Trayvon Martin and the Legalization of Murder

By this point it is quite clear that Trayvon Martin was murdered.

Mother Jones magazine has provided enough material, along with what has come out from other sources over the last few days, to show that George Zimmerman acted not merely as a racist psychopath, but even against the requests of the authorities.

This is not new for America.  I love all the people who are out there right now, demanding justice, or what can be scraped together or it, for Trayvon Martin's family, but this speaks to a deeper issue that has a long history.

The milieu that constitutes today's Tea Party, the Christian Right, etc. are the same milieu socially that spewed filth at Black children in Little Rock, Arkansas, that burned buses and assaulted Freedom Riders, that constituted the John Birch Society, that supported Barry Goldwater.  We recognize this milieu as that which showed up in thousands to watch Black men be lynched, which burned their bodies, and cut them up and sold them in formaldehyde-filed jars at local general stores.

This milieu has gotten stronger and more vitriolic, more brazen, more vile in the face of their systematic loss of power after 1964.  This milieu is as much an expression of the development of global post-fascism as Jorg Haider, the Jobbik Party, the French National Front, and all the rest who would take parts of society and put them outside the law, subject to the arbitrary power of a power beyond the law.  It is not incidental that it is this milieu which has produced the Oklahoma bomber, the man who flew his plane into the IRS building in Texas, the man who attempted to assassinate Senator Gabby Giffords, and the people who show up to President Obama's events with guns on their hips.

What is most distressing in Florida is the refuge that this racist (in the 911 calls, one can hear him refer to  Trayvon as a "coon") finds in the so-called self-defense law.  Hopefully it is no surprise that I doubt that had Trayvon killed George Zimmerman he would have been allowed to invoke this defense and law on his behalf.  We face today something not unlike what Germany faced in the 1930's with the re-inscription in law of a pejorative state which exists alongside of the normative state, that is, one rule of law for those accepted as "citizens" and an arbitrary rule for those who are rejected, or only tenuously accepted, as citizens.

We cannot depend on the state to uphold the law.  To do so would be to make the mistake the German Social Democratic Party made in 1929-33 in the face of fascism, or the United States in all manner of periods.  Only the activity of millions of people can enforce our right.  I cannot but salute the people in Florida, New York, and all the other places who have courageously stepped forward.

Book Review: Not Adorno's Negativity

John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, Sergio Tischler
Negativity & Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism
Plutio Press, 2008. 256pp.  $37.00 pb
ISBN 9780745328362

     One of the novel features of the struggles over the last 6 or 7 years has been their negativity in the sense of a lack of demands and in their tendency towards a raw refusal without an alternative. In light of this, the title Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism would seem to promise an interesting union of this negative activity and Theodore Adorno's philosophical notion of negativity. Yet the title is discordant, even jarring. Negativity. Revolution. Adorno. Political Activism.

     Revolution and Political Activism? “Activism”, with its connotations of a kind of professionalization of political action, carried out by specialists known as “activists”, goes uninspected in this entire book. In a book which nominally takes Adorno seriously his profound distrust of activism generates no self-reflection.

     Negativity and political activism? The activist negativity, the “No!” of refusal, has little to do with Adorno's philosophically informed negativity, which is to say as determinate negation. The two are forced together in an uncomfortable union. This is enabled by the repetition, over and over again, of certain formulations of Adorno's, taken out of context and without any attention to the development of those formulations, a very un-Adornian way of proceeding. This general lack of critical reflection on activism is nowhere more self-evident than in chapter 5, which poses a post-vanguardist activism against a vanguardist activism, but which has no notion whatsoever of where that vanguardism came from or that the activism in both cases is possibly more critical in binding them together than the vanguardism in question drives them apart.

     Adorno and Revolution? Adorno was a determined enemy of this society. He sought to work out in concepts its increasingly barbarous character. However, Adorno did not believe that revolution was on the front steps, around the corner or even in the same neighbourhood. Not only did he not think that the massive counter-revolution that ran from 1923-1945 was simply going to be reversed, but he believed that capital was going about consolidating its victory in a variety of ways that would likely cement it in place, at least for the indefinite future. Most importantly, Adorno believed that the problems of the present were not simply grounded in capital, but in instrumental forms of Reason going back to the Greeks. Sadly, little to nothing of Adorno's own political thought is engaged with, but instead he is himself used instrumentally.

     Which brings us to Negativity and Adorno. Despite the invocation of Adorno's negative, most frequently this is reduced to nothing so much as a “No!”. Negativity as raw refusal goes against every ethical aspect of Adorno's thought. Interestingly, this denigration of negativity gives rise to a constant need to scold Adorno for his role in 1968. The “No!” is first and foremost said to Adorno, ritualistically, at the beginning of almost every chapter. You can almost invariably tell the quality of the coming chapter simply by noting the presence or absence of this revolt against the Father in the first 4-5 paragraphs. This means that the Introduction and Chapters 2 and 6 lack any awareness of how far they depart not only from the negativity of Adorno, but from Holloway's own earlier work before he was usurping the Name of the Father in order to kill the Father. 

     More importantly, the general lack of a properly philosophical negativity seems to go hand-in-hand with a positive, ontological treatment of labour, of sociality, and of direct, unmediated relations that was foreign to Adorno.

   Good, concrete labour is posited against bad, abstract labour, but Adorno saw communism entailing a world in which labour no longer mediated the relation between Man and Man. Labour belongs to the realm of necessity, not freedom, a point which Adorno understood explicitly. Along with Holloway's contributions in Chapters 2 and 6, so too Sergio Tischler's chapter 7 sings the praises of living labour as Doing. This hypostatization of labour, of living labour against dead labour, is just the lauding of variable capital against constant capital. The raw, simplistic “No!” to capitalism gives way to a joyous, simplistic “Yes!” to the ontological positing of “Doing”. Such a positing of Doing is no better than a positing of Being, since all it can claim in effect is that our Being is our Doing and so we run full circle back to a social ontology of Being, and thus capital reappears through the back door. The irony of this conception of labour is that the familiar, and philosophically underdeveloped, critique of Deleuze's concepts carried out in chapter 4 by Alfredo Bonnet can be turned on this conception of labour with equal force. Just as Deleuze turns away from negativity and dialectic towards difference, desire, and life and thereby make these into first principles, into metaphysical and positive-ontological essences of a transhistorical human existence, so Holloway in particular transforms labour into just such a creative essence.

