Private Crime, Public Madness

This chapter attempts to clarify the questions raised by the relations between madness and justice, with reference to the heritage of the French Revolution. It also assesses the distinction between crime and madness and their respective treatments in public and private spheres. Indeed, what prompts current discussions on the function of the psychiatrist in the courtroom or on the role of judgments of civil capacity in the treatment of mental illness, is yet again the perspective offered by the reframing of the Penal Code (including the famous Article 64, which makes “insanity”—or, in the more recent version, “psychic or neuro-psychic disturbance”—into the principal operator of the nullification of a crime or a delict, either in its juridical reality or in its penal consequences).

Zur Sache Selbst: The Common and the Universal in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

This chapter outlines a structural interpretation of the Hegelian statement, “Tun aller und jeder,” or TAJ, and its function within Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in order to pave the way for a better understanding of what at the heart of the “system,” and sometimes against it, constitutes the irreducible singularity of this work. At the same time the chapter also considers the debates surrounding interpretations of Hegel's work. The expression das Tun aller und jeder occurs at the end of Chapter V, Section C, §a (“The spiritual animal kingdom and deceit, or the 'matter in hand' itself”), and it is almost immediately taken up again in the Introduction to Chapter VI (“Spirit,” der Geist).

The Messianic Moment in Marx

This chapter reexamines a recurring question in interpretations of Marx: “What is the relationship between his concept of politics and religious (or theological) discourse?” Here, the chapter focuses mainly upon a single text: the article, entitled “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung,” that Marx published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in March 1844. For the first time, in this text, Marx uses the name “proletariat.” Hence, this chapter shows that, read to the letter and placed within its proper context, this text represents the “messianic moment” in Marx's thought, and it makes it possible to examine the permanence and the metamorphoses of this dimension throughout his work.

Aimances in Rousseau: Julie or The New Heloise as Treatise on the Passions

This chapter looks at how writing and theory are superimposed in Rosseau's novel, Julie or the New Heloise. Drawing upon two of Paul de Man's readings of the novel in his Allegories of Reading, the chapter embarks on a discussion regarding passion, which is generally considered to hold the philosophical key to the novel, by deriving from two assertions. The first is that that “passion is not something which, like the senses, belongs in proper to an entity or a subject but, like music, it is a system of relationships that exists only in the terms of this system;” it is a relational notion. De Man's second assertion defines the literary category of allegory as a “narrative of the second degree,” which includes the deconstruction of its own immediate, apparently realistic signification.

Bourgeois Universality and Anthropological Differences

This chapter articulates the relationship between the political categories of modernity and the question to which its metaphysics always returns: that of subjectivity, endowed with consciousness—perhaps affected with unconsciousness—and with rights, duties, or individual and collective missions. It examines this relationship on the level of the history of ideas, morals, and social relations, and also articulates it as a conceptual unity that helps to clarify certain existential and institutional problems. In so doing, this chapter asks whether they are still our problems (and why) or whether they are already on the wane (and how). This discussion is thus schematic, incomplete, and preliminary, not only in its “conclusions” but also in its formulations.

Blanchot’s Insubordination: On the Writing of the Manifesto of the 121

This chapter analyzes the encounter between the radicality of the Manifesto of the 121 and the specific radicality of Blanchot's own thinking and writing. First, the chapter adheres to the letter of the manifesto and discusses the implications of its key words and expressions. It then examines the intersection between the idea of a “declared right to insubordination” and other of Blanchot's formulations that refer to the idea of a refusal or negativity that under certain circumstances might be carried to extremes. Finally, this chapter outlines two concurrent hypotheses that can be formed with respect to the idea of a “foundation without foundation” of the law, which is evidenced precisely by the need for civil insubordination or disobedience.

Men, Armies, Peoples: Tolstoy and the Subject of War

This chapter analyzes the Clausewitzian concept of war as reflected in Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, which first appeared in five installments from 1865 to 1869. It is universally considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, not only because Tolstoy used elements from Clausewitz in preparation for writing the novel, but more specifically because the narrative echoes one of Clausewitz's most famous theses: that which concerns the “strategic superiority of defense over offense.” Tolstoy's new interpretation of this thesis goes back, in a certain sense, to the “source” of its elaboration in order to draw new philosophical consequences from it.

Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist: Spirit’s Dictum

This chapter argues that while the category of “modernity” is differential, it is so in several senses that intersect and vie with one another. It introduces certain theses on modernity which aim to “deconstruct” the institutions, presuppositions, and discourses of modernity, arguing that they are always present at the heart of the philosophical expressions of modernity. The chapter discusses these concepts with respect to a problem of reading and interpreting a particular Hegelian utterance: “Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist” (hereafter, “IWWI”), taken from Chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In doing so the chapter also takes into account two models for Hegel's utterance: the theophanic utterances from the Gospel of John, and Rousseau's Social Contract.

Judging Self and Others: On the Political Theory of Reflexive Individualism

This chapter attempts another rereading of classical texts in order to rethink the question of “responsibility” for actions as an agency of the individualization of the subject, and next to characterize the democratic function of the “faculty of judgment.” It begins with the Greek idea of the citizen capable of judging, as referenced from Aristotle's Politics, Book III. The chapter then turns to a discussion of what this texxt refers to as “reflexive individualism”—the other face what has been called “possessive individualism.” Finally, after addressing the citizen's competence the chapter turns to their relative incompetence—after the foundation of reflexive individualism, the chapter observes its limitation in the form of a judiciary that is essentially a social institution.

The Social Contract Among Commodities: Marx and the Subject of Exchange

This chapter unfolds the moments of a Marxist critical construction of the universal. From the first, Marx's theory of commodity and money fetishism formed one of the most admired and contested aspects of his “critique” of political economy. In an astonishing fashion, it restores the correlation of sovereignty and subjection to the heart of the modern “social relation” that appears to herald the triumph of free individuality. To this end, it was necessary conceptually to reinscribe the classical schema of the “contract” into the representative and practical space of commodity exchange, whose immediacy he explodes by showing its latent metaphysics, which is also an anthropology and a politics.