Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics 2004, 15-16

POLYGRAPH

NUMBER 15/16

AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE & POLITICS

IMMANENCE, TRANSCENDENCE, AND UTOPIA Issue Editors: Marta Hernandez Salvan and Juan Carlos Rodriguez

'f . . �.�IJ .

Jean-Luc Nancy

IMM/TRANS

Arturo Leyte

LEAVING IMMANENCE

Alberto Moreiras

I NFRAPOLITICS AND IMMATERIAL REFLECTION

.

Kenneth Surin

POST-POLITICAL CITIZENSHIP

Slavoj Ziiek

THE BECOMING-OEDIPAL OF GILLES DELEUZE

Alain Badiou

THE FLUX AND THE PARTY

Bruno Bosteels

LOGICS OF ANTAGONISM

Mladen Dolar

KAFKA'S VOICES

Alenka ZupanCic

INVESTIGATIONS OF THE LACA NIAN FIELD

Robert Spencer

TRADITION AND TRANSCENDENCE

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

IMMANENCE AND (ITS) INTERRUPTION

POLYGRAPH

NUMBER 15/16 (2004)

CONTENTS

J)�-' S ') f70Ib/f� -j ! �

AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE It POLITICS

IMMANENCE, TRANSCENDENCE, AND UTOPIA Introduction: Neither Immanence nor Transcendence

Issue Editors: Marta Hernandez Salvan and Juan Carlos Rodriguez

3

Marta Hernandez Salvan Imm/Trans

11

Jean-Luc Nancy -

Editorial collective

Laura Balladur Janelle Blankenship Rodger Frey Simon Krysl Alex Ruch Abby Salerno Matthew Wilkens Advisory board

Rey Chow, Brown University Manthia Diawara, New York University Jane Gaines, Duke University Lawrence Grossberg, UNC-Chapel Hill Michael Hardt, Duke University Fredric Jameson, Duke University Wahneema Lubiano, Duke University Andrew Ross, New York University General sponsors

Duke University

Program in Literature The Center for International Studies Marxism and Society Group Graduate and Professional Student Council

UNC-Chapel Hill

University Program in Cultural Studies

Acknowledgements

The follOWing departments and programs of Duke University have generously supported the publication of Polygraph 15/16: English, Film and Video, Latin American Studies, Romance Studies, and Women's Studies.

Information

Polygraph is published annually. Send all

Leaving Immanence: Art from Death

correspondence to

Arturo Leyte

Polygraph Art Museum 104, Box 90670 Duke University Durham, NC 27708 Fax: +1 919 684 3598 E-mail: [email protected]

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

Post-Political Citizenship

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

59

Slavoj Zizek The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus

Distribution and Ubiquity Distribution. ISSN 1533-9793. Copyright © 2004 by Polygraph. All rights reserved. Individual authors retain copyright to their essays.

75

Alain Badiou Logics of Antagonism: ty" ar P e th d an x u Fl e h "T 's u io ad B in la In the Margins of A

On the cover

All images reproduced by permission of the artist.

47

Kenneth Surin

Polygraph is distributed through DeBoer

Spine: Elizam Escobar, Odiseo Paranoico (detail), c. 1986. Acrylic, collage, and text on canvas, ?" x 72" (repeated three times).

33

Alberto Moreiras

For more information, including the current call for papers and submission guidelines, see http://www.duke.edu/web/ polygraph.

Back: Elizam Escobar, Sujeto Muerto con Ceiba [Dead Subject with Ceiba Tree], 1992. Ink on paperboard, 10" x 1 2\4".

13

93

Bruno Bosteels •

Kafka's Voices

109

Mladen Dolar Investigations of th\ Lacanian Field: Some Remarks on Comedy and Love

131

Alenka Zupancic Tradition and Transcendence: Postmodernity's Entanglement in Immanence

Robert Spencer

1 47

Immanence and (Its) Interruption: Critical Reconstellations

Juan Carlos Rodriguez Contributors

169

Introduction: Neither Immanence nor Transcendence

193

Marta Hernandez Salvan

What is the primordial question of any possible political phi­ losophy today? This volume intends to open up the debate among some of the various philosophical tendencies that de­ rived from the different post- Marxisms of the seventies, and many other strands of thought that arose more directly from within poststructuralism and their endeavor to think through the crisis of the epistemological and political subject, as Ken­ neth Surin would have it. 1 Our present conjuncture is the result of the global dominance of neoliberalism and flexible accumulation, especially after the disappearance of the social­ ist regimes, and the end of a bipolar geopolitical order. One could thus claim that we now live in a post-ideological era dominated by an order of global flexible accumulation. Tak­ ing into account this conjuncture, it is perhaps not unfathom­ able to think that our post-ideological era has contributed to the disintegration of the political subject and to the withering of most of its former social practices of emancipation. The intention behind this volume is to create a dialogue between two philosophical traditions in their current evolution and their attempt at theorizing the present political conjuncture. Namely, the ontological Idealist tradition that begins with Kant and the Spino zan immanentist ontology.2 Let me briefly summarize the theoretical questions raised by each one of these traditions, because it is key to understand that the po­ litical discourses that stem from each one of the two tradi­ tions have a fundamental theoretical split whose origin can be found in their ontological premises. I. Freedom and Necessity

The Kantian Idealist tradition posits a fundamental ontologi­ cal duality between being and reason, and between freedom and necessity. Natural laws are beyond human reason, where­ as the moral law depends on individual choice. This is why every being is at the same time free and bound. The principle

..

Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

Marta Hernandez Salvan

Introduction

4

of difference is based upon this paradox between the freedom of moral law and the nece�s t: imposed by natural laws. The philosophical quandary posed by the im­ . . possIbIlIty of bnngmg together freedom and necessity in synthetic reason becomes a key i �sue for the Idealist tradition that comes after Kant. In this sense, Hegelian . dIalectics are an attempt to integrate the necessary laws of reason and freedom in the name of th� Absolute Sp rit. The concept of absolute spirit in fact manages to encom�ass the Idea of n ecesslty and freedom at once, by positing an entity which is . not subjected to a supenor power outside of it. What this means is that the absolute spirit is like ant s transcen e�tal subject, a being whose reason is not contingent upon the arbltranness of a dlVlne power. It is an entity whose existence is indepen­ dent of any o �her cause . Y �t, at t e same time the Absolute Spirit is determined by natural laws msofar as .It IS subjected to the laws of time and space. This means, fo � example, that it can be subjected to a notion of time defined as a progression (bIrth/death) or as a teleology. This is precisely why for Arturo Leyte and Jean -Luc Nancy only the event of death can interrupt the dialectical determination of the work of art. For Schelling, as we know, the absolute was represented by art. For Leyte and Nancy the work of art produces a space of absolute identification between the observer and the work of art that can only be interrupted temporarily by the ev�nt of death. In Glas, Jacques Derrida's book on Hegel, Derrida makes use of the stam a� a �et�phor to escribe the fact that the determinant limit of a concept is almost mfimte m Hegel. In the same work, Derrida suggests that there is a parallel , between Hegel s Aujhebung and the Lacanian notion of castration, and that both of them have a paradoxical nature. Castration is a process that leads to a subjection to the law of the father, the symbolic law; yet at the same time, it is also a process of subjectification. How to recover the spatial and temporal dimension of difference between free­ dom �nd determination? How to think about difference? How to think about sin­ gulanty? How to capture the spatio-temporal dimension of interruption of the ab­ solute? These are some of the fundamental questions that we have inherited from the Kantian Idealist tradition. Most importantly, these are some of the essential qu�stions guiding the articulation of our contemporary political theories. Derrida . mamtal�s that Hegel's logic cannot be deconstructed conceptually, because that would �lmply be a conceptual displacement of the dialectical logic from an outside. Such dIsplacement could only take place from a transcendental power outside the structure. Yet, neither Derrida nor Deleuze would ever accept the existence of a �ranscendental power o�tsi e the structure. The dialectical logic can thus only be l�terrupted by an excluslOn mherent in the formation of the structure. Such exclu­ SlOn can only exist as an excess:

�

�

�

� :

�

�

�

II n'�st �as sur q�'o� intervienne conceptuellement dans sa logique. Pour Ie falre 11 fa�dralt deplacer conceptuellement l' articulation conceptuelle­ : chez lUl mamfeste-entre Aufhebung, castration, verite, loi, etc. II faut faire apparaitr � des forces de resistance it la negativite speculative, et que ces for­ , ces de reSIstance ne constituent pas it leur tour des negativites relevables ou relevantes. En somme un reste qui ne soit pas sans etre un neant: un reste qui ne

5

soit.4 For Derrida there is no possibility to interrupt the logic of the absolute or of the law from a conceptual point of view, for that would also be a conceptual refram­ ing of the notion of the law. The very difficult task that is left to us, is a demand to find the possibility to resist negative speculation with a non subsumable negativ­ ity. I believe that this is, for example, the task at hand in Alberto Moreiras's essay, "Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection:' Departing from the imperial sovereignty of the Spanish Inquisition as an example of a biopolitical procedure to ensure that people cooperate in their own domination, Moreiras's essay questions the possibili­ ties for the suspension of a biopolitical narration of history in relation to the pos­ sibilities of immaterial labor. In order to articulate his response, Moreiras takes issue with Mauricio Lazzarato's notion of immaterial labor. Lazzarato thinks that there are two ways to look at the relationship between immaterial labor and production. Immaterial labor can be caught within the capital relation and therefore reproduce the structures of domination. On the other hand, immaterial labor may create a new relationship between production and consumption and promote values that could never be normalized by the apparatus of command within the system of production. Both responses are nihilistic in nature, which is also to say that they are messianic. Moreiras takes Lazzarato's proposition seriously in seeking to understand whether immaterial labor marks or fails to mark the final subsumption of living time into labor power. He then argues that there are two fundamental uses of history. For him, the biopolitical use of history is the sovereign use of history, the one that allows us to understand that if history is always a biopolitical history, then there is no outside to the biopolitical relation to history. The second use of history is what Moreiras calls a useless use, the infrapolitical use of history. "This use without use-says Moreiras­ has to do with un-working the determinations of the first use. If the characteristic procedure of the first use of history is the capture of life by the political, the capture of life by the sovereign relation, the characteristic procedure of the second use is the interruption of the principle of sovereignty, the unworking of the biopolitical, the deproduction of the use of history:' Is the uncanny power of Nancy's medusa as poignantly terrifying as the useless use of history? It is precisely this brief and sud­ den emergence of the Lacanian Real what opens up the possibility of interruption of the historical structure. As we know, the Lacanian Real is the inherent exclusion of the symbolic structure, the excess of the structure. The Real is, in Bruno Bosteels's words, the point of the impossible that vertebrates the symbolic. Yet, the Real can never be taken as a radical exteriority, it is always an intrinsic exteriority. The same goes for the radical-democratic orientation, which is based on the essential lack of the social bond. Such lack is always an inherently intrinsic exteriority of the power structure, rather than a transcendental exterior force. Radical democracy is based on the necessary and impossible fullness of society. Therefore there is a lack, something which is present and absent at the same time. The primary presence of such a lack articulates itself through empty signifiers, and the hegemonic operation consists in a discursive articulation of those signifiers to wider discursive totalities. We can thus conclude that none of these logical operations are ever based on the existence of a ..

6

Introduction

transcendental force determining the structure from a radical outside. II. An Absolute without Negation

This volume also intends to take issue with the Spinozist-Deleuzian notion of poli­ tics as a field of pure immanence. In their contemporary version these politics are embodied by the two complementary logics of Empire and the Multitude as they are outlined in the two respective homonymous books co-authored by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their critiques of Empire, most scholars have focused on the limitations of the power of resistance of the multitude. In this volume for example, Bosteels alludes to the theoretical challenges of articulating the multitude, and he points out that one should try to relate it to some of its historical equivalents such as the mass or the people. Bosteels argues that the concept of the multitude belongs to a long genealogy that is defined as what according to Badiou is "a canonical state­ ment, which holds that the masses make history, posits in the masses precisely this vanishing irruption of which political philosophy only tells the always belated, and always torn storY:' 5 The problem with the notion of the multitude as it appears to be grounded in Paolo Virno's account-Bosteels argues-is that having forsaken with the subject altogether it seems almost impossible to envision how such a politics could theorize about a political actor. I would add further that the problem rather lies in the dangerous liaison between the notion of the multitude and the mass, which is by the way the ghost that returns in Badiou's acrimonious article "The Flux and the Party:' As we know, the goal of the multitude is like the goal of any other mass that fights for its emancipation to form a community of sorts. What differenti­ ates the multitude from its predecessors is that it has no telos. One could argue that the multitude is a radically new concept insofar as it distances itself from the Chris­ tian images of so many other emancipatory discourses in which the goal is to tran­ scend the corruptions of the world by arriving at a pristine paradise. The multitude is rather a political space organized within the ontology of Empire: "The name that we want to use to refer to the multitude in its political autonomy and its productive activity-Hardt and Negri tell us-is the Latin term posse-power as a verb, as activ­ ity. . . . [Plosse is the machine that weaves together knowledge and being in an ex­ pansive, constitutive process:'6 In this sense, it is true that the multitude is a notion that bears no relation with the Leninist idea of the vanguard, nor with any anarchic notion of mass. It bears similarities nevertheless to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the multiple singular potentialities insofar as they are generated in the virtual field, which is the field of production. More important, however, is to note that from the ontological point of view, Empire and the Multitude form a singular substance. What is a singular substance? This notion is genealogically linked to Deleuze and especially to Spinoza. The substance for Deleuze is distinct and not different, because the notion of difference entails a numerical distinction. Numbers set limits and therefore they are defined by an external cause. The numerical distinction in Deleuze is not real, it is only a formal distinction because the substance can only have an internal cause. This actually emphasizes, according to Hardt, the fact that Deleuzian difference is not relational. Against Descartes and following Spinoza, Deleuze wants to eliminate any negative aspect of the real distinction. Negativity

Marta Hernandez Salvan

7

is inherent in the relational character of difference for Descartes, whereas for De­ leuze and also for Negri and Hardt "distinction would be a better term for defining the singularity of being" precisely because the notion of distinction as they under­ stand it does not have a relational character? The singularity of being is key to un­ derstanding the ontology of the multitude. "How can we conceive of the absolute without negation?" asks Hardt.8 According to Hardt, only the Spinozan principle of the singularity of being is conducive to an understanding of an absolute without negation. As we argued above, singularity is not defined by an external cause, and therefore it does not have any limitations that may define it by negation. A lack of a negative determination does not make singularity indeterminate, because accord­ ing to Deleuze, singularity is determined by an internal cause. "The singular-says Hardt-is remarkable because it is different in itself'9 "It would be false, then-he adds-to set up an opposition between singular being and determinate being. Sin­ gularity is and is not determination. In other words, Spinoza's be�ng, the unique sub ­ . stance, is determinate in the sense that it is qualified, that it is dIfferent. However, It is not determinate in the sense of being limited:'l0 What follows from this is that the principle of immanence has to exclude negativity because negativity is that which limits being, that which makes it tend towards transcendence. Hardt explains at length how Deleuze's substance is singular and internally de­ termined, or remarkable and absolute. According to Hardt the fact that Deleuze ad­ dresses determination is what allows his theory to be nondialectical. He also shows how immanence denies any form of eminence or hierarchy in being due to the principle of the univocity of the attributes, which requir� s th�t bei�g be expressed equally in all of its forms. Hardt argues that what Deleuzes explanatIOn makes clear is that Spinoza's ontology, a combination of immanence and expression, is not sus­ ceptible to the Hegelian critique of the dispersion and the "progressive loss" of be­ ing. Therefore both empire and the multitude are an all-inclusive substance where no subjectivity stands outside. Since we can only imagine the multitude as an abso­ lute, however, it is not clear how we may differentiate it from the mass. In this sense, I would tend to agree with Badiou's analysis of Deleuze's ontology.l1 Badiou argues that Deleuze is rather a philosopher of the metaphysics of the One, and not a phi­ losopher of the multiple. To reach the one, is what Badiou calls the democracy of de­ sire: "Une seule et meme voix pour tous Ie multiple aux milles voix, un seul et meme Ocean pour toutes les gouttes, une seule clameur de l'Etre pour tous les etants:'12 If we only hear the unique and absolute sound of one voice, how could we account for the singularity of the voice or for the lack of it? If there is only one voice, is there only one desire? Whose desire is it? How can we tell the progressive desire from the non progressive one? In this sense, it is important to remember Surin's essay, a� d . of the ThIrd especially his final conclusion, in which he criticizes the pragmatIsm Way and argues for the need to trace a non-negotiable line between the left and the right. If this is true, it seems that the multitude is a dangerous concept. Although, if we were to push this issue a little bit further, one could also argue that given our present conjuncture it might be necessary to redefine what do we understand by the left. That is precisely what Slavoj Zizek accomplishes in his essay on Deleuze. Zizek's article is a very nuanced critique of Deleuze, in which he praises the first ..

8

Marta Hernandez Salvan

Introduction

Deleuze of the Logic of Sense and criticizes his intellectual alliance with Felix Guat­ tari. Zizek argues that Deleuze's ontological system relies on two divergent logics, the logic of Becoming and the logic of Being. The logic of sense and the immate­ rial becoming as sense-event poses a radical gap between generative processes and their immaterial sense-effect. Sense-event is thus a sterile space, where nothing is produced. On the other hand, Deleuze posits the logic of becoming as production of Beings. Zizek makes a Lacanian reading of Deleuze against the grain, in which he draws a parallelism between Lacan's objet petit a and Deleuze's quasi-cause. The notion of quasi-cause is what prevents a regression into reductionism by arguing that in every determination there is an excess. Zizek's intent is to privilege Deleuze's logic of sense and thus to show that such logic is embedded in a materialist geneal­ ogy, rather than an idealist one. In this task Zizek shows how Deleuze's quasi-cause goes through the same inherent process of contradiction as Hegelian actualization. Through his Lacanian reading of Deleuze, Zizek shows how the quasi-cause plays the role of the phallic signifier and how Deleuze's last project stems from an ide­ alist argumentation because it argues that a virtual intensity generates a material reality. Through a coup de force Zizek then shows that the category of the sense­ event has its own autonomy, and that this is what proves Deleuze's real compromise with materialism. He thus proves that Deleuze and Guattari's leftist organization of molecular groups stems from an idealist subjectivism, whereas the sterility of the sense-event is indeed the real site for a political struggle: "What if the domain of politics is inherently 'sterile; the domain of pseudo-causes, a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality?"'3 Doesn't the sterile domain of pseudo­ causes function in the same logical manner as Moreiras's infrapolitical use of history or Nancy's work of art? The dull, dingy, and uncertain obstacle that terrifies the philosopher is certainly present in most of the theoretical accounts to be found in this issue. This is certainly terrifying, especially if our contemporary political theory cannot grapple with the uncertainty of such terror. This is especially pressing now, more than ever, in the wake of this past U.S. presidential election. It is now, I believe, that we are left with the difficult and urgent task of defining what the left is today, for us, for all of us. •

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1

Kenneth Surin, "Post-Political Citizenship;' in this issue.

2

Both Kenneth Surin and Arturo Leyte give very good accounts of the genealogies of these two philosophical traditions in this issue.

3

Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974), 20.

4

Ibid., 53.

5

Bruno Bosteels, "Logics of Antagonism: In the Margins of Alain Badiou's 'The Flux and the Parti" in this issue.

6

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 407.

7

Michael Hardt, An Apprenticeship in Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 60.

8

Ibid., 62.

9

Ibid., 63·

10 Ibid., 67· 11 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: La Clameur de l'are (Paris: Hachette, 1997). 12 Ibid., 20.

Deleuze;' in this issue. les Gil of pal edi -O ing om Bec e "Th ek, Ziz voj Sla 13

•

9

Imm/Trans Jean-Lue Naney

I tried to write for you a very short essay on your theme, "im­ manence and transcendence:' I give up because the topic is necessarily elusive. If indeed immanence designates being subsisting in itself [en soi], this being defines in and of itself an exterior against which it subsists autonomously. Sub-sist­ ing [sub-sister] implies being situated beneath some other thing. A substance is substance of . . . that of which it is a sub­ stance, and, as the case arises, of its accidents. A subject sub­ jeetum is subject of . . . its acts, its states of consciousness, etc., unless it has become in a sense forgotten, "subject" to the authority that rules over it. As subsistence, immanence opens onto an inevitable exterior. On the contrary, transcendence designates not the sub­ ject but the act, the movement that crosses the limits of sub­ sistence. But we have just seen that substance opens itself beyond its limits, risking its own subsistence: if it no longer opened, it would dissolve rather than remain poised on its acts and attributes. But the transcendental act happens nowhere, because outside substance only the order of the act exists, hence some­ thing of transcendence itself, or the order of the attribute, it­ self accidental and inconsistent. Transcending can be nothing but a tautology: transcendence transcends, and leads to noth­ ing. (One sees then that immanence immanates [immane], nothing more.) If transcendence leads to transcendence, it is immanent to itself. If immanence subsists as henchman without either acts or overtures, it dissolves in itself. On either side, a radical and absolute implosion of the thing or notion exists. Transcen­ dence immanatizes itself [s'immanentise] , like a bad infinite running behind its ghost, immanence undoes itself, like a rot­ ting corpse. Ghost and rot are the last two and unending figures of transcendence and immanence. Neither one exists. Existing, existence, ignores ghosts and rot, two ways to represent death as a state. But death is not a state. Death is not: as such it can -

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Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

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ImmlTrans

emerge, as indeed it does emerge. Death, mere death removes any speculation on "immanence" and "transcen­ dence:' In death, substance or act disappear. Simultaneously, however, death forms the only passage of subsistence outside itself. Subsistence rids itself of the envelope that maintains it subsisting (thus subsistence rids itself of that under which it sub­ sisted) and develops into ek-sistence, or into "sistence" outside itself. Into insistence, so to speak. Either within or through death (for death is but a slim barrier) the "sisting" insists far from any sub-sistence or con-sistence. "Transcendence" now be­ comes "immanence;' turned inside out like the finger of a glove. I could say as much for what we call the "work of art:' How do we recognize such a work? Only by the following: That faced with it, we do not stay faced, but we meet, we strike, we are struck, we lose our envelope just as this thing, the work, loses its own-its forms, its mannerisms [ manieres]. We develop within it as it does within us. We enter and exit. We are always in this in-between [entre-deux] of it and us. Rather quickly we understand there is about as much an "it" as there is an "us" (or "me"). There is-There is only reality that neither immanates nor transcends: that's the obstacle-the good-obstacle or the bad-obstacle, but the chock, the chocking obstacle against what is neither within nor without, but an erected barrier: death, birth, love, spoken word [parole] . There we strike, we are struck. We do not remain in ourselves, we do not leave ourselves. Just in between: we get a bump, a bruise, a blood clot. Being gets out of there swollen, tumescent, distended. Neither fluid such as water immanent to water, nor leaping such as a dolphin transcending waves. Rather dull, dingy and uncertain like a Medusa between two waters. Admittedly, that Medusa terrifies the philosopher . •

Translated by Laura Balladur. The original French text is available on the Polygraph Web site at http;llwww.duke.edulweblpolygraph.

Leaving Immanence: Art from Death Arturo Leyte

I

When, in concluding his Critique ofPractical Reason and sum­ ming up his vision of reality, Kant expresses admiration for only two things-"the starry sky above me and the moral law within me"l-surely he is drafting the final such conceptual image in a terminal line of thought. Indeed, just a few years later the image will come to define an exhausted territory to which Kant will never return.2 Today we might recognize the territory as that of "difference": the difference between, vari­ ously, "nature" and "spirit"; "necessity" and "liberty"; "nature" and "history" or, why not, the difference between the ancient metaphysical binaries of being and thinking. But if this is the case, Kant's elegant statement turns out to be at the same time a requiem for difference. In fact, his philosophy overall may be interpreted as the last concerted attempt to reconstruct a constitutive difference within human reason, locating the le­ gality of the physical uni,:,erse above this reason; moral legal­ ity within it. Yet if something like Kant's cumulative philosophy can be understood in this endeavor, it is because in it Kant already both perceives and attempts to avert a danger: philosophy's transformation into "critique" coincides with this move. Cri­ tique is then marshaled against totalizing reason precisely be­ cause the former presumes an irreconcilable duality between "practical reason" and "theoretical reason;' in turn further divided into sensibility and understanding: that is, critique presupposes that philosophy itself can be seen as the result of a fundamental duality between the empirical and the tran­ scendental, which is to say between the ontic and the onto­ logical. Yet, crucially, a cominon territory is lacking for the conjunction of these two: difference remains difference, and no ancillary third sector is ceded space between the two. This does not mean that there cannot be unity within the differ­ ence marking, for example, practical and theoretical reason or understanding and sensibility, but merely that this unity Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

14

Leaving Immanence

cannot be known-cannot, indeed, be a subject for philosophy. As Kant writes about the constitution of knowledge in the introduction to his first Critique, the two branches-sensibility and understanding-have a "common root:' "unknown" to us.3 This "unknown" character is owed not to human limitation, but is, rather, a facet of the very constitution of reason as finite reason. The unity of reason remains beyond the possibilities of knowledge. This is not the place to rehearse how the idealist interpretation of Kant, against himself, did away with difference as constitutive of critical philosophy. Suffice it to say that from Idealism onward the field will be dominated by attempts to encounter precisely the very unity so impossible for Kant-that between the starry sky (Na­ ture) and moral law (Spirit). Indeed, such unity will come to define philosophy. The idealism of Schelling and Hegel begins by calling this sought-after unity "the abso­ lute:' rendering philosophy simply the research into the constitution and exhibition of this absolute. Both theoretical and practical strategies are involved, to a certain extent, in this pursuit, in very different ways: for underpinning the theoretical in­ vestigation of the absolute will be the problem of its real apparition in the world, such that the absolute, far from being merely an idea-as the term "Idealism" might suggest -is in fact the problem of its own exhibition or realization, which in the last instance is neither purely theoretical nor purely practical. In or around 1800 (that is, just a few years after Kant had marveled at his starry sky and moral law) a still young Schelling proposed an initial name for this much debated and troubling territory where unity-where the absolute-was speculated to reside. This name, which from the very beginning aspired to designate very real grounds, was Art.4 If Descartes, at the dawn of modernity, found God to be the only link between the res extensa (nature, the starry sky) and the res cogitans (law); if, much earlier, the discipline uniting the physico-natural and the ethico-human had been Logic, here, in a rupture of modern tradition, the role of God and Logic was taken up, however provisionally, by Art. This was possible because the artwork marries the unconscious activity of nature and the conscious activity of the spirit, producing a unity that is the work itself. The artwork thus unites the two spheres while retaining an independence from its constitutive parts, an independence that is, moreover, objective-objective in the sense that it is physical, material, visible. The work of art is thus not only the union of the natural and the spiritual, but also of the material and the formal, the real and the ideal. In short, art becomes the absolute under a different name, insofar as it unites the productivity of nature with the activ­ ity of the spirit. Art is, then, production. If all this is true from an Idealist standpoint, a single problem presents itself: the absolute realized as art is at once very real and unknowable, for there can be no concept of it. The absolute becomes the work of art and material synthesis of the universal and the singular, and yet it cannot be known. The history of Idealism will be the history of just this conquest of the absolute, beyond Kantian difference. This conquest-or the path to the absolute, as Hegel will explicate it5-will itself also be the absolute, the medium within which all possibilities are brought into play. And if this absolute is identified with a unity located, at the turn of the nineteenth century, in art, but also with a totality to be procured,6 it seems plausible to imagine that this

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conquest of the absolute-itself nothing other than conquest-might be realized by politics as well as by art. Conquest of the absolute-which amounts to a demand that the absolute be realized-is effected by permeating not just intermediary space (the "between" bridging the starry sky and moral law), but all space, with a single aim of assuring that the absolute prevail as that which it is, ab-solutum, detached [des-ligado] from everything, devoid of relation with anything. This occupation of space simultaneously constitutes the liquidation of difference: the starry sky and the moral law are forced to fit within the same unity. The unity is the horizontal line of time, where there is neither above (starry sky) nor below (moral law within), but rather "history" moving from nature (itself the transit from the inorganic to the organic) to spirit (transit from mythical forms of consciousness to self-consciousness.) In other words: history or transit or unity coinciding with what is; with being, never again to be understood as a substance pitted against a thought. Substance and thought rather meet, however violently at times, in this line or history outside of which nothing can be, nor can be produced. Substance and thought, or ideas and things, come to be understood only as elements or materials, at times discrete, at times indistinguishable from this absolute. This is the absolute that may be termed "subject": that is, that which subtends, identified simultaneously as unity (again, between starry sky and moral law, between nature and spirit) and as totality (all the singular cases, all differences, are elements of the everything). To propose a subject at the margins or indeed outside of this absolute (again, subject) is, then, a deceptive move obfuscating the transformative possibilities at­ tributed that subject. The difficult truth of the matter is that this "horizontal" ab­ solute, which eliminated the "verticality" within which was still recognizable the above of the sky and the below of the human, could be called history, even "human history:' For in this axial switch, time has been reduced to the same infinite line of history. Time here is the time of the line and of the conquest of this line, until even this distinction becomes irrelevant. In this blurring oflines (indiferencia], and from the moment any segment of the line is made equal to and interchangeable with any other, even the very infinitude of the line may be suspended without altering a thing. Any given segment can come to represent the everything, just as one thing becomes absolutely interchangeable with another because it represents the value of the totality. Thus the very notion of the "other" may dissipate; and without an other, how is one to speak of the self [el uno?] The singular, then, is to be only "one instance" of the absolute, such that the singular can only continue representing and reiterating the absolute through the construction of series, a serial reproduction that needs to take account of [de cuenta de] this inexhaustible absolute. But the absolute turns out to be the result, not the theme of such serial reproductions; better, the absolute is the serial reproduction of instances. So what value can the singular have? What singular is contained in the work of art? And what singular results from a political action? Can one, indeed, speak of singularity? If art and politics, via different paths and perspectives, come to instantiate the absolute (even more so, perhaps, than contemporary science, which rather lives in this immediate identification with reality), then the two must contain a tendency

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to instantiate the absolute such that all becomes art and politics: thus one witnesses a simple urge to convert all artistic activity or political action into yet one more move of transformation, as well as a more elemental conflation of art and politics as soon as the territory of difference (the "between") is characterized by an inability to distinguish between starry sky and moral law. Political acts, including military ac­ tion and war in general, can consequently also be considered supreme works of art, because both are realizations, performances. If such equivocations were evident in the aftermath of so fearsome an event as 9/11, perhaps overlooked was the fact that the inability to differentiate testified to a simultaneous indifferentiation between the real and the ideal, an indifferentiation which Idealism held up, let us not forget, as the very realization of the absolute. Hence the current difficulty in determining what constitutes a work of art, and, sim­ ilarly, what constitutes a true political action or decision, with everything oflate be­ come a potential art object or intervention or political gesture. The extension of the legal into all aspects of life, including those most private, is only one confirmation of the latter: surely for a long time now absolute seriality has meant that even sexual relations between individuals have the potential to be juridically catalogued (hence, adjudicated) or to be considered a work of art, however bad, and to be exploited as such, albeit only as pornography. Indeed, it is not pornography's industrial, mercan­ tile expansion within the (still?) private sphere, but rather its interiorization which constitutes its triumph, a triumph that is nothing more than a signal, at times bright, at other times dim, of the absolute: that is, of the subject, of that which is; that which desires to impose itself objectively. Given all this, should we be surprised by the multiplication and leveling of ar­ tistic genres? Indeed, the ever-greater blurring of painting and photography or of photography and architecture, as well as the almost total lack of distinction between "things" (which can no longer be considered simply as real) and what constitutes le­ gitimate materials for sculptures, in turn often realized as "performances" or instal­ lations, is merely proof of this bleeding of everything into everything else. Proof too of that ultimate confusion (read identification) between art and politics summed up in the creation of a sculptural masterpiece from the wreckage of a downed airline (a political act?) in which three hundred persons perished? Besides, of course, the palpable good fortune of not having become the fiery stuff of the event, the spectator's purchase on the crash consists only in televised im­ ages and remains in a museum. But to what end such a piece? To reflect on terror? Is not the very distinction terror/reflection already evidence of a fundamental error in not comprehending that no thought remains outside terror's sphere-which is, again, nothing but the line or absolute that recursively demands serial action, be it as artistic production or political action? If, indeed, the only exception is owed to a capricious kismet that selects some people to be spectators of art (e.g., the remains of the crash) and others, victims (whose photographic remains alone are salvage­ able), perhaps the logical conclusion is already anticipated in the act (artistic or political?) of making the body and its transformations the supreme work of art. So, anyway, seems to be the case of the work of Italian -Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abromovic, who proclaims her own body to be the best and only

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available material.s In this perhaps scandalous, perhaps honest attempt to link the materials of art with the body of the artist, and the observer of the artwork with the work itself, is revealed a recognition of inescapable destiny, as well as the intuition, perhaps, that the final move remains the definitive assimilation of the death-event as material for art (as it already may be for spectacle) and, to be sure, for politics. This does not mean that photographic or material memento mari, like those from the Lockerbie crash, would in some quasi-archaic sense exemplify art's ultimate ex­ pression, but rather that in death itself resides this artistic reality, whenever death, both actually transpired or recounted, ceases to be something private and becomes a political, or at least a statistical, phenomenon (as if there were a difference). Earlier, the reality of death had perhaps defined the "between" of the Kantian starry sky and moral law, for this differentiation was nothing more than the expres­ sion of finitude, comprehended through death. Yet it is also the case that at the core of the Kantian project stirred a longing to reproduce nature's infinitude and regularity in the specter of "the moral law in me:' particularly as these qualities were brought into relief against the perceived fragility and vulnerability of human action. And it is Idealism, as we have seen, that will claim to construct that human infini­ tude which we now identify with repetitive artistic activity and infinitely repeated political actions that may well be, on the whole, little more than mere administra­ tion. The fact that Idealism finds in art, albeit via contorted paths, a synthesis of the absolute and a substitute for logic9 should not imply a consequent demonization of art. The question merely arises of how it happened that art came to play such a role. A quick answer is that art was at least partially so enabled because it assumed responsibility for the recuperation of that enormous "empirical reign" to which Hegel alludedlO in 1801; because it was able to conquer and elevate to the status of pure thing an empirical reality that had previously appeared only as the shadow of the concept. Yet this absolute elevation would paradoxically end up liquidating the thing, now become "merely" a work of art-that is to say, merely a copy, pace Plato's hoary legacy. That copies would come to so constitute reality as to appear to be its true elements is an outcome of the same process by which every thing, its use value irrelevant when not reviled, has become the stuff of exchange. Still, it was not possible to banish fully from the core of artistic or political activ­ ity a revolutionary element aspiring to transform reality, without the simultaneous recognition that such a transformation was already at work outside of all conscious action. Once the line is recognized as the subject (i.e., the absolute), the details of who it is that possesses knowledge [canace1, who decides or who creates becomes derivative, turning the revolutionary element emanating from art or politics into the most active operator of the absolute, structured by its destiny: an immanent, unlimited time that excludes nothing. Could not one well understand the revolu­ tionary transformation at work in late nineteenth century painting, particularly that produced by Cezanne and the Impressionists onward (inheritors of a Romantic and post-Romantic tradition dating to the work of Gericault), from this fatal perspec­ tive?" How indeed should these artists be understood, if not through Monet's obses­ sive series in which he reproduced, for example, the Cathedral at Rauen or Waterlil-

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Leaving Immanence

ies? What impossibility is concealed in the refusal to paint "in one fell swoop;' as it

were, the reality hidden in the cathedral or in the aquatic plants? If Velazquez or Rembrandt had chosen such themes, they would have somehow superimposed upon the reality of multiple perspectives a single, perhaps absolutely synthetic one.l2 But the Impressionists were without a single subject for painting, because in the intervening time all had become potential matter for art, which is to say there were no more "exemplary" themes. A pastoral scene, a cathedral, a dance, a street, any figure (card player, florist, bourgeois, prostitute, invalid) was equal fod­ der for art, because any thing now arose from and returned to the same immanent reality, which we might name, however grandiloquently, "time:' What the Impressionists painted was thus no longer a single thing, but an im­ age produced "in" time, impossible to reproduce without reproducing all its mo­ ments. Hidden in the grandiose transformation presumed by such painting was also a profound slavishness to the temporal reality the painting attempted to reproduce, as if to escape from such temporality were metaphysically impossible. And, to a certain extent, it was: because "metaphysically;' that is, beyond the reality presented us, is nothing. Everything remains on this side of a division for which "this side" no longer signifies one among many, but rather the "everything" Hegel identified with truth.'3 Did such painting actually constitute a triumph over classical art? If so, did the triumph consist in anything beyond responding to a new era? Of course, if it was a triumph, it was one indebted to an idealist philosophy, paradoxically buried, os­ tensibly "overcome" in the inversion of metaphysics undertaken by such apparently diverse figures as Compte and Marx, but whose result-the concept of absolute time-constitutes the original horizon from which emerges all political action and creative acts. Indeed, it is the burying of the difference between starry sky and moral law that yields the new time, now "absolutely" human; now, we might say, "imma­ nently" human, with respect to which one can and indeed must situate (a situating which in this context signifies production) "everything:' But this everything has, in turn, to be reduced from multiplicity and dispersion to the unity of immanence through the recognition of a common nature of all things, comprising: their com­ mon dependence on infinite time; their character as single moments within con­ tinual succession; their constitution as mere images fixed fleetingly amidst perma­ nent flux; and, finally, a recognition that every thing is produced only as part of an immanent ex/change of being( s) [cambio immanente del ser].'4 In short, something very similar to Marx's crucial observation in Capital that the true nature of things is not properly being but exchange value. In any case, the debate rages on within the arts, mainly because art aspires to encounter singularity and not merely interchangeable moments, or better, because art aspires to encounter "the moment:' Hidden in the obsessive creativity of Monet's repeated painting of the cathedral at Rouen and his reduction of the thing to dis­ crete moments throughout the day (morning, noon, evening) lies the danger of the simultaneous dissolution of singularity. Why, for example, choose only those par­ ticular moments (morning, noon and evening are, in the end, merely extra-tempo­ ral categories for fixing time) and not all the omitted moments between morning

19

and noon, and noon and evening? Hence the paradox that, if taken to its logical extreme, the Impressionist project (as illustrated to a certain extent in the Waterlil­ ies) produces the dissolution/multiplication via absolute fragmentation of the same reality the Impressionists intended to reproduce. Masked behind the obsession to paint reality, then, lies the obsession to reproduce the infinite capacity of the gaze that observes this reality; lies, indeed, the obsession to realize [darse cuenta de] ab­ solutely a regarding consciousness, unaware that in so doing consciousness itself, far from being grasped, succumbs to never-ending flux. Does art then truly rescue singularity? Or does it not rather confirm that the singular is merely an intranscendental moment, an excuse to reproduce the only reality that is, an infinite one that immanently reproduces itself without asking permission of anyone? Such questions hold within them art's liberatory potential, but also its potential enslavement to a reality no longer in possession of either a "beyond" or even of a characteristic theme to which to appeal for justification and legitimacy. Onto this uncertain terrain, unclear of whether reality can be known or transformed, or whether instead one simply reproduces a path towards a bad infinity within which singularity disappears, opens the twentieth century, whose true inauguration is difficult to date. In any case, the battles of the nascent twen­ tieth century derive from the Idealist project to realize the absolute; to achieve the indifferentiation between starry sky and moral law, between the natural and the human. Thus the century may have begun with the Impressionist endeavor, which, in struggling for a definitive singular image, finishes by unwittingly consuming the temporal absolute. Alternatively, one might pinpoint the century's beginnings in the exhaustive and anonymous labor of a Van Gogh who between 1888 and 1889 obses­ sively painted more than one hundred and fifty paintings, one of which in particular has been singled out. II

When, in 1899, Vincent Van Gogh painted his Starry Night,'5 surely he did not know how far he was from the aged Kant who had calmly marveled at his own "starry night" a hundred years before. But anyone who glimpses the painting today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York-that same city in which, for a few moments in 2001, history, politics, and art came together in a flash of violence and terror­ may perceive that Van Gogh's sky, rather than representing some Kantian Above, through a strange effect almost constitutes the foreground of the painting, making it difficult to distinguish an above and a below. The "below" in the painting indeed almost serves as an excuse to point out that the sky is not located above but rather to the fore, occupying our field of vision. No longer a celestial firmament, the sky is merely a figure differentiated from the earth by palette, not perspective, a distinc­ tion aimed to expose all difference as earthly. Starry Night does not return us to the serene, distant, Kantian sky, much less to ancient representations of a divine firmament. With its horizontal representation of sky and earth it seems rather to remind us that we are always already within the line of time. But the intense, concentrated, even optimistic rendering of sky and earth demarcates a decisive difference between the two spheres that also seems intended

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Leaving Immanence

to remind us that not everything is the same. Indeed, even the painting's impossible sky, next to a more conventional rendering of land, suggests that "sky;' albeit no longer the Kantian one, warrants distinction, even if everything now remains very much of this earth. It is not a suprasensible but a sensible sky, a sign that even in the sole world remaining to us, difference does exist and all is not absolute. Van Gogh's painting may perhaps also be interpreted as an unintentional invitation to exit the absolute, to leave the "being inside" that immanence signifies. It could, then, be a coming outside [un salir de dentro), not to go on to some "other" place, which in any case does not exist, but rather as a path of permanent leavetaking. In this sense, Starry Night may define a resistance. But of what does this resistance consist? In the same year that Van Gogh painted his Starry Night in Provence, a philoso­ pher was born in Germany who was to borrow from Van Gogh's ''A Pair of Boots" in an attempt to rescue a singular event "outside of" and "beyond" the absolute flux to which, nonetheless, Van Gogh himself was often attentive-namely, Martin Hei­ degger.'6 Heidegger's work, inflected by Van Gogh's, ever remains an articulation of a resistance that permits one to see things in another light. We should recognize this "other light;' in the face of the dark shadow of immanent absolute time, as the light of the starry night, and, therefore, as the light of death. If, from the perspective of the infinite, death can only be considered as a spuri­ ous moment or element, non-transcendental, accidental and disposable; if, from such a perspective, death is merely a defect that contradicts the light and transpar­ ency of the absolute, insistently demanding that everything appear, then Van Gogh's painting may also come, via different means, to recall this light of death, announc­ ing that life and death and all is at stake at least in a small difference in color: that if there is something singular, it will not be individual substance, but rather a lattice of sky and earth, and of artist (doubling as the figure of man more generally) and the gods who have disappeared.'7 The singularity of the painting eliminates any meta­ physical beyond because it parades this metaphysics before it, so that one may also see that there is nothing more and that, if a God is to be conjured at all, it will be through the struggle between the light of the sky and the darkness of the earth, so doing away with the tyrannical insistence underpinning science and industry that every thing appear. Only thus can art continue being art, distant from this insistent demand for ap­ pearance, for art as a reducible thing; singularity in service of the universal. But is the vague notion of some kind of singular outside of the universal indeed possible? That is, is any "singular" possible outside of the relationship singular-universal, if the universal itself can only be identified with the immanent absolute? If it is, such a singularity would have to have another name and above all another character. Yet again the same problem surfaces: if we are in the absolute-of which our partial, immediate and localized gaze is proof, we ourselves representing mere "instances" of this totality-how is it even possible to pose the question of an "other" that would not be at once another instance of the absolute? For to formulate, project or rec­ ognize an other, whether as an artwork or as a political act, might not be anything more than an inadvertent confirmation of the power of the absolute. It is quite possible that in a work of art like Starry Night a battle is being played

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out over whether such resistance can be successfully engaged or whether, on the contrary, the artwork merely indexes one more "instance" of the totality; whether through art the gaze may again recognize a thing in the wake of its reduction to a mere instance of the absolute, or whether this is no longer possible. But how, exactly, might a given artwork (painting, sculpture or architecture) better reveal a thing's own finitude? Only through an ability to reveal its "nothingness" [su nada): not "emptiness;' but what was described above as "the light of death;' or what might also now be termed "the time of death;' as opposed to that of the absolute. When Hegel declared the future (and so, in a way, the death) of art in his 182829 University of Berlin Lectures on Aesthetics, in which he deemed art to be "past;',8 he must have been aware of the advent of the reign of the absolute, within which the artwork would no longer appear as the sole, singular representation of the real. In other words, Hegel was conscious of the end of a metaphysics that had differentiated the sensible and the empirical portions of a concept (recall the still metaphysical Kantian separation of nature's sky and human law), for in the new metaphysical absolute the sensible is only a momentary expression [un momento) of this concept and has, therefore, only a subaltern and derivative characteristic. The death of art, it follows, is but one more example of the death of metaphysics, here understood as the disappearance of difference. But this means that if art hopes to mobilize itself against this disappearance of singularity, it has to produce a requisition for differ­ ence within itself. Yet this difference can no longer be the classical one of metaphys­ ics (namely, the difference between the sensible and the intelligible, between the thing and the idea), for in the wake of Idealism idea and thing have been melded into a new figure, containing both empirical and conceptual elements and bound up with the notion of infinite time. Indeed, in immanence, such shopworn metaphysi­ cal differences disappear. But what would a demand for difference look like when we are already within the time of the absolute? Hegel himself offers a clue, for even as he proclaimed art's eclipse he amended the meaning and reach of his judgment: faced with the death of art, he proposed death for art [la muerte para el arte) , or death in support of art [en favor del arte) , rephrased in the article's title as "art from death:' Hegel's amended formulation takes death to be a necessary condition of the very emergence of the singular "other" that, in turn, the artwork might reveal. This does not mean that death constitutes a theme within the artwork; rather, the formulation grants death­ which is not a concept, but not even really a fact or an act-its constitutive role in the emergence and consummation of the work of art itself. The mortal attributes of the artwork in the face of its immortalizing reduction to museum material would be only a weak expression, only one further consequence, of this principle. All this means that while it is not necessary that death appear in any one of its multiple representations in order to play so constitutive a role, it does define the status of the work, in the same way that death, for Hegel, truly defines the state of being. Still very far from his 1828 proclamation, yet the Hegel of the 1807 Phenom­ enology of Spirit seems, oddly, to lurk distantly behind the sense of death alluded to here: already in the Phenomenology he insists on the rupture and "unreality" of death ("the most dreadful")'9 as constitutive of the life of the spirit in the face of the •

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apparently absolute power of knowledge. Certainly not in the traditionally Idealist sense in which a figure must die in order for a self-opaque, in-itself absolute to be consumed; nor in the sense of some kind of permanent dialectical death that would function as a mechanism of reality. But Hegel did seem to endorse the notion of a decisive [de-cide} state of death, which is to say a "finite" state. We might understand this idea as the idea that death's revelation in a work of art demonstrates this negative, unreal component by exposing the work's intrinsic finitude more than any immanent process through which it might be supposed that death "must appear"-for if death must appear, than it is no longer death. The ac­ cession of an infinite time has, in deeming death a kind of necessary defect, made it into a statistically predictable obligation, simultaneously eroding its character as something constitutive. Yet a recognition of finitude will have necessarily to reckon with the insistence on death, which, in Hegelian terms, is decisive for the constitu­ tion of spirit. We do not have to agree fully with Hegel's understanding of spirit to make use of his characterization of death in articulating a philosophy and art based on a search for finitude beyond the dialectical relation finite-infinite (knowing full well we can­ not get outside the infinite horizon in which we always already find ourselves.) A philosophy of finitude must by definition contest the infinity of the vulgar notion of time as an uninterrupted continuum in which all occurs; yet this contestation must also be aware that neither art nor philosophy, however much they may wish to, can escape it. Finitude should, then, be understood provisionally as "interruption" -in­ terruption of the immanent process. But if by the interruption of immanence­ which itself constitutes a totality by permanently aspiring to the definitive union of all singular instances, to the universal happening of all elements-is understood the appearance of "transcendence;' transcendence must mean something very different than merely the opposite of immanence. Again we find ourselves moving between tyrannical opposites (finite/infinite, transcendence-immanence/singular-universal) that impede, if not make impos­ sible, our vision of a finitude, transcendence and singularity "outside of" or "on the margin of" that line in which infinity, immanence and the universal prevail. Tran­ scendence here does not then mean a "step towards the transcendent;' but rather "finitude" and "difference:' This finitude cannot but be that indicated by death, a fin­ itude that hurls us outward (including outside of the absolute). Because one cannot exit immanence ("indwelling, inherent; abiding in"), the all that is. One cannot exit through the door of death-which comes to mean, indeed, that there is no death, but only disappearance or redistribution. So death conceived in transcendence has to be a "definitive" death and not simply a reorganization of a positivity. It has to be, that is, unreality, negativity and fissure in the Hegelian sense, yet no longer in the service of an immanent totality. If one indeed may even speak of an "all;'20 it is in the sense in which death defines all existence, conferring upon it a unity: there is noth­ ing more total than the totality realized when death occurs, an occurrence which is the definitive sign that there is existence, and not merely a succession of moments. From these conclusions follows a familiar series of connections between the re­ ality of existence and of death, as if the two were inseparable. While we are accus-

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tomed by metaphysics to gather from the idea of "an infinite being" [un ser infinito} that something survives us beyond death, in fact, when being [el ser} remains linked to existence, such survival ceases to have meaning: not because in some trivial sense we cannot imagine that time continues incessantly, but because such an image proves nothing-or perhaps better, it shows up nothingness to be emptiness. Rather than engage this way of conceiving nothingness (as emptiness), an alternative ap­ proach would put the "work" back into work of art instead of considering it one more instantiation of infinite time. What would such an approach consist of? Might Van Gogh tell us? In Starry Night only the opposition between the paradoxically illuminated night skies and a darkened earth appears. Nothingness is neither the one nor the other, but rather the struggle between the two, a struggle which precisely does not appear, just as the affirmation of existence is sustained by a permanent tendency-or pos­ sibility-to desist. This possibility, for the Heidegger who observed the paintings of Van Gogh, is nothingness [Ia nada}. Nothingness, but not emptiness, which is the name the infinite reserves for declaring that outside of it effectively remains noth­ ing. Here then, in the phenomenological conception of existence, finitude means "transcendence": not searching for a "transcendent" beyond that would save us from finitude by the grace of the infinite, but rather transcendence as that movement which traverses, and thus unites, an origin and an end, a "from" whence a thing moves "towards" its arrival point. It describes the union of an origin and a desti­ nation, or perhaps it describes the "all"-an all of existence, which can only come delimited by death. Death is this nothingness that forever accompanies the "all" of existence and which is opposed to what it is not: infinite totality. So we are speaking here of two senses of totality: the "all" which delimits death, and the totality of being that, in modernity, appears as a succession of all figures, all referring to the same thing, among which are included consciousness, modes of production or states of nature. It should also be clear that only out of the first kind of totality could emerge an event able to resist immediate incorporation into the absolute. In truth, this event is existence, but what resistance can it put up when to exist has come to mean merely to transpire in time? Perhaps the artwork-and more concretely, Starry Night-re­ veals that we can understand "time" as something different than uninterrupted oc­ currence, but not as that moment "captured" in any painting either. We can instead realize that the moment contains within it the battle of time: time as battle [com­ bate.} Starry Night may convey the finitude of time, or time as event as opposed to time

as the mere succession of moments. Unlike others from the period, the painting does not depend on another version of itself representing the same reality minutes, hours or days later. Likely this is because the painting assumes that "reality itself" is a false metaphysical category even the most meticulous reproduction of series could not salvage. So representation is not necessary for finitude and the death inherent to it, just as time does not need representation. There is "death" precisely because there is no continuity, real or artistic, in that the painting reflects the struggle between day and night (and so represents a "moulting;' a change, but not serialization) and

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Arturo Leyte

between light, protagonist of the sky, and shadow, here the property of the earth. In the painting, as in Heidegger's phenomenology, death is not to be under­ stood as an event that will come and that can be registered. Similarly, time cannot be represented or conceptualized, for neither is it a fact or an action [un hecho] . Therefore any concept of being or time that concerns immanence remains absolutely suspended between parentheses. So too must be any utopic definition of the future (of the human project), realizable or not. If utopia is represented as a more or less happy destination or end, it is because an uninterrupted line has been assumed in which "it" (utopia, happiness, the supreme) can, or must, occur. But in that case a content has already been given to possibility, and time has, as it were, been forced to accommodate this possibility: the future has been forced. In such a scenario time ceases to be itself and becomes whatever the subject wants and decides must occur (although even this subject is more like a phantasm of a subject: he who wants to locate inside himself the process of what is; unlimited continuity.) Occurrence then ceases to be "being:' becoming instead an effect of whoever decides. If one takes this "he" to be the subject, necessarily invested with content, it be­ comes clear that utopia depends essentially upon "him:' perhaps because by subject we continue to understand a kind of consciousness (a mixture of thought and will) that reproduces the image of a Christian creator God whose understanding encom­ passes the course of the world. Such utopic thought does not shed, then, its divine nature, however human the utopia itself may be, in the same way that the reality of immanence remains an inferior (earthly, sensual, secularized) version of divin­ ity-only now it is not the suprasensible but the sensible pole of metaphysics that governs and directs. Indeed, to complicate things further, the metaphysical division between sensible and suprasensible is redoubled: if things, effects, finished products are primary, the suprasensible-metaphysical is the principle of productivity situated behind it all, the immanence according to which all occurs. At issue is the old Spi­ nozan distinction between a productivity (natura naturens) and a product (natura naturata), but elevated to a general understanding of totality, a totality outside of which nothing fits because outside of which is nothing-not even death, which ac­ cordingly turns out to be only the transformation of one product (e.g., the human being) into another (e.g., a corpse.) This transformation has nothing to do with the alternations of night and day or death and life. In the end, behind these changes lies no organizing metaphysical principle such as immanence, for there is no organizing principle beyond infinitude, itself not a principle but the sphere of difference: the difference between that which appears and that which underlies appearance. Heidegger variously names this sub­ tending something sense, temporality, and nothingness, names that refer to truth, understood as the struggle between the darkness of earth and the lightness of the sky. Yet these names-sense, temporality, and nothingness-are not principles in an organizing metaphysics or of a supreme cause; nor, indeed, are they principles at all, but merely names for finitude and its nature. For temporality signifies "ex-stasis:' that is, a permanent "being outside" (outside of immanence; dwelling outside the uninterrupted line of time, for example); time is not a process or substance within which things occur. Yet it is also a permanent sign that one cannot be in the present, 21

25

for the same reason that one cannot be in the future or in the past, because funda­ mentally "to be in" [estar en],22 with respect to time, is an impossible operation (just as, to be sure, it is impossible to "be in" the unconscious or "in" consciousness, no matter how much consciousness may seem an irreproachable, Cartesian given.) On the contrary, one must precisely understand another mode of being [estar] that is perhaps Being [ser] : namely, being as not-being, or ex-stasis, because only in this way can one attend to an original nature of time, that same nature that has re­ mained underlying and occluded in the vulgar conception of infinite time, at whose end we are to find an earthly paradise, be it divine or human. As its constitution is temporal, "finitude" means being outside this continual present, instead allowing in the movement from future to past the emergence of a present that consists of reiter­ ated not -being. One might point out paradoxically that if the most potent versions of utopias retain an element of the unrealizable (or at best of the not yet realized), they are no different than finitude, which constantly escapes us. Because finitude, perhaps, as that which is most foreign to immanence, turns out to be the unattain­ able itself. It is so in various ways: to begin with, finitude is conceived from an understanding of immanent time, a time only God (or the utopic human paradise in its political or aesthetic form) can interrupt. But finitude is above all unattainable because of its very constitution-because it is not a something, but rather a permanent not-be­ ing-anything, a permanent being-outside-of, indeed, it is unreality, negativity, dif­ ference. Not the difference among a multiplicity of things, but rather the difference between the insistence that things appear and prevail, and the temporal constitu­ tion of these things, which is this nothingness, this permanent desistance which ac­ companies even the most splendid moment of an objective thing. The nothingness negates any notion of objectivity, but by the same operation has already decentered any subjectivity in advance. Objectivity and subjectivity would in this way come to be only figures and products of immanence itself, products that could even achieve totality-but only because they no longer retain any relation with finitude, or because they run up against this other sense, delimited by death, 'of an "all" that does not aspire to totality but is found in the constant struggle against it. The triumph-if we wish to use such terminology-of this totality of being would constitute, paradoxically, the triumph of metaphysics, particularly according to that version which pits an infinite princi­ pal (immanence) against its ultimate products. So if "utopia" means anything, it must be a "privileged" finite product; a "state" as it were (a period or segment of the absolute) that through its own apotheosis would also come to coincide with that which formed it: that is, with the principle of immanence. Thus would be attained a supreme state, or the supreme triumph of a political figure, or even the apotheosis of multiplicity, in its multiple and multiplied truth, outside any kind of unity. But all this would continue to be a multiplicity of all moments: infinite presentation, or its equivalent in metaphysical terms, complete coincidence of multiplicity and unity. For when total multiplicity is conquered, a however-superfluous unity appears, accompanied by absolutely achieved reconcili­ ation-albeit a reconciliation that produces permanent fissures, wounds and cru-

26

Leaving Immanence

elty, which could well be taken as simple derangements necessary for the greater alignment. III

Two senses of the "all" may be gleaned from the argument thus forth: one in which "all" is understood to be the absolute totality of time, tied to an immanence borne of the liquidation of Kantian metaphysical difference, and another in which "all" is bound up with an insistence on death as the "all" of existence, eventually legible as constitutive of the artwork. The latter holds only so long as art continues to posit an arena in which finitude's possibility is entertained, and so long as it does not give itself over to the reproduction of the infinite. This will not be easy, since every pos­ sibility, including that of a call for finitude, emerges from the limitless continuum, from the all-one or the absolute. Behind any of these alternatives lies a different sense of truth that may or may not be disclosed in art; to find out to what degree it is one might turn to the con­ temporary art world and ask whether the reproduction of all possible moments and perspectives of a thing presents its truth any more adequately than does an exclusive and finite representation of the same. A finite representation, in its refusal to make "all" appear and in its recognition of the inability to represent the very nothingness that makes possible the artwork's emergence, permits something incomparable and irreducible to occur. Certain modern art experienced this contradiction in extreme forms: it is possible, for instance, that the Cubist attempt to represent reality masked a yearning for finitude that would come, nevertheless, to fatally reiterate infinity. That is, although the attempt to disarticulate figure in order to present all its per­ spectives within a single glance might appear a finite (non-serialized) rendering, one also detects a "Cubist" suspension of time in this move; an attempt to dominate time. But can, then, this suspension be interpreted as finitude? Picasso himself, having achieved a certain totality of discrete yet connected fig­ ures in Guernica, recognized that his series of Meninas was the only possible re­ sponse to Velasquez's painting of the same name, which had managed to convey in a single image the complex, conclusive demarcation of finitude. It would be precipi­ tous ' however, to suggest that Velasquez, in distinction from Picasso, was a painter of finitude. The matter is more complicated, because Velasquez, like the great classi­ cal artists, surely only hoped to represent in a finite way . . . infinitude, whose repre­ sentation might be called "beauty:' Today, when the only infinitude worth examin­ ing is that of an infinite time (and not of an imagined or created exterior reality), beauty-assuming that the term still has any meaning-signifies something un­ known. Irritation at this unknown provokes an attempt to master it. How? Perhaps by ensuring that "all"-all things, including the ugly-be beautiful. If the field of "design" -less internationalist than totalizing in its spread-was the first to strive for this ugly-duckling conversion by recuperating objects from daily life to expose them in their perfect cleanliness, if not beauty (witness the use of steel and polished materials), what has succeeded it may well be an attempt to make all (every thing; everything) into image. Image consequently predominates over things, in accordance with an immanence interested more in the images of

Arturo Leyte

27

substances than in the protean substances themselves, which for their part have lost any inherent resistance to such a transformation. Surely the reduction of reality to film is the great interiorized image of one sense of Being in which the director ought to figure as the supreme god. But since in the meantime God has died, the true director becomes, instead, the camera (industry), in whose service, to be sure, one finds screenwriters, technicians and actors. Given these parameters, the disappearance of the great cinema of auteurs, already a relic of the old twentieth century,23 comes as no surprise. Nor is it enough to say that cinema today is merely industry and business, because this very affirmation oc­ cludes the meaning of "industry" itself, whose best approximation can be found in the German concept of Ge-stell,24 serving in the cinematographic example to point precisely towards the camera (ultimately, a machine), which can virtually film ev­ erything without discrimination. The example rehearses the old metaphysics within which the all-seeing human eye is blind to itself; if one understands, moreover, that this eye was at one point the ego cogito, at another point the ego vola, and at still another the very machinery of scientific, political or artistic transformation, one may also understand that infinite time is precisely that which produced a certain metaphysics based on the liquidation of irreducible difference. The new metaphysics, which is the seamless combination of a camera that never ceases to register reality and a reality that can only be registered as image, is purely positive and recognizes "nothing" [no reconoce 'nada'] outside it. Even art exists within this conceptual horizon, although perhaps if finitude (no longer identifiable as the mere realization of a given image) were recognized, and succeeded in banish­ ing the very image of the work, art might eventually return something of the thing beyond its mere image. This is not a call to squeeze one's eyes shut against image, but to see in a way dislodged by the infinite (and mimetically divine) eye that ac­ companied a metaphysical (even when allegedly post-metaphysical) way of seeing. But can one so easily eliminate infinite time? Like it or not, it is the dominant hori­ zon, and finitude may only consist in recognizing as much.25 At the risk of seeming melodramatic, one might say, as Sartre did about freedom, that we are sentenced not so much to death as to an infinity that does not let us to die, and which constitutes the horizon and point of departure even for finitude. This infinitude may be manifested variously, to be sure; we have here considered two instances: the political infinitude of the market (everything, to be a thing, must traverse it) and art's infinitude (everything, to be acknowledged, must lay claim to a rendered, designed [diseiiado] figure.) Of course, the two perspectives do not co­ incide precisely: the market enjoys a success that art (as design) cannot match. But this does not mean that art ceases harboring such aspirations, designing the ugly and horrifying, not to say bad, in an attendant reclaiming of ugliness. The ugly can rival the beautiful only by insisting on its presentation and reproduction in an ac­ ceptable form. Quickly the two poles become homologous and, finally, interchange­ able: the beautiful and the ugly are forced to coexist because in the end there is no difference [no hay diferencias.] The banalization of the bad, representations of disfiguration and repetitious scenes of death and pain (mainly sickness and physical or psychological torture) are not in fact the products of an attempt to make negativ-

28

Leaving Immanence

ity appear, but products of a definitive attempt to conjure the absolute, the infinite. This demand for the infinite, which depends on an egalitarian acknowledgement of difference-an acknowledgement that validity resides in multiplicity (which does not imply unity, except in the way that this unity is the pure affirmation of multiplic­ ity)-is obliged to elude or even to liquidate the possibility of death (death is always "possibility"). Certain contemporary art has, ironically, served as some of the best means by which to carry out such a project. When even Cubism is too metaphysical, given that it never stopped seeking essences (the geometrical figure that would expose the "thing itself" beyond its appearances), the solution must come from infinitely multi­ plying these appearances to the point ofleaving the spectator/observer/subject sus­ pended and annulled in the same reiteration of appearances (surfaces). The ultimate goal of advertising then may lie not so much in the spectator's persuasion by image as in the mutual confusion of spectator and image [se identifiquen J , achieved either by a spilling outwards of consciousness or a flooding of the interior with images. In both cases an interior/exterior duality is posited that manages to survive precisely with the goal of being overcome. The image ends up constituting the definitive and undifferentiated zone of encounter between he who sees and that which is seen, such that it does not make sense to speak of this "between:' In a period in which the great modern oppositions are dissolved (truth/falsity in scientific paradigms, good/bad within moral paradigms, and beauty/ugliness in the arts) at least one sec­ tor of art has comes to coincide with advertising, confirming this tendency towards the definitive liquidation of the paradigm interior/exterior and its replacement by the demand that all be exterior. But even this idea of exteriorization, allegedly manifested in transparent democ­ racy as against the prior opacity of the mandarin's or aristocrat's chambers, masks its danger: that everything be exteriorized may also imply that all comes under con­ trol and surveillance, eliminating the possibility of even thinking subversion [de la subversion pensadaJ . Because "to think" is still, today, an interior activity. The demand for exteriority occurs then via a liquidation of thought (here by "thought" I understand the possibility of an "other" project alternative to the constitutive and established order) and, once more, of death, which is neither interior or exterior, but rather a limit. It is, in effect, a demand that death also appear objectually in order that it be subjected to control. So it is not surprising that those who govern prefer to pit terrorism against thought, for terrorism always ends up reducing everything to objects, often to remains (corpses or wreckage)-in any case to observable, evalu­ able things. And if something can be evaluated it is more easily controlled. Terror­ ism, in this sense, is not at all revolutionary; instead it confirms the very immanence of the system. And for this reason will surely not be eradicated. It is no coincidence that political terror surfaces during roughly the same period in which philosophy insists on the absolute. Actually existing politics naturally must address this terror, and they do so by multiplying it as an artistic, even attractive, image. Much has been written about the fascination that terrifying images incite, yet it is worth pointing out that our morbid curiosity is borne not from an acceptance of death but because only through familiarity with death can we excuse ourselves

Arturo Leyte

29

from its reality. Can Warhol's series on the electric chair be understood in any other way? Or his series on traffic accidents?26 Do not, perhaps, the two series constitute a preemptive act of sympathetic magic, reminiscent of the ritual sacrifices of ancient religions staged to convince that death is but a transitory stage? And in the end, are the two series indeed much different than those Warhol did of Campbell soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, or Mao Tse Tung? Do not all respond to the same principle: namely, that everything appear in a multiplied form so as to exhaust its existence? Warhol's undertaking is the inverse of Picasso's Cubist rifling amongst the en­ trails of image. The empty geometric structures of the Cubist figure are rendered in repeated surfaces, as if such iteration announced that that is all that is, that there is no internal structure. Picasso may have more or less consciously continued to search for a truth, while Warhol knew that no such truth was possible, or was only possible as the infinite or serialized reiteration of the same thing, since finally there is no such thing. If there is a thanatic impulse in Warhol's series of electric chairs it is no less present in the series of Campbell soup cans.27 But is it really a thanatic im­ pulse, or is it better an attempt to disarm death by inviting it to the party? The series of traffic accidents and electric chairs register death's inert but objectual appearance: death turned into a packaged object; turned into image. An image of this nature finds itself in the service of the absolute (and of tranquility), but not of finitude: it reveals nothing final, it reveals not nothingness but rather an event not at all out of the ordinary, just as a sexual act or a dose of heroin need not be extraordinary, but merely repetitious, so deactivating any intrinsic nothingness, power and echo of death. Warhol, unlike Monet, did not have to time his work to capture the light at different hours of the day, since in the intervening seventy-five years all the day's hours had been equalized, just as the difference between life (Campbell's Soup) and death (Electric Chair) had come to be the same, equal; in any case, equally useless. Death disappears when it is reduced to an electric chair or even to a corpse, and an object instituted in its place. But death, Heidegger tells us, is not a thing, not even a thing to be discovered in the end. On the contrary, its reality as existential and not substantial accompanies finite life like nothingness or tempor�lity, defining it. The idea that death is not a thing to be measured by statistics but a finitude, as defined by Heidegger, can be­ come a sign of revolutionary possibility. But is death possible? And, consequently, is politics possible? Politics is fundamentally only possible within a horizon of fini­ tude. Beyond this there is merely administration, with which the political has often been confused: if the concentration (extermination) camp was possible, it was so because already politics had been confused with Administration. And Administra­ tion, when realized, means the administration of death as much as of any other function. Behind it resides the conviction that there is to be a final, inert reconcili­ ation that has overcome all negativity whatsoever. If death constitutes the supreme expression of this negativity, the reduction of death enables the goal of a full ad­ ministrative coincidence of all possibilities: the reign of an affirmative multiplicity which hides nothing, and in which all has been exposed, all has been (or is hoped to be) rendered transparent.

