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ОглавлениеChapter 1
Intersubjective Universalism:
A Theoretical Articulation
AGAINST THE WALLS
How to generate a form of togetherness that does not entail the sacrifice of the individual within the collective is one of the most central, difficult, challenging, and recurrent concerns in the history of humanity. Thinkers of all times have examined the advantages and limitations of different local and global allegiances by which human beings are inserted into communities or assembling categories such as patriotism and the nation-state, ethnicity, religious belief, social class, culture, political ideologies, gender, or sexual identities. From the second half of the twentieth century, a number of philosophers, sociologists, academics, and artists have excelled in their investigations of the difficulties and risks, yet necessity, of transcending these traditional forms of communitarian belonging in order to imagine more fluid ways of conceiving interpersonal relationships beyond the binary Us/Them that communitarianism inevitably generates. These theoretical contributions are enabling to articulate from a theoretical perspective the political project in Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, which this study interprets in the light of intersubjectivity and universalism.
This volume’s articulation of universalism, however, starts by acknowledging the urgency of moving away from the traditional construction of universalism, particularly since the Enlightenment, based on a monolithic “Universal” imposing European culture with colonialist, homogenizing, even violent ends. As a consequence of this imperialist universalization of a particular made dominant, it is not at all surprising that universalism has had so many detractors. As a sociopolitical project, universalism continues to be negatively associated with neutralization of difference and homogenization; it is considered a project aiming to absorb the plurality of humanity within a monolithic One. In fact, detractors of universalism accuse this project of being anchored in an old-fashioned, restrictive—racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, Christian—notion of the human subject that is evidently hierarchical, dangerously neutralizing, and ultimately totalitarian, exclusive, and even inhuman, in that it does not represent the characteristic plurality constituting humanity. Due to this negative reputation, indigenous and non-Western intellectuals (from Africa, Asia, South America, as well as from the religious point of view of Islam), on the one hand, and, identity-based groups within the West, on the other hand, have long disregarded universalism as a valid political movement for the construction of democratic societies, since each of these groups have for a long time been actual victims of the deeply marginalizing traditional Universal. Due to the negative reputation it has been made to earn, it is no wonder, then, that universalism is conceived as a dangerously totalitarian and homogenizing enterprise still in the twenty-first century.
Herman Melville’s oeuvre is expressive of a recurrent and profound critique against this negative universalism. Already in the nineteenth century, Melville rejected the premises upon which traditional universalism, in its vindication of the universalization of certain particulars over others, was being constructed and often imposed. Unlike other writers of his time such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (the latter Melville’s full contemporary), Melville was skeptical of universalizing certain temporary feelings or mindsets. Attracted as he was by Emerson’s pantheistic defense of the individual merging within “the currents of the Universal Being” through nature (Emerson “Nature” 10), Melville would confess that “there is some truth” in this “all feeling”, at the same time that he would warn that “what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion” (Correspondence 194). Melville’s conception of universalism, as expressed in his writings, is based on a belief in the humanity of all human beings, as well as in the necessary specificity and individualization of the human in order not to fall into abstract, and therefore paradoxically dehumanizing, categorizations. Deeply sensitive and respectful of the extraordinary plurality of humanity, and of the fact that plurality itself is the very trait defining humanity, Melville was critical of discourses, projects, and powerstructures neutralizing human plurality and individuals’ singularity within a collective Unum in their attempt to empower a specific particular. Instead, Melville’s construction of universalism is closer to what Linda Zerilli has defined as a “site of multiple significations” (8), since it underscores the dialogic and permanently imperfect nature of any form of knowledge, and, consequently, the fallacy of monologic Truths. In the 1876 Clarel, Melville emphasized the inevitable partiality of any interpretation of reality, as well as the narrowness, authoritarianism, and (self-)destructive dangers of clinging to monolithic conceptions and, frequently, impositions, of “Meaning”. Melville exposed and denounced monologic thinking in his texts. He both defended and created literary contexts encouraging plural thinking whereby different, and often radically opposed, conceptions of the world are juxtaposed, laid open, tested, critically assessed, and, many times, as with those worldviews that violate the plurality of humanity by upholding supremacist assumptions, eventually rejected. Melville’s universalist conception of humanity never falls into idealism. Depicting Jerusalem, in particular, and Palestine, in general, as contexts of division and inter-human hatreds which may be read as resonant of the inter-human divisions of postbellum U.S., in Clarel, instead of celebrating the multicultural character of the so-called Holy Land, the author analyzes the fact that innate depravity most often than not cancels out innate humanity. Realizing the necessity of universalism, thus, Melville at the same time acknowledged its unfeasibility, a pessimism which undoubtedly suffuses both the yearning and the lament for universalism he articulates. Yet, on the other hand, the fact that he is not complicit in the bleak pessimism, even nihilism, which he makes some of his characters representative of, together with his insistent analysis and articulation of universalism throughout his entire—very prolific—literary production may be indicative of the significance Melville placed on the project despite being aware that the very human nature that might give it force made it, at the same time, largely impracticable.
