Speculation: Politics, Ideology, Event (Diaeresis) 0810139359, 9780810139350

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
1 Hegel’s Speculative Universe: Correlationism, Contingency,and Necessity
2 Politics and Totality
3 Capitalism in the Twenty- First Century
4 The Veil of Ideology
5 A Question of Two: Ethics and Event
6 Speculative Utopia
Notes
Index

Citation preview

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

S P E C U L AT I O N

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Series Editors Slavoj Žižek Adrian Johnston Todd McGowan

diaeresis

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

S P E C U L AT I O N Politics, Ideology, Event

Glyn Daly

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2019 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2019. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

ISBN 978-0-8101-3935-0 (paper) ISBN 978-0-8101-3936-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8101-3937-4 (ebook) Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of Congress.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour — William Blake

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

1

Hegel’s Speculative Universe: Correlationism, Contingency, and Necessity

3

2

Politics and Totality

30

3

Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century

54

4

The Veil of Ideology

86

5

A Question of Two: Ethics and Event

119

6

Speculative Utopia

147

Notes

177

Index

191

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:41:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks are extended to a number of people who have helped me in the process of writing this book. Hilly and Con for their love, spirit, and unorthodox parenting. Jon Gorry for time-bending discussions about life, religion, and unlikely conflicts between assorted superheroes and public figures. Graham McBeath for encouragement and critical feedback. Richard Miller for his enthusiastic support and obscene jokes. Gary and Pia Pollock for keeping straight faces when I incoherently tried to describe this project. Paul and Theresa Maskell for lifelong friendship and solidarity. I am also deeply indebted to Slavoj Žižek for his infernal provocations. Finally I must thank Mari Daly, my beautiful wife, who illuminates my world with a rare and profound grace. We share our life with our two wonderful boys— Daniel and Ethan— who continue to keep me in touch with the Real.

ix

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Preface

The contemporary world is caught in a paradox. While on the one hand, the dominant (Western) milieu is one that continuously recycles its themes of individual expression, free choice, and infinite possibility, on the other hand this milieu is organized around a deeply fatalist core: capitalist fundamentalism. Everything can be subverted and/or overcome except the basic principles of capitalism. Interfering with the spontaneous movements of capital is strictly taboo, and when markets do collapse, we should rather sacrifice ourselves through austerity measures in order to appease the gods of finance. In similar fashion, the forces of secularization are increasingly supplemented by, and reproduced through, multiple forms of new age spirituality. In the West this is reflected in a montage of Buddhism, Taoism, and various paganistic ideas about nature, balance, harmony, and so on. In China, the rapid advance of capitalist development has been accompanied by the (state-sponsored) expansion of Confucianism with its similarly pacifying refrain that people should accept their social position and seek happiness and contentment within. In these ways, the future is being held hostage within modern finitude. What is at stake here is a particular form of Kantianism. In Kant there is the basic idea that we are limited historical actors, cut off from the absolute in regard to a fully Other noumenal world of authentic (positive) substance. This, in turn, creates the space for all kinds of mystical dogmas, including the prevailing dogma of contemporary economic mysticism, replete with its routinized mantras of “market forces,” “global realities,” “business confidence,” and so on. Here capitalism effectively operates with its own Kantian-style logic: we should make all kinds of subjective adjustments, and participate in continuous “change-making,” while accepting that there are forces beyond our control, an independent index of measurement that shapes our fate. As real power continues to shift from nation-states to corporations and their economic algorithms of power, there is the growing sense that humanity is becoming lost in an increasingly abstract sea of infinite finitude (or, if preferred, an end of history). One of the key philosophical, and indeed political, questions today is how to break out of this type of fatalistic finitude. It is in this context xi

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xii P R E FACE

that the formulation of the concept of infinity strikes a new urgency. An important trend here concerns the idea that infinity is something that can eventually be gained on. In the speculative realism of writers such as Quentin Meillassoux, there is the assertion of the necessity of contingency, and that this contingency can eventually be mastered through scientistic discourse as a way to develop infinite (even divine) potential in conscious terms. For Alain Badiou, on the other hand, the central emphasis is on the event and the somewhat paradoxical need to prepare for the surprise of the event.1 Yet in Badiou, there is also the idea that the event is in some way already part of a holistic skein of being that cannot be fully grasped (with events appearing as key moments in the unfolding of this skein). In both speculative realism and the evental perspective, then, there is an implicit view that the infinite is in some sense out there, possessed of its own autonomy, either as a mathematizable order of contingency (Meillassoux) or as an enduring order of being (Badiou). The thought of Hegel allows for a different approach. Hegelian philosophy can be classified under a single heading: speculation. In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel points out how the term “speculation” tends to be used in a rather vague and/or secondary sense; as when one thinks in a purely abstract way beyond given experience, or when one wagers money in order to achieve a specific outcome. This general view of speculation is far too one-sided and subjective. For Hegel, speculation should be regarded as something that effectively shows the unity of the subjective and the objective as a concrete totality.2 Speculation, or speculative reason, reflects an unfolding of what Hegel calls the understanding. Everything begins with the understanding; that is, the capacity to determine the world in terms of finite and conceptually distinct objects of knowledge. As Hegel puts it, “without the understanding there is no fixity or determinacy in the domains of theory or practice.”3 Understanding is primary and functions as “the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power.”4 The dialectical moment, on the other hand, reflects the opposition that inheres within all conceptual fixity: “Everything around us can be regarded an example of dialectic . . . instead of being fixed and ultimate, everything finite, through which the latter, being implicitly the other of itself, is driven beyond what it immediately is and overturns into its opposite.”5 For example, while life and death appear at first sight to be externally opposed, the dialectical truth of the matter is that “life as such bears the germ of death within itself.”6 In this sense, the dialectic functions as the opposite of the understanding and shows how every fixity is overcome (sublated) through its own inward contradiction. The speculative level is reached through a transcendence of both the empirical positivity of the

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xiii P R E FAC E

understanding and the purely negative aspect of dialectical opposition. Speculative thought is that which “apprehends the unity of the determinations in their opposition.”7 What is shown in the speculative is a reflexive appreciation of both the understanding and the dialectic, and in this way it yields something that is fully affirmative or “positively rational.” At the same time, the speculative can also be regarded as mystical: not as something impenetrably mysterious (i.e., beyond thought or reason), but rather as something that is situated beyond the understanding. The oppositions and anomalies that mystify (and which are mystified within) the understanding are positively grasped in the speculative as integral to the functioning of a concrete totality. What distinguishes speculative reason from more traditional forms of Enlightenment-based reason? At the beginning of Faith and Knowledge, Hegel argues that in seeking to overcome the perceived limitations of religion, the thinkers of Enlightenment reason ended up producing their own version of an impenetrable mystery that “has as little of Reason in it as it has of authentic faith.”8 The paradoxical result of the Enlightenment was that reason effectively defeated itself: Reason has already gone to seed in and for itself when it envisaged religion merely as something positive and not idealistically. And after its battle with religion the best that Reason could manage was to take a look at itself and come to self-awareness. Reason, having in this way become mere intellect, acknowledges its own nothingness by placing what is better than it in a faith outside and above itself, as a beyond (to be believed in). This is what has happened in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte. Philosophy has made itself the handmaid of a faith once more.9

What is common to the philosophical thought of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte is “the absoluteness of finitude and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous, and the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute.”10 The very success of Enlightenment reason— the richness of its empirical knowledge and its conceptual distinctions— has itself conjured the specter of a supersensible sphere that is beyond the ability of reason to grasp. It is a form of reason that is reflected in the well-known couplet from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” In Hegelian terms, the type of reason that predominates in the Enlightenment and modernity in general is one that tends to remain at the level of the understanding. In order to avoid this self-defeating logic, reason has to disengage

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xiv P R E FACE

from the understanding and engage with the speculative. There are two basic moves here. First there is dialectical opposition, where negativity and incompletion are shown to be inherent to the object in question; but second, there is the affirmation that such negativity and incompletion are necessary for the positive constitution of the object as such. In speculative mode, reason does not lay claim to knowable reality as bound by certain (epistemological) limitations; rather, what it perceives is that the limitations themselves are inherent (and ontologically necessary) to the positive reproduction of reality as such. Through a final exorcism of the specter of any mysterious beyond, reason is restored to itself, and reality with all its empirical wealth is shown as a notional cut or idea. What speculative reason grasps is not anything substantial beyond the understanding, but rather the embodiment and refinement of this notional cut in concrete historical terms; or as Hegel puts it, as spirit. More than the understanding, speculative reason is able to apprehend the mediated functioning of a concrete totality in its apparent distinctions and oppositions; it effectively understands the understanding itself, not in substantialist terms, but as a logic of delimitation. At the same time, it is also less than the understanding in the sense that it represents a fundamental subtraction from it.11 What is subtracted from the understanding in speculative reason is precisely the (constitutive) illusion of unknowable independent substance. In its attempts at conceptual distinctions, the understanding does not go far enough; that is, it fails to take into account its own distinctness as a notional cut or field of determination. In contrast, speculative reason is able to cut through the distinctions of the understanding and to pursue abstraction and notional simplification to the end. For example, if we take today’s dominant approach to the question of global poverty, then we can clearly see how it is rooted in the understanding. Poverty is invariably identified as exceptional (from the West’s perspective) and as something that needs to be addressed through aid, philanthropic programs, and a range of different economic and organizational strategies. There exists a paradigmatic externalization of the problem of poverty and a sense that a solution will be found at some indeterminate point in the future. Such externalization cannot hold from a speculative viewpoint, and instead what needs to be grasped is how poverty is systematically generated through the very reproduction of global capitalism as such— not as exception, but as part of the rule of its constitution. Far from being opposites, capitalist wealth and poverty comprise a concrete totality. Moreover, the very formulation of the problem of poverty through the understanding is one that contributes directly to the perpetuation of systemic poverty itself. In these terms, the understanding fails to take into account the way in which our (the

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xv P R E FAC E

West’s) actions are already inscribed within, and function as part of, the ongoing development of capitalism as such. What tends to be mystified in the understanding-based approach— the separation of the elements of poverty (aid delivery, effective infrastructure, fiscal stimulation, and so on) as a way of addressing its stubborn persistence— becomes clear in the speculative process of notional abstraction and simplification. And in this sense, the speculative may be said to act as a foil to the “beautiful soul” position; that is, the position that tends to externalize subjectivity as if it were outside the objective situation being addressed (“what can I/we do?”)— at the level of the speculative, there exists no alibi for subjectivity. In generating the sense of an impenetrable Otherness, the understanding may also be said to reflect the ideological. As well as externalizing (its perception of) social evil, ideology embraces the understanding in providing what it sees as a wealth of (often contradictory) empirical evidence concerning the Other’s transgressions. In opposition to this, speculative reason is distinguished by its affirmation of the radical interiorization of all Otherness. And in this regard, Hegel’s speculative thought may be said to go beyond standard forms of deconstructionism. In deconstruction, the typical operation is one of showing how a particular unity is subject to opposing contingent forces that undermine its full constitution. Yet what is shown in the speculative viewpoint is that unity itself consists of nothing but such oppositions held in dynamic form. Whereas the understanding may be said to have many objects of knowledge, the speculative effectively only has one: the schism between the One and its other (or void). This is what lies behind Hegel’s paradoxical view that essence itself is the ultimate diversity.12 All diversity springs from this basic inherent binary schism traversing both subjectivity and objectivity. In short, this is the absolute of substance = subject that Hegel develops in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Our subjective engagement with the world will always be incomplete not because of any epistemological limitation (the position of Kant), but because of the ontological condition itself; namely, that the substance of reality is itself incomplete. Reality is subject to the same schism between itself and its void (it can always be something other) and thus cannot have any independent consistency outside the terms of subjective engagement as such.13 Both subjectivity and objectivity can be regarded as different modes of response to the same central incompletion; neither is capable of resolving the other. Yet here Hegel makes an even bolder move and states his intention to break out of the traditional philosophical view that “truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, that is, that only sense perception gives filling and reality to them; that reason, insofar as it abides in

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xvi P R E FACE

and for itself, generates only mental figments.”14 In other words, what he rejects is the representationalist paradigm that can be traced from Plato to Kant to contemporary forms of realist and immaterialist thought in which the subject and object are presupposed as external to each other— the subject as that which tries to represent an object that is in some sense independent of it. Following Anaxagoras, Hegel begins from the position that “the essence of the world is to be defined as thought.”15 Thought itself is to be thought in quite literal terms as the central organizing principle and as constitutive of reality. This does not mean that the world can be reduced to thought as traditional idealism. The idea is not that there is no reality outside thought, but rather that there is no thought outside reality. Thought is the very medium through which we extend into the world and the world extends into us. Consequently, subject and object cannot be separated in any absolute sense. The true “object” of consideration is not anything external, but rather the interface itself between subject and object. Subjective thought is merely a set of impressions, opinions, and so on. Real or speculative thought begins with overcoming the one-sidedness of thought and recognizing that the very subjective/ objective distinction is something that is itself internal to thought. The world is shaped and organized according to thought, but this world is also one that reflexively transforms our thoughts and ideas. The highly intimate world of eroticization, for example, is not simply one of thoughts seeking to be enacted in objective terms. Eroticization is also a matter of ongoing engagement in the empirical world in ways that challenge and transform our very sense of the erotic. There is no externality to the interface between subjectivity and objectivity that would allow us to conceive this interface as either an absolute unity or an absolute distinction. We are in this sense always in media res without any telos or point of resolution. Hegel utilizes the same logic in his assertion that being and nothing can be considered to be the same as each other. Here he makes an analogy with the idea of pure light and pure night: The common practice is to imagine being, as if it were a picture of pure light, the clarity of unclouded seeing, and then nothing as the pure night— and the distinction between the two is then enshrined into this well-known sensuous difference. But in fact, if this very seeing is more accurately imagined, one can readily perceive that in absolute light one sees just as much and just as little as in absolute darkness; that the one seeing is just as good as the other; that pure seeing is a seeing of nothing. Pure light and pure darkness are two voids that amount to the same thing. Only in determinate light (and light is determined through

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xvii P R E FAC E

darkness: in clouded light therefore), just as only in determinate darkness (and darkness is determined through light: in illuminated darkness therefore), can something be distinguished since only clouded light and illuminated darkness have distinction in them and hence are determined being, existence.16

This again is the problem of the classical Enlightenment. In attempting to embrace the pure light of reason, it simultaneously conjures up the mantle of pure night in which mysticism reigns. The move toward speculative reason begins with this affirmation of clouded light/illuminated darkness in which perception is shown to be impossible without a certain obscuration. Yet Hegel’s point is that far from being something mystical or beyond reason, this obscuration is not only accessible to reason, but should also be considered as constitutive of reason. Through speculative reason, thought is able to think itself by taking its own “limit” into account. Yet there is no deficiency in reason as such, which is why for Hegel “what is rational is real; and what is real is rational.”17 There is no external measure against which reason can be held to account or judged to have fallen short. The true object of reason is not anything positive, but rather negative excess. This is the basis of Hegel’s dialectics. There are two contradictory movements here: the overcoming of opposition and the persistence of opposition. Nature, for example, is initially perceived as something external, a realm of portent and mystery. But through scientific endeavor, technological superimposition, and so on, this externality is overcome in such a way that it transforms our very experience of nature— through reason it is effectively realized as an idea. On the other hand, the overcoming of nature is something that itself generates new forms of ferality and threat (Ulrich Beck’s “risk society”). Likewise, the global development of a free market that overcomes the constraints of traditional relations and hierarchies is something that in turn engenders a new reign of unfreedom and exclusion in the form of the transnational command economy. This dialectical logic also renders ambiguous the relationship between being and nothing. Hegel shows that the apparent opposition actually reveals a deeper equivalence: the pure light of being and the pure night of nothing as two modes of void. And yet what is preserved in this equivalence is precisely the idea of their distinction— for two things to be equivalent, they must also be distinct. The proposition that being and nothing are the same is something that “equally contains the two as distinguished, it internally contradicts itself and thus dissolves itself.”18 Neither proposition— that “being and nothing are not the same” or that “being and nothing are the same”— is sustainable. The solution is a paradoxical one. For Hegel, the two propositions have to be brought together as a

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xviii P R E FACE

union that affirms their contradiction as a living force, as “an unrest of simultaneous incompatibles, a movement.”19 This movement is what Hegel designates by the term “becoming.” The in-itself of being is effectively empty, thwarted by an inherent Othering (an oppositional void within). The actuality of an entity results from the transience and/or transition from one state of becoming to another. Becoming contains both the moment of being over nothingness (a positive formation) and nothingness over being (rupture with a current state of being). To take again the example of eroticization, it is only in its ebb and flow of becoming that its essence or in-itself can be captured. This can also be applied in the recent debates surrounding the pluralization and diversification of gender and sexual identities: the movement from the categories of lesbian, gay, and bisexual to those of questioning, intersex, and asexual and so on (including the various permutations within and between these categories). All such (ongoing) pluralization and diversification continues to be possible because of the persistence of a primordial two: the impossible union of being and nothing as expressed through the movement of becoming. A crucial point to bear in mind here is that this primordial two is asymmetrical. Being and nothing do not comprise a simple duality that might be resolved or balanced in yin and yang terms. All being is inwardly impeded because of a basic irreducible oppositionality or radical negativity that functions as a force in its own right, an oppositionality that may be said to contain all potential opposites; in short, an excess. Moreover, the turbulence of oppositionality exists not only within the field of being, but also within nothing. It is because nothing is unable to constitute itself in its own terms that being comes into being. In this sense, oppositionality can be seen to drive the dialectical process while remaining in-itself undialectizable. Everything that exists can be seen as a paradoxical attempt to avoid any direct encounter between the dialectical and the undialectizable. The dialectical and the undialectizable appear opposed in this sense. On the other hand, they can also be viewed as the same: the dialectical carries the germ of the undialectizable within itself— a kind of pure excess for which there is no final resolution— which in turn generates the dialectical process and so on. It is in this context that Hegel approaches the question of infinity. Our relationship with the idea of infinity is a strange one. While, on the one hand, infinity appears as something totally abstract, impossibly remote, on the other hand, it is something that is deeply inscribed within our most intimate experiences. We marry and declare our love within the prospect of eternity, we organize the principles of our lives (what we stand for and so on) against the background of infinite nonbeing (death), and life itself is a disruption of the sense of an infinite continuum (a bracketing of the finiteness of being). Infinity,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xix P R E FAC E