     The positive adulation of the social goes hand-in-hand with this reading of labour. The romantically non-alienated aspect of everything social is part and parcel of a Leftism that denigrated the individual in favour of the collective, at times with utterly murderous consequences. Further, pre-capitalist society was oppressive and exploitative exactly through directly social relations of domination. Marx never deploys pairs of concepts except to indicate their existence as categories of capital. Use-value is a category of capital, the way in which things people use exist first and foremost as useful for valorization. Concrete labour is the particular labours through which abstract labour must subsist, but it isn't labour free from social form. So too sociality and individuality dance as a pair. If it was any other way, it would be hard to make a claim that use-value was self-contradictory, that is, that the contradiction between using things to meet human needs comes into contradiction with objects as useful for valorization, first and foremost among these, labour

     Finally, there is a tendency to imagine revolution as direct irruption of social Doing, as the end of mediation. This depends on a frequent elision of or confusion over the difference between mediation, contradiction, and antagonism. The end of antagonistic social relations does not necessarily entail the end of contradictions, the absence of which does not entail the end of mediation. The struggle with this is nowhere more clear than in Werner Bonefeld's essay. The very idea that critical theory has as its task to de-mystify actuality of course assumes what Bonefeld himself has long criticised: the idea that appearance is merely illusion, rather than the mode of existence of the essence, its necessary form of appearance. There is no de-mystification which can lead us to some direct knowledge of what really is the case. The appearance “really is” because it is the way in which essence must express itself, and not as two different worlds, but as one world which appears in a mediated fashion. Bonefeld actually formulates the problem of the entire approach taken by the majority of essays in this book:

Marx’s thesis that the understanding of the world of things has to comprehend human practice implies that this practice is constitutive. However, this formulation is full of dangers, too. It presupposes a definite resolution to the stated problem: If social practice constitutes, is it ursprünglich, be it primitive or original? If it constitutes, does it remain external to its creation? Can it remain innocent in the perverted world that it has created? (116)

However, not far down the conflation of antagonism and contradiction already occurs: “There is only one reality - a reality of disunion, contradiction, fissures, and antagonism” (117). Where Marx suggests that all science would be unnecessary if essence and appearance directly coincided, this entails that this non-coincidence is a part of actuality as such, not merely one where antagonistic relations obtain. Nor is contradiction synonymous with antagonism. There is a difference between a contradiction and an antagonistic contradiction in both Hegel and Marx. A contradiction in Marx's sense involves two unlikes which can each subsist only in and through each other, that is, which constitute a relationship of opposites which mediate each other. This contradiction does not need to be antagonistic. Nor does the resolution of the contradiction result in some kind of immediacy in relation to either object. That is, even in a resolved contradiction, the result is not an unmediated actuality.

     Were mediation to indicate only mediation of a contradiction and that contradiction only capable of being antagonistic, then communism would entail a world without mediation, of pure immediacy. This would erase the conceptuality of the world and reduce us to a world of pure immediacy, which would in effect be a state of psychosis. Following Bonefeld's own logic in reverse, if mediation exists, then contradiction exists, and then antagonism exists, and so capital becomes a closed loop.

     This results from the un-Adornian treatment of labour, immediacy, and sociality. Once one has taken the path, it is hard to veer off of it. So I do not find it surprising that the main political concept of a book on negativity is very positive: dignity. The concept has deep roots in Kant's own bi-polar, antinomic split of ethics and law. It is fitting that Adorno himself says that “Dignity was never anything more than the attitude of self-preservation aspiring to be more than that.” (133, Theodore Adorno 2002. The Jargon of Authenticity, 2^nd Edition (London: Routledge).)  This Adorno, no doubt associated with the Bad Father who called the police and was against activism, is not only of no interest to most of the authors, but is replaced with the Good Father, Subcommandante Marcos.

     The ultimate note of discord echoes from the effect of two chapters, which seem oddly out of place because they are distant from activism and genuinely engaged with Adorno. Adrian Wilding actually stages both a spirited engagement with Adorno's lectures and a subtle appreciation of his care to avoid becoming a guru or an institution, showing how badly his own students misunderstood him by trying to condemn him with the words “Adorno as an institution is dead.” Marcel Stoetzler's chapter provides a nuanced critique of sexual dimorphism, gender, and sexuality and the problem of the “liberation of sexuality” as opposed to human liberation. At odds with most of the rest of the book both in terms of quality and tenor, they set in relief rather than bring relief from the weakness of the book as a whole.

     The book remains a disappointment, despite these last, genuinely valuable contributions. The editors intended to produce a work that was self-consciously not a scholarly treatment of Adorno, but a genuine appropriation of his dialectic of negativity. They have indeed produced a work which is not scholarly, but they have not produced a convincing appropriation, critique or comprehension, of Adorno's negative dialectic.  

Between the City of Athens and the City of God [Incomplete Rough Draft]

I apologize for the unfinished character of this, it is very much under constructions.

                I've been thinking about the problem of politics a lot lately.  This may seem a bit obvious, but I don't mean it to be.  The problem I have been thinking about is what constitutes politics.  I have been re-reading a series of books and articles by thinkers as diverse as Gillian Rose, Gaspar Tamás and Jacques Rancière.  I was looking for an essay on Hegel's notion of Law and I ran across an essay called "On Law, Transgression, and Forgiveness: Hegel and the Politics of Liberalism" by Sharon Hoff, who teaches at The Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.  I am struck by the broad similarities of all of these contributions, as well as of the subtle differences between them, and I believe a broad presentation of the ideas of each, a discussion of their differences, and a working through of the whole offers some important ways to begin to rethink what politics entails.

                Jacques Rancière, in Hatred of Democracy, opens up the question of democracy by posing the modern complaint against democratic society as simultaneously an ancient complaint against democracy: democracy is the uncontrolled individual and appetite, the self-serving egoistic world in which fathers address their sons, teacher their students, governors their governed as equals and vice-versa.  It is a society in which no one knows their place nor does anyone really have a place.

                The only democracy which is recognized as good is "that form of government and social life capable of controlling the double excess of collective activity and individual withdrawal inherent to democratic life." (p. 8)  This is necessary because "in modern terms, it will be said that underneath the universal citizen of the democratic constitution, we must recognize the real man, that is to say, the egotistical individual of democratic society." (p. 35)  These are all so many ways of saying that left to their own devices people will not be responsible.  This is the political corollary of the economic argument that if people weren't forced to work for a living, they would just lay around and do nothing.  The same disingenuous logic applies in both cases, as the persons enunciating the argument always see themselves as not only not in need of such external discipline, but in some sense as qualified to at least defend this punitive and moralistic coercion and maybe even enact it.

                This however is not politics; this is the logic of police or oligarchic governance.  For police logic the right to govern belongs only to those with legitimate claims to rule, whether by natural or social differences, kinship or ability.  Democracy is the rule by lot, by chance, the de-legitimating of rule from kinship or ability, and as such democracy is like the part of no part.  Politics only actually begins with the separation of governance from natural or social hierarchy.  Hence Rancière's implied claim that all politics is actually democratic and all democracy is political.  Even in oligarchic governance there must be the presence of politics because either the elders must govern the educated or the educated must govern the faithful or the faithful must govern the elders, in all their infinite permutations of hierarchical claims.  All of them must appeal to something which is held by none of them, but which is also something held by those with no title to govern: this is the part of no part. 

