During the last three decades or so, there has been a renewed interest in the concept and practice of responsibility. Politically, this surge has taken place in a North Atlantic context increasingly defined by the modalities of depoliticized politics characteristic of neoliberalism and liberal democratic orders. Intellectually, it has been largely demarcated by the so-called turn to ethics in the humanities and social sciences, and the emergence of its empire of ethics and normativity. From post-Rawlsian political philosophers like Charles Larmore, and Frankfurt critical theorists like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, to the late Michel Foucault and his North American disciples, or Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Enrique Dussel, and Judith Butler, references to ethics, ethos, or normativity largely frame the most salient theoretical interventions of the past thirty years.
What these otherwise vastly different groups of scholars and thinkers share is that they all ultimately revert to different variations of the same theme: the virtual subsuming of the political into the ethical. This may take the form of an encirclement of political life achieved by granting primacy to “normative foundations,” and supplementing the political with ethical norms outside of its immanent logic. Alternatively, as in the case of scholars who prioritize the articulation of an ethos, it may mean reverting to versions of Platonic soul-crafting in which ethereal considerations about character and conduct tacitly, but not less decisively, dislodge any concern with the mainstay of political life and the forms of power and rule it authorizes.
Shalini Satkunanandan’s Extraordinary Responsibility makes its intervention against this background. It is a work that combines both critique and defense of responsibility: it criticizes “calculative responsibility,” which is unceremoniously dismissed as “bookkeeping” ethics (p. 5), and defends a sense of responsibility that takes place beyond calculation. The emphasis on calculation and the extraordinary, both of which the book’s title already announces, reveals the predominantly Nietzschean undertones of this intervention. Yet while deftly building upon Nietzsche’s critique of calculation and the ordinary, Satkunanandan further buttresses her argument through readings of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger and Arthur Koestler (with Simone Weil playing a minor but not unimportant role).
In doing so, Satkunanandan formulates what she calls an “ethos of attentiveness to calculation” (pp. 23, 79, 185, 195) that paradoxically enhances responsibility by denying it. Or as she formulates it: “At the heart of my argument for an ethos of attentiveness is the claim that by diverting our attention from being moral and giving attention to morality as a manifestation of calculative thinking, we might come to inhabit the world in a more profoundly attentive fashion and thereby become less moralistic and more responsible. Taken together Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber and Heidegger show that by giving attention to calculable responsibility and calculative thinking more generally, we can cultivate a deeper and broader attentiveness to the world” (p. 185).
Armed with this canon, Extraordinary Responsibility diagnoses the persistence of moralism in contemporary politics, which Satkunanandan traces to the sway of “calculation” in our ethical practices, and insists on the need to move away from the moralism of calculative thinking. Instead, readers are invited to increase their sense of the incalculable, which is, in and of itself, the sine qua non for human responsibility. If calculation defines ordinary responsibility, whose power is such that she thinks we are mostly in “thrall” by it, the incalculable is a higher responsibility that she claims also encompasses political responsibility. Zoning in on the ways we remain in “thrall” to calculative thinking can nevertheless open us to the extraordinary moment of the incalculable. Attention to calculation paradoxically yields an ethos of attention in tune with the incalculable: an ethos that instead of paying attention gives or gifts it.
By drawing attention to the ways in which calculation can impair the exercise of meaningful responsibilities, neglect vital aspects of political and ethical conduct (and even veer into forms of neoliberal rationality), Satkunanandan compellingly warns readers about the perils of an account of responsibility that reduces it to measureable quantities, and thus allows for the “discharging” of responsibilities when debts are duly paid. Even so, the book ultimately overshoots its target. It is one thing to criticize the practices of quantification that seek to reduce or settle responsibilities in ways that either tacitly or explicitly lead to the discharging of debts, as in official apologies for past atrocities by the Vatican, or in arguments about reparations for slavery. However, it is another thing altogether to rebuke the centrality of calculation and calibration for the enactment of political responsibility by reducing it to its least appealing versions, or, more extravagantly, to claim that moralism is primarily the upshot of calculable responsibility (p. 8). Extraordinary Responsibility seems to be too much in thrall with what lies beyond calculation to fully acknowledge the centrality of a modicum of calculation in any account of political responsibility worth the name.
