RABINOW-The Privilege of Neglect

THE
PRIVILEGE
OF NEGLECT
THE
PRIVILEGE
OF NEGLECT
SCIENCE AS A VOCATION REVISITED
PAUL RABINOW
ARC
Anthropology of the Contemporary
Research Collaboratory
© 2020 Paul Rabinow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
ARC
Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory
Berkeley, California
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904599

isbn 978-1-7347436-0-9
Page 35: Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait as a Man of Sorrows, 1522.

Art Heritage/Alamy Stock Photo.
Printed in the United States of America.
Chapter 2 was previously published as Trine Mygind Korsby

and Anthony Stavrianakis, “Moments in Collaboration:
Experiments in Concept Work,” Ethnos 83, no. 1 (2018): 39–57.
TO ANTHONY STAVRIANAKIS
For with friends men are better able both

to think and to do.
It is those who wish the good for their friends
for their friends’ sake who are friends most truly.
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
(1155b, 16–17; 1156b, 8–10)
Contents
Cri de Coeur: An Apology and a Lament ix
INTRODUCTION
Elements for a Remediated Foyer d’expérience 1

THINKING: SITE AND STANCE 3
SPECULATION 25
1
Crucible of Flourishing [2006–2013] 41
SOJOURNER’S HALTUNG:
FIELDWORK IN PHILOSOPHY 41
TO EU ZĒN: PHRONĒSIS 44
RECOGNITION 54
2
A Case of a Crucible of Flourishing [2013]
Trine Mygind Korsby
and Anthony Stavrianakis 65
EXPERIMENTATION 66
THE LABINAR 69
SPRING 2013 72
CONCEPT WORK 75
OMENISATION 80
THE LIVER 84
THE MATERIALITY OF THINKING 88
MOMENTS IN COLLABORATION 93
3
Crucible of Pariah-Hood [2013–2017] 99
CIVIL AND CIVIC EROSION: FROM FLOURISHING
TO PARIAH TOWARD MALICE 99
MINOR MODE: THWARTED AGENCY 103
ETHICAL SUBJECTS 114
COUNTER-CONDUCT I 120
4
Crucible of Malice [2017–2019] 131
X GAMES THE RULES AND ACTIVATES
THE UNIVERSITY STAR CHAMBER 132
MALICE: SUBJECT OF EXISTENCE VS.

SUBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE 137
ENVY: VIRTUE AND/OR VICE 150
ANTIDOTE 156
COUNTER-CONDUCT II: LATE STYLE IMPEDED,

NOT THWARTED 161
5
Exile: Wistful 173
SPECULATIVE THERAPY: ARETĒ’S SŌZEIN 174
DÜRER’S CRUCIBLE 175
Coda: Demands of the Day 179
Notes 181
Cri de Coeur
An Apology and a Lament
This work is a muted, conceptually mediated cri de coeur. It nar-

rates, celebrates, and then laments a period of flourishing in which
graduate students and a professor came together to invent, experi-
ment with, and relish a life of inquiry. It can be seen, in part, as an
attempt to embody a practice of inquiry in which living, work-
ing, and thriving were mutually dependent as well as mutually
reenforcing.
The venue of this experiment was a graduate department at an
elite university—formally, a site of privilege.
The experiment was eventually eroded and eliminated by the
actions of other members of the department. This work provides
a narrative of this journey organized around a series of crucibles—
periods of intense assembling and interrelating of practices of in-
quiry, norms of conduct appropriate to such a form of life, and
the making of subjects capable of desiring and willing to work on
themselves. As the process of assembling and interrelating was not
always freely chosen by those concerned, these crucibles can be
seen as exemplifying a mean, an excess, and ultimately a deficit.
At the end of this existential sojourn, the privilege of institu-
tional security and the indifference appropriate to an elite venue
with no ostensible instrumental claims remains. What has been
undermined—betrayed—are the principles of what Hannah
Arendt called “the life of the mind.” Her term “mind” is too
cognitive, too individual, too universal: the chapters that follow
explore alternatives.
ix
THE
PRIVILEGE
OF NEGLECT
What is done and what is undergone are . . .
reciprocally, cumulatively and continuously
instrumental in each other.
––john dewey, Art as Experience
INTRODUCTION
Elements for a Remediated

Foyer d’expérience
I nquiry aims to grasp and work over an indeterminacy or a

discordance in the form and/or mode of a situation. John
Dewey (1859–1952) deployed the term “situation” in order to
avoid beginning with a preestablished split of subject and object.1
For Dewey, the situation is primary, its elements constitutive and
contextual. Consequently, different situations will turn not on
mandatory pre-given (i.e., metaphysical, ontological, or epistemo-
logical) commitments but on problems requiring experimentation
and experience for their elucidation. How a situation becomes a
site of inquiry depends on the problem encountered and the man-
ner in which it is engaged. It follows that the term “situation”
potentially applies to a diverse range of scales.
What is experienced as inquiry as it gets under way and what
will eventually be warranted as “true” (or veridictional, in Dewey’s
terms) within what will become a transformed situation depends
1
2 the privilege of neglect
on the original conditions as well as on the initial framing of the

experiment (inquiry). The challenge is always how to achieve an
appropriate degree of resolution. Such resolution depends on a
number of parameters.
The type of inquiry at stake here is one that is capable of being
transformed into what Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has termed a
foyer d’expérience—that is to say, a crucible for experimentation and
experience of a specific sort. For Foucault, a foyer d’expérience is
constituted by the intersection of three vectors: knowledge, nor-
mativity, and subjectivity. The manner in which these terms are
specified and interrelated through their articulation defines the sta-
tus of an equipmental device (dispositif ):
forms of a possible knowledge (savoir), normative frameworks
of behavior for individuals, and virtual modes of existence for
possible subjects. It is the articulation of these three things that
one could call, I think, a crucible of experience.2
Over the last few years, Anthony Stavrianakis and I have experi-
mented with an approach where the possible transformation of a
given experience of inquiry into a crucible for experimentation
with experience occurs by way of procedures with distinct aims.
One such procedure has been to take experiential elements of
observation of a practice, in particular indeterminations and discor-
dances observed through inquiry, and find vectors through which
to gauge the determinations and transformations of the forms that
make such a practice function as it does in the present. We have
called this step of inquiry the transformation of experience in the
present into “configurations of the actual.” That configuration can
then become an object in a further iteration of inquiry.
A second procedure would be to ask what mode of existence
is possible for an inquirer, what attitudes-cum-stances are avail-
able for someone who wants to think about a particular practice
elements for a remediated foyer d’expérience 3
of thinking, not only in relation to the past, but also in terms of

its significance for the near future, and what virtual modes of exis-
tence the inquiry makes available for the life of the inquirer.
THINKING: SITE AND STANCE

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), in her projected magnum opus The
Life of the Mind (published posthumously and partially completed
by her friends), poses—and then opposes—two terms from Im-
manuel Kant (1724–1804): Vernunft (reason) and Verstand (intel-
lect).3 Arendt draws the distinction between Truth and Meaning
in a way that is no doubt loyal to Kant. Understood as faculties of
the mind, this distinction is a priori; understood within the debates
around positivism and hermeneutics that neo-Kantianism spawned
for more than a century in the human sciences, the dichotomy is
dated. In light of our prior anthropological inquiry and reflections,
we find this dichotomy both discordant and indeterminate; trou-
bling and troubled on the registers of both warranted veridiction
as well as ethics.
Rather than seek a theoretical (or even a strictly conceptual)
response to this troubling situation of how to identify the con-
stituent elements for the conduct of inquiry, we turn instead to a
different plane of orientation. Whereas Kant did his thinking and
composing at his desk, Arendt mandates solitude as a prerequisite
for the life of the mind to be set in motion. For a range of rea-
sons, we find these alternatives insufficient to delimit the defin-
ing sites and stances of thinking. Contemplating, writing, revising,
and wondering in a study and/or conducting interior dialogues
may well be aspects of an anthropological inquiry. Thus, anthro-
pological work might be conducted in a study, but it could co-
equally be undertaken in a media studio, not to mention in “the
field.” Again, anthropological (or other) thinking might well take
place in part while walking or staring out the window, but could
coequally be conducted in a laboratory, a seminar, or, to use our
technical term, during the work of a “collaboratory.”
Candidate terms for what qualifies as a site for thinking differ:
rather than the dichotomy of establishing a priori the site of think-
ing as mandatorily turning on the mind’s faculties versus the stance
of the thinker (solitude, not loneliness), heuristically let us con-
sider a relevant parameter in what Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996)
has named as a topological field of motion, or “movement space”
(Bewegungsraum).
BEWEGUNGSRAUM. History for Hans Blumenberg is

a movement space (Bewegungsraum) of observation-
intervention. It exists between two poles, both of
which Blumenberg rejects: the “oppositionality” of a
methodically secured Subject (Descartes, Husserl) and the
“extrapositionality” of Dasein (Heidegger). The lack of
fixed distances in this movement space primes attention to
the ethos of observation and intervention.
Blumenberg identifies the significance of the modern
ethos in terms of the self-affirmation and curiosity of
anthrōpos. Such an ethos turns on a renunciation of
“theoretical” continuity; a refusal to answer prior questions
with later means (and vice versa). The problem of a
contemporary ethos is to invent and practice a practice
capable of observing and intervening in a ratio with such a
(heroic) modern ethos, an ethos which is already becoming
historical within the movement space of history.4
The constitutive elements of Bewegungsraum, which one discov-

ers in a troubled situation through the episodic clarifying and
form-giving process of inquiry, cannot be fully known beforehand
(as they might be in a theory-oriented approach). Naturally, this

claim is not an argument for either an unmediated empiricism or
some totalizing hermeneutics. In sum, the goal is to invent a con-
ceptual repertoire for a mode of presentation of ultimately war-
ranted veridiction in inquiry that mandatorily takes into account
both the course of the inquiry and the stances and attitudes of
participants and observers encompassed by such an inquiry.
A MISSING PARAMETER: (MODERN) HALTUNG
The stance of the inquirer varies with the type of inquiry be-
ing undertaken, at varying moments of inquiry. Such a stance—
or Haltung—is itself an integral part of the practice of inquiry,
of form-giving, of thinking. Surprisingly, very little attention has
been paid to this dimension of knowing.
HALTUNG. “Posture, stance, style, manner, attitude,

composure.” Haltung makes visible the significance of a
specific occasion, or turning point, which is much more
than mere timing (kairos). The term was turned into a
concept and practice by Bertolt Brecht as a means of
changing the role of the actor in the theater.
In the practical, conceptual, and affective work
of inquiry, Haltung is the concept around which the
anthropologist can develop a manner as well as a tempo and
timing of exiting or Ausgang as well as entering or Eingang.
It underlines not only the conceptual work of the subject
in anthropology but also the affective and corporeal labor
required to carry through participant-observation.5
For Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), attitudes/stances as presented

onstage make inconsistencies, problems, contradictions, and so on
visible, and were designed to produce a critical stance (Haltung)
in the audience; minimally, this meant developing techniques

that would induce those observing the scene to reflect on and/or
reconsider their previous assumptions. Such a technique did not
consist, for Brecht, of a didactic explanation, except when he used
such a mode of abstract stylization to produce a distancing—his
famous “alienation” or defamiliarization effect.
Brecht elaborates in his Short Organon:
If we want now to surrender ourselves to this great passion
for producing, what ought our representations of men’s life
together look like? What is that productive attitude in face
of nature and of society which we children of a scientific age
would like to take up pleasurably in our theatre? The attitude
is a critical one.6
By “critical,” Brecht meant a way not only to make observers

conscious of the falsity or hypocrisy of claims or attitudes but also
to oblige them to think about claims and stances in general as any-
thing but natural or given.
Moreover, and more specifically here, Brecht’s aim was to de-
sign techniques and forms that embody the attitudes/stances (Hal-
tungen) of the actors onstage such that they must be attended to,
considered (betrachten), by an audience that consequently would
be obliged to begin the process of working through its own stance
(Haltung) toward the disruption of expected stances.
It is possible to transpose Brecht’s theatrical considerations and
experimentation to the domain of human science inquiry by in-
sisting that the significance of attitudes/stances observed in inquiry
is not explained uniquely or adequately by the cognitive param-
eters of inquiry.
Attention to Haltung underscores that in a situation of inquiry,
understood as the encountering of a problem of indetermination
or discordance requiring thinking, there is a ratio between the at-
titude/stance of those observed in a practice and that of the one
conducting the observation.
If we ensure that our characters on the stage are moved by

social impulses and that these differ according to the period,
then we make it harder for our spectator to identify himself
with them. He cannot simply feel: that’s how I would act, but
at most can say: if I had lived under those circumstances. And
if we play works dealing with our own time as though they
were historical, then perhaps the circumstances under which
he himself acts will strike him as equally odd; and this is where
the critical attitude begins. (A Short Organon, § 37)7
Whatever else Dewey meant by the “warranted assertibility”
of inquiry, a term he honed in order to move beyond the neo-
Kantian “method dispute” (Methodenstreit) that had begun in the
1880s, we draw on Brecht’s experimental reflection to claim that a
component part of inquiry’s “assertibility” is that, through writing
and other modes of presentation, stances toward the problem of
inquiry are made visible.
Such rendering visible of stance toward the warrant of what is
being asserted is a mediating moment in thinking for making judg-
ments about the situation under discussion. Dewey’s term “judg-
ment,” like his term “warranted assertibility,” is idiosyncratic and
is designed to avoid quagmires of stale academic debate in order to
go back to the question of how inquiry can have significance for
the life of an inquirer.
Judgment, in Dewey’s understanding, is the attribution of a
mode of being to a situation rendered more determinate through
inquiry. Anthropological judgment in turn poses the challenge for
the reader of working through his or her own (virtual) stance to-
ward the scene of action.
DÜRER’S TEST: INQUIRY AS A FOYER D’EXPÉRIENCE
Let us consider Foucault’s last three years of lectures at the Collège

de France (1981–1984) as a quest for a philosophic Haltung. A full
consideration of this quest would incorporate the variations that
the Haltung’s combinations with different Gesten would produce.

Foucault died before he could make sufficient headway in his
journey to settle on a form or forms.
His starting point was the problem of how to articulate a form
of frank speech as the defining parameter for his philosophic prac-
tice. Frank speech ( parrhēsia) articulated specific forms of truth-
speaking within a normative frame of sincerity: his lectures turned
on explorations of the genealogy of past and virtual subjects ap-
propriate to facilitate the articulation of the three registers and thus
to fulfill the conditions for a foyer d’expérience for philosophy.
Foucault’s quest for a “philosophic” stance can and should be
characterized as “modern” (using Foucault’s own criteria) insofar
as it is “heroic”—understood as a courageous stance embodied in
an upright manner. The conditions—or, in Dewey’s terminology,
the type of “situation”—for this stance to be put into practice and
put to the test are those in which the defining parameters are un-
equal “power relations” articulated with an ethos of sincere risk-
taking. Foucault wondered whether he could invent a “virtual
subject” for the then-current historical conditions.
The Haltung crafted by Brecht turned on a “critical” stance.
Perhaps today the task is to invent a range of different Haltungen—
a new articulation of the three axes of possible foyers d’expérience?
Further, what if one did not make the heroic and the critical into
the diacritics of this Haltung and this crucible, but rather used an
ethos of knowing and flourishing—a contemporary eudaimonia,
suitable for the actualities of our present lives? A series of steps are
required, as well as a detour through past foyers d’expérience, before
we can reconsider the question.
CONSIDERATION
Hans Blumenberg, in his book Care Crosses the River, considers

some of the variables and parameters in thinking that are frequently
taken for granted. He does so by proposing care as a guiding met-
ric; such a metric produces ratios of deficiencies, excesses, and

means. These ratios help to establish a considered observational
stance adopted before action, for example, “crossing the river.”8 It
is worth considering prudent pacing as a metric for inquiry.
CONSIDER. Late 14c., “to fix the mind upon for careful
examination, meditate upon,” also “view attentively,
scrutinize; not to be negligent of,” from Old French
considerer (13c.) “reflect on, consider, study,” from Latin
considerare “to look at closely, observe,” probably literally
“to observe the stars,” from assimilated form of com “with,
together” (see con-) + sidus (genitive sideris) “heavenly
body, star, constellation”9
In that light, Hannah Arendt was too self-confident in her af-

firmation of “meaning” over “truth.” Perhaps she was not suffi-
ciently careful in her considerations.
PRUDENCE
Blumenberg counsels prudence. He cautions, “Perhaps we should

cultivate not only a rage at the meaninglessness of the world, but
also a bit of fear in the face of the possibility that some day it could
be replete with meaning.”10
How should one heed such a counsel? To begin the process
of doing so, I introduce a device: three engravings from Albrecht
Dürer (1471–1528). The device is arbitrary in that I introduce it in
order to schematize ratios of excess and deficiency for the consti-
tution of inquiry as a foyer d’expérience.
The defining modern monograph on the artist, The Life and Art
of Albrecht Dürer (1938; revised in 1943 and 1955), was written in
English by the German art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968).
Exiled from Europe, a Jew escaping the Nazi advance, Panofsky
settled in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study.11 He was

renowned for his scholarship, above all for his emphatic mode
of iconographic interpretation. His work renovated academic art
history in the United States, transforming the discipline from con-
noisseurship to a scientific, or at least methodologically rigorous,
school of how to establish the meaning of an image.
In the space of two years, Dürer produced three engravings, not
unjustly known as his Meisterstiche, or “master works”: The Rider
(Knight, Death, and the Devil), 1513 (see fig. 3), St. Jerome in His
Study, 1514 (fig. 1), and Melencolia I, 1514 (see fig. 2).12 Panofsky’s
interpretation is neat and coherent, perhaps too much so. The
three engravings are not “ ‘companion pieces’ in a technical sense.”
Yet they form a spiritual unity in that they symbolize three
ways of life which correspond [. . .] to the scholastic classifica-
tion of the virtues as moral, theological and intellectual. The
Knight, Death and Devil typifies the life of the Christian in the
practical world of decision and action; the St. Jerome the life of
the Saint in the spiritual world of sacred contemplation; and
the Melencolia I the life of the secular genius in the rational and
imaginative worlds of science and art.13
Blumenberg once again:

Only by naming signs of deficiency can one know what lin-
guistic expression containing the element ‘meaning’ signifies,
as if it were self-evident. What a quandary it is when the ac-
cusatory handling of the expression ‘meaning’ is asked about
its own sense of responsibility. The admission “we don’t know
what we mean when we use the word ‘meaning’ ” already ap-
pears to require fearlessness.14
Panofsky, like Arendt, was nothing if not self-confident.

One might cautiously consider the neatness of the series that
Panofsky puts forth. Thus, Saint Jerome might well be taken to
FIG. 1. Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome in His Study, 1514.
be contemplating spiritual matters while he is at work, absorbed

by the manuscript on his worktable. Yet it is equally plausible to
suggest that the observer of this image is obliged to admire the
rational perfection of its composition. As has been pointed out,
the engraving demonstrates not only Dürer’s masterful technical
skill but also, above all, his mastery of Renaissance perspective: the
geometry of the painting is exemplary.15
TECHNĒ AND FORM
In his effortlessly erudite and intellectually inspiring book Perfec-

tion’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s “Melencolia I,” Mitch-
ell Merback formulates a mode of interpretation that successfully
works through (durcharbeiten) a centuries-old enigma. For Mer-
back, this enigma (from the Greek “to speak allusively or in rid-
dles”) consists in what he claims, with grace and wit, to be five
hundred years of attempts to make sense of Dürer’s work, espe-
cially his engravings.16 He argues that these attempts to “decode”
the “real meaning” of the engraving have failed; his case is but-
tressed by his demonstration of the lack of a settled consensus,
especially concerning Melencolia I (fig. 2).
In modern times, the most prominent of these interpretations
has been that of Erwin Panofsky (as noted above). Panofsky was
a colleague and friend of the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer (1874–
1945), both at the University of Hamburg and later in the United
States. Merback challenges Panofsky’s “laborious decoding” of
the complex engraving by asking whether Dürer’s engraving is
in fact a “unified statement, a symbol in the sense articulated by
Panofsky’s mentor . . . Ernst Cassirer”?17 Merback’s answer is an
emphatic “no.”
A competing interpretation that Merback finds richer and
more insightful, although not fully elaborated, is that of Aby War-
burg (1866–1929), a colleague of both Panofsky and Cassirer in
FIG. 2. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514.
amburg. He applauds “in Warburg’s phrase, ‘a humanist’s con-

H
soling image’ (humanistische Trostblatt), a token of spiritual self-
liberation and a resource for dispelling the darkness wrought by
the malevolent dark planet.”18 (The “malevolent dark planet” is
Saturn, held for centuries to be a defining vector in the onset and
persistence of melancholy.)
The theme of consolation, central during the Renaissance (in
both the North and the South), stretches back deep in the learned
tradition. In that light, and in accord with the pathway Warburg
indicated but did not pursue, Merback identifies the key to Dü
rer’s engraving as being
of a piece with Petrarch’s effort to revive the ancient epistolary
genre of consolatio, the consolation in times of grief and loss,
and to innovate a philosophical therapy of the word, a tradi-
tion rooted in Socratic dialogue, Aristotelian rhetoric, and the
Stoic training for life.19
Although Merback writes “of a piece,” his book argues persua-
sively for a specific form of “philosophical therapy.” That form
turns not on the symbolism of Dürer’s engraving per se but rather
on an engagement with the engraving on the part of those view-
ing it. He describes, without naming it as such, how the engraving
functioned as a foyer d’expérience.
Merback responds to the history of the drive for relentless de-
coding and its inability to achieve stability or consensus by ask-
ing, what if, instead of searching for iconographic coherence, one
shifted register to focus on form instead of content?20
What would such a shift to form, not content, consist in? The
point is not to construct a general theory of form or to ignore con-
tent. Rather, it is to attain historical specificity. In order to begin
doing so, Merback introduces the concept of the speculative image.
The speculative image begins its work in the contemplation of
the sensible world . . . but immediately it urges the mind fur-
ther, mobilizing in the process the whole hierarchy of mental

faculties described by scholastic writers.21
Consequently, as opposed to the interpretations of modern schol-
ars—again with the exception of Aby Warburg—who united in
the quest for an underlying truth or meaning to be uncovered and
decoded, the speculative image during the Renaissance functioned
to unite those viewing the image through the form of the image so
as to achieve a different kind of motion.
As sense objects and works of creative imagination, however,
their mandate is to remain concretely present, to keep intel-
lectual experience grounded in particulars even as thought is
granted its freedom.22
The speculative image, one might say, is less an object than a me-
dium. Merback continues: “Speculative labor is reflexive; it finds
itself as an object of contemplation amidst the contemplation of
externals.”23 The form at first glance turns on the experience of
the represented object, but once the content is recognized—as
erudite observers of the time would be inclined to do—it would
be understood to be a call to a distinctive kind of speculation.
Retrospectively, the modern understanding of what is taken to
be a settled scholarly relationship of observer to observed would
thereby be rather unsettled. That is to say, to recognize that Dürer
and his viewers were engaged in speculative work unsettles not
what they were doing but how it has been understood up to to-
day. For modern scholars, the way to settle the unsettledness of
sense impressions is to demand coherence. If, a priori, the object
is held to be coherent, then the viewer knew what the challenge
posed by the image must have been—coherence.
Art historians have diligently searched—in vain—for the key to
Dürer’s meaning, hoping to find a comment, a letter, or the like
from this very reflective artist as to his intentions. Dürer was friends
with, as well as an ardent participant in, the scholarly circles of his
day, including those close to the court, as the emperor was an im-
portant patron of his work. No key, iconographic or otherwise, has
been found among these scholars, their books, letters, or the like.24
CONSIDER THE TROUBLED SITUATION
But what if the failure to make headway in stabilizing Dürer’s en-

gravings is grounded in “a calculated indeterminacy capable of mo-
bilizing the beholder’s attention on several levels”?25 Under such
conditions, how might one proceed? One way to make headway is to
consider seeking aid: “the spectator as an agent of this passage toward
clarification, a collaborator in the return to creative functioning.”26
Merback demonstrates at length and convincingly that Dürer’s
engravings—above all Melencolia I (see fig. 2)—must be under-
stood as operating under those conditions. The elaborate details
of that demonstration are laid out at length in Perfection’s Therapy.
What concerns us here, however, is how this scintillating dem-
onstration of this sixteenth-century form might currently open up
new possibilities. That is to say, what parameters can be taken up
from Merback’s Dürer and remediated today?
A central term is captured in the following:
German thought has long relied on the word Erfahrung for
this dialectical image of experience as a self-enhancing jour-
ney, intimate but not identical with individual biography. . . .
Its opposing term is Erlebnis, which also means “experience,”
but the kind of unmediated, epiphanic experience that flashes
from out of nowhere, overwhelms, and even terrifies as it ex-
poses phenomena in their nakedness.27
Viewing the engraving, presumably after having read and absorbed

a definitive decoding such as Panofsky’s, one would feel justified
in one register or another of the “epiphanic experience.” “Oh,
now I see!” Such an experience qualifies as Erlebnis.
The salient term for the current undertaking, however, is Er-

fahrung. The meaning turns on the term Bildung, understood as
self-formation by way of reflexive experiences throughout the
life course. In the historical context within which Dürer was liv-
ing and creating, such a journey was far less individualistic than
it would be today. For one thing, the spiritual context was col-
lective in its biblical references and traditions, and the personages
and figures of speculative images were shared in the scholarly and
court circles in which Dürer lived. For another, the artist worked
while engaged in ongoing conversation and agonistic dispute with
a small circle of friends. These friends were Dürer’s first audience
and observers; in that sense they were his collaborators.
Lest one fall into nostalgia for “the world we have lost,” one
replete with meaning, there were absolutely no guarantees that
such speculative image work would be successful in bringing forth
either individual or collective virtuous states in the lives of those
engaged in such practices. Thus, Dürer’s image work can legiti-
mately be understood as an element in a larger crucible of experi-
ence and experimentation.28 Experiments can disappoint as well
as succeed; true experiments should produce unexpected results.
Today, the worth of looking back at a historical crucible of the
kind Merback has so adroitly and patiently brought to our atten-
tion is certainly not to reproduce it. Rather, its worth might well
be found in the careful consideration of other forms of experience
that might at least indicate how to make headway today before
crossing the river.
HALTUNG CONSIDERED AGAIN
Blumenberg again: “Whoever lacks meaning needs consolation.

. . . Therefore, part of pursuing a public accusation of meaningless-
ness includes discriminating against consolation as well as against
the skeptical counter-question of what is meant.”29
Let us introduce an image that can be interpreted as evoking

the complexity of Blumenberg’s abstract assertion: Albrecht Dü
rer’s 1513 Der Reiter (The Rider). The image is commonly known
in the literature as Knight, Death, and the Devil (fig. 3).
Panofsky provides textual evidence that the image’s theme is a
common one of the time: a Christian seeking his way in a fallen
world. This imposition of the meaning of the engraving, however,
even in iconographic terms, has been contested. The Knight, who
does not appear to be in any way either a merchant or a politician,
is in a hostile atmosphere on the way somewhere. He has been
seen as involved on a Christian quest or as a famous warrior going
to battle—whom he evokes is not clear, although various histori-
cal candidates have been nominated—and he has also been seen as
a kind of brigand, off to pillage and plunder.
Panofsky again:
Unlike all other representations of similar subjects, the enemies

do not appear to be real. They are not foes to be conquered
but, indeed, “spooks and phantoms” to be ignored. The Rider
passes them as though they were not there and quietly pursues
his course.30
Others have provided detailed interpretations of the form given

to the devil, to the hourglass, to the castle in the background, and
so on. The point here is simply that, for more than five hundred
years, and despite Panofsky’s declarative prose, no consensus has
emerged on the “meaning” of the image—assuming that there is a
single one, which is a contestable assumption.
Finally, for the moment, Panofsky adds an additional icono-
graphic gloss.
The Rider is accompanied by a handsome, long-haired re-

triever whose presence completes the allegory. As the armored
man personifies Christian faith, so the eager and quick-scented
FIG. 3. Albrecht Dürer, The Rider (Knight, Death, and the Devil), 1513.
dog denotes three less fundamental yet no less necessary vir-

tues: untiring zeal, learning and truthful reasoning.31
Perhaps. But if so, why are untiring zeal, learning, and truthful
reasoning minor but no less necessary virtues? Even if there were
theological arguments in the sixteenth century for this hierarchy,
they hardly apply today.
Panofsky completes his iconographic elaboration by adding
that
as “Veritas” he [the dog] helps the huntress “Logica” to catch
the hare “Problema.”32
There is, however, neither hare nor huntress in the engraving.
What is going on? We leave that quandary to the scholars to de-
bate. Nonetheless, the trio—Veritas, Logica, Problema—offer us,
if neither the meaning nor the truth of Dürer’s engraving, at least
the terms for making headway on our sojourn.
APPROACHING A CONTEMPORARY FOYER D’EXPÉRIENCE:

GESTUS + BETRACHTUNG
What have we learned by putting Dürer to the test?

