Continental Philosophy Review 35: 207–219, 2002.

REVIEW ESSAY 207

Review Essay
Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: or Calculating with
the Incalculable

Simon Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas

and Contemporary French Thought (Verso, 1999). 302 pp. ISBN 185984261
$20.00 (paper).

Introduction: a work of desire and friendship

There is a prodigality to Simon Critchley’s work that makes it difficult to

summarize. It is, formally, a sustained thinking of desire; an attempt at not
giving way on one’s desire, whether at the level of friendship or the passage
from messianism to action.1 To this end many figures are enlisted. An exten-
sive dialogue is set up, fraught with tensions that undergo scrutiny, between
German and French thought, between Habermas, Honneth, Derrida, and
Levinas – not to mention an engagement with American pragmatism from
Dewey to Rorty. An Auseinandersetzung is established between certain lit-
eratures and philosophy. In these dialogues, and to his credit, the cards are
not marked in advance: perhaps we are, as Critchley says, all “liberals” today
– but are we simply that? Perhaps philosophy’s task is to question political
actuality, 2 but it must do so in the name of several instances: ethics,
‘messianism’, the ‘other’. Perhaps literature alone, in the mode of comedy,
can re-shape the social imaginary by rethinking subjects in our finitude and
in the absence of anything like a tragic hero. Or again, perhaps comedy proves
insufficient to thinking our human finitude.
As we know, Lacan remarked of the hero, in a way that revalues the Clas-
sical ideal, that he is one whom you cannot betray. Now, ‘to betray’ comes
from the Latin “tradere,” which means to deliver over to an end, to an injus-
tice, or in paradoxical cases, to justice precisely, and in the case of comedy,
one can deliver over or betray an immanent truth, which, in becoming ‘pub-
lic’, revisits the distinction of public and private. Critchley weaves with all
these threads. He pursues the meaning of deconstruction with a view to doing
it justice. He seeks a supplement in messianism to Ernesto Laclau’s project
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of dynamic hegemonization; one that displaces the sense of the undecidable

in ethics and politics. He seeks to overcome what Gillian Rose decried as the
lack of irony in Levinas and in much post-modern philosophy, or the lack of
a teleological suspension of – as Rose put it – the everyday. Finally, Critchley
grasps the structural homologies between what is irrepresentable and prior to
thought in Levinas and the function of das Ding in Lacan. This allows him to
highlight Levinas’s refusal of the Freudian unconscious and to explore the
meaning of unconscious alterity, a split self, without what he calls Levinas’s
religious metaphysics.
Along with the ambitions of his project, Critchley’s work consists of a
fraternal gesture to us (“encore un effort . . . de nous autres!”) and toward the
two figures whom he does not betray: Derrida and Levinas. The project he
began in the Ethics of Deconstruction (1992) – which could be summed up in
the apophthegm: “ethics is ethical for the sake of politics,” that is, “. . . for
the sake of a new conception of the organization of political space” (EoD, p.
237) – has grown more sophisticated. The resource Levinas offers us: the
interruption of social and political predation that an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ effects with-
out thereby being an ethical agent or choosing its responsibility; this resource
is employed more economically, with a greater critical perspective, in Ethics,
Politics, Subjectivity.
Critchley has taken as a challenge one of his own definitional remarks in
the Ethics of Deconstruction. “The justified Said is a political discourse of
reflection and interrogation, a language of decision, judgment, and critique
that is informed and interrupted by the responsibility of ethical Saying.” Eth-
ics, Politics, and Subjectivity unfolds the meaning of a political discourse of
questioning, the elements of decision-making, and the critique of subjectiv-
ity and ethical agency. However it relies upon a different set of concepts than
did the Ethics of Deconstruction. These include comedy and the question of
literature as resistance. And the work explores Derrida’s “quasi-
transcendentals,” which permit us to rethink pragmatism in light of the mean-
ing of pitié. Critchley entertains the possibility that we may all be “liberals
today,” liberal ironists at least in an indeterminate political space, along with
a reflection on the role of a political party in a post-eschatological Marxian
resistance (EPS, p. 167).

