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The Ethics of Resistance
 ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY

Being and Event, Alain Badiou

On Resistance, Howard Caygill
Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage
Politics, Anthony Faramelli
Hegel and Resistance, edited by Rebecca Comay and Bart Zantvoort
Errant Affirmations, David J. Kangas
Apocalyptic Political Theology, Thomas Lynch
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Quentin
Meillassoux
For Rudi
The Ethics of Resistance:
Tyranny of the Absolute

DREW M. DALTON
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction The failure of ethics in the West

A history of collaboration
Ethics reenvisioned

PART ONE The tyranny of the absolute

1 The trouble with post-Kantian ethics: Alain Badiou and Quentin

Meillassoux on the vicissitudes of ethical absolutes
The ironic antinomies of post-Kantian ethical and political thought
The limits of liberalism
The dogmatic structure of nationalism
Alain Badiou and the “smug nihilism” of post-Kantian ethics
The ethics of fidelity
Quentin Meillassoux on the rise of post-critical fanaticism
Factial speculation and radical contingency
The fragility of Meillassoux’s hope
The trouble with speculative ethics

2 Phenomenology, ethics, and the Other: Rediscovering the

possibility of ethical absolutes with Husserl, Heidegger, and
 Levinas
Phenomenology’s problem
Edmund Husserl’s reduction
The radical foundations of the phenomenological revolution
Emmanuel Levinas and the possibility of phenomenological ethics
Martin Heidegger and primal ontology
Levinas and the ethical primacy of the Other
Shame and the Other
Responsibility and ethical subjectivity
Phenomenology and the absolute

3 The problem of the Other: Levinas and Schelling on the

reversibility of ethical demand
The face of the Other as absolute phenomena
The absolute and the infinite
Levinas’s God?
The ethical value of Levinas’s absolute
The ambiguity of the infinite
Schelling and the absolute reality of good and evil
The reversibility of good and evil in the absolute
The Other as absolute ground for good and evil

Interlude Sympathy for the devil: The tyranny of heaven

The evil of acquiescence
Kierkegaard’s apologetics for murder
A report on the banality of evil revisited
The tyranny of heaven

PART TWO The ethics of resistance

4 Don’t give up, don’t give in! Jacques Lacan and the ethics of
psychoanalysis
The radical power of Lacan’s thought
 Unconsciousness unsettled
The alterity of the Other
Desire for the Other
The subversion of the subject
The Other/Thing
The ethics of psychoanalysis

5 Carving a space of freedom: Michel Foucault and the ethics of

resistance
Michel Foucault and the exigency of ethical resistance
The uses of genealogy
The modern subject—Governmentality, normalization, and bio-
power
The trouble with modern subjectivity and the ethics of resistance
Ethics as care for the self
Technologies of care
Care for the self in relation to the absolute Other

Conclusion The ethics of resistance: A backward-turning relation

Ethics and the absolute
A backward-turning relation
Politics as first philosophy
The political ends of anarchy
The ethics of ab-archy

Notes
Bibliography
Index
If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have
a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page
I should write: “I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.” And,
as far as everything else is concerned, I say, no. I say no with all
my strength.
ALBERT CAMUS, NOTEBOOKS: 1935–42
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For All the Devils:

