Alessandro Ferrara

Rehabilitating authenticity: why agency, self-identity and community

presuppose purposive unity.

1. One "post" too many?

We have been living in times of "post" now for decades. One need only mention "post-histoire", as

the advent of an epoch when no historically significant turning points are any longer possible but

only chronicles of irrelevant incremental iterations of unchanging patterns;1 or "post-industrial"

society, as the new kind of social formation representing the acme of Western development;2 or

"post-modernity", as a cultural configuration that breaks free of the spell of grand narratives,

Archimedean points, views from nowhere and similar foundationalist myths;3 or "post-secular"

society, where a mutual learning process enables secular reason to learn from the insights of

religious consciousness, to refrain from the imperialist claim of translating religious insights into its

own language, and where historical religions have learnt to cohabit with modern science;4 or "post-

national" citizenship and "post-national" democracy, as the sequel to the modern merging of the

democracy and the nation-state;5 or "post-avangarde" art, as the kind of art practiced with the

awareness that what once counted as transgressive "avant-garde" experiments are now far from

1 See Arnold Gehlen, from “Das Rolle des Lebenstandards in der Heutige Gesellschaft ”, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 7: Einblicke, 18-19. In turn, Gehlen in this 1952 essay was commenting on Hendrick De Man's concept of "Post-histoire", as presented in De Man's Vermassung und Kulturverfall (Munich: Lehnen, 1951).2 The term was popularized by Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973) and it designated a society where the majority of the labor force is employed in the service or tertiary sector -- a threshold reached for the first time by the United States in 1956. 3 Three contributions that heralded the new era, though not all of them using the term "post-modernity", are Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Prienceton University Press, 1980), Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture (1985), translated by John R. Snyder, (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991).

4 Originally coined by Klaus Eder, the term post-secular, qua attribute both of a special kind of reason and of a type of society, was given vast resonance by Jürgen Habermas in his speech "Faith and Knowledge", on the occasion of the Peace Prize (see http://socialpolicy.ucc.ie/Habermas_Faith_and_knowledge_ev07–4_en.htm) and his "Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the 'Public Use of Reason' by Religious and Secular Citizens" (2006), in Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 114-147.5 See Saskia Sassen, "Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship"; J. Shaw, "Postnational constitutionalism in the European Union", Journal of European Policy 6:579-597 (1999); Martin Matustik, Postnational Identity. Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard and Havel (New York: Guilford Press, 1993).

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counting as transgressive, are plainly accepted and even encouraged by critics, by the public and by

academic and funding institutions.6

Among the latest additions to this already long list is the notion of a "post-authentic" kind of

individual agency, self-identity and community. "Post-authentic", along with the "metonymic" or

"post-identitarian" agency and community, is one of the defining concepts, coined by Thomas

Claviez for the Sinergia Project "Theory and Practice of Authenticity in Global Cultural

Production" and is designed to capture in just one poignant phrase the distance that various French-

and Italian-speaking critics of subjectivity -- Rancière, Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, Esposito -- as

well as theorist of views of subjectivity based on hybridity (Bhabha), or on ritual (Seligman), urge

us to take from contemporary views that in spite of their rejection of the modern notion of atomistic

self-autonomy, nonetheless remain fixated on the modern myths of the unity, self-transparency,

authenticity of the individual and the community. As examples of such views the Project takes

Taylor's reconstruction of an ethic of authenticity and, undeservedly to be sure, also my own view

as presented in Reflective Authenticity.

Among such philosophical positions is Rancière's critique of the suppression of the

contingency typical of the formation of communities and its replacement with an imaginary, i.e.

socially constructed, sharing of a destiny: "the politeia of the philosophers is the exact identity of

politics and the police".7 Similarly, what is known as the rule of law, is always "the rule of a law,

that is, of a regime of unity among all the different senses of the law posited as a regime of the

community. Today, the identification between democracy and the legitimate state is used to produce

a regime of the community's identity as itself, to make politics evaporate under a concept of law

that identifies it with the spirit of the community".8

In his celebrated work The Inoperative Community, Nancy starts out with a standard critique

of modern individualism: "one cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a clinamen.

