I agree wholeheartedly with the organizing theme of Gavin Hyman’s analysis in Traversing the Middle, the claim that present ethical, political, and theological discourse is ensnared, on the one hand, by a postmodernism particularism that is politically and ethically ineffectual and, on the other, by a push to return to “unequivocal universals” that “reinscribe the same problem, albeit in an inverted form” (x). I have also drawn on Gillian Rose to make a similar assessment a major organizing theme of my book, Waiting and Being. Nevertheless, aware that we struggle most fiercely to distinguish ourselves from those with whom we are most similar, I have several points of contention to raise with Hyman’s constructive proposal. As these differences occur within a broader agreement, my comments will focus largely on the interpretation of Rose’s work, about which I believe Hyman and I differ considerably. In sum, I believe Hyman understands the ethico-political significance of the “broken middle” in exactly the opposite way from the way in which Rose understood its importance. I believe this is the case because Hyman has invoked the equivocation to “the broken middle” without any accounting for the nature of how Rose conceives of speculative thought and without any reference to its ethico-political viability. This absence is decisive, I believe, for any appropriation of her work since, as Rose underscored in her 1995 preface to the reprint of Hegel Contra Sociology, the “speculative exposition of Hegel” in that work “remains the core of the project to demonstrate a non-foundational and radical Hegel, which overcomes the opposition between nihilism and rationalism” (viii). Insofar as I understand this to be Hyman’s goal too, my remarks will focus on what the absence of speculative thought (and its consequent orientation to “absolute ethical life”) cost Hyman’s project.

My first objection concerns Hyman’s claim that “the ethical and political are constituted by an enigma or aporia that is manifested in the central Judeo-Christian commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.” Hyman insists on the Derridian proposition that this commandment is “strictly and logically unrealizable” because, as Kant maintained, that realization would mean the commandment “belong[ed] to the domain of legality and not that of the ethical at all” (xi). Hyman maintains that ethics and politics are established on the equivocal diremption between the ethical demand to love the neighbor and the political demand to universalize that commandment as justice:

. . . I want to suggest that the ethical is a site of tension between contrary principles. These contrary principles are multiple and may be seen to proliferate. They include tensions between the universal and the particular, autonomy and heteronomy, love of self and love of neighbor, interestedness and disinterestedness, and so forth. The ethical actually depends upon these tensions, and the labor of the ethical consists in the tarrying with these tensions, and judging and acting in the midst of them. Perhaps foremost among these tensions is that between the universal and the particular. (5)

The trouble is that law is precisely what this commandment is, and it is the law of a particular religious ordering of social relations. Hyman treats this commandment of Torah as if it were the same kind of formal rule that governs liberal, bourgeois society. For reasons I will point out below, it is precisely in the context of liberal, bourgeois law that the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself is “strictly and logically unrealizable.” Now I simply want to note that whatever one makes of the universality of this commandment, it is not abstract. Rather, it is meaningful specifically within the context of Torah-observance, understood as fidelity to God’s covenant with Israel and/or the specifically Christian interpretation of that covenant. Even for Christianity, where Gentiles are included in the covenant, this is not a transcendental status but a concrete community and practice for which this commandment is binding. As Jesus says in John, “A new commandment I give to you, love one another.” This has the status of law for these peoples. Any assessment of the logicalness or realizability of the commandment must be made within these social contexts. And in the covenantal context, the commandment for neighbor-love is penultimate, first contextualized by the commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Deut 6:5 and Matt 12:30–31). Whatever sense there is to be made of loving the neighbor as oneself or of its fulfillment, it is meaningless apart from the particular “religious” context of absolute fidelity to the God of Israel.

Furthermore, I do not think it is as clear to me as it is to Hyman that this commandment is problematic. I am fairly confident that I witness it in various empirically verifiable ways every day. But I think it is clear to me because I have very different ideas of what “loving,” “neighbors,” and “selves” are than Hyman, ones that give priority to this religious context. I do not doubt that it is possible to conceive of loving, neighbors, and selves in ways that making the commandment impossible, but the “religious” context that conditions it views those conceptions as “sin.” What is most interesting about the Christian expression of “the religious” is not at all that it understands the absoluteness of love to be unrealizable, but that, as Herbert McCabe noted, they insist that in Christ, love is the law. The claim is that this is now ultimately true, though only for those who are “in Christ” (en Xristou). Consequently, legality itself is conceived differently in the actuality of this love. Paul is incomprehensible apart from his insistence that the social experience of this love is the Spirit of Jesus Christ in the Christian assemblies.

Hyman wants to maintain Rose’s emphasis on the equivocal nature of the relation between the universal, particular, and singular, while highlighting the oft-forgotten tri-unity of their relation. When the singular is elevated over the universal (Levinas) or the universal over the singular (Žižek), the anxiety that founds ethics and politics is precluded because the “brokenness” of the middle is artificially “mended.” Where this evasion occurs within the ethical by appealing to the plenitude (God) or emptiness (Void), it is also repeated by the attempt to give priority to ethics over politics (Levinas), politics over ethics (Žižek), or as a prioritizing of either passivity (Critchley, Hardt/Negri) or violence (Badiou, Žižek) within politics.

In the main I agree with Hyman’s demonstration that contemporary continental philosophy is committed to the mending of the middle. I am concerned, however, that Hyman does not grasp the significance of this mending in light of the full trajectory of Rose’s critique of social theory. I believe he interprets it in terms of the concern in continental postmodernism to resist the suppression of difference (i.e., the equivocation) to identity. However, as Rose first noted with reference to Adorno, her major concern was to resist those philosophies that are “more concerned with the Nietzschean perspective that to say that two things are identical is to make them identical, than with the Hegelian emphasis that to say that two things are identical is to assume incorrectly that they are independent of each other” (Rose, Melancholy Science, 22–23). Hyman situates the equivocation of the middle in this Nietzschean trajectory, and overlooks what Rose takes as the more interesting and promising project of showing that these evasions of the equivocation of the middle are premised on the suppression of the a fundamental investment in their separation. Rose’s project is animated by the drive to show that the dominant solutions to modern dualisms are, in fact, unwittingly committed to their separation.