On a more specific level, Clarel provides mechanisms to discharge universalism from its traditionally negative association with homogenization and colonialism, in order to reevaluate its validity, and urgency, in a world of deep inter-human divisions. The first condition for this dissociation is the need to rethink universalism so as to make it expressive of the plurality by which it is constituted, since, as Hannah Arendt noted in 1958, “[p]lurality is the condition of human actions because we are the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live” (8). Since its emergence in the 1960s, poststructuralist theory has developed into a determining turning point for the rethinking of subjectivity, community, and human relationships, which became particularly relevant after the proliferation of identity politics movements in that decade. Radically questioning the very notion of identity, and stressing what it criticized as both the homogenizing and the constraining essentialism of identity-based groups and communitarian formations, poststructuralism has introduced ways to think subjectivity beyond identity and other historical grands récits. In the twenty-first century, poststructuralism has pervaded the fields of social sciences, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, anthropology, and, of course, literature, opening up theoretical possibilities and new conceptual spaces which situate difference, plurality, and hybridity at the core of contemporary debates on politics, subjectivity, and human relationships. Owing to this fact, political activism has been freed from rigid conceptions of (inter)subjectivity and communitarianism, thus encouraging fluid standpoints from which to imagine more plural and decentralized—and, therefore, less hierarchical and oppressive—interpersonal ways of relating. Nonetheless, even if the deconstructionist importance of poststructuralism to problematize monolithic Meanings and essentialist conceptions of Truth has been deeply influential and widely acknowledged, some theorists have also critized the celebrative attitude of poststructuralism in front of such deconstructionism. These thinkers have pointed out as well the political paralysis at the heart of poststructuralism in its failure to construct a political project from its theoretical premises that is based on plurality and social justice. Such are the objections of Linda M. G. Zerilli and Ernesto Laclau:
Now that “we” all know and agree that poststructuralism is critically valuable but politically bankrupt; now that we all know and agree that the “old universal” was indeed a “pseudo-universal”, so the homecoming narrative goes; we can get on with the project of constructing a “new universal”. (Zerilli 3-4)
The correct question, therefore, is not so much which is the politics of poststructuralism, but rather what are the possibilities a poststructuralist theoretical perspective opens for the deepening of those political practices that go in the direction of a “radical democracy”. (Laclau New Reflections 191)
Deeply influenced by poststructuralism, yet facing what they consider its political failure, both Zerilli and Laclau do acknowledge the rich theoretical possibilities poststructuralism provides for political thinking. Actually, although the two thinkers turn to universalism as a political project that may be validly democratic, they carry out a rethinking of universalism out of its negative neutralizing reputation that is enabled by the theoretical tools of poststructuralism. Indeed, poststructuralism constitutes one crucial perspective to rethink universalism since, as Étienne Balibar has noted, “no discussion about universality […] can usefully proceed with a ‘univocal’ concept of ‘the Universal’” (48).
While the theoretical possibilities offered by poststructuralism illuminate Melville’s literary critique of communitarianisms and of monolithic conceptions of identity and Meaning, the author in no case provides a celebrative portrayal of the end of grand narratives of the kind poststructuralism vindicates. On the contrary. At the same time that he emphasized the destructive dangers of clinging to one-sided views of the world and monologic Truths, Melville set off to record the suffering, anxiety, alienation, and even destructive and self-annihilating tendencies caused by the sense of emptiness and uncertainty after realizing the lack of certainties. Restlessly oscillating between nihilism and the daring necessity to live searchingly (“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other”, commented Nathaniel Hawthorne of his friend as Melville was on his way to Palestine [qtd. in Bezanson “Historical” 511]), the author analyzed the, both positive and harmful, potentiality of intersubjectivity upon human relationships, beyond the divides that segregate human beings within separate identity-based groups. The present book interprets this necessity to live seachingly as an existential need to explore the potentiality of intersubjectivity to develop dialogic thinking and knock down inter-personal walls. Moving away from homogenizing conceptions of the “Universal”, Melville persisted in analyzing the sociopolitical and ethical implications of a plural universalism grounded on intersubjectivity. This intersubjective universalism—as the present volume names it—can be best articulated, from a theoretical perspective, through the arguments on subjectivity, interpersonal relationships, human vulnerability, unchosen vicinities, and global ethics posed by contemporary thinkers Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Judith Butler, Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. The following sections make use of these theorizations, not only from the perspective of poststructuralist theory but also from the perspectives of sociology, philosophy, ethics, and political science, in order to theoretically articulate the political and ethical possibilities of Melville’s literary project.
THE INTERPERSONAL IS POLITICAL
The claim that the interpersonal is political may look like an obvious one, especially after decades of identity politics movements stressing the politics of the personal. Nonetheless, in the present-day society of individualisms and well-interiorized inter-human divisions, both psychological and physical, it is important to lay emphasis on the potentiality of intersubjectivity for the development of relationships and thinking beyond such separation. This volume conceives intersubjectivity as a space of “shared understanding” (SAGE 468 and Encyclopedia 402) between individuals, in their difference, which enables the circulation of “meaning[s] between subjects” (Blackwell 161) as these subjects engage in collaborative negotiation and co-creation of signification by means of their interactions. In other words, intersubjectivity is the process created by and between individuals—necessarily and inevitably different—when they set on a dialogue of reciprocal recognition of one another’s difference and yet common human condition. Herman Melville best portrays intersubjectivity when he narrates the development of Ishmael and Queequeg’s feelings of togetherness in the first chapters of Moby-Dick, from Ishmael’s first fearful encounter of the unknown “Other” in Queequeg (a pagan Polynesian cannibal with yellowish skin and huge tattoos over his body) to the American’s realization not only of Queequeg’s noble nature but also of the redeeming power his friendship with Queequeg has upon himself:
I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. (62)
It is only through sharing—both of a physical space (a room and a bed) and of their respective beings and cultural practices (Ishmael joins Queequeg in his prayers to the little idol Yojo, while Queequeg attends with Ishmael the Bethel where Father Mapple delivers his sermon)—by means of constant interaction (verbal and non-verbal, for Queequeg communicates with Ishmael through gestures and sentences in broken English), that the bond between Ishmael and Queequeg is developed. This intersubjective union is eventually materialized in the symbolic wedding of the two men’s hearts, which has the power of giving peace to both Ishmael and Queequeg, and of stretching their thinking parameters in order to encompass those thinking paramenters of the other as well. Even though this study shall analyze particular instances of intersubjectivity, and of the failure of intersubjectivity, in the 1876 Clarel in future chapters, I find it important to anticipate at this point a Melvillean instance of intersubjectivity that may better enable an understanding of the ways the present volume appropriates the concept in its theoretical articulation of Melville’s intersubjective universalism. What derives from the previous Moby-Dick example, thus, is a conception of intersubjectivity which implies neither the fusion of individuals nor the colonial act of appropriating the other and neutralizing his or her difference so as to make the other less strange, and therefore less different, to ourselves. In a way similar to the Derridean notion of hospitality, intersubjectivity does not assimilate the other in one’s space but opens up one’s space to incorporate the other as other. Similarly, Martin Buber uses the image of the double cry to illustrate his understanding of intersubjectivity. The philosopher describes two cries that (cor)respond to each other, modifying one another yet without merging into an identical voice:
But then, somewhere, far away, another cry moves towards me, another which is the same, the same cry uttered or sung by another voice. Yet it is not the same cry, certainly no “echo” of my cry but rather its true rejoinder, tone for tone not repeating mine, not even in a weakened form, but corresponding to mine, answering its tones—so much so, that mine, which at first had to my own ear no sound or questioning at all, now appears as questions, as a long series of questions, which now all receive a response. The response is no more capable of interpretation than the question. And yet the cries that meet the one cry that is the same do not seem to be the same as one another. Each time the voice is new. (“Nature” 42)
Buber notes that intersubjectivity does not always necessitate language to become possible: “If I were to report with what I heard it [the cry] I should have to say ‘with every pore of my body’” (43).
