Resisting foundations: Politics between determinate negation and the ultimate double bind

Abstract

This article develops a critique of the post-foundationalist conception of politics put forward by Oliver Marchart. Confronting the depoliticizations that follow from both the foundationalist insistence on transhistorical foundations and the anti-foundationalist rejection of all foundations as fictions, post-foundationalism casts resistance as determinate negation of concrete political institutions rather than as opposition to phantasmatic totalities. I argue that this precludes the possibility to consider phantasmatic referents (be they divine right, natural law, the nation or the demos) as neither transhistorical/fictional nor exclusively political but to interpret them in terms of a conflict between competing modes of presencing. I elucidate this claim with reference to the work of Reiner Schürmann, which Marchart introduces as an exponent of post-foundationalism but which is better grasped as outlining a ‘para-foundational’ view. In focusing on the ultimate double bind that subtends foundations, Schürmann affords a more comprehensive perspective on the life and afterlife of the Western political and philosophical tradition.

Introduction

Can political resistance be thought in other terms than as a reaction? It might seem that resistance remains invariably tethered to its object, limited to an act of defiance on the ground of the very social, political, or economic foundations that it seeks to contest. But if we think of resistance in terms of a ‘capacity to resist’, then it is at the same time curiously excessive, irreducible to a binary opposition but ‘situated instead within a complex and dynamic spatio-temporal field’ (Caygill 2013, 4). What this suggests is a tension between the capacity to resist and its actuality in moments of opposition. That its actualization determines the capacity to resist both in relation to a concretely given state of affairs and to the conditions that gave rise to this same state of affairs is reflected in another recent definition of resistance as ‘equally pre- and ultra-political’, comprising both ‘recognizable political acts’ and apparently ‘formless and difficult to determine illegalisms’ (Saar 2022, 131). ¹ This ambiguous relation between form and formlessness captures the conceptual rather than merely political challenge posed by resistance. The question of determining an adequate standpoint for resistance is, of course, not a new one. It underpins already the young Marx’s call for a ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’ (Marx 1975, 142) and extends all the way to the late Adorno’s philosophical resistance to the ‘total violence of that which exists’ (Adorno 2003, 155). In what follows, I aim to shed light on the relation between resistance and its object by analyzing diverging forms of grasping ‘that which exists’ in terms of foundations.

To draw out these divergences and their implications, I contrast Oliver Marchart’s post-foundationalist theory of antagonism with Reiner Schürmann’s notion of ultimate double bind. Marchart’s theory turns on what he calls the post-foundational hypothesis, which entails the claim that the waning of metaphysical foundations brings to light a difference between the human need for firm foundations and the reflexive recognition that all foundations are human-made. The resulting antagonism between competing claims to foundation gives rise, in Marchart, to a powerful notion of protest politics as determinate negation of concrete political institutions and issues rather than against whole social systems or totalities. This notion of protest politics reacts to the depoliticizations that ensue from the totalizing perspectives of foundationalism and anti-foundationalism: Where foundations are either transhistorical as in foundationalism or entirely fictional as in anti-foundationalism, there cannot be political struggle over them but merely, in the first case, the suppression of heretics and, in the second, anarchy of power.

I argue that in its attempt to discard those views the post-foundationalist perspective flattens out the historical-ontological discordance at the heart of the problem of foundations into struggles over concrete foundations. As a result, the notion of resistance as determinate negation loses sight of how the concretely given remains shot through with the phantasmatic. Put differently, in this post-foundational turn, the essential indeterminacy or phantasm that has historically been central both to institutions and political action – in the guise of, for instance, divine right, natural law, the nation or the demos – becomes eclipsed by an exclusive focus on the determinate negation of specific political issues and thus fails to account for the curious persistence of foundations in contemporary Western politics. The ontological foundation supplied by Marchart, that is, the emphasis on antagonism as the organizing principle of politics, does more to obscure than to clarify the relation between concrete political struggles and the phantasms at govern modern societies. Contrary to post-foundationalist idealism, I suggest that the problem lies not in the perceived absence of metaphysical foundations but in the life and afterlife of phantasmatic foundations that might have lost their credibility but for all that have not vanished but, on the contrary, continue to govern ‘that which exists’.

To show this, I draw on what I call a ‘para-foundational’ strategy in the work of Reiner Schürmann, as it is expressed in particular by his notion of ultimate double bind. Moving from antagonism to ultimate double bind, I argue, affords us a more adequate perspective on the ambiguity of political struggle than the post-foundational strategy. This becomes clear in Schürmann’s explicit rejection of determinate negation as a form of negation that corresponds to the contradictory constitution of ‘that which exists’ and his subsequent reconsideration of negation as aphairesis, detachment, in the work of Plotinus. I will suggest that the ultimate double bind can be productively linked to this form of negation to outline a discordant resistance to ‘that which exists’: A form of resistance that does not settle within determinate negation but reckons with the excess or phantasm that subtends any formation of opposition. Accordingly, what is at stake in the para-foundational perspective is the apparent inseparability of the concretely given and the phantasmatic. In this perspective, foundationalism and anti-foundationalism are not commensurable opposites but incongruent yet inseparable dynamics, and therefore cannot be effectively overcome by post-foundationalism.

The post-foundational conception of politics

The post-foundational hypothesis in its most condensed and ambitious version, as formulated by Marchart, is based on the idea that the end of metaphysics has not brought with it a clean cut with foundationalism. ² Despite the historical fact that the status of foundations as absolute or eternal has come apart irrevocably in modernity, (political) fundamentalists and (theoretical) foundationalists continue to bank on absolute foundations, while others have embraced an anti-foundationalism that aims to annul all foundations once and for all. Post-foundationalist thinking takes a more realist approach by introducing the idea of a political difference between an ‘ontopolitical need’ (Marchart 2018, 14) of human beings for some sort of stable ground and the perennial conflict that subverts all instituted social formations. This difference opens a space for the political as the struggle over foundations and thus avoids the depoliticizations that come with foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, both of which adhere, if in diametrically opposed ways, to the image of absolute foundations. Beginning with the Machiavellian ‘moment of the political’ (Marchart 2007, 8), the political difference has recovered a condition that had been buried under metaphysical foundations and that can now be established as the ontopolitical horizon of opposition. ³ Accordingly, Marchart holds that ‘our social world […] is based on what Judith Butler calls “contingent foundations” […] [which] will always be plural, they will only be established temporarily, they can be reversed, and they have to be established against conflicting foundational attempts’ (Marchart 2018, 14-15; Butler 1992). What is crucial to this perspective is that it is reflexive: it is the realization that while an absolute foundation is impossible, foundations remain necessary for a world to come into existence at all.