30

Arturo Leyte

Leaving Immanence

Yet pain, opaque, always remains at the end of the day, in the solitude of one's room, at least for those who have not tried to overcome it through a visit to the doc­ tor or analyst. Pain has been swept under the rug of remedy, and hidden by attempts to do away with mourning. But the abandoned starry sky of Kant, which "no longer lights any solitary wanderer's path;'28 has not, in the meantime, been substituted for by a happy or safe earth. On the contrary, the baleful solitude of the new world fills the sails of so much positivity.

11

13 Hegel. See notes 5 and 6 above. 14 The Spanish "cambio" can mean both change and exchange. 15

Translated by Rachel Price.

1

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•

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•

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•

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•

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•

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2

Georg Lukacs already perceived as much when he opened his Theory of the Novel with the sentence "happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths-ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars:' Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 29.

3

"By way of introduction or anticipation, we need only say that there are two stems of human knowledge, namely sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root:' Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, trans. Nor­ man Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965), 61 (a15 b29).

4

This crystallization is developed by Schelling above all in the final chapter of his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism, whose title reads: "Art as an Organ and Document of Philosophy:'

5

"Because of this necessity, the way to Science is itself already Science, and hence, in virtue of its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness" G. W F. Hegel, Phenom­ enology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 56. This idea dominates the introduction more generally.

6

"The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development:' Hegel, op. cit., 11.

7

The 1988 crash of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 people died.

8

"I had to make the limits of the body the fundamental theme in my work" ["dass die Grenzen des Korpers das Grundthema meiner Arbeit bilden musste"]; see http://www. wdr.de/tv/nachtkultur/dokumentation120010117/abramovic.html.) The quotation is re­ produced in the work of Felix Duque, "El terrorismo nuestro de cada dia:' ["Our Daily Terrorism"] in the Spanish magazine SILENO 13 (Madrid, 2002): 109.

9

See Arturo Leyte, "El arte como organo y documento de la filosofia" ["Art as Organ and Document of Philosophy"] , La Ortiga 33/35 (Santander, 2002), and "Arte y Sistema" ["Art and System"] forthcoming (from a talk given in Belo Horizonte, Brazil). ' 10 "Beyond the objective determinations effected by the categories remains a gigantic em­ pirical reign, that of sensibility and perception, an absolute aposteriority for which is signaled no apriority . . ." G. W F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems ofPhilosophy, from the Spanish, Diferencia entre el sistema de filosofia de Fichte y el de Schelling (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1989), 4. (Also in Madrid: Tecnos, 1990, 5.)

Jan Hulsker, The New Complete Van Gogh (Amsterdam and New York: J. M. Meulenhoff/ John Benjamins, 1996), 401.

16 As is well-known, this is one of the motives Heidegger recreates in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975] , 15-87).

•

The complete phrase reads, "Two things fill the mind with an ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Although many English translations leave out the "me:' it seems important to include the emphasis present in the German.-Trans.

Arturo Leyte, "Razon ilustrada y arte" ["Enlightenment Reason and Art"] SILENO 13 ' (2002).

12 Although perhaps Rembrandt or Velazquez would have understood "perspective" as something very different than what it would later come to mean.

•

•

31

17 One will recognize in this description the interpretation that Heidegger puts forth in his essay "The Thing:' In Heidegger's thesis, the thing is interpreted as "frameness" or a cross between mortals and immortals, earth and sky. See also Arturo Leyte, "Figuras Construc­ tivas del Paisaje" ["Constructive Figures in Landscape"] SILENO 11: 17' 18 This citation is reproduced by Heidegger in his "Origin of the Work of Art:' where he writes: "In all these relationships art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest voca­ tion, something past" (80). 19 "Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all the things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being:' (Hegel, Phenomenol­ ogy, 19) 20 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, chapter 1 of the second section. The reference to this sense of "all" refers to that chapter of the work in which Heidegger develops his interpre­ tation of death. 21 For the problematic of temporality presupposed here, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, particularly paragraph 65, "Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care:'

•

22 Spanish has two verbs for being, ser and estar; estar is used for temporary, conditional and locational attributes, ser being reserved for more enduring or essential characteris­ tics.-Trans. 23 Fredric Jameson considers the films of the great auteurs to be mainly signs of the decline or extinction of the modernist movement: "abstract expressionism, existentialism in phi10sophy the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or ' the modernist school of poetry . . . all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them:' Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 1. 24 The German term "Ge-stell" was frequently used by Heidegger in many of his writings. It appears decisively however in two in particular: "The Question Concerning Technology"

32

Leaving Immanence and "The Principle of Identity:'

25

This, at least, is suggested in Spanish philosopher Felipe Marzoa's thesis, elaborated in his book Heidegger y su tiempo [Heidegger and His Time 1 (Madrid: Aka!, 1999).

26 Andy Warhol, Death and Disasters, The Menil Collection (Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1988). 27

Fredric Jameson has lucidly perceived that the thematization of death in these series no longer occurs on the level of content. But he doesn't finally articulate that if this thanatic impulse corresponds to the "deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them" (9), what is revealed is perhaps not death but its absence and the impossibility of its apparition in a reality that reduces exclusively to external sur­ faces. In the last instance, the photographic negative is also a positive presence to which all is reduced: color is dissipated in the negative, but to reveal the positive of the surface.

28 Lukacs again reminds us that "Kant's starry firmament now shines only in the dark night of pure cognition, it no longer lights the any solitary wanderer's path (for to be a man in the new world is to be solitary)" (36).

Infra politics and Immaterial Reflection Alberto Moreiras

I

Mauricio Lazzarato defines immaterial labor as "the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the com­ moditY:" Immaterial labor, not understood as labor proper in older modes of production, is today the task of a "mass intellectuality" whose presence defines "the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within societY:'2 Academic intellectual labor, whose sense it is to determine the uses of history for every one of the existing disciplines or fields of knowledge, and thus to help " [define and fix] cultural and ar­ tistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion;'3 must be understood within a contemporary division of labor which is itself established by the prevailing mode of production. If it is true that, as Lazzarato says, on the one hand, "the concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results in an en­ largement of productive cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication, and hence of its most important contents: subjectivity;' 4 and if it is simul­ taneously true, on the other hand, that "what modern man­ agement techniques are looking for is for 'the worker's soul to become part of the factory;" and thus "the worker's personal­ ity and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organiza­ tion and command;'s then we are facing a strong biopolitical cathexis on the very conditions of intellectual labor in the present. We must wonder whether any attempt to elaborate a new disciplinary subjectivity-that is, whether any attempt at revising the conditions of disciplinary knowledge-is not always already overdetermined by the subjection to organiza­ tion and command which is a consequence of the regulatory techniques of university management. Lazzarato seems to offer two responses: one optimistic, and the other pessimis­ tic. According to the pessimistic response, given the fact that what is peculiar to immaterial labor is not the production of commodities to be "destroyed in the act of consumption" but Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

34

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

rather of commodities that can "enlarge, transform, and create the 'ideological' and cultural environment of the consumer;' then immaterial labor produces "a social relationship" that reveals "something that material production had 'hidden; namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation:'6 Within this determination any possibility of intellectual labor, since intellectual labor is today by definition bound by the conditions of production that define mass intellectuality, cannot go beyond promoting the social relation­ ship as reproduction of the capital relation: every new production of subjectivity would be condemned to be nothing but the acquiescing response to the system of production's principles of organization and command. But Lazzarato also offers an optimistic response, having to do with the pos­ sibility of linking the production of subjectivity to a new praxis of meaning. For Lazzarato there is a possibility of genuine innovation in the fact that every act of immaterial production proposes "a new relationship between production and con­ sumption:'7 Such a relationship can only be appropriated and normalized by the system of production, but it can never be pre-determined by it. "The creative and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life pro­ duce:'s Lazzarato suggests that the struggle against work can promote values that would not be recoverable by the apparatus of organization and command within the system of production. These values could then develop the "social cycle of immate­ rial production"9 in ways that would outflank the capital relation itself. According to the old historian Henry Charles Lea, the Spanish Inquisition was "a power within the State superior to the State itself'lO That power is biopolitical power, understood as the power of capture and subjection oflife to political control, that is, the power of political animation of life, the subjection of life to the sover­ eignty principle. The power to subject life to sovereignty is in every case the power within the state superior to the state itself-an excess or supplement to the state without which there would be no state.'l Whence that excess? A properly materialist answer would consist of saying that, to the extent that the power within the state is state power, even when it exceeds itself, any power within the state superior to the state itself would come from another state, following a genealogical structure. A certain confluence between the work of Michel Foucault and that of Martin Heidegger might allow us to arrest the regression ad infinitum implied in that answer. Thus we could posit the ultimate origin of the genealogical structure in the Roman world, and particularly, and perhaps surprisingly, in the hegemonic structure of imperial domination in Rome. In his class lectures from the 1942-43 winter semester, in his seminar on Par­ menides, Heidegger says: "We think the political as Romans, i.e., imperialli'12 Hei­ degger's diagnosis, although thoroughly connected with the situation at the time (i.e., with the turning point in World War II represented by the German defeat at Stalin­ grad) and with a thoroughly ideological vision of German destiny, is not meant only for Nazi Germany.'3 On the contrary, it encompasses the totality of the history of the West, regarding which Heidegger had thought that the Nazi movement offered the possibility of a renewal. If to think the political is to think it as Romans, imperi­ ally, and if that comes to be, according to a Nietzschean genealogy, the "history of

Alberto Moreiras

35

an error;'l4 then we must find a non-Roman determination of the political: perhaps counterimperial, or non-imperial. The possibility of thinking a non-Roman, non­ imperial determination of the political goes through an understanding of the nature of that power within the state superior to the state itself that Lea associates with the Spanish Inquisition. This is not an arbitrary hypothesis: Heidegger himself says it, in passing, almost unintentionally. But I will dwell on it briefly. This issue is not so remote from Lazzarato's interest in finding out whether it is possible to suspend the very mechanisms of organization and command through an attempt at a non-predetermined mode of intellectual production-unpredeter­ mined by history, and insurgent against determined history. Heidegger's own notion of "originary thinking;' as developed in Parmenides, seeks an interruption of deter­ mined history, which he associates with the dominance of the Roman West.'5 All of it would have to do with a decisive event. Heidegger does not hesitate to call it "the genuine event ofhistorY;',6 in the sense that there is no other, more important single event, but also in the sense that it constitutes history as we know it: the event of his­ tory. The event is the Latinization of the Greek notion of truth. "What is decisive is that the Latinization occurs as a transformation of the essence of truth and Being within the essence of the Greco-Roman domain of history. This transformation is distinctive in that it remains concealed but nevertheless determines everything in advance:" 7 It is only a few pages later, in direct connection with this transformation of the essence of truth, that Heidegger mentions the Spanish Inquisition-only once in his Parmenides seminar, and perhaps in the totality of his work: Such change is ever the most dangerous, but also the most enduring, form of domination. Since then, the Occident has known of pseudos only in the form of falsum. For us, the opposite of the truth is the false. But the Romans did not only lay the foundation of the priority of the false as the standard meaning of the essence of untruth in the Occident. In addition, the con­ solidation of this priority of the false over pseudos and the stabilizing of this consolidation is a Roman accomplishment. The operating force in this accomplishment is no longer the imperium of the state but the imperium of the Church, the sacerdotium. The "imperial" here emerges in the form of the curial of the curia of the Roman pope. His domination is likewise grounded in command. The character of c;ommand here resides in the essence of eccle­ siastical dogma. Therefore this dogma takes into account equally the "true" of the "orthodox believers" as well as the "false" of the "heretics" and the "unfaithful:' The Spanish Inquisition is a form of the Roman curial imperi­ um. By way of Roman civilization, both the imperial! civil and the imperial! ecclesiastical, the Greek pseudos became for us in the Occident the "false:' Correspondingly, the true assumed the character of the not-false. The es­ sential realm of the imperial fallere determines the not-false as well as the falsum. The not-false, said in Roman fashion, is the verum.'8 To speak critically of the Spanish Inquisition during the Winter Semester of 1942-43 in Freiburg is not particularly banal, above all when such a reference to the Inquisi­ tion, which was the direct antecedent of the National Socialist administrative ap-

36

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

paratus for the "final solution" concerning the elimination of an enemy social body, the "Jews;' presents the Inquisition as a symptom of the great error in the history of the West: literally, thefalsi-fication of the essence of truth, which is also thefalsi-fica­ tion of the political. Heidegger is attempting to think of a counter-falsification of the political following a non-imperial and counter-Roman path. If it is true, then, that the Roman imperial, as a power within the state superior to the state itself, is the falsi-fication of truth, that is, the understanding of truth on the basis of the notion of the false, and if it is true that such falsi-fication is essen­ tially related to the capture and subjection of life to political control; if it is true that falsi-fication is in this realm the essence of biopolitics as a strategy of domination, then it is necessary first to understand falsi-fication better, and therefore its relation with the hegemonic structure of imperial domination. I will sum up Heidegger's analysis. Falsum comes from fallere, "to bring about a downfall;' "to cut" or "to hack" in the sense of bringing to a fall. Heidegger asks: "What is the basis for the priority of fallere in the Latin formation of the counter-essence of truth?" And he responds: "It lies in this, that the basic comportment of the Romans towards beings in general is governed by the rule of the imperium. Imperium says im-parare, to establish, to make arrangements: prae-cipere, to occupy something in advance, and by this oc­ cupation to hold command over it, and so to have the occupied as territori" 9 In the juxtaposition of imperare and hacking or felling we understand both the essence of the political as the power to command and the falsi -fication of truth (that is, once again, the understanding of truth as the mere negation of the false, the brought to a fall, what has been felled) as the very principle of hegemonic power. Heidegger does not use the word "hegemony;' but one can hear nothing else in his definition of imperial power. Because what is false is what has been felled, brought to a fall, what is false has been eliminated from the principle of territori­ alization. It is, in a paradoxical sense, not subjected to command-no longer sub­ jected to command. Eliminated from the reach of command, it is also eliminated from life. In life, subjected to the imperial circumscription, one can only have the not-false, and it is this non-falseness that will be administered according to hege­ mony's principle of organization and command. "To be superior is part and parcel of domination. And to be superior is only possible through constantly remaining in the higher position by way of a constant surmounting of others. Here we have the genuine actus of imperial action . . . . The great and most inner core of the essence of essential domination consists in this, that the dominated are not kept down, nor simply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted, within the territory of the command, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination:'20 Roman hegemony, the imperial principle of the political under which we still think the political, is, for Heidegger, the apparatus for the territorialization of command according to which what is not susceptible of hacking, of felling, of being brought to a fall, of simple elimination from life can still collaborate in its own domination: this is the biopolitical passion, the principle of subjection of life to sovereign cap­ ture, the animation of life under criteria of subjection to command in the name of the essential falsi-fication of the true, which is precisely the power within the state

Alberto Moreiras

37

superior to the state itself. As to Foucault, I am concerned with his project to establish a "history of truth;' or rather a history of the "politics of truth;' whose Heideggerian trace is not always sufficiently noted.21 In the five-lecture series delivered at the Pontifical Catholic Uni­ versity of Rio de Janeiro in May 1973, which was published under the title "Truth and Juridical Norm;' Foucault, talking about fields of knowledge, refers to the types of inquiry that " [b1 eginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries . . . sought to establish truth on the basis of a certain number of carefully collected items of tes­ timony in fields such as geography, astronomy, and the study of climates:'22 In par­ ticular, Foucault says, it is on the basis of these inquisitorial procedures that "there appeared a technique of voyage-as a political, power-exercising venture and a cu­ riosity-driven, knowledge-acquiring venture-that ultimately led to the discovery of America:'23 The relation to Heidegger makes itself obvious here. For Foucault the Inquisition, developed in the Middle Ages through administrative procedures directly inspired in the Carolingian revival of imperial Roman structures and in po­ litico-spiritual procedures already existing in the Church, in the Roman curia, is not only the principle ofbiopolitical action proper but also a grave historical event: "The inquiry that arose in the Middle Ages would acquire extraordinary dimensions. Its destiny would be practically coextensive with the particular destiny of so-called 'European' or 'Western' culture"24 The juridical forms that were derived from the inquisitorial model became "absolutely essential for the history of Europe and for the history of the whole world, inasmuch as Europe violently imposed its dominion on the entire surface of the earth:'25 Inquisitorial practices were imperial in the Heideggerian sense also inasmuch as they operated a complete inversion regarding the other juridical tradition that was active at the heart of medieval Europe: the Germanic tradition, which followed the principle of the test, and which constitutes the foundation of feudal law. For Fou­ cault, "in feudal law, disputes between two individuals were settled by the system of the test. When an individual came forward with a claim, a contestation, accus­ ing another of having killed or robbed, the dispute between the two would be re­ solved through a series of tests accepted by both individuals and by which both were bound. This system was a way of proving not the truth, but the strength, the weight, the importance of the one who spoke";26 "a procedure of inquiry, a search for the truth, never intervened in this type of system:'27 Through the inquisitorial system the representative of power would abandon the feudal system of tests and proceed to adjudicate justice, not just in terms of criminal acts but also for every dispute related to property, rent, taxes, and economic administration, on the basis of the absolute subjection of the involved parties to a rule of sovereignty. Hence, Foucault says, political power in this system becomes "the essential personage:'28 "On arriving at an appointed place, the bishop would first initiate the inquisitio generalis . . by questioning all those who should know-the notable, the elders, the most learned, the most virtuous-about what had happened in his absence, espe­ cially if there had been transgressions, crimes, and so on. If this inquiry met with an affirmative response, the bishop would pass to a second stage, the inquisitio specialis, the special inquisition, which consisted in trying to find out who had done what, .

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

in determining who was really the author and what was the nature of the act";29 "this model-spiritual and administrative, religious and political-this method for managing, overseeing, and controlling souls was found in the Church: the inquiry understood as a gaze focused as much on possessions and riches as on hearts, acts, and intentions. It was this model that was taken up and adapted in judicial proce­ , dure [by royal authority] : 30 This juridical form constitutes a decisive intervention in political history and in the history of the political at the level of what Foucault will term toward the end of his lecture series "infrapower:' Infrapower, a power in the state superior to the state itself, names "not . . . the state apparatus, or . . . the class in power, but . . . the whole set of little powers, of little institutions situated at the lowest leve!:'31 The inquisition as biopolitical procedure initiates the vast process of the subjec­ tion oflife to imperial command that would become characteristic of modernity. At stake is to ensure that individuals cooperate in their own domination, following the structure of hegemonic command: "bare life;' to use Giorgio Agamben's expression in Homo Sacer, that is, the life that can be killed without murder or sacrifice, is false life in the Heideggerian sense, and it is ambivalently excluded from the biopolitical operation.32 Everything else dwells in non-falseness, that is, subjected to administra­ tive imperial command. It dwells in self-subjection as the mode of service to a rea­ son that becomes co-extensive with political calculation. As Heidegger puts it, "the imperial springs forth from the essence of truth as correctness in the sense of the directive self-adjusting guarantee of the security of domination. The 'taking as true' of ratio, of rear, becomes a far-reaching and anticipatory security. Ratio becomes counting, calculating, calculus. Ratio is a self-adjustment to what is correct:'33 Foucault's infrapower is the political apparatus composed of the institutions whose mission is to "take charge of the whole temporal dimension of individuals' lives:'34 Genealogically conditioned by the Heideggerian history of "imperial falsi­ fication;' within late capitalism, infrapower rules over "the conversion ofliving time into labor power and labor power into productive force:'35 Infrapower institutions are, "in a schematic and global sense, . . . institutions of sequestration."36 To reduce or destroy the reach of the sequestering institutions and their hegemonic command is to attack infrapower, that is, to move toward a non-imperial practice of the po­ litical, an infrapolitics, one could call them, in the sense that they place themselves or find their appropriate site not at the level of hegemonic struggle but beneath it, below their (imperial) ground. "

Given the undecidability between Lazzarato's two positions, namely, either that it is possible to produce social values that are not pre-determined by the system of production or that it is not possible to overcome the biopolitical conditions accord­ ing to which every production of subjectivity is always already normalized by the system, any reflection on the uses of history is contained within a nihilistic perspec­ tive. In the Heideggerian interpretation, nihilism is not one: it always comes as two, the first one being imperfect nihilism, and the second accomplished nihilism. For Heidegger, in his interpretation of Nietzsche's Nachlass, there can be no imperfect or

Alberto Moreiras

39

"proper" nihilism except from the perspective of "fulfilled" or accomplished nihil­ ism.37 At the same time, however, there can be no accomplished nihilism unless we posit an imperfect form of it. In an essay titled "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin;' Agamben deploys the Heideggerian motif on the basis of an intriguing exchange between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem on Kafka. For Agamben the difference between the two nihilisms has to do very pre­ cisely with a dilucidation of "the hidden structure of historical time itself'38 Agamben introduces an additional complication when, following both Benja­ min and Scholem, he mentions that nihilism and messianism are or come to the same thing: If we accept the equivalence between messianism and nihilism of which both Benjamin and Scholem were firmly convinced, . . . then we will have to distinguish two forms of messianism or nihilism: a first form (which we may call imperfect nihilism) that nullifies the law but maintains the Nothing in a perpetual and infinitely deferred state of validity, and a second form, a perfect nihilism that does not even let validity survive beyond its meaning but instead, as Benjamin writes of Kafka, "succeeds in finding redemption in the overturning of the Nothing:'39 The difference between both perspectives on nihilism, between the two nihilisms or the two messianisms, is small: a matter of a "small adjustment;'4o a slight displace­ ment. Understanding the hidden structure of historical time would have to do with being able to operate that small adjustment, which would mean: the small adjust­ ment launches us into a form of accomplished nihilism/messianism. This is, in our context, to take a decisive position concerning the status of "the power within the state superior to the state itself;' that is, of infrapower, and hence also concerning the very conditions of immaterial labor. Does immaterial labor in our times, in other words, mark the final subsumption ofliving time into labor power? There are two fundamental uses of history that might adequately reference Lazzaratds two positions, or even the difference between the two faces or two deployments of nihilism or messianism. According to the first use, the most obvious one, the most dominant, the sovereign use, the use that allows us to understand, for instance, the Inquisition under the figure of sovereignty, or sover­ eignty under the figure of the state, history is always biopolitical history, and hence always immersion and capture by the sovereign relation. We could call this first use "relational surrender;' to adapt Eric Santner's expression.41 In relational surrender, the subject of immaterial reflection surrenders into relational life, surrenders into sovereignty. This is both a form of imperfect nihilism/messianism, and also a form of Lazzarato's first hypothesis, and it understands and deploys an understanding of history as the temporalization of the capture of life by the political. But there is a second use, a literally useless use that might not quite match Laz­ zarato's second hypothesis. The latter's progressivism is excessively caught up in the notion of the production of new values, that is, in a notion of productive subjectiv­ ity that is structurally unable to overflow the system of production precisely be­ cause all it can do is to establish a relation with it. Productive subjectivity, defined in

40

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

Lazzarato on the basis of "forms of life:' is always already biopolitical, and perhaps more so than ever at the moment it attempts to change the dominant conditions of biopolitics. This use without use has to do with un-working the determinations of the first use. If the characteristic procedure of the first use of history is the capture of life by the political, the capture of life by the sovereign relation, the characteris­ tic procedure of the second use is the interruption of the principle of sovereignty, the unworking of the biopolitical, the de-production of the use of history. This is still a messianic nihilism or a nihilistic messianism. This "overturning" of the first use, the "redemption" that Benjamin promises as precisely a redemption regarding the infinite biopoliticization of life, is still a use, even if a useless use, and it is still therefore under the gaze of the political-but in a very especial form, that is, in an infrapolitical form.42 Agamben solves the Benjamin/Scholem exchange into a diagnosis of the history of the present that is a prelude to the embrace of accomplished nihilism as a refusal of the structures of institutional sequestering: Today, everywhere, in Europe as in Asia, in industrialized countries as in those of the "Third World:' we live in the ban of a tradition that is perma­ nently in a state of exception. And all power, whether democratic or to­ talitarian, traditional or revolutionary, has entered into a legitimation crisis in which the state of exception, which was the hidden foundation of the system, has fully come to light. If the paradox of sovereignty once had the form of the proposition "There is nothing outside the law:' it takes on a per­ fectly symmetrical form in our time, when the exception has become the rule: "There is nothing inside the law"; everything-every law-is outside law. The entire planet has now become the exception that law must contain in its ban. Today we live in this messianic paradox, and every aspect of our existence bears its marks.43 Agamben has in mind Benjamin's eighth thesis on the philosophy of history: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task:'44 In the Eighth Thesis Benjamin in turn refers to Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, which defines sovereignty as the power to decide on the state of exception.45 From Lea's sentence on the Inquisition, the Inquisition appears as a sovereign body insofar as it is a power within the state superior to the state itself-the sovereign body has the power to suspend the law from within the site of the law, hence it lives simultane­ ously within and outside law. Like the Messiah: also He reveals the hidden structure of the law, and suspends the law indefinitely or infinitely. The Inquisition is the ni­ hilistic-messianic truth of our time, allegory or literality of a state of exception more legal than the law, that is, a sovereign relation that absolutely requires relational surrender. For Agamben, "we can compare the situation of our time to that of a pet­ rified or paralyzed messianism that, like all messianism, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception, 'the state of exception in which we live."'46

Alberto Moreiras

41

But Benjamin says that when we reach a concept of history that understands and accounts for the paradox of sovereignty (simultaneously hiding and revealing the exception in the law), what Jacques Derrida quoting Montaigne calls "the mystical foundation of authority;'47 then we will be able to produce "a real state of exception:' Again, two states: the state of exception "in which we live;' that corresponds to the biopolitical use of history, and that other useless and enigmatic "state of real excep­ tion:' on which any possible redemption depends. Between both the need for an infrapolitical "small adjustment:' only possible after reaching a concept of history that gives us its subterranean or hidden foundation. Agamben quotes Scholem's letter to Benjamin where Scholem comments on Benjamin's essay on Kafka. "Scholem defines the relation to the law described in Kafka's novels as 'the Nothing of Revelation; intending this expression to name 'a stage in which revelation does not signify, yet still affirms itself by the fact that it is in force. Where the wealth of significance is gone and what appears, reduced, so to speak, to the zero point of its own content, still does not disappear (and Revelation is something that appears), there the Nothing appears:"48 Validity without significa­ tion: the zero point of the sense of the law, but thus also appearance of the law in its messianic and sovereign force. The Inquisition is also validity without signification: imperfect nihilism. Eric Santner comments on this passage at length in On the Psycho theology of Everyday Life. If there are two uses of history, and if the first use is a petrified use through which the validity without signification of the law weighs in as imperfect nihilism, weighs in like the Inquisition does in the history of Spain and of the West; if the second use is infrapolitical and it moves in the direction of a new and "real" state of exception, an accomplished nihilism that unworks history by dwelling in the excess that is not just the condition of possibility of the sovereign relation but also the condition of possibility of its destabilization, Santner seeks the second. The first is for him "relational surrender:' He calls the second "unbinding the fantasy:' using Lacanian categories that have been foregrounded in the work of Slavoj Zizek. To traverse the fantasy is to undo the relational fantasy that captures us for and into subjective surrender. Santner calls "exodus" the redemptive possibility of undoing the relational fan­ tasy that keeps "life captured by the question of its legitimacY:'49 In dialogue with Agamben's interpretation of Scholem's phrase "validity without signification:' Sant­ ner thinks that "the dilemma of the Kafkan subject-exposure to a surplus of va­ lidity over meaning-points . . . to the fundamental place of fantasy in human life. Fantasy organizes or 'binds' this surplus into a schema, a distinctive 'torsion' or spin that colors/distorts the shape of our universe, how the world is disclosed to US:'50 Exodus is then "the possibility of recovering, of 'unbinding: the disruptive core of fantasy and converting it into 'more life: the hope and possibility of new possibili­ ties:'51 In other words, it is the possibility of an openness to "the surplus of the real within reality:'52 an openness to the awareness of infrapower within power. Exodus is infrapolitical consciousness, which means: it is only from within sequestration by the infrapower apparatus, as it determines the individual site of experience of the sovereign relation in every case, that it becomes possible to dislodge from it.

42

Alberto Moreiras

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

Perhaps we are not too far from Lazzarato's second hypothesis. For Santner, "the very dynamic that attaches us to an ideological formation is . . , the site where the possibility of genuinely new possibilities can emerge:'53 Sant­ ner repeats an old postulate of Marxism, according to which only capitalism can produce the weapons for its own overcoming. He does not mention the Derridean "hauntological" reading of Marx, but he nevertheless appeals to it in order to estab­ lish that, for both Franz Rosenzweig (the thinker that, along with Freud, is the main object of interpretation in Santner's book) and Marx, "relations of exchange-and that means all socio-symbolic systems through which what is individual acquires a general and generic value/identity-always leave a remainder, an insistent and troubling surplus for which no equivalent value can be posited. And for both think­ ers, this troubling surplus that for the most part functions as the driving force of the symbolic system can become the locus of a break with it, a site where the possibility of unplugging from the dominance of the sovereign/general equivalent can open:'54 But in Santner, and in Benjamin, and in Marx according to Derrida, that redemptive and revelatory possibility is a messianic possibility. The interruption of fantasy, the unbinding of the traumatic nucleus that sustains us as distorted and captured life in subjection to infrapower, is messianic intervention. Fantasy, the traumatic nucleus, Benjamin says in a passage quoted by both Santner and Agamben, will vanish "with the coming of the Messiah, of whom a great rabbi once said that he did not wish to change the world by force, but would only make a slight adjustment in it:'55 The passage from imperfect to accomplished nihilism is a matter of infrapoliti­ cal orientation towards the small adjustment. The text of deconstruction insists on this small adjustment as fundamental to its own strategy. The difference between any messianism and the messianic is in Derrida the minimal difference that insti­ tutes the messianic as the very possibility, which then becomes the necessity, of a po­ litical orientation for deconstruction, and over and over again the minimal basis for decision. In deconstruction's idiom, granted that the very conditions of possibility for justice are also the conditions of its impossibility, granted that "the impossibility of justice for all is the possibility of any justice at all;'56 and the impossibility of hos­ pitality the only opening for hospitality, of friendship for friendship, and so forth, an orientation to the infrapolitical opening is an orientation towards the conditionless condition that rules over the fact that the aporetic structure obtains. Aporia, that is, nihilism obtains. The difference between an imperfect and an accomplished experi­ ence of aporia is the difference between understanding aporia as an end of thinking or understanding it as an opening for reflective thinking, which is also an opening for infrapolitical practice there where the suppression of aporia (for instance, in all imperfect messianisms) reinforces the inordinate or exorbitant violence of biopo­ litical, imperial hegemony. How, then, does the messianic relation, as orientation towards the small adjust­ ment, affect the decidability of Lazzarato's two hypotheses on politico-intellectual practice, on immaterial reflection? The messianic relation is only the promise that accomplished messianism, the passage from imperfect to accomplished messian­ ism, can bring about a small adjustment. It is only a promise. The perfect Nothing of the promise is the other face of the Nothing of revelation that constitutes the

43

imperfect nihilism of Kafka's parable according to Benjamin. Can the mass intel­ lectuality of the present move toward the unworking of imperfect nihilism? Can it move toward an infrapolitical or non-imperial understanding of the political? Heidegger says: "We think the political as Romans, i.e., imperially:' Inquisitorial infrapower, the power within the state stronger than the state itself, the power of the fantasy that binds the traumatic nucleus of domination with our own invest­ ment in self-domination (the marrano problem par excellence)-those are sites for the Benjaminian overturning, and accordingly the sites where an infrapolitics can develop that would already think politics against imperial politics, in a non -Roman way, against the falsi -fication of world. Through falsi- fication worlding is no longer the terror or the joy of unconcealment but rather relational surrender. In relational surrender the political relation is nothing but a relation of power. Foucault says that one of the tests or ordeals of the old Germanic tribal order was the ordeal by water, "which consisted in tying a person's right hand to his left foot and throwing him into the water. If he didn't drown he would lose the case, because the water didn't accept him as it should; and ifhe drowned he had won the case, seeing that the wa­ ter had not rejected him:'57 But there must be a way to win this ordeal beyond the chiasmatic alternative: if you lose the case, you lose your life. If you win the case, you lose your life. Why have it at all? Infrapolitics is nothing but the (search for a) non-inquisitorial exodus from such a conjuncture. •

I wish to thank Marta Hernandez and Juan Carlos Rodriguezfor their comments on the original Spanish version of this essay, which have guided many of the revisions. •

1

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

al Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato, "Im material Labor;' in Radical Tho ught in Italy: A Potenti ss, 199 6), ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Mi nneapolis: University of Minnesota Pre 133·

2

Ibid., 133, 134·

3

Ibid., 133.

4

Ibid., 140.

5

Ibid., 134·

6

Ibid., 138.

•

•

7

Ibid., 146.

8

Ibid.

9

Ibid., 147·

lan, Mil Mc k: Yor w (Ne ies enc end Dep nish Spa the in tion uisi Inq The , Lea rles 10 Henry Cha 19 22 ), 35 7. , 190 6-0 7) is still lan Mil Mc k: Yor w (Ne s. vol 4 in, Spa in tion uisi Inq the f o tory His A 's 11 Lea been made out­ an extremely valuable reference on the Inquisition, but its scholarship has Escandrell me tolo Bar and a uev lan Vil ez Per n qui Joa See ch. ear res g nin rve inte by dated drid: Biblioteca Bonet, eds., Historia de la Inquisici6n en Espana y Am erica, 3 vols. (Ma contem­ d dar stan the for 3) 199 s, iale tor uisi Inq os udi Est de o ntr /Ce nos stia Cri s de Autore Foucault, The porary reference work. In terms of biopower and biopolitics, see Michel York: Vmtage, w (Ne rley Hu ert Rob s. tran n, ctio odu Intr An 1 e um Vol ity. ual f o Sex . History

44

Alberto Moreiras

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection 1990), 135-41, and Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College de France 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 253-63, among other texts in his later work. Giorgio Agamben takes up those Foucaultian concepts in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

12 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Blooming­ ton: Indiana University Press, 1992), 43. 13 For the connection between Heidegger's Parmenides and the Battle of Stalingrad see Ag­ nes Heller, "Parmenides and the Battle of Stalingrad:' Graduate Faculty Philosophy Jour­ naI 19.2/20.1 (1997): "The winter semester ended in January or February. The Soviet army had closed the circle around the German army in Stalingrad at Christmas 1942. Germany had lost the war. Few knew this; Heidegger was one of those who did. This is easy to decipher from the text of the Parmenides lectures" (248). Heidegger's overwhelming pre­ occupation with Germany is turned into a preoccupation with modernity as such in the establishment of an equivalency between Germany and the West, particularly after the failure of the National Socialist regime-for Heidegger already clear in the mid-1930s. For the politico-philosophical context, see Frank H. W. Edler's "Heidegger's Interpretation of the German 'Revolution:" Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 153-71, and "Philosophy, Language, and Politics: Heidegger's Attempt to Steal the Language of the Revolution in 1933-34:' Social Research 57.1 (1990): 197-239. See also Theodore Kisiel, "Situating Rhe­ torical Politics in Heidegger's Protopractical (1923-1925: The French Occupy the Ruhr:' Existentia 9 (1999): 11-30, for the political background to Heidegger's commitment to reactionary practice. But the crucial book on Heidegger's notion of a second Revolu­ tion within Nazism in favor of an originary philosophy of autochthony and rootedness and Heidegger's subsequent, post-Germany's defeat developments is Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots. Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 2003). See also Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's "Being and Time" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For an excellent use of Heidegger's Parmenides regarding geopo­ litical thinking today, see William S. Spanos, America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 53-63 passim.

14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Lon­ don: Penguin, 1990), 5l. 15 For originary or primordial thinking see Parmenides, 6-10. See also Heller, op. cit., 249 passim. And, generally, Bambach, op. cit.

16 Heidegger, Parmenides, 42.

45

and Power' Revisited:' 30-54.

22 Foucault, "Truth:' 49· 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 34· 25 Ibid., 40 . 26 Ibid., 37. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 Ibid., 45· 29 Ibid., 46. 30 Ibid., 47. 31 Ibid., 86-87.

ut ho l wit kil to d tte mi per is it ich wh in ere sph the is ere sph ign 32 For Agamben "the sovere life that is, t ha -t life red sac d an , ice rif a sac ng ati ebr cel ut tho wi d an committing homicide sphere:' Homo s thi in ed tur cap en be has t tha life the is dice rif sac t no t may be killed bu

Sacer, 83. 33 Heidegger, Parmenides, 50. 34 Foucault, "Truth:' 80. 35 Ibid., 84. 36 Ibid. 37 See volume 4 of Heidegger's Nietzsche, 4 vols., trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991) for his major dilucidation of Nietzsche's concept of nihilism. On the difference between nihilisms see, for instance: "Nietzsche's metaphysics is nihilism proper . . . Nietzsche's metaphysics is not an overcoming of nihilism. It is the ultimate entanglement in nihilism . . . . By means of the entanglement of nihilism in itself, nihilism first becomes thoroughly complete in what it is. Such utterly completed, perfect nihilism is the fulfillment of nihilism proper" (203)·

38 GiorgiO Agamben, "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benja­ min:' in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stan­ ford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 168. 39 Ibid., 171. 40 Ibid., 174·

iversity of Chicago Un o: ag hic (C e, Lif y da ery Ev of gy olo the cho Psy the On 4 1 Eric L. Santner, Press, 2001), 90.

18 Ibid., 46.

d from we rro (bo se sen nt ere diff y htl slig a in " ing ork nw "u of n 42 Agamben refers to the notio 61. , cer Sa mo Ho in t) ho nc Bla ice ur Ma d an y nc Na uc n-L Jea

19 Ibid., 44.

43 Agamben, "Messiah;' 170.

20 Ibid., 45.

44 Quoted ibid., 160. 45 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 1-15. Agamben had already referred to Schmitt's state of exception in Homo Sacer (8-19; 26-42), but he develops its implications in Stato di eccezione. Homo Sacer 2.1 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).

17 Ibid.

21 Michel Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms:' in Power: Essential Works ofFoucault 19541984, vol. 3, ed. and trans. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 2000), 13. On the relations between Heideggerian thinking and Foucault, see Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), in particular Milchman/Rosenberg, "To­ ward a Foucault/Heidegger Auseinandersetzung;' 1-29, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, "'Being

46 Agamben, "Messiah;' 17] .

46

Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

47 Jacques Derrida, Acts ofReligion , ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 20 01 ), 22 9. 48 Agamben, "Messiah;' 16 9.

Post-Political Citizenship

49 Santner, op. cit., 30 . Santner does not mention the wo

rk of Paolo Virno' although h'IS use of th word "exodus'" IS necessarily indebted to Vi rno's "Virtuosity and Revolution. The PohtlCal Theory of Exo dus;' in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in . . Italy.. A Potential PoiztlCS (Mmneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 19 96 ) , 18 9 210. S antne rs ' and V"lrnos ' ' uses 0f the term are for the most part hetero geneous. 50 Santner, op. cit., 39. .

�

Kenneth Surin

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5 1 Ibid., 40. 52 Ib id ., 74. 53 Ibid., 8l. 54 Ibid., 96 -97. 55 Quoted in Santner, 12 2 and Agamben, 174. 56 I am indebted to Martin Hagglun d for this form ul

57 Foucault, "Truth;' 38 .

ation in a personal communication.

There is a conventional wisdom in the history of philosophy regarding the more or less intrinsic connection between the metaphysical-epistemological project that seeks an absolute ground for thought or reason, and the philosophico-political project of finding a ground in reason for the modus operandi of a moral and political subject. According to the lineaments of this well-seasoned narrative, the essential congruence be­ tween the rational subject of thought and the complemen­ tary subject of morality and politics was posited by Plato and Aristotle, and this unity between the two kinds of subject then found its suitably differentiated way into the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Hegel (among many others). The core of this narrative is expressed by the somewhat Kantian proposition, characteristic of the Enlightenment in general, that reason provides the vital and indispensable criterion by which all judgments concerning belief, morality, politics, and art are to be appraised; so that reason is the faculty that defines and regulates the thinking being's activity, while this activity is in turn the essential means for reason's deployment in any thinking about the world, for the thinking being's capacity to describe and explain the world in ways that accord fundamentally with reason's precepts, and this precisely because reason is the irreducibly prior and en­ abling condition of any use of this capacity. Reason, in oth­ er words, constitutes the thinking being, and the activity of this being in turn enables reason to unfold dynamically (to provide a somewhat Hegelian gloss on this initially Kantian proposition). In the topography of this unfolding of reason, both thought and politics find their foundation. The philosophical tradition provides another way of de­ lineating this connection between the subject of thought and the political subject, one that also derives its focal point from Kant. Using the distinction between a subjectum (i.e., the thing that serves as the bearer of something, be it consciousness or some other property of the individual) and a subjectus (i.e., the thing that is subjected to something else), the tradition Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

48

Post-Political Citizenship

has included among its repertoire of concepts a figure of thought taken from medi­ eval philosophy that hinges on the relation between the subjectum and the subjectus. Etienne Balibar, in his fascinating but problematic essay "Citizen Subject;' uses this distinction to urge that we not identify Descartes' thinking thing (res cogitans) with the transcendental subject of thought that very quickly became a decisive feature of modern epistemology. Nothing could be further from the truth, says Balibar, because the human being is for Descartes the unity of a soul and a body, and this unity, which marks the essence of the human being, cannot be represented in terms of the subjectum (presumably because the subjectum, qua intellectual simple nature, can exist logically without requiring the presupposition of a unity between soul and body).l As the unity of a soul and a body, the human individual is not a mere intel­ lectual simple nature, a subjectum, but is, rather, a subject in another quite different sense. In this other different sense, the human individual is a subject transitively related to an other, a "something else;' and for Descartes this "something else" is precisely the divine sovereignty. In other words, for Descartes the human individual is really a s�bje�tus, and never the subjectum of modern epistemology (which in any case owes Its dIscovery to Locke and not to Descartes). For Balibar, therefore, it is important to remember that Descartes, who in many ways is really a late scholastic philosopher, was profoundly engaged with a range of issues that had been central for medieval philosophy, in this particular case the question of the relation oflesser beings to the supreme being, a question which both Descartes and the medieval philosophers broached, albeit in differing ways, under the rubric of the divine sov­ ereignty. The Cartesian subject is thus a subjectus, one who submits, and this in at least t:"o ways t�at were Significant for both Descartes and medieval political theology: (1) th � subject submits to the Sovereign who is the Lord God; and (ii) the subject also YIelds to the earthly authority of the prince who is God's representative on earth. As Descartes put it in his letter to Mersenne (April 15, 1630): "Do not hesitate I tell you, to avow and proclaim everywhere, that it is God who has established the laws of nature, as a King establishes laws in his Kingdom:'2 From this passage, and from his other writings, it is clear that the notion of sovereignty was at once political and �heological for Descartes, as it had been for the earlier scholastic philosophers. This IS not the place for a detailed discussion of Balibar's argument, which in addition to being a little sketchy is also not entirely new-Leibniz, Arnauld, and Malebranche had long ago viewed Descartes, roughly their contemporary, as a follower in the f?otste�s of Augustine who found philosophy's raison d'etre in the soul's contempla­ . tIon of ItS relatlOn to God, and who therefore took the dependence of lesser beings on the supreme eminence as philosophy's primary concern.3 But if John Locke is deemed by Balibar to be the inventor of the modern concept of the self, who then is �he real au�ho� of the fully-fledged concept of the transcendental subject, if Balibar . IS nght to mSlst that it is not Descartes? The true culprit here, says Balibar, is not Descartes, but Kant, who needed the concept of the transcendental subject to ac­ count for the "synthetic unity" that provides the necessary conditions for objective . expenence. Kant chose to foist onto Descartes something that was really his own "discovery;' and with Heidegger as his more than willing subsequent accomplice

Kenneth Surin

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in this dubious undertaking, the outcome of this grievous misattribution has been momentous for our understanding (or lack thereof) of the course taken by the his­ tory of philosophy.4 Kant however was about more than just the "discovery" of the transcendental subject. The Kantian subject had also to prescribe duties for itself in the name of the categorical imperative, and in so doing carve out a realm of freedom in nature that would enable this subject to free itself from a "self-inflicted tutelage" that arises when we can't make judgments without the supervision of an other, and this of course includes the tutelage of the King. The condition for realizing any such ideal on the part of the enlightened subject is the ability to submit to nothing but the rule of reason in making judgments, and so to be free from the power of the des­ pot when making one's judgments entails a critical repositioning of the place from which sovereignty is exercised: no more is this place the body of the King, since for Kant this "tutelage" is stoppable only if the subject is able to owe its allegiance to a republican polity constituted by the rule of reason and nothing but the rule of rea­ son. Whatever criticism Balibar levels at Kant for the (supposed) historical mistake he made with regard to Descartes, the philosopher from East Prussia nonetheless emerges as a very considerable figure in Balibar's account. For Kant also created the concept of a certain kind of practical subject, one who operates in the realm of freedom, and this practical subject, whose telos is the ultimate abolition of any kind of "self-inflicted tutelage;' had to destroy the "subject" of the King (i.e., the subjectus of Descartes and medieval political theology) in order to become a "self-legislating" rational being. Kant therefore simultaneously created the transcendental subject (i.e., the subjectum of modern epistemology) and discredited philosophically the subjectus of the previous philosophical and political dispensation. The real philosophical adversary of Kant is of course Hobbes. Hobbes stated the crux of the principle of sovereignty when he asserted that if the sovereign is the ori­ gin oflaw, then no law can bind the sovereign, and thus the State. The only basis for the functioning of the State is the decree of the sovereign, and force is effectively the determinant of the relation that the sovereign has to his subjects, or to other sover­ eigns. The sovereign does not derive his authority from the State, since the State only exists by virtue of the insuperable authority that emanates from the sovereign. The sovereign is necessarily the animating principle underlying all authority, and hence a subject's refusal of the authority of the sovereign is the subject's refusal of its own authority, and thus of itself. As Hobbes puts it, the sovereign is "the Publique Soule, giving Life and Motion to the Commonwealth:'5 The subject's authority, provided it is not usurped or feigned, can only be the authority of the sovereign, and a subject's disowning of the sovereign's authority is thus necessarily a nullification of the very ground of the subject's own authority.6 The unavoidable concomitant of this posi­ tion on the character of sovereignty is that the State can have only one sovereign, who therefore represents all the people (so that his acts are willy-nilly their acts as well), and all associations within the commonwealth are based on the principle of the State and the sovereign who gives the State its raison d'etre.7 Against Hobbes' absolutizing of the Sovereign, Kant asserts that "the people too have inalienable rights against the head of state . . . . For to assume that the head of state can neither make mistakes nor be ignorant of anything would be to imply that he receives divine

50

Post-Political Citizenship

inspiration and is more than a human being:'B The concomitant of Kant's philosophical evisceration of the "subject" of the King was thus the political emergence of the republican citizen, who from 1789 onwards would supplant the subjectlsubjectus of the previous epoch. In the process, Des­ cartes' philosophical world of subjects who submit to the laws of God and King was dislodged by Kant's world of "self-legislating" rational subjects who engage in this legislation precisely by adverting to the notions of right and duty. This new subject is the embodiment of right and of the operation of practical reason (right being for Kant the outcome that can be guaranteed only by the proper use of practical reason), and furthermore the subject is considered a citizen to the extent he/she embodies the general will, in which case the only laws worthy of the name are those framed to reflect "the united will of the whole nation:'9 Sovereignty is thus glossed by Kant through a recasting of the Rousseauan social contract. Laws are rationally promulgated only when they exemplify the general will, and this exemplification of the general will is possible only if there is a perfectly just civil constitution. The outcome, as the philosophy textbooks tell us, was a crucial separation of the earthly from the heavenly city. However, if Kant is the inaugurator of the Citizen Subject, then for Balibar Michel Foucault is the great theorist of the transition from the world of kingly �nd divine sovereignty to the world of rights and duties determined by the Sta�e a�� Its apparatuses, and Balibar concludes his essay with the following obser­ . vatIon: :As to whether thiS figure [the Citizen Subjectl like a face of sand at the edge of the sea, is about to be effaced with the next great sea change, that is another ques­ tion:' Perhaps it is nothing more than Foucault's own utopia, a necessary support for tha� utopia's facticity.lO I would like now to address the Foucauldian question left by Bahbar for future consideration, and pose the question of the current destination or fate of the Citizen Subject. To do this we have to look again at Kant. The reason that constitutes the subject is perforce a Transcendental Reason. The Ka�tian inflection here is not accidental, because the reason that grounds the . sub� ect IS �ot a reason that can be specified within the terms of the activity of the s �b)ect: thiS reason is the basis of this subject's very possibility qua subject, and by virtue of that, reason is necessarily exterior to the subject. Reason in this kind of em­ ployment is thus the activity of a single and universal quintessence whose object is . reason Itself, so that reason has necessarily to seek its ground within itself, as Hegel noted.ll Reason, by virtue of its self-grounding, is perforce the writing of the Abso­ lute.12 The subject's ground, which has to reside in Reason itself, is therefore entirely and properly metaphysical, and any crisis of Transcendental Reason unavoidably becomes a philosophical crisis of the subject. Kant himself was the first to realize this, though it was left to his philosophical successors in the movement known as early Romanticism (Friihromantik), to make the acknowledgment of this crisis of Transcendental Reason into a starting-point for philosophical reflection. With Nietzsche however the hitherto radical figure of the transcendental subject is propelled into a crisis, and with this crisis the fundamental convergence between the �etaphy�i��l-epistemological subject and the philosophico-political subject is dellled plaus�blhty. We �ll know from the basic textbooks in the history ofphilosophy that reason, msofar as It operates on both the understanding and the will, is placed

Kenneth Surin

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by Nietzsche entirely within the ambit of the Wille zur Macht, so that power/ desire b ecomes the enabling basis of any epistemological or moral and political subject, thereby irretrievably undermining or dislocating both kinds of subject. As a result of the intervention represented by Nietzsche, truth, goodness, and beauty, that is, the guiding transcendental notions for the constitution of this epistemological and moral and political subject, are henceforth to be regarded merely as the functions and ciphers of this supervening will to power. The same conventional wisdom also assures us that Marx and Freud likewise "undid" the two kinds of subject and thus undermined even further any basis for their essential congruence. The constellation formed by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud (and their successors) shows both the tran­ scendental subject and the ethico-political subject of action to be mere conceptual functions, lacking any substantial being (Kant of course having already argued in the Critique of Pure Reason that the subject of thought is not a substance). This hackneyed narrative about the collective impact of the great masters of suspicion is fine as it goes; what is far more interesting, however, is the story of what had to come after Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, of what it is that was going to be done with the ruins of the epistemological and moral and political subject who ostensibly had reigned from Plato to Hegel before receiving its quietus in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is interesting that Balibar, who is perhaps almost as resolute a Marxist as anyone could be in these supposedly post-Marxist days, appears not to take on board Marx's critique of bourgeois democracy in "Citizen Subject;' but in­ stead regards Foucault as the thinker who more than any other registered the crisis of this Subject. Be that as it may, it is hard to deny that the transcendental subject of modern epistemology suffered calamitously at the hands of Nietzsche (and Hei­ degger after Nietzsche), and that political and philosophical developments in the twentieth century cast the Citizen Subject adrift in a rickety life-boat headed in the direction of the reefs mapped by Foucault. But can the course of this stricken life-boat be altered, and the functions and modes of expression typically associated with the Citizen Subject be reconstituted in some more productive way, so that this Subject, or its successor (but who would that putative successor be?), would be able to meet the political and philosophical demands generated by the presently emerging conjuncture? Here one senses a cer­ tain ambivalence at the end of Balibar's essay, a wish that Foucault was perhaps not going to be right when it came to a final reckoning of the fate of the Citizen Subject, and that new and better times will somehow come to await a radically transformed Citizen Subject. But what could the shape and character of this new life for the Citi­ zen Subject be? Balibar has an emphatic proposal: the Citizen Subject will live only by becoming a revolutionary actor. I want to take Balibar's proposal as the starting-point for the conclusion of this paper. Whatever Foucault may have said about the supersession of the post-classical episteme, and the death of Man-Citizen that accompanied this supersession (I take Foucault's Man-Citizen to be coextensive with Balibar's Citizen Subject), it is obvi­ ous here that the subsequent mutation of classical liberalism into a globalizing neo­ liberalism and the disappearance of socialism to form the basis of a new conjunc­ ture-a conjuncture which some have called the "post-political" politics of the time