There has to be an inclination or inclining from one toward the other, of one by the other, or from

one to the other. Community is at least the clinamen of the 'individual'. ... An inconsequential

atomism, individualism tends to forget that the atom is a world. This is why the question of

community is so markedly absent from the metaphysics of the subject".9 In a move which has been

anticipated by Hegel and later by Mead -- who time and again emphasized that a self does not exist

except in the context of a relation with an alter -- Nancy points out that "community means that 6 The term was given wide currency by Peter Bürger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 7 Jaques Rancière, Dis-Agreement. Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998), 64.8 Ibidem, 108.9 Jean-Luc-Nancy, The Inoperative Community (1986) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 3-4.

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there is no singular being without another singular being, and that there is, therefore, what might be

called, in a rather inappropriate idiom, an originary or ontological 'sociality' that in principle

extends far beyond the simple theme of man as a social being".10 However, in such a "community"

"there is no communion of singularities in a totality superior to them and immanent to their

common being".11 What is then the relation of singular individuals to a community? According to

Nancy, it is not a relation of communion but of communication, in which participants relate as finite

singularities to one another. In a linguistic tour de force, Nancy tells us that the participants' finitude

"co-appears or compears (com-paraît) and can only compear".12 The participants' relation of

"communication" with one another thus "consists before all else in this sharing and in this

compearance (comparution) of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the interpellation that

reveal themselves to be constitutive of being in common -- precisely inasmuch as being-in-common

is not a common being".13 Community is then nothing else than the "compearance of finitude",

which logically and ontologically precedes the so-called "social bond". With a different

terminology Nancy, repeats an age-old commonplace of sociological theory since Durkheim:

compearance "does not emerge among already given subjects" but rather "consists in the

appearance of the between as such", a "between" that links "you and I" not via "juxtaposition", but

via "exposition".14 Thus "the being of community is the exposure of singularities".15 Community so

understood cannot be the product of work or intentional design: "one experiences or one is

constituted by it as the experience of finitude".16 Needless to say, community cannot not exist: "it

could not happen that in the social desert there would not be, however slight, even inaccessible,

some community. We cannot not compear".17 The point is taken up again in Being Singular Plural:

"being singular plural means the essence of Being is only as co-essence. In turn, coessence, or

being-with (being-with-many), designates the essence of the co-, or even more so, the co- (the cum)

itself in the position or guise of an essence".18 Thus the "we" that sometimes is used to refer to a

community should neither be understood as a "subject in the sense of egoistic self-identification and

self-grounding" nor should be understood as composed of subjects, and yet "the 'we' is not nothing;

10 Ibidem, 28. 11 Ibidem, 28.12 Ibidem, 28.13 Ibidem, 29.14 Ibidem, 29.15 Ibidem, 30. 16 Ibidem, 31. 17 Ibidem, 35. 18 Jean-Luc-Nancy, Being Singular Plural (1996), (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 30.

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it is 'someone' each time, just as 'each one' is someone ... 'we' says 'one' in a way that is singular

plural, one by one and one with one".19

Similar themes undergird Blanchot's The Unavowable Community, a text inspired by

Nancy's Inoperative Community and in dialogue with it. In agreement with Nancy's point that

community is not produced or in any sense connected with the dimension of work or sovereignty --

in this sense Nancy's community is totally "inoperative" and reflects what Bataille, a hero for both

authors, called the "negative community" or "the community of those who have no community" --

Blanchot points out that community has no other purpose than "the service to others unto/in death,

so that the other does not get lost all alone, but is filled in for [suppléel just as he brings to someone

else that supplementing [suppleance] accorded to himself".20 Finding its raison d'être in the

experience of the death of the dear ones, community for Blanchot (no less than for Nancy) "exposes

by exposing itself" and, being "always already lost", "creates no work and does not glorify itself in

that loss".21 In its exposing us to the death of the other, of the dear one -- in the second part of the

book Blanchot explores the nexus of love and death in the community of lovers -- community

"proposes or imposes the knowledge (the experience, Erfahrung) of what cannot be known; that

beside-ourself (the outside) which is abyss and ecstasy without ceasing to be a singular

relationship".22 Only community allows the individual to escape abstractness: "the isolated being is

the individual, and the individual is only an abstraction, existence as it is represented by the weak

minded conception of everyday liberalism".23

Again, the same theme can be found in Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, the Italian

philosophers who took inspiration from Nancy and Blanchot and echoed their themes, much in the

same way as in the 80's and 90's Gianni Vattimo and his fellow adherents of "weak thought" echoed

Rorty's and Lyotard's postmodernism and later Derrida's version of deconstructionism. Giorgio