It is simply the power peculiar to those who have no more entitlements to govern than to submit. (p. 46-7)

As soon as the link with nature is severed, as soon as governments are obliged to represent themselves as instances of the common of the community, separated from the sole logic of relations of authority immanent to the reproduction of the social body, there is a public sphere, which is a sphere of encounters and conflicts between two opposed logics of police and politics, of the naturl government of social competencies and the government of anyone and everyone. (p. 55)

                If democratic society is a society of non-rule as the difference between policing and politics, most of what we think of as politics is actually policing, and it takes two particular forms: the liberal administrative-rational conception and the communitarian conception. All governments and societies are oligarchic in his view; they all separate life into a public sphere and a private sphere, a sphere of citizens and of bourgeois, and they seek to make the sphere of politics into their own private sphere.  The public sphere is the sphere of open contestation, of what is everyone's concern.  The two modes of policing, however much they differ in their own modes of functioning, share the same desire to privatize politics and make it a matter of policing.  Politics then becomes the process of justifying the right to rule of this or that oligarchy, whether along liberal-rationalist lines of justification or along communitarian lines of justification.  The public sphere is privatized by being purged of private interest and thereby reduced to the domain of the interplay of professionals and institutions.

                Democracy is a double transgression of this tendency because it is a movement of extending the equality of public man to other domains of life in common, particularly those that govern the limitlessness of capitalist wealth, and it is also a movement reaffirming the belonging of anyone and everyone to that public sphere.  Democracy is the struggle to make public what has been privatized.  The hatred of democracy then is not the hatred of choice, of voting, of rights, but of the tendency to identify what domination would prefer to treat privately as a public matter, something to be openly contested as a matter of everyone's concern.

                There is a brief critique of the Arendt-Agamben notion that rights are either purely tautological (a citizen is someone who had rights, and someone who has rights is a citizen) or empty (human rights refer to bare life, the rights of those who have no rights because they are not a political subject.)  In this way, Rancière discusses the split between Man and Citizen.  Police logic would separate Man from Citizen absolutely, separating thereby Public from Private.  Arendt and Agamben do not, as they seem to think, register a truth, but reinforce police logic by hypostatizing the dualism of Man and Citizen.  Again, politics and political action

…opposes to the police logic that separates into spheres another usage of the same juridical text, another staging of the duality between public man and private individual.  It overturns the distribution of terms and places by playing man against citizen and citizen against man.  As a political name, the citizen opposes the rule of equality fixed in law and in principle to the inequalities that characterize 'men', that is to say private individuals subjected to the powers of birth and wealth.  And, conversely, the reference to 'man' opposes the equal capacity of everyone to all privatization of citizenship: those which exclude such and such a part of the population from citizenship, of those which exclude such and such a domain of collective life from the rule of citizen equality. (p. 59)

                A first significant limitation presents itself here, because Rancière also has in mind a critique of Marx, but Rancière elides that confrontation because 'Man' for Marx is never merely 'Man as such', but a definite man in a definite set of social relations.  Marx does not lay out Man and Citizen, but Bourgeois and Citizen.  This is the dynamic particular to capitalist society.  This presentation of the contestation between democracy and oligarchy as an eternal struggle, where democracy can never be a way of running the world, but only a kind of perpetual contestation, marks an absolute limit in his presentation.  Rancière is to this extent a liberal thinker of resistance, not a radical thinker of revolution. 

                Nevertheless, let us continue a little further, for as a description of the dynamic of capitalist society this is reasonably true, and since we seek to leave capitalist society, we must exit from within, by the means given us.  As we shall see, his basic notion of democracy as especially encroaching on capitalist wealth and power on one side and communitarian forms that would impose direct relations of domination on the other, can be found in Tamás' work as well.

                So we have neither the privileging of Man over Citizen in the manner of the communitarian logic, nor Citizen over Man as in the administrative logic, but the interplay between the moments without either their absolute reconciliation or rupture.  Universal plays against particular and particular against universal, politics inhabits the aporias of each and in this even "the opposition of 'bare life' to political existence itself can also be politicized." (p. 59).  We do not yet live in a universal concentration camp.

In so doing, they factually refute the demonstration of Burke or Hannah Arendt.  Either, they say, the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, that is, the rights of those who have rights, which is a tautology; or the rights of the citizen are the rights of man. But since bare man has no rights, they are the rights of those who have no rights, which is an absurdity. So, in these presumed logical pincers, Olympe de Gouges and her companions insert a third possibility: the “rights of woman and citizen” are the rights of those who do not have the rights they have and who have the rights they do not have. They are arbitrarily deprived of the rights the Declaration grants without distinction to members of the French nation and the human species. But they also exercise, through their action, the rights of citizens that the law denies them. They thus demonstrate that they indeed have the rights they are denied. “Having” and “not having” are terms that are doubled. And politics is the operation of this doubling. The young black woman who, one day in December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, decided to remain in her seat on the bus, which was not hers, decided by this very fact that she had, as a citizen of the United States, the right that she did not have as a resident of a state that denied that seat to any individual having one-sixteenth or more “non-Caucasian” blood. And the blacks of Montgomery, who decided, with regard to this conflict between a private person and a transport company, to boycott the company, acted politically by staging the double relation of exclusion and inclusion inscribed in the duality of human being and citizen.

This is what is implied by the democratic process: the activity of subjects who, by working on the interval between identities, reconfigure the distribution of private and public, universal and particular. Democracy can never be identified with the simple domination of the universal over the particular. For, according to the logic of the police, the universal is incessantly privatized, incessantly brought back to a distribution of power between birth, wealth, and “ability” that plays out in the state as well as in society. This privatization is readily carried out in the name of the purity of public life, which is opposed to the particularities of private life or the social world. But this alleged purity of the political is only the purity of a distribution of terms, of a given state of relations between social forms of the power of wealth and the state privatization of the power of all. The argument confirms only what it presupposes: the separation between those who are and those who are not “destined” to deal with public life and the distribution of public and private. The democratic process must therefore constantly bring the universal into play in a polemical form. The democratic process is the process of this perpetual bringing into play, this invention of forms of subjectification and cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life. Democracy indeed signifies, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenge to governments’ claims to embody the sole principle of public life and thereby to  circumscribe the understanding and extension of this public life. If there is an “illimitation” proper to democracy, this is where it resides: not in the exponential multiplication of the needs or desires emanating from individuals, but in the movement that unceasingly displaces the limits of public and private, of the political and the social. p. 60-1

                Rancière is not indifferent to what would make our system of representation more democratic in his sense, either.  That is, there are practical steps which would be taken, and they remind me a bit of Marx's discussion of the Paris Commune and the steps enacted that pointed towards the abolition of the state.

