Force and Understanding: Writings on Philosophy and Resistance

492 Pages·2020·3.428 MB·English

by  Howard Caygill (Author), Stephen Howard (Anthology Editor), Jacqueline Rose (Afterword)

Introduction
Howard Caygill’s philosophical practice
Cultural history, political theory, aesthetics, sociology, literary criticism?
Howard Caygill’s work over the past three decades defies categorization. He
is best understood as a philosopher in the continental tradition, but, given that
his is an original voice in the already wildly diverse field of modern European
thought, this leaves everything still to be explained.
Caygill is known for the innovative and sophisticated readings of major
thinkers in his books on Kant (Art of Judgement (1989)), Benjamin (Walter
Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998)) and Levinas (Levinas and the
Political (2001)). His A Kant Dictionary (1995) provides uniquely thoughtful and
historicized glosses on Kant’s terminology that have helped scores of readers
navigate the works of this most canonical of philosophers. In 2013, Caygill
reached a wider public through On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, a
timely exploration of the philosophical-political notion of resistance. His work
on resistance will form a trilogy: the second instalment is Kafka: In the Light of
the Accident (2017) and the third book, Aesthetics of Madness, will examine
madness, art and psychiatry.
It is less well known that over the last thirty years, Caygill has written
close to a hundred articles and book chapters on an astonishingly wide range
of topics. These are not merely drafts that were later collected in his books.
Caygill treats his books as self-sufficient works, writing each from scratch,
and his essays form a separate body of work in their own right. A glance
at the subjects treated in the essays shows that Caygill is a different breed
of thinker to the blinkered hyper-specialist typically produced by modern
universities. Topics on which he has written include Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz,
Italian-Egyptian poet Guiseppe Ungaretti, Shakespeare and nihilism, Husserl,
theories of memory, the Ottoman Baroque, Karl Popper’s ontology, Naples,
the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Saenredam, graffiti, the historians
2 FORCE AND UNDERSTANDING
Fernand Braudel and Arnaldo Momigliano, Scholem and Taubes on Sabbatai
Zevi, and many more.
The present collection brings together for the first time a selection of
Caygill’s most significant philosophical essays. It presents pieces originally
published in a range of journals, edited collections, magazines and pamphlets,
now often difficult to find, alongside new and previously unpublished texts. In
order to showcase his work on philosophical themes, I have left out Caygill’s
essays on art, architecture and cities (including, in fact, all those on the topics
listed above). Despite this limitation, the essays collected here have a range that
is unique in contemporary philosophy. As well as engaging more deeply with
themes in Kant, Benjamin, Levinas and Clausewitz, we see Caygill pursuing
surprising and provocative interpretations of Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx,
Maxwell, Arendt, Fanon, Derrida, Deleuze, Rose and many others. The essays
provide insight into the philosophical roots of Caygill’s ‘resistance’ project,
illuminating and supplementing the theoretical frameworks of On Resistance
and Kafka. Moreover, each individual piece has intrinsic philosophical interest
and testifies to Caygill’s belief in the value of close, critical reading.
Although Caygill’s work has an unparalleled scope, it does not fall prey
to an arbitrary eclecticism: it is unified by a complex but coherent approach
to interpreting the history of philosophy, ideas and culture. The present
introduction aims to provide coordinates for understanding this methodology,
which I will call Caygill’s ‘philosophical practice’. I sketch these coordinates
in what follows under the headers of the speculative, aporia, philosophizing,
philology and history.
It is apt to consider Caygill’s philosophical method in the light of his essays,
as he might be considered first and foremost an essayist. Even On Resistance
can be read as a coordinated set of essays that identify the strengths and
test the limitations of a series of practical and theoretical conceptions of
resistance. Ever since it was inaugurated by Montaigne, the essay form
has been characterized by its openness, its probing and assaying, and its
preference for local, provisional explorations over grand, definitive claims.
