Joshua Foa Dienstag

Tragedy, Pessimism, Nietzsche

This essay reexamines the link between tragedy and pessimism and disputes some assumptions commonly made about it. Debates about tragedy often suppose that connecting it to pessimism must render it elitist, reactionary or anti-political. But this discussion largely takes place in ignorance of the philosophical tradition of pessimism and, especially, of Nietzsches aims in characterizing tragedy as an outgrowth of pessimism. While acknowledging limits to the human condition, pessimism, as many inheritors of Nietzsche have seen, rather than confirming existing identities, political or otherwise, instead sanctions a process of self-renovation based on an acknowledgment of the fundamental instability and perishability of human life. Pessimism is as much an ethic of radical possibility as it is of radical insecurity. It makes little sense, therefore, to link pessimistic tragedy with conservative politics. The pessimistic spirit is a restless one, unlikely to be enamored of the status quo. Tragedy, though always anti-utopian, is indeed pessimistic without being either conformist or dead.

The pessimistic spirit

Pessimism today is poorly understood. Indeed, such is the disdain that pessimism engenders, that it often has difficulty being taken seriously as a theoretical position. Yet pessimism, which is distinct from skepticism and nihilism, has much to offer those who have discarded the Enlightenment’s expectation of progress. Through an examination of Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Unamuno, this paper traces out some of the common themes of pessimistic thought. Pessimism, it is argued, is concerned with the burden of time and with the problem of organizing the best kind of human life in the absence of a promise of progress, happiness, or salvation for society as a whole. But it need not urge passivity or resignation in response to these conditions. The figure of Don Quixote, first appealed to in this context by Unamuno, illustrates pessimism’s capacity to craft a positive ethic of personal conduct for life in a disordered and disenchanted world.

Building the temple of memory: Hegel's aesthetic narrative of history

This article examines Hegels philosophy of history with the intention of once again rendering it strange. Hegels “historicism” has been accepted for so long that the actual terms of his history are rarely examined afresh. But his account of the past, it is argued here, is best understood through the vocabulary of art and beauty that he develops in the Aesthetics . Historical forms cannot be wholly grasped through the vocabulary of dialectical reason, but ought to be seen as “shapes” in a strong sense. Two principle conclusions follow from this reassessment: The first is that the Philosophy of History is best understood neither as an optimistic account of rational progress, nor as a tale of the “end of history” in liberal democracy, but as an attempt to “seduce us to life”—that is, an attempt to reconcile us to the world through the beauty of history. The second conclusion is that this attempt must fail. It fails because, in his effort to discern beauty in the past, Hegel imposes a completeness upon time that excludes the possibility of a future. Whether intentionally or not, Hegels pessimism about art is transmitted to his philosophy of history. The Temple of Memory that Hegel builds to shelter our souls ends up imprisoning them instead.

On Political Theory, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences

Sometimes political theorists like to imagine that they are lonely humanists misplaced in social science departments. In fact, political theory was created as part of a political science composed of both humanistic and social-scientific elements. Rather than trying to locate political theory somewhere between the humanities and the social sciences, we should instead dismantle the boundary between the two and create a unified discipline of questioning that embraces both kinds of inquiry.

A Storied Shooting: Liberty Valance and the Paradox of Sovereignty

A variety of theorists have emphasized the paradox at the center of democratic legal authority, viz., that it cannot be self-derived but must ultimately rest on some extra-legal phenomenon, usually an act of exclusion. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance examines precisely this paradoxical situation and, I argue, actually suggests a novel response that has escaped theorists who have considered the problem in the past. The film’s best-known line (“print the legend”) in fact represents the opposite of its perspective—which is to carefully deconstruct and reveal (without debunking) the complicated interrelation of law and power in the formation of any state. Rather than undermining democratic authority, we can be strengthened, if sobered, by the revelation that law is not self-sustaining. By setting the facts alongside the legend, the film perpetuates the fortuitous moment of state formation. What constitutes the state, then, is neither law nor power, but rather the matrix of representation that creates the relationship between them—here a film, but perhaps, more generally, a sustaining narrative.

The Example of History and the History of Examples in Political Theory

Modern political theory was created with the idea that the ordered consumption of historical examples was the best kind of political education. But over the course of its history, the example receded as the idea of natural laws of politics rose to prominence in the Enlightenment. In the post-Enlightenment period, political theory has struggled to balance the roles of example and generalization as it has wavered in defining itself as either practical education for the practitioner of politics or, to the contrary, as scientific knowledge for the detached observer. A recent turn to film in political theory may indicate that the example is finding a new sort of purchase in the field, on the basis of a novel ontology of politics.

Book Review: The Open: Man and Animal

exclusion. But this does not mean it is absent. The between is the unthought condition of their projected wholeness, integrity, purity, transcendence, and identity, and as such it can be used to decenter and, one hopes, transform hegemonic (ascetic) formations in politically powerful ways. By positioning Nietzsche’s between as one type of difference among others, Zupancic misses its ontologically radical nature. In the process, however, she succeeds in deepening the discussion of difficult aspects of his thinking. For this reason, Zupancic does her readers a service.