                Overall, his insight points towards a tendency that is anarchistic as well, of a world without government.  This would be the other side of a liberal politics of resistance, that it ultimately inscribes the side of Law as always that of domination, and the side of ethics as always that of resistance to domination.  The Law and the Ethical, Reason and Will, remain split irretrievably in Rancière.  I am reminded of nothing so much as Hegel's discussion of Enlightenment and Faith in the Philosophy of Spirit, and the logic of Enlightenment which ends in the attempted immediate unity of individual and universal will in absolute freedom, the result of which was absolute Terror.

                A different reading of public and private, Law and Ethics, emerges in the work of Gaspar Tamás.  Society and government are not transhistorical oligarchic structures where a minority dominates a majority, although the dynamic of civic man and ethical man remains central to his discussion.  The split between citizen and bourgeois identified by Marx animates Tamás conception of modern politics, and he stakes his analysis on the trend since the Enlightenment to assimilate citizenship to the human condition, within the limits of the nation-state.  This tendency goes against the limited notion of citizen in pre-capitalist society, which was restricted to the elite and conferred by

the lawfully constituted authority, according to expediency.  Christianity, like some Stoics, sought to transcend this kind of limited citizenship by considering it second-rate or inessential when compared to a virtual community of the saved. Freedom from sin was superior to the freedom of the city. During the long, medieval obsolescence of the civic, the claim for an active membership in the political community was superseded by the exigencies of just governance, and civic excellence was abbreviated to martial virtue.[1] 

Citizenship since the Enlightenment is associated with human dignity.  This is evident in the universalizing collective struggles of the workers' movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, and so on.  These struggles, fundamentally about the improvement of the condition of the people involved and about their unqualified claim to human dignity and equal treatment, did not eschew conceiving of this universalizing of human dignity with rights, equality before the law, and full citizenship.  As Tamás puts it, "it appeared fairly obvious that the merger of the human and the political condition was, simply, moral necessity."  His conception of post-fascism applies to the entire matrix of contemporary politics because in his view both liberalism and communitarianism now seek to generate what he calls, following Ernst Fraenkl's analysis of Nazi Germany, a dual-state.  Post-fascism seeks as assuredly as fascism did to reverse "Enlightenment tendency to assimilate citizenship to the human condition."[2]

                Not unlike in Rancière's notion of democracy, the assimilation of citizenship to the human condition entails the expansion of the public against the private.  For Tamás however what is at issue is not "real politics" versus "policing", but a politics of liberation versus a politics of domination.  Both are very much real politics, but the political philosophy of socialism inverts the relation of private and public[3].  Everything that was private for capitalist society, such as wealth, income, housing, medical care, etc., that is, the entire range of civil society, is public, is political.  For Tamás, following Marx, the abolition of domination is certainly possible, but to do so does not mean fleeing from the assimilation of citizenship to the human condition, to an unmediated, apolitical flight, but from the radical completion of that assimilation which "required a revolution (doing away with the appropriation of surplus value and an end to the social division of labor)."[4]

                However, such an inversion does not go far enough.  Tamás understates the magnitude of the dilemma.  As the women's movement of the 1970's put it, "the personal is political".  That is, most importantly, what seem like family and interpersonal relations are also relations of power.  What seem like attitudes and prejudices are actually relations of domination as well.  The universalizing element of these struggles thus not only inverted the public and private, but struggled along the lines of Rancière's thought, to make public and subject to general contestation those relations of domination, or to put it another way, to constitute them as relations of domination rather than as organic, biological matters or as matters of bad legislation and administration, exactly by resisting them as such.  There is thus a sense in which Rancière exceeds Tamás, but Tamás exceeds Rancière.  Tamás' resolution is also more or less squarely in the domain of councilist thought.  His ending makes clear this limitation:

Social justice, that is, petty bourgeois egalitarianism (sorry) opposes mostly consumer interests, i. e., interests of private persons, thereby perpetuates the cleavages at the basis of alienation. Addressing exploitation head-on is a reply to liberal political philosophy where politics stops at the factory gate and at the office door. The private/public dichotomy as it is currently operated is groundless. Reuniting producers with the means of production would theoretically and practically solved this problem caused by their separation.[5]

Reuniting the producers with the means of production by itself is not good enough.  It assumes that the producers in a way still belong to the means of production and it to them.  The productive capacity of society is a social capacity, but the engagement of the individual has to be her own.  Only if the individual is free in relation to the productive capacity of society and if that capacity is bound to serve humanity as a whole can we speak of communism.

                Nor will reuniting the producers with the means of producing ensure that "the reference to 'man' opposes the equal capacity of everyone to all privatization of citizenship: those which exclude such and such a part of the population from citizenship, of those which exclude such and such a domain of collective life from the rule of citizen equality." (Hatred of Democracy p. 59)  The moment which would undermine the communitarian is lost.

                Gillian Rose confronts the problems of private and public and libertarian and communitarian politics in another way.  Both libertarians (roughly akin to neo-liberal liberals) and communitarians accuse the liberal welfare state and socialism of failure due to waste and bureaucracy.  There is a general move from statism (socialism, fascism, and welfare statism) to an anti-statism (libertarianism a.k.a. liberal individualism, communitarianism), which is also a move from a universalism still entrapped within the illusory community of the state to various kinds of particularism (in philosophy as well as in politics.)  We might thus think of four moments in the current constellation of liberal, libertarian, communitarian, ethno-cultural identitarian and work out a map in the following manner of the interplay of those moments:

The constellation of current positions in the absence of a universalizing politics presents itself fairly clearly in these binary relations[6].

                As Rose notes, "liberals defend the autonomy and independence of the individual as conceived in the legal notion of human and civic 'rights', across the range of social and political meanings from 'entitlement' to 'free choice', while communitarians draw attention to the embeddedness of individuals in networks of shared meanings and social norms." (p. 3).  At issue is the voluntary association of free individuals constituting the polity versus the organic community resting on history, territory, language and custom which cements the political bond.[7]  The libertarian demands a minimal state and taxes and an emphasis on individual choice.  In the resultant cultural pluralism (common both to the neo-liberalism, produced by the mixing of liberalism with libertarianism, and to identity politics, created by the mixing of liberal pluralism with communitarianism), class is gone and communalities are formed by race, gender, religion, nationality, sexuality, language, ad infinitum.  What differentiates one kind of communitarianism from the other, liberal pluralist from libertarian, is exactly the use of preferential legislation to redress and advance the empowerment of previously disadvantaged cultural 'categories' of people.  Both libertarian individualism and the communitarian interest group are arbitrary, but both have something crucial in common: "both are types of legitimizing domination as authority". (p. 4)

                Neither one is political insofar as "Politics begins not when you organize to defend an individual or particular or local interest, but when you organize to further the 'general' interest within which you particular interest may be represented." (p.4)  Rose notes that in light of "this shard refusal to take responsibility for what Weber called the 'legitimate violences' of modern politics, libertarianism and communitarianism require other agencies to act on their behalf.

