity not only suspended limitations brought upon particular identities by their respective communities, but also broke open “Europe’s self-immanence toward transcendence, toward the other, and what is other than Europe” (Gasche 2009: 27). Europe is in Gasché’s view an epitome of community “based on mutual help through mutual critique and subsequent correction” (27), even at the risk of thinking that other cultures and traditions are “deemed to be stuck in particularity, incapable of self-transcendence” (343). In Clark’s interpretation, these self-enclosed traditions are exemplified by the American self-aggrandizing multicultural “identity politics” based on provincial ignorance and prejudices concerning the others (Clark 2005:17–19, 23–27).102 Unlike such oppressive mentalities that permanently reinforce their own norm, Europe is conceived as a singular event. “Gasché thinks the irreducible alterity at the heart of this singular event and recalls that the heritage of this event named Europe carries not only a responsibility but a promise.” (Birmingham 2009:108)

Gasché is not the first European thinker to insist on originary heterogeneity as the guarantee of Europe’s singularity in comparison with other civilizations. He can count on an abundantly documented tradition of European cosmopolitan self-perception singled out against the background of others’ provincialism. The first self-congratulatory statement of Europe’s superiority in this regard is Aristotle’s famous opposition between the dialogically open and democratic Europeans (Westerners) and the self-enclosed and barbaric Asians (Easterners) (Politics: III, 1285a 6–7; VII, 1327b24–33). As Roberto Dainotto (2007: 52–87) has shown in his investigation of the modern imaginary shape of Europe, Montesquieu was the first to translate this Aristotelian division between the Western and Eastern civilizations into an intra-European opposition between the Northern and Southern Europeans. Thereupon, Voltaire transformed it into the opposition between Western and Eastern Europe. The polemics of Voltaire against Montesquieu notwithstanding, the superiority of French culture benefited from both these reconfigurations. To whomever the superiority was allocated on given political, social, religious and cultural circumstances – and the extra-European and intraEuropean asymmetries crisscrossed through the history of modern Europe in various ways – the pattern of the enlightened democrats emancipating themselves from the benighted barbarians persisted. Europeans traditionally perceive themselves as latecomers into the world dominated by telluric customs who find themselves obliged to take responsibility for its democratization. This explains why modernism follows Enlightenment in the systematic practice of relinquishing, antiquating, and storing this past in museums. Stating that humankind’s hapiness cannot be reached through remembrance but only redemption, modernist historicism keeps the Enlightenment’s promise of steady progress (Clark 2005:20).

Since redemption always implies postponement, the European spirit distinguished itself from the outset through a patient detachment from the “nonEuropean” or “not-quite-European.” Detachment makes the core of the European modernist idea. It functioned in the same way as Agamben’s normative “anthropological machine,” producing the non-human both outside and inside the human, the latter in the form of “the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form” (Agamben 2004: 37). The cosmopolitan axes human/animal and European/non-European operated hand in hand, engendering “a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of the inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside” (37). Europe was accordingly bringing its spiritual substance to expression by combining the extermination of inadmissible others and the overcoming of admitted others. As Herder significantly put it: “The barbarian subjects, the educated overcomer cultivates” (Der Barbar beherrscht, der gebildete Überwinder bildet) (1989: 706). Being “naturally” prone to cultivation, the European behavior displays human as opposed to animal traits. Herder’s distinction from the Essay on the Origin of Language (1966: 107, 117–121) neatly completes this self-congratulating conclusion: whereas the animal is self-sufficient, the human is other-related. In contradistinction to other civilizations, it was European civilization which operated as an epitome of the human persistently and attentively related to the non-human and less-than-human.

According to Reinhard Koselleck (1973) and Jürgen Habermas (1962), the cosmopolitan idea of Europe was definitely introduced with Voltaire’s Republic of Letters, an open community of heterogeneous citizens established against the nationally isolated and despotic model of the eighteenth century’s absolutist monarchies. Since then, a permanent literary education/cultivation of citizens “organically” belongs to European intellectual formation. Indeed, Herder’s cosmopolis leaves no barbarians outside its gates but, as they are now allowed to enter among the citizens of the world, the pressure of the European Bildungsimperativ placed upon them grows considerably. With the Enlightenment and especially modernism as its spiritual heir, literature becomes the medium of achieving European singularity. As a model expected to be followed worldwide, Europe figures as the prototype of literary (educated/cultivated/detached) community. As regards these expectations brought upon the others, the European model could be applied only by the not-quite-European humans outside and inside Europe who where “naturally” predestined or prepared to educate/cultivate themselves. Those whom nature “was obliged to deny nobler gifts” she has taken care to compensate for this denial by “an ampler measure of sensual enjoyment” (Herder 1997b: 77):

In a word, Herder’s tolerant and democratic vision of the broad human brotherhood could not possibly originate in “brute” Africa but merely in “refined” Europe; its birthplace was Europe’s assumptive cosmopolitan care for the rest of the world. Herder states that the “general spirit” of Europe amalgamates the “tribe formation (Stammesbildung) of many European nations” (1989: 705). Due to numerous modifications and ameliorations of ethnic narrow-mindedness that took place in the course of many centuries in this climatically privileged part of the world, “everything in Europe tends toward a gradual suspension of national characters” (706). Because of its mild climate,

In sum, in Herder’s finely tuned outline of races, which is astonishingly close in its shape to those of his contemporaries and founders of the forthcoming racist doctrines Blumenbach, Lavater and Camper, we find the following:

Like all plants, the environmentally bound non-European races and peoples flourish and wither (571), but in the more mobile and advanced European races culture goes forth (rückt fort; 628), taking on the seeds of withered peoples in order to continue with nature’s vital creation (lebendige Schöpfung; 573). This is why cosmopolitan Europeans are predestined to carry the torch of humankind toward the future freedom.

Yet their singular mission seems to have been incessantly generating obstacles, polarizations and asymmetries in the envisaged smooth flow of humankind’s progress. As Herder’s representative argument demonstrates, despite the reclaimed spiritual inclusiveness, the European idea of the dialogically oriented, generous and self-educating humans rests on geopolitical devaluations, marginalizations and exclusions. While it establishes proper “human nature,” it outlaws and/or derogates improper “natural humans.” The inclusion and exclusion inextricable penetrate into each other. For example, Herder states that the parasitic Jews are “hanging onto almost all European nations and drawing more or less profit from their juice” (702), and “Gypsies” are “good for nothing but harsh military discipline” (703). Unlike them, Germans “protected the culture that remained after the storm of the epochs, developed the common spirit of Europe and slowly and conspicuously ripened to effectuate all the world regions on earth” (805).

Not long ago, in the face of such discriminations at the heart of Herder’s cosmopolitanism, Julia Kristeva leveled accusations against his Volksgeist. She blamed it for the national idea rooted in soil, blood and language, praising in contradistinction Montesquieu’s esprit général for “a texture of many singularities” with which she “wholeheartedly agrees” (Kristeva 1993: 32–33). Yet by glorifying Montesquieu’s Europe for having incorporated foreignness, Kristeva also revivified Montesquieu’s geopolitical asymmetries, much more ill-reputed than those of Herder. In line with Gasché’s definition of Europe, she stated that unlike non-European civilizations inimical to contamination and overlaps with other traditions, Europe from the outset exemplified an exogamous society stipulating alliances outside the bloodline (Kristeva 1991:45–46). Montesquieu’s espritgénéral, as its chief promoter, must therefore defend “proper European cosmopolitanism” from the revival of the perilous German nationalism (Kristeva 1993:47). Nevertheless, is this peril to be averted by the same French cosmopolitan “crusade for liberty” that initially provoked German remedial ethnocultural reaction (Brubaker 1992:8)? Michelet epitomized this imperial crusade by describing France as a “glorious mother who is not ours alone and who must deliver every nation to liberty” (Girardet 1983: 13). To praise Montesquieu is to forget the religious, colonial and imperial difference at the heart of his Europeanism.

