Crime, Law & Social Change 26: 1-25, 1997. (~) 1997 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Politics and ethics in cultural criminology A reading o f B l a n c h o t ' s The M o s t H i g h

CHRISTOPHER STANLEY School of Law, University of Westminster, 4 Red Lion Square, WCIR 4AR London, UK

Abstract. This essay offers both a critique of the theory and practice of criminology and an alternative programme via a sketch of a cultural criminology utilising cultural and literary analysis. The first part of the essay calls for the problematisation of the issues of value and representation in the criminological project and offers a competing account of the theoretical basis of the project of criminology based upon a cultural politics of difference and the ethics of radical alterity. The second part of the essay is a demonstration of how this theoretical basis might operate in practice through a "cultural criminological" reading of Maurice Blanchot's novel The Most High (1948, 1996). This novel is an account of the relationship between language and transgression in a totalitarian society at "the end of history". An alteration in the discursive practices of the criminological project premised upon a competing theoretical perspective suggests that criminology (specifically the relation between law and transgression, deviancy and regulation) can become an important element in explanations regarding the organisation and disorganisation of contemporary urban culture utilising the strengths of its prior application (specifically uarratology) and abandoning its fear of culture.

Introduction: Novel orientation It might appear strange that I use the recent publication o f an English translation of a French novel first published in 1948 as a point of departure in the development o f an essay concerning the "practices" of criminology. 1 In part, an interpretation o f this novel is instructive in identifying the limitations o f the criminological project. In addition, the novel challenges assumptions relating to the relationship between law and crime in that its political and philosophical themes are concerned with the play o f transgression at the end of history in a totalitarian state (that totalitarianism completes history, be it fascist or communist - or in m y account, liberal democratic). If society is structured through excess (of political e c o n o m y and related regulatory strategies) then how is transgression within (against) society manifested? 2 Criminologists continue to contest the conception o f the relationship between law, crime and order in a dialogue organised around competing definitions o f deviancy and regulation. Unfortunately, this contest occurs along a narrow range of discourse. The novel which I analyse (and the reasons for using a novel as the

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basis of an analysis) takes as a key reference point (in its political and philosophical task) the relationship between law and language in the experience of the individual in relation to society and the state. A move toward a cultural and discursive explanation of deviant behaviour and orders of legitimation within criminology would serve to emphasise the strategic importance of the criminological project at a time when its relevance and claims to legitimacy appear increasingly hard to identity, let alone sustain. This essay is organised into two sections. The first section is a justification for using a novel as the basis of an analysis of an aspect of criminological practice in addition to offering a partial reading of the limitations of the criminological project. The justification calls for the assimilation of cultural and literary practices into criminology. In addition it calls for the project to adopt particular cultural and ethical values as the basis for intervention. The critique and the re-configuration of value merge at the point when criminology becomes a study in narratology, discourse and iconography. The contemporary urban cultural sphere can only be approached as a system of complexity subject to terrifying tensions between regulation and deregulation, order and disorder. To erase this complexity would be suture the potential of a cultural politics of difference premised on an ethics of radical alterity. The second section is a "cultural criminological" reading of the novel Le Tres-Haut (The Most High) by Maurice Blanchot (1948/1996). 3 In this novel (as throughout the oeuvre of Blanchot) we encounter the importance of the relationship between law and language and the problem of subjectposition against a background of ideological totalisation (totalitarianism) against which the individual struggles to transgress. The discourse through which the analysis of the novel takes place is one in which the nominations of "crime" and "deviancy" have been displaced and replaced by broader and subtler concerns regarding the relationship between philosophy and politics, transgression and regulation, in relation to the expression of desire. The novel is relevant in interpreting the cultural complexity of the everyday of contemporary existence, transcending its time and place, and opening a rich vein through which other voices can be activated in the play of dissent against the flat representation of legitimating practices and discourses. The novel reflected its time and place as did Franz Kafka's The Trial (1914/1994) and Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991). As cultural artefacts, documents such as these and the influences which produced them, provide accounts which can be built into considerations of contemporary "crises" and offer hope for understanding in the future, a future jettisoned of ideological fixation and rhetorical banality. They contain resonances which echo into the future and transcend specific aspects of location or time. As Goodrich notes (in a different context): "The use of literature as an interruption of the modernist

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project of legality mirrors, at the level of methodology, the history of minor jurisprudences as alternative genres or languages of law". 4

Justifications Criminology as cultural and literary critique First, if criminology is to continue to be a relevant discipline within the academy then it must escape its positivist paradigms and engage with the terrain of cultural politics. 5 The weakening of the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences and the humanities does not mean that subjects disappear or struggle on irrelevantly but rather that they develop new alliances and assimilate the techniques and philosophies of proximate areas of intellectual engagement and interrogation. Criminology could therefore utilise aspects of cultural and literary studies. Cultural analysis and literary theory rely upon the examination of icons and artefacts stretching from the ephemera of the everyday- of visual culture to the canon of the historical legacy of the written word. Cultural and literary studies are disciplines where strategies of critique are the basic tools of analysis. Latterly, given the "deconstructive turn" in these disciplines, the emergent critique has focused upon the mode of production of culture and the excavation of alternative cultural and literary experiences which are operative but repressed by dominant cultural forms. That which constitutes a jurisdiction of dissent is an important element in an emergent political-ethical awareness within these disciplines. 6 Probing behind the fixed ideological assumptions of common-sense accepted representations of cultural production illustrates the rich diversity and constant struggle between dominant cultural and subcultural forms. 7 Systems of representation developed by the state, the media, the corporations (and intellectuals) assume a monopoly over the transmission of messages and codes constituting the network of our experiences of the everyday. But these systems constantly seek to territorialise and colonise a life-world which is constantly destabilised and fractured and where there are alternative patterns of cultural re-production, often appropriating and inverting both that which is offered and the processes through which representations of cultural homogeneity are disseminated, into a bricolage of experience and terrain which can never be fully integrated, regulated or ordered. The regulation of our interpretative abilities (our voices, visions and desires) through media manipulation and advertising can never entirely avoid the intensity or variation of reactions or desires which constitute contemporary cultures as those of difference characterised by temporary allegiances and struggles in terms of cultural capital. An evolving cultural politics is therefore an investment in a political economy

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of both cultural reproduction and individual desire through a commitment to difference and the avoidance of the violence of subjection through the erosion of differences. The political manifestation of the project of critique is to articulate "the art of the ungovernable" (a Foucauldian inversion of the Kantian notion of critique) whilst being a witness to this ungovern ability. 8 This process of witnessing means not merely offering up academic investigation in yet a further process of representation (and of colonisation) but responding to the problem of representation in the sense of constantly problematising systems of representation as systems of cultural and economic reproduction. To fulfil the role of "critical by-stander" the academic commentator must both excavate those systems of competing cultural authority which have been or are repressed within society and exercise responsibility in listening to the voices of others. It is this mantle which the criminologist must assume, an abandonment of objectivity in some respects, a commitment to understanding the processes of deviant or criminal behaviour and the responses of society and the state within a broader context of cultural and economic dynamics under a political-ethical imperative.

