Akrivoulis DE. "Being radical: the modernist grounds of radical political rhetoric"

LONDON CONFERENCE

IN CRITICAL THOUGHT

Birkbeck University of London

29th & 30th June, 2012

http://londonconferenceincriticalthought.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @londoncritical/#londoncritical

London Conference in Critical Thought

The London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) began as many ideas do – in conversation with friends. In this case it was with new friends made at another conference where we all felt that the most interesting panels and papers always seemed to appear at the margins of the event and the margins of disciplinary boundaries more generally. From this we were inspired to find a means of developing and sustaining the sense of community we found on these margins. Central to this vision was an interdisciplinary, non-‐hierarchical, and accessible event which made a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emergent academics. While the original call for papers was developed by a small group of committed volunteers, the organising collective soon grew with an enthusiastic response from those who proposed thematic streams and panels. In this way, both the organising collective and the subjects discussed at the conference emerged in a very organic process as academics identified with an event oriented toward a broad interpretation of critical thought. In the spirit of accessibility and the facilitation of and emergent community of academics, we have kept the conference free and decided against the common practice of plenaries and invited speakers. Although the LCCT is not directly affiliated with any specific institution, it would not have been possible in its current form without the generous support of: the Birkbeck Institution for the Humanities, who have provided both financial and administrative support; The Birkbeck School of Law, who have provided financial support as well as the use of School facilities during the organisational process; and Edinburgh University Press, who are providing a reception during which the books of two of our organising collective will be launched. But most importantly, the conference has been possible due to the commitment of the organising collective itself – from writing the call for papers, to designing the program and coordinating volunteers. The LCCT is very much a reflection of the efforts and vision of the collective and conference participants. Next year's LCCT has been agreed in principle to be hosted by the London Consortium – and we look forward to the conversations and friendships that will continue to develop in 2013.

Victoria Ridler and the LCCT Collective


Friday 29th June

9:00-9:30 – Registration

Malet Street 152/153 (this room is open all day)

9:30- 11:00 – Parallel Sessions 1

1. Textual Space/Spatial Text (I. Text) – Malet Street 416

Boukje Cnossen – Reading Territory in Houellebecq's La Carte et le Territoire Octavia Bright – Baudellaire and the Rhizomatic City Johanna Hartley – ‘to' in Contemporary Poetry

2. Critical Art (I) – Malet Street 417

Steve Klee – Rancière Against the Cuts! Activism as Aesthetic Force Theo Reeves-Evison – Art, Professional Ethics and the Great Book of Accounts Sophie Hope – Notes Towards a Secret Service: Critical Art and Employment Contracts

3. Critical Human Rights (I. Human Rights Beyond Marx) – Malet Street G16

Andreja Zevnik – The Proletariat and the right for ‘the common’ Bob Cannon – The Modern Foundations of Critical Human Rights Paul O’Connell – Title TBC

4. Common Life: Critical Perspectives on Authority, Experience and Community (I. Questioning Community: New Articulations of a ‘Common’ Politics.) – Malet Street 541

Leila Dawney – The Idea of the Common Gundula Ludwig – Community as a ‘Body Without Organs’. Post-Sovereign Reformulations of Democracy Slavcho Dimitrov – Shattering the Grounds of Community: Queerness, Corporeality and the Political

5. The Question of the Animal, the City and the World (I. Consumption and the Question of the Animal) – Malet Street 538

Richard Iveson – Cannibals and Apes: Revolution in the Republic Kamillea Aghtan – Wolf-Biters and Over-Groomers: (Self-)Consumption as Ethical Reciprocity Karin Sellberg – Molar Ethics and Aesthetics

6. The Body and Subjectivity – Malet Street 151 Kristina Lepold - Social Integration Through Recognition: Between Normative Consent and Subjection Laura Roberts - Cultivating Sexuate Difference with Luce Irigaray’s Between East and West Erin K Stapleton - An Excess of One’s Own: The Feminist Sovereign in Georges Bataille

11:00-11:30 – Break


11:30-13:00 – Parallel Sessions 2

1. Textual Space/Spatial Text (II. Text & Space) – Malet Street 416

Pedro Castello – The Space of the Magazine Hannah Gregory – Textual Entrances and Crossed Thresholds Matteo Ciastellardi – The Android and the Electric Sheep

2. New Foucauldian Approaches – Malet Street 417

Graham Matthews – Title TBC Attasit Sittidumrong – Michel Foucault’s Theory of Sovereignty in Modern Political Society Michal Givoni – Title TBC

3. Critical Human Rights (II. Human Rights and the Potential of Law) – Malet Street G16

Bill Bowring – Title TBC Sally-Ann Way – Title TBC Joe Wills – The World Turned Upside Down? Socioeconomic Rights and Counter-Hegemony Reger Merino Acuña – Critical human Rights and Liberal Legality

4. Mapping the Concept: Developments in the Productive Power of Critical Theory – Malet Street 541

Tina Richardson – Formulating Systems of Affect: Developing a Methodology for Interrogating and Responding to the Dominant Aesthetic Martin Savransky – Capturing The Social Sciences: An Experiment on Political Epistemology Dan Öberg – Facing Transpolitics: From Image to Operational Formula Julia Roth – Decolonizing Critical Theory

5. The Object Between Time and Temporality (I. Attention to the Object) – Malet Street 538

Sam Barton – Happening Art: Anthropological Approaches to the Art Object Jacob Bard-Rosenberg – Alarm Clocks, Awakening, and the Outsourcing of Capitalist Time Sam Wilson – The Object(s) of Musical Experience: Potentials for Cross-Disciplinary Dialogues Calvin Hui – Fashion, Consumption, History

6. Marx and Marxism Today (I. Politics) – Malet Street 151

Marco Vanzulli – Marxism and Democracy Today Ozgur Yalcin – Inter-State Relations: Furthering National Interests Jonathan Lewis – From Negative Freedom to Recognition: A Change in the Concept of Reification

13:00-14:00 – Break for Lunch



1. The Object Between Time and Temporality (II. Roundtable) – Malet Street 416

Chris Wong, Stanimir Panayotov, and [Third participant TBC] discuss “Speculative Realism/ Object-Oriented Philosophy and the Criticality of Critical Thought” (Chair: Matt Mahon)

2. The Question of the Animal, the City And the World (II. Animals in Domestic and Urban Space) – Malet Street 417

Aaron Santesso – The Panoramic Animal: Authenticity and Living Exhibitions Angela Bartram – Art from the Dead: the Moral and Ethical Transformation of the Animal Pet into Cultural Artifact Lucia Vodanovic – Animal-Life in the London Zoo: Architecture, Consumption and Display

3. Thinking Egalitarian Emancipation (I. Thinking Egalitarian Emancipation) – Malet Street G16

Stefano Salvia – Participation, Cooperation, and Common Property: Outlines of a Post-capitalist and Communitarian Idea of (Global) Democracy Ana Azmanova – Egalitarian Emancipation via Structural Non-Domination (or How to Recover the Structural Critique of Domination)

4. Critical Art (II. Curators in Conversation) – Malet Street 541

Paul Pieroni – In Europe, Nobody Knows How to Scream Anymore Mads Led Behrend – Noise Repetition – The Political Potential in Contemporary Music

5. Marx and Marxism Today (II. Visualizing Capital) – Malet Street 538

Sami Khatib – Allegory, Commodity, and Death. Reading Capital with Benjamin Leena Petersen – On the Visual Dimension of Alienation: The Berlin School (Hirdina, Heise, Trebess)

6. Critique of Critical Theory (I) – Malet Street 151

Fernanda Frizzo Bragato – Towards a Theoretical Foundation of Human Rights: An Analysis from Decolonial Thinking Elise Derroitte & Alain Loute – Critique of Critique: On Critical Interventions

15:00-15:30 – Break



1. Critical Education and Radical Pegagogy (I. The Institutionalization of Education) – Malet Street 416

Matias Gardin – Evolution of Welfare States 1960-1970: Birth of Education Society in Finland and West Germany Stephen Cowden and Gurnam Singh – The Politics and Pedagogy of Debt: The New Poverty of Student Life Soo Tian Lee – The Tyranny of Structured-ness: Is the Struggle for Education Restricted to Institutional Battlegrounds?