Hegel maintains, has no independence of its own and cannot be set apart from finitude. Rather, they should be thought together and analyzed in terms of how they operate dialectically. Finitude cannot sustain itself without the appearance of the infinite. Infinity, by contrast, is something that emerges paradoxically through the very capriciousness of finite thought and living engagement: “In free will the true infinite is present and real; it is itself the actually present self-contained idea.”20 In human terms, the infinite is something that resonates with the notion of ought. What is contained in the ought is a basic alterity with regard to restriction. On the one hand, ought can imply an absolute restriction (“I cannot, even though I ought”), but on the other hand, it can imply an overcoming of restriction (“I can because I ought”). The ought functions precisely as a movement of incompatibles between reinforcing and overcoming restriction, and thus it is in the ought that “the transcendence of finitude, infinity, begins.”21 So what is this infinite, and how should it be conceived? The commonplace view of infinity is of something over and above the finite. This is what Hegel calls the infinite of the understanding, or bad infinity. Establishing a clear boundary between the finite and the infinite is actually self-defeating: “by making the infinite as pure and distant from the finite, the infinite is by that very fact only made finite.”22 Separating the infinite from the finite means that the infinite counts as only one of the two, limited by that which stands apart from it, as a “finite infinite.”23 On these grounds, infinity is effectively split into two types of finite: a finitized infinite and an infinitized finite. The finitized infinite results from placing infinity on one side in demarcated terms. But this demarcation implies simultaneously an infinitized finite. In its severance from the infinite, the finite loses its transitoriness and becomes fully self-enclosed and self-perpetuating, its own infinity. For Hegel, the finite and the infinite should be rather conceived as reciprocal determinations, or moments, of each other in a process of continuing unfolding: “the finite and the infinite are both this movement of each returning to itself through its negation; they are only as implicit mediation, and the affirmative of each contains the negative of each, and is the negation of the negation.”24 True infinity is movement and mediation, an ongoing process of becoming that contains both the finite and the infinite as instances of that becoming. The distinction between the finite and the infinite is interior to infinity as such, and thus it is infinity that is ultimately real. Does this mean that finitude is simply subsumed within infinity? It is clear that Hegel rejects the standard view of an essential distinction and affirms instead a basic unity of the finite and the infinite. At the same time, however, he also affirms the opposite: the finite and the infinite are absolutely

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xx P R E FACE

different and opposed. So how can this apparent contradiction be overcome? The answer lies in recognizing that the movement between the finite and the infinite is not one of simple alternation ad infinitum. The point is rather that the unity of and opposition between the finite and the infinite are the necessary moments of infinity as such. It is in the context of this infinite and irresolvable movement (of opening and contraction) that negation itself is determined as ideality and the very basis of affirmative existence. The finite falls into infinity, it is negated, but this infinity is in turn negated and the finite is reborn only to be subject to further negation and so on. Affirmation is not the result of anything positive or independent, but is rather a cyclical logic of the negation of the negation. The contradiction does not simply disappear, but is rather shown by Hegel as a living force in which unity and opposition function as the very moments of affirmation as such: “Inasmuch as each moment shows, as a matter of fact, that it has its opposite in it, and that in this opposite it rejoins itself, the affirmative truth is this internally self-moving unity, the grasping together of both thoughts, their infinity— the reference to oneself which is not immediate but infinite.”25 The problem with Enlightenment-based reason is that the more it illuminates, the more it casts into shadow the sense of an external unknowable beyond; the more it tries to unify, the more it reinforces a hard limit that it cannot penetrate and against which it declares itself lost or simply falls into silence. Such reasoning, which is what Hegel calls the understanding, is unable to think the beyond or to grasp that what appears as a limit for thought is actually the dimension of otherness within thought itself (an otherness that can nonetheless be thought). Speculative reason transcends the understanding in its capacity to grasp the opposing moments in their unity. Just as the finite and the infinite contain their other within themselves, affirmation itself results from reciprocal negation (the negation of the negation) in which the moments of opposition and unity are mediated as a living infinity of movement. Thus what appears as an excess or anomaly for the understanding is shown in speculative terms to be part of the thing itself. Culture, for example, already contains its opposition of counter-culture within itself as part of its functioning as culture (without it, culture would have no animus). More generally, it is the (apparent) impedances to a social totality— its subversions, transgressions, antagonism, and so on— that sustain its very reproduction as a totality. Here also Hegel also draws a distinction between finite and infinite thought. Finite thought is essentially a reflection of the understanding and is concerned with what is immediately present, remaining within a given horizon of possibility that is accepted as ultimate.26 This is effectively our situation today; that is, a situation where reason is increasingly

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xxi P R E FAC E

confined within a finitude of capitalist fate whose implicit injunctions operate along the lines of “observe the rules of the global market,” “seek only practical solutions to what currently exists,” “adjust to the demands of the system,” and so on. In this context, infinity tends to be projected into an ever-receding beyond that is dominated by a blend of worldly capitalist fate (“it is what it is”) and privatized spirituality (“look only for salvation within”). Finite thought operates with its own particular, or false, infinity and can be seen to divide precisely into the two aspects defined by Hegel: the finitized infinite— the sense of a remote untouchable sphere where fate is determined (the mysterious logic of capital); and the infinitized finite— the constant recycling of capitalism as the very horizon of possibility. Infinite thought, in contrast, reflects the unfettered nature of speculative reason. For such reason there exists neither an impenetrable beyond nor a finite horizon of possibility. And in this way, a space for the event is opened up in terms of inherent negation. Indeed, we might say that what Hegel’s speculative reason points to is the event as the truth of thought, a truth that is always on the side of infinity: “Infinity is the pure nullification of the antithesis or of finitude; but it is at the same time also the spring of eternal movement, the spring of that finitude which is infinite, because it eternally nullifies itself. Out of this nothing and pure night of infinity, as out of the secret abyss that is its birthplace, the truth lifts itself upward.”27 The true mystery does not consist in any beyond, but is rather something that lies in reason itself: the capacity to conceive and organize finitude in new ways. The famous end of history that Hegel is often associated with is not an outcome of history, but rather a site of infinite potential and of beginnings. It is on this basis that Hegel affirms a basic hollowness to all being and a radical mediated-ness to all reality. What infinite thought apprehends is that reason cannot be derived from any external measure. Reason must reason from this position of hollowness; it must create the very calculus by which it judges itself and establish its form and substance (its oppositional moments in unity) in concrete terms. Far from realizing or representing anything external, speculative reason is concerned rather with the very process of realization itself. This is why Hegel’s idealism is simultaneously the highest expression of materialism. Real truth in Hegel consists in the very process of transposing “visions of reason into reality.”28 At the level of speculation, or infinite thought, reason is linked directly to the social imagination and utopian possibility. The struggle to retrieve the notion of utopia is central to the revitalization of a radical political imagination. Notwithstanding the general drift toward postmodern cynicism, the contemporary world continues to rely on implicit forms of utopian discourse in its reproduction. These discursive forms, however, are

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xxii P R E FACE

fully rooted in the understanding of finite thought. Articulated directly with themes of security, modern utopia tends to be constructed in terms of a securitopia or perhaps, in Hegelese, a spuritopia in which there is a paradigmatic externalization of the Other as social threat (immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, and so on). It is in this construction of an external (and potentially conquerable) threat or Other that the idea of an attainable utopian ideal is sustained. Disturbia— increasing para-militarization, privatized security, gated communities and elite enclaves of every kind— thus becomes the very form of attainable utopian possibility. A true or speculative utopia, on the other hand, is one that opens toward infinite thought and, in so doing, seeks to overcome any such constitutive externalization. Put in other terms, speculative utopian discourse is one that seeks to move beyond any positive social image and to instead reconcile itself with the nature of excess as the very essence of all being. This book has two main objectives. The first is to draw out the meaning(s) of Hegel’s speculative approach and to demonstrate how it differs from our paradigmatically modern form of reasoning (as based on what Hegel calls the understanding) and its predominant tendency to reduce the problems of the world to questions of knowledge and/or technique. The second is to develop the logic of speculative inquiry in applied and theoretical terms across a range of discursive contexts. Through an engagement with (among others) figures such as Badiou, Meillassoux, Laclau, Žižek, and Jameson, this book seeks to intervene in key debates that center on questions of science, social totality, the logics of capital, the functioning of ideology, politico-ethical resistance, and evental possibility. Rather than forming a systematic progressive narrative, the book develops more as an iteration of the logic of the speculative with a view to drawing out its paradoxical movements of opposition and unification contained within and between the subject areas concerned. The opening chapter explores some of the main themes of Hegel’s philosophy. This is undertaken in the context of an engagement with speculative realism— a serious post-Kantian rival to Hegelianism— as developed by Meillassoux and others. As well as the different versions of the real that emerge in both perspectives, the chapter also examines the problem of correlationism that Meillassoux identifies, and it proposes an alternative way of “de-correlating the correlate” through the Hegelian logic of speculation. Chapter 2 moves from the physical to the social world and addresses the question of totality. How does the social totality operate in speculative terms? What is the role of politics and subversion in totality? The analysis here is developed further in relation to the Lacanian

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xxiii P R E FAC E

notions of fantasy and suture. Chapter 3 investigates the basic themes and logics that are tending to produce today’s social (indeed global) whole as a specifically capitalist totality. Two central and interrelated aspects are incorporated into a speculative analysis: (1) capital as a force that comes to “determine itself to be for itself through the negation of itself,” and (2) class struggle as a principle of distortion running through the entire social totality. Focusing on Laclau’s view of ideology as a form of universal distortion, chapter 4 argues for a speculative approach that also takes into account the distortion in the distortion; that is, the way in which ideology both distorts reality into a closure and regulates a critical distance from that closure. From Donald Trump to the wider development of so-called post-truth politics, the chapter also explores the ways in which ideology serves to consolidate the capitalist totality through its own transgressions. Chapter 5 engages with Badiou’s formulation of the classical one/many problem. Against his view of an originary multiplicity, the chapter develops Hegel’s speculative approach to the one as something that in its oppositional unity is always already a two. The logic of the Hegelian two is subsequently developed in relation to ethics and the notion of the event. The final chapter targets the implicit Kantianism of the dominant forms of contemporary political resistance wherein capitalism tends to be accepted as a basic framework in which there is only limited scope for regulation and/or social reform. An important exception to this tendency is Jameson’s attempt to reimagine a practical utopian world along very different politico-cultural and economic lines. In contrast to Jameson’s general rejection of the modern state, the chapter takes up the Hegelian notion of an infinite state as a way of developing a new type of social imagination that can be characterized in terms of a speculative utopia.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

S P E C U L AT I O N

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:42:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1

Hegel’s Speculative Universe Correlationism, Contingency, and Necessity Correlationism: The Philosopher’s Quest Reloaded In recent years, a major challenge to the Kantian tradition has emerged in the form of speculative realism. Among others, some of the key figures associated with speculative realism are Françoise Laruelle, Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Although there are different shades of speculative realism, what they all tend to hold in common is the idea of an independent Real that can be represented and/or accessed in some way. In this regard, Laruelle and Meillassoux can be seen as representing two ends of the speculative realism spectrum. Laruelle argues that every philosophy is defined by an “enchanted circle” of three interrelated moments: an (empirical) datum, a factum of a priori categories, and finally a synthesis of the datum and factum through the a priori functioning. All previous philosophy therefore remains caught within its own decisional circle of reflexive determination; that is, a recycling (tautological) process whereby the very process of the established methodological or evidential inquiry serves to (re-)validate the initial decision of the particular philosophy. In order to break out of this circularity, Laruelle asserts the primacy of the Real as an idempotent One or, as Nick Srnicek puts it, an “always-already-given-without-givenness.”1 Against what he perceives as the stranglehold of the predominant paradigm of (universal) Being and its necessary decisionalism, Laruelle affirms instead the radical immanence of the Real that, precisely as such, is generic; that is, a Real that, at some level, can also be said to always already exist in its own terms. Yet the problem here is that Laruelle can only determine his nondecisional perspective, or non-philosophy, through the decisional itself and, in this way, he becomes caught in his own tautological trap. As Meillassoux points out, Laruelle’s positing of an independent Real amounts ultimately to little more than a coup de force.2 Laruelle posits the existence of a Real that precedes and is indifferent to thought while simultaneously concealing the fact that this very act of positing is a decisional act; an outcome of his own thought. In other words, he simply interrupts the consistency of his own method at a certain point. And this 3

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

4 C H AP TE R

1

structural inconsistency is something that runs throughout his avowed non-philosophy: Non-philosophy is supposed to think the relation of thinking with a Real which precedes philosophy, but the name “non-philosophy” can only be constructed from the name “philosophy” together with a negation. Philosophy precedes non-philosophy in nomination, as in the acts of thinking. Hence, we have the first and manifest pragmatic contradiction between what Laruelle says about the Real and what he does when elaborating this notion.3

Laruelle’s attempt to assert the existence of an external Real necessarily embroils him in an unreflected correlationism. Indeed, Meillassoux argues forcefully that any attempt to posit an external or independent substance is, by definition, correlationist. Rejecting this type of externality, Meillassoux adopts an approach that proceeds to the very heart of correlationism with a view to exploding it from within. Like Richard Rorty, Meillassoux accepts that modern philosophy effectively began with Kant and his critique of traditional metaphysics. Kant famously rejected the search for primary substance, arguing that we cannot penetrate through to ultimate reality beyond our ideas and sense-experience; we cannot know the world “in itself” beyond our perceptions and conceptual constructs. Rorty applauds this first move of Kant but argues that it is limited, and even contradicted, by a second move. While Kant was willing to view the empirical world as a contingent experiential construction (the world is what we make of it), he nonetheless maintained that intrinsic nature and higher truth resided at the level of mind and spirit. The ongoing task of philosophy, therefore, should be to extend and radicalize the logic of Kant’s first move and to affirm that there is no higher truth or intrinsicality to be expressed or represented.4 Yet for Meillassoux, the task of philosophy is more or less the opposite. From his viewpoint, Kant’s first move has resulted in a serious hampering of philosophical enterprise. This is because it gives rise to the predominant paradigm of correlationism.5 Correlationism effectively undermines all immediacy and means that the Real always has to be put in parenthesis in regard to a historically subjective realism. All of contemporary philosophy is essentially bound by an implicit Kantian understanding that it is not “possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another.”6 Objectivity always remains relative to us and the world can appear as “the world”: that is, as a correlate of human thought (language, culture, and so on). Every philosophical tradition since Kant— from Husserl to Heidegger to Derrida and Lacan— remains

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

5 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

within the confines of the correlationist logic. Modern philosophy has created a transparent cage for itself and has thereby lost the “great outdoors” as the non-relative in-itself.7 Against Rorty’s (Kantian) injunction that we should simply abandon the quest for intrinsic nature, Meillassoux is demanding that this quest be reloaded and that it is perfectly possible to reach for, and to grasp, the primary qualities of what is Real.8 The point, however, is not to reject correlationism, but rather to ventilate philosophy and to establish a new kind of post-correlationist thought that opens toward the outdoors and the in-itself. Correlationism affirms the finitude of our understanding and engagement with the world. But if all understanding is limited by the correlate (the “for us”), then this limitation is an absolute one. Correlationists are consequently obliged to accept the fact that the world may be quite different from the particular terms of their (“for us”) representation of it. Meillassoux thus takes the opposite stance of Rorty. Where Rorty maintains the need to come to terms with the finitude of our historico-cultural engagement with the world, Meillassoux argues that it is through this finitude that we acquire “the absolute knowledge that the world might be other than we think.”9 It is precisely because every finitude (correlate) is an inherent failure— that is, a delimitation of possibilities that exceed it— that a path to the absolute is opened. What renders the absolute is not correlation as such but rather the facticity, or radical contingency, of correlation: the fact that the in-itself can always be something other than the given.10 This perspective does not return to any philosophy of a substance-behind-the-veil, but neither does it remain within the confines of standard correlationism. By changing the terms of engagement, the correlationist limitation becomes the very point of escape via the affirmation of radical facticity: Facticity will be revealed to be a knowledge of the absolute because we are going to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought. In other words, instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity. We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything and every world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason.11

The principle of (sufficient) reason is swept away, because “there is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is.”12 Everything that exists could disappear— from physical entities to the laws of nature

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

6 C H AP TE R

1

themselves— not because of any superior law, but because of “the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything.”13 From here, Meillassoux advances his central thesis: “Our absolute, in effect, is nothing other than an extreme form of chaos, a hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable.”14 This does not mean that everything is in a state of ephemeral flux. The point is rather that the field of the possible never achieves closure or a final form. Unreason (the absence of reason) is no longer the mark of our finitude; rather, it “is an absolute ontological property.”15 If unreason dissolves all necessity into contingency, then contingency itself is necessary. While there can be no necessary entity, the “contingency of the entity is necessary.”16 This condition of radical contingency, the necessity of facticity, Meillassoux terms “factiality.” Factiality is transcendental and derives from (or perhaps correlates to) hyperchaos, the trans-finite universe. Hyperchaos is without any laws or conditions except for one: an eternal incapacity to produce a necessary entity.17 Hyperchaos allows for everything except for the failure of contingency. Factiality is the ultimate law that suspends, puts into parentheses, all other laws; it is a necessity that abolishes all necessity. In this regard, it shares common ground with the Lacanian “there is no sexual relationship”— that is, all sexual relationships (and all sexuality) are formed in regard to an ultimate absence of a given, final, or ideal sexual relationship. In post-Marxism, the same principle is at play in the idea that all societies are constituted in terms of the impossibility-of-Society.18 Yet factiality finds its ultimate expression in mathematics such that “whatever is mathematically conceivable is absolutely possible,”19 even the emergence of a virtual God and the resurrection of the dead as an act of cosmic justice.

