So...

...let's just get this straight: we're in the middle of an "economic downturn" (i.e. a depression) caused by unregulated Wall Street speculation, and are seriously talking about extending tax cuts to the wealthiest 1% of people in the nation, placing a freeze on pay increases for government employees, reducing the deficit overall, and (in local politics) cutting back on major infrastructural improvements that would employ new workers (the ARC tunnel) as well as help the poor schmoes who each have 2 hour commute into the city.

This is scary

The comments of the CEO of a company taking over public libraries on the West Coast are genuinely scary:

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

[...]

“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension.

These are arguments that haven't changed since the days of union busting--though people still seem to fall for them!--but their application to the running of libraries, as if they were anything like GM, really does just sound ridiculous. The CEO even has something to say about that though:

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization."

Nothing sacred. It sounds like the politicians in charge of the local government have decided against providing public services in general for their community, no doubt because they probably had similar things to say: the government wastes money, it's ineffective compared to the private sector (which I, the candidate, have worked in), and the first thing that has to go is government workers and their unions, who are the laziest of all the lazy American employees (for a good rejoinder to this attitude, look at Paul Krugman's excellent recent bashing of the idea of structural unemployment). We can't have the government run by the government.

But the real perversity is just simply that it is an argument for job cuts, masked as an argument for efficiency and fiscal responsibility, when it is precisely the function of the government to provide and stimulate job growth by itself offering jobs like this--especially right now. That's what's weird: they're after the heart of things, attacking the idea that government has nothing to do with anything business-related, eliminating the idea of partnerships and going all-out for privatizing the whole damn thing, as if that really would be more efficient. If they're going to compare the library to GM, why not compare this company to Goldman Sachs?

Fiscal responsibility

Every time you hear the phrase "fiscal responsibility," think "job cuts," and "no services," because that's what it means, and what it has meant for 30 years now. "We have to be fiscally responsible," in the mouth of some conservative or libretarian or pro-business leftist blowhard, however "multicultural" or "green" or "patriotic" or whatever they are, means "I think we have to cut jobs and refuse to provide services to the public; I think we have to take away the few stable jobs that there are right now--government jobs, at the federal and local level--which provide vital public services and a national infrastructure; I think we need to 'privatize' it all, make the narrowest of private interests dictate what's in the public's interest--and in fact, wholly dictate whether ten percent (or more) of all of them can be employed or not, can make a living or not."

Molecular, shmoelecular

I often recall this statement of Fredric Jameson whenever the dissolution of the Left becomes too much to bear:

The critique of totalization in France goes hand in hand with a call for a “molecular” or local, nonglobal, nonparty politics: and this repudiation of the traditional forms of class and party action evidently reflects the historic weight of French centralization (at work both in the institutions and in the forces that oppose them) as well as the belated emergence of what can very loosely be called a “countercultural” movement, with the breakup of all the old cellular family apparatus and a proliferation of subgroups and alternate “life-styles.” In the United States, on the other hand, it is precisely the intensity of social fragmentation of this latter kind that has made it historically difficult to unify Left or “antisystemic” forces in any durable and effective organizational way. Ethic groups, neighborhood movements, feminism, various “counter-cultural” or alternative life-style groups, rank-and-file labor dissidence, student movements, single-issue movements—all have in the United States seemed to project demands and strategies which were theoretically incompatible with each other and impossible to coordinate on any practical political basis. The privileged form in which the American Left can develop today must therefore necessarily be that of alliance politics; and such a politics is the strict practical equivalent of the concept of totalization on the theoretical level. In practice, then, the attack on the concept of “totality” in the American framework means the undermining and the repudiation of the only realistic perspective in which a genuine Left could come into being in this country. There is therefore a real problem about the importation and translation of theoretical polemics which have a quite different semantic content in the national situation in which they originate, as in that of France, where the various nascent movements for regional autonomy, women’s liberation and neighborhood organization are perceived as being repressed, or at least hampered in their development, by the global or “molar” perspectives of the traditional Left mass parties.
-The Political Unconscious, page 54, note 31.

Looking back on the last decades of the 20th century, where we saw the rise of a neoliberalism (which translates to the rise of an effectively Libertarian Right, a Left that is often anti-Labor, and a far-Left that threatens to desert the Democratic Party [remember Bush got elected because so many defected to Nader, thinking him greener (!) than Gore] more than it compromises with a more moderate Left politics)--a neoliberalism that, we now plainly see, has utterly destroyed this country's infrastructure (and if it isn't plain to you, you need to look around), you have to wonder why theorists who prided themselves on their politics didn't pay more attention to statements like this. And you really have to wonder why Jameson got so much flack in the U.S. for making them at the time, from people who claim to recognize the force of his critique of the critique of totality, but who nevertheless go on to stick him in a long line of totalizers.

Because it is basically right on every single point. Getting behind people like Deleuze in the late 20th century without really adapting them to the American context made no political sense in the U.S. whatsoever. The only way it even seemed to make sense was precisely because of the state of the forces that Jameson here outlines: you denied the narrative was valid from the perspective of your particular group, concluded this meant the only valid totality was non-totality, multiplicity, a proliferating pluralism--and thereby subscribed to that narrative.

Of course, everything turns on what counts as a valid "adaptation." What I like about the quote is that it sets the bar for this so low: all Jameson asks for is some sensitivity to the resonance of the words, rather than what we might call their grammar: that is, their ability to cohere and build up a (non-totalizing) political ontology of whatever sort. But people in those days were better humanists than they thought they were, apparently, and loved their system-building: they argued, effectively, that merely "using" these theorists (as it was called) was precisely a mode of adapting them. Thus the popularity of Foucault: he's easier Deleuze.

But it is no accident that smarter theorists (Judith Butler is a good example) affirm the correctness of this Jamesonian narrative with very few reservations, because--well, a lot of them spent some time in France, and have some familiarity themselves with the resonance of the terms. To put Jameson's demand in a different way, all he is asking people to do is familiarize themselves a bit with the contexts in which these statements are made. It isn't even a demand that people familiarize themselves with the "original" context of the statement (just as it isn't the ideas of Deleuze or any of the Frenchies that Jameson is here indicting): it isn't translation, but simply reading the rhetoric (another word for this sort of resonance, which you would think would have resonance here, where Yale School ideas were popular) of the texts that is necessary, and picking up on the fact that that they come from, and address, a different situation.

In short, what I like about this quote is that is basically comes from experience, though it does not require that experience to be forceful: it doesn't take much to see that certain political concepts developed in France are meant to address a certain political state of things, and while plurality might work there, its near-inevitable result would be to further fragment a country where there has been nothing like a significant (post-Depression) Communist Party, where social issues have always been thoroughly divorced from economic ones because of the inexistence of a history of a landed aristocracy and the subsequent tenuousness of any class distinctions (a situation which is unfortunately changing today, as the lower-middle "class" of tax-paying baby-boomers screwed over by Wall Street bankers starts to develop something like the first serious class-consciousness in America since before the Depression), and groups and interests face nothing like the centralization in France.

Or, to put it more mildly--for I can't say this fragmentation didn't also provide a beneficial sort of shift of the situation in some ways (while the Labor and the Women's Movements were, however, both slaughtered in the 80's and 90's)--imported along with the ineffective political theories was a suspicion of centralization which had no practical application at all in the U.S., except as a way to protest the Vietnam War or something like the "corruption" (something so vague and unbounded it now hovers over things as banal and routine as occasional government overspending) of the Nixon administration. The repression of various groups, and a lack of means for forms of this repression to become visible, wouldn't end with the dismantling of this centralization--which, after all, has its roots in policy and could have been corrected or (but you never heard anything of the relation of theory in general to policy except by feminists and Marxists, though in the early 90's things started to turn more generally that direction under the pressure of events) retheorized.

It seems like a history of thoroughly short-sighted people: people who concluded that a sort of pluralistic local-government politics was the natural outgrowth of everything that started in the 60's, and so anything that seemed theoretically to push in that direction, or further develop that idea, was deemed useful. And there seemed no threat of losing various federal guarantees that created and sustained the environment in which such ideas could be fostered (it is especially depressing now to hear older academics remember the ample funds sluiced into universities in the 60's). But as the forces opposing everything that politics stood for grew and grew, and even used its ideas to oppose it (still happening: again, prior to an election, Republicans are making the Democrats into the politically-correct and pluralistic, concluding that the much vaunted "respect for the other" also means love of terrorists)... well, you have to be glad that things (at least in the humanities) seem to be turning in other directions: critical theory is dissolving, or rather expanding, into more focused, concrete endeavors, which nevertheless posit genuine totalizing concepts (the media of media-studies is one of them). Which also means Deleuze's rhetoric--and many other rhetorics--might finally be read, after all these years.

