Intersubjectivity and the Double

Troubled Matters

Brian Seitz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137563750
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book extends philosophy's engagement with the double beyond hierarchized binary oppositions. Brian Seitz explores the double as a necessary ontological condition or figure that gets represented, enacted, and performed repeatedly and in a myriad of configurations. Seitz suggests that the double in all of its forms is simultaneously philosophy's shadow, its nemesis, and the condition of its possibility. This book expands definitions and investigations of the double beyond the confines of philosophy, suggesting that the concept is at work in many other fields including politics, cultural narratives, literature, mythology, and psychology. Seitz approaches the double by means of a series of case studies and by engaging loosely in eidetic variation, a methodological maneuver borrowed from phenomenology. The book explores the ways in which wide-ranging instances of the double are connected by the dynamics of intersubjectivity.

© The Author(s) 2016

Brian SeitzIntersubjectivity and the Double10.1057/978-1-137-56375-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Politics of Intersubjectivity: Representation and the Double

Brian Seitz¹

(1)

Arts & Humanities, Babson College, Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, USA

End Abstract

Intersubjects

The double might best first be characterized as an existential phenomenon or—better—an ontological configuration, one animated by its profound association with intersubjectivity, an open-ended and unstable assurance that the parameters of subjectivity are fundamentally breached from the outset, that the subject is never solo. While this configuration is housed within philosophy and literature, it filters into their fancy frames from the multifarious, animated shapes the double takes in human life and stories. Since the double takes many forms, the profiles thematized in the chapters that follow this opening salvo will offer vibrant variants, with the thread of continuity being the inevitability of the sense in which the double is both an expression of intimately linked up with the dynamics of intersubjectivity. I might call it a “social” phenomenon, but that appellation is too domestic and numbingly familiar for my purposes. Putting a spectral spin on things, Thomas Thorp observes thus: “To exist in an awareness of one’s own death is to be forced to exist within a ‘second life,’ not the biological life given to us. We live within a world that is a dream of death, and this is a world that we must construct, a human world, a world defined, in short, by politics.” ¹

Meanwhile, it might be most effective to begin this series of visitations with a chapter on the double’s visage in this theater of politics, where intersubjectivity finds its most ritualistic and fecund voice, the relation between the double and intersubjectivity released and extended in new directions by the powers of representation.

From the outset, political representation is itself double, formulating itself both in practices and in narratives, entangled in both iconographies (stills, e.g. twos) and choreographies (ballets, e.g. character relations), with the stills serving to reinforce and intensify the power of the dance of the deuce. Starting here, in this opening chapter and encounter with stills and ballets, I will exercise the practice of something like eidetic variation, borrowed from phenomenology.

Orchestrating a Double

In the field, numerous permutations of the double play out not just in different examples but in variant expressions and configurations of political representation, The most conspicuous, “literal” variant is probably the one at work in the substitutions associated with what in its modern version is conceived of in terms of the practice of representative government, with representatives standing in the place of their electorates, constituencies, interests, nation, or “people” (the referent or subject of representative government takes decisively different shapes in different historical, political, and socioeconomic contexts, sometimes exhibiting different and even conflicting shapes simultaneously). Having written about that vexed and unavoidable double elsewhere, ² I will not dwell long on it here, although I would be remiss not to pause to acknowledge it and to observe that there is, of course, nothing actually literal about any such substitution, and that, marked by a fracture, this type of representation is by its very nature not only deeply double but also thoroughly metaphysical.

However otherwise conceived, this is a stage inhabited and enlivened by what Thomas Hobbes called “artificial persons,” ³ a concept that prefigures and is the condition of the much later, unabashedly tumescent yet degraded assertion that “corporations are people, my friend!” ⁴ To paint a picture of this dual beast—artificial persons and what they stand in for—John Adams famously wrote that a legislative body “ should be an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large.” ⁵ Now the image of an exact portrait is in itself both illuminating and compelling, particularly since exactitude in representation is not only an impossible but a fundamentally misguided ideal (the double is not only persistent but also seldom a neat binary affair, just as a mirror’s reflection is never neat). Less dramatic but perhaps even more compelling and even startling, though, is the reference to “the people at large”: metaphysics openly occupies the miniature portrait, but it is equally at work in that portrait’s referent.