As such, the post-foundational hypothesis is based on the premise that modernity is characterized by a ‘continuous chiaroscuro’, a ‘twilight of certainty and doubt’ (Marchart 2010, 8). ⁴ Foundations turn out to be brittle, yet they do not disappear: ‘not all social foundations have vanished into air […] but the validity claim [Geltungsanspruch] of each and every foundation is contested and can in principle be overturned’ (Marchart 2010, 16). This gives rise to ‘a constant interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundation […] – such as totality, universality, essence, and ground’ (Marchart 2007, 2), an interrogation that however must not be misunderstood as a one-directional process aiming to subvert existing foundations, which would amount to staging an anti-foundationalist gesture that remains entangled within a foundationalist horizon. Post-foundationalism, on the contrary, is conceived as a reflexive reckoning with foundations, appreciating both their ontological necessity and their historical impossibility. Thus, post-foundationalism bases itself on an integration of what is historically new and what is historically invariable or ontologically constant – namely, the ‘ontopolitical need’ for foundations.

Marchart names the post-foundational horizon so recovered antagonism: a foundation that grounds nothing but the struggle over foundations. In this, Marchart draws on Heidegger’s discovery that ‘the ground grounds as ab-ground’ (Heidegger 1989, 29; cited in Marchart 2018, 15), according to which the ‘differential play’ (Marchart 2018, 15) that binds together abyss and ground is never-ending. To theorize this perennial antagonism, Marchart recodes the Heideggerian premise, first, into Laclau’s claim that all social relations are constituted and deposed with reference to the pure negativity of an outside and from there, second, into Hegel’s notion of the labor of the negative. This ontologization or ‘ontopoliticization’ of negativity is coupled with a moment of affirmation, which responds to the ontopolitical need for foundations. Together, both moments provide a powerful revision of the notion of the political as a struggle over foundations. Marchart conceptualizes this under the title of ‘minimal politics’ (Marchart 2018, 182), a politics that is collective, strategic, organized, conflictual, partisan, and aims to become major, that is, to push a certain order out of its hegemonic position and replace it. This ‘protest politics’ (Marchart 2018, 110, 189) both opposes a specific hegemonic order and proposes an alternative one:

The very idea of a monolithic system of oppression is phantasmatic, as is the attempt at attacking that system head-on. Negation, therefore, can only mean determinate negation, i.e. the negation of something concretely given rather than merely imagined as all-powerful totality. The same is to be said about affirmation. It only makes sense as determinate affirmation: the creation of an actually existing project and collective will. (Marchart 2018, 202) ⁵

The post-foundational hypothesis thus translates into a notion of politics as activist escalation from negation to the creation of hegemony. Without going into further detail here on Marchart’s sophisticated and wide-ranging theoretical construction, this passage shows how Marchart determines ‘that which exists’ for resistance as in each case ‘concretely given’. What happens to the ‘phantasmatic’ – this ambiguous figure of a ‘monolithic system of oppression’ that has played a crucial role in modern politics both in its emancipatory and in its reactionary expressions – is not explained. ⁶ Yet it is precisely the question of what exactly is the ‘concrete’ reality of social or economic phenomena, of what constitutes an adequate explanation and what a delusion, that subtends political struggles in modern societies.

That Marchart’s determination of the object of resistance as ‘concretely given’ rests on the exclusion of the ‘phantasmatic’ from the field of politics is not a coincidence but decisive for grounding this post-foundational notion of opposition since the conceptual disjunction between the phantasmatic and the concretely given is what orientates the antagonism between conflicting claims to hegemony. It is the externalization or exclusion of the phantasmatic that gives ‘protest politics’ its direction: it turns not against some phantasmatic universal but what comes into view are particular problems. Given how significant it should be on this view to be able to distinguish what is concrete from what is merely phantasmatic, it is surprising that the relation between the phantasmatic and the real is nowhere explicitly addressed by Marchart. Whenever he uses the word ‘phantasmatic’, it serves as a sort of pejorative epithet for views that are rejected (Marchart 2018, 64, 69, 132). And it is here that we might start to wonder what determinate negation and determinate affirmation can actually mean in the post-foundational horizon, whether determination here does not obscure rather than clarify our historical condition: namely, that the separation between the phantasmatic and the concretely given is itself a philosophical and political issue that cannot be bracketed from specific struggles.

For Marchart, what is phantasmatic are the opposed yet equally totalizing beliefs in absolute foundations and in the impossibility of foundations tout court. In opposition to those misdirected beliefs, the post-foundational approach aims to dispense with all totalizing perspectives, focusing on specific institutional instances. Yet what the relation between phantasms and concrete post-foundational foundations is remains unclear. At what point do foundations become phantasmatic or totalizing? The claim put forward here is that attention to the phantasmatic, as opposed to the ontological prioritized in Marchart’s account, can better clarify the historical valence of last principles and ultimate foundations. ⁷ One issue with Marchart’s political ontology, as has been observed elsewhere (Mertel 2017), is the thinning out of historical forms into political forms. In this perspective, on one hand, the social is a merely passive sedimentation that requires political reactivation. On the other, Marchart repeats the trope that in modernity the political has remained subordinate to the social, the latter encroaching on the genuinely political domain (Marchart 2007, 84) without further inspection. As Mertel rightly notes, this presupposes rather than questions the ‘reification of the social’ (Mertel 2017, 969) into a sphere of apolitical passivity. The thinning out of historical into political forms discounts the resistance of phantasmatic hegemonies themselves and overstates the causal power of the decision on what is phantasmatic and what is not. Anticipating the charge of voluntarism (Marchart 2018, 146, 167, 195, 209-210), Marchart seeks to disarm it by construing political practice in terms of an ‘as if’: ‘No social conflict can be voluntaristically enforced. And yet: we activate the political in our activism to the same degree to which we are activated by the political by acting as if we were subjects of our own will’ (Marchart 2018, 153). But the sort of self-imposed fiction of the ‘as if’ is extremely precarious – too precarious, in any case, to justify the exclusion of the phantasmatic and its efficacy from the purview of analysis.