The European cosmopolitan spirit took recourse in the model of the selfreflexive modern literature so as to come to terms with this stubborn resurgence of an allegedly overcome provincial brutality amidst the European cultivated self from the Enlightenment onwards. Following this thread, a powerful tradition of seeing Europe as an interminable mission rather than a given fact endorses Gasché’s interpretation. Europe enjoys the reputation of an extraterritorial, freefloating essence epitomized in Odysseus as a “compulsive and indefatigable wanderer […] among those who would rather live their lives in a world ending at the outermost village fence” (Bauman 2004: 3). Mobile as it is, Europe permanently reinvents its singularity against the background of external and internal others’ particularities. Yet it is precisely because the singular European self needs the particular non-European others as its enduring background that it cannot bid farewell to them. European selves cannot assert their singularity without exempting themselves from the non-European particularity. Accordingly, Hans-Georg Gadamer points out in Das Erbe Europas (1989), “we are all others, and we are all ourselves” (quoted after Bauman 2004:7). Bauman develops this idea further stating that “we know that culture […] has no foundation except […] the dialogue that thought conducts with itself […] we, the Europeans […] have no identity – fixed identity […] ’ we do not know who we are’ and even less do we know what we can yet become […]” (12). Unlike other cultures that are unaware of being distinct because they are unrelated to the others, European culture “feeds on questioning the order of things – and on questioning the fashion of questioning it” (12). This ultimately makes it an “infinite task” of consistent self-singularization.

After Derek Attridge, European event-like singularity is a mobile and open nexus or configuration of attributes into which an unexpected event of reconfiguration breaks forever anew, with the effect of outmaneuvering all pre-existing determinations (Attridge 2004: 63). It is effectuated only through reiteration, within the give-and-take of contingent operations; it is an open form in the permanent remaking (111–119) organically linked to the inventiveness and innovation that are the essential properties of Western art throughout its history (13). Harmonizing with Gasché’s thesis of Europe as the “infinite task,” Attridge roots this inventiveness in Derrida’s absolute hospitality offered to the irreducible singularity of the Other (Derrida 2000b: 83). Yet the advent of this Other can be discerned in no other way but through the estrangement of the familiar produced by everyday cultural operations. It pushes at the limits, revaluates and refashions this familiar (Attridge 2004:18–19). The arrival of the literary Other thus reveals its strong cultural dependence: it can be brought to expression only against the background of a given “idiocultural” experience (21) and acquire its distinctive profile merely against this “negative foil.”

This event-like relation organically binds mobile and innovative literature to immobile and conservative culture, as the former can affirm itself only by outmaneuvering the appropriating operations of cultural particularization in the name of a radically empty freedom (Clark 2005:3–5, 12). The singularity of modern European literature cosmopolitically disengages the particularity of non-European cultures inside and outside Europe. Gradually extending its global ambitions, the celebrated European singularity finally operates as the subversive literary foundation of every culture’s particularity. This lends it an overarching and explosive quality of incalculable “eventness” that irrefutably infiltrates worldwide cultures. “We know in common that we have nothing in common,” formulates Derrida (2001a: 58). This nothing that we Europeans have in common is the universal vanishing mediator of literary singularity that undermines everything positive in its typically other-related, ex-static existence (2000a: 28–29). Derrida once termed this literary emptying out of all identified cultural phenomena (2001a: 56) “the natality of the everyday” (1995c: 8), associating its intervention with the “unreadability of the secret” (1992c: 152). Pushing its estrangement to “the limit of not understanding” (2000a: 93), this powerful symbolic “'economy’ of literature” (1992d: 43) imperatively demands “faith or confidence” (2002: 111), “learning by heart” and “translating the untranslatable” (1995a: 288–299). In instituting the global “jurisdiction” (1992d: 72) of the “most powerful powerless” (Attridge 2004:131), it ultimately indiscriminately uproots everything grounded in a particular time, space and culture. It “does not collect itself, it ‘consists’ in not collecting itself” (Derrida 1995a: 354) because its dissemination exceeds, transgresses and elusively surpasses the other. As in their “plea for a common foreign policy, beginning in the core of Europe,” Habermas and Derrida (2003) have concluded that, in proceeding thus, Europe assists in a substitution of a fully inclusive human community for a collection of territorially entrenched entities. The crucial unanswered question is, however, whether a human community set on the singular European pattern can really be “fully inclusive.”

11.2 The class cosmopolitanism of Cultural Studies

Even though it has been criticized by “singularists” for its tendency toward cultural particularization of the singular literary, British Cultural Studies, when it emerged for the first time around the middle of the twentieth century, did not aim to abandon the study of universal literature for the benefit of the study of particular cultures. On the contrary, it paradoxically followed the same European ideal as its singularist critique does today: to reconfigure in a new cosmopolitan spirit the culturally restricted, i.e. elite idea of literature that ruled the day from the 1930s to the 1950s. Through such an extension of the prevailing elite research horizon, literature’s differently structured and neglected conceptualizations stemming in the first place from the “subordinate class” were to be included for consideration. Bearing this primary objective in mind, this widening of the perspective envisioned by Cultural Studies might be termed class cosmopolitanism.

Beyond the national-philological concept of literature epitomized in the departments of English, the cosmopolitan project in question envisioned redescribing within its new terms comparative literary programs as well. The argument was that, although the latter had adopted an international idea of literature it remained oblivious to its fundamentally biased politics of representation. Despite generous declarations of its openness to various literatures, Comparative Literature reiterated the traditional inclination of Western culture to domesticate the otherness of non-European and Eastern European cultures as well as the “benighted” domestic populace,103 assimilating them into a picturesque diversity that feeds its progressing historical unity. From the cosmopolitan perspective of Cultural Studies, the broad internationalism of Comparative Literature was accused of the same surreptitious taming of otherness for which, a half-century later, anticulturalists or singularists targeted Cultural Studies’ particularism. They reproach the “culturalists” for the implementation of the same historicist pattern (Clark 2005: 209) that the culturalists previously objected to in the comparatists. Now, if the motivating force of an emancipating critique turns over time into the privileged target of the same critique, does not this indicate a slippery, re-signifiable character of cosmopolitan ideals? If these bright ideals are, owing to their tight relatedness to their sinister opponents, necessarily equivocal, can the required division between the singular and the particular, or Europe and non-Europe, be maintained in stable terms capable of reliably guiding humankind toward a final freedom?

Whereas literary singularists attack their cultural particularism, Cultural Studies raised the doubts concerning “cosmopolitics” underlying Comparative Literature predominantly from a class perspective. These studies emerged out of adult education programs between the 1930s and the 1950s dealing with the hard everyday life experience of culturally heterogeneous, mature and politically aware students recruited from the subaltern classes (Steele 1997:2). Through such teaching praxis, centers for permanent adult education revealed the origin of the ruling idea of literature in the cultural, ideological, social and political values of the elite. “Studying English was to study the growth from barbarism to civilization […]. To become English was to become human.” (57) An apparently disinterested and disembodied aesthetics, responsible for the dissemination of this idea of literature, was unmasked as a practice of cultural discrimination. After all, neither English nor Comparative Literature departments emerged as self-enclosed and organic but as interrelated and artificially constructed frames of references with shifting and permeable boundaries. As soon as their disciplinary idea of literature was put to “natural” use, ignorance toward that which remained outside their disciplinary field of expertise was set to work.

Once the exclusionist profile of the cosmopolitan idea of Comparative Literature is thus laid bare, one is better equipped to understand why the aesthetics associated with it treated non-European or not-quite-European literary works as invalid or failed embodiments of its ideals, or regarded the everyday life literary production as unworthy of scientific attention. Cultural Studies turned toward these “leftover” elements of the preceding disciplinary expertise in a very similar way as did, a century or so ago, the heterogeneous form of the novel. As Michel de Certeau (1984: 78) put it, this form with its predilection for the marginal and shadowy customs of bourgeois society was gradually made into “the zoo of everyday practices since the establishment of modern science,” which expelled them from its disciplinary expertise. It is exactly in this subversive way with regard to the official literary scholarship in the form of English or Comparative Literature departments that Cultural Studies saw its agenda. Yet if de Certeau raised such a representative literary genre to the desired model of Cultural Studies – quite an unexpected move if one considers its aforementioned resistance to the elite idea of literature – this happened because he developed an oppositional concept of literature associated with its emergence.

In established Literary Studies, literature sets the measure of “prominence” of particular cultures, and represents the supreme norm against which comparisons between them are undertaken. From de Certeau’s point of view, on the contrary, literature speaks for the anonymous mass of those who are dispossessed of a “proper locus” having to act on “terrain […] organized by the law of foreign power” (37) irrespective of the culture in question. These deprived “human remnants” of all cultures cannot express themselves except by taking an outsmarting detour through the imposed official discourse of a given culture. Being expropriated of an acknowledged agency for literary production on their own, these enablers express themselves through the subversive consumption, the mimicking re-appropriation of the borrowed discourse, and they turn it through such tactical estrangement against its culturally preordained usage. This is how de Certeau interprets the novel’s oppositional narrative techniques.