Because Kant’s separation of morality from legality demands disinterestedness of the ethical agent, self-consciousness will be conceived as constitutively split between an autonomous drive to subjugate the world to its activity and an heteronomous determination of that activity by “the other.” Hyman objects to any third term (i.e., the fullness of God or the emptiness of the Void) that would resolve that split and devolve into “complacency.” The role of “the religious” as a universal mediation is to supply the universal that can sustain the equivocation constitutes ethical risk and political labor. This universal must “suspend” any judgment with regard to the ontological status (theistic/atheistic) of the absolute. This suspension is not agnosticism, Hyman maintains, because it does not refuse faith but intensifies it as the commitment to the endless reconfigure of the relation of the universal, particular, and singular. Instead of knowledge of the absolute, Hyman proposes an infinite ignorance.

Hyman wants us to see the affirmation of such ignorance as salutary, the heart of the ethico-political task. But, for Hegel (and Rose), this is the essence of slavery. It subsumes any ontological content of the universal perpetually under the contradictory illusions of finite consciousness, sacralizing our present alienated social relations. In Rose’s words:

It subjects the objects of both theoretical and practical knowledge to the “domination of the discursive concept.”We can only turn from our limited knowledge of the finite to an insatiable yearning for the unknowable and inaccessible infinite. But this irrational relation to the infinite makes a rational relation to the social and political conditions of our lives impossible. The limitation of “justified”knowledge to the finite prevents us from recognizing, criticizing, and hence from changing the social and political relations which determine us. If the infinite is unknowable, we are powerless. For our concepts of the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities. (48)

If the equivocation of the middle actually constitutes ethics and politics, then we have only what Hegel calls “relative ethical life,” which gives us no basis for challenging or changing the conditions of our current social reality. As Rose notes, “Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute is banished or suppressed, if the absolute cannot be thought” (Hegel contra Sociology, 45). But speculative thought makes the absolute thinkable again under these fragmented conditions because it reveals that our experience of contradiction between the universal and particular is an illusion produced by our social relations. Because our social life mediates only antagonism between the universal and particular, any attempt to reconcile them is doomed to abstractness.

Without any reference to speculative thought, Hyman can only offer us another version of post-Kantian practical reason. He objects rightly to the “domination of the concept,” the Fichtean Sollen (“ought”), which he uncovers in diverse projects of Milbank, Žižek, Badiou, Critchley, and Hardt/Negri. He does not, however, see that same domination in his own insistence on the equality-in-distinction (equivocation) between the universal, particular, and singular. He does not see that this is simply an arbitrary transcendentalization of finite relativity, one that dominates the ethico-political activity by imposing limits on the field. Absolute ethical life, which would yield a social mediation of the absolute adequate to the particular and singular, is excluded as invalid simply on abstract principle. For Hegel, this means we are condemned to slavery.

But a social mediation of the universal that was adequate to the particular (and vice versa) would not the mean the cessation of ethical risk and political labor. Rather, because it is absolute ethical life, it is an infinite task. Its significance lies not with the fact that knowledge of the absolute is deferred in favor of the perpetual “risk” of “faith,” but that this knowledge is concretely—rather than abstractly—absolute, produced in and through a concrete social relation. Reconciliation of the finite with the infinite does not preclude ethico-political labor, but produces it. Knowledge (theory) and action (practice) are mutually implicated such that the absolute is only adequately perceived in the practice.

Most troubling of all is that the actual existing social conditions that Hyman makes the transcendental conditions of possibility for all ethical and political life are those of liberal, bourgeois property right. The universal and particular stand in this tension because social relations founded on the bourgeois self mediate a contradiction. Rose notes: “Bourgeois private property presupposes real inequality, for the law which guarantees abstract, formal property rights presupposes concrete inequality (lack of identity)” (60). And further on:

Private property is a contradiction, because an individual’s private or particular possession (Beseitz) can only be guaranteed by the whole society, the universal. The universal (das All-gemeine) is the community (die Gemeine). This guarantee makes possession into property (Eigentum). Property means the right to exclude others, and the exclusion of other individuals (particular) is made possible by the communal will (universal). But, if everyone has an equal right to possess, to exclude others, then no one can have any guaranteed possession, or, anyone’s possession belongs equality to everyone else. (78)

Strangely, Hyman asks us to take this as the condition of possibility for all ethico-political life. By contrast, Rose wants us to know, through speculative thought, the reality of the fragmentation of our social relations, and thereby to provoke the ethical and political action that will produce the wholeness that is absent. The only possibility we have for that wholeness is through the ethico-political risk that would establish the conditions for perceiving the unity of finite and infinite. Such action is impossible in the terms that Hyman has commended to us, which would perpetually defer that possibility by affirming only its incoherence. With no possibility of a social form that can reconcile the self and neighbor, nature and freedom, intuition and concept, mind and matter, the possibility of a truly radical ethico-political vision is lost. We have no future beyond the contradictions of bourgeois capitalism.

It matters a great deal that here is no mention of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit in Hyman’s text. It is this absence that tells us that the proposal is, in the end, purely formal. If Rose is right that what Hegel meant when he claimed to have reached the end of philosophy was not that he had attained the absolute but that he had reached the point beyond which anything else he would say would devolve into abstractness, then the only possibility of transgressing those limits will be within a social relation that can mediate the union of the universal and particular, one in excess of bourgeois property right.

Ultimately, I believe the decisive question is whether the very singular naming of the absolute as Jesus of Nazareth and the very particular social relation he assembles is adequate to absolute ethical life.

There are many middles traversed in this book. One of them is methodical, between doxography—giving exemplifying names to certain possibilities and positions of thought—and exhortation. The tracing of themes in Levinas and Kant and Rose and Hegel and Badiou and Žižek and Milbank in a dialectical curriculum constitutes a sort of topography of the problem of passivity and hyperactivity, but to remain there is clearly not Gavin Hyman’s purpose, since such an endless dialectic of difference would, in the realm of ethics and politics both, spell paralytic indecision. This is what he aims to point beyond, mapping out his path of many middles. The decision he prescribes is indeed a decision, but its signature would always be personal, struck out in the ink of fallibility; thus more Here I stand, I can do no other than Thus saith the Lord. It might differ in all sorts of ways from the counsel of all those senior sages whose works this book traverses, but it would remember them, include them without leaving them behind, and finally would enact something of their mind. I think he means this to be exemplary; it is not a matter of discounting contestants for first place in the formulation of correct propositions, but rather one of making a middle wherein the dialectic is always able to resolve practically without however ceasing or becoming simply the past of a practical decision.

