QOTD: Some Self-Indulgence on Derrida

(((living impossible lives; Marco Roth's paean/elegy/no-something-else to Derrida upon the latter's death in 2004; me and Derrida and Kierkegaard -- if you don't care about either me or Derrida, you will probably find this hopelessly boring; also some Badiou)))

I just stumbled across an essay from 2004 regarding Derrida's death. It's more memoir-ish than Derrida would write, but otherwise, he makes the appropriate derridean gestures. More than that, I appreciated much of what he said about Derrida and deconstruction.

Reading this essay was the first time since a course on Postmodern Theology in grad school (where we read Heidegger, Lévinas, Derrida -- and Mark C. Taylor) that I haven't felt essentially alone in my thinking about Derrida. And in the last sentence I quote (not the last of the essay), I feel as though someone has finally explained to me why I love Derrida (and, might I add, precisely what he has in common with Kierkegaard, whom I loved first), which had been a mystery, ultimately, even to me. 

I wanted to post it here partly because I know there are a few who will appreciate it, although perhaps in somewhat different ways than I myself do. But also because I think it sets up a way of understanding Badiou as filling the gap left by Derrida and Deleuze, and also as providing important -- even if problematic -- rejoinders to their work. When I finally cottoned onto Badiou, I immediately saw his work as an extension of what I had found compelling in the work of Derrida (and Deleuze, as well, more so in some ways, less in others). Clearly Derrida and Badiou were coming closer to each other toward the end of the former's life, and there is a note about this (or anyway something close to it) in The Logics of Worlds.

There's also something to be drawn from the full essay, not quoted here, about teaching. Not just in the story of Derrida's sporadic and horribly long "lectures" at the Haute École, but in the author's observation that where or who or what Derrida was could not "be transmitted." So then one wonders what the teaching part is, and I note that it is mainly in his reflections many years later that the author comes to understand things he learned way back when. Some he got then. Some he didn't get until now. Derrida was, you might say, a certain absence of a teacher. And that's the only clichéd deconstructive move I'm going to make. I leave the rest to Marco Roth, who said it all so much better -- and so much less in strained and painful imitation of Derrida -- than I imagine myself being able to do that I can only quote him for the real substance of this note.

http://nplusonemag.com/derrida-autothanatography

----

But now isn’t the time for such games. To do so would be disingenuous and accede too quickly to one of the charges often leveled against “Deconstruction”: sophistry, a fondness for the play of rhetoric and metaphor over truth, facts, and history. The charge, never just or fair though leveled by vocal supporters of justice and fairness, ignored that Deconstructionists were incredibly wary of saying aloud that they’d discovered a truth for fear that they’d uncovered another metaphor. The conviction that all was metaphor or trope could grow into arrogance, but more often bred a dull hesitancy about concluding. Old school literary critics always understood this, and so warned against Deconstruction as a school of resentment and its hermeneutics of suspicion. Neither poetry nor ‘hard’ philosophy, sharing aspects of both, Deconstruction is loved by neither.

[ . . . ]

The fashion for theory and the words “Orientalism” and “Deconstruction” was as much a result of intelligent, angry and alienated Americans fastening on to a promise without quite grasping the training and the commitment to lonely thinking through a fixed tradition required to make it a reality. Despite its rapid politicization, “theory” in America or la pensée 68 in France, was not going to change the world (if by world we mean government). Theory, however, could and did change individual lives. Briefly, it redeemed difficulty and especially a discomfort some people felt intuitively about subject and object, language and self. Those people who felt they stood on shaky foundations suddenly had a home for their native anti-foundationalism. They too could become theorists. Think of it as a job creation program for all intellectual nerds, outcasts and misfits, people whose kind of intelligence meant that they weren’t even comfortable around most other intelligent people. The betrayal by the American system of higher education of those who’d enrolled enthusiastically in these job placement programs is a sad but minor footnote to the history of the 1990s. I don’t mean the dwindling number of jobs for French, German, and philosophy PhDs or the corporatization of the University, although that’s part of it. The betrayal began before, when those who showed glimmers of interest in theory were led to think that their curiosity would be nurtured into knowledge by a series of occasional course offerings and visiting instructors who rarely stayed long enough to ground a program. Instead of finding themselves in an academy, however, these students found themselves in the agora, fighting for money, time, attention, and space against better organized guilds. Theory did not, in itself, corrupt the young. The siege mentality surrounding theorists and theory did.

[ . . . ]

In the institutionalization and translation of Derrida’s philosophy, something was always lost. A way of thinking that emphasized the singular and unrepeatable, the absent and the paradox could never offer the satisfaction that one was leading the good life, only that you and others were leading an impossible life. [emphasis added -- jf]

QOTD: Parmenides Wasn't Stupid

(((Quote of the Day; the poetic and the mathematical; being and non-being; Parmenides; Lacan and the Pre-Socratics; Badiou on Lacan on etc.)))