Libertarian extensions of the right of 'individuals', the right to purchase and consume goods and services, presuppose and widen the already unequal distribution of opportunities and resources within capitalist society.  Extension of individual rights amounts to an extension not an attenuation of coercion: it calls for a reinforcement of the police function to contain the consequences of inequality.  Communitarian empowerment of 'ethnic' and gender pluralities presupposes and fixes a given distribution of 'identities' in a radically dynamic society.  'Empowerment' legitimizes the potential tyranny of the local or particular community in its relations with its members and at the boundary with competing interests.  It is the abused who become the abusers; no one and no community is exempt from the paradoxes of 'empowerment'. (p. 4-5)

The perspicacity of this analysis is evident from the riots in England and the response of Cameron and the Liberal Party to the experience of 'community politics' and racialized and gendered struggles over representation in urban politics where only someone "from the community" can represent "the community".

                Both the liberal and the communitarian split Law and Ethics and demand their re-fusion in an immediacy that places one over the other.  These re-fusions do not have only one form, but play out as I noted above, in the form of liberal and libertarian forming an individualistic multi-culturalism

                For Rose, these splits are reflective of the Kantian diremption if Law and Ethics, both philosophically and in the split of citizen and bourgeois, practically.  Rose seeks a bringing together of Law and Ethics, but without the pretense of one succeeding over the other or that such a bringing together entails some perfect, non-contradictory fit.  Tamás at one point in his discussion of post-fascism recognizes exactly this split in a very clear way:

Before the Enlightenment, citizenship was a privilege, an elevated status limited by descent, class, race, creed, gender, political participation, morals, profession, patronage, and administrative fiat, not to speak of age and education. Active membership in the political community was a station to yearn for, civis Romanus sum the enunciation of a certain nobility. Policies extending citizenship may have been generous or stingy, but the rule was that the rank of citizen was conferred by the lawfully constituted authority, according to expediency. Christianity, like some Stoics, sought to transcend this kind of limited citizenship by considering it second-rate or inessential when compared to a virtual community of the saved. Freedom from sin was superior to the freedom of the city. During the long, medieval obsolescence of the civic, the claim for an active membership in the political community was superseded by the exigencies of just governance, and civic excellence was abbreviated to martial virtue.

If the Enlightenment tends to bring Law and Ethics into relief, it does not really bring them together.  The problem Rose takes up is that there is never an immediate identity of Law and Ethics.  Where there is a claim to such a thing, you have tyranny and ethical crisis.  Kant, like capitalist society, formally accepts the non-identity of Law and Ethics, but for Hegel and Marx there must be a speculative relationship of the two, both in concept and in practice.  This I believe is what Rose has in mind with her notion of the Broken Middle.[8]

                That is, while the possibility of overcoming domination is possible, this does not lead to an exalted state of immediate, direct sociality shorn of contradiction or of risk.  If anything, I believe we should consider direct, unmediated sociality for what it would be: a state of psychosis.  The apolitical imaginarium of anarchism and to a lesser degree councilist thought is of course no worse than the statist Panopticons of Leninism and its multiple progeny.  What is at issue is the possibility of creating conditions in which the broken middle may be a terrain negotiated without mass violence and mass suffering, without the fantasy that it can be negotiated magically with no violence and no suffering, whether by a perfected Ethics or an iron-clad Law.  At best, such a perfected Ethics remains impotent and the iron-clad Law is too rigid to be effective. 

                In her paper "On Law, Transgression and Forgiveness: Hegel and the Politics of Liberalism", Shannon Hoff suggests that Law is inadequate to particular situations and persons, being “generally incapable of reflecting the dependence of universality upon singularity.”  “With the concept of forgiveness, however, Hegel defends the priority of this singularity.”

What does it mean to say that the riots in England or the strike at Verizon are or are not 'political'?  Interestingly, neither the rioters nor the Verizon strikers who took independent action against attempts at scabbing viewed themselves as quite outside society. 

                In the case of Verizon it was quite evident that the workers saw themselves as fighting to maintain their middle class status.  The corporatist limitations of the unions were evident in this fight, among the workers as well, insofar as they were defending their contract, which they were entitled to as Verizon workers and IBEW members.  There is still no notion in the U.S. that the things they were striking to maintain should be universal.  One of the particularities of the U.S. is that much of what makes a contract like the one at Verizon one of the last bastions of the power of the old labor movement is that it privatized, in the sense of reducing to a corporate body, things like a good retirement plan and nearly free medical care.  Even retaining this limited, semi-privatized contract practically entailed a political struggle against the right of the company to bring in "replacement workers", scabs, and the court injunctions to limit their strike actions.  What the union was unwilling to do the workers frequently took upon themselves in organizing a necessarily unpleasant reception for the scabs.

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[1] "On Post Fascism", Gaspar M. Tamas, Boston Review, 2000

[2] "On Post Fascism", Gaspar M. Tamas, Boston Review, 2000

[3] "Rudiments of a Political Philosophy of Socialism", Gaspar M. Tamas, 2006.

[4] "On Post Fascism", Gaspar M. Tamas, Boston Review, 2000

[5] "Rudiments of a Political Philosophy of Socialism", Gaspar M. Tamás, 2006.

[6] As I have noted elsewhere, following on Richard Gunn's 'Notes on Class", capitalist society has a tendency to produce such binary oppositions and we are not here simply making matters up.

[7] Rose refers to the "…echoes of Kant versus Herder, Paine versus Burke…" (p. 3)

[8] Richard Gunn, in his work on Hegel's notion of recognition in "Hegel on Theory and Practice", and Moishe Postone in some less developed comments on politics and mediation in his opus magnum, both take up similar themes.

Towards a Politics of the Broken Middle [Rough Draft]

                There is a common theme to what I feel is the most engaging way to think about contemporary politics and I would like to sketch it out here.  The various expressions of this theme have significant differences, but for the moment I am going to elide this as gracefully as possible and focus on what they share.[i]  First and foremost there is an (at times implicit) attempt to come to terms with a certain kind of loss, the loss of the kinds of traditional radical politics which opposed both liberal (formal-legal) rationality and communitarian politics.  Secondly there is an understanding of a liberatory politics as necessarily opposing both those kinds of politics because both of them are simply different means of aiding and abetting what is variously referred to as oligarchic, authoritarian, post-fascist, or simply capitalist power and control.  In other words, the typical kinds of politics are more kinds of policing.  Thirdly, for each of the thinkers I am inspired by the characterization of a liberatory politics is tied to the way in which it stakes its validity without claim to a transcendent foundation.  It is an ­unsanctioned claim to governance, seeking no legitimacy in God or race or expertise or country or property.  Finally, liberatory politics is comprehended as neither an anti-politics of withdrawal or subtraction nor of the Big Bang nor as a social-democratic encroachment upon the state substituting the "good party" for the "bad party".   In other words, the problem posed is a politics of liberation which is outside the normal coordinates of anarchism, council communism, social democracy and Leninism.