I think we must certainly credit Hyman with the intention of exemplifying what he exhorts; that is, he intends his discourse to be exemplary more than he intends his conclusions to be final. Of all his interlocutors, it seems clear that he regards the wise Gillian Rose as the best guide, but whether or not his conclusions are Rosey (and I might suggest he differs from her more than it seems) is not, I think, an especially pertinent question. He is skeptical of a correspondence theory of truth, and thus whether or not his mind and his conclusions correspond with those of Rose is a inquiry alien to the purpose of the work; this is Gavin Hyman’s book, not hers. Likewise with many of the figures he works with and who serve as the terms between which he will trace his median; whether or not he gets them “right” might not be so important.

But before saying, or rather perhaps asking, more about the middles, I think it’s worth asking what Hyman might mean by “traversing.” In of the most basic ambiguities of the book, he seems at once to exhort us to traverse—traversal would then be the act of moving through the middle—and to suppose that we are already traversing, and what remains for exhortation is choice of route.

Yet to traverse is not only to pass across, it can also mean to bridge; in the second sense, close perhaps to what Hyman wants to avoid, the specious mending of brokenness through equants and equal-temperaments. But there is also a kind of bridging he exhorts. In the very last passage of his book he describes the life of faith as a bridge; a suspension bridge, in fact, “the suspension of the ontological,” whereby the ethical (and political) are instituted in their integrity over an abyss. The striking image isn’t painted in any further detail, but one gets the sense that this bridge conducts the traffic of human life in all directions, from the political to the ethical and back. But what this bridge, religion defined as the life of faith, is made of is left unclear; it sounds rather like a high wire, but even more perhaps like the invisible span traversed by Road Runner, which the Wile E Coyotes of either objective certainty or subjective uncertainty cannot cross.

But back to middles. What is being bridged in Hyman’s schema is self and other in the ethical realm, bridged by Jesus (or a Golden Rule exemplified by Him) ever in the middle of any two on the road to Emmaus, as opposed to other rules which tend to either abjection in favor of the other or a kind of tyranny in favor of the self, each deviation being the result of a disorder of the relation between universal, particular, and singular, the three Hegelian stations the negotiations between which are, for Hyman, constitutive of both the ethical and the political. These negotiations are like the moves of a dance, fraught with the possibility of falling, ever in tension and ever in action. But there is no tension, for him, between the ethical and the political; they are analogous or even continuous. Hyman’s phenomenology of them both sees one practice of translation between the three. What this phenomenology is concerned to do is to rule out “ontologically privileged” mediating thirds; there is no universal grammar to which all can be reduced, there is only constant translation. Given that ethics and politics are his concern here, it is curious that he takes his cues solely from The Science of Logic; surely some mention of what Hegel has to say about the relation of universal, particular, and singular of The Philosophy of Right—where they are something like the terms of the Aristotelian practical syllogism as carried out by a persona moralis—would have been useful.

Perhaps the biggest middle Hyman wishes to traverse is between Žižek and Milbank. Much of Traversing the Middle is concerned with cautioning us against too big a return of the big narrative, and Hyman sees both of these writers as being too incautious.

But it seems to me that Žižek is careful (as much as he ever is, which means not always, or not always apparently) to insist that the gap between the universal and the particular can never be wholly bridged; to think that the particular can wholly instantiate the universal is delusional, and consciousness of the universally human only arises in fracture, in breaking of habits, in unsettling shocks. This is the principle of praxis for Žižek; the common ground of mankind is precisely the ground of unsettlement. And theoretically, he has been just as careful to critique immediacy and the pretense of an absolute objective knowledge in some crude foundationalist sense; and here Hegel himself would agree, I think. Hyman grants much of this, but still thinks that atheism, “privileging the antithesis,” upsets the balance, not because it is untrue, but rather, because is says more than it can know.

And likewise with Milbank. Here “theism” is the problem, “privileging the thesis.” As with the first case, Hyman grants that this is a very qualified position. But he thinks it goes awry because it says more than it can know.

Now certainly both run risks. But I wonder whether Hyman hasn’t made so much of the risk that he ends up making straw men between which his own middle path might be traversed. It seems to me that, given that Milbank and Žižek both make most of the needful qualifications preventative of totalization, that what Hyman finally objects to is not just the totalization, but rather idea of the truth claim itself.

The book ends by commending an idea of personal truth, truth to self, where the self is the normative man; universal, but always particular, though in a way which in no way excludes other particulars as singulars. The truly common man as the common good, as it were; but one of the reasons he commends it is because he thinks such a standard is quite separable from, and thus independent of, the test of “correspondence.” For Aristotle, such an exemplary person would of course “correspond” to God, to the divine life, and Christians claim that for the Lord Jesus, of course, and say moreover that the way in which He corresponds to God is not simply by way of eminence but is unique, so unique that a special discourse had to be contrived in order to express the mystery.

And it is in fact that Jesus whom Hyman puts forth as the exemplary person, the truth of what it is to be human; this is in fact a book which commends Christian faith as the exemplary religion, the one which perfectly, at least in principle, holds universal and particular and singular in balanced tension. More on this in a moment.

But about that independence from correspondence. To be sure the “correspondence theory” as generally understood has its problems; for one, it presumes a world of brute extension and makes that the measure of reality. Its “facts” have been deservedly deconstructed. But it is common knowledge that Russell’s is hardly the only realism on offer; to take the correspondence theory as exemplary of realism is a serious oversight. The middle of real knowledge is not confined to the consistency of subjectivity between correspondence theory on the one hand and a complete skepticism on the other. Neither Aristotle nor Hegel would subscribe such a view; for them, wisdom is comprehensive of the cosmos, not of course by pure observation for which the world is a mere object in relation to which the knower is at once both peripheral and panoptic, but by a recognition in which both self and world are seen as each in the other; a correspondence of a sort, certainly, but given the connotations of that word, the relation might better be put as coinherence. Donald Verene, as I recall, argues that for Hegel, Spirit is the copula between an-sich and fur-sich. Granting that wisdom cannot be a unilaterally indexical apprehension, still, if mind does not truly comprehend the differentiated orders of reality, it is not wisdom but rather will be simply the self-recursive subjectivity of the “beautiful soul” for whom neither ethical nor political resolution is really possible. Its itinerary is not the universal world-traversing road of Erfahrung, but is rather merely the voyage autour de ma chambre; it never leaves the Konigsberg of the “true for me.” This is not, I think, at all what Hyman intends. But in shying away (for good reason) from the totalizing truth of a Badiou in its more Maoist moments, or (less agreeably) from the possibility of falsification, he runs the risk of sounding as though he is willing to sever spirit from world, subjectivity from objectivity.

