Throwing the Moral Dice

Ethics and the Problem of Contingency

Thomas Claviez, Viola Marchi

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780823298099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life. The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency—as the unnecessary and law-defying—in or for ethics? What would an alternative "ethics of contingency"—one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence—look like?The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws.From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today's most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself. Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe, Slavoj Žižek

II

Other Others

Ethics 2.0 and the Problem of the “Unsynthesizable”

Commonality versus Individuality

An Ethical Dilemma?

Étienne Balibar

More than ever these days, we find ourselves caught in a debate about ethics where the values of “communitarianism” and of “individualism” are opposed. On one side, with more or less substitutability, such values as solidarity, belonging, fraternity, recognition; on the other side, such values as utility or personal agency, self-entrepreneurship, and self-achievement. On both sides there are notions of rights, duties, interests. Before entering the debate, which I would like to historicize and problematize, allow me to propose a terminological convention. I will place the simple defense of each orientation in the realm of moral discourses (and doctrines), and I will preserve the category “ethics” for more complex, reflexive positions, in which it is a question of constructing the value of the individual from within the idea of the community, in relation to its existence, and conversely. This will lead me, in my conclusion, to insist on the importance, in these matters, of thinking always in relational terms.

I pursue a threefold objective. First, I want to delineate a genealogy of the opposition itself, showing its metapolitical character (which generally is a specificity of ethics, when it tries to provide politics with foundations or representations of its ends, therefore entering with politics into a constitutive circular relation). Second, I want to ask in which sense this opposition is typically “modern,” by invoking classical “narratives” of the construction of modernity, such as Max Weber’s (for whom “individualism” is typically a juridical invention) and Karl Marx’s (for whom it is essentially a consequence of the development of economic structures: capitalism and the market).¹ Third, I want to see if a confrontation between Marx and Foucault helps us understand the question. Apparently, they fall right into the antithetic pattern, with Marx the “socialist” on the communitarian side and Foucault the Nietzschean aesthete on the individualist—even the hyperindividualist—side. Nevertheless, Marx and Foucault have several things in common, to begin with, their critique of the “empirical-transcendental doublet” of modern bourgeois anthropology, which serves as a foundation for the various institutions mediating the social and moral tensions between the principles of liberty and equality. On this basis, it should be possible to show that Marx’s communism is not just a patriotism of the national community displaced and Foucault’s individualism a variety of libertarian anarchism.

I shall discuss these issues in two moments, each divided into three parts, to begin with the question of the “abstract individual” and conclude on the question of the “ontology of relation.”

FROM “CIVIC-BOURGEOIS UNIVERSALISM” TO CONFLICTUAL VISIONS OF CITIZENSHIP

In my perception, the question of the abstract individual is a direct correlative of the emergence of an ideological and institutional formation which I call civic-bourgeois universalism (as expressed in the great Declarations of Rights and the constitutions of the American and the French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century). In analyzing its structure, I rely mainly on two authors who diverge on essential points but are both institutionalists: Hegel (in the 1820 Philosophy of Right) and Arendt (particularly in her analysis of the crisis of the nation-state and the rights of man).² For them, the individual who appears as a bearer of rights and a potential citizen is not naturally “given”; he needs to be constructed historically through the work of institutions. It is in this framework that we can understand the crucial articulation of what Arendt calls “the right to have rights,” with its two sides: an active participation in the public sphere and a more passive subjecthood coinciding with the acquisition of legal personality. Since Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, this double aspect has been philosophically reflected in the category of “self-ownership” of the individual.³ This legal and social construction becomes philosophically expressed in what Foucault has called the “empirical-transcendental doublet” as an instrument to reduce anthropological differences and subject them to the abstraction of the universal subject.⁴ Importantly, reducing is not erasing: Anthropological differences (of culture or “nationality,” race, gender, age, morality or “character,” etc.) are not suppressed or ignored by a philosopher like Kant (the key reference here), but they are particularized and inscribed in the realm of empiricity (the various modes of articulation of “nature” and “culture” in the history and geography of mankind). This in turn makes it possible to subject them to the universality of human moral nature (defining the transcendental subject, common to all humans, who is also the bearer of rights and the agent of absolute morality). This speculative articulation acquires a practical function, when it comes to devising the institutional forms that prescribe the transformation of individuals into citizens (particularly pedagogy), which simultaneously emphasize (or categorize) differences and valorize—through imposing as a norm—the features of the abstract individual.⁵

A second look at this complex dialectic shows that we can express the abstraction in a symmetric manner. An abstract individual (who is essentially defined in moral and juridical terms, what Hegel after Locke will call “the person”) is represented as a formal member of an abstract community (the body politic, or community of citizens), but each of these two abstractions also needs to acquire a “concrete” form of existence. For the community of citizens, this is essentially provided when citizenship is equated with national membership and the normative character that is imposed on all members is represented as national or even “ethnic” identity.⁶ For the individual, this is provided by conditions of normality, which command the practical use of the various differences (for example, gender differences) in the social processes with a civic function: education, work, judiciary procedures, etc. I will come to this more precisely in my second part.⁷