By analogy, far from officially representing literature as do the disciplines of English or Comparative Literature, the non-discipline of Cultural Studies subversively enacts it. It does not take literature into cognitive possession from the vantage point of any disciplinary norm, but mimics it in its genuine way. As Michael Taussig (1992) has suggested in his redescription of the concept of mimesis in accordance with its “primordial” meaning, Cultural Studies understands mimesis in the same sense as “primitive communities” do, i.e. as mimicry rather than representation. Yet if literature is conceptualized in this “performative” rather than “constative” fashion, then it no longer makes a distinctive domain of research represented by prominent authors, but rather a marginalized disappropriating practice of deprived human beings without a recognizable profile. It is the practice of the “disregarded” in the same sense I have claimed, in the previous chapter, poststructuralism is; and it opposes Comparative Literature in the same way the latter opposes structuralism – that is, as emancipating cosmopolitanism opposes the assimilating one. Finally, as it is anything but culture-specific, it makes the emancipating cosmopolitan basis of all cultures. Put in these terms literature for the first time becomes, to engage Derrida’s apt phrase, “the mystical foundation of authority” (1992b: 11). Its all-pervading deactivating effects underlie any culture whatsoever.

Undoing all cultural particularities, the idea of culture is characterized by this cosmopolitan operation of literature in Cultural Studies. The decisive point is that, if in English and Comparative Literature the concept of literature was tacitly shaped by the particular ruling culture of those in power, in Cultural Studies the concept of culture is silently subverted by the cosmopolitan literature of the disregarded population. Cultural Studies acts in the name of the indeterminate residue of determinate cultures and disciplines in the same way as its critics, the “singularists,” will do in turn. To authorize their cosmopolitanism, both take recourse to modern literature’s consistent self-disempowerment, a relentless detachment from the political power of cultural identities. Both act as the self-appointed agencies of the destitute enablers, conducting a “politics of trauma.” As a result, the transition from English and Comparative Literature to Cultural Studies does not translate simply “from literature to culture,” as it is usually rendered, but rather “from the culturally determined self-asserting literature to the literary determined self-questioning culture.” The opposition between literature and culture, considered to be fierce antagonists, reenters the identity of each of its constituents, attenuating their conflict. Taking the cosmopolitan perspective of the socially disregarded, Cultural Studies persistently deactivates the monolith concept of a culture of Literary Studies to prevent the elite cultural authorization of literature. Instead of literature being defined from the perspective of elite culture, this culture is now defined from the perspective of the hybrid literary practice of the anonymous and expropriated enablers.

This might explain the literary manner in which Richard Hoggart, one of the forefathers of Cultural Studies, in his The Uses of Literacy (1957) misappropriated the disciplinary discourse of English Studies, combining it with personal and public history, autobiography and ethnography. Another literary maneuver was undertaken by Raymond Williams, the second forefather of Cultural Studies, who in The Long Revolution (1961) interrogated the established meaning of the key disciplinary concepts of English Literature by delving further back into their forgotten past. The borders of the concept of literature were thus extended to include all kinds of writing such as scientific, historical, autobiographical as well as fictional texts. The intention of Williams’s reconstruction was to show that such a broad concept of literature prevailed up until the end of the eighteenth century, and underlied division into fictional and factual literature only in the wake of Romanticism. Instead of connecting the past and present into a smooth historical continuity, Williams thus treats the past as the stockpile of alternative and contestable resources, an unstable and asymmetrical ensemble expected to destabilize the present. Confirming our thesis on Cultural Studies’ literary techniques of disappropriation, his undoing of the homogeneous present by way of pluralizing the past thus opposes institutional historiography, taking the liberty germane to literary experimentation. Besides, in disappropriating disciplinary history by means of literary memory, he takes recourse to the ancient but meanwhile apocryphal “plebeian” techniques as analyzed by Nietzsche in The Joyful Wisdom (see chapter eight).

Hoggart’s and Williams’s literary disappropriating operations applied to the mainstream disciplinary legacy paved the way for the discourse of British Cultural Studies, which subsequently incessantly maneuvered between various disciplines and freely combined the past and the present. As one commentator put it, the whole British project of Cultural Studies relies on the “ability to plunder the more established disciplines while remaining separate from them” (Moran 2002: 51), i.e. “stealing away [from them] the more useful elements and rejecting the rest” (Johnson 1996: 75). Opposing the growing institutionalization of the field, Stuart Hall (1992: 285) warned that it threatens the transdisciplinary character of Cultural Studies, which draws strength precisely from its marginality within the academy. If the disciplines were to be denied their exclusive rights, then one was surely not expected to establish a new discipline.

But exactly this firm alignment with the plundering tactical maneuvers of the anonymous populace deprived of any recognizable cultural identity may turn out, as Bill Readings (1996: 122) has argued, to be animated by old Kantian nostalgia for an all-inclusive education guided by the idea of unrestrained human freedom. In his famous treatise The Conflict of Faculties (1798), Kant accused the disciplinary fragmentation of knowledge of spawning a regrettable triumph of the disciplined expert over the self-reflective philosopher. He set out by offering an analogy between the idea of the university, promoted at that time under the pressure of the necessity of the mass production of knowledge, and the division of labor in the factory (Kant 1979: 23). In his vision, the form of the university makes only a part of the larger “organism” of an emergent society that replaces the centralized monarchy with the democratic republican constitution. Alongside the necessary differentiation of discrete domains, both society and university are expected to strive for a unifying principle that would ensure the commensurability of divergent particles. Stressing the importance of this principle that completely escapes the empirical evidence, Kant claims that each constituent must obey a “thoroughly interconnected whole of experience” (2007: 19) despite the mere hypothetical character of the latter. On this claim, obviously, the requested authority of philosophy rests.

However, in order to keep steadily in touch with this unfathomable idea of the whole, readiness and ability for self-governing are required from the human self. They usually distinguish academic people from the extramural “incompetent populace” which unconcernedly obeys someone else’s governance. Unfortunately, even within the academy not all academics appear to be self-governing subjects, since one can clearly distinguish between the true researchers and mere “technicians of learning” (Werkkundige der Gelehrsamkeit) (1979: 25). The latter Kant scornfully labels “the tools of the government” (Werkzeuge der Regierung) as opposed to the representatives of philosophy which is “by its nature free and admits of no command” (29). Placed in the position of the critical judge of disciplines by virtue of its being “independent of the government’s command” (27), philosophy is expected to relinquish the “secondary disciplines” (45) of their “private property” for the benefit of the forthcoming “common freedom” (59–61).