Another important theorization of subjectivity as intersubjectivity is Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of Being as being-with. Moving away from the notion of community, which the philosopher himself had contributed to articulate in earlier works such as The Inoperative Community (1983), in the 1996 Being Singular Plural, Nancy theorizes a relational ontology: he argues that meaning is the very sharing of Being, and Being—and therefore meaning—is nothing but being with others. Consequently, Nancy explains, Meaning is not communicated but “put into play” (27) as and in the “with” of Being; it is exposed and reformulated through the act of dialogue every time Being is enacted and shared. Nancy’s relational conception of existence is enabling to rethinking interpersonal relationships, interpersonal bonds, and interpersonal responsibility beyond egocentrisms and communitarian forms of identification, including nationality and the nation-state. Nancy’s being-with may also be connected to Agamben’s concept of the “coming community” formed by “whatever singularities” that constitute enemies of the State due to their rejection of identity and of traditional forms of belonging. According to this, Agamben develops the notion of adjacency, which the philosopher defines as “exiling oneself to the other as he or she is” (23). This is disruptive of conceptions of a common identity and sameness upon which communities have traditionally been built. Agamben’s adjacency might be taken as equivalent to Nancy’s being-with as well as to Derrida’s hospitality, in that it constitutes an intersubjective space of possibility by which different singularities make contact with one another, without affirming an identity. The potentiality of this exile into, or reception of, the other may be a development of a sense of belonging together beyond identities or communities, which opens up new relational spaces and possibilities for plural thinking. In a darker light, however, intersubjective contact may also lead to violent consequences when such openness to the other is not produced.
Similarly to Nancy, Agamben, and Derrida, Martin Buber has theorized a conception of community that turns away from identitarian and community-based models. This philosopher argues that community not only encloses and contains the existence of each individual within that of the group, but also hinders individual relationships among its members, even suppressing the personal for the collective (“Social” 68). Instead, Buber locates community not in a uniting feature but in the communal disposition of the individual: “a people is community to the extent that it is communally disposed” (“Community” 99). It is, therefore, in this communal disposition, in the interpersonal or intersubjective, that bonds may be formed between people, without limiting such bonds to identitarian commonalities or questions of sameness. Buber’s notion of community understood as communal disposition facilitates the conception of universalism as a process grounded on the very plurality by which it is constituted. This plural universalism is created intersubjectively, as individuals who are necessarily different (not only because they are representative of certain racial, ethnic, national, religious, sexual, identities, but because they constitute complex subjectivities, inevitably different from one another) negotiate meanings by means of dialogic encounters. The positive potentiality of this dialogic process is abridging inter-human divisions posed by the nation-state and other forms of communitarian affiliation that obscure human connectedness and pose inter-personal walls as natural. This dialogic process may also enable the potentiality for global spaces that are more ethically and politically democratic than community-based ones.
As S. N. Eisenstadt has noted, intersubjectivity is rooted in social interaction and a continuous dialogue (27) by which meaning may be seeked out, explored, challenged, deconstructed, made anew. According to Hannah Arendt, dialogue is the instrument through which human beings make sense of their experiences of the world to others: “whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. […] Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves” (Human 4). It is also the instrument by which human beings make sense of their experience of the world to themselves, since Arendt also emphasizes the “being-with-myself” that takes places within the individual, which she names “solitude”:
To be with myself and to judge by myself is articulated and actualized in the processes of thought, and every thought process is an activity in which I speak with myself about whatever happens to concern me. The mode of existence present in this silent dialogue of myself with myself, I now shall call solitude. Hence, solitude is more than, and different from, other modes of being alone, particularly and most importantly loneliness and isolation. Solitude means that though alone, I am together with somebody (myself, that is). It means that I am two-in-one, whereas loneliness as well as isolation do not know this kind of schism, this inner dichotomy in which I can ask questions of myself and receive answers. (“Some Questions” 97-98)
By making sense of the world, according to Arendt, human beings “humanize” reality: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human” (“Humanity” 25). In this process of interpretation and consequent humanization, Arendt vindicates openness to others as the conditio sine qua non of humanity (15). In a similar way to Derrida and Buber, Arendt locates in interpersonal relationships, particularly in friendship, a fundamental political potentiality, defending that dialogue may restore human beings’ relationship with the world and with other human beings. As Arendt and other philosophers conceive it, therefore, dialogue is central to intersubjectivity, since it is the process by which bonds between individuals (an inter-human space of negotiation and possibility) may be developed. The development of such space, through dialogue, gradually enables the development of plural thinking as well, which, in turn, makes possible a questioning and transcendence of monologic conceptions of Meaning: “as soon as it is uttered”, Arendt claims, truth “is immediately transformed into one opinion among many”, which is immediately and inevitably “contested, reformulated, reduced to one subject of discourse among others” (27). Projects that uphold a single Truth, Arendt argues, are consequently “inhuman” because “a single truth, could there have been one, […] would have spelled the end of humanity” (27). For Arendt, even Kant’s cosmopolitan project is one among those that reinforce a particular Truth, since she claims that “[w]hatever the merits of their arguments, the inhumanity of Kant’s moral philosophy is undeniable” due to the fact that his philosophical teachings are based on the premise that an absolute Truth exists, and Kant imposes his Truth about interhuman relationships as an absolute (27). In her articulation of dialogue as a space of plural thinking and possibility, Arendt uses the phrase “critical judgment”, explaining that critical judgment stimulates the development of an “enlarged mentality” (241), because it places different individuals and their worldviews in conversation with one another in an intersubjective engagement that enables a negotiation of meaning. Critical judgment, therefore, as Arendt considers it, is the seed enabling politics and democratic political thought:
Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy […] nor of counting noses and joining a majority, but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion. (It is this capacity for an “enlarged mentality” that enables men to judge; as such, it was discovered by Kant in the first part of his Critique of Judgment—who, however, did not recognize the political and moral implications of his discovery). (241)
Arendt emphasizes the ethical and political implications of the exercise in critical judgment she describes, which is important to this study’s analysis of Melville’s project in Clarel. Furthermore, Arendt’s notion of critical judgment can be connected to Ernesto Laclau’s theory of “hegemony” in his articulation of universalism, which, revising Gramscian genealogy of this concept, Laclau defines as the relationship that emerges from the dialogic interaction of different particulars, in which each individual element can temporarily occupy the space of the “empty signifier” of the universal. Most importantly, Arendt’s critical judgment can also be related to the dialogism and construction of “Manysidedness” (Clarel 3.16.263) in Melville’s oeuvre. In this dialogism, in the capacity to create plural thinking on a textual (and, hopefully, supratextual) level, and in the spaces formed between individuals through their intersubjective conversations, Melville located the possibility of de-transcendentalizing Meaning and encouraging manysidedness in his works.