Adorno writes in his classic analysis that, in the essay form, ‘thought’s utopia
of hitting the bull’s eye unites with the consciousness of its own fallibility
and provisional nature’ (Adorno [1958] 1984, 164). This deliberate, thematized
tension between thought’s striving towards fixed conclusions and its inability
to attain full satisfaction – a key Kantian idea to which Caygill often returns – is
one reason that the essay is such a fitting vehicle for Caygill’s philosophical
practice.
The essay, in another apposite formulation proposed by Adorno, can be
thought to occupy a space between the conceptual work of philosophy and
the freedom of art. Neither attaining scientific results nor creating artistic
forms, the ‘effort of the essay reflects a childlike freedom that catches fire,
INTRODUCTION 3
without scruple, on what others have already done’ (Adorno [1958] 1984,
152). Adorno’s description fits the way that Caygill’s essays arrange intellectual
materials from the past as kindling on which something new can ignite. For
Caygill, the necessity of thinking through the history of philosophy and culture
nevertheless provides the freedom to bring to life new conceptual and political
possibilities, by interpreting, ‘without scruple’, past philosophers and forms
of thought. This is a qualified freedom, for, as we shall see, he is intensely
conscious of the risk of unduly emphasizing freedom or possibility over Kant’s
other modal categories of actuality and necessity. Moreover, a comment
by Gillian Rose indicates a further way in which the essay is an appropriate
vehicle for Caygill’s thought: ‘the essay form … corresponds to the method
of speculative engagement’ (Rose 1993, xi). We can now turn to Rose’s
conception of speculative thought, as the first methodological coordinate for
grasping Caygill’s philosophical practice.
The speculative
Gillian Rose (1947–95) was Caygill’s doctoral supervisor in the sociology
department at the University of Sussex, with whom he wrote his thesis,
‘Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories of Art and Society 1640–1790’, which
developed into his first book, Art of Judgement. The two were close friends
and philosophical interlocutors; Caygill became Rose’s literary executor
after her untimely death in 1995, and he edited and published the notebook
jottings from the last weeks of her life and her unfinished work-in-progress
Paradiso (Rose 1998, 1999). His moving memorial lecture for Rose at Sussex
is published here for the first time (Chapter 1).
Rose was perhaps the most important British continental philosopher
of the twentieth century. This does not mean that she was in any way an
epigone of the French ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers whose ideas swept through
Anglo-American humanities departments in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: she
was a vociferous critic of her fashionable French contemporaries.1 Her books
are highly original contributions to post-Hegelian thought, tracing a line from
Hegel through Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to a reconceived Judaic
philosophy, all in service of a sophisticated examination of contemporary
social and political reality. Rose sought a deliberately ‘difficult’ renewal of
the Hegelian notion of the absolute, while dissolving any hope of dialectical
resolution of the irredeemable contradiction (the ‘aporia’ that we will
consider in the next section) that she identified therein. For Rose, politics
is the attempt to think the absolute.2 Such an attempt requires a distinction
between dialectical and speculative thought, a distinction also significant to
Caygill’s early work.
4 FORCE AND UNDERSTANDING
Whereas Hegel’s philosophy is usually primarily understood through the
dialectic – an organic process in which conceptual contradictions are negated,
preserved and raised up in higher forms – Rose stresses its speculative side.
Hegel presented speculative thought as a higher mode of philosophy than
dialectic: the latter is negative reason, which traces the movement of fixed
determinations, but only speculative thought can be positive reason and a
true philosophy of spirit.3 Rose foregrounds Hegel’s notion of a ‘speculative
proposition’, in which the subject and predicate are at once non-identical
and identical. The key Hegelian speculative proposition, for Rose, affirms the
identity of religion and the state.4 This proposition is misunderstood if read
as containing a stable subject and predicate. Instead, both terms – in this
case, ‘religion’ and ‘the state’ – are initially empty and problematic, and they
must be filled out over the course of a philosophical development – here,
Hegel’s philosophy – through a series of changing relations between them.
As Caygill puts it, ‘The “is” of a speculative proposition … does not mark a
present identity, but rather the promise of a future meaning that will arise out
of unforeseeable experiences’ (Caygill 1998a, 23). The echo of the specular in
the term ‘speculation’ is relevant: a speculative proposition foresees the result
of a series of encounters between the subject and predicate, although the
specific encounters are themselves unforeseeable.5 This struggle between
chance experiences and a speculatively affirmed rationality remains an
undercurrent of Caygill’s thought, up to and including his recent work on Kafka
and the ‘accident’.