Agamben, for example, drawing on Blanchot's "negative community" and Nancy's "inoperative

community", has suggested the idea of a "coming community", disjoined from the predication of

identity, both at the level of the individual and of the collectivity. In a kind of post-modern remake

of Diderot's immortal "Rameau's nephew", Agamben suggests that "tricksters or fakes, assistants or

'toons are the exemplars of the coming community".24 More generally, a "community" of the kind 19 Ibidem, 75-76.20 Maurice Blanchot, The Inavowable Community (1983) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 11. 21 Ibidem, 12. Exemplary approximations to a realization of community so understood, according to Blanchot, were the experiences of the French groups "College of Sociology", "Acéphale" and "Contre-Attaque", see ibidem, 12-14.22 Ibidem, 17. 23 Ibidem, 18.24 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (1990) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 10.1.

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envisaged by Agamben could come about if only "humans could not be-thus in this or that

particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face". Once de-

subjectified, humans would give rise for the first time to "a community without presuppositions and

without subjects" or "to a communication without the incommunicable".25 Such a community,

according to Agamben, would exhude a radical, albeit in my opnion slightly mysterious,

antagonism: "What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a

community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable

condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)".26

Along similar lines, Roberto Esposito reiterates Nancy's and Blanchot's point: "Community

appears to be definable only on the basis of the lack that characterizes it. It is nothing other than

what history has negated, the non-historic backdrop from which history originates in the form of a

necessary betrayal".27 This view is presented as an alternative to an allegedly "communitarian" view

that really belongs to no one. Echoing a style common to all these authors, Esposito accuses an

unidentified "political-philosophical discourse" of forcing community "into a conceptual language

that radically alters it, while at the same time attempts to name it: that of the individual and totality;

of identity and the particular; of the origin and the end; or more simply of the subject with its most

unassailable metaphysical connotations of unity, absoluteness, and interiority".28 Even worse, "neo-

communitarian philosophy" is accused of inflating or "swelling" the self even more than its

supposed adversary, i.e. atomistic individualism, when it theorizes "the hypertrophic figure of 'the

unity of unities'".29 All of these philosophical traditions -- liberal individualism, the communitarian

critique of liberal individualism, the sociology of Gemeinschaft (by which Esposito basically means

Tönnies), the "various ethics of communication" (Apel and Habermas) and the communist tradition

-- presuppose a wrong view of community as a "fullness" or a "whole", in any event as a property of

the subjects that it binds together: "community is conceived of as a quality that is added to their

nature as subjects, making them also subjects of community".30 Ironically, Esposito emphasizes the

etymological and then conceptual nexus of "community" and "munus", gift -- perhaps ignoring that

in so-called communitarian thinkers such as Taylor and MacIntyre community is linked with the

idea of a duty to society, originating in the gift received by each of us from the social milieu that

makes us what we are, not to mention the republican literature that emphasizes virtue as the

25 Ibidem, 64.5.26 Ibidem, 85.6.27 Roberto Esposito, Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community, (1998) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 16.28 Ibidem, 1-2. 29 Ibidem, 2.30 Ibidem, 2.

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disposition to give priority to the common good over the particular advantage. Equally vague as his

polemical target -- even Hobbes' state of nature becomes a version of community31 -- is Esposito's

alternative notion of community. Community is constituted by its relation to death, as signified by

its central symbolic element, the munus. Of the munus, or the gift that enjoins reciprocation, we are

told that it

"is the non-being individual of the relation; the continuum that originates out of and to which we are drawn by a force that is directly counterposed to the instinct for survival; the wound that we cause or from which we emerge when we ourselves are changed when we enter into a relation not only with the other but with the other of the other... This meeting, this chance, this contagion, more intense than any immunitarian cordon, is the community of those that manifestly do not have it, when not losing it, and losing themselves in the very same process of flowing away from it".32

The same theme is echoed also within a number of traditions other than deconstructionism,

for example in fields as diverse as post-colonial studies and the religious neo-Goffmanian theory of

the ritualistic constitution of subjectivity. As Homi Bhabha has suggested,33 the antagonist, anti-

hegemonic notions of "mimicry" and "hybridity" empower subaltern actors by offering them a

subversive strategy "that negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative 'unpicking' and

incommensurable, insurgent relinking". Whereas hegemonic colonial discourse revolves around

metaphor, according to Bhabha mimicry brings to the force the axis of metonymy: drawing on

