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...
Recent Comments