52

Post-Political Citizenship

after 1968-represents an added inconvenience for the already punishing trajectory taken by this Citizen Subject or Man-Citizen. The culmination of this trajectory in the "post-political" politics of the last few decades seems at one and the same time to reduce the weight of the critique represented by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud (the subject's apparent superfluity in this "post-political" dispensation undermines the very need for its critique; with the effacement of the object of critique, critique also finds itself fading into nothingness), while at the same time making more urgent the question of the ontological status of the subject of this "post-political" politics (is it still some kind of vestigially effective subject, a barely breathing remnant of the Man-Citizen of Foucault's modern episteme or Balibar's Citizen Subject of the time after 1789?); and if so, what powers (if any) reside in this brute remnant, or are we left today with nothing for the metaphysical constitution of the possibility of poli­ tics but the sheer acknowledgement of the power of the body, the power of bare life (as proposed by the thinkers of the "inoperative" community and the community to come), or the appeal to some kind of undeconstructable justice coming from the outside of any totality (as proposed by Derrida and his epigoni), etc.? We don't have to hear too much along these lines in order to recognize that the practices and orders of thought associated with the "societies of control" delineated by Deleuze, and those of the domain of the biopolitical identified by Foucault and others each derives their saliency from this "post-political" conjuncture. Also important here is the attempt by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to outline a form of constitutionalism that is not indebted to the metaphysics of classical (and for Spivak, Western) politi­ cal sovereignty. What kind of political subject, if any, can continue to exist in the conjuncture of a "post-political" politics, and has this subject to possess an intrinsic connection to the political sovereignty that grounded the classical Citizen Subject? The invention of something different to put in place of the system of representa­ tions that has governed thinking about ethnicity, race, clan, nation, sovereignty, and patrimony-these representations being the linchpins of an episteme or mentalite that has prevailed since 1789 or 1492 (these markers are emblematic of course)-will have of course to be a vast, collective undertaking, perhaps extending over several generations. The suggestion here is not so much that these notions have necessarily to be dispensed with; but that they be rethought and placed in the service of a dif­ ferent vision of the future, a different salvation even. Here I agree with Tom Nairn that it is difficult to conceive of the swift and outright elimination of the "nation" of modern nationalism. The forces and the desire named "nationalism" can probably be transformed over the longer haul into the vehicle of the "civic nationalism" that Nairn and others have advocated, but its demise in the shorter term seems rather improbable. To state the obvious: the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a United States hegemony and replaced the antagonism between capitalism and bureaucratic socialism with a whole series of struggles between competing brands of capitalism, and here the outcome is uncertain, as indicated by the current and ongoing recession, or "jobless recovery" as it is now being called. Moreover, there seems to be a more active role in the international system for regional as well as local states, and these are accompanied by new mechanisms of cultural identifica-

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tion that are tied to regions or sub-regions rather than nation-states (such as the various "separatisms" associated with the Basques, Catalonians, Ulster Protestants, Chechens, Kurds, Corsicans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Kashmiris, Eritreans).13 What we are likely to see here is the coexistence of the transnational with the interlocal, with the nation-state having an altered but still significant function as the mechanism that coordinates the flows between the transnational and the interlocal. Concep­ tions of sovereignty and citizenship have of course been changing with these trends. Important here is the shift from government to governance and meta-governance, as large-scale official state apparatuses are dismantled or deemphasized, and govern­ ing becomes more and more a matter of organizing flows between multiple agen­ cies and networks of power and information (governance), and of providing the "axioms" to integrate and coordinate all these systems and movements (i.e., meta­ governance).'4 In such a world notions of citizenship and nationality have become more flexible and compartmentalized, and so we have lotteries for American green cards, Caribbean countries putting citizenship up for sale, and so on. What concepts are going to be needed for this rethinking of a different politics, a different political future? The list of these concepts is going to be pretty long, but it would include something like a transindividualization of desire of the kind that Warren Montag has associated with Spinoza. And then there is the monumentally intractable matter of sovereignty. Here it is important to note that acknowledging the seeming indispensability of the nation -state in the current political dispensation is simply not symmetrical with the demand that we ("we" being philosophers of the political) conceptualize outside the order of the State. For we can conceptualize outside the order of the State whilst still acknowledging the current indispensability of the nation-state; just as we can acknowledge the current political indispensability of the nation -state without heeding the imperative that we conceptualize outside the order of the State or sovereignty. In talking about this conceptualization, a promising starting-point is Rousseau's proposition that a certain miraculation or occultation occurs when sovereignty is exercised, namely, that individuals surrender to the sovereign a certain fundamental plenitude of being possessed by them in the state of nature, in return for which they emerge as public citizens. Marx had his own version of this occultation or "miracle:' As he pointed out, capital has perforce to reconstitute social subjects and market . participants (and non-participants), who by virtue of this reconstitution become the agents and bearers of its "substance" as they come to be constrained by capital and its allied organizations, even as they exercise varying degrees of command on capital's behalf. It is therefore a historically defined manifestation of constituent power that defines capitalism and its agents. This manifestation of constituent power serves as the model of realization for capital-it is the nexus, at once social and politi­ cal, which invests everything with (a productive) desire before a capitalist regime of accumulation can come to possess its enabling conditions. Capital's constituent power is the power of a basic disempowerment, an undermining of living labor, and it is this debilitation of living labor that enables capitalism to come into being and to reconstitute itself.15 It is axiomatic here that the project of liberation must therefore shape itself as a countervailing strength (in the manner akin to Spinoza's

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potentia) that severs any propensities for liberation from the grip of this original disempowerment that incapacitates living labor in order to make capitalist accumu­ lation possible. Capitalism, and this is the powerful insight announced by Deleuze and Guattari, only arises because the power that would prevent it from emerging, the power of what amounts to an "ur-liberation" antecedent to any "actual" libera­ tion, has already been neutralized by the prior violent installation of the forms of social cooperation that will in turn allow capital to emerge as a full-blown economic assemblage. These forms of social cooperation are precisely those responsible for the emergence of the public citizen, the Citizen Subject, so that there is a royal road which leads from Rousseau to Foucault. This in turn poses the critical question of the organization of constituent power which enables the possibility of this liberation to be stated. How are we begin to think the thought that subtends this occultation in which the Citizen Subject emerges? Of course the state and sovereignty are enabling conditions for this emergence, but if there is anything to be learnt from the papers given yesterday, it is that it is not enough to conceptualize the exteriority that lies beyond the State.,6 Constituent power resides in this exteriority, taking the form of the enemy/friend dyad of Schmitt's which is the enabling condition of the political, or the multitudo in Spinoza, which, as Warren Montag and Jon Beasley-Murray pointed out in the question-and-answer session yesterday, is really antecedent to this or that manifestation of state power or sovereignty. So it is not sufficient to con­ ceptualize the exteriority or surplus that lies beyond the state; the conceptualization of this pure exteriority or surplus has itself to be conceptualized in a higher order reflection. Before the State, before power and politics, there is this enabling surplus or pure exteriority. But before this enabling surplus or exteriority there is . . . ? Using very broad brush strokes, we can state this meta-theoretical thesis in terms of the history of philosophy. If Kant and Hegel, the State-thinkers par excel­ lence, enable us to conceptualize the lineaments of the State's form and character­ istic dispositions, then this conference has indicated that the exemplary thinkers of the State's exteriority are Machiavelli, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Schmitt. The thinking of this exteriority or excess, associated so far with Machiavelli, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Schmitt, however demands in turn its own conceptualization. But this concep­ tualization will necessarily be of something that is non-denumerable and indeed non-spatiotemporal, since it does not consist of countable elements or ordered rela­ tions. Friends and enemies can be counted, but what makes their becoming possible at the conceptual level is not countable, however. The place of this thinking cannot therefore be systematized nor can it take the forms of testable hypotheses or em­ pirical predictions. And yet it is a place that already exists, as indeed it has to, since friends and enemies and the political already exist. A becoming friend or a becom­ ing enemy must have its own conditions of possibility, moments of possibility which are eternal while simultaneously enfolding space and time, and in so doing provid­ ing the becoming friend or becoming enemy with their point of accession into the spatiotemporal domain, or more precisely, the domain of the actually political. The metaphysical or theological traditions have a term for this becoming-possible of becoming, namely, the Aeon or Kairos, an indefinite and therefore unmasterable time that makes possible the unfolding of events. An unmasterable time, but also

Kenneth Surin samething

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that without itself being spatial enfolds a place, the place of the becom. .J11g of this event or that event. Interestingly enough, It was the rned'laeva1 theoioglan ' . D uns Scotus who first defined this concept, the concept 0f a h aecceltas or h aeccel'ty, from potent!'al'Ity to to designate the possibility of an event's becoming as it moves . act. Scotus rightly perceived that the movement from potentIal'Ity to � ct can�ot b � a single event or indeed several linked events, since it is s.i�ply impoSSIble to Ident�fy the very point at which potentiality ceases to be potentlahty and �anages to re�llZe itself in act, to complete or exhaust itself in act. The only alternative, therefore, IS to view the connection between potentiality and act as an infinite series of oscillations between potentiality and act, and to then say that the event is constituted as the outcome of these unceasing oscillations. The event-whether it is being-friend, or being-enemy, or being-tyrant, or being-corrupt, and so on-emerges not from a perm� nent or stable co� dition, b�t . . rather from a mixed conceptual regime that embodIes dIfference, vanatlOn, devI­ ation, and inflection. To see how such an unavoidably mixed conceptual regime would work, it has to be acknowledged from the outset that there is no unitary conceptual operation which subtends a being-friend or being-enemy or being-cor­ rupt or whatever. These are images of thought, and as such they a:e the product of . quite specific conceptual or theoretical operations. Sometimes an lII�ag� of thought is formed by a process of augmentation, as when the image-concept IS hke a broken porcelain vase which is missing a few pieces that have to be recovered in order to re­ store it to its original shape; and sometimes an image-concept needs to have some­ thing subtracted from it, especially when it misleads us into thinking t�a� it contains . everything that can be seen or which needs to be seen. The dlffere� tlatmg la� or of concept-image creation therefore necessarily underlies the theoretlCal operatlon of delineating the space from which the figures of the political emerges. Bu: the la��r of concept-creation, philosophy in other words, is itself always irreducl�ly P ?htl­ . cal, and depending on the character of this conceptual labor it can contam Wlthm itself its own "revolutionary becoming" (if one may use a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari). What then can we say, in conclusion, about post-political citizenship (this paper's original subject)? Very briefly, in a time when citizenship ca? incre�singly be bought and sold, and when the forms of sovereignty are bec�mmg va�lable, �nd the state itself is best conceptualized as an assemblage of projects, no mterestmg problems-I was tempted to say no interesting philosophical ��oblems-a�e posed . by these modulations of the post-political. But the post-pohtlcal IS preClsely the . form of the political today, and so more important, much more Importa�t, than the task of defining and describing post-political citizenship is the one whIch asks of the body politic how if at all it is going to take politics beyond the lin��� e?ts of this post-political. Relevant here is the following passage from SlavoJ. Zlzeks The Ticklish Subject:

The best formula that expresses the paradox of post-politics is perhaps Tony Blair's characterization of New Labour as the "Radical Centre": in the old days of "ideological" political division, the qualification "radical" was re­ . served for either the extreme Left or for the extreme RIght. The Centre was,

50

Post-Political Citizenship

by definition, moderate: measured by the old standards, the term "Radical Centre" is the same nonsense as "radical moderation:' What makes New Labour (or Bill Clinton's politics in the USA) "radical" is its radical aban­ donment on the "old ideological divides;' usually formulated in the guise of a paraphrase of Deng Xiaoping's motto from the 1960s: "It doesn't matter if a cat is red or white; what matters is that it actually catches mice:" in the same vein, advocates of New Labour like to emphasize that we should take good ideas without any prejudice and apply them, whatever their (ideologi­ cal) origins. And what are these "good ideas"? The answer is, of course, ideas that work. It is here that we encounter the gap that separates a political act proper from the "administration of social matters" which remains within the framework of the existing sociopolitical relations: the political act (interven­ tion) proper is not simply something that works well within the framework of the existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work. To say that good ideas are "ideas that work" means that one accepts in advance the (global capitalist) constellation that determines what works (if, for example, one spends too much money on education or healthcare, that "doesn't work;' since it infringes too much on the conditions of capitalist profitability). One can also put it in terms of the well-known definition of politics as the "art of the possible": authentic politics is, rather, the exact opposite, that is, the art of the impossible-it changes the very parameters of what is considered "possible" in the existing constellation.'7 In other words: the first task (and there will be countless others of course) of the citi­ zen who is launched on a trajectory beyond the post-political is to find the resources of power and hope that would enable us to insist that there is a non-negotiable line, or maybe it is a chasm, between the political left and right, and that such notions as "the radical center" are vapid fictions. Philosophical labor is no substitute for this practical-political labor of the citizen, but it is its necessary complement. This is a prolepsis to the task of breaking the hold of the now pervasive Law and its support­ ing institutions and frameworks . •

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1

2

3

57

Kenneth Surin

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•

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Etienne Balibar, "Citizen Subject;' in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), 33-57. In another work, Balibar goes on to argue that it is Locke and not Descartes who invents the modern con­ cept of the self as that which the "you" or the ''1'' possesses. Balibar, Identite et difference (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Rene Descartes, Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 28. Also in Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1987), vol. 1, 145. Balibar refers to this letter on page 36 of "Citizen Subject:' The importance of the Augustinian tradition for Descartes is stressed in Stephen Menn, "The Intellectual Setting;' in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33-86; see especially 69. See also Nicholas Tolley, "The Reception of Descartes' Philoso-

phy:' The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1992), 393-423. 4

According to Balibar, the notion of the transcendental subject arose from Kant's modi­ fication of the Cartesian cogito, with the Lockean self beginning a second trad"l�lOn that circumvents Kant before ending up with William James and Bergson. See Bahbar, " Je/ moi/soi;' Vocabulaire europeen des philosophies (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

5

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 230. First published 1651.

6

Ibid., 122.

7

Ibid., 155-56.

8

9

ImmanueI Kant, "On the Relationship of Theory to Practice in Political Right (Against Hobbes ):' in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambn'dge: C ambridge University Press, 1991), 84. Immanuel Kant, "On the Common Saying: 'This May Be True in Theory but It Does Not Apply in Practice:" in Political Writings, op. cit., 71.

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10 Balibar, op. cit., 55. Balibar says a great deal more about the Cartesian and me ieval-theo­ logical subjectus than can be indicated here, rightly pointing ut that a notIon that had evolved over seventeen centuries from Roman times to the penod of the urop an bso­ lute monarchies is not easily encompassed in a single definition. He also nghtly llldlCates that the supposed novum of the Citizen Subject has to be regarded with some SkeptIC1S , . . since under the aegis of bourgeois democracy thIS subject was always gOlllg to retalll some traces of the old subjectus.

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'0

e Difference For Hegel's (early) view on the operation of "speculative" reason, see his between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, trans. Horton S. Hams and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 88. For excellent commentary o this aspect of Hegel's relation to Kant, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A BIOgraphy (Cambndge. Cambridge University Press, 2000), 160ff.

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12 The essential correlation between Reason and the Absolute e tails that every oper ti n . of consciousness, practical as much as theoretical, is necessanly one whlch falls Wlt�lll . the remit of the Absolute. The subject of thought then has to be the subject of morahty and politics and vice versa-a connection previously established y Kant when he moved . . from the First to the Second Critique, that is, from the subject s understandlllg to the subject's willing and acting.

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·13 Bob Jessop, "Capitalism and its future: remarks on regulation, government and gover­ nance:' Review of International Political Economy 4 (1997), 561-81. 14 Ibid., 574-75.

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15 The great recent theorist of this exercise of constituent power is of urse Antonio egri . Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. MaurlZla Boscagh (Mlllne . apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Originally pubhshed as II potere costltuente, saggio sulle alternative del moderno (Carnago Varese: Sugar Co., 1992).

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16 A version of this paper was presented at the conference "Thinking Politically" held at Duke University, October 24-26, 2003.-Ed. 17 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 198-99.

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze Slavoj Zizek

•

In his "transcendental empiricism;' Deleuze gives to Kant's transcendental dimension a unique twist: the proper tran­ scendental space is the virtual space of the multiple singular potentialities, of "pure" impersonal singular gestures, affects, and perceptions that are not yet the gestures-affects-percep­ tions of a pre-existing, stable, and self-identical subject. This is why, for example, Deleuze celebrates the art of cinema: it "liberates" gaze, images, movements, and, ultimately, time it­ self from their attribution to a given subject-when we watch a movie, we see the flow of images from the perspective of the "mechanical" camera, a perspective which does not belong to any subject; through the art of montage, movement is also abstracted/liberated from its attribution to a given subject or object-it is an impersonal movement which is only second­ arily, afterwards, attributed to some positive entities. Here, however, the first crack in Deleuze's edifice appears: in a move which is far from self-evident, Deleuze links this conceptual space to the traditional opposition between pro­ duction and representation. The virtual field is (re)interpreted as that of generative, productive forces, opposed to the space of representations. Here we get all the standard topics of the molecular multiple sites of productivity constrained by the molar totalizing organizations, and so on and so forth. Under the heading of the opposition between becoming and being, Deleuze thus seems to identify these two logics, although they are fundamentally incompatible (one is tempted to attribute the "bad" influence which pushed him towards the second logic to Felix Guattari). The proper site of production is not the virtual space as such, but, rather, the very passage from it to constituted reality, the collapse of the multitude and its oscillations into one reality-production is fundamentally a limitation of the open space of virtualities, the determination/ negation of the virtual multitude (this is how Deleuze reads Spinoza's omni determinatio est negatio against Hegel) .

Polygraph 15116 (2004)

60

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles De/euze

!

The ine of Deleuze proper is that of the great early monographs (the key ones . bemg Difference and Repetition and The Logic ofSense) as well as some of the shorter introductory writings (like Proust and Signs and the Introduction to Sacher-Masoch1). In his la�e work, it is the two cinema books which mark the return to the topics of The LogIc of Sense. This series is to be distinguished from the books Deleuze and Guattari co-wrote, and one can only regret that the Anglo-Saxon reception of De­ leuze (and, also, the political impact of Deleuze) is predominantly that of a "Guat­ tarized" Deleuze. It is crucial to note that not a single one of Deleuze's own texts is in any way directly political; Deleuze "in himself" is a highly elitist author, indiffer­ ent towards politics. The only serious philosophical question is thus: what inher­ ent imp asse caused Deleuze to turn towards Guattari? Is Anti-Oedipus, arguably , Deleuzes worst book, not the result of escaping the full confrontation of a deadlock via a simplified "flat" solution, homologous to Schelling escaping the deadlock of his Weltalter project vi� his shift to the duality of "positive" and "negative" philosophy, or Habermas escapmg the deadlock of the "dialectic of Enlightenment" via his shift to the duality of instrumental and communicational reason? Our task is to confront again this deadlock. Was, therefore, Deleuze not pushed towards Guattari because ua tari presented �n alibi, an easy escape from the deadlock of his previous posi­ . es Dele�zes conceptual edIfice not rely on two logics, on two conceptual tIon . ? OppOSItions, whIch coexist in his work? This insight seems so obvious, stating it seems so close to what the French call a lapalissade, that one is surprised how it has not yet been generally perceived: 1. On the one hand, the logic of sense, of the immaterial becoming as the sense-e�ent, as the effect of bodily-material processes-causes, the logic of the radlCal gap between generative process and its immaterial sense-ef­ fect: "multiplicities, being incorporeal effects of material causes, are im­ passible or causally sterile entities. The time of a pure becoming, always already passed and eternally yet to come, forms the temporal dimension of this impassibility or sterility of multiplicities:'2 And is cinema not the �l�imate case of the sterile flow of surface becoming? The cinema image IS mherently sterile and impassive, the pure effect of corporeal causes, although nonetheless acquiring its pseudo-autonomy. 2. On the other hand, the logic of becoming as production of Beings: "the emerge �ce of metric or extensive properties should be treated as a single . . process m whIch a contmuous virtual spacetime progressively differenti­ ates itself into actual discontinuous spatio-temporal structures."3 ay, in his analyses of films and literature, Deleuze emphasizes the de-substantial­ lzat�.on of affects: in a work of art, an affect (boredom, for instance) is no longer attnbutable to actual persons, but becomes a free-floating event. How, then, does this impersonal intensity of an affect-event relate to bodies or persons? Here we �ncoun�er the same ambiguity: either this immaterial affect is generated by interact­ mg bodIes as a sterile surface of pure Becoming, or it is part of the virtual intensities ou� of which bodies emerge through actualization (the passage from Becoming to Bem�). So, on the one hand, Manuel DeLanda, in his excellent compte-rendu of De­ leuzes ontology, affirms the logic of the "disappearance of process under product:'

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Slavoj Zizek

61

the logic which relies on a long (also Hegelian-Marxist!) tradition of "reification": "This theme of the disgUising of process under product is key to Deleuze's philoso­ phy since his philosophical method is, at lea�t in part, designed to overcome the o ­ , . jective illusion fostered by this concealment. 4 A� , t e proper level of produc�lOn IS . also unambiguously designated as that of vlrtualItles: m and beneath the constituted reality, "the extensive and qualitative properties of the final product:'5 one should discover the traces of the intensive process of virtualities-Being and Becoming re­ late as Actual and Virtual. How, then, are we to combine this unambiguous affirma­ tion of the Virtual as the site of production which generates constituted reality, with the no less unambiguous statement that "the virtual is produced out of the actual"?

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Multiplicities should not be conceived as possessing the capacity to actively interact with one another through these series. Deleuze thinks about them as endowed with only a mere capacity to be affected, since they are, in his words, "impassive entities-impassive results:' The neutrality or sterility of multiplicities may be explained in the following way. Although their diver­ gent universality makes them independent of any particular mechanism (the same multiplicity may be actualized by several causal mechanisms) they do depend on the empirical fact that some causal mechanism or another actually exists . . . . [Tlhey are not transcendent but immanent entities. ' " Deleuze views multiplicities as incorporeal effects of corporeal causes, that is, as historical results of actual causes possessing no causal powers of their own. On the other hand, as he writes, "to the extent that they differ in nature from these causes, they enter, with one another, into relations of quasi-cau­ sality. Together they enter into a relation with a quasi-cause which is itself incorporeal and assures them a very special independence:' . . . Unlike actual capacities, which are always capacities to affect and be affected, virtual af­ fects are sharply divided into a pure capacity to be affected (displayed by impassible multiplicities) and a pure capacity to affect. 6 The concept of quasi-cause is that which prevents a regression into simple reduc­ tionism: it designates the pure agency of transcendental causality. Let us take De­ leuze's own example from his Cinema 2: The Time-Image: the emergence of cin­ ematic neorealism. One can, of course, explain neorealism by a set of historical circumstances (the trauma of World War II, etc.). However, there is an excess in the emergence of the New: neorealism is an Event which cannot simply be reduced to its material/historical causes, and the "quasi-cause" is the cause of this excess, the cause of that which makes an Event (an emergence of the New) irreducible to its historical circumstances. One can also say that the quasi-cause is the second-level, the meta-cause of the very excess of the effect over its (corporeal) causes. This is how one should understand what Deleuze says about being affected: insofar as the incorporeal Event is a pure affect (an impassive-neutral-sterile result), and i �sofar as something New (a new Event, an Event of/as the New) can only emerge If the chain of its corporeal causes is not complete, one should postulate, over and above the network of corporeal causes, a pure, transcendental capacity to affect. This, also, is why Lacan appreciated so much The Logic of Sense: is the Deleuzian quasi-cause

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Slavoj Ziiek

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

not. the exact equivalent of Lacan's objet petit a, this pure, immaterial, spectral entity whIch serves as the object-cause of desire? One should be very precise here in order not to miss the point: Deleuze is not af­ firming a simple psycho-physical dualism in the sense of someone like John Searle· he is not offering two different "descriptions" of the same event. It is not that th� same process (say, a sp�ech activity) can be described in a strictly naturalistic way, :s a ne�ro�a�, and bodIly process embedded in its actual causality, or, as it were, from withm, at the level of meaning, where the causality ("I answer your question because I understand it") is pseudo-causality. In such an approach, the material­ corporeal causality remains complete, while the basic premise of Deleuze's ontol­ ogy is precis�ly that corporeal causality is not complete: in the emergence of the . New, somethmg occurs WhICh cannot be properly described at the level of corporeal causes and effects. Quasi-cause is not the illusory theatre of shadows, like a child wh? thinks �e is magically making a toy run, unaware of the mechanic causality whICh effectIvel� does th� wo�k-on the contrary, the quasi-cause fills in the gap of corporeal causaitty. In thIS stnct sense, and insofar as the Event is the Sense-Event . . quaSI-cause IS non-sense as inherent to Sense: if a speech could have been reduced to its sense, then it would fall into reality-the relationship between Sense and its designated reality would have been simply that of objects in the world. Nonsense is that w�ich �aintains the autonomy of the level of sense, of its surface flow of pure becommg, WIth regard to the designated reality ("referent"). And does this not bring us back to the unfortunate "phallic signifier" as the "pure" signifier without signi­ fied? Is the Lacanian phallus not precisely the point of non -sense sustaining the flow of sense? Thi� bri�gs �� to the topi � �f "Deleuze and psychoanalysis": what Deleuze pres­ ents as ?edIp.u� IS. a rather ndICulous simplification, if not an outright falsification, of Lacans pOSItIon. In the last decades of Lacan's teaching, topics and subtitles like "au-dela de I'Oedipe;' "I'Oedipe, un reve de Freud;' etc., abound; not only this, but Lacan even pre�ents the very figure of Oedip �s at Colonus as a post-Oedipal fig­ . ure, as a figure beyond the OedIpus complex. What, then, if one conceives of the �acanian "obverse of the Oedipus" as a kind of Deleuzian "dark precursor" mediat­ mg between the two series, the "official" Oedipal narrative of normalization on the one side, and the pre-subjective field of intensities and desiring machines : on the othe � sid:? What if it is this th�t Deleuze desperately tries to avoid, this "vanishing medIator betwe.en �he two. senes? What one should do is thus to repeat, apropos of I?ele�ze,s reductIOlllst readmg of (the Freudian) Oedipus (his other uncanny excep­ tIOn, . m term� of a .botched, simplistic interpretation), the same gesture as the one that Imposes Itself m relation to Hegel. In today's theory, especially in Cultural Studies, reference to Oedipus is often reduced to the extreme of a ridiculous straw-man: the flat scenario of the drama of the child's entry into normative heterosexuality. In order to fulfill this rhetori­ cal function, the Oedipus complex has to be ascribed a multitude of inconsistent functions. Let .me quote the fo�!owing typical passage (which will tactfully be al­ lowed to r�mam anonymous) : In the Oedipal scenario, the young boy desires to conquer hIS mother sexually in order to separate himself from her and begin to '

63

al xu s se hi r, he s fat hi oy str de t us m he d, ee cc su to m rOw as an adult. In order for hi e th te ra pa se to is n tio nc fu g" tin tra as "c e os wh r he fat e th t ompetitor:' So, it is no ­ ne ta ul sim gs in th t en ist ns co in e re th do to s ha y bo e th boy from his mother. In fact, t ha . W er th fa s hi oy str de d an r, he m fro lf se m hi ously: conquer his mother, separate : ty ic � pl im an eli eg H rl pe ro its in e siv er bv su ng � hi et m � � Jerry Aline Flieger did7 is so ng en ov sc dI e) , (r ry to rn te n la uZ ele D to in ck ba us she reinscribed-retranslated Oedip e em pr su e th n, io at liz ria ito rr te de of t en ag ic ad m no a ;' in it an "abstract machine of it lim e th r fo s nd sta ho w f" ol w ne "lo e th ll ca case of what Deleuze and Guattari : ely tiv ec eff d, . An de tsi ou its ds ar w to t" gh i fl of ne "li a the pack of wolves, opening s hi ed w llo fo ) rm te e th of es ns se th bo (in dly in does Oedipus-this stranger who bl y wa s, by ve ol w an m hu of ck pa e th of it lim e m tre ex trajectory-not stand for the r, (o e on al g in ish n fi e, nc rie pe ex an m hu of it of realizing, acting out, the utter lim ad de g in liv a , ad m no ss ele m ho a y, all er lit , as n) ow s rather, with a pack of exiles of hi n ia uz ele D e th s, lu al ph of t ep nc co e th on re among humans? One should focus he ­ un "Th n: io tit pe Re d an e nc fere if D in d ce du tro in r;' so term for which is "dark precur le, sib vi in an by ed ed ec pr e ar ey th t bu , es iti ns te in nt re ffe di derbolts explode between in th pa r ei th es in rm te de ch hi , w e) br m so r eu rs cu re imperceptible dark precursor (p , e th is r so ur ec pr rk da e th , ch su s A g d: te ia gl advance, but in reverse, as though inta signifier of a meta- difference: r so ur ec pr e th , es nc re ffe di of s rie se o tw s, Given two heterogeneous serie by . r, ne an m is th In es nc re ffe di e es th of r to ia nt re plays the part of the diffe r: he ot an e on to n tio la re te ia ed m im to in em virtue of its own power, it puts th , ds or w r he ot in " nt re ffe di tly en er iff "d e th or e it is the in -itself of differenc to nt re ffe di s te la re ch hi w nt re ffe di lfse e th difference in the second degree, s­ vi es m co be d an le sib vi in is es ac tr it th pa e th e different by itself. Becaus e th by d re ve co d an er ov d ele av tr is it at th ible only in reverse, to the extent at th an th r he ot e ac pl no s ha it , m ste sy e th in ith phenomenon it induces w is it s: ck la it ch hi w at th an th r he ot y tit en from which it is "missing;' no id its s ck la it as e" ac pl its in ng ki ac "l is ch hi w e on e precisely the object x, th own identity.9 In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops this concept through a direct reference to the Lacanian notion of "pure signifier": there has to be a short -circuit between the .two series, that of the signifier and that of the signified, in order for the effect-of­ sense to take place. This short-circuit is what Lacan calls the "quilting point;' the direct inscription of the signifier into the order of the signified in the guise of an "empty" signifier without signified. This signifier represents the (signifying) cause within the order of its effects, thus subverting the (mis)perceived "natural" order within which the signifier appears as the effect/expression of the signified. And, effectively, the relationship of Deleuze to the field generally designated as that of "structuralism" is much more ambiguous than it may appear. Not only is the key notion of "dark precursor" in The Logic of Sense directly developed in Lacanian structuralist terms; at the same time, Deleuze wrote "A quoi reconnait-on Ie structu­ ralisme?" a brief, concise, and sympathetic account which, precisely, presents struc­ turalism not as the thought of fixed transcendent Structures regulating the flux of

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The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

experiences, but as deploying a consistent theory of the ro le of nonsense as the gen­ erator of the flux of sense.lO Furthermore, Deleuze here explicitly refers to (and de­ velops in detail) the Lacanian identification of this signi fier as phallus." How, then, are we to read his later obvious "hardening" of the stan ce towards "structuralism?" Why is the very Lacanian reference of the "dark precur sor" reduced to the status of a "d�rk p:,ecursor" in the later Deleuze's thought, turn ed into a kind of "vanishing medIator whose traces are to be erased in the finished result? Perhaps it is all too hasty to dismiss Deleuze's endors ement of "structuralism" as a feature belonging to an epoch when he was not yet fully aware of all the con­ sequences of his basic position (thus, the "hardeni ng" would be conceived of as a necessary radicalization). What if this hardenin g is, on the contrary, a sign of "regression;' of a false "line of flight;' a false way ou t of a certain deadlock which resolves it by sacrificing its complexity? This, perh aps, is why Deleuze experienced his collaboration with Guattari as such a "relief" : the fluidity of his texts co-writ­ ten with Guattari, the sense that now, finally, thin gs run smoothly, is effectively a fake relief-it signals that the burden of thinking w as successfully avoided. The true enigma is hence: why does Deleuze succumb to th is strange urge to "demonize" structuralism, disavowing his own roots in it (o n account of which one can effec­ tively claim that Deleuze's attack on "structuralis m" is enacted on behalf of what he got from structuralism, that it is strictly inhere nt to structuralism )? Again, why must h e deny this link? Is the Fr�u�ian Oedipus complex (especially in terms of its Lacanian interpre­ .tIve appropnatIOn) not the exact opposite of the reduction of the mul titude of social intensities onto the mother-father-and-me matrix: the matrix of the exploSive open ­ ing up of the subject onto the social space? Undergoing "symbolic castration" is a way for the subject to be thrown out of the family network, propelled into a wider social network Oedip us the operator of deterrito rialization. However, what about the f�ct that, nonetheless, Oedipus "focuses" the initial "polymorphous perversity" of dnv�s �nto the mother-father-and-me coordina tes? More precisely, is "symbolic castratIOn not also the name for a process by means of which the child-subject enters the order of sense proper, of the abstractio n of sense, gaining the capacity to abstract a quality from its embeddedness in a bo dily Whole, to conceive of it as a p ec��ing no longer attributed to a certain substance-as Deleuze wou ld have put it, red n o longer stands for the predicate of the red thing, but for the pure flow of be ­ coming-red? So, far from tying us down to our bo dily reality, "symbolic castration" sustains our very ability to "transcend" this reality and enter the space of immaterial Becoming. Does the autonomous smile which su rvives on its own when the cat's bo dy disappears in Alice in Wonderland also not stand for an organ "castrated;' cut off from the body? What if, then, phallus itself, as the signifier of castration, stands for such an organ without a body? Is this not a further argument for the claim th at Deleuze's quasi- cause is his name for the Lacanian "phallic signifier?" Recal l how, according to Deleuze, the quasi-cause "extracts Singularities from the presen t, and from individuals and per­ sons which occupy this present;'12 and, in the sam e movement, provides them with their relative autonomy with regard to the intens ive processes as their real causes, -

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Slavoj Zitek

65

and sterile effects with their morphogenetic impassive power-is these ing oW d en . " fier IS ' , " b not exactly that sym IC castratIon w l' movement of 0 " ( h ose slgm double thiS . . . . " 1e, �orpod ff , f the impasslve-stenle Event IS cut 0 , extracte ro ItS Vlfl First, � s)? h allu P aI , causal base (if "castration" means anything at all, it means thiS). Then, thIS flow re . is constituted as an autonom us fi e ld of ItS own, t�e auton�my 0f the Event � o f Sen se. ,lI1COrp oreal symbolic order with regard to ItS corporeal embodIments. Symbolic castration;' as the elementary operation of the quasi-cause, is thus a profoundly . ' "If we since it answers the basic need of concept, any matena I'1St analYSls: erialist mat are to get rid of essentialist and typological thought we need some process through which virtual multiplicities are derived from the actual world and some process through which the results of this derivation may be given enough coherence and autonomy. The problem, of course, is the following one: the minimal actualization is h�re onceived as the actualization of the virtual, after its extraction from the precedmg ctual. Is, then, every actual the result of the actualization of the preceding virtual (so that the same goes for the actual out of whic� the actualized vir�ual was ex­ . tracted), or is there an actual which precedes the virtual, smce every Virtual has to be extracted from some actual? Perhaps the way out of this predicament-is the virtual extracted from the actual as its impassive-sterile effect, or is it the productive process which generates the actual?-is the ultimate, absolute ide�tity of the two operations, an identity hinted at by Deleuze himself when �e descnbed the opera­ . �l) and, tion of the "pseudo-cause" as that of virtualization (extractIOn of the vlrtu simultaneously, minimal actualization (the pseudo-cause confers on the Virtual a . what minimum of ontological consistency). What if, as we know from Schellmg, makes from the field of potentialities an actual reality is not the addition of some raw reality (of matter), but, rather, the addition of pure ideali� (of lo�os)? Kant himself was already aware of this paradox: the confused field of ImpressIOns turns into reality when supplemented by the transcendental Idea. What this fundam�n­ . tal lesson of transcendental idealism means is that virtualization and actualization are two sides of the same coin: actuality constitutes itself when a virtual (symbolic) supplement is added to the pre-ontological real. �n othe� words, t�e very extracti�n of , the virtual from the real ("symbolic castration ) constItutes reality- actual reality IS "13

�

the real filtered through the virtual.

, ,ItS task . The function of the quasi -cause is therefore inherently contradICtory: is, at one and the same time, to perform a push towards actualization (endowing multiplicities with a minimum of actuality) and to counte: actualiza�ion by way of extracting virtual events from the corporeal processes whICh are the�r causes. One should conceive of these two aspects as identical: the properly Hegelian paradox at work here is that the only way for a virtual state to actualize itself is to be su�p�e­ mented by another virtual feature. (Again, recall Kant: how is a confused multiplic­ ity of subjective sensations transformed into "obj �ctive" reality? It happ�n� �hen t�e , subjective function of transcendental synthesis IS added to thiS multI�I JClty.) �IS is the "phallic" dimension at its most elementary: the excess of the virtual which sustains actualization. And, this reference to the phallic signifier also enables us to answer one of the standard reproaches to the Lacanian notions of phallus and

66

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

castration: the idea that they involve a kind of ahistorical short -circuit, that is to say, the complaint that they directly link the limitation serving as a condition of human existence as such to a particular threat (that of castration) which relies on a specific patriarchal gender constellation. The next move is, then, usually the one of trying to get rid of the notion of castration-this "ridiculous" Freudian claim-by way of claiming that the threat of castration is, at its best, just a local expression of the global limitation of the human condition, which is that of human finitude, experi­ enced in a whole series of constraints (the existence of other people who limit our freedom, our mortality, and, also, the necessity to "choose one's sex"). Such a move from castration to an anxiety grounded in the very finitude of the human condition is, of course, the standard existential-philosophical move of "saving" Freud by way of getting rid of the embarrassing topic of castration and penis envy ("who can take this seriously today?"). Psychoanalysis is thus redeemed, magically transformed into a respectable academic discipline that deals with how suffering human subjects cope with the anxieties of finitude. The (in)famous advice given to Freud by Jung when their boat approached the coast of the U.S. in 1912 (that Freud should leave out or at least limit the accent on sexuality, in order to render psychoanalysis more acceptable to the American medical establishment) is resuscitated here. Why is it not sufficient to emphasize how "castration" is just a particular instance of the general limitation of the human condition? Or, to put it in a slightly differ­ ent way, how should one cut off the link between the universal symbolic structure and the particular corporeal economy? The old reproach against Lacan is that he conflates two levels, the allegedly neutral-universal-formal symbolic structure and the particular-gendered-bodily references; say, he emphasizes that the phallus is not the penis as an organ, but a signifier, even a "pure" signifier-so, why then call this "pure" signifier "phallus?" As it was clear to Deleuze (and not only to Lacan), the notion of castration answers a very specific question: how does the universal sym­ bolic process detach itself from its corporeal roots? How does it emerge in its relative autonomy? "Castration" designates the violent bodily cut which enables us to enter the domain of the incorporeal. And, the same goes for the topic of finitude: "castra­ tion" is not simply one of the local cases of the experience of finitude- this concept tries to answer a more fundamental "arche-transcendental" question, namely, how do we, humans, experience ourselves as marked byfinitude in thefirst place? This fact is not self-evident: Heidegger was right to emphasize that only humans exist in the mode of "being-towards-death." Of course, animals are also somehow "aware" of their limitation, of their limited power, etc.-the hare does try to escape the fox. And yet, this is not the same as human finitude, which emerges against the background of the small child's narcissistic attitude of illusory omnipotence (of course, we do in­ deed say that, in order to become mature, we have to accept our limitations) . What lurks behind this narcissistic attitude is, however, the Freudian death drive, a kind of "undead" stubbornness denounced already by Kant as a violent excess absent in animals-which is why, for Kant, only humans need education through discipline. The symbolic Law does not tame and regulate nature, but, precisely, applies itself to an unnatural excess. Or, to approach the same complex from another direction: at its most radical, the helplessness of the small child about which Freud speaks is not

Slavoj Zizek

hysical helplessness, the inability �o provide for one's need� , b�t a h�lplessness in h e face of the enigma of the Other s desire., the. �elpless fascmatlO� �lth the e�cess of the Other's enjoyment, and the ensuing mabIhty to account for It m the avaIlable terms of meaning. When Roman Jakobson wrote on phonemes and the bodily grounding of lanfree­ the and res gestu died een embo betw gap al cruci the on ed focus he , ge gua . . . 11 n s "�astratlOn." ca Laca what gap IS S -thI emes phon of ork netw olic symb ing float Jakobson's crucial point is that it is only the signifier, not meaning, WhIC� can do this job of deterritorialization: meaning tends to revert to our concrete hfe-world embeddedness (the premodern anthropomorphic mirroring of interior and exte­ rior is the attitude of meaning par excellence .) So, the phallus, far from signaling the rootedness of the symbolic in our bodily experience (its territorializatio n), is the "pure signifier" and, as such, the very agent of de-territori�liz�tion. �ere, Jak�bson introduces the key dialectical notion of secondary groundmg m bodIly expenence: yes, our language shows overall traces of this embodiment (the word "locomotive" resembles the profile of an old steam locomotive; the word "front" is formed in the front of our oral cavity, and the word "back" in the back of it-and so on and so forth). However, all of these are reterritorializations against the background of the fundamental cut which is the condition of meaning.'4 This is why the anthropomor­ phic model of mirroring between language and the human body, the reference to the body as a fundamental frame of reference for our understanding, is to �e aba� ­ doned-language is "inhuman:' (The process thus has three phases: (1) pnmordial territorialization as the "assemblage of bodies" -an organism marks its surround­ ings, its exchanges with it, in a texture of affective inscriptions, tattoos, etc.; (2) de­ territorialization-passage to the immaterial, virtual production of sense-marks are freed from their origins (enunciator, reference); (3) reterritorialization-when language turns into a medium of communication, pinned down to its subject of enunciation whose thoughts it expresses, to the reality it designates.) So, what is symbolic castration, with the phallus as its signifier? One should begin by conceiving of the phallus as a signifi� r-which means ,;;hat? Fr�m}he tra­ ditional rituals of investiture, we know the objects that not only symbohze power, but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effective�y exercisi�g power-if a king holds in his hands the scepter and wears the crown, hIS words WIll be taken as the words of a king. Such insignia are external, not part of my nature: I don them; I wear them in order to exert power. As such, they "castrate" me: they in­ troduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (i.e., I am never fully at the level of my function). This is what the infamous "symbolic castration" means: not "castration as symbolic, as just symbolically enacted" (in the sense in which we say that, when I am deprived of something, I am "symbolically castrated"), but the castration which occurs by the very fact of me being caught in the symbolic order, assuming a symbolic mandate. Castration is the very gap b� ­ tween what I immediately am and the symbolic mandate which confers on me thIs "authority. " In this precise sense, far from being the opposite of power, it i� synony­ mous with power; it is that which confers power on me. And, one has to thmk of the phallus not as the organ which immediately expresses the vital force of my being,

f

68

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

my virility, etc., but, precisely, as such an insignia, as a mask which I put on in the same way a king or judge puts on his insignia-phallus is an "organ without a body" which I put on, which gets attached to my body, without ever becoming its "organic part;' namely, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive supplement.15 And, consequently, does the mysterious reappearance of the notion of "wound" in late Deleuze not function as a kind of "return of the (Lacanian) repressed"? "A wound is incarnated or actualized in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtu­ ality always within a milieu (plane or field):'16 "My wound existed before me" -i.e., the very "event" of my existence is grounded in symbolic castration. One should therefore problematize the very basic duality of Deleuze's thought, that of Becom­ ing versus Being, which appears in different versions (the Nomadic versus the State, the molecular versus the molar, the schizo versus the paranoiac, etc.). This duality is ultimately overdetermined as "the Good versus the Bad": the aim of Deleuze is to liberate the immanent force of Becoming from its self-enslavement to the order of Being. Perhaps the first step in this problematizing is to confront this duality with the duality of Being and Event, emphasizing their ultimate incompatibility: Event cannot be simply identified with the virtual field of Becoming which generates the order of Being-quite the contrary, in The Logic of Sense, Event is emphatically as­ serted as "sterile;' capable only of pseudo-causality. So, what if, at the level of Being, we have the irreducible multitude of interacting particularities, and it is the Event which acts as the elementary form of totalization/unification? Deleuze's remobilization of the old humanist-idealist topic of regressing from the "reified" result to its process of production is telltale here. Is Deleuze's oscilla­ tion between the two models (becoming as the impassive effect; becoming as the generative process) not homologous to the oscillation, in the Marxist tradition, be­ tween the two models of "reification?" First, there is the model according to which reification/fetishization misperceives properties belonging to an object insofar as this object is part of a socio-symbolic link, as its immediate "natural" properties (as if products are "in themselves" commodities); then, there is the more radical young Lukacs (et al.) notion according to which "objective" reality as such is something "rei­ fled," a fetishized outcome of some concealed subjective process ofproduction. So, in exact parallel to Deleuze, at the first level, we should not confuse an object's social properties with its immediate natural properties (in the case of a commodity, its exchange-value with its material properties that satisfy our needs). In the same way, we should not perceive (or reduce) an immaterial virtual affect linked to a bodily cause to one of the body's material properties. Then, at the second level, we should conceive objective reality itself as the result of the social productive process-in the same way that, for Deleuze, actual being is the result of the virtual process of becoming. Is this opposition of the virtual as the site of productive Becoming and the vir­ tual as the site of the sterile Sense-Event not, at the same time, the opposition of the "body without organs" (BwO) and "organs without body" (OwB)? Is, on the one hand, the productive flux of pure Becoming not the BwO, the body not yet struc-

Slavoj Ziiek

69

tured or determined as functional organs? And, on the other hand, is the OwB not from its embeddedness in a body, like the the VI'rtuality of the pure affect extracted . , . that persists alone, even when the in Wonderland Cheshire cat s body Alice in lile sl1 longer present?: "'All right; said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, e inning with the end of the taili and e�ding with the grin, ,:"hich rem�i� ed some thought . e after the rest of it had gone. Well! I ve often seen a cat WIthout a gnn, tIm . ' I ever saw m my I·e ue.1 m Alice ; , but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thmg This notion of an extracted OwB reemerges forcefully in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, in the guise of the gaze itself as such an autonomous organ no longer attached to a body.17 These two logics (Event as the power w�ich generates .re.ality; Event as t�e sterile, pure effect of bodily interactions) also mvolve two prlVlleged psychologi­ cal stances: the generative Event of Becoming relies on the productive force of the "schizo;' this explosion of the unified subject in the impersonal multitude of desir­ ing intensities, intensities that are subsequently constrained by the Oe�ipal matrix; the Event as sterile, immaterial effect relies on the figure of the masochIst who finds satisfaction in the tedious, repetitive game of staged rituals whose function is to postpone forever the sexual passage a l'acte. Can one effectively imagin� a s.tronger contrast than that of the schizo throwing himself without any reservatIOn mto the flux of multiple passions, and of the masochist clinging to the theater of shadows in which his meticulously staged performances repeat again and again the same sterile gesture? . . The philosophical background of this tension in Deleuze provIdes a CruCial key here. When, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze deploys the two geneses, transcendental and real, does he not thereby follow in the steps of Fichte and Schelling? Fichte:s starting point is that one can practice philosophy in two basic ways, ide�list and Sp� ­ nozan: one either starts from objective reality and tries to develop from It the genesIs of free subjectivity, or one starts from the pure spontaneity of the a�solute SU.b! ect . and tries to develop the entirety of reality as the result of the Subjects self-posItmg. The early Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism goes a step furthe: by claiming that, in this alternative, we are not dealing with a choice: t�e t,,:o optIOns are complementary, not exclusive. Absolute idealism, its claim of the IdentIty of Sub­ ject and Object (Spirit and Nature), can be demonstrated in two wa�s: one either develops Nature out of Spirit (transcendental idealism, a la Kant and FIChte), or one develops the gradual emergence of Spirit out of the immanent movement of Nature (Schelling's own Naturphilosophie). However, what about the crucial new �dvance achieved by Schelling in his Weltalter fragments, where he introduces a thIrd term into this alternative, namely, that of the genesis of Spirit (logos) not out of nature as such-as a constituted realm of natural reality-but out of the nature offin God himself as that which is "in God himself not yet God;' the abyss of the pre-ontologi­ cal Real in God, the blind rotary movement of "irrational" passions? As Schelling makes clear, this realm is not yet ontological, but, in a sense, more "spiritual" than natural reality: a shadowy realm of obscene ghosts which return again and again as "living dead" because they failed to actualize themselves in full realit!.18 To risk an anachronistic parallel, is this genesis, the pre-history of what went on m God bef�re he fully became God (the divine logos), not effectively close to the quantum physICS

��

0

70

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

notion of the state of virtual quantum oscillation preceding constituted reality? And, effectively, what about the results of quantum physics? What if matter is just a reified wave oscillation? What if, instead of conceiving waves as oscillations between elements, elements are just knots, contact points, between different waves and their oscillations? Does this not give some kind of scientific credibility to De­ leuze's "idealist" project of generating bodily reality from virtual intensities? There is a way to conceptualize the emergence of Something out of Nothing in a materialist way: when we succeed in conceiving this emergence not as a mysterious excess, but as a release-a loss-of energy. Does the so-called "Higgs field" in contemporary physics not point precisely in this direction? Generally, when we take something away from a given system, we lower its energy. However, the hypothesis is that there is some substance, a "something;' that we cannot take away from a given system without raising that system's energy: when the "Higgs field" appears in an empty space, its energy is lowered further.'9 Does the biological insight that living systems are perhaps best characterized as systems that dynamically avoid attractors (i.e., that the processes of life are being maintained at or near phase transitions) not point in the same direction, which is towards the Freudian death drive in its radical opposi­ tion to any notion of the tendency of all life towards nirvana? Death drive means precisely that the most radical tendency of a living organism is to maintain a state of tension, to avoid final "relaxation" in obtaining a state of full homeostasis. "Death drive" as "beyond the pleasure principle" is this very insistence of an organism on endlessly repeating the state of tension. One should thus get rid of the fear that, once we ascertain that reality is the in­ finitely divisible, substanceless void within a void, "matter will disappear:' What the digital informational revolution, the biogenetic revolution, and the quantum revo­ lution in physics all share is that they mark the reemergence of what, for want of a better term, one is tempted to call a post-metaphysical idealism. It is as if Chesterton's insight into how the materialist struggle for the full assertion of reality, against its subordination to any "higher" metaphysical order, culminates in the loss of reality itself: what began as the assertion of material reality ended up as the realm of pure formulas of quantum physics. Is, however, this really a form of idealism? Since the radical materialist stance asserts that there is no World, that the World in its Whole is Nothing, materialism has nothing to do with the presence of damp, dense mat­ ter-its proper figures are, rather, constellations in which matter seems to "disap­ pear;' like the pure oscillations of the superstrings or quantum-vibrations. On the contrary, if we see in raw, inert matter more than an imaginary screen, we always secretly endorse some kind of spiritualism, as in Tarkovsky's Solaris, in which the dense plastic matter of the planet directly embodies Mind. This "spectral material­ ism" has three different forms: in the informational revolution, matter is reduced to the medium of purely digitalized information; in biogenetics, the biological body is reduced to the medium of the reproduction of the genetic code; in quantum phys­ ics, reality itself, the density of matter, is reduced to the collapse of the virtuality of wave oscillations (or, in the general theory of relativity, matter is reduced to an effect of space's curvature). Here we encounter another crucial aspect of the opposition idealism/materialism: materialism is not the assertion of inert material density in

Slavoj Zitek

71

its h umid heaviness-such a "materialism" can always serve as a support for gnostic spiritualist obscurantism. In contrast to it, a true materialism joyously assumes the "disappearance of matter;' the fact that there is only void. With biogenetics, the Nietzschean program of the emphatic and ecstatic asser­ tion of the body is thus over. Far from serving as the ultimate reference, the body los es its mysterious impenetrable density and turns into something technologically manageable, something we can generate and transform through intervening into its genetic formula-in short, something the "truth" of which is t�is abstra� t g�� e�ic formula. And, it is crucial to conceive the two apparently opposite " reductions diS­ cernible in today's science (the "materialist" reduction of our experience to neuronal processes in neurosciences, and the virtualization of reality itself in quantum phys­ ics) as two sides of the same coin, as two reductions to the same third level. The old Popperian idea of the "Third World" is here brought to its extreme: what we get at the end is neither the "objective" materiality nor the "subjective" experience, but the reduction of both to the scientific Real of mathematized "immaterial" processes. The issue of materialism versus idealism thus gets more complex. If we accept the claim of quantum physics that the reality we experience as constituted emerg­ es out of a preceding field of virtual intensities which are, in a way, "immaterial" (quantum oscillations), then embodied reality is the result of the "actualization" of pure event-like virtualities. What if, then, there is a double movement here?: first, positive reality itself is constituted through the actualization of the virtual field of "immaterial" potentialities; then, in a second move, the emergence of thought and sense signals the moment when the constituted reality, as it were, reconnects with its virtual genesis. Was Schelling not already pursuing something similar when he claimed that, in the explosion of consciousness, of human thought, the primordial abyss ofpure potentiality explodes, acquires existence, in the middle of created posi­ tive reality-man is the unique creature which is directly (re)connected with the primordial abyss out of which all things emerged ?20 Perhaps Roger Penrose is right: 1 2 there is a link between quantum oscillations and human thought. So, what if we conceive of Deleuze's opposition of the intermixing of material bodies and the immaterial effect of sense along the lines of the Marxist opposition of infrastructure and superstructure? Is not the flow of Becoming superstructure par excellence-the sterile theater of shadows ontologically cut off from the site of material production, and precisely as such the only possible space of the Event? In his ironic comments on the French Revolution, Marx opposes the revolutionary enthusiasm to the sobering effect of the "morning after": the actual result of the sub­ lime revolutionary explosion, of the Event of freedom, equality, and brotherhood, is the miserable utilitarian/egotistic universe of market calculations. (And, inciden­ tally, is not this gap even wider in the case of the October Revolution?) However, one should not simplify Marx: his point is not the rather commonsensical insight into how the vulgar reality of commerce is the "truth" of the theater of revolutionary enthusiasm, "what all the fuss really was about:' In the revolutionary explosion as an Event, another utopian dimension shines through, the dimension of universal emancipation which, precisely, is the excess betrayed by the market reality which takes over "the day after" -as such, this excess is not simply abolished, dismissed as

72

Slavoj Zizek

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

irrelevant, but, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, continuing to haunt the

emancipatory imaginary as a dream waiting to be realized. The excess of revolution­ ary enthusiasm over its own "actual social base" or substance is thus literally that of an attribute-effect over its own substantial cause, a ghost-like Event waiting for its proper embodiment. It was none other than G. K. Chesterton who, apropos of his critique of aristocracy, provided the most succinct Leftist egalitarian rebuttal of those who, under the guise of respect for traditions, endorse existing injustice and inequalities: "Aristocracy is not an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one:'22 Here, we can discern in what precise sense Deleuze wants to be a materialist­ one is almost tempted to put it in classic Stalinist terms: in opposition to the me­ chanical materialism which simply reduces the flow of sense to its material causes, dialectical materialism is able to think this flow in its relative autonomy. That is to say, the whole point of Deleuze is that, although sense is an impassive sterile effect of material causes, it does have an autonomy and efficiency of its own. Yes, the flow of sense is a theater of shadows, but this does not mean that we should neglect it and focus on "real struggle" -in a way, this very theater of shadows is the crucial site of the struggle; everything is ultimately decided here. William Hasker perspicuously drew attention to the strange fact that critics of reductionism are very reluctant to admit that the arguments against radical reduc­ tionism are false: "Why are so many non-eliminativists strongly resistant to the idea that eliminativism has been conclusively refuted?"23 Their resistance betrays a fear of the prospect that, if their position fails, they will need reductionism as the last resort. So, although they consider eliminativism false, they nonetheless strangely hold onto it as a kind of reserve ("fall-back") position, thereby betraying a secret disbelief in their own non-reductionist materialist account of consciousness-this being a nice example of a disavowed theoretical position, of the fetishist split in theory. (Is their position not homologous to that of enlightened rational theologians who nonetheless secretly want to keep open the more "fundamentalist" theological position they constantly criticize? And, do we not encounter a similar split attitude in those Leftists who condemn the suicide-bomber attacks on the Israelis, but not wholeheartedly, with an inner reservation-as if, if "democratic" politics fails, one should nonetheless leave the door open for the "terrorist" option?) Here, one should return to Badiou and Deleuze, since they really and thoroughly reject reductionism: the assertion of the "autonomy" of the level of Sense-Event is for them not a com­ promise with idealism, but a necessary thesis of a true materialism. And, what is crucial is that this tension between the two ontologies in Deleuze clearly translates into two different political logics and practices. The ontology of productive Becoming clearly leads to the Leftist topic of the self-organization of the multitude of molecular groups which resist and undermine the molar, totalizing systems of power-the old notion of the spontaneous, non-hierarchical, living mul­ titude opposing the oppressive, reified System, the exemplary case of Leftist radical­ ism linked to philosophical idealist subjectivism. The problem is that this is the only model of the politicization of Deleuze's thought available: the other ontology, that of the sterility of the Sense-Event, appears "apolitical:' However, what if this other

73

uze ch Dele whi , of own its of tice prac and c logi tical poli a lves invo also ogy ontol 1915 when, in in in Len like eed proc , then not, we uld Sho e? war una was elf hims el-not to his di­ Heg to rned retu , he tice prac nary lutio revo w ane nd grou to der or e ther , e way sam in the if, at Wh ic? Log his , to arily prim but, , ings writ tical poli y rectl n ctio dire in this st r hint fi The ? here ed over disc be to tics poli n uzia Dele r othe an is l orea le corp coup the een betw llel para oned enti dy-m alrea the by ided prov be may re/s u­ uctu astr infr ple cou t rxis Ma old the and g min of beco flow ial ater imm ses/ cau of lity dua le ucib irred the both unt acco into take ld wou tics a poli such re: uctu perstr "obj ective" material/socio-economic processes taking place in reality as well as the ain dom the if at Wh er. prop c logi tical poli the of nts, Eve nary lutio revo of sion xplo e of politics is inherently "sterile;' the domain of pseudo-causes, a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? •

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Translated into English as Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty by Jean McNeil (New York: G. Braziller, 1971).-Ed.

1

2

Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002) , 107-8.

3

Ibid., 102.

4

Ibid., 73-

5

Ibid., 74.

6

Ibid., 75.

7 8

See Jerry Aline Flieger, "Overdetermined Oedipus;' in A Deleuzian Century?, ed. Ian Bu­ chanan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999 ). Gilles Deleuze, Difef rence and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 ), 119·

9

Ibid., 119-20.

10 Gilles Deleuze, "A quoi reconnait-on Ie structuralisme?;' in Fran�ois Chatelet, ed., Histoire de la philosophie, tome 8: Le XXeme siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1972), 299-335 (written in 1967); English translation, "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?;' published as an ap­ pendix to Charles J. Stivale, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), 258-82. And one is tempted to claim that Deleuze's turn against Hegel is, in a homologous way, a turn against his own origins-recall one of Deleuze's ear­ ly texts, his deeply sympathetic review of Hyppolite's reading of Hegel's Logic, reprinted in Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 191-95. •

11

See Deleuze, "Structuralism;' 277-78. For a more detailed account of the link between "dark precursor" and phallus, see Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 227-30.

12 The Logic of Sense, 166. 13 DeLanda, op. cit., 115· 14 See Roman Jakobson, On Language (Cambridge: Belknap, 1995). 15 From the strict Lacanian perspective, objet petit a and the phallic signifier are, of course, not identical-but the elaboration of this distinction would take us too far here. 16 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 31-32. For this reference to the notion of wound in Deleuze, as well as for many other precious

74

The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze suggestions, I am deeply indebted to the perspicuous commentary to my text by Marta Hernandez Salvan and Juan Carlos Rodriguez.

The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus

17 One of the metaphors for the way mind relates to body, that of a magnetic field, seems to point in the same direction: "as a magnet generates its magneticfield, so the bra in generates its field of consciousness:'(William Hasker, The Emergent Self [ Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 199 9], 190 .) The field thus has a logic and consistency of its own, although it can

Alain Badiou

persist only as long as its corporeal ground is here. Does this mean that mind cannot survive the body's disintegration? Even here, another analogy from physics leaves the gate partially open: when Roger Penrose claims that, after a body collapses into a black hole, one can conceive the black hole as a kind of self-sustaining gravitation al field-so even within physics, one considers the possibility that a field generated by a material object could persist in the object's absence. (See Hasker, 232 .) 18 See F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World (Albany: SUNY Press, 200

0).

19 For a more detailed reference to the "Higgs field:' see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Ziiek, The Pup­ pet and the Dwarf (Cambridge: MI T Press, 200 3). For a popular scientific explanation, see Gordon Kane, Supersymmetry (Cambridge: Helix Books, 200 1). 20 See Schelling, op. cit. 21 See Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 22 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 127. 23 Hasker, op. cit., 24.