Bike lane prospects

So while I was out in California for a couple weeks, the NYC DOT finally put in the bike lane along Prospect Park West. There was uproar all through the Slope about the lane, put in the master plan over a decade ago in 1997. Things got really intense earlier this year, when the borough president (Marty Markowitz) asked the transportation commissioner (Janette Sadik-Khan) to kill the project in an open letter. In the last few months flyers were being passed around and posters were being taped up claiming, like Markowitz, that it would eliminate parking spaces, make walking across the street a nightmare, and increase congestion on the street generally.

The first claim hits at the most wide-ranging problem in the Slope, as parking is extremely hard to find and is only becoming more scarce as more and more families come into the area with more and more cars, and more and more parking garages are sold and turned into more and more apartments. The next claim about pedestrian traffic is the most narrow in focus, as it affects mostly the population in the streets closest to the park (some of the choicest properties in all of New York City). And the last claim about congestion is groundless, like the first two--the only difference being that it if you have ever lived in or near Park Slope, you would never make it in the first place.

This is because (to take the last claim first), as only a little experience with the road will tell you, the problem on Park Slope West is not traffic congestion at all but speed, as the planners of the project understood when they made this the foremost goal of the plan. They claimed, rightly, that the actual traffic along the park simply didn't require three lanes of one-way street, and that having three lanes there could only encourage people to rocket along and weave through lanes unpredictably. And this is what people did--wouldn't you? A particularly bad twist to this was that the cab companies which thoroughly infest Park Slope and make it a dangerous place to walk with your children realized it could work as their own personal freeway: thus, just a couple weeks ago, cabbies were shooting along, weaving around on either side anyone going slower than 50, or floating from the left lane all the way over the middle to the right and back again, looking for the street they had to turn down to find the executive they would race that day down into Manhattan or up to JFK. Moreover, it became a thoroughfare for people in other neighborhoods to make their way towards the BQE. Why people didn't get pissed about this, and did get pissed about the commission's decision to reduce the road to two-lanes and force people to drive slower, I guess I'll just never understand. But even in my ignorance I can positively say that the threat of congestion couldn't be the real reason, since the only possibility of it existing on that road was when the commission was trying the stop-gap solution of fiddling with the timing of lights and increasing the length of reds--pending the more thorough solution the plan would provide. This, to the eye of someone who believes that traffic problems are only solved by expanding roads and adding lanes, rather than by incentivizing the use of real thoroughfares (Flatbush Avenue, Atlantic Avenue, 4th Avenue) or (gasp!) public transportation, I guess might look like congestion. But the view isn't then much different than the person's that would use anything to convince us that any project without immediate benefit to the most immediate parties involved--which tends to be most projects in the interests of the local population--can't be managed, and that we should concludes, like Markowitz, that the only thing worth approving are lucrative projects like the kick-backing corporate orgy that is Atlantic Yards (which at least looked a bit like that before costs, and Frank Gehry, were cut--all without "managing," however). Meanwhile, even though it is too early to tell how the reduction of lanes has affected things in any significant sense, I can say there are many hints of slower speeds already.

In short, even if Janette Sadik-Khan had to basically ram the project past all of the objections, this was thoroughly justified, as the objections were not only groundless but also were made by people with only private interests in mind. This goes especially for local residents who somehow thought (to take up the next claim) the walking situation would be complicated by bikes. While crossing a bike lane is indeed a bit annoying, anyone who enters the park from the west does it already without complaining just to get to the Long Meadow--and on the bike lane inside the park's West Drive which they cross, they have no problem avoiding marathons, races, and all sorts of bike-related tomfoolery. What's a bike lane--which is better than undirected bikes flying everywhere, mind you--to that? Nevertheless, the concern is more global than this annoyance, since the goal of the bike lane involves directing more new bike traffic to this area. But one has to realize that this is done to alleviate the car traffic on Prospect Park West in an even more substantial way than the ways already mentioned: by encouraging biking rather than driving by the park. And one can't complain about too much congestion, as we saw above, at the same time as one complains about every remedy for it--unless of course, what one is really complaining about is any and all traffic along the park except their own. And while the park should be for local use, "local" should not be defined so exclusively as to require no traffic at all coming from elsewhere, and especially from areas so close by that people are using bikes to get where they are going, since they will probably also live around the park (something else is going on when you effectively claim the other sides of Prospect Park are not "local" enough).

But the most astounding thing about the whole bike lane project is the way it put the fears about parking to rest. The planners simply moved the bike lane to run right along the curb, protected by the cars which now park right along the street (and given lots of room on the other side from the extra-wide sidewalk). Everything regarding the cars is exactly the same as it was before with three lanes, only we now have two lanes: the bike lane does not interfere at all with the process of parking or finding or getting a space, as the cars and the bikes don't have to cross each other at all. While no spaces were added (that I can see), none at all were taken away or made tough to access, and it is probable that with more bike traffic into the area, the demand for parking spaces will actually go down.

New problems are sure to emerge, of course. But if the commissioner and everyone involved in the project handles those with a similar combination of creativity and levelheadedness, I'm also sure they will be manageable.

On Latour and Sedgwick

(I have been rewriting this over the last few days, adding a bit to the end especially, so I am reposting it.)

The practical problem we face, if we try to go that new route, is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts.
-Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"

Latour has been a guiding light for many people looking for a way to transform critical theory (that is, to give it more specificity) and bring it out of the morass of heavy ideological/cultural critique that was so prevalent in the last twenty or more years. (I should say he hasn't only been influential in critical theory, but also in the regular activities of various fields, like philosophy.)

I won't recapitulate his more recent (and not so recent) arguments about associations and things. Suffice it to say that many people find his critique of critique insightful because it stresses adding to the reality of whatever is being studied rather than undermining it, or searching for its conditions of possibility. (Latour is quick to say that phenomenology does something similar, but still goes the wrong way: I'd totally agree to the first part, the fact that phenomenology adds reality, as the main reason one gets interested in phenomenology in the first place.)

His parallel in literary studies and literary theory has to be the late Eve Sedgwick, whose paper on paranoid reading and reparative reading has become increasingly popular over the years as the Latourian critique of critique has hit home more and more.

Unfortunately, both reparative reading and positive or realist criticism (as I'll call it), remain too close to 1) a shift merely in attitude, not of method and 2) the creation of new objects, not tools. I'll admit Latour is, to my mind, much more productive of tools, and so the criticism of him here is a bit less harsh. But when he says something such as the above statement (that we need somehow to condition ourselves to act positively) what he is doing is turning a question about method, indeed about the creation of tools, into something indistinct, something which the critic can either have or not, a property that is assumed to be too self-evident. Sedgwick is horrible on this front: the reparative reading, which does not suspect its text, which does not try to undermine it in order to prove a point, which does not try and look for contradictions but which, well, it's hard to say what it actually does... perhaps inflect it in a different way (I try to extract something good out of it in this later post)... well, this reparative reading (whatever it is), remains more a banner or sign which one can pin to one's analysis without having to make any methodological concessions or innovations at all, without citing differently, without writing differently, and fundamentally without thinking differently. It involves the worst of what theory does: it announces a methodological change without at all making this change, or, perhaps more accurately (and more perversely), announces a methodological change and turns methodology into an evaluation of the announcement.

While Latour shies away from such a perspective by the creation of a particular level at which his analysis will move, and both he and Sedgwick generally escape these criticisms because of the insightfulness and innovation of their work (in short, because of their sophistication), it isn't hard to see their statements producing a sort of criticism or critique that merely replaces the disasters of recent theory with other disasters. Before I say what these disasters actually are--for all of recent theory and all of the new theory aren't themselves disasters--let me say that this criticism would be, basically, feel-good criticism overconfident in the actuality of its object (though the diffuseness of Latour's object again keeps him from being so overconfident--not so for simpler associations), or a criticism that values individual judgment insofar as it is confident of its contributions and its grasp of rich areas of investigation. One can look at various philosophical realists (championing, like Latour, their pre-criticality) glimpse, at times, this sort of confidence that says now, we're not only getting at the real things, but also that our attitude, our willingness to add to the reality of things, assures us that we get at the reality of things--a field that I should say is less subject to this particular feel-goodery, however, because it has to pay attention to its method, or its way of inquiry, and so can't totally be assured of much. One can certainly look at literary criticism, however, and see that the turn to two areas in particular, affect and aesthetics, while they also respond to other necessities in the field (the return of aesthetics is a very much needed return, though the question is how much it ever really died off), also exhibits a certain Sedgwickian self-satisfaction--by which I mean less of a focus on method and on explicitly looking at how interpretation will proceed, in favor of creating a new object of inquiry with the old tools by the sheer force of one's individual grasp of the real (one can see both aesthetics and affect return in this way in Sianne Ngai's overrated, but sometimes insightful, Ugly Feelings).