Lacan, he claims that "mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of difference,

but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part,

metonymically".34

Finally, a similar train of thought can be found in Adam Seligman's reflection on the import

of ritual, as opposed to the quest for authenticity, in the shaping of the human self. Jointly taken,

rituals of politeness and of all other sorts, according to Seligman, constitute the fabric of social

life.35 The intrinsic performativity of ritual -- what matters is one's doing the appropriate thing, not

one's inner state -- generates an entirely different picture of the constitution of the subject, a picture

which runs against the grain of the modern emphasis on sincerity and authenticity. What contributes

to this process of coming into being is not so much the other person's recognition of my inner states

but the other person's perception of my ritual acts in the space of the subjunctive, the "as if" world

created by the joint performance of ritual acts. In Seligman's view, this self-constituting capacity of

31 As Esposito puts it: "What men have in common, what makes them more like each other than anything else, is their generalized capacity to be killed: the fact that anyone can be killed by anyone else. This is what Hobbes sees in the dark depths of the community; this is how he interprets community's indecipherable law", ibidem, 13.32 Ibidem, 19.33 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 175.34 Ibidem, 90.35 Adam Seligman, "Ritual and Sincerity", Philosophy and Social Criticism, special issue on Ritual and/or Sincerity, 36, 1, 2010, 11.

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rituals allows more leeway for the subject's freedom than the modern paradigm of self-autonomy

premised on atomism or its authenticity version, premised on expressing inner motives through

outer conduct: when "getting it right is not a matter of making our acts conform to inner beliefs", 36

Seligman argues, "the self is left more 'room to wander' than in one [conception of subjectivity]

where the self has to be firmly identified with its role - where the matrix of social order is in

sincerity".37 As in Goffman's view of the unsubstantiality of the self, as an effect of a well-staged

impression management, so for Seligman ritual (including religious practice, etiquette, music,

dance, some forms of play) has the advantage (over the modernistic emphasis on sincerity and

authenticity, ie the alignment of outer conduct and inner states) of conveniently side-stepping

"questions of belief or truth",38 of enabling us "to live with ambiguity and the lack of full

understanding", of avoiding the closure inherent in binaries like "thought and action, structure and

agency, values and interests" and finally to create a world of "representations", "fragile but not

false", a world where, if we do not demand too much in terms of sincerity and authenticity, then

"differences can be accommodated, tolerance enacted ... and openness to the other maintained".39

Despite the diversity of the underlying vocabularies -- some draw on Heidegger's distinction

of the being of beings from the being of Being, others on the dichotomy of contingency and

necessity, others on that of metonymy vs metaphor, on that of ritual and sincerity/authenticity -- all

these accounts of agency, identity and community nonetheless share two basic assumptions and one

implication.

1. The first assumption is that the self cannot be understood as a center of unified agency: internal

heterogeneity, fragmentation of motives, impulses, incompatible drives are the norm and agency

follows suit, it unfolds under the sign of hybridity and fragmented, occasional motivation, at best

under the aegis of shared rituals. Instead, récit, narrative, coherence, continuity and similar

constructs all distort the basic experience of subjectivity just as the old plot of the realist novel of

the 19th century would present an unlikely and disturbingly consolatory picture of the world where

every cause leads to an effect and every effect has a cause, and time is a unidirectional arrow.

Authenticity, even when it rejects all postulation of an essentialistic "true self", epitomizes this

distorting approach: ironically, all reference to authentic subjectivity sounds as fake as the realist

novel after the inception of the avant-garde. This assumption has a coda, which is irrelevant here,

namely that the self cannot be conceived atomistically, as a self-contained and self-sufficient center

of autonomy that seeks to establish some relation with others. I call this assumption (present in

36 Ibidem, 13. 37 Ibidem, 13.38 Ibidem, 14.39 Ibidem, 15.

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Esposito and Nancy) irrelevant because it targets a strawman that few would identify with. Modern

20th century liberalism from Dewey to Mead, to Rawls and Dworkin, has nothing to do with

atomism à la Hobbes or Locke. It is only lack of familiarity with one's polemical target that explains

this recurrent accusation against liberalism as such.

2. The second assumption shared by these authors is that community, the group, the polity cannot

be the locus of unified agency and homogenous self-representation either: these human

collectivities are just the juxtaposition of irreducible singularities and their inherent difference. Only

difference exists. The unity of community, when we talk about it, is constructed from without, as an

objectifying gaze that glosses over difference, and is a false unity. For community, at least for

Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben and Esposito au fond rests on absence, void, mortality.