Put simply, Marchart’s definition of the labor of the negative as ‘the negation of something concretely given rather than merely imagined as all-powerful totality’ tends to preclude an understanding of the historically and conceptually determined relation between the concretely given and the phantasm of an all-powerful totality. The question is: in a situation in which all metaphysical foundations have lost their credibility, can we so easily distinguish between a concretely given reality and the phantasmatic? To respond to this question, I will look more closely at the work of Reiner Schürmann, who is one of the ‘left Heideggerians’ (Marchart 2007, 16-17) Marchart cites in support of his post-foundational hypothesis. ⁸ In my reading, Schürmann can provide a correction to Marchart’s post-foundational account. Whereas the latter discounts the actuality of totalization while at the same time relying on a fictitious ‘as if’ to ground foundations, the totalizing dynamic of Western forms of thinking and acting is at the center of Schürmann’s approach – and it is for this reason that it can, I will argue, be qualified as para-foundational.

Schürmann’s para-foundational wager

Marchart’s references to the work of Reiner Schürmann position the latter as an important contributor to post-foundational thinking. Contrary to Giorgio Agamben, for whom Schürmann’s paradoxical notion of ‘anarchy principle’ (Schürmann 1987, 6) indicates the limitations of his approach, Marchart presents this principle as anticipating his own radical democratic idea of antagonism as ultimate foundation (Marchart 2010, 254-255). ⁹ And indeed, casting Schürmann’s work as providing material to a post-foundational hypothesis can be plausibly argued based on his insistence on the hypothesis of metaphysical closure. Throughout his work, Schürmann refers to this closure as a moment in which the metaphysical trajectory comes to an end – both apogee and exhaustion – in the age of technology. Schürmann in this follows Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as the last representative of the metaphysical tradition. In this view, the age of technology is Janus-faced because the essence of technology already points beyond the technological world. Heidegger seeks to express this ambiguity in his reference to Hölderlin’s famous line that ‘where danger is, grows / the saving power also’ (Heidegger 2000, 29; cited in Schürmann 2019, 39). But Schürmann seems to waver as to how exactly this pointing beyond is to be conceived.

The ambiguity of the hypothesis of closure as it arises here consists in the fact that the ‘end’ of metaphysics is not conceived as a simple, chronological one, but rather an ongoing process that places us on the threshold drawn by the closure. Schürmann at times contends that this decline of the metaphysical order is a ‘destiny’ (Schürmann 2019, 45) and that its withering away can be hastened, thus suggesting that the borderline site is but a position we move through in transit. But if it is a state of transition, this can be understood in two distinct ways: as an event indexed to a chronological trajectory, or as a historical site that relates to the past and the future in complex ways and that is not simply situated as a point between a before and an after. Both these temporal dimensions are at work in Schürmann, and they are both crucial to his general approach. Whereas the former focuses on a diachronic sequence, the latter emphasizes the moments or sites – or, in Schürmann’s words, the ‘momentary sites’ (Schürmann 2003, 576) – in which foundations are established and come apart. Since this perspective focuses less on a post-foundationalist antagonism between competing foundations than on the discordant emergence of foundations itself, this conceptual entanglement cannot be reduced to the differential play between contingent history and ontopolitical need.

This second perspective is what we might call the ‘para-foundational’ strategy at work in Schürmann’s thinking. ¹⁰ Contrary to the post-foundational externalization of the differential play of ground and abyss, this para-foundational approach locates itself within the process giving rise to first principles. It grasps this process in terms of a differend between the universal and the singular that occurs when a phenomenon among others becomes elevated into a first principle. For in a first principle, singularity and universality mutually exclude and presuppose each other. The singular denotes a phenomenon in its coming into presence, that is, in its manifestation as irreducibly individual. While this singular can be experienced as such, its representation invariably turns it into a particular instance of some universal. In Broken Hegemonies, Schürmann gives as an example the Nietzschean expression ‘There, that mountain!’, which deictically refers to a singular phenomenon yet, by rendering it an instance of the concept ‘mountain’, in the very moment of articulation breaks this singularity. This does not mean that the singular is eclipsed by the universal: ‘Linguistic usage maintains and activates a conflict between a given geological formation and the common figure under which we range all the peaks of the world’ (Schürmann 2003, 5). Through subsumption to a ‘common figure’, linguistic usage represents the singular as a particular instance of a general rule. Representation is thus both the condition of the reality of any phenomenon and the moment of its fissure. What this shows is that Schürmann distinguishes between the unsubsumed singular and the mechanics of subsumption that obtain between universal and particular without implying that the former could be had without the latter. As we will see, the tragic conflict between both is what gives rise to the double bind that ultimately blocks the possibility of reconciling it with the post-foundational hypothesis.