Consider, for instance, the question of accountability, a term that Satkunanandan is likely to find suspect on the basis of its resonance with calculation, but one that is ineludible in any discussion of political responsibility in which the mainstay of collective life—forms of power and relations between rulers and ruled—is encompassed. In such political contexts and situations, responsibility is always limited and differentiated, and it demands adjudication not only in terms of the traditional binary of perpetrator and victims (what Ella Myers has called predicaments of “shared injurability”), but also under conditions such as postcatastrophic social orders, or when populations have been subjected to austerity measures. In all these cases, the responsibilities of both rulers and citizens become paramount, as is determining the structural beneficiaries of the particular political situation. Who are those responsible for bringing about, continuing, or sanctioning the predicament in question? Who benefits from austerity policies, or from catastrophic state forms? What degrees of responsibility do beneficiaries of a political and social order designed to protect their interest bear for a condition from which they benefit and to which they acquiesce? These are ordinary but hard questions that any responsibility to the political world unavoidably needs to confront. It is along these lines that there are degrees of responsibility in any political situation that need to be ascertained on the basis of asymmetries of power either codified or sanctioned, or both, in differential terms that often consist of some combination of class, gender, or race.
These are the kinds of differentiations that Satkunanandan’s invocation of the world does not adequately conceptualize, however. References to the world in this book are abstract and somewhat misleading. For instance, world for Heidegger is an unearthly, mythical-cum-theological world, while in Weber responsiveness to the world and its corollary responsibility has a very precise content. It is a world of imperialist Machtpolitik and, by the time of the “Vocation” essays, a political world defined by the defeat of Germany’s imperial ambitions and its concomitant failure to assume “its responsibility before history” as a great power. In Weil, we find a world heavy with capitalist rationalities and bureaucratic imperatives, as her writings on factories and her Oppression and Liberty amply show. And Weil’s attentiveness to the world actually requires re-cognizing it, and being attentive to the differentiations that such a cognitive shift entails.
Satkunanandan, to be sure, acknowledges the differences among the thinkers she marshals for her arguments, but she underestimates the problems that arise from them. With such different conceptions of the actual meaning of “world,” she is bound to reduce the term to its lowest common denominator, and that is something that makes her argument extremely abstract and ultimately lacking political determinations and import, especially when the mainstay of collective life is nowhere theorized. Similarly, there is something arbitrary about the author’s selection of scholars and thinkers, and no real criteria to account for both the inclusions and exclusions offered. Whereas minor theorists of ethos are engaged, James Tully—head and shoulders above them—does not receive a single mention, even if his body of work emphasizes contingency and a form of critical activity that simultaneously confirms and questions the relative indeterminacy of Satkunanandan’s “political ethos” and its claims to earthliness. More puzzling still is how Extraordinary Responsibility is silent about Derrida’s seminal contribution to the questions that lay at its core. Both Politics of Friendship and his tour de force essay “Psyche: Invention of the Other” offer coruscating critiques of calculation that are directly relevant to Satkunanandan’s argument.
Both the inclusions and the omissions further raise questions about the strategies of reading involved in this book, and the all-too-common impulse in Anglo-American political theory to contrive thinkers into yielding what the interpreter wants, while other intellectual resources that can be readily invoked without contortion are unaccountably neglected. Of course, slicing and dicing texts to offer readings of particular passages and sections in order to claim a novel insight with no concern for whether or not it fits with the overall architecture of the intellectual system, oeuvre, or even book in question—or how much it distorts it—is common enough in the field today. Satkunanandan’s subtle but historically innocent readings exemplify and reproduce this trend.
In the name of “a broader and deeper attentiveness,” Extraordinary Responsibility not only warns against the sway of calculation in ethical discourses but similarly draws attention to a conception of human ethics that is concerned with a world that is politically indeterminate and abstract. And the latter illustrates that despite the valuable critique of calculation, especially as Satkunanandan thinks it bears on the present, this is a book of the field and written for it. It thus reflects on, but also exhibits, the strengths and weaknesses of current academic political theory.
