REVIEWS

Peter Bürger, Ursprung des postmodernen Denkens

Velbrück Wissenschaft: Weilerswist 2000, €9.90, paperback
190 pp, 3 934730 10 8

Peter Dews

RESITUATING THE POSTMODERN?

In his sombre essay of 1915, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’,
Freud begins by evoking the cultural ambience of the belle époque. For the
educated European of the time, Freud claims, the pre-eminent artists and
thinkers of the continent had contributed to a ‘common civilization’, unseg-
mented by political or linguistic barriers:

None of these great men had seemed . . . foreign because they spoke another
language—neither the incomparable explorer of human passions, nor the
intoxicated worshipper of beauty, nor the powerful and menacing prophet,
nor the subtle satirist; and he never reproached himself on that account for
being a renegade towards his own nation and his beloved mother-tongue.

But with dismaying speed this sense of a shared cultural heritage had
disintegrated amidst the manipulative propaganda, raw animosity and
unparalleled destruction of the First World War, a conflict which, according
to Freud, ‘threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any
renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come.’
It is both the strength and weakness of Peter Bürger’s book on the
origins of postmodern thought that it takes this moment of civilizational col-
lapse, so poignantly recorded by the first psychoanalyst, as its starting point.
Strength, because Bürger—best known in the anglophone world for his
1974 Theory of the Avant-Garde—provides a lineage of postmodernism which

136 new left review 25 jan feb 2004

 dews: Postmodernism 137

reaches back far beyond the political disillusionment of the 68 generation,

or the economic shift towards neoliberalism and post-Fordism, which crit-

reviews
ics on the Left have often seen as the source of the postmodern Stimmung.
Weakness, because, despite his title, Bürger offers no real explanation of
why ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’ should have become the ubiqui-
tous buzz words of cultural analysis in the final quarter of the twentieth
century. Rightly sceptical of hyperbole about an epochal transition, Bürger
regards postmodernism as essentially the latest expression of an opposi-
tional stance internal to modernity. But, in consequence, he displays little
interest in the social and cultural transformations which gave the tropes of
postmodernism such global resonance. Indeed, his real interest is in the
genealogy of French post-structuralist thought—and it is only in so far as the
Parisian philosophy of the 1960s and 70s can be regarded as the intellectual
powerhouse of recent cultural theory that his account has any real purchase
on the question of the postmodern.
Yet within these confines, Bürger’s book does have original things to say.
His lineage of French post-structuralism leads back to the mire and massa-
cre of World War One, and the ‘crisis in the self-understanding of modernity’
that the slaughter provoked, by a double route, one more direct than the
other. The first trail runs via the anarchic subversions of Dada—its found-
ing manifesto published in Zurich by Tristan Tzara the year after Freud’s
essay—and then via the Dadaist impulses that fed into French Surrealism.
The second passes through the young Heidegger’s response to the turbu-
lence of the interwar world, and the impact of his account of authentic
being-in-the-world on the French Hegel renaissance of the 1930s. The vivid
existentialist slogans of Alexandre Kojève’s reinvention of Hegel, in his lec-
tures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, would have been unthinkable, Bürger
contends, without the example of Sein und Zeit. ‘Man’, Kojève declares,
giving Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-towards-death’ an exacerbating twist, is
‘death living a human life.’
These lines of influence may appear implausibly convoluted. But it is
Bürger’s contention that they come together in the thought of those French
writers of the 1930s who were to attain iconic status for the intellectual
avant-garde of the sixties. Both Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot are,
in their contrasting ways, responding to the collision of Hegel, Heidegger
and Surrealism. More specifically, Bürger proposes that postmodern thought
springs from the effort of these writers of the thirties to throw grit in
the cogs of Hegel’s dialectic of recognition. Hegel’s philosophy represents
for them the most profound attempt to think history as a developmental
process, a collective human project in which civilization is progressively
built not by the master, but through the imposed self-restraint and delayed
 138 nlr 25

gratification of the labour of the bondsman. It is Kojève who formulates the

point with his typical aphoristic concision:
reviews

Lordship is an existential dead-end. The lord can either become stupefied

through pleasure, or die as lord on the battlefield, but he cannot live con-
sciously, and thus know himself as satisfied by what he is . . . Understanding,
abstract thought, science, technology, the arts—all this has its origin in the
forced labour of the bondsman.