Jointly taken these assumptions generate a powerful case for the dismissal of concepts such

as autonomy or authenticity as irremediably connected with a view of subjectivity that even when

renouncing the essentialist claims connected with atomism, nonetheless under the guise of unity

smuggles in the suppression of the contingent, the aesthetic, the bodily, the sensorial. The

implication of these two assumptions is that our "correct" view of subjectivity should be, in Claviez'

words, "post-authentic", rhizomatic rather than hierarchically ordered. In lieu of a centered

subjectivity a re-conceptualization of subjectivity around the ephemeral, the fragmented, the

diverse, the un-unifiable is suggested. In a move reminiscent of Adorno's negative dialectics,

subjectivity is said to inhabit the liminal area where the non-identical resists reduction to identity.

However, does the prefixing of the adjective "authentic" with a "post" really make sense,

when we speak of post-authentic agency, self-identity and community? In the following section,

five objections are briefly examined that might induce the legitimate suspicion that the prefix "post"

in this particular case has been used a bit too hurriedly and unwarrantedly.

2. Five rejoinders against post-authentic views of self, agency and community

The first two rejoinders focus on the implausibility of post-authentic agency at the individual level:

1. No agency can be envisaged without a unified subject of imputation

If the agency of the subject is not directed by a "purposive unity", there is hardly a way of imputing

one course of action or one line of conduct as opposed to a series of doings to an individual or

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collective subject. The individual self becomes then a mere container of a plurality of discrete,

unrelated couplets of acts and reactive responses, none of which can be called her own more than

any other. Frankfurt's "wanton"-character or Thomas More, as a character in Bolt's A Man for All

Season, telling the ambition-driven Richard Rich "you couldn't answer for yourself even so far as

tonight", or Plato's description of the tyrant as a slave to his own passions are all examples of the

fact that concepts such as accountability and responsibility should be abandoned as meaningless if

we did not assume that action presupposes some sort of "reflexive endorsement". Paradoxically,

neither can the complex act of writing Being Singular Plural be made sense of, nor the substance of

the book taken seriously, unless we impute some reflective purpose to Jean-Luc Nancy and in turn

understand that purpose as relating to a certain way of interpreting one's activity as a philosopher. If

Jean-Luc Nancy had been playing with a computer and just by an unlikely chance a random word-

generating program had produced exactly the sequence of sentences composing its text, the

resulting text would not be Being Singular Plural, but a mere string of unrelated signs.

At the collective level, the point is illustrated by the difference that separates the US and the

EU as subjects of agency. All we need is to consider such questions as "Has the EU intervened in

Libya?" and "Has the US intervened in Libya?". In the case of a collective actor partially unified

around a purposive core, it becomes almost impossible to discern when an action has been

performed or what action has been performed. A defender of "post-authentic" subjectivity could

then answer that these observations only prove that internal unification is a necessary condition for

accountability but could be provided by an external source, an observer who interprets the acts of an

individual or collective agent as if they were manifestations of a purposive motivational unit of the

subject. In fact this attribution of a purpose could just be an explanatory device devoid of any

concrete anchoring within the self-experience of the subject, a necessary illusion in other words,

which is indispensable for the development of a social life. In order to understand why this is not so,

we need to move on to the next rejoinder.

2. No practical relation of the subject to itself can develop without a unified center

Every subject, qua conscious being or collection of conscious beings, enters a relation of some sort

with itself. On that relation depends the subject's capacity to act as a first person. What kind of

relation? A long tradition has understood that relation of the self with itself along cognitive lines:

the subject knows itself better than any observer does, because it can take advantage of an inside

track, a direct access to what observers, third parties can only infer from perceiving what we are

doing. Theories of subjectivity of a cognitivistic orientation, starting from Descartes, have tended to

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equate subjecthood and self-knowledge but have run into a host of difficulties, two of which are

particularly significant. On the one hand the necessity to account for the distinctiveness of the

knowing and the known self -- a distinctiveness between the knower and the known which is

presupposed by all forms of knowledge -- leads one to postulate that the knowing subject is not part

of the object of its knowledge. On the other hand, this logical preexistence of the knowing to the

known self forces us also to admit that there is more than self-knowledge to the human subject, or,

in other words, that the human subject pre-exists reflection, indeed comes to reflection while being

already constituted evidently by some other performance. And then, if the really constitutive aspect

of selfhood is bound to remain out of the limelight, how could reflection ever hope to claim to have

grasped its object?

