Figures of Refusal

Adam Haaga (bio)
Memorial University of Newfoundland

A review of Goh, Irving. The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject. New York: Fordham UP, 2014.

Motivated in large part by Jean-Luc Nancy’s question, “who comes after the subject?,” Irving Goh’s book delivers a reply, provocatively arguing in favor of the reject, a figure resistant to the historically and politically contentious concept of the subject. Working among thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, and Cixous, Goh systematically illuminates the suppressed figure of the reject from within current theories of the subject, attempting to drive “contemporary French thought beyond its existing horizons or limits” (23). To be clear, Goh’s proposed figure of the reject is not another concept among others vying to replace the subject, as if it were a substitutable concept. Goh instead prefers the phrase “figure of thought.” However Goh’s analysis balances and trembles between, on the one hand, the call for a decisive break with the subject as concept and, on the other, remaining dependent on it as material for rejection and auto-deconstuction from within the concept itself. Occasionally slipping into a conceptual frame that he intends to evade, Goh defines the reject as “a concept that really knows no boundaries” (180). The reject is Goh’s gesture toward what Nancy claims is “that to which one can no longer allot the grammar of the subject nor, therefore … allot the word ‘subject,’” (Nancy 6), a claim that he will articulate along the axes of discourse enumerated in the title.

Curiously, though, Goh sees no need to address the subject head on. “I will not tarry with the subject here. Neither will I tarry with texts that continue to problematize the subject” (5). In the same collection of essays in which Nancy’s leading question occurs, Michel Henry rightly names Descartes and Kant the two most influential thinkers in the history of modern thought to have “given rigorous meaning to the concept of subject,” such that “any critique leveled against the subject that does not proceed by the light of the foundational analyses of the Meditations and the Critique of Pure Reason would be meaningless” (158). Goh’s decision to forgo the injunction is worthy of concern. We ought to be suspicious of this abstention, for the most we are offered as regards the contestable nature of the subject centers around a nod in the direction of the generic “Eurocentric subject,” as if this is adequately descriptive of the problem, citing feminist and postcolonial literature as having thoroughly rendered the subject “problematic.” The usual critiques raised against the subject are quickly tallied: assertions of certainty and/or presence, capacity to rationalize, affirmations of power, tendencies of appropriation, etc. Despite the veracity of such claims, in an absence of any detailed critique against the subject, Goh makes the cavalier leap ahead to an articulation of the reject as that figure capable of going “beyond” the subject (3).

But even the degree to which Goh accomplishes this move “beyond” the subject, abandoning it completely, remains to be seen. One can certainly make a claim for the necessary reinscription of the subject within the figure of the reject amid the very attempt to overcome and evacuate the subject from its sovereign conceptuality. One could go further and radicalize the conceptuality of the subject by demonstrating the fundamental structures of auto-deconstruction already at work, exteriorizing the subject onto its auto-rejective other. In fact, my reluctance dovetails with my suspicion that what Goh names the reject only reiterates in form and content what Derrida articulated as the law of auto-deconstruction. It is incumbent upon Goh to either specify their affinity or delineate the manner in which the reject is at variance with auto-deconstruction, potentially improving upon it—neither of which is made explicit on my reading. For Goh will rely on an “animal vision” to deconstruct State politics, all the while insisting that the animal-reject eventually be incorporated and participate in the political discourse. Between the questions of gaze and response, on the part of the animal (reject) figure, Goh’s analysis echoes the gap already de-centering the subject in a hetero-affective play of violence, and the result is conspicuously auto-deconstructive.

Throughout the book, the figure of the reject takes many forms, but is reducible to three: the passive, the active, and the auto-reject. Everyone is said to have experienced rejection (passive), to have rejected others (active), or to have turned a force around on oneself (auto-reject), as when one revises one’s thinking or takes a new course of action, rejecting older methods, strategies, and beliefs. The crucial turn of Goh’s analysis hinges on this third figure, the auto-reject, for it is not only said to sustain a critical distance to establish an ethics without the conceptual scaffolding of the subject, but also to prevent any return to the subject and the threat of absorption into the same.