But once the opposition is formulated in these stark—not to say, somewhat

simplistic—terms, the question of which standpoint is to be preferred
becomes irresistible. And the reply of Georges Bataille and his fellow-
thinkers is well known: sovereignty, ecstasy, expenditure without reserve, is
ultimately preferable to the position of the bondsman, and the remorseless
rationality of the world he is forced to construct. In his essay ‘Hegel, Death
and Sacrifice’ Bataille wrote:

Man’s intelligence, his discursive thought, developed as functions of servile

labour. Only sacred, poetic words, limited to the level of impotent beauty,
have retained the power to manifest full sovereignty . . . To the extent that
discourse informs it, what is sovereign is given in terms of servitude.

No wonder Kojève, whose thought always pointed, in due Hegelian fash-

ion, towards the moment of universal reconciliation, the mutual recognition
of master and slave, resisted Bataille’s blandishments, labelling him the
‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
Despite the immense differences in politics and tone, Maurice Blanchot’s
early work plays a similar cat-and-mouse game with Hegel. His famous
essay ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ is, in fact, an extended debate
with the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ingeniously, Blanchot focuses not on the
master–slave dialectic, but on Hegel’s treatment of the early modern cult of
sincerity, in the section called the ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’. The paradox
of an ‘authenticity’ which dissipates as soon as it is externalized in the work,
and thus surrendered to the vagaries of public interpretation, gives Blanchot
his model for the dilemma of the writer. Literature, Blanchot asserts, is ‘for-
eign to any true culture, because culture is the work of a person changing
himself little by little over a period of time, and not the immediate enjoy-
ment of a fictional transformation which dispenses with both work and
time.’ Indeed, Blanchot provocatively implies the affinity of literature and
Revolutionary Terror—that metaphysical short-circuit, analysed by Hegel, in
which the complex institutional mediations of freedom are erased in a self-
destructive frenzy of negativity.
Historically, Bürger’s claim for the influence of Bataille and Blanchot
on the leading figures of post-structuralism can scarcely be denied. Derrida
 dews: Postmodernism 139

published a landmark essay on Bataille in his first collection, Writing

and Difference, and has grappled with Blanchot throughout his career (tell-

reviews
ingly, a short essay by Blanchot is about the only secondary text on Marx
which Derrida finds worth considering in Spectres of Marx). Foucault’s
theory of the displacement of transcendental subjectivity by language, which
reaches its paroxysm at the end of The Order of Things, is largely inspired
by the same thinker. And, thanks to his biographers, we now know that
his interest in transgression, like that of Bataille, was far from being
merely theoretical. In his 1970 preface to the first volume of the Œuvres
complètes, Foucault declared grandly: ‘nous devons à Bataille une large part du
moment où nous sommes’.
In the case of Jacques Lacan, of course—the third prominent thinker of
the sixties to whom Bürger devotes attention—it is not even a question of
influence. A friend and associate of the Surrealists, who published some
of his earliest work in the journal Minotaure, Lacan was shaped by the
same milieu in which Bataille’s and Blanchot’s thinking was also formed.
Indeed, he enjoyed what his biographer Elisabeth Roudinesco terms a ‘sub-
terranean friendship’ with Bataille, a friendship which, predictably perhaps,
revolved around a kind of sexual pact: the writer’s wife, Sylvia, became
Lacan’s lover, and ultimately his second spouse. More unusual was the fact
that Lacan appeared to be more influenced than influencing, his theories
of desire, perversion and sublimation revealing a debt to the slightly older
man. Arguably, Lacan was also Kojève’s most creative inheritor, using the
insights of the Phenomenology to produce a pioneering account of the inter-
subjective dynamics of the analytic process.
But plausible as Bürger’s account may be as the genealogy of an impor-
tant strand in post-structuralist thought, it leaves one large historical
question unanswered. The history of Surrealism is inseparable from the
political turbulence of the 1930s. Bürger vividly evokes the atmosphere of the
time: the aftermath of the Depression, the ominous rise of Nazi Germany,
disillusion with the ineffectual parliamentarianism of the Third Republic,
anticipations of violent social transformation. In 1935 André Breton and
Georges Bataille, sinking their differences, were among the founders of
Contre-Attaque, a grouping of far-left intellectuals formed to counter the
intensifying threat of fascism in France. The rhetoric of the group was
often brutal and apocalyptic, and—in the case of certain texts composed
by Bataille alone—suggested a celebration of violence beyond any political
utility. Indeed, in the draft of a letter to Kojève, Bataille frankly admitted,
‘I do not attribute much importance to the difference between commu-
nism and fascism.’ A comparable mood, if more sinuously expressed, is
exemplified by some of Blanchot’s writings of the thirties. Only a regime
of terror, Blanchot argued in an essay for the Maurrasian journal Combat,
 140 nlr 25