The second difficulty concerns the explication of the authority of first-person accounts of

whatever beliefs and desires one has. In this connection, either one gets entangled into the

intricacies of claiming the existence of a knowledge "without observation or inference" (this is the

case with Anscombe's view of intention) by postulating, with Descartes, a privileged access to

internal reality or, on the other hand, one gets entangled into the intricacies of the Ryle's idea that

self-knowledge is observational in nature -- a move which in principle destroys the very intuition of

a fist-person authority, because if observation is the key to self-knowledge then an external observer

could have even a better access to our desires and beliefs than we have. In either case, the solution

devised for the difficulty of accounting for the authority of first-person seem worse than the

difficulty itself.

The one alternative left open, as Larmore and others (Korsgaard and Frankfurt) have

recently suggested, for understanding the relation of the self to itself includes two basic moves.

First, to distinguish between a cognitive and a practical relation of the self to itself: through the first

we know ourselves, albeit always incompletely, through the second we commit ourselves to doing

something. Second, the justification of the primacy of the practical relation over the cognitive one:

"The fundamental self-relation which is constitutive of the self is one in which the self commits

itself, and not one in which it knows or is aware of itself".40 Evidence for this is offered by the fact

that even to believe or to desire something presupposes "being committed to reasoning in accord

with the presumed truth or value of the thing believed or desired".41 The self is then best understood

as defined not by a cognitive, but rather by a practical relation to itself: we are beings who care

about our being (to repeat Heidegger's point) or, in other words, about what we do with our life.

This reconfiguration of our view of self-constitution along practical lines -- carried out also by

40 Ch. Larmore, "A Normative Theory of the Self", ... p. 353. 41 Ibidem, 353.

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Korsgaard -- enables us to make sense of the so-called authority of the first person in new terms.

Larmore writes:

"When we declare what we believe or desire, and do so without relying upon observation or inference, we are explicitly committing ourselves. ... Such a statement counts as authoritative, not because it expresses some superlative form of knowledge, but precisely because it serves to avow a commitment. For only we ourselves, and no one else in our stead, are in a position to commit ourselves. If we announce a commitment, no one else can object that it is not so, that we are not in fact committing ourselves. Although, of course, others are entitled to complain (and on this score they may well be right), that we are mistaken in undertaking such a commitment. Another can know us better than we know ourselves. But no other person can commit us. Only we can do that".42

We could rephrase the argument using the terminology of Korsgaard (reflexive endorsement and

the adoption of a practical identity) or that of Frankfurt (wholehearted identification) but the overall

thrust would not be different. The point of this digression is that we cannot but have a theory,

explicit or implicit of the subject and of the way it comes into existence. Recent philosophical

reflection has built massive evidence about the difficulties of understanding self-constitution along

cognitive lines, as coming to know oneself. The other avenue is to think of the self's constituting

itself and relating to itself in practical terms, by way of committing itself to something (avowals and

attestations being alternative ways of designating the same thing). Even the use of declaratives such

as "I love you" cannot be reduced to descriptions of inner states, but have the status of avowals or

commitments to act as a lover. But if the key to subjectification or self-constitution is commitment,

because only commitment is ineradicably first-personal, we still need a subject as a center of

initiative in order to form a commitment. We could not make any sense of a fragmented subjectivity

where one part of myself commits itself to something and another does not. Would I have

committed myself or not? Deconstructionist or "post-authentic" views incur this second difficulty,

on top of making hard to understand how I could be responsible for anything.

3. Certain basic experiences presuppose a unified self

My third and fourth rejoinders address more specific aspects of subjectivity. The third rejoinder

focuses on the problematic moral psychology underlying the deconstructionist or "post-authentic"

view of subjectivity. No one has offered a better deconstruction of the deconstructionist view of the

centerless self than Hume, the one philosopher who most poignantly at the end of Book I of his

Treatise of Human Nature (1740) questioned the very idea of "personal identity" as consisting of