What Schürmann insists on, however, is the specific form the mechanics of subsumption have taken in the history of Western thinking when he argues that, in the West, this structure has given rise to what he variously calls first principle, arche, hegemonic phantasm or ultimate referent. This first principle provides a general rule that prescribes what and how anything can appear in a given political-philosophical order. In other words, an arche configures the site to which appearances must conform if they are to be perceived at all. As such, prior to its subsumption to a specific concept, any phenomenon is already subsumed to the rules according to which its coming to presence must lend itself to representation, that is, as a phenomenon; as Schürmann puts it, this historical order constitutes ‘the phenomenality of phenomena’ (Schürmann 2003, 7). Yet the universal claim and unifying function of an arche is precarious since it is itself nothing but a particular representation that has been elevated (or, in Schürmann’s Heideggerian lexicon, ‘maximized’) into a first principle. Its authority is premised on this phantasmatic elevation remaining hegemonic: while the arche is not itself justifiable, everything must be justified with reference to it. Although, as we have seen, this generalized subsumption operates through a denial of singulars by turning them into particulars, the hegemonic phantasm must at the same time itself be fashioned as singular, as that which cannot be subsumed. Paradoxically, then, the universal simultaneously denies the singular as that which cannot be subsumed and affirms it as that which ultimately invests it with principial authority. The terms ‘differend’ and ‘discordance’ denote this conflict between the universal and the singular (Schürmann 2003, 26–48). This is why for Schürmann the singular is not only what is first but also what is last or ultimate, and this is why each principial economy that hast governed the West had its end built into its beginning. As first, principles suppress singularity and dominate; as ultimate, they rely on singularity and therefore ineluctably subvert philosophical-political order.

In this respect, there is a certain tension between the earlier book on the anarchy principle and the later work on broken hegemonies. Whereas in the former Schürmann uses ‘first’ and ‘ultimate’ synonymously, in the latter he introduces a distinction between ‘supreme referents’ and ‘ultimate referents’. I would suggest that to this specification corresponds a move from an anti-foundational strategy in the earlier work to a para-foundational – yet not post-foundational – one in the later work. The anti-foundational strategy is expressed in the affirmation of rupture that runs through the book on anarchy and that is almost entirely absent from the later work, where this strategy has given way to a para-foundational approach that complicates the earlier call for ‘hastening the withering away of […] epochal principles’ (Schürmann 2019, 34) without for all that giving up the political implications of those findings. Contrary to the post-foundational point of view, the para-foundational approach does not externalize the desire for an absence of all foundations; yet if it does retain the anti-foundationalist momentum within itself, this is because metaphysical foundations are not as mobile and changeable as the post-foundational hypothesis would have it. In particular, they cannot be adequately opposed by determinate negation, but require a reflection that remains true to the material force that ancient foundations still have as constituent moments of contemporary capitalist societies.

Thus in Schürmann there are two divergent yet inextricable argumentative strategies at work, one appropriating the narrative of the end of metaphysics as a move beyond first principles and one that, by pointing out the anarchic or singular excess of every first principle, undermines the very notion of ‘Firstness’ as the origin of order and integration. Put differently, while Schürmann does make an anti-foundational argument when calling for a hastening of the downfall of first principles, he also suggests that their status as ‘first’ principles is wrested from a singular phenomenon that, as we saw, is not first but ultimate, that is, always in temporal excess of the process linking the universal to the particular. This ultimate discordance is processual rather than foundational; as opposed to the subsumptive mechanics ordering the relation between first principle and particular phenomena, it is inseparable from the process of its actualization. The authority of the First is thus not only challenged as it were downstream from the point of view of the phenomena it subsumes as particulars, but also upstream from a more originary (ultimate) yet at the same time less original (foundational) singular. Whereas the anti-foundational strategy formulates a critique of universalization by stressing the irreducibility of any phenomenon to a mere particular instantiation of a universal rule, the para-foundational strategy insists that this irreducibility is not to be taken as an unbroken, primordial original that would itself be prior to the historical artifice of a first principle, but as an originary conflict precisely between irreducibility and reduction. From the post-foundationalist point of view, this discordance must appear as a difference. Yet the perspective of difference as difference does not adequately grasp that discordance is not only the object of thinking but pervades thinking itself. The point here is less that ‘concretely given’ foundations can be politically challenged because they are recognized as historically contingent, which is what Marchart’s political difference gets at, but to emphasize the para-foundational differend or discordance between foundations and the singular on which they are precariously erected.

As an essential moment in Schürmann’s approach, this discordance runs counter to the strict separation Marchart introduces between the concretely given and the phantasmatic and explains why Schürmann, as Marchart notes, might seem incapable of providing a political theory. Marchart holds that Schürmann ‘sh[ies] away from a truly political notion of acting’ and instead ‘defend[s] […] a form of acting bereft of all activism’ (Marchart 2018, 184). This stance, he suggests, results in a ‘depoliticisation of acting’ and, more generally, in a ‘higher form of passivism’ (Marchart 2018, 184). We have seen that this claim downplays the scope of Schürmann’s attempt: where Schürmann tries to think through the discordant relation between, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘ground’ and ‘ab-ground’, Marchart levels the opposition into one of determinate negation. This distinguishes Schürmann’s approach from Marchart’s re-inscription of broken hegemonies into constituent politics and lets the charge of higher-order passivism appear at least questionable.

In sum, Marchart’s reading discounts those aspects of Schürmann’s work that counter the story of a linear or sequential end of metaphysics. Schürmann’s understanding of the complex temporality in which the notion of an ‘end’ of metaphysics is raised complicates the idea of a sequence moving from foundationalism (and its complement, anti-foundationalism) to post-foundationalism. The perspective of what Schürmann develops as an ‘analytic of ultimates’ is neither foundational nor anti-foundational. Instead, if Schürmann insists that it ‘says one word too many to be able to ground understanding, ideals, systems, and institution’ (Schürmann 2003, 345), this provides an alternative to the post-foundational hypothesis. This is most clearly articulated in the para-foundational strategy at work in Schürmann’s attempt to think an ultimate and discordant double bind.