2. Žižek and the Political (I. Žižek and Violence) – Malet Street 417

Petr Agha - Anonymous Democracy – The Legacy of the French Revolution Dasten Julián Vejar – The Mapuche Hunger Strike and The Terrorism Act in Chile: Symptoms of a State and their anti-ethical dimensions

3. Deleuzian Theory in Practice (I. Practices) – Malet Street G16

Marko Jobst – Deleuze, Philosophy and the Missing Architecture Robert Gorny – Who Does Architecture think It Is?: Agencement–Theory and the Form of the City Charles Barthold – What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Political Theory, if There is Any?

4. Critique of Critical Theory (II) – Malet Street 541

Donna V. Jones – The Limits of “Bare Life”: Eurocentrism and the Biopolitics of the Periphery Selamawit D. Terrefe – Critical Theory and Violence: Enabling Projects, Constitutive Elements Dhanveer Singh Brar – The Blackness of Black Studies

5. Critical Art (III) – Malet Street 538 Amelia Groom – Killing Time Without Inuring Eternity Benoît Dillet & Tara Puri – Forging time: Challenging Modernity in Ai Weiwei Oisín Wall – Constructing Surrealism

6. Radical Political Rhetoric (I. Theorising Political Rhetoric) – Malet Street 151

John Roberts – Discourse or Dialogue? Habermas, the Bakhtin Circle and the Question of Concrete Utterances Mark Kelly – The Tactical Polyvalence of Leftism Dimitrios E. Akrivoulis – Being Radical: The Modernist Grounds of Radical Political Rhetoric Giuseppe Ballacci – The Politics of Redescription and Democracy: Going beyond Rorty

7. Cosmopolitanism and the City – Malet Street 540

Daniel O'Gorman – ‘Reorient[ing] the Politics of the State’: Cosmopolitanism and Multidirectionality in Teju Cole’s Open City Rachel Kapelke-Dale – Paris, Paramount: Ernst Lubitsch and the Imaginary Open City Esra Mirze Santesso – Cosmopolitanism and the Metropolis Erdem Ertürk – Olympics: Cosmopolitan Dialectics of the City and the State


Saturday 30th June

(front desk and late registration in Clore G01, Management Centre)


1. A Transdisciplinary Approach to Law and

Culture – Malet Street G15 Siraj Ahmed – Colonial Law and the Destruction of Tradition Saroj Giri – Fanon, Violence and the Post-colonials Eddie Bruce-Jones – Oury Jalloh and the Colonial Scene: Law as Reminder

2. The Question of the Animal, the City and the World (II. Animal Life: Beyond Good and Evil) – Malet Street 451

Daniel van Strien – A Marxist Response to ‘The Animal Question’? Hyun Sook Oh – Deleuze and an Ethics of Suffering: Toward the Zone of Indiscernibility of Human and Animal Tom Lee – A Poetics of the Naughty

3. Thinking Egalitarian Emancipation (II. Emancipatory Practices) – Clore 101

John Foran – Taking Power or Re-Making Power? New Political Cultures and Strategies of Opposition in the Americas and Beyond Kevin Gray – The Failure of the Post-1968 Consensus Inigo Wilkens & Andrew Osborne – Abstract of Catalyzing Dissent: Irreversible Noise and Computational Immanence

4. Deleuzian Theory in Practice (II. Corporeality) – Malet Street 415

Anna Chromik – Humoural Assemblages and the Praxis of Corporeal Confluence Aidan Tynan – Deleuze and Alcoholism Dennis Rothermel – Refractions of Crystallinity

5. Sovereignty at the Margins: Critical Theory and Early Modern Encounters with the State (I) – Malet Street 417

Paula Schwebel – Walter Benjamin’s Monadology and the Fragmentation of Sovereignty: A Response to Carl Schmitt Osman Nemli – Hobbes, Foucault and the Shadow of Sovereignty Mauro Senatore – On the Unconditional Heteronomy of the Sovereign

6. Marx and Marxism Today (III. Dialectics) – Clore 102

Vasillis Grollios – Max Horkheimer’s Open Marxism Retrieved. A Defence of His Dialectics Tom Bunyard – Marx, Hegel and the 'Realisation of Philosophy' in the Work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International Ishay Landa – Communism and Consumerism: A New Perspective

7. Critical Human Rights (III. Thinking Beyond The Human of Rights) – Clore 103

Daniel McLoughlin – Human Rights and the End of History Andrew Schaap – Abjection and Agonism: Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights Itay Eisinger – Paintballs Against Lynchers – The Israeli media's coverage of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Can Oztas – Race-thinking: Still Setting the Boundaries of Human Rights Law

11:30-12:00 – Break



1. Critical Education and Radical Pegagogy (II. Critical Theory and Radical Pedagogy) – Malet Street G15

David Christopher Stoop – Critical Education and the Creation of Situations: From Adorno’s Critique of Halbbildung Towards a Situationist Pedagogical Praxis Kasper Opstrup – Understanding Post-Situationist Struggles in Education: A Comparative Analysis of the Production of Bio-Political Utopias and Revolutionary Subjectivities Then and Now

2. Common Life: Critical Perspectives on Authority, Experience and Community (II. On the Practical and Embodied; Radical Perspectives on the Production and Experience of Community) – Malet Street 451

Tracey Skillington – ‘We Bow Our Heads in Deep Mourning’: Genocide Remembrance Amongst Global Political Communities Thomas Swann – Social Media, Organisational Cybernetics and Non-Hierarchical Community Organisation Adam Gearey – On Martin Luther King Day...

3. Textual Space/Spatial Text (III. Space) – Clore 101

Andrea Vesentini – Rewriting the City, Reading Harry Beck's Tube Map as a Form of Writing Edwina Attlee – Fire Escape / Washing Line Peter Safronov – The Language of Real Estate Boards in Moscow, Kiev and Bucharest Jonathan Stafford – Towards a Spatial Ontology of the Maritime Subject of Modernity

4. Marx and Marxism Today (IV. Abstraction and Value) – Malet Street 415

Simon Choat – Real Abstraction and the Marxism of Alfred Sohn-Rethel Elena Louisa Lange – Failed Abstraction: A Critique of Uno Kõzõ's Reading of Marx's Theory of the Value Form

5. Sovereignty at the Margins: Critical Theory and Early Modern Encounters with the State (II) – Malet Street 417

Erin McElroy – Securitization Through Sovereignty: Anti-Roma Violence in the Nation and Supranation Perveen Ali & Nicolas Blanc – Waning Sovereignty’s New Walls: Contested Mexican American Identity Politics in Ethnic Studies in Arizona Konstantinos Eleftheriadis – Is Radical Queer Politics Transnational? Expanding Transnational Activism Towards Marginality

(session 2 continues on the next page)