Science and the Divine Notwithstanding the absoluteness of contingency and the elevation of ignorance to an ontological principle (the apprehension that reality can be other), Meillassoux insists upon privileging one form of discourse that is able to slice through all correlational ambiguity and open a gateway to the great outdoors: the discourse of science. Science is distinguished from all other discourses because of its ability to provide access to what he calls the ancestral. Ancestrality refers to a time that existed before our being and consciousness and thus, by definition, a non-correlated time— a kind of mute existence untouched by human mediation. The presence of arche-fossils bears witness to this time, and the unique prop-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

7 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

erty of science is its capacity to “discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent.”20 Science gives us a direct form of access to, and knowledge of, the “ontological problem of the coming into being of givenness as such” and thereby enables us “to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not.”21 Yet this strikes a discordant note in Meillassoux’s schema and renders ambiguous the very status of the absolute that he establishes. To argue that the absolute is characterized by ontological ignorance (knowledge of the contingent mutability of reality) and then to claim that science nonetheless grants us direct access to a positive account of pre-subjective reality (of “what is whether we are or not”) appears suspicious. There is a kind of leap of faith that involves a set of implicit assumptions that are not necessarily derivable from the former argument. Why, for example, should we assume that pre-subjective reality is not also unstable and contingently mutable? Why should we assume diachronic linearity? Harman points out that Meillassoux does not provide any real argument as to why we should consider prehuman diachronic events (e.g., the extinction of the dinosaurs) to be more significant than synchronic events (unexperienced occurrences within human time) as regards the critique of correlationism.22 Moreover, Meillassoux draws rather straightforward conclusions from his view of the diachronic world— conclusions that are not shared (at least, not universally) by scientists themselves. For example, he is dismissive of the “literal” reading of the biblical determination of the age of the Earth (around 6,000 years old) and the auxiliary idea that God put in place fossils and radioactive compounds in order to test the faith of scientists. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould is more circumspect in this matter. In his book Adam’s Navel, Gould takes up the notion of the prochronic as developed by the Victorian naturalist Philip Gosse in his ill-fated book Omphalos. If the diachronic concerns all conventional time since Creation, the prochronic refers to a kind of divine blueprint or set of appearances— along the lines of Berkeley’s divine archetypes— outside time. For Gosse, all the diachronic evidence gathered by scientists could be simultaneously, and consistently, understood in prochronic terms; that is, as divine constructs in which the diachronic properties are already inscribed. Although his thesis was intended to reconcile religious and scientific accounts, Gosse ended up being widely ridiculed by naturalists and theologians alike. Gould is less certain: “But what is so desperately wrong with Omphalos? Only this really (and perhaps paradoxically): that we can devise no way to find out whether it is wrong— or, for that matter, right. Omphalos is the classic example of an utterly untestable notion, for the world will look exactly the same in all its intricate detail whether fossils and strata are prochronic or products of an extended history.”23

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

8 C H AP TE R

1

Gould makes the wider point that what “science is doing is not clever cogitation; we reject Omphalos as useless, not wrong.”24 Gould here reflects a basic philosophical tradition that, from Husserl through to people like Thomas Kuhn (and others), has sought to show how science is not a separate neutral domain, but is thoroughly bound up with the life-world and paradigms of human values and practical engagement. One only has to think of the ongoing debates surrounding evolution, ecology, genetics, and so on to appreciate this point. So the idea that science provides, or ever could provide, us with a positive meta-discourse of the in-itself appears more aspirational than actual. In Meillassoux there appears a characteristic tendential slippage from an ontology of ignorance to an ontology of substance. On the one hand, there is the strong affirmation of the noncontingent character of contingency— which means that we always live in ignorance as to how reality might be transformed beyond what we currently know. But on the other hand, Meillassoux maintains that science is able to access, and to provide knowledge of, the uncorrelated pre-subjective world. And this knowledge is not simply knowledge of our ignorance; it has a clearly substantialist character concerning “primary qualities,” ancestral objects and phenomena, and so on. Mathematics is here affirmed as the metalanguage of the universe in providing an unmediated access to the primary qualities along the lines of archaeological processes of unearthing what simply exists in its own terms.25 Indeed, his entire project boils down to a reclaiming of a substantialist (uncorrelated) form of ontology: “I refuse this ‘Real without realism,’ because if I don’t have a rational procedure to discover specific properties of the Real, those properties threaten to be arbitrarily posited.”26 He goes on to say that “what contemporary philosophy lacks is not so much the Real as realism: the Real with realism is the true challenge of philosophy.”27 Everything here depends on the status of the Real. For Meillassoux, the Real is something that can be captured, and represented, in positive terms by the realism of scientific thought. Through a continuous refinement of its discourse, science is able to advance upon its quarry of the really existent. Although Meillassoux divests the world of any underlying or hidden Reason— there is only the “manifest gratuitousness of the given”28— he nonetheless maintains a rather traditional view that the world can be divided in terms of reality and appearance, or what he calls primary qualities (i.e., properties of the Real) and secondary qualities (i.e., sensible or pathological properties). Scientific discourse is able to strip away the secondary qualities of appearance and to get at the primary non-pathological (or uncorrelated) properties. For Meillassoux, the very positing of the gap (of correlation) as a transcendental becomes

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

9 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

itself a way of bridging the gap in positive terms. On this basis, the Real (what there is whether “we are or not”) and the entire datum of unreason as contingency can be recaptured by reason. The problem with the Kantian tradition is that it has led to an abandonment of the absolute; we remain stuck at the level of subjective encounter. And this in turn has led to a climate of cynicism and ironic distancing, especially in Western (postmodern) reason, which has inadvertently opened up the space for new types of dogmatism and revelatory ideologies to flourish. Through its abandonment of the in-itself, philosophy has allowed the absolute to become further mystified and to become prone to all those discourses (cults, fanaticisms, neo-fascisms, and so on) that would make some claim to it. It is crucial, therefore, to reclaim the absolute within the terms of universal reason.29 The question is whether Meillassoux himself manages to fully escape the Kantian tradition. In Kant, the absolute is essentially referred to an unknowable world of the noumenal where a kind of divine knowledge exists in separated suspension, beyond finitude. But in his ambition to unite the Real with realism— which is effectively an Enlightenment ambition— Meillassoux is inexorably drawn to the same kind of imaginary. This becomes most apparent in his unpublished manuscript “Divine Inexistence,” excerpts of which are published in Harman’s book on Meillassoux. In this manuscript, Meillassoux affirms a world of justice that already exists in the imagination as an “object of desire traversed by reason . . . the place where life is transfixed by the thought of the eternal.”30 In such a world, the dead can be resurrected to a state of immortality, and a virtual God (or even Gods) can arise as “the last-born of humans.”31 Science thus becomes the path to omniscience, ultimate mastery (even over death), in which human and divine merge together. Yet this type of dream is one that already emerges within the Kantian universe itself: “if only the two worlds of the subjective and the noumenal could be reconciled . . .” The difference between Kant and Meillassoux lies in the attainability of divine knowledge, but in both cases there is the sense that such knowledge already exists: in Kant it resides in a separate supersensible sphere, while in Meillassoux it is something that (potentially) awaits the last humans. The correlationist limit (the absence of reason) is presented in Meillassoux as an external object of knowledge that can nonetheless be directly approached and positively grasped (mathematized) through reason. In other words, the limit is presented as ultimately a problem of epistemology or, in Hegelian terms, a problem of the understanding. This is perhaps why Meillassoux appears so drawn to a tangible sense of the divine. And one could imagine further layers of mysticism being added here: for example, that only certain types of people will be recognized

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

10 C H AP TE R

1

and resurrected by the virtual God into the world of justice. In this way, it could very well return to an all too familiar paradigm whereby we seek to justify our capacity to act (or not to act) in the name of something external; that is, a virtual God who is either pleased or displeased with “us.” In other words, there is a danger that it would restore yet another version of the big Other. At the same time, Meillassoux’s perspective also tends to leave untouched the dimension of necessity as a material force. The very emphasis on contingency can thus become a way of not thinking about the grounded forms of necessity. Indeed, the dominant view of the modern world— where the “free market” is routinely recited as a signifier of infinite hyperchaotic potential— is that everything and anything is possible under the capitalist sun. This finitized infinity effectively functions as today’s ideological-fantasmatic necessity.

Infinity and the Idea Meillassoux asserts that we need to “revoke the transcendental.”32 This is because the transcendental— and, in particular, the transcendental subject— can only be thought as something that “takes place” under concrete spatiotemporal circumstances.33 The transcendental is thus conceived as something secondary to, as a function of, the “time of science” (i.e., the contingent interplay of objects and circumstances). The time of science emerges precisely at the point where the transcendental exhausts itself and is shown to depend on particular conditions of possibility. Yet Meillassoux’s perspective also relies on its own implicit notion of the transcendental: contingency as an absolute exception. Both Meillassoux and Badiou share a view of contingency-as-absolute (though in different ways) and present this in terms of a mathematized infinity. For Badiou, it is presented as the multiplicity of multiplicities where being is conceived as “a mathematically thinkable pure multiplicity.”34 For Meillassoux, it is the idea that “whatever is mathematically conceivable is absolutely possible.”35 From any starting point, we can proceed in an infinity of directions with an infinity of sequential permutations and outcomes. In the Cantorian sense, every infinity leads to another infinity. The Hegelian problem that emerges here is a conceptual separateness, where infinity tends to be viewed as something over and above the given and which, in some sense, can be grasped in mathematical terms. Hegel approaches this problem in a different way, beginning with the question of otherness: the other is always-already internally inscribed, and the in-itself is precisely the constitutive failure of something to be

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

11 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

itself in positive terms. Things always indicate an other; an other that is also something and which in turn indicates a further other and so on ad infinitum.36 For Hegel, this conception of infinity as an unending number of instances and combinations, which is simply opposed to the finite in positive-independent terms, is a spurious one.37 It does not touch upon the true dimension of infinity. One should not approach infinity in terms of multiplicities that simply overrun any singularity or finiteness. In the first place, infinity should not be thought of as something set apart from finitude. True infinity is determined as “the unity of the infinite and the finite.”38 This “unity” is not any kind of identity, but precisely the opposite: it is the name of a radical tension, or impossibility, that forever bars (unified) identity as such. In other words, infinity grows out of finitude (and vice versa). Infinity emerges as a consequence of the failure of the finite to fully constitute itself; it is the inherent dimension of impossibilitynegativity in every finite. Likewise, the finite is not an independent actuality, but a continuous process of reconstitution against the infinite threat of immanent dissolution. Thus, it is not a question of a finite combination of multiples versus an unending multiplicity of possible combinations, but rather that every multiplicity is itself sustained or generated by an infinite “singularity”: the persistence of an infinite self-relating negativity within the finite. Put in Lacanian terms, the infinite arises as the not-all of the finite (and vice versa). For Lacan, “mathematization alone reaches a Real.”39 But the Real here is nothing substantial, and certainly not any pre-subjective or prediscursive reality. What mathematics is able to give expression to is precisely the Real in terms of its incompleteness, inconsistency, and lack. Its real force lies in its capacity for the “signifying of dispersal and unraveling.”40 Far from capturing a solid noncorrelated ground on which to base a diachronic narrative of development, mathematics marks the very point(s) at which fantasy has to intervene in order to patch up the inherent inconsistencies of reality. More generally, what follows from this is that science (in its everyday applied forms) functions ultimately along fantasmatic lines. Science serves to generate or reproduce an autopoietic consistency that is capable of rendering “reality” as something communicable as a field of effectivity.41 Science, like the language of James Joyce, has a self-referential structure where terms like “atom,” “electron,” “quark,” and so on only make sense as relational categories.42 Something similar can be said about our engagement with the world generally. From remotely operated technology to satellite navigation and the use of augmented reality, the distinction between the real and the virtual is becoming increasingly blurred. Digitized screens are becoming the very frame of reality through which we manipulate objects and information

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

12 C H AP TE R

1

in both their virtual and physical forms. The externality of the world is being overcome through superimposed constructions that are themselves subject to direct mediation, bringing the real world to “life” and opening up new possibilities for action and engagement. Science and technology function as self-referring networks of signification (information data, instrumentation, etc.) that not only provide consistency to the order of being, but enable the pursuit of human objectives. As with the unconscious, the subject of science is coterminous with signification and likewise cannot be derived from anything independent or beyond its own terms. Far from yielding any signatura rerum of a given reality, science weaves its signification(s) for “the world” in ways that are constitutive of reality as such. Scientific discourse is always in medias res and makes no purchase on anything outside of its own paradigmatic terms. In this regard, Meillassoux’s time of science— where there is an immediate access to pre-discursive reality— can only appear as a fantasy. Meillassoux’s conceptualization of contingency is, from this viewpoint, similarly flawed. For him, contingency emerges as the exception: everything is subject to contingency except contingency itself, and thus contingency is ascribed the status of an independent idealized form. But in Hegel contingency is not something that can be set apart as a selfconstituting exception, and thus it cannot be considered absolute or necessary. On the contrary, what is necessary is not contingency but internal differentiation and equivocation where every particular thing is, in its very essence, constituted in and through its relation with its other. As if in response to Meillassoux, Hegel writes: The purpose of philosophy is . . . to banish indifference and to become cognizant of the necessity of things, so that the other is seen to confront its other. And so, for instance, inorganic nature must be considered not merely as something other than organic nature, but as its necessary other. The two are in essential relation to one another, and each of them is (what it is), only insofar as it excludes the other from itself, and is related to itself precisely by that exclusion. Or in the same way again, there is no nature without spirit, or spirit without nature. In any case, it is an important step in thinking, when we cease to say, “Well, something else is possible too.” When we say that, we are burdened with the contingent, whereas . . . true thinking is the thinking of necessity.43

This means that finitude does not mark any external or temporal frontier— which can be overcome potentially through science and mathematics— between givenness and independent (pre- or post-subjective) reality. Just as finitude already holds infinitude (self-relating negativity) within itself

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

13 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

(and vice versa), so too contingency and necessity should be thought together. Contingency arises because of the necessary constitutive failure of necessity to establish itself in its own (absolute) terms; necessity arises because of the contingent dislocation(s) that inhere as a necessary possibility within contingency as-such. Something similar can be said about the traditional subjective/objective distinction. Hegel makes clear that it is absurd “to consider subjectivity and objectivity as a fixed and abstract antithesis.”44 Rather, we should consider the two as dialectical moments of each other where objectivity functions as the other of subjectivity and vice versa. This also informs his approach to the Idea: “The Concept, which is initially only subjective, proceeds to objectify itself by virtue of its own activity and without the help of an external material or stuff. And likewise the object is not rigid and without process; instead, its process consists in its proving itself to be that which is at the same time subjective, and this forms the advance to the Idea.”45 The Idea is a kind of logic of objectification without any object; it is processual, not given or substantial. There is no external criteria or measure that is already there awaiting discovery. The point of “origin” is rather a pure posited-ness or mediated-ness as such. In this regard, the human condition is one of ongoing processes of differentiation(s) that enable the effective navigation of such mediated-ness. Through science, art, philosophy, politics, and so on, the mysterious alien character of “nature” is overcome or sublated in the pursuit of historical objectives. The Idea effectively recasts objectivity (the sense of the external) in a way that reveals the characteristic form of conceptual-subjective engagement. On this basis, the Idea manifests the essential unity of both the Concept and objectivity. In its mute existence, the objective realm of “nature” is experienced as an absolute externality, the negation of subjectivity. Through the symbolic networking of the world and nature (the intagliation of the signifier), this experience is sublated— there is a negation of the negation— and a consequent transformation of both subjectivity and objectivity. Subjectivity does not simply become reconciled with objectivity (as if mastering the mysteries that are already there); nor is there— which amounts to the same thing— an ideal synthesis of subjective-objective relations. The philosophy of Hegel is consequently not a representationalist or interpretivist one. It is not as if things happen objectively, in a realm of actuality, and are then interpreted (or represented) through subjective discourse. And here he effectively rejects the three main ontological traditions: subjectivism (reality is an effect of mind); objectivism (reality is something external and ultimately knowable); and subjectively limited objectivism or finitudism (reality is out there but, as limited historical actors, we cannot fully know it). For Hegel,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

14 C H AP TE R

1

reality is opaque, but the point is that this opaqueness is part of the construction of reality itself. Reality, in this sense, cannot know itself because it is constitutively incomplete. Just as the north and south poles of a magnet exist only in relation to each other, the order of being is achieved only through the basic principle of distinction (i.e., through constitutive otherness). These poles have no particular content in and of themselves, yet their mutual dependence and mutual thwarting is capable nonetheless of producing a tensional field of phenomenal reality. This is intrinsic to Hegel’s notion of the absolute Idea. The absolute Idea has no content of its own, but rather reflects the point at which content passes over into a pure kind of form that is revealed as for-itself, or as self-reproducing. What is shown in the absolute Idea is not anything substantial but its very “system of determinations” or “currency of moments”46— it signals not only mediation but mediated-ness itself as the very basis of immediacy. The absolute Idea represents the point at which the subject-object field of reality is perceived or experienced as something that is delimited as a frame of being. It is the whole that organizes and makes sense of the particular moments as a characteristic for-itself economy or configuration. In a way, it is both pure form and pure content. The absolute Idea expresses both the nature of form as a particular kind of content (i.e., delimitation as such as the universal content) and of content as a particular kind of form (the characteristic articulation of its moments as universal form). What is real for Hegel is the process of differentiation as such, and the delimited fields of differentiation that emerge from it historically in the guise of necessity. “Absolute knowing” in Hegel has, consequently, nothing to do with “knowing everything.”47 It is not a question of a development in the quantity of knowledge but of its quality.48 Absolute knowing is rather the recognition of the absolute limitation of the frame of being as such. The In-itself can never be grasped in a tangible sense because the In-itself is nothing but the frame of being produced through delimitation. Put in other terms, what absolute knowing “finds” ultimately in the search for the In-itself is the field (or field-ness) of the search itself. In this context, the problem with Laruelle’s decisionalism is not its radicalism, but rather that it does not go far enough. For Laruelle, the decisional circle of reflexivity is still constituted against something that is external to it: an independent Real. Following Hegel, the decisional should rather be considered as a universal problematic (coterminous with the order of being); something that always has to be enacted against the background of a thoroughly de-substantialized (non-positive) condition of undecidability. In these terms, the Real is already part of the mix; it is inherently (and constitutively) inscribed in the very distortion that is

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

15 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

being. This is where Hegel’s materialism lies. For Hegel, the one cannot emerge— either as a positive pre-givenness (Laruelle) or as a progressive overcoming toward a new time of science (Meillassoux). The one is always marked by its own decisionalism and thus by its own failure.

De-correlating the Correlate Neither Laruelle nor Meillassoux manage to escape the problem of correlationism. Both of them maintain, at some level, the idea of a hard (pre-subjective) externality that can be reflected (and finally captured) by thought. In this sense, they may be said to confuse the idea of the presymbolic Real with that of a pre-subjective objectivity. Yet the pre-symbolic Real in Lacanian terms does not presuppose an order of the actual or a cosmic set of elements. The pre-symbolic Real is the opposite: it is a basic formlessness that has to be configured, made sense of, in historically circumscribed terms. This formlessness indicates the ineradicability of medium-ness or field-ness as such— that is, the Hegelian point that the form imposed brings with it its own content— and as such signals the dimension of speculative infinity. Far from there being anything positive or independent to speculate upon, we are confronted by the purely speculative in itself: the radical tension and incompleteness of any field of being (the Hegelian absolute of subject = substance that always persists both before and after as an inexpressible constitutive surplus). Bruce Fink identifies two (overlapping) orders of the Real in Lacan: the pre-symbolic Real (R1), which can be nothing more than “our own hypothesis”; and the post-symbolic Real (R2), which consists of all the inconsistencies and impasses that the symbolic itself gives rise to.49 Ultimately, however, we are dealing with a radical interiorization where R1 and R2 reflect different forms of the same basic impossibility in which medium-ness can never be fully mediated. This is also reflected in Lacan’s claim that there is no metalanguage. There is no external point, or final language, which might determine the nature of language as an object of unity. Language cannot find an exterior point by which it might describe and/or evaluate itself objectively; language can only function in its own terms. This does not mean that everything can be reduced to language. The point is rather that the very functioning of language is simultaneously a malfunctioning; it is always, to use the Lacanian expression, not-all. Language is both Achilles and the tortoise in this sense that it cannot catch up with itself, cannot mediate the condition of its own mediatedness. The gap is not between subjective interpretation and something objective outside it

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

16 C H AP TE R

1

(an independent Real); rather, the gap is inherent to the language that organizes and makes sense of the very distinction(s) of the subjective and objective as such. Language is always constitutively lacking, but the lack here does not refer to any kind of (epistemological) paucity that might be overcome through more and/or better science. The lack is the result of a constitutive asymmetry between mediation and a mediatedness that always exists in excess to it. Because Laruelle and Meillassoux look toward some kind of externality of resolution, they both effectively remain within the field of idealism. The correlationist problem results from the very one-sidedness of formulating the idea of reality in terms of either the subjective (Kant) or the objective (Meillasoux, Laruelle, and others). From Hegel’s speculative viewpoint, this one-sidedness does not hold. Correlationism cannot be overcome through the assertion of an externality that is accessible in some way (this would be to already fall for the idealist allure of correlationism itself). The point is rather to pursue correlationism right to the end and to dissolve any substantialist sense of a correlate. In other words, the point is not to de-correlate reality, but rather to de-correlate the correlate: that is, to conceive subjectivity and objectivity not as correlates of each other, but rather as parts of a concrete totality that is traversed by an essential negativity. In a speculative approach, the subjective and the objective are distinguished only as (anamorphic) dimensions of each other in the distorted and incomplete constitution of reality itself. The correlationist problematic is not only false but also self-defeating. The very attempt to break out of correlationism is itself correlationist in that it relies upon the idea that there is some kind of externality that can be reached and represented. Hegel opens a different possibility. By affirming the substance = subject as absolute— by showing that reality is generated as a decentered phenomenal field traversed by incompleteness— Hegel demonstrates that there is no (hard) externality as such. The Real, consequently, is not any kind of “out there,” but is fully inherent to reality in its constitution as a particular distortion in relation to limit and failure. The sense of inside and outside is given as a perspectival polarity. And this polarity can change over time, so that what was once perceived as external can switch over to become part of the inside (this is part of what happens in an event). For example, while the idea of popular participation was once regarded as an external threat to the natural or rational order (“mob rule,” etc.), it has now been widely transformed through democratic discourse into an idea that resonates with “legitimacy,” “civilization,” and so on. In Lacanian mode, the inside and outside have the (extimate) structure of the Möbius strip and around which object-a and $ (the subject as void) circulate in tensional proximity to each other.50

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

17 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

The way out of the correlationist problematic lies not in the assertion of any (pre-subjective) externality, but in showing that the correlate is in itself non-correlational, that it is the mode of appearance of a speculative (non-all) whole. Herein also lies the problem with Graham Harman’s immaterialist perspective or object-oriented ontology. There are two main assertions in this perspective. The first is that we should avoid anthropocentrism. According to Harman, thinkers such as Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux all tend to produce a basic division between people and everything else,51 a division that implicitly privileges the human. For Harman, we should instead begin with a flat ontology where everything (human and nonhuman) can be considered as a certain type of object (or subset of an object). The second main assertion is that objects are irreducible to their (sociosymbolic) relations: there is always an excess that is unknowable, permanently obscure. Harman is consequently opposed to Meillassoux and his view of progressively mastering the objective world through mathematical codification. Yet Harman’s alternative immaterialism is one that relies implicitly on Kantian logic. Harman rightly points out that while objects rely on relations of interaction, they are not reducible to those relations— this is the problem with, for example, standard forms of structuralism and constructivism. Objects in their emergence can always become something other than their existing configuration of relations; there is always an irreducible excess to the object. The problem is that this impenetrable excess tends to be conceived by Harman as an independent property of the object as such. This consequently reproduces a familiar Kantian type of external relationship between the knowable and the unknowable— at the very point of privileging the objective, the idea of subjective knowledge returns with a vengeance. Anthropocentrism has been replaced by a kind of objectocentrism whose ultimate reality is supersensible. Again we are faced with another form of one-sidedness. Meillassoux and Harman represent two aspects of the same Kantian problematic. While for Meillassoux external reality is ultimately knowable, for Harman this reality is unknowable (what remains Kantian is the very idea of such externality). The way out of this problematic is through Hegel. In the first instance, this means problematizing the distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. At the level of the understanding, this distinction is clear: the field of knowledge is finite and there is always a beyond that is unknowable. But from a speculative position, the two need to be thought together as reciprocal determinations of each other: the knowable and unknowable not as a distinction but as movement. The unknowable arises as a negation of an existing field of knowledge (e.g., the breakdown of Newtonian physics in regard to paradoxical

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

18 C H AP TE R

1

events) that in turn is negated (a negation of the negation) with the rise of new knowledge (e.g., Einsteinian physics) and so on. In other words, the point is to grasp the unity of the knowable and the unknowable in their opposition. The limit of a field of knowledge is internal to it and does not indicate any kind of external beyond that is either knowable or unknowable. At a speculative level, the first priority is to stop framing the problem in terms of an externality or one-sidedness, either on the side of relations of interaction or on the side of the object. The in-itself of an object cannot be reduced to its subjective or socio-symbolic relations, but neither can the in-itself be placed wholly outside these relations as an independent unknowable property of the object as such. It is on this basis that Lacan formulates the relationship between the subject and object-a, not as a simple correlation but precisely as Hegel’s “unrest of simultaneous incompatibles, a movement.”52 Because the subject is impenetrable to itself, it projects this surplus of not-knowing into various forms of object-a: i.e., that which appears in the object yet is more than the object. The reason I desire an object is not because of its basic empirical existence, but because it embodies a mysterious excess or object-a that promises some kind of (impossible) fulfillment, a sense of being in touch with the real Thing as a way of anchoring me to the world and providing an answer for who or what I am. The subject and object-a are inextricably linked, and it is the irresolvable tension between them that is constitutive of reality. What we have are two kinds of excess— the impenetrable excess of the subject and the mysterious surplus of the object— that circulate around each other in an irresolvable tension that is in turn generative of reality. Consequently, excess is not anything independent of or external to reality. The point is rather that the world of objects reflects the very impenetrability of the subject to itself; both object-a and the subject are counterpoint dimensions of a reflexive continuum. Thus what appears as externally opposed— subject and object— are shown to be two modes of excess within the same speculative field of proximate incomplete reality. Strictly speaking, Hegel’s ontology is simultaneously an anti-ontology. In a speculative approach, ontology is both possible and impossible. The very aspect of the impossibility of ontology (the persistence of the subject in its radical negativity) is precisely what renders ontology (in the form of the understanding) possible. There exists no external obscure world beyond reality. For Hegel, reality itself is a structured obscuration, a mediated provisional cut or distortion of the absolute (non-relation) of subject = substance. In speculative terms, both idealism and materialism need to be thought together as moments within a unity of opposites. Yet the central point is that the very idealism/materialism distinction is only possible against a background of radical materialism.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

19 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

Weird Science: Hegel in the Eleventh Dimension In general, the speculative realists remain too wedded to the quantitative model of knowledge— where science is viewed as something that gains progressively on the uncorrelated real— and they miss the qualitative shift in the unfolding of knowledge toward an appreciation of absolute limitation (i.e., an understanding of knowledge as a delimited field). In Lacanian terms, what is overlooked is the Real as absolute limit, as something that is coterminous with, and constitutive of, the field of knowledge as such. In consequence, the problem of epistemology and knowledge is ultimately a problem of ontology. This has been demonstrated in the quantum physics of people like Niels Bohr who have shown how the more science closes in on the basic units of material existence, the more indeterminate they become.53 It is not that epistemology reaches a certain limit while reality remains “out there” in full independent terms (so that we have multiple “interpretations” of something that already exists); it is rather that reality itself is ontologically, and constitutively, incomplete. The indeterminacy and incompleteness of reality cannot be epistemologically overcome, but are rather the very in-itself of reality as such. And this extends to both the subjective and objective sides of reality. In psychoanalytic terms, Bohr may be said to have identified the implicit sexual structure of “Nature” itself in its aspect of impenetrable lack. Nature is a deviation from “the natural,” separated from itself in terms of any given or holistic structure. In other words, Bohr’s perspective is one that “exposes the non-relation at the very heart of every relation.”54 Asymmetry or lack is affirmed here as intrinsic to every relational gesture. What we normally associate with the sexual (i.e., erotic physical interaction) is simply one expression of the non-relation inscribed in nature itself. Against the standard complaint that “psychoanalysis reduces everything to sex,” the point is rather the opposite: sex is effectively reduced to everything, shown to be part of a continuum of discontinuity; an activity premised upon a universal repetition of lack and difference. Meillassoux argues that by maintaining the facticity of the correlate, the inherent incapacity to access objective reason actually becomes the way out— the Kantian incapacity is merely a reflection of a basic absence of reason. The absolute is nothing but this absence. It is on this basis that Meillassoux wishes to restore science and mathematics to their proper status as disciplines capable of disclosing the primary properties of un-reason and of describing the work of radical contingency in a way that transcends the given or subjective. Yet Meillassoux’s critique of Kant only goes so far. His absolute refers only to the subjective side of matters

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

20 C H AP TE R

1

and not the objective or substantial side. By elevating our incapacity to find objective reason at the level of the transcendental, contingency itself is made the ideal object of knowledge; something which is subject to the privileged jurisdiction of mathematical encoding. The very thing that remains an ontological constitutive limit for subjectivity (i.e., radical contingency) is consequently re-epistemologized as a problem that is solvable ultimately through enlightened science (the Real as reconciled with realism)— Meillassoux effectively de-Kantianizes metaphysics only to reKantianize science. Hegel, by contrast, marshals a two-sided approach that dissolves the Kantian universe as such. For Hegel, there is no selfcontained world or independent outdoors that can be accessed. Both subject and substance need to be thought together: The disparity which exists in consciousness between the “I” and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general. This can be regarded as the defect of both, though it is their soul, or that which moves them. That is why some of the ancients conceived the void as the principle of motion, for they rightly saw the moving principle as the negative, though they did not as yet grasp that the negative is the self. Now, although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the “I” and its object, it is just as much a disparity of the substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject.55

The outcome of the processes by which this insight is historically realized— i.e., that substance is essentially subject— results finally in a manifestation of objective spirit. The truth of the phenomenology of spirit is something that shows itself in the “form of simplicity which knows its object as its own self.”56 Does this amount to a teleology (as many commentators have claimed) in which there is ultimate reconciliation between subject and substance? Does the historical process result in a “pure form” whose moments are “necessary and eternally stable”? 57 Put another way, is this the highest expression of idealism? In fact, Hegel breaks decisively not only with the Kantian opposition between subjectivity and substance as external (noumenal) entities, but also with the entire idealist problematic. In Hegel, there exists rather an economy of movement between subject and substance. This economy remains impossible in the sense that there is no final outcome other than the disclosing of its economy as such. For Hegel, essence is this economy. Subject and substance do not achieve any simple unity or identity; subject is not absorbed into substance (e.g., as human genome), nor is substance absorbed into

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

21 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

subject (e.g., as generator of reality). There is not, in other words, a dialectical unfolding toward a positive absolute; rather, the absolute is the dialectical unfolding itself. In his analysis of the various forms of judgment (the interplay of the Concept and its particularities), Hegel shows how the subject is linked to some form of finitude— its content relies upon particular predicates either positively (“the rose is red”) or negatively (“the rose is not red”). The subject and the predicate may be said to be always in a game of tag with each other and only touch each other at certain points, but the subject may be regarded as universal in the sense that it can always escape its particular predicative contents. On the other hand, the predicate can be viewed as universal because it can always outrun any particular subject. There is a basic ambiguity which means that everything depends on circumstance. But when it comes to the infinite judgment, things stand very differently. In infinite judgment there exists an “empty identity-relation” which finds expression in such propositions as “the spirit is not an elephant” or “the spirit is spirit”; these are propositions which are “correct but pointless.”58 These forms of infinite judgment— which collapse in on themselves and thereby reveal the empty form of all judgments— express “the total incommensurability of the subject and the predicate.”59 In other words, the subject exemplifies an impenetrable self-relating negativity that can never be fully captured or configured within predicative substance. But again, this does not mean that the subject is independent of substance-predicate. Hegel is very precise in his use of the term “incommensurability.” The subject is ultimately revealed in this form as a result of the inability of substance to complete itself. Subject emerges as the feral excess of the movements of substance. In contrast to the Enlightenment ideal of a non-alienated ideal, Hegel argues that substance is already alienated in-itself, and the subject is precisely an effect of this alienation. As he puts it: The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. The Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its anti-thesis (the immediate simplicity). Only this self-restoring same-ness, or this reflection of otherness within itself— not an original or immediate unity as such— is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual.60

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

22 C H AP TE R

1

In showing the essential connectedness of subject and substance through non-identity, Hegel advances beyond Kant. Subject is not a separate entity, but the inherent negativity of substance itself. Equally, substance has no independence “out there”; it is rather a continuous process of differentiation driven by this negativity. When Henry Harris speaks of Hegel as positing a “self-moving substance,”61 we should perhaps add two further points: first, in its basic nature, substance is nothing but movement; and second, this movement is generated by a kind of absolute inertia: namely, inward opposition and the essential failure of substance to achieve full being. Contradiction itself becomes that which “moves the world.”62 From this point of view, science cannot be regarded as a continuum of neutral knowledge that gains progressively on an indifferent world or substance; precisely because there is nothing substantial to be gained. We cannot penetrate to an underlying pre-subjective reality because we are already included within the negativity that moves the world and thus do not have an independent standpoint. As the theoretical physicist Max Planck put it: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”63 Yet what Hegel would add here is that this mystery does not point to anything that is beyond reason as such. For Hegel, what speculative reason enables us to do is to grasp the nature of the mystery itself (i.e., as an absolute limit to the field of being). The move from Kant to Hegel is something that continues to be played out at every level in science. What science is tending to reveal is not the structure of an indifferent external world, but rather a world without a fixed form or purpose and without any independent markers of certainty; in short, science is revealing the nature of substance as also subject. Not only do we have “ecology without nature,”64 we also have bioengineering without biology (the capacity to directly synthesize bacteria and to create living forms), neuroscience without experience (the direct instilling of states of consciousness), and mathematics without order (the capacity to manipulate the world through meaningless numbers and formulae), right through to quantum physics and its affirmation of matter without matter and the inherent indeterminacy of all reality (creating the possibility of artificially generating universes without God). In this context, Nature is dissolving and opening up toward new kinds of reflexive possibility. Far from apprehending any ideal in Nature, science is revealing the unsettling presence of the void that, in turn, de-idealizes science as such; that is, it shows it to be part of mediatedness without any external point of reflection. In other words, science is not gravitating toward any teleological outcome or hidden substantialization, but rather the Hegelian absolute. What is being reached

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

23 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

is an understanding of infinite Otherness (that everything relies upon a certain differentiating cut that produces its Other). As in the Lacanian traversing of the fantasy, science is not achieving a final breakthrough into a realm of hidden or noumenal substance, but rather an appreciation of absolute limit or infinity— the empty frame as the “object” of all objectivity (an object that “requires” subjectivization— the presence of the observer). From this viewpoint, we might say that while Meillassoux still hopes for (unmediated/pre-subjective) objects, Hegel affirms that there exists only the empty frame. Or to put it in Lacanian terms, there exists only object-a (the counterpoint to the subject-as-void). The Hegelian logic is also to be found in the recent developments surrounding M-theory— where “M” stands for “membrane” but which is also variously referred to by scientists as “mystery,” “mad,” and “mother”— and the conceptual discovery of an eleventh dimension. This dimension is not merely one in the series of dimensions, but is closer to a kind of dimension of dimensionality as such. If our universe is a membrane, then the eleventh dimension is that which contains all possible membranes; in short, it is the very frame of the multiverse or parallel universes. What is found here is a kind of cosmic disjecta membra where the night of the world meets the night of the multiverse. This dimension is not a tranquil, free-flowing realm. On the contrary, it is a realm of basic conflict and violence where membranes encounter each other as turbulent waves. Occasionally these waves crash into each other and there occurs a “big bang” in which a new universe, with new forms of matter, emerges (potentially) as a by-product. Far from the cosmic harmony of the spheres, the multiverse is something that reveals the madness of the membranes. The dialectical interpolation here would be that all these M-mobilizations are themselves the result of an inherent failure or excess of movement; that is, a basic incapacity of the multiverse to complete itself— its dynamism arises essentially from being jammed. The crucial Hegelian point here is that the big bang can no longer be considered as unique, but rather as something that itself results from an ongoing process of splitting and differentiation. Our universe does not function in its own terms, but is something that achieves its consistency through distinguishing itself from its Other. This can also be seen in the most fundamental sense of gravity, which is neither internally generated nor closed within our universe. The physicist Lisa Randall, for example, explains that the weakness of gravity is something that results from a certain tensional differentiation wherein gravity leaches into our own universe, warping and structuring it, via the eleventh dimension and the presence of other (parallel) universes.65 It is the almost negligible differential force, the incredibly weak field of gravity (the very “stuff” of splitting and differentiation) that is absolutely

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

24 C H AP TE R

1

decisive in the constitution of the universe. Viewed through this lens, we might argue that Hegel is the most consequent of quantum theorists. In Meillassoux, and even Badiou, there is arguably an implicit kind of holism at play. Notwithstanding the emphasis that is given to contingency and pure multiplicity, the basic idea is that mathematics is capable of capturing or representing the latter in authentic terms as a full disclosure.66 But from a Hegelian viewpoint, this is not the heart of the matter. It is not that there are real contingent possibilities or multiplicities that are awaiting discovery by mathematics. The point is rather that such possibilities are the result of interior distinctions. Difference does not reside in any realm of the transfinite or order of being (and which would then be subject to representation). Rather, it is an effect of differentiation itself: that is, a process of inherent tension, splitting, and struggle. Taking Heraclitus’s standpoint that “everything flows,” Hegel affirms that the flows that take place are not simply between something and an outside other but, crucially, within the something itself. This inward otherness— the essential contradiction of being-there— produces a basic alterity that drives every something beyond itself. Contradiction, alterity, and movement are intrinsic. This is where Hegelian dialectics differs from that of pre-Socratic philosophers such as Anaximander who presented a kind of dialectical symmetry where opposites take “offense” at each other. Such opposites are generated via what he terms apeiron, a boundless sphere of pure indefiniteness. While this appears to overlap with Hegelian thought, the problem is that the dimension of indeterminacy is conceived as something external, an infinite realm that is capable of generating countless finitudes. Hegel, by contrast, formulates the problem in precisely opposite terms: infinity is something that can only be reached through (the negation of) finitude itself. Infinity does not have any kind of independent generating capacity of its own. The type of spatial opposition of which Anaximander speaks is reconceived in Hegel as something internal to x itself: an existential opposition between x and its own void.

