Long Sunday

We the vulgar

In this post, Alain linked to the neoconservatism issue of Logos, and I perused much of it. There were two articles about Leo Strauss and his connections to the neoconservative movement, the first of which, “Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror” by Nicholas Xenos, raises some interesting questions about what the neocons mean by the words they use. As Alain and some of the commentors cautioned, we don't want to fall for some sort of idealism here and imagine that the ideas of Strauss and of his students are really what's driving the “war on terror”; of course, if there weren't money and power in it for the monied and the powerful, these intellectuals would not be allowed to drive policy in this way. But Strauss provides an ideological framework and a language, as Xenos explains, and surely tells us what the neocons think they're doing (I wouldn't be surprised if those intellectuals imagined that they were in fact piloting the ship of state rather than some vulgarian CEOs). Based on Xenos's summaries of Strauss, the ideological framework is neither impressive nor interesting: it's The Republic all over again and, you know, I really didn't care for that one the first time around.

However, this leads me to the interesting question: what the hell do these people (Kristol, Kagan, Krauthammer, Wolfowitz, Frum, Perle, Abrams, Barnes, Nafisi et al.) think they're doing?

"We created this whole concept of a testicle lockbox in connection with Mrs. Clinton

Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh reminded his August 25 listeners that "we created this whole concept of a testicle lockbox in connection with Mrs. [Sen. Hillary Rodham] Clinton [D-NY]." Limbaugh added, "I mean, she has that kind of appeal to people." Limbaugh has repeatedly used the phrase "testicle lockbox" in discussing Clinton.

From the August 25 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: But a lot of Democrats are worried that, you know, she doesn't have what it takes. She doesn't connect on TV. We talked about this. She doesn't come across as friendly. She doesn't -- she, you know, she's like -- my favorite name for her is Nurse Ratched. I mean, we created this whole concept of a testicle lockbox in connection with Mrs. Clinton. I mean, she has that kind of appeal to people. She's -- you fill in the blanks here.

Benevolent Global Hegemony

Much has been made of the influence of the neoconservatives over the last several years. Many books have been written, much notoriety bestowed. What fascinates me is the consistent theme among all of them of the importance of ideas - specifically that ideas are important not only for politics but for transforming the world. This is even consistent with the now imfamous "Reality Based Community" comment from last fall's Presidential election. I have recently discovered an issue of the online journal Logos dedicated to the neoconservatives. In one of the essays, Gary Dorrien lays out a recent ideological history of the movement and focuses on William Kristol (son of Irving Kristol, the so called god father of neoconservatism). William Kristol is one of those smug talking heads that appears on Fox every Sunday, is the editor of the Rupert Murdoch financed Weekly Standard, and has a Phd in Political Science from Harvard. In addittion to being one of the most condescending and pedantic human beings alive, he seems to have had a significant influence on American foreign policy.

A Note on the World Picture

In contrast to the modern age of the world picture, Heidegger invokes the world of the Greeks:

“Man is the one who is looked upon by that which is; he is the one who is – in company with itself – gathered toward presencing, by that which opens itself. to be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be born along by it, to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord – that is the essence of man in the age of the Greeks.”

‘to be driven about..” Note how man is here the object of something which encompasses and precedes him. As such, he must attune himself to, respond to that prior world and the demands it makes. For the Greeks, says Heidegger, the world is an extended or continuous question addressed to man. Man is defined by this answerability to this address; he is beholden to that which beholds him. The presence of the non-human works to distribute across humanity a kind of ontological humility.

All this (irrespective of whether it accurately ‘depicts’ the Greeks) is significant as the exact reverse of modern man. We look at, direct and interrogate the world – an interrogation always for human ends. We do not apprehend the world we represent or enframe it. We render it as a picture.

The idea is that to render something as a ‘picture’ is to render it manipulable. The proverbial Lacanian mirror image: the self has slipped inside a frame and become, thereby, an object of control. To say picture is to imply frame. The picture is framed by and for us. And the frame sunders us from the world, is an immediate exemption certificate.

It’s here I’d like to pause again. I wonder if the notion of the modern world picture, and its contrast to that other sense of being ‘beheld’ by the world, can productively be brought into proximity with some of what Lacan says about picturing and about the ‘gaze’ as embedded in the world outside us. For Lacan too speaks of being seen by things, by ‘points’ outside us in the world, but this within a rather different set of concerns and problems from Heidegger. So there may be no overlap here. These two ‘genres’ of thinking may be simply on different planes. Any comments welcome.

Spectacles for the Gods

Heidegger’s essay on the Age of the World Picture remarks on the distinction between a time when man was a spectacle for the gods, the object of a perception which was itself beyond conception, and a modernity wherein man is fundamentally the perceiver of a world that offers itself to him as or is posited as a picture. Benjamin, in his Artwork essay, also alludes to man’s former status as an object or show for the gods. Fascism, he famously remarks turns humanity into a spectacle for itself. At the same time, the gigantism of this spectacle – the rallies, the giant screens, the massive advertisements careering towards the random city dweller from the sides of buildings, magnifies man to God-like proportions. The modern citizen is miniaturised before the Olympian powers of industrial society but also watches them, agog, and lives vicariously though them.

The older sense, of an inhuman presence watching humanity means that there is a dimension of existence which is incalculable, unknown, beyond your ownership or objectification. The subjective stance corresponding to this doctrine is, therefore, a kind of humility and receptivity to an Otherness which has preceded us both temporally and ontologically and which we can, so to speak, never get round the back of. If we are all, equally, objects for an inconceivable Other, we are less likely to become objects to onanother, so it goes. According to some, the place of non-human Other is supposed to be a kind of guarantee of humaneness.

