The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject by Irving Goh (review)

Loyal to Gilles Deleuze’s view of the philosopher as a creator of concepts, in The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject, Irving Goh offers a compelling response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s question “who comes after the subject?” by conceptualizing the reject as “a figure of thought” that interpellates everyone. This is both because, Goh reminds us in the preface, we have all experienced some form of rejection in life, and because we tend not to recognize the reject in ourselves—and we should. By eliciting this figure from the work of Deleuze, Nancy, Derrida and Irigaray, the project situates itself explicitly in the tradition of French post-structuralism. From the outset, Goh recognizes the inauspicious conditions that confront the emergence and recognition of the reject: the French language makes it difficult to articulate it, since there is no word linguistically similar to sujet, objet, abject, or trajet that would preserve both the passive and the active meanings of the English word reject. Moreover, Jean-Luc Nancy himself expressed doubts at the idea, dismissing it as “bad wordplay” [une mauvaise idée de langage]. Hopeful that this conversation can be left behind as an amicable dissensus, Goh appeals to Nancy and to the French language to welcome the reject, and to “French theory” to avoid thus a premature demise: “la pensée française contemporaine, encore un effort!” (4).

The book is an original, wide-ranging, and sustained effort to articulate the figure of the reject, which subtends, Goh notes, post-structuralist thought. The author writes from the position of a scholar whose relationship with French theory is an illustration of the “anticommunity,” or “antifriendship” he describes in the second chapter; not an easy community of the like-minded who gather around a common project, but a friendship that aims beyond itself, holding before its eyes the thought of its impossibility. In claiming that Derrida has not gone far enough in deconstructing the figure of the friend in Politiques de l’amitié, Goh’s reading practice illustrates the “syncopic love” he posits instead (via Catherine Clément), one that fundamentally transforms the lover, opening him to a radically new “thought, articulation and encounter” (56). French theory, The Reject suggests, offers the imaginative, philosophical, and linguistic resources to open up an unimaginable horizon, the event of a future to come, if we are ready to dream beyond our current notions of community, religion, politics, posthumanism; in other words, if—and this is no trivial condition—we are ready to relinquish the subject. Adamant about maintaining the latter even heavily qualified, Goh tirelessly distances himself from contemporary efforts to put the subject in critical perspective without discarding it. We need to break free definitively from the history and properties that the subject has accumulated, “not so much the subject that develops a conscious certainty as to how he or she singularly determines his or her thought, action and existence, but the subject that extends that sovereignty with a sovereign ambition, that is, the subject that decidedly positions his or her existence as the foundation of an exceptional worldview, to which all must accede and not resist” (166). “Any sublimation toward a subject must therefore be interrupted” (179), Goh reminds us repeatedly. The gamble of the book is on a new figure of thought that articulates and maintains together three gestures, or “turns”: a figure conventionally designated to be marginalized, denigrated, or erased; an active rejection “in retaliation to the external forces acting against it”; and a force of rejection turned upon itself, not out of a nihilistic impulse, but as a gesture of creative regeneration (7). Unthinkable without the first two turns, auto-rejection is the crucial dimension of the reject. Made to own this figure that subtends it, French theory itself emerges transformed from the loving encounters staged in Goh’s book.

The Reject is not, and probably cannot be, a comfortable book. Pervaded by a self-consciously “somber...