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Have I Been Destroyed? Answering to Authority and the Politics of the Father

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ore so than any other journal to which I am committed and can subscribe, differences has bravely faced down a formidable adversary, the inescapable non-dit that defines its institutional personality and continues to track every issue. It is not as though any one contender walks out as a clear-cut winner: the adversarial pull does not let up as it has with other journals that started off on theoretical boosters only to let them drop somewhere in the mid-zone of relative stability. Differences, by contrast, has held its course, though one senses a back history of struggleone might say that its gps has been programmed to assure a constitutively unsteady course. Declining the perks of ideological homecoming events and holding out against the retrohumanist temptation to ease off on its internalized mission statement, it hasnt seemed to settle into a pose of institutional accommodation but for the most part has evaded persistent calls for a return to the firm ground of referential prerogative. With nearly paradoxical pride, the journals anniversary celebration disputes the complacency of reward: the fact of anniversary does not imply it has arrived. Yet, despite the way it curbs its solemnization, differences
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has earned bragging rights over its singular style and idiomatic habits: in effect, it commands authority. Let me stick with this point and give it some backup, if that should prove possible. Let us approach this issue with the aim of exploring the authority that differences calls up, for here is a way to locate the journals alone-standing stamina. What is authority and how can it accrue to a journals profiled stances? The question brings us to the heart of the matter of theoretical practiceto one of the hearts, or to that sector of theory that is left more or less stranded by a world of phrases meant to bring in cognitive results and affirm practical effectiveness. Theoretical practice, in a Kantian sense, is condemned, for all sorts of determined reasons, to shoot blanks even as it stipulates and demands modification in the distressed world of social justice and political materialism. Shout out as it may, any genuinely theoretical intervention, according to Kant and his critical heirs, must renounce a secured sense of legitimacy. This renunciation is a gift. Theory, in the Kantian lineage (of which there are many split heirs, some disavowed, some brandishing his name, still others ignorant of their origins), emerges from a condition of impoverishment and the steady loss of ground, a predicament that makes rigor and the unrelenting probe all the more necessary. Differences has been scrupulous about maintaining the elusive ground from which it calls us out. One of the recurrent questions that it marks at a subthematic level entails the achievability of its own legitimacy: can theory berhaupt hold authority? Can it deliver a decisive punch? Or does the strength of theory depend on the very absence of authoritative claims, a missing ground on which it secretly prides itself? After all, authority, since Plato, is that which holds its punches and tends to maneuverif it maneuversagainst its own establishment. For reasons of survival, and in order to be counted among the values that grow out of the motif of relevance, theory has had to stand its posited and Potemkined ground, defending itself even when it wanted to expose its essential defenselessness. The theme of relevance, as we by now know, is often asserted in bad faith. This is not the place to plead for or pitch something like sacred irrelevance, nor do I want to set up tidy oppositions between what counts nowadays as relevant and what gets tossed away or moved to a condemned site set aside for useless speculation or mere language play. I will only go so far as to stand on untimeliness and the provision of inoccurrence to which something like sacred irrelevance points, marking the almost inconceivable registers of the incalculable that it invokes. Suffice it to say that differences has negotiated a peace