42 Ibidem, 360.

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anything beyond the memory of the succession of our perceptions of the self.43 The next partition

of Hume's Treatise begins with a phenomenology of pride and humility as two passions which can

take as their object nothing else than the self in its entirety, conceived as a unity. Pride and humility,

together with love and hate, grief and joy, belong to the number of "violent", as opposed to "calm",

passions.44 They are so basic that we cannot offer a definition, continues Hume, but only enumerate

some of the circumstances that give rise to them, so that anyone who has previous and direct

familiarity with them, can recognize them. The point is that these opposing passions, which we can

never feel at the same time, take the self as their object: "when self enters not into the consideration,

there is no room for pride and humility".45 Hume proceeds then to illustrate the great variety of

causes of pride and humility: a sense of pride can be generated by the perceived possession of

certain mental qualities ("imagination, judgment, memory, wit, good-sense, learning, courage,

justice, integrity") and a sense of humility can be caused by the realization that one lacks such

qualities, or by bodily qualities such as "beauty, strength, agility, good mein, address in dancing,

riding, fencing and dexterity in any manual business or manufacture", or even by objects associated

with us, such as "our country, family, children, relations, riches, houses, gardens, horses, dogs,

cloaths". Indeed "any of these may become a cause either of pride or of humility".46 The object of

pride, however, is always the same, and that is the self in its entirety. A man, runs Hume's example,

may be proud of his beautiful house. However, the objective beauty of his house, which he as

anybody else may admire, if "consider'd merely as such" and not as related to his self, "never

produces any pride or vanity".47

In sum, concludes Hume, "'Tis always self, which is the object of pride and humility; and

whenever the passions look beyond, 'tis still with a view to ourselves".48 The passions of pride and

humility, to translate now into our own vocabulary, cannot be experienced in the modality of the

third person, can hardly be explained to those who never felt them, and would have to be erased

from our moral phenomenology if we did not presuppose the existence and the sensibleness of an

image of the self as a unitary construct. Neither pride nor humility or shame can be meaningfully

43 "As memory alone acquaints us with the continuance and extend of this succession of perceptions, 'tis to be consider'd, upon that account chiefly, as the source of personal identity" David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740), 2nd edition with text revised and notes by P.H.Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Book I, Part IV, Sect. VI, p. 261. I wish to thank Lorenzo Greco for having drawn my attention to Hume's argument on pride and humility as passions that presuppose the unity of the self. See Lorenzo Greco "Hume and the Narrative of the Self", paper read at the 40 th International Hume Society Conference, Universitade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 21-28 July 2013

44 Hume, Treatise, Book II, Part I, Section I, p. 276. 45 Ibidem, Section II, p. 277.46 Ibidem, Section II, p. 279.47 Ibidem, Section II, p. 279.48 Ibidem, Section II, p. 280.

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directed at parts or fragments of the self. A deconstructionist or "post-authentic" view of the self

would be difficult to reconcile with large sections of the vocabulary with which we describe key

passions like love and hate, pride and shame, joy and grief. The two latter passions -- joy and grief

-- lead us to the next rejoinder concerning the phenomenological implausibility of the so-called

"post-authentic" view of subjectivity.

4. Inconclusiveness, or the inability to tell whether one's life is flourishing or stagnating

My fourth rejoinder concerns another specific area: the distinction of happiness or joy and

gratification, and on the other hand despair and frustration. These two pairs of concepts belong in

different levels of self-experience. Gratification and frustration do not presuppose the sense of self-

unity and integration that joy and despair -- just as Hume's pride and humility -- instead require in

order to be experienced. As the founder of the "psychology of the self", Hans Kohut, once

observed:

Even death and martyred passivity can be tolerated with a glow of fulfilment. And, in reverse, survival and social dominance can be bought at the price of the abandonment of the core of the self and lead, despite seeming victory, to a sense of meaninglessness and despair (Kohut 1977: 117).

The irreducible diversity of levels at which the two concepts are located is best illustrated by the

existence of scores of people who, despite severe frustration of their needs, despite severe

deprivations, losses and conflicts, do manage to maintain a sense of direction, purpose and meaning

in their lives, and, on the other hand, by the existence of lots of people who, while blessed with high

levels of gratification of their needs, while blessed even with socially sanctioned gratifications,

nonetheless experience their lives as empty, purposeless and fruitless. Even if we understand

gratification in the broadest possible terms, as the satisfaction of the sum total of one's desires, the

joy of fulfilment appears to be something more complex, unrelated to it and again that takes the

whole self as its unit of evaluation. The view of the self propounded by the theorist of "post-

authenticity" cannot be reconciled with this basic distinction embedded in our common sense moral

phenomenology, because it rejects the unified notion of the self which must be presupposed for the

experiences of fulfillment and despair to make sense.

