Saturday, November 21, 2009

Laclau: dialectics and contingency (1)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 223-5:

I have a suspicion that the philosophical aspect of this political disagreement between Butler and Laclau on the one side and me on the other finds its expression in our different stances towards the notion of 'essentialism'. Butler and Laclau rely fully on the opposition essentialism/contingency; they both conceive of 'progress' (if this term is still defensible) as the gradual passage from 'essentialism' to the more and more radical assertion of contingency. I, however, find the notion of 'essentialism' problematic, in so far as it tends to condense three different levels of resistance to total fluidity: the imaginary 'essence' (the firm shape, Gestalt, which persists through the incessant flux of change); the One of the Master-Signifier (the empty signifier that serves as the container for the shifting significations: we are all for 'democracy', although the content of this term changes as a result of hegemonic struggles), and the debilitating Sameness of the Real (the trauma that resists its symbolization and, as such, triggers the very repetitive process of symbolization). Is not Butler's criticism of Lacan the exemplary case of how the term 'essentialism' implies the progressive reduction of the latter to the former level: first, the Sameness of the Real is reduced to a 'fixed' symbolic determination (Butler's point that sexual difference as real equals a firm set of heterosexual normative symbolic determinations); then, the symbolic itself is reduced to the imaginary (her thesis that the Lacanian 'symbolic' is ultimately nothing but the coagulated, 'reified', imaginary flux).

The problem with 'essentialism' is thus that this critical designation shares the fatal weakness of the standard procedure of philosophical rejection. The first step in this procedure is the negative gesture of totalizing the field to be rejected, designating it as a single and distinctive field, against which one then asserts the positive alternative--the question to be asked is the one about the hidden limitation of this critical totalization of the Whole that one endeavors to undermine. What is problematic in Kantian ethics is not its formalism as such but, rather, the fact that, prior to Kant's assertion of the autonomous formal moral Law, he has to reject every other foundation of ethics as 'pathological', relating to some contingent, ultimately empirical notion of the Good--what is problematic is this reduction of all previous ethics to the utilitarian notion of the Good as pathological, serving our pleasure... (against this, Sade, as the truth of Kant, asserts precisely the paradoxical possibility of a pathological-contingent attitude which works against one's well-being, finding satisfaction in this self-blockage--is not the point of the Freudian death drive that one can suspend the rule of utilitarian egotism on 'pathological' grounds?).

In much the same way, is not Derrida's 'metaphysics of presence' silently dominated/hegemonized by Husserl's subjectivity as the pure auto-affection/self-presence of the conscious subject, so that when Derrida talks about 'metaphysics of presence', he is always essentially referring to the Husserlian subject present-to-itself? The problem with sweeping philosophical oppositions (all the others against me and possibly my predecessors) therefore lies in the problematic totalization of all other options under one and the same global label--the multitude thus totalized is always secretly 'hegemonized' by one of its particular species; in the same way, the Derridean notion of the 'metaphysics of presence' is secretly hegemonized by Husserl, so that Derrida in effect reads Plato and all the others through Husserl. And it is my contention that the same goes for the critical notion of 'essentialism'. Let us take the case of capitalism itself: against the proponents of the critique of global capitalism, of the 'logic of Capital', Laclau argues that capitalism is an inconsistent composite of heterogeneous features which were combined as the result of a contingent historical constellation, not a homogeneous Totality obeying a common underlying Logic.

My answer to this is the reference to the Hegelian logic of the retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity: of course capitalism emerged from a contingent combination of historical conditions; of course it gave birth to a series of phenomena (political democracy, concern for human rights, etc.) which can be 'resignified', rehegemonized into a non-capitalist context. However, capitalism retroactively 'posited its own presuppositions', and reinscribed its contingent/external circumstances into an all-encompassing logic that can be generated from an elementary conceptual matrix (the 'contradiction' involved in the act of commodity exchange, etc.). In a proper dialectical analysis, the 'necessity' of a totality does not preclude its contingent origins and the heterogeneous nature of its constituents--these are, precisely, its presuppositions which are then posited, retroactively totalized, by the emergence of dialectical totality. Furthermore, I am tempted to claim that Laclau's critique would have been much more appropriate with regard to the very notion of 'radical democracy', to which Laclau and Mouffe regularly refer in the singular: does this notion not actually cover a series of heterogeneous phenomena for which it is problematic to claim that they belong to the same genus: from the feminist, ecological, etc. struggle in developed countries to the Third World resistance to the neoliberal New World Order?

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