Three tasks in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity

In a footnote to his discussion of Rorty’s critique of epistemology, with which

he agrees pending reservations, Critchley writes that, “this would still leave
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open the possibility of a form of philosophizing, exemplified in the phenom-
enology of the early Heidegger, the later Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, that
would be critical of the slide . . . into naturalism” (EPS, p. 103 n.3). What
makes Critchley an interesting but unwieldy thinker is his use of each of
these philosophers to carry out a three-part venture whose themes cross each
other. First, a critique of politics that embraces the undecidability and finitude
of action while remaining open to a quasi-transcendental moment,209 affect-
ing the political decision from without, from the position of the Other. This is
a politics that borrows from Ernesto Laclau’s work, but Critchley approaches
it simultaneously from a Derridean messianism – a messianism whose con-
tours are underdetermined by an open future and haunted by the “spectral”
characters of capital and those who have disappeared – and from Levinas’s
aporia of ethics and politics, i.e. the passage from the Other to the Third Party
(EPS, p. 273).
What Critchley asks of deconstruction should be asked of his own project.
Indeed, what of “a deconstructive approach to politics, based on the radical
separation of justice from law, and the non-instantiability of the former within
the latter?” (EPS, p. 101). How is it with a justice that is “disembodied, where
no state, community or territory could be said to embody justice?” (ibid.).
And here, he turns toward Levinas, “One might say that the ‘experience’ of
justice is that of a . . . transcendence that guides politics without being fully
present in the public realm” (ibid.). Here are the contours of a democracy to
come.
Critchley’s second task is to revisit the relationship between politics and
literature, and philosophy and literature. He does this by way of comedy,
which may offer us a privileged genre of political criticism: that of demysti-
fication après coup. If the philosopher was the fou du roi, then the fool today
is “that thing that speaks the truth to power, that speaks in refusing speech,
[and] subverts the protocols of everyday . . . language” (EPS, p. 231). In
short, comedy opens a privileged encounter with das Unheimliche, within
the realm of the political. Moreover, the seriousness of Levinas, which for
his readers may slide toward piety or even despair over the impossibility of a
non-metaphysical transition from the immanence of obsessive responsibility,
to the miracle of the third party and the change in perspective which makes
the third party possible in the face to face encounter – this seriousness and
despair are shaken up by comedy. Comedy makes Levinas’s “metaphysical
desire” for the other into a desire interrupted by its own finitude. Comedy,
adds Critchley, dissolves the residual logics – in Levinas – of Manicheanism
and neo-Platonism, where being is privation and conatus, and the other is the
epekeina tès ousías. Comedy opens a back and forth movement between good
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and evil. It works like a teleological suspension of the everyday, within the
everyday. And comedy permits a catharsis that does not stipulate that the
only measure for desire be its tragic impossibility. And so, Critchley takes a
step further with his discussion of philosophy, literature, and politics. He
enquires whether a politics of resistance and responsibility – still bearing the
prophetic dimension we found in Levinas – could not be fashioned from the
solidarity of laughter, that “minimal form of sensus communis” (EPS, p. 235).4
Critchley’s third task concerns an account of the subject as constituted in
scission, in a diachronic time whose difference from synchronic time is like
that of Derrida’s à-présent, the “now which is not the empty . . . flow of
objectivist history.” (EPS, p. 154). Not that today the revision of the ‘subject’
is an isolated endeavor, it is the way in which Critchley articulates Levinas
and Lacan through the shared pathology of trauma. He does this in two mo-
ments. First, he evinces the paradox of Levinas’s subject in the light of the
latter’s refusal of psychoanalysis: “We have already followed the paradox in
which, on the one hand, Levinas writes that his analysis of the subject is not
on the side of the unconscious, because psychoanalysis seeks to restore self-
consciousness, but, on the other hand, Levinas gives us the meaning of the