The paradigmatic case of the speculative proposition for Rose, the identity
of religion and the state, is not central to Caygill’s work. Rather, he expands on
Rose’s broader point that, in his words, ‘the task of philosophy is to rehearse
the trauma of reason – to tarry with the negative and to work through its
brokenness in an interminable analysis’ (Chapter 1). Whereas Rose’s analysis
of the trauma of reason increasingly came to focus on the intersection of
philosophy, politics and theology, Caygill arguably shifts the analysis to
philosophy, politics and history. This historicized attention to the travails of
modern reason will be discussed below.
Caygill develops Rose’s notion of the speculative in further ways, which
align with his increasingly sharp critique of Hegel in the mid-1990s. In 1994,
he published three essays on ‘Hegel and the Speculative Community’: the
second of these contrasts Hegel and Clausewitz (Chapter 4). With the notion
of a speculative community, Caygill develops the idea that, unlike the dialectic,
speculative thought assumes responsibility for its destructive moment. A
speculative community thus recognizes and is accountable for the fact that its
civic freedoms are inevitably qualified by violence: it is a community marked
by the difficult but necessary awareness of its speculative identity with
violence. According to Caygill, Hegel shrinks back from his early awareness of
INTRODUCTION 5
this mutual implication of violence and civility; in failing to theorize this in his
philosophy of right, Hegel opens the space for Clausewitz’s philosophy of pure
violence. Although not yet foregrounding the notion of the capacity to resist
in Clausewitz’s concept of war, the 1994 text is a first iteration of ideas that
appear in On Resistance thirty years later.
Caygill’s 1998 book on Benjamin revolves around the notion of the
speculative, arguing that Benjamin consistently seeks to present a ‘non-
Hegelian speculative experience’. Benjamin’s concept of experience has a
speculative character in its ‘sensitivity to the indirect manifestations of the
absolute in space and time’ (Caygill 1998b, 120). Unlike Hegel, but echoing
ideas of German Romanticism, Benjamin considers the absolute or infinite
to be folded into the spatiotemporal totality of the present. The absolute
manifests itself indirectly in that it can be discerned ‘in those things that the
present regards as insignificant, absurd and unwanted’ (Caygill 1998b, 8).
For Caygill, Benjamin’s work is characterized by a tension between, on the
one hand, properly conceiving of speculative experience as a methodological
principle, guiding us to unearth the traces of the absolute in the ‘neglected
detail and the small nuance’, and, on the other hand, succumbing to a dogmatic
belief that this method might yield timeless truths or redemption (Caygill
1998b, 152). Only the former, regulative notion of speculative experience is, in
Caygill’s view, to be affirmed.
Caygill’s transformation of the speculative thus takes a path that increasingly
diverges from Rose’s Hegelianism. For Caygill, speculative thought is oriented
towards the immanent totality of experience and the absolute that indirectly
and partially manifests itself in the overlooked debris of everyday culture. On a
very abstract level, this orients Caygill’s philosophical practice throughout his
work and throughout the essays collected here. Among Rose’s ideas to which
Caygill nevertheless remains faithful, however, perhaps one is key: that our
reading of philosophy and culture must attend to the broken, aporetic nature
of speculative experience.
Aporia
Caygill has developed an aporetic approach to the history of philosophy
that remains an underappreciated methodological innovation. Aporia is
foregrounded by Rose in her 1992 book on Kierkegaard, but the aporetic
approach developed in conversations between Rose, Caygill and the artist and
mathematician Greg Bright around their respective projects in the 1980s and
1990s. For Rose, aporia is a consequence of reason’s ‘broken middle’ that is
buried between the irreconcilable oppositions of speculative thought. Caygill
emphasizes this connection between speculative thought and aporia in an
6 FORCE AND UNDERSTANDING
essay on Rose: he contends that she affirms ‘Hegel’s speculative experience
as intrinsically damaged and aporetic’ (Caygill 1998a, 23). Against dialectic,
which even in its Adornian, negative form employs determinate oppositions
and objects of knowledge, speculative thought wrestles with the challenging,
irresolvable aporia of the simultaneous identity and non-identity of its objects.
