Nazi-identified students. Or one might revert to the still stinging history of the great majority of the philosophical faculty in Germany, who supported the Third Reich. There is no doubt that Heidegger’s desire for, and enactment of historical praxis, which was promoted in terms of Geschick as a way of making history reinitiate itself, remains unprecedented among philosophers. Not even Plato signed up with, or for, the actualized State. What happens when philosophers or their outsourced affiliates, so-called intellectuals, leave the reserve or relax the gadfly function of which they were relentless practitioners? These instatements and sign-ups invite further discussion and a carefully delivered idiom by which to gauge the often-consensual parasitism of philosophy and State.
To be sure, studies on authority prior to Kojève’s had been linked to reflections on power, which he wants to see dissociated in terms of essential state and legal relations. Authority, according to Kojève, cannot operate in a relational void but implies (unlike force and power) some degree of reciprocal adherence and specific levels of responsiveness. There is the matter of those who bow to Authority, respect its principle and range, surrender without manifest struggle to its requirements—and let us not forget those among us who need the coveted whip. Even those who rail against Authority confirm its hold.
So, how am I doing? Have we seen authority brought to its stance of urgency? Can a different kind of approach better serve the needs of thinking through authority? Is this the time for greater or lesser degrees of sobriety in terms of exposition and analysis, in terms of prediction and the articulation of Sorge? Let me continue to explain some of the choices I have made.
What Was Authority?
I admit to having avoided quite a number of staple discursivities—the phrasal regimens of shared political infrastructures and anxieties that hold sway over the way we treat matters of common concern. I could have done a better job of subduing the extravagant distress that is usually narrowed down by acknowledged forms of political discussion. For starters, I could have mobilized recognizable themes or identifiable arguments that bind the disciplines, which run us safely to the types of suppositions that we return to everyday, that underlie the way we talk to one another. A more grounded procedure would have been tempting—backed, God forbid, by a “methodology”—and then there would have been no struggle for legitimacy, internally surveilled or more externally controlled. Finally, I could have disclosed a list of works that have been eliminated for these and those stated reasons. I can say this much for myself, however: unlike those who make claims for striking out on their own or those who adhere to group formations that exclude stray shots, alien premises, or intrusive contention, I have read extensively the very works that I choose not to mirror, and whose powerful legitimacies I relinquish. In part, this is why there has been no pretension to a political theory here or to restoring a political science.
Instead, I keep the focus mostly on the co-belonging of the philosophical and the political. Maintaining their reciprocal involvement, I account for the political as a philosophical determination, which is not to say that the philosophical simply precedes and trumps the political. It is understood that, for any serious investigation of authority, philosophy owns a timeshare in the neighborhood of psychoanalysis, whether this address is given out or kept unlisted. If you are thinking “philosophy, psychoanalysis: no thanks, not necessary,” then you are lapsing into the habits of the total dominion of politics which crowds out any critique and inevitably assumes totalitarian qualities.
This “recall” to the philosophical of the question of the political—which, contrary to what one might think, supposes no assurances as regards philosophy—is not a simply critical and “negative” gesture. Vigilance is assuredly necessary, today more than ever, as regards those discourses which feign independence from the philosophical and which claim, correspondingly, to treat the political as a distinct and autonomous domain (or, and this does not make much difference, one tied up with or subordinated to another empirical or regional domain). [...] The project of a theory or a science of the political, with all its socioanthropological baggage (and, consequently, its philosophical presuppositions), now more than ever necessitates its own critique and the critique of its political functions.6
This “recall” should not count as strengthening the dominion of the philosophical, but opens the space of a more original co-belonging, a conversation largely muted by the persistent clamoring of warring discursivities. Without a doubt, philosophy, stripped of power and more often than not dispossessed of authority, can and must, as Kant once admonished, fire blank shots at the political behemoth and its brutalizing tendencies. One must stay on guard against those discursive and academic practices that make claims for autonomy or subsist on disavowal when it is a matter of granting significance to an often-repressed philosophical ground. Nowhere is this more evident than in statements made on behalf of the fantasy of an independently sanctioned political domain. Let us not be intimidated.
In their opening address to the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political, cited above, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe consider the philosophical essence of the political. They observe that, when it comes to the political, philosophy unavoidably finds itself divested of authority. Something about this encounter manifestly weakens the philosophical hold on things, its ability to tell us about the world or to invent a future. In many contemporary forms of political discussion and theoretical exploration, it is no longer practicable to yoke politics and philosophy. Nevertheless, as a twosome they have counted on each other, if only behind the scenes; among the ancients, the philosophical and the political of course form an unbreakable pair, requiring each other’s attendance and support for family gatherings and foreign outings. At this point, they represent a severed couple, a fissured entity whose history of breakup continues in itself to be of consequence.
What Is Called Father?
Before going any further, it is perhaps necessary to interrogate the nearly immutable paternal input that still intrudes into places where the political gets marked or activated. This is the neuralgic point I’m trying to get at. Even where change is programmed there remains a relation to the Father’s worldly energy and familial endurance, precisely when we are dealing with a necessarily failing or fictional outlay of the paternal. A powerful philosophical energizer and political fiction since at least Plato, the assertion of paternity has served many crucial functions that, despite their ubiquity and conceptual banality, still require interrogation in the manner developed by Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” which links the Logoi to the origins of paternal interdiction as well as to particular rushes and writings. Using another watchword, let us return for a moment to Kojève’s casting off and retention of the paternal function—he manages to both remove and preserve the father, disqualify and hang on to the effects of this authority. Lacan has noted the way Kojève skips over the father’s very springboard into being, or let us downshift and say merely that Kojève refrains from engaging the Father’s onto-legitimacy. For some reason, Kojève won’t go there, can’t look back. One cannot simply enter codes to open up endless new accounts that may explain Kojève’s recalcitrance to explore this paternal overdrive and its precedence, neglecting the very premise of his thought. Still, it may be useful to pause and consider the snag in the political philosopher’s thought to which Lacan’s criticism points and wonder what route Kojève might have taken had he interested himself in what came prior to what he understood as the fundamental and master position—and what Lacan saw as derivative of the paternal metaphor. One might further wonder what the stakes are for Lacan in bringing up this missing link to the ousted Father in Kojève, and how it serves the unfolding of his own argument. Lacan may be trying to manage the field of the subject, which remains a point of fixture as he himself navigates through Heidegger, Luther, and Descartes. Lacan never gives up on the subject, even when traversing the Heideggerian oeuvre. The steadfast engagement with the subject on the part of Lacan may well clue us in to his investment in the matter of paternity. A quality of Kojève’s refused “regression” to what precedes the figuration advanced by Hegel comes to light in Freud’s own insistence on what is prior to the Father and what anticipates something like the subject on which so many of these reflections rely. Freud underscores the ruptures and breaks
