THE DWELLING

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas introduces his phenomenological concept of the dwelling, which marks the self's accession to consciousness through a process of individuation whereby the self becomes separated from both the elements threatening it and the Other. It is only in and through the “event of dwelling” that the self attains the capacity for private thought and thereby comes to understand itself as a temporally inscribed being with a future.Footnote ¹⁰ If “the withdrawal from the elements” establishes personhood, then private life can only be lived as an opening onto the world, unfolding on the border between intimacy and understanding, on the one hand, and insecurity and mystery, on the other (TI 153). For Levinas, this constitutive openness couples privacy inextricably to a form of publicness, since privacy can only be maintained if individuals secure the dwelling, their interiority, from the dangerous uncertainty of the elements to which other people are subjected. This concept locates ethical responsibility within a social topography scored by architectural walls, the proverbial walls of the dwelling that separate the self from the Other.

The threat posed by the elements, however, can imbue individuals with existential fear, such that they no longer see privacy and responsibility as mutually internal but feel compelled to choose between them. According to Levinas, “the disquieting future of the element” can induce ethical blindness; the result is an egoistic mode of conduct that turns the goods furnished by nature, the very means of prolonging life, into private possessions (TI 158). Possession “removes being from change” and “affirms its power over time, over what belongs to nobody – over the future” (TI 160). Securing privacy through possession, Levinas suggests, abets an illusory feeling of control over the unknowable future. The dwelling installs responsibility for the Other at the heart of personhood while at the same time introducing the temptation of egoism. As Lisa Guenther explains, Levinas understands “both the temptation to build a wall around oneself, and the unethical and unjust implications of acting on this temptation.”Footnote ¹¹ Guenther's object of inquiry is contemporary homeownership and its implication in a carceral regime that disproportionately imprisons black bodies. Levinas's architectural notion of interiority, I believe, maps more broadly onto the problems vis-à-vis the private family laid out thus far. He understands how cleaving to a private social unit leads to unethical behaviour, obscuring alternative forms of sociality.

The temptation of egoism introduced by the dwelling corresponds to the ideology of family values that neoliberal governance has abetted. Neoconservative celebrations of the family as a sacrosanct institution have helped the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state secure legitimacy amongst constituencies that could benefit from progressive tax structures and public forms of assistance. Indeed, Melinda Cooper notes a “collaboration between neoliberals and social conservatives,”Footnote ¹² and David Harvey identifies an “unholy alliance between big business and conservative Christians backed by the neoconservatives.”Footnote ¹³ The political potency of these partnerships means that neoliberal economics cannot be isolated from social conservatism without overlooking a great deal of violence. Many critics have already pointed out that neoliberal welfare reform is indissociable from a campaign to pathologize the families applying for benefits, as the effort to slash welfare subsidies united budget-conscious neoliberals and family-oriented conservatives. Since the late 1970s, neoliberal policy work has been a point of consensus between America's two major political parties; in eliminating publicly funded forms of protection, social retrenchment and anti-tax legislation serve to prop up the private family. Whereas the New Deal empowered a number of political actors to fight for forms of social security that delinked protection from the private family, the neoliberal program of upward redistribution has reestablished the family as the fundamental building block of the social order.Footnote ¹⁴

The overlap of neoliberal economic conditions and family-values ideology has made the nuclear family a disciplinary institution within contemporary America. Kathi Weeks points out that “family ethics … serv[es] various family-values campaigns as a tool of political-economic discipline.”Footnote ¹⁵ Such campaigns are only the most visible instantiations of a regulatory phenomenon that has shown the capacity to absorb and to no small extent neutralize oppositional political stances. Lisa Duggan's concept of “homonormativity” frames the increasing legitimacy of gay culture as a result of gay subjects embracing normative modes of kinship and thereby engaging in “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them.”Footnote ¹⁶ Jasbir Puar extends this link between gay subjects and neoliberal norms to the rhetoric and practices of nationalism after 9/11; George Bush's “War on Terror,” Puar contends, generated the agonistic conditions under which homonormative subjects could accrue sociopolitical capital as they espoused nationalist rhetoric.Footnote ¹⁷ Michel Foucault's contention that modern forms of discipline home in on the bodies of individuals in order to channel their capacities in normative directions remains as relevant as ever.Footnote ¹⁸ As Frederick Engels and Antonio Gramsci pointed out during earlier stages of capitalism, and as contemporary critics underscore, the private family's imbrication with the state is not incidental but vital, constructing a social base of normative constituents and consumers who affirm the nation's core cultural values while their labour generates surplus value for capital.Footnote ¹⁹

