CHAPTER 9

                                                FOURIERISM AND THE INSANITY OF "AMERICA"

 

                                                                                                         Socialism was an unbounded dream.  Fourier promised that under socialism people would be at least "ten feet tall."

                                                                                                                        —Daniel Bell, "The Background and Development of Marxian Socialism in the United States"

 

                                                                                                         [Mailer] came at last to the saddest conclusion of them all for it went beyond the war in Vietnam.  He had come to decide that the center of America might be insane.

                                                                                                                        —Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night

               Even today, there are ghosts to be exorcized on the Left and Right.  Chasseguet-Smirgel and Grünberger insist upon drawing connections betweem the theory of the ego ideal and the theorists of May 1968; the leap may not be wholly unjustified.  The opening sentence of Freud or Reich? attacks Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972); note that the latter book's favorable summary of Reich's orgonic theory in the "Introduction to Schizoanalysis" chapter is immediately followed by two reverent citations of Fourier (Deleuze and Guattari 291-294).  The Freudo-Marxists were particularly interested in Fourier—in Eros and Civilization (1955), Herbert Marcuse claimed that the Freudian reality principle would have a historical end due to technological advances.  The dawning of the Age of Aquarius prophesied by Marcuse has a Harmonian influence—Marcuse praised Fourier's "central idea," "the transformation of labor into pleasure."  While it is obviously necessary to historicize the reality principle, it is quite another matter to foresee a historical end to unattractive labor. 

               But Chasseguet-Smirgel does not devote as much time to exorcisms on the Right.  For example, one recent manifestation of the myth of American theological exceptionalism is Francis Fukuyama's claim that the United States, having fulfilled its destiny, has now brought humanity to the end of history.  I think Fukuyama's numerous critics have not sufficiently appreciated the narcissism implicit in his proclamation.  As its philosophical authority, "The End of History?" invokes Alexandre Kojčve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947).  But Fukuyama's rendering of Kojčve is incomplete, as he strategically elides the relationship between the end of history and the Wise Man of the Phenomenology.  Kojčve offers a tripartite definition of the Wise Man: he is not only the "Man of absolute Knowledge, the perfectly self-conscious—i.e., omniscient, at least potentially," but also the "man who is perfectly satisfied with what he is," and even "the morally perfect man" (78, 80).  A fourth definition, the Citizen of the perfect State, can be derived from the following:

 

                              The real aspect of the "circularity" of Wisdom is the "circular" existence of the Wise Man. . . .  [I]n his existence, the Wise Man remains in identity with himself, he is closed up in himself; but he remains in identity with himself because he passes through the totality of others, and he is closed up in himself because he closes up the totality of others in himself.  Which . . . means, quite simply, that the only man who can be Wise is a Citizen of the universal and homogenous State . . . in which each exists only through and for the whole, and the whole exists through and for each man.

                                             The absolute Knowledge of the Wise Man who realizes perfect self-consciousness is an answer to the question, "What am I?"  The Wise Man's real existence must therefore be "circular" (that is to say, for Hegel, he must be a Citizen of the universal and homogenous State) in order that the knowledge that reveals this existence may itself be circular—i.e., an absolute truth.  Therefore: only the Citizen of the perfect State can realize absolute Knowledge.  Inversely, since Hegel supposes that every man is a Philosopher—that is, made so as to become conscious of what he is (at least, it is only in these men that Hegel is interested, and only of them he speaks)—a citizen of the perfect State always eventually understands himself in and by a circular—i.e.,absolute— knowledge.

                                             This conception entails a very important consequence: Wisdom can be realized, according to Hegel, only at the end of History.  (94-95)

From the above, it follows that in recognizing the end of History and realizing absolute Knowledge,[1] Fukuyama is necessarily proclaiming himself a citizen of the perfect State, necessarily proclaiming himself the completely self-conscious, self-satisfied, morally perfect, post-philosophical Hegelian Wise Man.  It is this smugness that allows the Wise Man to describe the United States as much more than a relatively just society.  For Fukuyama, America is the "essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx"—classless, that is, in the realm of ghosts, for the Untermenschen must not be conscious of what they are, therefore must not be the Citizens of whom Hegel speaks, therefore must not be closed up in the totality of the Wise Man, therefore must not be one of those in whom "Hegel is interested," therefore must not matter.

               Let us look at one more passage: "Now, we are faced with a fact.  A man who is clearly not mad, named Hegel, claims to have realized Wisdom" (Kojčve 97, my emphasis).  In reply, one can only quote the American pragmatist philosopher Ann Landers: "Wake up and smell the coffee, dearie!"  Engels was right: not only does the closure of the Hegelian dialectic suffer in comparison with Fourier's myths for having "no lemonade at all,"[2] but Hegel, in his own way, is as mad as Fourier.  For the idea of the dialectic's historical end, with its concomitant collapsing of the identity between Wise Man and perfect State ("each exists only through and for the whole, and the whole exists through and for each man"), appeals to the same narcissistic, regressive, and potentially fascistic "colossal body" fantasy of omnipresence that Chasseguet-Smirgel attacks in Fourier.  Furthermore, the "moral perfection" of the American end of history is an illusion that can only achieved by denying the existence of those for whom Fourier spoke.

               I am not claiming that Fourier's utopian dialectic is "true" (or perhaps "sane"), but rather that the critical examination of this dialectic also exposes that which is "false" (or "insane") in the ideological vision of America as agent of the historical dialectic's closure.  One should not castigate Fourierists or U.S. citizens for holding worthy ideals, but for believing that these ideals can be achieved magically.

 

 

Works cited

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    [1]Although there is a question mark in his title, Fukuyama accepts the Hegelian claim that the history of the ideal realm ended 183 years earlier at the Battle of Jena (Fukuyama 4-8).

    [2]To his credit, Fukuyama acknowledges this as well:

                              In the post-historical period there will neither be art or philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.  I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.  (18)

Perhaps he is not the self-satisfied Wise Man, after all.  If so, however, he would then be incapable of recognizing the end of history.