Kant was the first thinker to raise a “quasi-discipline” to the status of the true representative of human freedom. He envisaged for philosophy not just the task to avert the attention of “minor faculties” from their restricted property toward universal freedom, but also to ensure the “enlightenment of the masses” (161). Yet this was an unreal expectation, as he himself admitted, because “the populace consists of idiots” (das Volk, “welches aus Idioten besteht,” 25, trans. modified). No wonder, then, that the humanities established in the next century neglected the “public instruction of the people” in favor of the formation of an exemplary subject capable of moving “among the increasingly differentiated spheres of human society” (Lloyd 1998:33). This representative subject was expected to embody Kant’s conviction of “the disposition and capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance toward the better,” to be the author of its history (Kant 1979:151). Owing to the exclusion of the masses, the authorization of humankind’s history was relegated exclusively to such representative subjects. At the outset of the specialization of British university life in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Anglican priest William Whewell raised the imperative of systematic knowledge closely associated with philosophy. In a kind of a revanchiste aristocratic strategy that countered the advancement of the industrial bourgeoisie, he emphasized the necessity of evaluation and justification of discoveries made in particular disciplinary fields, according to their deducibility from the larger body of common scientific knowledge. This latter knowledge, supposed to channel the torrent of university activities in an edifying direction, was supposed to be preeminently theory-driven (Fuller 2000:79–85).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, in a countermovement to this aristocratic strategy, a new “quasi-discipline” of English Literature, raised by Matthew Arnold to the status of the central agent of the populace’s emancipation, substituted the hermetic philosophy that proved inadequate for such a purpose. Literature was more adaptable to the political formation of citizens in the increasingly disintegrated nation-state of the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it took several further decades before the study of literature managed to defy the resistance of the established scientific disciplines. Toward the end of the 1920s, with Arnold’s academic follower Frank R. Leavis, it raised the claim to become the pivotal subject and point of liaison for all the other disciplines, one that provides a “strong humane centre” to increasingly “specialist studies” (Leavis 1969:3). But although he envisaged literary study to be a discipline which is not one, since it is “concerned with training of a non-specialist intelligence” (Leavis 1948: 43), Leavis ferociously fought to establish its preeminence over its mighty rivals, the departments of classics and philosophy. He accordingly opted for its careful disciplinary pro filing in order to prevent “blunting of edge, blurring of focus and muddled misdirection of attention: consequences of queering one discipline with the habits of another” (Leavis 1972: 213). As soon as it becomes part of a hierarchical distribution of power within the university, no “quasi-discipline” can transcend the corrupting influence of the academy, and wipe its hands clean of any interest (Moran 2002: 34). In the 1980s, Cultural Studies finally replaced Literary Studies, appropriating the techniques of subordinate and anonymous social strata excluded from the horizon of the latter. If in all these cases a “quasi-discipline” superseded the narrow-minded disciplines, this was because the excommunicated residue of an anonymous and “idiotic”populace was placed at the service of its cosmopolitan authorization. The same legacy would be taken up by the “singularists” who argue in the name of the suppressed “event-like contingency” of the Other.

Unfortunately, the unprecedented mobility of this residue’s appointed representative requires the desperate immobility of the represented amorphous masses. In order for the first to remain permanently mobile, the second are expected to remain always easily mobilizable, i.e. flexible, investible and disposable (Fuller 2000:104, 110). This suppressed asymmetry between the agencies and enablers in the corpus of allegedly emancipated humankind saw daylight as Cultural Studies started to attribute to each “other” his/her appropriate “subject position.” Such a “politically correct” practice instituted the custodial relationship akin to the one between Kantian “free thinkers” and the “idiotic populace”: the freedom of “representatives” was reinstated through a ceaseless detachment from the passionate “adherents of self-constraining.” In order for the first to demonstrate their sovereign self-governing capacity, the latter were relegated to restricted gender, racial, ethnic or sexual positions. Thus the gap between the agencies and enablers, which was expected to be bridged in the agenda of class cosmopolitanism of Cultural Studies, was by its practice ultimately only deepened. Devoid of awareness of its institutional and disciplinary presuppositions, Cultural Studies regressed to the same agency that it was supposed to replace. Since it raised the same representative claims with regard to the all-encompassing anonymous basis as its fiercest opponent, Leavis’s Literary Studies did, the political left and the political right turned out to be pure “mirror images” (Hillis Miller 1998: 63–64).

This might be the reason why Timothy Clark (2005: 19–20) recognized in Cultural Studies just a logical outcome of a principle leading from the Enlightenment through to late modernism: If the progressive narrative of emancipation is to succeed, its constitutive surplus of whatever sort is doomed to be victimized. After all, why did Cultural Studies experience such an easy acceptance by the Western universities if it was not owing to its ability to domesticate the inassimilable otherness of women, racial and ethnic varieties or gays and lesbians into a welcome diversity in the triumphant terms of continuous progress? By explaining literary texts in terms of “subject positions,” argues Clark (23), the cultural critic “expresses a drive to position oneself as the embodiment of a supposedly fully enlightened eye to whom all these supposed subject positions and identities are visible and morally mappable.” They become transparent in their particularism, unlike him or her who remains resilient to such acts of identification.

It was against this violence of cultural stereotyping, i.e. the pressure of the self-exempting literary norm to pin down everybody to its particular cultural identity, that Clark introduced what he called the “poetics of singularity.” As he interprets this central concept, singularities are resilient to any kind of classification of their otherness, displaying an exemplary European capability of vanishing mediation (Balibar 2004:203–235). Europe was often regarded as repeatedly becoming “other than the other,” being born ever anew, jumping out of any allocated temporal or spatial category, and continuously operating as an invisible enabler of all agencies. As Hannah Arendt, one of the proponents of Clark’s poetics would put it, singularity resides “outside determination” by the others’ agencies, resistant to their aggressive appropriation since it is completely unpredictable and contingent. Thanks to such characteristics, its untiring enabling mimics and outsmarts all agencies imposed upon it. In the delineated profile of singularity, the legacy of early German Romanticist “exuberant abundance of life” derived from the modern idea of the literary is unmistakable. All advocates of the poetics of singularity as Clark represents them, i.e., Heidegger, Gadamer, Blanchot and Derrida, therefore tacitly agree that such singularity is epitomized by modern European literature engendered by Romanticism.

As if suppressing this common source, their idea of literature attempts to detach itself from both the elite European literature promoted by the project of Comparative Literature and the outsmarting maneuvers of the socially disregarded applied in the project of Cultural Studies. Both projects were eventually caught up by the identity pattern of narrative progression they initially starkly opposed – and the key “singularist” concepts like the unworked or confronted (Nancy 1986, 2003), unavowable (Blanchot 1983) or coming community (Agamben 1993) ferociously attack this pattern. Paradoxically, in order to deconstruct it they engage a very similar kind of evasive literary performance to that inaugurated by Cultural Studies as their antagonist. In the name of the socially disregarded, “culturalists” also advocated the idea of literature as an “excluded enabling domain” against the representative idea of literature of English or Comparative Literature departments. Since their envisioned emancipation failed, “singularists” now extend the jurisdiction of the modern European idea of literature to serve as the pre-contractual basis of human community.

11.3 Cruelly attached to unfathomable singularity

What opposes the literary community to political communities is that it establishes a co-belonging, which does not rely on any particular identifying predicates attributed to subjects. As Giorgio Agamben explains in The Coming Community, with regard to this focusing on singularity literature is similar to love: it introduces an eventful relation between partners that precedes or withdraws their division into subject on the one hand and predicate on the other. I do not love the other because she as a subject possesses particular qualities due to her belonging to a community of whatever kind. Disabling any such self-assuring judgment on my part, she draws me outside myself exactly by being singular, i.e. belonging only to herself. Being expropriated of all identity attributes, the lovable is “never the intelligence of some thing, of this or that quality or essence, but only the intelligence of an intelligibility” (Agamben 1993: 2), i.e. of being-thus (tale-quale). What characterizes the singular mode of being-thus is precisely the evacuation of any protective proper nature (102), i.e. a complete exposure, which enables the related singularities to touch their impossibility instead of enjoying power (32), to experience their vulnerability instead of exhibiting self-assurance (39). If singularities so radically skip the tranquilizing identity attributes of existing political communities, this is because they are completely handed over to the coming one (11), i.e. they get their face (or determination) from a disquieting empty space beyond representation (67–68). Because of this complete exposure to an absolute non-totalizable exterior they become a singular “whatever” (quodlibet, qualunque) (67). What therefore resolutely distinguishes this coming from the existing community is that the first, being completely devoid of attributes, determines its members without dividing the proper from the improper, the intelligible from the unintelligible, the human from the inhuman; it gives them a face without any distinctiveness. People thus belong to each other without any prior condition of that belonging (86). After Agamben, “if humans could […] not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable” (65). The coming community produces no human face as opposed to inhuman defacement inasmuch as in the place of human essence it establishes a void. Impossible to turn into the means for any human end, thisvoidforms the ultimate horizon of the idea of singularity. It prevents singularities from being coupled to any common property, center or identity.