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treaty between the exigencies of high theory and the urgent distress of our fractured timesenmeshed tendencies that in the end cannot be dissociated from the theoretical aim. I cannot handle all these cues and their annexed minefields in one intervention, so let me focus on the question of authority, which may be a question that binds as it blinds. One can start off by considering the bumper stickers that urge us to Question Authority and all the insurrections, however minor or large scale, that we have known, as children or citizens, directed against established utterances and stances of authority. At the same time, let me recall that it was Platos intention to invent authority in order to trump state violence, on the one hand, and to outbid, on the other hand, a failed rhetoric of persuasionboth of which seemed lame when it came the to real-deal takeover schemes after which philosophy hankered. Plato was in mourning. Socrates had been murdered by the state; neither violence nor persuasion had proven viable options for the buddy philosophers. Shooting off his persuasive mouth had gotten Socrates killed. Plato had to find a third way to avenge his partner. To what degree and by what subterranean means have we inherited Platos dilemma when, essentially unarmed, we conduct theoretical raids? Maybe I can retrieve an action plan and make myself clear on this evasive subject, as I investigate where authority gets placedor how it takes placewhen squeezed between formidable challengers who do not shy away from violent reactivity. My University id Sometimes the subject matter with which one engages frustrates the hermeneutic drive. Or it menaces the whole enterprise and plan of judicious approach, undermining all the good intentions mobilized toward a sensible dialogue or purposeful probe. A vexed motif, an unauthorized problem set, threatens to capsize you. Be that as it may, I am a child of the university, an entity whose expressions of ambivalence have not yet destroyed me. (But how does one know that one has not been destroyed? I have evidence to the contrary. That is for another occasion. One day, on differences next anniversary, I will investigate the tyranny of the university over my own trajectories and dream projects, beginning with the way it has ruled over and overruled my body, beating down any healthy instinct, trampling the least cellule of creativity, but this problem does not move me now, and I know too well that I am rigged to be grateful

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that traumatic invasiveness, with all its identificatory passes, is also in the end structuring.) I mark these coordinates not out of a sense of entitled indulgence or narcissistic complacency, but in order to situate myself near the problem areas that I want to approach. The exercise of authority, including the covert habits of tyranny and evocations of injustice in the university, remains to be studied even as such investigations tend momentarily to downscale other, more manifestly distressed experiences of wrongdoing. The university, itself embattled by the threat of repressive regimes, seems in any case small in comparison to frankly pernicious political entities, and, in some cases, bravely shelters subversive types of cognitive sprees and intellectual diversity, making room for types of behaviors and reflection that receive no pass in other sectors of our dominant cultures. Nonetheless, whether or not it mirrors larger social tendencies, the university as life-form should not escape review, for it also sponsors unfreedom in a number of ways and appears to exhaust the teaching body under the weight of an ever-increasing bureaucratic prerogative. University offices, like all bureaucracy, dispense their toxic dosage of authoritarian rule, and the struggle over what carries authority or what is poised to make one perish (which is not limited to grammars of authorship and the contingencies of publication) is unceasing. If I have begun this segment of my run by slowing down for an institutional checkpoint, this happened in part because experiencebe it flagged by distress, disaster, scales of exaltation (or even mundanity) must nowadays be faced without the hallmark of truth. This is what Plato makes clear when he rigs up the shield of authority. He even invents an early version of hell in order to nail authority. Plato reverts to fiction in order to scare up the fear and awe that authority henceforth insinuates. The Household of Authority Authority, as Alexandre Kojve makes clear, has less than nothing to do with force or with strategies of implementation; it evades the 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 this view not only to the extent that force has proven to be

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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 stalls: Kojves 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, Kojve is onto something essential. Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, in another neighborhood altogether, paired up vitally to mark in what ways authority depends on its own representative and performative capacities, impatient to posit its field of determinations and earn the benefits of its own effectuation. The question arises of where to locate authoritys domain, how to separate off its different functions and identify its wide-ranging conceptual alliances. Whereas Kant removed authority from persons and offices, trouncing some of Martin Luthers 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 is instead something that can and does maintain a more internal, more complex relationship with what one calls force, power, or violence (13). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Samuel Weber control other sectors of the authority problem and stress panic as a principal concern for political thought and the way it leads to self-authorizing acts and paternal layovers. The three meet over a reading of Freuds 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. Kojve, who does not want to see authority bleed into other qualities of statement or act, opposes authority to force and power, basing his observations on paternal paradigms that are spared deconstructive takedowns. In the introduction to his La Notion de lautorit, the editor, Franois Terr, writes when broaching this Authority of the Father, whether hidden or repressed, that [l]apport discut de la psychanalyse est ici hors du champs de la reflxion (28). Psychoanalysis is off the tableright at the moment when paternal authority makes its mark and is shown to be repressed. Though another likely 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 to unsettle the household of authority that Kojve sets out to establish? Does psychoanalysis not always come back to