unconscious as the ‘. . . night in which the return of the me to the self [moi à
soi] is effected under the trauma of persecution’.”5 The meaning of Freud’s
unconscious, for Levinas, follows Freud’s logic of Verneinung: it is “at once
refused and readmitted” (EPS, p. 169); structurally inescapable, it is substan-
tially evacuated. This is an important point. One reason for its importance
lies in the necessity of questioning Levinas’s logic of recurrence from a per-
spective that is not intra-textual, one not governed by Levinas’s own para-
doxical hermeneutic. A valuable perspective begins with Freud, notably with
his categories of unconscious concepts and guilt, the compulsion to repeat,
and the primordiality of the Todestrieb, and with his studies on masochism.
This perspective should extend into the work of Lacan, and here Critchley
is insightful: “Levinas and Lacan share . . . a common concept of moral in-
sight,” or better “a shared pathology of the moral . . .” (EPS, p. 199). If the
matrix of this partage is the subject in trauma and the primacy of practical
reason and affects, then the contribution of Levinas’s other-in-the-same to
Lacan, and Lacan’s reading of das Ding to Levinas, are two different per-
spectives on the incommensurability between the act and the concept, the
event and its meaning. Critchley writes, “the real (as the realm of the ethical)
exceeds the symbolic (the realm of the aesthetic) but the latter provides the
only access to the former. Thus, access to the real or the ethical is only achieved
through a form of symbolic sublimation that traces the excess within sym-
bolization” (EPS, p. 203). If art, and above all, tragedy, permits the expres-
 REVIEW ESSAY 211
sion of this excess of the real, what plays that role in Levinas? Critchley uses
a term from his Ethics of Deconstruction:6 the “justified Said” (EPS, p. 205).
The “justified Said” – whereby agency justifies itself in the name of respon-
sibility for the other – brings justice into the heart of the excess of the real
and its meaning for psychoanalysis and politics. By 1999, Critchley will make
the “justified Said” the borderline that redraws the contours of Levinas’s
ethics.7
“Might one not wonder, he writes, “whether the radical separation of trauma
that defines the ethical subject, requires reparation in a work of love? . . .
might one not imagine the rhythm of Levinas’s discourse as a movement
between separation and reparation, . . . between traumatic wound and the
healing sublimation, between the subject and consciousness” (EPS, p. 206)?
In other words, if there is a return possible from the Other to the Same, if this
movement occurs with the justified Said, then no hypostatized justice is forced
into politics, but what is introduced is an opening to something undecidable.
We now have a mediation – and Critchley’s 1999 work is about non-meta-
physical mediations – between obsession and trauma on the one hand, equity
and justice on the other. Critchley remarks soberly: “There is nothing prior to
the mediation of the Said. Levinas’s writing might [therefore] be seen as an
anti-aesthetic aesthetic” (EPS, p. 205).8
These, then, are Critchley’s three tasks. They are interconnected, although
there is no rigorous order of reasons governing them. The central concern is
with politics. It is for politics that Critchley rethinks the subject, blurs the
line between philosophy and literature, the public and the private, the living
and the dead. Indeed, Critchley’s contribution to theorizing the political con-
sists in reframing the symbolic and political imaginary. The term “symbolic”
is underdetermined here; interruption can be a symbol – a symbol that is not
a sign, and an act.
By “political imaginary” I mean the imaginary that gets enacted in social
and political spheres, but is never abidingly instantiated; something that ani-
mates the representations and judgments of groups, even those which form
spontaneously. We should recall Hannah Arendt’s comments on the imagina-
tion in Kant. As she puts it, “the greatest discovery Kant made in the Critique
of Pure Reason [is that] the same faculty, imagination, which provides sche-
mata for cognition, provides examples for judgment.”9 Above all, a revision
of the imaginary displaces positions in political formations. Such a revision
changes politics’ ‘transcendentals’. It alters ideals and practices – sometimes
even without there being much change in the linguistic practices of the group.
Such displacements find privileged sites in contemporary science,10 but cer-
tainly, in literature and art. Blanchot’s rethinking of friendship without de-
212 REVIEW ESSAY