A crucible is composed of terms. A term is a word + a con-
cept + a referent. Thus, we have learned that referents as well as
concepts can change, as well as the manner in which they can be,
and have been, articulated. Crucibles share the basic repertoire of
vectors (veridiction, normativity, subjectivity), but, as the deter-
minations of the terms vary, so too does the articulation of terms
and consequently the capacities of the crucible.
Most encouragingly, we have learned that the term “crucible
of experience and experimentation” can serve as a heuristic for
grasping the ethical and equipmental parameters of the practice
of inquiry. In that light, we have learned that it is possible, at
times necessary, given different situations, for additional terms to
be added to a crucible in order for it to have the capacity to func-

tion with wit and power.
Then, once the apparatus is composed and put into action, it
can be put to the test—but, fortunately, not right now.
GESTUS: A TERM MADE INTO A PARAMETER
Bertolt Brecht coined the term Gestus to cover ways in which

arrangements of discourse, language, body, and attitude can be
combined to render visible a marked stance or pose. Rabinow
and Stavrianakis include the term Gestus in a glossary they call
“terms of engagement.” Brecht invented, experimented with, and
reworked the practices of actors and directors as an essential com-
ponent of his larger project for the theater. Perhaps the term might
serve to enrich and enliven a contemporary anthropology?
GESTUS combines “physical gestures and defined

attitude. It is a means by which an attitude or single
aspect of an attitude is revealed, insofar as it is expressible
in words or actions.”33
With the help of Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and the cultural

historian Devin Fore (1972– ), we identify three core character-
istics of how Brecht conceptualized Gestus (pl. Gesten): (1) how
arrangements are made visible; (2) the genre of their discursive
character; and (3) their semiotic (in)determination.34
FIRST. How is a Gestus made visible? Its mode of visibility turns

on its provoking second-order observation (Beobachtung zweiter Ord-
nung), to employ a concept coined by Niklas Luhmann (1927–
1998). Initially, it depends on Brecht’s famous “denaturalization
effect” (Verfremdungseffekt, known in English as the “estrangement
e ffect”), through which ordinary and expected reactions to a char-

acter’s behaviors and emotional states were performed so as to
make them seem strange or unfamiliar to an audience. If the Ges-
tus was effective, the audience was led to reconsider what it took
to be normal (normative). Such reconsideration was designed to
yield second-order observation that aimed to oblige the viewer
(and the actor in her training) to clarify habits and dispositions by
opening up the question of
what might need to be changed or maintained on the part

of those observed. It does this through a combination of
observation and intervention. Such observation and inter
vention, as dispassionate as it may be, is designed to provoke a
reaction.35
Dürer’s Melencolia I (see fig. 2) can readily be seen as exemplifying

a number of these aspects. As noted, frequently scholars’ interven-
tions have consisted in “laborious decoding.” Following Merback,
a contrastive Gestus (of the artist and the observer) would be de-
signed to be spiritual and collaborative.
Such a Gestus would shift the veridictional register from the
search for the implied code of the engraving to its significance for
the observer; it would shift the normative register from attention
to a physiological state (melancholia) to the drive to overcome
both the semantic and the physiological; it would shift the register
of the observing subject to a virtual one responding to the inter-
pellation to live otherwise with the care of others.
SECOND. Devin Fore, in his book Realism after Modernism: The Rehu-
manization of Art and Literature, qualifies the second-order character
of Gestus with a further characteristic: for him, a phenomenon is
gestic only if it is public, quotable, and repeatable.36 This particular type
of public gesture renders visible (or enunciable) tensions between
heterogeneous planes of meaning and action. The Gestus is com-

posed of the coordination of attitudes, discourses, and gestures that
show discord between gesture, attitude, and discourse. Arguably
the public and repeatable character of Gesten articulates the inter-
relation of an obvious meaning with an obtuse one. Dürer’s Gestus
in Melencolia I was unquestionably public and quotable. It rendered
visible heterogeneous planes of meaning and action. Centuries of
scholarly effort, yet once again, have gone into elucidating the
interrelations between the obvious and the obtuse meanings. For
it to be repeatable, however, second-order observation must be
introduced, and the requisite changes of register enacted.
THIRD. The Gestus, in Barthes’s reading, is resolutely signifying, or

even “violently” signifying, insofar as it is for Barthes the conse-
quence of volition and imposition. This forcefulness of the Gestus
could be said to call for a second-order grasping of “obviousness.”
Obvious meaning is symbolic and “intentional,” “taken from
a kind of common, general lexicon of symbols; it is a meaning
which seeks out the recipient of the message.” The obvious mean-
ing “proffers the truth.”37
The counterpoint to obvious meaning is the obtuse meaning.
The register of obtuse meaning operates through a mode that is
restive and recalcitrant. It appears not in lieu of the obvious meaning,
but rather occasionally appears and accompanies and disrupts the
first-order meaning of Gestus. The Gestus does not reside uniquely
on the plane of the propositional and the semantic. It appears only
in the pragmatic grasping by an observer of a signifier for which
the observer can name no signified.
The “emphatic truth” of the Gestus in a scene, its propositional
signification, is accompanied by a fundamental non-fixity of ac-
tion and affect. Such a state, once attention is artistically turned
to it, is intended to transform a first-order Erlebnis into a second-
order, reflective moment of Erfahrung.
CONTEMPORARY BETRACHTUNG: VIGOROUS OBSERVATION
Another term of engagement, Betrachtung, can be understood as

follows:
For Nietzsche (1844–1900) BETRACHTUNG entails a stance

(Haltung) or mood of life (Lebensstimmung) that includes
theoretical understanding, sensory perception, and a
drive or a force. The English translation “observations,”
or French “considérations,” misses the refractory intent
of an engaged and active state. Hence, Betrachtungen is
better conveyed as something more like the purposely
oxymoronic “vigorous contemplations.”38
Merback’s Dürer has shown us that ethos and ethics had been
an attempt to induce a Gestus of collaboration; it opened up a
second-order scene of consolation—or at least mutual solace—in
a troubled and troubling situation. It follows that it could be pos-
sible to imagine such a Gestus again, even though the referents,
concepts, and articulations would be distinctive.
Foucault’s early crucibles, one might say, were formally Gestik.
In his last three years of lectures, however, his sojourn was mak-
ing headway toward a form of Betrachtung that would invent a
crucible in which philosophy could be both caring and knowing.
He cast the journey and probably the telos in modern terms; as in
his interpretation of Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life, Foucault’s
own ethos was itself heroic and inventive. It retained a focus on
the subject as individual. At times, he regretted this framing. De-
spite those regrets, and a number of attempts at preliminary col-
laborative efforts, he died before the latter (or, for that matter, the
former) came to fruition.
It is worth considering that inquiry driven toward warranted
assertibility that clarifies a situation’s indeterminacy, accompanied
by a resolute ethical drive for an at least temporary resolution of
the situation’s discordances, might help to make some headway

toward the elusive problems that trouble us. During this sojourn
we are comforted by knowing that we are not alone; others have
considered crossing the river before us.
Let us conclude our sojourn then, in having made, one hopes,
some headway toward a contemporary foyer d’expérience in which
“Logica, is accompanied by Veritas in order to approach the Prob-
lema.”39
We have seen that the huntress, Logica, and the hare, Problema,
are missing from Dürer’s engraving The Rider (Knight, Death, and
the Devil) (see fig. 3). What is engraved is the alert dog, Veritas,
and the Knight’s Haltung. Whether this particular Knight was in
search of Logica and Problema, we will never know. That we are—is
certain.
SPECULATION
What follows is an attempt to invent a form whose standards—
horoi—remain to be established. The form has two parameters:
first, it is meant to conceptually encompass an account of events
and affects derived from a situation of academic breakdown;
second, and equally, the form is intended to facilitate a process
through which those who engage with it might achieve a degree
of solace through that engagement.
A sketch of the triggering events (the presentation of details
of which are limited by legal constraints and the obstinate insis-
tence on non-collegiality by the professors involved) is provided
(Malice). Reflections on the events, structured by a repertoire of
concepts (a subset drawn from previous work as an atlas of “terms
of engagement”), are distributed throughout the pages that follow.
In sum, this exercise is an attempt to invent a distinctive in-
stance of what Michel Foucault called un foyer d’expérience, which
we translate into English as “a crucible of experimentation and
experience.”40
DURCHARBEITEN: TROSTBLATT & TRISTIA
The TRISTIA (“Sorrows” or “Lamentations”) is a collection

of letters written in elegiac couplets by the Augustan poet
Ovid during his exile from Rome. Despite five books of
his copious bewailing of his fate, the immediate cause of
Augustus’s banishment of the most acclaimed living Latin
poet to Pontus in AD 8 remains a mystery. In addition
to the Tristia, Ovid wrote another collection of elegiac
epistles on his exile, the Epistulae ex Ponto. He spent several
years in the outpost of Tomis and died without ever
returning to Rome.
ACEDIA is a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring
or not being concerned with one’s position or condition in
the world. It can lead to a state of being unable to perform
one’s duties in life. Its spiritual overtones make it related to
but arguably distinct from depression.
MELANCHOLIA (from Greek: µέλαινα χολή melaina
chole “gall bladders” also Latin lugere LUGUBRIOUSNESS to
mourn, Latin morosus MOROSENESS of self-will or fastidious
habit, and old English wist WISTFULNESS of intent or
SATURNINE ) is a concept from ancient or pre-modern
medicine. Melancholy was one of the four temperaments
matching the four humours. In the nineteenth century,
“melancholia” could be physical as well as mental, and
melancholic conditions were classified as such by their
common cause rather than by their properties.41
In German, there is a tradition of experimentation and repeated

re-invention of variants of such a form: Trostblatt (literally, “solace-
pages”).42 As a defining aspect of the forms of Trostblatt turns, in
part, on an affective state linking observers and authors, brief at-
tention must be paid to three states: melancholia, acedia, and tristia

(see facing page). Variants of each of the three states have been
experienced during the course of the production of this text.
After I had a minor misunderstanding with an atypical graduate
student concerning academic standards and forms, there unfolded
a series of perplexities as to what exactly had happened. Appar-
ently, accusations were made by the graduate student of miscon-
duct on my part, although specific allegations were never rendered
public, nor were any formal bureaucratic procedures engaged in
to deal with them. As minor as the episode was in and of itself,
it occasioned a tide of affect (some explicit and some veiled) as
well as a trickle of reflection. Although my perplexity as to what
was charged remains, other aspects of the broader situation have
taken a central place in casting this form. After enduring more
than a year of existential uncertainty, ethical and political discor-
dancy, and veridictional indetermination, and after more than a
year of vain attempts to discover the basic details of what had been
alleged, during the course of which my writing and conceptual
work was carried out in a halting and fragmented manner, a de-
fining affective mood emerged and settled in. Unexpectedly, the
term that has provided a touchstone of clarification, specification,
and orientation—and a degree of solace—is tristia.
During the months of futile attempts to get someone to render
public what I had been accused of, what became increasingly clear
was that none of my colleagues was going to tell me anything of
significance. It is fair to say that during these months of inter-
mittent forays at activating long-standing collegial relationships, a
relatively mild form of melancholia set the tone. I wondered what
they were afraid of. Eventually, it became clearer that there was
little or nothing of substance to fear on their part, or my own. This
dawning realization did not lead to acedia, although there were
times when a mood of dispiritedness dominated.
Again, recently, it became apparent to me that the appropri-

ate mood that gradually materialized and endured was tristia. This
insight, if such it was, emerged during the course of listening to
myself describe to others (frequently outside the department of an-
thropology), over coffee or during phone conversations, the his-
torical changes in the department and the university. After a lecture
at Stanford hosted by a friend in the comparative literature depart-
ment, which was attended mainly by graduate students from the
humanities, there was an affirmation that many others were expe-
riencing a similar mood, although obviously not occasioned by the
minor breakdown with the graduate student or the peculiarities of
the Berkeley anthropology department. That mood was one form
or another of a sense of loss and sadness—whether at Berkeley or
at Stanford—in a privileged setting of m aterial security.
EXILE
Why? The university that many of us had been formed in and con-
tinued to value was, to quote the title of a book that had diagnosed
aspects of the situation years ago, “in ruins.”43 It was true that ever
more buildings were being built, stadia renovated, linkages with
the tech world proliferated and valued, and so on. But what was
not being saved was a broad mandate as to what a university such
as Berkeley had once claimed to be about: education and democ-
racy. Laments about the corporatization of the university, more
recently its “neo-liberalization,” had abounded in certain quarters
for quite some time. All too true. These sociological and political-
economic considerations contribute to an understanding of the
macro-changes under way. They provide convincing analyses of
the growing exploitation of the migrant labor force of instructors
and of the retreat of state governments from supporting public
universities. They underscore with urgency and justice the crush-
ing debt being imposed on those seeking minimal entry into the
middle classes. All too true.
Perhaps—all proportions kept in mind—the tristia was, and is,
an affect related to the conditions produced by these structural
considerations. Or perhaps the tristia is not exactly reducible to
these macroeconomic and institutional forces. The aforemen-
tioned forces produce a range of anger, humiliation, acedia, and
melancholia, or, in certain cases, a nostalgia that risks veering all
too close to sentimentality.
Tristia, under these conditions of change, should be named as
a minor affect. It should be examined and tested against a much
more limited set of conditions, one stemming from and contribut-
ing to what will be called here a position of privileged exile.
How should one think about this affect and the situations in
which it arises? Some hold that minor affects are reserved for a
small sub-cohort and consequently politically and sociologically
are a luxury to ponder, paling in comparison to the macro condi-
tions of exploitation and domination that produce ever-growing
injustices and an ever more unequal distribution of capital (both
material and symbolic). One can hardly disagree.
Let us keep in mind, however, that the Left in France, es-
pecially the French Communist Party at its apogee of influence
over French intellectuals during the 1950s and 1960s, expressed
utter confidence that topics such as sexuality or madness were mi-
nor epiphenomena of the truly significant apparatuses of state and
capitalist power. Fortunately, a few thinkers refused to meekly ac-
quiesce to the totalizing importance of these supposed self-evident
structures. These thinkers held that other, seemingly minor, con-
ditions of existence demanded attention, if one were to lead a life
worth living; among these thinkers was a certain Michel Foucault.
He, and eventually others, through their obstinate insistence on
focusing thought and care on certain conditions of existence, held
to be minor epiphenomena, gradually invented and tested what

came to be the vectors of crucibles of experience and experimen-
tation, which undeniably rose in the coming decades as situations
of primary significance.
Only time will tell whether anything similar is being under-
taken today. Regardless, that certain ranges of affect are vital con-
ditions should not be a controversial claim. Whether such minor
affects as tristia (or, as we shall see, malice) expose fields of inquiry
worth exploring remains an open question. Fortunately, this affect
is currently considered to be minor; consequently, those in a posi-
tion to explore its parameters and contours are left in the shadows
to pursue what haunts them.
The initial task, therefore, is to consider how to think about
such matters. One is obliged to wonder, What form of thinking is
appropriate? One must make preliminary choices as to form; here
it is no doubt hubristic to suggest, consider, and test out a contem-
porary variation on Trostblatt.
FORM: LATE WORK / LATE STYLE
An editor of a collection of scholarly articles on “late work” claims

that “Modernism’s ‘essential gesture’ . . . is to say ‘no’ to moder-
nity.”44 In contradistinction to modernism’s “essential gesture,”
work undertaken in a mode of a contemporary ethos would say
“slow down” to this blanket attempt to negate modernity. This
claim is neither a comprehensive affirmation per se nor a totalizing
defamation of “modernity,” a term with such a wide and varied
scope that adopting a binary attitude toward it a priori makes little
or no sense except as a stance, a Haltung.
Rather, a contemporary mode of inquiry and narration seeks
to experiment with inventing forms that are neither nostalgic (or
simply counter-modern) nor avant-garde (by now a modernist
term, in a strict sense, if there ever was one). The former con-
figuration is readily recognizable while the latter, the avant-garde

attempt at total rupture, constitutes an anachronistic adherence
to the modernist imperative—by now a century old—to “make
it new.” By so doing, it undercuts its own rhetorical strength by
simply placing itself historically. The avant-garde’s varied Haltun-
gen now appear historical, not “new.” Consequently, the problem
of form today turns partly on a diagnosis of which parameters con-
tinue to be pertinent and which are no longer salient in the quest
for modes of inquiry and form-giving in the face of a diverse and
changeable current actuality.
FORM
At present, there is a scholarly specialty concerned with what its

practitioners refer to as “late work.”45 The term is contrasted with
the term “late style,” invariably drawn from Theodor Adorno’s ar-
ticle on “Beethoven’s late style.”46 This scholarly field has concen-
trated on deploying Adorno’s term against other instances (mainly
in music, literature, and painting). These scholars convincingly
insist on drawing and maintaining a distinction between late style
and late work (basically as the term is anchored in the life course,
especially as it concerns approaching death). Thus:
What makes works late is therefore less their proximity to the
composer’s own death than their alertness, at the level of form,
to the increasing senescence of bourgeois society itself.47
Today, one must pause at the term “bourgeois society itself ” and
wonder what it refers to. Regardless of the answer provided (and
there are some), it is hard not to doubt the term’s relevance in pres-
ently existing formations.48 Is there really a “bourgeois society” in
the United States today? Was David Foster Wallace depicting a
bourgeoisie? We must also pause at the continuing use of organic
metaphors—“senescence”—and the unassuming adoption of this
archaic and misleading trope.
More to the point, this body of scholarship does not give em-
phasis to
the artist’s incapacity or his struggle against death [or] with the
impossibility of realizing the ideal of harmony in works of art,
an impossibility that should be put down to the insufficiency
and marginality of the sphere of the aesthetic itself and there-
fore ultimately to the disharmonious world that art strives to
articulate.49
While ideals continue to be invoked by peer-review commen-
taries, in blurbs and obituary encomia, it remains in and of itself
innocuous unless and until it becomes a decisive, if conceptually
vague and unexamined, instrument of audit and its sequels.
Perhaps it is less obvious that the same stricture should be ap-
plied to avant-garde performativity. After all, “Discordant works
. . . keep faith with the ideal of reconciliation by candidly register-
ing its absence.”50 Thus:
What unites late works, on this reading, is their critical po-
tential, the contradiction and conflict they express refusing a
too-easily achieved and duplicitous harmony.51
Whatever else the essay that follows this preface can be accused of,
it would most likely not be that it achieves “a too-easily achieved
duplicitous harmony.” But the question hovers: does it instantiate
one variant of a “late style”?
LATE STYLE: ADORNO
According to Theodor Adorno, in his by-now classic essay on

“Late Style in Beethoven,” the “formal law,” or principle, of “late”
works, the cause to which the resulting style of the late work is
attributed, is, at base, irreducible to psychology or to “expression.”
Nevertheless, Adorno underscores a ratio of subjectivity to form
that characterizes late style, even when these remain irreducible to
the expression of a psyche: “subjectivity—in the full sense given to

it by Kant—acts not so much by breaking through form, as rather,
more fundamentally, by creating it.”52
To take up such a ratio, Adorno asserts, one would have to pay
attention to the role played by conventions in works with “late
style,” specifically the relation of prior conventions to forms of
subjectivity. Adorno’s case in point is Beethoven and the works
he produced at what was to be the end of his life, his “late” works.
What is crucial for Adorno is that, whereas interpretations of “late
Beethoven” have insisted on the biographical character of the late
works, the chronologically late works of a musician at the end of
his life, physical loss and suffering cannot explain the “mysterious”
character of the style of late works. Late works do not express
“proximity to death”; they are neither the stylization of a body
breaking down, a subjectivity giving form to that suffering, nor a
metamorphosis of an “original pain.” Indeed, ultimately, they are
not individual or subjective expressions. Nor does one find death
per se, or significations of death, in late works. Rather, touched by
the pathos of loss and the limits of repair, the artist is able to renew,
or remediate a freedom in relation to the conventions of the forms
in which the artist had hitherto worked.
With creativity or artistic invention as a focal point, and bring-
ing together repertoires of musical knowledge and normative ma-
trices for the creation and reception of art, Adorno gives us tools
for grasping the pathos of living “late” in such a crucible of experi-
ence. Adorno says that late style is yielding rather than dominating.
Let us say that it yields to fragmentary assemblage and it is semioti-
cally “neutral,” in Barthes’s sense, rather than compositionally and
semiotically domineering.
Dürer’s Two Musicians (fig. 4), in which the figure on the
right may be an early self-portrait, is a stark contrast to Dürer’s
Self-Portrait as a Man of Sorrows (fig. 5), created not long before
his death.
FIG. 4. Albrecht Dürer, Two Musicians, ca. 1504.
FIG. 5. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait as a Man of Sorrows, 1522.
A late style, in Adorno’s grasp of the late works of Beethoven,

seeks not to free the work from convention but to free the use of
convention from the impression of mastery, thus allowing for a
freedom of invention, by a creative subject, within formal con-
ventions. Adorno’s rendering of Kant’s conception of “subjectiv-
ity” is that it acts by creating form.
CRITICS ON LATE STYLE
In Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain,
the literary critic Michael Wood, asked by Said’s widow to write
an introduction to a book that Said died before finishing, provides
insights into his friend’s thinking. Some of these are trenchant and
others are contestable. Both Wood and Said follow and depart, in
unequal measures, from Adorno’s concept.
Thus, late style, Wood writes, connotes “a sudden lateness, as
distinct from maturity, [producing] a special ironic expressiveness
well beyond the words and the situation.”53 Adorno said nothing
about “sudden,” nor did he qualify the elements of his concept
to include “ironic.” Thus, if Adorno is the gold standard, both of
Wood’s terms per se seem inappropriate and misleading, although
they are certainly worth testing against our cases.
The outcome of patient transformation was drawn from sus-
tained experimentation and variation arising from explorations
that had consumed these artists for some time previously. In fact,
it would be misleading to draw a sharp line of demarcation be-
tween periods or stages, as has been done with Beethoven over
the course of time. His late work is anything but ironic: there was
no stable distance established with a prior work, no doubling of
meaning, no calm, no resolution. Rather, there was a concise, if
brittle, relationality that by no means distanced the artist from his
work.
In this light, while affirming that Said held to the same un-
derstanding, Wood quotes Adorno’s claim of Beethoven’s refusal
to “reconcile into a single image what is not reconciled.”54 The
contrast case is “mature art.” Mature production can be seen as a
culmination, a so-called crowning achievement of prior work and
life; in contrast, a late style abjures such reconciliation between the
historical moment and artistic or intellectual creation, as well as
the creator’s life itself. Thus, a primary parameter of late style is its
recognition that consolation, in a range of senses that art has been
held to offer, is simply not available. Reconciliation undermines
late style.
Another critic, Stathis Gourgouris, expounds the claim of an
irreconcilable—but not tragic—ethos.
Late Style is precisely the form that defies the infirmities of the
present, as well as the palliatives of the past, in order to seek
out this future, to posit it and perform it even if in words and
images, gestures and representations, that now seem puzzling,
untimely, or impossible.55
Late style is thus recalcitrant, voluntarily chosen or not, willed or
unwilled. It arises in an urgent restiveness against the present state
of things at multiple scales and registers.
1
Crucible of Flourishing 2006–
2013
SOJOURNER’S HALTUNG: FIELDWORK IN PHILOSOPHY
Eugene Garver, a classmate of mine during the early 1960s at the
University of Chicago, in his learned and wise book Confronting
Aristotle’s Ethics:Ancient and Modern Morality, comments on Richard
McKeon (1900–1985), professor of philosophy at the University of
Chicago. Garver reminds readers that McKeon was a renowned,
respected, and feared teacher, of awesome scholarship and distinc-
tive pedagogy. Garver fully acknowledges these qualities—which
have marked his own intellectual trajectory for decades—while
stating with admirable candor that McKeon was not the most ben-
eficial teacher for him.1 The danger, Garver observes, was that
McKeon was so intellectually overpowering, so possessed both of
encyclopedic scholarly learning, which he invoked with effortless
agility, and of a notoriously steely temperament that it was hard
41
not to become either discouraged by McKeon—however unin-

tentionally, McKeon would have protested—to undertake phi-
losophy at all or to become an acolyte, as many did.
During 1962–1963, as I enrolled in and pursued McKeon’s fa-
mous Ideas and Methods sequence on the physical sciences, aes-
thetics, and social sciences, the above options became apparent
at this dangerous crossroads in my education. McKeon’s courses
were the most challenging and formative educational experiences
I have ever had; wondrous and terrifying lived aspects (Erlebnis)
of the opening of unanticipated horizons and norms of learning as
well as that of an unquestionable, unchallengeable, and daunting
authority—at the time, something I had previously encountered
only in mathematics—endure with me today. After taking a fourth
course—“Facts and Categories”—I had had enough. McKeon had
convinced me, among other things, that there was essentially no
“progress” (or even fundamental change) in philosophy (although
there was a ceaseless, extravagant supply of slovenly ignorance,
more or less willful misinterpretation, as well as a long-standing
plenitude of learned dogmatism).
McKeon brought his class list of fifteen to twenty students
with him. As he posed questions about an assigned text, he would
proceed alphabetically through the list. “Mr. Smithson, why did
Spinoza start part III of the Theological-Political Treatise with the dis-
tinctions he used?” Mr. Smithson answered, “Well, I think . . .”
Thundering silence. McKeon quietly but firmly replied (at times
with a slight chuckle), “I did not ask you what you think, but why
Spinoza drew the distinctions he did.” Heads bowed.
These trials were both humbling and freeing. They were hum-
bling because the answer was neither hidden nor esoteric, but we
had not been taught to read and think closely. These episodes—
anticipated and daunting—were freeing because the answer was
not to be found in what the student thought, but rather in what
Spinoza had written: right in front of you on the page. As Michel
crucible of flourishing 43
Foucault would articulate years later, this combination would

open the possibility to “se déprendre de soi.”
The experiences with McKeon left me with a fused sense of
having a dependency on a tradition I was ill-equipped to confront
and having the independence to proceed with caution and clarity
toward something called “inquiry.” There was usually a promise
at some point during the course that once one had correctly ana-
lytically addressed these exemplary texts, some form of interpreta-
tion and critique would follow. It never did. In a process that was
frustrating but also freeing, one was left with Spinoza. McKeon
strictly and ascetically did not indicate a way forward. In the long
run, at least for me, this lacuna was fortunate and salutary.
McKeon was a world-renowned expert on Aristotle and had
written a thesis on Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).2 From time to
time, McKeon would remark that John Dewey (1859–1952) had
been a teacher of his as well as a continuing philosophical guide.
Dewey, McKeon instructed us, advocated pursuing philosophic
inquiry per se (eschewing metaphysics or systematic rhetoric).
McKeon affirmed such a program. Yet . . .
The impulse to pursue inquiry outside the academic disciplines
and institutions—while maintaining and gratefully acknowledging
an embeddedness and dependency on their infrastructures—led
me to deeply respect McKeon’s teaching but to be equally acutely
aware that, as far as I could fathom, neither he nor Dewey, for
that matter, actually conducted the type and form of inquiry that
I was, however inchoately, seeking. The discipline of anthropol-
ogy, at least at Chicago at the time, was in principle inquiry-based
and open to a certain range of philosophic semantics (ranging from
Marx to structuralism, inter alia).
Eventually these impulses, incipient and partially formative ex-
periences, and a slowly developing conceptual repertoire led to
what I would name, from time to time, as fieldwork in philosophy—a
proposed sojourn, Erfahrung.
In recent years, I have turned more systematically to Dewey’s

writings and biography (as well as glancingly to Aristotle) for suc-
cor and conceptual guidance, knowingly full well that, as with
McKeon, neither Dewey nor Aristotle offered an exemplar of the
form of fieldwork in philosophy I was attempting to practice. The
hiatus between philosophic oeuvre and projects of inquiry was
gaping and salutary.
At its core, the central topic of these meditations has been the
quest to invent, instantiate, practice, and defend a specific type of
crucible of experience and experimentation—foyer d’expérience. Equally
catalytic has been the experiences of some inquirers of the periodic
battering of these efforts and their subsequent thwarting. Analyt-
ics and narrative have become the remaining recourse, sanctu-
ary, haven, refuge—retortion. The concept and instantiation of
a crucible of experience and experimentation have been explored in
prior works.
TO EU ZĒN: PHRONĒSIS
Phronēsis is the only virtue [aretē] peculiar to the ruler. The other
virtues, it would seem, must necessarily be common to both
rulers and ruled, but prudence is not a virtue [aretē] of one
ruled, but rather true opinion (doxa alēthēs).
—aristotle (Politics III.4.1277b 25–29) 3
Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics: Ancient and Modern Morality provides

a remediative and salutary orientation to Aristotle’s Ethics. Garver
writes, “The Ethics is a meditation on how to lead an active life. It
locates human beings and human goods in a world made up of ac-
tivities and the potentialities that make those activities possible.”4
This passage, as we shall see, contains a good deal more than the
straightforward English prose reveals.
TOPICS
THE TOPICS (Greek: Τοπικά; Latin: Topica) is the name

given to one of Aristotle’s six works on logic collectively
known as the Organon. The treatise presents the art of
dialectic—the invention and discovery of arguments
in which the propositions rest upon commonly held
opinions, or endoxa (ἔνδοξα in Greek).
Aristotle’s dialectic is different from Hegel’s: for Aristotle, there

are two universal arts, rhetoric and dialectic. Dialectic is the formal
art of invention and discovery, not an unfolding of spirit.
FIRST TOPIC: PRACTICES
Starting from the first sentence of the Ethics, Aristotle looks at

practices, not at individual agents.5
This point is extremely important. It is a practice which can be

“excellent” (aretē ), that is, brought to perfection. It is neither an
internal state nor, for that matter, does it concern a particular per-
son’s character. Aristotle’s Ethics is not about morals in the modern
or Christian or Islamic sense. We have room to breathe.
SECOND TOPIC: EXCELLENCE
THE ETHICS IS NOT A “VIRTUE ETHICS.” Its subject is eudaimonia,

happiness, and it discusses virtue [aretē ] because happiness is
virtuous activity. Contemporary virtue ethics locates ultimate
value in good agents without the ties to happiness, the soul,
and external goods.6
This is an absolutely central displacement. These first two
points underscore the fact that the modern subject-oriented inter-
pretations and translations of Aristotle are profoundly misleading.
They focus at the wrong scale and direct attention and scrutiny
to the wrong object: not individual agents but practices. Conse-
quently, Aristotle’s ethics are not a virtue ethics in the modern
(and Christian) sense. Today, these register shifts not only allow
but also encourage a displacement—as we shall see later—from a
focus on situations and practices to morality and character.
THIRD TOPIC: FLOURISHING
The topic of Aristotle’s ethics is eudaimonia. This term has been

misleadingly translated for centuries as “happiness.” This trans-
lation is simply wrong. Eu-daimonia means literally the “good
daimon.” A simpler (for us) topic to focus on would be to eu zēn,
“the good life.” Consequently, let us deploy the term “flourish-
ing” for both of these Greek terms. Whatever its ambiguities, it is
far better than “happiness.”
DAEMON is the Latin word for the Ancient Greek daimon

(δαίμων: “god,” “godlike,” “power,” “fate”), which
originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit, such
as the daemons of ancient Greek religion and mythology
and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy. The word
is derived from Proto-Indo-European *daimon “provider,
divider (of fortunes or destinies),” from the root *da- “to
divide.” Daimons were possibly seen as the souls of men of
the golden age acting as tutelary deities, according to [the]
entry δαίμων [in] Liddell & Scott.7
Listen when she speaks!

Anthony Long, the leading scholar of the philosophic schools
of the Stoic and Hellenistic world, writes in his article “Stoic Eu-
daimonism”:
Eudaimonia, as its etymology indicates, is the name for a
“blessed” or “god-favored” condition, a condition in which
a person’s lot or daimon is good. The term is normally and

correctly translated “happiness”—correctly because, as Greg-
ory Vlastos has recently insisted, eudaimonia includes both the
objective features of “happiness” (attainment of good) and
its subjective connotations (a profoundly contented state of
mind). Greek philosophers, it is true, devote more attention to
characterizing the formal and objective features of eudaimonia
than to telling us what it is like, viewed from within, to be
eudaimon. Nor is eudaimon ever used in Greek, like “happy” in
modern English, to describe transient moods or satisfactions.
To call someone eudaimon is to describe a person whose life
is flourishing to the greatest extent available to human be-
ings. But if eudaimonia is less psychological or subjective in its
connotations than “happiness,” there is abundant evidence to
show that the Greeks took a eudaimon person to be subjectively
satisfied with his or her life. If that were not to be so, it would
be impossible to account for the importance all philosophers
attached to emotional balance as a condition of eudaimonia.8
HAPPINESS: “BLAH, HUMBUG.”
Happiness might be a goal for some, perhaps in the domestic

sphere, but that is hardly the place for those seeking to practice
theoria! Flourishing indicates a restive, recalcitrant, thriving, civic,
“public happiness,” to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase.
TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT
Three key terms specify and animate the above topics:

1. e nergeiai (activity)
2. k inēseis (motion or processes)
3. d ynameis (capacities and powers), which energeiai realize
and perfect9
Once these are distinguished, it becomes possible to use these
terms dialectically in Aristotle’s sense.
There is a long-standing tradition of scholarly discussion as to

the exact meaning of each of these terms as well as their rela-
tionships. Reduced and oversimplified for our current purposes:
anthrōpos is endowed with a range of capacities and powers (dyna-
meis); these capacities can be activated toward instrumental goal-
oriented motion (kinēseis); or activities that are ends in themselves
(energeiai ). Thus, for example:
Virtue [aretē ] functions as the differentia for saying what sort

of energeia or activity happiness [eudaimonia] is. The genus of
happiness (eudaimonia) is energeia, and its differentia is virtue
[aretē ], since happiness is energeia kat’aretēn. Virtue (aretē ), the
differentia, then designates the dynameis made active and actual
in the energeiai of happiness.10
Once again, we must underscore that Aristotle’s Ethics is not a

“virtue ethics,” if by “virtue” one means a moral quality of the
subject. Again, the Greek term so misleadingly translated as “vir-
tue” is aretē (Greek ἀρετή). It means something closer to “excel-
lence in a practice.”11
ARETĒ, in its basic sense, means “excellence of any kind.”

