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Solidarity, justice, and the Third
(Cross-posted at I Cite).
As with Habermas, one might see Zizek's discussion of justice and solidarity as two sides of the same coin. But, rather than reconciled within a communicative universality, Zizek's two sides are those of the law and the revolutionary collective, the impersonal, abstract law that must suspend imagination and focus on principle, on the one side, and the revolutionary violence and hatred in the service of the work of love, that is, in the service of revolutionary justice, on the other. Each side involves an abstraction, a subjective destitution, a resolve to escape the 'vicious cycle of understanding.'
How, then, do we understand solidarity?
Solidarity is the one virtue specific to the political. We don't use solidarity to describe relations between friends, family members, congregants in a church, or soldiers in an army. It is not a relation of consumer to consumed, capital to labor, professor to student. It is not even properly understood as a relation between governors and the governed. Rather, solidarity is a category of the political understood in Schmitt's terms as rooted in the distinction between friend and enemy. The relation between political friends is that of solidarity.
Typically, this political friendship occurs in the form of the party. Thus, the virtue of members of a party is one of solidarity--a solidarity toward not each other as individuals nor to a specific message of platform, but to the party as the form of their political friendship, their alliance or affiliation.
Zizek's discussion of subjective destitution might be helpful here. First, solidarity with the party demands putting aside one's specificity, one's own convictions, one's identity, one's individuality. The problem of Bukharin was that he tried to assert a position beyond the party. Second, if the truth of the political party comes from its relation to that which is excluded under capital, to the remnant or symptomal knot of a social formation, and if adopting or assuming this position of exclusion necessarily requires subjective destitution then, again, solidarity with the truth formalized by the party involves subjective destitution. In his contribution to The Neighbor, Zizek discusses this with respect to Lacan's notion of suppleance as 'how a revolutionary collective functions," that is, such a collective is linked together through objet petit a as it 'renders palpable'--formalizes--the inconsistency of a formation.
In his exchange with Santner and Rheinhard, Zizek criticizes Levinas's subordination of the third to the primary face-to-face ethical relation. Zizek writes:
In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the One. Justice and love are thus structurally incompatible: justice, not love, has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I 'really understand.' What this means is that the Third is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship. the one in shadow, like the absent child of a love-couple. ...
Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it 'embedded' in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper.
How does the relation to the Third that grounds justice link to the relation that the party takes to the symptomal knot? Or is there a difference between this justice and revolutionary justice? One might say that the focus on the Third is precisely the focus of the collective, the principle of the party and the guiding truth that the party attempts to realize in law. The solidary relation is the gaze of the party toward the third, its awareness and attempt to focus on this background, to break through the attachment and ties to the present formation and present set of convictions, fantasies, identities.
To this extent, the freedom of the party, its ability to act freely, would be necessary for justice and thus there would be no difference between justice and revolutionary justice.Solidarity, then, would be the other side of justice.
Zizek writes that violence as such liberates, that it draws a line
of separation, that it establishes a difference, discards. One might
say that this freedom is necessary for the cut of universality proper.
And
then I wonder: is it possible to cut through the friend/enemy
distinction such that we have not friend and not not friend? And, would
this then be the Third? Such a reading breaks through fetishistic
reductions of the other to the one like me, to my neighbor, and to one
that I should love. And, it adds the third category of indifference to
the duality of love-hate, allowing for the love that emerges not in
contrast to hate but out of a larger indifference to all others.
Solidarity, then, would involve hatred toward one's enemies, love for
one's comrades, and indifference toward those Thirds as objet a.
If this is right, then, the suppleance is a fundamental relation to objet a and suggests the possibility of a community not rooted in enjoyment, which may well be the proper notion of solidarity.
By Jodi | February 6, 2006 in Zizek | Permalink
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» Agamben and Derrida on language and the political from Before the Law
Clark at Mormon Metaphysics has a post on Being in Heidegger and Pierce that triggered a thought on something that's interested me for a while, the different relationships of language to the political posited by Derrida on one hand and [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 7, 2006 8:31:38 PM
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Tracked on Feb 8, 2006 9:09:57 PM
» is solidarity? from What in the hell ...
Jodi wrote a piece posted at hers and at Long Sunday on Zizek and the concept of solidarity. In it she poses the idea that the paradigmatic relation between political friends is that of solidarity.
