Toward a Post-War Political Philosophy?

Will Kujala (bio)

A Review of Lambert, Gregg. Philosophy After Friendship: Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae. U of Minnesota P, 2017.

Philosophy after Friendship intervenes productively in our contemporary political and philosophical moment. Lambert’s central thesis is that the contemporary world, precisely because of its intensification and disorientation of war and violence, has opened a space for thinking after war. For Lambert, Western philosophy has always been silent about the “end of war” (160). He argues that the waning of the political today—defined in terms of a politics of friendship—is an opportunity for crafting the post-war thought of which political philosophy has hitherto been incapable. He carries this out by presenting six conceptual personae—friend, enemy, foreigner, stranger, deportee, and the revolutionary people—as sites for teasing out the limits of the politics of friendship. While Lambert responds primarily to the world of and to central figures in critical theory (such as Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Žižek) rather than to contemporary scholars, his book makes two main contributions to contemporary political thought and continental philosophy. First, Lambert provides a genealogical critique of the concept of friendship in politics and philosophy, crafting a novel methodology for conceptual history through Deleuze and Guattari and Benveniste. Second, against many contemporary critical theorists, he insists on the need to turn away from the metaphor and practice of war as political paradigm. Using peace as his first principle, he pushes against those who would centre the concepts of animosity, contradiction, antagonism, and conflict, while refusing as impossible a return to liberal management and negotiation.

Friendship and the Limits of the Political

Lambert argues that contemporary politics exceeds the boundaries, borders, and limits that have been the conditions of possibility for political philosophy. Modern political thought, he contends, gave us a compromise: politics within limits. Internal conflict is muted as debate, negotiation, and rights claims. Conflict that exceeds this limit is displaced, externalized, and therefore preserved as war, bracketed as conflict between two mutually recognized enemies aiming at mere defeat and not elimination. For Lambert, as for many contemporary political philosophers, this compromise is increasingly fragile: “Today we might ask whether polities (from the Greek term politika), which was used to designate a privileged place for the display of civil conflict (stasis), can any longer contain the extreme states of conflict that constantly break out in modern societies” (6). These extreme conflicts are symptomatic of an “extreme opposition between [the] richest and poorest populations that belong to the global polis” (6). A deepening divide between rich and poor has blurred the spatial boundaries that enabled the compromise of modern politics. Lambert’s conceptual personae (friend, enemy, stranger, foreigner, deportee, people) come under intense strain in a world in which “all contemporary territorial boundaries have been overrun and made permeable and subject to change, and there is neither a distinctly ‘foreign’ place nor a central location, or polis” (65).

This diagnosis resonates with critical theory over the past twenty years, whether Hardt and Negri’s examination of new forms of sovereignty that blur the differences between policing and war, Derrida’s analysis of the war on terror, or Agamben’s take on the notion that modern politics is the internalization of a state of war within law. Evoking this theoretical work, Lambert argues that we are currently confronted by a “new form of combat” (114) between an unassimilable remainder or surplus of humanity left to the futile defense of its remaining privileges, and the rich who can no longer include or subsume this remainder into the figure of universal humanity. What makes his account different is his assertion that this new form of combat is not a new form of resistance in relation to power. Instead, this new combat marks the limit of combat as a political paradigm, even of the political as such: “this limit to the political dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, power and resistance, is nothing less than the impasse and the final exhaustion of the concept of the political itself” (115). Conflict in the contemporary moment “marks the absolute limit where both political and economic powers have reached a threshold of postmodernity that cannot be addressed by a secularized ideal of the universal” (112).