This is unnecessary, because wisdom is of its nature persuasive, not coercive. Spirit in possessing itself possesses nature too, but wisdom does not appeal to a set of objects as its extrinsic authority; nevertheless, its persuasiveness is partly constituted by its peaceful and unpossessive possession of reality, a reality bigger than the subjective self. To make truth ethical in isolation is simply an optimistic sort of postmodernism, not a path out of its maze.

Leaving aside the question of coherence—that is, whether or not the “personal” is conceivable when the question of ontology is suspended—I have trouble seeing how Hyman’s idea of truth prescinding from being is really all that different from Žižek’s idea of transcendence as the disproportion of human spirit to human capacity of observation; or to pick a homelier example, the “higher power” of AA whose ontological status is quite expressly suspended. Think what one will of Milbank’s “trinitarian” solution to the problem Hyman is concerned with, it at least has the virtue of involving a believable God. Hyman rules it out as too theist, that is, having too much objective certainty; but whether or not Milbank might be able to defend his theology from standard Kierkegaardian charges (and I think he can), a God about whom we quite possibly know nothing at all is hardly a God from Whom any norms at all can intelligibly come, even in the form of a person.

The discourse of faith which traverses the true middle cannot prescind from ontology, though it will not be identical with it, nor will it take its authority exclusively from its generalities.

Richard Rorty is not to be found among Hyman’s interlocutors here, but the aversion to realism and the idea of outer measure, coupled with an optimistic social hope, sounds very much like what Hyman is commending, with the difference that the ethical ideal he sets forth is not only personal—the idea that ethical truth is measured by the figure of the eminently admirable man—but also Personal, since he offers Jesus as He for Whom the article must be definite. But if ontology is suspended (and if ontology is suspended, so is history), then the definiteness of the article is indicative only of the speaker’s regard; and why in such a state of affairs one ought to prefer Jesus is not at all clear, since de gustibus non est disputandum etc.

This kind of faith sounds very much like what Hegel describes as Jacobi’s doctrine:

The term Faith brings with it the special advantage of suggesting the faith of the Christian religion; it seems to include Christian faith, or even to coincide with it; and thus the Philosophy of Faith has a thoroughly orthodox and Christian look, on the strength of which it takes the liberty of uttering its arbitrary dicta with greater pretension and authority. But we must not let ourselves be deceived by the semblance superficially secured by a merely verbal similarity. The two things are radically distinct . . . the Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the church, but the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy has no other authority than that of a personal revelation . . . Faith itself, taken in this professedly philosophical sense, is nothing but the sapless abstract of immediate knowledge—a purely formal category applicable to very different facts; and it ought never be confused with the spiritual fullness of Christian faith, whether we look at that faith in the heart of the believer and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, or in the system of theological doctrine. (Encyclopedia 1.V.63)

If Jesus is only arbitrarily the man, then faith in Him has only the authority, as Hegel says, of personal revelation; in a strong form, we run up here against the problem of the Prophet Adler, which Hyman will want nothing to do with; and in the weak form—the one he seems to be proposing—I think a follower of Rorty might very understandably ask why exactly Jesus is being tacked on to what otherwise looks like a rather self-sufficiently Rortyan view of things.

If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ, is a falsity if taken as proposition rather than hyperbole. It is indeed Christian doctrine that Jesus is the exemplary man; but the confession that Jesus is the Savior is not only concerned with His status as exemplary man. It is just as concerned with Him as effective man as it is with Him as exemplary man, though the former is a necessary condition of the latter. This acclaim of Jesus as effective is the faith of the multitude, the catholic faith, and for that catholic faith the manner in which the salvation of the world was effected was the suspension of a man from a tree, not the suspension of the ontological question (nor the suspension of the ethical either, in case that needs to be mentioned). And Jesus is effective man because He is the Truth, the Word of a God who speaks.

 *  *  *

With regard to the (academic) religious return, Hyman would steer us between “theism” (no matter how critically purified) and atheism (the new theological Communism where the transcendent is man’s essence which transcends his particular determinations and standpoints, and is thus experienced as a “higher power”), and toward faith where the question of the ontological is never decided but always in play—which takes the narrative mode, perhaps, of What if? Hyman works to distinguish his position from Žižek’s irreligious religion, but the assertion that faith would be justified even if the world turned out, from the viewpoint of the Absolute (certainly a curious choice of words!) to be other than how faith sees it, begins to look like a distinction between grey cats. It is difficult for me to see why this wouldn’t be autopoiesis (or we could use the blunter English of “making things up”), however heroically carried out, in a void. Victoria Kahn has lately written:

Placing values on things . . . might be described as the activity of fiction-making but, we should not construe such values as “mere fictions,” since this would involve passing judgment on them from the position of absolute transcendence, which is not a position we can occupy.1

This seems me to express the substance of Hyman’s own position almost exactly. If so, then Jesus is being singled out solely by way of our placing a value on Him; this cannot be discounted as “mere fiction,” of course, because that would be to say more than we can know, but neither can Jesus be asserted as truth—a different thing from a purely external prop or guarantee, I think—because that too would be to say too much. But contesting Milbank and Žižek precisely where they converge, where they both make truth claims about the synthesis, seems to me to leave what Hegel calls abstract faith in the place of ontology or theology, and the subject in the place occupied by God/no God, with Jesus as the supposedly exemplar subject but with no frame of reference whatever by which exemplarity might be recognized. I think it might more dialectically profitable to agree with them where they contest each other.

Who embraces the middle? Obviously, it is those who reject extremes. It is those who are sensible, respectable, whose judgment is sound. It is those who think carefully and critically. In short, the middle is a very comfortable place for scholars; it matches the scholarly disposition.

