Book Review
European Journal of Social Theory 14(4) 557–560 ª The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1368431011417938 est.sagepub.com
Chiara Bottici A Philosophy of Political Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 294 pp. £58.00 ISBN 9780521876551 (hardback) A critical cultural hermeneutics rejects the reduction of ‘modernity’ to a one-sided ‘reason’ or ‘rationality’. Instead, trans-rational elements, such as the creative imagination and modes of meaning and significance need to be theorized alongside cultural forms of rationality. Within these horizons, Romanticism – most commonly associated with the recovery of trans-rational elements of the human condition – is not viewed as a conservative reaction to the Enlightenment, but as a cultural current co-constitutive of modernity’s field of tensions. Against this background, A Philosophy of Political Myth offers a rich and nuanced argument for the continuing significance of myth, not only to the human condition in general but also to modern projects of autonomy and critique. In elaborating her approach, Chiara Bottici seeks to reactivate a submerged tradition of political thought in modernity, and provides an alternative to accounts of the ‘rational individual’, especially those approaches that emphasize politics as the sphere of rational discussion/action. In this sense, she views a rationalized modernity as one that thinks it has done away with work on myth (as mirrored in the conventional Weberian literature on the disenchantment of the world) but ultimately has not. She argues that work on myth continues unabated in modernity and can play an important part in critique and thus also in modern projects of autonomy. In reprising this neglected tradition of political myth and its importance for modernity, Bottici seeks to move beyond what she sees as the impasses of Enlightenment critique of myth and Romanticism’s reversal of it. Her overall goal is to elaborate a philosophical framework for the political aspects of ‘the work of myth’ as an arational element in modernity that cannot be dismissed as a heteronomous, non-modern mode of being-in-the-world. Bottici’s careful delineation of political myth understands it as ‘the work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group (or society) ... make significance of their experience and deeds’ (p. 133).
Corresponding author: Suzi Adams, Flinders University, Australia Email:
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Bottici draws on Blumenberg’s phenomenologically oriented Work on Myth (Arbeit am Mythos) as a central intellectual source for her own elaboration. While Blumenberg’s analyses do not explicitly bring the political dimension of myth into relief, his understanding of the myth as something that is continually ‘worked on’ and essentially unfinished, that is, as an ongoing process instead of an already constituted object is something that Bottici finds valuable, and indeed, underscores the distinctiveness of her approach: myths are always a work-in-progress, a mutual production of narrators and receivers, and a reconfiguration of previous narrative edifices and constellations of significance. She situates her own approach between philosophy – which problematizes its ‘object’ – and the social sciences – which, in her view, takes objects as ‘given’. Bottici argues that political myths are fundamental to the ways in which we orient ourselves in the world. Myths ‘still manoeuvre among us’ (p. 2) and our political actions are not reducible to the products of reason and rationality a` la Habermas or Rawls. But neither can the polytheism of myths be reduced to the more general category of ‘symbolism’ or ‘narrative’. Myths draw on symbols and are framed within narratives, but, as Bottici sets out to elaborate over the course of this study, they go beyond them in important ways; in her account, political myth is defined as ‘the work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group (or society) make significance of their political experiences and deeds’ (p. 179). Taking genealogy as a form of critique to unearth the (discontinuous) historical trajectory Bottici reconstructs key shifts in the reconfigurations and presuppositions of myth as it appeared in the ancient Greek world onwards to modernity. She emphasizes the ancient Greek understanding of the essential plurality and co-existence of myths (and various elaborations of a mythologem) in relation to a form of truth as aletheia. In turn, ‘myth’ gradually became uncoupled from ‘logos’, and understandings of ‘truth’ were reconfigured such that myth historically emerged to become emblematic of ‘untruth’ and the ‘unreal’, in contrast to the revealed and unique truth of the ‘sacred logos’ and the later ‘scientific logos’ of the Enlightenment. Bottici’s argument is that myth – or work on myth – is not so much about ‘truth’; rather it responds to an ongoing human need for ‘significance’. Agreeing with Wittgenstein, she maintains that work on myth points to the ceremonious or symbolic dimension of the human condition and does not aim to provide ‘knowledge’ of the world. Throughout, a central contention of her philosophy of political myth aims to demonstrate that myth cannot be understood within the dichotomy of ‘truth’ and ‘unreality’: that, indeed, the historical emergence of myth as the ‘unreal’ – or alternatively, a perception of myth as myth – points, among other things, to a new understanding of ‘reality’. As Bottici sees it, the emergence of the Enlightenment saw a downgrading of tradition and the traditional tales of theologians and poets; instead our minds were to be nurtured with a pure reason. Myths were seen as deceptive and aligned with works of the imagination, itself seen as a source of anarchy and untruth. Only reason could unmask ‘the real’; the imagination, however, veiled the real with its fictions and phantasies. Thus, myth became to be gradually viewed not just as ‘the imperfect’ but also ‘fictive’ or the ‘unreal’ and the ‘scientific logos’ as fundamentally opposed to myth, although, following Adorno and Horkheimer, it too threatens to become a mythology of its own, and, conversely, that myth can offer a form of explanation (p. 69). With Kant, the mythical
