Spring 1999
Volume 25, Number 3

Morris and Frow's focus on the state in their reading of "The State of Shame" may be due in part to a confusion about my use of the concept of a limit; that is, about my interest in the limits of liberal recognition and how these limits temporariy cohere "a national collective will" from fragmented and contested fields of national public, juridical, and governmental discourse (p. 578; see pp. 577-79). There is a significant, if at first glance seemingly slight, difference between a claim that there is a limit which lies beyond or outside any particular idea, practice, or social group and a claim that every limit is the explanation, name, or phenomenon produced by the contradictions and anxieties of any given discursive field--the limit in this latter sense is nothing more or less than an indexical extension of its generative conditions.3

Dominant national multicultural discourses usually draw on the first understanding of a limit. this understanding appears in such rhetorical claims as "we have a point past which we will not go" and "such-and-such idea or practice is beyond human decency." It relies on assumptions like these: "we" predate our limits as do "they" and their repunant and intolerable practices; the intolerable exists outside us, or at least against our best intenions; the intolerable and repugnant are knowable. I am using limit(s), however, in the second sense--how "we" is constituted as a site of affectively and discursively conditioned inclusions and exclusions, the decent and indecent, the civil, barbaric, and human; how forms aof national cohesion, monoculturalism, pluralism, and multiculuralism are genearted out of the anxieties of ordinary and extraordianry citizens about the limits of their toleranceand understanding in the face of another society's values about the radical undecidability of the proper context for liberal forms of tolerance and intolerance. "The State of Shame" tracks the fact that well-intentioned people continually rediscover that other well-intentioned people produced, usually in teh past, the very abhorrentand uncouth domains they protested--even as these same people sketch out a new line in the sand of civil society.4 This was the point to the essay's dual opening--"I know I have hurt you. . . " and "The Tip of the Clitoris" (p. 575).

Thus, while Frow and Morris and I disagree about something, I do not think it centers on a hoary argument about the state.5 It goes much deeper: to the objects and priorities of analysis and practice; to the values of differing forms and tactics of critical engagement; to the syncopated rhythms of political and legal practice, of theoretical critique. What do we take at face value? Where do we put our intellectual energies, and wehen? When should we lose or fortify our faith and muster our optimism about the form of a social struggle, especially in the face of an always foreboding backlas? How do we act politically when we know we will have been wrong? This much I am suggesting, and with some certainty: before we can develop a "critical theory of recognintion" we need to understand better the cunning of recognition.6 We need to puzzle over a simple question: What is the nation recognizing and the courts trying to save from the breach of history? If Charles Taylor's politics of recognition takes inspiration from Herderian and post-Hegelian notions of recognition, an analysis of the cunning of recognition draws inspiration from Hegel's dark account of reason found in The Philosophy of History. In Hegel's hands the cunnign of reason was revealed at the same time its brutality was exposed. In this spirit, "The State of Shame" asks how late liberal ideology works through the passions of recognition and tries to develop its worth without subjecting itself to the throes of contestation and opposition. It asks how national pageants of shameful repentance and celebrations of a new recognition of subaltern work remain inflected by the conditional (as long as they are not repugnant; that is, as long as they are not, at heart, not-us). "Writing off multiculturalism" whould be much easier than what "The State of Shame" proposes, namely, to foreground what remains in the background of multicultural liberalism, untouched and uninjured.

3. Here I am moving from Hegel throught Althusser and Zizek, thought elsewhere I argue that the structural assumptions of the latter two scholars must be rethought in relation to contemporary models of pragmatics and metapragmatics. See for instatnce, Lous Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdeteriination," For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1996), pp. 89-128, and Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C., 1993).

4.

The incidents of particular native title relating to inheritance, the transmission or acquisition orights and interests on death or marriage, the trnasfer of rights and interests in land and the grouping of persons to possess rights and iterstes inland are matters to be determined by the laws and customs of the indigenous inhabitants, provided those laws and customs are not so repugnant to natural justice, euity and good conscience that judeicial sanctions under teh new regime must be withheld. [Mabo and Others v. The State of Queensland, in The Mabo Decision, ed. Richard H. Bartlett (Sydney, 1993), p. 44].