Similarly to Arendt, philosopher Martin Buber has also placed in interpersonal relationships the possibility of both ethics and politics, conceiving intersubjectivity as a vehicle to de-transcendentalize monolithic Truths. As a matter of fact, Buber argues that it is through interpersonal dialogue that human beings may learn that one’s own “relation to truth is heightened by the other’s different relation to the same truth—different in accordance with his individuation, and destined to take seed and grow differently” (“Social” 65). By this active exercise of seeing the other approaching the same “truth” as me from his/her unique perspective the other is affirmed as a self, as another I, in the same way that Ishmael affirms Queequeg’s subjectivity in the passage from Moby-Dick that was previously anticipated as a representative instance of intersubjectivity in Melville’s oeuvre. This process triggers a plural thinking with the power to transcend, and challenge, individual monologic assumptions and worldviews. In consequence, intersubjectivity goes beyond mere sympathy for, or tolerance of, the other, since it holds the other as a “partner in a living event” (69), not as an object on which to propagate one’s “identity” and worldview. According to Buber, both partners unfold to each other in the interpersonal space, which becomes a connecting space between their two existences, through a dialogue which enables the sharing of each of their selves. This sharing, Buber claims, constitutes the meaning of “truth”: “Whatever the meaning of the word ‘truth’ may be in other realms, in the interhuman realm it means that men communicate themselves to one another as what they are” (71). Such communication is not the mere telling of a narrative but a sharing of beings, necessarily different, and the cultivation of the inter-human space (72). This way, openness to the other constitutes the foundation of human relationships across traditional boundaries humans have interiorized as natural. In this respect, Zygmunt Bauman notes, dialogue may facilitate the development of a universalism, which, the sociologist claims, is not incompatible, as it has traditionally been regarded, with plurality:
Universalism is not the enemy of difference; it does not require “cultural homogeneity”, nor does it need “cultural purity” and particularly the kind of practices which that ideological term refers to. The pursuit of universality does not involve the smothering of cultural polyvalence or the pressure to reach cultural consensus. Universality means no more, yet no less either, than the across-the-species ability to communicate and reach mutual understanding—in the sense, I repeat, of “knowing how to go on”, but also knowing how to go on in the face of others who may go on—have the right to go on—differently. (Search 202)
This universalism already points to alternative bonds and forms of belonging, attachment, relating, feeling, and organizing beyond traditional communities and even beyond the nation-state model. These alternative bonds are fully based and dependent on the plurality by which they are constituted. As Bauman states: “Such universality reaching beyond the confines of sovereign or quasi-sovereign communities is a conditio sine qua non of a republic reaching beyond the confines of sovereign or quasi-sovereign states; and the republic doing just that is the sole alternative to blind, elemental, erratic, uncontrolled, divisive and polarizing forces of globalization” (202).
In line with Bauman’s sociological yearnings, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Nationalism and the Imagination (2010) also vindicates the need to “think without nation”, to de-transcendentalize nationalism through an exercise in equivalence which “rid[s] the mind of the narrowness of believing in one thing and not in other things” (72). Grounding this claim on the notion of comparativism, which she uses to the analysis of languages, Spivak conceives “equivalence” as the exercise of being aware that all human beings in all parts of the world feel a similar attachment to their “corners of the world” (their languages, lands, families, religious and nonreligious beliefs, cultural affiliations, gender and sexual identities, etc.), and that, therefore, each of these smaller or larger personal “spaces” deserves to be as equally respected, protected, preserved, and nourished, as it needs to be transcended in order to avoid falling into exceptionalist or monolithic conceptions of the world. Spivak defines equivalence thus:
Here is equivalence. It is not equalization, it is not a removal of difference, it is not cutting the unfamiliar down to the familiar. It is perhaps learning to acknowledge that other things can occupy the unique place of the example of my first language. This is hard. It’s not an easy intuition to develop, yet this need not take away the comfort in one’s food, one’s language, one’s corner of the world. Although even this the nomad can give up. Remember Edward Said quoting Hugo of St Victor: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land”. […] What a comparativism based on equivalence attempts to undermine is the possessiveness, the exclusiveness, the isolationist expansionism of mere nationalism. (31-32)
Spivak locates this comparativist movement in the infant impulse to negotiate the private and the public through the process of acquisition of the mother tongue, which inscribes the child in the past, present, and future (public) history of that language, at the same time that s/he makes the language private and unique by appropriating, interiorizing, and reinventing it. Although Spivak specifically refers to the multilingual reality of India in order to explain her views on equivalence, the comparativist move is not limited to the linguistic domain but filled with a wider dimension that can be extrapolated to ways of relating—inter-personally, internationally, inter-culturally. This relational spaces not only foster a movement away from self-enclosing definitions of community and nationalism toward “the complex textuality of the international” (Spivak 21), but also a de-transcendentalization of nationalism itself.