Politics and ethics in the theory of criminology The second justification for this liberty concerns the activity of witnessing. Following my comments regarding the role of the academic commentator as "critical by-stander" I suggest that the discourse of the criminological project requires a radical change in emphasis and tenor premised upon the fusion of the project within a broader frame of cultural politics and social theory. The activity of witnessing means listening to the stories of others and letting the other be heard. In some form this has always been the mechanism through which criminological theories have been developed. What is required is both a change in the form through which this mechanism is deployed and in the purpose of its deployment. Criminology has always attempted to utilise quasi-scientific processes in the collection and correlation of material in the form of dubious methodological strategies which constantly pursue an apparent objectivity (even when espousing an ideological position). These methodologies traditionally cite a conclusion to study prior to the performance of the study, the object of the theoretical dynamic is stated and then justified through the manipulation of the evidence. The argument in favour of this approach which pursues scientific lines is that it avoids relativism. Two points can be made about this. The first point would be a plea to abandon the fear of relativism. The end of history, the end of ideology, the triumph of commodification and the insidious strategies of governrnentality constituting "an unheard totalitarianism" make the fear of relativism a somewhat self-indulgent position to assume. The totalisation of representation eradicates

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difference but this means that difference is all that is left in the formulation of values. The second point is a plea for a position of enquiry premised upon a series of values which respects difference and activates differences at every juncture as an expression of an affirmative cultural politics operative from the margins of a jurisdiction of dissent (the witness can only occupy this point at the margin for to occupy the space of dissent would mean that this space is elsewhere - the jurisdiction of dissent is always elsewhere as soon as it is represented). The values inherent and expressed in this position would be those reflecting the assumption that philosophy completes the political, that ethics is the first philosophy and that the ethical exigency which must be fulfilled is not a Kantian regulative ideal, Hegelian transcendentalism or Cartesian dualism but rather an ethics of radical alterity. A radical alterity is an ethical position premised upon a demand by an other who is different to self - a singular and unique other defined through difference. The ethical response to this demand would always be to respond to it. Radical alterity does not presume a negotiation between self and an other in an intersubjective positioning or an interpretative moment between self and other (at which point a judgement is made about the other). Rather a radical alterity is the clearest demonstration of respect for the other as unique and absolutely different.9 This ethical position also assumes a multiplicity of subject positions. At this point there is an elision between the ethical and political. The force of law expressed as governmentality, surveillance and invasive regulation (or perhaps the force of governmentality utilising the value void of law in the process of framing the terrain and scope of legitimation) attempts to order subjects through language and desire into particular subject positions, erasing the problems of difference and judgement save in terms of weak distributive or repressive "models" of justice. If Gramscian ideological theory in relation to hegemony is worked together with Sausurrian and post-Sausurrian linguistic analysis, a strategic element of resistance through the liberation of desire (assuming a Deleuzian political economy of desire) 1° in terms of competing flows of power reliant upon subjectivity, is the assumption that the subject can occupy a multiplicity of subject positions in the determination of identity. This becomes central in the articulation of resistant discourses and practices of dissent (what Lyotard calls parologies) 11 - no less legitimate but constantly calling into question through their "absent presence" (the fact that they are repressed and suppressed) the foundation of legitimation. The production (or perhaps anti-production in Deleuzian terms) of competing discourses, alternative strategies of nomination and representation, together with the activation of what Kristeva terms the pre-semiotic chora (the affirmative chaos in the formulation of language prior to the settling of language and the production

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of an externalised subjectivity through repressive discursive practices which set limits to the expression of desire), 12 is both a political strategy of resistance in the liberation of desire-identity from externalised subjectivity and an ethical strategy in which difference is celebrated and respected in language and practice. 13 A cultural politics of difference and an ethical relation of radical alterity do not avoid the problems of value. Rather they re-configure the issue of value based upon the assumption of the difficulty of value in political and philosophical terms when applied to the other, to community and to society in consequence of struggling toward the simultaneous achievement of creating a resistant strategy to totatisation and a position from which to activate differences without offering difference to the processes of colonisation, nomination and representation. These difficult consequences can be expressed as a process of witnessing where the political and ethical exigency is the activation of "other voices" and an enabling of the silenced, the inarticulate and the foreign. Criminology becomes a practice of narratology and iconography, the evidencing of stories, practices and memorials from the jurisdiction of dissent. The discourse of deviancy would be one discourse in a complex web of cultural networks, a discourse of excess (in psychoanalytic and political economy terms) beyond the scope of but framed by the discourses of the interpretative community (in all its forms - the state, the media, the corporation, the a c a d e m y - a community which claims a monopoly on interpretation, the production of representation and the legitimation of desire which is the source of both individual and communal freedom).

Interlude 1: Narratology and iconography in the practice of criminology These two justifications prior to a discussion of a French novel published in 1948 might appear to be both a distraction and overtly hostile account of orthodox criminology. Any hostility or archness might be accounted for by the fact that this account is offered by an ignorant outsider. However, this outsider takes a further liberty in noting two points. The first is that the agenda I have sketched might be premised upon peculiar assumptions regarding ethics and politics in the play of values, but the conduct of the criminological enterprise in this form assuming the techniques of the literary and cultural theorist should not come as a surprise. Perhaps the most interesting accounts within the "canon" of criminology are those which pursue a theory tangentially and are more concerned with reportage and relating stories given by individuals in subcultures. 14 The archive is rich with these accounts. Stripped of their methodological (ethnographical) justifications, we discover voices from the present and past talking about the experience of subjection and repression,

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alienation and anomie, what it is to belong and to be excluded, what it is to inhabit a jurisdiction of dissent as a (with)out-law.