Politics and the ultimate double bind

The post-foundational limitation of opposition to the ‘concretely given’ and its rejection of opposition to a phantasmatic ‘monolithic system of oppression’ disregards the fact, highlighted by Schürmann’s para-foundational strategy, that oppression is concretely given and phantasmatic, and that engaging this double aspect of oppression is a precondition for any resistant struggle aiming to come to terms with ‘that which exists’ in so far as it is more than its various institutional expressions. ¹¹ As a result, if Marchart’s ontology of the political passes over the problem of the relation between the phantasmatic and the concretely given, the standpoint of resistance thus achieved is likely to reproduce the phantasmatic forms of thinking and acting of the hegemonic order it opposes. Turning to Schürmann’s notion of ultimate double bind allows us to complicate the post-foundational ‘ontopoliticization’ of negativity that underpins the positioning of antagonism as an ultimate foundation. With Schürmann, we can think political struggle not only in terms of the historical-systematic dialectic of foundations, but as an ever-renewed resistance to that very dialectic.

That Schürmann does not simply shy away from a truly political notion of acting can be seen in the fact that he explicitly rejects a post-foundational turn to determinate negation on several occasions. In light of his above-mentioned triangulation of the singular against the subsumptive mechanics between universal and particular, he asks: ‘How […] is one to think […] without lapsing into the most effective [subsumptive] mechanics of them all, namely determinate negation’? (Schürmann 2021, 67). Elsewhere, he notes that ‘people have misunderstood my vocabulary [the notion of anarchy principle] as if it were yet another attempt at dialectics: [as if] “anarchy” [w]as the determinate negation of “principle”’ (Schürmann 1988, 140). Seeking to counter this misunderstanding, he specifies the meaning of the phrase ‘anarchy principle’ as follows: ‘A principle is something, a universal representation, hence an entity. Anarchy however designates a mode of phenomenal interconnectedness: not some entity, but a relational net that lacks all archai’ (Schürmann 2021, 67). While this last statement still remains close to an anti-foundationalist gesture, in the notion of the ultimate double bind the problem of the relation between the arche and the anarchic ‘relational net’ becomes itself thematic: Schürmann here begins to question a simple separation and opposition between universal representation or entity, on one hand, and the anarchic relational net, on the other. In the double bind, the two incongruous or discordant realities – archic economy and anarchic relational net, entities and relations – intersect, and this is where experience occurs. This experiential opposition, as Schürmann insists, cannot adequately be grasped in the terms of determinate negation.

While not unlike Marchart’s antagonism, Schürmann positions the double bind as an ultimate condition, it does not refer to the constitution of a social world, but to that of individual experience. The purpose of his work is, Schürmann explains at the outset of Broken Hegemonies,

a testing of a suspicion, namely, that the other of life does not fit well with it; that their discord has always been known to us, however confusedly; that death joins life without, however, forming a tandem with it, that it does not reflect life symmetrically nor oppose it with a determinate negation. […] Life nourishes itself on fantasms, and that obliges us to rethink the difference with regard to the function of the double allegiance that nobody has ever escaped. (Schürmann 2003, 23)

The concept of double bind denotes a conflict between two incongruous injunctions. This conflict cannot be solved by treating them as in some way commensurable alternatives because they pertain to essentially different levels. ¹² One way out is, however, to deny the discordance between the two injunctions. Schürmann suggests that such denial of the double bind runs through the history of Western philosophy and politics. It is epitomized by Antigone’s violation of the political injunction by Creon not to bury her brother Polynices, or Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to enable the expedition of the Achaean fleet against Troy. In each case, the double bind exacts a decision between the incongruous laws of the polis and the oikos. The affirmation of one injunction at the expense of the other renders them commensurate alternatives; what the decision to obey one injunction and violate the other denies is precisely the ultimate incongruity between those injunctions.

What is ultimately denied is, in Schürmann’s view, the simultaneity of natality, being by birth, and mortality, being towards death, the two functions or traits between which human life unfolds. As such, they do not refer to the chronological fact of anyone’s birth and death but to the ‘discordant pulls on everydayness’ (Schürmann 2021, 70) that are the condition of possibility of experience. Now, Schürmann associates natality with an expansive, universalizing movement that names things and subsumes them under its conceptual grasp. Mortality, on the other hand, indicates a singularizing movement, the ephemeral character of phenomena, the loss of adequate concepts. This double bind between universalization qua natality and singularization qua mortality is, on Schürmann’s reading, inescapable: no word, name or concept will ever fully and permanently correspond to the given, because the given appears and withdraws in a way that leaves any attempt to arrest it grasping a void.

So far, Schürmann’s definition of the double bind might appear pretty much aligned with Marchart’s claim that under the post-foundational hypothesis ultimacy can only be vested in a negative foundation, except that Marchart locates the conflict on a political level where Schürmann refers it to human experience in general. This is why Marchart thinks Schürmann depoliticizes and formalizes the question of acting. However, for all its formalism, Schürmann’s description of natality and mortality as ‘ultimates of experience’ (Schürmann 2021, 70) has a temporal implication that is lost on the post-foundational flattening out of politics as determinate negation and affirmation. ¹³ What Schürmann’s para-foundational strategy brings out is not so much a negative foundation but the conflict that both constitutes and subverts any foundation.

This becomes clear when we consider that Schürmann distinguishes the ‘conflict of ultimates’ from the ‘historical differend’ that obtains between ideologies (Schürmann 2003, 31-32). In an ideological or thetic differend, competing normative theses enter into antagonism. The conflict is between universals. The conflict of ultimates, on the contrary, is between the universal and the singular. Marchart cannot make this distinction because in his ontology of the political every singular is just another thetic posit. But for Schürmann the singularizing pull is not thetic. It does not indicate a constitutive lack or absence but a mode of presencing. The differend that produces the ultimate double bind denotes not an antagonism but an incongruous interlacing of change and standstill. Whereas antagonism presupposes a commensurable opposition, the double bind is between the mechanics of subsumption and the excess of the singular. This implies discordant temporalities that are lost in Marchart’s antagonistic mechanics of sedimentation and reactivation. For, Schürmann contends, the double bind ‘introduces time into the unconditioned condition, even if it will be necessary to think a differend between temporal strategies. That differing will be the discordance of times which has announced itself under each of the hegemonic phantasms we have lived since the Greeks’ (Schürmann 2003, 36). ¹⁴ In their incongruity, these discordant times exceed the chronological determination of time that is implied in both the simplified notion of a ‘closure of metaphysics’ and in post-foundational thought. Neither closure nor the post-foundational hypothesis can properly account for the conflict of ultimates, ultimates that, through the process of their actualization, are ever beginning and ever ending and that, Schürmann holds, we ought to engage in our thinking and acting – without assimilating them to contradiction, that is, to the commensurate poles of determinate negation.