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So tempting to give a warm round of applause. Yes, yes! Read on: "It is a question of knowing how a revolutionary potential is realized, in its very relationship with the exploited masses or the 'weakest links' of a given system. Do these masses or these links act in their own place, within the order of causes and ends that promote a new socius, or are they on the con­ trary the place and the agent of a sudden and unexpected irruption?'" Could Deleuze and Guattari be dialecticians? The revolutionary dialectic as theory of discontinuities and of scissions, as logic of catastrophes-that's it, after all: the order of causes assigns no place where a rupture could take hold. No quantitative cumulation incorporates a new quality, or counts the latter's limit among its number of terms, even though quality is, necessarily, produced as the limit. True, the revolutionary crisis is an irruption oflarge mass­ es into history.2 The revolution is "a sharp turn in the lives of vast popular masses:'3 Deleuze-Guattari echo this here, with a touch of pedantry and vain Latinisms that stick to the soles of these nomads weighed under their baggage ("promoting a new socius;' you call that cute?). Any Marxist-Leninist -Maoist learns in school (cadre school,4 of course) that the Parisian workers, the soviet peo­ ple, the Hunan farmers, and the young workers of Sud-Avia­ tion in May ' 685 one day rose in revolt; and he knows better than anyone that whoever pretends having read, in his men­ tal horoscope, the good news in its precise sequence, merely wants to justify by this lie, after the fact, his personal defeat in the heat of the moment. Marxists-Leninists precisely base their particular energy and unvarying persistence on two facts: "Where there is oppression, there is revolt:' But it is the revolt that, at its own hour, passes judgment on the fate of the oppression, not the other way around. •

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"One has reason to revolt against reactionaries:' The popular and prole­ tarian revolt is the reason of the bourgeois oppression, it is what gives reason, it is our reason.6 True class revolt, in essence, surprises. It is a war by surprise, the generic brutality of scission. How could the established rule of the old (including the revolutionary old) put up with a deduction of what tends to break it asunder? How many people have we not seen enraptured by the fact that "no one could have foreseen May '68"! I even suspect that the ascent of the anti-Oedipus and all the fabrications about the pure mysteries of Desire take off from this question. The question is, strictly speak­ ing, stupid. Can one imagine a "foreseen" May '68? And by whom? Who does not see that the unforeseeable constitutes the essential historical power of May '68? To baptize this unforeseeable "irruption of desire" is about as soporific as opium. This baptism, however, is not innocent. It stages the entrance of the irrational. Unforeseeable, desiring, irrational: follow your drift [derive], my son, and you will make the Revolution. It'� been quite a while now since Marxist-Leninists ceased to identify the ratio­ nal WIth the analytically predictable. The dialectic, the primacy of practice, means first and foremost affirming the historical objectivity of ruptures. Masses make His­ tory, not Concepts. No one can ever really know precisely how, and in which work­ shop, a revolutionary (anti-union) strike began. Why Tuesday and not Thursday? The masses' gesture closes one period and opens another. What was dividing itself reversed its terms, the working class viewpoint takes over. A local, dialectical ra­ tionality opens for itself a new space of practice. The revolt condenses one rational t�me . a�d deploys the scission of another. The revolutionary process of organiza­ tion IS Itself reworked, recast, penetrated and split by the primacy of practice: "The composition of the leading [dirigeant] group . . . should not and cannot remain en­ tirely unchanged throughout the initial, middle, and final stages of a great struggle:' (Mao).7 The material objective base of everything (the revolutionary class practice) is never quite exhausted in that to which it gives rise. Revolutionary history renounces Hegelian circularity, imposes periodization, the uninterrupted by stages: one se­ quence's rationality cannot absorb the practical rupture from which the sequence deploys itself as such. The rupture can be thought in its dialectical generality. His­ torically, it is only practiced. Concept, strategy and tactic, organization, all have the solidity of a sequence; but behind them lies the historical new, that which founds the sequence and which the concept within the sequence necessarily leaves outside itself as its remainder. Masses make history-practice comes first in respect to the­ ory. There is, therefore, a leftover of "pure" practice, the historical rupture as such, which historical materialism and theory will not be able, integrally, either to deduce or to organize any longer, because their deductions and their organizing principles presuppose it as fact. What remains, however, is neither the cause nor the hidden essence.8 It is not at all unknowable: it is an infinite historical source, at least throughout a histori­ cal period governed by the same principal contradiction (bourgeoisie/proletariat).9 The "remainder" is that which, in the periodizing scansion (Commune, October, •

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Cultural Revolution . . . 10) , deploys such force of rupture that the long work of rup­ tures to come is needed to clarify the historical contribution of the masses, which is what sustains and what carries forward theory and organization, in an infinite ap­ proximation that is itself always split (battle of the two roads ) .11 Who doesn't see that practice, by the Shanghai workers in 1967, of the "workers' commune" slogan returns to the practical, historical, inexhaustibility of the Paris Commune? And at the same time, the positive development of this slogan, in the new form of the three-in-one revolutionary committee, carries this return forward.l2 From Paris 1871 to Shanghai 1967, revolt is the furnace [fond] , the great produc­ tion of class. From a just idea dismembered to a continental rupture, everything is there. The furnace of the class break, revolt, is without hearth and home [sans feu ni lieu] .

The good fortune of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary has never been his ability to predict and assign the revolt, but rather the irreparable suddenness of its storm.'3 Whatever weapons the Marxist-Leninist has assembled for the people-of organization, doctrine, prevision, patience, compactness of the proletariat-he will be judged according to his capacity to have them all taken away without warning by those who, suddenly rising up, are indeed destined to have them, but as a rule for later. The revolt surprises Marxists-Leninists and their organization too. It must sur­ prise, by a new kind of surprise. For the Marxists-Leninists must stand precisely where the surprise will slam right into them. The revolutionary, who profession­ ally prepares himself for the mass rising, for the revolt's irruption, obviously can never be ready enough. Only for him does the historical "not ready" have a rigorous meaning, since what is ahead is for him alone, class struggle professional, what he ceaselessly prepares for. But he is not ready: were he ready, how could he have left the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, the sole asset of this preparation, in reserve? The Marxist-Leninist, who analyzes, predicts, directs, who alone knows the revolutionary potential at each moment, is precisely the one to ask the question of the revolt's hour. What is at stake, for the Marxist-Leninist organization, is not to change the "it was for later" of its prevision, an approximating reserve of tactical composure, into the repressive "it's too early" of the Right. Here, its identity is played out all at once. Marx before the Commune: the Parisian proletarian uprising is bound to fail, but I stand unconditionally by its side; its real movement instructs and reworks through and through the theory of my (correct [juste]) prevision: the historical fail­ ure, the proletarian uprising, works and displaces my prevision. It criticizes my pre­ vision, even though it is correct, because it is correct.'4 Mao and the peasant revolt of 1925-1927: the peasant revolt-very good. Fun­ damental. Our tactical application of the primacy of the proletariat, as urban in­ surrection, must explode into pieces. The peasants in revolt teach us that it is not the demand of the countryside, but the proletarian uprising that is premature. The masses' violent rupture carries this rationality to come: the encirclement of cities by the countryside.'5 The Marxist-Leninist leader [dirigeant] is the one who sunders and splits him-

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self, between the objective form of the rational revolutionary preparation and the unconditional and unconditionally immediate reason of the masses' revolutionary revolt, that which Lenin called the actual moment. May my enlightened preparation break apart and be verified by the fire of irrefutable historical unpreparation: such is the essence of Marxist -Leninist direction, the direction of the party! There is no other direction but of the new. The old is managed, it is admin­ istered, it is not directed.16 The revolutionary direction scrutinizes the conflicted state of things,17 the class struggle, the clues accumulated during the proletariat's revolution in process. From there the leadership [direction] systematizes a guiding prevision that is both strategic and tactical. Let us take an example: since 1970, the revolt of the 0.S.18 puts to work a dispersed program of class against capitalist hier­ archy. Condensing this program as soon as possible, formulating combatant slogans that have its originary class power, we put ourselves forward, granted. But such an advance is but the point where a new assault wave is received and accumulates. Who clings to it too tightly, forever stays behind: with the Renault of '73 when it is about the Renault Of '75.19 The same goes for analytical prevision: there is a capitalist crisis today, there will be an anti-capitalist revolt. This is Marxism. So, let's get ready: propaganda, worker schools, popular committees on anti-capitalist direct action. But where and on what will the masses make their violent judgment bear? This must be studied quite closely, enumerating the practical hypotheses, half-living in the work of the masses. Then and only then will the unexpected breach, armed with this previous work on itself, taking along the skeletal frame of a sketched organization, carrying its directing virtuality [virtualite dirigeante], draining and reworking the Marxist­ Leninists' strategy, tear down the oppressive web as far as it can. A correct Uuste] line is the open road to the most powerful striking force of the proletarian irruption. The party is an instrument of knowledge and of war in an ever-widening space of maneuver and irruption. A correct line, a vanguard organi­ zation, an iron discipline, an organic relation [liaison] to the popular masses, a con­ stant exercise of Marxist-Leninist analysis,20 reclaimed and unraveled and reworked to the most minute detail, carried forward to the shadow of the trace of the new; the bark of class struggle pressed down to its imperceptible acid; everything interpel­ lated by directives: all of this-the party-is needed for the revolutionary revolt to strike completely, past the meshes [of the situation], into the historical unicity of the new. The directive activity of the party must be tireless, perfect, exhaustive; as the unexpected revolt and the unicity of the revolutionary hour will demand of it that it be split again, beyond anything it could and in fact did foresee, and, inevitably constrained by the new of the class that casts it forward. At which point proletarian thought filters through and gathers anew, itself establishes its kingdom, before de­ stroying it again: "There is no construction without destruction" (Mao).21 To which we add: without construction, there is no destruction - before destroying it there where nothing can be deducted or managed any more. Marxism-Leninism and the idea of the class party go further than the anti-dia­ lectical moralism of the theoreticians of desire. Moralism, yes, and of the dullest kind. Look at the two-column chart with which these jingly subversives would like

Alain Badiou

79

u s to conclude: "The two poles are defined, the one by the enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a given form of power or selective sovereignty, the other by the inverse subordination and the overthrow of power; the one by these mo­ lar structured aggregates that crush singularities, select them, and regularize those that they retain in codes or axiomatics, the other by the molecular multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the large aggregates as so many useful materials for their own elaborations; the one by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the flows, constrict them, turn them back, break them again according to the limits interior to the system, in such a way as to produce the images that come to fill the field of imma­ nence peculiar to this system or this aggregate, the other by lines of escape that follow the decoded and deterritorialized flows, inventing their own non-figurative breaks or schizzes that produce new flows, always breaching the coded wall or the territorialized limit that separates them from desiring­ production; and, to summarize all the preceding determinations, the one is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject-groups:'22 And this would be called "beyond Good and Evil" perhaps? All this cultural racket, all this subversive arm-pumping, only to slip us, at the end, that Freedom is Good and Necessity Evil? Freedom, and by the way, what Freedom? "Subject-group:' Freedom as Subject. Deleuze and Guattari don't hide this much: return to Kant, here's what they came up with to exorcise the Hegelian ghost. For quite a while, I wondered what was this "desire" of theirs, stuck as I was between the sexual connotations and all the machinic, industrial brass they covered it up for that materialist feel. Well, it's the Freedom of Kantian critique, no more, no less. It's the unconditional: a subjective impulse that invisibly escapes the whole sensible order of ends, the whole rational fabric of causes. It's pure, unbound, ge­ neric energy, energy as such. That which is law unto itself, or absence of law. The old freedom of autonomy, hastily repainted in the colors of what the youth in revolt legitimately demands: some spit on the bourgeois family. The rule of the Good, with Deleuze, is the categorical imperative upright again, by means of an amusing substitution of the particular for the universal: always act so that the maxim of your actions be rigorously particular. Deleuze would like to be to Kant what Marx is to Hegel, Deleuze flips Kant upside down: the categorical im­ perative, but a desiring one; the unconditional, but materialist; the autonomy of the subject, but like a fluid flux. Sadly, turn Kant, and you will find Hume, which is the same thing-and Deleuze's first academic crushes. Critical idealism has no obverse and no reverse, that's even its very definition. This is the Mobius strip of philosophy. On the toboggan of Desire, the head bobs down and up again, until it doesn't know one side from the other, object from subject, any more. All in all, that this be the Good or that, Evil is just a reversible matter of mood, with not much consequence: always act so that the maxim of your action does not, strictly, concern anybody.23

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Marxism-Leninism thinks of otherwise forceful "schizzes;' ones that secure themselves otherwise to the material of history. The unity of opposites, the impos ­ sibility to grasp the One except as the movement of its own scission; the step-by­ step struggle against all figures of reconciliation (two fuse into one: the essence of revisionism in philosophy); the refusal of all static dualisms, such as the moralism of desire, a structuralism full of shame. Yes, this is quite different from the catechism of the System and the Flux, the Despot and the Nomad, the Paranoiac, and the Schizo, all that, under the colorless banner of a freedom, invisibly leaks out [coule] its sterile other side. It is so different that a major historical object, like a class party, completely evades the "schizo" grip precisely since it concentrates dialectical divisions to the extreme. The "schizos" imagine they are done with the concept of representation. The party "represents" the working class: it is Theater, image, territorial subjection. Obviously it must end with the Great Despot. Bourgeois party, indeed, revised party: one facet, separately undecipherable, of the party as one in two. This theater is a necessary threat from the inside, as the party is itself split. Short of that, it is a cadaver. "If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end" (Mao).24 More than any other historical object, the party is one in two: the unity of the pOlitical p:oject of the proletariat, of its state-project, the project of its dictatorship. . thIS sense, yes: apparatus, hierarchy, discipline, renunciation. And so much And In the better. But at once, also, the historical flip side: the essential aspiration of the masses, whose organ, whose iron hand is the party, to the non-State, to commu­ nism. Which is what gives the party, as direction, all of its strategic content. The party directs the withering of what it must direct (the State, the separation of politics). The party's only proletarian reality is the turbulent history of its own self-dissolution. "Concern yourself with the affairs of the State!;' says Mao to the vast masses.25 And this is the party's word, as communist party, precisely. The State is the serious matter, the central matter. The petit-bourgeois leftist wallows into the mass movement and parades there with delight. But when matters turn to power, t� the S�ate, when matters turn to dictatorship (because all state-power [etatique] is dlCtatonal), see how he gets all furious, clamoring loudly of the Right to Desire. He is even relieved: the shameful electoral rallying of all the "leftists" to the Mitterand­ Marchais clique proves this, shows their appetite for bourgeois parliamentary poli­ tics, this dictatorship that squashes the people, but in the end lets all the intellectuals babble as they wish. In the end, the "leftist" political daydream is a mass movement that proceeds straight on until it is joyfully proclaimed that the State has quietly faded away. And since confusion belongs, invariably, to the thought of the vacillat­ ing classes, it will come as no surprise that this speaks both the true and the false. The false, for the most part: the State is the only political question. The revolu­ tion is a radically new relation of the masses to the State. The State is construction. A rupture without construction is the concrete definition of failure, and most often in the form of a massacre: the Paris Commune, the Canton Commune, the anarchists of Catalonia . . . .

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The true, nonetheless: it is true that the mass movement engages in a necessary dialectic with the State. Between the two there is no continuity, but rather unity of opposites. If the State is a proletarian State, the contradiction can be of the non­ antagonistic type.26 If it is a State of exploiters, the contradiction is antagonistic at heart. But in either case a contradiction exists, and a severe one, in that the masses cannot concern themselves with the affairs of the State other than by pushing the State, brutally or organically, towards its own dilution; by pushing the great dichoto­ mies of the State, city and country, agriculture and industry, manual and intellectual labor, the military and the civilians, nation x and nation y, to pure and simple dis­ appearance.27 The masses take hold of the State with the communist design [visee] [set on] its withering away. Any other way and we can be sure that it is the State that takes hold of the masses: bourgeois State, party infected by the bourgeoisie. Actually, each great revolt of the working and popular masses sets them invari­ ably against the State. Each revolt takes position against one power and in the name of another, of one thought as a step toward the dilution of the state. Each extensive revolt, across its specific contents (the school, the country, factory hierarchy), is an anti-state proposition. This is what puts the party through torture, while the masses' anti-state proposi­ tion has no other chance, no other way out than to see its summons succeed, the summons it addresses to the party or to that which takes the party's place. It is here that the party (which, as apparatus, as a real historical object, nourishes its own permanent prevision toward power, toward the State), summoned to fall into temporary blindness by another political thought, the one that brings out the anti­ state challenge [sommation] of the masses, must overcome its own fear. Here it will always .be eager to say "it is too early:' And there is barely the time to fall over into what has already opened up, as another sequence of political thought. Look at "The Crisis has Matured;' this literally inspired, work of Lenin.28 The passage from "it is too early" to "it is almost too late" solders in one block these pages where Lenin puts his resignation from the Central Committee on the scales. Brutally bound together, we have: 1. The unforeseeable constraint exerted by the popular uprising, accelerat­ ing practically in days. 2. The rational prevision of the party, itself in turn split into: . a. the wait-and-see approach [attentisme] of the Central Committee majority (it is too early) b. the Leninist anticipation (only immediate insurrection brings the prevision of the party on par with the violent practice of the masses; the masses in revolt broke with the State: they summon us to direct, to practice our proper kind of rupture-the order of insurrection­ or become nothing. If we reject the insurrection, from one day to the next we, the great Bolshevik party, become leftover riffraff). Lenin says: there is a peasant uprising. "It is incredible, but it is a fact:'29 This objec­ tive "incredible" does not surprise us, Bolsheviks, who analyze the class struggle. Kerensky's government protects capitalists and landowners, it oppresses the peasant masses that hoped to be liberated. But the only revolutionary question is this: will

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our broad theoretical prevision (our lack of astonishment) let itself be transformed, revolutionized, by the truly incredible reality of the peasant uprising? How will the party carry forward its correct prevision under the unforeseeable historical con­ straint of the irruption of popular forces? How will it formulate, in the direction of the vast masses, that which hits it in the face, this divided, sundered, immediate realization of what was given in the organized calm of Marxist knowledge? To this question, Lenin replies: immediate insurrection, whose signal, whose time, whose urgency, are in truth fully fixed by the movement of the masses, by concrete his­ tory. Meanwhile, so as not to infringe upon their necessary system of causes, ends and deadlines, the majority in the Central Committee persist in their perpetual "it is too early:' sheltering thus their Marxist prevision from the storm. And Lenin, intuitively at the very heart of the popular rising, beside himself with rage, liter­ ally slashes through the party, bombards it with all that history demands: " [TJhere is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee and among the leaders of our Party which favors waiting for the Congress of Soviets, and is opposed to tak­ ing power immediately, is opposed to an immediate insurrection. That tendency, or opinion, must be overcome. Otherwise, the Bolsheviks will cover themselves with eternal shame and destroy themselves as a party. For to miss such a moment and to "wait" for the Congress of Soviets would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery. "30 The source of all the party's strength, against "sheer treachery" and self-destruc­ tion, lies in this: it is the party to whom history addresses its summons, the party that must remain steadfast as the movement escalates, the party whom the revolt questions as regards direction. You who have foreseen all and were thus at the heels of the irruption, what good is it to us now that you're close by? Will you remain close, or will you let yourself be left behind by this for which you said you were ac­ countable? Lenin is, here, the question cast from within by the revolutionary practice of the masses (the unforeseen, rupture) to the party's vocation to direct (prevision, proj­ ect). This is the party as one in two, the working class itself as one in two: its appara­ tus on one side, its anti-state focus on the State on the other. From one to the other, the vertigo in the movement of history comes from the scission between a settled tactical rationality and a rupture that demands more than political rationality; that demands plunging into what the masses opened. Insurrection, Lenin will say, is an art. Not a science, an artY The party always directs the proletarian transition. The party is the dialectic. Its proper effect is the creative scission of the masses and the State as a directed process, as dictatorship of the proletariat. The party is a being of the thresholds [lisieresJ . It holds out amidst the tearing apart [ecartelementJ of the foreseeable theoretical, and the unforeseeable practical, of the project and the revolt, of the State and the non-State. "Fusion of Marxism­ Leninism and the working-class movement:' the classics would say.32 "Fusion" is a metaphor, it too must be divided. The party is the process of dialectical division of Marxism-Leninism and the proletarian movement. It is their torn encounter [ren-

Alain Badiou

con tre ecarteleeJ, always to be remade. Between Marxism-Leninism and the prole­

tarian movement, there is no coincidence (neither spontaneism, nor theoreticism), nor is there simultaneity: theory is in advance, but the movement of the revolution­ ary revolt is in advance of this advance. Marx did say "dictatorship of the proletariat" before the Paris Commune. But the Commune, which enacts this slogan, is no less a decisive advance on the question of this dictatorship. Yes, between Marxism-Leninism and the workers' movement there is unity, but it is a unity of opposites. The Marxist-Leninist party is the existence of this opposi­ tion [contrarieteJ. The party is that blind spot from which the proletariat grasps its own class practice, sorts it out, purifies it, concentrates it and prepares another stage of its war, a stage realized, however, by the masses, not by the party, so that what the party apprehends is always both in front of it (the project) and behind it (the revolt), but never exactly on the same plane. The party is the ever transposable [depla�ableJ organization of the proletarian present, as the split unity of the prevision and the assessment. That is what Mao means to say: "The masses are the real heroes, while we our­ selves are often childish and ignorant.33 "The mastery of Marxism-Leninism is the essence of communist direction. It is the solidity of science. But it is also childish and ignorant, if it believes history can be done by delegation, by representation, if it believes it can sidestep the heroic wisdom of the masses, the wisdom given in their irruption, in their practice, without appeal. And Stalin: he emphasizes that the party certainly does direct, but at the same time it is part of the working class, its detachment. 34 Detachment is something quite different from representation, it is the opposite: the proletarian party is the opposite of an image. The party is what cuts, what detaches. It is a body of the class at its cut: a threshold [lisiere J . The party has an essential historical instability. This is why it is constantly threat­ ened from within by bourgeois forces of restoration, which take hold on the separ­ ateness [separeJ of the party. The party, which concentrates the directive force of the proletariat, is also its latent weakness, its worst threat. Repress the revolt in the name of the prevision; smother the new in the name of legitimacy; crush the living pres­ ent, give in to the shadows, abandon the mobile threshold; put up the State against the vigorous communism of the masses: the bourgeoisie does not cease to work on the party's essential instability. What makes Stalin and Mao great proletarian leaders, aside from their differ­ ences, which are enormous, is, among other things, the conviction that the prole­ tarian project is ever to be reconquered, ever unstable and corroding from within; the conviction that all inertia tends towards restoration; that there is no place for mechanical adjustment. Lenin, Stalin, Mao critique ever more profoundly the reac­ tionary mechanism, the pacifism, the treachery of wait-and-see in the form of re­ formism and revisionism. The party, according to which the proletariat adjusts itself to its own class practice in terms of the project, in terms of state-construction, must be adjusted in turn: since the party is where the greatest burdens accumulate as well. Against this threat, nothing but a counter-threat will do. From here on, Stalin and Mao part completely, but this divergence lies within the history of the proletariat,

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within the dialectical movement of Marxism- Leninism. Stalin saw only one possible counter-threat: terror, everywhere. Be tirelessly wary, above all of the party (practically exterminated in the thirties) then of the masses as well, at the slightest suspicion of softness or resistance, during the mag­ nificent industrial upheaval. Mao set out from the same idea: the transition submits this dialectical object, the party, to a severe test. And it is a long transition: "A very long period of time is needed to decide 'who will win' in the struggle between socialism and capitalism:'35 But the answer turns Stalin's upside down. The answer is this: have tireless confi­ dence, above all in the masses (confidence in the masses is the central element of the counter-threat), then in the party too, and especially in the torn correlation of the two: proletarian cultural revolution, which is at the same time an assault of the masses, their anti-state focus on the State, against the reactionary stabilizers of the party, and the reconstitution, regeneration, revolutionization of the party itself as instability, as threshold, as dialectical inductor of communism.36 To these astounding dialectics of history, to these unstable objects, these pro­ letarian risings of unheard-of violence and richness, what do the little professors oppose, from their ambush full of desire? What do they oppose, here as well, to the toil ofprevision and of revolt immersed at the deepest in the workers' divisions, which constitutes the unparalleled affirma­ tive power of Maoist militants? What can they capitalize on against these thoughts, real in themselves, ever recast and traversed through and through by proletarian interpellations? Is there anything of value [equal to1 the project of letting the idea of the party be torn from one's hands by the masses, that which, in France, is not yet established, not yet decided upon, but still to be proposed and remade? What kind of "desire" will ever equal the one deployed throughout the profound entanglements and countercurrents of our history, the one Marxist-Leninists formulate: to hand back to the working class the question of its communist party of the new type?37 What is the final word of these hateful adversaries of all organized revolutionary politics? Read: to complete "this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds:'38 In effect, to seep out like pus. In the end, such maxims are innocent. Look at them, these old Kantians who pretend they're playing at scattering the trinkets of Culture. Look at them: the time is nigh, and they're already covered in dust. •

Translated by Laura Balladur and Simon Krysl. Originally published as "Le flux et Ie parti: dans les marges de L'Anti-Oedipe," in Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, eds., La Situation actuelle sur Ie front philosophique, Cahiers Yenan no. 4 (Paris: Maspero, 1976): 24-41. Hav­ ing introduced the early '70S philosophical conjecture in France, the collection brings together interventions against Deleuze ("Deleuze en plein"), Lacan and Lacanians ("Sous Lacan"), and Dominique Lecourt for the Althusserians ("La compagnie d'Althusser"). Badiou's essay is the first in the Deleuze intervention. The translators wish to thank Bruno Bosteels, Roland Fergu­ son, Eva Poskocilova, Ingo Schaefer, and Alberto Toscano, whose help made the translation and the notes possible. •

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a (New ni re ph zo hi Sc d an m lis ta pi Ca ' us . ip ed i-O nt A , and F e'I'IX Guattari ze eu I e D es ill G 1 htly modified) . ig sl n tio la ns ra [t 7 37 ), 77 19 g, in ik V York: . n tIO lu vo Re n ia ss Ru e th f o y . or ist ce" to the H fa re "P e Se . y's sk . ot Tr ev L IS On sI es pr . The ex 2 /arch'Ive/ rg s.o st xl ar m w. w w :// tp ht . at e lin on ) 32 . . (19 30) m Max Eastman's translation (19 d'laI ectlC, m Bah e t e or pl ex to e ac pl e th t no is is Th trotsky/works/ 193 0 - hrr/choo.htm, 0f ty Ul m t" n co h e d t an ) ( s e ur pt ru e th of lty ve cal no . diou's Maoist writings, between the radi . for �ere d ar eg sr di ist aO M n ee tw be or , ce en qu se Communist history beyond any single d fidelity to ) an 90 ), 75 19 , ro pe as M : is ar [P n, io ct di ra words (see Badl'ou'S Theorie de la cont eter (P y. t IS or h' IS h' t f e ag gu la e th p e a that m � � the slogans, to the words and phrases . so _ ilo ph d an ry to ls of n tlo e dl�u s conc � Ba in ge an ch g in su en e th t ou ts in po d ar Hallw ess, 20 03 ), Pr ta so ne m M of lty rs ve m U is: ol . ap ne in ' U. A SubiJ ect to Truth (M phy- m BadlO th'IS vocab u0 f t en em el ch ea le ib ss po or ul ef us it e 49-so.) Rather than to assign-wer . g.-Tr. m t' n w s U a d" lO B f 0 e ur at fe is th of te no lary, let us merely take 2S l. vo ., ed ish gl En h , 4t ks or W ed ct lle Co lution" (July 19 17 ), vo Re e th of ns so es "L n, ni Le 3 ified ). od m n tio sla an [tr 9 22 ), 64 19 s, er ish bl Pu ss (Moscow: Progre ad­ ty ar (p s" ol ho sc e dr "� to , nd ha e on e term. It refers, on th � d de vi di a is es dr ca de e ol Ec 4 ols ( 7th ho sc rm fo re al ic lit po e t ly al c i if ec sp or re school, weekend cadre school, etc.) er the May aft ed m na d an 68 19 m up t se n, tio lu vo Ma Cadre Schools") of the Cultural Re , It nd ha r he ot e th on r; bo la l ua an m d an l 66 directive on the integration of intellectua eanmg m al tu ac e Th :' ol ho sc s es in us "b , ly al c i if mes "school for managers" or more spec Tr. .re tu ec nj co al ic lit po oic or st hi e th will change with ion near at vi A dSu at 14 ay M on e ac p I o k to ce Fran . S The first factory occupation of 19 68 n. Work­ tIO lu vo re e th d re te en t ia ar et ol pr e th e un ' N antes. H ere, as 1'n the Shanghai Comm the f 0 I ro t on on t en ns co t h ou it w ke ri st � indefinite ers occu ied the factory and declared follo ­ e th m ce an Fr ss ro ac t ep sw at th e rik st ral . union le dership, inaugurating tli e gene . y, mt t e nl ta en om m if y el iv e eff , ed ss pa s te an � ing weeks. Control over the city of N ts en u st d an rs ke or w n e tw be n io at er tli er "co-op �. , hands of the revolutionary forces. W he as a 68 19 ay M on ns IO Sit pO es on s es pr ex ed will or working-class hegemony is accent

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g. on ed Z ao M to ed ut ib tr at ns io at ot qu Both . , . u yo u Jl na , po ya u yo Ii a N [ e" nc ta sis re is 1. "Where there is oppression, there ive: some us el IS se ra p e t of in ig or e th e, nc fankimg) . For all its future resona ed us ao M l. al at gs tm n w s ao M in be t no Chinese sources suggest its source may to �e­ d ue m nt co It ): 65 19 9, y ua an (J ow Sn � the phrase in his interview with Edgar - the Jomt es a pl ll of to m ed rc fo as w d an n � � cur during the Cultural Revolutio h of ut So , " le rv te m e Th . na hi C to t si vi 72 ,: Communique from Richard N ixon's 19 e West th m s er ap sp w ne l ra ve se in ed ar pe ap the Mountains to North of the Seas:' ouse, 19 71 ), H m do an R : . rk Yo ew (N n tio lu vo Re . repnnted l'n Snow, Th e Long an d IS . t C ommu m Jo e th r Fo 4· 20 ge pa on s ar 19 1- 22 3 The quotation in question appe B ll t e at St t of en t a ep D d an S 4): 72 19 3, nique, ee Peking Review 9 (March reat Umo G e Th s ao M e se e, nc re fe re r ie rl ea (March 20 , 19 72): 3S -3 8. For an slat an tr ), 19 19 4, t us ug -A 21 y ul (J 4 2n) lu the Popular Masses" (Xiangjiang ping R S, 19 78 ), JP : on gt m rl (A 1 l. vo 9, 94 -1 17 19 , ng . in Collected Works of Mao Ts e- Tu e C I­ Th · 87 ): 72 1 ch ar -M ry ua an (J 49 ly er and in Stuart R. Schram, China Quart gdahan e. on zh m /m om .c fa ng go w. w w :// tp ht at nese original is available online htm. against lt v re to ed ifi st ju t is "I or " es ri na tio ? 2. "One has reason to revolt against reac III hi S 19 39 se ra ph e th ed lll cO ao M . 11] u �,an yo . nan' es" [Du l' fia"ndo' ngpa i, zaof reactlO

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The Flux and the Party "Stalin is our Commander" speech, made in Yenan to celebrate Stalin's 60th birth­ day: "There are innumerable principles of Marxism, but in the last analysis they can all be summed up in one sentence: 'To rebel is justified.' For thousands of years everyone said: 'Oppression is justified, exploitation is justified, rebellion is not justified.' From the time when Marxism appeared on the scene, this old judg­ ment was turned upside down, and this is a great contribution." (Renmin ribao, September 20, 1949, translated in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought ofMao Tse-Tung, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 427-428.) The thought is attributed to Marx, its elaboration into doctrine and into reality to Stalin. In 1966, the phrase appeared on two big character posters in Beijing (Peking Review 37 [September 9, 1966 ] : 19-21). The extended version used here comes from Mao's reply. ("A Letter to the Red Guards ofTsinghua University Middle School;' [August 1, 1966], trans­ lated in Stuart Schram, ed. and intro., John Chinnery and Tieyun, trans., Chair­ man Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956-1971 [New York: Pantheon,

1974], 260-261.) See Badiou's analysis of les trois sens du mot "raison" [three senses of "reason"] in Theorie de la contradiction: "The phrase says all according to the dialectic: a simple that divides it­ self. What concentrates this division, what supports it, while apparently occulting it, is the word 'reason': there is reason, the revolt has reason, a new reason stands up against the re­ actionaries. Through the word 'reason; the phrase says three things, and the articulation of the three makes up the whole" (21). The revolt is reason, practice is primary to theory. . Marxism formulates the reason of the revolt, beyond its particular causes: the cumulative wisdom of the masses through history, the antagonism that underlies the obstinacy of the revolt. But the revolt "has reason" also in the practical sense: the proletariat will win. The revolt will "bring to reason" [rend raison], settle accounts with the explOiters for all opp ession. The phrase bespeaks, then, the split fusion of the objective and the subjective, of Wisdom and perspective: the "fusion of Marxism and the real workers' movement" ar­ ticulates the two. The knowledge (Marxism) summed in this very phrase is the reason of the revolt, the for-itself of the proletariat, where the revolt returns to reinforce itself. That the revolt has reason against reactionaries is, finally, the core of the sentence, the "internal condition of truth": not, as it may appear, a selective limit imposed upon it as an after­ thought. Revolt has reason in contradiction and scission, in criticism and self-criticism, ever against those who keep things the same.-Tr.

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Mao Zedong, "Some Questions Concerning Methods ofLeadership" (June 1, 1943), Selected Works, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 118.- Tr. See also Badiou, Theorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 217. In Bruno Bosteels's translation: "I posit that there exists no intrinsic unknowable. This can be said clearly with Mao: 'We can learn what we did not know.' Except to add that what we did not know before was determined as leftover from that which just came to be known, at the crossover of the movement without a name by which the real poses a problem and the retroaction, named kno ledge, that offers a solution." Mao's quote is from his "Report to the Second Plenary SeSSIOn of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China" (1949), Selected Works, vol. 4 (Beijing: FLP, 1965), 374. We are thankful to Bruno Bosteels for this reference.-Tr.

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See Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937), chapter 4, "The Principal Contradiction and the Principal Aspect of a Contradiction;' Selected Works, vol. 1 (Beijing: FLP, 1965), 331336.-Tr. 10 Ellipses here and throughout are Badi ou's.- Tr.

Alain Badiou 11

Antagonistic contradictions under dictatorship of the proletariat are expressed in the . art as the battle of two roads (socialist and capitalist), two classes (proletanat and ou geoisie), and two lines (revolutionary and revisi ist . '?wo roa s" were first ta en . b peasants and the agricultural development, m the sOCIahst educatIOn movement. In t e "23 articles" of January 14, 1965, Mao spoke of the "power-holders in the party that go the capitalist road." (Only much later were Peng Zhen and iu Shaoqi named.) For he 23 articles, see Richard Baum and Frederick C. Tewes, Ssu-Ch ing: The Socla/zst EducatIOn Movement of 1962-1966 (China Research Monographs, UC Berkeley Center for Chmese Studies, 1968), app. F, 120. The concept is omnipresent in the Cultural RevolutIOn: see the CC circular of May 16, 1966 (Peking Review, May 19), as well as the "Decision of th e CC CCP Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution;' in K.H. Fan, The Chl-. nese Cultural Revolution: Selected Documents (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 162-182. Being antagonist, the scissions in the party allow no middle road; any "goIden middle" is always on side of the reaction.-Tr.

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12 The 1967 Shanghai People's Commune, announced on February 5, marks the entr� of the industrial proletariat into the Cultural Revolution, the beginning of the revolutIOn as seizure of power. In January, the rebel worker groups seized the party paper, forced reorganization of the party committee and proceeded to assume the onditions of pro­ .. duction themselves from wages to organization of labor. (Both BeIJmg rebel students and revolutionary i tellectuals of the Cultural Revolution leadership were at the birth of the rebellion, the Shanghai "directives" were soon affirmed by Mao and the central party organs, as well as reannounced in the central press: a split unity of the workers and t e . party in control of revolutionizing the state.) For the ongmal texts, see K. H. Fan, op. CIt. . The Paris Commune example had been invoked throughout the Cultural RevolutIOn, including the 1966 "Sixteen Point" Central Committee decision (Fan, 169). In Shanghai, to reannounce this history was also to speak of the March 1927 Shanghai Com une, crushed by Chiang Kai-shek's coup. The objective contradiction between Shanghm and Commune, the local and the universal, the promise of an industrial center that effectlvely . fragments the proletariat and the political demand of workers s workers reappeared m . 1967. Real "contradictions among the people" were not resolved m the selzure: temporary . workers-peasants or youth forced from the city by lack of work-contmued to challenge new power structures. Within the totality of the country (of state o er) the chances of : . the revolution remained undecided: any weakness on its part, contmumg mSlde struggles between various workers' organizations, a failure of production, could and would be used by the structures and tendencies it ruptured. The name lasted a ere three weeks. After Mao's interventions, the Commune's steering committee became Shanghai. RevolutIOn­ ary Committee" and in the "triple alliance" [sanjiehe] of mass rebel organizations, the . army, and the cadres, the relative weight of the latter two displaced the rebels. Agamst the sense of "totalitarian expropriation" of a workers' revolt (howe er abstract " fragmented, and isolated), Badiou sees, consistently with his argument agamst Deleuzes anarchism, an invention of political form in the concrete conjecture.-Tr.

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13 As Mao writes in "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire" (1930): "How then should we interpret the word "soon" in the statement, "there will soon be a high tide of revolution"? This is a common question amo g c mrades. Marx­ ists are not fortune-tellers. They should, and indeed can, only mdlCate the general direction of future developments and changes; they should not and cannot fix the day and the hour in a mechanistic way. But when I say that there will soon b e a . . high tide of revolution in China, I am emphatICally not speakmg of somethmg which in the words of some people "is possibly coming;' something illusory, un-

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Ihe Flux and the Party attainable and devoid of significance for action. It is like a ship far out at sea whose mast -head can already be seen from the shore; it is like the morning sun in the east whose shimmering rays are visible from a high mountain top; it is like a child about to be born moving restlessly in its mother's womb:' See his Selected Works, 1.127.-Tr.

14 Aside from The Civil War in France (New York: International Publishers, 1988) itself, see Marx's letters to Ludwig Kugelmann on the Paris Commune, April 12 and 17, 1871 (on­ line at www.marxists.org), as well as Lenin's introduction to the letters. In Commune de Paris: une declaration politique sur la politique (Paris: Les Conferences du Rouge-Gorge, 2003), Badiou recapitulates Marx and Brecht on the Commune, as well as the Chinese "reactivation" of the Commune between 1966 and 1971, before proceeding to the "logic of the Commune;' in terms of his Logic of Worlds. Our thanks to Bruno Bosteels for this information.-Tr. 15

On the peasant revolt, see Mao Zedong's "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan;' Selected Works, 1.23-59. "Encircle the cities by the countryside" [nongcun baowh chengshi] defines Mao's con­ ception of the guerrilla war. The metaphor, taken from the weiqi table game, dates to 1930 or earlier (the struggle against Li Lisan and the tensions with the Comintern); Mao de­ veloped it in his 1938 anti -Japanese war writings. (On Protracted War, Selected Works, vol. 2 [Beijing: FLP, 1965] , §54, 146-147; Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan, idem, 79-112; the report to the 6th Plenum of the 6th CC CPC, "On the New Stage;' ex­ cerpted in Stuart Schram, ed., The Political Thought ofMao Tse-tung, 288-90.) Lin Biao's "Long Live the Victory of People's War;' written to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the victory in the anti-Japanese war (Renmin Ribao September 3, 1965; English by Foreign Language Press, 1965) applies it as a global-political directive, in a double sense: every­ where, liberation struggles are peasant struggles, making the Chinese military strategy pertinent generally; through the allegory of "cities and villages of the world;' encirclement becomes a sweeping notion of world revolution. The allegory originates with Bukharin and the Comintern program of September, 1928: Mao had projected the strategy's global­ political pertinence, in Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan (102), without relying on the trope.-Tr.

16 As Bruno Bosteels has pointed out to us, the opposition of management [gestionJ and politics proper (what here is direction) returns in Badiou's later writing, after the Mao­ ist works, as well. See Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 12. Analogous oppositions, or "occlusions;' are then posited regarding other truth procedures: sexuality and love, culture and art, technology and science.-Tr. 17 The wordplay of "Etat" and "etat" ("State" and "state [of the situation]") is prominent in Badiou's later work. The main explanation is found in "L'etat de la situation historico­ sociale;' meditation 9 of L'Etre et l'evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 121-128.-Tr. 18 Ouvriers specialises, unskilled workers. o.S., mostly immigrant workers, were key in the Maoist mobilizations in post-May France.-Tr. 19 Strikes of the o.S. at Renault-Billancourt, in March-April 1973 and at Renault, of truck drivers in the spring and of line workers in December, 1975. See Laure Pitti, "Greves ouvr­ ieres versus luttes de l'immigration: une controverse entre historiens;' in Sylvain Lazarus, ed., Anthropologie ouvriere et enquetes d'usine, Ethnologie fram;aise 31/3 (2001): 465-476. The general context of the change is the incoming economic crisis on the one hand, and the "unity" of the electoral, revisionist Left-long dreamt about and for this reason all the

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more disappointing-after 1972 on the other. The victorious 1973 strike brough forward the rupture between the demands and the strategies of the w rkers and the umon . This . antagonist contradiction, of the union demand for negotiatIOns an t e or ers non­ negotiable claim to "equal pay for equal work;' the demand for the objectIve sta dard of hierarchy, and the claim that the workers determine what is e ual to what, contmued to determine the sequence of proletarian struggle throughout the 70S. Both a refinement of hierarchies (granting a place on a wage ladder to all, including the former O.S.) and a continuing workers' pressure against them ensued from the stnke.-Tr.

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20 See Lenin, "'Left-Wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder" (1920) Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress, 1964), 23.-Tr. 21 Mao Zedong, "On New Democracy" (January 1940), Selected Works, 2.369 and else­ where.-Tr. 22 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), 366-367 [trans­ lation modified] . r on se us th Al is nt Ka of wn do e sid up g in rn tu 's ze 23 The obvious subtext regarding Deleu . Be n ns tra , arx M r Fo 's ser us th Al e Se l. ge He of al ers Feuerbach's-and early Marx's-rev e Brewster . ns tra l, ta pi Ca ing ad Re d an 9 -3 35 ), 69 19 , ne Brewster (London: Allen La ct p as l lpa nC pn e th ao M th wi g in riz eo th , re he (London: NLB, 19 70 ), 39 and passim. Elsew lme se es p re e th n o sh as ou di Ba , 2) -8 70 , on cti of contradiction ( Theorie de contradi Is ph lo o­ eo rg ou -b tit pe or n er od tm os "p low fel d an of inheritance that links Deleuze , Samt e th to o and Proudh n, ni ku Ba , rg bu m xe Lu h ug ro th ath m er aft '68 phers of the well as s, on ctI di ra nt co y ar nd co se d an al cip in pr If Max" Stirner of The German Ideology. ce on the en va ui eq in ed at ul tic ar e ar , on cti di ra nt co ss . as both aspects of the principal, cla Ident . No a str ab an th pe ca es l ca gi lo no is e er th en th . abstract axis of "domination;' es tak e Sir De al. aw dr th wi , er th ra , or lt" vo "re e revolution is then possible, ju st subjectiv posed to op r, he ot ch ea or irr m y ch ar an d an m lis ra tu the place of Stirner's "egoism;' struc the dialectic and history.- Tr. 1.3 17. - Tr. , ks or W ted lec Se , on cti di ra nt Co On , ng do Ze 24 Mao Review g kin Pe in 66 19 st, gu Au 10 on ng iji Be in s" se as m 25 Mao's statement at "meeting the Tr. 34 (August 19 ,19 66 ): 9 [translation modifie d] .in Contradicsm ni go ta An of e ac Pl he "T 6, r te ap ch , on cti di 26 Se e Mao Zedong, O n Contra tion;' Selected Works, 1.3 43 -3 45 .- Tr. , com­ to th pa e th on e m co er ov be all sh ich wh ie] 2 7 "Three major distinctions" [san da chab and Len­ e) m m ra og Pr a th Go e th f o e qu iti Cr e th d an sto munism. After Marx (in the Manife C, CP e th f ee itt m m Co l ra nt Ce e th of au re Bu in (State and Revolutio n) , see the Political , gust 29 , Au s, ea Ar l ra Ru e th in es un m m Co s le' op Pe "Resolution on the Establishment of ral R volu­ ltu Cu e th ri du , as ll we as , 22 ): 58 19 , 16 r be 19 58 , Peking Review 29 (S eptem g of tm ee M e th at lk Ta or ) 66 19 , 21 ly Ju ( " re nt tion, Mao's "Talk to the Leaders of the Ce 9 online at l. vo , ks or W ted lec Se ), 67 19 9, ry ua Jan ( p" ou : the Central Cultural Revolution Gr ere th ts, hc f n co ss cla to al r ve n ra "T : es rit w ou , www.maoism.org. In Theorie du sujet, Badi . between es nc re ffe di r ajo m e re th e es th s, nt ria va in are these great millenary structural ­ la l tu ec ell nt d an l ua an m n ee tw , re tu ul city and country, between industry and agric IOn) . lat ns tra s �ls ste Bo o un Br (m ish ol ab to m ai bor-which it is communism's entire and sh pen ish bl ta es re to cy en nd te e th s se us sc di ou di In his forthcoming Ie Siee/e, Ba One e Se a. m Ch ao M stpo in "ad ro t lis ita ap "c e the dichotomies-corresponding to th tp://culturemaht 4, ne hi ac M re ltu Cu in e lin on o, an sc To rto Divides into Two;' trans. Albe

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The Flux and the Party

fus e into one" [he er er yl] of Yang Xianzhen stands precisely against the Marxist-Leninist "one divides into two:' The controversy is relevant to the struggle between two roads, to the USSR as well as to all "post -capitalism" convergence theories. Regarding theory and practice, the history of Marxism is full of fusions of opportunist practice and theory in no tension with it. (Badiou takes up Yang's philosophy of "reconciliation" in Theorie de la contradiction, 61-66. See also "New Polemic on the Philosophical Front: Report on the Discussion Concerning Comrade Yang Hsien-chen's Concept that 'Two Combine into One;" Peking Review 37 [September 11, 1964]: 9-12 and "Theory of 'Combine Two into One' is Reactionary Philosophy for Restoring Capitalism;' Peking Review 17 [April 23, 197 1] : 6-11.) In France, the concept of "fusion" emerges, as classical, in French Maoism and across the '60S conjecture: Badiou or Althusser use it without having to quote. (See note 7 above; Althusser, For Marx,16; Althusser, "Marx dans ses limites;' Eerits philosophiques et poli­ tiques, vol. 1 [Stock/IMEC, Paris 1994], 371-387-) In the opening blurb in the Yenan collection volumes (not in the present one), Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus ask: "from what the anti-revisionist struggles in China and Albania are, what is to be retained, and transformed, to battle revisionism in France? What way is to be taken, here and now, so that Marxism and the real workers' movementfuse?" [empha­ sis in the original]. New French misreadings have also appeared, from Debord's Society of the Spectacle to Deleuze. Georges Peyrol's "Potato Fascism" ("Le fascisme de la pomme de terre;' La Situation actuelle sur Ie front philosophique, 42-52) takes up the mistranslation "one becomes two;' on whose basis Deleuze and Guattari, in "Rhizome;' do away with the dialectic. We thank Bruno Bosteels for his suggestions on these points.-Tr.

chine. tees.ac. uk! Cmach/Backissuesl jo041Articles/badiou.htm. -Tr. 28 Lenin, "The Crisis Has Matured" (October, 1917), Collected Works, trans. Yuri Sdobnikov �nd George Hanna, 4th English ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 74-85. Slavo' izek has taken up the play of "too early" and "almost too late" in "Repeating Lenin" (on .lacan.com) and ' Georg Lukacs as the philosopher of Leninism;' his post­ lme at , face to Lukacs s A Defence of HIstory and Class-Consciousness": Tailism and the Dialectic trans. Ester Leslie (London: Verso, 2000), 162-166. See also Badiou's Theorie du sujet 18 and following. The account follows John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, ch p. 3, onlme at www.bartleby.com.-Tr.

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29 "In a peasant country, nd under a revolutionary, republican government which enjoys the support of the Soclal st-RevolutlOnary and Menshevik parties that only yesterday . dommated petty-bourgeOIs democracy, a peasant revolt is developing. Incredible as this is, it i a fact." "The Crisis has Matured;' n Lenin uses the phrase many times ("The AgrarIan Program of the First Russian Revolution;' 1907; "A good resolution but a bad speech;' 1913; "Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade;' 1918, and other s).­ Tr.

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30 "The Crisis has Matured;' 82. Italics in Lenin's original.-Tr. 31 "What has the Party done to study the disposition of the troops, etc? What has it done to conduct the insurrection as an art? Mere talk in the Central Executive Committee and so ' on!" Lenin's note to "Crisis Has Matured;' 83n.-Tr. 32 Throughout the history of Marxism after Marx and Engels, "fusion of Marxism and prole­ tarian practice;' t e Leninist version of the "unity of theory and (revolutionary) practice;' punctuates M rxlst t� ory of organization. The latter is the threshold of Marxist thought and Commumst polItIcs: here, m the concept of fusion, theory comprehends their scis­ SIOn, their contradiction. Lenin determines the working class party through the fusion . of sOClahsm and the working class movement in "The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement" (1900 ) Coll cted Works, trans. Jo Fineberg and George Hanna, vol. 4 (Moscow: Progress, 972), 368; 1\ Retrograde Trend m Russian Social-Democracy" (1899 ), idem., 257, and in Left - i g Communism, an Infantile Disorder;' 23-4 . Rosa Luxemburg's polemic with Lem m rgamzational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" concerns the content of thIS notIOn above all. See Lenin's "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in Our Party" Collect Wo ks, v�l. 7 (Moscow: Progress, 1972) , 203- 425. Luxemburg's 1904 text, � m the 1934 edltlOn, IS vaIl le online at ww.mar w xists.org. Mao Zedong first discusses . the otlOn m the late 30S ( The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War [1938 ] , Selected Works, 2.209 and passim). It comes to the fore in the rectification movement of 1 42, a st uggle against those who both theorize instead of organizing work and a ply fore gn SovIet models onto Chinese practice. The same concept, rather than :, . . mere SlmficatlOn of Marxism, remains at stake: the concrete determination by Chinese r vol tionary practice reconstitutes, rather than to negate the universal claim. "Dialec­ , tlZlng a concept of the legalist philosopher Han Fei Zi (280- 233 BCE) , Mao uses the metaphor of the fusion between an arrow and a target ("Rectify the Party's Style of Work" [February 1, 1942] , in Selected Works, 3.38, 42). Yet the concept the two characters name is contr diction (mao dun) : in Han Fei Zi, the logical contradiction of an arrow that pierces anythmg and a target that cannot be pierced, in Mao, two opposites that both repulse and presuppose each other. As Badiou insists here, "fusion" is not immediate unity, it does not oppose the general dialectical law of "one divides into two" [YI fen we; er], to which he has remained faithful. See "One Divides into Two:' The concept must be divided: in the . major controversy on the Cultural Revolution philosophical front, the revisionist "two

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33 Mao Zedong, "Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys" (1941), Selected Works, 3.12.-Tr. 34 Joseph Stalin, "On the Problems of Leninism" (1926), Problems of Leninism (MoscoW: FLP, 1940), chap. 5, 132 and passim; online as "Concerning Questions of Leninism" at www.marx2mao.org. Stalin quotes Lenin's "Greetings to Hungarian Workers" (1919), Col­ lected Works, vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress, 1965), 388.-Tr. 35 Stalin's theory of transition in "On the Problems of Leninism" quotes Lenin's "Greetings to Hungarian Workers" to this effect. The quotation here is from Mao Zedong's "Speech at the CPC National Conference on Propaganda Work" (March 12, 1957), in Selected Works, vol. 5 (Beijing: FLP, 1977), 423 [translation modified] . See also On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People (February 27, 1957), Selected Works, 5A09.-Tr. 36 "We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing:' Mao Zedong, On the Co-operative Transformation ofAgriculture ( July 31, 1955 ), Selected Works, 5.188 . In his "Critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR" (195 8), in A Critique of Soviet Economics, trans. Moss Roberts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977 ), Mao writes that "Stalin's book from first to last says nothing about the superstructure. It is not concerned with people; it considers things, not people . . . . The basic error is mistrust of ,

•

the peasants (135) :'-Tr. 37 Revolutionary, not parliamentary, party as subject. The project of the "party of a new type" is a constant concern in Badiou's Maoist, militant thought, beginning from his po­ litical work from within the Parti socialiste unifie. See Badiou, H. Jancovici, D. Menetrey and E. Terray, Contribution au probleme de la construction d'un parti marxiste-Ieniniste de type nouveau (Paris: Maspero, 1970), as well as Theorie du sujet, 38. The concept itself was developed by Lenin at the 1912 Prague party conference that refused the party model of Western Social Democracy and split the Bolshevik party from the Mensheviks. It has

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received its canonic formulation in History of the CPSU(b): Short Course (New York: In­ ternational Publishers, 1939), 138-142, 172. English online at www.marx2mao.org. The instance and concept of the party, so central here, are put aside in further devel­ opment of Badiou's philosophy-if indeed the logic of abandoning them does not compel the transformations-as well as in his politics today. See Peter Hallward's "Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou;' app. to Hallward's translation of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding ofEvil (London: Verso, 2001), 95, but also the theses Qu' est-ce que I'Organisation Politique (Paris: Le Perroquet, 2001) and online at www.organisation­ politique.com.) Yet, (Groupe pour la Fondation de) I'Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Leniniste, Badiou's Maoist organization, did not consider itself a party even be­ fore it "re-began;' shedding some of its Maoist legacy, as Organisation Politique. As A. Belden Fields observes in his Trotskyism and Maoism in France and the United States (chap. 3 , online at www.maoism.org): .. The UCFML has made no claim to be a party. as have the other two organizations [Parti Communiste Marxisie-Leniniste de France, PC­ MLF, and Parti Communiste Revolutionnaire (marxiste-leniniste), PCR(m-I ) ] . In fact, it has not even claimed to be a 'union' yet, but a 'group' for the formation of a 'union: It has readily admitted that it does not yet have a mass base which would entitle it legitimately to refer to itself as a party. It also questions the legitimacy of the PCMLF and the PCR(m­ I) so doing:' Many thanks to Bruno Bosteels for his suggestions on this point.-Tr. 3 8 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti- Oedipus, 38 2.

