since moved front and center. Ten years from now many of us may be
ashamed for our failure to engage Chinese, Indian, Arab, and Japanese theory
closely. Some theorists are now pressing the rest of us to extend the geopol-
itical reach of political theory in response to changes in the circumstances of
global politics (see Asad 2003 ; Dallmayr 2002 ; Euben 1999 ).
It is also useful to recall that in the 1980 s Habermasian and Rawlsian
theorists often deWned post-structuralist and postmodernist theory to be
anti-Enlightenment. To them, ‘‘the Enlightenment’’ meant, roughly, a stream
of thought starting with Descartes and Locke and culminating in Kant, with
the latter’s transcendental deduction of the subject, ‘‘apodictic recognition’’
that morality must take the form of law, understanding of nature through
Newtonian laws, and appreciation of aesthetic judgment as the spontaneous
accord of the faculties (Coles 1997 ; Saurette 2005 ). The limits of this story are
exposed, however, when it is recognized that what is being heralded is merely
the moderate wing of the Enlightenment. Spinoza initiated a ‘‘Radical En-
lightenment,’’ a subterranean force far more pervasive in Europe than here-
tofore acknowledged in most intellectual histories (Israel 2001 ). Spinoza not
only contested (in advance) Kant’s concept of reason with an alternative that
purported to penetrate deeply into the thing itself, he opposed the ‘‘postu-
late’’ of a personal God, contested the idea of morality as law with an ethic
grounded in intellectual love of the complexity of being, emphasized the
importance of aVect inside thought, replaced mind/body dualism with a
parallelism in which a change in either ‘‘attribute’’Wnds some expression in
the other, and pursued a democratic pluralism more robust than that ad-
vanced by advocates of the moderate Enlightenment. If Habermas and Rawls
today can be said to rework the moderate Enlightenment, Deleuze and
Foucault can be said to transWgure the radical Enlightenment, with Derrida
having a toe in each camp. The attempt to deWne Deleuze, Foucault, and
Derrida as anti-Enlightenment founders, once you discern how the images of
body, mind, morality, and public reason invoked to do so reXect the mod-
ernization of only one wing of the Enlightenment.
There were other components of the Enlightenment, too, with the multiple
parties linked together by life and death struggles against the Church of the
day and adopting a more ambivalent orientation to the state. Is it possible to
respect this plurality within the Enlightenment while challenging the self-
certainty of the two most conWdent concepts of reason that emerge from it?
Deleuze and Habermas may both require critical attention in this respect.
Each sometimes acts as if he poses a deWnitive argument, theWrst to secure
838 william e. connolly