foreshadowing his later reflections on the affinity of writing and political

violence, can drag France out of its ‘unreality’.
reviews

The question, then, is why such apocalyptic gestures should have renewed
their appeal in the early 1960s? After all, this was the height of the postwar
economic boom, when Gaullism seemed firmly, even stiflingly, established
in power, in contrast with the instabilities of the Third and Fourth Republics,
and the French were beginning to enjoy an unprecedented—if unequally
distributed—consumerist prosperity. But simply to pose this question is
almost sufficient to provide the answer. It is true that, in one sense, post-
structuralism tries to render the moment of negativity autonomous, to
detach it from its Hegelian role as the motor of a progressive movement
of conscious self-determination. In the early Foucault this negativity takes
the form of ‘unreason’—later it becomes the plebs, or ‘the body and its pleas-
ures’; in Derrida its most famous name is, of course, ‘différance’. But this
focus on the heterogeneous, the blind spot, the inassimilable margin, is
only half the story. For what is equally typical of post-structuralism is a
sense of the ineluctability of the system, the inevitability of closure. The
utopian, revolutionary horizon that Surrealism was still able to hold open,
given its historical moment, has given way to a profound ambivalence. In
his ‘Reflections on Surrealism’ Blanchot wrote:

That rational constructions are rejected, that universal significations vanish,

is to say that language does not have to serve to express something, that
it is free, freedom itself. When surrealists speak of “freeing” words, of
treating them other than as little servants, it is a veritable social demand
they have in view.

By contrast, while they may have shared the rejection of rationality and univer-
sality, the thinkers of the sixties were simply embarrassed by the concept of
freedom. To its traditional metaphysical contrary, necessity, they preferred to
counterpose its poor relations—contingency, hazard and chance.
The ambiguity is already displayed clearly in Foucault’s Madness and
Civilization. In this book, Foucault tells two narratives simultaneously.
Inspired by the French tradition of historical epistemology, especially the
work of Bachelard and Canguilhem, he stresses the role of discourses and
practices in the constitution of objects of scientific investigation. ‘Madness’
is the distinctive object made possible by the modern asylum, and the moral-
ized psychiatric practices that it framed. At the same time, different epochs
are characterized by qualitatively distinct experiences of the other of reason,
incommensurable models of disruption, so that no comparative judgements
can be made: we have only a series of discontinuous paradigms. Yet Foucault
also tells a narrative of decline, in which the communication and exchange
between reason and unreason that was still possible in the Renaissance
 dews: Postmodernism 141

gradually gives way to the unilateral categorizations of modern clinical psy-

chology. The elegiac overtones of the book are unmistakable.