Interlude 2: Space, economy and regulation The second point is that this "cultural and literary turn" in criminology is already being undertaken, a5 Regrettably, on occasion these scholars become subsumed in attempts to establish alternative theoretical parameters to criminology. There is some honour here in that they realise that the existing theoretical parameters are problematic, artificial and limited. However, some of this work becomes obscurantist and opaque through the infection of trying to negotiate and appropriate (French) social, cultural and anthropological theory, accounts of gender and ethnicity, psychoanalytic perspectives and of epistemology. In addition, what is also often lost in these accounts are issues of space, economy and regulation. Theorists such as Bourdieu, Foucault and Maffesoli are acutely aware of the significance of these aspects of the contemporary lifeworld both sociologically and culturally. 16 A narrative or iconic analysis of practices of dissent or deviance and of alternative sources of legitimation must account for the arenas or terrains in which these practices develop (space as socially produced and place as culturally produced). These are the arenas of our subject-positions and identities moulded through the processes of colonisation which structure the parameters of the expression and experiencing of desire. This spatial dynamic must be built into the agenda. The language of inside and outside is inadequate although it is a seductive metaphor through which to enter the realm of the out-laws and the dispossessed via a metaphorial short-cut. But subcultural analysis, which operates from the trading floor of the global exchange to the suburban street where a rave occurs, demonstrates the immediate limitation of the nomination of inside and outside. A more useful delimiting nomination would be the play of margins, fluid boundaries between "'them and us" enabling multiple occupancy and temporary affiliations and battles. Similarly, there is an increasing relegation of the economic sphere in these "cultural criminological" accounts as if the cultural operates so as to exclude the economic. The materiality that determines desire and identity needs to be re-configured granted the triumph of a culture of signification where the representation of" material images as opposed to the actuality or reality of material images is sovereign but political-economy remains significant. The environment we inhabit and through which our experiences are determined is a built environment reflecting material production (and this includes aesthetic considerations). Our aspirations continue to be expressed largely in material terms. Therefore, notions of affluence and differential allocation of resources

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require assimilation. Cultural capital remains capital even though its value is determined not in monetary terms but in status terms. The tyranny of production and work (and the positive possibility of anti-production and unworking) continues. Political economy should perhaps be figured according to Baudrillard as one of simulation or according to Bataille as one of excess and the priviledging of abundance. 17 Whichever is adopted, the flow of resources remains a constant point in the production of power relations. The issues of space and economics are intimately connected with the issue of regulation. I have stressed the need to consider regulation beyond its narrow political economy perspective as an heuristic device (hence the use of Foucauldian notions of "governmentality" and "surveillance"). 18 Regulation applies to the ordering of language, to the manifestation of desire and to the circulation of interpretative mechanisms. Regulation might be articulated as deregulation in the sense of a strategic withdrawal which is a different mechanism of nomination-ordering. Regulation of the mode of production in its broadest sense requires to be taken into account. 19 What is happening at the centre is often excluded in preference to accounts of what is happening at the margin, that criminology is fixated by doing wrong on the "outside" when a whole range of deviancy exists on the "inside" (white-collar crime, corruption, political violence). Issues of "law and order" (what is to be done?), "fear of crime" and the "causes of crime" ( t o u g h - eh!) are central to the policy agenda of both Left and Right. It is easy to become trapped in the rhetoric through which these issues are legislated. A shift in the discursive sphere would reveal a range of competing nominations requiring explanation: disorder, decolonisation, chaos, nomadism, risk, enjoyment, excess - experiences of an other regulatory authority in a struggle for legitimation expressed in very different voices through a subtle shift in the discursive balance. Cultural criminology is a scholastic radicalism which requires a critical recognition of the displacement of disciplines which can radicalise the relationship between law, desire and transgression and which is sensitive to the geographical and political contexts of theoretical traditions and to the historical contingencies of their development.

Intermission: Listening to others in the city The ground has shifted considerably. We remain occupants of the same territory but find ourselves suddenly in places we thought familiar but which now are strange, uncanny - on the other side of the mirror. We are displaced from "our own place", disorientated and confused. Such is the experience of the modem world, at once familiar and different. Such is the possibility of escaping located subject-positions in an affirmative condition of schizoanaly-

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sis. The purpose and the methodology of the enterprise is now unfamiliar and possibly unfriendly. The divisions between "them and us" and between "subject and object" have collapsed, disciplines merge and the inhabitants of the "control group" stare back and snarl. That which we wrote requires reappraisal; that which we read requires fresh interpretation. That which we had confined as irrelevant returns with an exigency. There are too many differences to be absorbed and we risk cracking under the strain. All values have seemingly lost their value but we are urged to activate the differences and pursue a cultural politics committed to the value of difference. We thought we knew the language but suddenly it sounds strange to our ears and wrong in our mouths. We want to go home but our home has become a house. There are too many people speaking at once. There may be ways to map this alien territory. Others have provided some of the co-ordinates, be they Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Dick Hebdidge or Stephen Pfohl. The exact parameters of the discourse do not need to be known. Words such "transgression" and "desire" may be different to the ones we are used to. They serve to shift the emphasis of our inquiry and enable intersections with other perspectives. They serve to place the theoretical legacy of criminology into a context and provide openings into forgotten archives of experience. We have to become used to violence. Not only the violence of our own displacement within our discipline and of our philosophical and political certainties but also the violence of representation and interpretation. This is the violence which serves through regulation to erase differences in the maintenance of a stable order which is continually destabilised through interruption and hostile intervention. The violence which flattens the intensity of meanings and experience and which determines that there be only recognised discourses requires constant surveillance and deconstruction. Further points of orientation emerge. We must remain aware of the importance of space, economy and regulation. These perspectives can be mostly usefully worked with within a conceptualisation of the urban environment. The city remains the location of our inquiries. It is the city and the processes of urbanisation that set the context for the work of the cultural criminologist. The city is the site of our everyday experience and witnessing. It is the plastic and concrete vessel through which our experiences and desires are filtered. It is the site of dreadful enclaves of the dispossessed and the Mien. It is also an affirmative site - civitasperegrina, the place of possibility as opposed to the space of repression, communities united in exclusion, where we are all strangers to ourselves. These communities provide moments of being-in-common at the margin and expressions of justice which transcend the boundaries of good, bad, mad, right and wrong. The city is the site of surveillance, of invasive regulation and governmen-

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tality which encodes the very soul and grain of the individual, the carcereal archipelago as the epitome of the disciplinary state. The disciplinary state is always on the edge of implosion as the final desire of the individual as "freedom" becomes guaranteed through refusal, withdrawal and indifference to become an out-law in a deregulated and disordered jurisdiction of dissent. It is the city wherein the philosophical closes the political, as the political is exhausted through the constant arrival of the end of history and the end of ideology. The philosophical - and specifically ethics as the first philosophy becomes an avenue of possibility. The state exists in an uneasy relationship with the city. The city is the location of the state - the parliament house, the palace, the police station, the court, the prison, the welfare office - but the state in its current form is a fragmenting and mutating creature. There are sources of legitimation no longer a single source. These sources include the corporations and the media. The state is simultaneously retreating and invading. This might lead to the conclusion that developed liberal democracy together with the triumph of the capitalist mode of reproduction signifies the arrival of what Lefort calls "unheard totalitarianism". The processes of the ordering mechanisms of representation require "docile minds in docile bodies" achieved through fixed subject-positions, colonised lifeworlds and the satiation of apparent desires. The molar narrative triumphs over the molecular narrative. But the city as the site of stories does not enable such banal mechanisms of representational governmentality to triumph so easily - the contagion of heterogeneity cannot be isolated. The city enables a shift between identities to occur, it ensures that the search for the satiation of desire can always be premised upon a lack, it breeds difference at ever}, moment that differences are erased. The boundaries within the city are mutable in both temporal and spatial dimensions, its margins signify only the multiplicity of experiences available. The "tame" zone might be the site of the most appalling transgressions within quiet suburbia and within the apparent unity of the domestic unit. The "wild" zone might be site of alternative systems of belonging and passion developing out of the wreckage of the urban wasteland and taking place between the dispossessed in carnivals of resistance. They are both jurisdictions of dissent in that they are determined by alternative forms of legitimation which conflict with dominant regulatory modes. These are the margins of the sublime places of "unpopular culture". They are therefore sites of transgressions, sites of dissent not deviance. The cultural criminologist should figure in the process of reporting from these shifting margins, as a listener and enabler of the voices of those others resisting representation and nomination and telling different stories full of horror and banality, passion and violence. -