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bite the ass of the phenomenological politology that thinks it can simply discard it? Such questions seem premature and have entered an initial sphere only to indicate how severely authority can replicate itself when under investigation, disabling a friendly discourse such as psychoanalysiswell, maybe not so friendly, nor merely discursive, because too close for comfort. Kojve, in any case, proves impatient with the genealogical and Oedipal tracks that psychoanalysis will have laid downperhaps even with its exorbitant authority over political analyses in especially weighted theoretical settingsand decisively crowds them out. Yet it was Freud who consistently warned that we have yet to contend with the victory of patriarchy. The one thing I would have liked to see the severed pair get together onand here the allied tendencies of political philosophy and psychoanalysis would have encouraged us to no endinvolves new itineraries of pleasure and politics in conjunction with a relentless aestheticization of the political, a historical tendency that both psychoanalysis and Kojve have exposed, if not ripped apart. Even though he mutes the psychoanalytic program, Kojve relies on the draw of desireyou may say its Hegelian, I say its psychoanalysis (and then, depending on the intellectual climate, may whip out a whats-the-difference-nowadays lecture)in order to push forward with his political analysis. Kojve insinuates desire into the actualization of justice: his work brings to light the pleasure of judging, a pleasure as acute and specifically rendered as sexual and aesthetic pleasures. The human psyche is invested in and inspired by the Idea of justice and is outfitted with a properly juridical interestedness, which is as personal as it is intense (which is why, I will venture spontaneously, television offers up so may juridical dramas, to prime and parasite the personal investment in law, the delight in representations of juridical eventfulness). One would have to roll back to Kant to see how the recharging of desire works here, in the sphere of judgment. Kojve puts the pleasure back in judgment where Kant directed the explicit thrill of judging to the aesthetic domain, calming it down with disinterestedness, abolishing the privative in order properly to enliven judgment and to resurrect it from the numbing fields of the two prior critiques. Jump-started in the Third Critique, judgment comes to life but within the limits of a safety zone secured by constant philosophical inspection. Kojve carries out a double move when dealing with the primal principle of cohesion, for his aim is both to separate family and state and to disable the foundational myth of family. It is of some consequence for

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Kojve to disjoin paternal authority from the state and lock it solely into familial structures. The family depends on paternal ontology (due to setting father as cause, author, origin, and source of what is) by something like ontological default. Father, who figures the authority of the past, maintains himself only by means of ontological inertia. Kojve attempts to off the father, who cannot be easily removed, with a silencer. No one will hear the big bang of paternal jockeying because father mutely survives himself. Father stays the execution to the extent that lassitude has overtaken the family vote and nothing energetically moves in to replace or refute him. His imputed authority accrues to a default position. Here again, one might patch into Freudian circuits where the sons mobilize for the purpose of bumping the father. The overthrow of the paternal according to Freudian patterns gives rise to even more intense displays of authority squired by remorse. Kojve is perhaps more severe, if less inclined to construe a narrative explication that accounts for the fantasy of paternal demise. The father only ever held the key to authority by means of a nearly arbitrary shortfall, the type of inert passivity that Kojve ontologizes. Inert and essentially absent (complaints about absent fathers are only empirical derivatives of this essential feature), Father has a lock on the past even though he was ever always on his way out. Distinct Hierarchies of Authority Family and State obey distinct hierarchies of authority to which they are deemed answerable. They belong to different transversals of time, the overlaps of which Kojve deems largely illusory. Still, derivations and signals sent across the divide of regularly disbanding typologies are not uncommon. Father mixes in where he was evicted or merely tolerated, and memory traces of early identifications abound. He uses the notion of authority as a brace against the wages of an inassimilable history, as something that could override the blanking out of representation, where only a neutral gleam can be detected, and a relation to disabled time. In a sense, we are asked to examine the haunting qualities of a history that cannot be integrated, qualities that resist being simply absorbed and quieted down. Still, one would have wanted Kojve to take a stab at Father Time, to tell what brings time down upon us in terrifying ways, what makes the past recur and stand before us as the sign of what is ahead, and so on, and so back and forth, with childhood crawling through the temporal cracks at moments of extreme vulnerability to said authority. The figuring of time