In Rose’s work, aporia is generally aligned with speculation, against the
hasty solutions of dialectical thought. However, she also points to an aporetic
method, writing in Mourning Becomes the Law (1996) that philosophical works
can be read either deterministically or aporetically. According to a deterministic
reading, they are ‘fixed, closed conceptual structures, colonising being with
the garrison of thought’, but an aporetic reading is sensitive to ‘the difficulty
which the conceptuality represents by leaving gaps and silences in the mode
of representation’ (Rose 1996, 8). Rose’s formulation nicely captures the way
that Caygill transforms the theme of aporia into a fully fledged approach to
reading the history of philosophy.
Art of Judgement, Caygill’s first book, presents Kant’s treatment of
judgement as an example of an aporetic method. Faced by the difficulty of
explicating the human faculty of judgement, Kant adopts a singular procedure
according to which ‘the outcome of unravelling the problem is not a clear
solution – the revelation of a principle, as in the first Critique – but a statement
or report of its difficulty’ (Caygill 1989, 2). The aporetic approach thus seeks
to sufficiently attest to the complexity of a problem rather than feign to solve
it. Caygill has cited books by Harry Wolfson (The Philosophy of Spinoza:
Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning (1934)) and Edward Booth
(Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers (1983)) as
important sources for an aporetic history of philosophy. This approach does
not seek syntheses and neat solutions in past thinkers but scrutinizes the
historical emergence of philosophical problems and questions, which remain
open-ended and unresolved.
Caygill thus focuses on the historical genesis of concepts, arguments and
fields of inquiry. He carefully attends to the intellectual and social context of
philosophical works in order to unsettle the standard narratives about the
problems and solutions at stake. This entails a particular affinity for unfinished
philosophical projects: Kant’s Opus postumum (see Chapter 17), Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra and his ‘ghostly, unwritten magnum opus on philosophy and
culture’ (Chapters 2 and 7), Marx’s Capital (Chapter 2) and Benjamin’s Arcades
Project. From the perspective of the aporetic approach, such unfinished works
are valuable in that they may be unfinishable: they reveal a difficulty without
jumping to a hasty, facile solution.
As Benjamin writes of Baudelaire, we must be aware of the ‘historical
scars’ that the history of interpretations has inflicted on past thinkers. Caygill
identifies these scars in the reception of Benjamin’s own work: in ‘bringing
INTRODUCTION 7
out a particular feature or phase of Benjamin’s authorship and discreetly
tucking away the others’, this reception has led to an ‘inevitable levelling of
Benjamin’s work, and the reduction of its constituent paradoxes into stages
of a developmental narrative or Bildungsroman’ (Caygill 1998b, xi). Caygill
seeks to replace comfortable teleological narratives about progress or decline
within or between bodies of thought with the more complicated reality of
partial achievements, chance occurrences and unforeseen consequences. The
‘constituent paradoxes’ of a philosopher’s work can be seen in its aporetic
quality, the philosophical problems that it opens without resolving. This leads
the aporetic historian to focus on the indecipherable parts of an oeuvre. As
Caygill notes of Benjamin, ‘These difficult, opaque and often unreadable texts
are crucial to any interpretation of Benjamin’s thought’ (Caygill 1998b, 1). The
necessity of reading the unreadable might be said to reveal the ‘constituent
paradox’ of Caygill’s own philosophical practice. The key moments in a
philosopher’s oeuvre are precisely those that must be read because of their
unreadability, their resistance to being fixed and categorized.
Philosophizing
If philosophy can be productively seen as aporetic, as a series of attempts to
adequately state problems in their complexity rather than provide final answers,
then our focus shifts from the stately monuments that are philosophical works
and philosophies onto the ongoing and messy process of philosophizing.