Lacan sez in Encore (Badiou quoting Seminar XX page 22):

Fortunately, Parmenides actually wrote poems. Doesn't he use linguistic devices - the linguist's testimony takes precedence here - that closely resemble mathematical articulation, alternation after succession, framing after alternation? It is precisely because he was a poet that Parmenides says what he has to say to us in the least stupid of manners. Otherwise, the idea that being is and that nonbeing is not, I don't know what that means to you, but personally I find that stupid.

Of course, this very simple statement has consequences in Parmenides, consequences that make Parmenides an enemy of Badiou. But the point remains about the importance of the articulation, and this will then have to do with the distinction between knowledge and truth, between the banal (like, say, this post) and the revelatory (Parmenides), and then, still further, the poetic as a sort of precursor or movement in the direction of the matheme.

Quote of the Day: There is no such thing as the State

(((Auden; "September 1, 1939;" Badiou should have written about this, if he didn't, because it really is about communism; I've had it with Thatcher, too.)))

From "September 1, 1939," a poem Auden was "ashamed" of, the famous stanza he struck from at least one printing of it:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

I have written before of Badiou's view of the state, and in particular the communist negation of the state. Thatcher might have agreed (with Auden and Badiou) that there is no such thing as the state, but Auden insists that "no one exists alone." If Thatcher's "there are only individuals" means "there are only people who exist alone," then Auden, at least, knows she is wrong, that people being people live in communities. There is, he says, a human community, a community that is not "the State" (meaning not just national governments, but even local ones), the community in which we exist with other human beings. And whether you are the individual or the representative of the state, you face the same question, the same choice -- to live in that community, with others, or to die alone. This is, I think, the "one world" Badiou takes as a political principle. Not a statement of fact, but an assertion of principle. Whereas the State always presupposes its outside, presupposes (at least) two worlds (but probably really three -- the non-state governed by the state, and the Other State, both of which are threats to the order imposed/maintained by the state).

In one printed version of this poem, Auden rewrites the last line of the above stanza to read, "We must love one another, and die." If you read the whole poem, this makes sense, since it seems so much to be about how death is always with us. So the idea that we can escape death by loving one another is kind of ridiculous, at best, and "the romantic lie in the brain," at worst. But the point is still taken -- we must indeed love one another in order for us to live with each other, and so to live longer, better lives, even if not to become immortal.

Although perhaps, in a way, we become that, too, by loving one another. But that would be another post.

I am certain that I have seen or read (or both) Badiou discussing a part of an Auden poem. I can't find this reference and don't know if it's this poem. I kind of hope it is, since it fits and would slot right into the paper I am working on, but I also hope it's not, so that I can appear momentarily to be clever by making the connection. I'll follow up if I find it, but I would also be happy to have it pointed out to me. Actually, anything where Badiou discusses Auden at all would be helpful.

There Is Only One World

(((Alain Badiou on what it means to be communist today, the necessity for courage, a distillation of a communist "hypothesis" in the form less of a manifesto proper (communism already has one) but maybe a sort of post-manifesto?, communism is not properly speaking utopian (or religious for that matter :-))))

From a Badiou essay mainly about Sarkozy in the New Left Review:

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.

‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state.

Note that "state" is used here in a historically specified sense, but understood this way, communism is surely an essentially contra-statist idea, a reaction to (and against) the state-formation as a mechanism of oppression and repression, which it can hardly not be, to greater or lesser degrees. Of course, communism has become bound up with statism even more than Nazism (an expressly statist ideology), for reasons that require no explanation. The question before is us how to proceed in the world as communists while leaving behind (we might say, negating, in that technical sense of Badiou's) the statist/party politics of the 20th century. That's the challenge, and it is of course both a theoretical and a practical challenge, a universal and a local challenge (how can it possibly be one and not at the same time the other?). So what we set ourselves is not the proverbial ideologue's task (to figure out what is wrong with the world while maintaining our theory), but the goal of rethinking the theory and the practice together. Again, what does it mean to do anything else? What we DO maintain is the idea, the hypothesis, that another world is possible; indeed, that one world is possible.

The (19th-century) movement and the (20th-century) party were specific modes of the communist hypothesis; it is no longer possible to return to them. Instead, after the negative experiences of the ‘socialist’ states and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution and May 68, our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improving its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere.

What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline of a universal truth. One such might be the declaration: ‘There is only one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order; its opponents too speak of ‘alter-globalization’. Essentially, they propose a definition of politics as a practical means of moving from the world as it is to the world as we would wish it to be. But does a single world of human subjects exist? The ‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham.

We maintain the idea of one world against a contradictory capitalist idea of division deserved and unification deferred. Capitalism, liberalism, insists that it is the best way to achieve the goal of one world, despite all the evidence to the contrary, but also despite a hypothesis that insists that such class divisions as there are, are the fault of the world—lazy people who don't work hard enough or at all, for example, and so do not deserve to live in the upper classes, if they deserve to live at all—and at the very same time the very meting out of justice according to the hypothesis. Extraordinarily, capitalism (usually, I think, by means of economic growth) is both supposed to spread the wealth to everyone and at the same time (by means of its meritocratic logic) to redistribute wealth from the undeserving (the sign of whose moral bankruptcy is their very poverty) to the deserving (the sign of whose moral superiority is their very wealth).