What both here rely on is some notion that previous acts of criticism or critique somehow don't really display the qualities they attribute to a reparative or realist criticism. And this, this dismissal of the previous as too critical, is precisely the disaster of old critical theory that new critical theory would repeat. When Latour says, for example,

Once you realize that scientific objects cannot be socially explained, then you realize too that the so-called weak objects, those that appear to be candidates for the accusation of antifetishism, were never mere projections on an empty screen either...

in short implying that once you see your object as a richness rather than a mask, a fetish (Marx's sense), you begin to see the world of objects itself as things, as richnesses, as the real, which cannot serve as some ground with which to undermine the former set of objects--when Latour says this, how can he seriously think that previous theory and previous critique in general did not operate this way? I agree, there was a period when all you got was the social and the ideological. But good critique works this way pretty much whatever the situation.

Interestingly, Latour (along with Sedgwick) don't seem to really get at the problem--a problem literary theory (and not critical theory) has dealt with for a while. When they say that exposing the social or ideological conditions of possibility of an object has gone on too long, and that we need to care and protect our objects by adding to their reality, they're still assuming that there is some social or cultural connection between the individual critic's work and the societal effect of such exposure or protection. Yes, I agree with Latour: if you add to the reality of the object, you won't get such crazy things happening, probably, as the sociological critique of science hoisted on its own petard by crazy Republicans saying global warming isn't a fact, or inanely claiming that affirmative action is itself racist--thereby enlightening the enlightenment, or bringing down the idols that are the results of the process of bringing down the idols, a critique meant to advance learning, not impede it. But then again you might also still have these things happening, because fundamentally the way the public picks up these habits is not through the results of research but through instruction. That is, if they pick them up at all: frankly, it doesn't seem to me at all clear that academic work has much connection to the society whose products it unmasks. Or, because this borders on sounding unduly pessimistic, I should say that this connection is very very mediated, through all sorts of complexities (teaching, and I'd like to add method, are two of the more direct connections still available--the first direct because it is still immediate, the second because it has mediated, the connection, installed itself in a symbolic field or discourse and triangulated itself--to use a term from Frederic Jameson's "cognitive mapping"--in some way). Just adopting another attitude supposes that the power to point out the object, along with the object's being produced by society, is enough to guarantee that the resulting statement will be in some sense about a societal object. In philosophy, the same maneuver will allow one to talk about real or natural objects, "bypassing society," because they are produced by nature (or man controlling nature).

On this point, one is reminded of that dictum of Fredric Jameson: "In matters of art, and particularly of artistic perception [...] it is wrong to want to decide, to want to resolve a difficulty." It strikes me that both Latour and Sedgwick want to resolve difficulties, even if they aren't entirely dealing with artistic perception but interpretation more generally (with critical perception in general). We might also follow Jameson, who, in the essay from which I extract this remark (the famous "Metacommentary"), points toward Paul Ricoeur and his distinction between a negative and positive hermeneutic. The idea of a positive hermeneutic which would oppose a sort of demystifying critique (the negative hermeneutic) might be more helpful in the long run than Latour's realism (though it could be supplemented with the work on objects and things), and certainly, I think, is more helpful than Sedgwick's reparative reading (who cites Ricoeur only to, in effect, bypass him and replace his powerful notion with a hazy one). Why? Because, unlike reparative realism (as we might call it) Ricoeur links the positive hermeneutic to a search for an origin. In other words, the positive hermeneutic is not just a shift away from demystification, but is an effect of an effort to restore a forgotten meaning. In this respect, it points towards a goal (it is the explicit search for origin, though not as ground), that brings about a method, a process, or at the very least installs the work of criticism within a certain field that requires elaboration, systematic extension, which the conception of criticism as merely additive (ironically) does not do and, frankly, isn't interested in doing (since all that is required is the blank assertion that by adding one is immanent to the process of extension itself--and indeed perhaps what criticism does is think long and hard about the distinction between addition and elaboration).

Specters of communism

(Thanks to comments from Grant, I revised a lot of this post--see his comments below for some good insights. It is basically an attempt to extend certain frustrations of Fredric Jameson in his essay "How Not to Historicize Theory" to the way the events of the last few weeks were covered in the news. Postscript: the general thrust of this article aligns vigorously with Jiri Pehe's August 24th article on the Prague Spring which everyone should read: there Pehe says "I suspect that our lasting reluctance to discuss the period [of the Prague Spring] openly is, more than anything else, a sign that the trauma of communism is still very much alive today, despite the last 19 years that democracy has had to take root.")
Bill Keller said the following in the Times a couple days ago:

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.
So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.
If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

This seems completely backwards in so many ways (even in referring by proxy to Fukuyama, who himself has backed away from that thesis for a long time now), but it comes down to the following for me: if we in America think this summer in particular heralds the return of giant post-Communist powers, as Keller says, it is only because here in America we never quite found a way to deal with their passing away.
Now, indeed, Keller himself seems to argue this when he says,

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

And yet, he doesn't because he puts it in all the wrong terms: precisely the terms of return that I am speaking about. And this misses everything important.
In fact the verbal slip here is indicative: somehow Keller relegates "the beginning" of the end of the Soviets to the category of "end," discounting it as "a beginning," a beginning that was greater than that of an end. In other words, we have the beginning of the end, and then we have the end as a beginning, as a beginning that exceeds any beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire is not really a beginning, even though Keller must still call it only a beginning.
And what does this real beginning, the beginning that exceeds any mere beginning of the end, bring about or begin? In short, resentment. The end of Communism was the beginning of the very indirect, passive aggressive resentment of the West instead of the Cold War's more direct and clear combat with it. And this is the real problem with Keller's analysis, what makes him miss the point entirely: he characterizes Russia as a country that has suffered a particular pseudo-psychological defeat that has been seeting under the surface all these years to resurge in a sort of nationalist aggression like we see now in Georgia. This is why, as he says, 1989 was a real "beginning"--and why saying this is something different than saying that in our "victory" over Communism we have not learned how to cope with its passing (my personal thesis).
Why is this so mistaken? Because it presupposes a sort of psychodynamic or communal-consciousness model of the operation of the state and its people that was probably only valid for thinking about the actions of Nazi Germany--if it is even valid there. Thus, he says the fall of the wall and the disbanding of the USSR did the following:

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Very nice, but this is also the way we talked about Bosnia, which, as we will see, is mistaken for the same reason: it moves quickly between an idea of nationalism or community and the idea of totalitarian psychological frenzy, without making clear what allows for the jump across between the two. Furthermore, it seems only to apply to the states of Eastern Europe and anything resembling a Communist or post-Communist society. It is as if, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, it couldn't happen here. In short, one could call it the logic of the losers. But doesn't this betray the fact that it is merely a way of bolstering the idea that we were and still are (despite all signs to the contrary) the winners? Something seething under the surface, the inner core of a repressed Communism: this is what, for Keller, motivates the action and the nationalism going on in Russia now. Similarly, China is seen--though Keller only moves towards this somewhat--quite similarly, since it has supposedly given up its real hardcore Communist core and embraced capitalism.
And as I began to indicate, what the idea of the return of Communism qua failed-resentful-post-Communism does is, however, more important than whether any of this actually really corresponds to the reality of the situation. This idea covers up the extremely pressing issue of dealing with the "minor-league monsters" which Keller dismisses here but are very much a problem of globalization in the wake of the fall of Communism--indeed despite what Paul Krugman maintains. These monsters aren't just hiccups in the process of globalization and--here is the flipside--neither are they the the fallout of the collapse of any major government that would challenge that of the West.
As I suggested earlier, one would need to see how we dealt with the Bosnian War (and Rwanda, and, now Darfur--though I'll confine myself to Bosnia) as the template for precisely how this work of covering up the real problem proceeds. What was so horrible about Bosnia was the similarity to a large scale nationalism working on such a small scale, and yet so effectively: this obviously came to a head in the unbelievable work of ethnic cleansing. (I should note that a great movie on Heidegger, The Ister, makes certain connections between Serbian nationalism and Nazism that are very well thought out and well depicted.) Indeed, we still can't really seem to cope with this sort of nationalism that we find now with Serbians, particularly in their reaction to the arrest of someone so unbelievably evil as Radovan Karadzic. What produces it? We must work here at the level of more minute and precise forces than those Keller seems to naively posit are at work. In other words, we must not be taken in, as Keller is, and so many are, by the size of the nations and the movements involved (the hugeness of China, in particular). At this huge level, the forces needed to unify a movement just fall into all the old categories of propaganda that now seem so extremely irrelevant: is it really the case that Serbs hate other ethnicities because people tell them? Adorno already in his time gives extremely good reasons why this is a bad way of putting the problem (cf. "Education after Auschwitz").
Now, our ignorance in the face of these problems is precisely not what is addressed by the policy we took in Bosnia. That is, this is not because there is no way to address this level of the micro-forces, it is just that our models of action, which stem from the policy of aid and international peacekeeping which were honed in Bosnia, and which devolved into full out war, precisely avoid them. What is needed is a new way of dealing with the spread of globalization and the destabilization that post-Communist or post-authoritarian regimes introduce into it as this spread occurs. Aid has the tendency, it seems to me, to merely compensate for this destabilization and restabilize, but it allows what is problematic--which is precisely not solely economic, nor cultural, but political through and through--to fester anyway. That is, the problem is a political problem, located at the foundation of the political union that constitutes these post-Communist states, and in some cases, can be ethnic. But it is a problem not of seeing these ethnic interests a s things that are psychological--rather one must think them as the thing that unifies the notion of political action. And again not in the sense of propoganda: rather we are dealing with the idea that politics is founded on a notion of a living body of a certain type, and a sort of filiation or purity between its members: in this sense it is very much ethnic, though not in a cultural way. This takes me into further territory, which is too complicated and confusing for me now. I'll wrap this up.
One thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter--one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it by trying to shift certain aspects of it (those that allowed these politico-ethnic regions to somewhat unify under Communism, if they did unify) into areas like culture, separate from the economy or from the operation of the political sphere in these countries as such. The key is to see that Communism does not return into our thinking as a big massive, homogenous albeit weakened force, like we often depict China and how Keller tries to get us to think about Russia (it is homogeneously resentful): we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally (or rather, ethnic-politically) determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Fredric Jameson's insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists that this is still actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.