It is in this context that Levinas's aporetic notion of the dwelling becomes most helpful as a critical device for envisioning alternative forms of life that delink social security from the private family. For Levinas, the dwelling is not the sole possession of the individual but is co-constituted by the Other; that is, the individual's capacity to either diminish the suffering of others or sink into possessive egoism has been granted by the Other: “I must have been in relation with something I do not live from. This event is the relation with the Other who welcomes me in the Home, the discreet presence of the Feminine” (TI 170). The language Levinas employs here reflects the gendered division of power that heteronormative institutions have typically upheld. Such language is a problem in Levinas's work, and feminist critics have duly taken him to task for this insensitivity.Footnote ²⁰ This notable issue aside, the concept of the dwelling demands a deconstructive understanding. “The absolute, absolutely originary welcome,” writes Jacques Derrida, “takes place in a place that cannot be appropriated, in an open ‘interiority’ whose hospitality the master or owner receives before himself then wishing to give it.”Footnote ²¹ The interiority of the dwelling owes its existence to that which remains exterior, as a radical form of hospitality precedes private ownership. Indeed, for Levinas, the emergence of private thought is both a spatial “withdrawal” and a temporal “event.” Inhabiting the dwelling retains a spatiotemporal quality, exteriority combined with diachrony, that belies its most recognizable quality, interiority combined with synchrony. The confluence of these opposites intimates that possessive egoism relies on a structure of repression in order to function in good conscience, which means that the return of the repressed is always possible when the routines that sustain egoism's psychic hegemony are interrupted by failure or dysfunction.

Put differently, the failure of dominant social forms paves the way for sociality to assume non-normative dimensions, since alternatives are never wholly excluded from the realm of possibility but simply obscured. If the private family is at the core of neoliberalism, both materially and ideologically, then the breakdown of family togetherness is a helpful place to begin unearthing ethical visions. The point here is not to invalidate the family as a site of intimacy or to reveal it as a pernicious social unit. No images associated with contemporary American domestic policy are more distressing than those of children isolated from their parents in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centres. Furthermore, for minoritized subjects, often the family is the only site of cultural transmission insulated from assimilatory pressures. The fact that people remain emotionally invested in their families is not inherently problematic.

What is problematic is the power concealed by social norms that appear natural. Lee Edelman's polemic against the child, for instance, is not a screed against particular children but a critique of the abstract child around which heteronormativity and its ideological grip on the future coalesce.Footnote ²² To critique the family is not to reproach this or that family but to question the ideological apotheosis of family values. In displacing the burden of social protection from the state to individuals, neoliberal policies promote private wealth and thus the family as the most dependable form of security against the contingencies of the market. By exacerbating the hold that the private family has on individual life, neoliberal governance perpetuates, and reproduces on a wider scale, the forms of harm and domination that can unfold amongst kin – violence such as, but not limited to, abuse; adultery; gaslighting; rape; parental neglect; normative pressures; queerphobia and other kinds of bigotry; compulsory loyalty; emotional trauma; and gendered labour that goes unnoticed, unappreciated, and unpaid. The concept of the private family, moreover, insists on a firm distinction between inside and outside, and this in a country in which few people can reasonably disavow the fact that they are beneficiaries of other people's misery. The point of my ethically mediated inquiry into family dysfunction, then, is to cast a suspicious eye on a social institution that neoliberal governance has elevated to an unassailable norm.

According to Levinas, ethical responsibility is repressed through the “violence” of possessive egoism, a violence of irresponsibility that coextends with the very forms of life for which the private family is lauded (TI 171). Ethical conduct involves abandoning possessiveness altogether: “I must know how to give what I possess” (TI 171, emphasis original). It is possible to glean from this formulation conclusions that uphold, as opposed to undermine, the politico-economic status quo: on the one hand, Levinas seems to suggest that only individuals who own private property have the capacity to act ethically. On the other, the formula for ethical conduct seems no different than liberal forms of charity that have come largely to supplant welfare in the US. These are misreadings. First, in a Levinasian framework, no one – neither the poor nor the dispossessed – escapes relationality; no one, therefore, is barred from the capacity to act ethically. That said, the centrality of homeownership and the family to neoliberal logics makes the private dwelling a particularly fruitful site of inquiry into the contemporary modes of existence that pivot on the repression of the self's constitutive responsibility for the Other.

