Modernity and Ethics: The Ghost of Terror in French Thought A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Mira Reinberg IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Bruno Chaouat August 2010 © Mira Reinberg 2010 i Acknowledgements It is perhaps befitting to describe the accomplishment of a dissertation in terms of negative comparison. When climbing a high mountain, studying a difficult text, learning a new language, one can feel a sense of achievement and fulfillment even if one does not consummate the task at hand to a point of mastery. Halting the climb before reaching the summit, putting down the text before its end or resting along the process of absorbing a language do not impede the enjoyment and gratification we draw from these actions. Partial as the process may ultimately be, the distance travelled is sufficiently vast to inspire the traveler with a continuously replenished sense of pride. Writing a dissertation is a different charge. The process takes place on multiple levels; it is as much an exercise in rigorous academic writing as an inquest of our creative ability. Probed and appraised, our thought processes track alongside intellectual, emotional, and physical integrity in the ongoing challenge. Eventually we must reach an endpoint for the work to provide the insight of a finished task. As students, dissertation writers fluctuate between feelings of insufficiency and enthusiasm. A long breath is the categorical imperative. I owe numerous people for their help in sustaining this long breath. Pascale Crépon, Stéphanie Bérard, Muisi Krosi, Kathy Rider, Madeleine Craig, Anna Cavell, Greta Bliss, Becky Halat, Robert St. Clair, and Sara Wellman, my wonderful comrades at the Department of French and Italian, whose wit, opinions and emotional support have been more than precious. Many an hour have I spent with them under the caffeinated wings of the Urban Bean Café. My professors and teachers – Daniel Brewer, Bruno Chaouat, Mária Brewer, Juliette Cherbuliez, Eileen Sivert, Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Tom Pepper, and John Mowitt. I had ii the invaluable fortune of benefitting from their boundless intelligence, experience, and patience. I thank my friends Melanie Wall, Tom Augst, Tami Shellef, Rammy Shellef, Rina Ashkenazi, Michal Garber, Renana Schneller, Haya Liphshutz, and Lianying Shan. Their pragmatic comments and affectionate listening steered my writing toward clarity and soberness. To Yuri and Sophi, our lives in Minneapolis remain the backdrop to all my successes in academia. Omissions and lacuna are always part of the growing process, and I am indebted too to those I have forgotten to name. To my children Yonatan, Michael, and Roee, and my friend Giovana Xavier I am profoundly grateful. Their help has ranged from the intellectual to the technical with unrelenting encouragement and enduring warmth. Lastly, my father, who passed away in January 2010, my first and true teacher, from whom I learned how to read and how to want to read more. His playfulness and seriousness resonate through my work. My mother, her conviction and strength are the reason for my persistence. To both I send my love. iii Dedication To Yonatan, Michael, and Roee. For your trust and interest and love. iv Abstract “Modernity and Ethics” examines the different incarnations of terror in literary and philosophical works, as well as in film, in the 18 th , 19 th , and 20 th centuries. I follow texts engaged in thinking the dialectic between Enlightenment and violence and which had critical influence on French and Francophone thought in particular and contemporary global thought in general. Three principal questions emerge from my reading of these works: First, in light of the turbulent post-colonial reality in North Africa and France, as well as the Middle East, are there unique historical moments that call for a state of exception in which the law is suspended for raison d’Etat, or does ethics demand a rethinking of insurrection? Second, how do the positions which these writers take toward the understanding of violence shift the ideological frameworks that articulate or contest the conceptualization of terror? And third, what are the ethical stakes in the intersection of art and resistance? In works by Genet and films by Godard which confront the question of revolution I trace an ethics of resistance that is grounded more in the artistic interpretation of lived conflicts than in political endorsement or condemnation of violence. I analyze the notion of the gaze in Genet’s work, and of time in films by Godard. I examine the continuing dialogue of modern thinkers such as Marx, Arendt, Benjamin, and Lyotard with the ethics of universalism founded by Enlightenment thought. The tension of this dialogue is exemplified in Hegel’s conceptualization of the Reign of Terror as the logical v consequence of an ideological philosophy. Modernity is haunted by the relationship between two seemingly incompatible phenomena: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and terror. The philosophical