Zizek on Heidegger and Nazism, again

I presented a somewhat detailed response to this topic a while ago: since then, the essay Zizek wrote on "Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933" has made its way into his newest book, In Defense of Lost Causes--the topic thus merits a reconsideration, but I'll be more brief and more blunt.
Zizek's effort in this book is valiant. One can take this recent and precise characterization of the book by Terry Eagleton (a rarity in Eagleton's corpus--and perhaps the only one in this shallow, resentful review), and affirm it against Eagleton's scorn:

The self-consciously outrageous case the book has to argue is that there is a “redemptive” moment to be plucked from such failed revolutionary ventures as Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Žižek is by no means a champion of political terror: the Mao he offers us here, for example, is the mass murderer who mused that “half of China may have to die” in the Great Leap Forward, and who remarked that though a nuclear war might blow a hole in the planet, it would leave the cosmos largely untouched. His aim is not to justify such demented views, but to make things harder for the typical liberal middle-class dismissal of them (my italics).

Perhaps Eagleton phrases it in an asinine way, but I think that this "making things harder" of Zizek is precisely how we should read Zizek's effort. Phrased a little less cynically, we might put Eagleton's statement this way: Zizek restores weight to politics, philosophy, and culture--this is his mission and has been his mission consistently throughout this career. And rather than losing momentum over the years, he has only become more intense--his ambitions and his fire only have grown.
But Eagleton's idiocy locates the problem in this restoration--he makes the same mistake as Zizek, but falls only on the other side of its result. The problem is this: who is the subject to which Zizek addresses his discourse? Granted, unlike other big thinkers on the Left (I'm particularly thinking of certain Frenchmen, with their extraordinary academic and state apparatuses), Zizek's ideas is less institutionally supported in the sense of having a stable and somewhat more closed forum in which to speak--indeed, his best work is when he is among psychoanalysts. But his major works are always more global than that: he is probably the first thoroughly global (and this does not mean international) thinker. This means that his remarks are directed somewhat all over the place. And in the end, who reads them? Well, in the UK and in America, the typical middle-class Anglo-American thinker (I bypass the great and much more fruitful reception he has had elsewhere, and merely talk about our Zizek, the Zizek that we see and talk about here). I'm not saying the people are middle-class who read Zizek. It is that the particular middle-class that Eagleton has in mind is the one sympathized with and identified with by the Left intellectual: the subject needed to be mobilized and enlightened in order to do something substantial about capitalism. Zizek's great achievement is to try and restore some weight to Marxist notions and the Marxist spirit by showing Marxism isn't as old as we thought: it still has life in it yet, because it can link up in a creative way with Lacan--that is, an anti-humanistic (but not Althusserian) thinking. This must resolutely be called "making things harder" only in the sense that this means an ascesis, a training in thinking and in activity so as to be able to adjust thinking to the radically new problems posed by capitalism--those problems which escape the more rigid Marxism of most of the twentieth century. In short, it means thinking about action: Zizek is the thinker of individual and collective action against and within capitalism--if this means things must be harder, it means that we also are on the way to addressing their difficulty by becoming hard. Eagleton cannot know what this means: all he can do is seek out points where real thinkers are complicit in the capitalism they criticize.
Thus, where Eagleton would stupidly see some hypocrisy in the precise identity of the Anglo-American subject of Zizek's work (shouldn't Zizek mainly be talking to the rebels?), we can begin to see that the real problem in this identity is that it can only be marshaled into action by appeals to practicality--or at least this is what Zizek seems to assume (and with some grounds for doing so). The extremely impractical restorative weight that he gives to certain problems, then, ultimately has to turn on almost being able to be confused with the immediately practical: this is the one, sole aspect that constitutes the Zizekian flair in almost every sentence. There is a reversal on a conceptual level that he effects--for example, what Heidegger did in 1933 (join the Nazi party) was not evil, but actually a rare thinking-through of the commitment his philosophy was making politically and one that took place not within that philosophy itself (smuggled into texts) but in action--and this reversal almost of itself can seem to be absolutely pragmatic--it suggests that one should not philosophize politics as much as engage in political action. The force of this reversal is always an appeal to pragmatic action--and this because the audience Zizek writes his sentences for is one that needs not only conceptual shifts and reversals but clues to guide their practical activity. In short, the people Zizek writes for can't just think through a conceptual reversal--they need the force of this reversal to reflect some practical action they can engage in then and there.

While this might be right about these readers, I wonder whether Zizek doesn't need to rethink this aspect of his writings--for in a case like this with Heidegger we see that perhaps another way of arguing and appealing would be both more practical and intellectually interesting. For what is Zizek's treatment of Heidegger, after all? It doesn't say much besides its title: in short, postmodernist philosophers who sneak politics into their words are weak compared to even Heidegger, who had the smarts to join a party in the open, as an action--that is, be committed to what one says even more than theorizing it. Of course this was a monstrous choice--but in principle, with other parties, this is what the Left needs. So Zizek argues, but this is only to isolate what is most obvious about the case of Heidegger: that he made a political decision which was tied into his thinking. Beyond the shock, the appeal to mobilize in a similarly counterintuitive way (but with a totally different party)--precisely because (according to Zizek) Heidegger's case is a paradigmatic instance of the risks of political engagement for thinkers--this does not do much. And it risks making a sly appeal to the perverse in Heidegger's action as what we should feel if we are being political, if we are being active--it gives us something disturbing that we can be okay with so we can get off our asses and mobilize. In other words, this makes it seem as if the bar is lowered for all of us and that political action is just perverse since it always risks being an abomination. In short, it risks being pragmatic for the sake of being pragmatic--that is, just to mobilize. And it is willing to sacrifice the conclusions for this aim. This is Zizek's fault--and to say this is to be as far away from chastising him as a provocateur as possible.
In the end, if Zizek is advocating an action like Heidegger's but directed differently--if he is saying that most political action of thinkers has to risk becoming Heidegger--well I can't see how this isn't a refusal to think what is so vile in Heidegger: the privileging of presence, of activity, of manliness, of the poetic; and the denigrating of the calculating, the prosaic, the everyday--all this, so prevalent in his writings, being made into a Nazism, committed to very specific ideals that are unspeakably disgusting. Many thinkers have had these privileges before: they are not Nazis. And if Zizek is saying that they are precisely not politically engaged because of this--well, he is waging a war not just pragmatically in the now against capitalism, but with a lot of human history. It all comes down to this: is Zizek's discussion of Heidegger an example for a revolutionary mind? Or is it something more impractical? If it is the latter, well, I don't know how we would read Zizek.

Wars: Nietzsche, Foucault

My ever insightful buddy Sand Avidar-Walzer pointed out that the crucial thing in the passage from Nietzsche I quoted a little while ago is the fact that Nietzsche speaks of wars (Kriege)--that is, war in the plural:

Die höchste Kunst im Jasagen zum Leben, die Tragödie, wird wiedergeboren werden, wenn die Menschheit das Bewusstsein der härtesten, aber nothwendigsten Kriege hinter sich hat, ohne daran zu leiden.
-"Versuch einer Selbstkritik," Die Geburt der Tragödie (I quote the German because I remain a little dissatisfied by the English rendering of it.)

The highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.
-"Attempt at Self-Criticism," in The Birth of Tragedy

I was making the argument that self-criticism, for Nietzsche, was this war, and that it was a war precisely because it was not a slavish No to life. It is the closest thing to this No which can be made from a non-dialectical perspective, which is (to remind us) a perspective that seeks not to fix and set an other against a self in a fight that this self will always win--because the other will never be anything than the self's other--but to endure the risk of confronting an other that is beyond any fixing, apprehension, etc., and so is, in its being a threat, an enticement to life, a potential for the self to increase its domination, impose its reality. Self-criticism is, for Nietzsche, the only No that would say Yes to life, and this because it is a war.
And this because, as Sand says, war is in the plural here, is already more than one war. For, if one is to confront the other non-dialectically, there will be no fixed self to oppose this other just as much as there will be no stable or fixed other. The war of this self will already be another war from itself: this is indeed why war is primarily life-affirming for Nietzsche. That is, war is not life-affirming because Nietzsche is bellicose or valorizes violence generally (this is perhaps most the case even in his early writing on war, "Homer's Contest"). Nor is it merely that a higher man would find in war not a threat but an increase in power. It is that war, properly conceived, is the dissolution of the self precisely as the endurance of an other qua other. Self-constancy becomes a leap into becoming only here.
And I shouldn't even be talking of a "self." Nietzsche here talks about "humanity," or, to interpret "Menschheit" a bit more provocatively or in a more Nietzschian manner, human-ness, the constitution of our species when we consider it in its animality. What falls away into becoming in the wars here is any type of consciousness inhabiting this particular non-animal animality of the human: we become animals in these wars. I stress this because the body, the brute matter that makes this animal up, is really what is involved in this war rather than a self. Nietzsche affirms the body always against certain philosophers, who think of it only as "infected with every error of logic there is!" as he says in Twilight of the Idols. This parody of the philosopher here is so brilliant, because it brings forth so much of the human way of considering the way bodies work in wars: carnage is the first thing we see and think of--the destruction of bodies without logic, without reason, purely on the basis of the contingency of violence escaping any battle tactics (for these tactics do not extend down to the level of the wound: they only organize its possibility, remaining chillingly rational--we will come back to this). Nietzsche inverts, however, the way we think we think about it: could it be that we think war illogical and full of carnage precisely because we humans, and especially we philosophers, think of the body as illogical and as the defiling of reason, of the soul?
Again, this is not to valorize war: it is to rethink humanity on the basis of a site that to it, qua human, seems the most animal, the most bodily, the most inhuman, precisely because there it concretely has the chance to make more war. Who would make war within war? Certainly not a human. But this is exactly what Sand gets at: for Nietzsche war is only really made when it is made in a war--when it is already another war.
Foucault picks up on this, and I suggest that we can only really understand him when we connect him to Nietzsche's sense of war: in an interview, asked about how an event gets taken up into discourse, he says,

Here I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no "meaning," though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail--but in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics.
-"Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Essays, 1972-1977, p. 114

One merely needs to read "humanity" for "meaning," and one has our Nietzsche. And in fact, this is precisely what Nietzsche is already doing in talking about "humanity" and especially about "consciousness:" the animal that goes beyond humanity is one that does not have the same way of making things mean. This is why he or she is first of all an animal, and second of all, because he does not only have a different way of meaning, but really seems to break the form of meaning altogether, so as to have no recourse to it, he is beyond both other animals and the human animal. He or she differentiates himself or herself by not meaning--which precisely means seeing a different type of intelligibility altogether, and precisely in places like struggles, wars. In the end, this is the way that wars are always in the plural, why they are waged again from within war: the human does not merely break with meaning to try and establish another meaningful war within (but outside) the war, but actually breaks with war as meaningful in waging it again. The superfluity of the act, its being able to be waged again and again, is precisely how it constitutes its intelligibility, how it brings the human out of the human. And, indeed, does not close off the other: Foucault continues,

Neither the dialectic, as logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts. "Dialectic is a way of evading the always open and haserdous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and "semiology" is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue.
-"Truth and Power," 114-5.

What we find here is that the talk of strategies is not a reference to their being planned, but their being the intelligibility of a struggle beyond meaning--in this sense only then, we can interpret strategy as working all the way down to the level of violence, of the individual wounds, struggles, bodies (to respond to our hint above). One must read Foucault this way in order to get his sense of power and to place it alongside Nietzsche's. One has to wonder, however, exactly where war is and is not: whether terrorism, civil unrest, incidental violence, etc. are war or (what is likely) are war only indirectly--if not at all. Foucault's inversion of the famous dictum of Clausewitz is very helpful in this context, for if politics is war by other means, we have a greater sense of where and how this nondialectical, Nietzschian confrontation of alterity is distributed. Foucault would have it reach back into many of our daily processes. In a way, we can then understand him as thinking various regimes already from a Nietzschian standpoint, the standpoint where we are beyond the human animal. Rather than confining war to a genuine, essential moment (a privileged one where war is really war), war suffuses our everyday activities--but with the possibility that it is not even violent. Bombing, terrorism--what if these were not always war, and not because they were not instances where war was "really," "authentically" war, even in a Nietzschian sense? Furthermore, when we critique the war on terror by calling it "the so-called war on terror," we don't posit an authentic war to contrast it against in this way--otherwise the critique of the phrase would have more traction, I think. But if we are not doing this, then precisely how are we criticizing the assertion that the war on terror is really a war? It is because we have not perhaps been as precise in our analysis of it as a function of something like a discursive regime, perhaps, that we lack any way to say what where we can find real wars to contrast this so-called war against.

"The new black"

Tina Fey's awesome segment this week on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" probably understands what people like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich (especially today's column) can't in all their Clinton-bashing: that Democrats want to rally around an issue, a cause, a hope of some sort, and that Clinton--unless one declares "Bitch is the new black"--just seems to ignore this want or need. She differentiates herself, that is, in precisely the wrong way from Obama: in making her campaign about experience and practicality rather than a cause or several causes, she is seen as being indifferent to the spirit of hope in ideas that the Democrats currently have. More precisely, she gives Democrats the feeling that she thinks all Democratic issues are alike in the sense that they are implementable in a policy. Democrats now want to assert--against years and years of Republican distortions--that they have intrinsic good. It is indeed the worst case of wanting to feel self-righteous: they want to feel as self-righteous as Republicans. This doesn't mean they are voting for Obama out of guilt or anything: it is just that a call for unity around an issue is seen as courageous because it assuages doubts about the rightness of the idea in the first place.  Thus the inane calls for Clinton to try and "transcend gender" as much as Obama is "transcending race"--as if this were possible or even is being done by Obama. What this statement really means is that Clinton should give us hope of making gender something that should be transcended again as much as Obama is with race. Thus Fey's comment: Clinton has to say that she stands for something larger than herself about which she can always be impractical or believe in more radically than any policy's ability to implement an openness to it. Fey is reminding us, and her, that this "something" is her gender.

In other words, Democrats want to unify around all those ideas left behind with the takeover of Reagan, not in their practical aspect at all, but precisely around the utter impracticality of what they stand for. They want to restore some force to these ideas. Obama indeed believes these ideas have force. Clinton says they are words that need to be implemented. This is the difference and the difference is crucial. Democrats don't want to doubt the correctness of their ideas anymore: they look enviously over at the self-righteousness of the Republicans.

The issue isn't whether Clinton is more right about the nature of the ideas than Obama: Obama is in fact just as practical as Clinton in most respects when it indeed comes to implementing these ideas. The issue is the dangerous direction that this means the Democratic party could be headed on: the same route as the Republicans in the 80's and 90's. Democrats are tired of being the reality-check to the Republican party. And rather than confronting the problems that the ideas of the 60's and 70's have turned into--notably, the issue of identity--they want to restore the sense of the goodness or correctness of them. Clinton sees them as problems in the sense that they have to be implemented. Obama sees them as opportunities precisely in the same sense. The latter is what the Democrats want, regardless of whether the particular constitution of the ideas ideas themselves are practical or impractical in their conception to begin with.

That said, this is only an argument against the prevailing tendency of Rich and Dowd in their commentaries to belittle Clinton via contesting her pragmatism when they are really contesting her lack of their optimism about issues like gender and race. Thus, it is also against the dangerous language of fashion that Fey employs mistakenly to give body to the optimism that she really, beneath the word "new," is wonderfully standing for. In short, it is dangerous not in how Fey uses it (the point is actually that bitch was always the same as black), but in how it might be heard. That is, it is dangerous in how it is actually a reflection of the sad reality of what would appeal to the Left: they want to be able to have ideas be able have such inherent force and rightness again that they can be turned into a fashion even (see the current status of the environmental movement in its green living, etc.).

Of course there are many more reasons to vote for Obama than just this sense of his optimism in ideas, and this is reflected at the polls or at least in people's sentiments.  And there are many more reasons to vote against or for Clinton than her stance on the belief of these issues. The point is that Clinton isn't helping herself by saying comments like this in Providence, Rhode Island, parodying Obama:

“Now I could stand up here and say, let’s get everybody together, let’s get unified the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing,” she said, to a smattering of giggles. “And everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect... But I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and make the special interests disappear.”

