No More Learning

PART A
Deflating Hegel
Following Caygill's line of argument, Levinas's deflation of the Hegelian dialectic amounts to emptying the system of the movement associated with negation, mediation, contradiction and Aufhebung. Within such movement Levinas finds only a repetition of the same from which no new result emerges. As such, the Hegelian dialectic is emptied of the form and content that represent its presupposition that nothingness can be determinate, can be known. Against this, Levinas argues for a fundamental non-grounding of
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the I in the isolation of anonymous being, in the insomnia of the il y a that is the 'horror, trembling, and vertigo, perturbation of the I that does not coincide with itself' (1969: 143). Within this trembling a revelation regard- ing alterity is possible for Levinas in the isolation of the existence of the I in the form of the immediate caress. This consolation, lacking any finite agenda, transports the I 'elsewhere' (2001: 93). It is the nature of this else- where and its presence in the totality of the same that comes to define Levinas's philosophical and ethical project, described in Totality and Infinity as instituting 'a relation with the infinity of being that exceeds the totality' (1969: 23). Where the Hegelian dialectic can sublate such nothingness into meaning, Levinas insists that this only posits endless representation of the same: a totality in which nothing is ever allowed to remain as an un-sublated or an un-sublatable other. Hegel's infinite, says Levinas, operates by 'exclud- ing all multiplicity from it; he posits the infinite as the exclusion of every "other" that might maintain a relation with the infinite and thereby limit it' (1969: 196). This operation has meaning as time displayed in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history; as subjectivity in substance; and as objective freedom in the rational political state. Each 'meaning' only repeats the totality of the same, and each is the paganism that sees God or ethics reduced to ontology.
Levinas's anti-Hegelian project is grounded then in the impossibility of knowing the other within the totality of the same. It will be an important part of the reflation of Hegel in Levinas to show how he judges the incom- mensurability of the same and the absolutely other. For example, in Totality and Infinity he says,
the radical separation between the same and the other means precisely that it is impossible to place oneself outside of the correlation between the same and the other so as to record the correspondence or the non- correspondence of this going with this return. Otherwise the same and the other would be reunited under one gaze, and the absolute distance that separates them filled in. (1969: 36)
However, in judging that the same and the other are known as incom- mensurable Levinas posits for himself the very position that he deems impossible and illegitimate. 1 As we will see, mediation is already present in the assertions that Levinas makes for the difference between the same and the other, and as we will also see, the ground of this positing is of philoso- phy as error. Reflating positing retrieves the negative from within Levinas and returns him to education in Hegel. But this is not the Hegel found in
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Levinas who 'posits the infinite as the exclusion of every "other" that might maintain a relation with the infinite and thereby limit it' (1969: 196). That Hegel, the one Levinas opposes, does not take account of education in Hegel as we are presenting it. This will become clear later, but preceding this we need to spend a little time exploring some of the key terms that con- stitute Levinasian ethics in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being.
Totality and Infinity
In Totality and Infinity (1969) Levinas argues for three modes of non-Hegelian subjectivity that are interrupted by the absolutely Other. 2 Each is a form of desire, and each exposes the human subject to a fundamental vulnerability that exceeds the totality of the same. The interior life is both a happiness at having needs that can be satisfied - where, through taking in content it becomes content-ed - and a fragility at the uncertainty of attaining this content(ment) in the future. Time, however, expresses the vulnerability that needs cannot be certain to be satisfied in the future, and exposes the plenitude of enjoyment to 'the unknown that lurks in the very element it enjoys' (1969: 144). In doing so, time breaks up the totality of subjectivity and forces it beyond itself into relation with an alterity that cannot be assim- ilated. This vulnerability is consoled by the welcome that is 'in the gentleness of the feminine face' (1969: 150), a welcome that speaks to and of some- thing other than the I. 3 The hospitality offered to vulnerability is the possibility of 'the transcendent relationship with the Other' (1996: 155).
