Sina Kramer, <\/b>Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors<\/i><\/b>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 241 pp. ISBN: 978-0190625986.<\/b><\/p>\n
Reviewed by Amanda Parris, University of San Francisco.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Moving from <\/span>Glas<\/span><\/i> to L.A., from ancient Greek tragedy to Adorno\u2019s melancholy science, from Hegel to Black Lives Matter, Sina Kramer\u2019s <\/span>Excluded Within: The (Un)intelligibility of Radical Political Actors<\/span><\/i> makes powerful advances on multiple fronts. Unable to do justice to its multiplicity, I will focus primarily on two of these fronts. First, Kramer explicitly identifies and elucidates a concept that has been implicitly operative in the work of many thinkers roughly categorized under the name of Critical Theory: constitutive exclusion. She defines \u201cconstitutive exclusion\u201d as \u201cthe phenomenon of internal exclusion, or those exclusions that occur \u2026 when a philosophical system or political body defines itself by excluding some difference which is intolerable to it\u201d and analyzes its ontological-epistemological structure in the philosophy of Hegel. (5) Second, Kramer makes the tiger\u2019s leap and provides untimely analyses of three figures that mark the limit of political intelligibility, \u201cboth grounding and troubling the distinctions that structure political bodies and the terms of political agency\u201d (5): Antigone, Claudette Colvin\/Rosa Parks, and the 1992 LA Riots\/Rebellion. On her interpretation, these three \u201cmonstrous\u201d (58) figures\u2014fictional and historical, singular, twin, and collective\u2015show us \u201cmodes of resistance to and paths of flight out of or beyond\u201d politics constituted by exclusions. (6)<\/span><\/p>\n In Part One, Kramer diagnoses the structure and operation of constitutive exclusion, exposing the epistemological blind spot it involves as well as its quasi-transcendental character and temporality. Hegel, whose thought she claims \u201cmarks the apotheosis of systems-thinking in modern philosophy,\u201d is her model. (59) Through close and cogent readings of the <\/span>Science of Logic<\/span><\/i>, Kramer shows that Hegel\u2019s absolute knowing is an epistemology of ignorance. She argues that multiple negativity is the quasi-transcendental of the Hegelian system; it conditions both the possibility and the impossibility of the system. Against the reduction of Hegelian dialectics to the absolute negativity of determinate negation, she identifies a \u201crhythm of multiple negativities\u201d in the movement of being and nothing and the moment of the universal concept. (40) Against the sublation of difference into contradiction, she shows that in <\/span>Verschiedenheit<\/span><\/i> the difference between the determinate and the indeterminate, the speculative and the empirical, is troubled by a different difference, \u201ca multiplicity of more-than-two, a plural ontology.\u201d (49) On her analysis, the negativity operative in Hegel\u2019s system is symptomatic of the epistemological blind spot of constitutive exclusion; it is the disavowal or repression of multiple negativity. What is at stake in her interpretation of multiple negativity is not just moving beyond the impasse of the totalizing and open interpretations of Hegel (which her reading compels us to do), but of showing how the negativity of constitutive exclusion, the act of repression or disavowal, produces a \u201cparadoxical included exclusion\u201d (56) that both grounds and undermines, \u201cboth secures and troubles\u201d the markers of difference. (77) <\/span><\/p>\n Kramer continues her diagnosis of the quasi-transcendental character of constitutive exclusion through Derrida\u2019s reading of <\/span>The Phenomenology of Spirit<\/span><\/i>, and then turns to the temporality that produces epistemological blind spots. The temporality of constitutive exclusion, she explains, effects its exclusions retroactively, yet presents these exclusions as linear. This retroactive operation renders what is contingent necessary, what is effect cause, what is political a-political. In retrospect, we see this temporality in the moment of <\/span>Verschiedenheit<\/span><\/i>: \u201cthe distinction between determinate diversity [\u2026] and indeterminate diversity [\u2026] is decided retroactively, from the position of having already gone through diversity to opposition.\u201d (81) But the importance of Kramer\u2019s analysis of retroactive temporality goes beyond this insight about the <\/span>Science of Logic<\/span><\/i>; rather, it shows that the \u201ccritique of constitutive exclusion is thus necessarily a political critique, in that it seeks to re-politicize the exclusions by which we define ourselves\u201d and, we might add, by which others define us. (85) If this retroactive character of constitutive exclusion produces an epistemological blind spot, it also forces us to ask, \u201cHow do we read for the invisible? How do we hear the inaudible?