-"Clinton Turns from Anger to Sarcasm," from the New York Times

This is actually quite disgusting. The hardening of Hillary Clinton in this hour in her campaign against the hope in Obama's will only bring her message out less: it's utter inanity on her part. It makes the issues of the Left, which they are right in caring about (though perhaps not in the way they think about them), seem like a joke when they exceed the realm of policy and become beliefs, when, to these people, they are absolutely not.

Notes on Derrida and politics

Without the opening of an absolutely undetermined possible, without the radical abeyance and suspense marking a perhaps, there would never be either event nor decision. Certainly. But nothing takes place and nothing is ever decided without suspending the perhaps while keeping its living possibility in living memory... In the order of law, politics or morality, what would rules and laws, contracts and institutions indeed be without steadfast... determination, without calculability and without violence done to the perhaps, to the possible that makes them possible? We insist on the decision in order to introduce the aporia in which all theory of decision must engage itself, notably in its apparently modern figures--for example, that of Schmittian decisionism, of its "right-wing" or "left-wing" or even neo-Marxist heritage... Such a decisionism, as we know, is a theory of the enemy. And the figure of the enemy, condition of the political as such, takes shape in this century against the backdrop of its own loss: we would be losing the enemy, and thereby the political.

-The Politics of Friendship, 67-8

Whether or not this is a valid reading of Schmitt (and Derrida's reading of him is extremely rigorous) is not as important here as the link established between calculability, decision, and the figure of the enemy. Calculating or establishing a political decision for Derrida cannot be the calculating of who it is made against: it is the undermining of precisely this setting-up of an enemy, which means that, since all calculation inevitably fixes and determines and thereby always heads in the direction of establishing an enemy, is the interruption of calculation or decision-making itself. I'll elaborate on these notes later, but one can already see that the insistence of Derrida is against establishing a space in opposition to decisionism, but rather that interrupts decisionism from within it--that is, is always a call for more calculation (there is never enough of it in the political). How would anything get done? This is also a question, of course, but Derrida is emphasizing that no political decision ever takes place such that only after it there is action on it or that brings it into effect. Deciding is already bringing about its results. But, at the same time, this pre-decision never is itself the real, authentic locus of the deciding: we do not jump into a sphere where all that matters is the condition of the possibility of deciding--this essentially constitutes Derrida's opposition to (and faithfulness to) Marxism.

Beyond "language, racism, and beyond"

Here is a supplement to the post below on Derrida and the language of racism: a New York Times article on the circulation of the sign of the noose in the US just over the past two years, with an amazing chart documenting where and how this circulation takes place. The conclusion of the writers of the article is ominous, but reflects how the the rhetoric of "the end of racial inequality" promulgated by late twentieth century commentators from the years of Reagan through Clinton, and especially abused by George W. Bush and his defenders after Katrina, have overlooked reality:

It seems that the September rally in Jena — much as it was seen by many civil rights activists as the beginning of a new social movement — signaled not a renewed march toward racial and social justice, but a surprisingly broad and deep white backlash against the gains of black America.

If advocates of civil rights are seen as wrong to even demonstrate against the heinous crime in Jena, how can anyone claim that racism is on the wane in this country, or, to return to Derrida, that language does not always already lend itself by a necessity to racism? This is what Derrida is getting at: simply excluding the users of a racist sign like the noose--even if they could be found and brought to justice, as they should--employs the logic whereby racists seek to exclude a particular other. Insofar as justice can be executed, it is only a matter of a power (the power of the state over racists). What must be sought is the deeper problem of justice's lack of account for the necessity within racism to have recourse to language to constitute itself. This will bring the users of racist signs to justice but will also address the potential for us all to be racists. Whether this justice must reduce itself to a set of legal codes--or whether this is even possible--also has to be tackled: what is clear with respect to this is that a system of justice founded on the principle of the free actor obviously cannot do this, and while it is in place, still benefits racists and those sick oppressors of others.

Language, racism, and beyond

Jacques Derrida says in "Racism's Last Word" (a short text from 1983 on apartheid) something extremely interesting with respect to how we try to hold racism and especially racist language accountable: he says, "no racism without a language." But Derrida means by this something more precise:

The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word.

-"Racism's Last Word" in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1, 379.

Two things are being said here: first, words are never "only words"--Derrida could have put the two words in quotes. The point here should be obvious, but the text--in particular its lack of quotes, which must be supplemented--indicates that it should be remembered: language, and in particular racist language, says something. It never says nothing, never is "mere" language. But second, this sentence in a different register (and along the trajectory of its most forceful thrust) indicates that racial violence never just manifests itself in words. Words are not the only way racial violence manifests itself. So, in a way, what is being said is that words are "only words." But at this point it is crucial to read these two points together, so that we come up with the following: words are not merely the only manifestation of racial violence, but they are not this only insofar as they are never "without a language." That is, racial violence never just manifests itself in ("mere") words because it is never without language. This paradox is expressed in the last part of the sentence: racial violence is more than mere words because it "has to have" words.

The crucial thing for Derrida is this "has to have," the necessity of the linguistic, and not the linguistic itself. Many, many people still make the mistake that Derrida simply applies what one critic called once by the name of "semiological reductionism:" that is, a reduction of everything to movements of the signifier and to language more generally. For Derrida, however, racism does not have to have words because everything is words--that is, because racism and acts of racism can be understood under a broad definition of language. Indeed, this is the main thing I wanted to stress here, for though the paradox we just delimited is interesting, it can be absolutely misunderstood and misapplied if we understand it this way. Racial violence never just manifests itself in mere words because it is never without language--but this is not because racial violence is just another name for language. This cannot explain language being "mere" language for Derrida, "only language:" that is, being a limited set of something larger, more expansive--"racial violence." In Derrida, language still maintains its limited sphere of operation, refusing to open itself out into the model on which everything operates. This does not mean that everything does not need, like racial violence, the structures of language in some way. If this is grasped, the crucial distinction has just been made.

The necessity of racial violence having to have words, having to have recourse to language, is not because racial violence is just language, but because racial violence cites the structures and movements of language in order to be different than language, in order to be itself as other than language, to be more than mere language.

Thus, there is no racism without language. But racism is not just merely words. It is the citation of the structure of language, and thus needs words in such a way that words cannot be viewed as "only words" if we see this citation at work. Any of these words then will be bigger than just words, signs, but will indicate something larger than themselves that gets performed on their model.

Practically, it is obvious what is at stake: the fate of a category of law that could punish hate speech as an act (cf. Only Words by Catherine MacKinnon). Derrida would be gutting this category if he asserted everything is language: all racial violence would be hate speech. And many people act like this is what Derrida is saying. But what is really being addressed by Derrida here is how a juridical notion of hate speech does not and will not adequately do what it wants to do--get rid of racisim. This is because there is indeed something other than this speech--acts of racial violence. But these, according to Derrida, are not without recourse to words, to hate speech. So everything revolves around not just deterring hate speech: racism will not be combated if one merely deals with only words. We have to deal with the necessity in racism that invokes language, that cannot be without words. So punishing hate speech as an act like terrorism, as MacKinnon (brilliantly, and with much justification) suggests, doesn't yet get at the complexity of the acts of violence involved in racism and in hate (and thus makes her disturbingly ignore hate when it occurs in other forms than heterosexual sexual abuse--most notably, in instances of homophobia: for a better analysis of the legal ramifications of speech read Judith Butler's Excitable Speech).

I moved fast here because I have a lot to do--but I hope it is clear that the challenge Derrida is leveling here is to not merely see how what he says just reduces everything to language. This injunction to (re)reading Derrida is found in the lack of the quotes, and amounts to the following: if you can't go some lengths to account for the lack of these quotes, you might want to think about whether you are making things too simple regarding the relationship of language to social action and justice, politics, or anything beyond (should I have put this beyond in quotes?) language.

I'll leave you with what Derrida continues with:

...but rather that they have to have a word. Even though it alleges blood, color, birth or, rather, because it uses this naturalist and sometimes creationist discourse, racism always betrays the perversion of a human "talking animal." It institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes. A system of marks, it designs places in order to assign forced residence or to close off borders. It does not discern, it discriminates.