And second, what Levinas means by “giving” is more radical than charity, instead entailing a complete revision of social and economic life. “Limitation is produced only within a totality,” writes Levinas, “whereas the relation with the Other breaks the ceiling of the totality” (TI 171). This relation precedes and exceeds the liberal regime of possessiveness, which is no more than a “limitation.” Honouring the alterity of the Other translates into an imperative to transgress social norms in order to recognize new horizons of social possibility: “The other is not opposed to me as a freedom other than, but similar to my own, and consequently hostile to my own … No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home” (TI 171, 172). Levinas affirms the need to situate giving within a determinate social formation, but he also recognizes that the molar dispensations within which individual life takes shape work to impose artificial limits on the possible. Giving moves well beyond punctual forms of charity, designating a mode of living that labours to extend the comforts of the dwelling outward to the wider human community.

If the ethical subject is not the dialectical negation of other people but their co-participant in an ontological field permeated by existential contingency, then no family can deny that they belong to a broader social field than the private confines of the dwelling. Abandoning possessiveness entails radically recasting oneself in relation to other people, it entails eschewing the habit of putting the members of one's private dwelling before all other social commitments, and it entails supporting a politico-economic system that distributes resources evenly across the social body. In a Levinasian schema, the link between ethics and justice – between one's responsibility for the Other and one's concern for equality – offers one way of pursuing this radical recasting of oneself and one's conception of the private family. For Levinas, the ethical relationship between the self and Other – primordial, dyadic, and asymmetrical – cannot be isolated from a broader sphere of social relations in which innumerable others make claims on the subject. Levinas accounts for this wider human community with his notion of the third party (OTB 158–59). This other Other necessitates the transition from ethical responsibility to political action, calling for forms of justice that capture the spirit of ethical responsibility in leveling social hierarchies (OTB 157). Levinas, Guenther contends, is “a thinker of the relation between ethical responsibility and economic justice.”Footnote ²³ The pursuit of economic equality, requiring a vision of the private and the public as imbricated, allows a group of individuals inhabiting a dwelling, the private family, to build a future without abandoning their constitutive and asymmetrical responsibility for the Other.Footnote ²⁴

In other words, without a vision of economic justice in which the danger of the elements is softened not privately but collectively, the private family will remain a social institution through which neoliberal reason is internalized. For Levinas, such a vision emerges from what he calls the “teaching” of the Other, whose primordial displacement paved the way for the self's emergence and, subsequently, whose countenance lies behind the needs of the ontologically vulnerable. Such teaching is the condition of language and representation, which for Levinas do not begin “in the presence of a thing exposed to my violence” but “in my possibility of calling this violence into question” (TI 172). Thus, when Levinas explains that this originary teaching leads the subject to discover “itself as a violence” and to become “ashamed of its naïveté” (TI 171), we are authorized to think not of teaching in the conventional sense but of something along the lines of an innate capacity for critical thought and reflection – the capacity to see one's life as a form of violence, even if that violence does not unfold within the walls of the private home. While daily existence is rich with ethical potentialities, it can just as easily become a sandbox for possessive egoism, and the phenomenology of the dwelling foregrounds the imperative to remain skeptical in the face of all that presents itself to the subject's grasp, which forecloses ethical openness in its pursuit of mastery and knowledge.

This formulation of skepticism rests on the idea that ethical responsibility is always enacted from a determinate position in the social field. Levinas's phenomenological concept, that is, dislodges the lived experience of family life from the grip of ideology, allowing us to stress how failures, interruptions, and dysfunctionalities can rend the fabric of ideology and disclose alternative forms of sociality. Accordingly, reading Netherland through Levinas's phenomenology of the dwelling shows how the social hegemony of the private family inflects the narrator Hans's interpretation of visual phenomena. He need not espouse neoconservative politics to feel as though his participation in a broad field of social relations is diametrically opposed to, rather than imbricated with, his belonging to a private family. After all, ideology functions best not when it finds expression in abstract rhetoric but when it mediates desire, and Hans's desire to reconstitute his family blocks the full expression of the ethical possibilities glimpsed through the aperture opened up by dysfunction. It is this ethical failure on a narrative level that shifts the burden of criticism outward to the reader, hailing them as a subject capable of abandoning possessiveness in the service of ethico-political justice.Footnote ²⁵