                The problem of the split of citizen and bourgeois was a central feature of Marx's critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and his remarks in On the Jewish Question.  The problems of the limits of political emancipation are made clear, though this by no means is the end of Marx's concern with the problem of politics.  However, we have come a long way from the 1840's.  We have behind us 140 years of struggle since the Paris Commune and Marx's recognition that the state cannot be taken over, but must be overthrown.  Not only have we experienced the truth of this statement, but insofar as we have not been able to realize a situation in which the state no longer exists, we have yet to make this truth universal and actual.  We have yet to overcome the separation of citizen and bourgeois, of public and private, which as Gaspar Tamas astutely notes is first and foremost a problem inherited from Roman Law (codified and modernized as the form of law in Continental Europe through the Napoleonic Code.)  This problem is not rendered merely for law in that sense however, as ever since Kant the identity of Law and Ethics has been called into question.  Kant was the first to pose the antinomic relation between Law and Ethics and seemingly all of philosophy since has fallen in with one side or the other of this antinomy.  Even the anti-Enlightenment thinkers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have accepted this divide, generally coming out on the side of Ethics and against Law (e.g. the revaluation of values.)  This is after all another way of taking the side of Will against Reason.  Thus the appeal of thinkers like Nietzsche, and the French currents who draw heavily on him (Deleuze, Foucault), for anarchists, who first and foremost reject Law.[ii]

                The division of citizen and bourgeois is also the division of public and private, of politics and economy, of Law and Ethics (that is, the citizen is governed by Law, but as bourgeois their behavior is a matter of Ethics.)   This is an eminently modern division because the spheres take on both a certain autonomy from each other, a separation which does not really obtain in other social formations.  The only people entitled to be citizens in the city of antiquity were simultaneously men of property and standing.  Law and Ethics were united in practice.  In modern society the opposite takes place.  We have the diremption of citizen and wealth.  The tendency of the Enlightenment, noted by Gaspar Tamás in his two essays on post-fascism, has been to assimilate more and more people, within the confines at least of the nation-state, to citizen, to make citizen universal, a situation which also then entails the provision of a minimum quality of life. 

                This assimilation of citizenship to universal humanity has not been automatic or simply given, but has been the product of all manner of struggles.  The general character of the workers' movement, of the women's movement, of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, has been broadly universal.  That is to say, these struggles have not been particularly communitarian, but have generated the recognition of the humanity and equality of the participants qua citizens.  The goal of these struggles may or may not have been such recognition within the confines of this society, but the only way in which this society could accommodate those demands was the broadening of citizen as subject of the law: of who was a citizen, of what a citizen was entitled to.  The shift which seeks to recognize communities as communities within the universal community of the state is actually a retraction, a retreat from, the universalizing tendency.  The desire to be confirmed not as a human being but as a type is the central feature of the communitarian impulse, and multiculturalism is in exactly this way reactionary and a betrayal of the liberation movements.  It is an accommodation movement which hopes to sacrilize the failure to universalize humanity.

                In the past, liberal logic was the (slow, evolutionary, legalistic) expansion of citizenship to more and more people as individuals without putting the social form itself at risk.  The liberation movements, largely outside of political and economic power, sometimes putting the system itself at risk, but more often collectively seeking representation and rights within bourgeois society (that is, recognition as human beings within the terms set by this society).  In most places, the communitarian tendencies resisted the expansion of citizenship to 'the rabble', the 'riff raff', the 'mob'.  However, the communitarian tendencies also did not believe that all citizens were equally citizens, that there could be laws applying differentially to groups even though all of them were citizens.  The laws enacted on the grave of Reconstruction in the U.S., which after 1896 were developed and adopted systematically in the southern U.S. as Jim Crow or de jure segregation, were one of the first examples of this shift backwards.[iii]  The nature of communitarian politics as the creation of a dual state where some citizens were fully recognized and others were, without ceasing to be citizens, also outside the state from within, finds its first modern expression in this counter-revolution.[iv]

                This is where what is unique about contemporary politics becomes evident.  Both the communitarians and the liberals accept the creation of a dual-state, a regression from the expansion of citizenship at the same time as the universalizing tendencies extending the quantitative and qualitative boundaries of citizen have either disappeared or have become dominated by their own communitarian aspects.  This is most evident in the way in which the public and the private are conceived.  Both communitarians and liberals accept and seek to reinforce the privatization of the public space, but how they do so indicates their specific differences.  The liberal position is that participation should be by individuals based on their rational faculties, with a rule of expertise and knowledge.  The problem from this perspective is always one of the ignorance and mis-education of their opponents.  Only rational individuals should be allowed to rule.  The communitarian position argues that some groups are simply inherently superior; that the state belongs to them by right and that other groups must either convert or be excluded.  The logic of this is evident, for example, in workers' rights, civil rights, and women's rights struggles in the past, but also in today's struggles around gay marriage or gay and lesbian participation in the military without being forced to suppress or deny their sexuality.  For the liberal, the U.S. is a rational, secular state which should help by regulating excess and rationalizing the system.  For the communitarian, the U.S. is a Christian/White/Male/Heterosexual/Nativist/etc. state in whatever combination one thinks makes sense.

                Working class identity has dissolved, its universalizing tendencies giving way on one side to its liberal aspect, that is, the formal-legal side associated with unions as legal bargaining entities which accept the fundamental legal framework and pose no ethical challenge to capital as such versus the communitarian side in which "blue collar" becomes a cultural category associated with a volk-ish populism that elevates work to life's prime want, who enjoy the right to work of every individual, who "earn" their money, who are "responsible and law-abiding" patriots, generally religious and wedded to common sense.  That is to say, the power of labor forced capital to accommodate the worker as consumer and to make and market to and therefore form a working class identity, but one associated with having "made it": home owner, car owner, etc.  The formal-legal side of this bifurcation has been shrinking as its predicate was a workers' movement and a working class identity that does not quite match the transformation of the actual conditions of the capital-labor relation, that is, of the labor/valorization process.  The communitarian side, in the meantime, having shed its universalizing aspects, has not surprisingly adopted the ready-made Southern conception of the worker: anti-union, individualistic, uneducated, conservative Christian, provincial, paternalisticially tied to the company, and militantly against state intervention which disrupts any of the aforementioned moments.