The term may also mean “moral virtue.” In its earliest
appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was
ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment
of purpose or function: the act of living up to one’s full
potential. . . .
In some contexts, Aretē is explicitly linked with human
knowledge, where the expressions “virtue is knowledge”
and “Aretē is knowledge” are used interchangeably. The
highest human potential is knowledge and all other human
abilities are derived from this central capacity. If Aretē
is knowledge and study, the highest human knowledge
is knowledge about knowledge itself; in this light, the

theoretical study of human knowledge, which Aristotle
called “contemplation,” is the highest human ability and
happiness.12
Very well, then—but the translations of sophia (knowledge) and

theoria (contemplation) are themselves grossly misleading, as we
shall see.
Thus, for example, one might argue that theoria as the organiz-
ing principle of a life is not the same as theoria as the content of a
life.13 Simply said, the best English translation of the Greek term
theoria is neither “theory” nor “contemplation.” I propose the fol-
lowing unorthodox, to be sure, alternative: Betrachtung.
BETRACHTUNG(EN) is part of a practice of inquiry that

Niklas Luhmann calls “second-order observation”
(Beobachtung zweiter Ordnung). Second-order observation
aims to clarify habits and dispositions by opening up the
question of what might need to be changed or maintained
on the part of those observed. It does this through a
combination of observation and intervention. Such
observation and intervention, as dispassionate as it may
be, is likely to provoke a reaction. This reaction, at least
initially, oscillates between the poles of indifference and
violence.14
Today, being a professor of philosophy and leading a philo-

sophic life are not by necessity or expectation the same thing.
Perhaps they can be brought together, but that requires work and
discipline not expected, taught, or rewarded. Hence, theoria is not
the same or even close to the English term “contemplation.”
VENUE AND TOPOLOGY
For Aristotle, and in a different manner and on a different reg-

ister for us, there are topological and venue restrictions as to
when and how aretē and eudaimonia can be brought into a right
relationship.
Only within the polis are the two dimensions of virtue (aretē )—
energeiai as the perfection of kinēseis and energeia as the realiza-
tion of [the soul’s] dynamis—connected.15
We no longer live in anything resembling a polis, either generally
in what remains of the republic or more specifically in the current
university: for better and for worse.
The challenge under consideration here is whether it is possible
to discover and invent micro-crucibles, to set them within exist-
ing institutions, in which, at least for a time, the key terms can be
brought into an animated relationship. There are constraints:
A virtue (aretē ) might contribute to human flourishing, yet in
a way that makes its happy practitioner at odds with the com-
munity in which he or she lives.16
Aretē can contribute to eudaimonia in a manner such that the prac-
titioner is at odds with the community in which it was plausibly
considered that flourishing might be possible. Such a commu-
nity is deficient or more strongly pathological. We will explore
an instance of such a pathological community throughout this
narrative.
PARAMETER
The kind of crucible at stake here is not one in which knowledge

(sophia) is transmitted but one in which something like the Nachle-
ben of the Greek notion of paideia is at issue.
PAIDEIA. In the culture of ancient Greece and later of

the Greco-Roman world at large, the term paideia . . .
referred to the rearing and education of the ideal
member of the polis or state. It incorporated both
practical, subject-based schooling and a focus upon
the socialization of individuals within the aristocratic
order of the polis. The practical aspects of this
education included subjects subsumed under the
modern designation of the liberal arts (rhetoric,
grammar, and philosophy are examples), as well as
scientific disciplines like arithmetic and medicine.
An ideal and successful member of the polis would
possess intellectual, moral, and physical refinement, so
training in gymnastics and wrestling was valued for its
effect on the body alongside the moral education which
the Greeks believed was imparted by the study of music,
poetry, and philosophy. This approach to the rearing
of a well-rounded Greek male was common to the
Greek-speaking world, with the exception of Sparta
where a rigid and militaristic form of education known
as the agoge was practiced.17
Many of these features of paideia had been traditionally located

within the American university. Today, they have become sepa-
rated, specialized, professionalized, and commercialized, turning
them from energeiai into practices directed toward instrumental
external ends, kinēseis. Consequently, the scope of paideia under
consideration here is stunted and restricted—though its fading
memory and shadow nonetheless remain significant.
TO EU ZĒN: HYBRID DEPENDENCIES
The ultimate stakes of Aristotle’s Ethics—and urgently in a mi-

nor register for us today—turn on what is the integrated form
of the best life: to eu zēn. Let us repeat again, agreeing for once
with all the major commentators, and concurring with the self-
evidence, that we are taking it for granted that we do not live in
the Athenian Greek world of the polis with all of its structural,
essentialized inequalities, and the rest. The question remains, as
Garver argues,
If X.7 and 8 show that we should prefer the philosophic to the

political life, then that move interrupts an otherwise smooth
argument from the articulation of the good life to an inquiry
into how to establish its conditions.18
Still, the question remains of what conditions might still make it

possible to invent venues where aretē might mean something, and
which forms of flourishing have been brought into existence.
PROBLEM
Aristotle’s two candidates for eudaimonia and to eu zēn are the

“political life” and the life of theoria. Let us say, violating all of
the available translations in the name of contemporary truth in
opinion (doxa alēthēs): “the life of civic activity” and “the life of
second-order observation.”
If both flourishing and ethically virtuous activities are energeiai

of the virtues, flourishing is then a single activity engaged in
for its own sake, made up of activities each of which is en-
gaged in for its own sake. The fundamental question is how
these particular activities can be part of a single, integrated,
and unified good life without losing their own intrinsic value
as virtuous actions.19
Clearly, if it were ever possible to achieve this as Aristotle

thought, today the very idea is a faint flickering Nachleben. Still,
Garver offers us two citations: “When the energeiai one performs
are only integrated with difficulty and into lesser kinds of unity,
then one lives politically.”20 If this claim were convincing even
in the Athenian polis at its height of excellence, its applicability
today, under reduced, degraded, and pathological conditions, is
magnified almost beyond recognition. One might well wonder:
What is virtue ethics (the replacement for civic engagement) in a
massive bureaucracy?
Garver poses the alternative: “To emphasize integrative form
is to live philosophically.”21 Under contemporary conditions, the
key term in the claim is the activity “to emphasize,” because any-
thing more seems futile and deluding of self and others.
ASSEMBLAGES: DAS NACHLEBEN DER ANTIKE UND DER MODERNE
It is striking that, even for Aristotle, his juxtaposition of the life

of civic action and that of what his commentators misleadingly
translate as “contemplation” forms an assemblage. An assemblage,
we recall, brings into adjacency and sets in motion heterogeneous
elements, practices, and forms.22
Political activity points us to the contemplative life. Seen as
many energeiai the best life is political, seen as a single energeiai,
the best life is contemplative. . . .
The happy man will do and contemplate most of all the
actions in accord with virtue (aretē ).23
Thus, it seems possible that degraded forms of civic action are still
possible today.
The claim here is that a form of life whose virtue (aretē ) is
a form of Betrachtung can be—and has been—brought together
over time, only for a limited period of time, and activated as an
assemblage in which a form of flourishing was possible and in fact

existed. That assemblage was not and never was considered to be
entirely separate from the political conditions, the civic determi-
nations that to an extent supported it, financially, bureaucratically,
and at times, even normatively.
As we shall see later (in the chapter on Malice), it was then
undermined.
PARAMETERS
Rather than reenter the millennial scholarly debates and disputes

about Aristotle’s terminology, let us just state three parameters.
It is best to narrate them concretely in terms of their conditions,
as instances in light of second-order narratives of experiments in
venue formation, as in the case of “the labinar” provided by others
who participated in it (see “A Case of a Crucible of Flourishing”).
• “ The conditions under which praxis can be rational
are the conditions under which one can undertake
energeiai rather than kineseis.”24
• “ Energeiai is best, that can be transmitted from dynamis
to energeiai.”25
• “ The virtues (aretē) both ‘render the thing itself good
and also cause it to perform its function well.’ ”26
RECOGNITION
There is no way of living a false life correctly.

—theodor adorno, Minima Moralia, #18 27
Axel Honneth (1949– ) is recognized as the quasi-official spokes-

person for the so-called third generation of the renowned Frank-
furt School of social criticism (after the first generation of Theodor
Adorno [1903–1969], Max Horkheimer [1895–1973], and others,

and Jürgen Habermas [1929– ] in the second generation). Hon-
neth has produced multiple books, more than two hundred aca-
demic articles (as of 2018), and has been the subject of an extensive
and growing body of secondary literature. Honneth has consis-
tently engaged in exchanges with his interlocutors in a considered
response and micro-readjustment model while remaining steadfast
to the core tenets of his original position.
Whereas the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers were far-
ranging and eclectic in their conceptual reach, if ultimately cen-
tered on the social, ethical, and political ramifications of the
administrative forms of capitalism, they were not, strictly speaking,
theoretical, if that meant building a system meant to be judged by
its internal consistency. Their highly innovative experimentation
with multiple styles—from the aphorisms and maxims of Adorno’s
Minima Moralia to Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of En-
lightenment and its vast historical sweep—changed in the second
generation with Habermas. While he himself was outspoken on a
range of topics in the style of Foucault’s general intellectual, none-
theless he has earned his legitimacy as a philosopher and theoreti-
cian of communication through system building.28
While his predecessors were clearly carrying forward a distinc-
tive set of experiments in furthering “Western Marxism,” Axel
Honneth has consistently devoted his labors and his inspiration
more in the Hegelian line of the history of ideas and philosophic
systems. His core theme for the last thirty years or more has been
a theory of recognition under conditions of social modernity. Beginning
with his 1995 book, The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth has pro-
posed, elaborated, and defended a theory of the central normative
importance of recognition as being fundamental to modernity—not
of all social life, everywhere and at every time.29 The specificity
of this critical intervention marks his loyalty to Hegel and distin-
guishes his corpus.
Obviously, this narrative is not the place for a full-blown ex-

position of the ceaseless corrections and nuances that Honneth, in
his sincere and ambitious manner, has elaborated. For Honneth,
modern philosophy per se begins with Kant. The core problematic
of modernity as historical, however, was articulated by Hegel.
Timothy Boston, an admiring and astute observer, writes:
The key premise of Honneth’s system is that in order for a
human individual to be a moral agent in the Kantian sense of
the term—that is, to act autonomously and be morally respon-
sible—this individual must be recognized as an autonomous
agent by others whom she, simultaneously, recognizes as such.30
Honneth argues that Hegel’s development of this condition turns

on the term (and its multiple concepts and referents) of recognition
as a historical event.
Recognition is a relationship, and the forms it takes depend on
theoretical and normative foundations. As opposed to Kant, these
foundations and these norms are intended as historical, not univer-
sal ones. It follows that, as Boston frames it, Honneth has his own
somewhat restricted, if consistent, understanding of what consti-
tutes a “critique.”
A critique is immanent for Honneth, in the sense that there
is no need to look beyond the normative structure of rec-
ognition that is a condition of the possibility of individuals’
participation in the reproduction of this institution, through
obedience to the law, in order to criticize it for failing to fully
realize this recognition.31
Choosing to emphasize immanent and historical norms imposes

further obligations. Honneth has been criticized for underplaying
dimensions of the historical.
In the 1990s, the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser provided
a detailed, overarching attack on Honneth’s work, charging him
with neglecting or at least severely underplaying the political di-

mensions of social justice and the vast growing inequalities they
have continued to produce in recent decades. Fraser and Hon-
neth engaged in a book-length debate—Redistribution or Recogni-
tion?—concerning questions of the systematic unequal distribution
of basic goods, which Fraser argued could not be accounted for
within a neo-Hegelian framework. Honneth responded at length,
atypically growing increasingly frustrated and polemical in his re-
sponses.32 Fraser’s arguments are persuasive as applied to large do-
mains of social action, especially domains where topics of justice
and injustice are concerned.
The present case under consideration, however—the privileges
of neglect, its discontents and abuses—does turn on the normative
parameters and standards of the type Honneth focuses on. Given
this genre of specific and limited situations, the broader issues of
inequality and social justice can be temporarily bracketed.
In recent years, a line of criticism (mainly based in France, al-
though it has occasioned sustained and intelligent elaboration in
Australia) based in detailed studies of the sociology of work has
faulted Honneth for claiming his arguments depend on modernity
as a historical period but that they are out-of-date and too abstract
to account for actual empirical situations. These critics express de-
tailed concern that
Honneth’s theory criticizes only the institutional frameworks
within which working activities are embedded; it has no criti-
cal purchase on the activity of working itself.33
For an anthropologist, these reasoned hesitations as to the relevant

registers on which to test theoretical and conceptual claims are
persuasive. They also provide a second-order, contemporary ob-
servation of his work as becoming historical. To that degree, those
reflections can be called contemporary, whereas Honneth remains
a modern.
RECOGNITION AND THE PRIVILEGE OF NEGLECT
Although Honneth has varied the terms of his system from time to
time over the course of the decades, nonetheless he has remained
consistent in identifying three distinct normative registers of rec-
ognition: love, rights, and esteem. It is the second (rights) and the
third (esteem) registers that are at issue here.
In the third sphere, individuals are recognized for the speci-
ficity of their way of life, which can be more or less highly
esteemed for the contribution it makes to society.34
Regardless of what the actual “contribution to society” that aca-
demic excellence might make, Honneth’s standards are pertinent
in a situation that will be characterized as one of the privilege of
neglect. In the example that I will discuss in “Crucible of Malice,”
multiple evaluations, on both the individual and the institutional
level, have concurred in this instance that esteem—on the level
of the subject of knowledge—is legitimate and the privilege earned.
This legitimacy is in line with a Hegelian understanding of
work.
For Hegel, in the work process, the human subject “impresses
the seal of his inner being” upon external things; that is, pro-
duces an object that objectively instantiates his particular ca-
pacities and characteristics. Through this process, the subject
comes to “recognize himself ” in his products, developing a
specific human form of self-consciousness.35
When it comes to academic work, it is plausible to maintain that
one’s production “instantiates particular capacities and characteris-
tics” and thereby “the subject comes to ‘recognize himself ’ in his
products, developing a specific human form of self-consciousness.”
Further, Boston maintains that
While society as a whole can recognize, via the market, the
fact that a worker has made some kind of contribution to soci-
ety, only her co-workers can understand the specific practical

intelligence that she has exercised in overcoming real obstacles
to the completion of her tasks. For [ Jean-Philippe] Deranty,
there exists a subtype of recognitive esteem that can only be
granted within a workplace or a community of profession-
als, meaning a worker has a normatively legitimate claim to a
stable “work collective” in which “accurate judgment” of her
or his contribution can be made.36
Both Honneth and Deranty assume that those normative practices
(“what society as a whole can recognize”) are themselves legiti-
mate; or that diverse types of co-workers are equally capable of
sharing and recognizing forms-of-life as ones they could imagine
themselves potentially inhabiting.
CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION:
OBSERVING OBSERVERS OBSERVING
A troubling discordancy presents itself: what if those holding in-

stitutional offices of authority and power are not peers? What if
their actual expertise consists in the technologies and techniques
of shifting registers from the norms of the subject of knowledge to
those of the subject of existence? In making this shift, it is primarily
and primordially the norms of subjects of existence that are valued
by these institutional purveyors of rewards, favors, and esteem.
Their recognition goes to those adept practitioners of bureaucratic
careerism, enforcers of reigning political correctness, above all to
kindred actors, adept at replenishing wellsprings of malice. Recog-
nition is denied to those who do not devote sufficient respect and
effort to furthering these ends.
As Adorno caustically remarked in Minima Moralia (#80), un-
der the title “Happily oppressed,” “A breed of men has secretly
grown up that hungers for the compulsion and restriction imposed
by the absurd persistence of domination.”37 Absurd and degrading
as it may have seemed to Adorno, his unsettling insight was not,

and is not, recognized by many today as distressing. Many would
not recognize themselves in this description.
SOLACE
In what follows, a series of “contemporary” observations of Ador-

no’s maxims are laid out by recent observers. These reflections
are contemporary in a double sense: first, they come from near
contemporaries in the literal sense of those sharing generational
proximity; second, these observations open the way for the articu-
lation of an ethos that takes up modernity as becoming historical.38
What might Adorno have had to say about Honneth’s cor-
pus? To answer this challenge, one must be alert to the following
quotes chosen from Adorno:
Only the damaged subject can experience and—albeit imper-
fectly—reflect upon the damages that are done to life.39
One can readily agree with the critic Bert ven den Brink when
he claims:
We may conjecture that Adorno would have been highly
skeptical of Axel Honneth’s claim that a formal yet com-
prehensive conception of ethical life that encompasses “the
qualitative conditions of self-realization” can somehow be ab-
stracted “from the plurality of all particular forms of life” in
our societies and be made socially effective by means of justly
ordered institutions.40
In this light, Honneth’s theory is but a moment of responsiveness to

otherness that temporarily becomes immanent to the damaged life
and the (false) norms of justice and freedom. Then it recedes as the
experience (Erlebnis) fades.
Today, the maxim of the damaged life can be understood as
a self-conscious refusal to undertake a search for consolation either

in theoretical systems or in the institutions whose public relations
departments would claim to support and protect higher goals.41
Rather, one must keep in the front of one’s mind that a maxim
that the search—or even hope—for such consolation is itself a
pathway leading to further damage.
This claim is buttressed by Adorno once again:
Where ethical life is understood as part of private life only, it
is damaged. . . .42
Private existence, in striving to resemble one worthy of
man, betrays the latter, since any resemblance is withdrawn
from general realization, which yet more than ever before has
need of independent thought.43
A contemporary mode attempts to take into account that search
for consolation and its thwarted hopes. If one shifts registers from
major to minor, if one sees and even admires how the modernist
attempts at forging thinking’s consolation are becoming historical
artifacts, then it might well be that a form of solace opens up.
2
A Case of a Crucible 2013
of Flourishing
MOMENTS IN COLLABORATION:
EXPERIMENTS IN CONCEPT WORK
Trine Mygind Korsby and Anthony Stavrianakis
“Oh wow, it is beautiful!” All of us stare at the bloody sheep

liver lying in front of us on the table. A janitor suddenly enters
the room, quite surprised to see three PhD students in the
underground library of Barrow’s Hall at UC Berkeley, gath-
ered around a bloody animal organ, and he asks: “Did you
guys murder somebody and take out the liver?” We laugh and
Previously published as Trine Mygind Korsby and A

nthony Stavrianakis, “Moments
in Collaboration: Experiments in Concept Work,” Ethnos 83, no. 1 (2018): 39–57.
65
explain that we are actually exploring concepts of temporality,

and that what we have in front of us is both a sheep liver and
a divinatory tool. The janitor shakes his head, but stays in the
library, intrigued by this unexpected and somewhat shocking
scenario on a Tuesday evening. We lift the liver—at first very
cautiously—turn it around, and leaf through our books and
papers with drawings and detailed explanations of the func-
tions and meanings of each part of the liver. “Okay,” one of us
says, “now it seems like we have the right orientation.” Our
liver reading can begin.
The instance of a liver reading was a surprising moment in, and
one outcome of, a collaborative endeavour to think about ques-
tions of form, set within a graduate seminar at UC Berkeley dur-
ing Spring 2013. We begin with this encounter since the liver
was a catalyst for both the form of our working process and our
work investigating the temporal forms given to diverse practices.
In what follows, we analyse both the form given to our collabora-
tive investigation and our investigations into temporal forms.
EXPERIMENTATION
This is a time of experimentation in anthropology. A range of
exciting experimental and collaborative anthropological projects
have been undertaken: The Asthma Files1; Matsutake Worlds Re-
search Group2; Modes of Existence3; as well as The Comedy of
Things,4 to name just a few projects where collaboration is indexed
as the regulative practice for collective research. It could well be
argued that plural conceptions of collaboration—co-labouring—
have been central to the formation of different methodological and
analytical approaches within anthropology since its inception as a
field science.5 Although the history and transformation of these
modalities of collaboration in fieldwork and writing are beyond
the scope of this article, it is pertinent to note the importance of
a case of a crucible of flourishing 67
the epistemological and political critique of anthropological text-

production and field-engagements in the late 1960s and 1970s,
as well as the anthropological self-critique of the production and
circulation of forms and genres of writing from the 1980s.6 These
critiques ramified the collaborative and interdisciplinary practices
that had developed in the 1950s in anthropology in both the USA
and Europe (e.g. collaborative projects undertaken in the Harvard
Department of Social Relations and at the Department of Social
Anthropology at Manchester, to cite just two post-war institu-
tional developments). As Marcus and Holmes argue, collaboration
is not a “new methodological tool” but is rather central to the “re-
functioning” of anthropological research practice.7 Collaboration
is of increasing importance not only for anthropological work but
also across academic disciplines.8
In this article, we present a narrative account of an ongoing en-
deavour, started in Berkeley in 2005, as part of Anthropological Re-
search on the Contemporary, which is a collaborative research group
first set up by Rabinow and a group of (then) PhD students. In
the narration of this endeavour, we highlight an often-overlooked
dimension of the challenge of collaboration, a dimension that is,
we think, nevertheless propaedeutic and vital to its realisation: the
form given to actual practices of collaboration.
Concretely, given the proliferating calls for collaboration in the
academy, how does one become capable of practising anthropol-
ogy in a collaborative manner? What are the movements and mo-
ments of this work? How, in other words, is motion in thought
produced between and among people? Rather than mystifying a
practice, as has sometimes been the case in the past with fieldwork,
or reducing it to a set of methodological rules, we think it is im-
portant to reflect on how collaborative practices are created and
how they function. How do we think and work productively to-
gether in the university, and how are moments and momenta of
collective thinking produced?
In this article, we present one response to the challenge of

collaboration within the university: the “Labinar.” We argue for
the importance of experiments in the invention of forms for collab-
orative thinking. Whilst there has certainly been much reflection
within anthropology on practices of collaboration in the field,9
there seems to have been less thought about how anthropolo-
gists work and think with each other when not doing fieldwork,
and of the forms that might be created for thinking together.10
Processes of conceptualisation are often discussed informally, but
are rarely scrutinised or taken seriously to the point of chang-
ing specific practices, their orientations and their arrangements.
A focus on form and practice can result in many kinds of care
and reflection in the creation, sustenance and, where necessary,
transformation of the affects and techniques for working together
within the university. We focus here on collaborative forms and
practices of concept work.
For a number of years, Marcus and Rabinow have been pos-
ing questions of how to design spaces that would facilitate col-
laborative practices for anthropology. In 2005, Rabinow and a
group of PhD students began what became a long-standing effort,
within the space of the graduate seminar, to work through ques-
tions of how to create anthropological venues in which thinking
and invention can take place collectively. The early stages of this
experimentation were conducted together with molecular biolo-
gist Roger Brent at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley.11
For Rabinow, the twentieth- and twenty-first century scientific
lab meeting provided one model through which practices of de-
subjectivised critique are made normative and are supposed to
have productive effects on thought about scientific problems.
Desubjectivised critique does not mean engaging in or attempt-
ing to produce subject-less knowledge. On the contrary, a prac-
tice of desubjectivised critique means acknowledging relations of
power and the affective qualities of those relations. Taking affect

and power into account primes attention to how people work on
themselves and each other in such a way that might render partici-
pants capable of and willing (or not, as the case may be) to work
together. This is all the more important under current external
conditions in academic and research milieus, given the simultane-
ously growing demands for collaboration and the paucity of com-
mon problems and practices.12
For Marcus, the nineteenth-century charrette in architecture
provided a different model. Marcus has used this model to facili-
tate collective work on problems of ethnographic research design,
the collaborative construction of ethnographic media, as well as to
provide a form for collective critique.13
Rabinow and Marcus’ shared concern for collaborative practice
draws on, and problematises, transformations in American cultural
anthropology from the Second World War. At this conjuncture in
the 1940s, as Clifford Geertz wrote a few years before his death:
what had been an obscure, isolate, even reclusive, lone-wolf
sort of discipline, concerned mainly with tribal ethnography,
racial and linguistic classification, cultural evolution, and pre-
history, changed in the course of a decade into the very model
of a modern, policy conscious, corporate social-science.14
Collaboration, we thus should recall, is not avant-garde.
THE LABINAR
What is a Labinar? In administrative terms, it is the graduate
seminar of a senior professor at Berkeley, Rabinow. It is listed in
the course catalogue as such, and it takes place at a specific time,
officially once a week, with a specific duration (three hours). The
location is variable. It begins initially in a seminar room designated
by a university administrator. There are usually about 10 or so
The Labinar space in 311 Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley (Rabinow's office),

FIG. 6.
image taken from three angles. Spring 2013.
participants, which is a group small enough to move to work in

Rabinow’s office: 311 Kroeber Hall. One advantage of a smaller
number of participants is that familiarity is more quickly and easily
established; a certain confidence and trust may then follow more
readily. Participants in the Labinar have ranged from anthropol-
ogy PhD students to students of architecture, theology, English
literature, music, and Biblical studies. Over the years, it has in-
cluded poets, designers, and a librarian. The advantage of being
able to work in “311 Kroeber” is that the space has been modestly
configured to facilitate work together: until recently (as we will
explain), the room was arranged with a round table in the centre
of the room, fold-up chairs stashed away, a projector and large
screen in one corner so that everyone in the room could see and
participate, and paper flip charts to aid documentation of thought
and process (fig. 6).
Although formally a seminar, the Labinar begins each semester
by putting in question its very form as a seminar. Otherwise put, it
is a seminar which asks (a) what is a seminar in anthropology? and
(b) What else could a seminar in anthropology be? These ques-
tions had an initial parameter: what might happen in a seminar if
we abandoned the following items: a syllabus; a disciplinary lesson
to be learnt; an end known in advance? Positively, what might
be created if participants invented a practice of conceptual work
oriented to co-labour through shared materials? The end, in such

a case, would be to capture what was being made and thought, as
well as to reflect together on how it was being made and thought.
We wish to highlight at this point that the Labinar as a workspace
is as much if not more concerned with how we can think together
than with the specific content of what we are thinking about to-
gether. The content of this work is, of course, not irrelevant, and
is not arbitrary, but is not in itself the aim of the practice.
In the first Labinar (in 2005), as described by one of its key
designers, Meg Stalcup, the first parameter to be rethought was
the use and form of time. Stalcup posed the question as follows:
What are the actual practices of intellectual co-labouring? We

had some experiences of success, of magic moments when
thought seemed shared, an insight captured and made tan-
gible. We were also cognizant of what had been consistent
challenges. Groups were too large, students were competitive
rather than cooperative, and what work was accomplished
seemed to evaporate at the end. We wanted to consistently
create a space where intense intellectual exchange took place
on shared problems [. . .] Over the course of the semester
we designed a protocol for a graduate seminar around these
goals.15
The protocol gave a highly structured form to the seminar

time; breaking up three hours into distinct work blocks with the
aim that each block built on the last and then each week moved
the seminar forward, taking up selected elements of the previous
week’s work. However, the design, planning and labour involved
in creating and sustaining this form were not reproducible: begin-
ning from scratch each semester with new participants—some of
whom were curious but reluctant to be de- and re-subjectivated
in the name of experimentation (on the self and others)—was
too high a threshold. Each semester, the endeavour was modified
based on both the things learnt by participants from the prior at-
tempt and in relation to the open question of how new partici-
pants wished to proceed.
SPRING 2013
In the Labinar of Spring 2013—as in prior iterations—a topic
was selected by Rabinow and several PhD students who worked
closely with him, prior to the start of the semester. This is the first
temporal marker; that the Labinar takes place over the course of a
semester of the university calendar. The transposition of the Labi-
nar onto the timetable of the academic calendar has both positive
and negative constraints. Negatively, the academic tempo of the
semester is busy and short. Each semester, there are concerns about
what can be achieved in the time frame of three to four months,
in a situation in which this work is one among many other things
participants will be doing. Positively, this limit interferes, at least
slightly, with the production of doxa. Whilst it is true that a core
group of participants have returned to the experiment, having to
start again each semester requires openness to what the group will
work on as well as how to work on it.
The manner in which a starting topic is agreed on by Rabi-
now in dialogue with close collaborators indexes at least one char-
acteristic of how relations of power are configured. The aim is
not and could not be to create a neutral space of communication.
Rabinow is a senior professor and at least initially, the seminar is
his responsibility. The aim is to offer an engagement with an ex-
periment, one that is both unequal, insofar as it has a history to it,
and presupposes familiarity with, or else an openness to engaging
with such an ongoing experiment in repertoires of concepts and
practices. Nevertheless, it is an engagement whose power rela-
tions are reversible, since the aim is not domination or disciplinary
lesson giving. As we will show, what the seminar became in this
particular iteration was created by those of us who took part, and

its lessons were experiential rather than dogmatic. From the out-
set, the success of the Labinar was to be tested against its capacity
to short-circuit familiar stasis-inducing relations of power, which
reproduce the familiar or the already known.
At the beginning of the semester, Rabinow and Stavrianakis
were finishing their book Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropologi-
cal Tests, which deals with questions of form, ethics, and anthropo-
logical practice.16 The Labinar started with Rabinow outlining the
overall aim of the Labinar, and in this iteration, he thus proposed
a term for discussion, namely, “form.” Rabinow began with an
intriguing quotation from Foucault, indexing a longer history of
collaboration into which we were being invited:17
It is easy to believe that a culture is more attached to its values

than its forms; that the latter can be easily modified, aban-
doned, taken up once again, because only meaning (sens) is
deeply rooted. To do so is to misunderstand how forms, when
they come undone or are born can provoke astonishment or
arouse hatred; it is to misunderstand that people are more at-
tached to the manner of seeing, of saying, of doing and of
thinking than that which they see, think, say or do. The battle
of forms in the West has been as ferocious, if not more, than
that of ideas and values.18
This starting point for the seminar was then taken up and extended
by participants at two levels: (1) at the level of a provocation for
what we could take up as objects of discussion over the course of
a semester, that is, to investigate forms (arrangements of discur-
sive and non-discursive practices) at a first order of observation, to
observe activities of putting-in-form that provoke curiosity. We
asked ourselves how to distinguish observations of the relations
of forms to practice from those of the relations between ideas or
values and practices. (2) There was, simultaneously a curiosity at a
second order of observation, a curiosity about the forms of thought

through which we could take up forms as objects of thought, that
is, the form-giving practice at stake in the Labinar space.
As we will describe, these two conceptual spaces of thinking
about forms were mutually creative, such that our investigation
of historically and geographically heterogeneous forms of practice
ramified the form and practice of our investigation. As we indi-
cated with our opening vignette, our search would transform the
manner of our collective endeavour.
From this starting point, two working groups initially emerged,
facilitated by two PhD students who had participated in Labinars
previously, both anthropologists who were then in the final stages
of their PhDs, Lyle Fearnley and Joshua Craze. A third anthro-
pologist with prior Labinar experience, Anthony Stavrianakis, en-
gaged with both groups. The groups drew on the experiences and
interests of those in the room. The first group consisted of an ar-
chitect, Noam Shoked, who had returned to the university to pur-
sue PhD research; Roy Fisher, a Near Eastern studies scholar; an
English literature scholar, Joshua Anderson; as well as an anthro-
pologist of China, Fearnley. They proliferated instances19 in which
form is a problem for practitioners and observers: battles over the
development of Yosemite National Park, oriented by the conflict
between approaches to preservation and conservation in the work
of John Muir and Gifford Pinchot; the White City of Tel Aviv
and the question of how modernism and modernity have become
historical artefacts that require forms for preservation and for cura-
tion; hugely elongated temporal forms for nuclear waste storage
in northern Finland and New Mexico; as well as trans-temporal
forms of dietetics, as in the recent fashion of so-called “paleodi-
ets,” mythic returns to a supposedly original biological form.
Three terms were posited as a way of trying to name a tem-
poral problematisation of “form”: preservation, conservation, and
restoration. The initial thought was that these terms might en-
able the group to distinguish between different manners in which