In a chapter on friendship and love (community), Goh raises Bataille as a thinker who comes close to thinking the reject. In Inner Experience Bataille critiques the Hegelian dialectic, renouncing absolute knowledge or the appropriation and determination of everything, “including the thought of community” (Goh 26). Communication and ecstasy, for Bataille, are the undoing and dissolution of the subject; in them “there is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other; the one and the other have lost their separate existence” (Bataille 59). Against the world of work, utility, and a will to eternity and lasting duration, sacrifice for Bataille serves as precisely that attempt to abandon and destroy these subjected ties in what he calls “unproductive expenditure,” characterizing a fusion, or loss of self in the experience of immanent continuity. The notion of an abstract negativity that is inoperative and unemployed in Hegel now situates and informs the role of death in sacrifice as unproductive expenditure for Bataille. But immanence, which sacrifice aims to restore, is a-phenomenal (non-experiential)—sacrifice cannot accomplish immanence, nor can it even hope to accomplish immanence for that would turn into a productive work, and thus a comedy affair.

Ultimately, Bataille’s dissolution of the subject is not enough for Goh’s figure of the reject, for Nancy will expose the tendency in Bataille to view the death of the other as simultaneously both a negation and expenditure without reserve as well as resisting that immanence at the risk of putting death to work toward the creation of community. To paraphrase, Bataille was beleaguered by his own excess, for a kernel of working productivity haunted even his thinking of sacrifice. At the moment when Bataille thinks an abstract (unemployed) negativity has resisted the Hegelian system, Nancy asks whether Bataille does not in turn employ this very negativity in sacrifice as the communal project.

Goh adopts Nancy’s position—“thought of community does not depend on such apocalyptic messianism as a necessary condition”—for as he argues, there is always already community before “the teleologic quests for communitarian fusion, communion, closed finality or identity” (27). The figure of the reject will therefore obtain argumentative force in Nancy’s désoeuvrement or unworking, a disruptive suspension of all subjective work or project aiming at the identifiable, definable, or representable community. On Goh’s terms the subject fails as a philosophical construct to help us reject these values and subject-positions, and thus offers the reject as a strong figure to advance political justice.

One line of critique that Goh will take concerns network-centric friendship and capitalist tele-technologies. Goh is intent upon unworking the impulse to conceive of friendship and community as inclusive, that is to say, social appropriation via creating links and building networks, by revealing the reject as integral to the very notion of community—i.e. that community has always consisted of those who have no part in (e.g. Rancière’s sans part) or wish to stand apart from (reject) that community. As Derrida writes, every friend at some point desires an “untimely being-alone” (Politics 55). By existing in contradiction to, yet concurrent with and within a capitalist logic of community, the figure of the reject refuses to operate in conjunction with that logic, threatening to disrupt and displace any common notion of friendship.

Goh will remind us, following Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, of the other who is yet to come, the one who arrives from the future. However, he is equally quick to add that “there is always also the other who does not want to arrive.” He continues, “As rejects in or before friendship, each and every one of us will have the right to refuse to respond, or even the right to walk away, silently, without explanation, and there will be neither rapprochement nor reproach” (46). It is in this sense that we may begin to think beyond an ethics of recognition, turning on its head a certain moralistic compulsion to “view” the other (and in turn, be viewed).

The question of visibility returns to the fore in Goh’s reading of Cixous’s “messianic texts.” Within these texts, Goh argues, we primarily secure for ourselves the opportunity to critique, reject, and thus “discredit the concept of sovereignty” (197) from the viewpoint of certain figures that escape or sidestep the surveillance of the political spectrum. But in terms of where we are to locate such a figure, Goh has recourse to the animal that curiously inhabits religion without occupying it: “the thought of animals is at the heart of the question of religion;” “without animals, religion or religious experience will not have seen itself through” (134, 136). Following Cixous, Goh argues for a reading of religious texts from a point of view that occurs within religion but without falling under its circumspective concern (to use Heidegger’s language). The political upshot to this animal vision is that it has the “potentiality to leave all forms of politics predicated on fraternity and alliance or friendship … suspended, undecided, or undecidable” (196). The intention is laudable; however, Goh leaves himself open to critique precisely in his moment of privileging: when he puts the animal mode of vision at a political advantage over the state apparatus. Certainly the animal inhabits a space that “escape[s] the gaze and capture of politics” (203). Or more keenly, it is the animal’s own vision of the human, “this bottomless gaze offer[ed] to my sight,” as Derrida puts it, that escapes the political gaze (Animal 12). And Goh is right to augment this “escape” by insisting that any “becoming-animal must be vigilant to auto-reject any such desire … for an outside” (204). He names this place of escape an “adjacent space” (205). But are we not obligated to interrogate this shift in viewing power between State surveillance and animal vision? Essentially, what we obtain with Goh’s “becoming-animal” is a seeing-without-being-seen that cannot help but reinstitute a desire for political “self-consciousness.” Although never transpiring into a having–become-animal, becoming-animal for Goh remains watchful and is on the look-out for watchfulness itself —“the State’s surveillance apparatuses” —while escaping the gaze of that watchful entity, slipping toward a space of uncertainty, a blind spot (blind to the state-order surveillance) (212).