I like the idea of solidarity as the... [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 9, 2006 2:14:47 AM
Comments
Now that's an interesting thought, not that anyone needs me to validate their interesting thoughts, namely, "solidarity is a uniquely political virtue." Notice the contrast with Schmitt! For him, 'the enemy' is the essential category of the political. The 'other.' The "that-which-is-to-be-killed-in-the-name-of-the nation/people-as-a-way-of-affirming-our-own-existence" entity.
Yes, solidarity as a 'concept' in politics. Gramsci also after this idea; Lenin too. What else is 'hegemony' but a reverse caricature of solidarity? Very interesting train of thought possible here.
Alright so if we are scientific, phenomenological about the political phenomenon 'solidarity,' what do we see? The methodology of phenomenology is: How does the thing itself work? Suspending "prejudice" here means approaching the workings of a historical artifact innocently, without relying on a lot of 'signs' to tell one what such-and-such means. There's something anti-symbolic about the method of phenomenology, no? That, for me, describes the work-ethic of someone like Foucault. On the one hand, who can deny that Foucault approached the practice of mental health disciplines of the 50s and 60s with a certain 'prejudice' in mind? On the other, what other incidences of suppositionless critique do we have besides the kinds Foucault provided? Foucault joked once that he was a "happy positivist." One of the things that this meant was that the objects of his critique -- 19th century 'sexuality' discourses and contemporary treatments of homosexuality combined -- were really made to cringe and respond. As Foucault points out in another place, it's really interesting how many of these power/knowledge centers cannot stand to hear their own history recounted to them. It reveals too much. It demystifies too much. They can't take it: they need their myth.
I think that you, Jodi, or perhaps Zizek, or someone, or both of you, is on to something interesting concerning the uniqueness of the political via the concept 'solidarity.' -- John
Posted by: John S. Ransom | Feb 6, 2006 5:46:11 PM
Thanks, John! I'll take credit for the essentializing claim about solidarity a uniquely political virtue. I like very much the way you introduce hegemony--that seems quite productive. I had thought about returning to Lenin on this; like the idea of returning to Gramsci, too.
I'm not sure what to make of the introduction of phenomenology and so surprised and intrigued by your move to Foucault as phenomenologist.
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 6, 2006 7:41:26 PM
"What else is 'hegemony' but a reverse caricature of solidarity?"
Indeed, which is one reason why I have equal problems with the concept of solidarity as with the concept of hegemony. As it happens, I'm thinking of writing up something about this later this evening.
Meanwhile, Alberto Moreiras has posed the issue, also drawing on Schmitt, in terms of the relation with the non-friend, who is neither friend nor enemy.
Posted by: Jon | Feb 6, 2006 8:47:44 PM
Glad you're provoking along these lines, Jodi. (If there is a Levinas to be recovered, it will almost certainly have to be through Derrida and Blanchot, IMHO). Only wondering, which is the Zizek article that you cite?
Jon, do you have a link by any chance? I mean in addition to this...
Posted by: Matt | Feb 6, 2006 9:36:07 PM
Matt, well, there's "The Stain in their Eye".
A quotation: "Too expeditiously, cultural studies understood politics philocentrically, à la Carl Schmitt, presupposing that, if everything in politics is a matter of the rapport or of the relation of forces between friends and enemies, it would be enough to pile materiel on the side of the friend, to endow the friend with words, in order to change the relation of forces quantitatively, calculatively. But cultural studies failed to understand that Schmittian politics find their tendential finality in the absolute elimination of the difference between friend and enemy, in the absolute conversion of the field of the political into a field of friendship, which is precisely the moment of the full constitution of humanity into the liberal subject of humanity. Schmittian philopolemology is always a politics of friendship based upon a tendential saturation of the field of the political postulated upon the exclusion and the thorough evacuation of the stranger, of the foreigner, of the non-friend."
Posted by: Jon | Feb 6, 2006 9:55:25 PM
See, this is exactly the sort of shit that bugs me to hell and back about Zizek; he's misreading horribly, perhaps on purpose, a habit far too common with him over the last decade. Levinas explicitly deals with the problem of the third party, what Zizek calls the third, or what Derrida calls the other Other. It's the difference between ethics and justice in Levinas' thinking, and there is no programmatic opposition between the two; indeed, the very fact that one cannot fulfill one's obligation to the face (which is a phenomenological interruption that marks the preeminence of ethics over ontology, and not the "kernel" or core of some Levinasian ethics, much less a conceit by which the other other or third becomes "secondary" for Levinas; it is not necessarily a Real face but rather the Phenomenon of the face, it's innate announcement of alterity, that matters) or to those others others of which one is unaware is precisely the condition of ethicality itself - one must always be(have) ethically and yet one can never be ethical, at least not in any ontological sense.