Sketched thus, Agamben’s argument, put forth in 1990, establishes a clear family resemblance with the radical techniques of Blanchot’s impersonalization and Foucault’s self-defacement as delineated in chapter ten. Such placing of their selves under consistent literary erasure – Derrida’s sous rature, in its turn a translation of Heidegger’s kreuzweise Durchstreichung – strategically opened a sort of posttraumatic friendship grown from disaster, l'amitié-des-astres, Sternenfreundschaft. With this peculiar rendering reminiscent of Blanchot’s L'Écriture du desastre Derrida points to a bond without a bond established among the de-identified since deceased humans. The basic prerogative of such a posttraumatic friendship is an absolute detachment of friends from all identity attributes “what-ness”), which enables them to achieve the condition of a pure, singular and irreducible “who-ness” (Blanchot 1980: 50, 1971: 328), tantamount to Agamben’s “being-thus” that resists any political denomination (Derrida 1994b: 331). The politics of such a being-in-common is the politics of consistent estrangement, evacuation and emptying of the identified self. As I have tried to demonstrate in the previous chapter, an irrevocable disappearance of their selves in the labyrinth of writing was Blanchot and Foucault’s “joint venture” (Foucault 1972: 17, 1985: 9; Blanchot 1971: 328). This longing for an empty emplacement – withdrawal of friends into an irrevocable absence (Blanchot 1983: 21) – receives its authorization from an absolutely open yet-to-come (à-venir), autopian space of unconstrained freedom to which the friends attach their hopes. If “culturalists” argued in the name of the socially disregarded, homeless masses, then “singularists” argue in the name of singular “whos” (lovers, friends and affiliates) departed, deceased, emptied, de-identified, denuded, absolutely detached, irrevocably absent and brought to a traumatic silence. In the argument of singularists, complete ontological void and emptiness substitute for social anonymity and amorphousness.

Such an essentially hypothetical, “imagined cosmopolitan community” (Robbins 1998:2), which is grouped around an “empty space,” sets the horizon of Agamben’s ideal of singularity (1993: 10). In evoking it, he spontaneously works in the same early Romanticist tradition inaugurated by Kant’s assumptive establishment of sensus communis (2007: 68), as do Blanchot and Foucault, or Bakhtin with his carnival utopia for that matter. Bakhtin envisages the socially and culturally liberated individuals responsible exclusively to an “exotopic” (vnenakhodimoe) Third Person (tret'oe litso), the all-uniting horizon of all communities (Bakhtin 1979:305–306). This divine authority is, in its turn, a replica of Friedrich Schlegel’s God, whose redemptive intervention enabled the Romanticist agency’s uncoupling from all inherited political, cultural and/or social bonds with its fellow citizens. From His neutral and indifferent vantage point everything appears to be “exchangeable” and “de-personified” (Bakhtin 1979: 371). As regards this divine supreme detachment and disinterestedness, Bakhtin believed that every human being worthy of the name must strive to become an imago Dei, i.e. to evacuate systematically all selfish passions and inclinations from his or her earthly self. According to Friedrich Schlegel: “For a man who has achieved a certain level of the universality of formation, his inner being is an ongoing chain of the most enormous revolutions” (1963: 82–83).

By inventing his self-authoring modern self determined to become a “pure ‘man in man’,” “deprived of any social or pragmatic real-life concretization,” “independent of all real-life, concrete social forms (the forms of family, social or economic class, life’s stories),” Bakhtin (1984: 264) spontaneously subscribes to this Schlegelian formula. He thereby anticipates Agamben’s, Blanchot’s and Foucault’s “cruel optimism,” defined by Lauren Berlant (2011: 1–2) as a passionate attachment to something that actively impedes the aim of this attachment. The delineated tradition fully corroborates her thesis of “a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way.” The same kind of optimism, though certainly mediated by other relays than in the case of Bakhtin or Agamben, resonates in Blanchot’s free gathering of de-identified humans from May ‘68. He describes an atmosphere in which “anyone could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no other justification than that of being another human” (1987: 63, trans. modified) (un autre home, 1986b: 10).

In order to establish his messianic community “without presuppositions and without subjects,” i.e. consisting of mere singularities, Agamben along the same lines introduces the supreme authority of bare life (la nuda vita). In the way he elaborates this concept in the essay “Absolute Immanence” (Agamben 1999a), bare life establishes an identifying relationship between the subject and the object, but itself cannot be rendered in terms of any identity whatsoever. In a sense, it operates like “Europe, vanishing mediator,” setting up the identities of all others in such a way as to obfuscate its own identity. As Balibar (2004: 220) has formulated in his path-breaking essay, “Europe is a borderland rather than an entity that ‘has’ borders.” It enables conjunctions and disjunctions between the agencies by circumventing the status of agency – an absolute enabler as it were. We come to the same conclusion if we inspect the crucial terms of Deleuze and Foucault, Agamben’s philosophical “relays” in this essay. According to Deleuze, lived experience (le vécu) (1995: 4) escapes the terms of whatever Something (such as subject, consciousness, truth, person, or individuality); according to Foucault, life (2001a: 1593) roots both the subject and the object in the unexplored terrain of errancy (mépris) rather than a firm transcendence. Both “lived experience” engaged by Deleuze and “life” engaged by Foucault refer to utter contingency germane to the Romanticist concept of life. Building upon this richly resonating and “cruelly optimistic” European tradition, they pave the way for bare life as Agamben’s “absolute enabler.”

While differentiating the entire political field, bare life analogously escapes all discriminations. Its vanishing intrusion into the area of the political is the “foundational event of modernity” (Agamben 1998: 4). Yet Agamben repeatedly reminds us that this modern “inclusion of bare life in the political realm” (6) implies an exclusion of everything that does not conform to the differences established in this realm. With modernity, between the included determinate life and the excluded indeterminate life emerges a strange complicity of “the most implacable enemies” (10). Whereas politically identified life enjoys legal power, bare life stripped of all identity marks affirms itself only through the unworking of the legislated community. “In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the common being of men” (7, trans. modified) (la città degli uomini, 10). Modern human community rests on the void; this traumatic hole fatally infects all communal relations. To point out this crux of his argument, Agamben directs all his philosophical attention to the peculiar “non-relation” between political life (conceived as fullness) and bare life (conceived as emptiness). His discussion of Deleuze in the essay Absolute Immanence makes clear that these two “conjoined disjunctive realms” operate not only by way of conditioning but also by subverting and dislocating each other. Because of this “mole of the transcendent within immanence,” which the latter cannot but “disgorge […] everywhere” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994b: 46–47), there is no historical continuity in the process of the world’s becoming but only a succession of “between-times (entre-temps), between-moments (entre-moments)” (Deleuze 2005: 29, 1995: 5).

How does Agamben translate Deleuze’s thesis? As no rule can establish itself without the relation of the exception to it (1998: 18), the rule is engulfed in the whirl of exception, entailing a series of what Agamben terms the thresholds of indiscernability (soglia d'indifferenza) or zones of indistinction (zona d'indistinzione) (1998: 4, 9, 18, 27, 28 etc., see esp. 63, 112, 181). Their perfect emptiness is “the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew” (Agamben 2004: 38); they are the motors of an ongoing change. Since the advent of modernity, we live in a world in which the unlocalizable non-juridical state of exception makes the condition of the im/possibility of the localizable juridical order or political territory (20). Each territory is de-territorialized by this excluded enabling domain; nothing can escape the deactivating force of bare life that is irresistible in its vertiginous undoing. As soon as in the medium of live beings a distinction between the subject and object is established, it collapses back into the indiscernible medium of bare life that surpasses them both. The ultimate inseparability of the subject from the object explains Agamben’s recourse to Spinoza’s “undecidable” usage of the verb-as-noun (1999a: 234–235): at that time the so-called middle voice, that unrecognizably collapses the grammatical subject and object was an important topic of Western theory (Pecora 1991; Pepper 1997; White 1999; LaCapra 2001:19–42).

On the one hand, Agamben’s persistently reemerging concepts of the threshold of indiscernability and the zone of indistinction are clearly related to Blanchot’s category of the “relation at a distance” (or “relation without relation” (Large 2006: 4)) as a new and “explosive” “power of determination” of the modern self (Blanchot 1993: 251). Blanchot states that with modernity, a disabling enablement of the two incompatible terms, the transcendental (autre) and the empirical (autrui), arises: The one simultaneously empowers and expropriates the other (1993: 255; Suglia 2001: 59). On the other hand, Agamben’s concepts are equally reminiscent of Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge where it is said that “[t]he formal a priori and the historical a priori neither belong to the same level nor share the same nature: if they intersect, it is because they occupy two different dimesions” (Foucault 1972:128). In Blanchot’s and Foucault’s quasi-transcendentalism these two incompatible but conjoined a prioris “encounter each other everywhere, establishing a constellation of the utmost ethical and political importance” (Rothberg 2000: 62). Inasmuch as the transcendental not only determines the empirical but also results from it, their disjunctive conjuncture establishes a discontinuous temporality of the “future anterior.” In lieu of smooth historical continuity, the past disrupts the future and the future subverts the past. Beyond Blanchot and Foucault, two important relays of his redemptive thought, Agamben’s messianic temporality refers to Walter Benjamin’s equivocal concept of the Ursprung (origin but, etymologically, also the primordial leap). In The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin interpreted this concept as neither fully the cause nor fully the effect, but simultaneously both (Benjamin 1980: 226). His Ursprung entitles all constituents of becoming to completely rearrange its flow by arbitrarily leaping out of it at any point. As soon as such a leap into the uncertain exterior of the world’s becoming takes place, it engulfs (reißt hinein) the whole stream of becoming in its unpredictable whirl.