                Similarly with the women's movement and the anti-racist\liberation movements.  Identity politics oriented towards fixation of gender and racial divisions supersede the universalizing tendencies which sought to undermine the very validity and foundation of gender and race, that is, identity politics want to "empower" groups as minorities, in effect accepting as real and rational the very gender and race divisions that were rejected as social relations of domination.  Where people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gloria Steinem, to simply make use of archetypal public figures, explicitly did not seek a reversal of roles with whites and men nor an accommodation with a system of racialized or gendered relations, but the de-racializing and de-gendering of all levels of society (not only the state and civil society, but that most notoriously private domain in bourgeois society: the family), contemporary politics in both of these dimensions have tended to devolve into their liberal and communitarian dimensions as well. 

                For example, in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the demand for formal-legal recognition in terms of representation along racial lines leads to situations in which American cities with majority Black populations are reproducing equally racialized political apparatuses to those found in majority white cities, with the expectation that a 65% Black population should mean that 65% or more of the politicians are Black, under the assumption that only Black can represent Black, just as white racial politics always assumed that 'only like can represent like' in a system of formal racial parity which is also a system re-enforcing racial identity.  If such racialized regimes of power were tragedy the first time around, they appear the second time as farce, that is, as a pauperized and diminished version of the urban racial regime.

                The communitarian aspect which has given up de-racialization and de-gendering has taken the form of multiculturalism.  Groups are culturalized and thereby naturalized.  Race and gender difference are elevated to the level of givens which must be respected.  The prior formal-legal attempt to overcome discrimination is revoked in the name of tolerance, a way of thinking the problem that actually suspends the ethical and the legal rejection of racism and sexism: the problem is not whether or not there is racism or sexism, inequalities of power, etc., just a question of tolerating minorities and women.  The problems are reduced to those of personal attitudes and the education of private conscience, not matters of the public, social distribution of power and wealth.

                Both accept in certain fundamental ways that civil society and the family are fundamentally not political sites, but private sites, and that even at those levels public intervention should be the intervention of the state in the maintenance of matters of law and its prerogative to the monopoly of violence.  Liberal conceptions may wish to see state intervention provide for universal programs, but they must be subordinated to market rationality.  In this situation, rationality and control should come from elected representatives and the voluntary activity of enlightened individuals (Bill Gates, George Soros, Bill Clinton, and Warren Buffett come to mind).  The Law is supreme and ethical action which contravenes the law is ultimately to be avoided, especially in those cases where it is argued that the rule of law is in effect.  Communitarians may in fact find themselves thoroughly in favor of all kinds of state intervention, but only of the kind that extends their privilege or which punishes those outside the normative state.  The issue is not rationality, but 'natural' orders and 'traditional' hierarchies and 'God-given' values.  No wonder that it lends itself to a politics of ressentiment.  Ressentiment is both a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, and the assignation of blame for one’s frustration on another who is even less culpable.  The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability and in order to avoid a conflict with a power which is both greater than it, and with which it identifies, a lot like a bully who abuses weaker individuals instead of confronting their victimization by and identification with an abusive father.

               

                               

Anti-Politics and Communisation

                The various politics of human liberation identified with the workers' movement were, certainly after 1917, dominated by the idea that revolution was primarily political, though not in the sense entailed here.  Rather, it was political in the sense that its focus was on the conquest of state power by an affirmed working class and its political party/ies.  The contradiction contained in Social Democracy prior to 1914 split on side into contemporary Social Democracy as the gradual democratic seizure of the state and the use of that power to usher in democratic control over civil society, and on the other side into Leninism as the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatus and its replacement with a proletarian apparatus which would usher in workers' control over civil society.  Anarchism, the Communist Left, and councilism existed on the margins of these two tendencies after 1923.  Each differed in key respects with both the contemporary Social Democratic and Leninist, however in all cases the affirmation of the working class and labor was the majority position, whether in the senses of "the workers' state", "workers' control of production", "workers' collectives", "workers' councils" or what have you.

                Even as these politics have lost any credibility, what has emerged from several different directions is a conception of revolution which entails the self-abolition of the working class as revolution.  However this new notion is itself split.  On the one hand, the sort of notion of politics I have attempted to map out above, and on the other, a notion of a communising[v] anti-politics.  What I would like to lay out below is a something of a critical analysis of the latter, which strikes me, despite its claims to being anti-(not a-)political, an essentially romantic and apolitical conception.  Hand-in-hand with romanticism and apoliticism is a failure to follow through on the question of the abolition of labor.

                There are several threads within the concept of communisation but some common points connect them.  First, rather than focusing on the question of the capital-labor relation as a formal relation, they make exploitation primary, which actually naturalizes the social forms of labor and capital.  Within this move, a therefore uncritical notion of labor generally is maintained: labor is the transhistorical social substance of human relations.  What has to be undone is the exploitation of labor by capital and the focus becomes one on surplus value, rather than on value.  The second aspect is a failure to reckon with form at the level of communism.  As Gilles Dauve puts it directly, "Communism is a content", a view also shared by groups which otherwise have a critical relationship to both Dauve and TC, like Endnotes.[vi]  The problem is that the notion of "form" in play here is primarily to be understood as "shape" or "exterior", not the sense in which Marx and Hegel both use form, where form is not the exterior, some contingent feature, but the necessary form of appearance of the essence.  It is not exterior to the content and the content is not content except through form.  The value-form is thus in no way the "shape" of labor, but the form of appearance of a labor which is itself already a form, the primary form of social relation in capitalist society.  Thus labor could not be the content of any society, it can only be the content of a society where it is also the dominant social form.  In other words, what makes capital unique is not surplus value extraction, but surplus value extraction, that labor takes the form of the primary social mediation and that labor and all products of labor take the form of values and hence are commodities.  The capital form is the full circuit of this process, necessarily mediated by money as the perfected and most empty, the universal, form of value (as opposed to labor, constant capital, and the commodity, which all have a certain particularity.)

                Inadequately taking cognizance of form and making a fetish of content leads to a devaluation of the formal aspect in politics.  I do not mean organizational forms, like a party or group or even a council or soviet.  Rather, since communism is a content, all that needs to be done is to realize that content in the right form.  Far from escaping formalism, in treating form merely as shape, communizing tendencies fall prey to a vicious kind of formalism as well as to a predominantly ethical critique.  The formal aspect here respects that there is no simple confrontation with the Other, no politics of Us and Them, nor some flight or escape.  The former is merely a clean-shaven twin of Social Democracy and Leninism.  The latter recognizes that capital is us, but at the same time we don't just stop being us by wanting or willing; we cannot flee ourselves.  Splitting the world into 1% and 99% ignores the responsibility we all bear towards the 100%.  1% versus 99% is a complaint about an unjust distribution of wealth and power, but it does not take issue with the form of production of that wealth and power.  Anarchists and communizers do not hold a fundamentally different view, albeit a more sophisticated one in which the grouping will be capitalists versus proletariat, and the exploitation of the latter by the former.  Exploitation in the end is about the unequal or inequitable distribution of value produced, not about the social form as inherently one of domination which we help to reproduce.  This does not mean that exploitation is not unfair or unjust, only that is remains a surface complaint.

