PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY NATIONS Éric Alliez This second volume in a new EDITED BY AriellA AzoulAy series of books from the AUSTIN GROSS Étienne BAliBAr archive of the British journal MATT HARE Radical Philosophy reflects upon MARIE LOUISE KROGH Boris Buden the seemingly inextricable HowArd cAygill connection of philosophy – simon critcHley in Europe and beyond – to PHiliP derBysHire discourses of the nation: its AnnA-sABine ernst shifting historical meanings and functions, implications Peter HAllwArd and consequences, political Axel HonnetH significance and limits. gerwin Klinger The editors, Austin Gross, NATIONS lyndA neAd MAtt HAre & MArie Louise omedi ocHieng KroGH, are PhD candidates in the Centre for Research in Peter osBorne Modern European Philosophy Anson rABinBAcH (CRMEP), Kingston University JonAtHAn rÉe London. Bill scHwArz JoHn sellArs corneliA sorABJi essays from the isBn 978-1-9162292-2-8 radical philosophy archive 9 781916 229228 PHILOSOPHY & NATIONS PHILOSOPHY & NATIONS Essays from the Radical Philosophy Archive volume 2 edited by Austin Gross MAtt HAre MArie Louise Krogh Published in 2020 by Radical Philosophy Archive www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com isbn 978-1-9162292-2-8 (pbk) isbn 978-1-9162292-3-5 (ebook) The electronic version of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, please visit creativecommons.org. The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Designed and typeset in Calluna by illuminati, Grosmont Cover design by Lucy Morton at illuminati Printed by Short Run Press Ltd (Exeter) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Contents introduction Philosophy and nations AUSTIN GROSS, mATT HARe & mARIE LOUISE KRoGH 3 PhilosoPhy year Zero 1 The German as pariah: Karl Jaspers and the question of German guilt Anson RAbinbAcH 17 2 Socialist Socrates: Ernst Bloch in the GDR AnnA-Sabine Ernst & GeRwin KlinGeR 42 3 Ethnic war in Bosnia? coRneliA sorabji 75 4 Actually existing postcolonialism bill scHwarz 85 5 Children of postcommunism boRis buden 106 deciPhering revolutions 6 Lenin and Gandhi: A missed encounter? Étienne Balibar 125 7 The will of the people: Notes towards a dialectical voluntarism PeteR HAllward 144 8 The absent philosopher-prince: Thinking political philosophy with Olympe de Gouges ARiellA AzoulAy 172 national historiograPhies 9 English philosophy in the fifties jonAthan RÉe 199 10 The erotics of deference PeteR osboRne 245 11 Philosophy in Germany simon CritcHley & Axel HonnetH 254 12 What is – or what is not – contemporary French philosophy, today? ÉRic Alliez 280 13 The African intellectual: Hountondji and after omedi ocHieng 301 14 Andeanizing philosophy: Rodolfo Kusch and indigenous thought PHiliP deRbysHiRe 330 out of Place 15 Framing and freeing: Utopias of the female body lyndA neAd 353 16 From Abstraction to Wunsch: The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies Howard CayGill 362 17 Deleuze’s Stoic cosmopolitanism joHn sellars 372 souRces 389 image cRedits 389 index 390 ESSAYS FROM THE RADICAL PHILOSOPHY ARCHIVE series editor Peter Osborne This new series of books from the archive of the first 200 issues of the British journal Radical Philosophy (1972–2016) offers thematic selections of articles on topics that continue to innervate theoretical and political debates on the Left. volume 1 Critique & Betrayal ed. Austin Gross, Matt Hare & Marie Louise Krogh volume 2 Philosophy & Nations ed. Austin Gross, Matt Hare & Marie Louise Krogh FortHcoMinG volume 3 Societies of Assessment ed. Austin Gross, Matt Hare & Marie Louise Krogh volume 4 Philosophies of War ed. Mark Neocleous www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com Previous anthologies from Radical Philosophy Spheres of Action: Art and Politics (2013) ed. Éric Alliez & Peter Osborne Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity (2002) ed. Peter Osborne & Stella Sandford A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (1996) ed. Peter Osborne Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader (1990) ed. Peter Osborne & Sean Sayers Radical Philosophy Reader (1985) ed. Roy Edgley & Richard Osborne INTRODUCTION Philosophy and nations AUSTIN GROSS, mATT HARe & mARIE LOUISE KRoGH Humanity, some say, has got past the stage of nationalist claims. The time has come to build larger political unions, and consequently the old-fashioned nationalists should correct their mistakes. We believe on the contrary that the mistake, heavy with consequences, would be to skip the national stage.1 When ideas cross borders, they must lose their foreign mien and speak the language of the country in which they hope to settle, before they will be welcomed and naturalized.2 These two passages sketch something like a national imperative, in completely different contexts. For philosophy, even though ideas might cross borders, they can only do so by being natural- ized. For revolution, even though the struggle for emancipation is international, all internationalism first presupposes what Frantz Fanon calls ‘national existence’.3 