Thursday, July 18, 2019
ELEVEN THESES ON…
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/eleven-theses-on/
BY AGON HAMZA AND FRANK RUDA • 4
MONTHS AGO
With this text we want to salute an absolutely arbitrary
event in the life of one of the most important thinkers in today’s world. The
event is his 70th birthday. Almost everyone will immediately recognize the
thinker we want to celebrate, when we — as if this were philosophical Jeopardy —
offer a number of highly subjective descriptions or “theses” of what makes him
and his work worth such a eulogy:
1– He might be one of the very few thinkers in the history
of philosophy, who at points makes it, even for his closest
theoretico-political companions, almost impossible not to feel irritated or
chagrined by some of the positions and claims he defends or (un-)strategic
choices he has made. Depending on one’s temper, these sentiments are produced
quickly or rather late. But one can rest assured that one will come to such a
point.
2– This practical effect of his work is systematically
reflected in his thinking. And this does not simply mean that he is a polemical
figure, a figure of practico-theoretical polemos who simply enjoys
the provocation (even though he sometimes seems to do so). Rather, this feature
of his thought-practice is part and parcel of a refined elaboration of the
concept of negativity and this also means, in more colloquial terms, of
resistance. This is to say that his conceptualizations of negativity often
provoke a negative relation to the conceptualized subject matter as its
necessary ramification.
3– The preceding thesis comes with a further implication.
For, maybe the most difficult aspect of an engagement with his work does not
simply lie in straining to understand it. The problem is not so much how to
make sense of it, but, rather, how one cannot but at points confront one’s own
resistance to the practical consequence(s) and theoretical implications of what
one is reading. This may happen when one is confronted, for example, with
arguments that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler, that in a certain situation
it would be politically more revelatory for Trump to win than for Clinton, that
one has to repeat Lenin, perform an immanent criticism of #MeToo and more of
the like. Such a position demands more than a simple defense and, clearly, more
than a simple rejection. He dares (us) to think not something else, but
otherwise.
4– One way in which working through resistance is reflected
in his own thought is in his claim that great thinkers, like Plato, Descartes
or Hegel, generate an almost endless series of resistances: some resist by
declaring these thinkers to be only speaking nonsense anyhow, some by arguing
that they are totalitarian or dangerous, others again by over-endorsing and
over-identifying with their respective systems, so that resistance can appear
in the form of acceptance, which complicates the picture (think, for example,
of the conservative old Hegelians who after Hegel’s death dogmatically defended
his system).
5– In this sense, the history of philosophy is nothing but
a series of angry or excessively loving footnotes to Plato, Descartes and
Hegel. We believe that the thinker, whose name you have certainly already
guessed, can, in this precise sense, be compared to these (almost) eternal
names of philosophy. One cannot not resist him and one cannot simply resist
him.
6– This obviously raises the stakes. If we want to—and we
most certainly do—remain faithful to the philosophical, political, artistic or
psychoanalytic system of this thinker and to its consequences without endorsing
a blind defense (even though it is sometimes needed) and without an
idiosyncratically resisting rejection (even though it cannot be avoided
sometimes), then the question arises: How to do this?
7– The French philosopher Alain Badiou has once argued that
the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is “our Hegel,” the word “our” referring to the
generation that immediately succeeded Lacan. Different from the real Hegel—whom
Badiou has criticized in a classically Marxist manner—, our own Hegel (i.e.
Lacan) does present us with a new kind of problem. The old Hegelian dialectic,
as Marx points out, has an idealist and a materialist side, and we must
therefore sever the one from the other with great care to be able to put it to
use for a materialist conception of dialectics. Things stand differently with
“our Hegel”. For, strangely, he has been able to internally divide himself into
two all by himself—he did not need a Marx to do so. Trivially put: he has
divided himself into an early and a late Lacan, the latter radically turning
the former (i.e. himself) from his head onto his feet. Lacan, our Hegel,
thereby miraculously has been able to become his own successor, a Hegel who has
become his own Marx. Now, we believe that the thinker in question is, once
again, also “our Hegel”, yet one who strangely brought about a new Hegel that
only became possible because of his way of reading Hegel (especially via Lacan,
the Hegel of a former generation). So, we have before us a case where our Hegel
produces a new and different Hegel. He creates himself as his own predecessor.
Or, as “our Hegel” argues, One divides into one and itself.
8– The capacity to generate a transformation of the past
(Hegel) is what can be taken as a defining feature of a great thinker. After
him, even if you disagree with him on some points, the whole terrain of the debate
is transformed. In this precise case, he is our Hegel, because after him Hegel
(and Lacan), philosophy and psychoanalysis, will have forever been different.