buildings, environments, populations, and bodies are sustained and
cared for. For example, an orienting thought was that preserva-
tion might refer to a mode of care and form-giving that attempts
to freeze the object of intervention in an unchanging duration,
whereas restoration and conservation would require the active
changing of the object over time.
After several weeks of working together, meeting once a week
outside of the formal seminar time, narrating and critiquing nar-
ratives of preservation, conservation, and restoration, the group
found that their trio of terms could not be conceptually delineated
in a useful way. They were terms that generated interesting discus-
sions around heterogeneous objects, but they were not concep-
tually precise terms for identifying shared problems of form and
temporal care.
A second group was composed of an ethnomusicologist, Hong-
June Park; an English literature scholar, Rebecca Gaydos; and three
anthropologists, Gabriel Coren, Joshua Craze, and Trine Korsby.
The group took up instances including the Black Mountain poet
Robert Creeley’s experiments with formal and open techniques;
the question of whether or how the Cheroblynsk meteor in Feb-
ruary 2013 constituted a “world event”; Hurricane Sandy and
questions of modalities of the narration of chance, knowledge and
the hurricane as an event; storm modelling as a predictive science;
as well as the role of prophecy in Sudanese politics.
CONCEPT WORK
For the first three weeks or so, members of the groups became fa-
miliar with each other, meeting up in person midweek to talk about
empirical instances they were interested in, and to try and think
about how these materials could be grouped, analysed, and synthe-
sised with the aid of concepts. The next step, an excerpt of which
we will describe shortly, was to ask which concepts could be cre-

ated and to ask whether and how they were useful. The aim was to
avoid the reduction of the seminar space to a proxy zone for merely
advancing in one’s thesis research. Simply put, we wished to try
and think together about things that we had not yet thought about.
In the fourth week, we began to discuss what kind of collabo-
ration might happen between the two groups, and not only within
each group. Unexpectedly, we began to discuss the possibility of
staging a live event as the outcome of the semester’s work. The
purpose of a live event would be both to engage in some con-
versation with other people in the university around questions of
collaborative practice, as well as to create a medium in which, we
thought, we could “collide” the two groups’ work on events and
the temporalities of form. We decided that given the Labinar’s
thematic of form, we would video record our working sessions
over four weeks with the aim to both use the material as a way to
objectivise and rethink what had been said, as well as to reflect on
the manner in which we were working together. We discussed
the aim of making a live event, and began to ask ourselves about
the appropriate media for such an event. Following Fisher and
Craze’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s figure of the “destruc-
tive character”—who knows only how to “make room” and to
“clear away,” “destroying even the traces of destruction”20—we
discussed what trace of our work together we should or should not
leave as the outcome of such an experimental situation.
The live event, which we called an ARCumentary (i.e. a doc-
umentary of the Anthropological Research on the Contemporary
collaboratory), took place on 14 May 2013 in the Gifford Room,
Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley, with participation of students and a
few professors from different disciplines at Berkeley. It consisted
of a screening of the edited video material interspersed with nar-
ratives about the processes of the work conducted, and observa-
tions about what was taking place in the video. In the end, we
decided not to film the event itself, to leave its form uncaptured,
and in so doing, we followed Fisher’s call not to control the mean-
ing of the event. Our discussions of the aim of the live event—
would it fossilise our experiences and work or would it enhance
its ramification?—pushed us further in thinking about how to test
and evaluate the adequacy of forms and concepts to a practice, and
of a practice to problems of forms and concepts.
The issue of testing the concepts that were emerging in our
common work had been present all through the semester. We
present below an excerpt from a session of the Labinar in which
the first group was responding to work from the second group,
on the temporality of different kinds of predictive or prognostic
claims. Their observations were tested against their own work on
the temporality of forms of knowledge and care for diverse ar-
rangements of people and things. The second group was paying
attention to the truth-telling modes of prophecy, prognosis, and
prediction as manners in which claims about the future are made,
and then looking at the way in which these claims are remediated
or tested in events, through modes such as denial (e.g. claims such
as “climate change isn’t real”), adjacency (e.g. “climate change
isn’t the point, development is”), and recontextualisation (e.g.
“there may be climate change, but we need to continue to invent
technologies to spur growth and provide climate solutions”).
The two groups’ work circulated around, what we began to
call, modes of “futurisation.” Futurisation as a term was helpful in
asking how temporal relations are configured. The way the term
was being used, however, reflected a set of assumptions about di-
rectionality and motion that needed to be thought about:
Fearnley: What we have tried to do in our last couple of meet-

ings is to try and distil all the work we are doing into almost a
conceptual instrument, or a function. As you can see, you can
read it from the left to the right. (See fig. 7.)
Where our work started was with a problematisation around

conservation. What we have identified is a problematisation in
which we could think about a site like the Yosemite-work
presented previously, in which there is an antithesis produced
between a modern progressive time, and the practices of con-
servation that are put in contrast to that as a counterprogressive
time. There has been a reproblematisation of that arrange-
ment, in things like these extremely lengthened [time] scales
of nuclear waste storage, or in environmental sustainability, in
which the aim is no longer to conserve a stable nature against
a modern progressive time, but rather to ensure a certain sta-
bility with motion at the same time. So, we saw this diagram
(fig. 7) as a way of documenting things that we were finding
in our instances. But we also saw it as a tool so that you could
run things through, for instance where diagnostically it looks
like there is an opposition between progressive and counter-
progressive temporalities, run it through the device and break
down that opposition to a range of different temporal scales.
The second group responded by questioning the degree to

which futurisation is the right term with which to open up a range
of temporalities and scales:
Gaydos: What connects the work of our two groups is that we
are interested in things that are forward-reaching, but then I
have been trying to question whether they really are forward-
reaching in light of the different instances we have been work-
ing with. For example, with Roy’s presentation of the paleo
fantasy, that involved reaching very far back in time, it also
seemed to have to do with the sense that man doesn’t evolve,
or isn’t adaptable and that there is this primal, timeless arche-
type that in returning to it, we are actually going forward. So
you showed this strange movement that was backwards but
also forwards.
FIG. 7. A diagram of the concept of futurisation.
Similarly with the work on Onkalo, the nuclear storage site

in Northern Finland, which is supposed to store waste in mas-
sively extended time horizons. One anthropological question
there was with respect to how to demarcate the site as “dan-
gerous” for a far, far distant future. So again there seems to be
a question of transhistoricality.
Within our own group’s work in looking at prediction, in-
sofar as it involved simulation it involved virtualizing the pres-
ent, bringing the future into the present, in order to get rid of
uncertainty. So I have been thinking that we need to rethink
the term futurisation in order to better capture these complex
configurations of temporality.
Rabinow: The term that has been coming to mind as you
all have been talking has been something like apprehension,
which is both an affect term and an action term. It seems to
deal with this concern that futurisation is too unidirectional.
OMENISATION
After these interventions, our working rhythm and joint trajectory
in the Labinar swerved onto a new path. Fisher brought to our at-
tention the practice of omen divination in animal livers, a practice
called extispicy. Liver reading (we discussed at length the degree
to which this verb was the appropriate one for the practice, with-
out deciding on an alternative) was a common divinatory form in
Babylonia, and the practice consists in identifying specific folds,
pouches, and furrows of the flesh of the liver, which can then be
interpreted with respect to past, present, and future situations and
events. To help the reader interpret the omen, ancient tablets with
descriptions of the different features of the liver are used, guiding
the interpretation.
What was interesting was how the linearity and progressive
feel of futurisation were somehow countered in the liver omen
readings; the readings could, of course, deal with future events

and help the reader anticipate how a conflict, a battle, or another
coming event would unfold. But the readings could also help in-
terpret past events in light of the present, making sense of the past
in the present. What combined these different temporal direc-
tions, flowing to and from the animal liver, was distance; temporal
distance to the situations and events it was catalysing. At the same
time—we imagined—the concreteness, the intimate, fleshy pres-
ence of the liver in the omen reader’s hands, called the reader (and
his/her listeners) into the present in a very concrete way. The liver
thus appeared as a temporal gathering point, a medium connect-
ing different temporalities. At this point, the term “omenisation”
seemed timely.
Besides this expanded approach to temporality which omenisa-
tion provided, the liver omens turned out to have far more to offer
conceptually and methodologically to the Labinar as a whole. A
few of the participants (Fisher, Shoked, and Korsby) felt especially
inspired by the liver readings, and the three-person group decided
to explore the practice further by carrying out a real liver reading
themselves. The group wanted to engage with an actual liver as a
temporal entity—as omenisation—in practice. One evening, the
group met in the underground library of Barrow’s Hall at UC
Berkeley with the necessary equipment for the endeavour, con-
sisting of a video camera, literature on the ancient tablets used to
assist in omen divination, and a real sheep liver.
So there it was, the liver, having travelled with one of the
group participants from the local butcher in Northern California
in a small cooler. The liver—bloody, red, and quite heavy—was
now lying on the table in front of us. We were very curious and
excited. We turned and moved the liver to get the right orienta-
tion. We touched it, lifted it, inspected it, and tried to read it with
the help of the Mesopotamian Manzāzu tablets; we asked the liver
questions and we got answers. The group was dedicated to taking
the practice of liver readings seriously and to explore what that

seriousness could lead to, collaboratively and conceptually. With
what Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell have called “purposeful na-
ïveté,” the group engaged with the liver for what it was: an animal
organ and a divinatory tool.21
Standing in the underground library, the group felt animated
by the experience and its intensity and started discussing the pos-
sibility of introducing the liver to the rest of the Labinar partici-
pants, and somebody suggested to ask the liver how that would
play out. We had the equipment at hand to conduct such an in-
quiry. We thus asked the liver in front of us: “How will the rest
of the group—including Rabinow—react to us bringing a real
animal liver into the Labinar?” We now inspected the liver care-
fully, turned it, looked at it, and one part of the liver in particular
caught our attention. We found a long, straight line in the flesh
(approximately 3 cm long) called “The Presence” according to
the Manzāzu tablets, and at the right end of The Presence was a
small, circular hole in the flesh of the liver. We browsed through
the pages of the Manzāzu tablets, and found the following inter-
pretation:
If in the right side of The Presence a Hole lies: Defeat of the
army.22
We were now in the situation of other omen readers—we as-
sumed—since this statement could be interpreted in multiple
ways: would it be defeat of our three-person group’s “army” and
our endeavour to present the liver to the rest of the Labinar partic-
ipants, or would our approach be the winning party? We discussed
the omen and concluded that the reading had to be in our favour
in the sense that The Presence was continuing our momentum
to bring the liver into the presence of the Labinar. We did not
see ourselves as an army, but the Manzāzu tablet aided us in read-
ing, discussing, and responding to the possible friction (a distinct
kind of physical moment) generated by our plan in the Labinar.

In the experimental spirit of the Labinar, we agreed that the liver
had spoken, and even though we knew that it would be a daring
endeavour to bring part of a dead animal into what was otherwise
a very discursive setting, we were now confident that we could
present a real sheep liver at the following Labinar meeting.
The group did not inform the rest of the Labinar participants
of the plan, and at the following Labinar meeting—when tak-
ing turns to present what each group had been working on—the
group took out a big, bloody sheep liver and placed it at the table in
front of the rest of the Labinar participants. People stopped in their
lively discussions, started laughing and immediately got up from
their chairs to inspect and eventually touch the liver. The liver was
sent around from person to person so that everyone could feel its
weight and examine it. People commented on its distinct smell,
oval form, and different colours of red. We felt energised. The
shocking entrance of the liver and our common interest in explor-
ing it, created a moment of collaboration and collectivity, all of us
gathered around the liver and the eventfulness it had produced.
We started discussing the liver; which features does a liver have—
for instance, its detoxifying function in the body—and how we
experienced its sudden presence. Several of us agreed that the liver
inspired a fuzzy mix of dissonance and resonance in us: on the one
hand, it was familiar to us, since we all have one inside our own
bodies, and since animal livers can be eaten—and therefore the
liver drew our attention to our own bodily functions. But on the
other hand, it was foreign and peculiar, suddenly lying on the big,
round table in a professor’s office. The liver triggered an uncanny
experience of the inside on the outside.
The liver was not just a random sheep liver lying in front of
us; it was much more than that because of our concept work and
momentum leading up to its entrance and our knowledge of its
affordances of divination. By this, we suggest that the timing of the
entrance of the liver—following weeks of work on different no-

tions of temporality—was crucial for our understanding of it. We
could not help joking about and discussing the liver as “live” and
the liveliness that it brought to our group.
THE LIVER
Our understanding and engagement with the liver as a trans-tem-
poral entity and technology inspired new modes of attentiveness in
our concept work and took our inquiries in new directions, mov-
ing our inquiries centripetally towards what was going on right
here between our hands in room 311 of Kroeber Hall, at Berkeley.
The liver was a step in another direction from our former concept
work with temporalities, such as conservation, restoration, pres-
ervation, and instances relating to the freezing of time; the liver
appeared as a vibrant, concentrated entity which caused multiple
reactions, affective as well as intellectual. The liver appeared to us
as an intensification of temporal scales, reaching towards the past
and the future in its capacity as a divinatory tool and at the same
time drastically drawing us into and changing (us in) the present.
The liver afforded a form of participation and communion, in
which the liver stood in for and rendered tangible the ethos of
the collaborative endeavour of the Labinar. As we will expand on
below, the liver was not simply a part of the Labinar, rather it had
turned into the means through which we instantiated what the
Labinar had become.
The liver as a coming-together of temporalities resembles Pe
dersen and Nielsen’s introduction of the “trans-temporal hinge”23
as a theoretical tool for understanding situations or things in which
different temporalities (certain past, present, and future events) are
momentarily assembled. One of their ethnographic examples is
from a Chinese infrastructure project in Mozambique, and it de-
picts how the Mozambican workers receive their salaries from a
Chinese accountant handing out bundles of notes through an open

window—a practice which the Mozambican workers are far from
happy with, since the absence of an envelope for the salary makes
the money appear like “money off the street,” as one of their in-
terlocutors explains. The inappropriate absence of the envelope
opens the Mozambican workers’ imaginaries of future scenarios
with the Chinese employers and in this way:
. . . the envelope constituted an imaginary (or speculative)

future moment that structured the present in accordance with
its virtual dimensions [. . .] the envelope (or more precisely
its absence) structured social life by indicating how appropri-
ate distances to radically different others might be established
and acted upon. This implied a series of immediate temporal
shifts between the present and an imagined future moment
(i.e. when receiving money in an envelope).24
Pedersen and Nielsen thus argue that the envelope—as an ex-

ample of a trans-temporal hinge—constitutes a unique temporal
scale, which holds together events that are otherwise distributed
across different moments in time. The liver as a trans-temporal
technique can be said to hold some of the same affordances as the
trans-temporal hinge, when regarded as a mid-point, momentarily
gathering—or rather, we would argue, creating passage-way for—
different temporal streams.
At this point, our inquiries into temporalities had transformed
the sheep liver in our hands into a concept to both apprehend
and present. The liver was a different concept from what we had
worked with until now in the Labinar. This concept was not in
the form of a verbally articulated term, but could be touched,
looked at and it was one with which we could attempt to com-
municate. It opened up to a very concrete, bodily engagement
since this concept could be held, squeezed, or lifted—and its form,
size, and surface were linked to concrete interpretations. We had,
however, not only discovered the liver’s conceptual affordances.

The liver became a catalyst for new paths in our work: the liver
did not just hand us a new word or phrase (instead of futurisation
or omenisation), it gave us, rather, a new bodily and conceptual
orientation and participation.
This collapse of things (in this case organs) and concepts into
one has been described by Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell as a
methodological and theoretical approach of going “back to the
things themselves,”25 highlighting that the phenomena or thing
in question in itself can be illuminating, instead of searching for
what the thing might signify or represent: “. . . the assumption that
concepts are ontologically distinct from the thing to which they
are ordinarily said to ‘refer’ must be discarded.”26 In their intro-
duction to Thinking Through Things, besides collapsing the relation
between concepts and objects of inquiry, the authors encourage
anthropologists to attend to things as they emerge or present them-
selves in the ethnographic encounter. Our situation was not one
of fieldwork or an ethnographic encounter as such, but a process
of working through instances and, in that process, encountering
an animal organ which—as a concept—turned out to capture a
lacuna in our concept work, which had not been filled out by our
previous, verbally articulated terms and concepts; in this case, the
liver as concrete, intense form offered us something beyond our
discursive engagements. This, however, did not render us speech-
less. Rather, the disjuncture and liveliness of the liver ramified our
capacity to think and speak, even though—or perhaps because—it
activated a different, affective, register.
We discussed whether one way to describe the entrance of the
liver—following a string of inquiries into temporalities—could be
as a kind of escalation, here referring to a process of animation and
affect (rather than a scale of progress or time), unexpectedly inten-
sifying and accelerating the working rhythm we had experienced
so far that semester. But at the same time, the liver also provided
the opposite—de-escalation—for the group; it made us slow down
and pause in our “normal” mental process of doing concept work,
because it so concretely called our attention. There was something
eventful and animating about the liver’s appearance and presence.
Deleuze and Guattari write about concepts as events:
The concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing
[. . .] If one concept is “better” than an earlier one, it is because
it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances,
it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out. It brings forth an Event
that surveys [survole] us [. . .] The concept is the contour, the
configuration, the constellation of an event to come.27
But besides its eventfulness, what kind of concept was the liver?
The liver was a composition of several features, one of them being
its temporal condensation and capacity as a divination tool, and
another feature was its “organic” materiality. What we were en-
gaging with was not a chair, crafted by a carpenter, or a talisman,
blessed by a priest or a shaman. It was an organ. It seemed crucial
that the liver-as-concept was also an animal organ, and that we
were not solely talking or reading about it, but actually holding it.
Especially for the working group who performed the initial liver
reading, the liver’s particular, visceral qualities seemed to make
us aware of our own corporeal terrains in new ways: taken to the
extreme, we could argue that this attentiveness was making us into
organs with bodies.28 The point is that the liver-as-concept and
the liver-as-organ are the same entity, and underlining the liver’s
capacities as an organ—in contrast to a tree, a bird, or a human
hair—together with its temporal, divinatory functions is central to
understanding how we were pushed conceptually in this particular
part of our work together.
Paying attention to the materiality of concepts and the multiple
temporalities condensed in objects opened up discussions of the

physical space of the Labinar as a material conceptual setting. How
did our own postures and the physical frame around us affect our
collaborative concept work?
THE MATERIALITY OF THINKING

After the end of the semester, a few of the Labinar participants
started exploring the Labinar’s physical space: how did the space
work and what kinds of power relations were inscribed in it? And
most importantly, what kind of engagement did this arrangement
produce?
Our common confrontation with the staged event of the liver
had included affects of surprise, joy, and bodily appearance, which
then, in turn, had jolted something new into being between us
as participants. We were curious as to how the physical landscape
around us could possibly be attuned to the emergence of other
such collaborative moments to come. As we will expand on be-
low, a process seemed to have been set in motion between us, a
moment was then projected and extended, which required us not
only to analyse and explore the material frame of our thinking but
also to rethink and develop this materiality in order to accommo-
date the new forms of collaboration which had emerged.
Precisely because the university is a space laden with power
relations, we purposefully asked ourselves which kinds of power
relations are deformative for collaboration and which kinds might
lead towards flourishing forms of co-labour. It is certainly true that
we did not come to a consensus on all decisions, as the endeavour
was more experimental than procedural: we tried different things,
in different constellations of participants, and, as our description
above shows, at different points, people intervened to suggest
paths to follow, for instance, Rabinow’s suggestion of a term that
could grasp the affect we were attempting to name, such as appre-

hension, and Fisher’s suggestion that we look at concrete practices
of divination. The work of course took place within a search for
form that was to a large degree guided by Rabinow, a search that
was itself formative. In terms of his own reflection on the charac-
ter of power relations during the seminar, Rabinow brought up
the question, which had remained unspoken, of whether he could
or should have been more or less directive during this work, or
how else he could occupy his position as simultaneous instigator
and accompanier, without taking on the posture of the lesson-
giver. We think that it is accurate to say that we were attempting
to work on the power relations between us such that they were
oriented to mutual productivity and flourishing. Our experience
was that such work can decrease the deformative effects of power,
and can be productive of a positive conception of freedom as
something other than an individualising mythology of autonomy.
In our analyses of the objects in the physical space of the Labinar
(such as chairs and tables), we were looking for a surrounding ma-
teriality to reflect the cadence and structure of our work together.
We needed to attend to the media through which we could work,
such as using tables where people could work in smaller groups,
but that were still attached to the tables of the other groups, thus
creating movement back and forth between work in the Labinar
group, smaller working groups, as well as individual work (such as
research on instances).
One of the architectural solutions being discussed was to place
hinges or other devices of attachment between the tables, enabling
a wide range of configurations of the tables in the room, accen-
tuating their—and thus the participants’—ability to move and
disengage, without letting go of the anchor to the rest of the col-
laborative scenery. As Pedersen and Nielsen write about (trans-
temporal) hinges, they can be seen as gathering points, as “. . . a
point of symmetry defined by its capacity to be always in the

middle without constituting a centre.”29 The working flow of the
Labinar also benefitted from interventions—ruptures in the struc-
ture—such as the unforeseen introduction of a real sheep liver.
The hinges and their capacity to simultaneously detach and attach
materialised this need for flexibility without leaving behind the
core rotation. This movement of simultaneous connection and
disconnection was also what the original outset of the Labinar’s
desubjectivised critique was all about; being part of the Labinar
meant letting go (to some extent) of one’s own research project
and agenda; a movement between non-group to group work, and
from there, a return to one’s own research project—but equipped
differently.
We started experimentally thinking that the characteristics and
capacities of the liver itself might actually be the same as those of
the Labinar; there were important analogic connections between
the two entities, and we wondered whether these connections
were what generated the resonance in the group. We discussed
how the liver as mediating device for apprehending time and ex-
perience, on the one hand, and the Labinar as form, on the other
hand, were interconnected but also discrete things. Both entities
are spaces and instruments that facilitate and guide an unfolding
process. Both when dealing with the liver as mediating device and
when being in the Labinar working space, we as participants felt
drastically drawn into the present, creating the needed distance
to the events and instances we were trying to make sense of, and
giving us room to think and interpret backwards and forwards in
time. The liver and the Labinar both recalibrated the present, and
they both accelerated that process through particular forms.
We started discussing the history of the liver together with the
history of each of our entrances into the Labinar; how did we all
end up in this space, and what was the liver’s historical trajectory
(as concept and as animal organ coming from a sheep in a farm in
Northern California)? What had we and the liver passed through

to get here? Having been prompted to rethink our positions, as
well as our chance encounters and dissatisfactions with existing
modes of graduate pedagogy, we drew maps of our paths into the
Labinar and narrated these paths to each other.
Architect Shoked led the discussion with Rabinow and other
Labinar participants, regarding how to reconfigure the office
space—including decisions on where to place Rabinow’s com-
puter table and chair, a zone of individual work. This question
focused attention on the differentiations to be inscribed in such
a space. The group removed the large circular table, which until
now had dominated the office and replaced it with smaller, rect-
angular, connectable tables, the paintings and posters were reor-
ganised, and one wall was painted with blackboard paint. Another
wall was used for the screening of the Labinar’s projector. What
we were attempting to do was to transform the office from a bifur-
cated space, with one zone for individual work, and a second zone
for collective work, into a series of reconfigurable spaces, multiply-
ing both the zones and lines of interaction. Figure 8 indicates the
transformation from a bifurcated space of individual and collec-
tive work (left), towards a space (right) organised such that it can
produce differentiated and interconnected zones of work surfaces.
We discussed how this process did not mean an absence of power
relations between a professor and PhD students; restructuring the
space was simply an attempt to furnish the space with capacities
for collaboration between and among those who would occupy it.
Our hope was that the bodily engagement in the Labinar,
which our concept work with the liver had inspired us to pursue,
would be encouraged by the new physical space. The flexibility
of the re-arrangeable chairs and tables, the larger floor-space freed
up in the office and the use of blackboards were materialisations
of the composed indeterminacies which seemed to frame the Lab
inar, which had a highly ordered rhythm and procedure at the
FIG. 8. Transformation of “311 Kroeber.”
same time as opening up for unexpected interventions. Concrete

bodily movement would be necessary in a different way in this new
space, since participants would now need to walk, stand, and draw
in the room to a much larger extent than before, where sitting on
a chair was what was done most of the time. The removable fur-
niture could also inspire this bodily movement. Thinking of other
situations in which one has arranged a space with others—moving
a sofa or hanging pictures on the wall—and the experience of the
change in one’s relation with the room and the people involved in
the concrete activity, the hope was that the scholarly work would
be affected by this change in physical arrangement and consequent
bodily presence. The experimentation with forms and concepts in
the collaborative space and its effect of giving a different form to
oneself and to others had to be reciprocally attuned to the Labi-
nar’s material form.
MOMENTS IN COLLABORATION
Roland Barthes’ essay “To the Seminar,” a reflection on his
weekly seminar, begins with the following question:
Is this a real site or an imaginary one? He replies: “Neither. An
institution is treated in the utopian mode: I outline a space and
call it seminar” . . . One might put things differently: that the
(real) seminar is the object of a (minor) delirium and that my
relations with this object are, literally, amorous.30
Our relations with the Labinar form and experiment did not
involve love, but rather involved a certain quality and form of
friendship. The aim of the Labinar was to experiment with partici-
pation, thinking, and friendship. The aim of the Labinar was thus
to keep the possibilities of “joyous science” alive in the contem-
porary university. We therefore find it germane to consider which
forms might—or might not—enable productive collaboration to
take place, in this case, in relation to particular collaborative prac-

tices concerning concept work.
Barthes identifies three spaces in the seminar, which are worth
reflecting on with respect to our past experience of and future
hopes for collaboration in the university—not only this experi-
ence, but also the virtual forms which are yet to be invented.
First is the institutional space: it took place at Berkeley, it took
place mainly with PhD students. The institutional constraints and
supports cannot be wished away; however, there are degrees to
which inherited institutional forms can be remediated—forms of
time and habits. Rabinow’s co-labour with students to create a
venue in his office is testament to the long durational collective in-
vestment in sharing forms for thought, forms, we reiterate, which
are as much material, as experiential and conceptual.
Barthes’ second space is transferential, in a basic—and as he
says, not rigorously psychoanalytic—sense. In his assessment, the
“transferential space” of the seminar should disrupt the habitual
sovereign relations of director to the directed. When judged as
successfully short-circuiting “oedipal” relations, such a space be-
comes, in his terms, “phalansterial.” He has in mind Fourier’s pha-
lanstère designs, a self-contained structure housing a cooperative
community (the term comes from the term phalanx, a kind of an-
cient Greek military form with multiple forms of connection and
differentiation). For Barthes, “the phalanstery is a retreat within
which one moves,”31 a haven of motion and connection.
The third space is, perhaps, the most intriguing and problem-
atic, the textual space32: intriguing because here we have attempted
to bring into a textual form an experience of the Labinar, a text
written out of prior Labinars, which is already being rewritten, as
we write, in new iterations of the Labinar and other experiments
yet to come.
The liver encounter was just one instance over the course of
Labinars over the years. The entrance of the liver into our con-
cept work did not make us all into liver readers. Nevertheless, our
encounter with the liver, with these objects, concepts, and affects,
as well as the materiality of the Labinar setting, served to orient
us towards formative effects of thinking together and the need to
invent, reinvent, or remediate materials and practices. In this way,
the Labinar provided new possibilities for considering the rela-
tionship between anthropological analysis and methodology—not
in relation to fieldwork practices, as Gudeman and Rivera have
described,33 but when thinking together in extra-fieldwork situa-
tions. In our concept work, in our work with the liver, anthropo-
logical analysis and methodology seemed not only to resonate and
connect, but to merge into and become variations of each other,
that is, conceptual work and practice. In this case, the liver was
a participative device that afforded us a mode, a concept and an
analysis of collaboration.34 We have thus suggested that one of the
outcomes of this particular Labinar experience was the momentary
entwinement of analytical account and methodological approach,
of thinking and materiality, of forms for observation and participa-
tion: form understood not only as materiality, but as an affective
force in a collaborative venue, growing out of our concept work
with the liver and its visceral affordances.
Could the liver reading and a similar line of concept work be
done successfully in another setting, with another group of par-
ticipants? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Other forms of participa-
tion are no doubt possible, each with their distinct temporalities,
narrative forms and manners of seizing the object and objective of
experience. What we take from these collaborative moments, and
what we hope to pass on to others with this account, is to offer an
alternative perspective on what scholarly work in the university
might look like. And above all, it is an attempt to convey what we
have experienced as the highly productive, energising and joyous
force of working together, engaging seriously with the concrete
forms and formations of concepts.
3
“We cannot give you any support
if we don’t know who you are.”
You cannot drive on this road
if you do not have a car.
I cannot sleep at night
if I won’t go to bed.
They used to be my friends
but now they are dead.
—robert creeley , “Onward”
Crucible of Pariah-Hood 2013–