On the way to the ‘universally intelligible’ European philosophy that Joseph Willm aimed at back in the early nineteenth century,4 and on the way to internationalist struggle across more nebulously drawn boundaries between former colonial powers and the colonized, the nation implants itself, modestly, as a transition. We might be stuck in this transition. For this second volume of essays from the archive of Radical Philosophy, we have selected texts that work within, or struggle against, one or several of the knots binding philosophy to the idea of the nation. However, this is not a volume concerned with philosophies of or about national identity and nationalisms, modern nation-states or ideas of cosmopolitanism as such. While most of the pieces are written with a view to notions of nationality tied to the state-form, few offer historical or theoretical accounts of how these two were mobilized together from the late eighteenth century onwards, or of how states functioned as agents in projects of nation-building or national territorializations.5 Rather, it is instead a collection intended to problematize the relations between philosophy and the nation-form, their complicities (espe- cially after German Idealism) and the possible vectors along which the two have been or could be broken apart. To centre philosophy here displaces but does not jettison the political stakes of Fanon’s intervention. On the contrary, we hope to highlight similarities between the knots binding philosophy to the nation and those binding revolution to the nation. The national is a problem that reproduces itself within the remit of a global horizon, in the apparent inescapability of the nation to both the historicity of philosophy and the constitution of political bodies. If philosophers and poets alike have conventionally been or- ganized into national canons, this is undoubtedly related to the roles they play in national mythology. Figures like Shakespeare and Dante are represented as founders of national cultures and languages, and certain philosophers are credited as doing the same. ‘Kant is the Moses of our nation’, Hölderlin wrote.6 Given this mythology, what would be more natural, after the fall of the Third Reich – in a generalized crisis of political legitimacy, sus- pended between a fallen (criminal) regime and a denazification process initiated by occupying powers – than to return to Kant, as Karl Jaspers did, as the basis for a new political unity. In the first essay of this volume, Anson Rabinbach details Jaspers’ inter- vention as a public intellectual in the post-war period in terms that, it seems, liken him to a Moses who would unite his nation. Here we approach a situation of ‘Philosophy Year Zero’, and we can ask if it is by chance that a philosopher should play such a role in the context of a catastrophe. Jaspers’ intervention had real stakes, but its proximity to the mythological role of the phil- osopher as founder raises other questions. When it is forgotten 4 philosophy and nations that myths of foundation are myths, they are profoundly misunderstood. It is not Plato’s plan for the ideal republic that is utopian, so much as the perspective of foundation from which it is written. In the periods after wars, this utopian perspective of foundation is suddenly imposed. The powers of the day have a chance to build a new polity from scratch, employing human and social materials that have been made plastic by recent devasta- tion. Colonial powers have often indulged in such fantasies and attempted thereby to reduce the colonized population to a blank slate. Colonization always begins, in Aimé Césaire’s words, with the imperative: ‘Start the forgetting machine!’7 Similarly, the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq was, in part, a naively utopian capitalist project, planned as the realization of neoliberal theories of the relation between the market and democracy. In this collection, this aspect is apparent in the case of the so-called ‘transition to democracy’ in the Eastern bloc, whose ideology required the denial of the past existence of political collectivities and the transformation of their citizens into children – see Boris Buden’s ‘Children of Postcommunism’, below. Although the new Solons were not exactly philosophers, they enacted something like a forced realization of the utopian perspective that philosophy adopts as a methodological fiction. In Bill Schwarz’s ‘Actually Existing Postcolonialism’, Enoch Powell explicitly appears as lost in another such Solonic reverie, in which the condition of the end of empire would not only restore the nation as ‘the absolute index of what differentiated truth from falsehood’,8 but position Powell himself as ‘a lone visionary, a tribune’9 of an England at last returned to itself. A second and acutely felt knot between philosophy and the nation-form is located within the historiographical problem of philosophy and of cultural formations more broadly. The narra- tion of the history of philosophy in terms of nations and national characteristics is of a relatively recent date.