Agamben’s firm adherence to Benjamin’s messianic time makes him argue that Deleuze derives his concept of “immanence” not so much from manere (to remain [within the same]) as from manare (to flow out, to spring forth [into something else]) (Agamben 1999a: 223). The effects of immanence do not naturally emanate from the continuous substance of life but discontinuously and unexpectedly spring forth from it. “Immanence flows forth; it always, so to speak, carries a colon with it. Yet this springing forth, far from leaving itself, remains incessantly andvertiginouslywithin itself. This is why Deleuze can state […] that ‘immanence is the very vertigo of philosophy’.” (226) Everything that it has thrown out, immanence takes care to reintroduce into the intermittent and discontinuous stream of becoming. Like Blanchot and Foucault in their quasi-transcendentalism, Agamben privileges this indeterminate whirl of becoming (the Absolute Enabler) over its determinate constituents (agencies), which are located in the realm of the political. He derives this priority of ethical non-relation over political relations also from Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of Foucault: “The actual is not what we are but, rather, what we become, what we are in the process of becoming – that is to say, the Other, our becoming-other.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994b: 112) That Foucault privileges the whimsical becoming over the given present, follows from his consistent introduction of the exterminated exterior enabler into the acknowledged interior agency in the paradoxical form of the Outside-interior (le Dehorsintérieur) (113). Deleuze and Guattari infer: “Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside.” (59–60)

In compulsively repeating concepts such as the threshold of indiscernability and the zone of indistinction, and in consistently pushing all empirical evidence toward that which remains indiscernible or indeterminate, Agamben pays the highest possible respect to this “plane of immanence.” In an exemplary gesture of “cruel optimism,” he attaches all of his hopes to this excluded enabling domain that takes care to subvert and crush them. As a result, in Agamben’s philosophical narrative “mourning becomes the law” (Rose 1996) of our being-in-common. It threatens to “disarticulate relations, confuse self and other, and collapse all distinctions” in a kind of “post-traumatic acting out” “caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes” (LaCapra 2001:21). A powerful desire to remain within a traumatically empty emplacement of love or friendship partners engenders an excessive restaging of the traumatic scene. The desire is so powerful that in Agamben’s political philosophy, akin to Derrida’s “messianism without a Messiah,” the holy obligation to the radically transcendent and postponed divinity obliterates secular and immediate commitments to the fellow human beings (LaCapra 2004:145–151). The “passionate attachment” of these ethics to the all-engulfing “vanishing mediator” uncouples it completely from the political realm of norm and law.

As if testifying to this inclination of his thought to absolutize the sublime, Agamben proffers the “localized unlocalizability” of the concentration camp as the most prominent example of Foucault’s Outside-interior in the modern political space. “As the absolute space of exception, the camp is topologically different from a simple space of confinement” (Agamben 1998: 22, [italics added]), i.e. Foucault’s prison. It paradigmatically demonstrates that sovereign law rests on the structure of the ban, which not merely excludes but abandons the subaltern, i.e. exposes and threatens it at the threshold of its political order (28). The ban therefore consists of a particular kind of non-relation between the political order and a “mass without qualities” (Deleuze). It is primarily in this sense of being nonrelated (29) (I'irrelato (1995: 35)) that Agamben raises the concentration camp to the paradigm of European modernity (1998: 166). Like Jean-Luc Nancy, from whom he takes the idea of the ban, he does not restrict extermination to Jewish destiny but refers, for instance, to the camps during the war in the former Yugoslavia (Nancy 2000:145; Agamben 1998: 176). In the globalized state of exception anybody can become the subaltern on given circumstances, which completely accords with Derrida’s ill-reputed declaration “Each other is altogether other” (1992e: 68, 76–77, 1995b: 68, 78) that dangerously equates justice with deconstruction. Like Blanchot’s friendship or love, Deleuze’s “lines of flight” take up this lead, continually drawing away from determinate sovereign identities toward indeterminate subaltern multiplicities, from the life of human beings to bare life. This subterranean force of exception multiplies neighborhood zones inside the political territory. Deterritorialization of political territories is incessantly on its way, drawing every discernible item into its redemptive whirl of becoming. The battle is ultimately won by the power of the cruelly optimistic attachment to an entirely vague prospect.

11.4 The counter-narrative of singularity

Envisioned in these posttraumatic terms, Agamben’s “community to come” founded by death clearly resonates, though it is not explicitly mentioned, in the book of his compatriot Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives, originally published in 1997. Both treat the Altogether Other that is beyond representation as the point of departure of individual and communal self-representation. This entails a constitutive priority of the ethical non-relation to alterity, inassimilable to any horizon of communal being, over the political relation to other human beings taking place within this horizon.

Cavarero starts with the conception of subject formation developed by Hannah Arendt, one of the philosophers who feature prominently in Clark’s genealogy of the idea of singularity. In The Human Condition (1958) and The Life of Mind (1971) Arendt considers each human being to be unique yet acquiring its irreplaceable who-ness through the exposure to another human being. As it is only through the other’s gaze and voice that I am identified in my singularity, I am unable to master my self-display but must always search for it in You. It is because of such constitutive dependency on You that Cavarero originally titles her book Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti: regard me, narrate me who I am! With Blanchot from L'écriture du desastre (1980: 37–41) and La communauté inavouable (1983: 15–20) as a silent supporter, she insists on what Heidegger called “permanent reopening” (ständige Unabgeschlossenheit) or Bataille in his turn “the principle of incompleteness” of the self, although without mentioning any one of these “male” thinkers directly. Nonetheless, Cavarero sides with their opinion that the self is fundamentally and enduringly called into question by the vanishing Other by opposing Arendt, who highlights another human being. Every narrative of the self provided by such an evasive Other can be only provisional and open (and not finished and closed, as stated by Arendt).

Supported by these tacit philosophical “affiliates,” she disagrees with Arendt as to the capability of this You to close up my life-story: the latter has to be constantly re-narrated, as no determinate external alterity can resolve definitely and in a satisfactory way the uniqueness immanent to the self, not even its death, as Arendt assumes. For if the self is dead, the storyteller cannot but treat it in the third person, cannot but talk about it to someone else as in the epic narrative. Yet the gist of Cavarero’s argument goes against the pre-modern impersonal epic in favor of the modern personal narrative: the protagonist has to be in the second and not the third person, a you and not s/he of the storytelling (Cavarero 2000:32, 59, 92, 116). For the singularity of my self to come to the fore, a counter-narrative to the traditional epic narrative is needed. “Storytelling is the living’s desire for narration, not the desire for the immortal fame of the dead.” (100) In the wake of Agamben’s presented argumentation, Cavarero states that, similar to love or friendship, this narrative is based on a nude co-appearance (comparizione) of me and you. Deprived of the intermediacy of any what, two whos are irretrievably exposed to one another and forced to confront their limits. Her thesis finds support also in Blanchot’s claim that friends never speak about each other but only to each other (1997: 291) or Derrida’s claim that a friend exists for me only as who, never as what (Derrida 1994b: 326–327). As the Italian neologism comparizione testifies, Cavarero tacitly appeals not only to Agamben’s The Coming Community but also to Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Unworked Community, where the French comparution is equally peculiarly used with the meaning of co-appearance (or compearance) of two mutually exposed, tightly co-dependent singularities (Blanchot 1993: 66; Nancy 1986:165). They share nothing except finitude determined by mutual contact zones, which establish between them a relationship of fatal dis/juncture (Nancy 1986: 70). Nancy’s being-in-common is a face-to-face preventing any immanence, autonomy and individuality of its constituencies (Dalton 2000:34–35). What transpires from these covert references to Agamben, Blanchot, and Nancy is a literary community established among the friends, love and narrative partners caught in an interminable search for completion.