Logics of Antagonism: In the Margins of Alain Badiou's liThe Flux and the Party" Bruno Bosteels

Introduction: Philosophy as the Struggle Against Revisionism

•

Alain Badiou's early Maoist text, "The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus;' is part of a 1977 collection of polemical interventions titled The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front. Published by members of the so-ca�led . orgamza­ Yenan-Philosophy Group, itself part of the MaOIst tion UCFML, or ( Groupe pour la fondation de) ['Union des Communistes de France Marxistes-Leninistes, these interven­ tions tackle the state of philosophical thinking around the mid-seventies in France by targeting Lacan (in the guise of Jacques-Alain Miller's "Matrix" and Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau's The Angel: Ontology of RevolutIOn) and AI­ thusser (in the guise of Dominique Lecourt's little book on the "Lysenko affair") no less than Deleuze and Guattari (Anti­ Oedipus and the short text "Rhizome" that would soon there­ after become the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus). The main thrust of the polemic states that a new revisionist mode of thinking has taken hold of philosophy-a mode of think­ ing that, whether in the name of writing, science, the bod!, or desire and its libidinal flows, abandons the harsh questIOns of political organization and the class struggle in favor of an . abstract and purely formal dualism that, by droppmg the ref­ erent of the proletariat and its party vanguard, directly op­ poses the masses to the State. "Everywhere to substitute the couple masses/State for the class struggle: that's al� there is to . . , it:' part of the collective opening statement reads; The pOIIh­ . cal essence of these 'philosophies' is captured in the followmg principle, a principle of bitter resentment against the entire history of the twentieth century: 'In order for the revolt of the . masses against the State to be good, it is necessary to r�)ect the class direction of the proletariat, to stamp out MarXIsm, Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

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to hate the very idea of the class party:'" The result of such arguments is either the complete denial of antagonistic contradictions altogether or the jubilatory recogni­ tion of a mere semblance of antagonism. "They dream of a formal antagonism, of a world broken in two, with no sword other than ideology;' whereas a complete understanding of emancipatory politics would involve not just the joy and passion of short -lived revolt, but the painstaking and disciplined labor of forcing the exist­ ing contradictions of a particular situation, whether they are antagonistic or not, in the direction of a generic truth: "They love revolt, proclaimed in its universality, but they are secondary in terms of politics, which is the real transformation of the world in its historical particularity:" On the philosophical front, therefore, one urgent task for the authors of this polemic involves precisely the struggle against such revision­ ist tendencies. For Badiou and his Maoist comrades, this is the lesson to be drawn from the militant sequence between 1968 and the onset of a backlash in 1972, with the so­ called Common Program of the Left in France. "Everyone, including the Maoists, is after all called upon today, after the Cultural Revolution and May ' 68, to take a stance, to discern the new with regard to the meaning of politics in its complex ar­ ticulation, its constitutive trilogy: mass movement, class perspective, and State;' the opening statement reads, continuing: "Such is clearly the question of any possible philosophy today, wherein we can read the primacy of politics (of antagonism) in its actuality:') Is this still the primordial question for any possible philosophy today, the reader might ask, nearly thirty years later? In the remarks that follow, I want to argue that Badiou's current thought with regard to politics, despite a sharp distanc­ ing from the idea of the party and its underlying debts to the dialectical mode of thought and action, remains to a large extent inscribed within the framework of presuppositions, if not the terminology, that articulate masses, classes, and the State. The key to this articulation, as should already be obvious from the preceding lines, is the notion of antagonism, particularly as developed by Mao in "On Contradic­ tion" and "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People;' as well as in their systematic reformulation by Badiou, first in Theory of Contradiction and On Ideology and then even more abstractly in the footnotes to The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic. A first set of questions might thus concern the fate of an­ tagonism in Badiou's later works. As I have tried to elaborate elsewhere, the treat­ ment of antagonism in terms of division or scission and the forced return upon a divided situation bespeaks a logic of social change that remains almost entirely valid for these later works as well.4 Badiou's Maoists texts, moreover, not only illuminate his later thinking in ways that are very different from what an isolated reading of Being and Event, for example, would produce, but, for all their shocking bluntness, polemics such as the ones fought out in The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front also continue to prove invaluable, or they regain much of their initial urgency today, nearly thirty years later, when for Deleuze and Guattari we might substitute the names of Hardt and Negri, for Lacan, that of Zizek, and for Althusser-Lecourt, those of Laclau and Mouffe-not to omit Derrida and the stubborn legacy of Hei­ deggerianism.5 Whether or not these figures represent the front line of the philosophical battle

9S

e activ his s after y year man even ou, Badi for that mind in keep ld shou we y, toda ist sion nst revi agai gle strug its in ed n defi to be s inue cont hy osop phil od, peri t aois M '6 er ism: Rath sion revi nst agai ggle stru the is hy osop phil of nce esse "The s: tion evia d than to consider this period over and done with, perhaps we should entertain the e s mor fact seem in ou Badi y. tenc ofla a stage in red ente has past the that esis h ypot h and more inclined of late to bring these latent continuities out into the open, pre­ cisely in an attempt to answer inquiries such as my own, for example, regarding his e -on oach ic appr raph riog ly histo pure a e, efor ther d, avoi us Let ism. Mao to s debt that would reduce the significance of texts such as Badiou's early article on Deleuze, now translated here for the very first time, to that of being a dusty and slightly em­ barrassing museum piece. Instead, I will rely on Badiou's thought in general, and try to demonstrate the timeliness of the translated piece in particular, by taking up three basic orientations in the logic of antagonism as developed in political thinking today.7 This will allow us to begin reading Badiou's work as a polemical intervention that cuts diagonally across the divisions between immanence, transcendence, and totality. Immanence and the Life of the Multitude

The first orientation is the Spinozist - Deleuzian one that underlies the notions of immanence and the multitude as expounded by radical Italian political philoso­ phers such as Paolo Virno and Toni Negri. The latter, we are told, is now working with Michael Hardt to prepare the follow-up for their bestselling Empire, a second tome simply to be titled Multitude. Its follow-up but also its complement: indeed, there is a relation of reciprocity and resistance at the same time, without dialectical negation, between the multitude and the concept of Empire as developed by Hardt and Negri. Inside and against the imperial logic, like its photographic negative yet without allowing any of the familiar dialectical topics of "the outside within;' there inevita­ bly emerges the specter of the multitude. Better yet, Empire always has been an im­ possible project to control the creative mobility and desire of the multitude, whose vital constituent force should therefore be considered ontologically anterior to all the attempts at its mediation on behalf of constituted power, whether in terms of the market and globalization, in the name of the people, or by the State. From this inexhaustible fountain springs what I would call the politico-ontological optimism and unapologetic vitalism that characterize Hardt and Negri's brand of material­ ism: "The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges:'8 When facing a massive work such as Empire, the crucial task of the reader can­ not consist simply in evaluating the prophetic power of Hardt and Negri's book, written long before the global war on terror, by comparing their theses with the current situation. In fact, it is never a question of deciding whether a political phi­ losophy is relevant, let alone applicable, to a given situation. Following the principle that guides Badiou in his Abridged Metapolitics, the task is rather the other way around: to study which conceptual instruments philosophy must elaborate in order

Logics ofAntagonism

to register in its midst the effects of what is happening, in the streets and elsewhere, as a new figure of the present. A metapolitical approach thus puts philosophy under condition, under the condition of "a" politics (une politique), rather than continuing to define "the political" (Ie politique) together with the advantages and disadvan­ tages of various regimes of state power, as has been the obsession of most hitherto existing political philosophies. As Badiou writes, "By 'metapolitics' I understand the effects that a philosophy can draw, within and for itself, from the idea that real politics are themselves exercises in thinking. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which pretends that politics is not thought, so that it falls to the phi­ losopher to think 'the political:"9 Politics is an exercise in practical thinking in its own right. In order to think, the process of a true politics fortunately does not have to wait for the philosophers. Two indications might suffice to show the magnitude of the task of a metapoliti­ cal approach in relation to the work of Hardt and Negri. First of all, we should fur­ ther reconstruct the complete and undistorted genealogy behind the concept of the multitude. The novelty of this actor is in fact highly questionable. As Badiou writes in Can Politics Be Thought?, "From Rousseau to Mao, a canonical statement, which holds that the masses make history, posits in the masses precisely this vanishing ir­ ruption of which political philosophy only tells the always belated, and always torn, storY:'l0 The real question, then, concerns the ways in which we should articulate the notion of the multitude, not only with the modern ideas of the people and the nation-state, as both Negri and Virno propose, but also with the traditional Marx­ ist, or Marxist-Leninist, triad of masses, classes, and the State. Here Badiou's early hypothesis might still be valid, namely, that the multitude today presents the masses without classes, whereas the tradition of the revolutionary left, from Lenin to Mao, always supposed that the party would organize the masses into a common front by way of the class struggle. Even if Badiou nowadays refuses the visible form of the party, he is relentless in his insistence that politics is inseparable from some form of organization: "Political organization is necessary in order for the intervention, as wager, to make a process out of the trajectory that goes from an interruption to a fidelity. In this sense, organization is nothing but the consistency of politics:'ll By focusing on the tension-which is never really antagonistic, except in name only­ between Empire and the multitude, Hardt and Negri in a sense re-actualize an older opposition, the one that opposes the masses directly to the state apparatus, without any mediation through class interests, social contradictions, or their concentration into the political act proper. Second, and to make the same point in a different way, we should perhaps ask if the multitude does not run the risk of becoming the slogan of an anarchic and speculative leftism of sorts, in the sense in which Lenin talks of leftism as the in­ fantile disorder of communism-unless, of course, the category of the multitude gives way to new and lasting forms of organization, in an ongoing series of wagers on the capacity for thought and action of the many. Therein lies the importance of debates such as the ones that surround the antiglobalization movement in Seattle or Genoa, the forums in Porto Alegre, or the protests and uprisings in Argentina and Bolivia-to mention but a few recent cases. Do these new forms of mobilization

Bruno Bosteels reV1've

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the idea of direct democracy? Do they mark the end of the political, ifby the )olitical today we understand the war games of global capitalism that leave even the I arliamentary rule in a position of either impotent ally or irrelevant opponent? The ypothesis, rather, would be that these searching forms of organization indicate �he beg inning of a new political sequence, one � ar�ed by the closure and ��austJon . orgalllzatlOn that dommated politICs for at of the party as the privileged form of least two centuries. A corollary of this hypothesis would explain the contemporary resurgence of various forms of speculative ultra -leftism in so-called radical politi­ cal philosophy today: In a situation of rampant conservatism and blunt reactionary policies such as the ones that rule in the USA or Italy, when new forms of political organization are either lacking or still insufficiently articulated, the most tempt­ ing posture is indeed one of radical left-wing idealism or adventurism. Convers:ly, whenever the question of organization is actually raised, the old specters of Lenm­ ism, of democratic centralism, of party discipline and the critique of trade-union­ ism and social-democratic reformism, inevitably raise their ugly head again. Hardt and Negri barely allude to these questions in their conclusion. "We need to investigate specifically how the multitude can become a political subject in the context of Empire;' they posit in their short last chapter. "Recognizing the potential autonomy of the mobile multitude, however;' they continue, "only points toward the real question. What we need to grasp is how the multitude is organized and rede­ fined as a positive, political power:'12 Hardt and Negri's book, in the meantime, does not pretend to be the umpteenth messianic version of the passage through purga­ tory-through the rule of Empire-so as to arrive at redemption-at the potential­ ity of the multitude. Even so, the book does not always avoid the pitfalls of what we might call "good (bad) conscience;' which in the sixties and seventies would have been discussed in terms of the dialectic of the Hegelian-Lacanian beautiful soul. At least Virno, in his Grammar of the Multitude, seems much more subtle and astute in this regard, while recognizing the profound ambivalence of the multitude, capable of the best and the worst: "The multitude is a form of being that can give birth to one thing but also to the other: ambivalence:'J3 By starkly opposing the constituent force of the multitude to its mediation by the constituted power of Empire, no matter how flexible the latter's regime of control is made to appear, Hardt and Negri finally end up repeating a familiar scheme that contrasts the purity of insurrection and im­ manence to the equally pure power of transcendence and the established order. The counterposing of Empire and multitude thus appears to repeat previous dualisms such as those of capital and labor, order and anarchy, power and resistance, or even, at bottom, the old Kantian dualism of necessity and freedom, as Badiou argues in his early article on Deleuze. What this scheme wins in speculative radicality, how­ ever, it looses in terms of its specific metapolitical effectiveness to think through the present political situation. The key to understanding the non-dialectical relation of reciprocity, or the disjunctive synthesis, between Empire and the multitude is in reality an idea that De­ leuze, Negri and Hardt all borrow from Foucault. This is the idea not only that there can be no power without resistance, but also, and more importantly, that resistance is ontologically prior to power itself. "Even more, the last word on power holds that

�

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resistance comes first;' Deleuze writes in his Foucault: "Thus, there is no diagram that does no� contain, aside from those points it connects, other relatively free or unbound pomts, elements of creativity, mutation, resistance; and we should start fr�m these, perha� s, to understand the whole:" 4 Badiou himself, in fact, proposes . . thIS very Idea m hIS early attack against Deleuze, quoting directly from Chairman Mao: "Where there is oppression, there is revolt;' to which Badiou adds, "But it is the revolt that, at its own hour, passes judgment on the fate of the oppression, not the other wa.r around:' '5 With Negri and Hardt, however, this understanding . of p �wer an� resistance qUIckly leads to the conclusion that, even though there is nothmg outsIde of Empire and, hence, all hitherto existing political philosophers have gone astray when they continue to presuppose the existence of such an outside Empire no�etheless c�n always at the same time be read as a sign of the potentialit of the multItude. Agamst the claim that any sort of external aid or extension, such as the vanguard party, would be needed to guarantee the effectiveness of the current struggl�s, this log�c leads to the almost perverse conclusion that the more power and oppresslOn there IS, t�e better are the chances for resistance and revolt: "Perhaps the . more caplt�l extends ltS global networks of production and control, the more pow­ . of revolt can be:" 6 Following this logic, to be sure, there is erful any smgular pomt nothing that we cannot hope for nowadays! In Deleuze: "The Clamor of Being;' a book which in many ways rephrases the a:g��ent from "The Flux and the Party" in strict ontological terms and without the VitrIolic attacks, Badiou describes the Deleuzian orientation and method in terms �f a logic of th� double signature. Every entity that from the point of view of enti­ ties, or of CO� stItuted power, appears to be a stable, molar identity, can also be read at the same time as the sign of Being, as the event of virtualization of the actual and �ctualization �f the virtual, that is, in political terms, as constituent power. Intuitive m an ontologIcal sense, the method consists in following this itinerary back and fort� bet�ee� the two poles, without loosing the power of univocity in the hands ?f d�alectIcs. From A as entity to B as Being, then from B as Being to A as entity, . mtUItlOn concatenates thought to things as copresence of a being of simulacrum . a�d of a simula �rum of Being:" 7 Everything that exists thus presents itself as doubly �Igne?, dependmg on whether it is read as entity or as Being, as thing or as event, as Id�ntIty or as becoming, as Empire or as multitude. This explains the radiant opti­ �llsm of Hardt and Negri in Empire. Indeed, if we adopt the principle of reversibil­ Ity, not o�ly do�s the new global order confirm the flexible rule of pure immanence, t��s makmg Spmoza into the quintessential philosopher oflate capitalism, as Slavoj .�Izek often repeats by way of a critique, but the all-powerful rule of Empire itself, m a sense, also always bears witness to the vitality of the multitude that sustains its rule. To give but one especially eloquent example of this logic from Empire:

;

�rom one perspective Empire stands clearly over the multitude and subjects

It to the rule of its overarching machine, as a new Leviathan. At the same time, however, from the perspective of social productivity and creativity, �rom what we have been calling the ontological perspective, the hierarchy IS reversed. The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vital-

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ity of the multitude-as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.'s Without mediation or negation, Empire and multitude stand opposed as two signs of a gaze that is no longer dialectical but perhaps merely hermeneutical. The whole p oint almost seems to be to read Empire in terms of the multitude, and vice-versa. Real change is hereby reduced to a mere reversal or shift in perspectives. There is no need, therefore, to wait for the second volume of Empire, announced under the title Multi tude, since all the interpretive clues to understand the latter already coincide, point for point, with the clues that serve to read the former. This logic, in which antagonism is transmuted into a principle of immanent reversibility, explains both the strength and the weakness-and thus, perhaps, the remarkable international success-of Hardt and Negri's book. Their enormous force lies precisely in the combination of two equally irrefutable interpretive gestures: by declaring the real subsumption of labor into capital, oflife into biopolitics, they are capable of filling the trash can of history with all those modern conceptions of poli­ tics that still rely on an antagonistic contradiction between inside and outside, be­ tween old and new, between friend and enemy; but by affirming the reversibility, or the intuitive unity, between power and resistance, between Empire and multitude, they are at the same time capable of overcoming the pessimism of the intellect with the purest optimism of creativity, which is but the ontological name of life itself. In this orientation, finally, the notion of antagonism does not vanish completely, at least not in name, but it can no longer be understood in the context of older dialectical categories such as the qualitative accumulation of contradictions into an explosive antagonism, for instance, in the theory of the weakest link in Lenin, in the theory of structural causality and overdetermination in Althusser, or in the theory of antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions in Mao. Negri's work, inciden­ tally, has undergone dramatic changes in this regard over the last few years. Going against "the ABC of revolutionary dialectics;' Negri and Hardt thus reject any inter­ pretation of resistance in terms of a theory of the weakest link in the imperial chain: "In the constitution of Empire there is no longer an 'outside' to power and thus no longer weak links-if by weak link we mean an external point where the articula­ tions of global power are vulnerable:" 9 By contrast, as late as in his "Tw.enty Theses on Marx;' Negri still advocated the highly orthodox idea that revolutionary change takes place wherever and whenever contradictions accumulate into a strategic node and thus become antagonistic: ''Actually, the fabric of the present is an enormous node of strategic contradictions-it is like a boiling volcano which multiplies the ex­ plosions and fluxes;' whereby "the strategic contradictions of development show, or better, produce and institute a new antagonistic subjectivity. All this does not come about in a deterministic way, but instead it is the fruit of a process dominated by the multitude, which exalts its own power in freedom:'20 Even in the case of this earlier formulation, however, Badiou's central question regarding Deleuze and Guattari cannot be resisted: ''All this cultural racket, all this subversive arm-pumping, only to slip us, at the end, that Freedom is Good and Necessity Evil?""

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Transcendence and the Real as Act

� second orientation, one that gave rise to a new theory of radical democracy pre­

cls �ly b� p�tting the recognition of antagonism at the center of political philosophy, d �nves It � Impetus from �he le�acies of Lacan and, to a lesser extent, of Heidegger (via Dernda) that for a bnef whtle, during the late eighties and early nineties, found a common �round in the work of thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Zizek. From this perspective, the field of the political appears as a pre� carious social totality, articulated on the basis of a vanishing term whose function in this whole is similar to that of Being for Heidegger or of the Real for Lacan. The event of Being, in the deconstruction of ontology, gives its origin to the history of metaphysics; this origin, however, only offers itself by withdrawing itself at the same �ime and as such it is irreducible to the continuous unfolding of history. The Real, m psychoanalysis, is the point of the impossible that vertebrates the symbolic order; the Real itself, however, is that which absolutely resists symbolization. It is in a similar way that the place of power appears in the radical-democratic orientation. Whether it is called lack, difference, or antagonism pure and simple, the founding term around which the social order is constructed is an empty term; better yet, it is an absent cause that completely vanishes into its effects. Following Claude Lefort's ;;ell-known thesis about the empty, unoccupiable place of power in democracy, Zizek thus writes that "the Lacanian definition of democracy would then be: a so­ ciopolitical order in which the People do not exist-do not exist as a unity, embod­ ied in their unique representative. That is why the basic feature of the democratic order is that the place of Power is, by the necessity of its structure, an empty place:' 22 Only by remaining empty does the place of power in democracy make possible the regime of democratic representation; this place itself-like the center of Empire for Hardt and Negri, by the way-is a non-place or blank space that is impossible to repr�sent, much less to embody in a particular historical subject-whether the pro­ letanat, the party, or the charismatic leader. In an extreme reading, even civil society no longer offers a valid alternative, insofar as it would do no more than reiterate the illusion of a unique and indivisible bond in eternal opposition to the apparatus of the State. The structure of radical democracy paradoxically displays its greatest force at the point of its greatest weakness, when it endlessly exposes the fragility of its Achilles' heel. It articulates the field of the social following the principle of a lack of founda­ tion, which is �oth, a�d �t the same time, the condition of possibility of democracy . and the condition of ItS ngorous impossibility. This idea of democracy is radical, in other words, not because it inaugurates a return to the root of the human essence or to the stable ground of some ultimate truth but, to the contrary, because it aban­ dons �ny �r�:ens �on to found politi�s on a principle of substantive power. "Society . no such thmg as society:' is the first slogan of the thinkers doesn t eXist, or , there IS of radical democracy, a slogan obviously inspired by the Lacanian axiom: "There is no such thing as a sexual relationship."23 Several years before Laclau and Mouffe would consolidate this reading in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the Lacanian real is in :�ct already understood in a political key in Badiou's Theory of the Subject, so that , If the real of psychoanalysis is the impossibility of the sexual as relationship,

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the real of Marxism states: 'There is no class relationship: What does this mean? It can be said otherwise: antagonism:'24 For the radical-democratic orientation, too, this means that politics is not based on the plenitude of the social bond, but on its essential lack, due to the unbinding, or the dislocation, of the social whole by an in trinsic exteriority, which others might call subalternity. It does not rely on a previ­ ously established identity but on the constitutive alterity of any social formation. As Roberto Esposito writes, "Democracy is that which guards alterity, which does not give illusions or consolations, which does not dream terrible conclusions: the one, im manence, transparency:'25 Above all, radical democracy is not grounded in the sovereignty of the people as demos, but robs the ground from beneath any preten­ sion to derive a politics from the immediate, organic or substantial self-presence of a given community. Such self-presence is nothing but the eternal referent of myth. All too often, however, this radical-democratic view of antagonism limits itself to assuming, as in a kind of death drive, the inherent impossibility of the symbolic order of a given society. The project seems able to formulate itself only in terms of a categorical imperative that obliges us to recognize the intrinsic negativity of the so­ cial, as though the task consisted merely in learning to live with the impasse-with­ out opening a passage through it. As Zizek states most eloquently: In this perspective, the 'death drive: this dimension of radical negativity, cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, it defines la condition humaine as such: there is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to 'overcome: to 'abolish' it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it. 26 Metapolitically speaking, this mode of recognizing the constitutive nature of an­ tagonism tends to be the only actual political experience, other than really existing parliamentary democracies, capable of being thought in the categories of the radi­ cal-democratic orientation. Badiou often repeats how all political philosophies stand under the condition of a specific politics. The only effective politics behind the concept of radical democ­ racy, however, seems to reside in the double parliamentary-electoral game, in the in­ terminable conversation achieved by means of the vote and the public debate; often reduc�d to mere opinion-polls. In order not to identify themselves with the glaring limits of really existing democracies, then, the proponents of radical democracy sometimes have recourse to an aesthetic analogy in a paradoxical and necessarily violent presentation of the void of power in the midst of democracy (or the political) itself. By way of such aesthetic figurations, this political philosophy transcends the framework of what can be thought objectively in history or in the social sciences. This alternative could be called arch-aesthetic, if we accept the explanation offered by Badiou in his reading of Wittgenstein: "I say arch-aesthetic, because it is not a question of substituting art for philosophy. It is rather a question of posing within the scientific or propositional activity the principle of a clarity the (mystical) ele­ ment of which is beyond this activity, and the real paradigm of which is art. It is a question therefore of firmly establishing the laws of the sayable (the thinkable), in

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such a way that the unsayable (the unthinkable, which in the final instance is given only in the form of art) be situated as 'upper limit' of the sayable itself'2? Aside from this arch-aesthetic alternative, there only remains the desire to repeat the power of an absolutely radical act in an imitation, within philosophy, of the revolutionary act itself-as when Benjamin seeks to "blast open" the continuum of history, or when Nietzsche, calling himself dynamite, pretends to "break history in two:' The desire for a radical act in this case can be called arch-political, if once again we take into account the explanations given by Badiou: "The philosophical act is arch-political in the sense that it seeks to revolutionize humanity at a more radical level than the calculations of politics;' as in the case of Nietzsche, who "proposes to make formally equivalent the philosophical act as an act of thinking with the explosive potentiality that is apparent in the politico-historical revolution:'28 The arch-aesthetic and the arch -political versions of the radical act, however, are never far removed from the kind of speculative ultra-leftism already found in the first orientation. Scission and the Symptomatic Torsion of Truth

For Badiou, both these orientations must be carefully avoided. His early polem­ ic against Deleuze already indicates that a political truth arises neither by purely intuiting the vital immanence of the multitude behind the oppressive machinery of power, nor by merely recognizing the structural fact of antagonism as the hard kernel of the real in the midst of everyday reality. Neither the immanence of pure life nor the transcendence of the death drive can account for the possibility of real change in a given situation. And yet, this is the only question that really matters for Badiou. Not only: what is being, on the one hand, and what is the event, on the other? But: what truly happens between ordinary configurations of the multiple of being and their supplementation by an unforeseeable event? This means to think of the truth of an event as an immanent excess from the point of view of the initial situation: "It is thus an immanent break. 'Immanent' because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else-there is no heaven of truths. 'Break' because what en­ ables the truth-process-the event-meant nothing according to the prevailing lan­ guage and established knowledge of the situation:" 9 Badiou thus agrees with those contemporary Lacanians who affirm the structural necessity of an exclusion inher­ ent in the formation of any subject-precisely the kind of "outside within" rejected in the Spinozism of Deleuze or Hardt-Negri. As Lacan had written in his Ecrits, and Badiou quotes this line approvingly in his Theory of the Subject: "The subject stands in internal exclusion to the object:'3o For Badiou, however, no truth actually comes out of this structural fact without also involving a symptomatic torsion of the opening situation from the point of view of its unnameable excess. Whether this process is described in terms of destruction and purification or, more recently, in terms of subtraction and disqualification, the point is that the logic of the constitu­ tive outside in and of itself remains an empty and purely structural scheme without the supplementary effort of a forced return to the initial situation. "It is a process of torsion, whereby a force reapplies itself to that from which it emerges by way of con­ flict," Badiou wrote in Theory of the Subject: "All truth is new, even though its spiral also means repetition. What puts the innovative break into the circular inflection?

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certain coefficient of torsion. Therein lies the subjective essence of what is true: th at it is distorted:'3! Badiou's principal concern, in other words, is not with a pristine opposition of being and event. Whenever he does seem to establish such a divide as that between truth and knowledge, or between being and event, these should not be taken as two alre ady separate dimensions, which moreover only his critics transcribe with capi­ tals. Rather, from the point of a subjective intervention, they stand as the extremes of an ongoing process of detachment and scission. Despite a recurrent temptation by the Mallarmean wager, Badiou is rarely taken in by the absolute purity of truth as a voluntaristic and self-constituent decision in the radical void of the undecidable. To the contrary, much of his philosophical work is guided by the hypothesis that the opposition between being and event, as well as that between structure and subject, far from constituting in turn a structural given that would merely have to be rec­ ognized, hinge on the rare contingency of a process, an intervention, a labor. Truth as an ongoing process, moreover, actively destroys the premise of a simple face-off, no matter how heroic or melancholy, between an established order of being and the untainted novelty of an event-between place and force, or between necessity and freedom. Was this not, after all, the most stringent Maoist lesson to be drawn from the events of May ' 68 and the Cultural Revolution according to Badiou himself? If we take this point of view a step further, even Badiou's later philosophy as systematized in Being and Event begins to revolve around two key concepts-the symptomatic site of an event and the forcing or torsion of truth-which his critics tend to ignore, but which in fact sum up his contribution to a forgotten tradition of the materialist dialectic. In ontology, the event is defined, not just in terms of a pure self-belonging cut off from the situation, but as an event for a given situation as de­ termined by its symptomatic site: "There is an event only in a situation that presents at least one site. The event is tied, in its very definition, to the place or point that concentrates the historicity of the situation:'32 The site of an event is symptomatic of the situation in its totality for the same reasons that in the earlier days explained the qualitative accumulation of contradictions into an antagonistic node. Except that today, after the obscure sequence from the late sixties to the mid-seventies, such antagonism can no longer be read off directly from a sociological an4lysis of the structure, rather it is the result of a subject's intervention and fidelity to the events of politics themselves. Antagonism, scission, or the fundamental twoness at the heart of politics, can no longer be determined objectively, but must be produced through the labor of chance interventions: What is being sought after today is a thinking of politics which, while deal­ ing with strife, having the structural Two in its field of intervention, does not have this Two as an objective essence. Or rather, to the objectivist doctrine of the Two (classes are transitive to the process of production), the political innovation under way attempts to oppose a vision of the Two 'in terms of historicity: which means that the real Two is an event-related production, a political production and not an objective or 'scientific' presupposition.33 There is little doubt in my mind, in any case, that the idea of the event's site is a con-

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tinuation, in ontology, of the search for a certain dialectic in which every term Or multiple, even the otherwise unfounded multiple of the event, is internally marked by the structure of assigned spaces in which this multiple is placed. Otherwise, with­ out the logic of scission and torsion, the ontological discourse risks leading us back to a false structural or ultra-leftist scheme, insofar as the event would constitute a pure vanishing insurrection of the void which founds the structure of being and which merely stands revealed in the immeasurable excess of the state of a situation over this situation itself. An event, however, is not pure novelty, revolt, and insur­ rection, but it is tributary to a situation by virtue of its specific site; "The idea of a turnabout whose origin would be a state of the totality is imaginary. All radical transformative action originates in a point, which is, within a situation, the site of an event:'H Even Badiou's later thought remains dialectical, in other words, by rejecting such stark opposition between being and event in favor of the specific site through which an event is anchored in the ontological deadlock of a situation that only a rare subjective intervention can then unlock. "We have seen;' he writes, "that not every 'novelty' is an event. It must further be the case that what the event calls forth and names is the central void of the situation for which this event is an event:'35 A subject's intervention, moreover, cannot consist merely in showing or recog­ nizing the traumatic impossibility, void, or antagonism around which the situation as a whole is structured. If such were to be the case, the dialectic would remain pro­ foundly idealist-its operation delivering at most a radical, arch-aesthetic or arch­ political act that either renders visible the unbearable anxiety of the real itself, or ultimately calls upon the annihilation of the entire symbolic order in a mimicry of the revolutionary break, which can then perfectly well be illustrated with examples drawn all the way from Antigone to Hollywood. Badiou's thought, by contrast, seeks to be dialectical and materialist in understanding the production of a new truth as the torsion, or forcing, of the entire situation from the precise point of a ge­ neric truth, as if the latter had already been added successfully onto the resources of knowledge available in this situation itself. Despite Zizek's objections, the aim of the generic extension and the subsequent forcing of the situation is profoundly anti­ Kantian. It is not a question of treating the truth of what is otherwise indiscernible in a given situation merely on the level of a regulative idea so as to avoid provoking a "disaster" but quite the opposite, so that the "as if" here becomes key to a violent forcing of the existing situation itself: "The idea is thus to see what happens when, by force, one 'adjoins' this indiscernible to the situation:'36 Without the subsequent process of forcing based on such a generic extension of the initial situation, further­ more, the Real that resists symbolization will only have been the site of a possible truth, but it is not already the given truth of the situation itself. In fact, the Real in this case would merely indicate a structural impossibility and not even an event's site whereby the regular structure of a situation becomes historicized. The subject, finally, is a laborious material process that requires a putting to work of an event. It does not come to coincide, in a purely formal act of conversion or a mere shift in perspective, with the impasse of the structure as with the real kernel of its own impossibility-say, through the traumatic symptom, with which a subject can only identify after traversing the ideological fantasy. At best, to acknowledge or experi-

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ence this radical impasse, as in the case of antagonism for the radical-democratic orientation, is still only the inaugural act of subjectivization bereft of any subjec­ tive process; at worst, it is actually that which forever blocks and radically obscures the consequential elaboration of a new truth. For Badiou, a subject emerges only by opening a passage, in a truly arduous production of novelty, through the im­ passe-forcing the structure precisely there where a lack is found-so as to make generically possible that which the state of the situation would rather confine to an absurd impossibility. In a famous Chinese saying, frequently invoked in the course of the Cultural Revolution, this means nothing if not to bring the new out of the old. To force a new consistent truth out of the old order of things from the antagonistic point where our knowledge of the latter is found wanting .

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An initial version of this paper wasfirstpresented under the title "The Future ofAntagonism"for the Program in Literature and the Center for European Studies at Duke University (February 19, 2002). For this invitation and the ongoing dialogue surrounding this and other discussion texts, I want to express my lasting gratitude to Alberto Moreiras. Thanks are also due to the participants in the long special seminar on Badiou and politics that followed the day after the talk, and to the Polygraph collectivefor inviting me to contribute this piece as an introduction to the translation of Badiou 's text. •

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Groupe Yenan-Philosophie, "Etat de front;' in La situation actuelle sur Ie front phi­ losophique (Paris: Fran<;:ois Maspero, 1977), 12. All translations in the present essay are mine unless otherwise specified. In addition to Deleuze, Lacan, and Althusser, a fourth interlocutor-Michel Foucault-is mentioned in a footnote as the subject of a future dis­ cussion, but this polemic was never to take place. Incidentally, this lacuna can still be felt in Badiou's current work, in which certain readers might want to see a more sustained confrontation, particularly with Foucault's final seminars at the College de France.

1

2

Ibid., 10. The mention of Nietzsche's arch-political attempt "to break the history of the world in two" anticipates a future version of this same polemic, in which Badiou will once again reject the radical-anarchic figure of antagonism, or the two as such, as part of Nietzsche's problematic legacy. See Badiou's Casser en deux l'histoire du monde? (Pa­ ris: Conference du Perroquet, 1992). Compare also with Alenka ZupanCiC's recent book, deeply inspired by Badiou's views, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003).

3

Ibid., 12-13.

4

See my "Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Ma­ terialism?" published in two parts in PLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12 (2001): 200-29; and 13 (2002): 173-208.

5

I have dealt with Badiou and the Heideggerian legacy in general in "Write et for<;:age: Ba­ diou avec Heidegger et Lacan;' in Alain Badiou: Penser Ie Multiple, ed. Charles Ramond (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), 259-93.

6

Badiou, "Quelques reponses a un ami exigeant" (author's unpublished typescript). The English translation of this text will appear as an afterword in the volume Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004).

106 7

8

9

The notion of orientation itself is also borrowed from Badiou. See his meditation "Destin ontologique de l'orientation dans la pensee;' in L 'Etre et l'evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988 ) , 311-15. Badiou distinguishes three orientations: constructivist, transcendent, and generic, in a subdivision that roughly overlaps the one used in these pages. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000 ) , xv. Among the plethora of international commentaries on Hardt and Negri's bestseller, I would like to single out the extraordinary critique formulated by Raul J. Cerdeiras, in deep affinity with Badiou, in "Las desventuras de la ontologia biopolitica de Imperio;' Acontecimiento: Revista para pensar la politica 24-25 ( 2003) : 11-43. Badiou, Abrege de mtitapolitique (Paris: Seuil, 1998 ) , 7. The English translation of this book by Jason Barker is forthcoming from Verso.

10 Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985 ) , 12. My English translation of this book will be published by Duke University Press. 11

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Ibid., 112.

12 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 394 and 398. 13 See "Apendice: General Intellect, exodo, multitud. Entrevista a Paolo Virno por el Colec­ tivo Situaciones;' Gramatica de la multitud: Para un analisis de las formas de vida con­ temporanea, trans. Adriana Gomez, Juan Domingo Estop, Miguel Santucho (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueiios, 2003 ) , 131. 14 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986 ) , 95 and 51. 15 Badiou, "Le flux et Ie parti;' in La situation actuelle sur Ie front philosophique, 25. See the translation in this issue. 16 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 58. 1 7 Badiou, Deleuze: "La clameur de I'Etre" (Paris: Hachette, 1997 ) , 57; De/euze: "The Clamor of Being" (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) , 36 (translation slightly modified). 18 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 62. 19 Ibid., 58. Of course the theory of the weakest link was never meant to be such an external point of vulnerability to which the logic of immanent resistance can serve as an alterna­ tive. 20 Negri, "Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today;' in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl for the Poly­ graph collective (New York: Routledge, 1996 ) , 163-64. 21 Badiou, "Le flux et Ie parti;' 31 (and included in this issue). 22 Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989 ) , 147. In the Foreword to the second edition of For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as Political Factor (Lon­ don: Verso, 2002) , Zizek seeks to distance himself-partially in response to my criticisms of his reading of Badiou-both from the heroic and quasi-transcendental reading of the Real as the impossible Thing-in-itself and from the liberal-Lefortian defense of radical democracy, both of which arguments would signal the fundamental weakness of his ear­ lier book. As I plan to argue elsewhere, however, there is little in this Foreword, and much less in For They Know Not What They Do itself, to support this alleged break away from the arguments in The Sublime Object. 23 See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, "Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antago­ nisms and Hegemony;' in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic

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Politics (London: Verso, 1985 ), 93-148. I offer a more complete critique of the political philosophy of radical democracy in "Por una falta de politica: Tesis sobre la filosofia de la democracia radical;' Acontecimiento: Revista para pensar la politica 17 ( 1999 ) : 63-89. Re­ printed as "Democracia radical: Tesis sobre la filosofia del radicalismo democnitico;' in Los nuevos adjetivos de la democracia, a special issue of the Mexican journal Metapolitica 18 ( 2001 ): 96-115. Several theses from this earlier text are reflected in the present sum­ mary. 24 Badiou, Theorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982 ) , 145· 25 Roberto Esposito, "Democrazia;' in Nove pensieri sulla politica (Bologna: II Mulino 1993 ), 58. 26 Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, S.

27 Badiou, "Silence, solipsisme, saintete. L' antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein;' i Barca! Poesie, Politique, Psychanalyse 3 ( 1994) : 7· 28 Badiou, Casser en deux l'histoire du monde?, 11. 29 Badiou, L 'Ethique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal (Paris: Hatier, 1993 ), 39; Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding ofEvil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001 ) , 42-43 30 Jacques Lacan, quoted in Badiou, Theorie du sujet, 142. 31 Badiou, Theorie du sujet 29 and 139. Badiou adds: "If the word 'torsion' is not current in Marxism, it can nevertheless be inferred from it, by combining the notion of the circle and that of the leap" ( 141 ) . 32 Badiou, L 'Etre et l'evenement, 199· 33 Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989 ) , 71-72; Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999 ) , 90-91 (translation modified to keep the difference between "politics" and "the political"). 34 Badiou, L 'Etre et l'evenement, 197- For the dialectical overtones of this and other key argu­ ments in Badiou's later works, see my "On the Subject of the Dialectic;' also forthcoming in Think Again. 35 Badiou, L 'Ethique 64; Ethics, 72 36 Badiou, L 'Etre et l'evenement, 393. In his Foreword to the second edition of For They Know Not What They Do, Zizek quotes my argument about the "as if" mode of a generic extension of the situation and then uses this argument to reassert his earlier claim, made in The Ticklish Subject, about Badiou's na'ive Kantianism. See Zizek, For They Know Not, Ixxxiii-Ixxxiv. This reply to my objection, however, completely misunderstands the pro­ cesses of generic extension and forcing, which precisely break with the imperative to treat regulative ideas merely in the mode of "as if" and not as a real, even violent change ef­ fected in the existing situation itself. For a strict Kantian, Badiou's insistence on the need to force a situation from the point ofview of its generic truth would be the prime example of a transcendental illusion, which is another reason why Badiou has never ceased being a profound anti-Kantian.

Kafka's Voices Mladen Dolar

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In order to provide a quick entry into Kafka one can take a formula which stems from Gershom Scholem's correspon­ dence with Walter Benjamin from the thirties: Geltung ohne Bedeutung, validity without meaning. The formula economi­ cally epitomizes the functioning of law in Kafka: one is faced with the law that holds us in sway with its validity, but one is unable to figure out its meaning. The meaning eludes us, yet faced with the law one is by definition guilty, as Joseph K. on the first page of The Trial, without it being clear of what and according to which particular law; he will never learn this throughout the book, despite his desperate attempts, he will die on the last page, executed, without having found out why. The law doesn't make sense, yet it is valid, it holds us to the last straws of our existence like a blind automatism which has no outside. One cannot escape it, one is always implicated in it, it is like the dead letter which has got hold oflife in its total­ ity, but not by mortifying life or killing it, Ie mort saisit Ie vif (the formula by which Marx epitomizes the effects of the capi­ tal on life in the Introduction to Capital). Quite the contrary: the law provokes an animation in the subject, an excitement, an agitation, an unrest, one hasn't got a minute of peace, there is no recess, one has to anxiously examine oneself, investigate the ways in which one could satisfy the law, one has to oscil­ late between revolt and resignation, try to figure out its secret, come to the bottom of its enigma, penetrate its source, its cen­ ter, the origin of its authority, and one never can. The psychi­ cal counterpart of the law is not mortification, but an anima­ tion that permeates the subject with enjoyment, an enjoyment coextensive with the rule of law and which makes it possible. Guilt is not mortification but a wrong kind of vivification, as it were, which binds the subject to the law. The indictment on the first page instills great excitement into Joseph K:s life, it is a beginning of a whole new life, but a wrong life, which coin­ cides with the life of the law itself. There is no law without the enjoyment, but precisely as an enjoyment that doesn't bring life, but rather "undeadness;' to use Eric Santner's term.! The Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

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law, the authority, the guilt and the enjoyment form a vicious circle. The law functions as an interpellation, it addresses the subject but the subject cannot figure out what is the meaning of this address. It is a call which lacks the other part, the recognition, the subjectivation in the Althusserian meaning of the word; a call to which the subject cannot assign a sense, he doesn't know what the law wants ?f .him. Interpellation fails insofar as it doesn't produce a recognition, the transmission of a mandate, but at the same time it succeeds triumphantly, since the very non-recognition triggers a flood of doubts, self-interrogation, aggression, revolt, humiliation, all of it futile. The subject is cooked, he has let himself fall into the trap of the law through the very non-recognition, through the failure of as­ suming a symbolic mandate, a mission, a vocation. This is how he becomes the subject, .i. �. : subjec�ed, subject to the law as such, not to some particular assignment or prohlbltl �n; he IS sl. �uated in the empty validity, neither dead nor alive, subject to :he law wI�hout �uahfications, which is at the same time the law that presents an emgma, detaills a hidden secret. Where is the law, what does it command, what does it prohibit?2 One is always "before the law:' outside of its gate, and one of the great �aradoxes of this law is that it doesn't prohibit anything, but is itself prohibited. It is �Ike a red�u�led Prohibition, the prohibition of the prohibition, the prohibition is Itself prohibited.3 One can never get to the locus of prohibition, if one could do that then one would be saved. Yet what prohibits it is just an infinite deferral. The gate is open, the doorkeeper , doesn t stop the man from the country, but the doorkeeper is just the last and the least of the doorkeepers, there is an infinite hierarchy of them that has no last in­ stance. There is no physical impediment, anyone is welcome to enter, the door is always open. And this is the next essential twist: the very openness is the form of closu�e. �e law is closed in the very form of openness. The more it is open, the . Impossible . to enter, the more it is impossible to revolt. If you don't enter, it IS ore It � IS your own problem, one always falls into one's own trap. ("The court doesn't want an�hing from you. It receives you when yo� co�e and it dismisses you when you . secret, yet III this elusiveness it is also what is the go. ) The law IS. an ever-recedlllg closest, it animates us from our most intimate interior, it holds us within it is unat­ tainable and yet totally immanent, our own internal exteriority, our ex;imacy-to . very fine word coined by Lacan. . use this It is impossible to enter through an open door. The openness itself immobilizes, . stands awestruck and paralyzed in front of the open door, animation the subject and paralysis being two sides of the same position. The subject is excluded from the law, but the ve�y exclusion is the form of his inclusion, since this is the way that the . III sway. Before the law one is always inside the law, there is no place law holds him before the law, exclusion is inclusion. The exclusi�e inclusion or the inclusive exclusion is precisely the way in which fto'ga�ben. des �nbes the �tructure of sovereignty. Sovereignty is the point of excep­ tion mscnbed �n the law Itself, the point that can suspend the validity oflaws. On the first pages of his book he defines sovereignty, following Carl Schmitt, as a paradox: The sovereign is at the same time outside and inside the juridical order. . . . The sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, is

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legally situated outside the law. This means that the paradox can equally be formulated in this way: "The law is exterior to itself:' or rather: "I, the sover­ eign, who am outside the law, declare that there is no outside of the law:'5 So sovereignty is structurally based on exception that is included in the law as its own point of exteriority. The sovereign is the one who can suspend the legal order and proclaim the state of emergency where the laws are no longer valid and the exception becomes the rule. At the opposite end of the sovereign we have its inverse figure, which is the homo sacer, the bare life excluded from the law in such a way that it can be killed with impunity, yet without entering into the realm of the sacrifice. Being outside the law, his bare life exposed to be killed with impunity, the homo sacer is exposed to the law as such in its pure validity. The state of emergency is the rule of law in its pure form-precisely the excess of validity over meaning, the suspension of all laws and therefore the institution of the law as such. And one could say: Kafka is the literature of the permanent state of emergency. The subject is at the mercy of the law beyond all laws, without any defense. He can be arbitrarily stripped of all his possessions, including his bare life. The law functions as its pure transgression. Whenever one encounters the representatives of the law in Kafka-and one always encounters only its lowest and the most insignificant emissaries-they always act as the figures of transgression, disregarding any rules, the figures of whim who can arbitrarily either enforce the law or make an exception, and are constantly making exceptions for themselves, they are figures of total unpredictability. Kafka's heroes are always homines sacri, exposed to the pure validity of the law which manifests itself as its opposite. Kafka has turned homo sacer into the central literary figure, thus displaying a certain shift in the functioning of the law that has taken place at the turn of the twentieth century, and inaugurated a new era, with many drastic consequences which will define the century. Is there a way out of this world without exteriority? Agamben proposes an op­ timistic reading of the parable "Before the Law:' precisely at the point where other interpreters merely saw the defeat of the man from the country, for the man never succeeded to get into the Law, he died outside the gate and when dying learned that this gate was reserved only for him. Yet, the last sentence reads: "This gate was ,, made only for you. I am now going to shut it. [Ich gehe jetzt und schliej3e ihn.] 6 But if the very openness of the law is the pure form of its closure and of its unqualified validity and power, then the man succeeded in a most remarkable feat: he managed to attain the closure. He managed to close the door, to interrupt the reign of pure validity. The closed door is a chance of liberation. It is true, he was successful only at the price of his own life, so that the law is interrupted only when he is dead-one reading would be: the law has no power over the dead alone, one doesn't stand a chance while alive. Still, there is a perspective of closure, of invalidating the law if only one persists far enough. Was the man from the country so naIve or so shrewd? On the one hand he was very timid, he let himself be subdued very quickly, he was easily diverted from his initial intention, instantly intimidated. But on the other hand he displayed an incredible stubbornness, persistence and determination. It is the struggle of exhaustion; it is true that they manage to entirely exhaust him with the open door, yet in the end he is the one who exhausts the law. If one is prepared

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to persist to the end one can put an end to the validity of the law. This seems a desperate strategy. But what other strategies are there in this im­ possible predicament? If there is always some way out of the closure, there seems to be none out of the openness. This is why Kafka is generally perceived as the depress­ ing author of total closure with no exit. Misperceived, I think, for this is not Kafka's message at all. There is a way out, at all times, and there is a politics in Kafka that is not at all the capitulation before this unfathomable validity, this circle of internal transgression and culpabilization. In what follows I will examine three strategies that offer an exit, and they are all connected with the instance of the voice. Why the voice? What makes the voice placed in a structural and privileged posi­ tion? Let us briefly look at the intricate question of how does the law manifest itself. It always shows itself through some partial objects, typically through a glimpse, a tiny fragment that one unexpectedly witnesses and which in its fragmentation re­ mains a mystery; by morsels; by servants, doorkeepers, maids; by trivia, by trash, the refuse of the law. The massive validity without meaning is epitomized by partial objects, and those are enough for the construction of fantasies, enough to capture desire. The law acts as the pure metonymy, from one morsel to another, while the construction of its unfathomable meaning falls entirely upon the shoulders of the subject. And among those partial objects there is the voice, the senseless voice of the law: the law constantly makes funny noises, it emits mysterious sounds. The validity of the law can be pinned to a senseless voice. When the land surveyor K. arrives to the village under the castle he is lodged in an inn and he is eager to clarify the nature of his assignment. He was sent for, he was summoned and he wants to know why, so he calls the castle, he uses this recent invention, the telephone. But what does he hear on the other side of the line? Just a voice that is some kind of singing, or buzz, or murmur, the voice in general, the voice without qualifications. There was a murmur coming from the receiver such as K. had never heard before from a telephone. It was as if this murmur of countless children's voices-but this murmur was no murmur, it was the singing of very distant, extremely distant voices-as if this murmur, in an impossible way, was turn­ ing into a single shrill high-pitched voice which was piercing the ear as if it wanted to penetrate deeper than mere hearing.7 There is no message, but the voice is enough to stupefy him, he is suddenly para­ lyzed: "In front of the telephone he was powerless:' He is spellbound, mesmerized. This is just one example chosen at random among many. Before going any farther one should note that the intervention of a voice in this place is crucial and necessary. The voice epitomizes at best the validity beyond meaning, it is structurally placed at the point of the exception of the law. For the law is the law only insofar as it is written, that is, given the form which is universally at the disposal of everyone, always accessible and unchangeable-but with Kafka one can never get to the place where it is written to check what it says, the access is always denied, the place of the letter is infinitely eluding. The voice is precisely what cannot be checked, it is ever changing and fleeting, it is the non-universal par

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excellence, that which cannot be universalized. This is why the superego, the reverse

side of the law, is always manifested by a voice.8 And this is the point of Lacan's use of shofar: this ancient primitive instrument used in the Jewish rituals is the presen­ tification of the supposed voice of the dying primal father which keeps resonating, thus endowing the letter with authority. The letter of the law, in order to acquire au­ thority, has to rely, at a certain point, on the tacitly presupposed voice which makes that the letter is not "the dead letter;' but exerts power and can be enacted. So the voice is structurally in the same position as sovereignty, which means that it can put into question the validity of the law: the voice stands at the point of exception, the internal exception which threatens to become the rule, where it suddenly displays its profound complicity with the bare life. The emergency is the emergence of the voice in the commanding position, its concealed existence suddenly becomes over­ whelming and devastating. The voice is precisely at the unplaceable spot at the same time in the interior and the exterior of the law, and hence a permanent threat of the state of emergency. And with Kafka the exception has become the only rule. The letter of the law is hidden in some inaccessible place and may not exist at all, it is a matter of presumption, and we have only voices in its place. I can add in parenthesis that this is also exactly Hegel's problem-Slavoj Ziiek keeps coming back to this in several of his books.9 When Hegel introduces the mon­ arch, which is for him the highest speculative category of the political philosophy, the very embodiment of reason, he introduces it as the figure of supreme sovereignty but deprived of any power. The sole function of the monarch is to add his signature: the laws are written and passed by competent people, by democratic procedures, etc., yet in order for them to acquire validity, the monarch has to add his signa­ ture. But this is the only thing he does, the signature has the performative power of instituting the law, of making it valid, his act resides in pure validation without possessing a meaning. The monarch himself is chosen on the completely contin­ gent and "irrational" basis of natural heredity, not by his abilities, in the maximum contrast to the law as the embodiment of reason. So the monarch is the constitutive exception, the exception is inscribed within the realm of the law, but in such a way that it is made innocuous. It is reduced to the mere signifier, the signature, a pure performative act without a meaning. This was Hegel's wager: to include the point of exception and thus to neutralize it, to deprive it of all the pernicious effects and taus to enact the realm of reason through the very irrational point of exception in its center. There is a crucial point in this strategy: to reduce the externality and the exception to a mere signifier, a meaningless signature as the seal of reason. The sig­ nifier in the form of the senseless letter which, despite its meaningless nature, is still a letter, that is, universally disponible and verifiable, a zero point of universality. This is not the path that history has taken in the past century: it treated the exception not as a signifier to be included, but as a voice which, in its senseless nature, cannot be included, it is the zero point of non-universality, not the zero point of universality. This is where the economy of the letter totally differs from the economy of the voice. And this is why the voice constantly threatened to undermine the authority of the letter, or rather to supplant it, to invalidate it. End of parenthesis. .

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K. is spellbound by the voice emanating from the castle through the telephone, as the wanderer is spellbound by the song of the Sirens. What is the secret of that ir­ resistible voice? Kafka has an answer in his short story "The Silence of the Sirens;' ("Das Schweigen der Sirenen") written in October 1917 and published in 1931 by M ax Brod, who has also provided the title. The Sirens are irresistible because they are silent, yet Ulysses nevertheless managed to outwit them. Here we have the first strat­ egy, the first model of escape from the unstoppable force of the law. "To protect himself from the Sirens Ulysses stopped his ears with wax and had himself bound to the mast of his ship:'l0 The first sentence is already one of Kafka's wonderful opening coups de force, as, for example, in the opening paragraph of his novel America, where we have his hero Karl RoBmann arriving by boat to the New York harbor, admiring the Statue of Liberty with her sword rising high up in the sun. One almost doesn't notice, but where is the sword in the Statue of Liberty? Here we have Ulysses stopping his ears and tied to the mast, while in the legend it was the oarsmen who had their ears stopped with wax while Ulysses was tied to the mast. There was a division oflabor, indeed the very model of the division oflabor, if we follow the argument that Adorno and Horkheimer developed in Dialectic ofEn­ lightenment. There is a sharp division between those who are doomed to be deaf and to work, and those who listen and enjoy, take pleasure in art, but helplessly tied to the mast. This is the very image of the division between labor and art, and this is the place to start scrutinizing the function of art, in its separation from the economy of work and survival, that is, in its powerlessness. The aesthetic pleasure is always the pleasure in chains, it is thwarted by the limits assigned to it, and this is why Ulysses confronting the Sirens is so exemplary for Adorno and Horkheimer. Kafka's Ulysses combines both strategies, the aristocratic and the proletarian one, he takes double precautions, although all know that this is useless: the song of the Sirens would pierce any wax and the true passion would break any chains. But the Sirens have a weapon far more effective than their voice, which is their silence, that is, the voice at its purest; the silence that is unbearable and irresistible, the ulti­ mate weapon of the law. "And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never:'" One cannot resist silence for the good rea­ son that there is nothing to resist. This is the mechanism of the law at its minimal: it expects nothing of you, it doesn't command, one can always oppose commands and injunctions, but not the silence. The silence is the very form of the validity of the law beyond its meaning, the zero-point of voice, its pure embodiment. Ulysses is naive, he childishly trusts his devices and he sails past them. The Si­ rens are not simply silent but they pretend to sing: "He saw their throats rising and falling, their breasts lifting, their eyes filled with tears, their lips half-parted;' and he believed they were singing and that he has escaped them and outfoxed them, although their singing was unstoppable. "But Ulysses, if one may so express it, did not hear their silence; he thought they were singing and that he alone did not hear them:'12 If he knew they were silent he would be lost. He imagined that he has es­ caped their power by his naive cunning, and in the first account we are led to sup­ pose that it was his naivete that saved him.

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Yet the truth of the story is perhaps not in his naivete at all: "Perhaps he had re­ ally noticed, although here the human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent, and held up to them and to the gods the aforementioned pretense merely as a sort of shield:'13 The shrewd and canny Ulysses, the sly and cunning Ulysses-Homer never fails to accompany his name by one of those epithets. Is his ultimate slyness displayed by putting up an act of naivete? So in the second account he outwitted them by pretending not to hear that there was really nothing to hear. They were going through the motions of singing and he was going through the mo­ tions of not hearing their silence. One could say that his ruse has the structure of the most famous Jewish joke, the paragon among Jewish jokes, the one with the two Jews on the railway station: "If you say you're going to Krakow, you want me to believe you're going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you're going to Krakow. So why are you lying to me?"14 So by extension: "Why are you pretending that you don't hear anything when you really don't hear anything? Why are you pretending not to hear when you know very well there is nothing to hear? You pretend so that I would think you don't hear anything while I know very well that you really don't hear anything:' The Jewish joke is Ulysses' triumph, he managed to counter one pretense with another. In the joke the first Jew, the one who simply told the truth about his destination, is the winner, for he managed to transfer the burden of truth and lie on the other one, who could only reply with a hysterical outburst. One is left with the same oscillation as in our story: was the truth-teller so naIve or so shrewd? Which is exactly the question that remained in the air with the man from the country dy­ ing on the threshold of the law. Ulysses' strategy is not unrelated to the strategy of the man from the country: Ulysses counters pretense by pretense, the man counters deferral by deferral, exhaustion by exhaustion-he manages to exhaust the exhaus­ tion, to bring an end to the deferral, to close the door. This doesn't work with the Sirens. To be sure, they are defeated: "They no longer had any desire to allure; all they wanted was to hold as long as they could the radi­ ance that fell from Ulysses' great eyes:'lS Are they suddenly seized by the yearning for the one who managed to get away? "If the Sirens had possessed consciousness they would have been annihilated at that moment. But they remained as they had been; all that had happened was that Ulysses had escaped them:'16 They have no consciousness, all their behavior is going through the motions, they are an automa­ ton, they are inanimate, they are a machine imitating humanity, they are cyborgs, and this is why their defeat cannot have any effect. This one has escaped, but this cannot dismantle the mechanism. So can one fight the law by turning a deaf ear to it? Can one just pretend not to hear its silence? This is no simple strategy, it defies human understanding, says Kafka, it boggles the mind. It takes the supreme cunning and it doesn't introduce a closure of the law. Ulysses was an exception, and everybody else is the rule.17 .

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Let us now turn to another strategy that has again the voice at its kernel, the voice which can counter the voice, or the silence, of the law. "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" ("Josefine die Sangerin oder das Yolk der Mause"), is actually the last

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story that Kafka ever wrote, in March 1924, a couple of months before his death. By its being the last one it is necessarily placed in the perspective of reading it as his testament, his last will, the point de capiton, the quilting point, the necessary illusion of it being the vantage point which would shed some ultimate light on his work, provide a clue which would illuminate, with finality, all that went before. And it is no doubt bizarre and ironical that this clue, this suture, is provided not only by the voice, but by the tiniest of voices, the minute microscopic squeak,'8 and one is structurally inclined to take this minuscule peep as the red thread that could retro­ actively enlighten Kafka's obscurity. There is a vast question of Kafka's multiple uses of the animal kingdom which are so prominent in his work-here I can only follow Deleuze and Guattari, who dwell upon this at some length. There is, most notoriously, the becoming-animal of Gregor Samsa, which features, among other things, his voice, the incomprehensible chirping sounds which come out of his mouth when he tries to justify himself in front of the chief clerk. '''That was no human voice; said the chief clerk . . . ," '9 it is the signifier reduced to pure senseless voice, reduced to what Deleuze and Guattari call the pure intensity. The general question can be put in the following way: is animality outside the law? The first answer is: by no means. Kafka's animals are never linked to mythology, they are never allegorical or metaphorical. Here is the justly famous line by Deleuze and Guattari: "Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor;'20 and on this account Kafka is perhaps the first utterly non-metaphorical author. The animal societies, the mice and the dogs to which we will come in a moment, are organized "just like" human societies,21 which means that animals are always denaturalized, deterritorialized animals, there is nothing pre-cultural, innocent or authentic about them. Yet on the other hand they nevertheless represent what Deleuze and Guattari cali ia ligne de Juite, a certain line of flight. The becoming-animal of Gregor Samsa means his escape from the mechanism of his family and his job, the way out from all the symbolic roles that he had assumed, his insecthood is at the same time his liberation. Metamorphosis is an attempt of escape, though a failed one. But there is a double edge to this: one can read the becoming-animal on the first level as becom­ ing that what law has made out of subjects, that is, to become indeed reduced to the bare animal life, the lowest kind of animality represented by insects, the crawling . disgusting swarm to be decontaminated, the non-sacrificial animality (the insect is the anti-lamb), the bare life of homo sacer. The law treats subjects as insects, as the metaphor has it, but Gregor Samsa destroys the metaphor by taking it literally, by literalizing it, and thus the metaphor collapses, the distance of analogy evaporates and the word becomes the thing. But by fully assuming the position of the bare life, the reduction to animality, a ligne de Juite emerges, not as an outside of law but at the bottom of the full assumption of the law. Animality is the internal outside that is endowed with ambivalence precisely at the point of fully realizing the implicit presupposition of the law. Josephine's voice presents a different problem. It is not a question of metamor­ phosis, but of the emergence of another kind of voice in the midst of the society governed by the law; a voice that wouldn't be the voice of the law, though it may seem indistinguishable from it. Josephine's voice is endowed with a special power

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midst of this entirely unmusical race of mice. (A parenthesis: what Freud and Kafka curiously have in common, apart from the obvious analogies of their Jewish origins and sharing the same historical moment and the space of Central Europe, is their claim that they are both completely unmusical, that music is the one thing they don't understand at all. This is an extraordinary trait particularly given their Jewish background, since music was historically one of the Jewish specialties, up to this day.22 Couldn't one say that this absence of musical gift is the best entrance into the susceptibility to the voice?). So what is so special about Josephine's voice? Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine's singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary. Is it in fact singing at all? . . . Is it not perhaps just piping [whistling, pJeifen l ? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life. We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without thinking of it, indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. . . . Josephine . . . hardly rises above the level of our usual piping . . . . 23 Josephine merely pipes, whistles, as all mice do, all the time, even in a less accom­ plished manner than the others. "Piping is our people's daily speech . . . ;'24 that is, the speech minus meaning. Yet her singing is irresistible, this is no ordinary voice, though indistinguishable from others by its positive features. Whenever she starts singing, and she does it in unpredictable places and times, in the middle of the street, anywhere, there is immediately a crowd that gathers and listens, completely enthralled. So this very ordinary piping is suddenly placed on a special spot, all its power stems from the place it occupies, as in Lacan's definition of sublimation, "to elevate an object to the dignity of the Thing:' She may well be convinced herself that her voice is very special, but it is just "to a straw" like any other. This is 1924, the time of Marcel Duchamp, ten years after he displayed his La roue de bicyclette (1913), the ordinary bicycle wheel, elevating it to the dignity of the Thing, this art object that mysteriously looks exactly like any bicycle wheel (to be followed by shufl1ing spades, urinals, etc.). As Gerard Wajcman put it, Duchamp invented the wheel for the twentieth century.25 There is an act of a pure creatio ex nihilo, or rather creatio ex nihilo in reverse: the wheel, the object of mass production, is created not exactly out of nothing, but rather it creates the nothing, the gap that separates it from all other wheels, and which presents the wheel in its pure being-object, deprived of any of its functions, suddenly in its strange sublimity. So Josephine's voice is the ready-made object, it is the extension of the ready­ made into music. All it does is to introduce a gap, the imperceptible gap that sepa­ rates it from all other voices while remaining absolutely the same-"a mere nothing in voice."26 This can start anywhere, everywhere, at any time, with any kind of ob­ ject: this is the art of the ready-made, and everything is ready-made for art. It is like the sudden intrusion of transcendence into immanence, but a transcendence that stays in the very midst of immanence and looks exactly the same, the imperceptible

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difference in the very sameness. Her art is the art of the minimal gap,>7 and this is the hardest nut to crack. To crack a nut is truly no feat, so no one would ever dare to collect an audi­ ence in order to entertain it with nut-cracking. But if all the same one does do that and succeeds in entertaining the public, then it cannot be a matter of simple nut-cracking. Or it is a matter of nut-cracking, but it turns out that we have overlooked the art of cracking nuts because we were too skilled in it and that this newcomer to it first shows us its real nature, even finding it useful in making his effects to be rather less expert in nut -cracking than most of US.28 So any voice will do to crack the nuts, provided it can create nothing out of some­ thing. Her genius is in having no talent, which makes her all the more the genius. An accomplished trained singer would never have pulled off this feat. Josephine is the popular artist, the people's artist, so the people take care of her as the father of the child, while she is persuaded that she is the one that takes care of the people; when they are "in a bad way politically or economically, her sing­ ing is supposed to save" them and "if it doesn't drive away the evil, at least gives us strength to bear it:'29 Her voice is a collective voice, she sings for all, she is the voice of the people, who otherwise form an anonymous mass. "This piping, which rises up where everyone else is pledged to silence, comes almost like a message from the whole people to each individuaI:'30 In a reversal, she embodies the collectivity and relegates her listeners to their individuality. There is the opposition between her oneness and the collectivity of people-they are always treated en masse, they dis­ play the uniformity of their reactions, despite some minor divergences of opinion, and their commonsensical opinion is rendered by the narrator (Erzahlermaus, as one commentator put it), the bearer of the doxaY They are non-individuals, while she, on the other side of the scale, is the exceptional one, the elevated individuality who stands for, and can awaken, the lost individuality of others. But in her role of the artist she is also the capricious prima donna, there is the whole comedy of her claims for her rights. She wants to be exempt from work, she requires special privileges, the work allegedly harms her voice, she wants that the due honor should be paid to her services, she wants to be granted the place apart. She "does not want mere admiration, she wants to be admired exactly in the way she prescribes:'32 But the people, despite the general esteem, don't want to hear about any of this, they are cold in their judgment, they respect her, but want her to remain one of them. So there is the whole charade of the artist who is not appreciated as she would deserve, she doesn't get the laurel that she thinks belongs to her, she puts up the act of the genius not understood by the contemporaries. Out of protest she announces that she will cut down her coloraturas, this will teach them a lesson, and maybe she does, only that nobody notices it. She keeps coming up with all sorts of whims, she lets herself be begged and only reluctantly gives in. There is the comedy of the hurt narcissism, the megalomania, the inflated ego, the high mission of the artist's overblown vocation. So one day she indeed stops singing, firmly believing that there would be some huge scandal, but nobody cares, nobody gives a damn, ev-

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erybody goes about their business as usual, without noticing a lack. That is, without noticing the lack of the lack, the absence of the gap. Curious, how mistaken she is in her calculations, the clever creature, so mis­ taken that one might fancy she has made no calculations at all but is only being driven on by her destiny, which in our world cannot be anything but a sad one. Of her own accord she abandons her singing, of her own accord she destroys the power she has gained over people's hearts. How could she ever have gained that power, since she knows so little about these hearts of ours? . . . Josephine's road must go downhill. The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her. . . . Perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all, while Josephine . . . will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers.33 Despite her vanity and megalomania, people will do easily without her, she will be forgotten, no traces will be left of her art, this is not a people of historians and ar­ chivists, and besides, there is no way one could stack, collect, archive her art, which consists purely in the gap. So this is the second strategy, the strategy of art, of the art as the non -exceptional exception, which can arise anywhere, at any moment, which is made of anything, of the ready-made objects, providing it can provide them with a gap, make them make a break. It is the art of the minimal difference. Yet the moment it makes its appear­ ance this difference is bungled by the very gesture that brought it about, the moment this gesture and this difference became instituted, the moment art becomes an insti­ tution to which a certain place is allotted and certain limits are drawn. Its power is at the same time its powerlessness, the very status of art veils what is at stake. Hence the whole farce of the egocentric megalomania and the misunderstood genius, the special privileges etc., which occupy the largest part of the story. Josephine wants the impossible: she wants a place beyond the law, beyond the equality-and equality is the essential feature of the mouse-folk, the equality in tininess, in their miniature size (hence her claims to greatness are all the more comical). But at the same time she wants her status of the exception to be legally sanctioned, symbolically recog­ nized, properly glorified. She wants to be, like the sovereign, both inside and outside the law. She wants her uniqueness to be recognized as a special social role, and the moment art does this, it is cooked. The very break it has introduced is reduced to just another social function, the break becomes the institution of the break, its place is circumscribed and as an exception it can fit very well into the rule. That is, into the rule of law. As an artist who wants veneration and recognition she will be forgotten, relegated to the gallery of memory, that is, of oblivion. Her voice, which opens the crack in the seamless continuity of the law, is betrayed and destroyed by the very status of art, which reinserts it and closes the gap. At best it can be a tiny recess: "Piping is our people's daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it

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sets us free too for a little while:'34 Just for a little while, but by setting us free it only helps us bear the rest all the better. The miniature size of the mouse is enough to open the gap, but once it is instituted and recognized, its importance shrinks to the size of the mouse, despite its delusions of grandeur, and despite the temporary thrall it will be forgotten. It is the voice tied to the mast, and the oarsmen, although they may hear it in the flash of a brief recess, will continue to be deaf. Thus we end up not with Kafka's version of Ulysses, but are stuck with Ulysses tout court, or rather with the Adorno and Horkheimer version. Her sublime voice will finally be den Miiusen gepjiffen, as the dictionary has it (and this German expression may well be at the origin of the whole story), that is, piped to the mice, piped in vain to someone who cannot understand or appreciate it-not because of some obtuseness of the mass, but because of the nature of art itself. One could say: the art is her mousetrap. So the second strategy fails, it is ruined by its own success. •

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Let us now turn to a third option. "Investigations of a Dog" ("Forschungen eines Hundes") , written in 1922 (two years before his death) and published in 1931, the title again given by Max Brod, is one of the most obscure and most bizarre among Kafka's stories-and this is to say something-apart from being one of the longest. Here we have a dog who lives a normal dog's life, like everybody, and who is suddenly awakened from this life by an encounter with seven rather special music-producing dogs. . . . out of some place of darkness, to the accompaniment of terrible sounds such as I had never heard before, seven dogs stepped into the light. . . . [Tlhey brought the sound with them, though I could not recognize how they pro­ duced it. . . . At that time I still knew hardly anything of the creative gift for music with which the canine race alone is endowed, it had naturally enough escaped my but slowly developing powers of observation; for though music had surrounded me as a perfectly natural and indispensable element of ex­ istence ever since I was a suckling, an element which nothing impelled me to distinguish from the rest of existence . . . ; all the more astonishing, then, indeed devastating, were these seven great musical artists to me.35 To start with the situation is similar to that of Josephine's singing: music is every­ where in dogs' lives, the most run-of-the-mill thing, utterly inconspicuous, and it takes "great musical artists" to single it out, that is, to produce the break. But there is a twist: They did not speak, they did not sing, they remained generally silent, almost determinedly silent; but from the empty air they conjured music. Everything was music, the lifting and setting down of their feet, certain turns of the head, their running and their standing still, the positions they took up in relation to one another . . . [theirl lying flat on the ground and going through complicated concerted evolutions . . . .36 Where does the music come from? There is no speaking, no singing, no musical

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instruments. It just came from nowhere, from the empty air, ex nihilo. Music was everywhere in dogs' lives, ready-made, but this one was just created out of nothing. We have seen that Josephine's problem was to create a nothing out of something, in creatio ex nihilo in reverse, creatio nullius rei, but here it's even better: they create nothing out of nothing, the gap of nothing which encircles the ready-made object made out of nothing. There we have the great wonder: the ready-made nothing. The ready-made nothing is epitomized by the voice without a discernible source, what Michel Chion called the acousmatic voice.37 It is the voice as pure resonance. Let me take a brief pause for a digression. In one of his (rather rare) reflections about the voice in the (unpublished) seminar on anxiety on June 5, 1963, Lacan argues for his tenet that the object voice has to be divorced from sonority. He curi­ ously makes an excursion into the physiology of the ear, he speaks about the cavity of the ear, its snail-like shape, Ie tuyau, the tube, and goes on to say that its impor­ tance is merely topological, it consists in the formation of a void, a cavity, an empty space, of "the most elementary form of a constituted and a constituting emptiness [Ie videl ;' like the empty space in the middle of a tube, or of any wind instrument, the space of mere resonance, the volume. But this is but a metaphor, he says, and continues with the following rather mysterious passage: If the voice, in our sense, has an importance, then it doesn't reside in it reso­ nating in some spatial void; rather it resides in the fact that the simplest emission . . . resonates in the void which is the void of the Other as such, ex nihilo, so to speak. The voice responds to what is said, but it cannot be re­ sponsible for it [La voix repond a ce qui se dit, mais elle ne peut pas en repon­ dre.l In other words: in order to respond we have to incorporate the voice as the alterity of what is said [l'alterite de ce qui se ditl . What are we to make of this? I will take up just one thread. If there is an empty space in which the voice resonates, then it is only the void of the Other, the Other as a void. One speaks, and there is a response, a voice that comes back to us, the voice as the answer to what was said, but this response is the mere resonance in the Other. The voice comes back to us through the loop of the Other. We say something, some minimal emission, and what comes back to us from the Other is the pure alterity of what is said, that is, the voice. This is maybe the original form of the famous formula that the· subject always gets back his own message in an inverted form: the message that one gets back in response is the voice. Our speech resonates in the Other and is returned as the voice, something we didn't bargain for, the pure alterity: the inverted form of our message is its voice, which was created from a pure void, ex nihilo, it is the minimal form of the echo, not the sound echo that one can hear, but the inau­ dible echo of the pure resonance, and this non-sonorous resonance endows what is said with alterity. The pure void produces something, something emerges out of nothing, there is a resonating nothing, although this resonance has no sonority. One expects a response from the Other, one addresses it in the hope of a response, but all one gets is the voice. It is a response to our words, but it is not responsible for them, the subject is the one who is responsible for the emission. The voice is what is said turned into its alterity, but the responsibility is the subject's own, not the Other's,

122

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Kafka's Voices

A politi cal slogan in the time of the general infantilization of social life,

which means that the subject is responsible not only for what he said, but must at the same time respond for, and respond to, the alterity of his own speech. He said something more than he intended, and this surplus is the voice that is merely pro­ duced by being passed through the loop of the Other. This is I suppose at the bottom of the rather striking phenomenon in analysis, the dispossession of one's voice in the presence of the silence of the analyst: whatever one says is immediately countered by its own alterity, by the voice resounding in the resonance of the void of the Other, which comes back to the subject as the answer the moment one spoke.38 This reso­ nance dispossesses one's own voice, the resonance of the Other thwarts it, burrows it, makes it sound hollow. The speech is the subject's own, but the voice pertains to the Other, it is created in the loop of its void. This is what one has to learn to respond for, and respond to.39 The dispossession is at the same time an opening. But this is just a digression, made in the wild hope of clarifying one obscurity with another, that of Kafka by that of Lacan, the hope that two combined obscurities might produce some light- ex nihilo. If we take up just the slogans of "the resonance of the Other;' "the void;' "ex nihilo;' then we see that the seven dogs' voices are com­ ing out of a pure void, they spring up from nothing, a pure resonance without a source. As if the pure alterity would have turned into music, the music that pervades anything and everything, as if the voice of this resonance would have got hold of all possible points of emission, and not the other way around. The resonance of the voice functions not as an effect but as a cause, a pure causa sui, but which in this self­ causality encompasses everything. It is as if the pure void of the Other would start to reverberate in itself in the presence of those great musicians, whose art consisted merely in letting the Other resonate for itself. The hapless young dog is overwhelmed: . . . the music gradually got the upper hand, literally knocked the breath out of me and swept me far away from those actual little dogs, and quite against my will . . . my mind could attend to nothing but this blast of music which seemed to come from all sides, from the heights, from the deeps, from ev­ erywhere, surrounding the listener, overwhelming him, crushing him, and over his swooning body still blowing fanfares so near that they seemed far away and almost inaudible. . . . [TJhe music robbed me of my wits . . . .40 This experience entirely shatters the young dog's life, it is the start of his quest, his investigations. His interest in all this is not artistic at all, there is no problem of the status of this voice as art, as with Josephine, his interest is an epistemological one. It is the quest for the source, the attempt to gain knowledge about the source of it all. One of Josephine's endeavors was to preserve the dimension of the child in her art, in the midst of that race of mice which is both very childish and prematurely old at the same time, they are like children infused with "weariness and hopelessness;'41 and Josephine's voice was like preserving their childhood against their economy of survival, against the always premature adulthood. But the young dog is at the very opposite end of this, he decides that "there are more important things than childhood:' Es gibt wichtigere Dinge als die Kindheit:42 this is one of Kafka's great sentences, it should be taken as a motto, or indeed as a most serious political slogan.