2017
CIVIL AND CIVIC EROSION:
FROM FLOURISHING TO PARIAH TOWARD MALICE
Gradually, incrementally over time, the basic civil as well as the
civic conditions under which the Labinar had been conceived, ex-
perimented with, and put to certain tests began to be eroded. The
process of erosion was diffusely centered—if one can say such a
thing—among various professors (in small cohorts and separately)
in the department of anthropology. These actions unfolded more
in the spirit and mode of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus rather than in
a coordinated, conspiratorial fashion, although certain professors
provided some directionality.
That being said, macro forces of change in the university and
beyond were also operative. Therefore, it is best to name the
changes that directly concern the events under consideration here
as falling under the rubric of the “civil.” With that proviso, let us
group the elements of the erosion of older tacit norms, especially
those of collegiality, as falling into the category of a “minor”
mode, a term we will return to shortly.
99
Although the various cohorts of the Labinar (as well as my

teaching, advising, and intellectual interests) had never been re-
stricted to members of the existing discipline of anthropology or
its current trends and methods, the core of those animating the
Labinar was situated in anthropology as broadly understood both
historically and philosophically. The commitment of existential
engagement, whether through “fieldwork” or through a more dif-
fuse dépaysement, that drew people to the discipline was neither
typical of the other human science disciplines nor rewarded by
them unless these motivations could be transmuted into Method.
Hence, as fewer and fewer anthropology students registered
for the Labinar, its ethos (tacit underpinnings) began to alter. This
erosion of enrollment was not an accident. Over a period of years,
no students were admitted to the department as my advisees. A
part of the responsibility for this process was mine. I had stopped
going to the ever-more bureaucratic, frustrating department meet-
ings. In any case, the meetings were gradually replaced by more
formal bureaucratic procedures for sorting and winnowing candi-
dates. Coincident with the growing procedural formality was the
spread of informal discussions and gossip. Not to participate and
“defend one’s interests” meant one abdicated representation.
Such social and political exclusion, partially tacit and partially
willed, fits the parameters of Jean-Claude Milner’s conceptualiza-
tion of the state of pariah-hood as discussed in his book Le juif de
savoir.1 As Milner describes, as long as it lasted, the pariah condi-
tion of social and political exclusion had its benefits; among them,
it gave me the time for a florescence of thought and writing and
a grudging esteem from others for intellectual work, once other
activities were foreclosed. Strands of anti-Semitism were unques-
tionably present in the Berkeley anthropology department, and
were especially overt among graduate students; this ethos was en-
couraged by certain professors and resisted vigorously by no one.2
This period of time included the Boycott Israel movement as well
as the extravagant growth of social media. Naturally, no one had
crucible of pariah-hood 101
the honesty or courage to make this theme explicit in their civic

deliberations, but its informal expression was another matter.
An exemplary instance of the strengths and ultimate vulner-
abilities of such a condition can be found in the book Dreamland
of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School.3
The historian Emily J. Levine presents the rise for several years
during the 1920s of an extraordinary flourishing of the humanities
in general and of art history in particular, under the leadership of
the three great scholars mentioned in the title—all Jews. She also
chillingly documents its destruction. It is worth noting that the
initial attacks on these scholars were led by anti-Semitic student
groups before the final blows were delivered by the National So-
cialists. Fortunately for art history and the humanities, Ernst Cas-
sirer (1874–1945) and Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) found refuge
in the United States. Aby Warburg (1866–1929) died before seeing
the final events unfold.
Another example of civility destroyed in the name of a Higher
Morality can be found—hauntingly—in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play
The Crucible, written and performed at the height of the anti-
Communist frenzy led by Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957).
That frenzy had less tragic and irremediable consequences than
those of National Socialism, although its corrosive evil remains a
vital strand in the United States.
PRODUCTION STANDARDS (HOROI )
Only by virtue of opposition to production, as still not

wholly encompassed by this order, can men bring about
another more worthy of human beings.
—theodor adorno 4
In sum, for a number of years, the core civic constitution of gradu-

ate education at this elite university remained formally in place.
Gradually, the erosion of an ethos of collegiality, combined with
an increasing consolidation of decision-making by the administra-

tion at the expense of messy democratic departmental meetings,
began to abet a degradation of the primacy of academic excellence
(scholarly inquiry + pedagogy; aretē ). Its replacement by other cri-
teria led to increasing individual careerism. The micro-practices
of these changes and their consequences are taken up in the next
chapter, “Crucible of Malice.”
In 2018, in the self-styled elite academy of the human sciences,
production normatively turns not on truth claims or the produc-
tion of scientific advances (in the older sense of the term), but
on networks. What counts are connections, forged on committees,
through conference invitations, in social media activity, and the
like. Audit culture measures these activities, encourages their pro-
liferation, and delimits what counts in academic life.5 This form of
production is dedicated to and measured by symbolic capital, repu-
tation, and micro-positions of power (granting committees, edito-
rial boards, and so on). Whatever else this mode of production is,
it is distant from and deeply corrosive of Wissenschaft als Beruf.
It must be said—and Weber said it—that the advancement of
mediocrity within the university and the rewards of bureaucratic
politics are not novelties of the present. However, we lack a le-
gitimate language to express such a self-evident sociological fact.
We no longer live in a world of German mandarins, even in their
twilight period.6 Once again, the temptation might well be to la-
ment this state of affairs—but lament no longer has a viable con-
temporary form (any more than consolation does). The Nachleben
of laments past now turns—and is turned—into gossip, slander,
and ressentiment, all cast in subjective terms.
Regardless, who today could honestly lament the passing of the
old order of the university qua institution with its tacit and explicit
class, ethnic, and gender privileges and exclusions, including its
smug and pervasive anti-Semitism, its untrammeled and largely
unexamined sexism, and the like?
It is crucial to emphasize that all of the processes, first of erosion

and later of malicious undermining, were set within a situation of
privilege and basic security. Hence, the stakes are not the brute
fate of an individual but the processes and alterations of a way of
life. That way of life and the institutional underpinnings that fa-
cilitated it (and at times provided the conditions for a distinctive
form of affordance) have not been totally disrupted, even if they
are under threat by a general change in the reigning climate. As
with climate change in the strict sense, however, the end has not
arrived, even though many signs point in the direction of demise.
Consequently, it is simply honest to underscore that, prior to
the erosion of the crucible of flourishing, memories and prac-
tices—perhaps a Nachleben—of the recent past lingered. Some of
the practitioners of this crucible of flourishing, including the pro-
fessor, shared their regrets over the course of events that they were
witnessing and enduring. They did so, however, in a space collec-
tively referred to as “a haven,” albeit in a minor mode. Thus, set
within an ongoing situation of privilege, a process of what can be
called—to use a barbaric term—pariahfication was rendered into a
pariah-station during the longer sojourn being narrated here.
Given this broad diagnosis, and given a commitment to second-
order observation set within a political and institutional setting,
the next step is to proceed to conceptual and narrative explora-
tions and experiments that might prove adequate to the situation
as it unfolded.
MINOR MODE: THWARTED AGENCY

Sianne Ngai, a literary and media critic, has opened up a field of
exploration of the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual terrain of
what she saliently names as situations of “thwarted action.” She
succeeds in transferring the problem space of action and Haltung to
a minor mode, although she does not use that vocabulary. Here,
a primary goal is to begin to explore how one might build on her

work so as to make it more amenable to a contemporary prag-
matic anthropology, thereby making it into an equipment capable
of grasping the conditions of its practice. The wager at stake here
is that Ngai’s conceptualization and analysis of “thwarted action”
will aid us in grasping the contours and operators at play in the
crucible at it was rendered into a station of pariah-hood.
In her thesis-based book Ugly Feelings, through close readings
of extended literary examples, Ngai renders approachable a vast
domain of expression and concern that prior to her cartography
had been largely invisible, or at least unmentionable, having been
considered unworthy of scholarly attention by critics and theo-
rists of art, society, and politics. As occasionally happens—Michel
Foucault’s identification and analysis of disciplinary technologies is
another instance of a similar event—once a previously supposedly
petty range of practices is named and conceptualized, it becomes
visible and enunciable. Once this motion takes place and pen-
etrates into the reigning discourse, we are then astonished and
humbled (or humiliated) by the sheer scope and scale of the phe-
nomenon that, we realize, was there all along. How were we not
talking about this stuff when we were experiencing aspects of it
on a daily basis?
The domain Ngai has been exploring concerns “ambivalent
situations of suspended agency.”7 It turns out that this previously
discursively uncharted and insufficiently conceptualized territory
is actually quite familiar to most of us, even though it has been
considered to be too trivial for professional attention, and conse-
quently has been insufficiently reflected upon. This neglect and
disdain provide the nutrients, as it were, for these “ugly feelings”
to continue to fester unattended by scholarly discourse or institu-
tional action.
Ngai, pointedly drawing from the Italian Marxist Paolo Virno
(“The Ambivalence of Disenchantment”) rather than from Fou-
cault or Fredric Jameson, insists that these states of suspended

agency be addressed not merely as annoying epiphenomena but as
vital functional aspects of the operation of a larger field of power
relations and subject formation and maintenance.8 As of yet, there
is no Bentham of thwarted agency—although Ngai may become
that figure—but there are unquestionably a multitude of splenic
practitioners close at hand.
SPLEEN
A core component of the terrain’s neglect by critics is that the

function of these sentiments and situation is characterized by what
Ngai nicely names as its “fundamentally ambivalent sentiments of
disenchantment.”9 Sentiments, Ngai further specifies, that are
explicitly amoral and non-cathartic, offering no satisfactions
of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying
release.10
To a significant degree, these sentiments and the conditions in
which they arise seem petty and are hard to acknowledge without
self-belittlement. To a degree, part of their potency is that it is
held to be honorable to remain above the pettiness of academic
and bureaucratic frays; or at least to reserve discussing such things
to appropriate settings such as bars or cafes, over lunch or dinner.
It would definitely be worthwhile to chart the motives and func-
tions of those who proffer injunctions to stay out of the proverbial
gutter.
It follows that since the situations under consideration are reac-
tive and splenic, concentrating on the participants’ intentions leads
one astray diagnostically. Ngai argues that
the unsuitability of these weakly intentional feelings for forceful
or unambiguous action is precisely what amplifies their power
to diagnose situations, and situations marked by blocked or
thwarted action in particular.11
The aesthetic affects and the available concepts and categories to

identify these thwarted terrains of ethos are neither cathartic nor
sublime. Hence, a different type of aesthetic appreciation is re-
quired. In Ugly Feelings and even more so in her Our Aesthetic Cat-
egories: Cute, Zany, Interesting, Ngai leads us with humor, wit, and
insight into this hinterland of cultural studies without any of that
discipline’s a priori valorization of the seemingly minor.12
No doubt the range of thwarted actions, minor vices, and
micro-practices of power constitute a technology of significance
and impact in the pragmatics of ordinary interactions, perhaps es-
pecially in the academy, with its specific securities and insecurities.
These arise and proliferate within many domains beyond and prior
to the textual: pragmatic and quotidian domains that are primed,
in part because of their pettiness, for affective saturation.
MODAL SHIFTS: TO THE MINOR
Dewey’s American optimism was not equipped to think through

situations of bewilderment and pettiness rather than ones of dis-
cordancy and indeterminacy. Ngai points out that, although it is
not impossible to address situations that are “syntactically negative,
in the sense that they are organized by trajectories of repulsion
rather than attraction,”13 doing so requires other moves than those
of “critique” and/or denunciation.
The force field of these situations is characterized by weak
forces rather than strong ones: irritation rather than hatred. These
weak forces facilitate linkages as well as myriad small disruptions in
the grander pattern and order of things.
It is these multiple levels of negativity that make the ugly feel-
ings in this study so useful for conjoining predicaments from
multiple registers—showing how sociohistorical and ideologi-
cal dilemmas, in particular, produce formal or representational
ones.14
How and in what ways such shifts of registers and scales are ac-
complished, without anyone orchestrating it, constitutes a core
analytic challenge for a pragmatic anthropology.
For Ngai, the distinction between “emotion” and “affect” is a
key textual operator.
The difference between affect and emotion is taken as a modal
difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal differ-
ence of quality or kind. My assumption is that affects are less
formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or
structure altogether; less “socio-linguistically fixed,” but by no
means code-free or meaningless; less organized in response to
our interpretations of situations.15
What the switch from formal to modal difference enables
is an analysis of the transitions from one pole to the other; the
passages whereby affects acquire the semantic density and nar-
rative complexity of emotions, and emotions conversely dena-
ture into affects.16
Without going into the current academic disputes about the dif-
ferences, she insists on a modal shift rather than a clear generic
opposition between them.
STYMIED: TOPICS, INSTANCES, OPERATORS
STYMIED: Golf: (on a putting green) an instance of a ball’s lying

on a direct line between the cup and the ball of an opponent
about to putt.
A situation or problem presenting such difficulties as to
discourage or defeat any attempt to deal with or resolve it.17
The challenge is to turn Ngai’s discerning use of categories drawn

from and applied to literary and cinematic media into equipment
for anthropological work. An initial step consists in identifying a
subset of her categories and beginning the process of turning them

into topics. Topics are both starting points for inquiry as well as
sites on a topological space.
The Western philosophical understanding of the passions and
affects depends on incisive turning points, often on an event.
These turning points are discursively narrated in treatises, letters,
plays, and other media. The event is usually short-lived—an insult,
a breakdown, injuries of various kinds, and so on—even if some of
the reactions to it might be long-lasting.
In a minor mode, passions, sentiments, and affects have a differ-
ent temporality and a different range of intensities. Ngai observes:
Unlike rage, which cannot be sustained indefinitely, less dra-
matic feelings like envy and paranoia have a remarkable capac-
ity for duration.18
That duration can continue for long periods, because effectively

there is no catharsis or discharge of the “ugly feelings” or minor
affect states; thus “moments of conspicuous inactivity remain af-
fectively charged.”19 Consequently, a further challenge, after the
identification and diagnosis of these affect states, would be to scale
and characterize their intensities and tempos. How does one cali-
brate non-vehement passions?
THWARTED ACTION: FROM CONTEMPT TO DISGUST
Ngai devotes the “Afterword” of Ugly Feelings to the surprisingly

odd couple of contempt and disgust. Her work helps us to under-
stand how my colleagues tacitly established fields of “tolerant con-
tempt,” cast in a minor mode of indifference and muted deceit,
shrouded in a fog of political correctness and an opaque discourse
of moralism. In the instance to be taken up below, they had been
able to establish such a field not through public proceedings and
debate that turned on either reason or justice but by forcefully
moving into realms of bureaucratic proceduralism, eventually jus-

tified as a state of emergency.
Ngai develops her thoughts on these ugly feelings with re-
flections on Herman Melville’s character Bartleby the Scrivener,
who famously “preferred not to.” In her gloss, Ngai argues that
Melville portrays Bartleby as a character who attempts to achieve
“social invisibility”; however, by insisting too much on his social
invisibility, the scrivener fails. His Haltung undermines his desired
goal. Once rendered visible, the “civil inattention,” to use Erving
Goffman’s phrase, “on which the routines of public life in an afflu-
ent democracy depend,” disappears.20 Bartleby’s exercise in social
invisibility defeats itself by drawing attention to itself.
It is not stretching analogies too far to draw a parallel with the
privilege of neglect and its associated condition of pariah-hood.
Under these conditions, one accepts, with a certain resigned
world-weariness, accedes to, even values, a form of social invisibil-
ity. Once others come to recognize this social invisibility as willed,
however, and once the right occasion arises, the vulnerability of
the pariah condition becomes ever more apparent.
BEYOND SENECA ON THE PASSIONS:

FROM A TECHNĒ FOR THE PROPATHEIA TOWARD
A TECHNĒ FOR A MINOR MODE OF METROPATHEIA
Some conceptual help is provided by shifting historical registers

in order to achieve some distance from the events under consid-
eration. A return to the philosophy of Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE),
as well as some of his current interpreters, provides both distance
from current affects and emotions stirred by the case under consid-
eration and a range of concepts and instances cast in a minor mode.
The article “Senecan Emotions” in The Cambridge Companion
to Seneca unintentionally provides some elements to advance the
project of moving from a tradition cast in a major mode of philo-
sophic reflection and practice to an anthropological inquiry whose

objects are the minor modes of affects and passions as well as the
modes of subjectivation that accompany them. Might this open
the way for the invention of a series of minor technai?
The article’s uncontroversial claims are that “Seneca’s writings
constitute the fullest surviving evidence for the Stoic view of the
emotions”; furthermore, Seneca’s approach (unlike that of Aristo-
tle or Cicero) “was not focused chiefly on oratory”; rather, “he
was interested in . . . the emotions appropriate to the sage.”21 The
article is instructive and synthetic on a number of registers, but
since the concern here is with neither the overall understanding
of the Stoics and their views on the passions nor the figure of the
sage, those who are interested in these topics are encouraged to
consult the article itself, as well as the Cambridge volume as a
whole.
Several points in the article, however, do further the current
exploration. Although it is hardly surprising that “Seneca was
naturally concerned with the passions of the powerful,” given
Seneca’s relations with several Roman emperors, especially and
tragically Nero (whose tutor he had been and who ordered both
Seneca and his wife to commit suicide), it is nonetheless a marker
of the major mode that Seneca and his audience understood as
appropriate to the topic.22 Thus Seneca, like Aristotle, devoted
his philosophic reflections to those able (given their status and
formation) and willing (those seeking instruction or improvement
for whatever reason) to undertake the project that Foucault has
named as “the government of self and others.” Consequently, for
those who are concerned with the passions and the limits of ac-
tion but are not members of this ancient ruling class (or who wish
to follow the current self-reflective status set), much of Seneca’s
observations are stimulating but seem decidedly beside the point
of the current inquiry.
Although Seneca is commonly classified as a Stoic philosopher,
he did not share every aspect of the classical Stoic doctrine (or
what we have come to know of it). Thus, for example, Seneca did
not share the goal of eliminating passions entirely. His goal was
not to attain the sage’s condition of ataraxia or apatheia, at least in
the sense of having no feelings whatsoever. Rather, he retained
a modified form of the Aristotelian metric of excess, deficiency,
norm.
Aristotle favored emotions in due measure, that is, propor-
tional to the nature of the eliciting cause (an insult or unjust
treatment in the case of anger, for example), and this doctrine
was later referred to as metropatheia [measure + pathos].23
Seneca sought to develop and live by a technē so as to be able
to govern the passions once they arose. He held that various forms
of the passions were both inevitable and appropriate. Thus, as op-
posed to Aristotle, Seneca extended his considerations to prior
conditions in which primitive forms of the affectations arose.
Given this broadened scope, he designed a technē devoted to the
transformation of the precursor passions. He thereby made a dis-
tinctive contribution to the ancient approach to the passions.
TECHNĒ IN A MAJOR MODE
Scattered across several of his writings, Seneca sketches the linea-

ments of an understanding of the wellsprings of the passions as
arising involuntarily, if appropriately and with a given inevitabil-
ity. Seneca provides examples of pre-passions such as “shivering or
goose-pimples . . . slimy things . . . the rising of one’s hair at bad
news, blushing at obscene language,” and so on.24 These states are
not uniquely human.
Animals have violence, rabidity, ferocity, aggression, but do
not have anger any more than they have licentiousness. . . .
Dumb animals lack human emotions, but they do have certain
impulses that are similar to emotions.25
Animals are presumably not sensitive to slights, nor do they

have beliefs about whether the ill treatment they may suffer
is deserved or not. More generally, if animals attack furiously,
it is not out of a desire for revenge but out of hunger or self-
defense or some other instinctive motivation.26
Their onrushes and outbreaks are violent, but they do not have
fears and worries, sadness and anger, but rather things that are
similar to these. (On Anger I.3.4–8)27
Some of these states (shivering) are shared by animals, but not

all: as animals do not possess reason (logos), they never move from
these primary passionate states to an understanding of the passions
per se. Thus, for example, in his Consolation to Marcia (5.1), “Sen-
eca remarks that animals do not experience sadness and fear any
more than stones do.”28 Fortunately for our contemporary well-
being, in the first century after Christ the extravagant twenty-first-
century discourse of transhumanism would have made no sense
whatsoever.
Because they lack logos, animal passions do not have duration.
They arise from and respond to specific situations or stimuli. Later,
we shall return to the differential importance of duration and situa-
tions as they come into play in a minor mode.
Seneca defines these pre-passionate states as “motions that do
not arise through our will.” Given that state, they “are therefore
irresistible and do not yield to reason.”29 For this Stoic patrician,
however, they are governable through a distinctive technē. That
technē is based on an understanding that, for the Stoic sage, the
object of intervention is precisely not these preliminary states per
se over which reason (logos) has no sway, but only the later devel-
opments in the course of their unfolding. For Seneca and others of
his time and status, it goes without saying that such a technē would
only be available to those with the leisure, learning, and philo-
sophic inclination to work over their involuntary and nonrational

passions so as to achieve the good life, one of virtue and relative
serenity.
In his treatise On Clemency, Seneca provides an example of
the use of the aforementioned technē: the difference between pity
(misericordia) and clemency (clementia). A pre-passion is naturally
aroused when one witnesses the suffering of others. It is normal
that one feels pity for those suffering punishment or illness and
the like. That state, however, is a deficient one. Through the use
of the technē of the proper use of reason and judgment, one will
be able to accept the initial response (as is inevitable for those en-
dowed with reason) but not to submit to it. Thus, in On Clemency,
Seneca discusses what must be done to continue the motion from
the initial state to a possible transformation into a relation that
could encourage virtue. Our scholarly author observes:
For pity is a “disturbance of the mind [aegritudo animi]” result-
ing from the misery of others, whereas the mind of the sage
is always serene and never subject to perturbation or grief,
whether for the sufferings of others or his own. (2.5.4–5) 30
Pity is deficient, and literally miserable, because it is merely reac-
tive to the condition it encounters and to that degree will remain
bound to it.31
The sage never pities (miseretur) because pity is necessarily ac-
companied by misery (miseria) of the mind. (2.6.1) 32
So, what is the sage to do?
It does not require pity to come to the aid of those in trouble:
the sage performs all that is needed, but with a tranquil spirit:
he does not pity, he helps (2.6.3). For the same reason, the
sage does not pardon, which constitutes a remission of the just
penalty, whereas clemency, though it may overlook offences,
respects justice. (2.7.3–4) 33
It should go without saying, although it needs to be said, that few

are (or were) either in a condition of serenity or of having the ca-
pacity to intervene, not to mention the two together.
Those being pitied, and worthy of clemency in one fashion or
another, do not enter Seneca’s treatise as subjects per se. Lest we
be too smug in judging him, his tragedies demonstrate a much,
much more complicated, passionate, and ultimately tragic aware-
ness of the affairs of the powerful, their relations between and
among themselves, as well as those they dominate and exploit.
ETHICAL SUBJECTS
Whatever Adorno meant exactly by “Moralia” in the title of his
book of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, he clearly implied neither an
external code whose rules one could (or should) abide by nor a
cultural formation to which one could (or must) remain faithful.
Adorno was refusing a positioning that was individual, uniquely
personal, which is what he seems to be equating with the “Sub-
jective.” One can readily accept his rhetorical gambit without ac-
quiescing to a refusal of a different, expanded, more historical and
interpersonal conception of the “subject.”
PRACTICES
Foucault casts a similar but not identical challenge as follows:

But when I came to study the modes according to which in-
dividuals are given to recognize themselves as sexual subjects,
the problems were much greater.34
Substituting the term “ethical subjects” for Foucault’s “sexual
subjects” enables one to enter into the topography of the discon-
certing situations under consideration here. In this instance, the
problems encountered pragmatically were indeed greater than the
reigning discourse—just another petty, nasty academic experi-

ence—would suggest.
How to proceed? Foucault provides some help:
It was a matter of analyzing, not behaviors or ideas, nor soci-
eties and their “ideologies,” but the problematizations through
which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought—and the
practices on the basis of which these problematizations are
formed.35
Although the broader problematizations at issue will eventually

receive some attention here, note that Foucault cautioned that
problematization should not be approached as a constructed object
that could be represented.36 It follows that it is only on a differ-
ent plane than that on which “being offers itself, to be, necessar-
ily, thought,” that objects of inquiry, in Dewey’s sense, might be
specified, that is, constructed and represented. Consequently, we
will take Foucault at his (emphatic, if elusive) word and concen-
trate on “the practices on the basis of which these problematizations
are formed.”
ETHICS VERSUS MORALS
To simplify a more nuanced argument, we can draw a tripartite

analytic distinction.
For a rule of conduct is one thing; the conduct that may be
measured by this rule is another. But another thing still is the
manner in which one ought to “conduct oneself ”—that is,
the manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical
subject in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up
the code. Given a code of actions, and with regard to a specific
type of actions (which can be defined by their degree of con-
formity with or divergence from the code), there are different
ways to “conduct oneself ” morally, different ways for the act-
ing individual to operate, not just as an agent, but as an ethical

subject of this action.37
The division: (1) rule of conduct; (2) the conduct that may
be measured by the rule; (3) the manner in which one ought to
“conduct oneself ” in relation to prescriptive elements that make
up the code.
Foucault underscores that
These “ethics-oriented” moralities (which do not necessarily
correspond to those involving “ascetic denial”) have been very
important in Christianity, functioning alongside the “code-
oriented” moralities. Between the two types there have been,
at different times, juxtapositions, rivalries and conflicts, and
compromises.38
These would seem to qualify as “ideal types” in Max Weber’s
sense: useful for orienting an inquiry or a preliminary thought ex-
periment (Gedankenbild ): a tool, not a goal.
GEMÜT: PASSION (THYMOS, GR. θυμός)
The passions are located in the space that a civilization leaves

open between its concept of insanity and its concept of irony.39
The feelings, the affections, the sentiments, and the passions are not
alternative ways of talking about the same matters but language
used in the service of quite distinct politics of the inner life.40
—philip fisher
A significant feature for understanding the events under consid-

eration (as well as the narrative under construction) is the dis-
tinction—named and analyzed by Philip Fisher in his book The
Vehement Passions—between the vehement passions (especially
“spiritedness,” or thymos) and their historical transformation into
moods covered, in part, by the term Gemüt.
GEMÜT (German; Disposition). Kant in his Anthropology

from a Pragmatic Point of View asks how questions of “can”
[können] and “should” [sollen] can be given a relation in
the self-understanding of anthrōpos. Kant has a cosmo
political aim in answering this question: knowledge of
anthrōpos as a citizen of the world. In his Introduction to
Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault underscores that although
the Anthropology has a cosmopolitical aim, in fact it takes
up anthrōpos as an object from the interior point of view
of the Gemüt, the site of self-affectation of the human
being. . . .
Gemüt has proved to be important as the locus of
equipmental attention, so as to open the possibility of a
pragmatic reduction of possible ideas, values and forms.
One specific set of forms in which equipmental attention
can be given to the Gemüt is narrative mood.41
THYMOS (Greek; θυμός). Thymos expressed the concept

of “spiritedness” (as in “spirited stallion” or “spirited
debate”). The word indicates a physical association with
breath or blood and is also used to express the human
desire for recognition.42
A central claim of Fisher’s book is what he identifies as a signif-

icant shift from the primacy of the vehement passions in Western
culture to moods. He writes: “We can see in mid-eighteenth-
century English philosophy and rhetoric the banishing of the term
‘passion’ and its replacement by the new term ‘emotion.’ ”43
Fisher is pointing to a shift in literary culture and sensibility. He
is not claiming that vehement passions such as anger, grief, and the
like have disappeared from human experience; only that, histori-
cally, the reigning moral discourse was in the process of shifting

its emphasis and invention away from the primacy of the passions.
Using a different conceptual vocabulary, one can say that the shift
constitutes a historical construction of a different object of under-
standing of self and others, of formative practices of civilization
and class, and of pedagogy and governmentality.
In the current instance, conceptualizing the events under con-
sideration (as well as the narrative under construction) entails situ-
ating the shifting relationships among and between passions and
moods. Here (perhaps elsewhere as well), such relationships (pas-
sions to moods) form a temporal sequence. In this instance, that
sequence can be observed to have a syncopated temporal unfold-
ing as well as a modal shift from major to minor.
To the degree that that sequence is structured, it is character-
ized by—and set in motion within—a setting of thwarted action.
One might name it (provisionally) as a post-thymic state.44 To re-
capitulate, in the instance that will come under consideration (see
the chapter on Malice), an event occasioned an eruption of pas-
sion—thymos, “anger”—which was followed by non-resolution
and impeded action. With stunning rapidity, the terrain shifted;
subsequently the range of affect and of mood within which further
activity took place had to be accounted for, in one way or another,
by those involved.
PARAMETERS OF THE POST-THYMIC
We can identify several parameters of “thwarted action.” As op-

posed to postcoital states (almost always characterized as states of
release and restfulness), the post-thymic condition is today fre-
quently anything but resolved, or even resolvable.
Within impassioned states like anger two highly significant

secondary features occur: obstinacy and irritability. . . . Obsti-
nacy is the rigid pursuit of what has been willed, while irrita-
bility is the response of the will when it is baffled and unable
to achieve its goal.45
Continuing in that vein leads to stasis or, at most, a sullen vexation.
BELITTLING
For Aristotle and the Greeks of ancient times, the highest stake
was honor. In defense of honor, and consequently justice, vehe-
ment passions were played out amid a world of familiar persons.
From Aristotle to Hume the philosophical accounts of the

passions always included the idea that the passions are incited
by what occurs within a world of care and concern—parents,
children, friends, those loved or close to us—as well as by what
happens directly to us.46
Actions that are the occasions for honor or dishonor may well
include the presence, or the direct interventions, of others: for
example, the Persians at Troy.
What counted culturally were those who were close to Achil-
les’s display of anger at Troy—not observers or foreigners from
afar. Anger at those far away does not make any more sense than
being angry, or thymic, at the plague: at the gods, perhaps, but not
the plague.
Anger is a relation of the will to that radius which it assumes to

be within its control, or within which anything that happens
either affirms or denies that territory.47
Said another way, Fisher writes:
The excitations of anger mark out the places where self-worth

or honor has been transgressed.48
This claim renders visible a core assumption of the Greeks (and

others) that virtues must be put to the test.
To discover and defend a perimeter of self-worth that one will
not allow to be violated by a slight or challenge to that self-
worth is a sign of the Greek notion that only in struggle (agon)
are the essential features and limits of anything revealed.49
If one puts one’s honor, or courage, or temperance to the test and

is thwarted, the result, for Aristotle, is termed oliguria. The word
denotes a lessening, a diminishing, or in English perhaps one could
say a “belittling.”50
What might be done?
COUNTER-CONDUCT I
If you never do anything for anyone else

you are spared the tragedy of human relation-
ships. If quietly and like another time

there is the passage of an unexpected thing:
to look at it is more
than it was. God knows
nothing is competent nothing is

all there is. The unsure
egoist is not
good for himself.
— robert creeley, “The Immoral Proposition” 51
The specific background situations and instances at issue here cover

only a small part of the larger domains: thwarted action in the
elite academy in the face of what Max Weber diagnosed a century
ago as the major vectors shaping universities and those seeking a
vocation of knowledge (Wissenschaft) within them. Weber saw,

with his usual lucidity, the forces shaping the American university
system—capitalism and bureaucracy—as inevitably spreading and
conquering older craft and even feudal forms of organization and
status.
Inwardly as well as externally, the old university constitution
has become fictitious.52
This process, as triumphant as it has been, leaves a cloud of Nachle-
ben of former ways of life, which for reasons that need to be clari-
fied are maintained as part of the university’s brand: thinking, free
speech, faculty independence, and so on.
Given the protected and comparatively free conditions of
twenty-first-century professors in U.S. universities that brand
themselves as elite, it would be shameful and inaccurate to com-
pare the thwarted action under consideration here with that faced
by many, many others situated elsewhere in highly stratified state
organizations as well as contemporary capitalism.
CONDUCT
Foucault centered his analysis of pastoral power on conduct as an

object of governance. He distinguished pastoral power from both
sovereign power and disciplinary power and their associated tech-
nologies. Pastoral power does not operate through subjecting per-
sons to laws, nor by training people into becoming mute, docile,
and useful bodies and selves. Rather, pastoral power is concerned
with the “conduct of conduct,” rendering conduct as an object of
attention for both the one who seeks to direct others’ conduct and
the one directed who seeks to direct their own conduct.
The Greek fathers called this object, in its generality, the oiko-
nomia psuchōn, the economy of souls. Foucault thinks the best
translation for oikonomia is “conduite,”
since the word “conduct” refers to two things. Conduct is the
activity of conducting (conduire), of conduction (la conduction)
if you like, but it is equally the way in which one conducts

oneself (se conduit), lets oneself be conducted (se laisse conduire),
is conducted (est conduit), and finally, in which one behaves (se
comporter) as an effect of a form of conduct (une conduite) as the
action of conducting or of conduction (conduction). I think the
least bad translation for the oikonomia psuchōn . . . could perhaps
be the conduct of souls.53
The pastorate is a form of power, as an economy of souls and
relations of conducting and being conducted give rise to counter-
conducts, and thus a different economy. The concept of counter-
conduct will enable us to attend to the limits of its range.
AGONISTIC TERMS: COUNTER-CONDUCT AND CRITIQUE
Danielle Lorenzini, in her article “From Counter-Conduct to