The Speculative Universe: Much Ado about Den There is no entity that can coincide with itself. And this also extends to nothing as such. Nothing is the mother (or, perhaps, mOther) of all differentiation. In quantum physics, the widely held view is that the universe came from nothing.67 This nothing is not simply empty but manifests itself in two distinct modes: true and false vacuum. In each case, the nothing

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

25 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

reaches beyond itself and, along the lines of Hegel, externalizes its own limit (its failure to coincide with itself) in the emergence of something. In a true vacuum the forces are already broken (there exists asymmetry and differentiation), and these tend toward the lowest (zero or nearzero) energy state: for example, rivers flowing toward the true vacuum of sea level.68 Nothing here exists only in a relational sense with regard to something(s). In a false vacuum, there is the appearance of symmetry and stillness. But like water that is contained in a dam, this stillness is the result of highly concentrated pressure-energy. Nothing exists in a state of compression that, if pierced, can release torrents of energy and matter at an exponential rate. In this way, universes “can spring out of the vacuum almost effortlessly.”69 This is precisely the context for a big bang. In this aspect, nothing is constituted as an intense containment of (potential) something(s). We can also see how, in a way, this logic of the two vacuums is played out in the field of politics. In very broad terms, totalitarian regimes tend to reflect the structure of the false vacuum in the sense that the state and the people are placed under immense pressure to ensure that nothing disturbs the power regime. With modern democracy, by contrast, the model is closer to a true vacuum such that the people are bombarded with all kinds of demands to participate in political and sociocultural activity precisely in order to neutralize any real action. It is along these lines that we can also understand the paradox of the Higgs field, which Brian Greene explains in the following terms: “To force a Higgs field to have a value of zero— the value that would seem to be the closest you can come to a state of nothingness— you would have to raise its energy, and energetically speaking, the region of space would not be as empty as it possibly could. Even though it sounds contradictory, removing the Higgs field— reducing its value to zero, that is— is tantamount to adding energy to the region.”70 Greene draws an analogy with noise-reduction headphones: “just as you hear less when the headphones are suffused with the sounds they are programmed to produce, so cold, empty space harbors as little energy as it possibly can— it is as empty as it can be— when it is suffused with an ocean of Higgs field.”71 Never quite at its own level, nothingness is always part of a condition of surplus of both less and more than itself. And thus “what we normally think of as empty space— the vacuum, nothingness— plays a central role in making things appear as they do.”72 The very fact of a Higgs field having a non-zero value simultaneously designates a process of “spontaneous symmetry breaking.”73 The primordial, or hypothetical, symmetry that exists— for example, between electromagnetism and weak nuclear forces— unravels as a (Higgs) process of dissimilation, allowing mass to form and so on. It is not that we have symmetry on one

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

26 C H AP TE R

1

side and dissimilitude on the other. Diversity does not emerge in independent terms; it results rather from the noncoincidence of symmetry. Put in Lacanian terms, symmetry is not-all; it is something that breaks down through the paradox of an encounter with its own inherent impossibility. Indeed, the Higgs field itself can be seen as a symptom or, more accurately, a sinthome of this paradox: that is, an attempt to establish a certain form through paradox itself. The principle of noncoincidence equally applies to difference and its inherent subjection to entropy; for example, the breaking down of organic differences into inorganic simplicity and base material, as in the phrase “dust to dust.” Or, following Hegel, we might say that the nature of the universe is effectively speculative. The very inconsistencies and paradoxes that are encountered in trying to understand the universe in independent or discrete terms should be viewed as inherent to the very logic of the (becoming) universe itself. In a way that resonates with the Higgs model, Hegel views difference in terms of a tensional mediatedness that is itself the result of a basic stuckness: that is, a paradox that constantly seeks to resolve itself through the absolute of substance = subject; an absolute of impossible symmetry. For Hegel, the ground of all being is difference/differentiation as such. Differentiation in, for example, the form of fossils does not speak to any pre-subjective reality. The fossil of all forms of differentiation is (impossible) differentiation itself. In this context, however, Hegel can be said to have reached a limit and needs to be supplemented by Freud. Hegel does not reach the level of pure mechanical repetition, or repetition as its own economy.74 While there is repetition in Hegel, this tends to be of a transformative nature (Julius Caesar dies as an individual, but the title is repeated at a universal level). With Freud, and as developed by Lacan, there is a new and fundamental emphasis on the death drive as a pure empty form of repetition that is self-sustaining (e.g., the compulsive gambler whose goal is the next win, but whose essential aim is the perpetuation of gambling as such). In Hegel, the central idea is that being and nothing have to be thought together as a continuous process of becoming.75 This becoming is always toward something other and is the very basis of Hegelian dialectics. Here negativity tends to be thought in terms of the deforming and reforming of the positive (negation is always, at some level, negation of something). This renders Hegel unable to grasp the “non-dialectizable core” of dialectics itself.76 What is overlooked in Hegel is the way in which negativity is not simply a transformational moment (or series of moments), but is also something that achieves animation in its own terms: the death drive of pure repetition. All differential movement is simultaneously accompanied by the spectral persistence of negativity itself. On the other hand, it might be argued that the non-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

27 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

dialectizable is implicit in Hegel. In speculative terms, the dialectizable and the non-dialectizable would function as an oppositional unity. What sets in motion dialectics is a non-dialectizable negativity that cannot be captured within the dialectical process itself. There is not simply a yin and yang of blockage and movement, but rather movement itself as its own form of blockage. Thus, in every transformational movement there is also the dimension of movement as blockage or repetition (an excess of movement that cannot be incorporated). In this context, the death drive can be seen as a compulsion to return to this negative movement as such. This also provides a way of approaching Ray Brassier’s perspective on thought and extinction. Like Meillassoux, Brassier maintains the capacity of thought “to think a world without thought.”77 This capacity is derived from what Brassier calls the “organon of extinction.”78 Brassier begins with the Freudian notion of the death drive, which is defined as a “primordial pull back towards the inorganic” (i.e., the way in which life is drawn toward the lifeless void or aboriginal death).79 On this basis, Brassier argues, thought comes to the realist realization that “inanimate things existed before living ones.”80 In other words, the death drive testifies to an inorganic order of things, an underlying objective reality, as the effective in-itself from whence all organic life and all sense of purpose springs.81 In this way, thought is able to achieve an “adequation without correspondence between the objective reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise.”82 Yet the Freudian death drive can also be given a Lacanian reading. In this context, the death drive does not refer to any kind of organic death, but rather to an inexorable “will to begin again”83 that persists beyond both life and death. The drive is not toward death but toward itself. Far from referring to an aboriginal death, the death drive is more an aboriginal cyclicality, a selfreferencing incompleteness (an asymmetrical striving for symmetry) that gives rise to the tensional phenomenological field of subject and object-a. The repetition in the death drive does not mark an eschatological return to the in-itself of a pre-given inorganic-ness; it is the repetition as such which is the in-itself. The repetition does not testify to any underlying order, but rather to movement or, in Hegelian terms, repulsion based on absolute difference (noncoincidence). In this sense, it is not so much the organon of extinction that characterizes our condition, but the organon of the undead. The drive, or compulsion to repeat, is symptomatic of a fundamental blockage: “we repeat because it is impossible directly to affirm.”84 This blockage connotes a kind of pre-ontological excess. While Hegel does not directly address this dimension of excess, it is, to some extent, present in

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

28 C H AP TE R

1

his argument concerning the way in which being and nothing continuously interact in the process of becoming. What needs to be added here is that (un-)becoming not only flows between being and nothing, but is inherent to nothing as such. The Hegelian form of nothing exists essentially as a negation of something; an emptying of content. Yet there is also a further step that can be taken which is not simply a negation of the negation, but rather a subtraction from nothing. This subtraction from nothing is neither nothing nor something, but rather a form of nothing-ness as a force in its own right, a force that contains nothing as one of its possibilities. This nothingness, which is irreducible to nothing, is analogous to Democritus’s notion of den. While nothing refers to (and depends on) the absence of something, nothingness-den subsists in its own terms as “a thing of nothing.”85 Den can be seen as a kind of pure unrest that reflects the unrest of the multiverse. As pre-ontological excess, it overflows both nothing and something (it is less than the former and more than the latter), and inscribes a basic imbalance or disturbance in every world. This nothingness-den is not zero, where zero would represent a certain balance of inputs and outputs. On the contrary, it is that which undermines all balance and symmetry. Den is not empty; it potentially contains “everything” in its aspect of non-all— the spectral abyss of inconsistent multiplicity that shines through all being. From this perspective, we might also say that den functions as a kind of embodiment of blockage itself— a pure form of impedance or inconsistency— that continuously tries (and fails) to resolve itself. It is both excess and impedance that sets nothing and something to work in dialectical economies. As such, den is a primordial surplus without any original measure. The pre-ontological nothingness-den is the very “ground” from which the dialectics of being and nothing spring; it is something that first has to be negated in order for nothing to emerge as a basic background against which something can then appear.86 Den as cause is a basic distortion that is not simply originary, but is coextensive with every order of being (in this respect it is consonant with the Lacanian notion of the Real). The generation of “reality” takes place as a distortion of this distortion through the presence— that is, a subject that serves to delimit a field of phenomenal consistency. Yet here we are returned to Hegel. In his engagement with the atomistic perspective of Leucippus and Democritus, Hegel affirms that the void and the atom, and the vacuum and the plenum, should not be conceived in external terms (as if the atom or plenum constituted an independent positivity filling up the negative void). For Hegel, atoms are not indivisible and “the plenum has likewise negativity in itself.”87 Far from being uniform or linear in its development, the plenum is inwardly (objectively) differentiated and there is no point of

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

29 HE G E L’ S

S P E CULAT I V E

UNI V E RS E

external reflection upon it. As part of the same “stuff,” our engagement with this plenum (and void) is equally one of differentiation and cut. In a way, Meillassoux remains at the level of the atomists; that is, he wants to provide a kind of external narrative, through mathematics, on the development of contingency. In doing this, he overlooks the contingency of narrativity and engagement as such; in quantum terms, the way in which the plenum is “resolved” into a certain phenomenal consistency. His hyperchaos is ultimately a limited one because he does not take on board the contingency of differential cut (or mediatedness), a cut that is effectively the subject in its incommensurability with substance. Science is not something through which we proceed to mathematical mastery or virtual divinity, but a notional field that progressively refines our relationship with the cut itself. All complexity and necessity are derived from the contingency of the cut. It is through this cut that infinity shows itself, not after but through finitude.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

2

Politics and Totality

How does the political emerge in contemporary society? Is it even possible to speak of the political in any singular or universal fashion? In his compelling opus Politics and Vision, Sheldon Wolin shows how early modernity was characterized by a steady absorption of the political into a rational organicist conception of society that was dominated by discourses of universal technique: governance (statecraft), economics, sociology, and so on.1 With the rise of a postmodern milieu and its affirmation of diversity and de-centeredness, there is a widely held view that our age is marked by a return of the political.2 The general condition is seen to be one of basic reflexivity in which there is a central awareness that human reality is always a contingent-historical enterprise that can only achieve the semblance of authenticity through practical forms of political engagement. But is there such a clear distinction here? Along the lines of Hans Blumenberg,3 what is emerging today is a certain reoccupation of the ground of substantial organicism with a kind of pure politicism. Early rational optimism has given way to a melancholic condition where the “real thing” is forever missed but which, in Freudian terms, appears even more present through the persistent referral to (the “encircling” and “marking” of) its absence or impossibility. Universality is dissolved and, at the same time, reborn as an “empty” cosmopolitan pragmatism regulated by an ethics of moderation and incompletability. The idea that mercurial remainders forever haunt every undertaking effectively constitutes the dominant paradigm of today’s hegemonic players and their sense of the political. From liberal-conservatism to the various forms of “post-ideological” discourse, political culture is largely characterized by an ironic distancing toward proposals for radical forms of intervention and by an ethos of managerialism in the face of the “realities” of global capitalism. In a strange historical quirk, this very return of the political appears conjoined with the emergence of a global (i.e., Western) apostasy and an ideological beige-ness whose names include the “end of history,” the “third way,” and even the supposedly nonideological “clash of civilizations.” In this context, a number of writers have engaged in speculating as to the nature of, and possibilities for, radical political intervention. Associated chiefly with the work of Claude Lefort, a key distinction in contemporary thought is made between politics and the political. For Lefort, the term “politics”— conceived as a particular level of the social whole (administra30

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

31 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

tive complex, the sphere of decision-making, governance, elections, and so on)— needs to be distinguished from the more radical idea of the political (le politique) as the moment(s) of rupture and contestation in which the very organizing principles of the social whole are drawn into question.4 The political is not a demarcated level, but rather a dimension (if only in potential) of every form of human endeavor wherein holism is undermined, subverted, and rendered undecidable or historical. But again, is this distinction so clear-cut? Badiou argues convincingly that there is no political philosophy as such and that the political is not something that can be universalized in neutral terms. The political, in this regard, is always bound by a politics.5 Moreover, Lefort’s characterization of politics (la politique) as essentially a formal-spatial realm is arguably too simplistic. The organization of the state, for example, is not a straightforward matter. Hegel makes clear that the state does not function in its own positive formal terms, but is always accompanied by an inherent Otherness and negativity with which it engages in order to (re-)produce itself. Politics, in this sense, strives to recognize and mediate its own failures and forms of subversion. The distinction Lefort makes between politics and the political consequently becomes more blurred. There exists rather an ongoing interweaving of the two moments (of politics and the political), in characteristic fashion, within the terms of a broader configuration that we might call the historical mode of politics. The idea of a politics of the political refers to a process of thinking about, and engaging with, the way in which politics and political subversion interact and condition each other in paradigmatic terms. In this context, the logics of subversion are essentially ambiguous. What appears, on the surface, as contestation and challenge against a social totality may in reality become caught up in the latter and actually serve to reinforce and stabilize it (e.g., democratic subversion as an outlet for protest and good conscience but which implicitly accepts, and legitimizes, the rules and grammar of political encounter). On the other hand, there are also forms of subversion which are not only more feral, but which are also capable of subverting the existing logics of subversion. Additionally, there is subversion that may appear as complicit with a totality, but whose very gesture and instances begin to take on a different quality and momentum in such a way as to undermine a given mode of subversion.

Engaging the Political The distinctive approaches to the questions of universality and social totality are of central import. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Butler,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

32 C H AP TE R

2

Laclau, and Žižek, 2000), Judith Butler rejects Laclau’s perspective and affirms instead a radical contextualism that she sees as excessive to, and ruinous of, every attempt to establish transcendental principles.6 One cannot, for example, speak of hegemony (as a universal logic) without paying attention to the place of enunciation; without putting “one’s body on the line.”7 There is consequently no universality as such, only a politics of competing universalities; one in which the very sense of the universal is “wrought from the work of translation.”8 For Laclau, by contrast, contextuality is something that already implies its Other: the universal conditions of possibility that enable contexts to emerge in the first place. In a kind of inversion of Kant, what we have is a “noumenalism” of empty universals: antagonism, dislocation, empty signifiers that can be added to the Derridean order of dark metaphysics: trace, differánce, undecidability, and so on. While Žižek certainly agrees with Laclau regarding the persistence of a transcendental and immanent form of negativity, he also agrees with Butler and her argument that the structuring of the social space and intersubjective recognition is retroactively constitutive of its very sense(s) of the universal. This does not mean that we can infer Žižek’s position as comprising any kind of “third way.” What Žižek is critiquing in both Butler and Laclau is an underdeveloped perspectivism. In the case of Butler, this refers to her implicit Foucauldianism where emphasis is placed on the emancipatory potential of marginal groups to challenge or subvert the power bloc by virtue of their marginality. For Žižek, what this misses is the way in which a power bloc is already split in terms of an “official” identity and an obscene underside that takes into account its own transgressions— they are both part of the perspectival totality. With Laclau, the problem arises from the opposite (transcendental) end of matters. The generalization of the hegemonic form of politics does not provide a perspectival account of the historical conditions of that generalization— Laclau’s own historicism appears to fall back on an implicit, even teleological, developmentalism. In Laclau, and post-Marxism generally, the political tends to be understood in terms of an irresolvable gap between contingency and necessity; there is an (incomplete) order and there is an infinite capacity (in principle) to subvert that order. On these grounds, democracy is affirmed as a unique historical configuration that is able to contemplate its own contingency and thereby assign a proper materialist dignity to the dimension of the political. Democracy contains the promise of a new form of engagement in which political subjects acknowledge hegemony as a basic existential and demonstrate an awareness of both their historical limitations and the provisional and partial basis of their interventions. In this way, hegemony and the political are presented as categories that are reaching their full

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

33 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

maturation in the context of the logics of advanced democracy. Yet for Žižek, it is more or less the opposite that pertains: the ascendance of the hegemonic form of politics is one in which the materialist force of the political is itself becoming more and more displaced and domesticated. The history of democracy can be looked at in terms of three main stages (or moments) of development. Initially, there is a positing of democracy in terms of a communitarian ideal (an elite polis on the basis of ethnicity, gender, property ownership, etc.). Subsequently, there is a progressive rejection of this ideal in favor of a new emphasis on contingency and the autonomy of politics. Finally, there begins to emerge a kind of Hegelian auto-reflective dimension of democracy: something that refines the paradigmatic quality of democratization with its own non-ideal/Othering and thereby underscores its constitutive limits. From this viewpoint, democracy (even radical democracy) should not be thought of as simply liberating “the political” as such, but rather as something that gives rise to a specific historical spirit of the political. In the terms of Niklas Luhmann, the political becomes part of the autopoietic and “necessitarian” development of the systemic whole. The liberal-capitalist-democratic imagination and its attempts to realize a world order, for example, shows how the dominant paradigm is speculatively engaging with its inherent Othering and trying to take its own dissonances and counter-forces into account. Thus the “contingent” antagonisms of terrorism, civilization clashes, and so on are presented as the ongoing birth pangs in the inevitable development of a global system. The “war on terror” functions as an implicit supplement to Western liberal tolerance— they are part of the same economy. Just as we have the idea of sustainable farming, resources, and tourism— conceived as part of an existing “ecological” whole— we can say that in international politics there exists a kind of sustainable terrorism: that is, a constitutive “recognition” in support of a certain holistic (and retroactive) unfolding of international capitalism. This reflects what might be called the political less than the political (a constrained political). This logic of the political is something that circumscribes a certain contingency and subversion, but in such a way that they do not fundamentally challenge the existing order within which it is functioning. There is a certain “grammar” at work that filters the acceptable from the non-acceptable in its reproduction. This is especially true of our multiculturalist ethos, where the emphasis is primarily on difference and accommodation. More and more, the tendency today is for organizations to develop an auto-reflective capacity (an institutional spirit) that embodies this ethos but which, at the same time, gives rise to its own prohibitions and taboos. In social welfare, for example, the typical position regarding employment is that if unemployed persons

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

34 C H AP TE R

2

have moral, religious, and/or cultural objections to particular jobs (e.g., retail in adult shops), then they have the right to be offered an alternative. While this self-reflecting differential awareness appears appropriate at one level, what remains hidden and untouched is the “natural” premise that people should be obliged to take on some form of work in such circumstances: that is, it is they, rather than the economic system (which relies upon structural unemployment and underemployment), who must assume responsibility for their own marginalization— they must adopt a work ethic toward a system that ethically betrays them. So what is disavowed is the more basic marginalization behind the surface marginalization. The inconsistencies of today’s differential culture provide fertile ground for Sacha Cohen’s film Borat. In what is essentially a road movie, the eponymous Borat travels to the “US of A” to make a documentary and to acquire information for the purpose of resolving national problems in Kazakhstan: “economic, social, and Jew.” Driving coast to coast in a defunct ice-cream van with his producer, Borat encounters different aspects of American sociocultural life from the perspective of a “barbarian.” The comedy relies upon showing what happens when the reflexive economy of multiculturalist tolerance breaks down in such a way that the Other ceases to be simply “different” and becomes an inassimilable real Other: someone who cannot, or will not, accept the terms of such an economy. After a series of social “transgressions” Borat’s position moves, in Möbius band-like fashion, from that of eccentric guest to unacceptable alien who consequently has to be dealt with by security/police. The dramatic purchase turns upon showing how, far from comprising a cosmopolitan “open society,” Western multiculturalist tolerance is mediated through implicit codes and authoritarian forms of exclusion. This filtration process is apparent especially in regard to the idea of class and class struggle. According to post-Marxist thought, class struggle has little or no analytical content and will not play the role that classical Marxism intended for it. For Laclau and Mouffe, class struggle presents a closed positivistic view of social identity that does not reflect the true nature of identities in their contingency, openness to negative subversion, and so on. There is some truth in this in that the predicted simplification of the social space and the final showdown between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has not emerged. But what is overlooked here is Marx’s central insight that what drives capitalism as an entire social formation is a disavowed negativity at its heart: the impossible nexus at the level of capitalist production. Capitalism thus relies upon a functioning contradiction: the simultaneous commodification and non-commodification of labor power. Labor power exists as a commodity to be bought and sold in a “free” market, but un-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