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has traditionally been paternalized, but this is outside of Kojves domain, perhaps for good reason given his materialist rap sheet, and understandably so if he wants to manifest an intention and plan without formal or aprioristic or ontological weights. Anyone subjected to time, bound to the temporal destiny on which Hlderlin broke, is scorched by a notion of finitude and left bedazzled by the conspiracy, or authority, of father and time. Let us simply establish a dossier for this area of speculative inquiry and wonder how Father Time ticks and tocks to make his offspring lose out to the authority and dissolution of time, a no doubt generalizable fate given over to the persecutory invasiveness that Kojve seeks to contain. Hence the schedules under which one labors in excess of his programthe timetables of compensatory aggression, the itineraries of historical payback, the beat of totalitarian return, whether subtle or overt, that I hope to review in another context. Authority also turns Hannah Arendt toward the vacant lot of divine abandonment, where humankind is left to fend for itself in the draft of monotheistic withdrawal. The gods have fled, and the one deity left for us has bailed or retreated into mute indifference. Somehow, authority is summoned to fill in the blanks of an ontotheological arrangement of replacement parts, whether viewed as a form of liberal democracy or as one profile of the secular totalitarianisms. For both Arendt and Kojve, the distress of losing authority convenes core survival issues that need inventive arbitration as well as, in some essential ways, recall. To be sure, earlier studies of authority had been linked to reflections on power, which Kojve wants to see dissociated in terms of essential state and legal relations. Others who have investigated the relations of authority to power without, however, effecting the specific separations to which Kojve is committed range from Alexis de Tocqueville to Karl Marx following the lines of one strong set of affiliations and from Emile Durkheim to Georg Simmel, following another critical set. Friedrich Engels and Max Weber offer their theories on authority in the context of industrial formation and bureaucracy. Relations of domination and obedience, power and submission, organize their discourses on authority, which, from a Kojvian perspective, serve only to enumerate what authority is not. Nonetheless, the lines they form around authority infiltrate and strengthen any serious consideration of contemporary anguish, which is regularly fueled by differing modalities and settings of authority according to selfrenewing constellations of bureaucracy and domination. Industrial and technological sutures of authority build and burn bridges in the literary

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expanses that define the Kafka-coded terrain, preparing new edges of the authoritarian takeover. Authority 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 its coveted whip. Even those who rail against Authority confirm its hold. A Critical Halt I admit having avoided quite a number of staple discursivitiesthe 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 our disciplines, that run us safely to the types of homes or their shadows in homelessness that we return to every day, that underlie the way we talk to one another. A more grounded procedure would have been temptingbacked, Gd-forbid, by a methodology, and then there would have been no struggle for legitimacy, internally surveilled or more externally controlled. I could have offered a list of works that have been eliminated for these and those stated reasons. However, I can say this much for myself. 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. This, in part, is why there has been no pretension to a political theory here or to anything resembling a political science. Instead, I have kept the focus mostly on the co-belonging of the philosophical and the political, and, where necessary, enlisting their reciprocal involvement, I account for the political as a philosophical determination. It is understood that, for me, philosophy owns a time-share 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 that crowds out any critique and inevitably assumes totalitarian qualities. Without a doubt, philosophy, stripped of power and more often than not dispossessed