                The communizing tendencies are therefore very much akin to an anarchist critique, which also seeks to evade the law.  Law does not refer to particular legal forms in the sense of a court room, nor law as regularity of repetition of a conditional phenomenon in the natural sciences.  Law here pertains to the public as against the private in the sense used in the first section of this essay.  Law deals with the problem in modern society of representation.  Anarchists and communisers alike would seek to escape the problem of representation, hence the frequent critique of democracy as representational, which we have sought to go beyond here.  Theirs is not surprisingly a world beyond mediation, a directly social world, that is, one where the individual is immediately the universal.  Hegel has already had his say about this immediacy in his writing on Absolute Freedom and Terror.  The charge I am making is that this direct sociality amounts to psychosis, a world of pure ethicality without mimesis, without representation, without Law.  It is thus not accidental that the champions of these ideas should appear to be akin to the Law of the Heart (anarchists, Occupy X), or the Knight of Virtue (Monsieur DuPont), or the Beautiful Soul (John Holloway, Werner Bonefeld) and pine for Absolute Freedom.

                These tendencies lack the capacity to comprehend the point that the only thing worse than the law is the absence of the law, but this is exactly the political crisis which we face in a period where the dominant trend is that of both a liberal and a conservative post-fascist politics which would reverse the extension of the power of the public over the private and subordinate state, family, and individual to the power of civil society.  Fascism was in effect civil society let loose, Prometheus unbounded.  Communisers can discuss the content of communism endlessly, but they lack the capacity to comprehend the particularity of the present. 

                A common mistake is that of Theorie Communiste and some of its followers, who believe that formal and real subsumption refer to historical periods, instead of being analytical distinctions which obtain within capital at all times.  This sort of categorical error indicates the most fundamental kind of confusion.

                Even more widespread is the conflation of the class relation with actual social classes, as if capitalism were dependent on a capitalist class to walk the commodity down to the market.  Alas, this reference to Capital doesn't understand that the commodity walking itself down to the market is labor, the individual selling their labor-power.  As long as there is labor, all the other commodities can move around just fine, they have no need of a capitalist class or individual capitalists per se. 

                Communism is not an infinite possibility that has always been waiting to be realized.  It is not a formless, unchanging content seeking its adequate form.  Communism is the real movement because communism is one mode of existence of the potential within the actual, one way in which the potential can be made actual.  It is not a flight from what is because that flight leads nowhere because there is nowhere else to be.  Only people who do not live in their own lives can simply imagine that they can walk away or like a Beautiful Soul, talk as if they can but act knowing that they cannot.  Neither can such people make a different life, lacking the material potential out of which a new actual might be brought into being.  Communism is also not an indefinite future because either it is now or it is not ever.  The mere seizure of power by a group (a party) which claims to represent another, larger group (a class) is only ever a change of who whom. 

               

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[i] The list of thinkers is quite diverse: Gillian Rose, Gaspar M. Tamas, Jacques Ranciere, Nicole Pepperell, the blog Permanent Crisis, to mention only those I am most immediately concerned with.

[ii] A further investigation of the French embrace of the side of ethics and will in the 20^th century might wish to investigate the relation between the conception of reality as marked by a fundamental lack or absence and Catholicism's emphasis on Original Sin, as the ontological stain which we cannot get past.  Is it an accident that Lacan in particular has been picked up, and his reading of (the Jew) Freud so welcomed, in predominantly Catholic countries?  As Ian Parker suggests in his monograph on Slavoj Zizek, Zizek is from a deeply Catholic nation (Slovenia), and some of his favorite films and texts to cite are those of English Catholics: G.K. Chesterton and Alfred Hitchcock.  He also suggests that Zizek's reading of the relation of Judaism, especially in relation to Christianity, is essentially the view of the Catholic Church.  One could go further and argue that Lacan's very notion of the role of the analyst is a secularized priest (and in Zizek's case, The Revolutionary Party as well.)  This view of the world as fundamentally marked by lack or absence is, in the end, the view of the Unhappy Consciousness.  What Zizek lacks, in his hard hearted condemnation of the Beautiful Soul, if we take Shannon Hoff and Richard Gunn seriously, is forgiveness.

[iii] Anti-Semitism had been a persistent feature of European society throughout the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment, but the broad tendency even there had been assimilation and extension of political equality, of Jew qua citizen, starting in the 18^th century.

[iv] Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, Nancy MacLean, 1995 Oxford Univ. Press.

[v] There are several concepts of communisation, or rather several communizing currents, most notably those associated with Theorie Communiste, those associated with Gilles Dauve and Troploin, and those who draw on those and various other sources.  There are also those who argue for a new commons, like John Holloway and Mariarosa Dalla Costa who can also be broadly be considered as part of this tendency.

[vi] "Those who developed the theory of communisation rejected this posing of revolution in terms of forms of organisation, and instead aimed to grasp the revolution in terms of its content." Endnotes #2, 2010

Inspidities to be Adored

Exchanges of thoughts past and in spite of irreconcilable differences, essentially bound up with matters of representation (mimesis in all its domains), the political, class, and my organicism against their mechanicism, it remains the case that few other people speak intelligently and openly in the same degree.

Highly allergic to the self-congratulatory and un-self-reflective consciousness and practice of the Left with its rackets and gangs, certain to make many people angry because it pisses on their self-certainty.

I highly recommend the following bits:
Self-Interview No. 2: Class Composition
This highlights the strengths and weaknesses of their idea of class, but certainly thoroughly skewers the psychological compulsion of "revolutionaries" to proclaim their objective proletarian-ness (as well as that of every other Uni student and social worker and professor).

Sadly, my only complaint would be that well before a certain anal retentive narcissism, Hegel identified the radical with the Law of the Heart. The recourse to viscerality is all too de rigueur, as almost any book by Slavoj Zizek at Barnes & Noble will attest.

Slef-Interview No. 1: On Occupy X

Autumn practices; Vacate X; But if these are the means, then to what purpose?

At some point, maybe clarification will ensue. The differences are as extreme as the similarities. All too frequently the diagnosis is the same, but it seems that the trip there is a source of disagreement between the surgeon and the accupuncturist, and the resultant and mutually opposed recommendations for this incessant back pain indicate a probably unbridgeable gap.

Still, I am obliged to recommend this fellow as well as myself, since everyone else is something of a crackpot. No doubt some hilarity would ensue from a coming together of the DuPontist International (sorry, a bad joke) and Nicole Pepperell, as their philosophical similarities (emergence, complexity, no doubt a deflationary theory of truth) would result in the same level of difficulties.