I would like to begin by taking a moment to thank a number of

people in my life without whom the present volume would not have
been possible. First, I would like to thank my friends, colleagues,
and students at Dominican University who have supported me
emotionally, intellectually, and finan­cially as I have prepared the
various drafts of this book. Specifically I’d like to thank the members
of the Philosophy Department, Tama Weisman, Nkuzi Nnam, and
Kelly Burns; the administration of RCAS; and the university as a
whole, especially then dean of RCAS and now provost of the
university, Jeffrey Carlson. The constant support and encouragement
of the Dominican University community was invaluable as I balanced
my teaching responsibilities with my writing duties.
I’d also like to thank the students and faculty of the Departments
of Philosophy and Political Science at Brock University, my second
intellectual home, who have generously allowed me to try out the
various arguments and theses articulated here over the past few
years through a series of invited seminars and lectures on my
research. Special thanks are due to Athena Colman, Michael Berman,
Rohit Dalvi, Leah Bradshaw, and my dear friend and constant ally
Rajiv Kaushik.
I’m deeply indebted as well to everyone at Bloomsbury for their
guidance, thoughtful suggestions, and hard work, particularly
Frankie Mace, who was the ideal editor for this project and whose
constant good humor made bringing this work to publication a
complete delight. Special thanks are also due to Tom Sparrow and
Dylan Trigg, both of whom read early drafts of this manuscript and
made vitally important recommendations, most significant of which
was suggesting I contact Bloomsbury to begin with. I also owe a
deep debt of gratitude to my dear friend Elizabeth Fansher who took
time while on vacation to read through and edit the first complete
draft of this text.
To my family and friends, Robin, Thea, Pop, Paul Simpson, Andrew
Osborne, and Luke Jenner, I owe more than I could ever do justice
with words. I am especially grateful to the stubborn persistence of
David Banach, with whom and against whom the first seeds of this
work were sown. Finally, I want to acknowledge Rudi Visker, whose
influence permeates both this work and my intellectual life as a
whole. Visker not only taught me what philosophical resistance looks
like in a million little ways, he still inspires me to think more broadly
and deeply and to never give up on or give in to my temptations to
be complicit with and complacent to my own desires, the
expectations of others, or the laws of the universe.
 INTRODUCTION
The failure of ethics in the West
A history of collaboration
The history of ethics in the West is a history of collaboration—a
history of assent and affirmation. It is the history of the varied
attempt to identify some idea of an absolute good and to define the
various means by which one may live perfectly in accordance with it.
Virtue belongs, according to this story, to the one who both knows
the absolute and has the courage and constancy to act
appropriately: to submit themselves to it willingly, fully, and
constantly. Whether conceived of as an eternal god, universal
maxim, or maximization of happiness or defined as the product of
divine revelation, rational deduction, or moral calculation, the origin
and apogee of ethical thinking in the West has always figured as a
kind of moral yea-saying to some absolute good—an intellectual and
practical acquiescence to some conceived supreme value. So it is
that the history of ethical philosophy in this tradition takes on the
image of an angelic chorus: the voices of its authors filling the
annals of religious dogma and rational intellection alike with the
echo of a million “amens.” “Let the absolute reign, forever and ever,”
they sing. “Let it be in our minds and in our actions, on earth as it is
in the heavenly realms of thought.”
Evil within this narrative has received the lesser part. Cast as a
form of moral failure by the philosophers of the West, evil has rarely
been granted its own ethical power. Instead, it has been placed in
the subordinate position: defined not as a moral force in its own
right, but as the perversion, rejection, or negation of the moral force
of the absolute. As such, evil has been traditionally portrayed in the
West as the consequence of an inability or unwillingness within a
moral subject to submit to the natural right or sovereign power of
the good, either due to blind ignorance, gross incompetence, or
idiotic refusal. In this tradition, evil has taken on the guise of a
purely negative force: nothing more than a kind of petty and
ultimately futile resistance to, rebellion against, or dissent from the
absolute power of the good. In contrast to the “yea-saying” moralists
then, the agents of evil have been caricatured in the West as a set of
puerile “nay-sayers,” epitomized in the portrayal of the devil in
various Christian mythologies and depicted in the book of Jeremiah
in the Latin Vulgate crying out “Non serviam”—“No, I refuse. I will
not serve nor obey the edicts of the absolute.”1
But what has this history of ethical thought wrought? What
practical benefit has been accomplished by the yea-saying
attendants of the idea of the absolute? The kingdom of heaven on
earth? Immanuel Kant’s perpetual peace? Jeremy Bentham’s
happiness? No, none of these. Instead, a variety of totalitarianisms
set up in the name of some form of absolute justice, purity, power,
or security, at least two global wars waged to end all wars and
secure perpetual peace, the North Atlantic Slave Trade, the
Armenian Genocide, the Shoah, Srebrenica, and countless other
massacres. Was all this demonstrative evil little more than the
product of some “lesser part” within us? Was all this suffering
nothing more than the result of a moral reluctance within our nature,
some unwillingness within us to submit fully or bow appropriately to
the absolute good? Can it be that the abject horror of human history
is simply the result of something missing from our hearts or minds—
some flawed conscience, or perhaps some collective idiocy,
weakness, or innate wickedness which has prevented us from
affirming wholly the absolute good and joining the morally upright
yea-saying philosophers of history? Can it be that the profound
suffering of the other which cries out to us from the pages of human
history is really nothing more than the effect of something negative
within us—some ethical deprivation which operates at the core of
our being? Perhaps.
 Perhaps the moralists of the West are right. Maybe we are all
“conceived in wickedness” and “born into sin,” as the Psalmists wrote
and the Evangelists snarl. Perhaps we are in fact structurally limited
by the frailty of our finitude, destined to always fall short of the
absolute: capable only of knowing it dimly and acting halfheartedly
in its name. Or perhaps, more hopefully, we simply have not applied
ourselves fully to the task yet. Maybe if only we were to redouble
our efforts to be good, to know the absolute fully and realize its
order completely, we could finally make a heaven for ourselves here
on earth, as individuals, as a polis, and eventually as a planet. But,
then again, perhaps the moralists of the West are wrong. Perhaps all
the evil we have known is not the result of some “lesser part,” some
moral failure to attain the absolute, but something else entirely.
What if it is the inverse that is true? What if the evils of human
history are not the result of something negative within us, something
which refuses or resists the absolute? What if, in fact, they are the
result of that within us which is most positive: our very pursuit of the
absolute good? What if the root of human suffering does not lie in
something missing from us, but in something present within us?
What if evil emerges from our very conception and pursuit of the
good as an absolute? Could it be that the history of ethical
philosophy in the West has not only been wrong, it has been an
accomplice to, and perhaps even the cause of, evil? The aim of this
book is to explore this possibility and to suggest an alternative to the
dominant narrative maintained by the moral “yea-sayers” of Western
philosophy.