The incongruity is, then, precisely between the discordant realities of the terms of opposition. In Broken Hegemonies, Schürmann puts this as follows:

The ultimate is not simple: at the origin of everyday experience we know—though only dimly—disparate functions. There is no reconciliation between the ultimates of the universalizing impulse and the singularizing withdrawal. […] From the outset, the imaginary production of thetic authorities places us in a discord [dissension] where we find ourselves at the mercy of the fantasmically posited, but equally entirely at the mercy of the singular given, thus singularities. These are the incongruous ultimates that tear our being. (Schürmann 2003, 4-5)

Schürmann explores how, in the history of Western thinking, this double bind has been denied through the establishment of hegemonies ordered around ‘ultimate referents’ or ‘hegemonic phantasms’. As shown above, an ultimate referent, an arche, rests on a linguistic construction to which everything that appears in a hegemonic economy of presence can and must be referrable, while it does not refer to anything itself. ¹⁵

It is in this notion of ultimate referent that the divergence between the para-foundational strategy and the post-foundational hypothesis is expressed most clearly: while ultimate referents as ultimate referents ‘are, quite literally, “nothing,” non-res’ (Schürmann 2003, 8), they are fashioned from specific phenomena. When a phenomenon is elevated into a hegemonic phantasm that can serve as the ultimate standard for relations between beings, its singularity is eclipsed. The regulating function of the phantasm is premised on this eclipse being complete. However, as we saw with reference to ‘that mountain’, subsumption leaves a remainder that undermines the ultimacy of the referent. The institution of hegemonic phantasms is built on a rupture between the singular and the universal that, in doubling them into incongruous or discordant counterparts, binds them together. The universal both relies on and denies the singular, which is what produces the ultimate double bind. Each historical institution of a hegemony is therefore in itself para-foundational. This is why the determination (and determinate negation) of the ‘concretely given’ cannot be conceived without reference to the indeterminacy into which the remainder left by subsumption is transformed in the process of the elevation of the singular into ultimate referent. The concretely given is bound up with the phantasmatic, and it is this relation that is at stake in the para-foundational perspective.

An ultimate referent itself does not appear among beings and yet orientates their relation. As a result, hegemonic phantasms constitute realities. If the ‘imaginary production of thetic authorities’ and of the ‘fantasmically posited’ is precisely what constitutes epochal economies of presence, this puts into question the disjunction between the merely phantasmatic and the concretely given that orientates antagonism in Marchart. So, while the Schürmann of Broken Hegemonies shares with Marchart the rejection of anti-foundationalism, his para-foundational interpretation of the ambiguity that defines our historical site diverges from the post-foundational hypothesis. For Schürmann, the task lies not in providing orientation within a post-foundational horizon, but rather in disorientating the denial that has buried the double bind under ultimate referents. In this perspective, any labor of the negative would consist not in determinate negation and affirmation but, first of all, in an unlearning of hegemonic phantasms.

This is why Schürmann stresses that resistance must ‘call all archic remnants by their name […] and […] rob them of their fictitious constancy’ (Schürmann 2021, 69). In his view, we are still very much under the sway of ultimate referents. While first principles might be ruined, the para-foundational strategy suggests that they have a material presence, and their ruined state does not render them less ruinous. If Schürmann elsewhere remarks that their ‘grip becomes all the more brutal and irrational as they fade’ (Schürmann 1988, 138), this implies that the historical materiality of the remnants of ultimate principles cannot be adequately grasped in terms of what is concretely given, but only if the phantasmatic constitution of these principial ruins is taken into account. On the post-foundational hypothesis, there are sedimented foundations and the possibility of political reactivation; from the para-foundational perspective, a field of towering ruins that continue to determine our orientation. They have taken on a life of their own, and we cannot even be quite sure anymore whether they are human-made or not. It is at this threshold between the historical and the ontological, between the concrete and the phantasmatic, that we can find the discordance or incongruity on which Schürmann emphatically insists. In this sense, Schürmann’s work is a reckoning with a historical site of ontological ruins. The ultimate double bind points to an originary break with history rather than in history. A political practice that corresponds to this para-foundational wager cannot content itself with the determinate negation of the concretely given but involves critical reflection precisely on the relation between the concrete and the phantasmatic or, in Schürmann’s words, a process in which unlearning is built into resistance.

All this being said, Marchart is right in criticizing the periodizing model that informs Schürmann’s account of metaphysics in Broken Hegemonies, if perhaps not, as Marchart charges, for its exclusive focus on philosophical firsts (Marchart 2018, 237-238 n.15). Rather, Schürmann’s periodizing account of the unfolding of metaphysics is problematic in that it forces a cyclical model together with a linear one in order to replicate the (Heideggerian) story of western metaphysics as extending from ancient Greek philosophy to modern European philosophy. Contrary to the claim of his own topological approach, this systematizes first principles in a way that can obscure the para-foundational strategy to the benefit of a post-foundational one. This is visible in Schürmann’s reading of Plotinus as the philosopher who destitutes the Greek hegemonic phantasm, ‘the One’, that had been instituted by Parmenides. Historically, Schürmann claims, this destitution is followed by the institution of another hegemonic phantasm, ‘Nature’, and therefore does not amount to what he calls the ‘diremption’ (dessaisie) of the structure of ultimate reference itself, which he sees at work in the age of technology. ¹⁶ Yet, as Christopher Long (2018, 72-103) has argued, Schürmann’s interpretation of Plotinus itself belies this positioning for the sake of a post-foundational argument.