\u201d (91) <\/span><\/p>\n To answer these questions and to avoid the trap of proliferating or displacing exclusions, in Part Two Kramer develops a negative and materialist method of critique using Adorno\u2019s negative dialectics. She argues that constitutive exclusion is not only quasi-transcendental, but also quasi-transcendent, as the excluded, read in terms of Adorno\u2019s concept of the nonidentical, furnishes an immanent path beyond what is. The negativity of this method provides a way to resist the assimilative demand \u201cto determine in advance\u201d (103) the meaning and effect of critique and to forestall \u201cfurther exclusions in any reconstitution.\u201d (109) The materialism of this method is grounded in \u201cthe experience of suffering\u201d (116) and orients thought toward \u201cthe sedimented history\u201d of such suffering \u201cin order to liberate the possibilities within it.\u201d (119) Because things could have been otherwise, this method tells us, \u201cthings may yet turn out otherwise.\u201d (121) Instead of reflecting further on the important interventions this historical method makes in the interpretation of history for the present, I will turn to the possibilities opened up by Kramer\u2019s use of this method in Part Three, which analyzes concrete contestations of exclusion. <\/span><\/p>\n Although it moves from an ontological-epistemological to a political-epistemological analysis, Kramer begins and ends the book with three \u201cinsurrectionary and monstrous\u201d figures: Antigone, Claudette Colvin\/Rosa Parks, and the 1992 LA Riots\/Rebellion. (2) We can say that since Aristotle, monstrosity is (un)intelligible. In explicating the causes of monstrosity, Aristotle sought to manage the chaotic cosmogony of the naturalist poets, to reduce the deformed multiplicity of the monstrous to the unity of form, to tame the threat of radical contingency through knowledge of its purposive necessity. But in <\/span>Excluded Within<\/span><\/i>, Kramer identifies a different operation of power\/knowledge in the epistemology of ignorance that structures constitutive exclusion: \u201cthe inability to see what is constitutively excluded is precisely what allows it to operate.\u201d (43) If we agree with Adorno that Aristotle is the first metaphysician, then we should already take seriously the power of the monstrous, for, as Aristotle explains in Generation of Animals<\/em>, monstrosity results when \u201cthat which is acted on escapes and is not mastered.\u201d (<\/span>GA<\/span><\/i>, 768b) This is what Adorno might consider a failure not of nature, but of hegemonic identity thinking or, in Kramer words, the \u201cunderground economy of resources\u201d remaindered by constitutive exclusion. (60) On her interpretation, these three \u201cmonstrous\u201d (58) figures of contestation are flashes of Benjaminian now-time buried in the past, \u201cshards of resistance sedimented in the history of the present.\u201d (132) In this sense, Kramer\u2019s critical theoretical project reclaims the threat of multiplicity and contingency, of a world that can be\u2015because it is\u2015other than it is. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n According to Aristotle, the female is the first monstrosity. (<\/span>GA,<\/span><\/i> 767b) It is only appropriate, then that in her interpretation of Antigone, which is also developed in Parts One and Two, Kramer analyzes this female monstrosity for the \u201ccrime\u201d of contesting the constitutive exclusion that structures gender and politics. (142) Kramer objects to Butler\u2019s conclusion that Antigone\u2019s contestation fails because she appropriates the language of that which she contests. Against Butler\u2019s emphasis on intention and identification with the father, Kramer points to \u201cthe radical potential\u2014sparked for a moment\u2014of the outside of politics, inside, calling into question the limits of sovereignty, authority, and politics as they are defined by constitutive exclusion.\u201d (144) In her untimely reading of the twin figure of Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin, a twin figure as monstrously conjoined in the Montgomery bus boycott as in Aristotle\u2019s examples, Kramer argues that the NAACP\u2019s choice of the \u201cmiddle-class feminine respectability\u201d of Parks over \u201cyoung, angry, poor,\u201d unmarried, pregnant, and darker Colvin, is structured by a constitutive exclusion that renders both, in different ways, unintelligible as political agents, and leverages some forms of exclusion over others. (146) Following Cohen and Sparks, her analysis points to the \u201creal costs\u201d of such political strategies: the domestication of radical political agency; the exclusion of Blackness based on a politics of respectability; the reinforcement of exclusions based on class, gender, and sexuality, which have made their contestation more difficult. But in seeing and hearing Colvin, Kramer\u2019s analysis more importantly underscores the contingency of the NAACP\u2019s choice and \u201ccalls us to remember that which we have never known.