pendence or reciprocity is one such displacement, and Critchley notes its

implications for politics. For this reason, I will concentrate on his final essay
in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity.

The Other’s Decision in Me, or the universal criterion that ‘I’ do not
posit

“The Other’s Decision in Me” completes Critchley’s construction of the chain

of signifiers in Derrida, which he calls “palæonymic displacements” or, taken
together, a “heritage” in construction and deconstruction, similarity and dif-
ference (EPS, p. 266). These Derrida enumerates in various ways, but always
in light of what-cannot-be-deconstructed: “aimance – justice – the messianic
– démocratie à venir – unconditional hospitality” (EPS, p. 265). The first
term, aimance, a noun made from present participle of the verb aimer, which
means both to love and to like – is key here. But what appears to be missing,
until Blanchot’s work on friendship and Derrida’s commentary, is this,

A deconstructive approach to politics, based on the radical separation of

justice from law, and the non-instantiability of the former within the latter,
leads to what we might call the disembodiment of justice, where no state,
community, or territory could be said to embody justice. One might say
that the ‘experience’ of justice is that of an absolute alterity or transcend-
ence that guides politics without being fully present in the public realm
(EPS, p. 101).

For this approach to be viable, Levinas’s messianic interruption must inform

political practice. It must do so without prescribing a content and without
requiring the accompaniment of a ‘religious’ system of representations. That
does not mean that the religious is socially or imaginarily reducible. Instead,
it requires a modification in the perspective that views political practices
from without. For Levinas, that modification was called “eschatology.” For
Critchley, it is a quasi-transcendental. “Quasi-”, he explains, is added be-
cause the condition in question is not just a condition of possibility but also
of impossibility (EPS, p. 265) – the way a paradox was a task, for Kierkegaard.
Messianic interruption must therefore refer to the other’s activity, in me
but also in my demands for justice. Messianic is a risky term. We see this
well in Derrida’s respectful criticism of Walter Benjamin’s messianism. For
Critchley, messianism, as an interruptive force, cannot really come from
Levinas. Critchley lets Blanchot speak for him in this essay: “Blanchot care-
fully (and to my mind . . . rightly) holds back from two Levinasian
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affirmations. Firstly, that the relation to alterity can be understood ethically
in some novel metaphysical sense and, secondly, that the relation has ‘theo-
logical’ implications” (EPS, p. 265).
Ultimately, Blanchot assures the passage between the private and the pub-
lic, the personal and the political, with his notion of friendship that is neither
a horizontal rapport nor a vertical relationship with an absence. But Blanchot’s
friendship is also not to be put into practice, perhaps it is not even possible
(EPS, p. 267). Is this not more worrisome than Levinas’s concept of respon-
sibility? It is not less paradoxical. But in Blanchot, the paradox is not as
haunted by the “holy” as it was in Levinas. Without seeking to defend the
holy, I would argue that we can not extricate ourselves from such a perspec-
tive without incurring other, logical, difficulties.
The passage from the ethical to a democracy à venir, which is taking place
now, also requires the logic of spectrality laid out in Derrida’s Spectres de
Marx. Critchley has analyzed this work. I will only highlight its erasure of
the frontiers between life and death, past and present, expressed lapidarily as
sur-vivance or “hantology.” To put it simply, if death did not firstly belong to
memory and to forgetting, and so to a personal and social imaginary, it would
be nothing. Returning to Levinas, but holding on to Blanchot, Critchley writes,
“die Stimme des Freundes is spectral and speaks from beyond the grave. It is
to this memory and out of this loss that I speak. . . . [And] if friendship is
what speaks to the other, to the dead friend . . ., then il faut l’oubli. . . . Why?
Paradoxically perhaps it is in order to remember that this speaking-to is a
response, a responsibility to that which I can never adequately respond . . .”
(EPS, p. 269). The supplement to friendship that Blanchot provides lets
Critchley work with the early Levinas, without being haunted by the “religi-
osity” of the later Levinas. More importantly, with Blanchot and Levinas, a
passage is opened to the political, but it is not completable. We may lay this
partly on Levinas’s doorstep, and Critchley points to five problems in Levinas
that set Derrida farther from Levinas than we might suppose. I will not go
into these problems in depth here, but two of them can be looked at in pass-
ing. First, Levinas’s “classical notion” of friendship. Second, his profoundly
androcentric conception of fraternity and political community.

Excursus on the difference of Jewish monotheism

Like Critchley, I haven’t much sympathy with formulas expressing univer-

sality while excluding what Seyla Benhabib has called the “Concrete Other.”
Yet I would like to complexify this in two ways. First, if Levinas has a “clas-
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sical conception” of friendship, then it occupies the wrong topos altogether.