35 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

like any other commodity, it is also the source of surplus value and profit. In a paraconsistent way, labor power counts twice at opposed levels: at one level it is part of the cycle of commodity exchange, but at another level it is constitutive of the entire cycle in its disavowed exclusion. Capitalism must do more than simply provide a framework for selling and buying labor power; it has to subject the workers who supply labor power to an entire regime of power and regulation, partially rewarding them, keeping them at a certain distance from the productive process, and so on. This is why capitalism requires continuous external sociopolitical interventions— discourses of freedom, opportunity, pluralization, and so on (especially at the level of consumption)— in order to reproduce itself as a social totality. Against this background, class struggle should not be conceived simply as one particular type of confrontation within the social totality, but rather as a structural contradiction which is constitutive of that totality and which inscribes within it a negativity that intrinsically prevents its completion as a full positivity. Class struggle cannot be represented directly (it is everywhere and nowhere) because it is part of the very modal structure of existing social reality. In this regard, it may be said to function along the lines of the Lacanian caput mortuum (death’s head). Fink elaborates this notion in the context of a numerical chain of signification: The caput mortuum contains what the chain does not contain; it is in a sense the other of the chain. The chain is as unequivocally determined by what it excludes as by what it includes, by what is within as by what is without. The chain never ceases to not write the numbers that constitute the caput mortuum in certain positions, being condemned to ceaselessly write something else or say something else which keeps avoiding this point, as though this point were the truth of everything the chain produces as it beats around the bush.9

In similar terms, the contemporary emphasis on social plurality should be seen as an unceasing capacity to not write the dimension of class struggle. The increasing diversification of the capitalist system can be seen as a repulsion against or avoidance of the writing of the structural contradiction, where class struggle is everywhere not written as part of today’s existential architecture. This aspect of a ceaseless not-writing that nonetheless functions precisely reflects the logic of the unconscious. The unconscious is not so much a level beneath consciousness, but rather an implicit structuring logic that is unknowingly repeated throughout consciousness itself. The wood of the unconscious is effectively hidden among the trees of consciousness. Put in other terms, the unconscious is

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

36 C H AP TE R

2

present throughout consciousness, but it cannot be directly approached or circumscribed; it is overly present in this aspect of persistently being not written. Class struggle, in this sense, persists as the unconscious of capitalism: it is objectively “known” in terms of the functioning of the system, but it cannot be integrated or resolved within it. At the same time, class struggle may be said to constantly write its own failure to be written through social symptoms— economic crises, social breakdown, widening antagonisms, and so on— whose cause is operationally obscured in the reproduction of capitalism itself. The question of identifying, and confronting, social symptoms is a critical one for Lacanian theory and for the development of left-wing politics. Yannis Stavrakakis, for example, seeks to effect a common cause between post-Marxist thought and Lacan. Despite certain misgivings over Lacanian notions such as jouissance, it is Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democracy that is seen to give authentic political expression for Lacanian theory.10 While this project is perfectly legitimate in its own terms, I do not think that it exhausts either the political or theoretical possibilities for the development of Lacanian ideas. One of the problems with radical democracy is that it does not provide a systematic account of today’s symptoms; that is, of those who are in a position to hold up the mirror to cosmopolitan capitalism. In arguing for equivalences to be established between all disaffected groups within the terms of the democratic imaginary, the propensity exists for radical democracy to become removed from the more basic and constitutive forms of exclusion and to become increasingly entangled in epicycles of infra-political networking. On that basis, political subjectivity would become prone to hyperactivity— endlessly fascinated by its own positions, continually refining itself and so forth— but would be incapable of acting as such. So the danger exists that radical democracy could devolve into a rather empty proceduralism: regulating the provisional character of all political engagement; repeatedly marking the empty place of the universal; always reinforcing its own prohibition concerning the privileging of one democratic struggle over another, and so on. It is on this basis that Aletta Norval draws direct, and rather uncomfortable, parallels between radical democracy and a Habermasian deliberative democracy.11 Here the radicality of radical democracy would amount to a kind of “contingency incorporated” approach to decision-making that would do little to alter the underlying power structures. Laclau is, of course, aware of the proceduralism and apostasy that are implicit in the Habermasian perspective. He stresses, by contrast, that radical democracy is always on the side of the underdog— that is, “those excluded from the process of representation”12— in opposition to all forms of institutional and procedural closure. But this immediately begs the question as to who

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

37 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

the underdog is and how their status is determined. Are all excluded groups to be given equal weight, regardless of socioeconomic position or the severity of privation? In other words, the stress on establishing an equivalency of the marginalized could all too easily lead to a rather anemic leveling of the sociopolitical terrain itself (i.e., without any real sense of how that terrain is structured as a basic capitalist distortion). The reticence over prioritizing certain types of political struggle and/or identifying concrete objectives— other than a general flourishing of democratic culture— arguably renders post-Marxism aloof and somewhat “beautiful soul” in outlook. The radical democratic process of articulating chains of equivalence can thus appear as an end in itself— a process of enchainment with little real (or Real) political momentum toward basic social transformation.

Speculative Totality The thematic post-Marxist distinction between necessity and contingency is one in which the idealism of the former is seen to meet its materialist nemesis through the latter. In this context, hegemony is something that names a constitutive and eternal interplay in which competing historical discourses strive to occupy the empty place of universal necessity. Yet following Hegelian logic, this type of distinction does not hold. The materialist cut is not so much between contingency and necessity, but rather between different modalities of both. This is crucial because it is precisely in terms of these modalities that the logics of hegemony and the political are constituted in characteristic ways. Luhmann, for example, has shown how systems are not simply closures, but are rather processes of autopoietic development and encounter with their sense of “environment.” Systems remain, as it were, fascinated by their constitutive Otherness and their capacity for transformation or subversion. Autopoiesis is not simply repetition but more a regulatory production of, and engagement with, Otherness in which the “inside” and “outside” of a system are parts of a reciprocal perspectivism. In contrast to Laclau’s view that the (constitutive) outside of a discursive order is a “radical outside without any common measure with the ‘inside,’”13 emphasis should be given to the Hegelian speculative dimension in which the inside and outside reflexively contain each other. The Sadean excesses, for example, are not simply directed against bourgeois morality— that is, as a radical outside without any common measure with what they oppose— but rather, they exist as excesses of that morality; of morality in its Otherness. The writings

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

38 C H AP TE R

2

of Sade show not only their passionate attachment to bourgeois culture, they also help to shape its infrastructure of obscene rituals and imaginings. And in this sense they play an inherent role in the constitution of bourgeois culture as a totality. What Hegelian thought demonstrates is that the appearance of the internal and the external is already an effect of the reflexive attempts to realize a “totality.” It is not so much that we have objectivity as a “positivity of elements”14 that is then subject to various forms of subversion from “outside.” The point is rather to see how a dynamic life-world totality always attempts to articulate the “inside” and “outside” as inherent dimensions; as parts of its economy. In Lacanian terms, there exists here a relationship of extimacy— the outside ex-sists externally precisely through being strangely intimate with the inside. A totality, in this sense, is something that is historically improvised and which simultaneously functions to structure improvisation as such. This insight informs the Frankfurt school’s critique of the jazz form. The field of jazz improvisation and spontaneity is ultimately a set of “subversive” variations on dominant motifs within a phonic economy. The improvisations implicitly accept the terms and conditions of the musical “contract.” Something similar occurs in contemporary dance, trance, and techno music where typically there is an initial “ethnic” take (chanting, use of traditional instruments, religious or folk singing, and so on) which is then subjected to, and absorbed into, the universal “grammar” of drum and bass. And with today’s “subversive” discourse of human rights, we see how the latter is used not only to justify all kinds of military interventions, but more broadly to impose liberal capitalist terms and conditions on the nature of political diversity and its forms of engagement. As Condoleeza Rice once put it, “American values are universal values.” There exists, in other words, a particular dimension that implicitly totalizes the whole. Totalities emerge (retroactively) precisely when their own subversions come to be naturalized and when there is implicit acceptance of the ways in which the gaps and inconsistencies should be addressed and resolved. A totality draws its strength not so much from the positive articulation of its elements, but rather from its capacity to harness and direct its own failures. In this way, subversion itself becomes drawn into a totality’s dynamic and starts to function as a (disavowed) technique in its economy of “necessity.” This is reflected in the paradoxical ways in which capitalism continues to be reproduced through (what appears as) anticapitalist protests and demands. As the eco-capitalist author Paul Hawken puts it: Ironically, organizations like Earth First!, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace have now become the real capitalists. By addressing such issues as greenhouse gases, chemical contamination, and the loss

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

39 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

of fisheries, wildlife corridors, and primary forests, they are doing more to preserve a viable business future than are all the chambers of commerce put together.15

Hawken argues that what is emerging now is a spontaneous, self-organizing, “unnamed movement” (for which he is an advocate) that crucially has no “ideological” utopian vision and which “doesn’t attempt to disprove capitalism, globalization or religious fundamentalism,” but which instead “tries to make sense of what it discovers in forests, favelas, farms.”16 This movement, which is an expression of “humanity’s immune response to ‘toxins’ like political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradations,”17 is essentially directed at the current practices of the capitalist system rather than the system as such: “The stereotype of civil society is groups resisting corporations, and that is true as outlined in previous chapters. What is also true, however, is that nonprofit groups have formed productive relationships with corporations to help them develop in more benign ways.”18 As an agent of the big Other, this “unnamed movement” acts not only as the custodian of humanity, but as a conveyor of ancient and practical wisdom or know-how whose expertise needs to be properly sourced and applied in order to achieve a harmonious reconciliation between our economic and ecological systems. In other words, it is a movement that implicitly acts on behalf of the dominant paradigm and which serves critically to reinforce it as a naturalistic horizon. This is where the Hegelian form of the liberal-capitalist totality is reached proper; that is, through an engagement with its own subversion and negativity. A totality is not defined simply in relation to what it excludes as threat-negativity, but rather through symbolizing, and making sense of, this very division within itself. A totality truly succeeds through the constitutive recognition of its failures and by providing a certain grammar for its transformation. Put differently, a totality is at its strongest when it is able to circumscribe the very terms of its own subversion. It becomes an anonymous horizon that defines our responsibilities and the limits of our action.

Suture It is in this context that we could argue that Hegel’s thought reaches a certain limit. For Hegel, the question of historical necessity or a concrete universal is not so much whether it exists, but rather how it is produced in concrete terms. What tends to be overlooked in Hegel is the way in which

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

40 C H AP TE R

2

the production of such necessity (the completion of a specific concrete universal as a world spirit that is then overturned by a new process of historical renewal) ceases to be a means to an end but can become an end in itself. In other words, what is overlooked is the extent to which modernity remains enclosed within its autopoietic economy of power that seeks constantly to recycle itself. The name that psychoanalysis gives to this type of economy is of course “drive.” In drive, the pulsional energies circulate around a central void in the production of its own jouissance. What is enjoyed in drive is the void-as-object (objet a). The object of a drive— its true aim (as opposed to contingent goals: the realization of particular ambitions, etc.)— is the continuation of itself.19 Drive is indifferent to all finitude and lies at the base of the endemic human capacity for counter-rationalist activity, including self-destruction. As with Marx’s analysis of the chrematistic movement of commodity-money-commodity, there is a similar stress on the perpetuum mobile of drive-void-enjoyment as a self-fueling economy. It is in the context of this type of economy that Lacan approaches the question of totality. For Lacan, the necessitarian effects of a discursive totality arise from the mechanism of suture. In post-Marxism, suture tends to designate an impossible-closure effect where privileged signifiers (nodal points) attempt to “fix the meaning of a signifying chain.”20 Yet in Lacanian terms, suture does not simply fix meaning; rather, it connotes a point of exhaustion for meaning that consequently has to be resolved (quilted) through fantasmatic support. Suture is paradoxical in that it marks both a point of closure for a field of meaning and, at the same time, a point of openness (or, more precisely, contingency) for that field. Suture is both cause and symptom. While it is necessary to stabilize meaning, suture is simultaneously situated beyond it and as such sustains the very possibility of new distortions, significatory interplay, and so on. In its gesture beyond the symbolic, suture introduces a basic gap that shows the impossibility of all closure. The suturing operation is effected by a unary or master signifier (S1). This is a pure signifier (i.e., a signifier without a signified) whose tautologous character serves to provide a “foundation” for a discursive totality. In the discourse of nationhood, for example, there is an attempt to provide meaning through reference to language, culture, humor, moral outlook, and so on, but this widening of the signifying chain is not enriching. The chain exhausts itself and has to fall back on an empty reference to a “homeland,” a “way of life,” “what we stand for,” and so on. Nation is a master signifier (“it is what it is”), something to be felt rather than grasped at the level of meaning. In other discursive contexts, it is signifiers such as God, human nature, the laws of history, the free market, and so on that perform this paradoxical function of arresting meaning

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

41 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

by being beyond it. A parallel can be made here with the medieval figure of the sin-eater who was paid to consume the sins of the departed (in the form of bread and ale) so that they could enter the kingdom of heaven. The master signifier similarly tries to consume the excesses or surplus meanings of a discourse’s signifiers (S2s) so that they can be domesticated (or mortified) as parts of an intelligible totality. In order to function, a signifying totality requires an imaginary point of liquefaction (S1) that is beyond it, and cannot be positively represented. A master signifier is something that represents the void for all signifiers and which shows the impossibility of representation as such. The S1 marks an irresolvable gap between the symbolic and the void which it tries to finesse by alluding to a thing of enjoyment (“My Country!”), and the more it refers to itself, the more it fails to represent it as such. In this way, the jouissance-Thing acts not only as a stand-in for the void, but also as the object-cause for the signifying totality. The distinction between the object and the object-cause of desire can be illustrated in the context of charity-driven approaches to global ethics. The object of desire is essentially the liberal model of society (e.g., Rorty’s “liberal utopia”) where suffering is alleviated and individual opportunity is maximized. The object-cause of desire, however, operates more at the level of an organicist conception of civilization; that is, the elevated, and inaccessible, sense of a Western “us” that would give a global society its characteristic, libidinally invested, form. This fantasmatic economy is sutured at the level of gaze. A basic scheme in many charities is that of “adoption” (adopt a child/orphan/granny, etc.). In return for donations, regular feedback is provided from the beneficiaries— progress reports, photographs, letters, and so on. Effectively, what we have is a reification of how the Other perceives “us” (the donators) as elevated benefactors. The suture is effected through this staging of the gaze of the Other in such a way that our own gaze is returned to us. As one charity puts it, “you get to see and feel the difference your support makes, through the eyes of your sponsored child and their regular letters and photographs.”21 Thus, what is suturing is the very fantasy about the Other’s fantasy. It is here that our special stuff (a)— the x (or extra) factor that is projected into the gaze of the Other— is found and made palpable. Consequently, there exists no simple division between (interior) objectivity and (exterior) Otherness. By drawing the lens back, what we see is a speculative totality that attempts to traverse this division and to articulate both sides as inherent (spectral) dimensions within itself. A crucial contribution of psychoanalysis has been to show how such a totality is (retroactively) given “foundations” through the mechanism of suture; that is, a reflexive fantasy that frames the way the Other sees “us” as the authentic bearer of jouissance

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

42 C H AP TE R

2

and who is consequently motivated to possess, thwart, destroy, and/or inscribe himself within the latter.

Fantasy and Belief Subversion is not an open process. This is especially the case when it comes to the position of the big Other. As a kind of third-party authority that speaks through the subject, the big Other reflects Freud’s figure of the dead father; that is, it is even more present through its absence. Airport security provides a relevant example here. When being questioned about the contents of luggage, it would be very unwise to try and subvert the process (e.g., a jokey comment along the lines of “there’s a bomb inside”). This is because the security guard is here exercising authority on behalf of the big Other. As a third party, the big Other (state/national security) speaks through the guard. In this situation, the subjectivity of the guard is subordinated to his or her objective role as a stand-in for the state. While a guard may well believe that someone was joking about the contents of their luggage, he has to set this to one side and determine what the big Other itself believes: “Why are they joking?” “Is it a double bluff?” “If they are joking, then they are guilty of disrespecting (my role as) the law.” This, of course, has the structure of fantasy: “I know very well that the Other is not being serious . . . but nonetheless . . .” What both the passenger and the security guard thus come up against is the logic of objective belief and the implicit functioning of the big Other. This logic of belief, which has a series of real effects, is also operative in the field of international relations. In North Korea, for example, Kim Jong-Un has at various points threatened preemptive nuclear strikes against Washington and Seoul (largely as an attempt to unify national identity and consolidate his own power base). The sticking point, however, is that while nobody really takes such a threat seriously, ignoring it as so much posturing could potentially have disastrous consequences (and not least for the people of North Korea). If Kim Jong-Un believes that the West does not believe that he is serious, then this could make matters truly critical; not believing could bring about the actualization of the rhetorical threats and/or further domestic repression. This is what makes the current situation with North Korea so dangerous. Yet the decisive issue here concerns the public appearance of belief. The impression of a sincere response is crucial (whether it is actually believed or not), since this creates the opportunity for Kim Jong-Un to reassure everyone that, as long as North Korean interests and sovereignty are not threat-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

43 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

ened, there will not be any nuclear strikes. So we have this strange situation where nobody really believes in the threats directly, but where the parties concerned are nonetheless obliged to take them seriously and to participate in a ritualized process of objective belief that becomes its own necessity. And this also describes much of contemporary political (and indeed corporate) life today. The real world of politics is more and more one of ritual, the repetition of centrally determined sound bites and so on in order to enact sincerity and commitment as part of an objective grammar of performativity, a lived reality. The Hegelian loss of the loss typically functions as the very “ground” of belief. Hegel’s central point is that, in fact, we never had what we appear to have lost. In the beginning there was already a loss, nothing substantial, and fantasy works to try and (retroactively) fill in for this loss— what is lost is the fantasy that was already based on loss. The Arab Spring revolutions are relevant here. In overturning the previous political order, the people of Tunisia and Egypt have effectively lost nothing (nobody really believed in the idea of the desert traditions, tribal authority, and so on). What emerges through the loss of the loss is the fact that the preceding stability itself was held together by an “empty” fantasmatic network of beliefs that sustained the authority of the Arab dictatorships. The demonstrations in the squares of Kasbah and Tahrir led to a clearing of political space and an opening up of the sphere of possibility. And it was quite telling that the Islamic Brotherhood actually played a very small part in these revolutions, precisely because its own version of tradition and organic unity was also deeply threatened by the clearing effect of these “excessive” mobilizations. In Syria, by contrast, we might say that Assad is caught between the two losses. On the one hand, the symbolic efficiency of the Assadian state— its economy of belief— has been completely shattered, but on the other hand, this state has not yet been swept away. And this reflects a more complex picture of the relationship between ideology and closure. In Laclau, the ideological illusion subsists in the idea of extra-discursive closure. More especially, the ideological operation is one of attempting to attribute the impossible role of closure to a particular content; that is, the belief in a specific “social arrangement which can bring about the closure and transparency of the community.”22 Closure cannot be fully achieved; it can only be incarnated through the equivalential deformation of the elements making up a discursive field (e.g., the concatenation of “democracy,” “freedom of the press,” “civilization,” and so on). Yet the ideological does not consist simply of a straightforward or direct belief in a specific closure, but rather a broader and more complex configuration of a fantasmatic economy that supports such a belief. Paradoxically, the issue is not so much closure, but how

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

44 C H AP TE R

2

ideology maintains a certain non-closure; how it regulates a vital distance with the Thing of closure23 and how it inscribes non-closure within itself. Thus it is not so much the “grip of ideology,” as Jason Glynos24 puts it, but rather the ideologization of grip. The ideological subject derives a perverse satisfaction from being in the very grip of something that cannot, or should not, be approached too closely. As with courtly love, it is something that must remain de-reified and beyond tangible reach in order to maintain its libidinal spell. This is how the notion of a New World Order also tends to function; that is, as a thing of fantasy whose payoff relies upon not being engaged directly. In order to avoid the pain of real transformation (power-sharing, the eradication of poverty, the development of equality and liberty in a meaningful sense, etc.), such an order is something that should not be realized (“while this is our ultimate objective, we currently need to deal with reality . . .”). We agonize but do not act. Unfortunately, this also typifies much of today’s leftist discourse where agonizing about the Other can become an end in itself, where guilt itself is directly enjoyed. The ideological operation consists not so much in attributing (impossible) closure to a particular content,25 but rather in making a particular content appear impossible as a way of avoiding any direct encounter with it. In this way, it seeks to sustain fantasmatically what is disavowed at the level of actualization. It is through such regulated non-closure that the ideological reproduces itself. The distinction between ideology, as extra-discursive closure, and the political, as the moment of openness or contingency, is thus not clear-cut. While ideology conjures with its own non-closure, the logic of the political is not innocent of its generative conditions and can function to bring about de facto closure. This is one of the problems with radical democracy. What is overlooked is the way in which the very emphasis on the “empty place,” contingency, and reactivating the political can become its most insidious ideological aspect. Along the lines of a smoker who boasts that he could give up any time he wants, democratic ideology is one that reproduces the fantasy that it can submit everything, including global economic activity, to conscious political control and that we could change if we really wanted to. Through reference to the multiplication of social struggles and movements, resistance appears as something that is already contained within democracy and its declared potential for infinite adaptability. In this way, the failures of democracy become indicators of its success, reflections of impossibility or undecidability that reinforce the mythic appeal of democracy as a kind of systematicity without a system. If there is no credible alternative (“all the others are worse,” as Churchill put it), and if an alternative is not needed, then democracy and humanity comprise a single destiny in

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

45 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

naturalistic terms. In a more pervasive way than any totalitarianism, closure can be achieved through the very culture of democratic openness.