A Crack in the Picture

While I was trying to write a post on the idea of ‘being looked at,’ I came across Nabokov’s lecture on Kafka’s metamorphosis. The relevant point here was the use of the ‘picture’ metaphor. N. is talking about Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde:

The fantastic side of the setting—Utterson, Enfield, Poole, Lanyon, and their London—is not of the same quality as the fantastic side of Jekyll's hydization. There is a crack in the picture, a lack of unity.

So ‘picture’ here, as we might expect, stands for compositional unity, coherence, unitary perspective. It denotes a world that slots together according to certain rules. In literary terms, then, it means genre. Jekyll, says N., is a ‘A Gothic character in a Dickensian setting’. Two different genre-rules co-exist in the same story. What this does, presumably, is to prevent us inhabiting either of these genres, for each rubs up against the other and in so doing ‘shows’ itself. Each genre is thrown into relief against the other and therefore ‘denaturalised’. As a reader, we ‘don’t know where we are’. The element of willed deception (‘yes, I agree to inhabit this generic world’), of imaginary security, is foreclosed.

Ignore, for the time being, whether this is a satisfactory comment on Dr.J&Mr.H. The reason it attracted my attention, in composing my Lacan related post (which may nor may not see the light of day), was this notion of the ‘crack in the picture’ as a place where different compositional or ‘generic’ fields rub up against one another and cancel one another out. Each is put ‘out of joint’, and so, simultaneously, is the spectator.

And this little example, it seemed to me, might be a useful analogy in talking about the ‘gaze' in Lacan. For when N. talks about the ‘crack in the picture’, it is in that such cracks or folds that Lacan locates what he calls the gaze, at least as I understand it. This is where the gaze nestles. And the gaze is what puts the spectator’s world ‘out of joint’.

The ‘picture’ conceived as a compositional unity, presumably reaffirms the pov for which the picture is composed. The crack or fold, in disturbing that unity, at once renders that pov incomplete and implies, albeit negatively, another place of seeing, however empty or hypothetical. That’s all I have to say for the moment. In fact, I am saying practically nothing, merely soliciting comments. Consider this post a prelude to some other thing.

Humanism finale

Humanism [Part 3 of 3]. Might as well get this over with - not sure the tone of the piece is very successful, but, er, oh well.

Sartre

In a way Sartre is ‘old-fashioned’ with regard to the question of the human/inhuman. As previously noted, in many respects the current debate concerning the human has mutated from a primarily Marxist question regarding the alienation of man from nature, labour, and his species-being, and moved towards a concern with the biological and biopolitical. Thus we have Habermas’s recent work on ‘liberal eugenics’, Foucault and followers on governmentality (or, how to conduct the conduct of others), Agamben’s work on the camps and the Musulmann.

Humanism encore

Humanism [Part 2 of 3]

Agamben

In a chapter entitled Mysterium disiunctionis in The Open, Agamben posits that ‘[f]or anyone taking a genealogical study of the concept of “life” in our culture, one of the first and most instructive observations to be made is that the concept never gets defined as such’. We should avoid the immediate conceptual conflation of ‘man’ and ‘life’, but, nevertheless, Agamben’s conception of ‘bare life’ will owe a lot to his complex analyses of the way in which ‘life’ and ‘man’ traverse and intersect in the modern ‘machines’ of humanism and inhumanism. Agamben’s extension and critique of Foucault’s work on biopolitics attempts to introduce an Aristotelian dimension to the genealogical analyses of Foucault: namely, to begin with an entirely polysemic and philosophical (and thus not strictly biological) notion of ‘life’:

An Anti-Zionist Zionist?

Perhaps the most gifted of Heidegger’s students, Hannah Arendt is best known as one of the most influential political theorists of the 20^th century.  What is perhaps not so well known was her early involvement in the Zionist movement during the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Though she helped children escape to Palestine, she herself had little interest in settling there.  When she fled Germany in 1933, her destination was Paris, not Jerusalem.  When she arrived in Paris, she posed the question to herself: “What can I specifically do as a Jew?”  Her answer was to get involved in politically “Jewish work.” 

Humanism

Response to Mark Kaplan’s Sartre Questions, part 1 of 3 [Mark's original question follows my response, the second and third parts of which - on Agamben and Sartre/Heidegger/Marx - will be posted in a day or so]

'The Humanist Controversy' + Reflections on Balibar

‘The human/inhuman distinction seems to be merely twin perspectives on a single entity’ – Mark Kaplan

The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human – and, thus, his being always less and more than himself – Giorgio Agamben, ‘Without Rank’, The Open: Man and Animal.

Nihil humani a me alienum puto - Marx's favourite maxim

Is the question of ‘humanism’ badly posed? Current philosophical literature on humanism and antihumanism, not to mention constant casual and vague use of terms such as ‘human rights’, anthropocentrism, ‘humanitarianism’, entails confusion about the status of the ‘human’ relative to other disciplines. How does humanism relate to science, for example? Is science just what ‘humans’ do, or do its results continually demonstrate how unimportant humanity is at the cosmic level? What is its status vis-à-vis politics? Can we still speak of progressive emancipation in politics, or does this imply an illegitimate quasi-religious belief in some kind of anthropocentric historical destiny? What is humanism’s relation to religion? Does humanism possess the formal characteristics of a ‘new religion’, or is it still – as it once thought it was - the most powerful critique of religion? Even engaging in a rough separation of contemporary humanisms and antihumanisms is no easy task. We can perhaps point to three broad moments of contemporary humanism: