Long Sunday

'Another origin of the world'

As other "Theory"-literate and serious denizens of the blogosphere duly note, Specters of Marx is a book that continues to look better with each passing year.  Generous, intricate and faithful expositions of Derrida's later political thought, meanwhile, are so few and far between that a recent article by Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang (ProjectMuse) is most welcome, and also conveniently works as a rather natural continuation of our Spivak (and Europe, and technology, and democracy) discussions. 

Suffice to say that many familiar themes make an appearance.  I provide some brief excerpts and comment below the fold, as the authors are friends and were kind enough to share a copy.   (Those interested and without Muse access may I suppose ask very nicely via email.)   The excerpts are by no means generous enough, as indeed the article covers quite a lot of ground, including responsible forays into anonymous internationalism (composed of "no one" who is , nevertheless, "not just anyone" – cf. Thomas Keenan; recalling also Blanchot's communism), Spivak's (partly just) criticisms in Ghostwriting, Derrida's distinctly atheist transformation of Benjamin's 'weak messianism' and Roland Barthes' reflections on the photograph among other things.  The bold and truly excellent SUBSTANCE Magazine was once kind enough to grant us a generous "fair use" permission to quote from its "Counter-Obituaries" issue on Derrida from some time ago...so consider this too a first step, if you will, toward a more precise engagement there. 
    
From the key orienting and introductory 'graph (or rather, a bit of graft on my part, as the  framing, justifying work performed by introductions certainly is important to get right):

As admirable as [their] aims may be, Habermas and Derrida’s proclamation inevitably raises the question of their global bias.   Although their article closes by “renounc[ing] Eurocentrism,” it seems nonetheless to reassert a particular European obligation to act on behalf of the world.    American political philosopher Iris Marion Young objects to the publication’s premise in an essay for the web-based journal openDemocracy.  She asserts, “Europe needs not globalism but a provincialism that will enable a dialogue of equals with the rest of the world.”   Young points out that the anti-war rallies of February 15, 2003 were planned at a World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in January 2003 and, moreover, took place in hundreds of cities throughout the world.   Such a “coordination may signal the emergence of a global public sphere, of which European publics are wings, but whose heart may lie in the southern hemisphere.”   Though [Iris Marion] Young correctly calls into question their geopolitical assumptions, a closer evaluation of Derrida’s key statements makes clear that his position on Europe is distinct from the one Habermas sketches in their jointly signed text* [...]   

Contrary to his press, Derrida never made a secret of his allegiance to the European Enlightenment.    Our title, “the last European,” is meant as a tribute and a provocation, a corrective to the idée fixe that “deconstructionism” seeks to corrode Enlightenment ideals.   The allusion to Blanchot’s Le dernier homme notwithstanding, it is unlikely Derrida himself would have recognized the descriptive pertinence of the phrase or accepted its eschatological pathos.   We certainly do not wish to suggest that he clung to the Continent.   On the contrary, the globe-trotting itineraries of his teaching and lecturing – in particular his numerous visiting professorships in the US – imparted a decisively non-European competence and tonality to his numerous public stances.   The topic of European identity, he admitted, is predictably tired:  “Old Europe seems to have exhausted all the possibilities of discourse and counter-discourse about its own identification” (Other Heading 26).   And yet, paradoxically, European identity has never really been taken up in the promise that it holds for the future.   For Derrida, this at one and the same time old and young identity is a fine example of Hamlet’s famous declaration that “the time is out of joint.”   In the following, we argue that this temporal rift is precisely what compelled him to speak in the name of Europe.

  The authors proceed to engage first with Derrida-Valéry in a manner that deserves to be quoted at some length, though again I will limit myself:

Valéry’s texts figure in The Other Heading, then, as telling, modernist examples of the Eurocentric idealism that continues (in a somewhat threadbare mode) to animate the West’s cultural politics.   To Jameson’s account of Derrida’s strategic use of Valéry we would only add that Valéry does not simply function as the object of an ideology critique.   His outmoded Eurocentrism also serves, paradoxically, to advance Derrida’s deliberation on the future of Europe.  Valéry forcefully elucidates the expansive limits of a high cultural European self-understanding, and thereby, points a way out from within....

* [Sadly and rather inexcusably, the actual Habermas statement co-signed by Derrida appears to be unavailable online...or at least eluding my night's efforts.]

Machiavellian

There are, at the very least, two ongoing major tragedies in English-language social and political theory: the non-translation of Carl Schmitt's Die Diktatur and the non-translation of Claude Lefort's Le Travail de L'Oeuvre Machiavel. While the non-translation of Schmitt is inexcusable (it's a pampthlet, it's an essential work and, yet, somehow we have two translations of "Theory of the Partisan" published in the same year), the non-translation of Lefort's book is understandable: Machiavelli studies is an already bloated field and, like most bloated fields, it is filled with negligible and unimportant works - one hardly, on first impressions, requires yet another book. And, of course, Lefort's book is seven hundred seventy eight pages long.

While I have some reservations with Bernard Flynn's recently published The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political, it is the only book on Lefort in English, it is a moderately able introduction to his work, and it contains the single, most detailed discussion of Lefort's book on Machiavelli in English (the first three chapters are on that book).  The final chapter about Machiavelli, on Lefort's theory of interpretation and reading, ends as follows:

what we lose with 'the partisan'

Schmitt makes a very interesting point around p. 28 of the English translation of "Theory of the Partisan." First there was the irresistible temptation experienced by established European powers to use 'partisans' for their wars of national salvation. He refers to Bismarck's comments about wanting to use "any weapon" made available by new-found national feeling against France and the Hapsburg monarchy. The Prussian Landsturm edict, signed by the Prussian king in 1813, ordered all Prussian citizens to use every means to oppose the French and demanded that citizens refuse to cooperate with any measures, no matter how banal, of the occupiers (29). But at the same time established armies treated 'irregular' troops with great harshness. When armies fought, everyone wore uniforms, carried weapons openly, and you knew who who was. The beneficial aspect of this, Schmitt points out, was that a sharp limit was established concerning who war was directed at. If a soldier from an invading army came upon a civilian in a town -- someone not dressed as a soldier, not carrying a gun or sword -- the soldier didn't have to worry that the 'citizen' might jump up and stab him. The citizen, likewise, did not have to worry that the soldier would regard her as a menace. The result is a barrier against total war. This distinction held up, with exceptions, through World War I.

blogging schmitt

Schmitt's lecture, "The Theory of the Partisan," is given in March, 1962.  What was the status of the figure of the 'partisan' at that moment?  Castro was active as early as 1953.  The Algerian War of Independence took place 1953-1962.  Schmitt has been invited to the capital of the basque region in the far north of Spain, Navarra, by the Estudio General de Navarra.  This 'estudio' has long-time links with Opus Dei; the estudio itself was founded by the Church in 1960.

For me the substance of the preface is very hard to make out.  He seems to say that a mistake has been made concerning this essay, that it's not really linked to The Concept of the Political (CP) at all.  But then what's with the subtitle?  The subtitle, he writes, is "explained by the specific date of the publication.  " The publishers, Schmitt goes on, "are making the text of my essay of 1932 (that is, CP -jsr) accessible again at this time.  In recent decades several corollaries to this theme have emerged.  " Corollaries to what theme?  Are we still talking about the subtitle or now is it CP?  "The present treatment of the subject is not one of these" – that is, not one of these corollaries of an indefinite theme.  No, The Theory of the Partisan (TP) "is a freestanding work." And this free-standing work, what does it do?  In a sketchy way – and here I quote precisely (as always!) – "issues unavoidably in the problem of the distinction between friend and enemy."   Either that's a typo or an infelicitous translation -- which is easy to do with German.  The problem is at the word 'issues.' TP can't "issues unavoidably" in any problem.  A plausible rephrasing: "The Theory of the Partisan is not one of these more recent corollaries to CP, but a free-standing work that nevertheless unavoidably touches on the friend-enemy distinction."   But at the end of the paragraph he tells us he has decided to make TP available in the interests of "all those who have been following so far the difficult earlier discussion of the concept of the political."   I end this paragraph not being sure how to assess the 'free-standing work' line.  The comment about the publisher is also unclear to me.

The historical illustration that Schmitt chooses for his discussion of the partisan is the popular, reactionary Spanish resistance to Napoleon.  A choice of historical backdrop that doubtless provoke a wolf-like grin of approval from Schmitt's masters in Opus Dei.  (Okay, that last sentence was a joke.  But Schmitt does choose a "Spanish civil war" and one that was also – in large part, no reductionism here – marked by the battle between Enlightenment and Reaction.  He also does not choose the other, twentieth century Spanish civil war, with its different sentimental attachments.  No Ernest Hemingway is going to show up in Schmitt's spanish civil war.)

"Oh, enemy, there is no enemy": the partisan disruption of the concept of the political

Carl Schmitt is well known for conceptualizing the political in terms of the friend/enemy distinction. What his account of the partisan suggests is a way of thinking about politics that disrupts this opposition. I read his "Theory of the Partisan," then, as a revision of his earlier work, one that works to elaborate a concept of the political no longer attached to the 18th and 19th centuries, but adequate to the particular challenges of the 20th century. This is not to say that his new account is clear and complete. Yet, it is an approach to the political that recognizes the political character of the indistinction between friend and enemy. The political, in other words, must be understood not simply in its clarity, but in its confusion and undecideability. At stake in the emergence of the partisan is the permanent destabilization of the political and of the political as itself another name for the temporal and spatial destabilizations wrought by the technologies producing something like a global.

Questions on and responses to the Spivak piece.

The following is a guest post by Nate Hawthorne, blogger at the militant What in the hell .....

First, thanks to Jon and the Long Sundayista crew for holding this symposium. This is not a text I would have otherwise read. I look forward to reading the other contributions in order to understand it better.

