Chapter 4: A Pure Theory of Illusions

The core of critical theory—at least, of a reconstructed critical theory—is the endless, recurring unveiling of illusions, in order to denaturalize the present and expose the distributional consequences of those illusions. The task of critical theory is to demonstrate how the myths that we believe so deeply distribute resources and power in society—knowing that, as we unveil one set of illusions and allow others to take their place, we will need immediately, once again, to unpack the next set of myths. This constant unveiling and demonstration of its distributional effects is an infinite regress.

Reconstructed critical theory is, in this sense, a pure theory of illusions. It is about tracing, over and over, endlessly, the real effects—les effets de réalité—of our belief systems. And performing this unveiling means, at all times, challenging interpretations and offering new ones. It means engaging in an endless form of reinterpretation, fully cognizant of the fact that there is no end to interpretation. It is interpretations all the way down. Or as others might say, it is turtles all the way down. The task is to ceaselessly explore how the next set of interpretations produce a new social order and trigger distributional consequences.

I.

Nietzsche set us on this path, but we must now go beyond Nietzsche. Nietzsche, with Marx and Freud, represented a break in the nineteenth century. A new way of thinking. A new way of interpreting the world—a new hermeneutic. An interpretation of a world made up of interpretations. A world of infinite regress of interpretations, going down vertically. In his essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” Foucault identified in Nietzsche’s writings this modern hermeneutic: a different style or system of interpretation with its own devices, techniques, strategies, methods. It was a hermeneutic in which interpretation always precedes the sign. Interpretations do not escape interpretation, but rather fold back on them. Signs are deceptive; and all that we are left with is an endless series of meaning-making.

Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud constituted, at least on Foucault’s reading, a nineteenth century episteme that had to be understood by opposition to the epistemological system of resemblance and similitude that marked the 16^th century. Foucault inscribes his interpretation of Nietzsche in the framework of his writing, at the time, of Les mots et les choses. His reading is fully inscribed in that period and its central philosophical work. Nietzsche becomes a crystalized object, an insect caught in amber; but one that has implications for the present—at the time, the debates with semiologists: Nietzsche’s hermeneutic, Foucault claims, is a dead enemy of semiology, which itself puts in place “the reign of terror of the sign.”¹⁰⁸

“Interpretation finds itself with the obligation to interpret itself to infinity,” Foucault wrote, “always to resume… Interpretation must always interpret itself.”¹⁰⁹

What does that mean, you may ask? It is a world in which we never get to the original meaning or first source. Take for instance the question “Why do we punish?”, a question that my friend and colleague Didier Fassin asks in his lectures on The Will to Punish. Well, we can offer an interpretation: you are familiar with them, so to get beneath the obvious first answers—deterrence, retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation—no, we punish to maintain a social order, one that is characterized by white supremacy and capitalist consumption. So we punish to control the poor by imposing small fines and attaching their wages, if they have any—or adding their fines to their water bills, in La Grange and those small towns in Georgia. But where does that come from? Well, perhaps from earlier forms of social ordering, such as the debt prisons and the relation between debtors and creditors, as Didier Fassin discusses. And that? Well, it might trace back earlier to forms of indentured service, of owing work for one’s freedom… and so on, and so on… But one never gets to the original meaning. And in the end, we do not know anymore why we punish: we just punish. Or as Nietzsche said so eloquently in The Genealogy of Morals in 1887: “Today it is impossible to say for certain why people are really punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.”¹¹⁰

There is, then, no first origin. There is no omega, as my friend and colleague Jesús Velasco would say. The interpretations do not end. This is a way of thinking, Foucault wrote, that these nineteenth century thinkers inaugurated:

“There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for after all everything is already interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing that offers itself to interpretation but an interpretation of other signs.

There is never, if you like, an interpretandum that is not already interpretans, so that it is as much a relationship of violence as of elucidation that is established in interpretation. Indeed interpretation does not clarify a matter to be interpreted, which offers itself passively; it can only seize, and violently, an already-present interpretation, which it must overthrow, upset, shatter with the blows of a hammer.”¹¹¹

Doing philosophy with the blows of a hammer—yes, indeed, there is violence in these interpretations. The violence of a will to power. As Nietzsche reminded us, again in his Genealogy, meanings and interpretations “are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function,” the character of a meaning.¹¹²

To properly address our political situation today, then, and get beyond it, we need to return to these insights. This is what Foucault did: “In Nietzsche, one finds a type of discourse”—Foucault writes—“that undertakes a historical analysis of the formation of the subject itself, a historical analysis of the birth of a certain type of knowledge—without ever granting the preexistence of a subject of knowledge.”¹¹³

But we must go further.

To move forward, from a counter-critical perspective, we need not simply to understand, but to deploy the infinite regress of interpretations—knowing that even we do not preexist the meanings that we impose on the world, that our subjectivity is shaped by those infinite interpretations, that the struggle, in the end, is a struggle over life and death, a struggle over our subjectivity, a battle over the imposition of those interpretations. We need to deploy that infinity of interpretations.

II.

“After Buddha was dead, people showed his shadow for centuries in a cave,—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead: but given the ways of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will still be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

— Nietzsche, Gay Science, III, § 108.

Counter-critical theory calls for these constant and better interpretations. The political struggle today demands trenchant and forceful resignifications, along with an unbending commitment to resist the shadows from the past.

A world made up of interpretations, an infinite regress of interpretations, all the way down: if that is where we find ourselves, then we must continue to struggle through resignification. If we live in a world in which we never get to the original meaning or first source, where there is no omega, then interpreting is what we must do, always. This represents a way of thinking, Foucault reminds us, that Nietzsche inaugurated, doing critique with the blows of a hammer.¹¹⁴ There is force to that method.

But again, we need to go even further. And we must test our new interpretations as we would sound out our beliefs and faiths, as we would test our past idols. Yes, we are at the twilight of old idols.¹¹⁵ But even more importantly now, we are at the dawn of new ones that we will need to interrogate immediately and ruthlessly.

Today, more than ever, we need to go counter with our critical theory Both in the sense of counter-play, offering better and more compelling interpretations, and in the sense of exceeding the ideologies we counter, of achieve a higher playing field. This is what happens when, for instance, counterpositivism becomes a philosophical method that no longer refers back to positivism. When the Counterreformation becomes something greater than a response to the Protestant reformation, but instead a new form of governmentality. When jujutsu becomes an art form. When the American Counterrevolution becomes a form of governmentality in the absence of any insurgency or revolution. When, in Joseph Conrad’s book, the Professor becomes himself the “perfect anarchist” who has gotten past the play of the game of counter-moves. Or when, in our case, counter-critical theory becomes a pure theory of illusions—autonomous, and no longer tied to the rejection of traditional critical theory. It may also offer us a model for resistance.

In the end, counter-critical theory must bring us to the heart of revolt and disobedience as well. It may be possible to develop a theory of the counter-move as a decisive form of critical practice. This may be the counter-Counterrevolution that Étienne Balibar had in mind in Equaliberty. But here too we will need to be less suggestive and develop it in detail. We will need to develop a new critical practice for the twenty-first century.¹¹⁶ But first, we need to address a common vision—what we used to call a utopia. Practices can only be sharpened in light of a vision of the future. Let’s turn there next.