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The Most High Paris, 1948 The city of Paris in 1948 might appear to have little relevance to the global cities of the end of the century. A novel reflecting an aspect of post-war European politics and culture might appear to have little relevance to the work of the cultural criminologist listening to stories of dissent in megalopolis. We could have visited Prague in 1914, Berlin in 1920, Vienna in 1904, London in 1936. But what occurs in Paris in 1948 in the sense of the experience of a group of intellectuals both premeditates a reading of the relationship between law, language and desire in the "complete" regulatory states of the late twentieth century and lays the foundation for an alternative radical scholastic enterprise which only now is coming to fruition and of which cultural criminology is an aspect. Paris, 1948 was a city liberated from Fascism and in the process of recovering its liberal democratic and republican principles. This process of recovery was hampered because of the assimilation of those who had collaborated with the Nazis and because of a realisation that the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and Stalinism could concretise into an horrific version of reality mimicking the utopic. The liberation of the Nazi death-camps and the embedding of the Stalinist gulags revealed technological and idealistic capabilities which the Enlightenment legacy had never foreseen but which were a perverse logical extension of the Enlightenment legacy belief in rationality. The Cold War was freezing into place and material affluence was only slowly beginning to emerge out of the ruins. In 1948 George Orwell wrote 1984 and Albert Camus wrote The Plague. In these novels, as in Blanchot's The Most High, the key figure is the raison d'etre of a society that is perfect but in a state of entropy. They represent terrible utopias resonating with a visible underside of the contemporary postmodern condition. This sketch of the context of the production of Maurice Blanchot's novel Le Tres-Haut reminds us of the political, economic, social and cultural confusion which opens the second half of the century and which resonates at the end of the century. Blanchot's novel is one of a number which comment upon its time and place but which is not fixed by temporal and spatial boundaries. It is this resonance or echo which I want to elaborate upon in terms of the principal theme of the book which I identify as the dual relationship between the individual and the state and between language and transgression. Paris in 1948 enables Blanchot to compose a work of ambivalences and silences, the delayed reception of which only serves to intensify its relevance to contemporary theorisation and investigatory strategies which struggle to make sense of everyday existence in the cities of the modern world. As Stoekl notes "'The Most H i g h . . . allows one to think about this distant period, this

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outmoded question of the end of history and to recognise the unrecognisable - that this period, in its remoteness, is what is most near, and to conclude that this question, in its extinction, is what is most alive. ''2° Maurice Blanchot A biographical sketch of the author of The Most High is not necessary. It is probably impossible to provide. Blanchot has remained singularly absent from the public stage. A group photograph taken in 1927 is the only record of an image of Blanchot. Blanchot records meeting Michel Foucault in a courtyard at the Sorbonne in May, 1968. Apart from these instances, Blanchot is anonymous beyond a corpus of work which is only recently becoming recognised as providing an important "missing link" in the genealogy of French social theory (we are confined to the paper trail of his writings). Blanchot's sparse biography may in part be due to his withdrawal from public life consequent upon his ambivalent position on Fascism in the 1930s. This episode has been well documented elsewhere (and still the truth remains shrouded in mystery) but requires brief elaboration at this point as I consider it to be an essential aspect in the context of the production of the novel The Most High. 21 There are signed and unsigned newspaper and journal articles suggesting that Blanchot was not unsympathetic to Fascism. It will be recalled that the 1920s and 1930s was a period of extremity in terms of culture and ideology. Aesthetic movements such as Expressionism and Surrealism questioned assumptions regarding the production of art and culture. Ideological movements such as Communism and Fascism questioned the role of the state and the nature of history. For Blanchot and others, such as his contemporary Georges Bataille, Fascism apparently guaranteed desire in that its collectivity and legitimation of violence enabled a communal expression of the desire for violence to be demonstrated and fulfilled. The legitimation of the sovereignty of sacrifice producing a community forged through blood was a powerful and seductive symbol representing a society's desire for collectivity and the eradication of difference. The role of the leader, or the head, as a charismatic encapsulation of collective desire emerged in the choice between Hitler and Stalin. It was possible to shift between ideologies of extremity throughout this era. The role of law and the state in relation to the issues of sovereignty and transgression were constant subjects for discussion within the political and philosophical writings of the period - law as crime, universal harmony as chaos and entropy, the glorious end of history as a rebirth of barbarism were all things associated with actual regimes that justified themselves by referring to the necessary movement of history. Other ingredients included psychoanalysis and art. Political and cultural turmoil which would result in war in Europe generated questions regarding the role of the intellectual in

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relation to the state and within society. Blanchot emerged from the war and dedicated himself to silence all ideology: "When I open the newspapers and reviews of today, I hear rolling over them the indifference of the future, as one hears the sound of the sea by putting certain shells up to the ear". 22 Before his work turns to "the silence of language" (which Blanchot identifies as "dread", the author dreads this silence but the task of the author is to say and write this nothing) he confronted the relationship of the individual to the state at the end of history in his most politically acute work The Most High. A further useful element in the impossible (improbable?) biography of Maurice Blanchot is to trace his intellectual relationships, those who influenced him, those he intellectually collaborated with and responded to, and those he influenced. The years of l'entre deux guerres, the Occupation and the failure to achieve a bourgeoisie utopia through ideology prompted many scholars in Paris in the post-war period to return to Hegel and Nietzsche for an understanding of what had apparently "gone wrong". 23 Blanchot was particularly influenced by a series of lectures given by Alexander Kojeve at the Ecole pratique des hautes 6tudes and published as Introduction to the Reading o f Hegel. 24 Kojeve's work influenced Sartre, Mefleau-Ponty, Lacan amongst others. Kojeve's reading of Hegel can be summarised in a letter written by Blanchot's friend Georges Bataille .... I grant (as a likely supposition) that from now on history is ended (except for the denouement). However, I picture things differently (I don't attribute much difference between fascism and communism, on the other hand, it certainly doesn't seem impossible that, in some very distant time, everything will begin again)'. 25 This interpretation of history as repetition and return functioned strategically as tropes of a new, radically different form of writing based on fragmentation which occurs in Blanchot's later work. For Blanchot, the central question was not whether history was ended but the nature of a negativity left "without a job" in a posthistorical State. Blanchot's other principal influence was Nietzsche. Paradoxically, Nietzsche evokes a stance with respect to history which contests Hegel's teleological orientated conception. With respect to The Most High the influence of Nietzsche is seen in the denial of the privileged status of truth, or the belief that truth is the product of error. By "error" Nietzsche means that western philosophy constantly attempts to disguise metaphors as concepts. Nietzsche provides Blanchot with an important recourse into the nature of language and interpretation: there is always some unfinished business (an excess) in the process of interpretation, the text or work, never completely presents itself, never surrenders itself in exactly the same way to different interpreters. At the heart of language is negativity - a death - which is transgressive. To transgress is to lose death as negativity, the source of power and mastery, and to encounter it as an impossibility. Importantly, this

