Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social heory 10(2), August 2009, 241–56 © Acumen Publishing Ltd. 2009 A Plea for Prometheus Alberto Toscano Abstract: his essay takes issue with Critchley’s diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejo- rative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Infinitely Demanding on an anarchic metapolitics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than infinite demands that is happy to embrace the accusation of “Prometheanism”. Keywords: ethics, nihilism, Prometheanism, solidarity, subjectivity Ever since the reflux of revolutionary political thought in Europe, datable to the late 1970s and early 1980s, a contingent of radical thinkers has sought to turn philosophy into an enclave for reflection on political alternatives. Whether this has meant retiring to the attic to sharpen the knives, 1 or, in a more melancholy mode, pondering the aporias of communism and community, the effects on philosophical thought of the putative lack of “real politics” are hard to miss. For many, philosophy has turned into a shelter for a radicality that struggles to find much breathing space in the public domain. Infinitely Demanding is explicitly positioned within this minor genre of philo- sophical thinking about politics in seemingly anti-political times. 2 In its montage of elements from a contemporary Continental canon, it is an instructive exemplar and recapitulation of the metapolitical forays of recent radical thinkers. Critchley makes much use of an increasingly ubiquitous mode of theory construction: having voiced a philosophical desideratum – in his case the formulation of an ethics that could motivate an otherwise enervated pre-political subject into radi- cal, emancipatory action – he proceeds to extract certain philosophical modules from various tutelary figures, to then graft and suture them into a conceptual 1. “Philosophy does not have, and has never had at its own disposal the effective figures of eman- cipation. hat is the primordial task of what is concentrated in political doing-thinking. Instead philosophy is like the attic where, in difficult times, one accumulates resources, lines up tools, and sharpens knives” (Alain Badiou, Infinite hought, J. Clemens & O. Feltham [eds] [London: Continuum, 2003], 163). 2. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York/ London: Verso, 2007).