We must now pause to examine different genealogies that have been proposed for this grand narrative, which lies at the core of the “sociological tradition” since the early nineteenth century: indicating how individual “subjects” became isolated as such, detached from their constitutive memberships, therefore at the same time alienated and liberated (we might speak paradoxically of an “alienating autonomy”).⁸ Why are there rival genealogies? Because one, best illustrated by Max Weber, emphasizes the legal determination, whereas the second, best illustrated by Marx, emphasizes the economic determination. The first essentially characterizes the abstract individual as a legal subject, whereas the second derives its properties from the notion of “Homo economicus.” In the Weberian genealogy, as very clearly explained by Catherine Colliot-Thélène, the decisive moment is provided by the emergence of “subjective rights” for the individual, which are rooted in the state’s monopoly of legislation (and not only “monopoly of violence”).⁹ In the Marxian genealogy, “private owners” of themselves (who can become contractors of their own capacities, especially their “labor power”) are historically released from their membership in closed, self-sustaining communities, through the dissolving effect of market relations (both internal and external). Importantly, this production of the abstract in history affects both the “capitalist” and the “proletarian” subject because they are both contractors with equal formal rights (which, of course, in Marx’s explanation, serve to implement a highly dissymmetric power relation). We seem to have yet another “doublet,” which materially underpins the philosophical construction of the anthropological doublet.

Leaving aside a closer discussion of Max Weber’s genealogy (which would be just as important), I want to qualify the (common) representation of Marx’s genealogy as purely “economic” (if not economicist), which I have just reproduced. In fact, Marx’s account is more complex (and more dialectical) because it includes an essential juridical moment in its construction of the capitalist social relation. This emerges when (essentially in volume 1 of Capital, chapter 2, “The Process of Exchange”) Marx analyzes a formal structure (one could see it as the great “structuralist” moment in Capital) where the relationship of exchange among equivalents (commodities incorporating the same amount of “social labor”) is mirrored in a contractual relationship among persons (the owners of the commodities), which have the same formal properties. Each of them is at the same time an “image” of the other and the practical complement without which it would not work. Accordingly, there is a “fetishism of persons” just as there is a “fetishism of commodities,” both of them representing an abstraction imposed by the logic of the market and generating its own antithetic bearers (individual values, individual subjects). This structure is directly inspired by Hegel’s exposition of “abstract right,” but with an addition and a subtraction. What is added is the typically Marxian correspondence between the economic form (of circulation) and the juridical form (of contract). What is subtracted is the final moment in Hegel’s dialectic of abstract right, namely, the introduction of “penal law” into the system of juridical forms, which transforms a mere “legal subject” (property owner) into a responsible, practically accountable subject. This development is achieved in Hegel through the consideration of the reverse side of any lawful relation, the moment of illegality and crime (both expressed in German as Unrecht), which in turn calls for judiciary institutions (the courts, the penal code, the trial and the punishment). This is what Marx in his structural account of the genealogy of abstraction leaves aside or postpones, therefore relegates to a derivative function.¹⁰ As a consequence, he also brackets (or postpones) the possibility of investigating the moral dimension of subjectivation as an essential element of the social structure, which goes beyond the “repressive” function of the legal apparatus and the state, subjecting the abstract individuality to a system of responsibility, recognition, accountability, and guilt.

In Althusserian terms, this would be the “interpellation of individuals as subjects,” which also “interpellates” subjects as individuals, in order to make them personally responsible before the law and their own moral consciousness. From this also derives his problematic identification of bourgeois ideology with the mere domination of the values of utilitarianism or “egoism,” as it is eloquently formulated in a famous passage of Capital (vol. 1, chap. 6), where he describes the sphere of the circulation of commodities as “the very Eden of the innate rights of man,” ironically naming them “liberty, equality, property, and Bentham.”¹¹ This does powerfully indicate the complementarity of bourgeois law and “individualistic” values with the logic of the market and its generalization (therefore it is very relevant today) but also erases other aspects of abstract individuality that are linked with the interiorization of such transindividual values as patriotism (Hegel’s Gesinnung in the Philosophy of Right) or what Nietzsche and Freud described as the intimate (even unconscious) “guilt” (Schuldgefühl) of the bourgeois subject. The articulation of “rights” and “duties” appears more one-sided, less ambivalent and contradictory than it is in reality.

This leads us to the third moment within this first part of my discussion: the tension between antithetic “foundations” of bourgeois universalism. The genealogies of the abstract individual that I was discussing or alluding to (Weber) are not only reproducing a narrative of the construction of the bourgeois universe; they can be said to give a preference to the constitutional dimension of this universalism. But in history, bourgeois un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Ethics and Contingency
• Introduction. Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics 2.0, Contingency, and Dialectics
• I: Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics and/of Contingency
• II: Other Others: Ethics 2.0 and the Problem of the “Unsynthesizable”
• Works Cited
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series List