Like Agamben and Nancy who in the formation of the self prioritize the nonrelation to radical alterity over the relation to the fellow human being, Cavarero states: I am desperately given over (consegnato) to the otherness of the other in the unprotected fragility of my inaugural existence (2000: 109). What I thereby desire is an equally inassimilable you “that comes before the we (noi), before the plural you (voi), and before the they (loro),” that is “truly an other, in her uniqueness and distinction” (90). In repeatedly emphasizing a nudity of the co-apparent self and other, Cavarero means that they cannot represent but only address each other, which is a radically performative relation between partners that next to love or friendship only personal (counter-)narrative is capable of. Two performative discourses (Cavarero skips Blanchot’s and Derrida’s discourse of friendship probably because it is, from her feminist perspective, too “manly” an affair) are thus singled out against the negative foil of all the constative others. However, if narrative performance comes into being only through the abandonment of everything that characterizes narrative representation, it profiles itself as a self-exemption from its pressure. Like lovers who tear down social distinctions in favor of their basically naked selves (110) – and lovers also in Blanchot’s view (1983: 83) abandon their identities through the complete exposure to each other – partners in the narrative performance exhibit their “generic selves” against all narrative identifications brought upon them (Cavarero 2000:10, 53). They push their singularity to the extreme by parenthesizing the resistance of “communal immanence.” If society’s identification procedures gradually suppress a “totally nude self-exposure […] naked and bared of what” characteristic of the “first chapter of our life” (38), then love and narrative are supposed to recuperate this lost singularity of our self by suspending identification procedures. Due to its restoring capacity to make my life begin always anew – an operation Foucault in The Order of Things termed recommencement – Cavarero takes personal narrative of singularization to be systematically emptying out my commonality established by the epic narrative of identification.

By highlighting cosmopolitan operations such as self-exemption, parenthesizing and suspension, Cavarero not only has recourse to a long-term messianic tradition of the unworking of the working days from the perspective of the Sabbath, as elaborated upon by Agamben (2005b: 95–112). She also inserts her personal narrative into a persistent self-evacuation from external identifications germane to the idea of literature in modern literary theory (since the inauguration of the Russian Formalist “politics of estrangement”; Tihanov 2005). She conceives the denuding operation of the literary narrative as a systematic opposition to the oppression of the political community. Bearing in mind this prominent role of literature in achieving the singular self, it is astonishing that her argument of the naked exposure of literary interlocutors strikingly recalls Levinas’s naked exposure of the ethical face of the Other. Levinas’s face equally deprives our “imperial I” of its ability to judge, disarms and empties it of its acquired habits (2001: 269–270), forces it to become a singular I instead of the mere embodiment of the Mind (1969: 276). This submerged reference to Levinas is astonishing because of his well-known reservations concerning the “feminine allurement” of literary narratives. Due to its “capacity for interrogation” and permanent “unsaying what it has said” (Levinas and Kearney 1986: 22), he regards philosophy as the only proper (male) instrument of establishing the “primordial language” of addressing and touching (Levinas 1987c: 313, 319–320).104 Yet Cavarero for her part resolutely rejects philosophy as the constative (male) identification of the human in general in favor of the personal narrative as the (female) performative of human singularity.

According to her, what I really am remains forever hidden from myself, beyond the possibility of my positive, constative knowledge. The only access I have to my singularity is through the memory that keeps telling me my personal story. But in as much as my natal self is never accessible to its recollecting reach, the story in question achieves no more than to act out this constitutive void: instead of being mastered or represented in the form of a narrative object, my I thus comes to the fore in the form of the denuded narrating subject. Due to such an appearance of the naked self that was supposed to be absolved by the narrative, the story of my uniqueness has to be told over and over (Cavarero 2000:34). Contrary to the closed-up epic narrative characteristic of the narratological account, Cavarero in such a way insists on an unresolved alterity in the midst of narrative, which seeks to be externalized ever anew (42–43).

Cavarero’s personal literary narrative accordingly subverts the classic narrative pattern of political identification against which, despite the differences between their philosophies, Levinas too leveled his ethical accusations. He condemned it for turning the plural and discontinuous “living time” opened to “the salvation of becoming” into the linear and homogeneous “fate” of historical temporality (Levinas 1989: 139–145). Toward the end of Totality and Infinity, historical narrative is blamed for taming the unlimited possibility of singular past events through their assimilation into a smooth continuous flow.105 On closer inspection, Levinas’s historical narrative coincides with what Nancy in The Unworked Community termed “mythic narrative,” ascribing it a foundational, structuring power in the matters of communal life (1991: 49). Political community appeals to myth in order to found, confirm and perpetuate the identity of its subjects (50–51). However, in Nancy’s as in Levinas’s conception, myth and political community coexist and implicate each other in their common effort to compensate for the fundamental incompleteness and dependence of the self on the other.

Nancy’s use of the concept of myth invokes a powerful Western tradition. In the sense Aristotle used the term, mythos refers to the process of recognition, i.e. the passage of the subject from the state of blindness into the state of insight (Cave 1988:4). Mythos enables the subject to become a communal being, i.e. to establish a belonging to a superior collective agency. Beware that narratology has followed this pattern, transmitted by Hegelian philosophy in an elaborated form, not only in its early definition of the story but also in its understanding of the reading process. These progressions amount to an overcoming of the state of mental bondage and exemplify the process of a successful subject formation. Through such narrative of coming to oneself, the subject becomes accountable, capable of representing itself as well as others. S/he overcomes the natural state of self-ignorance, self-deceit, or self-indulgence to reach the civilized state of self-knowledge, selfconsciousness, or self-mastery. Only inasmuch as subjects are capable of standing for themselves and others do they count as political agencies. Those who for any reason are unable to do this – whether due to infancy or old age, physical or mental illness, character weakness, moral corruption, linguistic or cultural incapacity, abnormal inclinations and habits, irresponsible behavior, or lack of recognizable identity – go unaccounted for. This predicament lasts for as long a period as such enablers do not qualify for political community by relinquishing their unaccountability.

Consider, for instance, the early Freudian conception of how the patient’s narrative proceeds in the context of therapeutic dialogue. In the course of storytelling, s/he is expected to overcome his/her self-ignorance by self-enlightenment, by getting rid of his/her deceptive past. This well documented European tradition explains why Nancy places myth at the very heart of political community. Myth is for Aristotle the bearer of the responsible, self-cultivating European agency in contradistinction to the irresponsible and self-enclosed Asian enabler. It not merely discursively engenders a self-conscious community (Nancy 1986:109); it also produces its representative subject entitled to make promises (Nietzsche 1996:39), or to join past and present in order to form a smooth and reliable identity. Recall that, for Gasché (2009: 26–27), Europe takes responsibility for the promise of universal humankind, self-authorized to execute this “infinite task.”

Cavarero, Levinas and Nancy are however not the first thinkers to challenge this European mainstream pattern of subject-formation. Paving the way for their philosophical critique, Nietzsche was the first to call attention to the oblivion, cleavage and discontinuity inherent to the consciousness-raising carried out by it. “Forgetfulness is no mere vis inertiae, as the superficial believe; it is rather an active – in the strictest sense, positive – inhibiting capacity” (1996: 39), moreover “a property of all action” (1957: 12). No definite passage from the irresponsible to the responsible subject, enabler to agency, is possible for the reason that the initial opposition between them reemerges at the end of the operation within the agency itself. According to Nietzsche, one never gives an account of oneself without being called upon by a social authority, put under a form of institutional pressure, and urged to respond to a demand to normalize oneself. This is why every acquisition of the status of agency implies subjection in lieu of sovereignty. Think, for instance, of confession or its modern descendant psychoanalytic therapy, as well as of giving a statement about an event to a police officer, appearing as a witness in court, or even writing down one’s memoirs. Does not this official pattern of subject formation spawn a conclusion that one becomes the master of oneself only on condition of obeying a sanctioned authority, i.e. subjecting oneself to it? In taking up this thread of Nietzsche’s, Foucault demonstrates in the first volume of The Historyof Sexuality how “pastoral power,” originally born within Christian institutions, has survived into modernity. But the bourgeois disciplinary mastering of oneself is based precisely on the disavowal of this surrendering as its condition of im/possibility. In order to rescue oneself from the permanent capillary surveillance of social authorities, one internalizes it over the course of time, spontaneously conforming to the demand for self-mastering. The sovereign subject is someone who has succeeded in adopting the control of the others over itself.