The only way one can read Levinas as Zizek does is if one stops after Totality and Infinity and never continues on to read Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, which repudiates explicitly some of the remnants of ontological thinking found in the previous work. Hence the distinction between the saying and the said in OTB, a difference that Levinas maps onto his previous use of the face in order to ensure that no one understands the face as simply a physical co-presence or ontological given. For Levinas, once one goes "otherwise than being," and understands that the other simply cannot be understood by the dint of the corporeal other, one turns - oh the shock of it - to language. And in language one finds that the very possibility of saying the other necessarily implies the equal problematic of all the other others that language addresses (the saying) outside of the context and manifesation of a particular address (the said). And so, by the time we get to the end of OTB (pp. 158-162), with his discussion of justice in full swing, Levinas will make clear that:
The others that obsess me in the other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature, indivudations of the human race, or chips off the old block... The others concern me from the first. Here fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others.
Now of course, this doesn't respond on point to Zizek since Zizek is doing a sort of bait and switch strategy, maligning Levinas in effect for why it is his conception of ethics cannot ground an ethical politics. Well not surprisingly, Levinas wasn't entirely stupid on this point, and actually addresses it in a number of contexts. Here's an easy and succinct statement of how his thinking would relate to politics (from Entre Nous):
There is a certain measure of violence necessary in terms of justice; but if one speaks of justice, it is necessary to allow judges, it is necessary to allow institutions and the state; to live in a world of citizens, and not only in the order of the Face to Face. But, on the other hand, it is in terms of the relation to the Face or of me before the other that we can speak of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the state. A state in which the interpersonal relationship is impossible, in which it is directed in advance by the determinism proper to the state, is a totalitarian state. So there is a limit to the state... The other concerns you even when a third does him harm, and consequently you are there before the necessity of justice and a certain violence. The third party isn't there by accident. In a certain sense, all the others are present in the face of the other.
I don't want to without charity here, because I think Zizek is a smart fellow. And I haven't read the new Zizek neighbor essay, but I did read Puppet and the Dwarf, which makes very similar unsupportable claims about the problems and impenetrability of the Levinasian Other (all without citing Levinas), but I trust Jodi's rendering of it. So while I'm open to a more robust defense/articulation by or on behalf of Z, reading the above blockquoted argument just pisses me off.
And what is really so damn annoying about Zizek's argument here (the one about the secondary third) is that Zizek doesn't need to do it. If one wants to argue that Levinas gives up the ghost on universality, well then by Gods, it's easy enough to do. Levinas might note that universality is made possible by the ethical relation, since there would be no ability to extract and produce a universal without the constitution of the subject via its relation to the other(s) and the debt that it entails, and that the abstraction of Zizek's universal voids the potential for the face-as-interruption and that, as such, the universal isn't a liberation from the other but rather the relegation of the other's (and the other others') specific conditions, and their subsequent sublimation to reason/metaphysics. In other words, Zizek's universal simply reasserts the primacy of the ontological by wishing away any of Levinas' arguments about why ethics precedes and determines ontological possibility. Now one can disagree with Levinas here, and obviously Zizek does, but to pretend as if Levinas hasn't addressed the importance of the third, or has relegated it to secondary status and to present the above as if "and therefore, we must focus on the universal as the only hope of ethics" is, to my mind, evidence of either sloppy critique (in that he can't or won't read) or malicious/predatory critique (in that he relies on his readers to not read the texts he engages).
That being said, I love the idea of solidarity as an essentially political category, and do not think it needs any support from big Z.
And Jon, I know this is a big request, but is it possible you might outline the objections that cause you to reject/oppose hegemony/solidarity? Or point me to a particular post that explicates them? I've been reading Posthegemony for some time, and while I'm sure some of it is due to my blinders, I'm just not sure I understand a) what hegemony you're talking about (as Laclau and Mouffe notes back in 85, it's not like hegemony is a uniform concept), and b) what its faults are. I have been wanting to respond to the question of posthegemony over at Ghost for some time, but having looked around, I'm still not sure I understand your position.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Feb 7, 2006 7:19:51 AM
Kenneth, this sort of thing about Zizek is just starting to piss you off? Still, maybe it's better to bite one's tongue; he is a provoking and useful polemicist, and smart fellow. It's tempting to say the bloggers making use of Zizek are often better than the man himself. OF course, in 30 years time it will become necessary to defend Zizek against those who would attack only the Blogospheric Zizekians who have, invariably, failed to read him carefully enough--or maybe sooner--but we're not quite there yet. Or rather, that sort of stuff's been going on forever, only it's learning how to gain more credence and dominate the public discourse even more, this time around.