Paul Ricoeur has argued that the Other in Levinas commands actions that a
friend alone could have done; yet Levinas’s other is never a friend.11 More
significantly, in regard to the second point, is our difficulty not the following:
one can lift Levinas out of Judaism, but one cannot take Judaism – the Lithua-
nian Talmudic-rationalist tradition – out of Levinas. To understand what that
means is a little like imagining Sartre without atheism. But that does not
make Levinas’s religiosity into a philosophical metaphysic. To illustrate, con-
sider an example from Schmuel Trigano’s essay, “Levinas et le projet de la
philosophie juive,” in which he re-reads Levinas “in light of Jewish philoso-
phy.”12 Here, the encounter with the other deconstructs the distinction be-
tween the private and the public:

Why does the presence of the other ‘consist in coming toward us, in mak-
ing an entry, the epiphany of the face is visitation’? These definitions evoke
the idea of the ‘world to come’ [“monde qui vient”], a term designating
messianic times, a reality that ‘no eye has seen,’ as the Talmud puts it. But
why does the other’s presence make an entry? Because the term that des-
ignates the act of reunion, of ‘assembly’ (knesset, which will give us ‘syna-
gogue’ . . .) comes from a root, kanes, which means ‘entry’. If, in order to
get together with the others in Athens, one leaves one’s home to go to the
Agora; in Jerusalem, on the contrary, one ‘goes back into’ one’s home [on
‘rentre’ chez soi]. It is within, in the penumbra, in a veiling, that ‘the other
is encountered in his face’.

How could one maintain the distinction between the public and the private –
the core of Rorty’s analysis, which Critchley is justified in questioning (EPS,
p. 85ff) – in a cultural system in which no such division was sustained?
We must not lose sight of the fact that Jewish monotheism, approached
from a Helleno-Christian perspective, is almost incomprehensible. There is
no passage without violence between those two monotheisms. Judaism not
only haunts Levinas’s philosophy. In its rabbinic form, it is the art of the
undecidable par excellence. As such it haunts more than Levinas’s work, it
runs through that of Blanchot and Derrida, despite the latter’s protest to the
contrary.
I now return to Critchley’s discussion of the hiatus between ethics and
politics in “The Other’s Decision in Me.” If this breach is irreducible, then
one of two propositions will be true: first, ethics is ethical for the sake of
ethics or the other; second, ethics is ethical for the sake of politics. Ethics, as
Levinas understands it, is ethical for no reason, on no ground, but also comes
to pass in irreducible instances and sites. Recall Miguel Abensour’s good
observation that Levinas’s thought is a formal utopia, without content and
 REVIEW ESSAY 215
prescription, the only viable utopian thought left to us.13 More important,
ethics is ethical in the moment that we act ethically, that is, when it ‘is’ in its
(reflective) impossibility: again, the logic of the quasi-transcendental. Here,
Critchley gives us an insight into the political. “So, the political decision is
made ex nihilo, and is not deduced or read off procedurally from a pre-given
conception of justice or the moral law . . . and yet it is not arbitrary. It is the
demand provoked by the other’s decision in me that calls forth political in-
vention, that provokes me into inventing a norm and taking a decision. The
singularity of the context in which the demand arises provokes an act of
invention whose criterion is universal” (EPS, p. 277, my italics). So we find
political creation in a calculation with the incalculable. Here, the “universal”
amounts to Abensour’s concept of formal (condition of possibility) utopia.
Perhaps Critchley wants too much from Derrida when he attempts to link
the political decision, political creativity, with a formal specification of
Derrida’s own démocratie à venir (EPS, p. 280). It is disturbing to read,
following his long exploration of Blanchotian friendship, that “there is no
conception of the political without an enemy” (EPS, p. 279). But Critchley
himself is aware of the complexities attaching to the notion of an “enemy.”
So it is disappointing that he leaves the binarism: friend-enemy hanging, and
turns quickly to “deterritorialized democratizations” in the form of
Greenpeace, Amnesty International, etc. (EPS, p. 281). These movements
articulate well with Laclau’s theory of hegemonization (which proceeds on
an analogous binarism), but Critchley emphasizes that they express an ethi-
cal moment, extending the sense of the Other into the natural environment.

Hegemonization and the political imaginary: two irreducible orders of

justice

Considerable study should be done on the movements and configurations of

hegemonization, using authors like Arendt and others. If we follow Critchley,
here, we need not now be concerned with questions like: How to grasp the
meaning of revolutionary hegemonization and renewal? Yet it is a crucial
question, and receives illuminating discussion in Derrida’s study of Benjamin’s
Zur Kritik der Gewalt. 14 Derrida’s contribution lies in deconstructing
Benjamin’s (quite Levinasian) categories of violence, foundation, conserva-
tion, the mythic, and the divine. Above all Derrida makes critical use of
Benjamin’s polarities; viz., between language as code and language as nam-
ing; between the justice of obeying the laws “of representation” and the jus-
tice that comes to pass – an interruption – as a law incommensurable with
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human affairs. Derrida’s critique of Benjamin produces no new onto-theol-