VISION AND BLINDNESS IN NETHERLAND

Told by Hans as a long flashback, the main narrative of Netherland seems disconnected from the life he is living in the novel's opening pages. At the outset, Hans has reunited with his wife and son in London circa 2006, admitting that he has done his “best to look away from New York” (N 4). The sudden and unexpected news that his former friend Chuck Ramkissoon has been murdered precipitates Hans's recollections. For much of the novel, he recalls the time he spent in New York following 9/11 and his wife's decampment for London – a time when he took up cricket, his favorite sport, again and subsequently met Chuck, a Trinidadian immigrant whose relentless, and putatively criminal, striving for entrepreneurial success captivates and disgusts Hans by turns. The novel, then, gives readers plenty of reason to locate Hans's “quest for vision” in the context of family trouble. America having become an “‘ideologically diseased’ country” is his wife Rachel's alibi for moving back to London with their son, but Hans soon realizes that “it was me, not terror, she was fleeing” (N 95, 30). At first blush, the circumstances of this separation, having less to do with national tragedy than with simmering marital discord, seem to reduce 9/11 to nothing more than a gripping backdrop for bourgeois drama. The attacks do nothing so much as shine a light on preexisting problems, the kind of problems that beset families whose affluence and racial privilege insulate them from the violence of poverty and discrimination. In this light, the novel seems to confirm Robbins's point that “[m]ost novels do not train our eyes to look very high or very low, or for that matter very far away.”Footnote ²⁶ However, family dysfunction in Netherland is ultimately what imbues it with a worldly quality, opening it up to ethico-political issues that outweigh the private drama unfolding within the dwelling.

For Rachel's return to London is the condition of Hans taking up cricket again, and a cricket match is where he first meets Chuck, albeit under unusual circumstances. A gun is brandished after a fight erupts, and Chuck abandons his role as the match's umpire to pontificate about the importance of the sport, calling it “a lesson in civility” (N 15). Chuck then muses about the sport's relation to race and invisibility: “You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country. Put on the white clothes of a cricketer. Put on white to feel black” (N 16). While the effect of his speech is to underscore Hans's racial privilege amongst immigrants of colour, Chuck is at least partly wrong here. For racism operates on a visual plane, making nonwhite bodies hyper-visible. According to Hortense Spillers, the nonwhite body “does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.”Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, a prominent feature of post-9/11 American jingoism was (and continues to be) a regime of surveillance that racialized and abetted discrimination against “black or brown” people.Footnote ²⁸ Viewed from the perspective of class, though, Chuck's comments speak to abstract value's occlusion of the labour that produced it. The intersection of class inequality and racial inequality means that visibility and invisibility do not form a binary opposition but are mutually internal. If surveillance procedures produce particularly coded subjects, it is also the case that globalization is, in Arundhati Roy's words, “like a light that shines brighter and brighter on a few people and the rest are in darkness, wiped out. Once you get used to not seeing something, then, slowly, it's no longer possible to see it.”Footnote ²⁹

Roy's suggestive metaphor all but compels an inquiry into the effect that globalization's light has on subjective perception. Hans is not only a beneficiary of globalization's selective light but an active participant in it. His job as an equities analyst involves him in the process of capitalist abstraction by which certain parts of the world are legible only in the context of an oil stock's potential for growth or decline. Hans must “express reliable opinions about the current and future valuation of certain oil and gas stocks” (N 51). Yet Hans's ability to evaluate stocks relies on a form of blindness particular to finance capital. As Marx explains, “interest-bearing capital” – which can be anything from credit to stocks and bonds – constitutes “capital mystification in the most flagrant form” in that “it no longer bears any marks of its origin.”Footnote ³⁰ The labour performed by Hans is phenomenologically detached from but systemically imbricated in industrial forms of exploitation. A rather strong argument can be made that Hans's role in global capitalism abets an abstract engagement with visual phenomena, as he remains insulated from the people whose lifeworlds the oil industry threatens and in many cases ruins.