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of authority, can and must, as Kant admonishes, fire its blank shots at the political behemoth and its brutalizing tendencies. One in any case must stay on guard against those discursive and academic practices that make claims for autonomy or subsist on disavowal when it comes to a largely 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. Freud and Political Science In La Panique politique, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy question the philosophical essence of the political. They bring Freud into the mix: The Freudian science is by rights a science of culture, and consequently a political science. Even and precisely if it turns out that this right gives rise to the greatest difficulties, indeed to the greatest disorder, and to the threat [...] of a theoretical panic (9). It is not clear that Kojve lays claim to or wants to be associated with the discursivity identified as political science when he sketches his thought on authority. Nor is it clear that by now canonical formations around the discipline feel summoned precisely by the portentous difficulties that an encounter with psychoanalysis implies. Avoiding psychoanalysisor even that part of Hegel prone to itKojve desists from pressing the panic button, staying instead on course without feeling the need to probe even the sociological authority of psychoanalysis where it faces off with political science or philosophy, the way it situates the socius in the ego or marks narcissism as the limit of social formation and considers identification the ground of the social. At the same time, Kojve was unable to finish his work on authority. The temptation to imagine an ending, or even to invent one for him and for us, is great and would by no means compromise my repertoire, my habit of picking up where others have left off. I will leave the work of completing Kojves thought to his tribe, however, and direct our own course toward another end. I do so with the understanding that our ends will at some points coincide before they part ways. Let us return to the model of the political that gave both Kojve and Freud a headache. One of the problems that both face involves the bullheaded identification of politics with the Father, a way of seeing a disjunction or disruption to the political within the political. I cannot go into the torsions and frustrations of Freuds tremendous insight now but will have to remain satisfied with stating, following the argument of

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Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy and the careful elaborations of Lacan and a number of others, including nowadays Samuel Weber, Laurence Rickels, and Judith Butler, that the model of the Power-Father was untenable already for Freud. Freud started erasing and limiting the power effect of Father on the basis of the uncompleted operation carried out on identification (Panique 15). The troublemaker or troubled site comes up as Darwin, who pitched an enduring red flag on the archeophiliac passages that had Freud consistently returning to the father. Darwin, admired and feared, scrambled the code, dragged Freud (and us) through the mud, dusting off any semblance of human dignity. If he, Freud, based social reappropriation on the thinking of identification, who could hope to make it stick when the lineage traced back to a gorilla? [T]he figure of the Father was untenable in the Darwinian derivation of Totem and Taboo (which will serve right to the end as a matrix): for a gorilla is not a father, and there can only be a Father after the event in the after of the mortal event (Panique 15). Displacing the origin with a gorilla has generated a massive narcissistic breakdown in the Freudian narrativeone so serious, let me hasten to add, that it in part accounts for the punishing maltreatment of animals, the splice of the disavowed paternal, today. Henceforth, the myths of primitive horde and Father fail to take off: irretrievably attached to Darwinian search engines, they simply do not work. This may be one reason why, in a sense, mystifications such as those sponsoring creationism above evolution are on the table: in order to skip the pages sketched by Darwin that undermine paternal license while rattling divine sanctity. Still, we are locked in the archeophiliac edifice of killing the father, which exercises effects of power over a wide range of offenses to this day, raising auxiliary problems of philosophical responsibility and theological authority. One persistent effect of this construction entails Judaisms assignation as a religion of the father (notably in opposition to Christianity, the religion of the son) (Panique 24). On another register altogether, though bridged by Kafka, the pernicious spread of bureaucracy and its special brand of cruelty, its rule-binding propensities, circuit into paternal tropologies that still require discrete systems of detection. The Power-Father, according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, not only dispatches the Freudian Political but comes about in all its forms as the pervasive consequence of an uncompleted operation carried out on identification (15). To the extent that the analysis of identification remains incomplete in Freud, it also, however, represents a blind spot that continues to drive the understanding

