The Nature of Political Theory

262 The Nature of Political Theory

resolution’; this appearance then ‘persists in helping forget the differend, in making
it bearable’. Lyotard detests any form of ‘essentialism’—democratic, socialist, liberal,
or feminist. Democracy is not prioritized. Rather, as a matter of fact, it tends to reveal
differences quicker than other doctrines. The danger is that many think of it as a
form of normative finality. In itself, democracy—or feminism for that matter—has
nonormative significance (see Lyotard 1999: 147; also Browning 2000: 16).
A similar reasoning holds for Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. In the latter
two the case is starkly obvious. Nietzsche, as even the most cursory reader will be
aware, held democracy, liberalism, socialism, anarchism, nationalism, and the like
in withering contempt. They were in fact his key targets (as the secular spawn of
Christianity)—as exemplars of an inauthentic cringing slave morality that denied
the will to power. Socialism is corrupt to the core, egalitarianism of all types is a
sign of deep weakness, and liberalism denotes a flimsy and undisciplined notion of
freedom and an empty-headed relativism. He sees nothing of any significance in these
doctrines. The will to power requires a sense of high culture and a pyramidal society
with elites and various castes. This is Nietzsche’s doctrine of aristocratic radicalism.
As one Nietzschean scholar remarks, ‘There is something risible about the attempt to
enlist Nietzsche’s political thinking to the cause of postmodern liberalism. Is Nietzsche
not the great decodifier who resists all attempts to rigidify life and so prevent the flow
of self-overcoming, whether through Christian ethics or bourgeois politics’ (Ansell-
Pearson 1994: 178). A similar criticism could be made of the democratic Heidegger.
Heidegger had a deep sympathy and enthusiastic direct involvement in National
Socialism during the 1930s, further he refused till the end of his life to condemn
or show any remorse for the actions of Nazis (particularlyof the holocaust). In
addition, Heidegger viewed liberal democracy as not so much a solution, but rather as
a symptom of a calamity and crisis in Western thought (particularly over technology).
Foucault also, like Lyotard, was only interested in liberalism and democracy insofar as
it revealed more directly incommensurable differences. Many have strained to bring
Foucault into the radical democratic liberal fold, and nearer the end of his life there
are signs that Foucault was aware of the problem, but it is hard to see any support for
it in his primary texts.
A final poignant example of this is Derrida. His deconstruction method has been
in many ways at the very core of the postmodern attack on normativism, foundation-
alism, and universalism. As I mentioned earlier, the core of Derrida’s theory is that
our conceptual ordering of the world does not reveal anything about the nature of the
world, since there is no nature to reveal. We float in a sea of signs with no anchorage
and no references. This is certainly the Derrida of the 1960s and 1970s.^39 He resol-
utely denied, initially at least, that any political programme could be read into his
deconstruction method. He appeared to be at most, as Terry Eagleton once described
him, a libertarian pessimist. However, in the last eight years there has been a flurry
of short books from Derrida, for example,The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s
Europe,Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International,Politics of Friendship, andOn Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, which
seem to yearn mournfully for something more universal and normative. Derrida’s