"The central front on the war on terror"

Don't we all sense that characterizations of the Bush administration's disgusting rhetoric as "fascist" or "dictatorial"--see Frank Rich's column yesterday if you want one of the more thoroughly executed instances of this--don't really get at the heart of the matter, and end up just sounding paranoid, ineffectual. Why is this the case?
It is because this term as it is used refers to fascism when it is at its height, its fullest manifestation. But wasn't Germany, for example, just as fascist in the years before the National Socialists came to power? That is, in its willingness ("will" is precisely the fascist way to describe it, as we will see) to sacrifice values, the values of the Heimat, etc. it was just as fascist as when it actually took them away. (One should revisit a review by Benjamin of a volume of Jünger, where he says precisely this--I think its in the second volume of the selected writings... Benjamin also sensed this about Heidegger, I think) The impotent will, the longing for a will that characterized Germany after the First World War--that is what fascism is, and this longing is what really pervades the disgusting "war on terror." The contradictions of Bush are not expressions of the double-speak of a Hitler or a Stalin--they are contradictory because they are expressions of a power that is really only the impotent longing for adefinite enemy, for a front on which to face them. Isn't the unbelievablely naive optimism of this administration that they will meet this enemy precisely what cannot be accounted for by every critic of this administration? Who has not explained it away as mere doublespeak in some form? We must ask ourselves, doesn't this impotent optimism resemble someone like Jünger's after the war (or Heidegger's, always) in his longing for another field of battle, for another definite enemy, for another front? (For Heidegger, we should say, another Auseinandersetzung.) That is, isn't this optimism genuinely expressed--in the sense that it also necessarily expresses an impotence to have the future be present?
Along these lines, we might reread a passage from Derrida as applying to our "war" in this way:

...polemos unites adversaries, it brings together those who are opposed (Heidegger often insisted on [this]). The front, as the site upon which the First World War was waged, provides a historic figure for this polemos that brings enemies together as though they were conjoined in the extreme proximity of the face-to-face. This exceptional and troubling glorification of the front perhaps presages another type of mourning, namely, the loss of this front during and especially after the Second World War, the disappearance of this confrontation which allowed one to identify wthe enemy and even and especially to identify with the enemy.
-The Gift of Death, 17.

What is crucial about this passage is that it emphasizes how the mourning for the polemos is already this second mourning, is already a "presaging," and thus is already the mourning for its eventual possibility of being lost. The two move together, and characterize how fasicism shows up on the scene not in the restriction of freedom itself but in the genuine (/contradictory) insistence that there is (the loss of an) enemy. That is, where things get framed in terms of polemos or of will and impotence--even by the opposition (see Rich's column)--and where this language is not taken seriously, there fascist tendencies are really at work. We shouldn't read, then, the blatant idiocy of a phrase such as "the central front on the war on terror" as the machinations of a conniving fascist administration like the NSDAP at the height of its power (when it was fascist as Nazism), but as the very real reframing of the way we talk about our actions in the very real (early) fascist language of longing through power for a definite identification, a definite confrontation. That is, it is precisely in how it makes any characterization of them as "fascist" in the late fully fledged Nazi sense seem paranoid. Insofar as we long genuinely for a will to bring back the rights of the constitution--like Rich does--we've already succumbed to their more subtle fascism, because we too look only for a real confrontation, a real enemy.

The blindness of David Brooks

I usually enjoy David Brooks' remarks in the New York Times and on NewsHour, because he shows how conservatism can be at least somewhat sane. Comparing him to any other conservative commentator in the news in print or on television really shows you how ridiculous the party's public intellectuals have become.
This is because Brooks' conservatism is mostly grounded economically: social issues for him as well as the role of the government tend to be inflected through a relationship of governance to the requirements of a free market. In a column a few weeks ago, Brooks tried--unsuccessfully I think but better than any of the other conservative commentators out there now--to ground this view in the writings of Burke. But his view of things tends more to hearken back to a fiscal conservatism of the mid-twentieth century and tie in well now with many of the economic conservatives like Fukuyama and those in the law and economics crowd.
It is here, though, that Brooks becomes blind. Because he consistently is a conservative outlining critiques of values-based conservatism, he cannot successfully engage with questions of value except through economics or the role of the government engaging in economic issues. But what happens with this is not an inability to talk about questions of values, but rather a filtering of questions of values through economics so that they seem to fizzle away and not really be issues at all. This is what he does today in his column on Reagan's 1980 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered sixteen years prior. Reagan got up and spoke of how he favored "states' rights"--insensitive to how that might sound to a group of people who used the issue of states' rights to oppose, sometimes through acts of murder, the federal attempt to bring civil rights to every state and especially those in the South.
Brooks says, after recounting the facts--which really did need to be done and he should be praised for it:

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.
Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.
But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

It is true that the "agitprop version" of the event overlooks the complexity of what happened (which Brooks does recount with fidelity in the case of Bartlett and drum--though, notice he does not speak of his colleague Paul Krugman's column a few weeks ago that makes the much larger claim that conservatism is based upon racism in the South, and is particularly faithful to the complexity of what happened in Philadelphia), but Reagan isn't being slandered as Brooks says because this "complexity," according to him, takes the following form:

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”
The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.
Reagan flew to New York and delivered his address to the Urban League, in which he unveiled an urban agenda, including enterprise zones and an increase in the minimum wage. He was received warmly, but not effusively. Much of the commentary that week was about whether Reagan’s outreach to black voters would work.

That is, Reagan is being slandered according to Brooks because this event is set in a larger context that tries to economically help out African Americans by "increasing the minimum wage" and diverting more funds to schooling. Prior to this quote, Brooks also sets up the economic ways Reagan was trying to court voters.
I'm not saying that Brooks said that the economic program Reagan was outlining is really what he thinks contributes to the "misunderstanding" of Reagan here. I'm saying that throughout the article, the economic pops up as the tantilizing evidence to the contrary that Reagan wasn't a racist. Brooks underlying emphasis upon this is how he really persuades us that the situation was more complex, not by just recounting the events.
Look at how dismissively Brooks utters "Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair." What's more important to him by far is that Reagan "spoke mostly about inflation and the economy." The intention to help these people out is really there, its in the numbers, despite an insensitiveness that borders on racism. The question of values end up getting addressed in the long run by Reagan's fiscal conservatism: it would have been great if he would have encouraged brotherly love, but really he was encouraging it all along if we look at the complexity the right way--that is, economically. Questions of values really just reduce to this.
This is dangerous and what makes Brooks perhaps even more blind than the other conservative hacks out there. By not interrogating values as values and dissolving them into questions of economic policy, which is valueless, or at least safer, less heated, more rational, Books is able to get Reagan off from being a racist. The real question is what he never addresses: was this a racist act? In fact, this question should have been asked precisely because of the context of events. For Brooks, however, the context, because it is "complex" (read: economic), this question never needs to be pursued.