13:30-14:30 – Break for Lunch

6. Radical Political Rhetoric (II. Case Studies and Engagements) – Clore 102

Alicia Dominguez Garnelo & Rommy Morales – The Not Reactive Rhetoric of Emergent Social Movements Zinaida Feldman – Not Another Twitter Revolution: Social Media and the Radical Politics of Refusal Anat Matar – The Role of Ethics for Radical Political Discourse Sofia H. Hadjisavvidou – This Silence that Is Not One: Silence as a Tactic in Politics

7. Critical Human Rights (IV. Unworking Disembodied Human Rights) – Clore 103

Anna Grear – Uncanny Disembodiments, an Ethico-Material Turn and the Future of Human Rights Elisabetta Bertolino – Right of Resistance and Human Rights Intactivism: The Mutilated Body of Female Genital Cutting Cecilia Sosa – Narratives of Blood and the Killjoy Sister: Queering Human Rights’ Politics in Contemporary Argentina



1. Critical Education and Radical Pedagogy (III.

Critical Pedagogy Now) – Malet Street G15 Jones Irwin – Paulo Freire’s Educational Progressivism and Its Contemporary Significance Sarah Amsler – The Practical Politics of ‘Criticality’ in Higher Education Joyce Canaan – Critical Pedagogy, Public Sociology and Student Activism

2. Common Life: Critical Perspectives On Authority, Experience And Community (III. Dreams of the common; openings, possibilities and concerns ) – Malet Street 451

Daniel Matthews – A Communality-to-Come: Deconstructive Politics and Community Tara Atluri – Pirates and Politics: A Digital Commons or Bill Gates’s Wet Dream? Naomi Millner – An Uncommon Commons: Radicalising the Radical Imagination as a Response to New Enclosures Sophie Ball – Reclaim the Commons: Occupy Everything

3. Textual Space/Spatial Text (IV. Critical Distance) – Clore 101

Ivan Callus – Passions and Agonies of Critical Distance; the All Too Exemplary Case of Maurice Blanchot Saul Anton – Photography, Violence and Sovereign Indifference in Benjamin, Agamben and Barthes James Corby – Critical Distance in the Aesthetics and Politics of Stephen Critchley

4. Deleuzian Theory in Practice (III. Incorporeality) – Malet Street 415

Daniela Voss – The Theory of Ideas: Kant and Deleuze Lee Watkins – Deleuze and Guattari: Creative versus Utopian Thinking Kristien Justaert – Tradition as Repetition: A Deleuzian Perspective on Christian Tradition and Practice

5. Sovereignty at the Margins: Critical Theory and Early Modern Encounters with the State (III) – Malet Street 417

Verena Erlenbusch – Contract and Gift in Hobbes’ Theory of Sovereignty Colin McQuillan – Hobbes’ Absolutism and Kant’s Republicanism Georgios Kolias – The Schmittian Deconstruction of Hobbes’ Leviathan

6. The Object: Between Time and Temporality (III. Temporality as Strategy) – Clore 102

Reuben Bard Rosenberg – Preservation, Restoration and the Politics of the English Constitution in the 19th Century Theodoros Chiotis – Rememory: Temporality and Autobiographical Discourse Matt Mahon – Postcolonial Thought, Temporality, Transdisciplinarity William E Conklin – The Experiential Time of Pre-legality

7. Žižek and the Political (II. Theoretical Interventions) – Clore 103

Gabriel Tupinambá – The Toilet as the Žižekian Vase: On the Implications of the Lacanian Concept of Cause to the Critique of Political Economy Ricardo Camargo – Rethinking the Political: A Genealogy of the “Antagonism” in Carl Schmitt Through the Lens of Laclau-Mouffe-Zizek Chris McMillan – Class Struggle and New Forms of Apartheid: What Does Sexual Difference Tell Us About Urban Slums ?

Evening: Reception [details TBC]


Thanks to Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Birkbeck School of Law for their support, Edinburgh University Press, and to the

Stream Organisers, the LCCT Collective, and to Victoria Ridler in particular.

Streams and Coordinators

A Transdiscipl inary Approach to Law and Culture Eddie Bruce-Jones

Radical Pol it ical Rhetoric

James Martin & Alan Finlayson

Common Life: Crit ical Perspectives on Authority, Experience and Community Leila Dawney & Samuel Kirwan

Sovereignty at the Margins: Crit ical Encounters with Early Modern Theories of the State

Verena Erlenbusch, Osman Nemli & Colin McQuillan

Cosmopolitanism and the City Anastasia Tataryn & Erdem Ertürk

Textual Space/Spatial Text

Hannah Gregory & Edwina Attlee

Crit ical Art Oisin Wall

The Object: Between Time and Temporal ity

Sam Wilson & Matt Mahon

Crit ical Human Rights Illan rua Wall

The Question of the Animal, the City and the World

Yoriko Otomo

Crit ique of Crit ical Theory José-Manuel Barreto

Thinking Egalitarian Emancipation

Matthew Cole & Svenja Bromberg

Deleuzian Theory in Practice Craig Lundy

Ž ižek and the Pol it ical

Chris McMillan

Mapping the Concept: Developments in the Productive Power of Crit ical Theory Stephen Connelly

Marx and Marxism Today

Chris O’Kane & Phil Homburg

Crit ical Education and Radical Pedagogy Matthew Charles, Timothy Ivison & Tom Vandeputte

The Body and Subjectiv ity

Daniel Matthews

New Foucauldian Approaches Samuel Kirwin


Friday 29th June

Time /Room

MS 416 MS 417 MS G16 MS 541 MS 538 MS 151 MS 540

9:30-‐11:00

SPATIAL TEXT I

CRITICAL ART I

HUMAN RIGHTS I

COMMON LIFE I

THE ANIMAL I

THE BODY

11:00-‐10:30

Break

11:30-‐13:00

SPATIAL TEXT II

FOUCAULT HUMAN RIGHTS II

MAPPING THE

CONCEPT

THE OBJECT I

MARX I

13:00-‐14:00

Lunch

14:00-‐15:00

THE OBJECT II

THE ANIMAL II

EMANCIPATION I

CRITICAL ART II

MARX II CRITIQUE OF THEORY I

15:00-‐15:30

Break

15:30-‐17:00

EDUCATION I ŽIŽEK I DELEUZIAN THEORY I

CRITIQUE OF THEORY II

CRITICAL ART III

RHETORIC I COSMOPOLITANISM I

Saturday 30th June

Time /Room

MS G15 MS 451 Clore 101 MS 415 MS 417 Clore 102 Clore 103

10:00-‐11:30

LAW I THE ANIMAL III

EMANCIPATION II

DELEUZIAN THEORY II

SOVEREIGNTY I

MARX III HUMANS RIGHTS III

11:30-‐12:00

Break

12:00-‐13:30

EDUCATION II COMMON LIFE II

SPATIAL TEXT III

MARX IV SOVEREIGNTY II

RHETORIC II HUMAN RIGHTS IV

13:30-‐14:30

Lunch

14:30-‐16:00

EDUCATION III COMMON LIFE III

SPATIAL TEXT IV

DELEUZIAN THEORY III

SOVEREIGNTY III

THE OBJECT III

ŽIŽEK II

Evening Reception [details TBC]

[1]

Being Radical: The Modernist Grounds of Radical Political Rhetoric1

Dimitrios E. Akrivoulis, Assistant Professor of International Relations in the

Balkans, UOWM, Greece

Please note: Paper presented at the London Conference in Critical Thought.

Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK, June 29-30, 2012.