Hans's blinding role in global capitalism makes the timing of his marriage's dissolution all the more conspicuous: “Inside the business, I had the beginnings of a reputation as a guru: on the Friday of the week Rachel declared her intent to leave for London, Institutional Investor ranked me number four in my sector” (N 26). Roy's metaphor finds expression here in the syntactical juxtaposition of professional success and marital discord – a juxtaposition that keeps our sightlines trained on Hans's private troubles while at the same time intimating the nuclear family's implication in a globalized system of value extraction. But because Rachel's departure allows Hans to form new social relationships, it is only through domestic turmoil that the novel can gesture beyond the family and open onto the sections in which Hans begins to cultivate an ethical mode of seeing, one that does not reduce sites of exploitation, attritional violence, and environmental degradation to good or bad investment opportunities. Chuck, for example, introduces him to a side of New York that “was initially undetectable” (N 146). This expansion of Hans's field of vision is not insignificant, since his job requires a certain amount of ethical apathy and allows him to live an existence that is equal parts affluent and myopic. And even though Hans's reunion with Rachel is evidence of this optical project remaining incomplete by the end of the novel, the relationship between family dysfunction and a wider purview resonates with Levinas's phenomenology of the dwelling, suggesting that ethical futures will greatly depend on rethinking the private family.

Given that Hans takes up cricket again in the wake of his separation from Rachel, his attachment to the sport cannot be dismissed from a serious discussion of the novel's ethico-political dimensions. For Hans, the sport “calls almost for a naturalist's attentiveness: the ability to locate, in a mostly static herd of white clothed men, the significant action. It's a question of looking” (N 149, emphasis mine). Unlike equities analysis, with its grid of profitability spread across the map of the world, what seems to fascinate Hans most about cricket is the contingency endemic to playing a sport in nature: “The nature of earth, like the nature of air, is subject to change” (N 148). If success as an equities analyst involves locating the most stable companies in which to invest, success on the cricket field forces one to embrace unexpectedness. Hans describes a cricket match at one point as embodying a “pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors” (N 9). Hans values cricket, then, for two seemingly contradictory reasons: first, the sport requires shrewd “attentiveness” from both the player and the onlooker, which calls to mind the critico-pedagogical phenomenology of the dwelling. Second, the sport strips the player of their sovereignty, confining them to a passive position from which they must nevertheless learn to act. The sport delimits a shared space within which individual actions have meaning as well as meaningful consequences. Cricket seems to offer Hans a utopia, if not a concrete model, of the commons, a sport where collectivity and personal satisfaction meet, where one's responsibility extends both to others as individuals and to other individuals as part of a meta-subjective whole.

That Hans sees the sport in this way accounts for the division between him and Chuck that becomes more pronounced as the novel progresses. The strength of Chuck's hold on Hans stems from a difference of upbringing and opportunity. Chuck has enjoyed none of the privileges that Hans has, and this inequality has ostensibly ignited in him a Gatsby-like desire to assimilate through accumulation. Nothing illustrates this assimilatory desire more than a scene in which Chuck shows Hans an American quarter before launching into a disquisition on the greatness of America's symbol of freedom, the bald eagle, which adorns the quarter (N 75). Accordingly, over the course of the novel, we learn that Chuck has, in Sarah Wasserman's words, an “instrumental relationship to cricket.”Footnote ³¹ Chuck sees the sport as a business opportunity, a chance to popularize the sport in America by capitalizing on moneyed entrepreneurs from both the West Indies and South Asia, immigrants with disposable income who love cricket. He wants to build a “sports arena” where “eight thousand spectators” would pay “fifty dollars” each to see “the greatest cricket teams in the world” (N 79). Hans's reluctance to pass judgement means that their divergence of opinion is more suggested than denoted; for example, Chuck takes Hans to the site of his imagined cricket arena – which Chuck plans to call “Bald Eagle Field” – and they see signs that read “PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO ENTRY and KEEP OFF” (N 146).