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starting with the infantilization of infants, the time which loves to take the despicable opposite line, namely that we are all children in our hearts and that this is our most precious possession, something we should hold on to. There are more important things than childhood: this should also be seen as the slogan of psychoanalysis, which indeed seems to be all about retrieving the childhood, but not in order to keep this precious and unique thing, but in order to give it up. Psychoanalysis is on the side of the young dog who decides to grow up, to leave behind "the blissful life of a young dog;' to start his investigations, turn to research, to pursue a quest. But his quest takes a strange and unexpected turn. The question "Where does the music come from? Where does the voice come from?" is immediately translated into another question: "Where does the food come from?" The mystery of the incor­ poreal resonance of the voice is without further ado transformed into the mystery of a very different kind, of the most corporeal kind imaginable. The voice is the reso­ nance from nowhere, it doesn't serve anything (Lacan's definition of enjoyment), but the food is at the opposite end, the most elementary means of survival, the most material and bodily of elements. Indeed, it is the question about a mystery where there doesn't seem to be any mystery. The dog sees a mystery where nobody else sees a mystery, the simplest and the most palpable thing suddenly becomes endowed with the greatest of secrets. A break has happened, from nowhere, and he wants to start his inquiries with the simplest things. In a few sentences, in a few lines, one passes from the enigma of song to the enigma of food-the stroke of Kafka's genius at its best, in a passage that is completely unpredictable and completely logical at the same time. Once one starts asking questions, there is no end to mystery. What is the source of food? The earth? But what enables the earth to provide food? Where does the earth get the food from? Just as the source of the law was an enigma that one could never disclose, so is the source of food an ever-elusive enigma. So the dog goes around asking other dogs, who all seem quite unconcerned by such self-evident trivialities, nobody would dream of taking seriously such banal in­ quiries. When he asks them about the source of food, they immediately assume that he must be hungry, so instead of an answer they give him food, they want to nourish him, they give him the bone, but no spirit. They want to stuff his mouth with food, stop his questioning with food.43 . The dog's mouth cannot be stuffed, he is not put off that easily, and he gets so in­ volved in his investigation that he eventually stops eating. The story has many twists and turns that I cannot go into, all of them illuminating and strangely wonderful; I must leave aside, e.g., the intriguing problem of the dogs floating in the air, etc. I will just jump to the last section. The way to discover the source of food is to starve. Like "A Hunger Artist;' "Der Hungerkiinstler;' the story written in the same year, not the starving artist, which is a common enough phenomenon, but someone who has brought starvation to an art. The starvation was his ready-made, since his secret was that he actually really disliked food. It was an art not adequately appreciated, just like Josephine's, and this is why the hunger artist will die of hunger. But the dog is no artist, this is not the portrait of the artist as a young dog, this dog is a would-be scientist, and he is starv-

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Kafka's Voices

ing on his quest for knowledge, which almost brings him to the same result. 44 But at the point of total exhaustion, when he was already dying (like the man from the country), there is salvation, the salvation at the point of the "exhaustion of exhaus­ tion:' He vomits blood, he is so faint that he faints, and when he opens his eyes there is a dog that appears from nowhere, a strange hound standing in front of him. There is an ambiguity-is this last part a hallucination of the dying dog? Or even more radically, is this the answer to Hamlet's question "But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?" Is this last section a possible sequel to "Before the Law:' the dreams that may come to the man from the country at the point of his death? Is it all a delusion, the glimpse of salvation only at the point of death? A salvation only at the price that it doesn't have any consequence? But Kafka describing this delusion, his pursuing it to the end, bringing it to the point of science, the birth of science from the spirit of a delusion on the threshold of death: this is all the consequence that is needed, something that affects the here and now, and radically transforms it. The dying dog tries at first to chase away the apparition of the hound (is this a ghost which intervenes at the end, as opposed to the other one which intervened in the beginning?). The hound was very beautiful, and at first it even appears that he is trying to pay court to the starved dog; he is very concerned about the dying dog, he cannot let him be. But all this dialogue is but a haphazard preparation for the event, the emergence of song, the song again coming from nowhere, emerging without anyone's will. . . . then I thought I saw something such as no dog before me had ever seen. . . . I thought I saw that the hound was already singing without knowing it, nay, more that the melody separated from him, was floating on the air in accordance with its own laws, and, as though he had no part in it, was moving toward me, toward me alone. . . . [T]he melody, which the hound soon seemed to acknowledge as his, was quite irresistible. It grew stronger; its waxing power seemed to have no limits, and already almost burst my eardrums. But the worst was that it seemed to exist solely for my sake, this voice before whose sublimity the woods fell silent, to exist solely for my sake; who was I, that I could dare to remain here, lying brazenly before it in my pool of blood and filth.4s The song again appears from nowhere, it starts from anywhere, from a void, it is separated from its bearer, it is only post festum that the bearer steps in, that the hound can assume it, acknowledge it as his. And this song is directed towards the starving dog alone, it is for his ears only, the impersonal call but which addresses only him personally, just as the door of the Law was meant only for the man from the country. It is like the pure voice of a call, just like the irresistible call of the law, like its irrepressible silence, only this time the very same call as its opposite, the call of salvation. So this voice from nowhere introduces the second break, the dog suddenly re­ covers on the threshold of death, the voice gets hold of him and instills new life in him, he who couldn't move cannot but jump up now, resurrected, the born-again

Mladen Dolar

125

dog. And he pursues his investigations with redoubled forces, he extends his scien­ tific interest to the canine music. "The science of music, if I am correctly informed, is perhaps still more comprehensive than that of nurture:'46 the new science he is trying to establish encompasses both his concerns, the source of food and the source of the voice, it combines them into a single effort. The voice, the music, like the pure transcendence, and the food as the pure immanence of the material world: but they have the common ground, the common source, they are footed in the same kernel. The science of music is held in higher esteem than the science of nurture, it reaches the sublime, but this is precisely what prevents it from penetrating "deeply into the life of the people:' it is "very esoteric and politely excludes the people:'47 It has been erroneously posited as a separate science, different from that of nurture, its power was powerless by being relegated to a separate realm. This was Josephine's unhappy fate, her song was separated from food, the sublime was her mousetrap, just as be­ ing immersed in nurture, the survival, was the unhappy fate of all the rest. Just as the science of nurture had to lead through starvation, so the science of music refers to silence, to "verschwiegenes Hundewesen," the silent essence of the dog, or the essence kept in silence, the essence that, after the experience of the song, can be dis­ covered in any dog as its true nature. For penetrating this essence, "the real dog na­ ture:' the path of nurture was the alternative and simpler way, as it seemed, but it all boils down to the same, what matters is the point of intersection. ''A border region between these two sciences, however, had already attracted my attention. I mean the theory of incantation, by which food is called down. [Es ist die Lehre von dem die Nahrung herabrufenden Gesang.]"48 The song can call down, herabrufen, the food: the source of food was mistakenly sought in the earth, it should have been searched for in the opposite direction. The voice is the source of food that he has been seek­ ing. There is an overlapping, an intersection between nourishment and voice. One can illustrate it with one of Lacan's favorite devices, the intersection of two circles, the circle of food and the circle of the voice, the music. What do we find at the point where they overlap? What is the mysterious intersection? But this is the best defini­ tion of what Lacan called objet a. It is the common source of food and music.49 Food and voice, both pass through the mouth. Deleuze keeps coming back to that over and over again. There is an alternative: either you eat or you speak, use your voice, one can't do both at the same time. Food and voice share the same loca­ tion, but in mutual exclusion: either incorporation or emission. Any language, rich or poor, always implies the deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue and the teeth. The original territoriality of the mouth, the tongue and the teeth is food. By being devoted to the articulation of sounds, the mouth, the tongue and the teeth are deterritorialized. So there is a dis­ junction between eating and speaking. . . . To speak . . . is to starve. so

By speech, the mouth is de-naturalized, diverted from its natural function, seized by the signifier (and for our purposes, by the voice which is but the alterity of the signifier). The Freudian name for this deterritorialization is the drive (if nothing else, it has the advantage that one is spared that terrible tongue-twister, but it aims at the same). Eating can never be the same once the mouth has been deterritorialized,

126

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Kafka's Voices

psychoanalysis.52 •

it is seized by the drive, it turns around this object, it keeps circumventing, circling around this eternally elusive object. The speech, in this de-naturalizing function, is then subjected to the secondary territorialization, as it were, it acquires a second nature, with its anchorage in meaning. Meaning is a reterritorialization oflanguage, its acquisition of a new territoriality, a naturalized substance. (This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the extensive or representational function of speech, as opposed to the pure intensity of the voice, if I undertake a smallfor(:age here.) But this operation can never be successful, and the bit that eludes it can be pinned down as the element of the voice, this pure alterity of what is said. This is the common ground it shares with food, that in food which precisely escapes eating, the bone that gets stuck in the throat (one of Lacan's formulas is precisely that objet a is the bone that gets stuck in the throat of the signifier). So the essence of the dog concerns precisely this intersection of food and voice, the two lines of investigation converge, from our biased perspective they meet in the objet a. So there would have to be a single science, the dog, on the last page, inaugu­ rates a new science, he turns into the founding father of a new science. Though by his own admission he is a poor scientist, at least by the standards of the established sciences that went before. He couldn't pass even the most elementary scientific examination set by an authority on the subject. . . . [T]he reason for that can be found in my incapacity for scientific investigation, my limited powers of thought, my bad memory, but above all in my inability to keep my scientific aim continuously before my eyes. All this I frankly admit, even with a certain degree of pleasure. For the more profound cause of my scientific incapacity seems to me to be an instinct, and indeed by no means a bad one . . . . It was this instinct that made me-and perhaps for the sake of science itself, but a different science from that of today, an ultimate science [einer allerletzten Wissenschaft]-prize freedom higher than everything else. Freedom! Certainly such freedom as is possible today is a wretched business. But nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a pos­ session.51 This is the last sentence of the story. The last word of it all, Ie fin mot as Ie mot , de la fin, is freedom, with an exclamation point. Are we not victims of a delusion, shouldn't we pinch ourselves, is it possible that Kafka actually utters this word? I think this is the only spot where Kafka speaks of freedom, but this doesn't mean at all that there is unfreedom everywhere else in his universe. Quite the opposite, freedom is there at all times, everywhere, it is Kafka's fin mot, like the secret word one doesn't dare to utter, although it is constantly on one's mind. The freedom that might not look like much, that might actually look wretched, but it is there at all points, and once we spot it there is no way of going away from it, it is something to hold on to, it is the permanent line of flight, or rather the line of pursuit. And there is the slogan, the program of a new science that would be able to treat it, to take it as its object, to pursue it, the ultimate science, the science of freedom. Kafka lacks the proper word for it, he cannot name it, this is 1922, but he would only have to look around, to examine the ranks of his fellow Jewish Austrian compatriots. Of course,

127

. ............ .

1

2

.

Eric L. Santner, On the Psycho theology of Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 18 and passim. The problem of our laws: "Our laws are not generally known; they are kept secret by the small group of nobles who rule us. We are convinced that these ancient laws are scrupu­ lously administered; nevertheless it is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know. . . . The very existence of these laws, however, is at most a matter of presumption. There is a tradition that they exist and that they are a mystery confided to the nobility, but it is not and cannot be more than a mere tradition sanctioned by age, for the essence of a secret code is that it should remain a mystery. . . . There is a small party who . . . try to show that, if any law exists, it can only be this: The Law is whatever the nobles do:' Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 437-38. All quotes from Kafka's stories are from this edition.

3

Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Prejuges, devant la loi;' in J.-F. Lyotard, La faculte de juger (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 122 and passim.

4

Franz Kafka, The Trial, 212.

5

Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 23·

6

Franz Kafka, "Before the Law;' 4.

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Franz Kafka, The Castle, 85·

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8

Hence the voice stands at the opposite end of the Kantian categorical imperative, and it is crucial to draw the line between the moral law and the superego. Cf. Alenka ZupanCic, The Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000), 140-67.

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9

Cf., e.g., Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do (London: Verso, 1991), 81-86, 267-70 and passim.

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14 This is of course one of the grand examples from Freud's book on jokes. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 161. In the mdex of jokes, at the end of the volume, this joke is laconically referred to as "Truth a lie (Jewish);' and indeed, as I have tried to argue elsewhere, this joke most economically epitomizes the problem that "Jewishness" presented for Western culture: the indistin­ guishable character of truth and lie, the fact that not only do they look the same but actually coincide, so that "Jewishness" seems to undermine the very ground of the truth­ telling capacity of language. This is the very problem with the "Jews": they look exactly like us, just as the lie looks exactly like the truth. 15

The Complete Stories, 431.

16 Ibid., 432. 17 Before leaving Ulysses let me just recall that in the standard iconography Ulysses was transformed into a Christian hero. This goes back to Saint Ambrose, in the fourth cen­ tury, who depicted Ulysses as the man courageously resisting temptation. So in endless renditions we see him tied to the mast, in a parody of Christ tied to the cross, surrounded

128

Mladen Dolar

Kafka's Voices

by a host of naked girls on the beaches, or the Sirens turned into mermaids; he is sweat­ ing and shivering all over, fighting his inner struggles, heroically defying the temptation, like St. Anthony, he is the Greek paragon of Christian virtue. And one can easily see that he is enjoying, indulging in this very Christian form of surplus enjoyment, this thwarted form-and hence irresistible form-of enjoyment in transgression and culpabilization. For an overview of the multiple uses of the Sirens, cf. Vic de Donder, Le chant de la sirene (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

person-his is the voice of anonymity and must remain without an ''I:' 32 The Complete Stories, 362. 33 Ibid., 376. 34 Ibid., 370. 35 Ibid., 28l. 36 Ibid.

18 The German dictionary offers the following expression: das tragt eine Maus auf den Schwanz fort, for a quantity so small that a mouse could carry it on its tail (with all the German ambiguity of the word, tail/penis). There is a rather vulgar expression in Slovene, "the mouse's penis;' which means the smallest thing imaginable, one cannot possibly con­ ceive of anything smaller; the mouse's voice is of that order of magnitude. The mouse's penis-a circumlocution for castration? Is Josephine a castrato, is this the secret of her voice?

37 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Chion found its supreme example in the mother's voice in Hitchcock's Psycho, another voice ex

nihilo. 38 One might say that the real is but the resonance of the symbolic, the distance of the symbolic to itself, the gap of its otherness, not a separate realm but the otherness within the symbolic itself. This is why the real is not merely something always already lost and unattainable, but rather something one cannot be rid of.

19 The Complete Stories, 98.

39 Bernard Baas puts it very well: "The voice is never my own voice, but the response is my , own response:' Bernard Baas, De la chose a [ objet (Leuven: Peeters/Vrin, 1998), 205·

20 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), 40. "There is no longer a proper sense and a figurative sense, but a distribution of states along the fan of the word . . . . What is at stake is not a resemblance between an animal and a human behavior, and even less a play upon words. There is no longer a man or an animal, since each deterritorializes the other. . . . The animal doesn't speak 'as' a hu­ man, but extracts from language the tonalities without meaning . . . :' (ibid.). 21 On closer inspection both mice and dogs in many respects strangely resemble the Jews and their destiny, as several interpreters have pointed out, but I will not go into this. Cf., "No creatures to my knowledge live in such wide dispersion as we dogs . . . ; we, whose one desire is to stick together . . . we above all others live so widely separated from one another, engaged in strange vocations that are often incomprehensible even to our canine neighbors, holding firmly to laws that are not those of the dog world, but are actually directed against it" (279-80). But it is the literalization that annihilates the metaphor: to live like a dog, poor as a mouse. To say nothing about mauscheln, with all its connotations in German (a word derived from Yiddish for Moses, Mausche, and meaning to speak Yiddish, and by extension to speak in an incomprehensible way, and by extension, secret dealings, hidden affairs, deceit).

129

40 The Complete Stories, 282. 41 Ibid., 369. 42 Ibid., 286. For the German original I use Franz Kafka, Die Erzahlungen. Originalfassung, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000), 420. 43 I cannot resist the temptation to quote some Lacan in parenthesis: "Even when you stuff the mouth-the mouth that opens in the register of the drive-it is not the food that satisfies it. . , . As far as the oral drive is concerned . . . it is obvious that it is not a ques­ tion of food, nor of the memory of food, nor the echo of food, nor the mother's care. . . . [T]he fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing [circling around] the eternally lacking object:' Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979), 167-68, 180.

22 Just consider the list of the most famous violinists of the past century: David Oistrakh, Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Shlomo Mintz, Pinchas Zuckermann, Itzhak Perlman, Ja­ sha Heifetz, etc.

44 If the young dog manages to pursue his investigation further than Josephine this is not due to the fact that "science" would be better situated than art, better suited to produce emancipatory effects, etc. Science as an institution is just as doomed as the institution of art, and what distinguishes the young dog is the persistence of his quest, his questioning of the separation of realms, his will to pursue his course to the end, which can only be done by blurring all the lines of division art/science/life. To use a pun, what distinguishes the dog is his doggedness.

23 The Complete Stories, 36l.

45 The Complete Stories, 314.

24 Ibid., 370.

46 Ibid., 314-15.

25 Cf. Gerard Wajcman, L'objet du siecie, (Paris: Verdier, 2000), for the best analysis of Du­ champ.

47 Ibid., 315. .

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26 The Complete Stories, 36727 I can only add in a footnote that this resonates exactly with Kierkegaard's problem: how to introduce a gap in the continuity as the transcendence in the immanence.

49 "If music be the food of love;' the famous opening lines of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, is another great literary testimony which most economically marks that place, although it immediately obfuscates it with the rhetoric oflove.

28 The Complete Stories, 361-62.

50 Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 35-36.

29 Ibid., 366.

51 The Complete Stories, 315-16.

30 Ibid., 367. •

31

Kafka, in the manuscript, crossed over four instances where the narrator spoke in the first

,

52 I would like to thank Marta Hernandez Salvan and Juan Carlos Rodriguez, the readers for Polygraph, for their extensive comments on this paper. I have tried to answer some of

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Kafka's Voices

their comments in this version of the paper, though the majority of their comments were of such a nature that they would demand an additional paper-a task that I will try to undertake at some point in the future, since this paper is already too long as it is.

Investigations of the Lacanian Field: Some Remarks on Comedy and Love Alenka ZupanCic

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In the times when "positive attitude" (humor and cheerful­ ness in life) and the importance of love are being often used in the construction of most lamentable ideological horizons, it is quite crucial that discussion of these notions (or some no­ tions related to them) be also maintained on another, differ­ ent level. Psychoanalysis had the merit of introducing into the discussion of love certain elements that should make an im­ mediate ideological appropriation of this notion much more difficult. It also has interesting things to say about that mode of producing satisfaction which is called comedy. As to the notion of love, it undermines both tendencies that have been predominant in the discourse on love: that of all-consuming amour-passion, which is presented as the fusion of two lovers in the flame of love, and that of the ideal (perhaps prevailing today) of two autonomous and independent egos construct­ ing a "meaningful" relationship, based on mutual recognition, respect and exchange. Moreover, the Lacanian discussion of love disentangles the latter from the thick field of feelings and emotions with which it is often confused. Like all Lacanian truths, love truth is out there, it is always outside (and not inside, in the depths of our personality). There is a certain affinity between love and comedy that has to do with the way they are organized around a central object which incarnates the very impossibility of any smooth complementarity of the elements involved. This is the thread that I will pursue in my discussion: comedy, as well as love, is only possible on the ground of a fundamental disharmony. The fact that things do not exactly add up is the starting point of virtually every comedy (and very often, although not always, also its concluding point). And the distinctive feature of comedy is that it employs this fundamental discrepancy or disharmony in the way that the latter keeps producing plea­ sure or satisfaction (instead of displeasure, or even pain). This is precisely why comedy is sometimes seen as socially conser-

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vative. Simply put: by making us laugh at certain problems (and thus by giving us a certain satisfaction in the very representation of these problems) it diverts us from doing (or even wanting to do) anything against them. The contemporary capitalist accent on (personal) satisfaction and happiness seems to be perfect for promoting comedy. And yet, although entertainment is all around (one could even speak of the presence of a certain imperative of entertainment), there is very little comedy in the strict sense of the word. It is not the issue of this paper to investigate political and (anti)metaphysical implications (finitude/infinitude) of comedy (and love). Its aim is mostly to articulate certain important things concerning comedy as comedy, which could also help us distinguish comedy within the more general notion of fun­ niness and/or entertainment. I believe that this kind of investigation and reflection, which this paper can only begin to develop, is necessary if one then wants to pursue this topic in other perspectives, especially in political perspective. The growing dissatisfaction with today's (economical and political) global order gives rise to a vast conceptual search for paradigms that could shift or subvert it. There have been many candidates for this role. Too many, perhaps. Sometimes it almost seems that we keep inventing new paradigms and possible break-outs so that we could go on living in the present one. In this respect, I am in no way tempted to rush forward and add comedy and love to this list (or perhaps reassert them there, since they have already been put on the list by some). Perhaps they can be much more politically subversive when they are not immediately put into some service or another (even a most progressive one). •

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The theme "psychoanalysis and tragedy" is a largely discussed and exploited topic, which could not exactly be said for the theme "psychoanalysis and comedy;' al­ though the latter would definitely deserve the same kind of attention. Not on ac­ count of any rule of symmetry, but simply because the topic of comedy (as well as that of jokes) is central to several fundamental issues of psychoanalysis. One of the peaks of the Freudian opus is undoubtedly his Jokes and Their Rela­ tion to the Unconscious. As to Lacan, it is worth pointing out that he introduces, develops and illustrates his famous graph of desire (which is frequently commented on in the context of his discussion of tragedy) through his commentary of Freud's book on jokes. Lacan brings this discussion to its climax with a brief but poignant commentary of Aristophanes and Moliere.' He returns to both these authors in sev­ eral other places. However, the link between psychoanalysis and comedy is far from being ex­ hausted by pointing out that the theme of comedy is also present in Lacan's work. The link in question is much more fundamental and concerns the way Lacan even­ tually comes to perceive and to conceptualize the question of the analyst's desire and of the end of analysis. J. -A. Miller puts this in the following terms: In Lacan's seminar the obsoleteness of the Freudian tragic character is al­ ready there. More on the side of the moque-comique then the tragique, with him comedy is truer than tragedy. If suffering and pain are conspicuously manifest in the treatment, la passe should transform tragedy into comedy. 2

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La passe, of course, is the famous passage from the position of the analysand to the

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position of the analyst that constitutes the proper (or most consequent) ending of analysis. And this passage is supposed to have a certain effect of comedy. While speaking of comedy, it would be a pity to deprive ourselves of the pleasure of exam­ ples. The deservedly famous ending of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, for instance, could be taken as a very good example of what happens at the end of analysis. Jack Lemmon, still dressed as a woman, sits in a boat next to the millionaire who wants to marry "her:' In order to discourage him from this idea, Lemmon starts point­ ing out things that he supposes will disturb the millionaire (s/he admits to being a heavy smoker, s/he confesses that s/he is not a natural blond, etc.). When none of this works and the millionaire is still eager to marry "her;' contentedly smiling at his prospective happiness while driving his boat, Lemmon desperately resorts to the last drastic way out: he pulls the wig off his head and emphatically cries out: "But I am a man!" Yet the millionaire just keeps on smiling contentedly, without even looking at Lemmon, and replies: "Nobody is perfect:' This is the last sentence of the movie. It could be taken as a very felicitous illustration of the end of analysis. If one puts aside the psychology and the motives of the millionaire (which constitute his movie character), one can easily picture him as an analyst who does what he does in order to finally bring Lemmon to utter this emphatic sentence ("I am a man!"), then leaving this sentence simply suspended in the air (as a kind of a bizarre ob­ ject), which makes it ring in another, comical dimension. Or even more precisely, the millionaire simply lets the sentence ring (without "absorbing" it by any kind of understanding or recognition), this echo being precisely what produces the comic effect. In other words, the reply "nobody is perfect" is not at all a kind of emphatic acceptance of the other (such as s/he is), it is not an acceptance or an assimilation of Lemmon's word by the Other, but rather functions as a panel from which Lemmon's Word rebounds and is left hanging in the air. Lemmon's words do not provoke any surprise or indignation in their addressee, so that the ultimate outcry of Lemmon's identity (or being) is posited on the same level with the habit of smoking or the color of his hair. If the millionaire were to react in any way to Lemmon's words (for instance, ifhe were at least to look at Lemmon-instead of which he continues look­ ing straight forward, driving the boat and smiling), he would become Lemmon's interlocutor, he would accept and assimilate Lemmon's words or, which is the same thing, he would-by recognizing them-bestow upon these words the meaning that Lemmon aims at. Instead, the meaning does not fulfill itself, it does not get to be ac­ complished (or completed) in the circuit between the subject and the Other. Some­ thing else gets produced in this ultimate, yet very punctual and precise separation of meaning and signifier. The signifier of Lemmon's Being emerges as such (one could almost say that the signifier emerges as object), and it is precisely this emergence that makes us laugh. In other words, Lemmon's words are diverted from the side of the register of meaning, of interpretation and of understanding, towards the side of the object where the eternal question "What am I?" gets separated from its usual complement-What am I for the Other, what do I mean to the Other? It seems, however, that the topic that Lacan takes up in one of his most famous seminars, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, namely that of the relationship between de-

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sire and action, and the related question of a possible (ethical) act, is foreign to any notion of comedy, but instead strongly emphasizes and makes the case for the "trag­ ic dimension of analytical experience" (as goes the title of one of the sections of this seminar). Still, at the end of The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis, where the central question of the relationship between action and the desire that inhabits us is indeed explored in its tragic dimension, Lacan reminds us again of its other, comic dimension: However little time I have thus far devoted to the comic here, you have been able to see that there, too, it is a question of the relationship between action and desire, and of the former's fundamental failure to catch up with the lat­ ter.3 Or: Actions are inscribed in the space of tragedy, and it is with relation to this space, too, that we are led to take our bearings in the sphere of values. More­ over, this is also true of the space of comedy, and when I started to talk to you about the formations of the unconscious, it was, as you know, the comic that I had in mind.4 What is it, in fact, that both dimensions-tragic and comic-have in common? They both, although in different ways, put forward and explore the problem of the relationship between action and desire, or, to put it slightly differently, the problem of the relationship between desire or demand, as far as the latter is articulated in the signifier, and its satisfaction (i.e., that which is supposed to meet this demand). Some fundamental discrepancy, which is coextensive with the signifying order as such and which could be formulated in terms of dichotomy between the signifier and the id (the Lacanian �a), constitutes the motor of tragedy, as well as of comedy. Within the tragic paradigm, the accent is on desire, and Lacan's choice of the figure of Antigone (who does not "give up on her desire") is by no means accidental. The alternative lurking behind Antigone's position is the following one: to die or else to give up on one's desire (and thus to satisfy oneself with something less than what desire ultimately aims at). This alternative is a consequence of the fundamental pre­ supposition according to which the split between, to put it simply, the desire and its satisfaction is an absolute one, i.e., that the demand as articulated in the signifier and that what comes to answer this demand, can never meet or overlap. The real of the desire is "impossible" in the sense that it is inaccessible to "the speaking being:' The accent on the tragic dimension of human desire and the placement of the ethics in this dimension springs from this fundamental axiom: the gap between desire and its satisfaction (or realization) is irreducible, and the real as impossible refers to this irreducible gap. The "pure desire" is an absolute demand that can only be met by the other absolute, death. In this sense, tragedy (and particularly Antigone) is an hom­ age to the fundamental non-relation between desire and satisfaction. Comedy, on the other hand, introduces us to a different logic of the real and of the non-relation (between demand and satisfaction). In comedy, the accent is not so much on desire (or demand), but rather on satisfaction, and in a first approach we could say that the discrepancy that constitutes the motor of comedy is the obverse

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of the one that constitutes the motor of tragedy. It is not that the satisfaction can never really meet the demand, but rather that the demand can never really meet (some unexpectedly produced) satisfaction. It is not that the satisfaction runs after demand like Achilles after the tortoise, never able to actually catch up with it, it is rather that the satisfaction immediately overtakes the demand, so that the latter now has to stumble after satisfaction. However, tragedy and comedy are not simply symmetrical, as the above descrip­ tion might suggest. The fact that in comedy satisfaction precedes the demand, affects the very nature of the satisfaction, which becomes, by definition, a supplementary satisfaction (and is no longer the impossible complement of the demand). Comedy is inaugurated by this kind of supplementary satisfaction (that we do not exactly know what to do with). The elementary form of the emergence of a supplement satisfaction could be best discerned in the phenomenon of jokes. The whole joke of jokes, if one might say so, lies in the fact that-much to everybody's surprise-the demand manages to find an unexpected satisfaction. (And one could say that com­ edy (as genre) is an attempt to inscribe this momentary and unexpected satisfaction into a framework of an extended temporality, i.e., of some duration.) In his discus­ sion ofjokes Freud puts forward the notion of an "incentive bonus;'5 which could be defined as a supplement of pleasure that allows the release of more pleasure. Lacan suggest that " Witz restores to the essentially unsatisfied demand its jouissance, and it does so in a double (although identical) aspect of surprise and pleasure-the plea­ sure in surprise and the surprise in pleasure:'6 In other words, one could say that the joke of the situation is precisely in the fact that we unexpectedly come across a satisfaction. Of course, this is usually a satisfaction of a demand that hasn't even been formulated (yet); satisfaction precedes the demand, and this is what accounts for its nature of the supplement. The discrepancy at stake could also be formulated in topological, instead of in temporal, terms: the satisfaction is produced elsewhere than we expect it or await it. What jokes trigger in us is, as Lacan points out, not only a pleasure in surprise, but also a surprise at pleasure. Something (a satisfaction) gets produced where we least expected it. Even if we know that we are going to hear a joke (and we usually know it, since part of the telling of a joke is to announce it, for instance by saying "do you know this joke . . :'), it still always surprises us. Lacan suggests that the narrative of a joke does not simply prepare the setting for its final point·, but also and above all directs and engages our attention elsewhere than where the point of the joke will pass. This is indeed a mechanism that we can observe in many jokes, and the following example makes it most palpable: A man comes home from an exhausting day at work, plops down on the couch in front of the television, and tells his wife, "Get me a beer before it starts:' The wife sighs and gets him a beer. Fifteen minutes later, he says, "Get me another beer before it starts:' She looks cross, but fetches another beer and slams it down next to him. He finishes that beer and a few minutes later says, "Quick, get me another beer, it's going to start any minute:' The wife is furious. She yells at him, "Is that all you're going to do tonight? Drink beer and sit in front of that TV? You're nothing but a lazy, drunken, fat slob, and furthermore . . ." The man sighs and says, "It's started . . . . "

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While drawing our attention to the television set and making us expect the Thing to come from there (to "start" there), the narrative of the joke leads us away from the actual direction from which the blow comes, accentuating the effect of surprise. No joke succeeds without this element of surprise. At this point one could draw a parallel between jokes and love encounters: could one not say that a love encounter is structured like a good joke? It coincides with the emergence of an "incentive bonus;' of an unexpected and surprising satisfaction, the satisfaction of some other demand than the one that we had the opportunity to formulate. That is to say: we can very well set off on a date with the explicit intention to find ourselves a "mate;' or even to fall in love. Yet, if this happens, if something like a genuine love encounter takes place, it still always surprises us, since it neces­ sarily takes place "elsewhere" than we expected it or intended for it to take place, it takes place, so to speak, along "other lines:' We look in one direction, and it comes from the other. And it satisfies perfectly something in ourselves that we didn't even demand to be satisfied. Two kinds of reactions can follow from this: we can take the ball from there, so to speak, and play on, or else we can react by providing or for­ mulating the demand to which this surprising satisfaction already was a reply. And this is where the tricky part oflove begins, for we can get stuck here. The supplement of pleasure, instead of allowing to release or produce more pleasure, could be ret­ roactively transformed from supplement to complement. That is to say, every love encounter brings with itself the temptation to re-inscribe the surprising, accidental and bonus-like dimension of the satisfaction into the linear or else circular coupling of demand and (its) satisfaction, or, in other terms, of desire and jouissance. This is the temptation to recognize the other (that we encountered through this surprising emergence of a bonus satisfaction) as the answer to all our prayers, that is to say, as an answer to our (previously existing) demand. This understandable and seemingly innocent, even charming move can have, however, rather catastrophic consequenc­ es. To put it in a single formula: it immediately closes the accidentally produced way out of the impossibility involved in the relation between demand and its satisfac­ tion, and it closes it precisely by transforming this impossibility into a possibility. In this move, the love-encounter is reconfigured in terms of an emphatic moment of a perfect complementariness of demand and satisfaction, and glorified as a case when the satisfaction did in fact meet our demand. We thus place the source of our satisfaction directly in the other. If this occurs, the impossibility for the satisfaction to ever meet our demand reaffirms itself in its full scale. Our next demand will of course not be met properly, and we will not be able to meet properly the demand of the other. And we'll interpret this as lack of love. One should therefore stress that the funny, as well as the subversive side of love (and of a love encounter) lies precisely in the fact that the other (that we encounter) is an answer to none of our prayers. If we lose sight of this, i.e., if we lose sight of the fact that, in a genuine love encounter, we get something that we haven't exactly asked for, then we lose the perspective oflove, in both meanings of the word. So what happens in a love encounter is not simply that the sexual non -relation is momentarily suspended with an unexpected emergence of a (possible) relation, but something rather more complex: it is that the non-relation itself suddenly emerges

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as a mode (as well as the condition) of a relation. A "happy" love encounter is the non-relation in its purest mode, or perhaps more precisely, it is a non-relation as re­ doubled. Not only do we not get what we asked for, on top of it (and not instead of it) we get something that we haven't even asked for. The non-relation is supplemented by another non-relation, which can then use the thing that obstructs the relation as its very condition (and can function like the Freudian "incentive bonus"). This brings us to our next question. If a love encounter is like a good joke, then what is love in its duration and tem­ porality, what is, as we say, a love that lasts? One could reply that love is structured like comedy, and that as such, it could be defined as a non-relation that lasts. Com­ edy is the genre that uses the supplementary non-relation as the condition of a rela­ tion. In order to explain this, let me now briefly consider the difference and the rela­ tion between jokes and comedy. The main difference between them concerns their temporality. A joke is always situated in the instantaneity of the moment in which its point passes. The pleasure in jokes is instantaneous and very much confined as to its time, which does not mean, however, that it can not be repeated. If we tell the joke on, it will again produce satisfaction. The repeating or telling on of the jokes is part of the pleasure we take in them, and in this sense we could say that jokes are by definition a promiscuous way of finding pleasure, there is something donjuanesque in them. We can only find pleasure in the same joke if we change partners, and en­ joy the joke every time with a new partner. Of course, there is also the possibility to turn this the other way around and to find or invent new jokes to enjoy them with the same partner. But this could be very exhausting and is not yet the shift from the temporality proper to jokes (their instantaneity) to another kind of temporality (du­ ration). However, the opposition instantaneity/duration is not yet precise enough to pinpoint the difference between jokes and comedy: it is not simply a question of how long something lasts, there are very long jokes and very short comic sequences. The difference in temporality concerns the temporality of pleasure (or satisfaction): a joke is always final, it always comes at the end, which is thus also true for the plea­ sure produced by jokes. At the end, we are left with a certain amount of satisfaction, and what precedes it (the narrative of the joke) is a preparatory phase leading to and making the final "joke" possible (also by means of distracting our attention). Comic sequences are not constructed in this manner. Satisfaction usually arises already at the beginning and is then kept alive (with fluctuations which follow a certain rhythm) during the whole sequence. Satisfaction does not so much conclude the game (as it does in the case of jokes), as it opens or launches it. Let us simply take an example here, a piece of comic dialogue that was circulat­ ing on the internet last year:

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Hu's ON FIRST By James Sherman ( We take you now to the Oval Office) GEORGE:

Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening? CONDI: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China. -1

Investigations of the Lacanian Field

Alenka ZupanCic

G: Great. Lay it on me. C: Hu is the new leader of China. G: That's what I want to know. C: That's what I'm telling you. G: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China? C: Yes. G: I mean the fellow's name. C: Hu. G: The guy in China. C: Hu. G: The new leader of China. C: Hu. G: The Chinaman! C: Hu is leading China. G: Now whaddya asking me for? C: I'm telling you Hu is leading China. G: Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China? C: That's the man's name. G: That's who's name? C: Yes. G: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of China? C: Yes, sir. G: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the Middle East. C: That's correct. G: Then who is in China? C: Yes, sir. G: Yassir is in China? C: No, sir. G: Then who is? C: Yes, sir. G: Yassir? C: No, sir. G: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the UN. on the phone. C: Kofi? G: No, thanks. C: You want Kofi? G: No. C: You don't want Kofi. G: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. And then get me the UN. C: Yes, sir. G: Not Yassir! The guy at the UN.

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C: Kofi? G: Milk! Will you please make the call? C: And call who? G: Who is the guy at the UN? C: Hu is the guy in China. G: Will you stay out of China?! C: Yes, sir. G: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the UN. C: Kofi. G: All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone. (Condi picks up the phone.)

C: Rice, here. G: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we should send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you get Chinese food in the Middle East?

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If one compares this example of comic dialogue with an example of a joke (for in­ stance the one quoted earlier), the following temporal and dynamic difference is most obvious. In jokes, the sparkle (of surprise and satisfaction) is produced at the end, and the narrative leading to it is a construction that makes this final sparkle possible. In comedy, there is first an unexpected sparkle (a kind of inaugural joke), and the unexpected surplus it produces is not conclusive, but functions as a motor of the subsequent comic sequence. One could also say that the inaugural surplus (or incentive bonus) introduces a fundamental discrepancy that drives comedy further and further. I've suggested earlier that what is at stake in comedy is not that the satisfaction runs after demand like Achilles after the tortoise, never able to actually catch up with it; it is rather that the satisfaction immediately overtakes the demand, so that the latter now has to stumble after satisfaction. Comedy is inaugurated by this kind of supplementary satisfaction (that we do not exactly know what to do with), as it is quite obvious in the quoted example. "Hu is the new leader of China" is what starts off the comedy. Bush does not view this as an answer to his demand ("Lay it on me"), he is surprised at this sentence, and decides to read it as a question. Condi, on the other hand, does not take Bush's "Who is the man in China?" as a question or demand, but as (a repetition of) the answer. (In one of the Marx Brothers' movies we have a very similar construction of a delirious comic dialogue on the basis of the similarity between the word "viaduct" and the question "Why a duck?") The begin­ ning of the quoted dialogue is also a great example of the double or supplementary non-relation that I claimed is at the heart of comedy: we do not get the satisfaction we demanded, and on top of it, we get a satisfaction that we haven't asked for. Now, one could say that the way Bush and Rice function in this dialogue is precisely the way an "ideal couple" would function. And this is not meant as a joke. There is an initial sparkle in which a certain nonsense makes sense, i.e., in which a supplementary sense is produced. This sense is produced precisely on the ground of a fundamental misunderstanding (the two protagonists do not exactly "read" one another). And yet this non-relation becomes itself a mode of a long and happy rela-

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tion . The obstacle of their relation (or of their "communication") becomes itself the very condition of it, i.e., the very thing that maintains it and drives it further. What drives this non-relation forward in the form of a quite exciting relation and makes it last is also the fact that none of the two protagonists appropriates the supplementary object-sense that is produced in their encounter. Instead, they keep it in the air, or at least on the table, like in a game of ping-pong. Yet, perhaps the essential thing in the "game of love" is not so much that the ball never hits the ground, as it is the fact that the ball remains there, somewhere between the two, as precisely the obstacle that enables them to relate to each other. Remove this obstacle, and their "relation­ ship" will fall apart. This is not the (un)famous obstacle that enables us to desire the other in her very inaccessibility, on the contrary, it is an obstacle that gives us access to the other in her very materiality, so to speak. In other words, the configuration I am describing (the obstacle of a relationship becomes its very condition) has ab­ solutely nothing to do with the configuration expressed in terms: "I can't love you unless I give you up:' As opposed to the former, the latter cannot be defined as "a non -relation that lasts"; with it, we lose the non -relation itself, since what is at stake is no longer a non-relation between two terms: we are left with only one term which appropriates or absorbs the other in the form of the loss. In Seminar XX, Lacan states that love "supplements the sexual relation as non­ existent:' and this statement should be understood in the perspective of the above discussion: love is the obstacle that enables the non-relation to last. And it is not that via this supplement two become One, on the contrary: via it, the two emerge as two and are maintained as (irreducibly) two. . . .

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This brings us further into the question of affinity between love and comedy. In Lacan's seminar L'angoisse one finds the following, rather peculiar statement: "Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire:'7 What is peculiar about this statement, of course, is the link it establishes be­ tween love as sublimation and the movement of condescending or descending. It is well known that Lacan's canonic definition of sublimation from The Ethics ofPsycho­ analysis implies precisely the opposite movement, that of ascension (that sublima­ tion raises, or elevates, an object to the dignity of the Thing, the Freudian das Ding). 8 In this last definition, sublimation is identified with the act of producing the Thing in its very transcendence and inaccessibility, as well as in its horrifying and/or inhu­ man aspect (for example, the status of the Lady in courtly love, which is, as Lacan puts it, the status of an "inhuman partner"). Yet, as concerns this particular sublima­ tion that is called love-which is thus opposed to courtly love as the worshiping of a sublime object-Lacan states that it makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire, that it "humanizes the jouissance:'9 The quoted definition is surprising not only in relation to sublimation, but also in relation to what we usually call love. Is love not always the worshiping of a sub­ lime object, even though it doesn't always take as radical a form as in the case of courtly love? Does love not always raise or elevate its object (which could be quite common "in itself") to the dignity of the Thing? How are we to understand the word

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"love" in the quoted passage from Lacan's seminar on L 'angoisse? Lacan himself provides a way to answer these questions when he states, in Le transfert, that "love is a comic feeling:'l0 Indeed, instead of trying to answer these questions immediately, we should perhaps shift our interrogation once more and ex­ amine the one form of sublimation that incontestably fits the first definition quoted above (as well as the condescending movement it implies), namely, the art of com­ edy. This might then make it easier for us to see how love enters this definition. Concerning the art of comedy, we can actually say that it involves a certain con­ descension of the Thing to the level of the object. And yet, what is at stake in good comedies is not simply an abasement of some sublime object that thus reveals its ridiculous aspect. Although this kind of abasement can make us laugh, we all know that this is not enough for a good comedy to work. As Hegel already knew very well, the genuine comic laughter is not a scornful laughter, it is not the laughter of Schadenfreude, and there is much more to comedy than just a variation on the state­ ment "the emperor is naked:' The trick is that, instead of playing on the difference or the discordance between the sublime appearance of the Thing and its real residue or its Void, comedies usually do something else: they reduplicatelredouble the Thing and play on (or with) the difference between its two doubles. In other words, the difference that constitutes the motor of the comic movement is not the difference between the Thing in itself and its appearance, but, rather, the difference between two appearances. Suffice it to recall Chaplin's The Great Dictator, where "the Thing called Hitler" takes the double form of the dictator Hynkel and a Jewish barber. As Gilles Deleuze pointed out, this is a Chaplinesque gesture par excellence: we find it already in City Lights (Charlot the tramp and Charlot supposed to be rich), as well as in M. Verdoux. Chaplin's genius, states Deleuze, consists in being able "to invent the minimal difference between two actions" and to create a "circuit laughter-emotion, where the former refers to the little difference and the latter to the great distance, without effacing or diminishing one another:'" This is a very important insight that will help us specify the mechanism of comedy as well as that of love. But, first, let us determine more precisely what this "minimal difference" is. We could say that it stands for a split at the very core of the same. In order to illustrate this, let us take another comic example, a punch line from one of the Marx Brothers' movies: "Look at this guy, he looks like an idiot, he behaves like an idiot-but do not let yourself be . deceived, he is an idiot!" We could say that comic art creates and uses this minimal difference in order to make palpable, or visible, a certain real that otherwise eludes our grasp. One could go even further and state that, in the comic paradigm, the Real is nothing else but this "minimal difference" -that starts itself to function as an object. The comic line from the Marx Brothers also enables us to feel the difference between the act of taking a (sublime) Thing and showing the public that this Thing is, in fact, nothing more than a poor and altogether banal object, and the act of tak­ ing the Thing, not to the letter, but, rather, "to the letter of its appearance:' Contrary to what is often believed, the axiom of good comedies is not that "appearances are always deceiving:' but, instead, that there is something in the appearance that never deceives. Following the Marx Brothers, we could say that the only essential decep-

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yet, the dimension of the Thing is not simply abolished; it remains on the horizon, thanks to the sentiment of failing that accompanies this direct passage to the Thing. In Lubitsch's movie, the director tries to name or show the Thing directly ("That's it! That's Hitler!"), and, of course, he misses or "passes" it, showing only a "ridiculous object;' that is, the actor's picture. However, the Thing as that which he missed re­ mains on the horizon and is situated somewhere between the actor who plays Hitler and the picture of that actor, which together constitute the space where our laughter can resonate. The act of saying "That's it, that's the Thing" has the effect of opening a certain entre-deux, thus becoming the space in which the real of the Thing unfurls between two "ridiculous objects" that are supposed to incarnate it. Let us be more precise: to "move directly to the Thing" does not mean to show or exhibit the Thing directly. The "trick" is that we never see the Thing (not even in the picture, since it is merely a picture of the actor); we only see two semblances (the actor and his picture). We thus see the difference between the object and the Thing without ever seeing the Thing. Or, to put it the other way around: what we are shown are just two semblances, and yet, what we see is nothing less that the Thing itself, becoming vis­ ible in the minimal difference between the two semblances. This is not to say that, through the "minimal difference" (or through that gap that it opens up), we get a glimpse of the mysterious Thing that lies somewhere beyond representation-it is, rather, that the Thing is conceived as nothing other than the very gap of/within the representation. The Real is identified here with the gap that divides the appearance itself, and in comedies this gap itself takes the form of an object (i.e., of an object­ supplement). Now, what has all this got to do with love? What links the phenomenon of love to the comic paradigm is the combination of accessibility with the transcendental as the configuration of "accessibility in the very transcendence"? Already, on the most superficial level, we can detect this curious affinity be­ tween love and comedy: To love, that is to say (according to the good old traditional definition), to love someone "for what he is" (i.e., to move directly to the Thing), always means to find oneself with a "ridiculous object;' an object that sweats, snores, farts, and has strange habits. But, it also means to continue to see in this object the "something more" that the director in Lubitsch's movie sees in the picture of "Hitler:' Comic love (which is to say real love) is not the love that is called sublime, the love . in which we let ourselves be completely dazzled or "blinded" by the object so that we no longer see (or can't bear to see) its ridiculous, banal aspect. This kind of "sublime love" necessitates and generates a radical inaccessibility of the other (which usu­ ally takes the form of eternal preliminaries, or else the form of intermittence, the relationship that enables us to reintroduce the distance that suits the inaccessible, and thereby to "resublime" the object after each "use"). But neither is real love the sum of desire and friendship, where friendship is supposed to provide a "bridge" between two awakenings of desire and to embrace the ridiculous side of the object. The point is not that, in order for love to "work;' one has to accept the other with all her baggage, to "stand" her banal aspect, to forgive her weaknesses-in short, to tolerate the other when one does not desire her. The true miracle of love-and this is what links love to comedy-consists in preserving the transcendence in the very

tion of appearance is that it gives the impression that there is something else or more behind it. One of the fundamental gestures of good comedies is to make an appear­ ance out of what is behind the appearance. They make the truth (or the real) not so much reveal itself, as appear. Or, to put it in yet another way, they make it possible for the real to condescend to the appearance (in the form of a split in the very core of the appearance). This doesn't mean that the real turns out to be just another ap­ pearance; it means that it is real precisely as appearance. In one of his best movies, To Be or Not To Be, Ernst Lubitsch provides another excellent example of this. At the beginning of the film, there is a brilliant scene in which a group of actors is rehearsing a play featuring Hitler. The director is com­ plaining about the appearance of the actor who plays Hitler, insisting that his make­ up is bad and that he doesn't look like Hitler at all. He also says that what he sees in front of him is just an ordinary man. Reacting to this, one of the actors replies that Hitler is just an ordinary man. If this were all, we would be dealing with a didactic remark that transmits a certain truth, but that doesn't make us laugh, since it lacks that comic quality having quite a different way of transmitting truths. So, the scene continues: the director is still not satisfied and is trying desperately to name the mysterious "something more" that distinguishes the appearance of Hitler from the appearance of the actor in front of him. He is searching and searching, and, finally, he notices a picture (a photograph) of Hitler on the wall, and triumphantly cries out: "That's it! This is what Hitler looks like!" "But sir;' replies the actor, "this picture was taken of me:' This, on the contrary, is quite funny, especially since we ourselves as spectators were taken in by the enthusiasm of the director, who saw in the picture something quite different from this poor actor (whose status in the company isn't even that of a true actor or a star, but of a simple walk-on). We can here grasp very well the meaning of the "minimal difference;' a difference that is "a mere nothing;' and yet a nothing that is very real and has considerable material effects. In the comic paradigm, the Real is, at one and the same time, transcendent and accessible. The Real is accessible, for example, as pure nonsense, which constitutes an important matter of every comedy. And yet, this nonsense remains transcendent in the sense that the miracle of its real effects (i.e., the fact that the nonsense itself can produce a real effect of sense) remains inexplicable. This inexplicability is the very motor of comedy. One could also say that nonsense is transcendental in the Kantian sense of the word: it is what makes it possible for us to actually see or per­ ceive a difference between a simple actor and the picture of Hitler (which is, in fact, the picture of the same actor). This difference that we "really" see is pure nonsense, but yet it makes sense. In relation to comic art, one could speak of a certain ethics of unbelief Unbelief as an ethical attitude consists in confronting belief not simply in its illusory di­ mension, but in the very real of this illusion. This means that unbelief does not so much expose the nonsense of the belief as it exposes the Real or the material force of nonsense itself. This also implies that this ethics cannot rely upon the move­ ment of circulation around the Thing, which gives its force to sublime art. Its motor is, rather, to be found in a dynamics that always makes us go too far. One moves directly towards the Thing and one finds oneself with a "ridiculous" object. And :�.- ....