ogy: the two orders of justice in question are “radically heterogeneous,” and
there is but limited compromise between them. Part of the compromise sets
forth a paradox of enactment precious to Critchley. As he notes, “. . . there is
a universal criterion for action, but I am passive in relation to this criterion, I
have a non-subsumptive relation to this Faktum. . . .” (EPS, p. 277). The
‘Faktum’ endures as a ghostly presence that Derrida adumbrates using the
tasks of thinking and reading. “We must think, know, represent ourselves,
formalize, judge the complicity possible between all these discourses and the
worst (here, the ‘final solution’) . . .” (FdL, p. 146). This is the practical-
textual negotiation between the two orders of justice – the political imagi-
nary must be rooted in it, though our passivity in its regard means that this
“universal criterion” admits neither normalization, nor universal calculation;
hence, calculating with the incalculatable.15
Now, Critchley and Derrida both invite a comparison between “calculat-
ing with the incalculatable” and a remark of Claude Lefort on communism,
from his recent work, La complication: retour sur le communisme. “The con-
cept of totalitarianism is, to my eyes, pertinent in its application to commu-
nism . . . only if it designates a regime in which the seat [foyer] of power has
become illocalizable; [where] it is supposed to reside neither in someone . . .,
nor in several someones [quelques-uns] . . ., nor properly speaking, in the
people . . . recognized . . . by the law, [as] citizens.”16 What makes this crite-
rion of illocalizability so interesting for us is that when she studied spontane-
ous uprisings in her 1965 essay On Revolution, Arendt could not calculate
the contemporary extensions of this phenomenon. At that time, prior to the
overwhelming manifestations of globalization, Arendt insisted that the force
of spontaneous revolutionary organization shared the same symbolic and
ethno-political site as the party system. She wrote, “These two systems, so
utterly unlike and even contradictory to each other, were born at the same
moment. The spectacular success of the party system and the no less spec-
tacular failure . . . of the council system [in Russia] were both due to the rise
of the nation-state.”17,18
Now, what makes Derrida’s démocratie à venir compelling, yet pragmati-
cally imperiled today by globalization, is that organizations like the World
Trade Organization promise precisely this trans-national illocalizability of
power, along with the extension of policing capacities such that frontiers –
and horizontal alliances – are irrelevant. In other words, if yesterday it was
French divers who could sink the Rainbow Warrior, then tomorrow, it will
not be nation-states like “France”, or “Britain”, or even “North America” that
act – despite the post-September 11th, American initiative “Operation Per-
 REVIEW ESSAY 217
fect Justice,” which had to be changed to “Operation Enduring Freedom” to
keep Islamic countries (and those with large Muslim populations) favorable
to the Bush coalition.
Complex dialectics will engage the new, globalizing formations; their char-
acter will depend on the competing forces of hegemonization, now more
manifestly American and military than a year ago. Resistance to power clearly
continues even when power is hyperextended or anonymous. My point is
this: the conditions of resistance and organization have changed since Arendt
made her observations. This is why I argued that Critchley’s “sustained work
of desire” sketches the forms of a new socio-political imaginary. Is this ex-
periment now dated by the negative, nationalist imaginary revitalized since
“September 11th”? Perhaps. But his insistence that to think finitude requires
a quasi-transcendental, which preserves the “radical separation of justice from
law” (EPS, p. 101) while holding justice to an ethical standard whose mean-
ing is not fixed in political categories, retains its urgency.