Caygill foregrounds the process of philosophizing throughout his work, and
particularly in the introductions and entries in A Kant Dictionary. The latter
book, as Caygill acknowledges, is ‘by no means only a dictionary’ (Caygill
1999, 8). It is more a study of Kant’s conceptual inventiveness understood as a
point of sophisticated interplay between tradition and modernity, a case study
of the developmental and contextual nature of philosophical terminology,
packaged, for strategic purposes, in the form of a dictionary.
Caygill elucidates his account of Kant’s conceptual creativity through the
latter’s own easily overlooked distinction between axioms and acroamata. For
Kant, philosophical concepts are not axiomatic but acroamatic, which means
they are ‘the discursive outcome of an open-ended process of reflection upon
philosophical problems. Unlike geometrical axioms, philosophical concepts
are for Kant less the indisputable products of definition than the equivocal
outcomes of a process of indirect presentation resting ultimately on analogy’
(Caygill 1995, 2). Philosophical concepts are therefore not fixed in advance and
directly intuitable but are rather the equivocal – so to some extent aporetic –
results of a discursive process in which they are legitimated through language
and always open to further discursive challenge (Caygill 1995, 46–7). This
8 FORCE AND UNDERSTANDING
linguistic field in which philosophical concepts are developed and contested in
an open-ended process is the space of philosophizing.
The distinction between philosophy and philosophizing is one made by Kant
himself, who claims that one cannot learn philosophy, only to philosophize.6
Against the grain of 250 years of Kant scholarship, Caygill insists that Kant
was more interested in the process of philosophizing than in its end result, an
ossified philosophy. He points out that Kant took a surprisingly casual attitude
to his published works and, for example, often delegated to his students
the correction of the proofs of his books. An emphasis on this feature of
Kant’s work distinguishes Caygill’s dictionary from Rudolf Eisler’s 1930 Kant
Lexicon, as he notes: ‘Instead of presenting a concept as a fixed, axiomatic
element of Kant’s philosophy in the manner of Eisler, the entries stress the
problematic, exploratory character of his philosophizing’. Caygill thus offers a
highly unfamiliar picture of Kant that foregrounds ‘the studied equivocations
and sensitivity to aporia which characterize his philosophizing’ (Caygill 1995, 3).
Consistent with his stress on philosophizing over the philosophical
works that offer mere snapshots of this process at a standstill, Caygill has
a strong antipathy towards schools and -isms, which fossilize fertile and
open explorations into dogmas, whether Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist or
Nietzschean. Such followers fail to heed Nietzsche’s call to think beyond good
and evil or, otherwise put, fail to adhere to Kant’s model of critique, which
neither damns nor endorses, but tests the proper limits and identifies the
conditions of legitimacy of its object. Caygill therefore approves of readings of
Marx and Nietzsche that overcome the opposition imposed by Marxists and
Nietzscheans (Chapter 2) and affirms what he sees as Rose’s overcoming of
the opposition between left and right Hegelians (Caygill 1998a, 22).
Caygill’s emphasis on philosophizing over philosophy has various further
consequences. One is the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries that, for
historically contingent reasons, have separated philosophy from art and the
various sciences; this will be discussed below. Another is the affirmation of
an interpretative practice that seeks to keep works as open as possible. In
the book on Benjamin, Caygill outlines this practice in terms of Benjamin’s
conception of immanent critique, which does not apply external standards of
judgement but finds its criteria within its object:
Immanent critique, sensitive to the incompleteness of a work and the
negotiability of its formal limits, was dedicated to revealing the unrealized
futures inherent in the work. Such critique did not apply criteria of judgement,
but sought strategically to maximise the possible futures of a work. It did so
by showing the restrictions of existing interpretations – the ways in which
they foreclosed on the work’s possible futures – and by attempting to keep
open these futures for critical invention. (Caygill 1998b, 79)
INTRODUCTION 9
Interpretation, on the model that Caygill develops in tandem with Benjamin’s
thought, philosophizes by keeping open the possibilities latent in works and
the resources they offer for reimagining the culture from which they emerged
and in which we read them. This attempt to activate ‘unrealized futures’
proceeds immanently within the history of thought, through a practice of
reading, to which we can now turn.