Critical Attitude: Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being
Governed Quite So Much,” lays out the elements and steps of
a problem that Foucault was seeking to diagnose—what term to
pair with power relations understood as dynamically relational, if
asymmetric.54
Counter-conduct always implies, on the one side, a govern-
mental mechanism of power trying to impose on a group
of individuals a specific form of conduct (which is the tar-
get of resistance or struggles) and, on the other side, a re-
fusal expressed by the individuals who can no longer accept
being conducted like that and want to conduct themselves
differently.55
During the course of his 1978 lectures at the Collège de France,
Security, Territory, Population, Foucault proposed one candidate
term—counter-conduct. Later the same year, most famously in his
lecture “What Is Critique?,” Foucault backgrounded that term,
substituting the term critique for that of counter-conduct. He thus
opened the way both to change the salient concepts of the terms
and to shift their referential domains. He thereby began to shift the
pathway and the inquiry.
In 1978, in addition to critique, Foucault simultaneously began
exploring the range of the term governmentality. His shift to em-
phasizing the primacy of governmentality over “the state” or “power
relations” in general, while rich and fascinating, brings with it a
host of other, ultimately regulating—in the sense of orienting in-
quiry—ramifications. These ramifications specify the domain of
one term—critique—while limiting the pertinence of another—
counter-conduct.
Lorenzini presents the conjuncture:
Governmental mechanisms of power rely on the fact that the
individual accepts being conducted thusly, since by definition
we speak of government (instead of constraint, domination
and so on) if and only if the individual is free to choose to be
governed or not to be governed like that.56
Foucault was in search of a term and correlative concept that was

itself productive, relational, and dynamic. During the course of
the 1978 lectures, he decided to join the two terms: critique and
governmentality.
In the 1977–1978 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault
experimented with a range of adjectives in search of a term that
would better capture the historically diverse examples that were
cropping up during his inquiry on the rise and articulation of the
form of governmentality during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Genealogically, he posited that the practices that he was
grouping under the term counter-conduct covered a long historical
span in Western thought and practice.
Significantly, he proposed that critique could be defined as “the
particular form that counter-conduct takes in modern times.”57
These adjectives needed to be put into a relationship with a noun.
Thus, words—rétivité, intransitivité—or insubordination and dissi-

dence—correlate with the asymmetric relationality of pastoral re-
lations. The hope was to find or invent active forms, or at least
adjectives.
What if such a search took us in the wrong direction for con-
duct under thwarted and minor conditions?
OBSTINACY (EIGENSINN )
Although Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s book History and Ob-
stinacy (and much of Kluge’s other writings and media productions)
is concerned with the more general situation, it can be argued,
nonetheless, that aspects of it obtain even for those who are not
especially affected either economically or in terms of social status.
The domain of those of us in that position is one of the “with-
drawal of meaning [Sinnentzug]. A social situation in which the
collective program of human existence deteriorates at a rate faster
than the ability to produce new programs of existence.”58
In institutions such as the University of California at Berkeley,
this situation is masked by an extravagant program of branding
of excellence and utility. Learning for its own sake is not explic-
itly ruled out, but it is simply not mentioned in the institutional
public relations. A certain lip service may well be paid by various
functionaries (chairs of departments, myriad deans, assistant deans,
associate deans, and the like), but the power and salience of this
ideal are quickly backgrounded in situations of attempted action
not strictly in accord with currently reigning bureaucratic norms
or funding campaigns.
This shift of authority and agenda is recent. Lest my plaint
sound either nostalgic or utopian, actually it is not. It is not nostal-
gic because, while the prior situation, to a degree, did give credit
to the meaning of “science as a vocation,” there was no shortage
of academic politics, sexism, cronyism, differential pay scales, and
the like in the “good old days.” It is not utopian, because the cur-
rent American university utopia turns on different norms. Thus,
Kluge and Negt claim that
Utopia no longer seems to stand before us as a future to be
realized, but, reversing its polarity, to lie behind us as a past to
be recovered.
As imperfect as it was, whatever meaning had obtained in a life
of Wissenschaft als Beruf has been greatly diminished. In sum,
we are dealing today with forms of counter-public sphere that
are so embedded in the official public sphere that they are of-
ten no longer even recognizable.59
How does one survive with a minimal self-respect under such
conditions?
OBSTINACY, NOT PARRHĒSIA
Kluge and Negt’s use of the term Eigensinn—translated as “obsti-

nacy”—obtains in a vast and variegated range of situations.
The word Eigensinn [. . .] implies a degree of stubborn ob-
tuseness, an imperviousness to directives from above. Hegel,
for example, famously defined Eigensinn as “a freedom” that is
“enmeshed in servitude.”60
Over time, in these situations of thwarted action, of “freedom
that is enmeshed in servitude,” it became clear that the options
were retreat and acquiescence, which constituted a form of un-
warranted legitimation—and a tone—of obstinacy. Devon Fore
captures this state of affairs:
“Mute” and “faceless” as Brecht wrote, their self-will (Eigen-
sinn) most often finds only a negative expression, by interrupt-
ing the status quo, by deranging the dominant discourse, by
triggering parapraxes, and other productive failures.61
The results were certainly not directly efficient or instrumentally

effective. All they could do was produce a certain uneasiness and
discomfort for the officials and a gradual understanding for me
that justice was not to be obtained under these conditions without
major investments of time and resources (hiring a lawyer, formal
appeals to the higher administration).
Here once again, Devin Fore, the translator for Kluge and
Negt, captures the mood and tone.
History & Obstinacy calls not for revelation, but for reconfigu-
ration, for a shift in perspective that would demonstrate the
motivated connections between seemingly unrelated particu-
larities and incidents. “We are seeking an economy of com-
bined trivials.”62
It has become apparent that the available recourse is a weak tactic

of not acquiescing totally to a futile situation of thwarted action.
Having digested and more or less accepted my condition of
being thwarted in bureaucratic domains, and a general affect field
of “unbrotherliness,” what remained was to think about the situa-
tion. I came to the realization that the parrhesiast mode of valoriz-
ing veridiction alone as a means of action did not obtain.
That realization did not mean that I was to abandon thinking,
only that I accepted that its effects were to be found affectively in
a minor mode.
“Why is human thought so slow?” Kluge asks one of his regu-
lar interlocutors, Dirk Baecker. The latter replies, “thought is
slow because that’s its only chance. Thought means stopping
short, hesitating, not reacting immediately, inhibiting reflexes,
meeting instinct with mistrust, and only then doing some-
thing.”63
That freedom—however enmeshed in servitude and thwarted ac-
tion of so many varieties—remains.
The expected response to indifference and contempt is usually

cast in a rhetoric of “indignation or complaint”64—to which one
should add: irritation, frustration, annoyance, paranoia, and the
blues.
At a certain point, even for a privileged pariah, a limit has been
reached, and the situation becomes—to use an adjective used by
both Gilles Deleuze and Foucault—“intolerable.”65 Both thinkers
were explicit that there was no theory of the “intolerable” or even
a conceptual analysis that would provide the kind of arguments
that Habermas or Honneth would have required. Rather, the in-
tolerable was an eruptive experience, an Erlebnis. The challenge
then becomes how to take up such an Erlebnis and integrate it
into an Erfahrung, referring to an extended experience that reaches
beyond the eruptive and immediate into an extended narrative of
trials and testing.
One might well be expected to react to an experience felt to
be “intolerable” through anger, a major mode of affect. But fol-
lowing Aristotle and other thinkers in the Western tradition, an-
ger was an honorable, justified passion when a citizen had been
diminished in his status and honor. But what if, now far into the
Erfahrung of pariah-hood, the subject of knowledge realizes that
he is no longer a free citizen? His social honor as well as the pur-
ported standards of the institutions have long since been stripped
away. He is enmeshed and entrapped in a field of unequal force
relations, not a field of recognition. In such a situation, not only
would anger be futile but also it would border on the ridiculous—
a braying in the night.
4
Late style is precisely the form that defies the
infirmities of the present, as well as the palliatives
of the past, in order to seek out this future,
to posit it and perform it, even if in words and
images, gestures and representations, which
now seem puzzling, untimely, or impossible.
––stathis gourgouris
Crucible of Malice 2017–

2019
T he following narrative (analytic procedure + diagnostic
+ form-giving) is an attempt to carve out a set of initial
determinations for a repertoire of terms and concepts in order to
clarify a distinctive situation of breakdown. Once a sufficient, if
preliminary, analytic apparatus is assembled, it then becomes pos-
sible—but not assured—to compose a riposte to that breakdown.
The first step is to identify ethical, political, and veridictional ele-
ments present in the situation’s constitution and subsequent break-
down. In that sense the assemblage constituted a crucible.
The ultimate goal of this narrative is to buffer the pervasive
anti-veridictional and moralistic mood that had been established
institutionally by the first-order actors as part of that crucible. In
order to accomplish this goal, the plaintiff (author), both for him-
self and eventually for others, must invent a means to riposte and
parry the diverse passions occasioned and deployed by the injuring
parties. The goal is not to eliminate either the affect or the passions
131
directly but to turn them into objects of inquiry. If that were to

be done, it would enable the emergence and articulation of a dif-
ferent objective: a vigorous, justified, second-order response on
the grounds available—that of a narrative based on contemplation
(theoria).
None of this is meant to suggest that these procedures are cura-
tive or consolatory. Dürer’s Knight may well have had his Chris-
tian faith to guide him through the demons of the world. Since
that option—nor any kindred Nachleben—is not available here, the
challenge of assembling the elements of a Haltung so as to continue
the sojourn is what remains. How this labor will work out and
where it will lead is uncertain.
X GAMES THE RULES AND ACTIVATES

THE UNIVERSITY STAR CHAMBER
During the summer of 2017, extending into the fall of that year,
a dispute and subsequent breakdown of relations took place be-
tween a senior professor and an atypical graduate student. The
details of the dispute cannot be discussed here, because the senior
professor has been advised that he would risk legal action should
he offer his description of the incident or provide the names of
the actors.
The friendly (and not so friendly) cautions about discussing the
case reminded the senior professor of an episode in the novel Go,
Went, Gone (the title refers to a German lesson given to African
refugees in Berlin), concerning a professor of ancient philosophy
and literature, recently retired from what had been an East Ger-
man university, who came to be involved somewhat unexpectedly
as an advocate for a group of refugees in the unified German state.
Along the way, the professor
had discovered the report in his Stasi file in 1995: Subject’s areas
of weakness include habitual arrogance and [. . .] unpredictably vacil-
crucible of malice 133
lating political-ideological positions. In time of political crisis, subject

tends to show poor political judgment, sometimes going so far as to
make statements of an antagonistic-negative character. Subject unsuit-
able for conspiratorial collaboration according to Directive 1/79.1
The reader will encounter other echoes of Stasi-like structures in

what follows.
Although it is probably not the case that any equivalent official
file has been compiled by the administration of the university with
which the professor and the student were affiliated, it was reli-
ably reported to me by some of its contributors that there was an
informal trove of accumulated dismissive remarks, which, in the
ceaseless, toxic grapevine operative in the corridors of academic
departments, gradually turn into informal stylizations (memes) and
then circulate sinuously, if sotto voce, until they achieve the status
of accepted opinion (doxa).
STAR CHAMBER
THE STAR CHAMBER (Latin: Camera stellata) was an English

court which sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, from
the late 15th century to the mid-17th century (c. 1641),
and was composed of Privy Councellors and common-
law judges, to supplement the judicial activities of the
common-law and equity courts in civil and criminal
matters. The Star Chamber was originally established to
ensure the fair enforcement of laws against socially and
politically prominent people so powerful that ordinary
courts would probably hesitate to convict them of their
crimes. However, it became synonymous with social and
political oppression through the arbitrary use and abuse of
the power it wielded.
In modern usage, legal or administrative bodies with

strict, arbitrary rulings and secretive proceedings are
sometimes called, metaphorically or poetically, “star
chambers.” This is a pejorative term and intended to
cast doubt on the legitimacy of the proceedings. “Star
Chamber” can also, rarely, be used in its original meaning,
for instance when a politician uses parliamentary privilege
to examine and then exculpate or condemn a powerful
organization or person. Due to the constitutional
separation of powers and the ceasing of the Star Chamber,
the main powers of select committees are to enhance the
public debate—politicians are deemed to no longer wield
powers in the criminal law, which belongs to
the courts.2
STAR CHAMBER:
FIELD NOTES
After this encounter, the Star Chamber proceedings began.

Although I had formally NOT withdrawn from X’s
committee—having written an email to the graduate advisor
on September 15—it took weeks for a rationale for not informing
me of changes to be discovered. Once it was ascertained that since
X had neglected to turn in a “yellow sheet” (listing his field state-
ments and committee), technically there was no committee.
Apparently, subsequently much activity ensued, with X asking
several members of the department to serve on his committee: one
declined and the other dodged the issue when asked. I have this
information from the one who declined.
Several visits to a very uncomfortable chair of the department
produced nothing but an uneasy “I feel your pain,” and “it is not
my decision” set of responses.The third visit produced bureaucratic
language.
No mention of the academic personnel manual criteria for a
doctoral thesis research has been mentioned. It states that the thesis
must be based on new research.Whether long-term experiences
count for the medical anthropology program only the local bureau-
crats and its founders know for sure.
At present (October 14, 2017) this is all I know.
ACTIVATING THE STAR CHAMBER
During the six or eight weeks following the department being

contacted, actions were taken, decisions made, meetings held,
consultations arranged, papers filed. All of these actions were done
in the manner of Star Chamber proceedings, even if this manner
of proceeding was never acknowledged (or denied) by those ac-
tivating it. It is indisputable that charges of ethical or legal impro-
prieties were levied. Otherwise, why was there a need for secrecy
and for breaking departmental rules and customs? Many members
of the anthropology department were privy to these charges, but
not the purported agent of whatever improprieties (or worse) had
passed into discourse.
In this manner, all affective bonds of collegiality were sun-
dered. This operation took place on at least two distinct registers:
(1) the formal rights and obligations stipulated in the university’s
Academic Personnel Manual as well as the formally adopted rules
of the anthropology department were abrogated; (2) the informal
affective and sentimental ties of collegiality of varying degrees and
kinds that had formed over the decades were weakened and, in
extreme instances, were dramatically and intentionally betrayed.
The formal justification for the first, from the department’s

chairperson, was that nothing untoward had happened. The grad-
uate advisors of the medical anthropology program as well as the
department as a whole invoked the right to protect the student.
Against what he was being protected, they insisted they could
not say.
REPORTS
It has been reported that X passed his oral exams. Hence, he was
able to proceed in the program. He put together a doctoral com-
mittee composed of two members who had publicly announced
that they would not serve on his committee. It has been reported
that previously the members of the medical anthropology program
(not including the author) had met and agreed that none of them
would serve on X’s thesis committee. The reasoning behind this
group decision remains a secret. In any case, it was soon violated:
malice trumps rights.
The new chair of the doctoral committee was previously ac-
cused of ethics violations by a professor in another university; UC
Berkeley exonerated him, saying his conduct did not rise to an
actionable level. He attempted to leave the department of an-
thropology to join the biology department. When his request was
rejected, he attempted to leave the anthropology department’s
sociocultural group; this request was turned down as well. The
reasons for these rejections are unknown, although nasty gossip
abounds. The anthropology department has declined to release
either the topic of X’s dissertation or its expected date of comple-
tion. This refusal is unprecedented.
In this instance, as elsewhere in the United States in 2018, Star
Chamber proceedings are becoming commonplace. Many aca-
demics no longer find them surprising.
MALICE: SUBJECT OF EXISTENCE

VS. SUBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE
A breed of men has secretly grown up that hungers for

the compulsion and restriction imposed by the absurd
persistence of domination.
––theodor adorno 3
The literary theorist François Flahault, a student of Roland Barthes,

in his book Malice (the original French title is La méchanceté) con-
ceptualizes and argues for an understanding of the limits of those
who attempt to counter malice (and related states of the diminu-
tion of others), whether discursively or otherwise. Flahault’s start-
ing point is a diagnosis of what he refers to as “modernity” or, at
times, “Enlightenment.” However contestable this choice of terms
might be, his analysis provides a helpful distinction for understand-
ing the reigning “dividing practices” operative in this case.
What a narrative says about the subject of existence is something

that the subject of knowledge is not in a position to hear.4
Flahault argues that this division between a subject governed by

principles of reason and a subject founded on what he takes to be a
deeper anthropology, one in which the reach of reason in guiding
conduct is limited, is profound. Thus,
the belief that it is bad values alone which are at the origin
of the evils humans inflict on one another; and that, in the
absence of these pernicious ideologies, humanity would avoid
wickedness.5
Values can be analyzed, contested, and reformulated but all such

counter-moves depend, in one form or another, on argument, and
consequently on rational criteria. They are, by definition, essen-
tially futile under conditions where the above distinction of the

subject of knowledge and the subject of existence holds sway.
It follows that if “wickedness is caused by external and circum-
stantial factors, it [humanism] is not in a position to supply any
new answer itself.”6 Consequently:
We should mistrust the way in which morality is inclined to
portray malice: as something which the discourse of good
should be able to act upon. . . . As soon as we profess moral
ideas, we are led to believe that the subject of knowledge has
the power to overshadow and govern the subject of existence.7
Flahault is certainly not claiming that appeals to reason or ar-

ticulated values are either worthless or without power in the
world—only that, so long as they are held to be primary to all
other orientations, they are misleading. In sum, for Flahault, two
anthropologies are at stake.
Being decent, just and benevolent is a way of existing. Being
malicious is equally a way of existing. It is therefore essential
to distinguish between morality as something that offers us a
goal and morality as a discourse which sees itself as a means of
action.8
Blurring the distinction between goal and means of action risks—
nay, impels—a fundamental error with multiple ramifications.
To grasp a situation solely in moral terms is therefore ulti-
mately immoral; it implies a certain laziness, a refusal of the
effort which is necessary in order to discern in the situation
those specific features which one nevertheless needs to know
and understand in order to act better.9
Hence, self-pity for states such as pariah-hood stems from a misun-
derstanding, a misidentification of the basic vectors that produced
this situation.
RIPOSTE
One possible defense against malice would be counter-malice. If

one chooses, for both ethical and existential reasons, to eschew
descending into the micro-politics—for what is at stake here is a
technology of power relations rather than an overtly ideological
division—of this soiled, degrading milieu, one must accept that
ripostes to accusations and characterizations of reason will be nul-
lified by the technology of transfer from the register of knowledge
(and earned privilege) to the register of the domain of existence. In
the latter register, neither privilege nor neglect is an applicable
term.
Crucially, such resignation is not at all a form of post-Stoic
ataraxy or apatheia. It is not a dulling or overcoming of passion.
Rather, it is an attempt, first, to conceptualize the vectors produc-
ing the felt need for a possible annulment of passion; second, it is
an ethical—that is, a considered and reflective—refusal to shift do-
mains. Once these two steps become dispositional, one is obliged
to formulate and embody a Haltung of obstinacy:10 an obstinate
Haltung; a defense of virtue or excellence (aretē ).
Under the current circumstances, a contemporary defense of
Wissenschaft als Beruf is both an ardent assertion of the worth of the
subject of knowledge and a riposte to the distinction between knowl-
edge and existence, defended and imposed by the agents of malice.
In sum, the apologia for the Privilege of Neglect turns on the excel-
lence, the virtues (aretē ) of pariah-hood as earned and defended in
such “dark times.”11
A troubling discordancy presents itself: What if those holding
institutional offices of authority and power are not peers? What if
their actual expertise consists in the technologies of shifting regis-
ters from the norms of the subject of knowledge to those of the subject
of existence? If so, the norms of the subject of existence are primarily
valued by these institutional purveyors of rewards, favors, and es-
teem. If so, recognition goes to those who are adept practitioners
of bureaucratic careerism, to enforcers of reigning political cor-

rectness, and, above all, to kindred actors, adept at replenishing the
wellsprings of malice. Recognition is denied to those who do not
devote sufficient respect and effort to furthering these ends.
HALTUNG: OPTIONS
One must begin with the search for a suitable Haltung. Albert
Hirschman (1915–2012), in his famous little book Exit, Voice, and
Loyalty, proposed a deceptively straightforward schema of the
structural options confronting an actor in a situation of break-
down, decline, or betrayal.12 According to the Wikipedia entry
about his book,
The basic concept is as follows: members of an organiza-
tion, whether a business, a nation or any other form of hu-
man grouping, have essentially two possible responses when
they perceive that the organization is demonstrating a decrease
in quality or benefit to the member: they can exit (withdraw
from the relationship); or, they can voice (attempt to repair or
improve the relationship through communication of the com-
plaint, grievance or proposal for change).13
The voice option entails providing reasons for the diagnosis of de-
cline as well as for the conscious choice of exit or loyalty.
However, if there is no audience willing to hear the reasons
because of the person articulating them, or if the decline is such
that the diagnosis is rejected and no remedies are considered, then
one form of voice will have to be addressed to a different audience
or simply abandoned altogether. In this case, the rhetoric of voice
will have to be crafted to move others who are not directly con-
cerned in the case. It will have to be crafted so that it satisfies and
encourages the Haltung of the offended subject desirous of voicing
a protest.
If the plaintiff is going to the trouble of voicing a complaint,

it implies that the option of loyalty is still under consideration.
The question then becomes, loyalty to what? Here, the loyalty
is neither to the current academic institution—“the university in
ruins”—nor to the actual configuration of the discipline of an-
thropology, but to “a way of life”—once again, to a contemporary
version of Max Weber’s 1917 diagnosis of the modern condition of
Wissenschaft als Beruf.
BOUNDARIES
Conceptually, we have identified an operator—malice—that works

to shift registers from the intellectual to the existential. This opera-
tion produces a topography in which malice dominates and colors
all actions and interactions. When malice—or rather the proto-
patheia that led to malice—is put to work so as to produce pariah-
hood, its practitioners can entirely avoid publicness and thereby
circumvent having to account for their charges against the accused.
Shreds of these accusations—slander, defamation, innuendo, and
the like—are filtered by willing participants across boundaries as
secondhand gossip.
The status of pariah can be produced along a spectrum rang-
ing from simple, often informal, exclusion to more extreme forms
of active accusations of wrongdoing, cast primarily in moralistic
terms. This extreme end of the spectrum, within certain institu-
tions, operates to legitimate the informal attribution of a stigma-
tized status; it thereby either warrants that status (at least in its
own normative terms) or simply produces vilification of various
sorts. Punitive action on the pariah register circumvents ostracism
because such action would entail a range of procedures—and bu-
reaucratic actors—that the masters of malice wish to eschew. This
form of pariah-hood, under the operator of malice, seeks to stay
proximate to, but not to engage in, the procedures required for of-
ficial exclusion. In terms of virtue it is a deficient variant of cour-

age: it is (among other things) cowardice.
Were malice to be put to work so as to produce ostracism, it
would be obliged to publicly introduce political and legal consid-
erations. It is essential to distinguish a pariah condition from one
of ostracism: the pariah is still, at least in principle and by corporate
civic (“academic”) right, a member of society. For colleagues and
institutional officials to force someone who had achieved institu-
tional prerequisites into a state of outright ostracism would require
more courage and publicity than is typically characteristic of agents
of malice. In order to institute proceedings for the enactment of
full-fledged ostracism, legal grounds and institutional codes would
have to be mobilized and argued, with the possibility of a defense
being mounted by the accused. Consequently, the type of attack
under consideration here—at least initially—is cast in moralistic
and affective terms rather than directly political or legal ones.
To cast an attack in overt political terms would require what
Hannah Arendt calls a move into publicity. An open denial of the
right to access the sphere in which privilege had been earned and
granted, as Milner shows, occurred for German Jews only with
the conquest of state institutions by the Nazis. Later, the use of
surveillance technologies in everyday life as a tool of state control
of discourse and social relations was brought to an exemplary in-
stitutional form by the East German state in the institution of the
Stasi.14 Compared to the current available tools of social media, the
Stasi, with its paper archives, payoffs, and threats to neighbors and
coworkers, seems archaic and crude.
OSTRACISM
OSTRACISM. 1580s, a method of 10-year banishment

in ancient Athens, by which the citizens gathered and
each wrote on a potsherd or tile the name of a man they
deemed dangerous to the liberties of the people, and a man

whose name turned up often enough was sent away. From
Middle French ostracisme (16c.), Modern Latin ostracismus,
or directly from Greek ostrakismos, from ostrakizein “to
ostracize,” from ostrakon “tile, potsherd,” from PIE
*ost-r-, from root *ost- “bone,” which also is the source
of Greek osteon “bone,” ostreion “oyster,” and German
Estrich “pavement” (which is from Medieval Latin astracus
“pavement,” ultimately from Greek ostrakon).15
In discussing Aristotle’s Politics III.10–13, Foucault writes

The problem Aristotle poses is how ethical differentiation is
possible given this principle of the rotation and alternation of
governed/governors. . . . Ostracism . . . permits the people to
exile an individual . . . because his prestige, his excellence, and
the personal qualities of which he has given proof raise him
too far above other citizens.16
ALLEGATION: SOCIOPATH
A person with a personality disorder manifesting

itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior
and a lack of conscience.17
The trope of sociopath (a clinical term) has been widely used in gos-
sip (a number of students and professors at Berkeley and beyond
have affirmed hearing it). Its importance relies on the deployment
of a register of truth.
If indeed there were to be evidence of sociopathic conduct
on the part of a professor, then it would be incumbent by the
procedures of the university for the appropriate authorities to be
notified. All staff (professorial and administrative) at the University
of California are required to take a two-hour online “ethics” test

every two years (they threaten to delay paychecks if it is not com-
pleted). It stipulates that behavior that seems to violate the standard
procedures of the university must be reported to the appropriate
authorities. Such action would then require the chair or an om-
budsperson or mediator to contact the person being accused and
open a discussion of the accusations. Such steps would render the
charges open to discussion. This has never happened in my case.
The clinical truth claim should have been referred to a legal or
bureaucratic procedural authority, where the accusations would
have had to be made explicit and justified with evidence. The ac-
cused might then have the right to dispute the claim of a medical
pathology while perhaps being willing to modify behavior if that
were justified. None of this has happened.
It is relevant to note that in a recent highly publicized case
of alleged sexual harassment by a professor of a graduate student,
the designated faculty committees, after examining the case for a
number of years, decided the charges were unfounded. The chan-
cellor then intervened by producing the argument that the accused
professor had told the graduate student not to work with certain
other members of his department. The chancellor, in a letter to
the faculty, argued that this behavior justified tripling the penalties.
How does this fit with Star Chamber proceedings?
Once again, it is a question of operators that do or do not shift
registers. The malice operator functions on the plane of secrecy,
vagueness, and character defamation without having to render its
accusations public or defend them. It is a very ingenious piece of
equipment.
One can readily observe that these proceedings occasion a cer-
tain discomfort among those authorizing them. The department
chair refused even to acknowledge that there had been trouble un-
til she was forced to by the testimony of others (which I quoted to
her). She looked down at the floor and said, “I can’t talk about it.”
Both the chair and the department’s chief administrative officer

have recently had service dogs approved. Hence the many stressful
events and decisions of these offices are remedied by therapeutic
means. In this instance, some truth-telling would have been ap-
propriate at an elite public university.
POINTS OF ATTACK
The anthropological department in (toxic) Kroeber Hall

was never your home at UC Berkeley.
—a former student, now a uc professor
The Labinar, which ran from 2005 to 2017, was a successful ex-
periment in graduate school pedagogy and governance.18 It came
to an end for both internal and external reasons. Or it is better
to claim: it was brought to an end by the actions of locals who
actively discouraged anthropology graduate students from partici-
pating and by the effects of career patterns in the larger American
academy.
In the final years of the Labinar, no graduate students of the an-
thropology department attended. There were UC Berkeley grad-
uate students from architecture and city planning, music, English,
and Near Eastern religions, and visiting graduate students from
Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and oth-
ers. The dynamic of participation and preparation shifted. None
of these fields emphasized participant observation–based inquiry.
Among other things, this meant that the relations of “ethical” and
veridictional aspects of inquiry were cast largely on the object
side. Consequently, the problem of “the government of self and
others” took on a different cast than it had previously had with a
more majoritarian anthropological grouping.
ALLEGATION: CULT
An apparently widespread trope in the gossip discourse was that

the Labinar had become a cult and that students who took part in
it became my disciples. The evidence for the gossip is anecdotal.
The claim, however, has been stated in print by George Marcus,
a longtime discussion partner and co-contributor to a volume on
remediating anthropology, who, it must be said, sees himself as a
rival.19 That I do not and did not take Marcus or others as rivals is
documented in the dialogues in our coauthored volume. I sought
to engage in debate but failed to account for the fact that the other
participants in this volume felt diminished by the encounter. This
insensitivity stemmed from a commitment to inquiry qua inquiry:
this limitation was naïve.
On its face, the claim of discipleship is false. If one were to
look at the lengthy list of doctoral theses that I have directed over
the decades, one would be hard pressed to identify a common
doctrine. Almost all of them, however, do share a common char-
acteristic: they display a hard-earned erudition that they have put
to the test of participant-observation and subsequently put into
narrative form. Their subject matters differ widely in regard to
both the location of the research and, more important, the specific
problems addressed. These theses are gratifyingly sophisticated. All
the candidates have been rewarded (despite the gossip) with pres-
tigious positions in the academy, achieved through competitive
job searches and by virtue of evaluation of their diverse qualities.
The claim that these ardent and self-defining inquirers were
parroting a party line—although this would have been a standard
and expected outcome in some elite departments with their most
prestigious actors—would be very difficult to sustain.
Perhaps it is exactly the rigor, independence, and originality of
these scholars that was the root cause of the malicious envy that
nourished the toxic atmosphere of Kroeber Hall as well as Twit-
ter feeds and a range of formal social media postings and informal
conference gossip. At various times, students and others offered

to show me some of these postings. I systematically refused to
consider them. I felt that reading them would be irritating and
distracting, and would produce a range of stultifying reactions,
resulting in a further diversion of my energies and an erosion of
my direction and concentration on ethics. I repeated, on several
occasions, a stock anecdote from Richard McKeon to the effect
that would-be philosophers should buy a pipe not so much to
smoke it, or to look like a professor or intellectual, but rather
because one was going to have to endure a stream of demeaning
banalities—the pipe served to bite down on so as to prevent overt
expressiveness or responses that would only lead to further misdi-
rected counter-responses.
Finding that the reigning conceptual repertoire in the field of
anthropology was insufficient for conducting inquiry (as opposed
to research) under conditions that were vastly different from those
in which the discipline had been formed and to which this rep-
ertoire had been, at times, an enriching set of equipment, I (and
some of those who worked with me) tended to underreport cita-
tions from the discipline.
Experience has shown that attempts at agonistic engagement
are almost always taken to be antagonism and responded to by
withdrawal and studied indifference. Although there is no guar-
antee whatsoever that engaging directly would have led to an en-
riched discourse, nonetheless I should have tried to do so with
more consistency and diligence. Not doing so was a mistake and a
deficiency in terms of ethics and veridiction.
ALLEGATION: CHARISMATIC AUTHORIT Y
The external charge that deserves more attention and credibility

turns on Max Weber’s concept of “charisma.” Although the af-
fect Weber associated with the term, as well as the type of group
formation he identified (religious affiliations) were not directly ap-

plicable to my situation, something rang true here as far as the
external description unfolded. A hook to attach was found and
assiduously held to.
Weber writes:
In the following discussions the term “charisma” shall be un-

derstood to refer to an extraordinary quality of a person, re-
gardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed.
“Charismatic authority,” hence, shall refer to a rule over men,
whether predominantly external or predominantly internal, to
which the governed submit because of their belief in the ex-
traordinary quality of the specific person. . . .
. . . The legitimacy of charismatic rule thus rests upon the
belief in magical powers, revelations, and hero worship. The
source of these beliefs is the “proving” of the charismatic qual-
ity through miracles, through victories and other successes, that
is, through the welfare of the governed. . . . Charismatic rule
is not managed according to general norms, either traditional
or rational, but, in principle, according to concrete revelations
and inspirations, and in this sense, charismatic authority is “ir-
rational.” It is “revolutionary” in the sense of not being bound
to the existing order.20
Having experienced something of the “extraordinary” quality of

those I have had the privilege and good fortune to have studied
“under,” I have some sense of the experience to which Weber is
referring. Each of these figures was explicitly committed to a form
of reason and explicitly sought to discourage those wishing to be
followers. Counter-effects abounded, whether explicitly designed,
discouraged, or endured or whether they produced some secret
wellspring of gratification, however ambiguous.
The claim of discipleship on an intellectual plane misses the
mark—and might well have not produced the silence, indiffer-
ence, and maliciousness that ensued. Still, the move to a subject

position of self-disciplined directionality, risking indifference and
pariah-hood, was probably insufficient. Early on, from my first ex-
periences at Berkeley, which were predominantly outside Kroeber
Hall—with Robert Bellah (sociology), Hubert Dreyfus (philoso-
phy), and Allan Pred (geography); in the French department, his-
tory department, English department, and later the molecular and
cell biology departments; and with famous visitors such as Michel
Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and others—my network and my
speaking engagements around the world were occasioned by my
eclectic reach and disciplined demeanor.
RECOGNITION?
Responding directly to these and related charges seemed to be a

trap. What form such a response could take that did not reinforce
the accusations remains unclear.
No concerted or coordinated defense appeared from the for-
mer students. The power and character dynamics in this instance
no doubt varied, but they were consistent across quite diverse
people. Why?
This topic leads back to the discussion of Axel Honneth’s con-
cept of “recognition.” One response from former students, or col-
leagues elsewhere, has been along the line that, local Berkeley
politics aside, recognition (along the “esteem” axis) has been af-
forded there. This claim clearly has some validity. Responses such
as “Not to worry,” “Don’t be paranoid,” “Kroeber Hall has been
toxic for decades,” while often offered as solace, also encouraged
passivity and self-justification. These responses might have sufficed
for a long time as accepting the usual slings and arrows of academic
nastiness, but things have changed (perhaps generationally), such
that now my manuscripts are not even considered at university
presses or are turned down despite a mix of praise and unspecified
accusation. Consequences occur.
The question returns: What form of recognition is sought,

on one register by the masters of malice, and on another register
by me?
ENVY: VIRTUE AND/OR VICE
Envy is suffering (λύπη) at the good fortune of others.