Great indeed is the challenge of transcending nationalism in our present days, as it also was in the nineteenth century, the age of widespread nationalist waves and of the construction and consolidation of nations and definitions of national subjects. As James Mayall has noted, nationalism has proved successful as a system which thwarts people from imagining an alternative to the nation-state model (25). So has, in a similar way, race, as Paul Gilroy has convincingly analyzed in his 2000 Against Race, where he moreover vindicates a movement away from “race-thinking” in order to embrace a planetary kind of humanism. In a similar line of thought, other thinkers have emphasized the problems of global movements such as cosmopolitanism and internationalism, noting how these ultimately and paradoxically reinforce nationalism and other communitarianisms while declaring a global affiliation with humanity. Most remarkably, Jacques Derrida moved closer to this direction in a 1997 lecture at the University of Sussex, proclaiming that, if cosmopolitanism constitutes a positive understanding of human relationships, it is also a limited concept to think democracy and the political, because it is constrained by nation-state boundaries and by notions of citizenship. If, as Derrida noted, traditional cosmopolitanism, from the Greeks to Kant, perceived human beings as sharing a condition of brotherhood in their quality of citizens of the world, the conception of cosmopolitanism inherited from Kant, according to Derrida, limits the relationship of hospitality with the other through a series of conditions, most importantly the fact that “you should of course welcome the stranger, the foreigner, to the extent that he is a citizen of another country, that you grant him the right to visit and not to stay” (“Politics”). Thus, the role reserved for friendship in cosmopolitan politics is limited by both nation-state boundaries and clear-cut (frequently homogenizing and excluding) definitions of citizenship. Derrida’s vindication is that, while there is still much work that needs to be undertaken within the limits of the cosmopolitical, we also need to move beyond the nation-state and citizenship, toward a conception of democracy that “redefine[s] the political not only beyond the nation-state but beyond the cosmopolitical itself” (“Politics”). With this purpose, Derrida defends the potentiality of interpersonal relationships, claiming that friendship can develop a politics that rethinks democracy beyond such limits. Without ignoring the complexities of rethinking democracy beyond the limits of the nation-state and the cosmopolitical through the notion of friendship, Derrida defends the unquestionable necessity of such a task:
That of course looks like a utopian or very distant perspective. I don’t think so. Of course there is an enormous distance if we think that these things have to be reached and concretely embodied, but we know today as soon as we open a newspaper that these problems are urgent and prevalent in everyday life. In everyday life we see that the classical concept of democracy, the way it inhabits all the rhetoric of politicians and parliament, is shaken, that we need something else. We see that the concept of citizenship, the concept of the border, immigration, are today under a terrible seismic displacement. We not only feel this: we can analyse this every day, so what seems to be, and is, very far ahead of us, is also very close to us every day, and it is an urgent task to re-elaborate, to re-think, to re-engage and to be committed differently with these issues. (“Politics”)
In Melville’s times, the concept of democracy was also being “shaken”, particularly in the postbellum years. Actually, Melville’s full contemporary and poet Walt Whitman would claim in his 1871 Democratic Vistas that American democracy was a dormant abstraction still awaiting realization: “We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted” (37). Melville embarked on a rethinking of democracy and democratic human relationships outside nation-state boundaries, without neither falling into the defense of a “world community” based on an essentialist—and almost always supremacist—“common” identity, nor into an abstract universalism that neglected plurality in an imperialist endeavor to unify, and consequently neutralize, such plurality. Melville conceived universalism as a political and ethical project based on and constructed from plurality, permanently in progress, differently shaped in every intersubjective encounter, and therefore subjected to the capacities and limitations of the very human beings who might either create or entirely suppress it. This is a decentralized process built from plurality and polyphony, which emphasizes its own processual and imperfect nature since, as sociologist Jeffrey Weeks claims, “[h]umanity is not an essence to be realized, but a pragmatic construction, a perspective, to be developed through the articulation of the variety of individual projects, of differences, which constitute our humanity in the broadest sense” (199-200). It is relevant to underline, in this respect, how, throughout history, all genocidal practices, wars, cultural and religious persecutions, slavery, colonialism, racism, and other forms of discrimination, have been sustained—and continue to be sustained—through systematic processes of dehumanization. In other words, it has been because the “Other” was/is deployed from the humanity that s/he shared with his or her victimizer, and thus turned into an inferior human being or into a creature that was/is even regarded as non-human at all, that the victimizer could/can feel the right to oppress, colonize, enslave, murder, torture, rape, or inflict any possible form of violence or subjection upon another human being. Weeks’s conception of humanity is in tune with Hannah Arendt’s arguments on polyphonic dialogism and negotiation of meaning as a process for humanizing the world. In such dialogism, which this study claims Melville’s texts exemplify, answers are never conclusive but merely partial interpretations or ways of understanding the world, not endings but starting points for further questions, debate, and negotiation. Considering Melville’s literary project, this study, hence, disagrees with Bruce Robbins’s affirmation that “[c]ommon humanity is too weak a force to generate sufficient solidarity” (4). Yet, Melville’s oeuvre does not fall into a naïve championing of intersubjectivity either. As analyzed through the 1876 Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, at the same time that they emphasize the transformative effects this process may enable upon human thinking and ways of relating, Melville’s works analyze, with a much more pessimistic and tragic awareness, the neutralization of intersubjective dialogue by individuals who do not transcend their individualities and monologic thinking parameters, an attitude which, in all cases, as the author shows readers, leads to (self-)destructive and violent consequences. This tension between the potentialities of developing intersubjective relationships while, at the same time, the failure of human beings to open themselves to other human beings or to negotiate the other’s difference is a central aspect in the universalist project of Melville’s Clarel. The awareness of the destructive as well as of the constructive potentiality of human beings, however, does not lead Melville to reject the project: common humanity imposes an ethical obligation which is beyond community or identity-based walls, and which is inseparable from the creation of democratic human relationships and thinking.
THE ETHICS OF INTERSUBJECTIVE UNIVERSALISM
“So we are neither one nor the other, we are really both. […] We are implicated in each other’s lives”, asserted Gloria Anzaldúa in a 1987 interview (243). This implication derives from the fact that human beings share the earth with one another, to the extent that actions in one part of the globe have consequences in the lives of those in other parts of the globe, close and distant. The Native American imaginary, for example, illustrates this interconnection in its conception of the world as a web in which each of the parts sustaining the whole are interlaced: the pulling of one string has an effect upon other strings constituting the web. Due to this inevitable and inescapable interconnection and interdependency, ethical relationships need to be understood beyond notions of community or proximity in order to be global in character. It is, however, as necessary as it is difficult to theorize ethics, since, as Zygmunt Bauman has noted, the need of morality cannot be discursively contended without turning such a call for humanity into an imperative or mandate. This is precisely, Bauman notes, what religious discourse does: from the moment religion prompts obedience to a commandment (e.g. to act moral or “love one’s neighbor”), such commandment absolutizes as a call for obedience that neutralizes free will and makes individuals paradoxically irresponsible, instead of resulting into a call for humanity encouraging and potentially activating our response-ability. Actually, in his analysis of philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s arguments on the ethical demand, Bauman notes that “[w]ere we told exactly what to do, ‘the wisdom, insight, and love with which we are to act’ would ‘no longer be our own’; the command would not be a call to humanity, imagination and insight—but to obedience; Christian ethics, in particular, would be ‘ossified into ideology’” (Individualized 170). While not only Christianity but most—if not all—world religions certainly share in this “call to humanity” as their basic tenet, and while to many—perhaps the majority of—people around the globe religion may be an access to ethical responsiveness, this study defends that Melville turned to humanity in an Arendtian and Baumanian sense, beyond religious moral imperatives, in his evaluation of the ethics of intersubjective universalism.