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accessibility of the other. Or, to use Deleuze's terms, it consists in creating a "circuit

laughter-emotion, where the former refers to the little difference and the latter to the great distance, without effacing or diminishing one another:' The miracle oflove is not that of transforming some banal object into a sublime object, inaccessible in its being-this is the miracle of desire. If we are dealing with an alternation of at­ traction and repulsion, this can only mean that love as sublimation has not taken place, hasn't done its work and performed its "trick:' The miracle of love consists, first of all, in perceiving the two objects (the banal and the sublime object) on the same level; additionally, this means that neither one of them is occulted or substi­ tuted by the other. Secondly, it consists in becoming aware of the fact that the other qua "banal object" and the other qua "object of desire" are one and the same in the identical sense that the actor who plays Hitler and the picture of "Hitler" (which is actually the picture of the actor) are one and the same. That is to say, one becomes aware of the fact that they are both semblances, that neither one of them is more real than the other. Finally, the miracle oflove consists in "falling" (and in continuing to stumble) because of the real which springs from the gap introduced by this "parallel montage" of two semblances or appearances, that is to say, because of the real that springs from the non-coincidence of the same. The other that we love is neither of the two semblances (the banal and the sublime object), but neither can she be sepa­ rated from them, since she is nothing other than what results from a successful (or "lucky") montage of the two. In other words, what we are in love with is the Other as this minimal difference of the same that can itself take the form of an object. Here we can clearly see the difference between the functioning of desire as such (which is not to be confounded with lust) and the functioning of desire when it enters the configuration of love. Desire necessitates an obstacle that maintains the other in her inaccessibility. This explains the basic fantasy of love stories and love songs that focus on the impossibility involved in desire. The leitmotiv of these stories is, for instance: "In another place, in another time, somewhere, not here, sometime, not now . . . :' This attitude is often read as misrecognition of an inherent and structural impossibility, which it represents in terms of an external, empirical obstacle. ("If we'd only met in another time and another place, then all this would have been possible . . . :') One usually says, in this case, that the Real as impossible is camouflaged by an empirical obstacle that prevents us from confronting some fundamental or structural impossibility. However, the point of Lacan's identifica­ tion of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so traumatic, disturbing, shat­ tering-or funny-about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It always happens at the wrong time and in the wrong place; it is always something that doesn't fit the (established or anticipated) picture. The Real as impossible means that there is no right time or place for it, and not that it is impossible for it to happen. The fantasy of "another place and another time" that sustains the illusion of a possibly fortunate encounter betrays the Real of an encounter by transforming the

Alenka ZupanCic

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"impossible that happened" into "impossible to happen" (here and now). In other words, it disavows what has already happened by trying to submit it to the existing transcendental scheme of the subject's fantasy (instead of taking on the ball of sat­ isfaction from there where it surprisingly and unexpectedly emerged). The distor­ tion at stake in this maneuver is not that of creating the belief that something im­ possible will, or would, nevertheless happen in some other conditions of time and space-the distortion is that of making something that has happened here and now appear as if it could only happen in a distant future or in some altogether different time and space. A paradigmatic example of this disavowal of the Real (which aims at preserving the Real as inaccessible Beyond) is to be found in The Bridges ofMadi­ son County: What we have here is a fortunate love encounter between two people, each of them very settled in their lives: she as a housewife and mother, bound to her family (immobile, so to speak); he as a successful photographer who moves and travels around all the time. They meet by chance and fall passionately in love-or so we are asked to believe. But, what is their reaction to this encounter? They im­ mediately move the accent from "the impossible happened" to "this is impossible to happen;' "this is impossible:' Since she is alone at the time of their encounter (her husband and children gone for a week), and since he has to stay there anyway in order to complete his reportage, they decide to spend a week together and then say goodbye, never to see each other again. Described in this way, this seems like a casual adventure (and, I would say, that's what it is). But, the problem is that the couple perceive themselves, and are presented to us, as if they were living the love of their lives, the most important and precious thing that has ever happened in their love life. What is the problem or the lie of this fantasmatic mise-en-scene?-that the encounter is "de-realized" from the very moment it happens. It is immediately in­ scribed and confined within a discrete, narrowly defined time and space (one week, one house-this being their "another time, another place"), destined to become the most precious object of their memories. We could say that even during the time their relationship "is happening;' it is already a memory; the couple is living it as already lost (and the whole pathos of the movie springs from there). The real of the encounter, the "impossible that happened;' is immediately rejected and transformed into an object that paradoxically incarnates the very impossibility of what did hap­ pen. It is a precious object that one puts into a jewel-box, the box of memory. From time -to time, one opens the box and finds great pleasure in contemplating this jewel that glitters by virtue of the impossibility it incarnates. Contrary to what might seem to be the case, the two protagonists are not able to "make do" with the lack. Rather, they make of the lack itself their ultimate possession. To return to the question of the difference between love and desire, we could now say that the entre-deux, the interval or gap introduced by desire, is the gap between the Real and the semblance: the other that is accessible to desire is always the imaginary other, Lacan's objet petit a, whereas the real (other) of desire remains unattainable. The real of desire is jouissance, namely, that "inhuman partner" (as Lacan calls it) that desire aims at beyond its object and that must remain inacces­ sible. Love, on the other hand, is what somehow manages to make the real of desire accessible. This is what Lacan is aiming at with his statement that love "humanizes

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jouissance" and that "only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to con­

descend to desire:' As should be clear from the previous discussion, this in no way implies an "abasement" of a sublime object. Neither does it imply that it becomes something like a fetish, although the reference to the latter can help us clarify what is at stake. What is a fetish? An object that could be said to be "full of its own beyond:' Fetish is the material support of the belief in something that is not there. This is why it can play an important role in the economy of desire. In Freudian theory, fetish is, to put it very simply, an object that allows us to disavow the lack in the Other. Disavowal is not the same thing as negation, and Octave Mannoni pointed out the rather more complex structure of the fetishist disavowal: je sais bien, mais quand meme. For instance: "I know very well (that this object is only a common object), but still (I continue to believe that it has secret powers):' In the context of our dis­ cussion this could take the following form: I know very well that my partner is just a human being like any other, but I still continue to believe that she is not. On the other hand, the structure introduced by love is rather different, and one could perhaps formulate it as follows: "I know very well that my partner is just an­ other human being, but I still believe that she is just another human being:' In other words, love rather produces a structure similar to that from the already quoted Marx Brothers joke: "Look at this guy, he looks like an idiot, he behaves like an idiot-but do not let yourself be deceived, he is an idiot!" In this respect, love is the very oppo­ site of fetishism. And this is precisely what it has in common with comedy

Tradition and Transcendence: Postmodernity's Entanglement in Immanence

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1

Cf. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire. Livre V. Les formations de l'inconscient, (Paris: Seuil, 1998).

2

Jacques-Alain Miller, "The Desire of Lacan;' Lacanian Ink 14 (Spring 1999) : 19.

3

Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 313.

4

Ibid.

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Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 118. Cf. also "Three essays on sexuality;' in Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality (Har­ mondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 131. It was Joan Copjec who drew my attention to this no­ tion of incentive bonus in Freud.

6

Les formations de l'inconscient, op. cit., 121.

7

Jacques Lacan, L'angoisse, unpublished seminar, lecture from May 13, 1963.

8

The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis, op. cit., 112.

9

L'angoisse, lecture from the May 13th, 1963.

10 Jacques Lacan, Le transfert (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 46. 11

Gilles Deleuze, L'image-mouvement (Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1983), 234.

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" Things that are modern:' claims Theodor Adorno, "do not just sally forth in advance of their time:" Rather, they unblock latent possibilities that until then lay dormant. Tradition is worthy of preservation because it harbors possibilities that are in danger of being disregarded in our impetuous desire to transcend it. Our attitude to the tradition bequeathed to us is therefore a circumspect one. We neither inherit nor reject tra­ dition but engage with it, and as Paul Ricoeur has argued, the condition of this engagement is a fully conscious reception of all that has come down to us: "Nothing survives from the past except through a reinterpretation in the presenf'2 Each generation and each individual is faced with the choice of car­ rying tradition on or calling a halt, of rejecting certain aspects or releasing unblocked potentials stored within. In short, one is not free of the past when one has rejected it out of hand for she who exorbitantly gainsays tradition remains its prisoner, since her stance towards tradition is dictated by it. Only when one takes up a balanced and critical attitude towards tradition can one hope to transcend it. The thinker who regards tra­ dition should rather take as his model the gatekeeper whose job it is to decide who can pass. We should neither sustain nor forsake tradition, therefore, for that which remains of use should be allowed admittance. To engage with the history of that which has gone before does not necessarily mean to accept it without reservation, to affirm its momentum or to endorse history's present course. The constructive engagement with tradition might also lead one to continue or fulfill those aspects of it that remain esti­ mable or useful while rejecting others. Thinking historically therefore also means, as Walter Benjamin recognized, think­ ing "against the grain" of hitherto occurring history.3 This is, I think, the attitude that separates on the one hand certain heralds of a "postmodern condition" such as Jean -Franc;:ois

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Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

Tradition and Transcendence

Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard and on the other those defenders of an unfinished modern project such as Jiirgen Habermas. Identified with the qualified defense of the project of modernity-defined as the process of disenchantment, rationaliza­ tion and secularization-Habermas's theory differs most markedly from those of his self-proclaimed adversaries in its contention that the resources of modernity have not yet been exhausted. His last-ditch effort to engage critically with modernity rep­ resents an attempt to extract something of value from a tradition that postmodern thinkers comprehensively eschew. Habermas is convinced that the project of mo­ dernity has failed because the ideals it avows-the replacement of myth and super­ stition with the sovereign powers of reason and the substitution of the democratic will for arbitrary despotism-have not yet been realized. Modernity is the name given to that abortive process whereby the secular ide­ als of freedom and reason endeavor to succeed the arbitrary dictates of myth and irrationalism. Frankfurt School Critical Theorists have concluded that, since the ideals of modernity have not yet been realized, we are confronted with a situation in which modernity's promise has been broken, in which the ideals of freedom, reason, and democracy contrast with the incapacity of an inequitable economic set-up to put them into effect. It is this lag between the ideal and the actual that characterizes modernity and gives rise to the innumerable catastrophes of which it is guilty; esti­ mabIe ideals are evacuated from the empirical sphere, becoming ideological props of a system that allows suffering and injustice to run amuck. The difference between modernist and postmodernist thought, therefore, boils down to a dispute about the course of action that will best enable us to transcend this state of affairs. For Adorno, one transcends tradition by bringing it down from within. "One must have tradi­ tion in oneself;' he writes trenchantly, "to hate it properly."4 He who would release himself from the burden of tradition can do so successfully only by first adopting its maxims, just as we might manage to outstrip modernity only by holding it to its word, pressing its ideals against the inability of a capitalist system unable to make good on them. To modify Adorno's maxim: one must have modernity in oneself to hate it properly. The process of transcending modernity, as Neil Lazarus has argued, demands that we "think with modernity against moderniti'5 By contrasting the ide­ al with the actual in modernity such constructive engagements with tradition turn anew to its discredited project. They refuse to forget tradition in case by so doing they overlook the means of moving beyond it. Habermas's defense of modernity, therefore, is by no means a pig-headed fidel­ ity to a discredited epoch. Rather, he attributes the current disillusionment with the modern era to which the various currents of postmodern thought attest not to modernity but to its incompleteness. The basic contention of Habermas's theory is that the depredations of the unfinished project of modernity are attributable not to those ideals but rather to their hitherto inadequate and partial realization. He is convinced that any precipitate attempt to ditch modernity in toto risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater, renouncing laudable ideals on account of the blanket rejection of a society that had failed to adequately accomplish them. The Enlighten­ ment project of disenchantment, rationalization, and secularization has undeniably gone awry. Instead of disavowing it, however, Habermas like his predecessors argues •

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that "enlightenment can only make good its deficits by radicalized enlightenmenf'6 He contends that modernity has misfired because the model of communicative ra­ tion ality has been obscured: "spheres of communicative action, centered on the re­ production and transmission of values and norms, are penetrated by a form of mod­ ernization guided by standards of economic and administrative rationaliti'7 For Habermas a form of instrumental reason geared towards abstract imperatives has squeezed out the founding bourgeois ideal of unhindered democratic communica­ tion, which acts throughout modernity's infamous career as a counterfactual norm. Not reason, then, but its misuse and distortion is at fault for the crimes committed in modernity's name. Habermas's account of modernity bears witness to "a selective pattern of rationalization, a jagged profile of modernization:'8 He is not, therefore, content to see reason retained unmodified. His ideal of a public sphere in which each and every participant would have the right to speak and partake on equal terms with his or her peers, in which the unforced force of the better argument would win out, gives shape to an alternative notion of inter­ subjective reason that constitutes a normative critique of society based upon radical democratic principles. Although, since about 1980, he has increasingly suggested that a workable public sphere could be realized within the constraints of capitalist society,9 the ideal of Habermas's thought nevertheless stands as a radical, norma­ tive challenge to the status quo. " [I]deologies;' he previously contended, "are not only manifestations of the socially necessary consciousness in its essential falsity . . . . [T]here is an aspect to them that can lay a claim to truth inasmuch as it transcends the status quo in utopian fashion, even if only for purposes of justification:'l0 Yet if Habermas, as Peter Dews has remarked, assiduously reconstructs the narrative of modernity in order to unearth buried alternatives within it, the drastic disavowal of modernity in Lyotard and Baudrillard "appears to imply a denial of the meaningful­ ness of any counterfactual history, the belief that no epoch can contain possibilities other than those which have been actually realized:'ll By modernity, then, is meant that flawed epoch in which the dreams of social emancipation and the triumph of reason over myth struggle to be realized but which, because of the existence of these unfulfilled elements, points towards its own transcendence. Critical Theory, which maintains a qualified commitment to modernity, reconstructs the narrative of mo­ dernity in order to salvage from its hitherto inadequate realization those aspects of it that might do service in the cause of political emancipation. Critics have taken up two broad positions in the ongoing "postmodernism" de­ bate. The first, which offers a qualified defense of the heritage of the Enlightenment trust in reason and knowledge, rejects the thesis that we now live in a transformed epoch in which the boundary between ideal and actual that characterized moder­ nity has been blurred by wholesale commodification. For these modernist think­ ers-most prominent among whom are Habermas, Alex Callinicos, Christopher Norris, David Harvey, Peter Dews and Terry Eagletonl2-our task, despite certain novel obstacles that late capitalism places in our paths, is still the modern one of measuring the status quo against its ideals, fact against fiction, truth against ideol­ ogy. These thinkers have highlighted the philosophical contradictions in postmod­ ern thought and combated the caricature it offers of the modern tradition. For them,

150

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Enlightenment reason is not a unitary tradition that bred and could not have avoid­ ed breeding the Holocaust and other crimes committed in the name of progress. They see modernity as the scene of diverse possibilities. The second position in the postmodernism debate proclaims the obsolescence of the modern project resulting from the advent of a totalitarian system of commodities, an all-inclusive regime in which we can no longer contrive enough discrepancy between the ideal and the ac­ tual and between the illusory and the real to allow us to hold the system to account. It is represented most vocally by Lyotard and Baudrillard. The case of America's foremost Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, however, requires special pleading. For Jameson has a foot in both the residual modernist and the fatalistic postmodernist camps, mitigating as he does his undaunted faith in political transformation with a melancholy insistence that reification is now more or less total, an iron cage that allows no possibility of critique. Fredric Jameson and the End of Modernity

The immanent criticism advocated by modernity's beleaguered partisans is intend­ ed not to uphold or endorse modernity but to indict its failure. Such criticism con­ trasts a deficient and inadequate empirical sphere with its own ideology, with the ideals that it has not yet realized. Yet it remains true to modernity insofar as the ide­ als it proclaims originate in that epoch. Immanent criticism holds modernity to its promises. As Max Horkheimer once claimed, "it is not the ideals of the bourgeoisie, but conditions that do not correspond to them, which have shown their unten­ abilitY:" 3 The essential paradox of Jameson's recent work is that although he stays true to rational comprehension or what he calls "cognitive mapping"-the project of graduating to some total knowledge of late capitalism's gargantuan system'4-he nonetheless defines postmodernity as that age in which cognition as such has been written off in advance by the preponderance of reification. Jameson concludes that the fall of communism and the advance of capitalism into hitherto uncommodified areas-the definitive closing of the frontier of the world system-means there are no territories that have yet to be subjected to the rule of capitalism. There is no high ground from which we might espy capitalism's advance. Nor, despite the empha­ sis in Jameson's earlier The Political Unconscious on the utopian nature of aesthetic experience, is the formerly autonomous sphere of culture able any longer to give reification the slip. No theory of cultural politics on the Left today has been able to do with­ out one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last. What the burden of our preced­ ing demonstration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including "critical distance" in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism.'s Whereas modernity harbored a variety of time scales and modes of production­ what Raymond Williams has called residual and emergent tendencies'6-in our own unprecedented epoch the depthless commodities spawned by late capitalism have

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no rival. Postmodernism is the only game in town. postmodernity therefore denotes for Jameson the final extinction of those areas that hitherto remained outside the scope of commodification. His eschewal of the possibility of critical, modernist art is therefore one of the m?st conspicuous symp­ toms of his theory's political fatalism. Autonomous modermst art was once able to give voice to alternatives to capitalism b��ause it origi� ate� in those �limes where , capitalism had not yet been entrenched. Modern art, m thIS respect, Jameson a:­ gues, "drew its power and its possibilities from being a backwater and an archalC holdover within a modernizing economy:" ? The novels of Franz Kafka, for example, are privileged a last-ditch critical distance from the impersonal, bureaucratic exis­ tence instilled by monopoly capitalism; they view the onset of this epoch from the fast-eroding breakwater of a still largely feudal nation. Postmodernity, which for Jameson tends to spawn depthless and self-referential cultural products, no longer provides any vantages from which such insight might be contrived. Now all vestiges and remnants of the past have been expunged. Our age is not uneven but flat and featureless, not an amalgam of differing time scales but a single temporal continu­ um. "Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the 'West'):',8 Jameson discounts the possibility of autonomous modernist art because there is now no possibility of getting outside the reified system. But he is too easily discour­ aged, for he has misjudged modernism. For him it is a full-sc�le dress re� earsa� for . utopia. Modernism is "a Utopian compensation for everythmg relficatlOn bnngs with iC'9 Though it serves an ideological function by providing images of reconcili­ ation in the midst of an alienated present, modernist art nonetheless constitutes for Jameson a portent of the utopian life of the collective, a signpost to the emancipated condition. Adorno, however, offers a subtly different account of modernist art. Here the accent falls not upon utopia but upon its frustration.20 Modernism for Adorno does not so much embody utopia as articulate its absence: "Modern art, with its vulnerability, blemishes, and fallibility, is the critique of traditional works, which in so many ways are stronger and more successful: It is the critique of success:'21 The modernist work amounts to an immanent critique of the traditional artwork, exemplified for Adorno by the harmonious structure of the sonata. Modern works deliberately thwart the ideal of reconciliation and in so doing testify both to an alienated world in which reconciliation cannot be found and to the enduring urge to bring reconciliation about.22 Since society itself is unreconciled, it would be ideo­ logical for art to feign reconciliation, and therefore the modernist w? rk gives itse�f over to dissonance and thus mimes in its broken form the antagomsms that spilt society apart. Modernism is charged not with anticipating utopia but with articulating its absence. It exists not to compensate or to console but to incite dissatisfaction. Modern­ ism, then, is not utopian as such but an expression of the frustration of utopian im­ pulses under present conditions. Jameson contends that since the ass imilati?� of ca­ . . nonical high modernism mass culture can now bear the load of utopIan antlClpatlOn that modernism has put down. The sting is taken out of the daring and iconoclastic modernists when they are hung in the lobbies of investment banks or co-opted by

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the official approbation of university syllabuses.2) Thereafter, according to Jameson, it is those products of the culture industry unjustly spurned by Horkheimer and Adorno that shoulder the burden of utopian presentiment. Jameson points to "their Utopian or transcendent potential-that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs:'24 Jameson objects to the fact that Adorno and Horkheimer place a positive value on high, modernist art yet repudiate mass culture as sheer manipulation. He proposes instead to redress the balance by seeing high and mass culture as "objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena:'25 Yet as Andreas Huyssen points out, this is exactly how Adorno saw the relation of high and mass culture.26 They are, in Adorno's famous phrase, "torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add Up:'2? Adorno is not out to defend some sacrosanct aesthetic realm but to show that modernist art is parasitic on modernity, an articulation of the dissonance to which modernity unavoidably gives rise. He actually concurs with Jameson in present­ ing modernism as a symptom of and not as a solution to the crises that modernity brings about. Adorno is also at one with Jameson in portraying modernism as an effect of commodification and not an escape from it. He is therefore emphatically not to be likened to conservative opponents of mass culture or to uncritical adher­ ents of modernist art. Indeed, for Adorno mass culture and modernism are basically alike. The former obscures social injustice and alienation by feigning reconciliation, issuing promises on which, given the continued existence of social divisions, it is necessarily unable to fulfill. "The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. . . . [TJhe diner must be satisfied with the menu:'28 Modernism, on the other hand, unabashedly confesses this discrepancy, giving shape to the gulf between art's promise of reconciliation and its inability on its own to make good on that promise in an unreconciled social order. In the end the dis­ tinction between the two lies in the greater obviousness with which this is achieved in modernist works. Modernist art eschews premature affirmation in a world that is not yet reconciled, that is still disfigured by the disjunction between ideal and reality. Jameson is therefore, I think, in error when he reads the last rights over mod­ . ernist art. The only evidence he adduces for its obsolescence is the appropriation of formerly iconoclastic modernists by an official canon. But modernism has its origin not in the prestige or otherwise of its outlaw practitioners but in social conditions of uneven development. It is not modernism itself but individual modernists that become obsolete. Charged with articulating the gap between the system's ideals and its inability to make good on them, modernism lasts for as long as the fallible epoch of modernity endures. Adorno's defense of modernist art is therefore akin to Habermas's defense of modernity. Both assume the task of decrying the gap between the systems ideals and its current inability to fulfill them. Ostensibly, Jameson attributes both postmo­ dernity's absolute break with the incomplete epoch of modernity and the demise of modernist art to the sheer universality of capitalism. Yet his qualification-that this is true "at least from the perspective of the 'West"'-gives the lie to his own thesis. In

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more guarded moments, therefore, Jameson is prepared to concede that capitalism is not quite as ubiquitous as his rhetoric frequently implies. Moreover, the economic authority that Jameson calls to bear witness to his contention that postmodernity and late capitalism constitute an "absolute break"29 with modernity and a still fallible monopoly capitalism also tells a quite different tale, for it is precisely this clean break that Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism repudiates. Mandel claims that "the ideology of 'technical rationality' mystifies the reality of late capitalism by claiming that the syste m is capable of overcoming all the fundamental socio-economic contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. The present work has sought to show that late capitalism has not, and cannot, accomplish this:'30 Capitalism is incapable of becoming a universal system; it is perennially hobbled because its fundamental fea­ tures-the extraction of surplus labor (the transformation of living labor into com­ modities) and the class relationship that impels this-still obtain under late capital­ ism and generate divisions that give the lie to the systems apparent universality. "Uneven geographical development and expansion;' as David Harvey has written, "cannot possibly cure the internal contradictions to which capitalism is heir:')1 The expansion of the system into the third world is as likely to aggravate contradictions as it is to resolve them. The ideology of globalization which Jameson's thesis resembles is therefore as false as any other ideal avowed by capitalism. Superficially this term is used to de­ scribe the growing interconnectedness of the planet whereby the fates of disparate climes are linked by global systems of production, finance, and trade. Globalization is shorthand for a process of homogenization, the transcendence of the nation -state and the rendering insignificant of territorial frontiers. It reorders time and space, putting global processes beyond local control in a fully planetary division of labor. Yet the flip side of this interconnectedness is increased division. The peripheries of the system are integrated not by bringing them up to speed with the most advanced nations-by promoting development in hitherto under-developed climes or by ex­ tending the remit of nominally democratic Western institutions-but by forcing them to act as impoverished and biddable dependencies, profitable sources of raw materials and cheap labor. The global system is unitary but unequal; it fragments as it amalgamates. Modernism, according to Adorno, originated in those societies in which inequality was most flagrant, in which the high -flown avowals of a modernizing system contrasted most flagrantly with the reality of backwardn.e �s and under-d.e­ velopment.32 For Eagleton too, unevenness is the essential condItion of modermst artY More importantly, Jameson himself occasionally concedes that autonomous, modernist art might be achieving a second wind in peripheral societies where the systems ideologies clash openly with the brutal reality of har.dship and partitio� .34 If Jameson is to maintain his faith in a possible transformation of postmodermty then he must countenance the endurance of what I have described as the paradigm of modernity, the existence of disjunctive spaces which allow us to mount a politi­ cal critique of the system by measuring its rarefied ideals against its less edifying achievements. He must concede the persistence of disjunctions upon the periphery of the kind that give rise to modernist art's "critique of success:' Since capitalism

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is unable to totalize itself, we are still able, like the classical exponents of Critical Theory, to contrast critically its aims with its accomplishments. Ostensibly for Jameson late capitalism is the final termination of that non-capi­ talist space that, in friction with capitalism, ignited modernism, and thus the elimi­ nation of the negativity that enables critique. It seems churlish to point out that capitalism is sustained by immanent contradictions because we can be sure that Jameson knows this already. The problem is that his desire to maintain an "absolute break" with modernity demands the assertion that capitalism has definitively put paid to its contradictions, a claim that does not stand up to empirical scrutiny. The contention that reification is now total induces a political defeatism that threatens to forestall Jameson's project of "cognitive mapping" and is in any case belied by the current regime's inherent fallibility. If the global network of production is now invis­ ible beneath the superficial, depthless culture of postmodernism, then Jameson has written offhis political project in advance. When there is no reality to be discerned beneath the ubiquitous commodities and simulacra because " [p ]ostmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good" then there is no longer any possibility of political critique.J5 Jameson is torn between his desire to present late capitalism as a novel regime of total reification and the political necessity of claiming that reification is not yet invulnerable and therefore susceptible to examination. "The problem for Jameson under these cir­ cumstances is;' according to Steven Connor, "how to remain true to the analysis of postmodernity which he has produced, while yet preventing the enormity of the analYSis from overwhelming the possibility of critique:'J6 In the end the only way for Jameson to maintain his radical credentials is by confessing the essentially uneven character of late capitalist social development and thereby conceding that the still fallible epoch of postmodernity is not suffiCiently discontinuous to merit its prefix. Yet the totalizing account of the postmodern always included a space for various forms of oppositional culture: those of marginal groups, those of radically distinct residual or emergent cultural languages, their existence be­ ing already predicated by the necessarily uneven development of late capi­ talism, whose First World produces a Third World within itself by its own inner dynamic.37 I� now seems that postmodernity, like modernity, accommodates a host of divergent tl�e scales �nd oppositional cultures, and therefore provides room for the system's hIgh-flown Ideals to be contrasted with its woeful accomplishments, its claims to universality with its acrually rather limited scope. We would be justified, therefore, in questioning whether postmodernity merits the novelty he claims for it. More­ over, we would be correct to conclude that this claim has obscured the essential continuity between our own epoch and the modern age to which many theorists have bade a premature farewell. So-called late capitalism constitutes, as David Har­ vey's more serviceable account of our era contends, not a break with modernity but an exacerbation of previously existing trends.38 Over the past thirty years we have witnessed a quantitative, not a qualitative, transformation. Jameson, when it comes down to a choice between postmodernity and critique, chooses the latter. To

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t h uS take issue with Jameson's "postmodernism" thesis is in a sense to do no more than follow the momentum of his own thinking. It is therefore by no means to im­ pugn the radicalism of his thought but merely to remark that his salutary attempt to stress the changes wrought in the world economy since the Second World War leads him to postulate an "absolute break" with the modern era that falls foul of his theory'S own better instincts, his unfashionable awareness of the need for political critique and radical action. It is not, therefore, Jameson's commitment to a root and branch transformation of the social order that is at issue here but his assessment of its feasibility. Ultimately he prefers to accentuate the continued imperfection of late capitalism, the existence of alternative tendencies germinating within the system and therefore the endurance of the modern project. It is to his immense credit that his theory avoids the reckless fatalism of other, less circumspect proponents of the "postmodern condition:' Baudrillard, Truth, and Art

When the dust settles Jameson sides with the opponents of the idea that postmoder­ nity constitutes an "absolute break" with the preceding epoch. He can be assigned to that group of radical thinkers for whom modernity is not yet complete and for whom modernist art can still play a critical role. On the other sides of the barri­ cades, however, are postmodernity's precipitate celebrants, for whom the disjunc­ tion between ideal and real on which modernism fed has collapsed. " [A]rt is dead;' according to Baudrillard, "not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image:'J9 Stripped of its autonomy, art has become defunct. Or rather, art has not really been made redundant, for in a sense it has never been more in demand. Indeed, the dreams of the avant-garde have at last been accomplished, and on a scale it could scarcely have envisaged; according to Baudrillard art has been realized in all spheres of social existence. There is no lon­ ger any need for a separate aesthetic realm quarantined from everyday life because image, color, and illusion now proliferate interminably in an exhilarating dissemi­ nation of all that was formerly ghettoized in the aesthetic. Baudrillard breaks into the palace of bourgeois culture and disburses the bounty. Everything has become a bewitching daydream, an object of carefree aesthetic pleasure. "[O]ur society has given rise;' claims Baudrillard, "to a general aestheticization. . . . Whereas art was once essentially a utopia-that is to say, ultimately unrealizable-today this utopia has been realized:'40 Art's hideout has been detonated and the fallout bathes us all in pop culture's lurid glow. In an increasingly self-identical world, then, there is no normative or critical aesthetic refuge that might give commodification the slip and vaunt its incompatibility with the status quo. Art is put out of commission because it can no longer transcend the airtight immanence of postmodernity. No more is it a distant ideal that furnishes a critical contrast with a debased and unaesthetic social sphere; it is rather a realized utopia that attends our everyday existence. With a flamboyant fin-de-siecle nonchalance Baudrillard announces both the end of culture and the exhaustion of modernity's dreams of social transformation. "I don't want culture;' he has provocatively declared; "I spit on it."41 Modernity had

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maintained its faith in the existence of some sacrosanct reality that remained outside the spreading ambit of commodification. Postmodernity, by contrast, is that epoch in which reification is thought to have swallowed all alternatives. Effecting a radical break with modernity, it constitutes, according to Baudrillard, a wholly novel era in which all traces of some ultimately discernible reality have been expunged. Just as Jameson bemoans the onset of a "whole global, yet American, postmodern cul­ ture;'42 Baudrillard heralds the advent of a world modeled upon what he sees, with equal measures of condescension and homage, as the United States' awesome su­ perficiality. Modernity saw the commodity as a cryptic, apparently self-acting thing that nevertheless belied some hidden essence that could be decoded and reappro­ priated. In America, however, there is nothing but reification. The commodity, like the desert, is an impenetrable and mysterious thing that can never be deciphered, comprehended, or reappropriated. What America exemplifies for Baudrillard is the desertification of modernity's formerly verdant and uneven landscape. Here one is bewitched by "the fascination of the very disappearance of all aesthetic and critical forms of life in the irradiation of an objectless neutrality. . . . The fascination of the desert: immobility without desire. Of Los Angeles: insane circulation without de­ sire. The end of aesthetics:'43 Baudrillard commenced his career as a Marxist supplementing the critique of political economy with a theory of the sign.44 In its attempt to buttress Marx's analy­ sis of reification in the sphere of production with his own account of reification in the sphere of consumption, Baudrillard's project bore a family resemblance to the similar efforts of the Frankfurt School a generation earlier. Lately, however, Bau­ drillard has gone one step further than his predecessors, who still retained a mini­ mal hope that alienated subjectivity might call a halt to reification. In Baudrillard's eyes whatever was once considered the opposite of illusion and false conscious­ ness-truth, objectivity, reality, authentic needs, use-value-has now been utterly overwhelmed by reification. Exchange value has swamped use-value, and symboliC exchange generally has obliterated production, meaning, and rationality. The divid­ ing line between culture and economics has been effaced because we have entered upon a wholly novel economic regime in which society is suffused through and through by signs and images and in which political opposition, deprived of the pos­ sibility of making out the system through the impenetrable haze of simulacra, has vanished. This is a nihilistic world in which the downtrodden have no chance of arming themselves with the truth because such a thing no longer exists; what we say bears no relation to what actually is. From a strictly diagnostic account of the obscurity of truth in an age of consumer capitalism and mass media simulations, Baudrillard leaps zealously to a grandiose skepticism about the validity of any truth-claim whatsoever. Henceforth signs and codes constitute the real instead of merely designating it. According to this idealist and relativist creed, the universe is but a figment of our imagination. Reality is not so much obscured by a veneer of illusion as constituted entirely by discourse to the extent that, as in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, truth is nothing but a con­ venient fiction established by convention and ratified by habit. Whereas the Situ­ ationist Guy Debord still saw the commodification of everyday life in the "society

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of the spectacle" as an identifiable development �f moder� capitalis� and there�ore Baudnllard sees It as " potentially susceptible to critical, hermeneutic evaluatIOn, as . realm of images that could never be cogmzed or redeemed : vve are no depthless onger in the society of the spectacle w�ich th� Situ�ti?nists t�� ed about, nor in the . types of alienation and represslO whICh t hls Implted. � s pecific . . . . in the dispute about the contmued eXistence of realtty and stake Its cogmtlOn At is the very possibility of a critical consciousness of late capitalism. On t� is dep ��ds . the chances of genuinely radical social change. In the eyes of the matenallst cntlcs of postmodern theory, for whom late capitalism can still be interpreted and t�ans­ formed, Baudrillard's insistence that the world is no longer within reach of ratIOnal subjectivity amounts to collusion with reification. Probably Baudrillard's most co�­ bative foe in the ranks of modernity's embattled adherents is Christopher Norns. What aggravates Norris about Baudrillard's work is its flattenin� of t� e distinction . between truth and illusion. He is incensed above all by Baudnllard s provocative contention that "the Gulf War did not take place;' an outlandish inference drawn from the otherwise uncontroversial observation that government propaganda and media disinformation contrived for most people in the West to obscure the indis­ tinct real event.46 When reality for many has become a matter of indifference and opinion has become the reflection not of genuine events but rather of whichever media-inspired discourse happens to possess the greatest rhetorical force then there is, of course, no denying the diagnostic value of Baudrillard's insights. Far more dubious is the extrapolation of this local insight into an overstated thesis about the liquidation of any reality outside of the particular discourse t� at happens to h�ld sway. For when we decree that the video-game imagery of the mghtly news IS. realtty then we are summarily stripped of the ability to hold that discourse to account by critically contrasting it with the truth. For an unabashedly polemical Norris, Bau­ drillard's emphatic, albeit tongue-in-cheek, insistence on the illusory character of the conflict in the Gulf amounted to a risible failure of political nerveY It is surely the case that when reality is thought to be constituted e�tirely by � is­ course and there is no longer any operative distinction between what IS happenmg on the ground and what the authorities tell us is taking place there, we relinquish the possibility of appealing to truth and historical record. We forgo the chanc� of denouncing our opponents' discourse as self-serving propaganda or self-consolt� g ideology. When we are told that there is no chink in the armor of the present m which we might lever open some revealing distinction between what the p �wers that be would like us to believe and what actually is the case, we lose the capaCIty for critically contrasting different viewpoints. Indeed no discour�e can b � more odio�s . w relatIOn tive c fi equally an have ��h reah­ than any other, since henceforth they all ty.4" We live in a Lyotardian archipelago of disconnected language games o� phrase­ regimens" in which the creative art of concocting fictions has been substituted for the onerous labor of uncloaking reality. Famously, for Lyotard " [w1 e no longer have recourse to the grand narratives-we can resort neither to the dialectic of Sp�rit nor even to the emancipation of humanity as a validation for postmodern sClentt�c . discourse:'49 Instead of explaining phenomena with reference to some maglstenal grand recit we now recount modest fables, the validity of which extends no further

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than the lips from which they fall. The Enlightenment ideal of scientific judgment is supplanted by a hotchpotch of little narratives. Where knowledge was, there point of view shall be. Politics is now the art of persuasion, of telling the most gripping yarns. Lyotard claims that the one remaining criterion of justice is the compulsion not to encroach upon other narratives and "language games;' not to speak over one's fellow storytellers: "each genre is played as such, which implies that it does not give itself as the game of all the other games or as the true one:'50 But when we lose faith in truth we lose the possibility of measuring interests against reality. We abandon any standard of judging certain interests truer or more just than others and lose sight of the fact that some interests might benefit from and thus be interested in the prolongation of a particular historical reality. "For if;' reasons Norris, "everything is ultimately constructed in discourse-truth, reality, subject-positions, class allegiances and so forth-then ex hypothese we could only be deluded in thinking that any particular discourse (for instance, that of feminism) had a better claim to truth or justice than any others currently on offer:'51 Norris ar­ gues that the rejection of any possible criterion by which to judge a discourse more true or false than another is politically disastrousY We risk inaugurating a situa­ tion in which, because no particular viewpoint seems any more disreputable than any other, the viewpoint that wins out is simply the one that leaps the highest. Ac­ cording to the strict letter of their theories, Baudrillard and Lyotard would have no reason to consider Holocaust-denial particularly despicable so long as he who held th�se views did not try to foist his opinions on others. A retention of the concept of Ideology, on the other hand, allows us, as Eagleton points out, to draw "attention to the ways in which specific ideas help to legitimate unjust and unnecessary forms �f politi�al omination:'53 The willingness to accuse some discourses of being more . IdeologIcal than others opens the way to an understanding of some viewpoints as truer than others due to their greater insight into the way the world happens to be. Public intellectuals such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky wisely disregard the postmodern suspicion of truth. They continue to contrast the norms nominally accepted by the powerful with the truth that these ideals are all too often jettisoned for reasons of realpolitik and political and economic gain. They stubbornly uphold the modern conviction that the laborious task of research and documentation can unearth explosive data-evidence of hushed-up massacres, for instance, or of of­ ficial connivance in environmental destruction-that can be used to denounce the duplicitous actions of those in power and hold them to account.54 Chomsky argues that it is the responsibility of the intellectual, assiduously digging for facts, to ex­ hume the truth from beneath the covering of obfuscation, ignorance, and official de­ nial.55 Too many postmodern intellectuals, however, have taken literally Nietzsche's injunctions to foreswear truth and embrace ignorance. Theatrically overreacting to the arrogant positivist assumption that the truth is a stable entity vouchsafed to a learned elite, they have swung too far in the opposite direction. For the arrogation of truth is not the only weapon in the arsenal of the powers that be. They are equally adept at concealing the truth, at whitewashing the true state of affairs in order to keep the downtrodden from an empowering intimacy with their fate and the forces that govern it. The Nietzschean claim that truth is just a self-promoting fiction fails,

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in ditching the notion of truth altogether, to realize with Eagleton that dissimulation is the status quo's stock in trade.

In such conditions, the true facts-concealed, suppressed, distorted-can be in themselves politically explosive; and those who have developed the nervous tic of placing such vulgar terms as "truth" and "fact" in fastidiously distancing scare quotes should be careful to avoid a certain collusion be­ tween their own high-toned theoretical gestures and the most banal, routine political strategies of the capitalist power-structure. The beginning of the good life is to try as far as possible to see the situation as it really is. 56 The prevailing skepticism about objective truth deprives the downtrodden of the means by which they might contrast the claims of their rulers with the reality of their rulers' wrongdoings. Baudrillard, then, has taken one geographically and socially specific tendency within our epoch and made it into the whole of reality. From his experience of a consumer capitalism that obtains only in a tiny sliver of the world, he extrapolates a series of exaggerated, globe-encircling proclamations about a totalitarian system of signs and the liquidation of objective reality. By accentuating the sheltered well­ being of the West at the expense of the oppression on which it is built, Baudrillard is, as Steven Best and Douglas Kellner have argued, "too one-sided, reductive, and blind to the continuing importance of the economy, state, race and gender domina­ tion, neglecting a wide range of economic, environmental, and political issues:'57 It is undeniable that he has successfully captured the fatalistic mood of a disen­ chanted intelligentsia in an age that has witnessed several concussive rebuffs to the labor movement and a wholesale consolidation in the west of consumer capitalism. Yet this setback hardly warrants his hyperbolic assertion, unaccompanied by either analytical or demonstrative rigor, that reification is now total. Baudrillard would be better advised to acknowledge the limits of his undoubtedly productive insightsY For there are tendencies germinating within late capitalism that might help us peer beyond it and attain enough leverage between fact and fiction to denounce it. Oth­ erwise Baudrillard risks committing the same blunder he accuses his opponents of making, totalizing history by discounting the possibility of alternatives taking shape within it. •

Conclusion: Modernity as Unfinished Business

The two positions in the postmodernism debate-the case for the prosecution and that for the defense-have one crucial thing in common. For both, our epoch has been the scene of capitalism's wholesale consolidation. We are faced with both a deepening and a broadening of reification. On the one hand the reign of the com­ modity has extended into the most intimate minutiae of everyday life and on the other it has overflowed the frontiers of the first world and saturated those enclaves it formerly disregarded or excluded. Mass media simulation has veiled reality to the extent that we find it ever more difficult to tell fact from fiction whilst the near universality of capitalism leaves us at a loss to find any space from which to get its measure. Yet if, as political and moral agents, we wish to avoid throwing in the towel

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(and either heralding the brave new world of the consumer society or reluctantly bemoaning the exhaustion of the modern projects of emancipation and enlighten­ ment), then we must concede that a gulf persists between the system's ideals and its achievements. An increasingly globalized capitalism professes to be, imminently if not already, universal. But in a world as unequal as ours this claim obviously rings false. Unprecedented global unity goes hand in hand with increasing fragmentation. Our age remains modern by virtue of this enduring discrepancy. Too much postmodern theory is guilty of a catastrophic failure of political imag­ ination in not acknowledging the regional limits of its insights and in overlooking the conflict and indigence that prevail in more remote locales. This is why the work of the Frankfurt School, from its early practitioners to its contemporary advocates, ought to be heeded. This tradition, unafraid to stress the daunting totality in which we live, has the great merit of also stressing the contradictions that inhere within the dispiritingly monolithic status quo. The possibility of redemption, as Benjamin argued, stirs inconspicuously in the most unpropitious circumstances. For Benjamin, as for Herbert Marcuse, the work of historical construction is fix­ ated with the past,59 The inveterate backward gaze of the attentive historian finds not a benign tale of progress but an unremitting Calvary of slaughter and exploitation, a sequence of calamities and abortive revolts. Benjamin argues that it is the task of all radical politics to reverse these setbacks, to make victories of our forebears' gallant defeats. Indeed, it is by paying heed to this narrative of recurrent and continuing failure that we are enabled to transcend the status quo. Not optimism but pessimism is the correct disposition of the radical thinker; he espies not success but the ubiq­ uitous fallibility of a purportedly monolithic system. Benjamin's paradoxical claim, then, is that those interested in transcending the ongoing catastrophe have as their immediate concern only the past. Radical thought looks for transcendence where it might be least expected. Instead of ecstatically heralding some imminent utopia it ransacks the status quo for the means of exceeding it. Transcendence, therefore, is not anterior to the debilitating continuum of immanence but takes shape within it. It does not so much develop alongside immanence as germinate furtively within it. "That things 'just go on;" writes Benjamin, "is the catastrophe . . . . Redemption looks to the small fissure in the ongoing catastrophe:'60 Benjamin argues that it is the task of the historical materialist to break apart the homogeneous appearance of history. He shows that history is not a monologue but a cacophony of different voices that can intercede and object. For every official account there is a minority report, a suppressed and disregarded "tradition of the oppressed" that articulates the outlook of the underlings. What could be is therefore stealthily fomenting in what is. The immanent method seeks not to forecast impetu­ ously the political hereafter but instead to unblock the way to a future society by showing up the contradictions and fallibilities of the present one. We might say that Critical Theory, like Marxism in general in the words of the young Georg Lukacs, "changes the transcendent objective into an immanent one:'61 We can call a halt to the ongoing catastrophe because the status quo is defective and flawed. Capitalism can be wound up because it is already insolvent. Transcendence, in short, takes root in the omnipresent fallibility of the status quo. It is to be achieved not by promulgat-

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ing the ront conf y dedl -hea hard by but r orde l socia ed sform tran a of rints p blue g in present's ragged and ruptured character. . . et disr postmodern thinkers like Lyotard and Baudnllard display an Irreveren um tinu co ive ruct dest the ys alwa is ry histo that nds grou the on ry histo for � pect s . gard disre Yet this be. that ers pow the d by cate advo t men hten enlig and ess r prog of is itself an inadvertent form of historicism. Postmodernists write off the history of preceding epochs as an unmitigated catalogue of atrocities brought about by instru­ mental reason and thus go on to foreswear the grand narratives that drove human­ kind to such hubristic acts of social engineering. Despite their wariness of totality, therefore they impute a grandiose homogeneity to history itself. Thus spooked by this leviathan, Lyotard in particular sets about advocating his utopia of discon­ nected and monadic language games. In so doing he appears to imagine that grand narratives could be repudiated by theoretical fiat as if totality were imposed not by capitalism but by its critics, as if it were not an objective fact but a pattern imputed to history by the malign schemas of Enlightenment theorists. Baudrillard even ar­ gues that Marxism, by prioritizing production, is capitalism's mirror image.62 But as Eagleton argues, the incessant history of exploitation is the result of capitalism, not of the totalizing zeal of its opponents. .

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History for Marxism is indeed, as Mr. Ford wisely commented, bunk, or at least the same old tedious story. Those who celebrate history as change, difference, plurality, unique conjuncture, and who hone their theoretical instruments accordingly to capture something of this precious specificity, simply blind themselves politically and intellectually to this most scandalous of all transhistorical truths.63 Those who celebrate the proliferation of language games and the inauguration of an achieved aesthetic existence are jumping the gun, for it would take a concerted, practical effort of refusal to overhaul the system. Because totality endures, t�o�e who ignore it tend to collude in its perpetuation, and it is therefore the responslbli­ . ity of intellectuals to tailor our concepts and theoretical vocabulary accordmgly. Gainsaying grand narratives brings us no closer to stopping them. Lyotard wants to stop the world and get off, but even ifhe could it would then carry on spinning. Our task as responsible critics is to ferret out the hidden conflicts lurking beneath the graveyard stillness of postmodernity. We are to remind ourselves that because these antinomies endure we remain within the paradigm of modernity, which has still to be put to bed. Instead of starting from scratch, therefore, we should settle our scores with modernity before setting sail for its successor. The method that I advocate is at once dolorously pessimistic and determinedly hopeful. It is pessimistic because it considers the brave new world champio� ed by postmodernism to be but a continuation of the deficient epoch of modermty. Yet it is decidedly more optimistic because the hope nurtured by dialectics-nothing more than the "regulated, methodically-cultivated spirit of contradiction;' as Hegel defined it in conversation with Goethe64-lies precisely in contradiction. Holding fast to these contradictions-not least of which is that between the ideals of mod­ ernism and their current lack of realization-it would like to kindle what Jiirgen

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Habermas has called "the good and true life" from the antinomies that still fissure the bad and false one.65 Modernist artworks articulate this state of permanent and irredeemable crisis. They express in their form the social struggles that beset soci­ ety at large. We should bear in mind the fact that by defending aesthetic autonomy Adorno wished only to point out the capacity of aesthetic experience to bring to mind the secret contradictions that we otherwise tend to overlook. By neglecting art as a means of critical self-reflection, therefore, we hammer one more nail into the coffin of critical distance. The Frankfurt School's emphasiS on the hindward gaze of the immanent critic proves, then, to have been an abiding commitment to settling our scores with mo­ dernity before we can win the right to post-modernity. The notion that we have outstripped modernity, on the other hand, only masks its endurance. The portrayal of it as a thing of the past presumptuously applies to the whole uneven and multi­ form planet the narrow life experiences of a well-heeled and contented minority. We should, however, be more careful to recollect the plight of those for whom truth and critique are not the passe shibboleths of a discredited metaphysics but the essen­ tial means of resisting their pitiable fate. Adorno recognized time and again that to make precipitate acclamations of a reconciliation not yet apparent in the lives of the alienated and the downtrodden is to be guilty of culpable indifference, of complicity by default in the injustices such a position chooses to ignore. The hasty disavowal of modernity therefore allows it to continue its injurious work in secret, to sustain the gulf between the system's laudable ideals and its deficient accomplishments. Pay­ ing heed once more to the discredited paradigm of modernity, however, offers the chance to resolve these antinomies and thereby fulfill modernity's promise. The widespread conviction that reification has overwhelmed everything from nature to the unconscious and from pre-capitalist backlands in the third world to reality itself is both, as I have sought to show, an abdication of political and intel­ lectual responsibility and a piece of dubious rhetoric unsupported by the facts and susceptible to empirical refutation. Baudrillard's skeptical denial of objective truth is at once politically inefficacious and philosophically contradictory. Indeed, he is vul­ nerable to the standard philosophical criticism of relativism, for despite his disbelief in truth he still makes a definite claim about what is the case. The relativist creed denies the existence of truth, but for its exponents relativism is itself true and can be said to obtain. Indeed, if knowledge is now all about the telling of tales and the invention of worlds then there is no reason why Baudrillard's own account of post­ modernity is not a partial account without wider validity outside the circumscribed milieu of Baudrillard and his TV screen. Yet it is difficult to make this charge stick in Baudrillard's case for he is determined not to play by the usual academic rules which require him to justify his hyperbolic theses with evidence and exegesis. Challenged to defend his theories, Baudrillard would doubtless refuse to pick up the gauntlet and perhaps restate his conviction that it is not his task to purvey cogent theoretical models. For his undertaking is not one of positive construction but one of cathartic destruction, and it is this blase unconcern for the arduous labor of social transfor­ mation that so exasperates his critics on the left who see in his destructive vigor a noxious form of philosophical vandalism.

There is one way, however, in which we can redeem Baudrillard's fertile insights and diagnostic acumen for the modernist cause. We might think of Baudrillard's to and gal­ nt affro to be ld then wou job His r. labo tive nega a as lly ntia esse vre oeu vanize and not to elucidate and to instruct. If this is the case then we can safely dis­ count his more excessive pronouncements. Baudrillard then becomes like Soc rates, more vexing gadfly than the herald of a totalitarian system of depthless signs, a licensed fool calling into question our positivist faith in rational subj ectivity and k brea the tes gera exag lard dril Bau that s tend con ner Kell glas Dou ge. wled kno le stab with modernity in order to give us advance warning of a society as indifferent about es writ er;' pref "I tics. poli l iona osit of opp ine decl the ut abo d erne onc unc is as it h trut Kellner, "to read Baudrillard's work as a science fiction, which anticipates the future t wha ut abo s ning war y earl ides prov thus and es enci tend ent pres ting gera exag by might happen if present trends continue:'66 The joke in the end might be on Bau­ h oug alth For d. wor his at him ng taki and y iron his sing mis for ics crit st lefti 's lard dril opposition is not the goal of radical politics, it might transpire that Baudrillard's fu­ rious negative labors are a perfectly justifiable endeavor, robbing us as they do of our arrogant epistemological certitude. Yet this negative labor only becomes worthwhile ­ bet ng ethi som aise we upr in, jam Ben by ted oca adv ic crit tive truc des the like n, whe ter in place of that which we demolish: "What exists he reduces to rubble, not for ow st foll mu 7 We if'6 ugh thro ing lead way the of that for but ble, rub the of e sak the the adherents of a postmodern break with modernity only as far as their critique cal phi loso phi ir the of shy ht g fi n to lear and s ion itut inst and xies odo orth nt of exta prescriptions. Benjamin's injunction to reveal alternative subaltern tendencies ben eath the unvarying immanence of history has never been more germane. Immanence en­ ­ uni ed fess pro s em syst The on. icti trad con es pos sup pre ' lity tota and e enc erg tails div versality is belied by its systematic inability to remedy under-development and it re refo the uld sho We . nge cha al itic pol for g nin ope an rds affo t tha ity ibil fall is this not return to modernity in order to rest easy with a flawed and deficient epoch. bad the but gs thin old d goo the m "fro not t star uld sho we hat -t xim ma 's Brecht as a new ones"68-still holds true. Modernity should rather be rehabilitated only to nd -a nity der mo to rn retu st mu ker thin ical crit The lf. itse ng ndi sce tran of means be modernism-and take a single step backwards so that two strides forward might . possible. His or her task, as Adorno once put it, is to "kindle the flame of utopia on the smoking ruins of the pasf'69 •

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1

Theodor W. Adorno, "Vienna;' Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rod­ ney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2002), 216.

2

Paul Ricoeur, "Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue;' trans. David Pellauer, Philosophy Today 17-2/4 (1973): 165.

3

Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History;' in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 248.

4

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflectionsfrom Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jeph­ cott (London: Verso, 1974), 52.

•

Tradition and Transcendence 5

Neil Lazarus, "Hating Tradition Properly;' New Formations 38 (1999): 13.

6

Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 84· Similarly, Horkheimer and Adorno renounce not the En­ lightenment per se but a particular, distorted version of it. The Enlightenment, they hope, might become enlightened about itself. "We are;' they write, "wholly convinced-and therein lies our petitio principii-that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought:' Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1999), xiii.

political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as with fireworks dis­ solving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history:' Fredric Jameson, "Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Dis­ course;' in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986, vol. 2: The Syntax of History (Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 101.

21 Theodor W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1999), 160.

22 Theodor W Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 99-100.

7

Jiirgen Habermas, "Modernity-An Incomplete Project;' in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (Harlow: Harvester, 1993), 102.

8

Jiirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rational­ ization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1984), 241.

23 Jameson, Postmodernism, 4.

"The goal is no longer to supersede an economic system having a capitalist life of its own and a system of domination having a bureaucratic life of its own but to erect a democratic dam against the colonizing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld:' Jiirgen Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," trans. Thomas Burger, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 444·

25 Ibid., 14.

9

10 Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cam­ bridge: Polity, 1989), 88. 11

Peter Dews, "Editor's Introduction;' Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jiirgen Habermas, ed. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1992), 25.

12 See especially Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); Christopher Norris, Whats Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the En s of Philosophy (London: Harvester, 1990); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodermty: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Peter Dews, Logics ofDisintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), The Limits ofDisenchantment: Essays on Contemporary Eu­ ropean Phzlosophy (London: Verso, 1995); Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

�

13 Max Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality;' Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 3714 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Ver­ so, 1992), 51-54. 15 Ibid., 48. 16 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121-27. 17 Jameson, Postmodernism, 307. 18 Ibid., 310. 19 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1996), 236. 20 Jameson elsewhere seems conscious of the inevitable frustration of utopian aspirations in an unequal SOCiety. "Utopia's deepest subject, and the source of all that is most vibrantly

24 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1990), 29. 26 "Contrary to what Fred Jameson has recently argued, Adorno never lost sight of the fact that, ever since their simultaneous emergence in the mid-19th century, modernism and mass culture have been engaged in a compulsive pas de deux:' Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1988), 24. 27 Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence: 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 130. 28 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139. 29 Jameson, Postmodernism,

xx.

30 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 1999), 505-6. 31

David Harvey, Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999), 431.

32 Theodor W. Adorno, "Culture and Administration;' trans. Wes Blomster, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2000), 105· 33 Terry Eagleton, "The Archaic Avant-Garde;' in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995) and "Nationalism: Irony and Commitment;' Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, eds. Terry Eagleton, Edward W Said, and Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 23-42. 34 Fredric Jameson, "Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism;' in The Jameson Reader, eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) and "On Magic Realism in Film;' Critical Inquiry 12.2 (Winter 1986): 301-25. •

35 Jameson, Postmodernism, ix. 36 Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 48. 37 Jameson, Postmodernism, 159· 38 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. 39 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 151. 40 Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 16. 41 Jean Baudrillard, Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane (London: Rout­ ledge, 1993), 105 ·

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42 Jameson, Postmodernism, 5.

61

43 Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 124. 44 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 199 6 [1968] ) . 45 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, 56. For Debord, see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spec­ tacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995 [1967]). 46 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 47 Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992). 48 Christopher Norris, Truth and the Ethics of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester Univer­ sity Press, 1994). 49 Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geof­ frey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 60. 50 Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 60. 51 Christopher Norris, The Truth About Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 25. 52 "Worst of all, these ideas deprive critical thought of the one resource most needful at present, i.e., the competence to judge between good and bad arguments, reason and rhetoric, truth-seeking discourse and the 'postmodern' discourse of mass-induced media simulation:' Christopher Norris, Whats Wrong, 44.

62

Georg Lukacs, "Tactics and Ethics;' in Political Writings, 1919-1929: The Question of Par­ liamentarianism and Other Essays, ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. Michael McColgan (London: New Left Books, 1973), 5. Jean Baudrillard, "The Mirror of Production;' in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cam­ bridge: Polity, 1988), 98-116.

63 Terry Eagleton, "Base and Superstructure in Raymond Williams;' in Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, ed. Terry Eagleton (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 167· 64 Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), 244. 65 Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Huma n Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 317. 66 Douglas Kellner, "Jean Baudrillard and the Fin-de-Millennium;' in Jean Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, ed. Douglas Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 13. 67 Walter Benjamin, " The Destructive Character;' in One- Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1992), 159. 68 Walter Benjamin, "Conversations with Brecht;' in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1992), 121.

69 Theodor W. Adorno, "Alban Berg:' in Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stan­ ford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 79.

53 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1996), 167.

54 Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures ( London: Vin­ tage, 1994), 63-75.

55 "For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideol­ ogy, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us . . . . It is the responsibility of the intellectual to speak the truth and to expose lies:' Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: The New Press, 2002 [1969]), 324-25. 56 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 379. 57 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: Macmillan, 1991), 125. 58 Norris sees postmodernism's grandiose heralding of an "absolute break" with preced­ ing rationalist paradigms as "just another (all too typical) case of self-induced cultural myopia, of short-term localized symptoms mistaken for a long-term epochal decline, or of thinkers absurdly willing to extrapolate from their own limited perspective-their experience of 'theory' as a god that failed-to world-historical pronouncements about the 'postmodern condition:" Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Cri­ tique of Cultural Relativism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), 195. 59 Herbert Marcuse, "Philosophy and Critical Theory;' in Negations: Essays in Critical Theo­ ry, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 60 Walter Benjamin, "Central Park;' trans. Lloyd Spencer and Mark Harrington, New Ger­ man Critique 34 (1985): 50.