Ethics reenvisioned
My goal is to prove two things. First, I want to show that
determinate evil action is not ultimately the result of a privation of or
derivation from some absolute good within us; but, more often than
not, it is the result of precisely the opposite: namely, the attempt to
realize the good as an absolute, a status which, as I will show,
allows for the justification of virtually any action in its name, no
matter how manifestly terrible. In pursuit of this goal, I will show
that many of the most horrifying atrocities in the political history of
the West are not ultimately the result of some dissent from the
good, however perverse, but much more often the effect of a casual,
well-intended, and even at times well-reasoned assent to some idea
of an absolute good. In this way I hope to prove the old maxim
which marks the perfect as “the enemy of the good” to be more true
than ever before imagined. In fact, as I will show, the concept of
perfection found in the idea of the absolute good is, more often than
not, the ultimate ground of and condition for evil.
The second goal of this book is to redefine ethical reasoning in
light of this claim as a form of resistance to any idea of an absolute
good. It is my aim to reclaim the defiant resistance announced in the
demonic non serviam decried by the moralists of the West as the
only means by which any actual good can be preserved and pursued
in the real world. Such a persistent r esistance, I will argue, is the
only ethical maxim we should strive to emulate in our thought and
action alike.
Note that it is not the aim of this book to deny the existence of
absolutes in toto. Nor is it to argue that we should rid ourselves of
the absolute in order to pursue the good. My aim here is not to kill
the gods of the morally upright philosophers, deny their power, nor
call for their excision from ethical reasoning. To the contrary, I hope
to affirm the power of the absolutes they tout. Indeed, as I will
argue, the idea of the absolute is not only inescapable, it is in fact
necessary in order to found and justify any practical ethics. But, as I
will show, the value such absolutes hold, acting as the foundation for
moral judgment, must be reevaluated. It is the aim of this book to
alter the register in which we speak of the absolute in ethical
philosophy. It is my aim to transmute the value traditionally
attributed to the absolute, from good to evil; and, on the basis of
that revaluation, I aim to establish a new model of ethical reasoning
which defines the good as emergent from determinate resistance to
the lure of the absolute.
To achieve these goals, I must first address and dispel a common
misconception within contemporary philosophical circles: namely,
that the question of the absolute is passé—that, in the words of
Friedrich Nietzsche, “God is dead.” This has been the tacit
assumption of contemporary philosophers for the last two centuries:
that the idea of the absolute is no longer of concern for serious
philosophers. Since Immanuel Kant’s critique of dogmatic
metaphysics, such questions have been assumed to be the exclusive
domain of the ideological or the uneducated. Indeed, the aim of
ethical philosophers since Kant has been to identify and detail
various modes of moral reasoning which do not invoke the absolute
as an actual and universal power. Hence, the birth of ethics as
deontological reasoning, moral calculation, and more recently
deconstructive openness. In order for my aims to be achieved then,
I must first show, in contrast to this assumption, that the idea of the
absolute, as the ground and aim of ethical reasoning, is still very
much alive in the West after Kant. I must show, in other words, that
Nietzsche was wrong: that God, as the idea of the absolute, is in fact
not dead, but is rather still very much alive in contemporary Western
ethical thinking. Moreover, I must show that this “God” lies hidden
precisely where we would least expect to find him, even in those
political and ethical philosophies which have grown from the Kantian
critique and the Nietzschean pronouncement of the death of God as
a universal and actual absolute. Only by first revealing the absolutes
hidden within such projects can we understand how very present
“God” still is with us today, and how this idea in turn functions to
ground very real social and political evils. This is the task of the first
chapter of this book.
There we will examine two contemporary attempts to reframe
ethical thought in the wake of the so-called “death of God.” The aim
of this examination is to show that even among those most
committed to the project of thinking of the good outside the bounds
of the absolute, the absolute still manifests as an end to be affirmed;
and, inasmuch as it does, it gives way to any number of concrete
and practical ethical and political problems. To make this case,
Chapter 1 will examine the ethical works of Alain Badiou and Quentin
Meillassoux, respectively, both of whom forthrightly attempt to
diagnose the problem of the absolute in ethical thinking after Kant
and propose a solution to it. Unfortunately, as we will see in detail