Abstract

Radical political rhetoric (RPR) is generally treated as a future-oriented venture

calling for a total break with the past and presuming a sclerosis of the present

order. It owes this usage to a modernist conceptualization of radicality, which,

however, bears etymologically the traces of its past (radix=root). This

conceptualization poses the issue of the extent and limits of the inventiveness or

mere mimesis of RPR in relation to the dominant discourses it seeks to disrupt, as

well as the novelty of its argumentative forms and rhetorical practices. This

article argues that although the investigation of the tropes and modes commonly

deployed in RPR is important in its own right, we can neither appreciate its

potential dynamism nor avert its possible pathologies, if the relation between

future anticipation and present experience within RPR remains unexamined. By

building on Paul Ricoeur’s dialectic of ideology and utopia and his hermeneutics of

historical consciousness, and by reading these in parallel with Reinhart Koselleck’s

conceptual history, the article shows that dominant discourses do not merely

function as distorted representations of political experience. They also pertain to

the legitimation of the present political order, as well as to the integration of

society. Correspondingly, RPR does not only disclose a series of future political

possibilities and open up a space for a critical interrogation of the present. It may

also lead to a form of escapism from the necessities and callings of current

political experience. The article then applies these insights to a brief consideration

of RPR in the context of the eurozone crisis of 2011-2012.

Keywords: Radical political rhetoric; historicality; ideology/utopia; tradition;

Ricoeur; Koselleck

1 I thank the participants and especially Alan Finlayson, Jim Martin, Sofia Hadjisavvidou,

and Aslı Güven for their helpful insights. I am grateful to Terrell Carver for his detailed corrections and insightful suggestions. I also thank Mervyn Frost, Stefan Rossbach, and Mick Dillon for their comments and support on earlier versions of my entanglement with Ricoeur's thought.

[1]

Past Not Yet: The Historicality of Radical Political Rhetoric

It is almost a truism to suggest that radical political rhetoric [RPR] is a clearly

future-oriented venture, involving a successful breaking with the past. This

commonsensical understanding of RPR owes its dynamism to a modernist

noematic shift of radicality. Deriving from the Latin radix [root], the radical

etymologically bears already the traces of its past. In a medieval philosophical

sense [late 14th c.], being radical [radicalis] first meant arising from or having

roots.2 In the spirit of the Renaissance [c. 1650s], the word radical was even

used to connote the return to the root or the source.3 It was Modernity that

marked the noematic metamorphosis of radicality: its literal, lexicalized meaning

now involved a certain passage of its central idea from the opening-up to the

breaking-with; from disclosing a future to wholly departing from the past. Against

Marx's (1982, 137) own admonition, to be radical is not 'to grasp matters at the

root'. Modern radicality still registers the future, but only after and through a

divorce with the past.

This revolutionary meaning first became implicit in everyday communication as

Charles James Fox's 'radical reform' became a current phrase, and the term was

eventually used in its present meaning to describe the political agendas and

rhetorics of the early-19th century British Liberal Party, the 1848 revolutionaries

etc. In parallel with the social and political developments of the 20th century, it

also became a synonym for the unconventional, the revolutionary, the

incontrollable (Kraditor, 1981). The concrete political agenda of radicalism

remained variant and defined in a historically and culturally specific way. In a

manner relevant to the purposes of the present article, its ideological movement

and diversification has been determined a contrario by the agenda of its

occasional adversary, the dominant ideology.4

[2]

Reflecting the protest and civil rights movements' demand for rejecting the

sociopolitical sclerosis of the late 1960s and 1970s, the impressive bibliography

on RPR attests as a whole to this modernist future-oriented emphasis on change

(Auer, 1969; Bosmajian and Bosmajian, 1969; Brandes, 1971; Katope and

Zolbrod, 1970; Miles, 1971; Tanner et al., 1985; Zorza, 1970). A similar

persistence on the functions of critique and change is also typical in the more

recent literature on RPR (Allen and Faigley, 1995; Fairclough, 1992; Morris III

and Browne, 2006; Stewart et al., 1994). Almost exclusively, the focus is on the

tropes, modes or sources of an effective, subversive, transitory and creative RPR.

These are often traced in the symbolic or creative capacity of language itself

(Griffin, 1969; Merelman, 1992), cynic parresia and diatribe (Kennedy, 1999;

Windt, 1972), violence and the disruption of communication (Benson, 1970),

protest songs (Denisoff, 1968), humour (Hodge and Mansfield, 1985), or even

silence (Block de Behar, 1995, 6-9; Hadjisavvidou, 2012).

Exploring the most efficient tropes and modes of RPR is of course important by

itself. Yet, if the historicality (Heidegger, 1962; Ricoeur, 1980) of RPR remains

unexamined, how could it avoid repeating the avant garde (Bürger, 1984)

gestures of the past? Has the idea of an RPR already become a cliché? Or is it

that while RPR represents itself as constituted in a radical break with the

dominant discourses, in fact it stands in direct and discrediting continuity with

them? Could a post-foundational radicalism face up to the contingencies of

history, without giving up the illusion of a 'new beginning' (Blumenberg, 1983)?

With the exception of the hermeneutic strand (Jost and Hyde, 1997), perhaps the

closest theorists have reached to discussing the historicality of rhetoric was with

the debate on the so-called 'rhetorical-situation'. The two leading views, first

coined by Lloyd Bitzer (1968) and Richard Vatz (1973) respectively, discuss the

[3]

context of a historical situation (issue, audience, constraints) either as

determining rhetoric, or as being created by a rhetoric which renders certain

issues salient. The syllogism implicit in this debate is reminiscent of similar

theoretical dualisms (i.e. realism vs. social constructivism) pertaining to whether

reality is discovered or created by the language we use to describe it. However,

both strands in this debate presuppose that the identity of the subjects involved

in a rhetorical situation 'is constituted in a terrain different from and external to

the particular rhetorical situation' (Biesecker 1989).

In my view, this debate presents itself as a dualism between two seemingly

incommunicable and incommensurable ends, due to a limited understanding of

the relation between language and reality. This phenomenal aporia has been

resolved in Paul Ricoeur's (1991b, 462, emphases added) ontological paradox of

creation-as-discovery: 'Through this recovery of the capacity of language to

create and recreate, we discover reality itself in the process of being created. …

[Language] is attuned to this dimension of reality which itself is unfinished and in

the making. Language in the making celebrates reality in the making.' Both

language and our sense of reality are thus shattered and increased in parallel

(Ricoeur, 1978, 132).

Following Ricoeur's work on the dialectic between ideology and utopia and his

hermeneutics of historical consciousness, read in parallel with Reinhart

Koselleck's conceptual history, this article argues that an investigation of the

historicality of RPR involves a) a 'regressive analysis of meaning' (Ricoeur, 1986,

311) with respect to the social functions of and the subtle dialectic between RPR

and dominant discourse, and b) a distinctive reading of what has been given to us

by the past as 'traditionality', 'traditions' and 'Tradition' (Ricoeur, 1988). I argue

that RPR is not only a critical interrogation of lived experience from the vantage

point of an aspired future. It is a projection towards the political future from a

[4]

historical present always already conditioned by the past. In this context, I will

use the subtle dialectic between Koselleck's (1985) meta-historical categories, the

'space of experience' and the 'horizon of expectation' within RPR, to elucidate the

political implications involved in the articulation of future aspirations when this is

done on the basis of history as historicality, the future-being-affected-by-the-

past.