Cricket does not appeal to Hans as a source of great profit. He even goes as far as to call it a game of “men imagining an environment of justice” (N 121). His not infrequent feelings of alienation encourage us to take this comment at face value, and while Hans's descriptions of cricket may seem sui generis, they echo C. L. R. James's sentiments about cricket in Beyond a Boundary, a part-memoir, part-meditation on the game of cricket. O'Neill has written glowingly about James's book, calling it the latter's “greatest,” so it is by no means a stretch to conclude that he has drawn inspiration for Hans's encomiums from the book.Footnote ³² In it, James goes to great lengths to compare cricket to art, at one point writing that the sport is “first and foremost a dramatic spectacle,” and then he proceeds to links its “pure artistic appeal” to “significant form” in painting.Footnote ³³ Cricket captures significant form because, in presenting “harmonious action,” it “gives us a heightened sense of capacity,” and the sport's formally transcendent quality makes it a “common possession” (BB 207, 202, 208). Cricket assumes democratic dimensions through its significant form, opening up ground for sharing, community, and equality.

James's understanding of cricket captures the difficulty of balancing ethics and justice that preoccupies Levinas's phenomenology of the dwelling. Whereas ethical responsibility resists formalization and requires a respect for alterity, politico-economic justice needs form and structure. What James emphasizes is that form need not threaten alterity. The implications of cricket's significant form crystallize in an early passage of Beyond, one that prefigures Hans's musings on the sport and thereby helps to frame an ethico-political understanding of cricket's place in Netherland. On the cricket pitch, James explains, “all was changed”:

James does not associate cricket with assimilation or homogeneity – unlike Chuck – but with coordination amongst people whose ethnic origins and class positions are heterogeneous. For James, cricket delimits a space of community that does not entail a hierarchy of humanness. It provides room for commonality across cultural and class difference.

The challenge posed by cricket qua fugitive social form intimates the importance of keeping the ethical relation at the center of our analysis. If cricket affords temporary space for a community of equals within and against a broader political formation, then the critical capacity to recognize the injustice of social inequality beyond the cricket pitch falls to the subject whose freedom is constituted through and by “the event of the dwelling” (TI 153). Levinas explains that “[t]o be free is to build a world in which one could be free” (TI 165). The event of individuation by which consciousness and agency take shape endows the self with the power to address the state of their lifeworld in an ethical or egoistic manner. The phenomenology of the dwelling holds out the possibility for a social form that emerges from “my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights” (OTB 159). It is in these ethico-political terms that Hans's “quest for vision” demands to be thought, since the “environment of justice” that he sees in cricket flatly opposes the narrow form of nationalism – discriminatory; war-mongering; and as George Bush encouraging his constituents to keep shopping suggests, consumerist – that took shape after 9/11.

In fact, cricket in Netherland affords a cosmopolitan view of post-9/11 New York in which intimacy and alterity converge, as O'Neill refuses to reduce notions of home and otherness to a binary opposition. Recounting the day he first met Chuck, Hans admits that he took the sport up again “out of loneliness” and soon became “the only white man” on the field, as his teammates “variously originated from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka” (N 10). Hans is quick to underline his anomalous status within the amateur cricket league he joins, but he is just as quick to point out that cricket is not merely a timely diversion but also the activity that he most associates with his childhood in Holland – with, that is, “the young man who got a hundred runs in Amsterlveen with a flurry of cuts, who took that diving catch at second slip in Rotterdam, who lucked into a hat trick at the Haagse Cricket Club” (N 49). The version of himself that comes to mind when playing cricket is his “mothered self” (N 50). The unsubtle Freudian overtones yield the observation that the private family, a social unit comprising multiple generations, need not foreclose one's ethically oriented participation in the well-being of the wider human community.Footnote ³⁴ If the nuclear family is to be reconceived along ethical lines, then the association of cricket with both intimate memory and a community of strangers provides direction. For Hans, cricket enables a heightened form of self-understanding that cannot be disentangled from the social heterogeneity it forces him to acknowledge, and this paradoxical imbrication of private and public provides an ethico-political image of community that contradicts the vociferous nativist rhetoric to which 9/11 gave rise.