there, the solutions proposed by both thinkers are not without their
own catastrophic problems. The nature of these problems will allow
us to conclude that a new approach to the nature and role of the
absolute within ethical deliberation must be developed if we are to
overcome the horrors of the past. Such a project requires, however,
first acknowledging the necessary function of the absolute as a
ground for ethical deliberation. Moreover, it requires discovering a
universal and actual absolute which does not reassert the kind of
dogmatism thankfully laid to rest by Kant’s critique. Only once this
task is accomplished can our larger goal to reevaluate the value of
the absolute begin.
Chapter 2 responds to this challenge by detailing how a new
nondogmatic account of a simultaneously universal and actual
absolute can be discovered within the phenomenological tradition,
specifically within the account of the Other presented in the work of
Emmanuel Levinas. To examine the nature of this absolute, we will
begin there by tracing the genealogy of the idea of the Other qua
absolute within the history of phenomenology, beginning with the
work of Edmund Husserl, proceeding through the thought of Martin
Heidegger, and arriving finally at the ethical analyses of Emmanuel
Levinas. Then, through a detailed analysis of Levinas’s work, we will
discover how the idea of the Other can serve as a simultaneously
universal and actual absolute ground for ethical thought without
falling into the vicissitudes which arise from the Kantian critique.
This chapter concludes by suggesting that the demands levied by
the Other as detailed by Levinas can function as a new absolute
ground upon which to establish ethical deliberation anew. But, as will
become clear in Chapter 3, this solution to the problem of
contemporary ethics comes at the cost of the long-held belief in the
inherent goodness of the absolute. Indeed, as we will see there, this
solution can only be taken, as I have already suggested, if the value
of the Other qua absolute is radically reevaluated.
To see how this must be the case, Chapter 3 reveals how Levinas’s
account of the Other qua absolute is not a force to be casually
acquiesced to, as is assumed by his most committed readers; but is
in fact a force which should be scrupulously interrogated and
diligently resisted. Chapter 3 argues that despite Levinas’s earnest
attempts to found in the Other an absolute ground for ethical
responsibility to be heeded and obeyed, what he inadvertently, albeit
serendipitously, accomplishes is precisely the opposite: namely, to
define an absolute which functions as the actual ground for
determinate evil. In other words, what Chapter 3 shows is that while
we can use Levinas’s account of the Other as a universal and actual
absolute upon which to establish ethical deliberation anew after
Kant, it is not an absolute which we should deem wholly good nor
strive to obey completely. In order to make this point all the more
clear, Chapter 3 will conclude with a brief survey of the work of
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who identifies in his analysis of
the power of the absolute what he termed the “reversibility” of good
and evil. So it is in Chapter 3 that the first aim of this book is finally
accomplished: that is, the identification of a present and active
absolute moral force upon which to ground ethical deliberation after
Kant, only no longer as a telos to be attained, but as lure to be
resisted. As we will see there, the absolute ground for ethical
deliberation present in the demands of the Other give rise to the
possibility of the good only inasmuch as they are resisted. If they are
obsequiously obeyed, the demands of the Other function as the
absolute ground and condition for the possibility of evil. This
realization allows us to turn from the first of our goals, to the
second: the articulation of a new conception of ethical delibe ration
qua resistance to the demands of the absolute.
The urgency and exigency of the need to develop an ethics of
resistance against the demands of the absolute Other will be
expounded upon in an interlude separating the first three chapters
and the remaining three. The aim of this interlude is to demonstrate
all the more clearly the necessity of cultivating a new mode of
ethical thinking in relation to the absolute. There the concrete
dangers of this ethical reversibility within the Other qua absolute will
be detailed by reevaluating two particularly poignant moments
within the history of Western philosophy where the idea of the
absolute good faltered rather tellingly. The first of these moments
will be excavated from the work of Søren Kierkegaard, the second
from the thought of Hannah Arendt. In this interlude we will discover
how, contrary to the expressed aims of these thinkers, the
reversibility of the demands of the Other, qua absolute good, is all
the more apparent—how, in other words, the good of the Other,
when absolutized, reverts immediately to evil. To make this danger
all the more clear, this interlude will show how actual manifestations
of evil in human history, from suicide bombings to the Shoah, have
all been grounded upon and justified in the name of some concept