Nietzsche’s polemical argument highlights the “bourgeois” obliteration of this self-disciplining as the condition of the im/possibility of sovereignty. Rather than as a way to achieve proper autonomy, he regards the exemplary narrative of subject formation primarily as a foreclosure of unruly bodily drives by codified consciousness. Rendering self-consciousness as a commanding and censorious instance (2010: §354 and 355) rather than the locus of accomplished social consensus, Nietzsche’s argument unmasks power dissymmetry between consciousness (as the herd’s site) and the unconscious (as the individual’s site). This does not mean that he blames human subjects for such a submissive formation of theirs. They have no choice but to obey the social rules of behavior and adopt forgetfulness as the law of their survival. Nietzsche even treats oblivion as the gate-keeper of human happiness: being unable to be rid of a myriad of memories, to select the necessary from the contingent, one is not just deprived of a proper future but at risk of being regarded as unaccountable. Therefore, obedience to external authority is not a matter of free deliberation. To be a subject means to accept a subjected position, to become a self means to surrender to the Other. This is why the agency is always an enabler. Whoever attempts to avoid such auto-subjection is subjected to harsh sanctions.

With Nietzsche’s dismantling of the European foundational myth in The Joyful Wisdom and On the Genealogy of Morals, the European exemplary narrative of subject-making was transferred from an instrument of social cohesion to an instrument of political power. The ultimate effects of the European foundational myth are oppressive. This is the point of connection for Nancy’s argument. Precisely in as much as it surreptitiously imposes the terms of commonality, myth suppresses existence in its singularity; to get rid of this suppression, its foundational fictions have to be constantly unworked (désœuvré). Invoking Blanchot’s concept of désœuvrement in the very title of his book, Nancy makes clear how important a place this permanent interruption of mythic narrative, conceived as the repressive political instrument of subject formation, takes in his conception. Not the narrative itself but merely its relentless unworking can take care of freedom.

However, as is often the case with Nietzsche’s provocative and audacious arguments, this one also appears based on a simple “revolutionary reversal”: consensus into dissent, continuity into discontinuity, recognition into misrecognition. If it is equally instrumentalized in both cases, is there a substantial difference between the narrative as the liberating and the oppressive instrument of subject formation? Do we give an account of ourselves exclusively after having been pressed by an institutional authority? And is narrative to be unreservedly identified with the discursive rules of that authority? If we were to grant such an assumption, this would imply that no one has the desire to examine the state of his or her selfknowledge until requested to do so. One’s familiar self-representation would be broken only upon someone’s external insistence. Yet what if narrative comes into being as an attempt to bridge an already existing break in my identity, if its discursive otherness is just a necessary means to repair my fundamentally uncertain self? This would turn narrative from an oppressive agency into an enabling condition of identity by rendering it as an equivocal and diversely investible instance.

Such a cautious conception is much closer to the later than the earlier Foucault, who uncritically sided with Nietzsche’s unilateral rendering of power as force. Inasmuch as it prepares the way for Nancy’s unworked myth as well as Cavarero’s personal literary narrative, this more complex concept of the narrative deserves closer inspection. Whereas Foucault in the first volume of History of Sexuality (1975) interprets confession in a Nietzschean vein as a practice infiltrated by the Victorian power regime with the aim of eliciting sexual truths from its subjects, several years later he treats it as a speech act enabling the self to appear to the divine Other (Foucault 1983). If one wants to develop one’s own truth through speech, one is required to disappear, sacrifice oneself as a real body and real existence. This means that, toward the end of his life, Foucault abandons the idea of power as a self-sufficient force and introduces in lieu of it a mobile and heterogeneous field of codes, rules and norms opened up toward a constitutively exterior enabler. According to this new conception hospitable to the unexpected arrival of the Other, the field of power is demarcated not only by a sovereign discursive authority with whose prescriptions all speech acts are supposed to conform, but by an unpredictable non-discursive enabler as well. This excluded non-discursive zone lurks behind the borders of discourse and operates as a displaced addressee of the broadest variety of actions performed within it. This Absolute Enabler sets the ultimate horizon of freedom for all agency-formations, which take place within the restrictive field of discourse. Every subject irrespective of his/her particular position within this field is appointed by this exterior Other for the continuous detachment from his/her discursively given agency and thus invited into an interminable process of self-remaking strategically interrupted by re-beginnings.

It is time to return to Adriana Cavarero’s argument about singular narrative formation. She takes Foucault’s non-discursive Enabler as her starting point. The other whom I am seeking to tell me who I am is as completely beyond identification as I am myself; we are pushing each other’s politics of estrangement to the extreme. Cavarero contends that personal narrative is devoted to exhibiting an elusive “generic self” that originates in the singular event of birth. However, her insistence on the essentially non-discursive profile of narrative self-formation is as polemically exaggerated as is Nietzsche’s argument about its preeminently discursive nature. The singular conception of narrative departs from the assumption of a naked baby as a “first chapter of our life.” Yet a “totally nude self-exposure […] naked and bared of what,” as Cavarero would have it (2000: 38), barely exists at the origin of human life. Suffice to recall Lacan’s warning that the total symbolic net envelops human life long before the human being enters the world (1966: 279) or Althusser’s reminder that each individual is always a subject, even before its birth, predestined to become such by its firmly ideologically structured family configuration (1982: 128).

Therefore, ethical nakedness is not so much a prerogative as a retroactive effect of the evacuation of political masks. It results from their unmasking. Nevertheless, Cavarero raises the imperative, “social qualifications must be torn down by lovers” (2000: 110) in favor of the originally naked selves that would otherwise be forgotten. She thus transforms an arbitrary effect into the logical prerogative of an Absolute Enabler. The same holds for her philosophical antagonist Levinas who promotes the elusive face of the Other into the ethical authority that questions me, disarms me and empties me out of my political attributes (2001b: 269–270). His Absolute Enabler equally resists all attempts to be politically attributed. As soon as such an attribution happens, it withdraws, departing into an irretrievable past (271, 275).

The apparent opponents actually mirror one another: What Levinas renders as the face mutatis mutandis amounts to what Cavarero calls the uniqueness of the Other (in each other). In both cases, at stake is an Absolute Enabler that addresses the storyteller by “breaking the careless spontaneity of his naïve perseverance in life” (Levinas 1989: 86) and by demanding to be responded to. In Cavarero’s view to respond means to resist all attempts at identification, which is the philosophical or masculine way of dealing with alterity. Levinas states that to be a singular I and not just an embodiment of the Mind means to be able to see the face (1961: 276). Both insist on the priority of an immediate relationship face-to-face with the Other over the mediating intervention of the Third, emphasizing that the latter destroys the who of the other, defaces it. But in order to prove the counterfactual possibility of a relationship of uncontaminated proximity, both have to imagine an instrument of establishing it. This finally leads them to hypothesize a purely performative language stripped of all constative qualities – and to passionately attach their argument to this wishful projection.

Thus Levinas speaks of a “primordial language” of contact, a “pure communication” bared of all “words and sentences” which enables one, instead of transferring any message, to touch the other, to approach its uniqueness (1987c: 313, 319320), to engrave one’s trace upon it (2001b: 282). As if parting company with him on that point – “as if” because she never mentions Levinas explicitly in her book – Cavarero chooses precisely narrative to be this absolute performative. Taking a position diametrically opposite to her argument, ante rem, Levinas condemns narrative for turning the “living time” opened to “the salvation of becoming” into a linear and homogeneous “fate,” i.e. for taming the alterity and exteriority of each inserted event into a smooth series of narrative situations (1989: 139–142). In an almost perfect inversion of Cavarero’s thesis, Levinas interprets philosophy as the epitome of performative language, while narrative appears as the constative opposite:

Even if Cavarero’s inversion secretly and understandably polemicizes against an influential philosophy with masculine overtones, one crude dichotomy can hardly be efficiently beaten by another. However understandable this polemic exaggeration may be, the result is an equally unquestioned order of priority between the who and the what, between performative and constative language, the narrative and the philosophical, the political and the literary, the feminine and the masculine. Yet how is the exclusive merit for the constitution of the singular self to be ascribed either to narrative or to philosophy? Would this not mean attributing a very distinctive feature precisely to something that is proclaimed to resist any attribution whatsoever?