And yet, marital rapprochement marks the end of Hans playing cricket; he explains that it “would feel unnatural … to separate myself from my family” in order to play (N 186, emphasis mine). Attributing Hans's use of the word “unnatural” to thoughtless word choice or the duties of family life would amount to stifling the ethico-political significance of “earthly cricket” (N 148). If there is no hint of irony when O'Neill elevates Hans's innocent musings about cricket to the status of profound insight, then Hans's curious diction underscores the repressive dimensions of the private family (N 148). “Concretely speaking the dwelling is not situated in the objective world,” explains Levinas, “but the objective world is situated by relation to my dwelling” (TI 153). Because the dwelling serves as the primary orientation device in the individual's engagement with the world beyond privacy, feelings of hospitality or egoism inflect one's interpretation of visual and/or public phenomena. What appears unnatural from inside the dwelling – from inside, that is, the ostensibly happy family – is anything but when dysfunction thrusts Hans into social relations that he would not otherwise develop. The more Hans shuttles between family togetherness and dysfunction, the more the natural–unnatural binary unravels, losing its objective veneer as the appearance of naturalness comes to depend on Hans's domestic vantage point.

The retreat from ethics signaled by the reconstitution of the family becomes most clear in the final pages of Netherland, when Hans leaves the present for the past one last time. Hans is reunited with his family as they ride the London Eye at sundown, and his mind “drifts” to “another sundown, to New York, to my mother” (N 255). Aboard the Staten Island ferry, Hans and his mother gaze upon the Manhattan skyline, “a world concentrated most glamorously of all … in the lilac acres of two amazingly high towers going up above all others, on one of which … the sun began to make a brilliant yellow mess” (N 255). The abstract terms in which Hans couches the Twin Towers seem to be for effect, to be sure, but also the effect of Hans's psychic state upon reaching the “top” of the London Eye's “celestial circuit” with his family; for just before drifting into the past, Hans notes that

The proximity of “prefabricated symbolism” and eye contact between spouses suggests that returning to normality has reawakened Hans's flawed mode of looking.

Accordingly, Hans's description of the moment he shared with his mother needs to be read in a critical spirit. About a “pink watery sunset” above the “lilac acres” he claims that “[f]actual assertions can be made”: “I can state that I wasn't the only one of us to make out and accept an extraordinary promise in what we saw – the tall approaching cape, a people risen in light” (N 255–56). The symbolic excess of this image substitutes the grammar of transcendence for the natural–unnatural binary, as Hans inscribes imagery associated with Christian belief – Hans and his mother qua Madonna and Child – over the top of the “mothered self” he associates with cricket.Footnote ³⁵ He thus reaffirms the family as a sacrosanct institution, one hooked up to God and to capitalism. This abstract image of the Twin Towers underscores Hans's inability to link his visions of justice on the cricket field to a serious consideration of these towers’ centrality to a global system whose exploitative operations reach far and wide. Netherland contains no greater expression of globalization's selective light than this final image.

Overshadowed by these final pages is the ethico-political energy linked to cricket, the horizontal relationality and democratic sociality enabled by the sport's significant form. From the “prefabricated symbolism” of spousal rapprochement to Hans's description of “a people risen in light,” it seems as if the resuscitated intimacy of the private family has led Hans to find value in abstraction once again. Hans's circular arc brings us back to the imbrication of phenomenological and capitalist forms of abstraction. As Marx contends while discussing “the abstraction of the category ‘labour,’ ‘labour as such,’ labour pure and simple,”

According to Marx, the effects of capitalist abstraction can be traced to the visual and mental abstractions that assume natural dimensions. That is, “indifference” to the specificity of labour is a phenomenological condition at the same time that it is conditioned by untrammeled capitalist production. Marx's theory of abstraction folds the individual's phenomenological engagement with the world into a “form of society” in which certain phenomenological norms prevail.

The point here is to underscore the coincidence of Hans's reconstituted family with certain forms of visual abstraction (“the lilac acres of two amazingly high towers”). The abstract visual norms that Hans develops as a stock analyst become difficult to jettison when a return to family life restores his ability to see his work in a self-righteous light. Perhaps no image of the nuclear family is more enduring than that of the patriarch working hard to sustain the health and happiness of kin. The private family's centripetal pull seems, in other words, to extinguish Hans's capacity to overcome the epistemological abstractions that organize his visual field. Marx remains helpful. In noting how a specific “form of society” can induce “indifference” to the “specific form” of labour, Marx knows that social forms are an ineluctable fact of human life; at the same time, he recognizes that they are not created equal. The very possibility of acknowledging a particular form of labour implies that distinguishing between communally oriented and exploitative social forms is a critical procedure first and foremost.Footnote ³⁷ Such a procedure involves something of a “quest for vision.”