Heidegger, Nazism, Zizek and Politics

One of you was awesome and pointed out that Slavoj Zizek had just written an intriguing article on Heidegger provocatively entitled "Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933," and I thought I'd address it more here, since I was perhaps a little too initially dismissive of what it said. (To perhaps help with this address--for what is said here will either submit to or efface its evidentiary trace, though this will occur precisely through a reinterpretation of its evidentiary authority--I've attched a famous photo of Heidegger at a meeting with other Freiburg faculty and administrators. Heidegger is marked with an X.)
It's an amazing article, and very thoroughly goes through the positions people have taken and are taking towards Heidegger's engagement--regardless of where you fall on the issue, I think that looking over and subscribing to how Zizek outlines the current situation is profitable. I also think Zizek's account of the interrelationship between Heidegger's thinking and his political decisions not only during the Nazi period but especially afterwards is absolutely insightful--and merits everyone's attention who is interested in the issue.
But I still think the main point of the article is where Zizek gets into problems. Let me first say, though, that I have been and am nearly always sympathetic to Zizek--to the extent that I agree with him when he says that our political situation stands in need of a repetition of Leninism, where repetition means not a return to Leninism but precisely seizing on the open possibilities of Leninism today (although my understanding of repetition is still different, see my post on "Repetition, Negativity and das Geschehen des Daseins," below). I also agree with Zizek that along with this repetition there needs to be (and this is even more urgent) a fierce opposition to populism as a seductive but in the end extremely dangerous position for the Left to endorse (See Zizek's article "Against Populist Reason"--I think it was called--in Critical Inquiry). Fundamentally, though, Zizek remains and has always remained too the real potential of Derrida and deconstruction, which I know he sees--and I just this is afflicts his theorizations of an adequate postmodern subject-position (in at least one way I'll outline below). But to the article.
In the (extremely accurate) words of the person who pointed it out to me, the article essentially tries to outline how "today we are quick to renounce things like collective action, revolutionary engagement, and wagers on truth as containing an element of 'totalitarianism,' where the proper analysis would look beyond this broad-brush approach and find the redemptive elements within collective politics that don't yield totalitarian results." My awesome interlocutor continues: "All of this becomes relevant to Heidegger though, when considering the 'totalitarian' nature of his Nazi engagement. We are all too quick to dismiss his engagement as such as totalitarian. Zizek argues that this engagement is positive and fully necessary for politics - where Heidegger missed was his inability to think beyond the current political horizion and to grasp the emergence of an Event."
In response I said the following, prefacing this with how I don't take issue with the critique of the "broad-brush" approach to totalitarianism--that is, I agree wholeheartedly that we can't read Heidegger simply as a Nazi philosopher, as a philosopher of Nazism or even of totalitarianism generally. Instead, I say, "I'm taking issue with the way he goes about trying to change the way we are disposed to dismiss Heidegger, that is, the way he wants us to read Heidegger in light of a better conception of totalitarianism."
I pretty much stand by that, but I thought I'd elaborate why I think Zizek (and perhaps my interlocutor) would say I was wrong--since it's in the article (and indeed all of Zizek's work), because it brings up a huge question about the nature of the Lacanian political project and, indeed, the post-modern political project as a whole (if one can subsume it under this heading).
Now, Zizek would respond to me by saying that I am, like many people who side with Derrida, ignoring the consequences of my own critique of Heidegger. That is, if I am willing to condemn Heidegger and his Nazism, and at the same time willing to admit of a more complex situation regarding Nazism and totalitarianism now and in Heidegger's time (that is, I am not just naively looking at totalitarianism and Heidegger as "bad," as a philosopher of Nazism), but unwilling to take up a comportment towards these issues I critique, I am (to be frank) emptying out all the force of critique and of subjectivity more generally--I become merely a function of late capitalism, an postmodern unhappy consciousness, another hack who doesn't have any real conception of the consequences of words precisely when he asserts that words have consequences. In fact, according to Zizek, this is precisely what Heidegger resisted in his decision to become a Nazi--an empty form of perpetually unhappy academic criticism. And to that extent, Zizek continues, Heidegger was right in 1933--as the title of the essay says. That is, Heidegger resisted the typical leftist illusion of a comportment towards the political that precisely did not do anything political, did not risk anything in its ability to continue thinking, did not correctly apprehend the violence that is in the nature of the political act insofar as it actually does risk doing something. Heidegger, according to Zizek, precisely engaged in this risk--and insofar as he did so, he conceived of and engaged in the political subject-position or comportment correctly.
Now, I absolutely agree with all of this regarding someone who does not take up a definite subject position to this object of their critique--but don't think it applies here to what I'm saying, because I do not think that Heidegger's resistence to this indefinite Leftist position with respect to the political itself constituted a correct apprehension of the essence of the political subject-position--and I think this is really what Zizek is saying. In other words, I don't think this criticism applies, because fundamentally I don't think we can say Heidegger was right at all in 1933, even in the sense Zizek suggests.
Why? Not because I agree with any of the other readings of Heidegger's actions in 1933 (and before and after) with respect to Nazism, especially with those readings that assert it was just a mistake, but because fundamentally I think Heidegger did what Zizek does, which is confuse the violence inherent in thought with the risk that lies in the political event. To assert that this violence is part of the necessary risk inherent in the political subject position is then, really incorrect. The violence in thinking, or even active thinking (action, praxis), is not the same as the risk that this thinking takes in doing this violence.
Let me be clearer on what I mean by "violence," for Zizek is good about marking the occurence of this word in Heidegger's texts and this strain in his thinking--and approving of it. For Heidegger it has to do with the ability of thought to retreive essential or proper thought (thought of the truth of being) and to break down or destroy other thoughts in order to transform them into this essential thought. Like Derrida, and like Zizek, Heidegger fundamentally thinks thoughts are violent--they have effects, and they cannot escape having effects. The history of metaphysics is the history of a certain type of violence for Heidegger, which needs to be properly transformed--and this must also be done through a certain type of violence. This is what Heidegger is getting at in a preface to his book on Kant, to take only one instance of this discussion of violence:

Readers have taken constant offense at the violence of my intepretations. Their allegation of violence can indeed be supported by this text. Philosophicohistorical research is always correctly subject to this charge whenever it is directed against attempts to set in motion a thoughtful dialogue between thinkers.
-Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th edition, xx (the remark is written in 1950).

In other words, nothing can be signifiantly thought without this violence.
Now, Zizek thinks the assertion about the violence in thought stems from something correct in Heidegger--the conception of the real risk in having a relationship to the political in one's thinking, the sense Heidegger had of the political act of thought and its very real consequences. That is, thought risks itself (its ability to continue existing), as well as the thought of others (their ability to continue existing), in being political. Furthermore, if it does not risk itself, it is not political. But there is no such thing as an apolitical thought--Zizek argues. There are only thoughts that risk nothing--these are postmodern unhappy thoughts just characterized. This political risk is the other side of thought itself--insofar as thought is to be itself, then, it must develop and account for (be responsible for) this risk. Heidegger was not responsible enough for this risk--in the sense that he did not develop the risk enough.
But already risk and violence are confused. Violence is about what thought does. It is concerned with its effects. Risk is about the survival of thought itself, it is about what allows thought to continue to be thought. Zizek wants us to recognize both the risk and the violence inherent in thought--i.e. that it is staked upon (risks) precisely its violence. But what this means is that any time a thinker acts in such a way so that they two exist together, he is conceiving of the political correctly. He is comporting himself towards the event. I would contend that it is precisely when one does not stake ones thought on the violence, when one risks an infinite respect towards the violence of thought, that there is politics. This doesn't mean there is a refraining from action--it just means that the political is shifted onto the act of respect rather than upon the mere coexistence of thought, risk, and violence. Thus acting responsibly is not being respectful to the ontology of the political event itself, but precisely by respecting what constitutes the event (which is alterity--see below).
So in Zizek's eyes Heidegger missed the real nature of the risk he was engaged in. Heidegger was not enough of a Nazi for Zizek: he was too much of a thinker of violence and not enough of a thinker that risked his thinking in the political.
But this I think is to confuse risk and violence--thought can risk something precisely by accounting for and respecting this violence. For me there is a difference between recognizing the imperative to be responsible for this violence in its action--this is nothing less than the ethical imperative that we can find in the work of Levinas and Derrida--and employing this violence blindly--which is what Heidegger does in my view. In other words, there is a difference between acting with a respect for (and some degree of control over) the the necessity of this violence, which includes the fact that it is necessarily a source of pleasure--i.e. that it is the site of unavoidable jouissance--and merely employing it and asserting that it is a necessary component of any risky action itself. The latter position may even try to account for this violence in some way similar to the first position, but I think the accent is on the this necessity as an excuse, rather than as something to be respected--and this makes all the difference. So in my view Heidegger was profoundly wrong because of the actual violence of his thought in its risking itself--indeed, Heidegger was not so naive as to think thought could engage in Nazism without violence, but he mistakenly took the mere coexistence of this violence and thought (that was engaged, risking itself), for a respect for this violence.
In fact, to a disturbing degree, he approves of this violence--he approves of its relation to jouissance, and he approves of the fact that thought is constituted by it. Just like Zizek. But doesn't this betray the fact that both Heidegger and Zizek are too wrapped up in the mere act of trying to show people thought is violent and risky and less with trying to conceive of a respect that can issue out of their coexistence? That is, their thought itself becomes indistinguishable from an excuse--though of course to take it as an excuse would be to miss their point. The point is that real thought and real politics are justified only through excuses--that the nature of the political act of thought just is violent and risky beyond excuse. But the disturbing thing about this is that it is also a refusal to think about how to be responsible to more than just the nature of this thought in political action.
This is the barbarism of Heidegger--what produces the inane Heimatkunst within his writings, as well as the Wagnerian strains in his descriptions of the necessary movements of thought.
Of course, I'm not saying that we should be looking for a way out of this violent and risky necessity of political thought--a solution will not present itself to us. This is the position of the unhappy postmodernist that Zizek hates (along with me). It means that we should focus less on fidelity to the event itself, and more on the conditions (or, rather, the condition, which is multiplicity itself in the form differing and deferring alterity/ies) that construct it, that make these things (violence and risk and the political thought) coexist. That means that we have to account for why we cannot ever sufficiently respect the conditions of this political event--which lies in how that these conditions would have to be present to us--and that the real respect is located in this accounting. This means thinking of the conditions of the event as not reducible (as they are in Badiou and Zizek) to the Big Other and the Real--i.e. the fact that the Big Other doesn't exist. That is, there might be an alterity that is more profound and more disruptive than the Other of Lacanian thought and the Real. Thinking how this is the case is really thinking about responsibility: at least this is the Derridian/Levinasian claim--a claim I think is just as politically effacacious as it is correct.
Regardless, just because Heidegger got the risk and violence inherent in the political event right doesn't at all make what he did right (as an act--for Zizek of course it was wrong in what it acted towards, i.e. Nazism)--even if this risk and violence is precisely the opening up of the political to nonpresence, to alterity. Let me be clear: the point is that Heidegger conceived of this alterity like Zizek--that is, as reducible to the Real in the Other--and thus made a political decision that only served to assert the reality of the violence of thought risking itself... he did not try at all to be responsible for this reality, because it thought that merely comporting oneself towards it was enough. What Heidegger did not do is try to integrate it into his thought in an effort to be responsible for it--to this extent his thought shares in what made him become a Nazi. This isn't failing to grasp the emergence of an Event, it is failing to integrate a responsibility to an alterity that cannot even fit within the structure of the Event (as outlined by Badiou)--an alterity that Heidegger was himself on the way to theorizing.
But one can return to Heidegger's thought and indeed transform it into responsibility: this I believe is precisely the project of Derrida and Levinas. More closed to this project than he should be, Zizek does not adequately conceive of the political subject-position.