9– The transformation in question has a determining impact
on his rethinking of the foundations of dialectical materialism. Obviously,
this endeavor is, for him, intrinsically linked to Hegel. But, at the same time
and correlatively, Hegel thereby—and surprisingly—becomes the thinker who
allows for a rethinking of the idea of emancipation (communism). Against all
odds, by constituting a new Hegel, our Hegel has enabled a new understanding of
politics by returning from Marx to Hegel, as though “sacrificing” or “letting
go” one of the most important thinkers of communism and turning to the
materialist heritage of idealism. The “letting go” is part of a renewal. And
where else but in Hegel does our Hegel find the conceptual tools to realize
what Marx has desired to achieve? By moving from our Hegel to the Hegel that he
brought into life, the minimal difference between Hegel and (our)Hegel is what
makes possible a new thinking of politics.
10– The thinker in question allows us, therein, to
take a distance, too, from our own bloomy fantasies of emancipation—which,
again, can be quite annoying. He contrasts it to a rather gloomy, or more
realistic, picture of what we should expect from emancipation, liberation or
even communism. Instead of believing in an idealized manner that in a future
society all antagonisms would be resolved, “our Hegel” points to the inherent
negativity even of such a state of society. Even communism will not be a form
of organizing society devoid of jealousy, resentment, and the like. In it, “the
wound of spirit leaves no scar behind,” because the process of healing produces
yet another wound. While it may generate (political) resistance, resignation or
disappointment, this gesture transforms fundamentally our conception of
emancipation.
11– The philosophers had only interpreted the world, in
various ways. Then, there was Slavoj Žižek who has changed our understanding
not only of the world but also of what it means to change or interpret the
world and, thus, of philosophy.
Happy birthday, tovariš!
A GREAT AWAKENING AND ITS DANGERS
BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
On November 7 2017, Judith
Butler helped organize a conference in São Paulo, Brazil. Although the title of
the conference was “The Ends of Democracy,” and thus had nothing to do with the
topic of transgender, a crowd of right-wing protesters gathered outside the
venue where they
burned an effigy of Butler while shouting “Queimem a bruxa!” (Portuguese
for “Burn the witch!”). This weird incident is the last in a long series of
proofs that sexual difference is today politicized in two complementary ways:
the transgender »fluidification« of gender identities and the neoconservative
backlash.
The famous description of the
capitalist dynamics in The Communist Manifesto should be supplemeted
by the fact that global capitalism makes also sexual “one-sidedness and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.” Similarly, in the domain of
sexual practices “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned.” Capitalism thus tends to replace the standard normative
heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable shifting identities and/or
orientations. As I’ve already argued before, today’s celebration of
“minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position,
and even alt-rightists who complain about the terror of liberal Political
Correctness present themselves as protectors of an endangered minority. Or,
take those critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it were still a hegemonic
position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the
first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it
has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
relations.” These words are still ignored by those Leftist cultural theorists
who focus their critique on patriarchal ideology and practice.
So what should we do with
regard to this tension? Shall we limit ourselves to supporting the transgender
fluidification of identities while remaining critical of its limitations? There
is a third way of contesting the traditional form of gender identities
exploding now: women massively coming out about male sexual violence. All the
features of the mediatic coverage of this event should not distract us from
what is really going on: nothing less than an epochal change, a great
awakening, a new chapter in the history of equality. Thousands of years of how
relations between the sexes were regulated and arranged are questioned and
undermined. And the protesting part is now not a LGBT+ minority but a majority:
women. What is coming out is nothing new. It is something we (vaguely, at
least) knew all the time and just were not able (willing, ready…) to address in
the open: hundreds of ways of exploiting women sexually. Women are now bringing
out the dark underside of our official claims of equality and mutual respect,
and what we are discovering is, among other things, how hypocritical and
one-sided our fashionable critique of women’s oppression in Muslim countries
was (and still is). We have to confront our own reality of oppression and
exploitation.
As in every revolutionary
upheaval, there will be numerous “injustices,” ironies, etc. For example, I
doubt that Louis CK’s acts, deplorable and lewd as they are, could be put on
the same level as direct sexual violence. But, again, all this should not
distract us; we should rather focus on the problems that lie ahead. Although
some countries are already approaching a new post-patriarchal sexual culture
(look at Island where two thirds of children are born out of a wedlock and
where women occupy more posts in public power institutions than men), one of
the key tasks is to explore what we are gaining and losing in this upheaval of
our inherited courtship procedures.
First, new rules will have to
be established so that we avoid a sterile culture of fear and uncertainty. Some
intelligent feminists noted long ago that if we try to imagine a wholly
Politically Correct courtship, we get uncannily close to a formal market
contract. The problem is that sexuality, power, and violence are much more
intimately intertwined than we may expect it, so that elements of what is
considered brutality can be sexualized, i.e., libidinally invested. After all,
sadism and masochism are forms of sexual activity. Sexuality purified of
violence and power games can well end up getting desexualized.
The next task is to make sure
that the ongoing explosion would not remain limited to the public life of the
rich-and-famous but would trickle down and penetrate daily lives of the
millions of ordinary “invisible” individuals.