A genetic phenomenology of RPR

Political rhetoric is often regarded as radical by virtue of a) the challenges it

poses to the given order and its dominant forms of discourse, and b) the vista of

possibilities it opens to politics. Both the efficacity and the appropriateness of RPR

are evaluated according to how successfully it meets these functions. Yet, are

these two social functions (challenge and possibility) the only ones served by

RPR? If these are the positive functions of its political imaginary, is RPR free from

any pathology? Furthermore, what is the relation sustained between RPR and the

dominant discourse it seeks to disrupt?

In this first section, I will examine the social functions of RPR in pair with those of

dominant discourse, in order to explore their positive and pathological traits and

show that the functions of these phenomenal adversaries are caught up in a

dialectic that involves both conflict and complementarity. My analysis will be

based on Ricoeur's discussion of ideology and utopia as two limit-ideas, as two

constitutive expressions for any durable society. In his 'regressive analysis of

meaning', Ricoeur (1986, 311) attempts to 'dig under the surface of the apparent

meaning to more fundamental meanings' of ideology and utopia, so that both

their positive and pathological traits will be highlighted. He suggests that ideology

pertains not merely to the functions of distortion but also to those of legitimation

and social integration. Correspondingly, utopia does not only function as an

[5]

opening of future possibilities. It may equally function as a critique of the given

order or even as a form of escape from the current necessities and callings.

In a similar vein, both RPR and dominant discourse pertain to certain

representational qualities and social functions, which are parallel to those of

ideology and utopia respectively (Akrivoulis, 2005). An exploration of their social

functions complements Ricoeur's own genetic phenomenology of ideology and

utopia, to the extent that their subtle dialectic is here examined at the temporal

plane, too. In order to investigate this dialectic, I will briefly follow Ricoeur's

(1998, 61, 76) 'difficult detour' into their initial disproportionality.

As a form of re-evaluating and constructing our political experience and

expectation, a dominant discourse is often criticized as being a deliberately

segmental, selective, inaccurate, or false representation of political reality. In that

sense, a dominant discourse is thought to perform the apparent ideological

function of distortion. Yet, such an understanding of distortion implies the pre-

existence of a real (correct) political experience and expectation that then

becomes dissimulated.5 By distortion here I rather mean the process through

which the present of a political community is uncritically vindicated as

corresponding to what has been given by the past, and through which the

community's symbolic means for the mediation of its temporal existence become

fixed and fetishized (Ricoeur, 1995b, 230). This process is the meeting point of

representation and praxis (Ricoeur, 1986, 10).6 Yet, an understanding of

dominant discourse as mere distortion is but a definition of the concept at the

surface level.

Moving to the next, deeper level of meaning, I reach the legitimating function of

dominant discourse. It is the task of a dominant discourse to legitimate the

community's present by filling in the gap between the present sociopolitical

[6]

ordering that provides society with a specific ideological pattern or Gestalt

(Ordnung) and the individual intellectual representations of this order

(Vorstellung) (Klotz, et al., 2006; Schaar, 1981; Skocpol, 1979; Wolfe, 1977).

The belief in the legitimacy of the given order is always in need of a symbolic

supplement, and it is the role of the dominant discourse to provide it (Ricoeur,

1992; 1989, 170-173; 1987, 41-43; 1991a, 205-206; Habermas, 1975). Hence it

becomes the discourse of the community's political ontology, eventually leading

to its blindness and closure. It ceases 'to be mobilising in order to become

justificatory; or rather, it continues to be mobilising only insofar as it is

justificatory' (Ricoeur, 1997, 307). This occurs when 'schematization and

rationalization prevail' (Ricoeur, 1986, 266), finally leading to the 'stagnation of

politics' (Ricoeur, 1981, 229).

At the third and deepest level in this 'unmasking' of dominant discourse, we find

the function of integration. By providing a shared symbolic system, the dominant

discourse helps to integrate society. Through the codifying function of its

representational modes, the dominant imaginary is maintained by turning its

fundamental ideas into commonly shared opinions. In this symbolic

schematization, it allows the idealization and perpetuation of the existing forms of

political organization and interaction. In other words, a dominant discourse may

function as both distortion and legitimation, because it has already functioned in

an integrating manner at the level of symbolism (Ricoeur, 1982, 116).

Let us now turn to the genetic phenomenology of RPR by discussing its first level

of function, that is, the way it discloses a series of future political possibilities.

RPR provides an alternative imaginary variation on political reality by opening up

a way towards the not-yet. It includes both an anticipation of and a claim for an

alternative future that, although not presently existent, wants to be realized. This

is the utopian 'function of the nowhere' that dialectically relates to Dasein: 'To be

[7]

here, Da-sein, I must also be able to be nowhere. There is a dialectic of Dasein

and nowhere.' (Ricoeur, 1986, 310)

Moving to the second level, we meet RPR functioning as challenge. This function

is the counterpart of the legitimating function of dominant discourse. Whereas the

latter provides the symbolic supplement in need, RPR aims at divulging the

undeclared surplus value. Such a call is not merely 'the fantasy of an alternative

society'. It is a political 'nowhere' that functions 'as one of the most formidable

contestations of what is' (Ricoeur, 1986, 16). We are capable of radically

rethinking the given, because we have already placed our viewpoint in the non-

place of political invention, for 'the shadow of the forces capable of shattering a

given order are already the shadow of an alternative order that could be opposed

to the given order'. It is the utopian function of RPR 'to give the force of discourse

to this possibility' (Ricoeur, 1982, 117-118). This view from the not-yet nowhere

functions as a meta-critical gaze, an epoché, suspending our assumptions about

the past and the present.

At the third deepest level, we may discuss RPR as a form of escapism. If RPR

remains alien to political experience, it may strengthen indifference towards the

realisation of its claim, leading to an 'eclipse of praxis' (Ricoeur, 1991a, 322). In

this case, it may further function as a new dogmatic orthodoxy itself. If RPR fails

to provide the practical conditions for realizing a radical political future, all it could

do is 'project a static future' (Ricoeur, 1995b, 230). Whereas a dominant

discourse may function as distortion because it has already functioned in a

legitimating and integrating manner, this pathology of RPR emerges out of its

most positive trait, that is, its 'function of the nowhere', which has allowed the

reimagination of politics in the first place. In such a case, we could find ourselves

in a position no different from the one in which the distorting function of

dominant discourse has already placed us. It seems that the functional traits of

[8]

dominant discourse and RPR are simply opposed to each other: integration contra

challenge, legitimation contra possibility, distortion contra escapism. Yet, this

subtle dialectic involves both conflict and complementarity. They are

complementary expressions of the Janus face of social imagination.

The (post 9-11) discursive responses to the eurozone crisis offer an apt example

of this subtle dialectic. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategies of the dominant

neoliberal discourse involve, among others, the segmentation, nationalization,

and securitization of the crisis, the parallel securitization of the migration

'problem', the criminalization of dissent, the promotion of neoliberal policy

remedies, etc (Huysmans, 2006). These rhetorical strategies have proven to be

successful especially in those states that most suffer the crisis and have been

held primarily accountable for it (e.g. 'European South'), performing the social

functions described above as ideological (distortion, legitimation, integration). To

a great extent, the dominant discourse has namely managed to a) suppress the

systemic roots of the crisis (distortion); b) legitimize the intervening role of the

neoliberal institutions, numerous anti-popular neoliberal policies that would have

normally involved an unbearable political cost, the walling of state borders, the

adoption of extreme police measures of monitoring and control, and the

exceptional suspension of civil liberties (legitimation); and, finally, c) integrate

society by averting possible insurgencies or even a societal collapse through a

rhetorical mix of fear, insecurity, and no-alternative policy options (integration).

On the other hand, the RPR often employed as a response to this dominant

discourse pertains to the social functions discussed above as utopian (possibility,

challenge, escapism). More often than not, it aims at a) disclosing those

alternatives that have been suppressed or silenced by the dominant discourse,

while at the same time opening up a vista of altogether new political possibilities,

alien to the neoliberal imaginary (possibility), and b) divulging the undeclared

[9]

surplus value of the neoliberal rhetoric on the crisis, exposing its systemic roots,

and questioning the 'inescapability' of the policies so far opted (challenge). At the

same time, though, it c) runs the risk of functioning as a form of escapism, if it

fails to designate a concrete exit from the crisis and a path towards an alternative

political and economic system (escapism).

On what ground should we then count on and value RPR, if it fails to fully escape

its own pathology? It is the task of RPR to 'flight from' and 'return to' the

specificities, necessities and callings of political experience. For as Ricoeur (1982,

124) has asked, 'who ... knows if a certain degree of individual pathology is not

the condition of social change, at least to the extent that such pathology brings to

light the sclerosis of dead institutions?' We always already find ourselves

entangled, yet not helplessly entrapped within the practical circle, in which RPR

and dominant discourse are interacting. Yet this circle is not unavoidably closed,

rigid and immutable. It is our task to turn it into a spiral. The not-yet-realized

horizon of the aspired future may function not only as a critique but also as the

integrating imaginary ground of human emancipation (Koselleck, 2002, 261-264).

This presupposes that our expectations are brought together with the actual field

of lived experience. It is of course important to investigate the appropriate

discursive forms for developing an effective RPR. Of equal importance are also the

imaginary variations of a radical political future. Yet, neither the means nor the

end could escape the utopian pathology of RPR, if we fail to carefully draw our

path towards this radical political future.

traditionality, traditions, Tradition

What then, if any, should be the role of political experience in our path-making to

a different future with RPR? What is the situation we find ourselves in when

claiming for a radical break with the past? How could the claims for a renewed

future become socially meaningful and practically attainable? These are the core

[10]

questions that I tackle in this second section by drawing on Ricoeur's

hermeneutics of historical consciousness read in conjunction with Reinhart

Koselleck's work on the receptivity of the past, to which Ricoeur’s own discussion

is much indebted.

Ricoeur (1988) calls for a practical yet imperfect mediation between past and

future in a pluralistic unity, building upon two regulative concepts developed by

Koselleck (1985): the 'space of experience' and the 'horizon of expectation'.

Ricoeur interprets the dialectic between these two meta-historical categories

under the light of three related topoi, in which these categories were instantiated

by the philosophy of the Enlightenment: first, the belief that the present age has

an unprecedented perspective on the future; second, the belief that these new

times are also accelerating times and that changes for the better are rapidly

progressing faster (Koselleck, 1985, 18); and third, the belief that human beings

are increasingly more capable of making their own history. According to Ricoeur

(1988, 214), although those main categories have been illustrated by these three

topoi of Modernity, they 'stand on a higher categorical level than any envisaged

topoi'. They are meta-historical concepts to the extent that their perseverance

has outlasted the decline of the sparkling topoi of the Enlightenment.

Ricoeur (1988, 212) suggests that the first of these topoi (new times, neue Zeit)

appears to be suspect insofar as hardly could anyone claim for a progressive

distinctiveness of the modern age, Neuzeit. What is distinct in the first topos of

Modernity is exactly the idea of progress that underwrites it, increasing the

distance (l'écart) between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation

(Ricoeur, 2004, 390). The second topos (acceleration of history) is equally

challenged. According to Koselleck, the modern age is characterized by an

increasing distance between the space of experience and the horizon of

expectation. This acceleration of history is 'the infallible manifestation that the

[11]

écart is maintained only while permanently changing' (Ricoeur, 2004, 390). As to

the third topos (mastering history) Ricoeur notes that its vulnerability is divulged

not only by the unintended results of human actions and the contingency of

historical change, but also and most crucially by a cardinal misapprehension of

history itself: our disregarding that we are always already thrown into a history

which conditions both our existence and our anticipations. This is something

against which even Marx himself (1996, 32), one of the preponderant exponents

of this topos, has cautioned us by suggesting that 'men make their own history,

but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for

themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited.'7

What is downplayed through this topos of modernity is the fact that in 'making'

history we always already find ourselves affected by what has been given to us as

history and by the history we ourselves make. It is only when this final topos

escapes its modern alignment with the idea of progress and recognizes this

'rapport double à l’histoire', that it becomes a truly metahistorical concept

(Ricoeur, 2004, 391).

In that sense, any call for a radical break with the past involves the necessity of

critically re-examining how we relate to tradition. Warning against the aphoristic

assertion that the future is always open and contingent, whereas the past is

always closed, rigid and finite, Ricoeur (1988, 221) counsels that rather than

treat the past as a fait accompli, we have to re-open it as a 'living tradition', so

that its undisclosed possibilities would be revivified. It is our open-ended task to

rhetorically formulate a path towards the realization of a radical future, under the

penalty of our RPR being cancelled as soon as it loses its foothold in experience.

It is also imperative to make sure that this tension is not turned into a schism.

This entails that any claim for a radical future is always already inscribed in the

present and should hence respond to the necessities, callings and commitments

[12]

of political experience. In that sense, there has to be sustained a tensional

relevance between political experience and future expectations within RPR. Even

when RPR projects a radically different future, we still are the heirs of the past;

we are still embedded in given discourses and practices. No matter how distant

our aspirations for the future might seem to be, we would never be in the position

of being 'absolute innovators', but rather we would be 'always first of all in the

situation of being heirs' (Ricoeur, 1988, 221).

Hence the paradox: We cannot struggle for a different political future without

breaking with the sclerosis of the present. But equally we cannot suppose that

our hopes about this future become more meaningful in deficit of any historical

household. This by no means implies, however, that a dominant discourse should

become the criterion of truth for any future claim. This is an immanent danger,

which we will unavoidable face if we 'easily succumb to the sterile antithesis

between a reactionary apologism of the past and a naïve affirmation of progress'

(Kearney, 1991, 57).

Rendering this being-affected-by-the-past more intelligible involves a passage by

way through a clarification of past heritage. Here it is useful to follow Ricoeur's

distinction between three different problems discussed under the headings of

'traditionality', 'traditions', and finally 'Tradition'. First, 'traditionality' (Ricoeur,

1988, 219-221) refers to the transmission of past heritage to future generations.

It is the temporalization of history through a certain dialectics between our being

passively affected by history and our active response to history. On the one hand,

traditionality resists both the total abolishment of the past and the Nitzschean

idea of a hiatus between changing horizons that would dissolve history into a

multiplicity of incommensurable individual perspectives. On the other hand, it

also resists an idealist synchronisation of past and future that would reduce the

diversity of history to the absolute identity of contemporaneous understanding.

[13]

Second, 'traditions' (Ricoeur, 1988, 221) refer to the 'material concept of the

contents of a tradition', that is, the actual transmission of past meanings through

texts and narratives and their reception within the present symbolic order. Here

the consciousness of being exposed to the past becomes supplemented by our

interpretative response to the texts that communicate this past to us. It is

through such (re-)interpretations that what has been independent from the

temporality of Dasein is now appropriated into human existence. Even more

crucially, it is through the transmission of historical meanings that a certain aura

of sociality is added to historicality, surpassing the monadic ontology of

Heidegger's Dasein. Thinking of history as historicality, thus understood and

supplemented, is what conditions the efficacity of the past through collective

memories or narrated stories (Bourgeois and Schalow, 1990, 138).