reviews
It was typical of Foucault’s intellectual itinerary, however, that he did not
seek to sustain this ambiguity. Rather, his subsequent work can be seen as
a series of lurches—first towards the elimination of the pre-discursive alto-
gether, in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge (‘There is
no heaven which glitters through the grid of all astronomies’), then towards
the emergence of the mute ‘body’ as the target of operations of power and
discourse, and finally towards the reinstatement of a notion of freedom as
pure self-constitution and self-creation, in his final writings on an ‘aesthetics
of existence’. In Derrida’s case, a similar ambiguity is not played out his-
torically, in a series of experimentally adopted positions, but rather is built
into the fundamental posture of his philosophy. Deconstruction operates on
the borderline, neither content to remain within what is characterized as
‘logocentrism’, nor convinced of the possibility of escaping it, internally dis-
rupting the repressive structures of rationality, but not in a way which might
lead to any definitive supersession of them.
Bürger regards the work of both Foucault and Derrida as culminating
in an impasse, and a plausible case can be made for this view. But it is
debatable whether he formulates the deadlock correctly. In Foucault, Bürger
suggests, it is the concept of discourse that sustains the ambivalence: dis-
course being, on the one hand, the system of rules which determines what
can and cannot be said, and on the other ‘the locus of the free unfolding
of language’. But it is doubtful that Foucault ever thought of discourse in
terms of such a burgeoning. Even in the last phase of his thought, which
turns around the notion of problematization, discourse defines historically
the terms in which subjective self-constitution can occur, rather than itself
being an expression of the subject’s freedom. The essential ambiguity of
Foucault’s work, I would suggest, turns rather on the status of the pre-
discursive: is it a mirage generated by language, or is it the indefinite
contour of a reality which appeals, however mutely, for articulation? At the
end of his life, Foucault moved towards a curiously Sartrean resolution:
there is no positive field of the pre-discursive, no human nature to be eman-
cipated, but there is the elusive indeterminacy of freedom as such.
In the case of Derrida, Bürger’s claim is that any philosophical attempt
to go beyond the essentially servile subject of labour and rational projection
must have recourse to a different, more distant origin, one which situates
self-conscious subjectivity as an effect or derivate. The fact that Derrida
describes this ultimate, trans-subjective source as a ‘non-origin’, or as ‘non-
present’ does nothing, Bürger rightly claims, to alter the fundamental
structure of his thinking. Indeed, as he points out, it is the very non-
presentability and non-locatability of différance which might lead one
 142 nlr 25

to think of it as an ‘origin’ in the most fundamental sense. Like the

grace of God in Christian theology, différance is a ‘primordial happening’
reviews

(Ursprungsgeschehen) which is everywhere, and hence nowhere. Here the

problem is not so much that Bürger has misrepresented the basic tension
of Derrida’s position. Rather, what is strange, in view of the recent date of
Bürger’s book, is his neglect of the extent to which Derrida himself has
moved towards the notion of a non-present, non-objectifiable source—now
reconfigured as the transcendent futural point of ethical orientation, as
justice or the messianic.
Post-structuralism, as we have seen, rejected the visions of human eman-
cipation that drove the original Surrealist fusion of the aesthetic and the
political. And, even if one compares the post-structuralists with Bürger’s key
forefathers, Bataille and Blanchot, whose relation to Surrealism was oblique,
if not antagonistic, it is clear that the pathos of their treatments of subjec-
tivity is lacking. An unbridgeable gulf yawns between Bataille’s tormented,
quasi-mystical explorations of l’expérience intérieure and the young Derrida’s
blank assertion that there is ‘no such thing as experience’, just as it does
between Blanchot’s reflections on the death-like eclipse of the subject of
writing, and Foucault’s brusque reduction of the author to a function of dis-
course in his famous lecture on the topic from the late sixties.
Bürger does not discuss the events of May 68, and this is scarcely
surprising, since they do not exactly support his case. The Surrealist impulse
erupted again on the streets of Paris, with slogans to match. But where
were the doyens of avant-garde French thought? Foucault was away teach-
ing in Tunisia, where his partner, the sociologist Daniel Defert, was fulfilling
his volunteer service requirements. Besides, his thought was regarded with
suspicion as being structuralist and technocratic, even Gaullist, by the rebel-
lious students. Derrida was sympathetic to the pcf during the sixties (he
broke with the Tel Quel group when they plunged into the chinoiserie of their
post-68 ‘Maoist’ phase). His celebrated lecture on ‘The Ends of Man’, deliv-
ered in New York in October 1968, hardly chimed with Marxist-humanist
protests against a reified, bureaucratized society. It announced instead, with
an apocalyptic frisson and gestures towards the global ferment, the demise of
all philosophical anthropology, all notions of the humanly appropriate.
Consideration of les évènements also brings into focus the distinctive posi-
tion of Lacan, the third of Bürger’s progenitors of the postmodern. For in
some respects, Lacan fits into Bürger’s narrative more neatly than any of
the other thinkers he treats, his work forming a direct connexion between
the avant-garde milieu of the thirties and that of the sixties. His friendship
with the Surrealists and debt to Kojève have been noted. Yet Lacan had little
understanding of the May rebellion, despite the odd expression of sympathy,
intended rather to provoke his own followers. When Danny Cohn-Bendit
 dews: Postmodernism 143