I do think the notion of solidarity (as a concept stronger perhaps than "affinity" or rapport?) demands further articulation, at the end of the day, and as radically separate from any paradigmatic notion perhaps of the party form, and from Zizek's reading (but is it his?) of the Act, or admiration for a certain 'Lenin' etc. which is why I like the end of Jodi's post, which seems to remain open in this direction...but then I would, wouldn't I?
Posted by: Matt | Feb 7, 2006 10:49:28 AM
Well it appears I don't know how to format this, so try to imagine italix at all the right places. Here's hoping that I understood what was going on in this extremely interesting post.
"What this means is that the Third is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship...
And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background." (Emphasis mine)
Zizek is here asserting two things, as I read it.
1. The Third is always already present.
2. The focus on the Third requires a moment of abstraction.
My issue is this: It does not seem at all clear to me how the Third can possess at once the radical presence implied by the always already and yet also require a moment of abstraction, of conscious re-focusing to become the object of care that calls forth justice.
Let me try to work through this.
The important point here, both for Zizek and for any discussion of solidarity- is the moment of abstraction, of the moving from the face-to-face relation to any relation proper to the Third. It would seem much must take place within the face-to-face relationship to prepare the ground for abstraction, for politics. Is it not the case, then, that Zizek projects into the face-to-face relationship a would-be subject, a subject capable of abstracting in such way as to arrive at the consideration of the third? Is he not more right than he knows when he says the Third is not secondary? Indeed it is not, it is rather third, what is secondary is the establishing of the subject as subject in the return of the Other’s gaze. The face-to-face relation founds the subject, and as such is radically prior to any moment of abstraction, prior to any thinking of the third, any thinking of justice. Levinas is asking the abstracting subject to remember his indebtedness to the Other, insofar as the experience of the Other is essential to the subject coming of any self-consciousness, be it liberal consistency, existential throwness, or whatever.
In this reading, Zizek is thus attempting yet another metaphysical end-run on Levinas, seeking to install an abstract justice, and a similarly abstract Third in the place where there is only the face-to-face, only the pre-abstract. In my view this misses Levinas’ point entirely – namely that in any abstracting we have already departed from the face-to-face relationship, into the thinking of the Third. That this abstraction is, in some sense, called into being by the asymmetry of the primordial relationship (to the Other) does not allow us the forgetting of this relationship’s initial priority.
What I wish to make clear is that I am here agreeing with what Zizek says regarding the foundation of justice – I am simply troubling the ease with which he seeks to dispatch with the business that allows such a foundation; the preconditions of abstraction qua abstraction. It is not that justice is simply the denial of the Other in front of me in favor of a focus on the Third(s)- who escape my vision but not my thinking- justice is rather the rehearsal of the relationship with the Other at the level of abstraction. That this produces a partial justice, universal in pretension only, is an essential remainder, a tingling in the hands and feet of any so-called revolutionary party. (Perhaps we can see a place for Derrida’s justice-as-deconstruction thesis opening up somewhere in here.)
What of solidarity in this mess? A great deal, as I see it.
Let us proceed not by asking, is solidarity the only properly political virtue, but rather by asserting it: Let ‘solidarity’ be the name we give to all virtues that take political place, all virtues that depend on the abstraction towards the Third for their meaning and relevance. Let solidarity be virtue pursued in the name of the Third… Solidarity as the ethical supplement to the movement towards abstraction.
I hope here then to gesture at what is perhaps a stronger formulation for the fate of the Third then simply ‘not not friend.’ The Third is the Other post-abstraction, literally, a stand-in for the Other in the rehearsed, conceptual space of politics taking place. The Third (ideally) prevents our forgetting in terms of our ethical primordiality – thus allowing for a productive engagement with the abstract. The Third is to the moral as the Other is to the ethical, and solidarity is the what happens when keep the (T)wo in mind.
Posted by: squibb | Feb 7, 2006 11:46:45 AM
Jodi, a very provocative post. I have a naive question: Is indifference to the Third an element of a (future) community not rooted in enjoyment? And by extension, is it part of the proper notion of solidarity? I apologize if the answers are obvious, but it seems that it is extremely difficult to think of solidarity without a notion of exclusion.