The second mode of this vulnerability is expressed in property. In the interiority hollowed out by enjoyment there is formed a heteronomy 'that incites to another destiny' (1969: 149). The paganism of enjoyment is pos- session which, compared and quantified, is property. But the approach of the stranger calls into question 'my joyous possession of the world' (1969: 76) and this disquietude again breaches the totality of the ego. Here the relation to the Other is in the need to give or refuse to give what I have to the stranger. Thus, as the feminine graces the welcome that is the home, so generosity graces private property with the Other, and is therein the aboli- tion of inalienable property rights.
The final example of the ambivalence of totality is expressed in Levinas's conception of metaphysical desire that 'tends towards something else entirely, toward the absolutely other' (1969: 33). '"The true life is absent. " But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi' (1969: 33). Metaphysics breaches the satisfaction of man with himself with a desire that cannot be satisfied. This vulnerability, this il y a, draws beyond the I to 'the
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alterity of the Other and of the Most-High' (1969: 34), and it is present in the metaphysical import of the face-to-face.
These three breaches of totality by the welcome, by generosity and by the face-to-face speak against Hegelian negation and mediation. These latter oppose and sublate what is Other, whereas the former remain vulnerable in 'a non-allergic relation with alterity' (1969: 47). Levinas believes that this non-allergic relation remains open to God while the Hegelian operation closes it down. It is part of Levinas's argument here that desire is totality and infinity in a way that mediation cannot sustain. As such, the epiphany of the face-to-face relation is wholly Other and unassimilable, and contests its ability to be murdered by the same. This contestation and this epiphany are the stranger, the destitute, the widow and the orphan. This epiphany cannot be represented, for the same cannot think it. Its impossibility exhausts all the resources that the same can call upon to represent the Other, and exceeds them. It is the language of God, and on earth this lan- guage speaks as ethics and justice. It precedes thought and consciousness and breaches their totality by this precedence. 'A God invisible means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible in justice. Ethics is the spiri- tual optics' (1969: 78).
One can understand why Levinasian ethics has proved so attractive to a form of Western thinking that is trying to mediate its power in and over the world. For the view that the philosophical tradition of self-conscious reason has failed to protect the world from the horrors of war and from the Holo- caust in particular, Levinas offers something absolutely beyond rational self-consciousness. In the loneliness and isolation of bare existence he finds God as the absolutely Other who is present in our vulnerability. Not in thought but in the physicality of the face, this truth is communicated to us as gentleness, as generosity and as the welcome. Levinas offers here an ethics that transcends the sovereignty of the rational I that is allergic to oth- erness, and an ethics that protects all that is best in human existence, that is, the truth that exists in our caring for others. He reconciles the transcen- dent with the deconstruction of absolutist philosophy and offers truth that is other than dogma, than imperialism, and than totality. In sum, he offers goodness without mediation, a face-to-face ethical relation 'maintained without violence [and] in peace' (1969: 197), maintained, that is, not in negation and return but in revelation. Negation 'remains within the total- ity' (1969: 209) whereas God exceeds this totality. As such, 'war presupposes peace' (1969: 199) because peace is the presence of God in the nakedness of the face before its being clothed in social relations. We will return to the theme of war and peace in Levinas below.
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Already here there are themes that characterize education in Hegel, most importantly perhaps, that of vulnerability. In Totality and Infinity the I is vulnerable to himself as desire; he is vulnerable to the gaze of the other who breaches the I; he is vulnerable to the sovereignty in his property; and he is vulnerable to the truth of this vulnerability as metaphysics. In educa- tion in Hegel, however, the I is vulnerable to himself as his own other; he is vulnerable to the other who, even as other, is not the same other as he is to himself; and he is vulnerable to the truth of the relation of the two vulnera- bilities, a truth he knows in education. But from our account of Totality and Infinity it is clear that Levinas sees himself addressing these themes in ways very different from Hegel.
