Where, then, do I locate my difference with Laclau? Here, the above-mentioned oscillation between 'mere terminological misunderstanding' and 'radical incompatibility' is even stronger. Let me first deal with some points which may seem to concern mere terminological or factual misunderstandings, as is the case with Laclau's critical remark about my advocacy of the Cartesian cogito. With regard to my reference to the 'forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernel of the cogito, which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent self', Laclau's claim is that I deprive the cogito of its Cartesian content and Lacanize the tradition of modernity, 'like calling oneself a fully fledged Platonist while rejecting the theory of forms' (EL, p. 73). To this criticism I am first tempted to respond, in a naive factual way, that my position is by no means as 'eccentric' as it may sound: there is a long tradition within Cartesian studies of demonstrating that a gap forever separates the cogito itself from the res cogitans: that the self-transparent 'thinking substance [res cogitans]' is secondary, that it already obfuscates a certain abyss or excess that is the founding gesture of cogito--was it not Derrida himself who, in his 'Cogito and the History of Madness', highlighted this moment of excessive madness constitutive of cogito? So when Laclau refers approvingly to Kierkegaard's notion of decision ('As Kierkegaard--quoted by Derrida--said: "the moment of the decision is the moment of madness". And as I would add [which Derrida wouldn't]: this is the moment of the subject before subjectivization' [EL, p. 79], I--while, of course, fully endorsing his approval--would insist that this 'moment of madness' can be conceptualized only within the space opened up by the 'empty', 'non-substantial' Cartesian subject.
Furthermore, I claim that democracy itself--what Claude Lefort called the 'democratic invention' can also emerge only within the Cartesian space. The democratic legacy of the 'abstract' Cartesian cogito can best be discerned apropos of the pseudo-'feminist' argument for a more prominent role for women in public and political life: their role should be more prominent since, for natural or historical reasons, their predominant stance is less individualistic, competitive, domination-oriented, and more co-operative and compassionate... The Cartesian democratic lesson here is that the moment one accepts the terms of such a discussion, one already concedes defeat and also accepts the pre-democratic 'meritocratic' principle: there should be more women in public life not because of any particular positive female psychological properties, but on account of the simple democratic-egalitarian principle (what Balibar called égaliberté): women have the right to a more prominent role in public decision-making simply because they constitute half the population, not on account of any of their specific properties.
Leaving aside the question of how to read Kant (I also think there is an aspect of Kant that is totally obliterated by the standard academic image of him), let me go on to a further difference between Laclau and me which may also appear to be grounded in a simple terminological and/or factual misunderstanding, albeit already in a more ambiguous and problematic way. This difference is clearly discernible in Laclau's criticism that in my reading of Hegel I do not take into account Hegel's panlogicism, that is, the fact that Hegel's philosophy forms a closed system which radically reduces contingency, since the passage from one position to the next is always, by definition necessary:
"accepting entirely that the Absolute Spirit has no positive content of its own, and is just the succession of all dialectical transitions, of its impossibility of establishing a final overlapping between the universal and the particular--are these transitions contingent or necessary? If the latter, the characterization of the whole Hegelian project (as opposed to what he actually did) as panlogicist can hardly be avoided." (EL, p. 60)
For me, Laclau's opposition is all too crude, and misses the (already mentioned) key feature of Hegelian dialectics: the ultimate mystery of what Hegel calls 'positing the presuppositions' is the mystery of how contingency retroactively 'sublates' itself into necessity--how, through historical repetition, an initially contingent occurrence is 'transubstantiated' into an expression of a necessity: in short, the mystery of how, through 'autopoietic' self-organization, order emerges out of chaos. Here Hegel is to be read 'with Freud': in Freud also, a contingent feature (say, a traumatic sexual encounter) is elevated into a 'necessity', that is to say, into the structuring principle, into the central point of reference around which the subject's entire life revolves.
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