One additional consequence of this difficulty is that the consistent followers of a

deconstructionist approach would also have difficulties with making sense of how the individual

subject can orient him- or herself in life choices which require the actor to assess alternatives in

terms of their prospect for securing fulfillment or avoiding stagnation and despair. Without

assuming the purposive unity of the self, I/we simply would not have any sense of which of my

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motivational fragments has to be acted upon. Deconstructionist views of the self are "inconclusive"

in that the actor constructed along their lines would not be able to choose a line of conduct with a

life-course in mind.

5. Humanity and Gate 22: two impossible challenges for a community without identity

We have thus far focused on some difficulties of the deconstructionist, post-colonial, ritual-

theoretical view of agency and self-identity. Also concerning "community", taken here not as

Gemeinschaft, but as a paradigmatic term referring to various forms of human association,

counterintuitive consequences follow from the central idea -- underlying Nancy's, Blanchot's,

Agamben's and Esposito's texts -- that community is not "plenitude" or the positive affirmation of a

web of relations unified by some symbolic core mostly of a normative kind, but is on the contrary a

void, a negative, a moment of subtraction, "the exposure of singularities" (Nancy) and one

coextensive with the experience of death (Blanchot, Esposito). This usage of the term "community"

-- I hesitate to attribute a concept of community to these authors -- runs into two distinct problems.

First, when defined through the shared exposure to finitude of its members, community

paradoxically loses its difference and becomes synonymous with the human condition, with

humanity. There is no way of rescuing any sense in which this community is different from any

other, or its existence now differs from its existence one thousand years ago. For all their insistence

on difference and singularity, Nancy, Agamben, Blanchot and Esposito have de-differentiated the

philosophical vocabulary and deactivated -- to an extend unprecedented among the most

universalist and formalist among their antagonists -- our capacity to connect human groupings with

singularity. With this deactivation of the nexus of community and collective singularity also our

ability to distinguish the moral and the political understanding of a human grouping fades away.

The realm of politics can no longer be addressed or even conceived as a distinct one, because its

subject matter has merged with the indistinct horizon of a human condition defined by finitude.

That distinguishing the notion of community from that of humanity should become an impossible

challenge is indeed a paradoxical consummation if one considers that it originates from thinkers

who set out to call universalism into question through difference.

Second, not just the "upper threshold", so to speak, that separates human communities from

"the human community" appears blurred among the thinkers of singularity, but also the "lower

threshold" that separates the variously inoperative, inavowable, coming, munus-connected

community from random and transient human groupings can hardly be intelligible without reference

to a "unity of purpose" all-too-hurriedly jettisoned by the thinkers grouped under the heading of the

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"post-authentic". Gate 22 is the nightmare of communitas. For at Gate 22 the crowd of people

waiting to board the plane is all difference and no unity. They share nothing of their past, except on

the scale of smaller sub-groupings if they are traveling with family, friends or lovers, they share

nothing of the future, of what they'll do at their future destination once they will arrive. They only

share a micro-segment of their life course with others and share exposure to the same vulnerability.

Only from the outside they can be looked at as a whole, separated from the passengers of Gate 21,

and be seen as a stratified group -- "those with sky-priority", those traveling with children, those

who need assistance, those sitting in rows 18 to 36, and all the rest -- but qua member of the same

human grouping the passengers waiting for boarding at Gate 22 appear indistinguishable from a

community made of difference and lacking any overarching purpose. If, at a closer scrutiny, Gate

22 still looks too much like a traditional community because after all the passengers share a

destination, one could refine the counterexample, and compare communitas with the human

grouping formed by passengers of Sector B, which includes 60 gates with different destinations. In

this case, more singularity without overarching unity could not be asked for. The challenge for any

notion of community that wishes to dispense with a sense of purposive unity -- however pluralistic

and thin its underlying "purpose" might be, like in Dworkin's "liberal community" or in the political

values invoked by the preambles of liberal-democratic constitutions -- is to demarcate how its sense

of community is different from both humanity as such and the people at Gate 22.

Until these questions are answered, the suspicion is legitimate that the time to appropriately

prefix authentic agency, self-identity and community with the lexeme "post" is perhaps still to

come.

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