––aristotle, Rhetoric II.10
Proceeding toward an anthropology of crucibles requires (1) first-

and second-order participant-observation; (2) abstracting at least a
partial table of gestures in Brecht’s sense; (3) inventing a form of
narration that brings all of the above into a common form; (4) be-
ing existentially engaged in this complex and (as of yet) ill-defined
undertaking.
As concerns envy, the term is almost always attributed to indi-
viduals (albeit in relation to an object of envy, whether another
person, group, or object). Although this claim has a surface plau-
sibility, it is inadequate if it remains uniquely on the individual
register.21 In the situation at hand, and in many others as well,
one can analytically observe a double shift, first, from individual
to collective (including history and memory) and back from col-
lective to individual, and second, from emotion to affect. A key
anthropological problem consists in identifying, conceptualizing,
and abstracting the technologies (or “operators”) that enable and
modulate these dynamic shifts. It would be equally anthropologi-
cally significant to be able to identify, analyze, and abstract the
technologies (and arts of governmentality—action upon actions)
that incite, maintain, and regulate the shift from emotion to affect
and then back to emotion.
These terms are given narrative forms that judge them as exces-
sive or deficient. If we ignore or underplay these dynamic relations
and the technologies and arts (in the older rhetorical sense of the
term), then terms such as “envy” might well be easily categorized

as being an inherently individual deficit or even a pathology (not
to mention a sin). Let it be said, however, that envy per se might
well be taken up in a mature, mildly self-reproaching, form. Thus,
in the situation at hand, several colleagues seemed to have been
driven by a form of envy—they had accomplished little in schol-
arly or scientific terms over an extended career. It seems appropri-
ate—within certain bounds—for them to be envious of someone
who has achieved significantly more than they had. At issue, ulti-
mately, is the ability to draw ethical and affective boundaries and
to self-enforce them.
Envy takes many forms. It can be simply public, often in a con-
fessional mode: “I envy his skill.” Although such statements may
have an edge to them, they are nonetheless reflexive. Adam Smith,
in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, observed,
Envy is that passion which views with malignant dislike the
superiority of those who are really entitled to all the superior-
ity they possess.22
However, there are certainly instances in which malignant dis-

like is not primed. For example, envy might well be close to ad-
miration or a sadness of regret at life gone by. Admitting that one
lacks the skill, intelligence, patience, doggedness, beauty, or the
like required to achieve a practice or fulfill a vocation at a very
high level is relatively easy to do if one’s distance is great enough
from the object—“Lévi-Strauss changed anthropology”—or if the
object is in a domain far from the one responding to it—“Bach is
an incomparably great composer.” The distance in these instances
might be historical or vocational, or they might be a recognition
that few could ever hope to achieve such superiority in a given
practice. Self-knowledge can temper the malignant drive, as well
as establish the validity of a scale of worth and thereby even pro-
vide a form of solace.
PROPORTIONAL PRACTICE
The introduction of another term—arrogance—provides a mecha-

nism whereby the use of the term envy can be moved from an
emotion and a range of associated stances (Haltungen) to a justifi-
catory mechanism that provides a self-justificatory shift from the
benign toward the malignant register. Should the object of envy
agree, or be seen to agree, with claims of his or her superiority,
then a becalmed situation—with a basically stable distance between
subject and object—can readily turn to a state of turbulence and
trouble. “Who does he think he is? We are colleagues, after all.”
ARROGANCE (n.). “A manifest feeling of superiority of

one’s worth or importance, combined with contempt of
others,” c. 1300, from Old French arrogance (12c.), from
Latin arrogantia “presumption, pride, haughtiness,” abstract
noun from arrogantem (nominative arrogans) “assuming,
overbearing, insolent,” present participle of arrogare “to
claim for oneself, assume,” from ad “to” (see ad-) + rogare
“to ask, to propose (a law, a candidate); to ask a favor,
entreat, request,” apparently a figurative use of a PIE verb
meaning literally “to stretch out (the hand),” from root
*reg- “move in a straight line.”
In order for the attribution of arrogance to function as the op-

erator for malignant envy, “contempt of others” must be read into
the situation. That this attribution can be accurate is undeniable.
However, it is not the only alternative.
A different dynamic arises if and when the subject to whom ar-
rogance is attributed may well feel justifiably superior to colleagues
by dint of mutually recognized norms, but not feel contempt for
the colleagues. Such a subject may have long pondered the pos-
sibility of feeling contempt and decided it was demeaning to the

subject regardless of the others’ behavior or lack of achievement.
To accomplish this restraint, the subject must work at understand-
ing and practicing a standard that could not be drawn from others’
deficient practice.
Such work on the self, and the associated technologies, requires
time, experience, and the good fortune of encountering others—
living and dead—who have recognized and worked at this practice
of “care of the self ” and “knowledge of the self.” Eschewing con-
tempt is an ethical means but it also necessitates a standard (horos)
by dint of which it can qualify as a practice in Alasdair Macintyre’s
sense of the term.23
MALICE AND ENVY
Other variants of malice and envy exist that are neither public nor
confessional in either the affective or the narrative domain. Those
forms are at issue here. When a broader frame—as is being sug-
gested here—is introduced, however, other dimensions must be
taken into account if one is to approach an adequate understanding
of a situation. Prime among these dimensions are power relations.
In fact, political philosophers such as John Rawls acknowledge the
presence of power relations as central. For Rawls and others, envy
(and other emotions) can be seen to turn ultimately on notions of
justice.24
In the case at hand, however, considerations of justice, while
pertinent, are backgrounded. They are deemphasized partly because
the possibility of achieving justice in this situation has been dimin-
ished by rampant gossip, Star Chamber proceedings, and the like.
Before seeking justice or rendering injustice visible and central,
the telos of a range of situations must be analytically understood
through introducing and analyzing a variety of mechanisms or
perators. The one of concern here is malice. Such mechanisms op-

o
erate in the shadows, resolutely not in a public domain. Whether
or not envy is considered to be irrational or irreducibly passionate,
there is no doubt that it can be, and has been, deployed for both
tactical and strategic ends.
Let us consider at least one further mood term: stultitia.
STULTITIA (Latin). Seneca used the term to indicate a

state of being in which the subject is fragmented and
unsettled. For Seneca, the stultus is someone who has not
cared for himself, blown by the wind and too open to the
outside world.
Those engaged in inquiry and thinking are often
haunted by Stultitia. Hence, recognizing the affects and
effects of Stultitia can aid them in their practice.25
As the malevolent winds of the academic world buffeted the

participants in the situation at issue here, one coalition chose the
path of malicious bureaucratic action (moralistic and/or legalistic)
and the other party settled on—eventually—a decision to pursue a
path forward through inquiry and thinking. It was hoped that at-
tempting to understand the broader situation would provide some
solace—some dissipation of the stultitia.
Such a decision, it became clear, entailed abandoning hope of a
political or legal solution. Consequently, it entailed a commitment
to a Haltung, one not seeking redress but one that entailed pursu-
ing veritas, the missing hare in Dürer’s engraving.
OPTIONS: TOWARD ANTIDOTES
Having been designated as a target of punishment, and malice hav-

ing been chosen by others as the safe register on which to oper-
ate, the accused is left with a range of options. One is to move to

the envy/superiority register. Friends and observers have consis-
tently invoked the claim that “they are envious of your accom-
plishments.” Envy, whether the case or not, in its excessive form
overflows the boundaries of controlled and restrained affect. Even
if this were to a certain extent valid, ostracism would have been a
straightforward procedure in certain circumstances, but not in the
university. It runs the risk of legal considerations and would bring
higher administrative authorities into the situation.
As the object of operations of malice, one is tempted to re-
spond (once thumos has subsided) with claims of innocence and/
or victimhood. However, with the passing of time (and hence of
the legitimate arousal of vehement passions) and reflection, such
a response reveals itself to be insufficient to achieve the goals of
binding wounds or remediating the situation.
Furthermore, such a reaction would also be ethically unwor-
thy. One must admit that one has in fact entertained, felt, and in
different ways communicated (in offhand comments that became
gossip, a Haltung interpreted as haughty, and so on) a sense of
earned superiority as well as a certain contempt for those bring-
ing the machinery of malice into operation. Ethically, while the
former (excellence, aretē ) might be justified, the latter (contempt)
is not.
Consequently, having been subjected over time to increasingly
focused operations of malice, one is faced with options that attempt
to engage with the given register (forcing the department to bring
in an ombudsman or other such “neutral” bureaucratic authori-
ties) or with pondering how to refuse these options while insisting
on an ethical register of conduct. The latter option requires work
on the self on the double register of knowing and caring: the as-
cetic preconditions required to achieve the status or possible status
of an ethical subject.
ANTIDOTE
ANTIDOTE. “Remedy counteracting poison,” early 15c.

(c. 1400 as a Latin word in English), from Middle French
antidot and directly from Latin antidotum/antidotus “a
remedy against poison,” from Greek antidoton (pharmakon)
“(drug) given as a remedy,” from antidoton literally “given
against,” verbal adjective of antididonai “give for” (also
“give in return, give instead of ”) from anti “against” (see
anti-) + didonai “to give” (from PIE root *do- “to give”).
Compare Middle English antidotarie “treatise on drugs or
medicines” (c. 1400).26
HALTUNG: AUDACIOUS AND ADMIRATIVE GRATITUDE
Let us put the following hypothesis to the test: The antonym of

contempt and envy is admiration. The corollary is that what is
maliciously taken as arrogance can actually be gratitude.
AUDACIOUS (adj.). 1540s, “confident, intrepid, daring,”

from Middle French audacieux, from audace “boldness,”
from Latin audacia “daring, boldness, courage,” from audax
“brave, bold, daring,” but more often “bold” in a bad
sense, “rash, foolhardy,” from audere “to dare, be bold.”
In English, the bad sense of “shameless, unrestrained by
propriety” is attested from 1590s. Related: Audaciously;
audaciousness.27
ADMIRE (v.). Early 15c. (implied in admired ), “regard with

wonder, marvel at,” from Old French admirer “look upon,
contemplate” (correcting earlier amirer, 14c.), or directly
from Latin admirari “regard with wonder, be astonished,”

from ad “to, with regard to” (see ad-) + mirari “to
wonder,” from mirus “wonderful” (see miracle). The sense
has gradually weakened toward “regard with pleasure and
esteem.” Related: Admiring; admiringly.28
GRATITUDE (n.). Mid-15c., “good will,” from Middle

French gratitude (15c.) or directly from Medieval Latin
gratitudinem (nominative gratitudo) “thankfulness,” from
Latin gratus “thankful, pleasing” (from suffixed form of PIE
root *gwere- (2) “to favor”). Meaning “thankfulness” is
from 1560s.29
The point here (as throughout) is not to develop a theory of af-

fects, virtues, and vices but to assemble instances that can facilitate
their conceptualization as elements of a Haltung—or to mobilize
concepts that can identify and specify such instances. Establishing
relationships of concepts and instances in a preliminary fashion is
not an end in itself. Rather, its goal is pragmatic: build equipment
so as to render judgments concerning truth claims and the conduct
of life. Such judgments are character terms: the technical term, as
explained in Designs on the Contemporary, is parastēmata.
PARASTĒMATA is a character term. It refers to a subject’s

relation to the interconnection of truth and conduct.
Ordinarily referring to the stature of bearing of a character,
or else the bearing and poise of a subject, not simply a
mark of civilized manners, which could be understood
as behavior arbitrated by a rule. Rather, parastēmata are
what Foucault has called an “ethical substance”—that
which must be the object of conscious consideration—

the questions a person must keep in mind in order to do
what they do truthfully. Parastēmata are thus principles
or maxims.
In our use, the concept of parastēma indexes neither a
principle nor a behavior learned, but rather the need to
make a judgment about the distance or proximity between
claims to truth (warranted assertibility) and the conduct of
life (bios).30
It follows that it is risky to pursue practices of the self that

embody and prime admiration and gratitude, because few others
have done the work on the self to understand or care (even if they
themselves are not capable of such work and such directionality).
Pursuing the aforementioned practices (admiration and gratitude)
facilitates the operation of maliciousness as a shift of registers from
the veridictional to the existential. This shift facilitates a change of
registers from ethics to morality.
Beware! Be forewarned! Be prepared!
TOPOLOGY
Today a commonsense assumption (given the individualism and

identity politics that reign) is that beneficial and nurturing rela-
tionships (outside the family) should be horizontal (friendship,
marriage, teamwork, etc.). It is worth considering, however, that
the vertical axis is supremely salient for certain types of relation-
ships between the self and others—especially veridictional and
ethical ones. Among the relationships to cast and practice on this
axis, primary candidates are those that turn on learning and intel-
lectual (spiritual) growth: in a word, flourishing. The Greek word
for “flourishing” is eudaimonia. The term is composed of a “good”
“daemon” to whose advice one must pay avid attention.
Another working hypothesis: inquiry and ethics are collabora-

tive.
SYNDIALĒPSIS. The doing or undertaking of scientific

and intellectual research, together with others.
This archaic term, used neologistically, surprisingly
captures the critical dimension of a collaborative and
vindicatory lēpsis (i.e., the work requisite to move through
the actual to the contemporary).31
In light of the problematic presented in The Government of Self

and Others, Foucault concentrated his attention on the work on
the self that must be undertaken under the guidance of a master
so as to know the self and, above all, to care for the self. Foucault,
however, pays scant or no attention to whether the master is living
or dead, earthly or otherwise. Further, he does not seem to have
attended to the topic of whether the master was (or is) ethical.
As was appropriate for practicing philosophers, especially dur-
ing Roman times, the larger turbulent political and moral terrain
had to be taken into account as a dimension of the problematiza-
tion within which problems arose and practices were formed.
So, too, today.
ADJACENCY: A FIELD OF TENSION
Reflecting on those thinkers whom I have been fortunate—and

audacious—enough to have encountered and to have been in-
directly guided by in the realm of bios and truth-seeking, several
things strike me. Adorno provides a maxim in this regard that can
be taken up as a parastē ma.
Distance is not a safety zone but a field of tension. It is mani-
fested not in relaxing the claim of ideas to truth, but in delicacy
and fragility of thinking.32
The contours and dynamics of the “field of tension” warrant

closer scrutiny. The reigning metaphoric field for capturing such
fields of tensions, such relations with thinkers, is familial, especially
oedipal. Harold Bloom has written most convincingly about this
semantic domain. No doubt many find, or have found, themselves
operating within and struggling with this field of tension.
I have thought about the tense distance from the thinkers with
whom I have had the great good fortune to learn from in person
(albeit at different distances and times) for some time now. None
can be adequately captured in the semantics of a familial field.
Rather, it is a hypothesis worth exploring that it is precisely be-
cause these varied relationships were not familial (father, mother,
brother, etc.) that they provided a field of tension that—if handled
appropriately, given the “delicacy and fragility” at stake—was not
murderous or competitive.
Here is a preliminary list of those whom I admire and from
whom I have learned in person: Richard McKeon, Clifford Geertz,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, Hannah Arendt, Robert Bel-
lah, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem.
In each case it took audacity to arrange and/or endure the en-
counter. None of these thinkers was a friend or a direct master in
the sense that Foucault has described as necessary for ethical and
veridictional growth and wisdom. Upon reflection, it is simply
ridiculous to imagine that one could be competitive with (or, for
that matter, in revolt against) McKeon or Canguilhem (to take
names at the beginning or end of the initial list).
The tense distance was sought and sustained for varying periods
of time. The audacity of distance provided little human warmth,
obviating the search for such consolation in these relationships.
Such comfort and disappointment would be sought and found and
lost elsewhere. A different form of affection from a series of other
professors and friends who were much nicer, more accessible, and
communicative was unquestionably sustaining.
If circumstances permit, seek a field of tension for thinking. If

one was fortunate enough and audacious enough to have been able
to test oneself in a field of tension with masters of thought, perhaps
one could establish minor variations of such relations with others.
COUNTER-CONDUCT II:
LATE STYLE IMPEDED, NOT THWARTED
Terms like “thwarted,” “stymied,” or “impeded” indicate that for
a subject there exists a horizon of possible desirable motion con-
fronted with obstacles that prevent the subject from setting off
to explore and experience what she imagines to be the apparent
horizon (and hopefully other horizons not yet apparent). There
are many instances in which this diagnosis holds. How to react to
such a condition? In a situation of thwarted action, for example,
one might well seek means of exiting (or retreating) in order to re-
lieve—but not resolve—a condition of stymied hopes and blocked
habits of motion.
These observations raise the question of whether there are stan-
dards for handling—not simply enduring—situations of affective
frustration and/or states of belittlement. A first step is diagnostic:
What is the nature of the situation in which one is enmeshed?
One possible standard (horos) that is worth testing as an alterna-
tive to thwarted, blocked, or stultifying situations is to recognize
that an impeded situation may well be stalled but may not be a
condition of permanent reactivity or stasis. An online dictionary
defines the transitive verb “to impede” as “To interfere with or
slow the progress of.”
An online etymological dictionary provides the following:
IMPEDE (v.). c. 1600, back-formation from impediment,

or else from Latin impedire “impede, be in the way, hinder,
detain,” literally “to shackle the feet,” from assimilated
form of in- “into, in” (from PIE root *en “in”) + pes
(genitive pedis) “foot,” from PIE root *ped- “foot.”
Related: Impeded; impedes; impeding; impedient.33
Being hindered in carrying out the intention to pursue a previ-

ous plan of action means delay, but not necessarily impossibility.
Delay is a temporal term. Being delayed or untimely are not
necessarily bad states in and of themselves. In fact, a pause (vol-
untary or not) might well be an opportunity for a moment of
reflection or informed observation. In such cases, time is accorded
to ponder other options than the reigning stasis. Especially in situ-
ations where privilege continues to exist, even if malice is thwart-
ing the habitual practices, lines of flight still might be possible.
Cases of stymied and/or thwarted action turn on the micro-
and macrorelations of power. Impeded action, however, can be
defined as a condition that is not definitively thwarted by external
forces per se; rather, it is stuck—at least in part—because it lacks
a standard that would bring thinking, bios, and eudaimonia into a
common form, thereby facilitating a practice.
In reflecting on and pursuing motion that might lead toward
the existence of a virtual subject, through an emphasis on reme-
diating older norms, while steadfastly testing and warranting ve-
ridictional forms and practices—in all this, one must strive for a
transformation of stasis and stultitia through a remediated crucible
of experience and experimentation.
IMPEDED: DEFICIENT: STASIS
There is currently a circumscribed range of historically consecrated

determinations of legitimate forms of thinking, creating, and pro-
ducing works of art, science, and the human sciences. Many of
these determinations function today as impediments. It is proving
extremely difficult to overcome them, at least in the worlds of

art as well as the human and social sciences, although many have
tried and many continue to attempt to find a path to historically
significant change. A first step to the formation of such a crucible
is to identify the topoi of these determinations in at least a rough
sketch of the current topography.
In literature, while massive amounts of writing and publication
continue as though nothing had changed from the time of Dick-
ens or Zola, there was—at least under the norm of modernism—
a requirement (horos) of experimentation in form, criticism, and
norms as to what counts as “good” writing. A variety of insti-
tutions have been created to keep these standards visible (Nobel
Prizes, the Man-Booker competition, etc.).
Not acknowledging that anything is amiss, others continue as if
nothing has changed. The genre and the skill that brought recog-
nition continue to seem satisfying and appropriate. Claude Lévi-
Strauss can serve as an icon: he lived to be one hundred and his
writings in old age were not radically different from work he had
produced decades before in terms of method, form, or evidence.
However, Lévi-Strauss crafted, nourished, and defended institu-
tions—Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, Collège de France—
within which loyalty to his form and style served as the price of
admission, if not to the entire discipline of anthropology in France,
then at least to its most prestigious institutions and publications.
Whatever else such continuity may be, it is not modern sci-
ence. To make a complicated discussion simple: no one in physics,
chemistry, molecular biology, or astronomy (among other disci-
plines) could possibly perform experiments and claim scientific
credibility today in the same manner that was normative in 1956.
Regardless of whether one chooses to invoke progress, paradigm
changes, technological revolutions, massively different funding
bases, or other such variables as the parameters in the sciences to
be dans le vrai, stasis is not a legitimate option.
AN ALTERNATE FIGURE
How to explain that the writings of Marx, Durkheim, Weber,

Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida continue to be taken to have a
salient actuality? Foucault was intrigued with this problem, at-
tempting to answer it at first through a history of epistemes—unities
whose sequence did not constitute progress, only change. Eventu-
ally, in his later work, he abandoned these breaks, at least for the
problems that then concerned him.
Earlier on, Foucault had tested the concept of “founders of
discursivity” but did not pursue it.34 For our purposes, this intrigu-
ing term offers a rich contrast to “progress” and the like. Situated
within the problem space of late work and/or late style, the term
indicates that enduring form can come not as late style, or mod-
ernist newness, but as a problem—a practice and a style (form plus
singularity).
Charting the emergence, endurance, and conditions under
which the term “founders of discursivity” appears remains a chal-
lenge that has not been taken up. The topic is thorny: Lévi-Strauss
was such a founder, while Clifford Geertz proved not to be. The
institutional reasons are important contributing variables but do
not explain everything. Regardless, the “founders of discursivity”
appear to be practitioners of an early style, consciously full of hope,
of future horizons that had yet to be tested or examined.
EXCESSIVE: INCESSANT INVENTION
In the human and social sciences, the conditions of change and

validation are more diffuse and contested than in the sciences or
the arts. Here, the scientific model is no longer dominant (as op-
ponent or advocate) in the positivist form it took in the middle
decades of the twentieth century, although pockets of such activ-
ity and its norms continue to be practiced, funded, and published.
Sporadic moments of experimentation in form (including
changes in media) have taken place (and continue to do so, here

and there) in the human sciences, but the monograph and the
article are basically still the standards (horoi) they were in the early
days of these disciplines at the turn of the twentieth century.
Many strands of qualitative human or social science proceed as
if the challenges, criticisms, debates, and attacks over the course of
a century had never taken place. Attempted remediation is com-
fortably relegated to the proverbial junk bin of history. At best
these efforts qualify as “junk” that should be stored away in librar-
ies and databases because they might be useful, or of interest to
historians or archivists, in an often unspecified, frequently dismis-
sive, way. Sydney Brenner, referring to the fact that only a small
fraction of the DNA of living beings’ genomes has so far been
shown to have functional significance, contrasts “junk” with “gar-
bage.” While the former might well have (or have had) a function,
the latter has just accumulated, and, if it does not cause damage, it
simply accumulates and remains in stasis.
Especially in the United States, current training relegates the
history of a discipline or a tradition of inquiry to at best a prior site
of prejudice and error—post-coloniality, racism, elitism, and the
rest reigned and distorted findings, methods, and forms of life. It is
held that only the young will be able to overcome the pathologi-
cal past.
IMPEDED ACTION: LATE WORK
In that light, I present a pair of terms as possible “exit markers”

(Ausgang Wegmarken): late work and late style. An exploration of
these terms might cast further light on restoring motion to im-
peded situations. If one were looking for an exit (Ausgang), or at
least markers (Wegmarken) pointing in the direction of a possible
exit, however, one must be alert to the possibility that the direc-
tion chosen might well prove to be misleading. Consequently,
putting these markers to tests would be a sensible, precautionary,

preliminary step. In order to test them, identifying the current
determinations, at least in very broad strokes, is a required task.
Late work can be—and, according to recent scholarship, has
been—a possible tactic (consciously adopted or not) in different
historical periods. It makes sense as long as there are genre tradi-
tions in place (sonata form, lyric poetry, monumental buildings,
etc.).35 The chronological age of the practitioner is not an absolute
variable, since biologically younger people facing an ending, for
whatever reasons—health, creativity, war, politics—can attempt
to bring their work to a culmination of sorts. Or others, again at
different chronological ages or stages of life, may recognize or feel
that they have nothing more of significance to say. The muse has
departed: continuing their life work would only diminish their
prior accomplishments. That being said, it takes courage, care and
knowledge of the self, and honest attention to the times to stop.
Such courage is not common: hope lingers, perhaps with dogged
persistence, that the muse will return. What other options exist?
What are the standards by which one evaluates these options?
The work being undertaken here is not seeking a culmina-
tion of previous work. There are several determinations at play:
the tradition and/or discipline at issue is at an impasse. Hence,
undertaking a project of mature work that is the summation of
previous work would likely be dated upon its completion. Such an
effort might well prove satisfactory for the practitioner, but would
be unlikely to overcome the impediments to further motion cur-
rently being put in place and maintained.
In Inquiry after Modernism, Anthony Stavrianakis and I argued
that the discipline of anthropology had remained adjacent to the
vast movements of modernisms in the arts (painting, music, lit-
erature).36 Granted that occasional practitioners (Michel Leiris,
Marcel Griaule, and others) crossed the line—might it follow that
we have neglected iconic instances of late work that sum up via
a masterpiece the work of a lifetime (or generation) or a late style

that breaks with the reigning genre and opens up new horizons in
style and form?
We have identified the work of Marilyn Strathern as a major
figure in anthropology whose work has been striving to master the
genre of late work.37 We have qualified this effort as an eminently
admirable one. Her recent work—seen from the outside—is cast
in a heroic mode, in part for its courageous and consistent effort to
continue, even save, the traditional pillars of the discipline: the ar-
ticle and the monograph, fieldwork, and ethnography. This quest
seems to have obliged her, unwittingly no doubt, to produce the
only candidate we know of for a late style in the modern human
sciences. Hers is not a style, however, that opens up a future, but
a hybrid coalescence of late work and late style that completes,
brings to an end, or exhausts the vitality of disciplinary parameters
by carrying the traditional forms and terms to their limits.
CONTEMPORARY IMPEDANCE: TOWARD A COUNTER-CONDUCT
A contemporary challenge would be neither striving for a ma-

ture fulfillment of a life’s work (or its closure) nor making a self-
conscious attempt to invent a late style. The first motion would
be conceivable and even enviable within a stable discipline whose
forms are still recognized as vital and open. The latter motion risks
avant-gardism. One danger here is excessive subjectivism—giving
primacy to the author. Of course, not all avant-gardism within
modernist traditions has proved sterile—quite the contrary. Al-
though that claim is plausible for the arts, for reasons yet to be fully
explored, it seems less so for the human sciences.
Here, the striving for motion and narrative (Erfahrung, not Er-
lebnis) arises from an impeded situation in which—regardless of
other forces at work, and given the privilege of a degree of free-
dom—carrying on the tradition in its own terms seems to lead
to heroic formal end points. These end points, as the example of

Strathern highlights in its thorny brilliance, while explicitly at-
tempting to revivify the traditions and forms of a discipline, equally
demonstrate how opaque it would look if such an effort were to
be carried forth collectively.
Taking up Adorno’s term of “a field of tension” and hypoth-
esizing that the yoked term late work / late style was forged within
the history of modernity and modernisms—how would one ap-
proach these topics and terms with a contemporary ethos? Is there
a form—and a means—that might be invented by those who are
impeded?
There is a point of contact between Adorno’s grasping of the
significance of late style as a theme of subjectivity, form and free-
dom, and the “domain” of anthropological inquiry outlined by
Kant in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Late style and
Kant’s anthropology can be brought into a shared problem domain
precisely on the question of how subjectivity both participates in
the creation of form and is shaped by that participation, as well as
on the question of whether there is a distinctly “late” variation on
this practice, in Adorno’s sense of priming a problematic relation
of freedom to both convention and invention.
This question cannot be answered in the abstract. It is not a
matter of theory. It is a matter of experience. It is a matter of
experimentation. It is a matter of practice. It is a problem. It is
existential. Once various stymied, thwarted, and/or impeded situ-
ations have yielded a disquieting and stultifying experience (Erleb-
nis) that calls for relief, the challenge poses itself—can one forge a
pathway beyond impedance that leads to an entry (Eingang) to a
crucible of experience and experimentation in which a horizon of
eudaimonia hovers?
The veridictional armature of the current work has been taken
from the “Terms of Engagement” that Anthony Stavrianakis and I
developed over the last years. Here, it has been deployed as equip-
ment to conceptualize and give form to primarily the affective/

passionate aspects of a discordant situation. It was not planned as
an exercise either in late style or in late work. Rather, it stuck to a
certain obstinacy to “not be governed that way.”
The initial step to conceptualize that obstinacy was a defining
element in a Haltung appropriate to the situation, with the proviso
that the desired Haltung would afford motion, not just resistance or
obstinacy. But additionally, the Haltung has to afford a manner of
sojourning (Erfahrung) that would oblige the journey to be itself an
embodiment of that for which one was setting out to find.
To return to the beginning of these fragments, recall Dürer’s
dog in search of the (absent) hare, Problema. Let us conclude our
sojourn then, in having made, one hopes, some headway toward a
contemporary foyer d’expérience in which
Logica, is accompanied by Veritas in order to approach the
Problema.38
We have seen that the huntress, Logica, and the hare, Prob-
lema, are missing from Dürer’s engraving. What is engraved is the
alert dog, Veritas, and the Knight’s Haltung. Whether this particular
Knight was in search of Logica and Problema, we will never know.
That we are—is certain.
5
What is done and what is undergone are . . .
reciprocally, cumulatively, and continuously
instrumental in each other.
––john dewey, Art as Experience
Exile
Wistful
H aving had the privilege of experiencing a variety of pub-

lic and private freedoms, varied states of intellectual and
spiritual pleasure, punctual and serial experiences of flourishing,
as well as minor and more substantial malicious skirmishes with
overt and tacit rebuffs and defeats; and after having considered
the situation over time, while developing an analytic repertoire
to understand these episodes (as well as their long-standing condi-
tions, which had been known and understood at a macro level for
many years); and then, having gradually formulated and modified
a narrative (late) style, one is faced with the challenge of how to
continue.1
Given the reigning configuration of the actual, one must accept
that the earlier parameters and relationships among and between
eudaimonia, aretē, and the prior venues that afforded them are no
longer available at this time, at this institution.
173
Repair of the polis—whether on an ascending series of macro

levels or even at the local micro level—has been rendered implau-
sible. The remaining challenges are, first, the remediation and care
of the practitioner; next, the normative complexities of the prior
crucibles that have been narrated in their flourishing, marginaliza-
tion, and defeat; and consequently, a challenge that comes to the
fore is the question, is there a potential mode for a virtual subject?
At this juncture, one dimension of this challenge consists in
speculating about the parameters required to imagine, invent, and
discover—as well as eventually to inhabit—a remediated Hal-
tung. In that light, we pause to wonder: What mood might aid in
continuing the inquiry and the journey? Certainly, such a mood
would be mindful of caring for the maintenance and remedia-
tion of the overall Bewegungsraum. No doubt it would be restive
and recalcitrant—but what additional modal shift would be fit-
ting for a conjoined crucible in this series? A prime candidate is
“wistful.” The adverbs and adjectives intently, longingly, pensive,
musing indicate a mood (a subdued pathos) neither bitter nor spent
nor buoyant.
WISTFUL (adj.). 1610s, “closely attentive,” perhaps from

obsolete wistly “intently” (c. 1500), of uncertain origin.
Perhaps formed on the model of wishful. Middle English
wistful meant “bountiful, well-supplied,” from Old English
wist “provisions.” The meaning of “longingly pensive,
musing” is by 1714. Related: Wistfully; wistfulness.2
SPECULATIVE THERAPY: ARETĒ’S SŌZEIN

