Review Essay of Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devestation

This is small review essay of Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope. Published in 2006, it's book whose themes - cultural devastation and hope - only really seem to have grown in pertinence since its publication. I was introduced to this book only two years ago, in a talk given a professor who was enthusiastically giddy over it, and finally, after letting that charge of excitement stew in me since, I've managed to get around it. In fact it's the second book of Lear I've now read, after thoroughly enjoying his Happiness, Death, and the Reminder of Life, a fantastic contemporary reckoning with the Freudian death drive as read though (and against) an Aristotelian lens. Bad news is that in comparison, Radical Hope ... has problems. As I hope you'll read below!

 

 

There’s a story that Jonathan Lear tells here about the young Crow medicine man, Wraps His Tail. It’s a story incidental to the book, one mobilised in the course of narrating the life of his preferred protagonist, Plenty Coups, who, in every way, is the hero of Radical Hope. Wraps His Tail is not the hero of Radical Hope. Unlike Plenty Coups, the Crow chief who helped lead his people through the devastation of reservation life imposed upon them by the American government, Wraps His Tail had the temerity — to rebel. For it he was killed as he surrendered, shot in the head by Fire Bear, an Indian police officer. Of this, Lear writes that from the perspective of Plenty Coups’ ‘commitment to the future’, Wraps His Tail’s actions weren’t “just futile”; they were also “a nostalgic evasion”.

Against this nostalgic evasion does Lear pitch his ‘radical hope’: the idea that, despite the falling away of an entire life-world - the holocaust of bison, the confiscation of a continent - one might yet still come out on the other side with an ability to flourish, recomposed in a world after the end of the world. It’s a beatific vision, one studded with promise, offered as a model of how one is to practice ‘ethics in the face of cultural devastation’. For Lear, Plenty Coups lead a “complete life” (Aristotle), one in which he was able to “unify it across discontinuity”, and, at the end of that life, capable of "seeing it as having unity and purpose”.

Yet the serene triumphalism of Lear’s reading is oddly marred by the statement that Lear picks out as motivating his entire book from start to finish. It comes from Plenty Coups himself, who, in relating his life story to his biographer, lamented that “when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened”. To hear Lear tell it however, not only did plenty of things in fact happen, but these happenings allowed for a continuity and a completeness that straddled the time both before and after White settlement, itself reconfigured into something like an opportunity to reestablish a life-world, an opportunity which Wraps His Tail did not seize, but which Plenty Coups did.

Told like this, what counts as ‘cultural devastation’ for Lear is almost something like an accident. It happens, however it does, and the therapeutic question is simply: how is one to face up to it so as to live the good life now? It's in this regard that the recalcitrant actions of Wraps His Tail come off as 'futile nostalgia', unable to meet the moment because unable to refigure his life in the face of devastation. Yet what remains unasked in this picture is, I think, the question once posed by Theodor Adorno, which has never ceased haunt all ethical inquiry since: can one lead a good life in a bad life? To this, I think Lear has nothing to say. Circumstances such as they are, one either finds a way to live a good life, or one fails to do so.

At no point is the question raised as to whether the good life is, at the same time, a just life. While Lear's ethical sensibilities run deep and, in truth, brightly illuminate some of the most distinctively human parts of ourselves - Radical Hope is, as the title implies, replete with accounts of dreams, fantasies, imaginings, courage, eroticism and desire - at no point is any sense of justified recrimination against a state that imposed Indian misery given its due. Ensconced in the revivifying but overwhelming light of ethics, politics as a legitimate arena of human action is snuffed out, an obstacle to the good life at best, a threat to it at worst. Where the US government is mentioned, it is as if a natural force, a sometimes unfortunate presence to which any engagement is exhausted by legal petition.

For instance, while a passing sentence makes mention of the 'alcoholism and drug abuse that plagues the reservations [in which] unemployment and poverty play crucial roles', the accent is placed instead on 'finding ideals worthy of internalizing' - ideals espoused and lived by Plenty Coups. While the latter surely has its place, what Lear doesn't acknowledge, in fact actively excludes from acknowledging, is any sense that the 'incompleteness' of a life might have to do with those who actively maintain such lacks. In this neutralization of politics, those who are ethically worthy are simply those who survive devastation the best. An ethics for victors and their collaborators. From this angle, what Lear calls radical hope, looks not unlike a radical resignation if not - forgive me - a radical cope.

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One last, positive, thing. If the ethics of radical hope leaves much to be desired, Lear, for all that, is a diagnostician of devastation of the first order. His account of loss that makes up the first half of the book - the loss to which radical hope is a response - is a genuinely moving and soul shattering piece of writing. I read, with almost trembling hands, the moment recounted here where Wraps His Tail returned from a raid on an enemy camp, in the full expectation of celebrating victory with his tribe, only to be met with charges of disgrace and shame.

It was an inversion of values that left him bewildered and unmoored: "They call us 'thieves' ... they, the palefaces, who make treaties only to break them, who have stolen our buffalo and our land, they call us 'thieves'". In the face of genocides that remain ongoing today - Palestine and Sudan - where every moral response is met as though as slight to all that holds the sky in place, it is in the incomprehension of Wraps His Tail - and not in the noble acquiescence of Plenty Coups - that we can find the image that is most equal to our time. I only hope - a more radical hope than is espoused in this book - that we meet a better fate. 

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One even laster, kinda neutral, thing. It's probably not irrelevant that Lear was a practicing psychoanalyst. Radical Hope reads as if having put a culture on the couch, one in deep distress and in a need of a cure, so much so that a not insignificant part of the book is given over to an analysis of Plenty Coups' dreams! To that degree it also speaks perhaps to the limits of psychoanalysis when pressed into a social or cultural role. Concerned, primarily, with what is possible in the clinic, to take it out of the clinic without at the same time working to alter the conditions of society, leaves one with what are impoverished tools for a job it was never designed to handle. 

Having read Lear's Happiness book, it's interesting to note a kind of isomorphism between the two: where Happiness diagnosed crises of meaning as opportunities for clinical breakthroughs, Radical Hope does something very similar at the level of (a) culture. Only, here it doesn't work, at least not without lapsing over into a conservatism as a result of its inability - or unwillingness - to ask for change not just at the level of the analysand and their unconscious, but of the very world they are embedded in. This isn't a call to write-off the use of psychoanalysis in, or for, politics entirely, but perhaps for its more incautious deployments, of which this is one.