Thanks.
Posted by: Alain | Feb 7, 2006 12:46:42 PM
Alain, thanks for your questions. I would say yes (at this point). In part I say yes because my early work on solidarity tried to think the concept without any exclusion at all (so, I turned the us/them opposition of Schmitt into a you-me opposition within a we, second-person plural). I now think that this is mistaken and that one can have the possibility of a solidarity understood universalistically when one draws from the Lacanian/Zizekian rendering of feminine structure, non-All. And, this is what introduces the idea of indifference as an advantage over love and hate which oscillate between/presuppose each other.
Also, indifference, it seems to me, escapes from the traps of the imaginary and the Symbolic other to allow for the other as Real. Why? Because rather than tolerating or loving the other in their otherness (there weird sexual practices, strange clothes, different food) we are simply indifferent to all this. I think this follows as well from St. Paul's 'in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew."
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 7, 2006 1:05:20 PM
Squibb--could you clarify the following:
You write that it would "seem much must take place within the face-to-face relationship to prepare the ground for abstraction."
I don't know what to make of this, perhaps because I don't read Zizek as emphasizing cognitive capacities and this is what your comment suggests to me. It seems to me that for Zizek the face to face relationship is already an abstraction, a fetish, a fantasy, one premised on abstracting, say, from the Real of the other person, one, and on the fact that subject and other are both characterized by lack, two. Given this, it doesn't seem to follow that the face-to-face relation prepares the ground for abstraction.
Kenneth--thanks for the Levinas material. I won't defend or attack Zizek on this point--I don't know enough about Levinas to do so. And, I think you may be right that the concept of solidarity doesn't need any help from Z; yet, I turned to Z in the effort to think a notion of solidarity that wouldn't rest on enjoyment.
Jon: I don't find the passage you quoted convincing at all. First, cultural studies (at least British and American) rejected a narrow and essentialist reading of the political in favor of a much more open, pluralistic account of politics that includes all sorts of micropolitical practices. Second, I disagree with the claim that Schmitt's view ends up eliminating the enemy; Schmitt would say that this end would be the end of politics; and, this is his critique of liberal democracy.
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 7, 2006 1:22:11 PM
I'm with Jodi, btw, regarding that quote. I have never understood Schmitt to be advocating the dissolution of the enemy as the goal of politics, nor have I (prior to this) encountered anyone who has read Schmitt this way. Perhaps you can tell us if the book has a more sustained and textual argument for this reading?
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Feb 7, 2006 1:43:43 PM
Speaking of solidarity.
Posted by: Craig | Feb 7, 2006 2:03:08 PM
The Third (ideally) prevents our forgetting in terms of our ethical primordiality – thus allowing for a productive engagement with the abstract.
Think I see where you may be coming from, Squibb, though not sure what is meant by "ethical primordiality?" I also wonder, still, about this phrase, "prevents our forgetting." As in, is there any memory that isn't itself the function of at least some forgetting? So, mightn't forgetting be understood not only in a negative manner? (Welcome, by the way. HTML-wise, either "em" or "i" tags may be used to italicize in commments.)
For whatever it's worth, from my skimming of the entire article Jon links above, there does seem to be a rather Derridian argument/specific re-appropriation of Schmitt being made therein..
Posted by: Matt | Feb 7, 2006 2:20:03 PM
Preferably em tags, as i tags have been deprecated. :)
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Feb 7, 2006 2:34:02 PM
My favorite line from the link above regarding solidarity is "the only love left in this country that dare not speak its name."
Posted by: Alain | Feb 7, 2006 2:38:56 PM
"For whatever it's worth, from my skimming of the entire article Jon links above, there does seem to be a rather Derridian argument/specific re-appropriation of Schmitt being made therein."
Indeed. And Jodi, Ken, you might want to look at the longer essay to which I linked if you want to get more of a sense of Alberto's argument.
My point was merely to indicate someone else who also sought to break out of the friend/enemy distinction, in this case with the category of "non-friend." (There's much more, not only in The Exhaustion of Difference but, on the "Third," in Tercer espacio.)
Moreiras frames the "non-friend" in terms of the subaltern. And I agree with his assessment of cultural studies in so far as it hopes to establish a relation of solidarity with the subaltern. A hope that is bound to be dashed, as the characteristic expression of subaltern agency is always treason, betrayal.