Otherwise than Being
We turn now to some of the ways in which Levinas develops these themes in Otherwise than Being. This text continues Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation but there is an enforced change of emphasis due to the introduction of the third party to the relation of self and other. This complicates significantly the metaphysics of the social relation described in Totality and Infinity. Levi- nas employs terms in Otherwise than Being that move his thought on from that in the earlier text. Prior to the war of allergic egoisms there is now a relation of proximity, an originary ethical disinterestedness where responsi- bility of one for the other inverts the ego by substituting itself for the other who approaches. For Levinas, this is a different kind of subjectivity alto- gether from essence for it is where the 'Here I am' is hostage to and for the care of the other. It is found in the relation between 'saying' and the 'said'. Proximity, as originary ethics, is a saying that is beyond essence, beyond the dialogue that occurs between two people. The saying is therefore above the said in which the former is thematized, conceptualized and cognized. How- ever, the latter is absolutely necessary as the 'lived time' (1998: 37) in which phenomena appear. While saying lies beyond essence as proximity and responsibility, the said exposes entities as phenomena and exhibits them around the subject-object relation. Synchronization is this assembling of entities in the totality of the present by the same, synchronized, that is, 'into a time that is recallable, and becomes a theme' (1998: 37). As such, says Levinas, 'the subordination of the saying to the said, to the linguistic system and to ontology, is the price that manifestation demands' (1998: 6). Saying, in being said, is 'a betrayal' (1998: 6), and further, it makes the otherwise than being, in this case saying, appear to be 'an event of being' (1998: 6).
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Equally, proximity for Levinas is the primary form of sensibility, and cog- nition is only secondary to this. Proximity disturbs cognition and therefore essence in a way similar to the unrest seen above in Totality and Infinity. This disturbance is a 'coring out' (1998: 64), a murmur that is 'the non- coinciding of the ego with itself, restlessness, insomnia, beyond what is found again in the present' (1998: 64). This break up of the totality of essence is variously described by Levinas as the signifyingness of significa- tion, illeity, and diachrony, in addition to proximity and substitution. They are, in sum, 'a tearing away of bread from the mouth that tastes it, to give it to the other' (1998: 64) and they are registered as physical sensations prior to their synchronization. Also similar to the relation of enjoyment and trauma in Totality and Infinity is the idea in Otherwise than Being that sensibil- ity and suffering have no sense unless they are relative to the enjoyment which they tear apart. Sensibility is the pain of giving, for giving has a mean- ing 'only as a being torn from the complacency in oneself characteristic of enjoyment' (1998: 74). Proximity has meaning, says Levinas, 'only among beings of flesh and blood' (1998: 74). Substitution is material and real; it is not ideal.
How, then, within this totality, does Levinas conceive of the possibility of 'a break out of essence? '(1998: 8). This question focuses on the conditions of possibility for temporalization. Beyond temporalization with its return of the same, 'there must be signalled a lapse of time that does not return, a diachrony refractory to all synchronization, a transcending diachrony' (1998: 9). The lapse of time that transcends synchronization is the significa- tion that is carried in saying, that is, the signification not of what is said but by the responsibility embodied in the approach of the neighbour. Here subjectivity becomes the signifyingness of signification; not a negation of subjectivity but more an overpowering of essence by the prior obligation of proximity to the other. This disinterestedness Levinas calls 'passivity' (1998: 49). Illeity is the term used for the ambiguity of the infinite that transcends synchronization yet requires that synchronization in order to exceed it. Ille- ity here is substitution of one for another: it is giving. It is, again, the 'tearing away of bread from the mouth that tastes it, to give it to the other' (1998: 64). This substitution of essence for illeity is the ambiguity beyond I or Thou. It is where 'I am inspired' (1998: 114).
If substitution is the signifyingness of the signification that bears respon- sibility for the other, and exceeds the limits of essence, diachrony is the anachronism of that excess. It is where saying is anachronism. As the-one- for-the-other is the signifyingness of the signification of the break-up of
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essence, so, diachrony is now revealed as immemorial time within tempor- alization, or within the present.
Diachrony is the signifyingness of the signification of the lapse of time wherein the sovereignty of the totality of memory is exceeded. 'I am ordered toward the face of the other' (1998: 11) in the transcendence of time immemorial.
As with Totality and Infinity there are themes here that resonate with edu- cation in Hegel. Proximity is the vulnerability of an ego or a subject to the other who approaches, and illeity retains the ambiguity of vulnerability in looking to totality (as synchronization) and infinity (its excess, its otherwise than being) at the 'same' (divine and earthly) time. We will return to Other- wise than Being and to some of these themes below.
It is often not commented upon that education stands at the centre of Levinasian ethics. Education is explicit in Totality and Infinity but rather more implicit in Otherwise than Being. We will now explore three ways in which education is presented by Levinas: as teaching, as philosophy and as study.
Teaching
If the relation of totality and infinity is neither concept nor representation nor any act of assimilation by knowledge in the totality, how is this epiphany structured? Levinas's answer to this is teaching which he affirms in Totality and Infinity as the relation that binds the vulnerability of totality to the vul- nerability that is infinity.
The breaches of totality are found within time, property and desire. These breaches form a relation with the Infinite that is, as Levinas says, 'non-aller- gic' (1969: 51). The special quality of this relation is that it is expressed in the face and commands a response of welcome, generosity and metaphys- ics. This command, which is not experienced as object or subject, is what Levinas refers to as 'a teaching' (1969: 51). From the other is received more than the I. To receive is both a breach of totality and a teaching therein about infinity. The primacy of teaching is the 'primacy of an irreducible structure upon which all other structures rest' (1969: 79). It is, in this sense, part of 'the marvel of creation' (1969: 89) which creates 'a being capable of receiving a revelation, learning that it is created, and putting itself in ques- tion' (1969: 89). As such, says Levinas, 'the miracle of creation lies in creating a moral being' (1969: 89) or a being who from his isolation is open to being taught about his creation through the absolutely Other. It is in this teachability, characteristic of the created moral being, that justice comes to be known.
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Levinas also argues that teaching is contained in the transitivity of the face and the feminine. They are capable of the transitivity from having to giving, a transitivity that knows itself as education. The face and the feminine signify the signifyingness of this educational movement. As such, they are not just teaching; they are also learning, and part of their teaching is that one learns to be teachable. Becoming teachable, in Levinas, is becoming responsible. Levinas is clear, however, that teaching must not be seen as a middle term. 'Western philosophy,' he says, 'has most often been an ontol- ogy: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being' (1969: 43). Teach- ing in Levinas avoids this reduction to the same by arguing that teaching is not a neutral conjoining of subject and object in (free) cognition. Rather, teach- ing is the break up of all such reconciliations and all such illusions of freedom and knowledge. Teaching is in the trauma of the loss of the latter and teaches that alterity cannot be reduced to such freedom and knowledge.
Teaching in Totality and Infinity is thus required to carry the weight of infinity exceeding totality. As we saw above, Levinas introduces the idea around the non-allergic relation to the Other, that is, the ethical relation. It is the calling of the I beyond itself and its view of itself as an essence, to the relation with the Other who 'approaches me not from the outside but from above' (1969: 171). Thought can thematize everything that is exterior to it and assimilate it into the same; but it cannot assimilate the teacher who makes thematization possible. This transcendence is in the unassimilable face of the Other. Teaching is what is received from this height; it is the face of the Master. Levinas continues here,
this voice coming from another shore teaches transcendence itself. Teach- ing signifies the whole infinity of exteriority. And the whole infinity of exteriority is not first produced, to then teach: teaching is its very produc- tion. The first teaching teaches this very height, tantamount to its exteriority, the ethical . . . The Other is not another freedom as arbitrary as my own, in which case it would traverse the infinity that separates me from him and enter under the same concept. His alterity is manifested in a mastery that does not conquer but teaches. Teaching is not a species of a genus called domination, a hegemony at work within a totality, but is the presence of infinity breaking the closed circle of totality. (1969: 171)
Teaching, then, is not just about God; it is the truth of God expressed in the face. It is not merely a conceptual knowledge; it is the breach of the totality of concepts. Its education is radical; its expression teaches that the
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infinite requires the separated and isolated being in order that the infinite can breach the totality in its teaching. Without the atheism of the ego, there would be no teaching of the absolutely Other. The miracle of creation is that it creates in such a way that it can be revealed, present but absent. Teaching is this revelation. 'The contradiction between the free interiority and the exteriority that should limit it is reconciled in the man open to teaching' (1969: 180).
Additionally, Levinas holds that because teaching comes from beyond totality it is a 'non-violent transitivity' (1969: 51). The importance here of the notion of transitivity cannot be underestimated in Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation. Signification, expression, infinity, transcendence, the ethical, the face in Levinas all claim some kind of transitive quality in which what they do is also what they are. In transitivity, then, Levinas seeks to evade the dualism of theory and practice at the level of the transcendent. If the dual- ism did persist, then the 'epiphany of the face' (1969: 51), for example, would split into the totality of immediacy and its representation. Thus, teaching in Levinas is 'the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face' (1969: 67). It is not, as it were, under a category, and first of all it teaches this teaching itself, by virtue of which alone it can teach. It is the primacy of the ethical. It effectuates the welcome of the other and there- fore 'expresses a simultaneity of activity and passivity' (1969: 89) which places the relation with the other outside of the dichotomies of the a priori and the a posteriori. Teaching, then, is the non-conceptual relation of totality and infinity. But by its very nature it is in contact with the conceptualiza- tions of totality, for it is the truth of their vulnerability to becoming breached. Despite the emphasis that is sometimes placed only on the exteriority of infinity, teaching retains the ambivalence of being infinity in relation to totality. If there is no relation, there is no teaching. 4
In addition, teaching in Levinas has to be distinguished from the teacher/ student relation restricted within totality. Theirs is a totality defined by free- dom and lack of freedom, whereas the transitivity of teaching, of infinity in the face-to-face, 'leaves the plane of economy and labour' (1969: 181). The temporal teacher and student represent teaching as the war of totality in which knowledge is possession and autonomy. Teaching in the epiphany of the face, however, is described in Totality and Infinity as 'peace' (1969: 203). The face - teaching - does not offend my freedom, 'it calls it to responsibil- ity' (1969: 203), and is a peace that 'maintains the plurality of the same and the other' (1969: 203). This is another occasion where Levinas grants prior- ity to peace over war, finding here 'the first rational teaching, the condition for all teaching' (1969: 203).
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Teaching is not explicitly pursued in Otherwise than Being, yet its transitiv- ity is retained in the ways that signify the Other beyond the dichotomy of activity and passivity, that is, in the 'passivity of passivity' (1998: 143) which he also calls the glory of the Infinite. As such, education in Otherwise than Being is carried in the language of ethics by which the ego is com- manded beyond itself. Justice is the most important conduit of divine education here, and we will explore justice a little later. Aside from justice, sincerity is one of the ways in which the il y a 'is identified with nothing but the very voice that states and delivers itself, the voice that signifies' (1998: 143). The scandal of sincerity, then, is 'the impossibility of being silent' (1998: 143).
Philosophy
A further way in which education is carried in Otherwise than Being is in phi- losophy. Much of Levinas's criticism of philosophy is part of an engagement with Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl. However, with a view to the educa- tional in Levinas we will concentrate on the critical moment of scepticism within philosophy that he draws attention to and its import beyond essence in otherwise than being.
His most sustained commentary on philosophy in Otherwise than Being comes amid a host of questions he asks about whether philosophy is a reduc- tion of otherwise than being to the same. For example, in chapter 5 he notes that some might say that
the very discussion which we are at this moment elaborating about signi- fication, diachrony and the transcendence of the approach beyond being, a discussion that means to be philosophy, is a thematizing, a synchroniz- ing of terms, a recourse to systematic language, a constant use of the verb being. (1998: 155)
Levinas is dismissive of this kind of scepticism. Such objections, he says, are 'facile' (1998: 155). It has been the whole point of his treatise to show how 'everything is shown by indeed betraying its meaning' (1998: 156) and that when philosophy draws attention to this abuse, as Levinas has done, then this is precisely the abuse 'that justifies proximity itself [and] in which the Infinite comes to pass' (1998: 156). The contradiction of signification requires 'a second time' (1998: 156) to that of the immemorial, a time that Levinas calls 'reflection' (1998: 156), the time in which contradiction appears. Reflection is the time of the contestation of the meaning of significance but
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it is not the time of two simultaneous statements; it is the time 'between a statement and its conditions' (1998: 156). The contestation that this pro- duces is self-consciousness. Self-consciousness here is the result of time interrupting eternity. As such, philosophy can only achieve an ambivalent status: it is the knowing of proximity and it is the undermining of that knowing, for in its betrayal is the immediacy from which philosophy arises. Thus philosophy can do no better than 'to conceive ambivalence' (1998: 162).