Subversion, Universality, and Event In Laclau and Mouffe, subversion is conceived as something that discloses the “presence of the contingent in the necessary.”26 Yet the relationship between contingency and necessity is more ambiguous than it might appear at first sight. For Hegel, the point is to understand not only how necessity emerges within the contingent, but also how the lived experience of contingency is shaped by necessity. Perhaps the ultimate example here is capital. Capital is radically subversive in the sense that it sweeps away all previously existing “fixed, fast-frozen” social relations (i.e., it shows their contingency), but only insofar as it imposes further the necessary character of the social relation of capital itself. And in this sense we can see how subversion is something that can develop through a necessitarian logic (e.g., the neoliberal subversions of Keynesian welfare capitalism in order to nurture a more global form of financial capitalism). Emphasis should also be given to the mode of subversion. Far from developing in a vacuum, subversion is something that takes place in a historically structured way. With multiculturalism we get all kinds of subversions that, although they do challenge existing authorities and denaturalize a whole range of social and sexual relations, do not manage to threaten the underlying principles of the socioeconomic order itself. Such subversions often become a way of preserving the very dynamism of that order. The manipulation of subversion in order to sustain the power regime is nicely rendered in Bong Joon-Ho’s underrated film Snowpiercer (2013), in which the remnants of humanity find themselves stuck on a train eternally circling the globe in a post-apocalyptic ice age. The train is divided between the elite class at the front and an underclass of tail passengers (providing child labor and other services) at the back. After a series of abuses, Curtis organizes a resistance in order to assail the engine room and take over the train. Curtis eventually reaches the engine room and confronts Minister Wilford, the creator of the engine. Curtis is told that not only was the revolt orchestrated by Wilford, but that such revolts have been regularly enabled as a way of releasing tension and also as a way of finding a new leader for the train. It is this type of regulated resistance (resistance-indominance) that needs to be resisted. Subversion is effectively split between its historical modes of practice and the way in which those modes themselves can be undermined

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

46 C H AP TE R

2

and rendered undecidable. An understanding of this split-ness is crucial to a revitalization of the leftist imagination. In order to develop more radical forms of intervention, the Left may well have to withdraw (or “subtract” itself, to use Badiou’s term) from what are perceived as progressive forms of subversion and in this way begin a process of subverting subversion, challenging the accepted grammar of subversive engagement. This process of clearing the ground, or emptying (kenosis), is one that creates a space for the potential of an event. Laclau is opposed to the Badiouian conception of the event on the following grounds: “Events” in Badiou’s sense are moments in which the state of a situation is radically put into question; but it is wrong to think that we have purely situational periods interrupted by purely evental interventions . . . the meaning of the unrepresentable in which the event consists involves reference to an unrepresented within a situation, and can only proceed through the displacement of elements already present in that situation. This is what I have called the mutual contamination between situation and event. Without it any winning over by the event of elements of the situation would be impossible, except through a totally irrational act of conversion.27

Yet Badiou has repeatedly pointed out that an event can only be an event insofar as it relates to a situation— Badiou elaborates four main typologies that characterize the possibilities of an event in regard to its “site.”28 In fact, I would go further and argue that both Laclau and Badiou underestimate the extent to which a certain logic of the event can permeate the very ordering and development of a situation (especially that of global capitalism)— this is something that can be considered as eventalism. But the event proper is neither simply rational nor irrational, and here it is Laclau who (implicitly) is drawing too strong a distinction. An event certainly does not conform to the existing mode of rationality of a given situation (otherwise it would not be an event), but neither is it something that is fully external to it— a random physical disaster would not necessarily be an event in the Badiouian sense. What the event gravitates toward and holds in suspension is the very configuration of that which is considered impossible within a given situation; in short, it disputes the undisputable. An event draws into relief the very excess on which an existing order already relies. Put in other terms, an event bears witness to the very madness within reason itself (the unreason of reason) and which thereby enables a reconfiguration of the form and content of reason as such. In this sense, the event might be considered as post-rational: a traumatic disruption of the existing symbolic order, and its mode of

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

47 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

rationality, that effectively shows the latter to be its own kind of contingently configured excess; an excess that can never be fully eradicated. From a Lacanian perspective the event (or, more particularly, the act) is something Real in that it courses through the socio-symbolic order (as contingent potential) but is simultaneously beyond it. The event-as-Real reconfigures the parameters of the possible in a given situation and the being or content of its situation-ness. An event is not simply a matter of “winning over,” as Laclau puts it. The event is more radical than this: it is effectively a (re-)distortion of the fabric of reality where the rules of the “game” are changed in such a way that the idea of what constitutes “winning” and “losing” is also transformed— it is self-validating in this respect. The logic of the event thus resonates with Einstein’s view that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Put differently, the event is something that occurs at the level of truth rather than knowledge; that is, it represents precisely a break with (and recognition of) the failures of existing knowledge as part of a basic reconfiguration of the very terrain of knowledge itself. For Lacan, knowledge is something that tends to feed into the discourse of the master. The master here is not so much a particular figure but more a command, or categorical imperative, along the lines of “Continue. March on. Keep on knowing more and more.”29 Knowledge here acts as a kind of service des biens, serving to preserve and develop the existing power order in more efficient ways. Thus, for example, universities across the globe are concerned with “knowledge transfer” with a view to addressing problems that arise for the economy, for security, for the social order, and so on. And this renders more ambiguous the Foucauldian view that knowledge is power. That is to say, it is not so much that knowing something gives one mastery over it (though, in some instances, this may be true), but rather that knowledge itself, or what Lacan referred to as the university discourse, is a power structure in its own right. Paradoxically, what knowledge aims at today is precisely not power. In service to the existing socioeconomic system, knowledge seeks to present itself in purely objective terms, without any sense of a particular will or master behind it; one corporate manager can replace another with relatively little effect on the functioning of the system as a whole. And in this way the sense of infinite systemic possibility is preserved. On this basis, I would also question Laclau’s view of the evental subject as having already made a “choice and evaluation” and who simply proceeds with “the symbolic resources of the situation itself.”30 While at some level the evental subject can be seen to have committed herself to become part of an event, there are two central points that need to be added. The first is that such a choice is something that will be largely

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

48 C H AP TE R

2

determined retroactively (“it was in that moment that I knew there was no turning back . . .”)— it is something that is effectively rationalized after the event. The second is that the unconscious choice involves a fundamentally negative dimension of withdrawal, an unbinding, from the sociosymbolic order and not any straightforward mobilization of the latter’s resources. In this sense we might also say that the unconscious, which is also a realm that registers basic resistance, is already promised to the event. The event is something that effectively happens to the subject (as, for example, in the event of love) in which there is a fundamental disruption of existing symbolic resources and an uprooting of the subject from his or her place in the symbolic order. Far from being a subject of straightforward reason, the evental subject is rather a subject of madness (of excess, obsession, evil— call it what you will). This subject is not an “agent” in the traditional sense of the term, but precisely the subject of a fall; the one who is prepared to sacrifice everything, despite all reason, in the name of something Other (e.g., the signifier “freedom”) that is without direct representation or evaluation. This is the subject not of place or finitude, but the subject of void and the infinite. In Hegelian terms, the event is precisely that which bears witness to the dimension of the subject within substance. The event is not simply chosen or evaluated in advance; it is rather something that is produced through a commitment to a hitherto unspoken “language” defining the new: in short, Badiou’s fidelity. As Oscar Wilde might have said, the event can only succeed through excess. Far from being a mere transitional process, the event is something that involves a traumatic break. This is reflected in the figure of Peter, who famously denied knowing Jesus three times before the cock crowed. Peter is addressed by the big Other (the Roman state) as being guilty of association, but he assumes a stance of ignorance in order to try and break the interpellative deadlock and to escape any consequences. The sound of the cock crowing is the “voice” of the Real, which at one level can be seen as an unbearable manifestation of his guilt. This is indicative of how the subject is never fully at the level of the event (or the Lacanian act). In an event a subject encounters a certain excess that he or she cannot account for or symbolize. The excess effects a fundamental break in, and reconfiguration of, the subject; a traumatic shedding (or ceding) of subjectivity so that a new form of subjectivity can be born. It is not so much a question of will (as if attempting to break through a barrier); it is more a question of coming to terms with the Real of an unaccountable (excessive) change. The event is something that exacts a retroactive reconstitution. Peter is resurrected into the event, and the event is resurrected in Peter, through “reconciliation” with excess: not

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

49 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

an overcoming of excess (as in a return to harmony and stability), but rather an acceptance of the excess itself. This can be seen as manifesting another voice of the Real, where the sound of the cock crowing is not simply an accusation of guilt, but rather an almost unbearable call to act, an unmitigable and/or infinite sense of commitment that signals the mobilizing effects of the Real in the symbolic. What is expressed here is the type of double affirmation that Alenka Zupančič highlights in regard to Nietzsche’s philosophy.31 The affirmation is not simply one of taking on the burden of what exists (e.g., adjusting to life without Jesus, carrying on, acknowledging guilt, and so on); this would be merely affirmation through the existing form of being. What Nietzsche is getting at is the type of affirmation where negativity itself is affirmed as a living force; that is, affirmation through becoming. What crucially happens in the second affirmation is an opening toward negativity/the Real as an inherent dimension within all objectivity. The possibility of this type of affirmation through negativity (a kenosis of becoming) itself has to be affirmed. In this redoubled affirmation, what is manifested is the “shortest shadow” (between something and its void) where being itself is revealed as its own kind of shadow— an indeterminate shimmering interlaced with nothingness— in the full glare of noon.32 In this interstitial moment of the Real, the evental subject undergoes a certain de-subjectivation or traumatic disruption that cannot be evaluated in the available (symbolic) terms. The resurrection is not one of positive being (the story of Christ’s return, etc.); the true resurrection is the resurgence of negativity as a new and living force of becoming. What is affirmed in the movement from Peter-in-denial to Peter-as-founder of the church is precisely this dimension of cut and traumatic impossibility. And in this very movement, Peter comes to embody the Hegelian turn in the event as something that can only be saved through its embodiment, through institutionalization and the concrete re-formation of social relations. The (political) truth of the event is not derived simply from fidelity to something external; rather, it is forged in the post-evental work of enactment and resurrection. From this perspective, Laclau’s view of hegemony is also problematic in its implicit tendency to de-eventalize the event. For Laclau, the universal is always an empty place33— and thus a neutral space (a “beyond” of the finite)— that, in principle, all groups can attempt to occupy. This not only depoliticizes the universal, but it also strangely echoes Fukuyama and even Rorty (for whom Western democracy is “the last conceptual revolution”). This is further reflected in the perspective of radical democracy that is advanced as the ideal form and/or maturation of this conception of universality. In Laclau the event (the “big bang” of the modern logic of democracy) has, in a way, already happened such that all subsequent

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

50 C H AP TE R

2

history is effectively a kind of ersatz or series of partial events: limited interventions, ongoing subversions, incomplete hegemonizations, and so on without end; in effect, an expansive milieu of political irony in which the event as such cannot emerge. It is on these grounds that Laclau can be seen to share with Badiou a kind of flat ontology. In the same way that for Laclau we are bound by finiteness (never able to adequately fill out the empty place of universality, etc.), Badiou also affirms that the event is a “fragment of being.” Thus, for Badiou, the event only appears as an event because as finite beings we cannot grasp the immensity of being (the multiplicity of multiplicities). While in Laclau there is only subversion (the reaffirmation of contingency in all being), in Badiou everything is played out in similar fashion as shards of being. In other words, there exists in both perspectives a residual Kantianism at work. The problem with Laclau’s formulation of the universal is its onesidedness. In placing the universal beyond the particular, Laclau implicitly particularizes the universal (i.e., as something definably separate) and thereby misses the way in which the very emphasis on the idea of an empty place can feed into the contemporary myth of openness, infinite democratic possibility, and so on. Taking a metaphor from Hegel, what is overlooked is the extent to which the “sacred grove” of the universal (as empty place) is already part of the timber of a particularized (power) distortion. At the same time, this type of approach raises the equal and opposite problem of the universalized particular where the particular is conceived as self-perpetuating, accommodating all change as its own horizon of (distorted) universality. The tension here is reflected in an exchange between Jacques Rancière and Jacques-Alain Miller. Commenting on the debate surrounding the Charlie Hebdo killings, Rancière complained that universalism is being manipulated and “transformed into the distinctive sign of a group.”34 Miller, however, pointed out that “universalism is never anything but the ‘distinctive sign of a group.’”35 More specifically, it is the distinctive sign of the group that is passed off, depoliticized, as universalism. This was manifested in the recent “Black Lives Matter” protests in America and the response by Trump (and his followers) that “all lives matter.” What is obfuscated in the apparently neutral universalism of the latter is precisely the functioning of the distinctive sign of the group, of acceptable white America, in its constitutive violence in seeking to submerge or disavow the particularity of its systemic racist exclusions within the terms of a finessed universalism. More widely, this type of universalist logic is integral to capitalist drive where every particular (traditional identities and relations) is uprooted and submitted to the universal imperatives of the global economy precisely as a way of reproducing the particularity of the capitalist whole.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

51 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

Against such one-sidedness, Hegel affirms that the relationship between the universal and the particular is not external but speculative. Far from existing beyond or outside the particular, the universal is fully inscribed in particularity as intrinsic excess. The universal is not an empty place that particularities try to fill out; it is rather the broken place within the particular itself: the point of failure and discontinuity that prevents the particular from becoming fully itself. The gesture of the universal is one of rupture and challenge to existing practices and identities (e.g., the feminist challenge to particularized religious or cultural views of womanhood). The universal thus shows the very determinateness of particularity as distortion. As a result of universalist disruption, a reconfiguration of social reality takes place that in turn becomes its own delimited particularization— what Hegel refers to as a concrete universal— and so the entire process begins anew as part of the infinite. In this sense, the universal and the particular are both the same and completely distinct; they constitute what Hegel refers to as a speculative unity in opposition. This means that the functioning and effects of the universal are altogether more ambiguous than either Rancière or Miller acknowledge. Where the universal is simply recycled as a way of reproducing the particular power distortion (as with capitalism), then it clearly reflects the distinctive sign of that distortion— an ongoing process of supplementation. But in its very dimension of rupture, the universal is also something that can open toward the possibility of the event beyond a given particularity. In this more radical speculative sense, the universal marks the very condition of void or excess within the particular that allows for the possibility of an event to emerge, not as a fragment of the order of being, but as a political restructuring of that order and its forms of mediation.

Traversing the Fantasy: A Democracy Named Desire From the viewpoint of radical democracy, the main priority is to deepen and sharpen the principles of the liberal-democratic imagination as a way of taking on not only capitalist repression, but also antidemocratic power structures in general. There are two main interrelated problems here. First, radical democracy tends to overlook the way in which the multiplicity of sociocultural struggles can become implicated in, and fractalized as part of, the totality of cosmopolitan capitalism; that is, the way in which the capitalist totality is itself reproduced dialectically through (regulated) pluralism. Second, in focusing on marginalized groups in

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

52 C H AP TE R

2

general, radical democracy loses sight of those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embodies the symptomal truths of our age: that is, those whose situation appears naturalized as the result of pure chance, beyond any direct or immediate solution. These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped and the homeless, the slum-dwellers, the detainees, and so on. They are the radically excluded who are excessive yet constitutively necessary to the functioning of the whole: the nameless “unfortunate” who are passed over and/or kept at a nonthreatening distance through the various aid and charity initiatives. In Hegelian terms, what radical democracy overlooks is the extent to which the capitalist totality is not only content (as if all its existing elements could be progressively democratized), but also form— form that already takes democratization into account as part of its reproduction. Distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing of the fantasy have also emerged in this context. In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the “cataclysmic desire of fantasy.”36 The problem, therefore, is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from object-a and to thereby affect a condition where we can “really enjoy our partial enjoyment.”37 Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive, but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favor of the finite, provisional, and pragmatic. Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase, but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively “a constant search for something else . . . (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it.”38 Radical democratic desire, in this sense, is sustained by not having the “object” of democracy: it is always finally elsewhere, just out of reach. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment in never attaining the real thing. Yet traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a nonfantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe that is defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such. Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess, but rather to inflect or assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive. Traversal, in this sense, puts one

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

53 P O L I T I C S

A ND

T O TALI T Y

in touch with the object of drive— the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves. To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force, but to recognize that the force itself is the result of a certain (tilted) excess— a Real intervention/ structuring— and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or logic of the political) can be shown. The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation, but is precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense; that is, the acceptance of the fact that imbalance or excess is our most basic condition toward which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition. Through this reading of the traversal, the possibility is opened for developing a new type of politics based on drive rather than desire. Rather than circulating around a metonymy of not-having (which in desire signals the unobtainable presence of an indefinite ideal), a politics of drive is based on the direct realization of desire as such. Far from embracing today’s alibis where social problems are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, and/or a distant state, a politics of drive is one that places “us” in the scene and assumes responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from that of democratic desire in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place of the universal. And here the universal is not conceived as independent of the particular, but as something that inheres within it. The universal has to be found and made within the terms of the particular as such, through “excessive” commitment without excuses or dependence on some version of the big Other (God, laws of history, an abstract ideal, etc.). To put it in Lacanian terms, a politics of drive is one that recognizes that the only way out is the way in.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