This is the rhetoric of the middle: what “the middle” evokes and how it persuades. In recent years the middle has been used as a technical term in social theory and theology, drawing on the seminal work of Gillian Rose. Those theologians who embrace “the middle,” or who embrace the spirit of the middle, are broadly Hegelian in outlook. They do not see isolated subjects but rather subjects constituted in relation to other subjects, to communities, to histories, and to themselves—and to the absolute. They imagine themselves standing between two camps of Hegelian extremists: the Radically Orthodox, on the right, whose Hegelianism affirms tradition and authority, and, on the left, secular, critical Hegelians such as Gillian Rose, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek. The latter-day Left Hegelians read a Hegel who refuses teleology in favor of continual disruption, continual re-formation, and continual opportunity for transformation. The latter-day Right Hegelians laud teleology, of human and of world, laud hierarchy, and laud a beauty that binds. In between, happily situated in “the middle,” are Gavin Hyman, Andrew Shanks, and most famously Rowan Williams (perhaps William Desmond and Cyril O’Regan qualify for this camp as well, though the position seems essentially Anglican). Gavin Hyman’s Traversing the Middle offers the most recent defense of this position.

In the US context, a similar attempt to forge a path between the most recent iterations of Left and Right Hegelians is found in the work of Clayton Crockett, Jeffrey Robbins, and Creston Davis. The advantage had by advocates of the middle over these scholars becomes clear when the middle is viewed neither rhetorically nor ontologically (it is not midway between heaven and earth) but rather as a method. This is where Hyman’s book is at its best: where Crockett, Robbins, and Davis often take what they like from the Right and what they like from the Left, Hyman demonstrates how one might distinctively engage with the world, and with other scholars, given a commitment to the middle. This is a method of immanent critique: listening carefully to the thoughts of others, to their assumptions and their reasoning and their conclusions, situating those thoughts in their context, separating their rhetorical excess from their genuine insights, and using them to think critically about the world. This spirit of charitable engagement is often missing from both today’s Right Hegelians and Left Hegelians; the former are too zealous in guarding against heresy and too eagerly embrace what is perceived to be orthodoxy while the latter’s excessively critical stance can ignore the genuine accumulation of insight expressed in the voices of others. It is something like faith, hope, and love—favored terms of advocates of the middle—that allow for criticism to be calibrated rightly. When criticism is calibrated rightly, it advances justice, giving each her due both in the critical engagement itself and in implementing the insights garnered by that criticism. This is a point Hyman makes implicitly, but makes well.

In other words, the method of “the middle” is ethical, and it is well suited for reflecting on ethics. It is suspicious of systems but also suspicious of the fetishized other; it is interested in virtue and community but not to the exclusion of norms and rules. Ordinary people may well think about ethics—the “real” kind, in the “real” world—in this way already (a point persuasively made by Bernard Williams). However, it is clear that the will to truth continues to produce plenty of ethical prescriptions—at scholarly conferences, from pulpits, in newspaper columns—that reflect little more than the will to power. At every register of discourse, the more antidotes the better, and for offering one, Hyman deserves praise. It is a therapy that certainly will work well for some (British Anglicans, say) and not others (American evangelicals, say), but such therapy needs to be crafted to particular communities—otherwise, it reproduces the will to truth it disclaims.

Hyman’s claim that “the middle” is a perspective that can help reflect on, or conduct, politics is less convincing. Raymond Geuss seems entirely correct in his contention that reflection on politics has too often reduced itself to applied ethics—do ethics and scale up, as it were. In reality, politics is much more about practical wisdom: assessing a messy context, determining who has power, deciding how certain interests can best be advanced from a particular location. Abstract ideals such as justice and concepts such as the state must give way to specific institutional configurations: these agencies that produce those regulations who are influenced in this kind of way or that kind of way. Politics requires persuasion—framing issues in a way that advances certain interests and not others. It is not the domain for careful, rigorous contemplation. In short, ethics and politics are not the same, and when we act as if they are the same, we become unethical or poor politicians. It is hard not to point to the “political” life of Rowan Williams here.

The politics of the middle that Hyman develops is meant to remind us that we must balance our impulses towards reform and revolution, towards the particular and the universal. But politics requires bracketing this tension once interests have been discerned. The vision of the middle is helpful in discerning interests—in seeing past the distortions of ideology, in hearing the voices of others, in reflecting on one’s own interests and the interests of one’s community—but those are, we might say, questions of ethics. Politics seems more like a craft, learned through experience, unique to a context. To say that politics is a craft, like ship-building, is to say rather too much, for the domain of politics uniquely invites distortions. Here, like nowhere else, do we find the will to power creating opacity. Moreover, unlike the craft model, social justice is more often advanced by social movements than by social justice artisans. The craftsman analogy, which has no place in the discourse of the middle, does convey something of the restraint we scholars must impose on ourselves in a domain where normativity is so tempting. Teaching a craft in a book, or even teaching the right stance towards a craft, is futile pedagogy.

On questions of difference, the middle seems most like rhetoric in the most pejorative sense, concealing interests as it persuades. The middle at first sounds just right for such questions: extremes don’t have patience for differences; the middle, with its infinite patience, infinite willingness to “work” difficulties, must. Yet as scholars of difference are eager to point out, turning gender, disability, race, sexuality, religion, and more into “differences,” managed by “diversity coordinators,” turns difference into sameness—more precisely, “difference” is the contemporary rhetoric of sameness. Advocates of the middle scoff at John Milbank’s supposed Christian triumphalism, but does that suggest they would also scoff at James Cone’s Black theology? In other words, privileging one form of difference as definitive of one’s worldview seems antithetical to the method of the middle, yet for those whose lives are defined by one form of difference—often not of their choosing, and without an option of opting out—what hope does the middle offer? The language of chosen difference is imprecise and misleading here, particularly as our understandings of sexuality, gender, disability, and race (and religion!) develop. The middle, and its Right Hegelian correlate, “complex space,” sometimes sound uncomfortably close to the logic of late capitalism that embraces differences to manage them, and to manage subjects, acknowledging multiple, shifting affiliations but ultimately reading these as desires to be satisfying in the marketplace of goods, both cultural and economic. The Right Hegelian solution is to resist this market logic by imagining the underlying subject as desiring not goods but God. Affiliations with intermediary associations can be judged according to how they satisfy this desire—a desire which effectively names one “difference,” religion, privileged above all else. But the advocate of the middle lacks the resources to respond in this way and is left with a subject whose desires are not ordered by any telos. One worries that, by default, those desires are then ordered by market forces.