Also Bauman has pointed out how, in face of the consolidation of corporate capitalism, consumerism, market economy, and money-oriented society, “human solidarity is the first casualty” (76). This is due to the fact that the possibilities for values such as sharing, cooperation, and mutual help are rejected in favor of individualism, competition, and economic sovereignty. But if plurality is the essential condition for the existence of the common world, as Hannah Arendt has theorized, individualism is one of its greatest menaces. This individualism can become a form that is a consequence of “conditions of radical isolation, where nobody can any longer agree with anybody else”, or it may appear under conditions of mass society (and also of nationalism and, more generally, forms of communitarianism based on a “common identity”), where people “act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest” (Human 39). On the other hand, present-day globalization has not cohered the different regions of the globe on an equal basis, but has instead served the interests of capitalism and of certain dominant national powers. As a consequence, globalization has enforced an unequal economic development between different world regions; it has widened economic inequality and given rise to identitycentered projects asserting regionalisms, nationalisms, or particularisms in reaction against the homogenizing tendencies of globalization. In face of this situation, it comes as imperative to imagine ethical human relationships aiming not only to preserve the (dignity of the) lives of human beings in separate parts of the globe, but also to restore individuals’ connection with the world and the awareness of their mutual vulnerability, which both unites them with and separates them from other human beings. This ethics needs to be universalist in scope, in the sense that it should break through individualisms and communitarian ways of belonging (nationalism included) which are ultimately self-centered, excluding, dividing, hierarchical, and frequently damaging to others.
This global ethical dimension is constitutive of the universalist project this volume interprets in Herman Melville’s Clarel, since the poem points to intersubjectivity as the means through which a conscience of interhuman diversity, vulnerability, suffering, and connectedness, and, therefore, a global ethics based on interpersonal responsibility, might be created. Margaret Canovan has claimed in her introduction to Arendt’s The Human Condition that “[o]nly the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense. Without it, we are each driven back on our own subjective experience, in which only our feelings, wants and desires have reality” (xiii). The sharing of the world, as Arendt has noted, is certainly horizontal and transnational, but also vertical and transtemporal (Human 55). This expands our interhuman responsibilities not only in the direction of those human beings who cohabit the world with us in the present moment, but also of past and future generations. For thinkers like Arendt or Bauman, there is no question about why one should be responsible for those we do not know, trans-spatially, trans-temporally. As a matter of fact, Emmanuel Levinas noted that asking why one should be responsible for his or her fellow human beings already voices the death of morality, since the necessity to ask such a question indicates the deep individualism of contemporary societies, at the same time that it tragically reflects how human beings have cut off their connection with other human beings. Indeed, Levinas has vindicated that our obligations to other fellow mortals are innate. What is more, the philosopher identifies the self and the other1 as inseparable and mutually constituent, arguing that moral responsibility for others pre-exists individuals. This means that the ethical demand is imposed upon each human being even before his or her existence, and that it is in relation to this ethical demand for the other that each individual develops his or her own self. This inevitable, innate, connection with and obligation toward the other also exposes the vulnerability of the self, since the other may actually harm the self in its attempts to approach the other’s self. Influenced by Levinas’s thinking, Judith Butler has also noted that this vulnerability “names both the necessity and difficulty of ethics” because “[i]t is surely hard to feel at once vulnerable to destruction by the other and yet responsible for the other” (“Precarious” 14). On the other hand, it is precisely this vulnerability that, Richard A. Cohen explains, “opens the human to the suffering of others” (xxxiv). As Levinas remarks, I cannot not respond to the other; from the moment I am born I am bound to the other in my responsibility for him or her, despite the fact that I did not choose the interlacing of our existences (“Without” 64). This responsiveness and responding to the other’s ethical demand, Levinas claims, is completely disinterested (“An-Archy” 57). In a similar way, and resonating with Derrida’s notion of hospitality, Gayatri Spivak also interprets one’s responsibility for the other as “a call to a relationship” by which the other is allowed a discursive space within the dialogic encounter (Reader 5). This implies, Spivak claims, that dialogue is not centered only on one or other of the participants; it fluidly travels from one to the other and among all: it is, Spivak states, an “embrace, an act of love” (269-270). As Levinas argues, the identity of the self is its moral relationship with the other, which makes the self part of a human community bound together by individuals’ reciprocal responsibility for one another (Humanism 6). This philosophy of interpersonal ethics is universalist in scope since it is based on a humanism which, like Arendt’s theorizations, renounces the conception of Man in the abstract, as a naked face removed from history and culture.2 This defense of humanism, then, upholds a belief in the irreducible dignity and equality of each human being, and, in a way similar to Martin Buber or Jean-Luc Nancy, locates meaning precisely in this dimension of being characterized by interpersonal responsibility. Levinas’s thinking is informing to this study’s theoretical articulation of the ethical dimension of the universalist project in Melville’s Clarel: the philosopher’s arguments for what might be considered a global ethics based on interdependence and interpersonal responsibility resonate within the democratizing potentiality Melville’s works attributed to intersubjectivity. This interhuman responsibility is the ultimate justification and guiding principle on which Melville’s universalist project rests:
Justice derives not from the state, which must nonetheless institute and maintain justice, but from the transcendence of the other person, the “widow, the orphan, the stranger”. It is in relation to this irreducible and immediate responsibility that, in the name of justice, culture, history, organized religion, the state, science, and philosophy take on their ultimate sense and have their ultimate justifications. The entire realm of the universal, in all its particular historically determined manifestations, emerges from and is guided by the imperatives of morality and is subject to moral judgment. (Cohen “Introduction” xxvii-xxviii)