and some of his comrades were summoned to explain the movement to

him, the discussion collapsed in desultory incomprehension. In December

reviews
68 Lacan famously declared to the assembled students at Vincennes, ‘As
revolutionaries, what you long for is a master. You’ll get one’. He was vexed,
even jealous, when some of his best pupils turned towards Maoism—he,
after all, was the great helmsman.
At the same time, it is arguable that Lacan has been seriously mis-
categorized as a ‘postmodernist’. He was certainly out of sympathy with
the pluralism, culturalism and relativism that have been hallmarks of the
postmodern internationally. In Lacan we find a rethinking of the relation
of subjectivity and truth, and not an attempt to dissolve this nexus, or
its constituents. Nietzscheanism, after a brief episode of youthful enthus-
iasm, held no appeal for him, with its implication that we have to choose
between meaning and truth. If meaning has been drained from the desic-
cated, symbolically impoverished lifeworlds of contemporary society, it has
nonetheless found refuge in our dreams and symptoms, in the discourse
of the Other, of the ‘true subject of the unconscious’. Hence the thinker
who most closely matches Bürger’s model in relaying the impulses of the
thirties is the one whose thought, in its fundamental outlines, bears least
relation to the constellation of attitudes typically labelled as postmodern. It
is no accident that contemporary French thinkers such as Alain Badiou, who
make a point of their dismissal of postmodernism, are those who draw their
primary inspiration from Lacan.
In short, Bürger has an idiosyncratic take on the postmodern, to say the
least, equating it more or less entirely with Bataille’s notion of négativité
sans emploi, the protest of a powerless sovereignty against our thoroughly
functionalized world and its catastrophic consequences. Yet even if we accept
this definition, if we acknowledge that singularity and negativity cannot
simply be absorbed in some reconfigured narrative of progress, we are still
faced with the problem of evaluation. Bürger’s admiration for Surrealism
and its offshoots, for their disruptive exuberance and dangerous excess,
radiates from the book. Surrealism has taught us a vital lesson, that ‘the sub-
stantial content of the unity of modernity is diremption . . . The rift is not to
be closed, since it defines modernity.’ Yet, in the end, Bürger seems ingenu-
ous in his tendency to transfer this admiration to the postmodern, almost
without qualification. In his conclusion he writes: ‘Postmodern thought
holds on to an epochal experience. It draws from despair the power to devise
a form of thought that no longer relies on the securities of the dialectic.’ But,
unfortunately, this verdict downplays the extent to which postmodernism,
as a broader cultural phenomenon, suggests an anaesthesia that no longer
allows for anything as salutary as despair.
 144 nlr 25

Of course, if the essence of play is chance and spontaneity, then

Surrealism was characterized by a profound playfulness. But somehow the
reviews

willed inauthenticity, the self-undercutting and suspicion of seriousness in

much contemporary thought is something different. There is perhaps no
clearer indication of this gulf than the curious way in which the term
‘Theory’, as used in the anglophone Cultural Studies milieu, has become
what might be called an ‘intransitive noun’. No longer an effort at the
systematic comprehension of anything, ‘Theory’ has become a largely self-
referential structure—and one whose ostentatious deployment appears far
more important than the phenomena whose disclosure it might once have
been assumed to serve.