Ken, on posthegemony, I'll be writing up something more programmatic before long.
In the meantime, this is my (far too) brief reflection on solidarity, via Arguedas.
Posted by: Jon | Feb 7, 2006 4:38:41 PM
Jodi, ended up commenting on this a bit at a post on Before the Law --
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Feb 8, 2006 2:24:17 AM
Jodi – By way of clarification: I think a lot of where one ends up on this issue of abstraction has everything to do with siding either with Zizek or with Levinas. Kenneth makes the point I was trying to get at much more effectively than I do when he writes:
“Levinas might note that universality is made possible by the ethical relation, since there would be no ability to extract and produce a universal without the constitution of the subject via its relation to the other(s) and the debt that it entails, and that the abstraction of Zizek's universal voids the potential for the face-as-interruption and that, as such, the universal isn't a liberation from the other but rather the relegation of the other's (and the other others') specific conditions, and their subsequent sublimation to reason/metaphysics.”
I might further add that Zizek seems overly willing to simply rehash Derrida’s (justly) famous criticisms in “Violence and Metaphysics,” where he says, roughly, that Levinas is content to do philosophy as metaphor without thinking the metaphor as such. However this ignores the fact that much of Otherwise than being… is written as an attempt to get beyond this criticism – again, Kenneth makes a similar point, with more clarity, above.
Matt-
First, the finding ourselves here again, amidst theory and technology - many happy returns.
Second, I agree with you about Zizek, perhaps it is too easy to be too hard on him, after all, he is certainly preferable, in the ranks of overly-prolific impresarios, to, say, Simon Critchley.
And finally, with regards “ethical primordiality:” the phrase is an intentionally awkward offspring of a performed, lexical coupling of Levinas and Heidegger; an attempt to hint at my less-than-total approval of Levinas’ famous description, all the while defending it against Zizek. And I think your comment about the aletheia-ic nature of forgetting highlights some of what I was, crudely, attempting to gesture at, namely that lurking mystic metaphysic that seeks to locate itself beyond reach… in analytic terms, we might say it is the ultimate in trapdoors, even surpassing, perhaps, the most absurd of the Marxisms.
Posted by: squibb | Feb 8, 2006 12:20:44 PM
Oh, but this is going to be fun. More on lurking mystic metaphysics later, but what's your beef with Critchley (careful, he may be listening..) In any case, thanks for following that up.
Posted by: Matt | Feb 8, 2006 4:32:43 PM
And some more circling around the issue now here.
Posted by: Jon | Feb 8, 2006 9:14:49 PM
Enjoyed the post and my skim of the comments. Just one question, and one that could be expected from me:
Why should we think of justice as 'the impersonal, abstract law that must suspend imagination and focus on principle'? Especially when the most just forms of law are personal, even if formally abstract and principled, precisely insofar as they creatively imagine ways of meeting the demands of abstraction and principle in ways that are liberating for those who are impoverished.
I'm thinking, for instance, of a judge in a Brecht play I saw once and now can't remember the name of for the life of me.
Posted by: old | Feb 8, 2006 9:58:25 PM
Old--I like they way that you put it, your coupling of abstraction and creative response. I agree that this works well--especially insofar as the most creative response will work in terms of the abstract law; which tells us that one does not need personalized, identity based, specific law, or policies determined by very specific needs; rather, the abstract law, creatively applied, works just fine. (This, by the way, is how I understand Zizek's use of Judaism and his claim that Christianity requires Jewish law.)
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 8, 2006 11:31:44 PM
Could you tell me where Z. uses Jewish law? I remember the claim about Christianity requiring Jewish law from Puppet and the Dwarf, but the point wasn't dwelt upon long enough for me to understand what he was after (perhaps if I'd read more of Zizek at that point ...).
Posted by: old | Feb 8, 2006 11:47:08 PM
Also, my post for the week at the weblog (now up) deals with collectives and the party a bit, with a brief wave as well at the question of violence.
Posted by: old | Feb 8, 2006 11:59:23 PM
hi Jodi,
Where is the Zizek piece you're referencing here? Thanks!
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Feb 9, 2006 2:00:51 AM
Nate--the Zizek piece referenced here is "Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence" in the book The Neighbor, by Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, U Chicago Press, 2005
Old--there are a number of places where Z talks about jewish law, including this piece; others include Puppet and Dwarf, On Belief, chps 14-15 in Fragile Absolute.
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 9, 2006 8:22:45 AM
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