However, in this ambivalence there is 'the periodic return of scepticism and of its refutation' (1998: 167). Levinas sees scepticism as a refusal of syn- chronization, one that returns again and again and is insensitive to attempts to refute or totalize its return. As such, scepticism for Levinas has an impor- tant educational significance. It contests the synchrony of the same in such a relentless way that Levinas credits scepticism with being 'sensitive to the difference' (1998: 168) between saying and the said, and between the same and the other. Crucially here Levinas states that because of this sensibility, and because scepticism refuses to be assimilated as the negation that reab- sorbs every difference into its own order of the same, 'scepticism in fact makes a difference' (1998: 168). The difference it makes is that because it returns it exceeds all absorption into the self-contradictory. This articulates how education in Levinas's philosophy is to be distinguished from educa- tion in Hegelian negation. The totalitarianism of the latter can refute scepticism in terms set by the negative, but it cannot totally refute it because scepticism 'returns' (1998: 168) in the face (as it were) of totality. Scepticism carries 'the trace of the saying' (1998: 168), a trace that because it does not appear within 'the logical scope of negation and affirmation' (1998: 168) is wholly underestimated by philosophy. This trace is an alternating movement which is 'without end and without continuity. [It] is a tradition' (1998: 169) and it renews itself as an 'excluded middle' (1998: 169).
Scepticism then is anti-Hegelian. But Caygill argues that this is not able to complete a rejection of Hegel, only its deflation. Levinas, he says, sustains the power of the negative while remaining vigilant 'not to endorse the nega- tion of the negation' (2002: 54). Indeed, says Caygill, Levinas 'diverts negation into an iterative circuit of the eternal return of botched nega- tions' (2002: 54). The substance of Caygill's claim, I believe, lies in the fact that education in Hegel is not characterized by allergy to otherness, nor is it able to totalize scepticism such that it makes no difference. Otherness and the return of scepticism, in education in Hegel, do not just trace a dif- ference, they oppose themselves in the tracing. To say that this opposition is 'other' than the truth of otherness in scepticism is to separate its return,
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its dialectic, from itself. This is the protection from the negation of the negation that Caygill refers to. The deflation is grounded in positing the difference between 'other' in opposition and 'other' in the trace - which is a positing of the very concept of otherness that is presenting itself in its eternal moments. We might risk saying here that Hegel's absolute and Levinas's otherwise than being witness the same movement, they just differ in how open they are to learning of eternity from this eternal return. Hegel is open to learning that all judgements of the same and the other are grounded in a positing of the identity and non-identity of what otherness is. It is this positing that is used by Levinas as the criterion for judging what is and what is not Other. As education in Hegel has shown us in previous chapters, it is not just that otherness is posited here before the enquiry into what it is is carried out, although this remains the case in Levinas. When he judges such mediation as allergic to otherness it is a judgement based in precisely this positing. It is also the case that what is being judged as Other comes from the point of view of the life that already has death as other. The very concept of otherness hides the relation that determines it. We will return to this presently. This same risk in bringing Hegel and Levinas together here is also recognized in calling their relation to each other not one of mere opposition, but one of deflation and reflation. There is still opposition between totality and infinity and in otherwise than being, but the deflation and reflation of education in Hegel are the import of these oppositions in Levinas, that is, where scepticism falls to itself in the signifi- cance of its own eternal return.
Study
Caygill notes that in some of his Talmudic Commentaries Levinas articu- lates the State of Israel as 'bearing witness to the promise of a new kind of state' (2002: 167), a new form 'of the political that marks the transforma- tion of the territorial nation-state' (2002: 175).