Lambert turns, in this conjuncture, to the concept of friendship. “The friend” stands in for a politics of friendship that has defined modern politics as association with those like us in contradistinction to outsiders and enemies. Using a compelling and novel methodology based on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of conceptual personae and Benveniste’s etymological investigations, Lambert argues that friendship “actually refers to an original or even primitive ‘conceptual persona’ first invented by the Greeks, the meaning of which is now difficult to discern … since many of its social and ritual significations have become hopelessly and irretrievably lost” (2). The goal, in this methodology, is not to retrieve a pure, original vision of friendship to which we could return against the one linked to war. The point is to find the limits of political philosophy’s appropriation of friendship by tracing the irrevocable loss of this vision (13). Lambert contributes to an expanding literature on friendship in politics and philosophy by arguing that friendship and war are linked in Western political philosophy. Friendship offers political and philosophical orientation when God and nature offer little or no guidance, such that politics is “based on the idea of ‘free election,'” on impermanent and spontaneous promises of alliance (29). In lieu of essential and inherent indexes of belonging, friendship acts as a political technology of boundaries, borders, and limits. By saying who is in (the political) and who is out (subject to war, exclusion, rejection), friendship “demarcates the social sphere of those members ‘who directly have a share in political rights'” (85). The basic arrangement of the politics of friendship is a compromise that, in creating an “inside” for political community and freedom, leaves war “outside” and intact as the constitutive condition of possibility for politics. As I read Lambert’s account, as friends, we get politics within limits but we are also never finally able to “quit the state of nature” (19), and can therefore never live in a “post-war” society (18).

This compromise has always been unstable. Lambert locates the origin of this instability in Plato’s writings and traces it through to Schmitt’s Concept of the Political. Plato realizes that the polis contains not only an internal rival and external enemy, but also “social beings” who fit into neither category (86). These ambiguous presences introduce the ever-present possibility of misrecognizing the enemy. Lambert shows that Plato insists on an apparently “natural” enemy to resolve this problem: the barbarian. The barbarian orients animosity away from the polis (57). This natural distinction can be traced through Western political thought, embodied in figures of racial difference, colonial subjection, gendered hierarchies, and “uncivilized” or “undeveloped” peoples. Schmitt marks an innovation in this respect, arguing that natural enemies are a dangerous mystification. Instead, he offers the enemy as an artificial foundation for friendship, i.e., for political community. The enemy recursively determines the friend not on any natural or self-evident basis, but on condition of its threat. Many political theorists appropriate Schmitt precisely because he offers this non-foundational account of the political premised on antagonism. His idea of politics as irreconcilable conflict has allowed political theorists to push back against the “post-political,” neutralizing character of our times.¹ Lambert makes an implicit contribution here by taking aim at the central premise of Schmitt’s appropriation: namely, the recursive determination of our identity and position by way of the enemy. He notes that while Schmitt, in one sense, solves Plato’s problem by finding a way to stabilize the figure of the friend without appealing to natural difference, Schmitt also conceals a “fundamental dissymmetry” between the friend and enemy that threatens to undo the recursive determination of the friend by way of the enemy. Lambert writes that “while … there is general agreement (consensus) concerning, ‘who is the enemy?’ there can only be multiple and highly variable responses to the question ‘who is the friend?'” (58). Here, he chips away at Schmitt’s scheme of the political with evidence from lived experience. We often find it difficult to say, specifically, why we are friends with someone. This is not because we have no idea, Lambert insists, but because we have so much to say about the friend. We have a whole set of “individualistic, subjective, intuitive, culturally relative, probabilistic, and overdetermined” inclinations, but the reason for our friendship remains mysterious (59).

Lambert builds on this point by mapping enemy and friend onto Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the molar and molecular. The enemy is “clearly molar in the sense that … the enemy is always one, and all the traits of individuality can be submerged behind the appearance of this opposition” (60). By assimilating differences to a unifying centre of molar unification, enmity solidifies the fragile, artificial politics of friendship. At the same time, however, the mystery of friendship’s origins threatens to kick this backstop out. Friendship is precisely not a molar, unified identity but a molecular one. Friendship arises out of a set of inclinations that are “preindividual and unconscious” (63). Friendship is not a unified identity in opposition to an enemy but an instantiation of what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “concrete multiplicity” irreducible to any unifying identity (62). To emphasize this vision of friendship, Lambert asserts, would be to find at the heart of political philosophy’s politics of friendship a concept that enjoins “friends [to] ally themselves against the existence of such a self”: a unified political body or “solipsistic” experience of self (63). Lambert gestures toward a critique of any political theory that uncritically appropriates Schmittian discourses of animosity to ground revolutionary politics or, for that matter, any kind of political subject. In the very friend on whom they rely, a set of heterogeneous, molecular possibilities exceeds any schematic opposition between friend and enemy, pointing toward a politics not premised on a metaphor (or reality) of war or combat.