To translate this into a context immediately recognizable and noteworthy to philosophers and political theorists today, the matter-of-fact givenness assumed by and asserted in “the people at large” is a paradigmatic exemplification of the motivations for a deconstruction of presence as well as for genealogies of the subject: It’s not that nothing is there, but the problematic portrait is as constitutive of what it represents as vice versa, a frequent characteristic of the double, which is to say that political representation is what Foucault describes as a “semio-technique.” ⁶ And it is worth adding that while Adams’ illustration is not exactly quaint and should not be historically diminished, the dynamics of contemporary political representation, which would seem to continue to be rooted in eighteenth-century theory, have gotten immeasurably more complex in the intervening years, a case of an evolving and increasingly complicated double characterized by new forms of convoluted yet creative disjunction embedded in the interdependence between its two aspects, an interdependence largely now informed and shaped by the convergence of electronic technology and global capitalism. One might say that representative politics of the electronic world is a double of eighteenth-century political representation.

The last observation regarding evolving or mutated relations between prominent aspects or twinned elements of the political double could lead to questions regarding quality of representation, a Nietzschean assessment of which might perhaps be conceptualized by measures of health: robust representation, life-promoting representation, therapeutic representation, anemic representation, necrotic representation, and so on. And it is Nietzsche who provokes us with the question, “Are you genuine, or just an actor? A representative? Or the very thing that’s represented? In the end you may simply be an imitation of an actor.” ⁷

Alternatively, representation might be gauged in terms of degrees, splayed out in terms of a spectrum: full representation, moderate representation, some representation, meager representation, misrepresentation, or even the absence of representation (that last is a peculiar one that would seem to make no philosophical sense), and so on. Regardless of the register, the ability to make judgments about either quality or degree is clearly of paramount importance on an empirical plane, and philosophers have devoted considerable efforts toward making the conceptual distinctions upon which such judgments might be based. ⁸ However, and while it is not my intention to conflate variegations, what philosophers say has little bearing on things once the general discourse of representation is established (which it always will have been). So in contrast with, in particular, political science, I am taking something like a phenomenological stance ⁹ here, focusing on one facet or a subset of the essence of representation: Once there are representative bodies, some version of the double is always in play in the realm of political intersubjectivity, and it is that ineluctable reality that is of abiding philosophical interest. This is the case whether representatives are understood to be, on the one hand, delegates bearing instructions and an already defined agenda, or, on the other hand, trustees endowed with the license and prerogative to determine what that agenda might be (and of course, representatives typically tend to pose as delegates while exercising their license as much as they can get away with). The delegate model assumes a solid, determinate identity to be represented, while the trustee is free to define and articulate what that identity is. But whether the representative stands for those who elected her or stands for something more openly ethereal—for example, national interest—and whether representation is understood to be actual or virtual, its practice introduces a deep double into the dynamics of political intersubjectivity, and there is no getting around a double that is just there.

All of this having been said, the curious thing about this sort of representative double is that, however it is understood, that which “speaks in the name of” the average, must itself be exceptional, extraordinary. The split embodied in this double is no more symmetrical than others we will encounter along the way.

