Simon Critchley: Letting the State Be?

Also cross posted at The Yolk.

Although I am late to the debate, I would like to post a few notes while reading Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding today.

The best chapter of the book is chapter 4, "Anarchic Metapolitics." The title of the chapter is clearly a reference to Alain Badiou's recently translated book Metapolitics. His reliance on Badiou is timely. As many of you know at LS better than I, Badiou has made a splash in recent theoretical discussions because of his opposition to "every consensual vision of politics." He would rather focus on revolutionary and militant political prescriptions and decision-making in political movements. Badiou writes in Metapolitics:

The essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists. Of course, this exercise or the test of this presciption and the statmement it commands - all of which is authorized by a faded event - go by way of debates. But not exclusively. More important still are the declarations, interventions, and organizations.

For Badiou, politics is more than debate and consensus formation; it is, significantly, about the construction of successful forms of politics that bring about a "rupture with what exists." Because of his sheer brilliance and clarity as a thinker, Badiou's work has been widely welcomed by English audiences at a time when such pronunciations have been disturbingly absent.

But Critchley, it seems, would like to make a few modifications to Badiou's program; namely he intends to "weld together ethics and politics," while still building upon a metapolitical framework. He does a good job of developing his argument: the book, which essentially functions as an accessible little political pamphlet, is easy to follow, and is not written in an overly technical way.

In chapter 4, he goes to work to connect his earlier discussions of political and ethical subjectivity, or self production, to the classical and the distinctly modern problem of the connection between politics and state. As Jodi pointed out in her post, Critchley posits a separation between political action and the state, including a depoliticization of struggles for power occurring within the state. According to Critchley, Leftist politics should operate outside or somehow beyond the reach of state power.

The distance he takes from the state has specific implications for the argument that follows. He tends to remain at the individual and the subjective levels of analysis, although his concern with the oppositional "name" come universal attempts to subvert this problem (91). But these sections rely very heavily on Laclau and Mouffe, which makes me want to read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and not Infinitely Demanding.

Yet, to state my concern with increased clarity, it still isn't clear to me how Critchley defines the state in the book. In a particularly productive section he argues that:

The state - whether national like Britain or France, a supernational quasi-state like the EU, or imperial like the USA - is the framework within which conventional politics takes place. Now, it is arguable that the state is a limitation on human existence and we would be better off without it [...] However - to put it at its most understated - it seems to me that we cannot hope, at this point in history, to attain a complete withering of the state, either through concerted anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-communist action or through revolutionary proletarian praxis with the agency of the party. Within classical Marxism, state, revolution and class form a coherent set: there is a revolutionary class, the universal or classless class of the proletariat whose communist politics entails the overthrow of the bourgeois state. The locus classicus for this position in Lenin's State and Revolution , a text that is, in my view, fatally sundered by conflicting authoritarian and anarchist tendencies.
[...]

In a period when the revolutionary proletarian subject has decidedly broken down, and along with it the political project of a withering away of the state, I think that politics should be conceived at a distance from the state [Critchley makes reference to Badiou here]. Or, better, politics is the praxis of taking up distance with regard to the state, working independently of the state, working in a situation. Politics is praxis in a situation and the labour of politics is the construction of new political subjectivities, new political aggregations in specific localities, a new dissensual habitus rooted in common sense and the consent of those who dissent. In addition to the examples of the politics of indigenous rights discussed above, this is arguably a description of the sort of direct democratic action that has provided the cutting edge and momentum to radical politics since the days of action against the meeting of the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and subsequently at Prague, Nice, Genoa, Quito, Cancun, and elsewhere" (112).

One more quotation is in order:

However, to forestall a possible misunderstanding, this distance from the state is within the state, that is, within and upon the state's territory. It is, we might say, an interstitial distance, an internal distance that has to be opened from inside. What I mean, seemingly paradoxical, is that there is no distance within the state. In the time of the purported 'war on terror,' and in the name of 'security', state sovereignty is attempting to saturate the entirety of social life. The constant ideological mobilization of the threat of an external attack has permitted the curtailments of traditional civil liberties in the name of internal political order, so called 'homeland security', where order and security have become identified. Such is the politics of fear, where the political might be defined with Carl Schmitt as that activity which assures the internal order of a political unit like a state through the more or less fantastic threat of an enemy. Against this, the task of radical political articulations is the creation of interstitial distance within state territory (113).

Even though it would have been useful, Critchley does not address the problem of nihilism he worked to discredit in the first chapter. I am unclear about how these are not nihilistic political practices and presciptions, which, even in the face of the impossibility of such a thing, creates the necessary political space to "interstitially" resist the totally ordering practices of the state. This would be a form of active nihilism, in my view, if not a sort of politics of refusal that can be found in Badiou and Agamben (and certainly in Zizek) if one looks hard enough.

In any case, politics as the creation of distance where there isn't any seems to make some sense. I understand that politics always must face the impossibility of politics in any given situation. Yet, my concern here is that this doesn't travel far from Laclau and Mouffe who truly struggle to account for the emergence of universality in political struggle. These formal analysis are better at explaining why a particular movement remains particular, and not about how universality is possible and even realizable. Except, of course, the sense of universality that can be gained through the dangerous and always precarious construction of an 'external' enemy as a rally point. Critchley does address this problem with fleeting but well-informed references to Carl Schmitt, which makes me think that he did think seriously about the critique of the dangers of populism. However, by immediately refusing the possibility that the particular can be fully universal (why not?, I might ask), including a disdain for Jean-Luc Nancy's own reflections on the problem of populism, his argument becomes rather unclear, and leaves the state with the market on universalism because of its ability to determine 'external' enemies. For Critchley,

what has to be continually criticized in political thinking is the aspiration to a full incarnation of the universal in the particular, or the privileging of a specific particularity because it is believed to incarnate the universal: for example the classical Hegelian idea of the state, the modish and vague idea of a European super-state, or the fantasy of the world-state (119).

From Critchley's metapolitical perspective, politics is not about about the determination of enemies, or the construction of universality. Politics is, rather, about ethics. "If ethics without politics is empty, then politics without ethics is blind" (120). Although this is well intentioned and has its merits, my fear is that this leaves the "idyll of consensus" of the state merely "disturbed" but not replaced. That task is left, I'm afraid, for someone else...