What does not appear in this rereading of friendship is the notion of fraternity central to the politics of friendship and to Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, to which Lambert owes a clear debt. If the political subject has too often been considered a unified or molar identity that defines itself only against a killable, excludable, or deportable enemy, fraternity is a key ideology through which this politics has been naturalized. Balibar, for example, has persuasively shown that fraternity mediates and naturalizes universal concepts of political equality and freedom in their necessarily concrete context (50). An engagement with fraternity in relation to friendship might also indicate the crucial importance of gender to questions of friendship. Feminist critics have long argued that, insofar as the politics of friendship has been linked to fraternity, it was always already premised not only on war but on the exclusion, subjugation, and traffic of women.² These theorists have interrogated the limits of political inclusion and exclusion, and engaging with them would have strengthened Lambert’s analysis.

Thinking after War

Lambert’s novel genealogy of friendship as molecular provides a way to see beyond the vision of the friend that enshrines war as the necessary complement to political freedom. His rereading allows him to argue that the other conceptual personae reveal the instability of these attempts to naturalize war and the enemy as the outside of politics. The foreigner attests to an original foreignness that is just what Kant called our “unsocial sociability” (44). Society here is “the possibility of hospitality, exchange, communication, and generosity” covered up and obscured by the hardened link of sameness that friendship establishes (75). The stranger-guest relationship, as a special realm of friendship in which the guest is utterly dependent on the host, marks “the failures of this circle of the closed group to complete itself and become absolute,” revealing that beneath “positive laws,” we are all, as singular beings, dependent “strangers by nature” (93, 97, 94). The revolutionary people, sharing political rights by virtue of a molar identity and unity, make this unity through historically productive violence. Instead, Lambert argues that the only way to refuse war as the condition of possibility for politics would be to refuse the conversion by which violence is “put to work for a higher goal” (132). The deportee, finally, works as the master sign under which the crisis of the politics of friendship manifests, insofar as surplus populations are no longer enemies to be defeated or friends to be included, but remain locked in a “double bind” in which they can only be ignored or punished, deported or detained (106). Each conceptual persona reveals both the compromise by which politics is bought at the expense of war and points to the destabilization of this compromise. Lambert’s personae point to the possibility of “post-war philosophy” today in the refusal to rationalize or provide a historical justification for the condition of the global poor and victims of imperial wars. These are instead figures of inconvertible violence that can only evoke a stutter and aphasia from a tradition of political philosophy premised on this rationalization of violence.

For Lambert, Kant is the one exception in the Western tradition of political thought. Lambert argues that Kant was unique in his insistence on the end of war and in his refusal to provide any (explicit) legitimation or justification of war. Here Lambert finds his most challenging problem: moving beyond the “internalized” principle of war (159) as metaphor and guiding paradigm in political thought without returning to the also-defunct liberal political philosophy of legal negotiation and rational agreement. For Lambert, Kant offers a theory of consensus that goes beyond war even as a metaphor (159). Kant’s refusal to justify or even rationalize war links up with a contemporary scene in which we are confronted with unjustifiable violence that punitively ensures the fragile and doomed order of rich and poor (146). For those who see Kant’s philosophy as legitimizing a post-political cosmopolitan order, this is a provocative turn. It is also a compelling one, insofar as Lambert insists that Kant foregrounds peace in order to eliminate (by way of an international federation) the displaced yet persistent war outside of political community.

Lambert’s final chapter ventures furthest into the speculative and normative, and would have benefitted had he deviated from his otherwise productive propensity to ignore contemporary scholarship in favour of key figures in critical theory. The large critical literature on Kant emphasizes his ambiguous relationship to war.³ Scholars insist that, far from refusing all legitimations of war, Kant refuses explicit theodicies of war in favor of a historical logic according to which war propels us to peace just as economic and rational conflicts lead to greater rationality and human powers. The regulative idea of peace—as the infinitely distant telos behind Nature’s pitting us against each other in war—shows that absolute peace is, strictly speaking, impossible and possibly undesirable for Kant. Kant’s superficial emphasis on peace notwithstanding, perpetual peace leads to a dilemma: either what Deleuze calls a “peace more terrifying than fascist death” (115, 132) or infinite progress toward peace that amounts to war in perpetuity. In response, scholars like Murad Idris ask whether the road to war is paved with ideas of perpetual peace.⁴