Originary Doubling

But that general type of representation is only the first, most conspicuous or literal sort, and I intend to devote the remainder of this study exploring other varieties of the political double, which seem invariably to entail elements of the extraordinary. Second, not in order of priority but simply in order of address, another prominent linkage between the double and political representation is the one that revolves around and flows from a political community’s or political culture’s need to represent a coherent identity and thus by extension its legitimacy. This need—this necessity—manifests itself in a variety of ways, featuring often phantom-like images of twinnings and of reflections in narratives that both create and sustain, or that sometimes sustain by offering accounts of the origin. Representation in this second sense provides a political community’s foundation. And it is worth noting in advance that while such narratives often feature overt doubles, the narrative is itself a double in relation to the community, as well as vice versa (as a compact metonym, think here of the mutually constitutive relation between Adams’ portrait and the people at large). Sometimes these stories are even told by or reflected in social structures that are physical structures rather than in literal narratives.

The first variety of political representation and this second sort—the representation of doubles in narratives—overlap under the auspices of leadership. Parliaments, councils, senates, Russian soviets, Iceland’s Althing, even prime ministers, chieftains, and kings: all of these practices of leadership and leadership roles (subject positions) are instances of representation entailing substitution—standing for and acting for—and are thus by their very nature practices of doubling. But aligned with practices of representation, the stories about leaders and bodies of leadership are also permeated by the double, in both the form and content of theories and origin narratives, and in the rituals associated with these things.

The Double in the Flesh

My first self-conscious contact with this second sort of political representation—and thus with the determinative double featured in theories and stories—was in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault makes reference to Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. ¹⁰ Kantorowicz’s work should be familiar to anyone who has read Foucault, so, like Foucault, I will recount only its most general contours.

First of all, and most telling, in the historical backdrop of this later political theory about the double nature of the King is an earlier theological understanding of the twinned nature of Jesus Christ, who, to simplify some of the nuanced extensions contained within a protracted and variegated debate, has two bodies, his human body and his divine body (directly related to which are other theological twinnings, including Augustine’s distinction between the earthly city and the City of God ¹¹ ). Christ is the exemplary double for European Catholicism, and it is a bit stunning to ponder the fact that it his body that is the subject of this twinning.

While the discourse regarding Jesus’ two bodies is fundamentally theological in nature, it is also already political insofar as Christianity is an institution or network of institutions, and so the eventual historical transference of the two bodies discourse from a religious context to an overtly political context is not so mystical. Kantorowicz asks, “Did the idea of doubleness—‘One body of Christ which is he himself, and another body of which he is the head’—find its equivalent in the secular sphere when the corpus reipublicae mysticum came into being?” (K 268). But he has already paved the way to answering the question, having bluntly noted that “The idea of the corpus mysticum was undeniably transferred and applied to the political entities” (K 267), which is to say displaced from a Christological discourse to a political discourse regarding, now, the necessarily double status of the King.

Thus from a rich theological account is derived a complicated and even more nuanced set of what comes to be specifically English political theories regarding the two bodies of the king, which starts with his head in heaven and his feet on the ground, but evolves into the semi-secular and even more wildly metaphorical distinction between the King’s individual body and the King as body politic. The word Crown thus comes to mean “something not quite identical with ‘realm’” yet “not quite identical with ‘king’ either… As opposed to the pure physis of the King and to the pure physis of the territory, the word ‘Crown,’ when added, indicated the political metaphysis in which both rex and regnum shared, or the body politic (to which both belonged) in its sovereign rights” (Kantorowicz, 341–342). In other words, an understanding of the legitimacy and multi-layered, complex status of the King in his relation to the realm required a double, one whose gravity was amplified by the extra subliminal power provided by its derivation from an understanding of the Son of God. Summarizing the broad ramifications of this theory, Kantorowicz writes thus: “There can be no doubt that in the later Middle Ages the idea was current that in the Crown ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. The Politics of Intersubjectivity: Representation and the Double
• 2. Philosophy’s Use and Abuse of the Double: Plato and Kant
• 3. Precisely Not Me: The Deuce in Dostoevsky
• 4. Proximities to Death: Freud’s Archaic Doubles
• 5. The Ineluctable Double: Phenomenology’s Other
• 6. Epilogue: Second Guessing—Emergent Doubles
• Backmatter