The third and final category of historical past discussed by Ricoeur (1988, 227) is

'Tradition', defined as 'an instance of legitimacy, [that] designates the claim to

truth (the taking-for-true) offered argumentation within the public space of

discussion'. Here, the above mentioned danger of understanding the efficacity of

the past as an apology for the dominant discourse is more imminent. A

hermeneutics of RPR already involves a critique of ideology insofar as we accept

that the discourses and practices we are always already embedded in are not

mere dogmatic fixations, but ongoing dialectics full of historical continuities as

well as ruptures, internal crises, rivalries and revisions, which themselves open

up a critical space for interpretation.

This interpretation raises, in turn, the question of legitimacy. Here we face two

possible risks relevant to the Gadamer-Habermas polemic. These risks pertain,

according to Ricoeur, either a) to finding refuge in an idealizable but not

realizable future (if we follow Habermas's appeal to an ahistorical ideal of

[14]

undistorted communication), or b) to reading the past as Tradition (if we follow

Gadamer's backward look of inherited pre-understanding). No ideal of undistorted

communication could be possible without a dialogical dimension rooted in the

dialectics between our horizon of expectation and our space of experience

(Ricoeur, 1988, 219-224). It is only upon such a ground that RPR could be

validated, without leading us either to a schismatic negation of the given or to an

unconditional acceptance of the past.

In other words, an effective RPR presupposes that we are not only capable of

genuine intervention and initiative for creating something new (ipse), but also

ourselves made possible and constrained by our material and cultural situations

(idem). This is for Ricoeur (1992, 35; 2000, 23), the moment of 'l'homme

capable'. It is always in the agonistic context (Finlayson, 2009, 21) of our

interaction with others that the capacity to designate ourselves as the authors of

our own actions becomes meaningful. Commonly in calls for a radical break with

the past, we make an intervention and take an initiative that take place in a

historical present which stands exactly at the intersection of Koselleck's two

meta-historical categories. Whereas the space of experience is the past-made-

present through memory, the horizon of expectation is the future-made-present

through hope (Ricoeur, 1995a; Derrida, 1994). Whereas the space of experience

tends to unify its elements and create a solid ensemble of common memories and

narratives, the horizon of expectation tends to expand and proliferate so that

more possibilities will be included in its scheme (Ricoeur, 1988, 215).

Whenever a claim for a radical future is made, this moment becomes the junction

of the 'synchronic' and 'diachronic orders of experience', where the spaces of

experience and the horizons of expectation of 'concretely acting and suffering

human beings' overlap and intersect (Koselleck, 1985, xxii, xiv). The situation is

actually even more perplexing, since the contemporaries of any political

[15]

community pertain to several living generations. In this conjuncture of

heterogeneous dimensions, the historical subject undergoes simultaneously with

others what H.R. Jauss has described as the test of the 'contemporaneity of the

noncontemporaneous' (Koselleck, 1985, 89). As many diverse and often rival

future claims are synchronously voiced by a multiplicity of co-existing

generations, the process of their appropriation may constitute a paradox and in

extreme cases a scandal, at least in so far as this process involves the exercise of

political power, understood both as domination and as the will to live together.

Here, the horizons of expectation disclosed by the present-made and future-

oriented calls for a radical break with the past (one history) meet the

particularities of a multiplicity of spaces of experience. Here, the feasibility of

history meets the 'metacategory par excellence that constitutes the concept of

history itself as a collective singular' (Ricoeur, 2004, 391).

Drawing on Koselleck's conceptual semantics of history, Ricoeur (2004, 392) also

notes this noematic metamorphosis with regard to two events of longue durée:

on the one hand, the birth of the concept of history understood as a collective

singular 'connecting the special histories under a common concept'; on the other

hand, the '"mutual contamination" of the concept of Geschichte, as a complex of

events, and that of History, as knowledge, reception and historical science'. The

conflation of these two conceptual events has finally led to the absorption of the

latter by the former, finally forming 'one event, namely the production of the

concept of "history as such", of "history itself" (Geschichte selber)'.

This 'mutual contamination' is of particular relevance to the investigation of RPR.

It implies a certain shift in the didactic capacity of history, to the extent that

counsel is henceforth expected 'not from the past but from a future which has to

be made' (Koselleck, 1985, 36, 38). The birth of the concept of history as a

collective singular has marked the Hegelian gathering of all special histories into

[16]

one world history, which now appears indistinguishable from the multitude of all

particular memories (Halbwachs, 1952). The old naïve concept of history as a

pretension to truth has been now reappropriated by a new, self-reflexive

experience of history that coincides with modernity. Because of its omnitemporal

character, this modern concept implied that history 'is the history of humanity...

Humanity becomes the total object and the single subject of history at the same

time when history is made a collective singular' (Ricoeur, 2004, 393). What is

really at stake here concerns the ability to make the reconciliatory and

universalistic claims for one humanity coincide, one history for each community,

with the multiple horizons of expectation disclosed by the claims for radical

invention, without necessarily declining the spaces of experience formed by

particular histories.

RPR is inescapably conditioned by the human condition of plurality, which

according to Arendt (1988, 7) is 'not only the conditio sine qua non, but the

conditio per quam' of all political life. Besides agreement, consent or compromise,

it unavoidably faces the challenges posed by human plurality ranging from

difference and disagreement to rivalry and conflict. When claiming for a radically

new future, Ricoeur's 'l'homme capable' intervenes and initiates, guided by the

idea of a common humanity, conditioned by the absence of any differentiation. In

that sense, the ideological vaulting horse is 'nonpolitical inasmuch as it only

brings onstage a single man, an Adam'. But 'Eden is not a political setting'; his

intervention and initiative take place in the fragile stage of the polis; and here 'we

are no longer in Eden' (Ricoeur, 2000, 91).

If ascribing a specific content to the meaning of innovation presupposes a certain

moral judgement, what could then validate our future expectations? Here

Ricoeur's (2000, 154) answer is no other than phronesis, understood 'as practical

wisdom or, still better, as wisdom in judgment'. To be more precise, Ricoeur's

[17]

(1992, 290) practical wisdom is the Aristotelian phronesis reconciled with Hegel's

Sittlichkeit by way of Kant's Moralität. We find ourselves entangled in exactly

such an aporetic and fragile state of affairs, where there are often difficult and

responsible choices not between black and white but between gray and gray. It is

because of its intrinsic relation to the responsibility involved that this situation is

ineliminably fragile. It is because of the ever-present danger that even the best-

intentioned interventions could 'aggravate the evils they claim to cure' (Ricoeur,

1996, 15) that this fragile situation could as well prove to be a tragic one

(Aubenque, 1963, 155-177; Jaspers, 1953). And yet, this fragile riskiness that

brings forth the necessity of practical wisdom is finally what precludes the

possibility of invention ending up into a closed, rigid, absolute and total concept. I

would say that a radical future is accomplished, in a way similar to history, while

pre-empting the unaccomplished; and 'any interpretation adequate to it therefore

must dispense with totality' (Koselleck, 1985, 24).

Back to the future of the eurozone

This article first suggested that although a future-centred study of the tropes and

modes of RPR is important by itself, an investigation of its historicality is central in

appreciating both its potential dynamism and possible pathologies. Following Paul

Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology, the article moved beyond the standard

critique of dominant discourse as a distortion of political reality, and the common

appreciation of RPR as a powerful tool for critique and change. Delving beneath

the surface-level functions of both adversaries to more fundamental ones, the

article explored the paradoxical relationship sustained between them. I have

argued that dominant discourses do not merely function as distorted

representations of political experience. They also pertain to the legitimation of the

present political order, as well as the integration of society. Correspondingly, RPR

does not only disclose a series of future political possibilities and open up a space

[18]

for a critical interrogation of the present. It may also lead to a form of escapism

from the necessities and callings of current political experience.