Schürmann’s reading of Plotinus is a sustained attempt to think against domination by ultimate referents without adopting the standpoint of determinate negation. What makes this constellation intriguing is the fact that, notwithstanding his suspicion of determinate negation and the reconciliatory (consoling and consolidating) moment of opposition, Schürmann cannot let go entirely of a standpoint of resistance because he insists that the closure of metaphysics is not to be understood as its quasi-automatic vanishing. Some sort of opposition, of negation, is required. The question he addresses to Plotinus is how to approach this problem of an opposition that is neither determinate nor contingent but discordant. As has already been indicated, it is in the notion of discordance that we find the properly para-foundational moment of Schürmann’s thinking: the binding together of maximization (the movement through which ‘the one’ is turned into an ultimate referent representing unity and acting as a universal cause that subsumes individuals (singulars) as particulars) and of the event of singularization, that is, the coming into presence of phenomena in their multiple singularity: If ‘The one as singular event of union is natality—not maximized, but retained in its purity’, this opposes ‘the natural metaphysician in us [who] lives off representations, exalting this or that one of them and positing it as supreme according to circumstances’ (Schürmann 2003, 156). It is interesting to note that Schürmann here retains a notion of natality prior to maximization, which is singular rather than universal.

Schürmann finds material for this discordance in Plotinus’ attempt to think ‘the one’ in its relation to the multiplicity of images it makes without attributing to it a causality, a will or an action that is separate from it and hence destroys its oneness. At stake here is precisely the relation or union between the concretely given and the phantasm of an all-powerful totality. Schürmann calls this a ‘discordance within union—incongruously universal and yet eonically singular’ (Schürmann 2003, 150). ¹⁷ The conflict that both undermines and holds together this discordant union is one of incongruous opposites that constitutes a dynamic rather than static site of opposition. On Schürmann’s reading of Plotinus, the one wills multiplicity without thereby creating a contradiction that could be reconciled dialectically through determinate negation. Schürmann expresses this in topological terms: ‘the one itself occupies two sites. Not inside/outside of itself, but twice in itself: a universal cause singularizing itself’ (Schürmann 2003, 187). The one does not have a simple position because if it were to be posited as a first, the ‘conflict between positing and posited’ would ruin its claim to firstness – and Plotinus, ‘who does not content himself with “positing” a universal, but who again ‘lets’ the singular phenomena be given’ (Schürmann 2003, 185), takes this originary ruin into account.

What Schürmann discovers in Plotinus runs counter to the post-foundational separation between the act of foundation and that of its destitution and replacement by another hegemonic phantasm. The key to understanding the incongruity between the post-foundational and the para-foundational strategy in Schürmann is the notion of the ultimate, which he connects not only to the first principles that lay claim to a simple foundation, but also and more significantly to the fact that the one is ruined from the outset: ‘for Plotinus the ultimate condition is an event with incongruous tractions: a phenomenalizing-singularizing event. Henology here would be the discourse of ultimates’ (Schürmann 2003, 163). Schürmann’s deployment of the notion of ‘ultimate’ pinpoints the ambiguity between ultimacy as semblance and as facticity. While at times he seems to externalize the discordance (such as when he speaks not of discordant union but of a discordance between union and its other [Schürmann 2003, 165]) and to chronologize the closure of metaphysics one-sidedly as a diachronic event, he also insists on the strictly ‘co-ultimate’ character of the integrating and disintegrating moments (Schürmann 2021, 77). The discordant negation that is not fixed to a supreme position but takes its directionality from within itself is both historically opposed to the domination by hegemonic phantasms and a systematically recurring constellation that cannot be dialectically reconciled without relying on yet another ultimate referent.

This ambiguity is retained in the self-affection of the one as ultimate and discordant double bind. As Schürmann puts it, ‘The ultimate position dislocates itself without the dislocating act negating it head-on’ (Schürmann 2003, 166). The terms of determinate negation are thus transposed into a topology of dislocation. The problem of opposition, however, persists. And it is this binding together of the discontinuity between negation and dislocation with the continuity of resistance that pits the para-foundational perspective against the post-foundational. In conclusion, I will briefly explore a form of negation that corresponds more closely with the para-foundational approach. This should clarify that Schürmann’s topological approach does not elude the problem of negation but reformulates negation as discordant rather than determinate.

From apophasis to aphairesis: On para-foundational negation

In his reconstruction of a ‘poetics of politics’ in Schürmann’s work, Christopher Long suggests that the ‘profusion of negations’ that permeate this work must not be understood as antithetical negations: ‘the apophatic [negative – the author] manner in which Broken Hegemonies is articulated gestures to a discordant otherness that eludes the economy of hegemonic domination’ (Long 2018, 72). But what can it mean to ‘elude’ hegemonic domination in a historical site characterized by normative phantasms whose grip, as we have seen in Schürmann’s quotation above, ‘becomes all the more brutal and irrational as they fade’? If such discordant otherness is not to reduce politics to evasion or, in Marchart’s terms, to an ‘anti-politics’ of refusal (Marchart 2018, 147), this needs to be specified a little further.

On Long’s reading, Schürmann’s apophatic gesture consists in moving from determinate negation to declaration, apophansis: ‘No world is opened by apophatic negation. Only the audacity to speak cataphatically has the power to bring to language the poetic presencing that is the event of union. Cataphatic saying, however, if it is not to succumb to its own maximizing tendencies, must endeavor to become apophantic by tempering its audacity with gentleness’ (Long 2018, 72-73). Long seeks to correct Schürmann’s reproduction of post-foundational dichotomies by complicating the ultimate double bind through a chiastic inversion and redoubling of its terms that puts an emphasis on the ‘middle voice’ (Long 2018, 102-103) and the ‘as if’ (Long 2018, 87, 89). Schürmann’s opposition of natality and mortality is thus transformed into one between mortal natality and natal mortality. Yet this improvement itself eludes the problem of political resistance raised by Marchart. What disappears in this reconstruction of a poetics of politics is the sense for the need, acutely articulated by Schürmann, to engage with the remnants of ultimate referents. In what remains, I will suggest another path, one that brings to bear the resistant moment of the para-foundational strategy of Schürmann’s thinking on the problem of negation.