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transgression of negativity through the "acceptance" of negativity involves an affirmative loss of personalised subjectivity because transgression begins the moment that power ceases to be the ultimate dimension. This "freedom" in Blanchot - the transgression of the horror of death which is evaded via externalisation of subjectivity through power relations - is achieved through the act of literature. As Gregg notes: "What literature and sacrifice have in common is that they are both fictive approaches to death, and the drama that they reenact is an encounter with death whose primary exigency is not mastery but rather passive indecision". 26 At this juncture it is possible to see the influence of Blanchot's friend Georges Bataille in the direction that Blanchot was to develop in his writing after The MostHigh but which is already latent in that work. Bataille was also influenced by Nietzsche in addition to entering into dialogue with Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel. Bataille's relationship with Fascism in the 1930s manifested itself not as propagandist writings but as experiments in sacrificial practices conducted under the aegis of the Acephale Group and discussions within the College of Sociology. Both were fascinated by the issues of sacrifice and transgression, of the role of the state and the origin of truth. But whereas Blanchot was to work through these issues in terms of the relationship between language and death, Bataille was to work through them in terms of economy and eroticism. The principal theme of both becomes community and their respective works can be seen as experiments struggling towards the becoming of a community through a transgression of the state-law and death. 27 Parallels with The Most High can be seen most clearly in Bataille's novel The Blue of Noon (1935). This novel concerns war on many levels: between Marxist revolutionaries and Fascist traitors, between sexuality and gender, between loss and expenditure. It is the most thorough attempt in Bataille's work to foresee the effects of the implementation of sacrificial negativity in society. Both novels commence as fictions about ideology and the sociopolitical sphere but they become "activities" about literature and death and what lies beyond in terms of community. Finally in this section I consider the influence of Blanchot upon the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. "Influence" is perhaps the wrong word because what happens in the work of Derrida and Foucault is a return to Blanchot in the sense of an eternal return to the problems of language and identity. Their respective readings of Btanchot have been considered to be important markers in interpreting their attitudes toward politics in a postmodern or post-structuralist account. In his essay "La Loi du genre" (1980) Derrida discusses Blanchot's work in terms of the consequences of the "death" not only of "man" but of the scientific, political and sexual hierarchies that "man" has used to construct himself. 28 In The Most High the protagonist Sorge is

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the embodiment of the State - a State which is total and inscribed upon the soul every subject so that transgression of the law through the expression of individual will-desire is impossible. 29 Death (sacrifice) for Sorge, is the last transgression. His act is that of "last man" (to conflate Nietzsche and Orwell) an act of freedom from the subjectivities that have constructed him. His act is an interruption of this process of construction by the external forces of ideology and sexuality. In this last act - the postmodern gesture within a possible version of modernity that occurred differently - Sorge withdraws from the process and becomes "free" through an act of negation and withdrawal which interrupts the process of subjection. Sorge interrupts the story - and the law of story-telling (which is of nomination and representation). Sorge ceases to t h i n k - he is indifferent - and therefore disrupts the Cartesian presumption that "I think therefore I am". Our thoughts are only from the outside and this is what must be ruptured. The vocabulary of rupture, disruption, interruption and withdrawl in both political and philosophical variations is central to Derrida's notion of differance, which is not another concept but rather a nonconcept in the margins of others which always returns to subvert the centrality of the hierarchical concepts which "orders" man. 3° Foucault's essay on Blanchot is called "The Thought from Outside". 31 Language, violence, transgression and the operation of power relations are, it is well known, central aspects to Foucault's project or questioning the presumption of Enlightenment rationality and subjectivity. Foucault's aim in this project is to activate that which inhabits the interstice (of space, of philosophy), that which always returns to trouble claims to truth and legitimacy. This project of genealogy through the discovery of other discourses (other voices) is pursued as a "will to know" in the establishment of an alternative ethics in the formation of communities. In addition, Foucault's work on violence and discipline has been more immediately assimilated within criminology than that of Derrida or Lyotard for example. In his essay on Blanchot, Foucault discusses the novel The Most High. It is interesting to read this essay in conjunction with his Nietzsche-Bataille inspired essay (although some commentators have criticised Foucault's reading of Bataille) "A Preface to Transgression" (1963). 32 In "The Thought from Outside" Foucault makes the following point regarding the retreat of the law in The Most High: The order of the law was never so sovereign than at this moment, when it envelops precisely what had tried to overturn it. Anyone who attempts to oppose the law in order to found a new- order, to organise a second police force, to institute a new state, will only encounter the silent and infinitely accommodating welcome of the law. The law does not change: it subsided into the grave once and for all, and each of its forms is only a metamorphosis of that never-ending death. 33

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The law never retreats - there is never an excess of law, but rather the constant "contagion" or subversion of the law by the forces which the law seeks constantly to quell (for every power there is a counter-power). It is this balance between law-chaos, order-disorder, regulation-deregulation and language-nonsense that is at the heart of the law and is the source of the "authority" of transgression - that transgression is needed by the law so as to guarantee its sovereignty but that the continual ruptures of the law through transgressive acts of interruption and withdrawal ensures that law is always under threat and that there is always a glimpse of the possibility of freedom before-under the law - another way of telling. Foucault's analysis of Blanchot's novel aims to show that at the heart of the law (whether epistemological or political) there is a secret which is the antithesis of law, an outside, out-with the law.

