it their life’s work to put unceasing pressure on the elaboration of social formations, and bravely continue to work through the mires of a relentlessly agonistic politics. But, for me, whether by default or theoretical perversion, there’s another way of going about things, another hand that can be played when it comes to the domination of the political and the necessity of sizing up its implications.
I start off by conducting nano-analyses, following minor or minoritarian tracks that may lead nowhere or, suddenly, they may flip into “the big picture” to function as canaries in a political coal mine. Growing into small spaces in order to bear hard upon big issues has its advantages, and I’m not the first to try this scholarly diet. Still, there are pitfalls and dramatic dissolutions. At the same time as one may be motivated by Kafkan velocities to interrogate the fate of a speck—at the same time as one senses the surprising advance of nano-traces, evicted conceptual shells, or the itineraries of imperceptible systemic disruption—one is also arrested by the magnitude of oversized concerns that are bound to existence. One is compelled to return to the fundamental structures that keep us going, if only in the mode of stationary mobility and according to archeophiliac determination—meaning that one is magnetized by the return of and driven by the return to ancient objects, concepts, formulae when piecing together the remnants of world. Even if one may favor the miniaturized portion of heavy-hitting problems, one sometimes crashes against the wall of their magnitude. Though preferring the speck to the spectacular, I must take my questions—well, they are not really questions, they are calls—I take these calls, given a choice (though it is not a matter of choice but let us go on). In order to be worthy of presentation, they should light up only when and if they arrive beyond themselves, from where they loom: big, barely manageable, yet non-dialectically allied with the speck. The calls may seem marginal, yet they require sizable backup from the tradition, the books, textual fronts, historical feints, and referential pretenses that increase their expanses. By chasing down the motif of authority—where big meets little, constantly exchanging and challenging attributes—I am attacking a cluster of issues that has been heckling me from the philosophical bleachers and that asks, in a way that won’t let up, these questions: Where does the political pose problems? How is the very possibility of peaceful coexistence undermined by apparently unbreachable structures?
The Fissures
I am not the only one to have been left behind when the gods absconded. I have heard you cry; I listen to the rumble of remote but unavoidable clashes: the job description of those left behind, without guarantor or reliable transcendence, without the pat on the back telling you to go on, you’re doing the right thing, hang in there. We scour the breakups, appraise the fissures, staying close to the fragile understructure of falsely grounded knowledge systems. We come in after the break, in the historical and nearly ontological zone that Jean-Luc Nancy designates as “after tragedy,” where he analyzes what “à venir après” means—what it means to ride in on the wake, to come in afterwards like the very concept of history, like all the posts and their chrono-logic that come after Aristotle.3 Setting up the links between the destinies of democracy and the loss of tragedy—the destruction of the tragic ethos—Nancy has underscored the risks of a continued experience of abandonment in the wake of true tragedy. The vanishing gods have left mortals on their own, among themselves in a space where we no longer address gods, offering victims and sacrifice, but one another, all the while wondering how and where language holds on to former rites of sacrifice. Whether or not we try to track the historical release from truth, its often violent unleashing, or the way ancient scenes of disaster bleed, leak, or smear into contemporary politics, it is still the case that, since or rather “after” Kant, one no longer knows what to do with or where to place “human dignity,” how to make it stick or stand plump with meaning.
I, for my part, coming after so many and so much, will grow low now, keep small, without the pretenses of any derivative of God or Subject or master signifier on my side, and strike out on my own, without any pretenses of having fully unloaded these unavoidable metaphysical bolsters. I don’t even have bragging rights or the wherewithal to boast with the triumphalist narcissism of being on my own or ownmost—even my being-towards-death is not my own—but that’s another philosophical story, invoking the well-known terms of Heideggerian thought. The strictures governing utterance are real and the scene of inscription, as Kafka has taught us, has become uncannily local, personal yet emptied of boastful interiorities, measurable achievement. So, for me, it’s back to school, strapped into place on academic death row, last seat in the last row, clenched by a history of repeated punishment. It’s not bad; I have grown to like it. I wobble in place without the brace of truth—that’s my only point here, which is what forces the “I” onto the page, as I offer a clip, a situation without substantial backing but that delivers the split injunction that I must go on, I can’t go on.
A Phenomenological Approach to “This Authority of the Father”
Authority, as Alexandre Kojève makes clear in La notion de l’autorité, has less than nothing to do with force or with strategies of implementation; it evades subphenomena of forcible assertion as well, since it repudiates legal types of bullying and disdains the arbitrary throwing of power punches. In fact, authority supersedes and trumps force on all essential counts, separating off from it with a kind of sovereign aloofness. I would want to argue with his view not only to the extent that “force” has proven to be philosophically inappropriable, difficult to pin down as concept or theme (unlike “violence,” with which philosophical thought has a long involvement), but also because we are made to confront other decisive shortfalls: Kojève’s set of assertions ignores the positing powers of linguistic acts, suppresses the subtle straits of education and sideswipes psychoanalysis, where figures of potency power up in covert sites and make legal inroads. Still, Kojève’s subtle analysis trains its focus on the debilitating consequences of tropological spillovers where politics is run by covert paternal commands. Thus, anything to do with paternal dominance easily slips into political dogma and comportment. Examining authority’s various forms of assertion from domestic habits to foreign communication, he remains attentive to the way it lends structure to material existence.
Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, in another neighborhood altogether, paired up vitally to mark the ways that authority depends on its own representative and performative capacities. How do we locate authority’s domain and sort out its different functions in order to identify its wideranging conceptual alliances? Whereas Kant removed authority from persons and offices, trouncing some of Martin Luther’s calculated maneuvers, and rerouted authority to the law, Derrida notes that law, in terms of the authority it wields, is not merely “a docile instrument, servile and thus exterior to the dominant power,” but instead something that can and does “maintain a more internal, more complex relation with what one calls force, power, or violence.”4 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and Samuel Weber control other sectors of the authority problem and separately stress panic as a principal concern for political thought in the way it leads to self-authorizing acts and paternal markers. The three meet over a reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, where Moses serves both as perpetual child and founding father, both as law-bearer and breaker of that which regulates social narcissism. However, Kojève does not want to see authority bleed into other qualities of statement or act, and opposes authority to force and power, basing his observations on paternal paradigms that are spared deconstructive takedowns. In the introduction to La notion de l’autorité, the editor, François Terré, when broaching “this Authority of the Father,” whether hidden or repressed, writes that “[the] aforementioned contribution of psychoanalysis is here outside the frame of reflection.”5 Off the table at the very moment when paternal authority makes its mark, psychoanalysis is shown to be repressed. Although this repressive move enacts another scene of the slaying of the father, at least it is honest: psychoanalysis has been tagged out as concerns a phenomenological approach to “this Authority of the Father,” and will not contribute to the formation of identity organized around group psychology. Will the spliced-out discipline return to punish or unsettle the household of authority that Kojève sets out to establish? Doesn’t psychoanalysis always come back to bite the ass of the phenomenological politicology that thinks it can simply discard it? Such questions seem premature and have entered our initial sphere only to indicate how authority can