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c h a p t e r 4 Materia in the Critique of Autonomy Althusser’s enterprise . . . is marked throughout by the dread of the Marxist intellectual, the dread of the intellectual fallen prey to politics: not to make ‘‘literature,’’ not to address letters without addressee; not to be Don Quixote, the fine soul who fights against windmills; not to be alone, not to be the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, an activity by which one loses one’s head, literally as well as figuratively. —jacques rancière, ‘‘Althusser, Don Quixote, and the Stage of the Text’’ [Philip II:] Terror alone can tie rebellion’s hands: Compassion would be madness. —friedrich schiller, Don Karlos To distinguish between the terror of sovereign power and weak or defective concepts that shelter the terror of association and provide grounds for a critique of terrorism. To imagine and provide, as it were, the concept of these weak or defective concepts, then the means for their actualization— these are tasks that take thought beyond the stultifying opposition to imagination and vision that Dante the poet enjoins upon us when he urges his readers not to attend to the form of torture and to consider instead its theological consequences and justification—la gran sentenza. What exactly constitutes a weak concept, however, is not clear. The topology of weak concepts, like the logic of sovereignty, is paradoxical. ‘‘Terror’’ is the content sheltered by such concepts, whose formal weakness makes manifest that content. Their principle of closure is neither internal nor external to them. What makes this or that weak concept a concept is intimately foreign to it—extimate, the Lacanian idiom might say. But are there such things as strong concepts? Nor is it clear how a weak concept might be produced. Do I mean ‘‘produce’’ in the sense in which one speaks of producing a commodity? Producing a rabbit from a hat? Producing a film? Indeed, there’s more than a hint of contradiction in the expression itself. Production is a term generally reserved for material objects, and concepts—weak, strong, or 110 Materia in the Critique of Autonomy 111 neither—are largely understood to be immaterial, numinous, abstract. The concept of matter is not itself material, for instance, or so it must surely appear. Finally, it is not clear what sort of normative value weak concepts might have. They pertain to three types of instance. First, they apply to a classically conceived, autonomous ethical subject, one who enjoins upon himself , for instance, the rules ‘‘Do not steal,’’ ‘‘Do not kill,’’ and so on. Is there a weak concept to match the injunction ‘‘Do not do’’ this or that? Second, they pertain to rules of association. What sort of standing would a weak concept of society have—for instance, one based on nonidentitarian, nonrecognitionist paradigms? What would be its normative force? Finally, they apply to the relation between autonomy, understood to designate the ethical subject’s rule granting and rule following, and association. I am going to come at the matter of rule following from an unusual perspective, on the margins of traditional ethico-political thought—a route dictated by the queer understanding of concepts I am developing. I will refer to but set aside two objections to the question ‘‘What are weak or defective concepts of association?’’ I will not be proposing, first, that weak concepts of association are proxies for contracts or structured as contracts and that following the rules one sets oneself or following broader rules of association should be understood in the way that a contractual agreement is understood. This is an obvious, venerable, and attractive avenue , but an insufficient one. Obvious, because to the extent that contractarianism is based on outcomes—an exchange of my liberty in this domain for security in that, say—my commitment extends only as far as the return upon the contract. At the point where my security is no longer guaranteed, my agreement to limit my liberty can become void. And since that point is always possible (security is never guaranteed, no matter how thoroughly my environment is mapped and policed), my acquiescence to the norms of the contract is always provisional, always marked by a possible void. That provisionality—the shadow cast upon the norm by the contingency of outcomes —might seem as good a way as any to render the concept of weak or defective concepts of association. The second objection is, roughly speaking, Wittgensteinian. In this approach, the...

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