This requires a brief return to Plotinus. Rather than focusing on the movement from apophatic negation to declarative, apophantic saying in the middle voice, Annick Charles-Saget argues that, in Plotinus, ‘the link between thinking and negation is perhaps less important than the opening of thinking and the necessity of letting [dessaisissement]’ (Charles-Saget 1990, 332, 343). This dessaisissant thinking recognizes the non-identity of the soul and the one and thus ‘demands that one overcome the opposition between action and inaction’ (Charles-Saget 1990, 333). To elucidate this thinking beyond being as identity, Charles-Saget distinguishes two aspects of negation in Plotinus, apophasis and aphairesis. Contrary to the canonical representation of Plotinus as a thinker of a system of hierarchies, Charles-Saget suggests that he encountered a ‘limit-experience between language and thinking’ that led him to understand negation as both a ‘mode of language and a mode of life’: while apophasis refers to language, aphairesis signifies an operation of detachment performed by the self on itself (Charles-Saget 2013, 394-395).

Although Plotinian aphairesis can be seen as connected to Heidegger’s releasement (Gelassenheit) and Meister Eckhart’s detachment (Abgeschiedenheit), which point to a negation of self in non-willing and un-becoming, the emphasis here lies elsewhere. ¹⁸ Designating ‘the removal [l’ôter], the stripping [le dépouiller], the taking away [le soustraire] in the operations of art or calculation’ (Charles-Saget 1990, 338), aphairesis indicates a specific kind of abstraction. As a philosophical exigency, it demands that one ‘[a]bstract from everything’ (aphele panta) (Plotinus 2018, 575). However, aphairesis is, Charles-Saget insists, not an abstraction in the Aristotelian sense, which remains discursive and dwells on that which is separated rather than on that which remains (Charles-Saget 1990, 336 n.32). Rather, aphairesis is an

operation of the soul on itself, or of thinking on itself, that has nothing to do with the reflection of a subject on itself, nor with the exteriority of reason to its object. One could say that power, in its originary force, suppresses, withdraws the determinations into which it has made itself explicit, to find out whether, in this erasure, it discovers in itself a force prior to its own. (Charles-Saget 1990, 339-340)

A reflection on an originary force itself irreducible to its determinations, Plotinian dessaisissement also differs from Heideggerian Gelassenheit: If in Heidegger negation remains tethered to nothingness, in Plotinus, aphairesis ‘gathers intellect and soul around one point, a center or their source’ (Charles-Saget 1990, 341). Two unequal metaphors correspond to this divergence: While the Heideggerian metaphor of listening can never be assured of the call it is to receive, Plotinus uses the metaphor of touch to denote a contact between the soul, narrowed down to a point, and its principle. But in that contact, both remain non-identical – as do the incongruous traits in Schürmann’s discordant union of the ultimate double bind.

It is this non-identity and incongruity that, Schürmann suspects, is obliterated by the Heidegger of Being and Time, whose notion of ‘authentic self’ remains dependent on subjectivity as a first principle (Schürmann 1988, 139). Schürmann explores this suspicion through the distinction of the form of releasement operative in Meister Eckhart and Heidegger and that implied by Kant’s demand for ‘man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage’ (Schürmann 1988, 133). While Schürmann observes that Kant’s notion of ‘release’ institutes (human) reason as another phantasm, he also considers the risk of an interiorized releasement cultivating a quietist and passivist attitude, citing ‘quite a few situations in many countries in the twentieth century where releasement does not bring one very far’ (Schürmann 1988, 138). ¹⁹ It is between these poles that the para-foundational perspective navigates. Aphairesis can then be understood to denote a negation as a mode of life that does not play right into determinate negation but gestures toward an individual or singular that, by abstracting from itself, remains incongruous with the dialectical movement between universal and particular while also avoiding a withdrawal into interiority.

It is true that Schürmann, contrary to Marchart, does not provide a tightly woven framework for political action, although he variously gestures to a practice that he terms ‘unlearning’ (Schürmann 1988, 138). Unlike in Marchart’s approach, the task of unlearning is not restricted to the destruction and reconstruction of hegemonic institutions, but requires the critical self-contextualization of any political practice within the economies of presence that have configured collective life in the West. This is why, from a para-foundational perspective, Marchart is both right and wrong when he argues, against Alain Badiou and Jodi Dean, that ‘in politics the given cannot be negated in toto’ (Marchart 2018, 202). As Marchart affirms, politics needs to be concrete and tackle specific issues and institutions rather than lose itself in projections. However, this does not mean that concrete situations are not a product of abstract social forms, such as the totalizing logic of modern capitalist economy (commodity-exchange, value-form, etc.), and that they can be addressed in separation from this overarching logic. The problem with Marchart’s account is that it refuses to engage with the issue of totalization yet at the same time insists on the need of foundations without supplying a criterion to discern justified foundations from unjustified phantasms. To the extent that today’s economic, social, political and ecological reality is produced by a totalizing and historically efficient logic, politics cannot avoid relating to the phantasmatic totality of ‘that which exists’. Schürmann’s para-foundational wager allows us to better understand this relation by way of a revision of negation. If we think resistance not as apophasis but as aphairesis, it does not coincide with the constitution of a phantasmatic totality but remains focused on the unlearning of economies of hegemonic domination.

Resistance, or opposition more broadly, is a matter, first and foremost, of disorientating the economy of presence that supports ultimate referents. As such, it is directed both against historical forms of violence such as the suppression of the past and against the systematic violence that suppresses the ultimate double bind at every moment. On Schürmann’s view, then, para-foundational anarchy has to oppose both the historical foundations of ‘that which exists’ and continuously question the systematic necessity of foundations as ultimate phantasms.