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became constituted via its exclusion from ‘rationality’, although, as the various revisions to the second edition of the First Critique show, this was not always clear-cut. Although Romanticism’s call for a ‘new mythology’ could be seen as favourable to a work on myth, Bottici argues that it was not so much a questioning of the Enlightenment but its inversion, and as such does not provide the arsenal needed for a philosophy of political myth, although she does agree with the early romantic insight that, as closely tied to the political imagination, myth can provide a means of questioning instituted reality, and thus can also operate as critique (p. 79). Here Bottici would seem to agree with Johann Arnason’s longstanding argument that the imagination is as central to the constitution of modernity as reason, and that, concomitantly, in order to move beyond the limitations of a subject-centred philosophy a general shift towards a hermeneutics of culture is needed. This would not only entail a shift from ‘reason’ to ‘rationality’, but also a changed emphasis from the imagination as a singular human faculty to social imaginaries as a cultural element. Work on myth is closely associated with meaning as a central element of the human condition. Wittgenstein’s rebuttal of Frazer’s understanding of myth as involving an appeal to truth claims becomes important to her overall work. Myth cannot be understood as a claim to truth but to significance: in that sense myth is neither real nor unreal. She finds Wittgenstein’s later work fruitful, especially in Logical Investigations, with its emphasis on ‘language games’ and thus a possible interpretation of meaning as both ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ (p. 90); her own understanding of meaning wants to extend it along figurative and contextual lines. This supports her overall emphasis on moving beyond the limitations of a philosophy of consciousness, supported by Wittgenstein’s view of language as a social phenomenon. In moving to articulate a positive philosophy of political myth, Bottici argues that an important part of mythical work is ‘naming’ through which things can become ‘graspable’ and hence the object of a narrative (p. 166). To ‘name the unknown’ brings not only the strange and unfamiliar nearer to us, it also provides a means of ‘orientation’ in the world. ‘Naming’, for Bottici, plays a part in ‘meaning’ but is also central to ‘mastery’, which need she implicitly includes as part of the human condition, in that the ‘empty space of the unknown’ can be filled and mastered (p. 119). The work of myth then mitigates against the ‘pure chaos’ of, following Blumenberg, an ‘absolute reality’ and answers a basic need for significance against an ‘indifferent world’. As such, myth grounds reality, not through responding to the question of ‘why?’, as we might expect Reason to do, but rather in answering the question ‘whence?’ (p. 123). For Bottici, political myths are important as they create ‘significance’. Here ‘significance’ is not reducible to ‘meaning’ – all narratives endow facts and events with meaning – but myth as narrative makes things ‘significant’ so that the listeners of narrative cannot remain ‘indifferent’. It is with the historical emergence of modernity that the explicitly political dimension of myth and its frequent uncoupling from a religious element first emerge as a problematic. In this way, Bottici elaborates ‘significance’ as lying between the question of meaning (‘What is this?’) and the question of being (‘What is the sense of Being?’), which she ascribes to the province of religion (p. 125). Myth responds to a ‘human need’ to ground events in the social world with significance. Bottici’s study on myth revives a neglected tradition of European political thought and imbues it with a critical edge. She not only focuses on various theories of myth but
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also on concrete political myths. Here she reconstructs key aspects of Cassirer’s ‘myth of the state’, where myth is viewed as regressive, as well as Sorel’s myth ‘of the general strike’, where myth is seen as a force for progress. Overall, Bottici finds Spinoza the most amenable for her project. Although his work does not directly deal with myth, but more on prophecy and political imagination, nonetheless Bottici maintains that for Spinoza all societies are in some way ‘mythical’ (p. 253). Bottici argues that political myth for Spinoza is neither predisposed to ‘progress’ or ‘regress’ but can be utilized in a variety of ways according to the socio-political context. What often distinguishes them is their capacity for critical interrogation. Importantly, for Spinoza, the imagination is not seen as exceptional within a wholly rationalizable world but is an integral aspect to rationality itself. Reducible neither to ideology, nor utopian images, myths, along with historical narratives, form part of the fabric of the social imaginary albeit in different ways. In her discussion of Castoriadis, Bottici sees political myth as an aspect of the instituting social imaginary, as well as integral to the work of a radical political imagination (p. 224). Perhaps because of this, myths are difficult to analyse in that not only do they form a dimension of our experience of the world, they often also figure as the framework through which the world is viewed. A Philosophy of Political Myth makes a valuable contribution to a hermeneutics of modernity and political theory, and offers a distinctive way into understandings of the contemporary manifestation of work on myth as intrinsic to modern constellations. Two points of critical engagement stand out, but their enumeration is not meant to obscure the overall scholarly argument and importance of Bottici’s book. First, the absence of a sustained discussion of Ricoeur seems puzzling. Bottici explicitly situates her approach within a phenomenological perspective, and a critical reconstruction of Ricoeur’s approach to myth, meaning, imagination and action, especially in relation to Wittgenstein, would enrich her overall account. Second, there is a tendency to reduce Castoriadis’ discussion of the ‘imaginary’ to the symbolic level; for Castoriadis, however, the imaginary dimension is the precondition of the symbolic. There is moreover scope for further engagement with Castoriadis’ linking of the creative imagination to meaning in the form of social imaginary significations, on the one hand, and the possible connection between his understanding of central, purely generative imaginary significations (such as ‘God’ or ‘autonomy’) of any given social-historical constellation, and the human need for ‘significance’ which was central to Bottici’s account of myth, on the other. Political myths are also a call to action. For Bottici, our contemporary work on political myth occurs in the interweaving of the extraordinary and the banal. Although this can have an insidious effect in obscuring the presence and work of myth, it does not, in her view, neutralize its potential for questioning and critical political action in everchanging circumstances of human significance.
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