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of the political. Freud recognized the knot that ties up psychoanalysiss reading of the political and puts in place evasive strategies to protect, as it were, his blindness. So powerful an archeophilia that it is blind to the contradiction which it never ceases to reproduce (Panique 15). Freuds situating the beginning in a common affectionate tie with a person outside the group is to presuppose the crowd and the person, it is to explain nothing. The history of the horde at least in this form, explains nothing, nothing but the self-explanation of the political (15). But here as elsewhere Freud persists in fomenting and in perpetrating on his part a coup which is the political par excellence: le coup de chef, the coup of the leader (15). Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy make the point that, for Freud, there must in the first place be a head, a leader. Despite any reservations he may have on this point, Freud wants a beginning, an archeophiliac drive or passion which forms the very essence of metaphysical (and) political desire (15). If Freuds trajectory is so evasive, so difficult to follow [...] and never completed, this is also, they state, because the archeophilia does not only proceed from the exterior, from an ideological (metaphysical) remainder in Freud. The politics of the Father is introduced as an external limit because it encounters an internal limit of psychoanalysis: that of identification (15). With identification something has happened to psychoanalysis, a sort of accident, the incision of a limit. And it happens to it on its political limit, which turns out to be both the cause and effect of the psychoanalytical limit (16). At this point, I can go only as far as to indicate the violent disorder of identities that ensues from the breakage in this description, none of which is Identity, and each of which nonetheless posits itself only through the exclusion of the others, each of which thereby finds itself deposed. Neither at the origin nor at the summit, nor at the bases, in each narcissus there is no Pan, no Arche, no initial Power [...] no archie, whether anarchic or monarchic. There is not even the archie of a Discourse, Logos or Speech which would already govern the crowd of narcissi (21). What we are left with, more or less, is the unrelenting tale of the immemorial patricide, for which Freud offers only an insufficient explanation that somehow manages to persist in different fields and structures of engagement in his world as well as in subcurrents of our shared worlds. Nailing the ineluctable detachment and the impossibility of the absolute Narcissusthe Father as absolute Narcissus (as Massenpsychologie describes him), is quite simply impossible (21)Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, by means of a subtle and intricate logic in both La Panique politique and Opening Address

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to the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political, move toward Freuds unceasing allocation of the paternal prerogative. The father gets set up on the withdrawal of the Other, impelling Freud to circumscribe paternal right, provided we henceforth understand that Father can only be the unnameable, unpresentable truth of the Mother (29). Always withdrawing, as the withdrawal of love and face, the truth of the mother hinges on a relation without relation (a relation of non-relation) (29), perhaps the very fearful thing that the incessant return to Power-Father covers over. Faking relation and pumping the political, Power-Father seizes a position of privilege with little recourse to foundation. The question of relation and the maternal swerve remerge in Opening Address, where the question of passage to community is raised, but it is equally the question of the passage to the subject (118), which throws off any thinking of self-sufficiency or autocracy. The question of relation (of passing into community, into subject) arises persistently in Freud, from the problematic of originary sociality to those of bisexuality, identification, or the prehistory of Oedipus (118). Yet relation is hard to squeeze out of Freuds initial register, which features the autarky of Narcissus, who is totalitarian, offering the reflection of an unconscious structured like a State or like a dictatorship (118). Nonetheless, Freud allows for the multiple weakenings and fissurings of this political and subjectival normativity (118), which forces upon itself a thinking, in principle and on principle, of relation and in the end excludes the position of a self-sufficiency and an autocracy (118). Freud raises the question of relation as a question, a limit question, in terms of the impossibility of presupposing the solution of relation, whether this be in a subject or in a community (118). The social bond, frazzled and assailable, based on an identification that slips away, is something of a gift for (if not from) psychoanalysis, something that Freud, at any rate, presents as a given, by which we mean: the relation which, in spite of everything, Freud gave himself, which, like the whole of philosophy, he presupposedthis relation of a subject to subjectivity itself in the figure of the father implies, in the origin or in the guise of an origin, the birth (or the gift, precisely) of this relation. A similar birth implies the retreat of what is neither subject, nor object, nor figure, and which one can, provisionally and simplistically, call the mother (11819). The transcendental of the polis, provisionally cast as the mother, does not lead to the hysteria capable of projecting a primal harmony or communion, nor that of a distribution of functions and differences (119). Nor does it