Second, while I'm glad to have read it and grateful for the opportunity to participate in the symposium, it is unfortunately the case that I'm not sure what to do with this text. Much of the idiom and at least one of the major writers it references--Derrida--is very unfamiliar to me. I also find some of the philosophical uses of Marx in the essay bring out a proprietorial response on my part. I'd like to claim that it's because I prefer treatments of Marx to stick closer to the letters of blood and fire in which the history of capitalism is written, but that would be dishonest. I like a lot of abstract treatments of Marx. I don't know what it is about this text that doesn't click for me, maybe it's just that I don't really understand chunks of it. Hopefully some of you lot can and will help sort me out.

In any case, below is what I have to contribute to the symposium on Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value." I have organized my contribution into three categories. There are two items under each category. I have numbered these items according to category.

The three categories in my contribution, in order of appearance, are:
- Questions that are nothing more than questions (QTANMTQ)
- Questions that are maybe a bit snarky and which are just as much comments as they are questions (QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ)
- Responses (R)

wrenching them out of their assigned function

I'm going to jump in here with a brief note on continuity and discontinuity in Spivak's text, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value."

The nub of Spivak's argument is this: she presents a critique, first, of what she terms "the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value" (In Other Worlds 155), but second and more importantly, also of "all ideologies of adequation and legitimacy" (171).

The notion of value as continuity (of unruffled exchange, or even a series of more or less orderly exchanges and transformations) is at best mistaken, at worst ideological, and so complicit.

Hence Spivak's recourse to "the concept-metaphor of the text" (171) and textuality, to indicate the overdeterminations, the loose ends, the "situation of open-endedness" that characterizes the process by which value is produced as "an insertion into textuality" (161).

But the point is that there are discontinuities and then there are discontinuities.

The Invaluable

The following is a guest post by pomegrenade, a dissertator in Comparative Literature, and state school teacher in upstate New York, who is starting to set foot on the shores outside the academy...

Let me start with the end of the first scene from Jean Genet’s The Screens--as it kept coming back to me while reading Spivak on Marx, for which I had to constantly defer the preparation I had to do for a Wednesday class on Genet’s play. In this scene, Said and his mother, very poor Algerians in the period immediately before the war of liberation, are carrying a suitcase of dough to the house of Said’s prospective wife, for the wedding. The end of the scene comes with a frantic/incestuous(?) dance of mother and son in a state of exhaustion from the long walk carrying the dough in the hot sun:

SAID: Take a look at my mother, see how beautiful and proud she is beneath her sweat and on her high heels! THE MOTHER keeps smiling and dancing. You’re beautiful. I’ll carry the valise. Whee!...

He imitates lightning. He reaches for the valise, but THE MOTHER grabs it first. A brief struggle. They burst out laughing, imitate thunder and lightning. The valise falls to the ground and opens, and everything falls out: it was empty. SAID and THE MOTHER fall to the ground and sit there roaring with laughter.

Tronti blogweave

For your quick or leisurely perusal, the compilation of Long Sunday's recent symposium on Mario Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal", and some remarks.  The multitudinous, but alphabetised, contributions:

»Jon Beasley-Murray, The new barbarians
»Eric Beck, Minor refusals
»George Ciccariello-Maher, Class and subalternity
»Jodi Dean, Two questions on Tronti [follow-up]
»Roger Gathman Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet
»Nate Hawthorne, Notes on "The Strategy of the Refusal"
»John Holloway, Adorno meets Tronti
»Doug Johnson, Intellectuals, the refusal of power, office workers' unions
»Brian Lamb, I would prefer not to bore you
»Craig McFarlane, Refusing to engage
»David McInerney, Tronti and Althusser
»Angela Mitropoulos, When will this labour end?
»Brett Neilson, Five theses on Tronti
»Stephen Squibb, Strategy of refusal of strategy
»Keith Tilford, How no can you go? Part I [Part II]

The preamble to the Long Sunday symposium, which includes links to related texts.  The relevant essay by Tronti is here, and a quick link to Long Sunday's Tronti folder. 

There were also a number of related posts elsewhere:  Destructive Creation, Northanger, Going Somewhere, Philosophy.com, pas au-delà, Attitude Adjustor. (Those are the most directly related to the discussion, though I wouldn't be surprised if I've missed some.)  And, not least, there is always the ongoing reading at Leggiamo Tronti.

My immense gratitude to all those who contributed their writings, readings and questions - those who simply took the time to read along with, and specifically those, such as Matt, who spent much time coding and uploading.

Already, Jon has the ball rolling for another reading, and I'm hoping that blogweaving continues, mutates and grows.  Not only because it creates a shared conversation that cuts across various blogs without converging along the one line, but also because - in ways that have yet to be fully explored - it marks an autonomy of writing, reading and research from the university that, particularly in times such as these, becomes an imperative.  Needless to say, what we read and write is related to how we read and write, no less than it is to the diificult questions of who, how and why this 'we' might appear, in that process.

Many thanks for the adventure.

Spivak

Hot on the heels of the rather successful Tronti symposium, it has been suggested that we turn our collective attention and efforts to Gayatri Spivak.

It is possible that this might be an enterprise that would bring together the forces of Long Sunday, the Weblog, and the Valve.

The proposed text is "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value".

Update: We now have a preliminary schedule.  Further participants and suggestions always welcome.