Thus, one may detect in Goh’s rejection of sovereign surveillance a strand of thought that secretly hijacks back into its sphere of influence the control of visibility—the privilege and power that accompanies the capacity to see while remaining invisible. What Goh manages to omit is that, much like the “written text that keeps watch over [Derrida’s] discourse” —unable to make out, without certain “oral specifications,” the letters “e” or “a” (I am of course speaking of différe(a)nce) —the auto-rejective potential of the animal’s gaze too harbors its own undecidability as it auto-deconstructively tends toward the invisible (Margins 4). For how does one “keep watch”? Is the “watchful” a threatening excess of power, dominant and oppressive, or is it a protective “looking after”? This very “undecidable” is incontestably not a trivial matter, and it calls for a certain keeping watch of our own part.

Three issues become imminently worrisome to me. First, in shifting the emphasis of vision from the state (anthropocentric, rational, politics of appropriation) to the animal (marginal, rejected, deterritorialized), Goh has merely reiterated a possibility that already lies at the heart of state politics—that power (and specifically vision) is auto-deconstructive. Goh’s notion of the auto-reject is conspicuously analogous with Derrida’s notion of auto-deconstruction, without however holding fast to the necessity of the undecidable. For Derrida will speak of a certain “economy of violence”—i.e., any discourse approaching justice can only do so by “acknowledging and practicing the violence within it” (Writing 117). There is no position in this “economy of violence” from which a watchful entity can be determined as benevolent or oppressive. As Derrida writes: “If light is the element of violence, one must combat light with a certain other light .… This vigilance is a violence chosen as the least violence by a philosophy which takes history, that is, finitude, seriously” (Writing 117). The distinction between State surveillance and the vigilance of the becoming-animal (or the auto-rejective potential of the animal reject) thus echoes what Derrida names a “preethical violence,” an irreducible alterity constituting an indeterminate act of violence from which no side of history can legitimate (Writing 128). Goh comes nearest to conceding this necessary undecidable in an analysis of the Occupy movement, wherein he speaks of the “countersovereign force of the voyou” or the rogue figure (187). However, vacillating between the two reject figures of the animal and the voyou—the one that escapes the political gaze, expelled to the margins, and the other which is entirely visible having “appropriated” public territory—Goh will inadvertently carry out in his analysis the necessary double bind inherent in Derrida’s economy of violence without however making this move explicit.

Secondly, when Goh inclines toward “a future where animals are no longer excluded or rejected from the domain of religious” or political discourse, one wonders how Goh himself conceives the animal reject as a figure of thought precisely when they are “no longer … rejected” (138, my emphasis). In the chapter on friendship and love, Goh routinely stresses the right of the friend to “refuse” friendship, to “walk away, silently, without explanation” (46). In a surprising turn of argument though, Goh also expresses the hope that reject figures will eventually come to be embraced as heterogeneous members of political discourse. A limit is thus constructed around the question of response, a question that is marked by the distinction who can (or cannot) respond and who refuses to respond (but is otherwise capable). In other words, can the animal, in being unable to respond (as per the tradition since Aristotle—e.g., “animal rights” has always been a matter of concern for “human legislation”), actively reject anthropocentric ideologies? Clearly not—and yet, the question of animal response is suspended and preserved in a structure of undecidability. It is thus left to the passive- and auto-rejective potential sheltered within the animal’s purported lack of response to upend and destabilize political injustice.