Even if the proliferation of differences embraced by the (secularist) New Left is now set aside as hopelessly compromised by capital, and so not generating a worry for Hyman’s perspective, class poses a deeper problem. It seems desirable for the perspective of a theologian concerned with social justice to resonate with the least fortunate, and particularly with those systematically disenfranchised. Yet the conceptual therapy performed by the perspective of the middle, like most therapy, seems like a bourgeois luxury. The complexity and messiness of the world is obvious to those whose lives do not count. From their perspective, however, what is relevant is not only complexity and messiness but the economic and social systems that create and perpetuate gross inequities—and that so cleverly mask their own workings. The careful movement between universal, singular, and particular commended by the perspective of the middle may actually naturalize the status quo, for it is there, in the broken middle, that advocates of this perspective tell us our investigation must start. This method of the middle presumes that our view of things is distorted a bit here and a bit there; with work, it can be clarified (even if some opacity will always remain). Yet from the perspective of the least fortunate, of the African American prisoner or the Haitian earthquake victim or the Palestinian refugee, an entire epistemological regime may need to come to an end, and it is unclear what resources the middle has for that. It is hard to see how the sort of “dialectical interplay” extolled by Hyman would address such systematic injustices secured by systematic distortions in what and how we see (prisoners as guilty, Haitians as in need of aid, Palestinians as involved in an intractable, two-sided conflict—all three undergirded by histories of colonialism and racism).

The most striking feature of the middle today, very much connected with the systematic distortion of how we see the world, is its connection with media. Advocates of the middle advance a scholarly disposition, encouraging us to work (in thought and action) through the various levels of our entanglement with our histories, our futures, our communities, our commitments, and ourselves. But we do not live in ancient Greece. Our relationships to the world and ourselves, our pasts and our future are always already mediated not just by concepts but by media technologies. It may be an overstatement to say that time flows now at the pace of a Facebook newsfeed, but the proliferation of mobile phones and social media are only the most recent in a centuries-old history of mediating technologies (Bernard Stiegler is particularly helpful on this point). An essential part of any explication of the middle, overlooked by Hyman, is to tell a story of these technologies at our moment, particularly the limitations and possibilities that they create for envisioning the dialectic between universal, particular, and singular that characterizes the work of the middle. From this perspective, it is not only politics but also ethics that requires more rhetorical skill than advocates of the middle allow. When ethics is viewed as always already mediated, when the triad of the middle is always already immersed in a fourth, a medium, the work of the middle always must be read as performance, as strategically advancing interests in a way that suits the specific context. This fourth, the site of media, is unholy, outside of the sanctified process of negotiating (even if not mending) a broken middle commended by Hyman. This unholy, unavoidable remainder serves as a reminder of the systematic distortions that come with living in a fallen world, a world where our very perceptions are shaped in a way that favors the interests of the wealthy and the powerful.

Given this messiness, or rather this mediated messiness, one worries about the Christian language that advocates of the middle associate with the work of the middle. Latter day Left Hegelians insist on a secular middle, and resist associating any religious language with the work of the middle. Latter day Right Hegelians seek to mend the middle, and find redemption in the work of the middle. Hyman, like Shanks, Williams, and others, tries to say something in between: the process of working the middle is religious but not teleological. In a fallen world, the middle will always remain broken. It would be easy to charge that the only explanation for labeling the work of the middle in Christian language is crypto-triumphalism, but if such projects are viewed as therapeutic, targeting a specific audience, then this is simply the idiom that must be employed to communicate with that audience. A more powerful line of critique, immanent critique, would point to the commitment entailed by the method of the middle to engaging seriously with salient features of the social world. Among these is religion, particularly Christianity. But Christianity is often thinned to a few familiar words in discussions of the middle, the richness of the tradition not part of critical engagement, which is more often focused on secular, philosophical figures (Hyman includes extended engagements with Badiou, Zizek, Levinas, and others). More generally, one worries about what precisely is being said about non-teleological work in the middle. It cannot be animated or inspired by God because that would suggest the teleology of the Right Hegelians, but it also cannot be undirected or solely animated by a spirit of critique because that would align it with the Left Hegelians. That there is indeed space for religion at all that is more than rhetoric between these two options seems doubtful.

The other challenge for advocates of the middle like Hyman, closely related to the previous, is explaining what role desire has in the middle. For Right Hegelians, desire for the highest good, God, animates the redemptive work of the middle. For Left Hegelians, desire to fix the gaps, the sites of incompleteness, in our own subjectivity and in the world fuels the secular work of the middle. In contrast, those seeking a middle path struggle to explain how desire fits into the picture of the middle they paint. Hyman’s chapter titles alone suggest the frigidity of an Anglican sermon: “Anxiety,” “Complacency,” “Between,” “Passivity.” Gillian Rose suggests that intellectual melancholia can be a cause of intellectual frigidity, the resolute fixation on a lost object taking away the capacity for desire in the present. One worries that, today, in an era of perceived extremes, the middle stands in for a lost, irretrievable object: an ideal world that is reasonable, thoughtful, well-mannered, inquisitive—and very white, and very bourgeois. The rhetoric of the middle shields its proponents from confronting the impossibility of the object it conceals, and so shields them from engaging with the systematic injustices of the world in which we live.

As the title, Traversing the Middle, suggests, there are two principal philosophers guiding Hyman’s enquiry: Slavoj Žižek (“traversing the phantasy”) and Gillian Rose (“the broken middle”).1 Notwithstanding his criticisms of Žižek, their juxtaposition suggests something of the way in which Hyman perceives a link between the two. Yet a wider consideration of the relationship between their thought is missing from his book. Instead, the work restricts itself to applying a broadly Rosean framework to critically situate Žižek’s political contribution. By way of response, I wish to interrogate further Žižek’s relation to Rose with a view to a wider critical appreciation of, and contribution to, Hyman’s project. In particular, I wish to argue that Žižek’s work, contra Hyman’s, is the best example thus far of the attempt to enact Rose’s critical enterprise.

