Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding:
Ethics of Commitment,
Politics of Resistance

Verso Books, £ 17.99

Review by Lorenzo Marsili

Simon Critchley's new work is an impassioned call to wake an increasingly apathic citizenry to the responsibilities of engaged, perhaps militant but never Jacobin, democratic practice. In times when the curtain seems to have drawn over the possibility of a truly oppositional grassroots political project, Critchley reminds us that public contestation - as the plural, un-coopted, sincere manifestation of outrage in the face of injustice - represents the very essence of radical democratic praxis.

At the root of Critchley's analysis lies a consideration of the motivational deficit at the heart of today's liberal democracies, which Critchley chooses to frame in the classical Kantian dilemma of experiencing the (governmental) norms that rule contemporary society as externally binding but not internally compelling. The task of the book can be framed around Yeats' famous declaration that the best lack all conviction, whilst the worst are full of passionate intensity (and one must here just recall Bush's latest speech in Prague before the G8): it is a call to arms, a ringing morning bell, a vigorous push to stand up and start walking.

The book is divided into two parts; one exquisitely ethical, the other overtly political. The problem haunting Critchley in the first part of the volume is how the self binds itself to whatever it determines as its good. In other words, where is conviction to come from? Critchley chooses to focus on three European thinkers, two philosophers and one theologian, from whom he borrows his basic tools of analysis.

From Alain Badiou, he borrows the idea of the subject binding itself to the universality of a demand that opens up within a particular instance, through a particular event, but which exceeds that contingent situation. With the thought of Knud Ejler Løgstrup, Critchley develops this into the idea of an infinite, unfulfillable, one-sided ethical demand, and the a-symmetrical relationship it creates between the subject and the nature of that demand. By reading Emmanuel Levinas he then attempts to show how this moment of radical asymmetry between the infinity of the ethical demand and the finite and fallible nature of man goes on to define the subject as the bearer of an impossible infinite responsibility.

After reading Critchley's short but precise analysis, one cannot but be left feeling that too much is being left unsaid, that entire Panzerdivisions of objections are not being dodged but simply ignored. Critchley's reading of the three thinkers mentioned is evocative but perhaps a little uncritical, the results potent but unchallenged. But indeed, this is a particular book, half a philosophical treatise, half a manifesto, and Critchley has spared us none of his critical powers in his other recent works. And, in fact, the gestures offered in the first section of the book cannot but be read together with the second, political exhortation.

Critchley begins by taking issue with the classical Marxist thought that capitalism is bound to create an increasingly homogeneous social fabric defined by a self-conscious revolutionary subjectivity, the proletarian worker. Critchley, rightly enough, sees instead a multiplication and differentiation of social actors in contemporary capitalism. But this immediately leads to the question - who is then the contemporary subject of revolutionary-emancipatory politics? As Mario Tronti, one of the founding minds of Italian operaismo, recently put it, who is the worker today, understood not as anthropological object, but as political subject? Critchley interprets this as the lack of a "name" around which radical politics can take shape, the lack of a commonly shared political vocabulary that allows multiple social realities with plural and at times contradictory demands to rally together under a common banner.

Critchley attempts to offer a response indirectly. Through a timely discussion of the "politics of fear" as the Schmittian creation of an internal order through the more or less fantastic threat of an external enemy, he calls for a radical political articulation conceived as the creation of interstitial distance within the state territory, defined by the active articulation of political opposition from local experiences of injustice by presenting universally binding demands. The art of politics is to weave together such cells of resistance into a shared political subjectivity precisely by stressing the universal character of the demand, and here is the connection to the first part of the book.

This leads to Critchley's call for a new anarchic meta-politics, which, as any reader of Laclau would wish, refuses to see democracy as the dead dog of neoliberalism, taking it instead as a "totally reproposable idea", to use recent words of Antonio Negri, defined by Critchley as "the deformation of society from itself through the act of material political contestation".

Although the total divorce of structural and super-structural concerns effected by Critchley raises the problem of the economical sustainability of the demands presented - thus limiting their scope of impact in the very structural organisation of society - we cannot but agree that if the possibility of viable alternative futures is to arise this will only happen through the articulation of what we many none too euphemistically call an enraged citizenry. A moment of disappointment comes from Critchley's failure to connect the universality of the political demand with the necessary transnational nature of the response. And this represents the crux of the problem: how to harmonise local and global? Are protests against delocalisation ethically universal demands when they are blind to the advantages such delocalisation brings to developing countries?

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