Philology
Nietzsche, whose work is a constant touchstone for Caygill, trained as a
classical philologist. Although he left his professorship in philology at Basel
due to ill health to become the nomadic freethinker of philosophical myth,
Nietzsche recognized that his philological training continued to shape his
thought:
It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist
still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading. … – this art does not so
easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read
slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with
doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers … My patient friends, this
book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: Learn to read
me well! (D 5)
Nietzsche demanded that his readers read him as well as a philologist would:
carefully, sceptically, attuned to delicate nuances of tone and irony, and ‘with
doors left open’: aware of the infinite perspectives that can be brought to bear
on any text. He remained a philologist, a teacher of close reading, because
philologists ‘are the destroyers of every faith that rests on books’ (GS §358).
Careful, critical attention to texts is anathema to any kind of faith, including the
faith inherent in lazy philosophical dogmatism.
Nietzsche’s call for philological readers informs Caygill’s philosophical
practice as much as does the German thinker’s specific ideas. Caygill adopts the
philologist’s approach, not only in his careful readings but also by scrutinizing
the provenance, editions and textual variations of texts to a degree unusual
in modern European philosophy. This includes attention to manuscripts, as in
the reading of the two versions of Kafka’s story ‘Description of a Struggle’
in Kafka. Through a painstaking comparison of the variations between
the manuscript versions, Caygill identifies two different responses to the
Nietzschean predicament of living after the death of God: a nihilistic collapse
into ressentiment grounded on a latent Platonic nostalgia, and a Nietzschean
affirmation of the unrealizable desire for eternity (Caygill 2017, 23–45). The
10 FORCE AND UNDERSTANDING
reading is moreover part of Caygill’s broader aim to undermine the prevailing
critical view that ‘The Judgement’, with its ‘claustrophobic father–son conflict’,
is Kafka’s first important story and an interpretative key to his writings (Caygill
2017, 47, 10–11). Such philological claims identify a process of philosophizing
between manuscript versions, which opens an ‘unrealized future’ of Kafka’s
work, beyond the themes of law, domination and punishment.
Alongside this attention to manuscript variations, Caygill reveals the
philosophical significance of publication history: for example, the sequence in
which Kafka wrote his novels. In influential essays, Arendt and Benjamin take
the order in which Brod published the novels to be their order of composition,
and as a result they erroneously read a redemption narrative and even a
‘happy ending’ into Kafka’s trilogy (Chapter 22). Such philological care leads
Caygill to identify overlooked breaks in philosophers’ oeuvres – such as that
between Nietzsche’s ‘yes-saying’ and ‘no-saying’ works (Chapter 8) – as well
as continuities – for example, between Kant’s well-known critical philosophy
and his relatively ignored late drafts (Chapter 17). In each case, attention to
the textual and historical conditions of philosophical production allows Caygill
to expose new interpretative possibilities that creatively resist the standard
accounts of the thinkers and ideas he treats.
History
In an inaugural lecture given in 1999 to mark his appointment as Professor of
Cultural History at Goldsmiths College, Caygill stated,
In my work I have tried to intensify the critical history of philosophy through
the methodology and disciplines of cultural history, with the hope that a
more thoroughgoing use of historical evidence and materials will intensify
the critique of philosophy. (Caygill 1999, 2)
Caygill here aligns his project with the young Marx’s critique of philosophy,
where the demonstration that philosophy is one more element of culture,
ultimately underpinned by economic relations, goes hand in hand with the self-
formation and self-overcoming of the proletariat class. Caygill acknowledges
the contribution that what he calls the ‘critical histories’ of philosophy
presented by Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray and Levinas make to this
project of situating philosophy within broader culture and undermining its
universal claims. He contends, however, that these critical histories rely on an
insufficiently rigorous or detailed conception of history, which is a failing also
evident in Rose’s work (Caygill 1999, 2, 5). Caygill thus diverges from both Rose
and post-war French thinkers in the care with which he historicizes philosophy,