Žižek

Žižek’s term, traversing, owes something to Lacan. Fantasy (i.e. fantasy of the sexual relationship) functions in the manner of a transcendental schematism: it frames, and thus mediates, our reception of the world. The twist, however, is that rather than masking a more substantial sense of self or noumenal reality, such a basic scenario masks the very lack thereof: the impossibility of the self and of the sexual relation. As such, fantasy is not a scene to be interpreted in the classical psychoanalytical sense but traversed; i.e., to “experience how there is nothing ‘behind’ it [fantasy], and how fantasy masks precisely this ‘nothing.’”2

Žižek’s political theology reads Lacan’s “traversal”back into Hegel’s kenotic theology: “what dies on the cross is indeed God himself,” not just his “finite container” but the God of the beyond, i.e. the God of metaphysics. After this, “Spirit” names the community of believers, the purely corporal body of the church. In other words, the incarnation and death of Christ traverses the basic ideological fantasy of a big Other (God) with the realization of the release it brings from transcendence.3

This in turn becomes the basis for a revolutionary and materialist politics of the act: as Žižek says, “‘there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of such a momentary ‘“suspension of the big Other,’ of the socio-symbolic network that guarantees the subject’s identity.”4 The politics of the act represents a dynamic of universalism for Žižek—universal not in the sense of encompassing all, but a difference which cuts across all particularities, in manner, for example, of St Paul’s claim that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek.”

Rose

Despite being one of the few women working in a British university on continental philosophy during the mid-seventies, much of Rose’s ire was targeted toward post-structuralism (including Lacan).

It is strange to live in a time when philosophy has found so many ways to damage if not to destroy itself. One by one all of the classical preoccupations of philosophy have been discredited and discarded: eternity, reason, truth, representation, justice, freedom, beauty and the Good. The dismissal of ‘metaphysics’ is accompanied by the unabated search for a new ethics. Yet no one seems to have considered what philosophical resources remain for an ethics when so much of the live tradition is disqualified and deadened.5

Rose’s concept of the broken middle with which she rebuked much of postmodern thought was fashioned by her early study, Hegel contra Sociology. The work proved to be key text for Žižek’s early studies in Hegel and more generally in terms of shaping the post-foundational reading of Hegel. In this text, she develops the significance of Hegel’s “speculative proposition” for social theory. To read a proposition “speculatively” means that “the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate.” In other words, in reading a given proposition one should not assume the identity of the given subject as already contained in the predicate, but rather see it as a work, something to be “achieved.” In particular, Rose argues that the basic object of Hegel’s exposition is the speculative experience of the lack of identity between religion and state.6

The thrust of her reading of Hegel was a critique of the neo-Kantian method adopted by classical sociology—a transcendental approach, which presupposes the actuality of its object and seeks to discover the conditions of its possibility. For example, classical sociology of religion attempts to explain religion with reference to the transcendental category of society. Yet this is not only reductive of religion, it is reductive of society also, which is taken as the given. By contrast, what is needed is an account of religion that explains society as well.

Herein lays the significance of her repeated claim that “Hegel’s thought has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought.”7 Rose calls for replacement of epistemological approaches to social thought with a historical phenomenology, a speculative reading which traces the historical trajectories of the forms of freedom, art, and religions, from Greek ethical life to Christian morality and out of which our life forms have emerged.8 With Hegel, she implores us to engage the “absolute ethical life”—the implied unity of law, ethics, and politics.

In The Broken Middle, Rose draws on Kierkegaard and Freud, amongst others, to excavate what she calls the “middle”—shorthand for the speculative standpoint. The broken middle offers a way of thinking about politics and ethics, the universal and the singular. The “middle” is a third space, not a unitary space (e.g. the neutral space of secular liberalism) but a place of anxiety to the extent it is the sheer “givenness” of the political and ethical situation which resists the retreat into sanctified beginnings or utopian ends. It is not a matter of employing political or ethical solutions to unify society’s diremptions [divorce] such as law/ethics, the very fields arise already out of the process of diremption.9 Her aim, then, is to recover anxiety within our political and ethical discourse, “re-assigning it to the middle.”10

Rose’s criticisms of the a/theology of Mark C. Taylor in The Broken Middle fashion in advance Hyman’s critique of Žižek. To put the matter in more directly Rosean terms, Žižek offers a “holy-middle” (i.e. a healed middle) in his “politics of the act”11 a “self-destructive act [which] could clear the terrain for a new beginning.”12 And so, recalling Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, Žižek says, “in the last resort there is no theory, just a fundamental practico-ethical decision about what kind of life one wants to commit oneself to.”13 In the wake of the demise of metaphysics, Žižek’s work stages the founding of the law, rather than speaking from the middle of a law already begun.

So while Hyman welcomes the return to Christian Universalism in Žižek’s work and as a feature of political and ethical discourse more generally, he argues nonetheless that this radical decisionist politics is undertaken at the expense of the singular (i.e., the dimension of ethics). In Žižek’s politics, there is no sense of working through issues with one’s particular neighbour.

Hyman views Žižek’s one-sidedness as a causal outcome of his resolution of the ontological question, manifest in his Christian atheism: there is no Big Other. Thus, Hyman’s employment of “religion” as the “third” mediating/tension serves to critically address the return of religion within continental philosophy. Yet, arguably, Hyman passes over other key ways in which Rose’s work furnishes Žižek’s thought. His resultant reading of Žižek is therefore impoverished. My argument, in effect, is that we need to be faithful to the “middle” in reading Žižek rather than readily resolve the complexity of his work into the one side of the dialectic (universal/singular). Put more boldly, what if Žižek’s work is contra Hyman’s, the best example thus far of the attempt to enact a Rosean critique?

Žižek contra Hyman

Žižek’s influence and commitment to the trajectory of Rose’s thought is evident from his early admonishment to “grasp the fundamental paradox of the speculative identity as it was recently restated by Gillian Rose.”14 Her post-foundational reading of Hegel helped to furnish his own. Moreover, in Hegel contra Sociology, Rose awards a key place to Marx’s critique of the economy. She was able to show how the critique of the bourgeois property relations—which give form to modern subjectivity—was already explicit within Hegel’s early work, thereby making the case that one does not need to dispose with the idealist element and supplant it with materialism in the fashion of Marxism: the idealist element is central to recovering the force of Marx. Her final paragraph, with its invitation to “expound capitalism as a culture” and insistence that “a presentation of the contradictory relations between Capital and culture is the only way to link the analysis of the economy to the comprehension of the conditions for revolutionary practice”15 could be read as a programmatic statement of Žižek’s entire project: to read Lacan back into German idealism as a radicalisation of Marx’s critique of ideology?