Notes

1. Simon Critchley’s three monographs include: The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida

and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992); Very Little . . . Almost Nothing (New
York: Routledge, 1997), and his most recent Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity (London and
New York: Verso, 1999). Citations from these works will be abbreviated in the text as
EoD, VL, and EPS.
2. Simon Critchley, “Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a
Public Liberal?” in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, op. cit., p. 88 ff.
3. For a discussion of “quasi-transcendental” moments see, for example, EPS, p. 265.
4. Levinas’s friend and co-participant in the annual Colloque des intellectuels juifs in
Paris, André Néher, had precisely this insight into prophetism. He analyses the proph-
ecy of Ezekiel as a “psycho-drama” in which Ezekiel’s suffering is both comic and
tragic, because of the “displacement felt by the prophet between the seriousness of his
message and the nonchalance with which the world receives this message,” see his
“Ezéchiel 30: 30–33: Un Paroxysme du psychodrame prophétique” in François Laruelle,
Ed. Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980), pp. 71–77.
5. Critchley, “The Original Traumatism” in ESP, p. 194. I follow the formulation of “moi”
and “soi” in his French version of the same essay, rather than the English formulation,
“the ego”.
6. Critchley, EoD, p. 233.
7. One difficulty in this is that trauma can and does speak through the lips of the come-
dian, but I doubt that comedy’s catharsis is enough to heal trauma.
8. More is at stake in Critchley’s discussion of Lacan and Levinas. It is enough, here, to
point out the two step movement in the confrontation he sets up between Levinasian
ethics, Freudian energetics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The question of comedy again
arises here, this time as a force that undoes the equation: sublimation-tragedy. Thus,
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too, the query into the ‘subject’ of politics. This is all the more pressing because Lacan
uses an unlikely pair to cast light on the subject of psychoanalysis as desire, or as
Patrick Guyomard puts it, desire as the “metonymy of the subject.” The pair is Lear and
Oedipus. Oedipus does not give way on his desire from the moment that he gives up any
form of altruism, from the moment he enters exile in Colonnus. Having accepted his
death, “Oedipus incarnates pure desire. The life that remains to him is nothing but his
desire . . . he renounces nothing, he is ‘absolutely unreconciled’.” Whereas Lear is the
comic figure because he holds fast to the illusion that he can know alterity – and how he
will encounter it in death. But if we try a cross-reading of Levinas and Lacan, we should
steer clear of Lacanian ‘destiny’, where desire is carried by death alone; where the
weight of finitude closes off its possibilities for comedy and sublimation. Moreover,
what is an action undertaken by one who ne veut plus rien savoir? Cf. Patrick Guyomard,
Le désir d’éthique (Paris: Aubier, 1998), p. 115. Guyomard is here citing Lacan’s
Séminaire VII, L’Éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 357.
9. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1982), p. 80.
10. Cf. the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, cofounder of the journal “Socialisme ou Barbarie,”
notably: L’Institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), and Le
Monde morcelé. Les Carrefours du labyrinthe III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990). The
first was translated into English by Kathleen Blamey, The Imaginary Institution of So-
ciety (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); the second by David Ames Curtis, World in
Fragments. Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
11. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Kathleen Blamey, tr., (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1992), pp. 188–189.
12. Shmuel Trigano, “Levinas et le projet de la philosophie-juive,” in Rue Descartes:
Emmanuel Levinas, No. 19, February 1998 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), p.
147. My translation.
13. Miguel Abensour, “Penser l’utopie autrement” in Cahier de l’Herne: Emmanuel Levinas
(Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1991), pp. 572–602, see for example, p. 574: “A new form
of utopia that does not give itself utopian contents for an object, but the form, the
modalities of utopia, the determination of its proper element . . .” My translation.
14. Jacques Derrida, Force de loi: le fondement mystique de l’authorité (Paris: Galilée,
1994), p. 146. My translation. Hereafter cited in the text as FdL.
15. Critchley reminds us that in Spectres de Marx, Derrida argued for the irreducibility of
the religious. This no doubt means a number of things, but I would like to concentrate
on the perspective Levinas describes in Totality and Infinity as standing outside of econo-
mies of violence. Call it what you like, in politics this perspective concerns the question
of quasi-transcendentals, or limiting power in the name of something incalculable, some-
thing irreducible to everyday force. It is probably dangerous to calls this, as Benjamin
does, “divine” or biblical violence. It is also dangerous to situate the limit in the mythi-
cal, which Levinas calls the ‘worlds behind the world’. Still, I wonder whether we can
stave off both the mythical and the religious. After all, messianism concerns the social
and political imaginary. Tensions in it arise from its historicity, its ties to ‘destinies’,
and its claim to a certain extra-temporality.
16. Claude Lefort, La Complication: Retour sur le communisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p.
11. My translation, my emphasis.
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17. Arendt, “The Revolutionary Tradition,” in On Revolution (New York: Viking Press,
1965) p. 251.

Bettina G. Bergo
Department of Philosophy
Duquerne University, Pittsburg, PA, USA
(E-mail: bergo@duq.edu)
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