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devolve merely into anarchy. It is the an-archy of the arch itself (assuming that the demonstrative pronoun it can still apply in the lexicon of the transcendental) (119). The essence of retreat, linked to Derridas treatment of the trace in his essay The Ends of Man and elsewhere, calls us to reexamine all sorts of disinstallations for which Derridas work is still responsible, beginning with newly refined edges of the question of the political. It is not clear that relation can ever be spoken of in the singular, so the retreat or the nondialectivity for which the mother standsand falls awaygives relation as relation insofar as the nature of relation (if it ever had a nature) is the reciprocal retreat of its terms (119). Whether retreat evokes Kants ethical prescription of relation or Heideggers problematic of the work of artwhere political retreat becomes a questionthe issue of retreating that retraces what it distances has brought Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy back to the question of a disjunction or a disruption more essential to the political than the political itself (119). The retreat of the maternal empire is something that I have tried to consider elsewhere, in terms of war and disputepolemos and polemicswhere the mother comes rebounding back as a grab for territory and language, as when the United States felt threatened by the mother of all battles. The time has come to clear out the question concerning authority and hope for its advent or relaunch elsewhere, according to other inflections and means. The insistent reversion to the paternal, even where it has been disqualified yet continues to run out the clock, still models the essential pull of authority. We do not know whether we need it or flee from it, if we need it in order to flee, to keep the motor going for the purpose of questioning its empty essence. As a starting point that does not look back or look down, the paternal still has a hold on power, the way it is shaped, the way it is justified and used. The paternal goes hand in hand with the fantasy of Identificationsomething left over, Nancy suggests, from monarchical and other forms of divinely appointed regimes that require identificatory passes. Democracy, if it had a Nietzschean lifeline and could affirm itself as nonfigural opening for the incalculable that escapes political determinationfor unaccountable inlets of joy, poetry, delight, creativity (all undervalued or nonvalued, hence Nancy introduces the Marxian inversion of an undervalue that ought to be embraced with or without capitals insistence on equivalencies)refuses Identification, refuses the coercive pull of paternal adhesiveness (33). The renunciation of major identification advocated by Nancy, whether it was borne by the image of a king, a Father, a God, a Nation, a Republic, a People, a

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Man or a Humanity, even indeed a Democracydoes not at all contradict the demand of identification in the sense of the possibility that each and everyone identify (nowadays we like to say subjectivize) with a place, role and valueeach inestimablein the situation of being-together (50).

p.s. In an upcoming work, I would like to convince you of how committed Kafka was to taking on these enigmas and, from another perspective, not incompatible with that of Kafka, Id like to get Lyotard to show you his cards and his acute regard for historical disturbance due to the pressures of patriarchal overload. The engagement with authority opens the way, I hope, for another type of encounter with the aggravation and distress that has beset our fractured worlds, blocked by unresolved and growing narcissistic grammars of being. There are still other routes to take in order to explore further some of the stinging implications of authoritys reach and to consider the necessity of its corrosive swell, its indwelling improbity as long as it takes off from the premises of the father, where Freud locates the unreadable plight of the absolute Narcissus.

This article is more or less excerpted from a work in progress, Loser Sons, that deals with masculinist aggression and political instauration. av ita l ronell is University Professor and Professor of German, Comparative Literature and English at New York University, where she taught an annual course with Derrida. She has just delivered a series of eight performances at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and is publishing her latest book, Fighting Theory, this winter. She codirects the Trauma & Violence Transdisciplinary Studies program at New York University and is Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

Works Cited

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