debate illuminates crucial questions that indicate the difficulty in articulating a viable understanding of modern conflicts. With a reading of Lacan’s essay “Kant avec Sade,” in which psychoanalysis confronts (Kant's) moral categories with Sade's literary formulation of "happiness in evil," I analyze the discourse of evil in a 19 th -century short story by Villiers. A psychoanalytic analysis of the literary text provides important insights into the understanding of categorical ethical formulations. vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Tribunal of the Rational: Modern Philosophers in Conversation with Hegel 30 Chapter 2: Jean Genet’s Final Revolution: The Palestinians or an Ethics of the Blind Spot 97 Chapter 3: Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique : The Adulthood of Redemption 156 Chapter 4: A Literary Escape from Universal Judgment: The Ethics of Lacan’s Kant avec Sade in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s “Le Désir d’être un homme” 219 Conclusion 275 Bibliography 283 1 Introduction As long as world events, real and violent, from Princess Diana’s death to the “Mondial de football,” wars or genocide, were contained within regional coordinates, and their disastrous effects were permitted only a global diffusion , the world could continue to fantasize about catastrophic events through films and the intermittent production of conspiracy theories. “Les événements ont cessé de faire grève,” writes Jean Baudrillard in a paraphrase of the Argentinean writer Macedonio Fernandez.1 The singularity of l’esprit du terrorisme is expressed not only in the upheaval it produces in history, but in its forcing of a transformation of the conditions of analysis itself. “Il faut prendre son temps,” says Baudrillard, “car tant que les événements stagnaient, il fallait anticiper et aller plus vite qu’eux. Lorsqu’ils accélèrent à ce point, il faut aller plus lentement.” 2 If we adopt Baudrillard’s qualification of the magnitude of September 11 as an irruption of a death that is more than real, “symbolique et superficielle – c’est-à- dire l’événement absolu et sans appel”, then past terroristic events inflicted on, and by, modernity, or rather, the modern West, remained localized atrocities, restricted to a more or less defined ethnic or religious group of people. 3 How the holocaust would be construed in this schema of non-absolute events remains to be explored, but to Baudrillard – and to numerous intellectuals who attempted to comprehend the event in New York – the symbolic value of the catastrophe lies in the realization that by picking up all the cards – by condensing the technocratic apparatus and a monolithic thought – the system of power itself forced the Other to change the rules of the game. 2 The event of September 11 dispensed a discourse of terror in the beginning of the third millennium which inarguably resonates across genres and disciplines. In this context ‘discipline’ refers not only to various fields within the academic institution but to the entirety of the social arena – the political, military, commercial, and university spheres that have had recourse to the term which manifests itself in differentiated forms in each scene. Indeed, the use of ‘terror’ as an ideological (and anti-ideological) trope has become a staple. In all fields of social engagement, from the entertainment world to the military, from political campaigns to proposed constitutional changes, from its prevalence as topic of discussion in the media to its analyses in the academe, ‘terror’ has become an industry, if only as catalyst to scrutiny by numerous industrious deliberators. The particular events of 2001 in the U.S. and the Middle East have supplied formidable catalysts to the debate, thus providing a plethora of perspectives enabling a broad array of criteria in its discussion. One can start from the blurring between the categorization of ‘terror’ as philosophical and psychological concept and the event of ideologically-driven ‘terrorism’. It is not excessive to presume that the very stake of terror as trope has caused many a good politician and writer to modulate the terms of its contextualization according to schemes that, if subjected to a rigorous logical analysis, would not meet the criteria enabling a reasonable meeting point. David Punter writes of the terrorist as embodying freedom in its unimaginable dimension “around which the ghosts of martyrdom and posterity hover in as yet undecidable shapes.” 4 Ann Radcliffe, a pioneer of the eighteenth-century gothic novel, defined the term ‘terror’ in an essay called “On the Supernatural in Poetry” 3 written in 1826 (and published posthumously) as “characterized by ‘obscurity’ or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially horrible events – it is this indeterminacy which leads to the sublime […] it expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life.” 5 Terror conjures up a state of being that cannot be assimilated to experience yet manifests a limit that marks the forbidden, the non-human, perhaps death.