According to Žižek, capitalism is sustained and “stained” by a self-generating excess which renders the system incomplete.16 Only rather than mask or hide away this excess, it elevates it to the principle of social life: money begets more money. By developing Lacan’s claim that what Marx called surplus value (i.e. the excess value produced by commodity exchange) finds its psychoanalytical counterpart in surplus enjoyment [jouissance], Žižek is able to further claim that the emergent social forms under capitalism arise historically at the point when this surplus enjoyment/lack becomes the social principle as a whole—the superego imperative of capitalism to enjoy, mastering the drive to consume in the endless circulation of desire. He thereby shows the necessary supplement of psychoanalysis in the challenge to expound the link between capitalism and culture in a way which Rose was unable.

The metaphysical position of capitalism qua social thought should also help to explain why Žižek adopts a “Bartleby” politics according to which the most revolutionary gesture should be conceived not in terms of direct action within liberal democracy, but direct inaction: the suspension of the big Other (i.e., disengaging from the relevant social practices). And herein lies Hyman’s contestation: in suspending or “subtracting” from the social (a kind of passive aggression) one refuses precisely the problematic engagement with face of one’s neighbour; the universalism of subtraction which cuts cross social difference refuses in the final instance the singularity of the other.

Yet in her criticism of Derrida and Marx, Rose claimed that “the search a new ethics [. . .] in the wake of the perceived demise of Marxism [. . .] what Hegel says about comedy [i.e., the movement of the Absolute as comedy]” is once again being ignored or maligned by neo-nihilism.17 Why comedy? In the incongruity theory of comedy, comedy relies on contradiction and thus shares an obvious relationship to dialectics. Moreover, comedy has traditionally occupied the ground of materialism, mocking the lofty aspirations of the universal in favour of the particular (consider, for example, philosophy’s first joke: “The jest which the clever witty Thracian is said to have made about Thales, when he fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars. She said that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was before him.”)18

The Hegelian twist to comedy is, instead of comedy usurping the universal in favour of the particular, to highlight the coincidence of the universal with the particular. This approach divests itself of all metaphysical conceit, whilst refusing the reductionism of life to a purely materialist outlook. As Mark Roche suggests, “‘comedy’ in Hegel functions as an aesthetic analogue to Hegel’s practice of immanent critique, by which the philosopher seeks to unveil self-contradictory and thus self-cancelling positions.”19

Rose accused Derrida of neglecting Marx’s materialism in favour of the Spirit of Marxism, a messianic spirit which speaks of a justice to come. As Hyman notes in the manner of Rose, this approach, so characteristic of the religious turn in postmodern thought, can foster an avoidance of political actuality, a political passivity: justice is only ever coming. Yet as Rose insists, if the absolute cannot be thought it has no social import.

Žižek is able to exploit the metaphysical impetus of Marxist analysis. As he points out, for Marx “a commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”20 This gives his work a metaphysical breadth evidenced in the range of his critique. Yet like Rose, Žižek also rejects the messianic turn in post-structuralism. Rather than spiritualise Marx, (and thus spiritualise Christianity in the process) he claims that the Good News of Christianity (i.e., the central meaning of the cross and resurrection) is that the event of salvation has already happened, and now we must live with the difficult consequences of that event, the fact that even though it has happened we must still work that out in actuality: the speculative moment of the cross.

Rose left Marx behind in The Broken Middle. Her writing becomes more Kierkegaardian, adopting an ironic form, which exploits the comedy of the dialectic in the very presentation of the work (for example, she situates her preface to The Broken Middle in place of a conclusion). Like Žižek, though, she interpolates Kierkegaard back into Hegel in such a way that both become philosophers of the middle, of our ontological incompleteness that remains always begun.

Yet Žižek is able to maintain the force and relevance of Marxist critique. His work can be said to embody, in part, a kind of conflation of Rose’s early and later works. Hence, her offer in Mourning Becomes the Law for a “comedy of absolute spirit as inaugurated mourning”21 (as opposed to the melancholia of Derrida’s justice always to come) serves equally well as a programmatic description of Žižek’s work. Indeed, nowhere is this more evident than in his recently edited edition: Žižek’s Jokes (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation) where he attempts to make good on Wittgenstein’s claims that a philosophical work could be written entirely out of jokes.

While Rose would arguably take contention with his lack of genealogy (and history, more generally) and his nihilist approach to reason and Truth (i.e., the extent he acknowledges no basis for the claims of Truth other than the act of enunciation) he nonetheless attempts to articulate the real of experience (i.e., to assume the speculative standpoint), and he does this in continual dialogue with the central issue of the critical tradition, from Kant and Hegel through to the Frankfurt school, whilst addressing the key cultural events of our time. To traverse the middle may therefore be better understood as recognising along with Žižek and Rose, that reality is incomplete, not supported by a fundamental guarantor of meaning or big Other, and in traversing our social and economic fantasies, one arrives at the middle where the difficulty and comedy of theo-political actuality begins.

Conclusion

In pursuit of a robust political engagement, Žižek was always more interested in how a universal truth came to be in the first place rather than the deconstruction thereof. As Marc de Kesel points out, Žižek’s approach to truth ends up approximating something like “revelation, a radical event from outside which demands the subject, in the name of the truth, to disappear into it.”22 But if that sounds absolutist, then it also sounds characteristically Kierkegaardian, to whom Hyman gives the last words: “an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is truth, the highest truth attainable for the existing individual.”23 Yet Hyman can only do so committing the violence of turning Kierkegaard into a kind of religious agnostic.

While Žižek maintains his resolute atheism, are they not both examples of what Kierkegaard called “the comic” to the extent they maintained the contradiction between intellectual appreciations of Christianity without actual commitment to the absolute paradox? Perhaps, Rose, amongst them in her final movement, made the transition beyond comedy to faith?

Returning, then, to Hyman’s central critique: Žižek invites a form of Christian Universalism, which “inaugurates a violent absoluteness that in turn destroys the ethical and political?” Perhaps one does well here to recall Rose’s criticisms of Levinas (strangely absent from Hyman’s enquiry?): “In Levinas there is neither the similarity of suspending the ethical nor the radicality of transforming the political [. . .] For according to its own metaphysics, this authorship can have no aesthetic—no mask or pseudonym—nor any humour of the religious.”24