The Most High: A Story (as interpreted by Michel Foucault) The house is always, at every instant, in proper order In Le Tres-Haut the law itself is manifested in its essential concealment. Sorge ("solicitude" for and of the law: the solicitude one feels for the law, and the solicitude of the law for those to whom it applied, even especially, if they wish to escape it), Henri Sorge, is a bureaucrat: he works at city hall, in the office of (vita) statistics, he is only a tiny cog in a strange machine that turns individual existences into an institution; he is the primary form of the law, because he transforms every birth into an archive. But then he abandons his duty (but is it really an abandonment? He takes a vacation and extends it, unofficially it is true but with the complicity of the administration, which tacitly arranges this essential idleness). This quasi-retirement - is it a cause or an effect? - is enough to throw everyone's existence into disarray, and for the death to inaugurate a reign that is no longer the classifying reign of the municipal register but the disordered, contagious, anonymous reign of the epidemic, not the real death of decease and its certification, but a hazy charnel house where no one knows who is a patient and who is a doctor, who is guard and who is victim, whether it is a prison or a hospital, a safe-house or a fortress of evil. All dams have burst, everything overflows its bounds: the dynasty of rising waters, the kingdom of dubious dampness, oozing, abscesses, and vomiting: individualities dissolve, sweating bodies melt into the walls; endless screams blare between the fingers that muffle them. Yet when Sorge leaves state service, where he was responsible for ordering other people's existence, he does not go outside the law. Quite the opposite,

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he forces it to manifest itself at the empty place he just abandoned. The movement by which he effaces his singular existence and removes it from the universality of the law in fact exalts the law, through that movement he serves the law, shows its perfection, "obliges" it, while at the same time linking it to its own disappearance (which is, in a sense, the opposite of transgressive existence exemplified by Bouxx and Dorte); he has become one with the law. The law can only respond to this provocation by withdrawing: not by retreating into a still deeper silence, but by remaining immobile in its identity. One can, of course, plunge into the open void: plots can hatch, rumours of sabotage can spread, arson and murder can replace the most ceremonious order; the order of the law was never so sovereign than at this moment, when it envelops precisely what has tried to overturn it. Anyone who attempts to oppose the law in order to found a new order, to organise a second police force, to institute a new state, will only encounter the silent and infinitely accommodating welcome of the law. The law does not change: it subsided into the grave once and for all, and each of its forms is only a metamorphosis of that never-ending death. Sorge wears a mask from Greek tragedy he has a threatening and pitiful mother like Clytemnestra, a dead father, a sister relentless in her mourning, an allpowerful and insidious father-in-law. He is Orestes in submission, an Orestes whose concern is to escape the law in order to fall farther into submission to it. In that he insists on living in the plague quarter, he is also a god who consents to die among humans, but who cannot succeed in dying and therefore leaves the promise of the law empty, creating a silence rent by the profoundest of screams: where is the law, what does the law do? And when, by virtue of a new metamorphosis or a new sinking into his own identity, he is recognised, named, denounced, venerated, ridiculed by a woman bearing a strange resemblance to his sister, at that moment, he, the possessor of every name, is transformed into something unnameable, an absent absence, the amorphous presence of the void and the mute horror of that presence. 34

"7 speak, I am speaking now" Law, transgression, language As opposed to providing a summary of the narrative of Maurice Blanchot's novel The Most High I have used that given by Foucault. This interpretation of the narrative is not only more elegant than that which I would have provided but more significantly I did not want to add yet a further layer of interpretation to those which already exist. The text has been re-presented and in this process

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it is reduced further so that its authenticity (and claim to truth) is gradually eroded as its use-value is appropriated for particular purposes as part of the colonisation procedures of an ever expanding interpretative community. In part, this has been the subject of the premise for this intervention: that criminologists should be aware of the tyranny of the processes of representation, interpretation and nomination. Criminology must be orientated toward the study of discourse, rhetoric and narrative in the recognition that language and the ways in which language is ordered and regulated is an essential element in the configuration of power relations in society. This "turn to stories" would be a cornerstone in a "cultural criminology". In the final section of this essay I want to develop the problem of law, transgression and language further. I pursue this development in two parts. The first part is concerned with an interpretation of this problem through a particular reading of The MostHigh. The second part applies the conclusions of this reading to the project of a developing cultural criminology and returns to the remarks ventured in the first part of this essay. My interpretation of the theme of The Most High in terms of its relevance to a cultural criminology exists within the frame of the two statements in the novel which were used to frame Foucault's description of the narrative: The house is always, at every instant, in proper order and I speak, I am speaking now. The latter statement closes the narrative and is "spoken" by the protagonist Sorge at the point or beyond the point of his death-sacrifice at the hands of Jeanne. She recognises that he is The Most High (the "high" victim/god who embodies the law and the transgression of the law at the moment of his death) and that the distance between them, as individuals, as a society, as the self and the state is unbridgeable save on the point of "death". This closure opens into Blanchot's later work such as The Madness of the Day (1973). In his essay "Literature and the Right to Death", published in the same year as the novel and seen as a commentary upon the novel, Blanchot writes the following: People (like Henri Sorge) cease to be individuals working at specific tasks, acting here and only now: each person is universal freedom, and universal freedom knows nothing about elsewhere or tomorrow, or work or a work accomplished. At such times there is nothing left for anyone to do, because everything has been done. 35

• . . The house is always, at every instant, in proper order

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In the society imagined by Blanchot in 1948 and as a reflection of Europe post-war and on the edge of a cold age, more than ideology is triumphant. It does not matter whether the ideology is left or right but rather that a society has determined itself into a State which is total and where meaning is complete. Totalitarian regimes are constructed as post-historical and occur after the end of history. This means that there are no claims or competitions for the legitimation of truth or the regulation of desire. The law is sovereign and ingrained in the soul of every individual and there is only one story to tell and not one's own story and only one way to tell that story. The law does not have to work to achieve compliance with its rule, it is not concerned with the inner reform and recreation or alignment of the individual - the individual is the embodiment and the parchment of the law. As Stoekl notes "(N)ow even violent revolt, no matter how nihilist, is recoverable, or it is a priori recovered, as such". 36 Man (sic.) had "died", which means that individual identity created through the expression of thought, language and desire is no longer relevant to being-in-the-world. In this sense the State is founded on the death of its subjects through the completion of their subjection. At this point the remaining "'desire" of both state and individual is indifference. Completion fulfils the lack upon which desire is contingent, in the absence of an excess to maintain desire, desire falls to the contagion of indifference there is nothing left to be done, nothing left to be said. Since repression is what we desire then the completion of the law as the foundation of a prohibition completes our repression. The rest is silence and indifference. But what happens to the law at this point of completion, the sovereignty of which rests upon the transgressions it invites? What transgressions are left after the completion of law-desire? Where is the disorder at the heart of the law which enables its authority? "What you'll do to escape the law will still be the force of law for you" says Sorge's stepfather. As Foucault states: "The law is the shadow toward which every gesture necessarily advances, it is itself the shadow of the advancing gesture" - the house is always, at every instant, in p r o p e r order. In what fracture of this edifice does Blanchot discover a transgression without or out-with the law? If the "law of language" is complete (regulated, ordered and determined) then it does not enable transgression. But what inherent-contagious heterogeneous elements does the law of language contain? This is the question of ethics and community framed in terms of language and death and leads to Sorge's retreat or retirement and his final or first declaration I speak, I am speaking n o w - the entrance of the Kantian sublime. To explain Sorge's last act and first words (his sacrifice and his voice) - his indifference to the State and his turn to the other - we must not discover the space of the other but rather a space of absence always waiting to be filled