The etymology of wistful also points us toward the topic of “wist”
or “provisions.” Looking for aid in past situations, without want-
exile: wistful 175
ing to force comparisons or analogies, one can observe how those

addressing previous breakdowns and dilemmas provisioned them-
selves.
Mitchell Merback’s book on Dürer (which previously in this
narrative opened pathways to understanding and narration) carries
the curious and somewhat surprising title Perfection’s Therapy. Mer-
back remarks on its unlikeliness for a title for a book on Renais-
sance art. Although he does not question the term “perfection,”
it would be fitting after the long journey here to recall this narra-
tive’s earlier discussion of Aristotle’s term aretē (virtue, excellence,
perfection).
Merback does defend his use of the term “therapy,” using schol-
arly etymological resources. He writes:
In both its Greek origin and its Latin adaptation, the word
“therapy” . . . encompasses notions of treatment, care, heal-
ing, and “attention.” (The word therapōn . . . denotes an at-
tendant.)3
The semantic range of these words suggesting action reminds us

of sōzein. There must have been a prior need for repair or defense
in order for the term and its associated equipment to be appropri-
ately summoned. At the broadest semantic and situational register,
these terms refer to pathology; thus they are terms of pathos. The
range of that pathos (for these topics) extends from the medical (in
Dürer’s case) to the spiritual (in both Dürer’s and the present case)
to the narrative (in both cases).
DÜRER’S CRUCIBLE
The core of Merback’s book concerns Dürer’s famous and mys-
terious etching Melencolia I. This is not the place to rehearse his
extended discussion of the misinterpretations of Melencolia I. Mer-
back insists that five hundred years of scholarly interpretation have

not succeeded in decoding Dürer’s work, because Dürer’s work
did not contain an internally coherent iconological or other hidden
meaning. Rather, Merback argues that the work has eluded schol-
arly industry and ingenuity precisely because Dürer had designed
it as equipmental—a speculative and therapeutic equipment—that
is part of a crucible of experimentation and experience.
One of the spectral Nachleben that lingers in the background
today is the Renaissance understanding and practice of the specula-
tive. Most broadly, what is the speculative? Merback writes:
Speculation exercises the soul (anima) and the mind (animus),
but never loses touch with the sense perception that sets it in
motion in the first place.4
The “sense perception” at issue is naturally preeminent for the

artist; however, it does not exclude anima and animus. To the con-
trary, the challenge of speculative work requires skill, insight, and
passion.
Speculative labor is reflexive: it finds itself as an object of con-
templation amidst the contemplation of externals.5
The labor involved in this instance is Dürer’s masterful skill at
joining speculation and representation. The object created is de-
signed to assemble the parameters for “perfection” (aretē ). Dürer’s
design is more than formal in the modern art historical sense. As
Panofsky and many others have documented, Dürer was a great
master of spaces, yet his skill in rendering perspective, geome-
try, and order is missing in Melencolia I. There, Merback argues,
Dürer’s design goal was to meet the more spiritual challenge of
obliging the artist qua artist to enter into a contemplative rela-
tionship with his creation. The goal was not virtuosity per se,
but rather to create a topological space that enables and demands
exile: wistful 177
a disruptive distance for artist and spectator alike. By achieving

this goal, Dürer made possible a therapeutic space for a virtual
subject.
A number of different levels and moments characterize this de-
sign process and its excellence.
Self-recognition is therefore more than a movement of the
soul from a state of sinfulness to one of repentance; it is also a
shift from the passive perception of externals to an active ob-
servation of self. Stoic philosophy dubbed this contemplative
ideal prosochē, best translated as “attention to oneself.”6
The parameter of sinfulness/repentance that so deeply concerned

Dürer and his contemporaries is not at issue here.
The invocation of the Stoic practice of prosochē and its telos
of ataraxia indicates a more pertinent distinction for us than the
Christian topos. If the goal of “attention to oneself ” is to achieve
a saving distance from most of the external world, however, it is
misleading for the current enterprise. Following Aristotle, eudai-
monia demands a relationship of the civic and the contemplative
(second-order observation) as a practice that recognizes, hierar-
chizes, and problematizes them. Dürer’s problem included theo-
logical dimensions not present in Aristotle or today.
A penultimate insight: “A conjoining of two modes of thera-
peutic action, perceptual and ethical, is the common property of
all speculative imagery.”7 Merback argues at great length, with
daunting scholarly authority, that the reason five hundred years
of interpretation of Dürer failed to find the “code” to Melencolia I
is, as we said, that there was none. The very goal of speculative
imagery (or form) is to create an “object of contemplation amidst
the contemplation of externals.”
Dürer was skillfully and excellently (aretē ) constructing a specu-
lative and therapeutic object for himself and his friends—an object
that required an active relationship, not a mastery. The defining

parameter of Dürer’s speculative form-giving is as follows:
Vicarious experience means that the represented action is
imagined as a possibility in the life of the spectator, a predica-
ment toward which his own fate could easily carry him.8
Just as the object of contemplation was not self-contained but was
intentionally not fully ordered according to the canons of the day,
so too a spectator searching for such an internally coherent or eso-
teric order will not find it. Instead, a spectator seized by the need
for care and repair might well find solace.
CODA
Demands of the Day
T he erosive processes embodied in the case considered here

were capped, as it were, in the fall of 2019 when the grad-
uate student X posted, both on his biotech company’s website
and on the professional networking website LinkedIn, that he had
been awarded a doctorate in medical anthropology from the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley in 2018.
This claim was false.
After verifying with the appropriate departmental and program
authorities that X had taken a leave of absence and had not sub-
mitted a doctoral thesis, I emailed the department chair, the prior
department chair, and the chief graduate advisor for the program,
informing them of this fraud and wondering what they were going
to do about it. I never received a reply from any of them.
So much for collegiality.
I then emailed the chair of the Berkeley faculty senate, asking
if there were university policies in such matters. He referred me to
179
the university lawyer, who responded that this matter concerned

the student and advisor but not the university per se. It was sug-
gested that one could contact LinkedIn to alert them to false cre-
dentials, but was warned that they were unlikely to reply.
Apparently, for the university authorities, the stakes were com-
mercial, not ones of academic legitimacy.
I then alerted a number of other anthropology colleagues to
this fraud (as it happened, it was during the graduate admission
process). One colleague did respond but advised me as a friend
that there was nothing to be done at the departmental level.
His word to the wise: being a whistle-blower is dangerous.
Let me be clear. The fact that X was unscrupulous was not a
surprise. That the University of California at Berkeley and the De-
partment of Anthropology declined to take action or to communi-
cate with me on the matter was initially disappointing. Eventually
the situation became for me a marker of the reigning institutional
norms.
Ultimately, what Max Weber had named as “the demands of
the day” was a matter, then and now, of forging a tolerable Hal-
tung for those concerned about the fate of Wissenschaft als Beruf.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: ELEMENTS FOR A REMEDIATED

FOYER D’EXPÉRIENCE
Epigraph. Cited in Mitchell B. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay
on Albrecht Dürer’s “Melencolia I” (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 67.
1. John Dewey, Logic:The Theory of Inquiry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1991; originally published 1938).
2. Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (Paris: Éditions Gal-
limard, 2008), 4–5: “les formes d’un savoir possible; les matrices norma-
tives de comportement pour les individus; et enfin des modes d’existence
virtuels pour des sujets possibles. . . . C’est l’articulation de ces trois choses
que l’on peut appeler, je crois, foyer d’expérience.” (My translation.)
3. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego and New York:
Harcourt, Inc., 1978).
4. Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, “Movement Space: Putting
Anthropological Theory, Concepts, and Cases to the Test,” Hau: Journal
of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 403–431.
5. Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, Designs on the Contemporary:
Anthropological Tests (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2014), p. 145.
6. Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organon, § 21–22.
7. Brecht, A Little Organon, #37.
8. Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River, translated by Paul Fleming
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010).
9. “Consider,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline
.com/word/consider#etymonline_v_18238.
10. Blumenberg, Care, 55.
11. On the background of Panofsky’s life and career, see Emily J. Levine,
Dream Land of the Humanists:Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg
School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
12. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1955), 151.
13. Ibid.
15. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy, 54.
181
182 notes
16. Ibid., 37.

17. Ibid., 45.
18. Ibid., 44.
19. Ibid., 19.
20. Ibid., 51.
21. Ibid., 100.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. On these biographical and historical points, see ibid.
25. Ibid., 100.
26. Ibid., 129.
27. Ibid., 160.
28. Today, the mode of a contemporary path would be ethical (in the double
sense of ethos and a practice of self-guidance), veridictional in the sense of
an ongoing journey toward and through multiple reiterations of warranted
confirmation of objects achieved through inquiry, and a collaborative un-
dertaking. Each of these parameters requires further specification, as does
the posture—Haltung—appropriate to making headway along the journey.
30. Panofsky, Dürer, 152.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 153.
33. “Gestus,” Wikipedia.
34. Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Image, Music,Text,
translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977); Devin
Fore, Realism after Modernism:The Rehumanization of Art and Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
35. Rabinow and Stavrianakis, Designs on the Contemporary, 141.
36. Fore, Realism after Modernism.
37. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some
Eisenstein Stills,” in Image, Music,Text, translated by Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana Press, 1977), 54.
40. For the full “terms of engagement,” see Rabinow and Stavrianakis,
Designs on the Contemporary.
41. Entries for “Tristia,” “Acedia,” and “Melancholia,” on Wikipedia.
notes 183
42. On the term Trostblatt and its various meanings, see Merback,
Perfection’s Therapy.
43. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
44. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 28. Cited in Robert Spencer, “Lateness and
Modernity in Theodor Adorno,” in Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays
in Art, Literature, and Music, edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 221.
45. Spencer, “Lateness and Modernity in Theodor Adorno,” 225.
46. Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven.”
48. More generally, see Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and
Literature (London: Verso Books, 2013).
50. Ibid., 227.
51. McMullan and Smiles, “Introduction: Late Style and Its Discontents,” 11.
52. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” 565.
53. Michael Wood, “Introduction,” in Edward Said, On Late Style: Music
and Literature against the Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), xiii.
54. Ibid., xv.
55. Ibid. See Stathis Gourgouris, “The Late Style of Edward Said,”
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics (Cairo) 25 ( July 2005): 168.
CHAPTER 1. CRUCIBLE OF FLOURISHING (2006–2013)

1. Eugene Garver, Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics: Ancient and Modern Morality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 54 .
2. Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random
House, 1942); idem, The Philosophy of Spinoza:The Unity of His Thought
(Longmans, Green & Co., 1928).
3. Quoted in Garver, Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics, 144.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Ibid., 70.
6. Ibid., 125. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013; originally published 1981).
7. S.v. Wikipedia entry for “Daemon (classical mythology).”
8. Anthony A. Long, “Stoic Eudaimonism,” in Proceedings of the Boston
Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 4, no. 1 (1988).
184 notes
9. Garver, Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics, 7–8.

10. Ibid., 96, citing Nichomachean Ethics I.7.1098a16, I.8.1099a29–31,
I.13.1102a5–6.
11. McKeon always paused at the term in a text and said “excellence.”
12. S.v. Wikipedia entry for “Arete.”
13. Garver, Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics, 194.
Anthropological Tests (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 141.
16. Ibid., 71.
17. S.v. Wikipedia entry for “Paideia.”
19. Ibid., 192.
20. Ibid., 196.
21. Ibid., 197.
22. Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory
and Social Complexity (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006).
23. Garver, Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics, 193 [Nichomachean Ethics
I.10.1100b19–20].
24. Ibid., 70.
25. Ibid., 199.
26. Ibid., 199 [Nichomachean Ethics II.6.1106a15–17].
27. “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.” See Bert van den Brink,
“Damaged Life: Power and Recognition in Adorno’s Ethics,” in Recogni-
tion and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, edited
by Bert van den Brink and David Owen, 79–99 (Cambridge: Cambridge
28. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action.Vol. I: Reason and the
Rationalization of Society, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press,
1984; originally published in German, 1981); The Theory of Communicative
Action.Vol. II: Lifeworld and System, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1987; originally published in German, 1981).
29. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition:The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts, translated by J. Anderson (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995;
originally published in German, 1992).
30. Timothy Boston, “New Directions for a Critical Theory of Work:
Reading Honneth through Deranty,” Critical Horizons 19, no. 2 (2018):
111–124, 112.
notes 185
31. Ibid., 113.

32. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political–
Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003).
33. Boston, “New Directions,” 114.
34. Ibid., 113.
35. Ibid., 115.
36. Ibid., 117.
37. Van den Brink, “Damaged Life,” 90.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 85.
40. Ibid., 80.
41. On “consolation” and “modernity,” see Michaël Foessel, Le Temps
de la consolation (Paris: Seuil, 2015).
42. Van den Brink, “Damaged Life,” 83.
43. Ibid., 84, quoting Adorno, Minima Moralia #6.
CHAPTER 2. A CASE OF A CRUCIBLE OF FLOURISHING (2013)

1. http://theasthmafiles.org/.
2. http://www.matsutakeworlds.org/. See Timothy K. Choy, Lieba Faier,
Michael J. Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing,
“A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake
Worlds,” American Ethnologist 36 (2009): 380–403.
3. http://modesofexistence.org. See Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes
of Existence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).
4. http://comedyofthings.com/.
5. For example, on the Boas-Hunt collaboration, see Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas
and Exhibits,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Cul-
ture, edited by George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985), 75–111; and Luke Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative
Ethnography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
6. Marc Manganaro, ed., Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Caroline Brettell,
ed., When They Read What We Write:The Politics of Ethnography (Westport,
Conn.: Bergin and Garvery, 1996).
7. George Marcus and Douglas Holmes, “Collaboration Today and the
Re-Imagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter,” Collabora-
tive Anthropologies 1 (2008): 81–101.
8. Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography; Geraldine Moreno-
186 notes
Black and Pissamai Homchampa, “Collaboration, Cooperation, and

Working Together: Anthropologists Creating a Space for Research
and Academic Partnerships,” Napa Bulletin 29, no. 1 (2008): 87–98; and
James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus, eds., Fieldwork Is Not What It
Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).
9. Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography; Jocelyn A. Géliga
Vargas, “Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories: A Disruptive Collaboration,”
Collaborative Anthropologies 4, no. 1 (2011): 90–118; Paul Rabinow and
Gaymon Bennett, Designing Human Practice: An Experiment with Synthetic
Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and P. Kerim Fried-
man, “Collaboration against Ethnography: How Colonial History Shaped
the Making of an Ethnographic Film,” Critique of Anthropology 33, no. 4
(2013): 390–411.
10. Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, Demands of the Day: On the Logic
of Anthropological Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
11. Paul Rabinow, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), xiv.
12. Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 113–126.
13. George E. Marcus, “Experimental Forms for the Expression of Norms
in the Ethnography of the Contemporary,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic
Theory 3, no. 2 (2013): 197–217.
14. Clifford Geertz, Life among the Anthros and Other Essays (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2012).
15. Meg Stalcup, quoted in Rabinow, The Accompaniment, 132.
Anthropological Tests (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
17. Anthony Stavrianakis, Gaymon Bennett, and Lyle Fearnley, eds.,
Science, Reason, Modernity: Reading for an Anthropology of the Contemporary
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1–36.
18. Michel Foucault, “Pierre Boulez ou L’écran Traversé,” Nouvel Observateur
934 (1982): 95–96, quote at 95.
19. We use the term “instance” as a needed alternative to “example.” Our use
of it follows in the wake of Francis Bacon, for whom instances are central
to empirical inquiry. Typically, one uses examples to test or exemplify
a theory. Our aim, however, was not to produce a theory, nor was it to
produce a “case.” Our aim was to start out by thinking together empiri-
notes 187
cally, non-theoretically, and to give ourselves the freedom from having

to develop a whole case, which is what one might be doing, for example,
in a PhD project, or in an extended inquiry on a single topic.
20. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,Volume 2: Part 2:
1931–1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
21. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, Thinking through Things:
Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (New York: Routledge, 2007).
22. Ulla Susanne Koch, Babylonian Liver Omens:The Chapters Manzāzu, Padānu
and Pān Tākalti of the Babylonian Extispicy (Copenhagen: Museum Tuscula-
num Press, 2000), 87.
23. Morten Axel Pedersen and Morten Nielsen, “Trans-temporal Hinges:
Reflections on a Comparative Ethnographic Study of Chinese Infrastruc-
tural Projects in Mozambique and Mongolia,” Social Analysis 57, no. 1
(2013): 122–142.
24. Ibid., 129.
25. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, Thinking through Things, 13.
26. Ibid.
27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 2009).
28. We thank Morten Axel Pedersen for clarifying this point. To say that
we were organs with bodies is to reflect on the inversion of the figure
of Antonin Artaud’s body without organs; a body of depth, of un-
differentiation and the virtual quality of the yet-to-be-differentiated
form. Our inversion meant asserting a material plane through a collabora-
tive form: our bodies, the Labinar space, and the liver.
29. Pedersen and Nielsen, “Trans-temporal Hinges,” 124.
30. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989), 332.
31. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989), 112.
32. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Anna Gottlieb, “Beyond
the Lonely Anthropologist: Collaboration in Research and Writing,”
American Anthropologist 97, no. 1 (1995): 21–26, esp. 21–22; and Luke Eric
Lassiter, “Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology,” Current
Anthropology 46, no. 1 (2005): 83–106, esp. 84–85.
33. Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera, “From Car to House (del Coche
a la Casa),” American Anthropologist 97, no. 2 (1995): 242–250, esp. 242,
243, and 245.
188 notes
34. Cf. James Faubion, Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructiv-
ism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 85; and Rabinow
and Stavrianakis, Designs on the Contemporary, 146.
CHAPTER 3. CRUCIBLE OF PARIAH-HOOD (2013–2017)

Epigraph. Robert Creeley, “Onward,” in The Collected Poems of Robert
Creeley, 1975–2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
1. Jean-Claude Milner, Le juif de savoir (Paris: Grasset, 2006).
2. The parallels with the role of the university in the rise of anti-Semitism
and eventually fascism in Italy are striking. See Massimo Mazzotti,
“ ‘I Don’t Really Care. Do You?’: Scientists in the Grey Zone in 1930s
Italy,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 8, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks
.org/article/i-dont-really-care-do-you-scientists-in-the-grey-zone-in
-1930s-italy/.
3. Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists:Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and
the Hamburg School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
4. Theodor Adorno, “Dedication,” in Minima Moralia: Reflections from
Damaged Life, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (New York and London:
Verso, 1978), 15.
5. On audit culture, see Marilyn Strathern, ed., Audit Cultures: Anthropological
Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (Oxford: Routledge, 2000).
6. See Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins:The German
Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Hanover and London: Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press and the University Press of New England, 1990; originally
published 1969).
7. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2005), 1.
8. Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” in Radical Thought
in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michel Hardt
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 13–36.
9. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 5.
10. Ibid., 6.
11. Ibid., 27.
12. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
14. Ibid., 12.
15. Ibid., 27.
notes 189
16. Ibid.
17. Online Etymology Dictionary, available at https://www.etymonline.com/.
19. Ibid., 14.
20. Ibid., 333.
21. David Konstan, “Senecan Emotions,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Seneca, edited by Shadi Bartsch and Alessandro Schiesaro (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 174.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 179.
24. Ibid., 175.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 176.
27. Ibid., 175.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 174.
30. Ibid., 180.
31. Ibid., 180 (2.5.1).
32. Ibid., 180.
33. Ibid.
34. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, translated by Robert Hurley
(New York: Random House, 1985; originally published 1984), 5.
35. Ibid., 11. “There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse
when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where
their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them
in the language of naïve positivity”; ibid., 9.
36. Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations,” in Michel
Foucault:The Essential Works,Vol. I, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, edited by
Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997).
37. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 26.
38. Ibid., 30.
39. Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2002), 47.
40. Ibid., 41; my emphasis.
Anthropological Tests (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2014), 145.
42. Wikipedia, s.v. “Thumos.”
190 notes
43. Fisher, The Vehement Passions, 6.

44. Cf. Seneca on pre-passionate states, Konstan, “Senecan Emotions,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Seneca.
45. Fisher, The Vehement Passions, 14.
46. Ibid., 174.
47. Ibid., 182.
48. Ibid., 176.
49. Ibid., 177.
50. Ibid., 182.
51. Robert Creeley, “The Immoral Proposition,” in The Collected Poems of
Robert Creeley, 1975–2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
52. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociol-
ogy, translated and edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 131.
53. Michel Foucault, Security,Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1977–1978, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell
(New York: Picador / Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; originally published
2004), 193.
54. Daniele Lorenzini, “From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude:
Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much,”
Foucault Studies 21 ( June 2016): 7–21; and Arnold Davidson, “In Praise
of Counter-Conduct,” History of the Human Sciences 24, no. 4 (2011):
25–41.
55. Lorenzini, “From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude,” 17.
56. Ibid., 7–8.
57. Ibid., 7.
58. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy, translated
by Richard Langston, edited by Devin Fore (New York: Zone Books,
2014), 17.
59. Ibid., 54.
60. Ibid., 36.
61. Ibid., 39.
62. Devin Fore, Introduction to Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy.
63. Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy, 32.
65. Foucault and Deleuze on the “intolerable.” Le Groupe d’Information sur
les Prisons, Intolérable (Paris: Collection Verticales, Gallimard, 2013).
notes 191
CHAPTER 4. CRUCIBLE OF MALICE (2017–2019)

Epigraph. Stathis Gourgouris, “The Late Style of Edward Said,”
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics (Cairo) 25 ( July 2005): 37–45, 45.
1. Jenny Erpenbeck, Go,Went, Gone, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New
York: New Directions Books, 2017), 128.
2. Wikipedia, s.v. “Star Chamber.”
3. Bert van den Brink, “Damaged Life: Power and Recognition in Adorno’s
Ethics,” in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Criti-
cal Social Theory, edited by Bert van den Brink and David Owen, 79–99
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90.
4. François Flahault, Malice, translated by Liz Heron (London and New York:
Verso, 2003), 10. Originally published as La méchanceté (Descartes & Cie,
1998).
5. Ibid., 2.
6. Ibid., 4.
7. Ibid., 166.
8. Ibid., 167.
9. Ibid. Flahault divides “the span of human relationships into three main
groups:
1. the set of relationships within which individuals mutually produce
a sense of their existence. This set will be discussed in terms of
coexistence, being ‘in a group’, or affiliation;
2. the set of relationships within which if the existence of one is
to grow, the existence of the other must diminish. Here there is
antagonism, malice and destruction.
3. the set of instances in which the other is external to our sphere
of existence: distancing, avoidance, neutralization.” (Ibid., 168.)
10. Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt, History and Obstinacy, translated by
Richard Langston, edited by Devin Fore (New York: Zone Books, 2014).
11. Remedy: Sōzein [“Terms of Engagement”]:
“Greek: To save, especially from a threatening danger; to protect
or guard; preservation of virtue; to defend; to keep in a proper state.
In the richest sense, sōzein refers to that which is a source of good.
“In anthropological practice the term plays a role in the sense of repair-
ing, protecting, and defining the worth of inquiry and those engaged in
it. The concept opens up a space of affect in which attention can be legiti-
mately devoted to addressing or confronting a range of breakdowns as part
192 notes
of a scientific life.” Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, Designs on the

Contemporary: Anthropological Tests (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014), 149.
12. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit,Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,
Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
13. Wikipedia, s.v. “Exit,Voice, and Loyalty.”
14. Devin Fore, “Gestus Facit Saltus: Bertolt Brecht’s Fear and Misery of
the Third Reich,” in Realism after Modernism:The Rehumanization of Art
and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 133–186.
15. “Ostracism,” in Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline
.com/word/ostracism#etymonline_v_9944.
16. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth:The Government of Self and Others II,
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, edited by Frédéric Gros,
translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador/Palgrave Macmillan,
2011; originally published 2008), 50.
17. “Sociopath,” in The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English, https://
www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures
-and-press-releases/sociopath-0.
18. See chapter 2 herein: Trine Mygind Korsby and Anthony Stavrianakis,
“Moments in Collaboration: Experiments in Concept Work,” Ethnos 83,
no. 1 (2018): 39–57.
19. Paul Rabinow and George E. Marcus, with James D. Faubion and Tobias
Rees, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (Durham, N.C.: Duke
20. Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of World Religions,” in From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 295–296.
21. “Envy is a complex and puzzling emotion. It is, notoriously, one of the
seven deadly sins in the Catholic tradition. It is very commonly charged
with being (either typically or universally) unreasonable, irrational, im-
prudent, vicious, or wrong to feel. With very few exceptions, the ample
philosophical literature defending the rationality and evaluative impor-
tance of emotions explicitly excludes envy and a few other nasty emo-
tions as irredeemable. . . . Yet there is considerable controversy over what
precisely envy is, and the cogency of various specific criticisms of envy
depends on what view of that subject is adopted.” Justin D’Arms, “Envy,”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 edition), https://plato
.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/envy/.
notes 193
22. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1982; reprint of the Oxford University Press edition, 1976), 244,
cited in D’Arms, “Envy.”
23. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013; originally published 1981).
24. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1971).
26. “Antidote,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline
.com/word/antidote#etymonline_v_13533.
27. “Audacious,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline
.com/word/audacious#etymonline_v_26716.
28. “Admire,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
/word/admire#etymonline_v_26020.
29. “Gratitude,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline
.com/word/gratitude#etymonline_v_11929.
30. Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, “Terms of Engagement,”
in Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2014), 147–148.
31. Ibid., 149.
32. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 127.
33. “Impede,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
/word/impede#etymonline_v_29973.
34. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” translated by Josue V. Harari,
in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101–120 (New York:
Pantheon, 1984).
35. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, eds., Late Style and Its Discontents:
Essays in Art, Literature, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
36. Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, Inquiry after Modernism, available
at www.snafu.dog.
37. Ibid., 128–144.
CHAPTER 5. EXILE: WISTFUL

Epigraph. Cited in Mitchell Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on
Albrecht Dürer’s “Melencolia I” (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 67.
1. For crucibles, see Rabinow and Stavrianakis’s discussion: “Foucault identi-
fies foyers d’expérience as venues in which ‘forms of a possible knowledge
194 notes
(savoir), normative frameworks of behavior for individuals, and potential

modes of existence for possible subjects are linked together.’
“An anthropology of the contemporary pays close attention to such
venues so as to ask how configurations of veridiction, jurisdiction, and
subjectivation are breaking down and being repaired (sōzein).” From Paul
Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropo-
logical Tests (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 144.
2. Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “wistful,” https://www.etymonline
.com/word/wistful.
3. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy, 30.
4. Ibid., 67.
5. Ibid., 100.
6. Ibid., 114.
7. Ibid., 67.
8. Ibid., 130.
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THE

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904599

Page 35: Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait as a Man of Sorrows, 1522.

Printed in the United States of America.

Chapter 2 was previously published as Trine Mygind Korsby

For with friends men are better able both

Cri de Coeur: An Apology and a Lament ix

Elements for a Remediated Foyer d’expérience 1

THE MATERIALITY OF THINKING 88

MINOR MODE: THWARTED AGENCY 103

ETHICAL SUBJECTS 114

MALICE: SUBJECT OF EXISTENCE VS.

ENVY: VIRTUE AND/OR VICE 150

COUNTER-CONDUCT II: LATE STYLE IMPEDED,

DÜRER’S CRUCIBLE 175

Coda: Demands of the Day 179

This work is a muted, conceptually mediated cri de coeur. It nar-

Elements for a Remediated

I nquiry aims to grasp and work over an indeterminacy or a

on the original conditions as well as on the initial framing of the

of thinking, not only in relation to the past, but also in terms of

THINKING: SITE AND STANCE

BEWEGUNGSRAUM. History for Hans Blumenberg is

The constitutive elements of Bewegungsraum, which one discov-

(as they might be in a theory-oriented approach). Naturally, this

A MISSING PARAMETER: (MODERN) HALTUNG

HALTUNG. “Posture, stance, style, manner, attitude,

For Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), attitudes/stances as presented

in the audience; minimally, this meant developing techniques

By “critical,” Brecht meant a way not only to make observers

If we ensure that our characters on the stage are moved by

DÜRER’S TEST: INQUIRY AS A FOYER D’EXPÉRIENCE

Let us consider Foucault’s last three years of lectures at the Collège

the Haltung’s combinations with different Gesten would ­produce.

Hans Blumenberg, in his book Care Crosses the River, considers

ric; such a metric produces ratios of deficiencies, excesses, and

In that light, Hannah Arendt was too self-confident in her af-

Blumenberg counsels prudence. He cautions, “Perhaps we should

settled in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study.11 He was

Blumenberg once again:

Panofsky, like Arendt, was nothing if not self-confident.

be contemplating spiritual matters while he is at work, absorbed

TECHNĒ AND FORM

In his effortlessly erudite and intellectually inspiring book Perfec-

­ amburg. He applauds “in Warburg’s phrase, ‘a humanist’s con-

ther, mobilizing in the process the whole hierarchy of mental

CONSIDER THE TROUBLED SITUATION

But what if the failure to make headway in stabilizing Dürer’s en-

Viewing the engraving, presumably after having read and absorbed

The salient term for the current undertaking, however, is Er-

HALTUNG CONSIDERED AGAIN

Blumenberg again: “Whoever lacks meaning needs consolation.

Let us introduce an image that can be interpreted as evoking

Unlike all other representations of similar subjects, the enemies

Others have provided detailed interpretations of the form given

The Rider is accompanied by a handsome, long-haired re-

dog denotes three less fundamental yet no less necessary vir-

APPROACHING A CONTEMPORARY FOYER D’EXPÉRIENCE:

What have we learned by putting Dürer to the test?

be added to a crucible in order for it to have the capacity to func-

GESTUS: A TERM MADE INTO A PARAMETER

Bertolt Brecht coined the term Gestus to cover ways in which

the Haltung’s combinations with different Gesten would produce.

amburg. He applauds “in Warburg’s phrase, ‘a humanist’s con-

e ffect”), through which ordinary and expected reactions to a char-