of an absolutized good. In this way, the aim of this interlude is to
show all the more clearly what is at stake in the second half of the
book: the necessity of defining ethical action as a form of resistance
against the absolute demands of the Other. It is to this latter task
that the remaining chapters of the book will be dedicated.
We will begin this task in earnest in Chapter 4 by examining the
psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan. There, through an analysis of
Lacan’s account of the genesis of the subject, we will see how
various forms of pathology, and what Lacan unambiguously called
evil, can result from an inappropriate relation to any Other which
bears the status of an absolute. In light of this danger we will
explore what Lacan termed “the ethics of psychoanalysis,” an ethics
which, he argued, can only be pursued by learning to say “no” to the
lure of the absolute Other and by subsequently cultivating a set of
practices which can embolden the subject to hold its own against the
inherent threats posed by the Other.
Chapter 5 will develop Lacan’s idea of the ethical necessity of “no-
saying” by way of the late work of Michel Foucault. There we will not
only find a further articulation of the inescapable dangers inherent to
the perception of the Other as an absolute ethical force; we will also
discover a number of strategies aimed at cultivating an ethics of
resistance within contemporary subjectivity. In this way, we will
discover in Chapter 5 a means of pursuing practically an ethics of
resistance via what Foucault termed the “technologies” associated
with appropriate “care for the self.”
The book will conclude with a final chapter which draws from a
number of classical and contemporary sources in order to help the
reader reimagine how ethical deliberation could be pursued as a
form of ethical resistance to the absolute Other. There, through an
analysis of the role of political philosophy in ethical thinking, we will
gain an even more precise understanding of how to accomplish
practically an ethics of resistance and how such an ethics might be
used to counter the imminent threat of evil present in the
contemporary social and political scene.
It is my profound conviction that for any ethics to be truly worthy
of its name, a project earnestly devoted to the pursuit of the good
and the defiance of evil, it must begin with the recognition that any
number of absolutes announce themselves in the world around us
today. Each of these absolutes are presented with the weight and
power of a demand issued in the name of some Other. Ethical
deliberation must begin by evaluating the demands of these absolute
Others. This requires the counterintuitive recognition that each of
these demands, by virtue of their status as absolute, has the
potential of inadvertently leading to evil when obeyed too faithfully.
For ethical philosophy to proceed it must acknowledge this possibility
and its resulting conclusion: that ethical action may require active
resistance to the demands of every absolute. Unfortunately, this has
not yet been the case within ethical philosophy in the West. For
ethical philosophy to continue to have any relevance in the
contemporary world it must renounce its traditional allegiance to the
absolute without denying the role such absolutes play as the ground
and condition for universal and actualizable ethical judgments. It is
the task of ethical philosophers today to recognize that in order for
the good to be defined, the absolute must be acknowledged as a
force to be resisted. To accomplish this task we must begin by
accepting that every absolute demand glowers with the fearsome
potential of justifying virtually any act, even murder and genocide, in
its name. Only by acknowledging this fact can those committed to
ethical action attempt to articulate the concrete and practical means
necessary to resist such potentially evil injunctions and secure the
good.
The task of the first half of this book is to identify and reevaluate
the absolute ground of ethical deliberation as a force which does not
call for affirmation, for saying “yes, thy will be done,” but which
requires resistance, which requires defiantly shouting “No, non
serviam! I will not be complicit in your agenda.” Having shown how
the demands of the Other arise and operate within lived experience
as an absolute, and how such demands ground and condition the
possibility of evil, the second half of this book aims to detail a set of
practices which may be useful for establishing such an ethics of
resistance. One need not restrict oneself to the set of practices
detailed here, however. To the contrary, it is my hope that this book
will inspire the expression of any number of concrete, particular, and
specific acts of political and ethical resistance, all equally suspicious
of whatever Other invokes its power in the readers’ life to solicit his
or her absolute allegiance. In the words of Chairman Mao “may a
thousand flowers bloom. Let a hundred schools of thought contend”;
and may each of them grow from the recognition that the demands
of every absolute must be resisted.
 PART ONE