And the last (but not least)
point is to explore how to link this awakening to the ongoing political and
economic struggles, i.e., how to prevent it from being appropriated by Western
liberal ideology (and practice) as yet another way to reassert their priority.
Remember how many of the accused, beginning with Harvey Weinstein, reacted by
publicly proclaiming that they would seek help in therapy – a disgusting
gesture if there ever was one! Their acts were not cases of private pathology;
they were expressions of the predominant masculine ideology and power
structures, and it is the latter that should be changed.
At approximately the same time
as the Harvey Weinstein scandals began to roll, Paradise Papers were published.
And is the basic lesson of their disclosure not the simple fact that the
ultra-rich live in their special zones where they are not bound by common
laws? Micah
White summarizes this lesson in two points:
“First, the people everywhere,
regardless of whether they live in Russia or America, are being oppressed by
the same minuscule social circle of wealthy elites who unduly control our
governments, corporations, universities and culture. /…/ there is a global
plutocracy who employ the same handful of companies to hide their money and
share more in common with each other than with the citizens of their countries.
This sets the stage for a global social movement. / Second, and most
importantly, these leaks indicate that our earth has bifurcated into two
separate and unequal worlds: one inhabited by 200,000 ultra high-net-worth
individuals and the other by the 7 billion left behind.”
We didn’t really learn
anything new here, as we have been vaguely aware of it for a long time. What is
new is not simply that our vague suspicions are now confirmed by precise data,
but a change in what, following Hegel, one should call the public
customs, Sitten, which now seem to tolerate much less corruption. One
should not idealize this new situation: a fight against corruption can be
easily appropriated by conservative anti-liberal forces whose long-standing
motto is “too much democracy brings corruption.” A new space is nonetheless
opened up: demanding of the rich and powerful to obey the laws can be
subversive insofar as the system cannot really afford it, i.e., insofar as
tax havens and other forms of illegal financial activities are a deeply
engrained part of global capitalism.
The first step in this
direction is to wonder why nobody demanded that people stop listening to the
songs of U2 and Bono (the great humanitarian, always ready to help the poor in
Africa) or of Shakira because of the way they avoided paying taxes and thus
cheated public authorities of large sums of money. Or that the British royal
family should get less public money because they parked part of their wealth in
tax oases… Yet, the fact that Luis CK showed his penis to some ladies instantly
ruined his career. Isn’t this a new version of Brecht’s old motto “What is
robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?”? Cheating with big money is
tolerable while showing your penis to a couple of persons makes you an instant
outcast.[i]
One has to make an effort so
that this awakening would not turn into just another case where political
legitimization is based on the subject’s victimhood status. Is the basic
characteristic of today’s subjectivity not the weird combination of the free
subject who experienced itself as ultimately responsible for its fate and the
subject who grounds the authority of its speech on its status of a victim of
circumstances beyond its control? Every contact with another human being is
experienced as a potential threat: if others smoke, if they cast a covetous
glance at me, they already hurt me. This logic of victimization is today universalized,
reaching well beyond the standard cases of sexual or racist harassment. Recall
the growing financial industry of paying damage claims, from the tobacco
industry deal in the USA and the financial claims of the Holocaust victims and
forced laborers in the Nazi Germany up to the idea that the USA should pay
African-Americans hundreds of billions of dollars for all they were deprived of
due to their past slavery. This notion of the subject as an irresponsible
victim involves the extreme Narcissistic perspective from which every encounter
with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject’s precarious
imaginary balance. As such, it is not the opposite, but, rather, the inherent
supplement of the liberal free subject. In today’s predominant form of
individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject
paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of
circumstances.
In a hotel in Skopje where I
recently stayed, my companion inquired if smoking is permitted in our room. The
answer she got from the reception person was unique: “Of course not, it is
prohibited by the law. But you have ashtrays in the room, so this is not a
problem.” This was not the end of our surprises: when we entered the room,
there was effectively a glass ashtray on the table, and on its bottom there was
an image painted, a cigarette over which there was a large circle with a
diagonal line across it designating prohibition. So it was not the usual game
one encounters in tolerant hotels where they whisper to you discreetly that,
though it is officially prohibited, you can do it carefully, standing by an
open window or something like that. The contradiction (between prohibition and
permission) was openly assumed and thereby cancelled, treated as inexistent.
That is, the message was: “It’s prohibited, and here it is how you do it.”
And, back to the ongoing
awakening: the danger is that, in a homologous way, the ideology of personal
freedom would be effortlessly combined with the logic of victimhood, with
freedom silently reduced to the freedom to bring out one’s victimhood. Such a
development would render superfluous a radical emancipatory politicization of
the awakening, making women’s fight one in a series of fights against global
capitalism and ecological threats, for a different democracy, against racism,
and so forth
[i] I
owe this point to Jela Krečič.
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