And this brings me to my third issue, connecting my first two points to Nancy’s question that lies at the heart of Goh’s project (“Who comes after the subject?”). In reading Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am do we not cross an intersection of gaze and response, precisely where it becomes a matter for Derrida of how to follow the animal, of being after the animal, as if in a chase, tracing its tracks, “following the traces of this wholly other they call ‘animal’” (Animal 14 )? “To follow and to be after will not only be the question,” but the question of that very question, “that which begins wondering what to respond means” (10). But Derrida does not exclude the possibility that the autobiographical animal (in this instance, Derrida himself) is both follower and followed, at once after the animal other and after himself as animal. And how would the animal respond if Derrida ever caught up with the animal? Because there is nothing active in the inability to respond, which is attributed to some animals, the question is redirected to “the passion of the animal,” to the passivity with which some animals endure their silence, unable to speak in their own name, subjected to an anthropological decision to speak on their behalf. The animal gaze arrives as if from the outside, interrupting the dominant practice (since Aristotle even) that sets the human apart from the animal, throwing the question of response back on the one who supposedly has the capacity for logos. For the inability to respond does not mark a privative attribute accorded to the animal, but rather deprives the human of any animal response. In actively denying the animal the capacity to speak, the human is condemned to suffer the animal gaze, an interrogative vision composed in the silence of a non-response, imposing a necessary suspension in the order of difference, requiring the one to be after the other.

Is it possible then to recast Goh’s project in light of the terms set forth in The Animal That Therefore I am? I am suggesting that the question “who comes after the subject?” be reframed not in terms of who or what could possibly replace the subject. On the contrary, Goh’s argument makes a lot more sense if we understand that the human-subject is after the animal-reject—and after itself as animal-reject—and discovers itself when, in pursuit of that figure which refuses the subject any determinate response, the mode of auto-deconstruction reveals that a figure of the reject internally fractures the subject, always and already displacing and destabilizing its sovereign moment. When the subject actively rejects the animal, denying it language to the point that the animal passively refuses intelligible response, it falls on the auto-rejective potential of the becoming-animal—which is situated strangely and “all-too-humanly” in a “zone of proximity” to the animal itself—to effect a critique of state politics, and Goh struggles interminably to articulate this limit.

But to his credit, I am wont to think that this struggle was precisely Goh’s success. In the heart of his discussion of friendship, Goh communicates a sentiment to which I am entirely amenable. Courageously attempting to think the unpopular—failure—Goh writes,

[O]ne must dare to think that love does not fully succeed in the crossing toward friendship. One must dare to think that love will fail friendship, precisely in that crossing. With love, there is the chance that there will be no deliverance to a future friendship. (53)

It is the mark of a rigorous thinker to always keep in mind the limit. Minding limits, thinking through the limit, giving oneself to think despite one’s limitation; these are ways in which we radicalize politics and contemporary thought. And I deeply appreciate Goh’s courage to think beyond the limits of the subject. But limits are tricky to negotiate. Despite Goh’s adamant insistence on the non-conceptualizability of the reject, one could easily flout his precaution in a hurried reading and be tempted to worry that the reject in fact falls into the bin of useful concepts for political theory and philosophic discourse—yet another term that we can employ and dispense with in accordance with the demands of our philosophic schemata. But upon further reflection, it seems more the case that the reject “figures” as a name, effect, or phenomenon of experience composed in deconstruction’s unapologetic aftermath; that, in fact, the reject does not do any added work to replace, or come (discursively) after the subject, but offers new language for the hetero-affectivity already at play within the subject. As I read it, the reject stands as a recasting and new branding of the marquee we have hitherto known as auto-deconstruction. It is fruitless to seek reprieve from the authority of the subject in another concept. But the reject will deliver positive justice if it awakens the subject to its disseminative labor and the experience of having already been thrown—“jected”—into this world: the subject re-jected.

Works Cited

• Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. New York: SUNY P, 1988.
• Cadava, Eduardo, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
• ———. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
• ———. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. New York: Verso, 2005.
• ———. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• Henry, Michel. “The Critique of the Subject.” Who Comes After the Subject? 157–166.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Introduction.” Who Comes After the Subject? 1–8.