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within the interstices of the jurisdiction of the law of language-desire-politics. In a simple interpretation, Sorge finds it possible to transgress the law by entering into "death"; the language of which "we" cannot know. He becomes The Most High, completing his "will to truth" by becoming the law and at that moment before the law he is the out-law. His entry into death reflects the contagion or plague that the law constantly seeks to simultaneously eradicate and e m b r a c e - it is reliant upon the virus which infects its authority but realises that the virus must be contained so as to ensure the immortal mortality of the law. Sorge's death marks the completion of the virus which the law has accommodated as the heterogeneous element of disruption at its heart. When escape appears impossible the realisation of indifference and the process of withdrawal consequent upon this realisation becomes the act of excess which is the transgression which disrupts the law. It is indifference - what is later to become unworking in Blanchot- which is transcendent and which is the virus at the heart of the law. Sorge becomes the embodiment and carrier of this virus which results in his withdrawal through death which enables him to speak. His last words are a reflexive awareness that now, at the very end, his first words, and the first words of his self-narration, can appear: "The impotence we saw in Sorge's communications as an embodiment of the State is here replaced by a language that is 'tied to a non-sense', a language that confronts and is finally 'about' the point at which the most rigorous formulation of language impossibly embodies or knows the experience that most radically escapes it. ''37 This "language" is the pre-semiotic and represents the expression of desire and freedom occurring within the system of law. It enables a moment of identity to appear within the margins of the system, not "other" to the system but rather as a consequence of the play of transgression as a random, de-regulated, disordered and disruptive contagion. This virus repels politicaljuridical representation because its work is that of unworking which occurs at the point of the completion of the desire of the law. This p o i n t - in spatial terms the location of the interstice - is that of a configuration of alternative power relations, desires and related mechanisms for being-in-the-world conjoined through death and the excess of language providing an ethics through a weak voice of retreat and indifference.

Conclusion: Out-with the law

The narrative and images that Blanchot provides, together with the context and interpretation which I have offered of them, might appear tangential to a sketch of a cultural criminology. The language used by Blanchot (and theorists such as Derrida and Foucault) is far removed from that of orthodox criminological discourse. In this concluding section I suggest that a work

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such as The MostHigh and the form of language used to interpret its meaning and relevance are important aspects in the theory and practice of a cultural criminology. The issue of representation developed in the novel and the nature of describing deployed in the interpretation of the novel suggest that it is possible to transcend the narrow range of discursive practices utilised by criminologists in an awareness that these discourses serve as a power relation in a complex balance of power relations through which the narrative legitimacy - ultimately the claim to truth - of the interpretative community (the state, the media, the corporations, the intellectuals) is maintained and through which other subject-positions - other voices - are ignored. But there are other voices telling different stories. Initially, parallels between Blanchot's post-historical "fictional" state imagined in the post-war period appear obscure. The conditions prevailing in contemporary post-industrial societies appear far removed from either Blanchot's imagination or the reality of Fascism or Stalinism. We do not, of course, exist as subjects in a totalitarian regime. There is, therefore, a concensus regarding the source of legitimation. There are, therefore, fixed definitions of good and bad. There is, therefore, political representation through which our voices are heard. There is, therefore, accountability of the state, of the corporations, of the media. There are "us" and "them", those who are within and those who are without (spatially and materially). We have more choice, we can decide, we have free-will. We do not need to transgress - those who do are deviants. At this point a parallel between The Most High and life in the cities of the late twentieth century might have appeared. Commentators such as Claude Lefort and Jean Baudrillard 38 (in very different voices) have argued that the political system of the "democracies" of post-industrial societies are those of an "unheard totalitarianism". It is possible to identify a number of factors to substantiate this claim. Economic prosperity and technological progress have increased material well-being subject to massive material differences. Economics and technology have also enabled changes in work-patterns - not noticeably more leisure but noticeably more unemployment. The state has withdrawn, only to reappear in more insidious forms through partnership with the corporations and the media. Corporate and media power has ensured that the "image" as opposed to the product is supreme. Despite greater access to education our interpretative abilities have been reduced. As opposed to the cultural eclecticism which might be imagined in a pluralist and de-regulated consumer society we are confronted by a flattening of meaning, the absence of choice, the failure to be represented because we discover that we already are represented as other to ourselves - we gaze to discover that we are gazed at. This "conspiracy" of representation means that we are content with our desires, our identities, our

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subject-positions and our stories, which sound like the stories of everybody else. The responsibility for legitimation might have passed to the individual as a "specialist practitioner" but the processes of de-regulation ensures that the territory of the law - the territory determining the jurisdiction of desire is only further increased. We fear crime because we are not forced to commit it: violence is available via cable, greed is good, our communities have been secured by closed circuit tv networks, "perversion" is safe sex (or we can travel to another community to obtain it). Morality and ethics are negotiable and therefore transgression is not necessary. Excess is banal and our in-differance to others is supreme. The contagion within The Most High appears to have arrived although via the back-door - which might be considered even more dangerous because the law has mutated the virus into an accommodating but necessary irritation but the house is, at every instant, in proper order. But there are other voices and other stories - another way of telling. There are narratives of dissent and places of desire which are the stories and locations of other desires and moments of being "out-with the law". These narratives and places occur in the margins-interstices of the regulated urban order and are expressed through the appropriation and inversion of the excesses of that order - they are no less sites of law but present possibilities of other ways of being as jurisdictions of dissent. They are moments of sublime indifference to the sovereignty of law and are the constituents of the virus or contagion which is necessary for the immortal mortality of the "law". These are the stories and places of the out-laws which cannot be told because to tell them would be to invest in the tyranny of representation which constantly strives to settle the truth of language. These are the heterogeneous, random and chaotic interventions and interruptions which singularly do not constitute subversion or revolt against the existing regime of signification (they are indifferent unworking) but which serve to identify a moment of alternative desires and identities at point further than the "last man". The cultural criminologist becomes witness. It is as though the kaleidoscope has been turned slightly. What is now seen is not "criminology" as a science of social problems, the study of deviancy and the causes of crime but rather as a radical scholarship of the narratives of dissent and the mechanisms of the maintenance of order through the hidden violence operative in the regulation of desire. Building upon the ethical and political premises stated earlier (a radical alterity operative through a cultural politics of difference) and taking account of the significance of space, economy and regulation, criminology would serve as both a study in how systems of surveillance and governmentality operate to determine representation and as an activity of witnessing through an analysis and genealogy of the discourses of transgression which are the moments of expression in the articulation of

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identity. In the postmodern, as in the terrifying modernity of The Most High, transgression is indifference, interruption and unworking - a ludic economy opening after the end of history in a carnival of resistance in the interstice, where our reports are filed from.