The tyranny of the absolute

 CHAPTER ONE
The trouble with post-Kantian ethics:
Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux on the
vicissitudes of ethical absolutes

The ironic antinomies of post-Kantian ethical

and political thought
One of the fundamental problems confronting contemporary
philosophy, or so the story goes, is the apparent lack of any obvious
universal and simultaneously actual absolute good upon which to
ground ethical and political assent. There is no longer any universally
shared God to whom we can turn for guidance, nor is there any
obviously actualizable noumenal realm of ideas or forms from which
we can deduce determinate action. “God is,” as Friedrich Nietzsche
put it, most definitely “dead.” Such pretensions, it is believed, were
unequivocally laid to rest by Immanuel Kant’s critique of dogmatic
metaphysics. As a result, post-Kantian social and political
philosophers have faced a difficult choice: either give up on ethical
absolutes entirely by embracing some form of ethical relativism or
nihilism which rejects both the universality and the actuality of the
good; or, alternatively, attempt to establish some new non-absolute
ground for ethical acquiescence and judgment. It is in pursuit of the
latter that the history of modern ethical theory emerges.
Such attempts to theorize the good after Kant have, however,
faced their own dilemma. Without access to any obvious universal
and actual absolute, they were forced to ground ethical judgment in
relatively non-absolute positions, either by 1) identifying a
universally assertable but non-actual (i.e., virtual) good upon which
ethical judgment could be founded, one deducible within the
structures of reason alone, for example (like the universal rational
duties touted by deontologists); or alternatively, 2) asserting the
power of some actual but nonuniversal (i.e., local) good which could
function as a ground for ethical judgment, one emergent from the
singularity of one’s own being, for example (like many of the post-
Nietzschean conceptions of virtue ethics). Ethical consequentialists
like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, for their part, seem to
have alternated between these two poles—at times, they have
insisted on the actuality of ethical absolutes by sacrificing their
possible universality (as is the case in classical utilitarianism which
considers the actual experience of a singular [read: local] individual’s
pain and pleasure, human or otherwise, but acknowledges that this
experience bears no universal absolute value); at other times,
conversely, they have asserted the possibility of universal values by
sacrificing their actuality (as is the case in eudemonic and aesthetic
consequentialisms which make room in their calculus for the virtual
goods of cultural and political values, but by doing so lose the
possibility of that calculus functioning on any universal level to
adjudicate between competing local values).
To make the nature of this post-Kantian ethical disjunction clearer,
think of the options available as falling along a set of Cartesian
coordinates where the vertical axis divides those values which are
asserted as actual from those values asserted as merely virtual,
while the horizontal axis divides those values which are asserted as
universal from those which are asserted as merely local such that
the resulting options available appear thusly:
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