A disciple of Levinas’s arguments on interhuman responsibility and of Arendt’s notion of cohabitation, Judith Butler has defended a conception of global ethics that is also relevant to theoretically articulate Melville’s project. Butler places the possibility of global bonds in the recognition of vulnerability and precarity as universal characteristics, as well as in the awareness of the fact that human beings are all “unchosen together”:
For whoever “we” are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone’s consent and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion. We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. (“Precarious” 23-24)
Through the recognition of this bond, which exposes not only our common humanity but also our common vulnerability, ego-centered thinking is transcended in favor of the interhuman, and this may trigger the “radical potential for [the] new modes of sociality and politics” indicated by Butler. Butler emphasizes Arendt’s premise that no human being has the right to decide with whom to cohabit the earth, because such a choice would directly attempt against the very plurality on which the earth itself and the very existence of each human being are directly dependent. Following Arendt, thus, Butler notes that human existence—as well as political life—depends on the earth’s heterogeneity and plurality, and that, therefore, there is no individuality outside plurality in the same way that no plurality can replace any individuality (17). In fact, Butler states that belonging “must actually no know [sic] bounds and exceed every particular nationalist and communitarian limit” (20). This leads her to turn away from any form of citizenship constituted by particular racial, religious, and national(ist) identitarian criteria, often generating displaced subjects who are made to remain in a limbo-like space between strict systems of classification, or who may even be unclassifiable at all by these criteria. Butler’s ethical views are universalist in scope, as she criticizes nationalism for concealing the fact that our political existence depends on unchosen cohabitation of the earth with other human beings on whom the very preservation of our lives relies. This unchosen cohabitation and inevitable vulnerability of our existences constitute the basis of Butler’s universalist ethics. Butler vindicates the need to develop institutions that preserve human life without giving preference to the worth of some lives over others. According to the thinker, vulnerability is the common condition of human beings (and of other living beings), and this vulnerability both affirms and determines our existence as relational and dependent on others. This conception of human existence resonates with Agamben’s adjacency, Buber’s intersubjectivity, Nancy’s being-with, and Derrida’s politics of friendship. Their “unwilled adjacency” (“Precarious” 5) inevitably connects human beings in our, also inevitably, precarious human condition; our lives mutually intertwined, not only with those who are near us but also with those in the distance. This implies that our inter-human responsibility and derived ethical obligations are global in character, and that these moral obligations expand beyond, and disrupt, the boundaries imposed by egocentric behaviors and community-based forms of belonging:
If I am only bound to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary. If I am only bound to those who are “human” in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling. But if ethical relations are mediated—and I use that word deliberately here—confounding questions of location such that what is happening “there” also happens in some sense “here” and if what is happening “there” depends on the event being registered in several “elsewhere”, then it would seem that the ethical claim of the event takes place always in a “here” and “there” that are fundamentally bound to one another. (8-9)
This global interconnection of human existences is “one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation” (13). It is in this global conception of human bonds that are invested the possibilities of a universalist ethics based on the possibilities enabled by the interpersonal or intersubjective “space” where the local and the global blend. Nevertheless, if, as Levinas argued, morality is innate in human beings, it is relevant to this volume’s analysis of Clarel to establish a connection at this point between the innate humanity or morality that Levinas defends, and the “Innate Depravity […] from whose visitations, in some shape or other”, Melville claimed, “no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free” (“Mosses” 51). If he at all believed in the potentiality of human goodness, what Melville continuously analyzed in his works was the evil side of human nature and the inseparability of good and evil in the human soul (“Evil and good they braided play / Into one chord”, states Rolfe in Clarel 4.4.27-28). Melville’s awareness of this inescapable intrinsic intertwinement determines his understanding, so often expressed in his oeuvre, that the potentiality of universalism for the creation of more democratic human relationships, and the destruction of such potentiality are, tragically and inevitably, inseparable tendencies. In these recurrent explorations of human evil, many scholars have located the source of Melville’s pessimism. However, even if it is certainly naïve to deny such pessimism, darker as the author grew in age and experiences, it is also important that Melville continued repeatedly investigating, to the last of his works, the potentiality (or the neutralization of the potentiality) of developing more democratic human relationships “without the walls” (Melville Journals 87) of identity and community. Also recurrent is Melville’s appreciation of the shared vulnerability and suffering condition of human beings, beyond proximity, culture, ethnicity or nationality, together with his emphasis on how, Judith Butler has remarked, “‘here’ is already an elsewhere” that is in relation to other elsewheres (“Precarious” 31). Melville’s literary production demonstrates an understanding that no human being is “foreign” or “illegal” in a world where we are all interconnected strangers exposed to suffering, vulnerability, mortality, and even the opposing forces of good and evil inherent to our very nature: “And as the tide in the water swept all craft on, so a like tide seemed hurrying all men, all horses, all vehicles on the land. […] It seemed as if some squadron of centaurs, on the thither side of Phlegethon, with charge on charge, was driving tormented humanity, with all its chattels, across” (Israel Potter 604). This awareness of a shared vulnerability and interconnectedness made of Melville a creator willing to embrace a critical plural thinking based on the acknowledgment that universal Meaning is a fallacy because each meaning is a culturally, ideologically, politically determined, mediated, and constructed interpretation. Melville’s works show how each signification constitutes an interpretive framework that is inevitably partial and in dialogic relationship with others. By developing a dialogic process that—from a critical stance—brings different human perspectives into conversation, negotiation, and contestation, Melville exposes intersubjectivity as a process through which interpersonal bonds rise above identity and community-based boundaries, thus transcending monologic meanings. This dialogic process rejects one-sided thinking parameters to embrace manysidedness, and opens up democratic relational possibilities for more global ethics and political relationships that are not limited by identity or community.