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Immanence and (Its) Interruption: Critical Reconstel lations Juan Carlos Rodriguez

In memoriam Itzolin (Tito) Garcia (1976-2003) No estoy. No estas. No estamos. No estuvimos nunca aqui donde pasar del otro lado de la muerte tan leve parecia:' -Jose Angel Valente, Elfulgor Immanence: A life

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l

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? An Exercise on Critical Ferocity

Two years ago I was invited by Marta Hernandez Salvan to collaborate in editing this issue of Polygraph dedicated to the notions of immanence, utopia, and totality. We began with a simple question: is immanence the organizing principle of society? It was around this question that, with the help of the editorial collective of Polygraph, we elaborated a set ofvarious interrogations concerning the implications of a possible struc­ turation of the global field (in its cultural-political-economic dimensions) in terms of immanence. Instead of endorsing the notion of immanence as a given structural fact in the consoli­ dation of a unified global field of power, our interrogations departed from the suspicion that the antagonism between planetary domination and global emancipation seemed to collapse in a plane of thought where political transformation and simulational reversibility were becoming indistinguish­ able.' Our main critical task was twofold, a dual performance: to put immanence into question as a mere structuring fact of globalization, and, at the same time, to evaluate the impli­ cations of recognizing or dismissing the constitutive role of immanence in contemporary critical theory, arts and politics. These are the questions we included in our call for papers: If both global capital and the multitude stand for the universal producing an autarchy of absolute imma-

Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

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Immanence and (Its) Interruption

nence, a relation without a relation, or an absolute totality, how can one account for the singularities subsumed under the logic of the universal? How can we interrupt the absolute character of immanence without fall­ ing into transcendence? Do we need a transcendent move in order to reach utopia? Is there a way out of transcendence without falling into immanence? Is there a mode of alterity or difference that remains incommensurable to both immanence and transcendence? We invite articles addressing the po­ litical implications of imagining a time to come beyond the duality imma­ nence-transcendence. As the questions suggest, it is evident that our strategy to interrogate the present stage of globalization intends to create a dialogue with Hardt and Negri's Empire. The idea behind this formulations is to displace the centrality of the Empire/Mul­ titude combination precisely by framing that very centrality in a different theoreti­ cal terrain that would allow for the otherwise than immanence to emerge with all its questioning force. The questions included in our call for papers attempted to push for a thinking both beyond immanence and in response-with/in responsibil­ ity-to immanence, while allowing the practice of critical theory to experience the vertigo of not knowing whether it is still possible to think otherwise than with/in immanence. Resituating the force of this suspense coming from the affective tuning informing our theoretical spectrumS-integrated by Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction-gave some of us the opportunity to relate ethically and politically to that which we felt was missing in the critical mood celebrating the emergence of some sort of "immanent enthusiasm" in post-Cold War globality. Can the otherwise than immanence serve as a critical supplement to the narrations of the global in Empire and Multitude?2 This question is an invitation to read. For me, questioning immanence is an exercise of critical ferocity and, also, an exercise on critical ferocity. After witnessing the consolidation of the imperial im­ pulse to command the planet-most visible in the so-called wars on terrorism ex­ ecuted by the United States against Afghanistan and Iraq under president Bush's military rule-we should embark ourselves in a self-criticism in order to determine to what degree the militarization of the globe has affected the relevance of our origi­ . nal task: editing an issue on immanence, utopia and totality. Let's keep in mind that the war against Iraq has taken place while we were editing the texts that form part of this issue. In an effort to maintain fidelity to our critical ferocity, I would like to ask whether the questions raised in this issue as well as the responses collected in it can still sustain their pertinence in the contemporary critical constellations that suf­ fer from Empire. Even if the questions and responses included here can eventually come to be outdated-running the risk of failing to measure the current state of the situation-it is the force to think immanence beyond itself what should remain as a powerful gesture to intervene with critical ferocity in the actual global conjuncture. Most of the arguments in this issue, while mapping the contemporary political lim­ bos that do not cease to inform our theoretical constellations, show the ferocity of the Nietzschean hammer (sometimes even hammering in spite of itself) : a critical effort in the abyss of immanence that, even when facing the void, attempts to inter­ rupt immanence in itself before interrupting itself in immanence. I would like to

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

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thank all the contributors of this issue for their generosity when responding to our questions. I would also like to recognize the fabulous work of all the members of the Polygraph editorial collective: their patience and stimulating intellectual engage­ ment in the editing process of this issue is a great example of the critical insistence made by theoretical reflection in times of war. Art and Immanence: Life does not just go on" II

Recent reflections on the notion of immanence involve the work of two French phi10sophers: Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy. For Deleuze, immanence is "not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one's bearings in thought:'3 Deleuze also conceives of immanence as a life, but a life that does not be­ long to an individual, a life that cannot be claimed by a subject or attributed to a self. According to Deleuze, immanence is both an image of thought and a life. As image, immanence does not coincide with an object but rather it is pure movement at infi­ nite speed. As a life, immanence does not belong to a subject but rather it is "a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness:'4 If immanence is "image;' "pure movement;' "qualitative duration;' it is very strange that, when having to exemplify his statement "What is Immanence? A Life . . . ;' Deleuze-after having written two books on cin­ ema-preferred to use a novel rather than a film for this purpose: Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Was Deleuze evading something?5 If cinema is a technology that exceeds "life" while doubling it in a moving and (un)timely image, then why did Deleuze decide to avoid the risk of having to explain, from the standpoint of cinema, the proximity of the image and a life as it is proposed in his notion of immanence? Couldn't Deleuze justify "Immanence: A Life" departing from the mechanism of the film camera: a technological invention that produces the illusion of life from the artifice of shadows? It seems that between life and its cinematic illusion there is a . slim barrier threatening to interrupt Deleuze's notion of immanence. For Jean-Luc Nancy the question of interrupting immanence and transcendence involves an encounter between art and death. 6 According to Nancy: Death, mere death removes any speculation on "immanence" and "transcen­ dence:' In death, substance or act disappear. Simultaneously, however, death forms the only passage of subsistence outside itself. Subsistence rids itself of the envelope that maintains it subsisting (thus subsistence rids itself of that under which it sub-sisted) and develops into ek-sistence, or into "sistence" outside itself. Into insistence, so to speak. Either within or through death (for death is but a slim barrier) the "sisting" insists far from any sub-sistence or con -sistence:'7 •

Then, Nancy goes on to suggest that I could say as much for what we call the "work of art:' How do we recognize such a work? Only by the following: That faced with it, we do not stay faced, but we meet, we strike, we are struck, we lose our envelope just as this thing, the work, loses its own-its forms, its mannerisms [manieres J . We develop

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within it as it does within us. We enter and exit. We are always in this in-be­ tween [entre-deux] of it and us. Rather quickly we understand there is about as much an "it" as there is an "us" (or "me"). There isThere is only reality that neither immanates nor transcends: that's the obstacle-the good-obstacle or the bad-obstacle, but the chock, the chock­ ing obstacle against what is neither within nor without, but an erected bar­ rier: death, birth, love, spoken word [parole]. There we strike, we are struck. We do not remain in ourselves, we do not leave ourselves. Just in between: we get a bump, a bruise, a blood clot. Being gets out of there swollen, tumes­ cent, distended. Neither fluid such as water immanent to water, nor leaping such as a dolphin transcending waves. Rather dull, dingy and uncertain like a Medusa between two waters. Admittedly, that Medusa terrifies the phi­ losopher:'s After reading Nancy's piece, I asked him about death, and about that slim barrier between his notion of death and Gilles Deleuze's notion of immanence as "a life playing with death." The following passage comes from a personal communication I sent to him. Do you see any relation between Gilles Deleuze's formula-"What is im­ manence? A Life . . ."-in his essay "L'Immanence: Une Vie" and your sug­ gestion that death is the only passage of subsistence outside itself, a passage marked by insistence? To re-articulate my question, let me refer to Deleuze's essay. Commenting on Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Deleuze sug­ gests that Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectiv­ ity of what happens . . . . It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil . . . . The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a life . . . .9 What is the relation between that which Deleuze calls "a life playing with death . . . a singular essence . . ." and what you refer to when you suggest that "dans la mort ou a travers la mort (car la mort est une mince paroi) Ie 'sis­ tant' insiste loin de toute sub-sistance ou con-sistance. La 'transcendance' y devient 'l'immanence' meme, retour nee comme Ie doigt d'un gant"? Does the insistence of the "sistence" coincide with the singular essence that De­ leuze refers us to as "a life . . ." or is that insistence of the "sistence" something else that cannot be reduced to "une vie . . ."? It took me a while to formulate these questions but Nancy never offered an answer to them. Nancy did respond though, and it seems that he approved these comments when he encouraged both Marta and me to publish our questions, but if chang-

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ing them from the interrogative to the affirmative mode. It could be argued that Nancy's endorsement to our questions, when read in the context of the comments referring to Deleuze, would imply the recognition that there exists some relation­ ship between his idea of death interrupting immanence and Deleuze's idea that im­ manence consist of "a life playing with death:' But if one looks at the last question I made to Nancy in reference to Deleuze, one notices that it cannot be transformed into the affirmative mode since it was not intended to affirm a correspondence be­ tween two notions but involved a decision to be made: either Nancy's "insistence of the sistence" coincides with Deleuze's pure immanence of a life or differs from it. In other words, when Nancy's interruption of immanence through death, in the "insistence of the sistence;' encounters Deleuze's "pure immanence" as a "life play­ ing with death" in this "either . . . or" structure, it becomes impossible for anyone to transform the statement into a declaration confirming the correspondence of the two notions as complementary articulations of the same affirmation. Affirming the statements coming from each side of the "either . . . or" is therefore a false choice. We are left with no other alternative but to decide for affirming the very suspense emerging from the confrontation between Nancy and Deleuze. Nancy's invitation to affirm the two alternatives presented in the last question is therefore a trap. Can this trap be read as the symptom of the work of art that, according to Arturo Leyte, cannot but desist to represent death? It is precisely this very suspense between Nancy and Deleuze what Arturo Leyte problematizes when he comments: "But how, exactly, might a given artwork (paint­ ing, sculpture or architecture) better reveal a thing's own finitude? Only through an ability to reveal its 'nothingness' [su nada] : not 'emptiness; but what was described above as 'the light of death: or what might also now be termed 'the time of death: as opposed to that of the absolute:'l0 (Let's advance these questions: couldn't the "light of death" and the "time of death" belong to the cinematic apparatus as it happens in painting, sculpture, or architecture? Or, do we have to see the cinematic appara­ tus through another "light" and at a different "time"?) Leyte, analyzing Van Gogh's famous painting "Starry Night;' argues that the revelation of death in the work of art does not correspond to its thematization but, quite the contrary, it involves "the emergence of the singular 'other'" in the unfolding of death as disappearance: l;Iegel's amended formulation takes death to be a necessary condition of the very emergence of the singular "other" that, in turn, the artwork might re­ veal. This does not mean that death constitutes a theme within the artwork; rather, the formulation grants death-which is not a concept, but not even really a fact or an act-its constitutive role in the emergence and consumma­ tion of the work of art itself. We might understand this idea as the idea that death's revelation in a work of art demonstrates this negative, unreal com­ ponent by exposing the work's intrinsic finitude more than any immanent process through which it might be supposed that death "must appear" -for if death must appear, then it is no longer death.ll The film 21 Grams!2 could be seen as the re-enactment of the very suspense between Deleuze and Nancy where the thematization of death leads to its disappearance in

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the work of art. Taken as a work of art, 21 Grams shows the point where the de­ cision between immanence (Deleuze . . . a life . . . ) and its interruption (Nancy . . . -death-) is suspended (Leyte's notion of the work of art as the emergence of the singular other): decision seems to remain suspended when immanence and its in­ terruption are transcoded into the power to affirm life or death in the work of art. 21 Grams narrates the story of Paul, Cristina, and Jack. Paul receives a heart transplant whose donor is Cristina's husband, Michael, killed in a car accident by Jack. Paul, moved by "the tyranny of the gift;' the "guilt that some transplant re­ cipients feel after receiving this gift that is inherently one-sided;' decides to contact Cristina and, in the course of their friendship, they become romantically involved.'3 In despair after the loss of her husband and two daughters, Cristina takes refuge in Paul, but her frustration also drives her to abuse drugs and alcohol. Later, while us­ ing cocaine, she transforms her frustration for a lost family into a call for justice. She decides to kill Jack, the driver who accidentally took the lives of her husband and daughters. Paul, who has revealed to Cristina that he holds Michael's heart, agrees to assist her in punishing Jack. When Paul is about to kill Jack, he finds himself unable to take Jack's life and decides to let him escape death. Later, Jack, an ex-con­ vict converted to Christianity, comes back to receive the punishment he considers deserving since he cannot deal with the feeling of guilt provoked by the traumatic memory of watching the victims of the accident about to die. When Jack comes back to confront the couple and demand punishment, Paul cannot deal with the guilt of having frustrated Cristina's attempt to find justice for her family and shoots himself in the chest. Before analyzing the thematization of death as disappearance in the work of art, let's analyze the roles of Paul's hearts. It is worth noticing that Paul's old heart, once detached from his body, is shown to him after the transplant surgery. In this scene, Paul takes in his hands the bowl of glass containing his heart and asks the doctor: "Ohhh! Is that my heart? . . . The culprit:' The culprit, the heart that has been removed from Paul's chest, leaving the empty space for the consummation of the "tyranny of the gift;' becomes what Zizek has called here and elsewhere, an "organ without a body;' a quasi-cause "that fills in the gap of corporeal causality" with a "pure, transcendental capacity to affect" precisely by detaching itself from the materiality of the body. When the culprit is substituted by Paul's new heart (Michael's heart, Cristina's dead husband) the "point of non-sense sustaining the flow of sense" remains as a spectral entity that marks the change of heart in Paul's desire. The culprit provokes in Paul the need to put an end to "the tyranny of the gift" precisely by realizing a tyrannical act against that gift which is not the culprit, but that has taken its place: Michael's heart. When Paul shoots himself in the chest, he is not only punishing himself for not being able to take revenge in the name of Michael, he is also shooting at Michael's heart, performing a false enactment of Jack's crime that is made to coincide with the punishment Jack demanded. The culprit cannot be punished, and it is in the absence of the culprit that punishment takes place in the subject. Punishment takes place precisely as the re-enactment of a crime that has not been committed by the subject but of which the subject pleads guilty, driven by the complete non-sense of the "tyranny of the gift:' Crime and punishment become

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indis tinguishable in the space left by the culprit. Paul suffers from the law of the culprit since he no longer has a heart, his heart does not belong to him. After the culprit, Paul's desire is at the mercy of his own broken heart. In "Shattered Love;' an elaboration on transcendence and love, Nancy suggests that In the broken heart, desire itself is broken [ . . . J the heart does not belong to itself, not even in the mode of a desire [ . . . J . Actually, the heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart. The heart is not an organ, and neither is it a faculty. It is: that I is broken and traversed by the other where its presence is most intimate and its life most open. The beating of the heart-rhythm of the par­ tition of being, syncope of the sharing of singularity-cuts across presence, life, consciousness:" 4 As opposed to death-death is not-the heart, once broken, is. The broken heart be­ comes the liberation of a cut: a cut across life. After Paul's suicide attempt, Cristina and Jack take him to the hospital; it is here when the film presents Paul on the verge of death. If the broken heart liberates a cut across life, it is not an abuse of reading to point out that such a cut across life is reflected in the editing of the film: the mo­ ment when Paul confronts death is divided into two scenes in the film's fragmented narrative. Paul's heart moves in a slim barrier, a slim barrier suggested by Nancy's various elaborations on the heart, a slim barrier between a "broken heart" whose beats cut across life and "the heart of things . . . a unique way of not beating-which has nothing to do with a death:" 5 This slim barrier is suggested by the film in the fol­ lowing way: while it is evident that Paul's broken heart cuts across life in the visual crosscutting of the two sequences (showing life events juxtaposed with shots of Paul in the emergency room), in the soundtrack we hear Paul's voice, but �aul's broken heart has lost its beating. It is precisely the beeping sound of medical technology what has substituted the beating of Paul's broken heart. The cinematic image allows us to see the suspense of Paul's passage from heart to heart: the visual crosscutting shows us the unheard beating of things coming from Paul's broken heart while the soundtrack projects the silence of "the immobile heart" of things that "does not even beat:' This occurs precisely when Paul gives voice to das Ding as it disappears: death121 Grams. In the first scene, alluding to this confrontation with death, the first shot presents a lamp viewed from Paul's subjective point of view in an emergency room. Then, there is a close-up of Paul's face with a tube in his mouth, and a voice-over corresponding to Paul's voice: "So this is death's waiting room:' It should be noticed that there is a lack of correspondence between Paul's visual image and Paul's voice: the film shows us that Paul's mouth is covered by a tube that impedes the emis­ sion of sound, but the voice-over in the soundtrack corresponds to Paul's voice. The autonomy of Paul's sound image from Paul's visual image allows us to confirm that enunciation is taking place beyond any corporeal emission. The voice travels outside of Paul's body without ever emerging from it. His voice is a virtual emission taking place outside the subject. It invades the space of the emergency room. The

Immanence and (Its) Interruption voice lists a set of ridiculous things while the camera films them: tubes, needles, etc. Then the voice asks: "what am I doing in this pre-corpse club? What do I have to do with them? I don't know when anything begins anymore or when it is going to end. Who will be the first to lose his life, he in the coma or me?" This feeling of not know­ ing when things have begun or are going to end, accentuated by the film fragmented narrative, comes from the virtuality of a voice that, while no longer coinciding with Paul's corporeality, cannot desist to occupy that slim barrier between life and death where Paul is. The virtuality of Paul's voice can be related to Mladen Dolar's arguments pre­ sented in his paper on "Kafka's Voices" included in this issue: "The voice is precisely what cannot be checked, it is ever-changing and fleeting, it is the non-universal par excellence, that which cannot be universalized. This is why the superego, the reverse side of the law, is always manifested by a voice:' Paul's voice marks the very suspense where both Nancy and Deleuze seem to confront each other in the slim barrier of the following question: Does Paul's voice correspond to a pure immanence, a life playing with death, as in Deleuze's notion of immanence, or does it echo the pas­ sage where death interrupts immanence as it throws subsistence out of itself in the "insistence of the sistence" affirmed by Nancy? There is no answer: the singularity of Paul's voice remains and it can only offer itself as a question exposing how the zero point of non-universality sabotages any claims attempting to produce a response to the question of immanence that would fill the void of the universal.16 In other words, when I argue that Paul's voice marks the very suspense between Deleuze and Nancy, it is not only because it is impossible to decide between immanence ("a life playing with death" ) and its interruption ("death as the insistence of the sis­ tence")-as we saw before when analyzing Nancy's response to our questions-but because Paul's voice verbalizes the very suspense reflected by Leyte in reference to the work of art. Death-that which interrupts immanence-can only emerge in the work of art to disappear in it as "nothingness": 21 Grams. From his bed in the emer­ gency room, Paul goes on to ask: "How many lives do we live? How many times do we die? They say we all loose twenty-one grams at the exact moment of our death. Everyone. And how much fits into twenty-one grams? How much is lost? When do we loose twenty-one grams? How much goes with them? How much is gained? How much is gained? Twenty-one grams, the weight of a stack of five nickels . . . a chocolate bar. How much the twenty-one grams weight?" Again, there is no answer; only Paul's voice remains. In this scene, Paul's voice crosses through the film's fragmented narrative that, up to this point, has presented the thematization of death as a series of tragic situations interrupting the everyday lives of the characters. As Arturo Leyte has commented, the serial interruptions of the image in the works of art that began to emerge in the nineteenth century, correspond to the representation of time as infinite and absolute in German Idealism. In the serial fragmentation of the narrative of 21 Grams, the infinity of time is made to coincide with the infinity of life. As a cinematic work of art, 21 Grams plays precisely with the recognition that human finitude is marked by death and death interrupts the course of life, but the serial representation of the course of life in the infinity of time cannot but desist to

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represent death. This is why the last scene of the film re-stages Paul's voice through the film's fragmented narrative in an ironic self-critique that questions the mean­ ing of (the) 21 Grams. As it thematizes death, Paul's voice appears in the film as an internal diegetic sound that put into question the meaning of the twenty-one grams, the measure corresponding to the amount of weight one looses when one dies, as if denouncing the incapacity of this measure-unit to represent death. However, when the voice questions the meaning of the twenty-one grams and its incapacity to rep­ resent death, one should observe that a non-diegetic element, the title of the film ( 21 Grams) has invaded Paul's voice. What the voice ends up questioning is the capacity of the film itself to represent death. Death never appears in the film; 21 Grams corre­ sponds to the non-sense of attempting to consolidate a thematized representation of death, but the voice emerges as that sensible mark guarding the margin where death is allowed to disappear in the work of art in order to haunt its own finitude. The expression 21 Grams performs two tasks. Taken as a non-diegetic element, it serves as the title of the film, a serial narration of the story of a man that becomes "a life playing with death" (Deleuze's immanence?). Taken as a diegetic element, it re­ fers to a piece of information given in the film by a voice playing with its own death: "They say we all loose twenty-one grams at the exact moment of our death" (Nancy's insistence of the sistence, immanence interrupted?). However, what about death in itself, those "twenty-one grams" "we all loose" "at the exact moment of our death"? Let me emphasize this point: death as such never appears in the film but rather death is thematized as it disappears in the screen. 21 Grams becomes a sound image. Before I asked if Paul's voice (the locus of enunciation) corresponded to immanence or to its interruption, now I would like to ask: is "21 Grams" (Paul's big statement) "a life playing with death" (Deleuze's immanence), or does it express "the insistence of the sistence" (Nancy's interruption of immanence by death) ? As it is clear from the analYSis of 21 Grams, in the art of cinema, "life does not just go on:' . As we observed previously when following Leyte's argument, the serial fragmen­ tation of life corresponding to the infinity of time governs the film and becomes its ideological fantasy. This ideological fantasy, the infinity of life in serialized time, presented in the film's fragmented narrative coincides with the ideological fantasy of some of the characters in the story. In various segments of the film, when different characters have to confront death, we hear a common answer coming from differ­ ent· voices: "life goes on:' The continuation of life in the infinity of time-linking in a common ideological fantasy the discourse of different characters to the film's strategy of fragmented narration-recalls one of the passages in Empire when Hardt and Negri defend the infinity of desire and life against the restrictions of the big government. Hardt and Negri suggest that In imperial postmodernity big government has become the merely despotic means of domination and the totalitarian production of subjectivity. [ . . . J We, on the contrary, struggle because desire has no limit (since the desire to exist and the desire to produce are one and the same thing) and because life can be continuously, freely, and equally enjoyed and reproduced.l? But, contrary to Empire, in 21 Grams, it is precisely the despotism of the continua-

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tion of life in the infinity of time what provokes Cristina's rage in the funeral of her husband and two daughters. When Cristina's father is trying to comfort her during the funeral, he recalls his sufferings after the death of Cristina's mother. Then, the father provides Cristina with a dose of the ideological pharmakos of the filill'. "I'e lle . goes on." A funous daughter expresses that she could not reconcile the death of he mother with her father's attitude towards it and then she responds: "That's a lie, lif does not just go on:' When 21 Grams is put into question by Paul's voice or when Cristina states that "lif� does not j ust g� �n:' their voices also open the space for the possibility of an . as It IS expressed by Alenka ZupanCic in her essay on comedy and ethiCs of unbehef love. ZupanCic suggests that

:

�n� elief as �n eth �cal attit�de consists in confronting belief not simply in

ItS Illusory dImensIOn, but In the very real of this illusion. This means that unbelief does not so much expose the nonsense of the belief as it exposes the Rea� or the �a�;rial force of nonsense itself . . . The act of saying "That's it, that s the ThIng has the effect of opening a certain entre-deux, thus becom­ ing the space in which the real of the Thing unfurls between two "ridiculous o�jects" that are supposed to incarnate it. Let us be more precise: to "move dIre�;I� t� t�e Thing" does not mean to show or exhibit the Thing directly. , !he tnck IS that we never see the Thing (not even in the picture, since it IS merely a picture of the actor); we only see two semblances (the actor and . . hIS piCture). We thus see t�e difference between the object and the Thing . . Without ever seeIng the ThIng. Or, to put it the other way around: what we are sh �wn are just two semblances, and yet, what we see is nothing less that . the ThIng Itself, becoming visible in the minimal difference between the two semblances. This is not to say that, through the "minimal difference" (or throu.gh that gap that it opens up), we get a glimpse of the mysterious Thing that h�s somewhe:e beyond representation - it is, rather, that the Thing is conceived. a� not�Ing other than the very gap of/within the representation. The Real IS Identified here with the gap that divides the appearance itself ... ))18

After Paul's voice mentions that 21 Grams corresponds to the weight one looses . he goes on to compare it to a series of ridiculous objects weighing when one dIes, t�enty-one grams, among them a stack of five nickels and a chocolate bar. Although thls film is far from the genre of comedy, 21 Grams, at least in the final scene, shares .Ith comedy a �acanian convention that cuts across various film genres: sublima­ ,: . tion-a set of ndiCulous objects are elevated to the level of the Thing. Failing to mark the passage from life to death, 21 Grams becomes the ridiculization of such a passage in Paul's voice. The film itself is a ridiculous object that cannot but desist to represent death, as � s �ack o � five nickels or a chocolate bar would do. In this way, 21 Grams marks the mInimal difference between various ridiculous objects (including the fil n:) standing as appearances that cannot but desist to represent death and at the s �me tIme reveals the en!r:-deux that becomes the very gap of/within representa­ . tion. If we transfer the mInimal dIfference we encounter in the analysis of 21 Grams

to the terrain of theory, it becomes clear what our analysis suggests: that, at least from a reflection on art, it is almost impossible to affirm or negate the consistency of immanence or its interruption as theoretical objects, there is a fracture in theo­ retical representation. This fracture is the Real of theoretical production. Although this fracture in theoretical representation expresses itself in the slim barrier between life and death, a form of striving that easily transcodes the suspense between imma­ nence and its interruption as the Real of theoretical production, one should insist that the Real is the very fracture where both immanence and its interruption persist in suspense, even before any notion of life or death (or their suspense) present itself as fictional representation for the sublimated reproduction of the theoretical. It seems that the question of immanence and its interruption is captured: the sublimation of theoretical reflection to the horizon of life and death is the screen/ name of this capture. Cinema, screening the sublimation of immanence and its in­ terruption to the simulation of the living/mortal being, shows the common ma­ trix where Deleuze's, Nancy's, and Leyte's reflections are captured. Our future task consists in mobilizing the question of immanence and its interruption beyond the point of sublimation-at the expense of loosing the friendship of three adorable Slovenians (Zizek, Dolar, Zupancic)-: we have to risk life and death as objects of thought. But what happens when it becomes impossible to disengage the Real, this very fracture in theoretical production, from that slim barrier that crosses between life and death as it haunts our theoretical imagination? Break: Infrapolitical Use of History and Im m anent Beyond Post-Political Citizenship

­ Al , ue iss is th in ed lud inc :' on cti fle Re ial ter ma Im d an ics lit po fra In hi s essay "In ­ mo o tw to g din on sp rre co y tor his of es us o tw een tw be es berto Moreiras distinguish l ica ret eo th a In y. tor his of e us al tic oli rap inf an d an l ica lit po bio a ments of nihilism: s rk wo e th n ee tw e be nc lue nf co in rta ce "a of g din fol un e th trajectory that involves l. ica lit po bio e th on es rat bo ela as eir or M ' er; gg ide He tin ar M d an lt of Michel Foucau re mo d, An n. tio isi qu In ish an Sp e th to on ati rel in ty gn rei ve specificity of imperial so s wa n tio isi qu In e th at th nt me ica ed pr a's Le es arl Ch y precisely, in the context of Henr as, eir or M to ing rd co Ac :' elf its te Sta e th to r rio pe su te "a power within the Sta d an e ur pt ca of r we po e th as d oo rst de un r, we po l ica that power is biopolit a­ im an l ica lit po of r we po e th is, at th l, ro nt co l ica lit po to e lif subjection of to r we po e Th e. ipl inc pr ty gn rei ve so e th to e lif of on cti tion of life, the subje r rio pe su te sta e th in th wi r we po e th se ca ery ev in is ty gn rei ve so to subject life ere th ich wh ut tho wi te sta e th to t en lem pp su or ss ce ex an to the state itselfwould be no state. es go ife ("l s ko ma ar ph al gic olo ide y's dd da nts ro nf co s, When Cristina, in 21 Gram t­ jus ad all sm "a s rm rfo pe on" go t jus t no es do e Lif . lie a t's ha "T on"), her proteste th of ts en gm fra ial ser e th es tur su t tha y tas fan al on ati rel e ment" that unbinds th y tor his of e us l ica lit po bio a of e vic ser e th in rs cte ara ch film and the discourse of the ­ un on" go t jus t no es do e Lif . lie a t's ha "T e. tim of y nit infi the in that captures life s rm rfo pe e rag 's ina ist Cr elf. its film e th in th wi m fro film e th of masks the ideology

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protest as critical agency when it interrupts the illusion that the film commodity tries to sell: "life goes on:' (One could even suggest that here is "a power within commodity superior to the commodity form" that can be related to president Bush's campaign to continue doing "business as usual") . This moment corresponding to the interruption of the film's ideological fantasy from within itself recalls Moreiras's infrapolitical use of history which, following Eric Santner, he has also related to the praxis of exodus. Moreiras suggests that the characteristic procedure of the second use is the interruption of the prin­ ciple of sovereignty, the unworking of the biopolitical, the de-production of the use of history. This is still a messianic nihilism or a nihilistic messianism. This "overturning" of the first use, the "redemption" that Benjamin promises as precisely a redemption regarding the infinite biopoliticization of life, is still a use, even if a useless use, and it is still therefore under the gaze of the political-but in a very especial form, that is, in an infrapolitical form. I would like to read Moreiras's notion of the "infrapolitical use of history" in rela­ tion to Bosteels's insistence that Badiou's notion of truth-procedure, conceived of as "immanent break;' can only occur when an intervention by a situated subject takes place.'9 Following Moreiras, it is evident that the site of politics where the subject of immaterial labor dwells today corresponds to the field of forces where the infinite biopoliticization of life takes (its) place. In order for the subject of immaterial labor to emerge in a truth procedure that would allow him or her to interrupt the simula­ crum of biopolitics as principle of sovereignty, it is not enough to declare his or her fidelity to the immanence of life or the transcendence of death. Following Badiou, Bosteels suggests that "a political truth arises neither by purely intuiting the vital immanence of the multitude behind the oppressive machinery of power, nor by merely recognizing the structur�l fact of antagonism as the hard kernel of the real in the midst of everyday reality. ' Neither the immanence of pure life nor the tran­ scendence of the death drive can account for the possibility of real change in a given situation:'20 If we transfer Bosteels's insight to Moreiras's reflection, it is possible to suggest that the subject of immaterial labor has to irrupt in the threshold where the void of the event that corresponds to politics refuses to be named life or death. Back in 1998, I was shooting a video documentary about the history of the anti­ Navy movement in Vieques, a small island in the eastern part of Puerto Rico with a population of 9,000 residents that served as a weapons testing range. At a public hearing of the Department of Natural Resources (an agency of the commonwealth government of Puerto Rico) I was videotaping, Carlos Zenon, one of the leaders of the 1970'S fishermen movement against the presence of the Navy in Vieques, made an unexpected connection that surprised many of us simply because it didn't sur­ prise any of us. He suggested that the Navy's control of the 75% of the land of Vi­ eques made him feel-and lead him to think-that he was living in a concentration camp. It could have passed as an excessive and dramatic reference to the Nazi ho­ locaust made by a subject denouncing his place in history, and this is precisely the way it should be read. Zenon's comment should be read as the theater of the subject, an abyssal locus that allows for the recognition of the relational fantasy as it binds

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the history of modern politics from Nazism to US. democracy: the passage from biopolitics to thanatopolitics, from the administration of life to the administration of death.21 When Zenon said, "no debemos olvidar que . . . vivimos en un campo de concentraci6n" ("we cannot forget . . . that we live in a concentration camp") the experience of the concentration camp was reclaimed by a subject who inscribed himself within the perimeters of the state of exception. Zenon, who was evicted from his "home/land" by the US. Navy at the age of four, made a link with the past when referring to the concentration camp: the construction of the US. military fa­ cilities that justified the expropriation of thousands of Viequenses was motivated by the Nazi's threat. But Zenon's intervention also made a link with the present military conjuncture to which he was exposed: the subject recognizes that he can be one of the "random" victims of a planned genocide motivated by the Navy's will to occupy the island of Vieques entirely in order to facilitate the destructive operation of training with live explosives without any concern for environmental or health regulations. There is also another phrasing made by Radames Tirado, former mayor of Vieques (1976-1980), that confirms the anxiety of the subject when having to rec­ ognize that he or she is exposed to genocide: "We are a species in danger of extinc­ tion. We, the people of Vieques, are in danger of extinction. And no one heard US:'22 But, in contrast to Tirado's ecological trope, when Zenon insisted on reclaiming the trope of the camp to describe his "living conditions" in Vieques, one has to realize the camp was not just a trope. Rather, Zenon touched on the very core of the rela­ tional fantasy that, according to Giorgio Agamben, constitute the nomos of modern politics: the experience of the camp.23 In his essay "What is a camp?" Agamben suggests that The state of exception, which used to be essentially a temporary suspension of the order, becomes now a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by that naked life that increasingly cannot be described into the order. The increasingly widening of the gap between birth (naked life) and nation state is the new fact of the politics of our time and what we are calling "camp" is. this disparity. To an order without location (that is, the state of exception during which the law is suspended) correspond a location without order (that is, the camp as permanent space of exception). The political system no longer orders forms oflife and juridical norms in a determinate space; rather it contains within itself a dislocating location that exceeds it and in which virtually every form of life and every norm can be captured. The camp in­ tended as a dislocating location is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we still live, and we must recognize it in all its metamorphoses. The camp is the fourth, an inseparable element that has been added to and has broken up the old trinity of nation, state and territory.24 Here it is important to point out the various consequences of the role of Puerto Rico in global military history, especially as it relates to the notions of the camp and citizenship. Puerto Rico was taken along with the Philippines by the United States as spoils of war in 1898, after the United States defeated Spain in the Span­ ish American War. As a Spanish colony, Puerto Rico served as a strategic military

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Immanence and (Its) interruption

zone for the expansion of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. When the United States occupied the island in 1898, Puerto Rico was again conceived as a strategic military zone for the expansion of the United States' rule over the Americas. When American citizenship was granted to all Puerto Ricans in 1917 by the Jones Law, this political concession was motivated by the threat of the German submarine force in the Caribbean, and the citizenship was conceived by the U.S. government as a way to build a sense of loyalty in the residents of Puerto Rico.25 The American citizen­ ship given to Puerto Ricans depended precisely on the military role of Puerto Rico in global geopolitics, a territory whose political status has been pushed to the limbo of sovereignty for more than a century. It is in its military role as dislocating location for citizenship that Puerto Rico, the last colonial enclave of the Americas, encoun­ ters the camp: it materializes the old trinity of nation, state, and territory as it breaks down in the margin of history. The American colonial rule over Puerto Rico belongs to the genealogy of the camp.26 During World War II, the United States intensified its military presence in Puerto Rico, creating a complex training facility that covered the municipality of Ceiba and the islands of Vieques and Culebra. In an attempt to contain the ef­ forts of the nationalist movement to decolonize Puerto Rico, the United States sup­ ported a strong plan for the modernization and industrialization of Puerto Rico that excluded Vieques and Culebra. The industrialization of Puerto Rico depended on transferring to Vieques and Culebra the impact of the military exercises that justi­ fied the strategic importance of the archipelago for the United States. This genealogy suggests that the disparity of citizenship and intensified militarism that lead to the interruption of the principle of sovereignty (a perverse version of "a power within the state superior to the state itself;' colonialism's turning into camp in the service of the infinite biopoliticization of subjugated life) has a name: Puerto Rico, a colony in the postcolonial world where the old trinity of nation, state, and territory is simply impossible to formulate or to make intelligible in a project of liberation. However, the American citizens living in Puerto Rico didn't suffer from the effects of such a disparity; they were suffered by those whose dislocated location made them live on the verge of permanent danger. "The real risk of living on a military target range"27 was suffered by Viequenses-and Culebrenses until the navy closed its training fa­ cilities in Culebra in 1975-alone, while the residents of the main island of Puerto Rico benefited economically from the supposed strategic and military importance of the region. Puerto Ricans in the main island benefited from a fundamental geo­ political role whose damaging effects did not affect them. Puerto Rico, the industri­ alized island, the showcase for democracy and modernization in the periphery sup­ ported by the United States, provided the relational fantasy its illusion, the ground for a post-political citizenship (i.e., citizenship emptied out of political horizons) as Ken Surin has discussed it in his paper for this issue.2 8 In contrast, Vieques had no option but to materialize the relational fantasy as formulated by Agamben: "The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen:'29 The recognition of the relational fantasy made by Zenon in 1998 as it binds the inscription of Vieques in the history of American global militarism is just the first

step towards an infrapolitical use of history. The vision of this community leader is consistent with Agamben's analysis: "the camp is the new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in order-or rather it is the sign of the system's inability to func­ tion without transforming itself into a lethal machine:'30 If the state of exception has become today's principle of sovereignty allowing the infinite biopoliticization oflife to turn into thanatopolitics, what happens when the state of exception is subverted by a subjective intervention that consists in putting in practice an infrapolitical use of history? Wouldn't the recognition of living in a concentration camp had prepared the way for what would happen in Vieques a year later, when the events following the death of David Sanes (killed by a Navy missile that missed its target) made pos­ sible the establishment of what have been known as the civil disobedience camps? Are the civil disobedience camps established in the Navy's target range of Vieques from April 21, 1999 to May 4, 2000 (camps that made possible the interruption of all military and bombing training on this island) just another version of Agamben's camp or an unexpected metamorphosis of it? Here it would be useful to comment on Katherine McCaffrey's reading of the experience of the civil disobedience camps in her book Military Power and Popular Protest: The us. Navy in Vieques. As the title ("David Sanes Rodriguez: Vieques's Martyr") of one of the sections of her book suggests, McCaffrey's reading of the civil disobedience camps focuses on the impact of the fetish of the dead victimY This is how McCaffrey narrates the memorial of David Sanes and the establishment of the first civil disobedience camps: Several days later, hundreds attended Sanes's funeral mass in the Monte Santo Catholic Church in Vieques. Following the ceremony, the Committee to Rescue and Develop Vieques organized a group of fishermen, anti-Navy activists, and members of the Sanes family to enter military lands and erect a twelve-foot high white cross in honor of David Sanes. It was supposed to be a religious ceremony. Sanes's family wanted no part of politicizing his death . . . . When the group arrived at the hill in the center of the impact zone, events took an unexpected course. The contingent staked its cross, according to plan, and christened the spot Monte David, in memory ofSanes. But then a member of the group, Alberto de Jesus (Tito Kayak), a self-proclaimed en­ vironmental "warrior" from Vega Baja, known throughout Puerto Rico for his high-profile acts of civil disobedience, stole the spotlight. De Jesus gave an impassioned speech against the navy and vowed to re­ main, to personally block the resumption of military maneuvers. Members of the Sanes family who were ambivalent about confronting the Navy were upset about politicizing the memorial. Committee members, who for years had painstakingly organized the military presence, were indignant that De Jesus, an outsider, was imposing his individual agenda on the group. The contingent left de Jesus on the target range, where he remained alone over­ night, while anti -Navy activists struggled over how to proceed. The next morning, Eleida Encarnacion de Zenon, the wife of fisherman Carlos Ze­ non, called Julia Ramos, a member of the Committee, and argued that de Jesus could not be left alone and that he deserved support. The Zenon sons

184

Immanence and (Its) Interruption

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

joined de Jesus on the target range, bringing food, water and supplies and eventually founding an encampment. More followed. For over a year activists positioned themselves as human shields on the bombing range, bringing military maneuvers to a halt. To get there, protes­ tors scaled fences or shuttled into the range by fishing boat. Over a dozen encampments sprang up on the target zone. Thousand of supporters from Vieques, Puerto Rico and the United States visited the campsites to express their solidarity. . . . David Sanes's death opened a new chapter in a decades-long story of conflict between the U.S. Navy and the residents of Vieques Island. The Committee to Rescue and Develop Vieques has laid a foundation for a movement to evict the Navy over the course of six years of organizing and coalition building. During the six years that the Committee denounced the Navy as a persistent threat to safety and health, it created the context for un­ derstanding the death of David Sanes. The Committee developed an organi­ zational structure and links to a broader network of supporters that would prove vital to sustaining more spontaneous and creative forms of protest. The Committee's work made possible the much broader mobilization that grew from de Jesus's individual act of defiance:'32

quotes this line approvingly in his Theory of the Subject: "The subject stands in internal exclusion to the object:' For Badiou, however, no truth actually comes out of this structural fact without also involving a symptomatic tor­ sion of the opening situation from the point of view of its unnamable excess. Whether this process is described in terms of destruction and purification or, more recently, in terms of subtraction and disqualification, the point re­ mains that the logic of the constitutive outside in and of itself remains an empty and purely structural scheme without the supplementary effort of a forced return to the initial situation. "It is a process of torsion, whereby a force reapplies itself to that from which it emerges by way of conflict;' Ba­ diou wrote in Theory of the Subject: "All truth is new, even though its spiral also means repetition. What puts the innovative break into the circular in­ flection? A certain coefficient of torsion. Therein lies the subjective essence of what is true: that it is distorted:'35 Later, he adds: If we take this point of view a step further, even Badiou's later philosophy as systematized in Being and Event begins to revolve around two key con­ cepts-the symptomatic site of an event and the forcing or torsion of truth­ which his critics tend to ignore but which in fact sum up his contribution to a forgotten tradition of the materialist dialectic. In ontology, the event is defined, not just in terms of a pure self-belonging cut off from the situa­ tion, but as an event for a given situation as determined by its symptomatic . site: "There is an event only in a situation that presents at least one site. The event is tied, in its very definition, to the place or point that concentrates the historicity of the situation:' The site of an event is symptomatic of the situa­ tion in its totality for the same reasons that in the earlier days explained the qualitative accumulation of contradictions into an antagonistic node. Except that today, after the obscure sequence from the late sixties to the mid-seven­ ties, such antagonism can no longer be read off directly from a sociological analysis of the structure, rather it is the result of a subject's intervention and fidelity to the events of politics themselves.3 6

This is how anthropology reads the events of the civil disobedience camps: loosing the event of politics in favor of constructing the simulacrum of solidarity. The death of the native animates the mobilization of the outsiders (the transcendence of death and the vital flow of immanence: complicity in action). It is true that the people that constructed the first camps of civil disobedience in the Vieques bombing field might have identified themselves with David Sanes, even to the point of experienc­ ing politics as a time and a space of mourning.33 But one should keep in mind that the political event should not be confused with an act of identification or solidarity with a victim; it always exceeds the operation of identification and solidarity.34 If an event has taken place at all in Vieques, its political edge cannot be constituted on the basis of producing an operation of identification with the victim. The symbolic manipulation of the dead victim, the political speculation that profits from the victimism of the dead, is not an element of politics at all; it is rather the capture and pacification of the political by the regime of ethical calculation. The political event always exceeds ethical calculation and irrupts in the void of the incalculable. Again, following Badiou, Bosteels invites us ,

to think of the truth of an event as an immanent excess from the point of view of the initial situation: "It is thus an immanent break. 'Immanent' because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else-there is no heaven of truths. 'Break' because what enables the truth-process-the event-meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation:' Badiou thus agrees with those contemporary Lacanians who affirm the structural necessity of an exclusion inherent in the formation of any subject-precisely the kind of "outside within" rejected in the Spinozism of Deleuze or Hardt-Negri. As Lacan had written in his Bcrits, and Badiou

185

.

I

As suggested by Bosteels when reading Badiou, it is only through the intervention of the subject that has been seized by a truth that an immanent break can occur in order to unleash the force of the event. When Alberto de Jesus, Tito Kayak, "a self-proclaimed environmental 'warrior' from Vega Baja;' decided to remain in the bombing field "to personally block the resumption of military maneuvers;' he was not performing "an individual act of defiance;' as McCaffrey suggests. Rather, he was subverting the nomos of modern politics by forcing a new notion of it, and, probably, without knowing it: a new camp, a "Civil Disobedience Camp:' The "Civil Disobedience Camps" in Vieques name a torsion of truth forced by a situated sub­ ject: the camp is forced to become the site where the interruption of the state of exception takes place without juridical remainder; here, the suspension of the law is interrupted by the outlaw,37 the one who, according to the codes of anthropology, only "stole the spotlight:'38

186

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Immanence and (Its) Interruption

Although I have to recognize that McCaffrey's rigorous work is probably one of the most lucid accounts of the anti-Navy struggle in Vieques, it seems that the ethnic staging of the conflict plays a central role in obscuring the analysis of the political sequence that takes place in Vieques and the truth procedure that belongs to it. McCaffrey's reading obscures the truth -procedure of the event by modeling the civil disobedience camps on a cultural fetish: the role of the "casita;' a wooden con­ struction very common in Puerto Rican rural imagination, that served as a symbol of national identity to the Nuyorican diaspora during the 1970S urban struggle for recognition. McCaffrey insists that the "casita" should be read as an affirmation of Puerto Rican culture: "the casita . . . is a particularly Puerto Rican form of protesf'39 McCaffrey's insistence on both the fetish of the victim and the fetish of national culture when reading the civil disobedience camps in Vieques is misleading. Doesn't the event of the civil disobedience camps in Vieques name an excess of the law, a void in a colonial situation that is both beyond the state of exception as it becomes the ground for a thanatopolitical enterprise and beyond national culture as it be­ comes a formula for liberation? It is precisely in Vieques's civil disobedience camps that the post-political experience of American citizenship in Puerto Rico is for the first time interrupted. I am tempted to propose that the interruption of post-political citizenship tak­ ing place in the civil disobedience camps in Vieques is consistent with Surin's politi­ cal and theoretical orientation: Very briefly, in a time when citizenship can increasingly be bought and sold, and when the forms of sovereignty are becoming variable, and the state itself is best conceptualized as an assemblage of projects, no interesting problems, I was tempted to say no interesting philosophical problems, are posed by these modulations of the post-political. But the post-political is precisely the form of the political today, and so more important, much more important, than the task of defining and describing post-political citizenship is the one which asks of the body politic how if at all it is going to take politics beyond the lineaments of this post-political.40 "Who" established the civil disobedience camps? What formes) of life or (non-) subject inhabits the site where the interruption of the state of exception takes place without juridical remainder? Is the figure of the human shield a political figure at all, or does it reterritorialize the place of the victim in the context of poli�ical protest? Is the human shield a human or post-human figure? Is it a figure of thought at all? Isn't the human shield the counterpart of the refugee in the present stage of global militarization? It is clear that the civil disobedience camps in Vieques involved the intervention of a subject situated in an infrapolitical experience of history, a kind of "who" that cannot but interrupt the infinite biopoliticization of life (and its turn into thanatopolitics) by incarnating the potentiality of immaterial labor as radical powerlessness. Pushed to the extreme, this experience of immaterial labor--this "Building, Dwelling, Thinking"41 on the verge of chemical disaster--as it unfolds in a bombing field that has been transformed into a new camp, neither express the "vital immanence of the multitude" nor the death drive of the militant suicide: it

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187

only points to the radical powerlessness of dwelling without a name in the site of the event. Talking about powerlessness, I used to be the target of a not-so-funny joke ev­ ery time I shared with friends some of my personal experiences in the Vieques's "Civil Disobedience Camps": "Hey dude, you were not a human shield, you were at the Vieques Beach experiencing a radical version of tourism:' One would have to ask: up to what point does an economic torsion of truth (if there is such thing as an economic torsion of truth) belong to the truth-procedure that opens the event of politics? If tourism is precisely the form of political solidarity today, up to what point does tourism belong to the torsion of truth that occurs in a subjective inter­ vention as it irrupts in the middle of a truth procedure, especially when the political sequence emerges elsewhere, abroad? Tourism . . . I would prefer not to . . . . Instead, I am strongly oriented to think that the fidelity to a political event is always exposed to the danger of trivializing itself in the simulacrum of the market effects. This is why the fidelity to a political event has to constitute itself as the persistent refusal to any form of capture. However, it is also here, in the simulacrum of the market effects of Academia, that the question of immanence and its interruption runs the risk of getting stuck on the threshold where the striving between life and death takes politics as its name in order to fill the void of our current situation. Running the risk of interrupting the vital flow of immanence before abandoning themselves to the transcendence of the death drive seems to be the challenge of the human shields. However, how far are the human shields from the tourists? How far are the tourists (on the side of political solidarity) from the fantasy of incarnating the place of the refugees? At least now, let politics name the void: perhaps . . . •

...... ... ... .

1

.

.

Bosteels's reading of Empire confirms and elaborates on this suspicion. See his "Logics of Antagonism: In the Margins of Alain Badiou's 'The Flux and the Party'" in this issue. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

2

Apart from Empire, see also Hardt and Negri's Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).

3

See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 37.

4

Gilles Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life . . ." in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 25.

5

This question has been formulated by Zizek when discussing Deleuze's relation with Guattari as a form of resistance assumed by this thinker when having to face the impasse between his two logics of thought. See ZiZek's "The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze" in this issue. See also his Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004).

6

According to Nancy, his contribution to this issue, "Imm/Trans;' is a new elaboration on the notions of immanence and transcendence that differs from a previous elabora­ tion made by him under the label of "transimmanence:' I won't elaborate on this matter, although it could be great a contribution in future interventions to examine this turn. For those interested in Nancy's notion of "transimmanence;' see his The Sense of the World,

188

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Immanence and (Its) Interruption

25 This reading is consistent with Ramon Grosfoguel's position: "The United States has made political and economic concessions to working classes in Puerto Rico (which have rarely been made to any other colonial or postcolonial people) primarily because of the military and symbolic strategic importance of the island:' See Grosfoguel's "The Divorce of Nationalist Discourse from the Puerto Rican People: A Sociohistorical Perspective;' in Puerto Rican Jam: Essays on Culture and Politics, ed. Frances Negron-Muntaner and Ramon Grosfoguel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 58. For a more detailed trajectory of the military conjuncture that motivated the United States to con­ cede American citizenship to Puerto Ricans during the First World War, see Maria Eu­ genia Estades Font, La presencia militar de Estados Unidos en Puerto Rico 1898-1918 . In­ tereses estrategicos y dominaci6n colonial (San Juan: Ediciones Huracan, 1988), especially chapter 6 of this book, "Guerra y reforma colonial: Puerto Rico en 191i' pages 165-215.

trans. Jeffrey Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 7

Jean-Luc Nancy, "Imm/Trans;' in this issue.

8

Ibid.

9

Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 28.

10 See "Leaving Immanence: Art from Death" in this issue. 11

Ibid.

12 Dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Iflarritu, 2003. 13 "Finally, a market could help overcome what has been referred to as the 'tyranny of the gift: This is guilt that some transplant recipients feel after receiving this gift that is in­ herently one-sided:' This passage, in which the therapy prescribed to patients receiving transplanted organs to overcome the "tyranny of the gift" gets a not so innocent name­ "market"-was found in S. Gregory Boyd, "Considering a Market in Human Organs;' North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology, 4.2 (Spring 2003).

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14 Jean-Luc Nancy, "Shattered Love;' in The Inoperative Community, ed. and trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 99. 15 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 1993), 167.

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16 "So the voice is structurally in the same position as sovereignty, which means that it can put into question the validity of the law: the voice stands at the point of exception, the internal exception which threatens to become the rule, where it suddenly displays its profound complicity with the bare life. The emergency is the emergence of the voice in the commanding position, its concealed existence suddenly becomes overwhelming and devastating. The signifier in the form of the senseless letter which, despite its meaningless nature, is still a letter, that is, universally disponible and verifiable, a zero point of univer­ sality. This is not the path that history has taken in the past century: it treated the excep­ tion not as a signifier to be included, but as a voice which, in its senseless nature, cannot be included, it is the zero point of non-universality, not the zero point of universality. This is where the economy of the letter totally differs from the economy of the voice. And this is why the voice constantly threatened to undermine the authority of the letter, or rather to supplant it, to invalidate it:' Mladen Dolar, " Kafka's Voices;' in this issue. 17 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 349. 18 Alenka ZupanCic, "Investigations of the Lacanian Field: Some Remarks on Comedy and Love;' in this issue. 19 Again, see Bruno Bosteels, "Logics of Antagonism:' 21 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller­ Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 22 Quoted in Katherine McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002) 98. 23 See also Giorgio Agamben, "What is a Camp?" in Means without Ends: Notes on Poli­ tics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). All the passages quoted from Agamben in my essay come from this short text. 24 Ibid., 43-44.

26 It would be important to add here that there is at least one historical instance where Cuba, another island in the Hispanic Caribbean, is linked to the genealogy of the camp as it un­ folds in Hispanic/American history. According to Agamben: "Historians debate whether the first appearance of camps ought to be identified with the campos de concentraciones that were created in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba in order to repress the insurrection of that colony's population, or rather with the concentration camps into which the Eng­ lish herded the Boers at the beginning of the twentieth century." Agamben, op. cit., 38. Agamben links the death of Spanish poet Antonio Machado to the history of the camp. It is pertinent to consider here that there might be a relationship between these series of reference to Hispanic history made by Agamben and Moreiras's genealogy of biopolitics as related to the Spanish Inquisition. This could be an important link to take into consid­ eration in future elaborations on the genealogy of biopolitics. 2 7 McCaffrey, op. cit., 149. 28 See Ken Surin, "Post-Political Citizenship;' in this issue.

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29 Agamben, op. cit., 4l.

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30 Ibid., 43.

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20 Ibid.

189

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31

If one reads Beruff's analysis of David Sanes's photograph quoted by McCaffrey on page 151, one realizes that the characterization of the victim, a civil servant "in uniform and in military salute;' combines in a single image the two important features of the Puerto Rican political transaction taking place under U.S. rule: civil citizenship in exchange for intense militarization.

32 McCaffrey, op. cit., 148. 33 According to Derrida, "in an economic, elliptic, hence dogmatic way, I would say that there is no politics without an organization of the time and space of mourning, without a topolitology of the sepulcher, without an anamnesic and thematic relation to the spirit as ghost, without an open hospitality to the guest as ghost, whom one holds, just as he holds us, hostage:' Aporias: Awaiting (One Another at) the "Limits of Truth," trans. Thomas Du­ toit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 61-62. Wouldn't it be relevant in this Der­ ridean context, following Moreiras's notion of the infrapolitical use of history, to push for a notion of an infrapolitics of mourning? In the case that an infrapolitics of mourning could be formulated, one would also have to ask about its relation to Badiou's fidelity to the event conceived as subjective intervention and symptomatic torsion of truth. 34 Badiou suggests that in some narrations made by subjects that have survived extermina­ tion in the camps there is a refusal to identify themselves with the victims. "That some nevertheless remain human beings, and testify to that effect, is a confirmed fact . But

190

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Immanence and (Its) Interruption

191

es necesario designar el par que componen el sitio (la fabrica, la calle, la Universidad) y el singleton del acontecimiento (la huelga, el alzamiento, el desorden), pero no puede llegar a fij ar la racionalidad del vinculo. Ademas, es una ley del estado ver en la anomia de ese Dos-que es el reconocimiento de un disfucionamiento de la cuenta-Ia mano del extranjero (el agitador externo, el terrorista, el profesor perverso) Carece de importancia que los agentes del estado crean 0 no 10 que dicen. Lo que cuenta es la necesidad del enunciado. Porque esta metafora es, en realidad, la metafora del vacio: 10 impresentado opera, esto es 10 que el estado dice, por designaci6n de una causa externa a la situaci6n. El estado obtura la aparici6n de la inmanencia del vacio mediante la trascendencia del culpable" (233). The metaphor discussed by Badiou, the hand of the foreigner (outsider), is mobilized in McCaffrey's characterization of Tito Kayak along with another metaphor: "stole the spotlight:' Is this metaphor, coming from the stage of media culture, an ironic twist of the discourse of the state after having been domesticated by the discourse of global communications? Or, is this metaphor a symptom of the way in which both the discourse of the state and that of media attempt to impose the protagonic role as repre­ sentational imperative to the fetish of the local victim struggling for a new site on earth?

this is always achieved precisely through an enormous effort, an effort acknowledged by witnesses (in whom it excites a radiant recognition) as an almost incomprehensible resistance on the part of that which, in them, does not coincide with the identity of the victim:' Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2002), 11. According to Badiou, it is the ethics of human rights, and not politics, what makes possible the recognition of man as victim. "The heart of the question concerns the presumption of a universal Subject, capable of reducing ethical issues to matters of human rights and humanitarian actions. We have seen that ethics subordinates the identification of this subject to the universal recognition of the evil that is done to him. Ethics thus defines man as a victim. It will be objected: 'No! You are forgetting the active subject, the one that intervenes against barbarism!' So let us be precise: man is the being who is capable of recognizing himself as a victim." Ibid., 1 0 .

35 Bosteels, op. cit.

36 Ibid. 37 The notion of the outlaw that I am proposing as the very naming of the excess of the un­ namable that occurs when the interruption oflaw is suspended by a situated subject leav­ ing no juridical remainder has been inspired by Badiou's discussion on the illegality of the name of the event from the perspective of the state of the situation. According to Badiou: "Esta nominaci6n es esencialmente ilegal, por el hecho de que no se puede ajustar a nin­ guna ley de la representaci6n. He mostrado que el estado de una situaci6n-su metaes­ tructura-permite hacer-uno de todas las partes en el espacio de la presentaci6n. De este modo, queda asegurada la representaci6n. Dado un multiple de multiples presentados, su nombre, correlato de su uno, es asunto de estado. Pero como la intervenci6n deduce el significante supernumerario en el vacio que bordea al sitio, la ley estatal alii se inte­ rrumpe. La elecci6n que realiza la intervenci6n es, para el estado-por 10 tanto, para la situaci6n-una no-elecci6n, ya que ninguna regia existente puede especificar el termino impresentado que es asi elegido como nombre del puro 'hay' del acontecimiento:' In the paragraph I am quoting, Badiou's line of thought jumps from the illegality of the name to the term of the site: there is, beyond representation, the outlaw. "Diremos tambien que el termino del sitio que nombra el acontecimiento es, si se quiere, un representante del sitio. Tanto mas que su nombre an6nimo es: 'pertenence al sitio: Sin embargo, esta represen­ taci6n no es jamas reconocible desde el punto de vista de la situaci6n-o de su estado-, puesto que ninguna ley de representaci6n autoriza a determinar un an6nimo en cad a parte, un puro termino cualquiera, aun menos extender este procedimiento ilegal por el cual de cada multiple incluido saldria-lPor que milagro de una elecci6n sin regla?-un representate desprovisto de toda otra cualidad que no sea su pertenencia a ese multiple, al vacio mismo, tal que la singularidad absoluta del sitio seiiala su borde. La elecci6n del representante no puede ser, en la situaci6n, admitida como representaci6n:' See "Me­ ditaci6n Veinte" in Badiou's EI Ser y el acontecimiento (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 1999), 230-31. Let us force a certain confluence between the notions of Agamben and Badiou as they converge in the question of the state: is not the permanent state of exception the state of the situation in which we live today? If the event taking place in Vieques-interrupting the suspension of law-belongs to a site, wouldn't this site be necessarily linked to the passage from the Nazi camps (state of exception) to the Vieques camp (stateless inscrip­ tion of the outlaw)?

39 McCaffrey, op. cit., 155· 40 Surin, op. cit. 41

•

38 Let us consider Badiou's comments on the figure of the agitator in the same meditation we discussed above from El Ser y el acontecimiento: "Cada vez que un sitio es el teatro de un acontecimiento real, el estado-en sentido politico, por ejemplo-ve claramente que

..1

See Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking:' in Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993).

Contributors

teaches philosophy at the Ecole Normale Sup€:'­ rieure and the College International de Philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays, and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject (1982) and Being and Event (1988). Sev­ eral of his books have recently appeared in English, including Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Verso, 2001), Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford Univer­ sity Press, 2003), Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Phi­ losophy (Continuum, 2003), and On Beckett (Clinamen Press, 2004.) Badiou's enormously original work has made major contributions not only to philosophy and political theory, but also to mathematics, psychoanalysis, film theory, and aesthet­ ics. The next issue of Polygraph will be devoted to critical es­ says on his thought. Alain Badiou

is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Cornell. He has also held positions as an assistant professor at Har­ vard University and at Columbia University. He is currently preparing two book manuscripts, After Borges: Literature and Antiphilosophy and Badiou and Politics (under contract with Duke University Press). He is also translating and introduc­ ing two books: Badiou: Can Politics Be Thought? followed by An Obscure Disaster: Right, Politics and the State and What Is Bruno Bosteels

Antiphilosophy? Essays on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan (both for Duke University Press). He is also the author of nu­ merous articles on Latin American literatures and cultures. Mladen Dolar taught philosophy at the

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University of Ljublja­ na until the year 2002.He collaborated with Slavoj Zitek in Opera's Second Death (Routledge, 2002). His Master's Voice is due by Verso next year.

is the chair of the Painting Department at the School of Plastic Arts in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His work could be characterized as an effort to think politics by com­ bining painting, poetry, and critical theory. On April 4, 1980, Escobar was arrested and accused of being a member of the Puerto Rican clandestine movement struggling for the inde­ pendence of his nation. He received a sentence of 68 years in prison. During 19 years and 5 months in prison, Escobar Elizam Escobar

Polygraph 15/16 (2004)

il

194

Contributors

continued painting and writing. (The works reproduced in this issue were created by him while he was in prison). His work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, San Juan, Anchorage, Edinburgh, Madrid, Havana, Managua, and many other Latin American cities. Upon his release from prison on September 10, 1999, Escobar re­ turned to Puerto Rico. That same year he published Los ensayos del artificiero: Mas alIa del postmodernismo y 10 politico-directo. He has recently published DobIes de Elizam Escobar, which includes an essay by Joserram6n Melendes addressing one of the thematic aspects of his plastic work. is a PhD candidate in the Romance Studies Department at Duke University. She works on Cuban post-revolutionary cultural production and trauma in the wake of globalization. She has published, with colleagues Carlos Pessoa, Lasse Thomassen, Seoungwon Lee, eds., "The Left, Democracy and Theory: An Interview with Ernesto Laclau:' Umbr(a) 1 (200 1): 7-29, and "A Dialogue with Michael Chanan: On New Latin American Cinema and the Intricacies of Film The­ ory:' Polygraph 1 3 (2001 ) : 1 29- 144.

Marta Hernandez Salvan

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vigo, Spain. He is a highly distinguished Spanish philosopher who has published several books on Hei­ degger, Schelling, and H6lderlin. He is also one of the main translators of Heidegger into Spanish. Some of his latest books and translations include Escritos sobre ji­ Arturo Leyte

losofia de la naturaleza (1996), Caminos de bosque (1998), Carta sobre el humanismo (2000), Hitos (2000), Un modelo para lajilosofia desde la musica. La interpretaci6n adorniana de la musica de Schonberg (2003). Alberto Moreiras

is Professor of Romance Studies (Spanish) and Literature. He

University Press, 1989) and Theology and the Problem of Evil (Blackwell, 1986). His book Liberation and the Next World Order is forthcoming with Duke University Press. .',

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is Professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana, Slovenia as well as Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School in Sass-Fee, Switzerland. Zizek is a prolific writer, having published over 50 books including translations into a dozen languages. He is the founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. His latest publications include Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Routledge, 2000); The Ticklish Subject: An Essay in Political Ontology (Verso, 2000); The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (Verso, 2001); For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Verso, 2002); Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences ( Routledge, 2003); The Puppet and the Dwarf The Perverse Core of Christianity (MIT, 2003). Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, the latest of his many books, is out now from Verso. Slavoj Zi:tek

Alenka Zupancic is a member of the

faculty at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slove­ nia, and of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. She is also editor in chief of the journal for psychoanalytical and cultural studies Problemi. Her books include Ethics of the Real (Verso, 2000), Das Reale einer Illusion (Suhrkamp, 2001), Nietzsche: Filozojija dvojega, Analecta (Ljubljana, 2001), Realno Iluzije, Jesenski i Turk (Zagreb, 2001), Esthetique du desir, ethique de la jouissance (Thetete Editions, 2002), and The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Zone, 2003).

(1987), Interpretaci6n y diferencia (1991), Tercer Espacio: Duelo y Literatura en America Latina (1991), The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Studies (Duke University 2001), and co-edited Pensar en la postdictadura (2001) with Nelly Richard. "Piel de lobo. Mor­ fologia de la raz6n imperial" is forthcoming in Biblioteca Nueva (2005). "Line of has published La escritura politica de Jose Hierro

Shadow. The Non-Subject of the Political" is his latest work in progress. is is a PhD candidate in the Literature Program at Duke University. He teaches Spanish Literature at the Universidad de Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras). He works on the intersections between Latin American visual culture, glo­ balization, and critical theory. He is currently working on a video project in Vieques and recently received the Olga Nolla Poetry Prize in Puerto Rico. Juan Carlos Rodriguez

reading for a PhD at the University of Warwick. His publications include "This Zone of Occult SenSibility: The African Novel in the Era of Decoloni­ sation" in New Formations 47 (2002) and "Optimism of the Intellect and Optimism of the Will: The Unseasonable Art of Ngugi wa Thiong'o" in Law, Social Justice, and Robert Spencer is

Global Development 6 (2003). in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is the au­ thor of numerous articles in politics and theory. He has also published The Turnings of Darkness and Light: Essays in Philosophical and Systematic Theology (Cambridge

Kenneth Surin is based

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polygraph 17: The Philosophy of Alain

Badiou (2005)

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