Lambert no doubt chooses Kant because he is a liminal figure in the tradition to which Lambert is responding, since Kant at least challenges us to think after war, even if the solution is imperfect—that is, all too finite. However, the problem lies in thinking that peace is the answer to war, as if these two terms are not thoroughly imbricated in the tradition Lambert wants us to think beyond. The desire for peace (to “quit the state of nature”), far from being merely a critique of war, has also functioned as an insidious legitimation of colonial violence.⁵ The rest of Lambert’s book clearly points beyond Kant’s idea of peace, which is a culmination rather than a rejection of the long tradition of political thought. Lambert’s references to Derrida’s “democracy to come” (144) to Agamben, and to Deleuze’s molecularity (62-3) in his understanding of a potentially alternative, immanent critique of friendship imply that he wants us to think beyond Kant, while rejecting any positive, transcendental project (143-44). As a student of Deleuze’s philosophy, Lambert might have given a provocative re-reading of Kant’s perpetual peace in light of the Deleuzian reading, where peace might appear not as the transcendental telos to a set of pre- existing dynamics, but as obscure virtualities and tendencies. In the spirit of Lambert’s argument, we could see Kant as the sharper limit to Western political thought, and the real challenge Lambert opens up for future thought: how to think peace otherwise than in contradistinction to war. His response, both to the valorization of antagonism and the politics of friendship, opens precisely the question of peace. Lambert himself points in this direction, acknowledging that peace can only be a preliminary principle, an alternate beginning, and not a “solution” (160). This preliminary principle or “theoretical judgment,” as Kant would put it, is that no justification or rationalization can secure violence (157).

Philosophy after Friendship makes a provocative contribution to philosophical thinking about war and peace, to the difficult problem of diagnosing our political and philosophical present, and to the question of what the end of philosophy looks like. This book is fourteen years in the making (161), which shows in its sedimentation of and reflection on thinking from the last twenty-five years. In this book, political theorists will find an important insistence on peace as a key concept of philosophy; those concerned with postmodernity will find a compelling diagnosis of the contemporary conjuncture; and those concerned with continental philosophy will find a new appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual personae as method. Even those sceptical of the overall argument will find many interpretive insights into difficult texts and problems. Above all, Lambert’s book is questioning, and opens us onto new ways of engaging with critical theory and with the problem of war.

Footnotes

1. See Chantal Mouffe’s On the Political and The Democratic Paradox. For a brief review, see Douzinas’s Human Rights and Empire. For a critique, see Žižek’s “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics.”

2. See Pateman’s The Sexual Contract.

3. For a review of the literature concerning global politics, see Buchan’s “Explaining War and Peace: Kant and Liberal IR Theory” and Hurrell’s “Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations.”

4. For a similar argument, see Bennington’s Kant at the Frontiers, 63-84.

5. See Neocleous’s War Power, Police Power and Nichols’s “Contract and Usurpation in Settler-Colonial Contexts.”

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998.
• Balibar, Etienne. Masses, Classes, and Ideas: Studies in Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. Translated by James Swenson, Routledge, 1993.
• Bennington, Geoffrey. Kant at the Frontiers. Fordham UP, 2017.
• Buchan, Bruce. “Explaining War and Peace: Kant and Liberal IR Theory.” Alternatives, vol. 27, 2002, pp. 414–418.
• Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale Anne-Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford UP, 2005.
• Douzinas, Costas. Human Rights and Empire. Routledge, 2007.
• Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000.
• Hurrell, Andrew. “Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations.” Review of International Studies,vol. 16, no. 3, 1990, pp. 183–205.
• Idris, Murad. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought. Oxford UP, 2019.
• Kant, Immanuel. Political Writings. Edited by Hans Reiss, translated by H. S. Nisbet, Cambridge UP, 1991.
• Lambert, Gregg. Philosophy After Friendship: Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae. U of Minnesota P, 2017.
• Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. Verso, 2005.
• —. On the Political. Routledge, 2005.
• Neocleous, Mark. War Power, Police Power. Edinburgh UP, 2014.
• Nichols, Robert “Contract and Usurpation in Settler-Colonial Contexts.” Theorizing Nature Studies, edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, Duke UP, 2014.
• Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford UP, 1988.
• Žižek, Slavoj. “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics.” The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, edited by Chantal Mouffe, Verso, 1999.