In its compassionate, liberal moments, it recognizes the falsity of that claim, but insists instead that, in Thatcher's words, there is no alternative, or at least no democratic alternative, no alternative compatible with the idea of the individual. But I've run out of the steam right now to respond to that. So go read the essay. Maybe, probably, I will take it up soon. But surely we can understand that the constitution of identity under capitalism is woefully underformed and binds us each to our several worlds, worlds in which our identity is often already constituted for us, but that even when we participate, we do so in the only way we can in a world of competing worlds: we pick a world.

War and Democracy: Always Already Together Again

(((Alain Badiou on what results from democratic materialism's commitment to the proposition that there are only bodies and languages; what else, by the way, is there?)))

Alain Badiou in Radical Philosophy, 2005:

Today, natural belief can be summarized in a single statement:

There are only bodies and languages.

This statement is the axiom of our contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why? Democratic materialism. The individual fashioned by the contemporary world recognizes the objective existence of bodies alone. [ . . . ]

Moreover, it is essentially a democratic materialism. This is because the contemporary consensus, in recognizing the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. [ . . . ]

Having said that, democratic materialism acknowledges a global limit to its polymorphous and animalistic tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benefit from this equality. A language that claims to regulate all the others, to rule over all bodies, will be termed dictatorial and totalitarian. Then it is no longer a matter of tolerance, but of our ‘right to intervention’: legal, international and, if necessary, military intervention. Aggressive actions serve to rectify our universalistic claims, along with our linguistic sectarianism.

Bodies will be made to pay for their excesses of language. That is how a violent Two (the war against terrorism, democracy against dictatorship – at any cost!) sustains the juridical promotion of the multiple. In the final analysis, war, and war alone, makes possible the alignment of languages.

War is the barely hidden materialist essence of democracy.

Democracy has always been at war with terrorism.

And always will be.

Quote of the Day: Subtracting (from) the State

(((Alain Badiou; Karl Marx; dictatorship of the proletariat; the withering away of the state; negation and "subtraction")))

In an effort to explain the concept of subtraction, and to distinguish it from negation simply understood, or understood as primarily or only destruction, Badiou provides an example:

Marx insists on saying that the destruction of the bourgeois State is not in itself an achievement. The goal is communism, that is the end of the State as such, and the end of social classes, in favour of a purely egalitarian organization of the civil society. But to come to this, we must first substitute to the bourgeois State a new State, which is not the immediate result of the destruction of the first. In fact, it is a State as different of the bourgeois State as experimental music of today can be of an academic tonal piece of the 19th century, or a contemporary performance can be of an academic representation of Olympic Gods. For the new State - that Marx names "dictatorship of the proletariat" - is a State which organizes its own vanishing, a State which is in its very essence the process of the non-State. [ . . . ] So we can say that in the original thought of Marx, "dictatorship of the proletariat" was a name for a State which is subtracted from all classical laws of a "normal" State. For a classical State is a form of power; but the State named "dictatorship of proletariat" is the power of un-power, the power of the disappearance of the question of power. In any case we name subtraction this part of negation which is oriented by the possibility of something which exists absolutely apart from what exists under the laws of what negation negates.

There are a number of interesting things about this passage, several of which may not be terribly accessible unless one is familiar with Badiou and perhaps Deleuze. I suppose what it amounts to is this, that the dictatorship of the proletariat—whatever it would actually look like, and a dictatorship of one is not a dictatorship of the proletariat, which is already a reworking of the very concept of dictatorship—the dictatorship of the proletariat is the form of the destruction of the bourgeois state, but it is also, at the same time and in the same way, the form of the creation of the non-state, of some radically new kind of state, such that even applying the name "state" is already deceptive, even more deceptive than the term "dictatorship" in the phrase, "dictatorship of the proletariat." It is not yet the non-state. It is perhaps the anti-state, the destructive part of the negation that operates together in tension with the affirmative or creative part of negation that results in something we probably are incapable of actually conceptualizing from within the context of the bourgeois state.

I don't yet think I have fully grasped the operation of subtraction in Badiou's thinking, but its application here may be very helpful in freeing Marx's thinking on the post-revolutionary "state" from the clutches both of liberals (who like to repudiate Marx and so mark themselves as "reasonable") and of "Marxists" (say, Stalin or even Lenin, and dare I say Mao? who seem content to dismember the liberal state, but then continue on with a mutilated form of it: the state is dead! Long live the state!). I am not even thinking of reactionaries and neolibs, who cannot help but think of Marx in cartoon form.

Badiou's talk is available with reasonable sound on YouTube, with the passage I quote beginning at about 8:40 of Part 1, and continuing at the very beginning of Part 2. There is a decent transcript available, which you might want to have available to refer to in tandem with the videos (the transcript seems to have been hastily done, and contains minor errors that do occasionally confuse).