Acknowledgement This essay is for Panu Minkkinen. I thank David Taylor and Veronique Voruz for intellectual companionship in another place.

References 1. M. Blanchot, The Most High, (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1996). Translation of Le Tres-Haut, (Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1948). 2. I have pursued this issue elsewhere at length. See for example C. Stanley, Urban Excess and the Law: Capital Culture and Desire, (London, Cavendish, 1996), pp. 105-127. 3. The work of Maurice Blanchot is only recently becoming recognised in the AngloAmerican sphere. Perhaps the best introduction is provided by Ann Smock. See A. Smock, "Translators Introduction" to M. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 1-19. Smock's introductory essay contains a useful selection of commentaries on Blanchot. See also J. Gregg, Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of I?ansgression, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994). 4. P. Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law, (Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1995), p. 13. 5. A project we see commencing with works such as S. Henry and D. Milovanovic, Constitutive Criminology, (London and New York, Sage, 1995), W. Morrison, Theoretical Criminology, (London, Cavendish, 1995) and A. Young, Imaging Crime, (London and New York, Sage, 1995). See generally the collection edited by D. Nelken, The Futures of Criminology, (London and New York, Sage, 1994) and S. Pfohl, Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History, (New York, McGraw Hill, 1985). 6. I have utilised the phrase "jurisdiction of dissent" which has been developed by Peter Goodrich. See P. Goodrich supra. 7. Perhaps the best introduction to this form of analysis remains that provided by Catherine Belsey. See C. Belsey, Critical Practice, (London and New York, Methuen, 1980). 8. See M. Foucault, 'Qu'est-ce que la critique?" (1990) Bulletin de la Soci~t~ francais de philosophie, 84th Year No. 2. See discussion by Stanley, op. cir., pp. 10--11. 9. The ethics of radical alterity have been articulated by Emmanuel Levinas. See E. Levinas, Totality and lnfinity, (Pittsburg, Duquesne University Press, 1969). See the commentary and application by C. Douzinas and R. Warrington, Justice Miscarried: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Law, (London and New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 132-186. 10. The idea that desire can be subject to similar analysis as that of political-economy is developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze (together with Felix Guattari): see G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia t, (London and New York, Viking Press, 1977). Discussion of the "flow" of desire as a power-relation and as the basis of excess, loss and abundance in terms of law and transgression can be found in Stanley, op. cit., pp. 121-122. 11. See J-E Lyotard, The Differend: .Phrases in Dispute, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988). See discussion by Stuart Sire: S. Sire, Jean-Francois Lyotard, (London and New York, Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996), pp. 69-91.

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12. On the pre-semiotic see the discussion by D. Milovanovic, Postmodern Law and Disorder: Psychoanalytic Semiotics, Chaos and Juridic Exegeses, (Liverpool, Deborah Charles, 1992), pp. 109-110. 13. The working through of ideology with linguistics is the theme of the political theory of E. Laclan and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, (London and New York, Verso, 1985). 14. The two books which first attracted me to the stories of "out-laws" were M. Morse, The Unattached, (Harmondsworth, Penguin-Pelican, 1958) and N. Polsky, Hustlers, Beats and Others, (Harmondsworth, Penguin-Pelican, 1971). 15. See for example the ground-breaking work of D. Hebdige, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, (London and New York, Methuen, 1979) and S. Redhead, Unpopular Cultures: 1'he Birth of Law and Popular Culture, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995) and S. Pfohl, Death at the Parasite Care: Social (Science) Fictions and the Postmodern, (London and New York, MacMillan, 1992). 16. The work of these theorists has been most interestingly assimilated within human geography. See for example the following collections: M. Keith and S. Pile (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity, (London and New York, Routledge, 1993) and S. Pile and N. Thrif (eds), Mapping the Subject, (London and New York, Routledge, 1995). Note must also be taken of the work of David Harvey and Edward Soja. See D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, (Oxford and New York, Blackwell, 1988) and E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, (London and New York, Verso, 1989). 17. See J. Baudriltard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, (London and New York, Sage, 1993) and G. Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure", in G. Bataille (A. Stoekl ed.), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 18. On the notions of "governmentality" and "surveillance" see G. Burchell, C. Gordon and E Miller (eds), The Foucault.Effect: Studies in GovernmentaIity, (London and New York, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991). 19. See Stanley, op. cit., pp. 42-44. 20. A. Stoekl, "Introduction" to M. Blanchot supra n.1, p. ix. 21. See S. Ungar, Scandal andAflereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930, (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 22. M. Blanchot, Fauxpas, (Paris, Editons Gallimard, 1943), p. 363. Cited by Stoekl, op. cit., p. 23. 23. See the acconnt by Beevor and Cooper: A. Beevor and A. Cooper, Paris afler the Liberation, 1944-49, (New York, Doubleday, 1994). 24. A. Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading ofttegel, (New York, Basic Books, 1969). 25. G. Bataille, "Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel," in D. Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology, 1937-39, (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 90. 26. J. Gregg, Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 17. 27. See M. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, (New York, Station Hill Press, 1988), and J-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 28. Published as J. Derrida, "The Law of Genre," in D. Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, (London and New York, Routledge, t992), pp. 221-253. 29. In Blanchot, the State at the end of history, in and through its very universality, recognises that all violence, all death, must lead not to the State's downfall but to its permanence, its immortality. Universally, in its immanence, becomes invisible and evaporates: the State is everywhere and everything, and therefore every act, no matter how "illegal" or hostile to that State, inevitably acts to reinforce it and further its goals. Indeed, every act is the State. Not only is the violence of the past recuperable: with history, all violence is immediately recuperated, in one way or another.

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30. See the discussion by A. Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge, (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 115-118. 31. M. Foucault, "La Pens6e du dehors," Critique, (1966), 229: 523-546. Translated as "The Thought from Outside," in Foucault-Blanchot, (New York, Zone Books, 1990). 32. Available in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Interviews with Michel I~bucault, in D. Bouchard (ed.), (New York, Cornell University Press, 1977). 33. Foucault (1990), op. cit., p. 38. 34. Op. cit., pp. 36-40. 35. M. Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death," in E Adams Sitney (ed.), The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, (New York, Station Hill, 1981), pp. 21-62 at p. 38. 36. Stoekl (1996), op. cit., p. xvii. 37. Gregg, op, cit., p. 191. 38. C. Lefort, "The Question of Democracy," in R Lacoue-Labarthe and J-L. Nancy (eds), Le retrait du politique, (Paris, Galilee Press, 1983); J. Baudrillard, In the Shadow oft he Silent Majorities, (New York, Semiotext(e), 1983).