The horizon of possibilities opened up by RPR is a horizon of expectations aimed

at the future. But these anticipations are already inscribed in the present. They

are 'the future-become-present, turned toward the not-yet' (Ricoeur, 1998, 208).

In that sense, the imaginary of RPR is not only a metacritical gaze from the u-

topos of an aspired future towards the historical present, but also a projection

towards the political future from this present. As always already inscribed in the

present, this projection needs to fully respond to the specificities of political

experience. A certain relevance needs to be sustained between the given and the

anticipated, a relevance that would preserve its tensional character without ending

up into a schism. Even if we were to resort to a radically innovated future we

would still be the heirs of the past, for the temporal distance that would separate

us from this past is always already a transmission generative of meaning. Of

course this does not mean that we should render those legacies a criterion of

truth. It is to connote instead that no matter how distant our future anticipations

might be, we would always first of all be the heirs of our past.8

Of course, the careful designation of the concrete steps towards a radical political

future is not only a challenging but also a historically and culturally specific

venture. It is hence impossible to provide a standard blueprint applicable in any

case. In order to explicate my argument, however, I will return in brief to the

example used in the first section of the article, concerning the dominant discourse

and the RPR employed on the eurozone crisis. Recent political developments in

Europe indicate a rise of the Left, a drift that is, quite interestingly, not confined in

the so-called 'European South'. Admittedly, this could be hardly attributed to the

efficacity of the RPR employed or the appeal of the political agenda of the Left

alone. Furthermore, no matter how appealing this RPR has proven to be, it still

[19]

has not formed powerful majorities within national electorates able to drive radical

reforms. The recent national elections in Greece, for example, where the maxim

dilemma has been 'fear or hope', have shown that people are still more afraid

than hopeful.

Of course, the RPR employed should keep disclosing all those alternatives that

have been shuttered by the neoliberal discourse, and challenge the 'no-

alternative' neoliberal dilemmas. Yet, the political agenda of the Left could be

hardly appealing enough to affect change, if the RPR employed fails to respond to

the necessities, commitments, and challenges posed not only by the eurozone

crisis, but also and foremost by the well-established practices and discourses of

neoliberal capitalism in the post-9-11 era. To be more precise, here follow some

questions that the Left should consider: How would the claim to tolerance and

equality become appealing, when electorates still see migration as a security

threat rather than as the systemic outcome of the workings of neoliberal

capitalism? How would the claim for social solidarity and social justice become

meaningful, when the modern individual still understands itself and its relation to

others as self-centred and self-interested, lastingly embedded in neoliberal

discourses and practices? How would people be able to hope and translate this

hope into a meaningful political claim, if they are still afraid; if, that is, a number

of already securitized issues have not been adequately de-securitized? How would

it be possible to draft efficient development alternatives, when 'development' is

still conceptualized and measured in terms of 'new imperialism'? How would

environmental concerns become meaningful, when the modern subject is no

longer the Latin sub-jectum, literally, 'that which is thrown under' (Critchley,

1999, 51), but the dominant sovereign subject surrounded by a nature always at

its disposal?

[20]

Answering such questions involves difficult decisions. This difficulty proves that

the crisis experienced is not only of an economic nature. Instead, our historical

present will remain, in Ricoeur's (1998, 235) words, wholly a 'crisis', as long as we

fail to bridge the hiatus between our space of experience and our horizon of

expectation. This is a moment of risk and fragility, a political moment, at least

insofar as the hopes and memories of a particular grouping meet the hopes and

memories of another. In a sense, this is also a violent moment since ascribing a

certain noematic content to this new future involves political relations that pertain

to domination and subordination. But this is also a time of Arendtean (1972, 143)

'action' and 'power'. Here the universal meets the particular. The one history

meets the multitude of individual histories, as RPR meets the challenges posed by

the specificities of a multiplicity of distinct spaces of experiences and horizons of

expectations. This aporetic and fragile moment constitutes both a paradox and a

challenge. The invention implicit in RPR is born from this paradox and inescapably

faces this challenge. It is only when RPR is counselled by a public phronesis that

adapts the universal to fit the particular that it can become both socially

meaningful and practically attainable.

Notes

2 The Greeks used the word rhexekelefthos, literally meaning the one who opens up a new

course.

3 Yet, this is not to suggest that such a lexical intervention could reveal any originary

meanings or unimpaired strengths of the word. Instead, I refer to the literal senses of

radical not as the origins of the word, but as the results of its usage having become

customary and lexicalised. My reference to the literal sense of radical neither involves a

conflation of the literal with the originary, nor implies that the word possesses in itself 'a

proper, i.e. primitive, natural, original (etumon) meaning'; because literal 'does not mean

proper in the sense of originary, but simply current, "usual"' (Ricoeur, 1997, 290, 291).

4 Margaret Thatcher has been even described as a 'radical' within the Conservative Party.

[21]

5 My treatment of this 'reality' is based on a reading of The German Ideology (Marx and

Engels, 1970, 46-47), where the 'real' (the way people are wirklich) is equated with the

'actual' and the 'material' rather than the 'correct', as individuals are put together with

their material conditions, the way they operate (wirken).

6 The starting and departure point of Ricoeur's (1986, 172-173) treatment of ideology is

Karl Mannheim's critique. Although he accepts Mannheim's discussion of its

representational qualities, Ricoeur rejects Mannheim’s claim that ideology is a mere

deviation from reality. I concur with Terry Eagleton’s (1992, 109) assertion that the

ideological function of Mannheim's 'sociology of knowledge' replaces the Marxist conception

of ideology with 'the less embattled, contentious conception of a "world view"'. Actually, in

both Ricoeur and Mannheim, ideology is treated as more a form of socially constructed

world view than as a system of ideas solely relating to the interests of the bourgeoisie. It

might be also the case that the drift of Mannheim's work comes to downplay concepts of

mystification, rationalisation, legitimation and the power-function of ideas 'in the name of

some synoptic survey of the evolution of forms of historical consciousness' (Eagleton,

2000, 194), thus returning ideology to its pre-Marxist conceptualisation. Yet, this could

hardly be the case with Ricoeur's own account due to the centrality not only of the

distorting but also of the rationalising, legitimating, power-related and mystificatory

manifestations of ideology in his analysis. Terrell Carver (1991; 2009) and Manfred Steger

(2008, 19-43) offer some critical histories of the conceptual mutations of ideology.

7 Re-reading the Brumaire as a short treatise on the performative power of this being-

affected-by-the-past, Carver (2002, 19) is making a similar point: 'The most astonishingly

original and egregiously underestimated of Marx's devices in the Eighteenth Brumaire is

not the idea that people make history albeit under constraints. The novelty is rather the

identification of "circumstances, given and inherited" - not with economic conditions or

relations of production or any such "material" feature of experience - but with something

quite different: "tradition from all the dead generations" weighing "like a nightmare on the

brain of the living".' I briefly return to this theme discussing the historicality of RPR under

the Ricoeurean headings of 'traditionality' and 'traditions'.

8 Interestingly enough, finding refuge to 'radical traditions' may even function as an

apology for one of the dominant discourses (see Salveson, 2011).

[22]

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