This Day in Philosophy — 9 September: Benhabib, Lacan, and what makes a person

The problem is this. Democracy means that those bound by the law are its authors. But self-government requires a self: a bounded people, with an inside and an outside. That boundary cannot itself have been drawn democratically, since those it excludes were not consulted. Every demos rests on a founding exclusion it cannot justify by its own standards.

Arendt named the human consequence in the phrase Benhabib returns to constantly — the right to have rights. A person expelled from every political community loses not merely particular protections but the standing from which any claim can be made at all. Rights turn out to be something a polity confers, and a polity is exactly what the stateless person lacks.

Why The Rights of Others is the book to read#

The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge, 2004) is her answer, built as a sequence of readings: Kant's cosmopolitan right of hospitality, Arendt on the contradictions of the nation-state, Rawls's Law of Peoples against the fact of migration, citizenship inside the European Union, and finally the chapter that gave political theory a term it now uses without attribution.

Her position is neither of the two available slogans. Against the view that a state may admit whom it likes on whatever grounds it likes, she argues that a first claim to admission — the refugee's claim to be heard, not turned back to danger — is a moral right no democracy can deny. Against open borders as a policy, she grants that a self-governing community may set the terms of full membership, provided those terms are ones outsiders could contest. Her word is not open but porous — and the terms are never final. That is the work done by democratic iteration.

Democratic iteration, in plain terms#

The term is borrowed from Derrida's account of iterability: every repetition of a rule alters it slightly, because the context of each use is new. Benhabib turns a claim about language into a claim about political legitimacy.

Norms — a constitutional right, an international convention, a rule about who may wear what in a state school — do not descend from a treaty and land intact on a population. They are re-enacted and re-described in courts, parliaments, newspapers and street protests, and each cycle changes what the norm means. Universal claims bind because a community has argued its way to them in its own idiom.

Her central case is l'affaire du foulard, the French headscarf controversy: three girls excluded from a school in 1989, and the decades of argument that followed about what laïcité requires. On her reading, the girls' own act — insisting on both the scarf and the classroom — forced French citizenship to be re-argued by the very people the rule was aimed at. That, rather than any court's final word, is what democratic legitimacy under pluralism looks like. The process was the point.

This is why the framework matters to the argument about borders now. If membership rules are either sovereign fiat or a moral abstraction owed to everyone, there is no account of how they change without force or capitulation. They change, Benhabib argues, by being iterated: the migrant and the resident non-citizen are already parties to the argument about their own admission, and a democracy that refuses to hear them hollows its self-government rather than guarding it.

The objection deserves its full strength. Communitarian critics answer that solidarity is finite, that a community unable to control its membership cannot sustain the trust redistribution requires, and that iteration describes what happens without saying when it has gone well. Benhabib has never claimed the process guarantees good outcomes, only that no other kind of legitimacy is on offer.

The Skytte Prize she now holds went in 2024 to Habermas, who died in March this year; the Hannah Arendt Prize carries the name of her other teacher. Between the two, in books written with Judith Butler and against her, she has made the border a problem in democratic theory rather than in policy.

Lacan: the subject that is not master in its own house#

Lacan died in Paris on 9 September 1981, aged 80. His slogan, le retour à Freud, was polemical. Post-war psychoanalysis, especially in America, had turned Freud into an adaptive therapy in which the ego was strengthened and the patient adjusted to reality. Lacan held that this took the symptom for the cure: the ego is not the seat of the subject but a defensive formation, the agency that does not know what it is doing.

He conducted the return with an instrument Freud lacked, the structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson. Freud's dream mechanisms, condensation and displacement, he identified with Jakobson's two axes of language: metaphor, one signifier substituted for another, and metonymy, meaning slipping along a chain. If that holds, the unconscious is not a reservoir of instinct beneath language but an effect of language — of a creature caught in a system of signifiers that pre-existed it and never yields a final meaning.

The mirror stage, presented in 1936 and reworked in 1949, makes the same point about the self. An infant still uncoordinated and living its body as fragmentary recognises itself in a mirror with evident joy. The image is whole; the body is not. That identification is a misrecognition, and the ego is built on it: the self is constituted in alienation, and identity is relational from the start. The mature framework adds three orders — the imaginary of images and rivalry, the symbolic of language and law, which pre-exists the subject and assigns it a place, and the real, what resists symbolisation absolutely.

His weekly seminar ran for nearly thirty years; his variable-length session was among the reasons the International Psychoanalytical Association struck him off its list of training analysts in 1963. He remains the test case for a hard question: when is difficulty a demand the material makes, and when is it a device? Sokal and Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense (1997) pressed the sharper charge, that the borrowings from topology are ornament trading on prestige. What is not in dispute is that the equipment is in use — Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, Julia Kristeva and Catherine Malabou are unintelligible without it — and that the argument about ideology is largely conducted in his terms.

Passmore, and the cost of wanting people perfected#

John Passmore was born at Manly, in Sydney, on 9 September 1914, and died in Canberra on 25 July 2004. He was Otago's first professor of philosophy and spent most of his career at the Australian National University. Hume's Intentions (1952) argued that Hume is not one system but several ambitions in tension; A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1957) remains the best single map of the discipline from the 1870s onward.

Two later books belong to today's thread. The Perfectibility of Man (1970) is a history of the idea that human beings can be made complete — by grace, education, breeding, revolution or technique — and of what has been done to people in its name. Man's Responsibility for Nature (1974) made him one of the first analytic philosophers to treat the environment as a proper subject, and he took an unfashionable line: the Western tradition already holds the resources for stewardship, and a new mystical ethic of nature is evasive, the obstacles being political and economic. Deep ecologists have argued with him ever since.

Goodman, and the schools that produce the delinquent#

Paul Goodman was born in New York on 9 September 1911 and died in New Hampshire on 2 August 1972. He read Kropotkin at City College and called himself a community anarchist thereafter. Pushed out of the University of Chicago in 1940 over his open bisexuality, he took his doctorate there anyway in 1954 and wrote in every form he could reach: novels, poems, city planning with his architect brother in Communitas (1947), and the theoretical half of Gestalt Therapy (1951), the founding book of Gestalt therapy.

Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System was turned down by nineteen publishers before Random House issued it in 1960. Its argument was simple and unwelcome. Juvenile delinquency is not a pathology of the young; it is a reasonable response by intelligent people to a society offering them no work worth doing, no honourable community and nothing to believe. The remedy is not to adjust the boy but to change what he is adjusted to. The Community of Scholars (1962) and Compulsory Mis-education (1964) turned the argument on schooling itself. Later readers are right that the young in the book are all boys, and that race barely appears.

The common ground, and its limit#

The four do not add up to a school, and it would be false to make them one: Passmore would have found Lacan unreadable, and said so. But set them on one date and the same suspicion runs through all four — that the equipment we use to describe a free person, choosing and consenting and knowing her own mind, is issued to her by arrangements she had no part in making. Language gives Lacan's subject its division. Schools and cities give Goodman's young their absurdity. Perfectibility gives Passmore's history its casualty list. Borders give Benhabib's stateless person the standing they lack.

What separates them is what follows. Lacan concluded that the division is constitutive and not to be cured. The other three thought arrangements made by people could be remade by them. Benhabib's contribution is to have said how: not by finding the right principle, but by keeping the argument open to those it is about.

Each day in this column we take up an event from the history of philosophy that falls on today's date.

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.

Arthur O. Lovejoy