\u201d (153) <\/span><\/p>\n The final figure of concrete contestation is the 1992 Los Angeles Riots\/Rebellion, a figure whose very name foregrounds the geographical and historical dimensions, as well as the political ambiguity, of the event. While framing the riots\/rebellion in terms of the historical convergence of riots and blackness in the (post-) Nixon era, an era that takes black riots\/rebellions to be \u201ca criminal act and not a political event\u201d (160), Kramer seeks to both \u201cconfirm and complicate\u201d the Afro-pessimist claim to \u201cthe singularity of anti-black racism\u201d in the political unintelligibility of the event. (164) The shards that complicate this claim are many; they include the forgetting of the murder of Latasha Harlins just two weeks after the beating and arrest of Rodney King and the suspension of the liquor store owner who murdered her, a forgetting that \u201coccludes the role of gender in the riots\u201d (168), as well as the forgetting of the multiracial geography of the riots, in which half of those arrested were Latinx, into whose communities Immigration Officers, not the National Guard were sent. (173) Beyond complicating the narrative of the riot, though, Kramer\u2019s interventions force us \u201cto pay attention to the political significance of looting\u201d (177), one which we can read into the contestation of \u201cthe very political conditions of ownership\u201d and the \u201cracial technologies of profit making\u201d (178) at work in Ferguson and other cities in the U.S. today. <\/span><\/p>\n Like its object, which \u201ccuts through ontological, epistemological, and political levels\u201d (6), <\/span>Excluded Within<\/span><\/i> is multiple, operating in different registers. But, as indicated in the analysis of concrete contestations just described, the objective of the book is unmistakably political. Kramer writes in \u201cthe radical hope\u201d of \u201ca future in which no constitution would necessitate an exclusion.\u201d (33) In the Postscript, she claims that this future cannot be one of mere inclusion, but requires the reconstitution of political bodies and political agency in terms of what she calls a pluralist political ontology. This ontology, Kramer suggests, should be inspired by Maria Lugones\u2019 \u201cinterdependency without domination\u201d (184) and Audre Lorde\u2019s ability to see others as \u201cother faces of myself.\u201d (187) \u00a0But, as the plural ontologist Spinoza has shown us, hope is the twin of fear, and at other times in her book Kramer raises a possibility I find frightening: \u201cThis critique operates in service of a future without constitutive exclusions; or if we find some exclusions are necessary, that they are determined democratically.\u201d (85) To invoke <\/span>democratic<\/span><\/i> exclusion in a world in which democracy is used to exclude, ravage, and decimate seems a failure to countenance the somatic moment in thinking the political past for the future, a failure that Kramer so carefully critiques throughout <\/span>Excluded Within<\/span><\/i>. Hence if I have one criticism of the book, it would be that Kramer needs to say a lot more about the future, a project I hope she takes up in later work. This criticism notwithstanding, in <\/span>Excluded Within <\/span><\/i>Kramer makes a vital contribution to Critical Theory, especially feminist, queer, and anti-racist theory. She provides rigorous textual and political analysis and, more importantly, she raises pressing epistemological-political questions that open up real political possibilities. Although she situates her own project in the work of Derrida, Laclau, Mouffe, Butler, Lacan, and Sexton, her work on constitutive exclusion could also be in productive dialogue with Agamben, for whom the inclusive exclusion of bare life is constitutive of Western politics, and Ranci\u00e8re, for whom the primary site of politics lies in the contestation of exclusion. Indeed in engaging the work of Ranci\u00e8re, we might begin to think through the democratic reconstitution at which Kramer gestures and toward which <\/span>Excluded Within <\/span><\/i>so forcefully and compellingly directs us. <\/span><\/p>\n Additional Works Cited<\/b><\/p>\n Aristotle, <\/span>Generation of Animals<\/span><\/i>, in <\/span>The Complete Works of Aristotle<\/span><\/i> Vol. I, (ed.) J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sina Kramer, Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 241 pp. ISBN: 978-0190625986. Reviewed by Amanda Parris, University of San Francisco. Moving from Glas to L.A., from ancient Greek tragedy to Adorno\u2019s melancholy science, from Hegel to Black Lives Matter, Sina Kramer\u2019s Excluded Within: The (Un)intelligibility of Radical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 20:42:56","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6732"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6903,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732\/revisions\/6903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}