THE POLITICS OF INTERSUBJECTIVE UNIVERSALISM
Ernesto Laclau has theorized a plural and decentralized model of universalism which this study considers enabling to the creation of democratic politics due to its dialogic possibilities. Drawing from the possibilities opened up by poststructuralist theory, Laclau rejects an abstract and homogenizing Universal in order to vindicate that universalism is not in opposition to particularisms and that, therefore, none of these two tendencies should be exclusive of the other. As a matter of fact, Laclau’s conception of universalism gathers together particular struggles (now separate and even confronting and competing against each other), while preserving the particularity of these struggles:
The universal is incommensurable with the particular, but cannot, however, exist without the latter. How is this relation possible? My answer is that this paradox cannot be solved, but that its non-solution is the very precondition of democracy. The solution of the paradox would imply that a particular body had been found, which would be the true body of the universal. But in that case, the universal would have found its necessary location, and democracy would be impossible. If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation. (Emancipation(s) 35)
Laclau’s model of universalism not only vindicates the inseparability of universalism and democracy, but goes as far as to claim that “the abandonment of universalism undermines the foundation of a democratic society” (122). The theorist’s view of universalism is based on a conception of the universal as an “absent fullness” (15), a missing totality that is each time anew, provisionally and temporarily, filled up by a specific particular which gets access to a position of “hegemony”. Revising the Gramscian concept of “hegemony” evoking notions such as rule, dominance, or competition, Laclau conceives hegemony as the process by which particulars temporarily inhabit the empty universal. This process consists of a pragmatic, collaborative, and dialogic practice by which not only are particulars given expression, but new meanings may be created when breaking through the barriers of each of these individual particulars. Universalism is, therefore, a “horizon” (“Universalism” 90) consisting of an empty space unifying multiple equivalential demands (56); it constitutes the process of temporarily inhabiting the defining emptiness of the universal. This process places particulars within a hegemonic relationship with other particulars, which, in turn, will themselves occupy the space of the empty signifier as well. According to Laclau, this empty signifier or universal is only possible because of its impossible totality, since, if it were constituted as totality, its “political grounding” would become “either a totalitarian closure or a pre-given unity […] waiting to be realized (Lott 666). This way, Nora Sternfeld explains, “[u]niversality is preserved as a dimension without any possibility of fulfillment by a particularism”. This vacancy facilitates politics, as multiple differences are placed within, and find their expression through, a relationship of equivalence by which each particular is as well split: “on the one hand, each difference expresses itself as difference; on the other hand, each of them cancels itself as such by entering into a relationship of equivalence with all the other differences in the system” (Emancipation(s) 38). This process enables the construction of universalism by means of subverting the differential nature of particularisms and, at the same time, placing them within an equivalential logics in which both the logics of difference and of equivalence operate, and which allows for the realization—or, rather, the impossible realization—of the empty signifier and the universal (39). Linda Zerilli describes the universal articulated by Laclau as “the fragile, shifting, and always incomplete achievement of political action; it is not the container of a presence but the placeholder of an absence, not a substantive content but an empty place”; it is, in other words, a universalism which “is not One” (15):
The very fact that commonalities must be articulated through the interplay of diverse political struggles—rather than discovered and then merely followed, as one follows a rule—means, first, that no group or social actor can claim to represent the totality and, second, that there can be no fixing of the final meaning of universality (especially not through rationality). The universal cannot be fixed because it “does not have a concrete content of its own but is an always preceding horizon resulting from an indefinite expansion of equivalential demands. (11)
Laclau’s theory places particularisms within a system of equivalential relationships that allows them to occupy a universal function in connection with other particulars, which will occupy this universal function as well. Consequently, for Laclau, hegemony results not in an imposition but, rather on the contrary, in a constant negotiation of the relationship between the universal and the particular. In this sense, Zerilli connects Laclau’s conception of hegemony to Hannah Arendt’s notion of “critical judgment”:
What Laclau and Arendt share, despite their differences, is the view that intersubjective agreement is not there to be discovered in the universality of experience or the sameness of identity. There is nothing that we all share by virtue of being human or of living in a particular community that guarantees a common view of the world; there is nothing extralinguistic in the world that guarantees that we all share a common experience; there is no Archimedean place from which we could accede to a universal standpoint. But if Laclau (like Arendt) refutes the false universality of abstract rationality or common identity, he by no means rejects universalism “as an old-fashioned totalitarian dream” (26). Playing a different language game with the universal, however, Laclau […] reinterprets universality as a site of multiple significations which concern not the singular truths of classical philosophy but the irreducibly plural standpoints of democratic politics. Even those who want nothing to do with this or any universal, says Laclau, can never quite escape the pull of its orbit. (8)
In short, universalism is not an essence but a political process that stems from the dialogic encounter of different particulars. Nevertheless, in spite of the democratic possibilities it opens, Laclau’s articulation of universalism is not without its loose ends. For example, Linda Zerilli has pointed out that the concept of the empty signifier may be misleading to a certain extent, since “it is not always clear what the place of the particular is, finally, in the empty signifier. Is this particular overcome, left behind, transformed? Is the empty signifier, strictly speaking, empty?” (14). As a matter of fact, Laclau does claim that the universal is empty; that it cannot be predicted in advance, because it needs to be the result of the hegemonic operation that enables different particulars to temporarily occupy the place of the universal and negotiate this place with other particulars which they are united to by their relationship of equivalence. In addition, the equivalential relationship process does not authorize all worldviews or particulars as equally valid. Zerilli notes how it is indeed a delicate matter to provide an answer to the question of why “not all claims to the universal are equally authorized; why the claims of some groups to represent the whole carry more cultural weight than those of other groups” (14), without seeming to fall into the paradox of restricting the very democracy and plural universalism we claim to give expression to. And, nonetheless, it is obvious that certain individuals and communities built upon racist, sexist, homophobic, cultural supremacist, imperialist, colonialist, even genocidal agendas, in the name of racial/religious “purity” or even of nationalism and the nation, must be rejected in the process of universalism, since these agendas attempt against the plurality of the very humanity which universalism is expressive of and by which it is constructed. Crucial to give an answer to this question are the arguments on ethics by thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Judith Butler, and Emmanuel Levinas analyzed earlier. As has been argued, these thinkers vindicate the need of developing ethical interpersonal relationships based on an understanding of the common vulnerability of human beings, the respect for the plurality of humanity, and the mutual interconnection and responsibility of human beings for one another, close and distant. In the same way that the particular and the universal are inseparable in the construction of democratic politics, politics and ethics are also inseparable in the construction of universalism. If we believe with Levinas that morality is innate to human beings, then, we have no reason for renouncing our obligations to others. The fact that, as Melville repeatedly analyzed and lamented in his oeuvre, innate depravity—combined with well-interiorized inter-human walls—may obscure or even entirely neutralize the task of developing intersubjective universalism out of segregationism and individualism, is not in itself an excuse to abandon the project. Rather on the contrary, it constitutes an added proof of its urgency.
1 In Humanism of the Other, Levinas does not capitalize the word “other”.
2 On the other hand, Judith Butler, among other theorists, has also criticized Levinas’s arguments on morality as problematic due to the fact that they are inscribed within the Judeo-Christian tradition, which might even make the ethical relationship articulated in Levinas’s philosophical thinking parochial and excluding of those outside such religious and cultural sets of beliefs (Butler “Precarious” 12).