3

Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century

Proteus (Greek sea god) “Proteus knew all things— past, present, and future— but disliked divulging what he knew. Those who wished to consult him had first to surprise and bind him during his noonday slumber. Even when caught he would try to escape by assuming all sorts of shapes.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Marx, Ponzi, and the Zombie Economy Marx characterizes the capitalist totality in terms of a “trinity formula”: capital (profit), land (ground-rent), and labor (wages). This formula “holds all the mysteries of the social production process.”1 The externality of labor and land (or space) is overcome through the dialectical process of capital. Land, as something raw and physical, is transformed into the spaces of capitalist enterprise— the factory, mechanized agriculture, private property, and later the leisure complexes and shopping malls, as well as the virtual spaces of digital capitalism. Labor is no longer tied to the land but is set “free”— transformed from serf into new mobile identities (skilled, unskilled, entrepreneur, service provider, consumer, prosumer, and so on)— and is consequently forced to sell their labor power for a wage within the cycle of capital; the freedom of labor becomes the very mode of unfreedom (wage slavery). It is only at this point that capital achieves the full status of a (reflexive) system. The constitutively violent distortions of capital, the brutal imposition of its social power— dispossession, mass expulsions, and so on— are transformed into the “neutral” operating system for socioeconomic practices as such. Thus exploitation is sublated within the “price of production,” appropriated land becomes “property,” speculative profit becomes “interest,” and value appears as something generated purely as the result of the continuous cycles of capital. It is in this context that we should look again at the case of 54

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

55 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

Charles Ponzi, the infamous architect of the eponymous Ponzi schemes. Ponzi, who always maintained that he had not done anything wrong, was someone who took the autonomous cycles of capital quite literally. In a way, he believed too much and too directly in the magic of money. In a Ponzi scheme, the members invest as equal partners, where everyone is promised the same high rate of return on their money, but the scheme eventually self-divides into winners (a small core of initial investors) and losers. Ponzi’s belief was that this could be offset by continuing to play the game in order to permanently defer any final “outcome”— the “cure” for a Ponzi scheme is more of itself. Ponzi perfectly understood capital’s reflexivity. As long as you keep the bank “moving”— that is, maintaining a kind of perspectival (or speculative) distance— thereby deferring the final payout— it can continue to work (this reflects the basic principle of borrowing from the future). The reason why Ponzi proved so difficult to prosecute was precisely because of the autopoietic illusion of capital and the naturalization of its myth. In the prosecution of Ponzi, we might say that capital itself was on trial (which is why the prosecuting judge was so concerned to suppress any knowledge of the Ponzi scheme getting out into the world). When his schemes came crashing down, the real problem for Ponzi was that, unlike the “legitimate” banking sector, he did not have access to the state and its taxpayers to bail him out. Ponzi found himself in the position of the “zombie company” that can only survive on bailouts, minimally repaying interest on its debts. But this also describes the position of the banking sector in the years leading up to 2008. Following the global financial crisis of 2008, trillions of dollars of public money was used to recapitalize the banks. So how will this money be repaid? The recapitalized money is made available for loans and mortgages to taxpayers who pay interest to the banks for the privilege of borrowing their own money. The banking debt is then repaid from this interest while preserving profit. In speculative terms, credit and debt are directly manipulated as (equivalential) moments within the financial system. Thus what we have is an institutionalization of the Ponzi scheme in which the problem of externality (taxpayers footing the bill) is finessed as part of a wider zombie capitalism in which operators within the system can fail but the system providers (the banks) cannot; they continue as the global undead. What Ponzi represented was a kind of analogue form of financial speculation. In modern capitalism, however, speculation is of a far more immediate digital form. This is especially exemplified in the phenomenon of high-frequency or flash trading. Using superfast computers that run complex algorithms, flash traders are able to intercept the transactions of investors who are seeking to purchase stock. The interception

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

56 C H AP TE R

3

serves to increase the value of the stock (based on demand) so that the investor unwittingly ends up paying a marginally higher price for it which, as a fully automated system played out over thousands of transactions daily, is a source of huge profit for the flash traders. The flash interception is a fully automated and nearly instantaneous process (an average of around 0.3 seconds before the final purchase— time is literally money) and thus the illusion of immediacy remains intact, thereby blurring the distinction between “simulation” and “reality.” As a systematic way of calculating the terms and outcomes of financial calculation, algorithms silently function as the basic fulcra of the capitalist matrix of power. What appears as open, risky, and chaotic is, in fact, already part of an algorithmically determined and highly ordered environment. It’s not so much that fraud is the basic business model of financial institutions, as Bernie Sanders puts it, but rather that fraud is institutionalized beyond the intentions of any particular actors, and is fully inscribed in the system as part of its “neutral” functioning. Whereas the Ponzi scheme relies upon the manipulated remoteness of, or the infinite diminishing of, capital (the inexistence of final substance and value), high-frequency trading is sustained by a kind of invisible nearness (the immediate injection of capital inflating the demand price in a fraction of a second). Both rely on an asymmetry of information, an asymmetry that is paradigmatic of the information age. In the case of Ponzi, information is withheld and/or distorted in regard to the investor. In the case of flash trading, information is not withheld, but is rather directly inputted into the system in order to produce outcomes that favor the capitalist elite. Flash trading is just one more symptom of the way in which the corporate financial world is continuing to map the economy according to its own simulations, the rules of which it can bend, distort, and even break (to put it in the terms of Morpheus in The Matrix).2 In other words, it reflects the central Hegelian insight that form becomes its own content (and vice versa). High-frequency and flash trading show how what appears as an open, neutral form of economy is itself the result of power content, the inherent tilt of capitalism that constitutively frames the economy. This is the Hegelian logic of oppositional determination where the universal is shown in its (opposite of) particularity. There is also a kind of “beautiful soul” logic at play here. In both types of practices, it is the investors’ belief in the system (as open and neutral) that is being directly manipulated. By perceiving themselves as players and operators of the system, what investors overlook is precisely their own role as functioning operatives within the system as such (i.e., as agents whose behavior is already factored in). In this latest development, human beings are becoming increasingly redundant as decision-takers or opera-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

57 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

tors vis-à-vis the wider virtual system that— with the help of programmers and maintenance staff— effectively functions for itself. This systemic algorithmization and reiteration of the power of capital also lies behind the increasing pressure being exerted by banks and corporations to replace hard money with virtual money that can again be mapped and manipulated in decidable terms. With global financial networks such as Visa, PayPal, M-Pesa/Vodafone (in Africa), and a widening culture of contactless payments, money as a living abstraction is driving consumption on hitherto unknown scales. At one level, this “frictionfree” economy enables the companies to extract more profit through digital transaction fees and technology or hardware rent; but at a deeper level, it also enables the accumulation of vast amounts of payment data (quantity, frequency, products, brands, and so on) that can be analyzed and used by the corporate command economy to structure markets, influence demand, and predict outcomes. This kind of reflexive determination is especially a feature of the new and diversifying forms of cryptocurrency (following Bitcoin) where prices can be directly manipulated through “spoofing,” “wash trading,” the use of bots, and so on by core investors who effectively control the virtual infrastructures involved and can dictate the terms of currency exchange. Thus what appears as open and spontaneous— users are themselves creating the “bank,” building the blockchains, and so on— is something that is already framed within the structure of financial hegemony. At the same time, there exists a kind of Ponzification of cryptocurrencies in which capital appears as a pure abstraction capable of generating its own returns and where the behavior of users and investors themselves becomes the source of profit. In this way, the centers of capital power continue to reproduce themselves through a widening of the periphery of vulnerable investors, which is why more and more cryptocurrencies are being created and offered in the open market. What is being sold is the dream of a fully democratized virtual capitalism, while the hardware of economic power remains firmly in place. In the world of work, new forms of algorithm-based technology are becoming the virtual managers of the labor market. With the rise of the gig economy and the so-called Uberization of the workforce, corporations (especially in the services sector) are using apps, productivity sensors, tracking devices, and so on to mobilize workers, determine price, assess performance, and even make decisions about the termination of employment. In this new “posthuman” world of work, individuals are interpellated as universal performers stripped of all particularity as beings of flesh and blood. The algorithm is becoming the basic mediator of the power of virtual capitalism, functioning as an undead automaton and ceaselessly writing the truth of capital in its manifestation of drive. At

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

58 C H AP TE R

3

the same time, the algorithm is something that conjures up the specter of the impersonal master, the big Other controlling and manipulating the system behind the scenes. In its very abstraction as algorithm, capital effectively takes on the status of the Lacanian dark God, sustained by unconscious belief, monitoring and regulating modern social reality as a power totality.

The Performativity of Nothing For Marx, capital is ultimately a theater of shadows where “the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.”3 Money becomes the ultimate commodity, or a general (equivalential) form for all commodities, and begins to expand exponentially as an autopoietic systematicity. This is where money reaches the true level of capital. The logic of capital is one in which the constant renewing of the circuit continues to add value to itself in this self-engendering way as a result of “its own movement.” Through the different cycles of capital— the various forms of money and commodification (including that of labor power)— a state is reached where “capital appears as a relationship to itself.”4 In this context, capital approaches the Hegelian notion where what is revealed is nothing substantial, but rather the modality itself in its form and functioning. Capital functions as a centrifuge where the ultimate “product” is the cycle of capital itself. Building on Hegel, Marx demonstrates how the production process itself comes to function as a kind of objectified dialectical process that is continually generating surplus value in such a way that the “excess is reflected back into itself from the rate of profit.”5 This applies also to the relationship between production and consumption, where what is produced ultimately is (the drive for) consumption itself, and what is consumed is ultimately the production of consumer desire. The distinction between production and consumption is becoming more and more blurred under capitalism. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, George Ritzer points to the increasingly performative nature of capitalism where consumers themselves are ascribed a role in the production of a stylized ethos. Ritzer’s central example is that of Starbucks and its theatrical staging of a kind of exclusive lounge or club vibe where consumers are interpellated as performers in the production of a “great experience accompanied by coffee.”6 This performative dimension is symptomatic of the way in which

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC 12:34:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

59 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

capitalism develops, not simply as an economic system for the exchange of goods and services, but as a lived mode of sociocultural existence. And here I think we should go further than Ritzer in affirming performativity as the very model of contemporary (Western) subjectivity in which it is precisely through the mechanism of interpellation that subjects recognize themselves as performers in the capitalist dramaturgy. A further extension of performativity can be seen, for example, in what can be called the YouTubization of capitalism where individuals are sponsored to showcase a range of products in settings that create an overall sense of mood, lifestyle, ethical orientation, and so on. The new subjects of capitalism are not only consumers but are also performers, proselytizers, and lifestylers in an era of increasingly immersive capitalism. Add to this webcamization, the prospect of the 3D printer, and so on, and these forms of prosumption are set to intensify. And here we might problematize Ritzer’s view of globalization with regard to the increasing expansion of “nothing” over “something.” For Ritzer, “something” is original and substantial and “nothing” is characterized by a lack of uniqueness: a Gucci bag is a non-thing, while a culatello ham is a thing; a bartender is a person, while a Disneyland worker in a costume is a nonperson; a gourmet restaurant is a place, whereas a fast-food outlet is a non-place.7 Yet these types of distinction need to be deconstructed. In the first place, there is surely a class dimension. It is more likely a member of the Gucci-wearing class, for example, who would be able to afford culatello ham in high-end restaurants. The bartender, by contrast, is more likely to have had broad experience of working in other service industries, including Disney and fast-food restaurants. And one might add that a bartender is just as much playing a role (precisely as “a person” with all of the implicit social codes and expectations that go with that role) as a worker in a Mickey Mouse costume or a barista outfit. As Marx knew well, there is no independent measure of things as such— the meaning and value of a diamond, for example, is something that depends on an entire network of socioeconomic relations (the diamond is effectively nothing in its own terms, a mere rock). So at one level, Ritzer is simply restating Marx: capitalism is a process that continues to sweep away all forms of traditional relations and substantial identities on a global scale. Yet Marx’s central point is that in doing this, capitalism is effectively showing that there was never anything authentic or substantial to begin with.8 The theater of capital comprises a performativity of nothing. And this for Marx is potentially one of the most radical universalizing dimensions (i.e., the fact of nothing) contained within capitalism. True authenticity is precisely on the side of nothing. As virtual capitalism continues to dissolve the solidity of the traditional world, it simultaneously tries to produce in countermeasure the

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

60 C H AP TE R

3

chimera of something at the level of the signifier (Chanel, Prada, Gucci, and so on).9 Capitalism strips away the grounded world and restages its various forms of “something” (retrospectively) for the markets of the global simulacrum: the Irish pubs, the rain forest experience, the real Africa, and so on. Something and nothing exist in a dialectical dynamic. The two need to be read together. As well as these deepening processes of hyper-spatialization and syntheticism, virtual capitalism is correspondingly moving toward a greater immediacy in terms of the (uploadable/downloadable) prosumption of experiences and ideas. Already our browsing interests and choices are being logged and curated so that we don’t even have to bother with the abyss of choice as such; we are addressed and interpellated as certain types of (demographic) choosers within bespoke forms of a virtual world. The new capitalism is further characterized by the increasing attempts to remove what the psychologist Adam Alter calls “stopping cues” (e.g., reading a newspaper to the end before moving on to something else, or watching a television program for an hour and then waiting a week for the next episode). In this form of hostage capitalism, the subject is caught in endless streams of information mediated through screens of every type (computers, tablets, smartphones, and so on) and is bombarded with suggestions for the next product and/or experience, thereby increasing consumption and intensifying participation in the cycles of capital. In this way, capitalism seeks to permanently defer satisfaction and push the subject toward a febrile of insatiable (empty) desire. Yet all such processes and developments are in effect nothing more than the capitalization of the world: the world increasingly shaped and encoded in regard to the notional development of capital as an absolute idea. This is the reflexive development of capitalism as an immersive and dynamic totality that is self-returning and self-modifying in thematic structural terms where, as Althusser put it in very Hegelian terms, all becomes “a variation of the— ‘invariant’— structure, in dominance, of the totality.”10

Regulation and the Bulimic Drive As both form and content, capital manifests itself as particular (fungible) commodities but also as the very movement, the (distortive) articulatory principle, that brings together land and labor through capital cycles that generate more and more surplus value. At the same time, capital is grounded through inward opposition and negation. Capital achieves its highest abstraction as a horizonal universality only through the simulta-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

61 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

neous affirmation of its absolute (opposing and contradictory) particularity. And it is precisely this aspect of inward opposition and contradiction that is overlooked in the idea of globalization as a progressive overcoming of all distortion and exclusion. The liberal think tank called the Globalization Institute sees the matter this way: “Globalization is the increasing integration of the global economy to bring together rich and poor countries . . . Only by integrating the poorest into the world economy can we put an end to the poverty that still blights much of the world today.”11 What this type of liberal myth disavows is the fact that capitalism of necessity is a power system of production based on structural exclusion. While capital works ceaselessly to transform and commodify all existing social relations, what it refuses to bargain with (in fact, cannot bargain with) is precisely its exploitative conditions of possibility. What, for example, would happen if the cost of exploitation— the extraction of surplus value from workers, the immiseration of vast sectors of the world’s population— was actually factored into the economic calculus of capitalism? Confronted with its own code of organization, it would simply implode. A similar critique can be made of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014). Piketty views capitalism as essentially a system of distribution that can (and should) be reorganized in order to produce a state of social justice. In other words, there is nothing wrong with the form of capitalism— indeed, Piketty regards capitalism as a practical system of distribution that encourages innovation, competitiveness, and so on— the problem lies rather with its current (“egregious”) content. For Piketty, we need to regain democratic control of the distribution of value and wealth in modern society through the global deployment of a progressive tax (up to 80 percent) on capital.12 There are two central problems here. First, as David Harvey points out, Piketty’s entire perspective is based on the neoclassical assumption that capital is a thing— something that can be itemized, valuated, and redistributed— rather than, as Marx demonstrates, a system of social power.13 Second, and relatedly, the problem lies not merely with the content but with the inherent form of capitalism. Capitalism is an entire mode of production that, in Althusserian terms, is complexly structured “in dominance.” Piketty’s normative vision of the democratic regulation of the power mode of capital consequently rests on assuming the possibility of something that is already rendered alien by that power mode— it is analogous to a system of apartheid trying to reproduce itself through antiracist legislation. Because it would involve such a radical transformation of the power base, Piketty’s perspective is one that already presupposes a decisive movement beyond actually existing capitalism— it does not resonate with capitalist reality as such.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

62 C H AP TE R

3

This problem is similarly reflected in Colin Hay and Anthony Payne’s Civic Capitalism (2015). In this book— which is essentially a reworking of Piketty’s perspective and the regulated capitalism model— the authors define civic capitalism as the “governance of the market, by the state, in the name of the people, to deliver collective public goods, equity and social justice.”14 But again, if this kind of governance were to be instituted, then it would already place us well beyond capitalist reality; it would already signal the triumph of a radical global Left. And this very possibility is something that is somewhat compromised by their thematic motto: “ask not what you can do for capitalism, but what capitalism can do for you.” In other words, the types of solutions that they are seeking are rooted firmly within the horizon of capitalism. What is implicit here is a basic depoliticization of the economy: capitalism as an unchallenged background that naturalistically circumscribes the political. The more radical question that should be posed is not what capitalism can do for us, but rather whether we can move beyond capitalism itself. What continues to suppress this type of question in the political imagination is precisely the (utopian) idea that capitalism can be transformed into a civic and/or democratic form of existence. This is what lies behind Badiou’s view that “today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It’s called Democracy.”15 In other words, the real problem today lies with the contemporary political mythology of democracy as something capable of regulating the global power of capital; indeed, it is the very investment in this mythology that continues to enable its reproduction. This mythology further obscures what can be called the bulimic dimension of capitalism. As evidenced among certain quarters of Roman elite society and their festivals and all-day banquets, the history of binging and purging (in order to make room for more binging) is a long one. This bulimic oral drive is similarly reflected in the capitalist drive where the periodic purging of capitalism is integral to the further development and intensification of capitalism as such. In other words, the regulation and purging of capitalism, instead of going to the very end, becomes the very mode of capitalist excess. This type of purging is outsourced to the margins of capitalism and becomes their defining feature. In this way, the global peripheries (both internal and external) effectively do the vomiting for “us” through the conditions of permanent austerity, social crisis, debt, and so on. It is also interesting in this connection to look at the board game Anti-Monopoly, developed by Ralph Anspach as a subversion of the famous Parker Brothers game of Monopoly. In Anti-Monopoly players earn credit by being anticapitalistic, taking up the cause of workers’ rights against corporations, and so on. Yet the objective of the game is not to overcome

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

63 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

capitalism as such, but to transform it into a smaller-scale free-market arrangement: in short, to give capitalism a more humanistic character. It is precisely this way of framing the basic antagonism— what is “reasonable” (democratized or regulated) versus what is “excessive”— that is the problem. Ironically, Monopoly itself was directly based on the Landlord’s Game devised by Elizabeth Magie, who similarly conceived the game as a critique of capitalist excess (opposition to slum landlords and so on). The Parker Brothers, who bought up the patent for Landlord’s Game and turned it into Monopoly, subsequently airbrushed Magie out of the history of the game while simultaneously ensuring that they did not have to pay her any royalties. Yet traditional Monopoly is in a way more honest in the sense that the game is over when one player achieves monopoly status (the other players are bankrupted). In the real world, however, this situation is effectively the beginning without a definable end. Today’s monopoly capitalism is one in which private ownership produces its own “commons” of debt bondage— debt becomes the very form of social control and political regulation (“we must live within our means” becomes the standard refrain of the privileged). Increasing ownership by the rich corresponds to a deepening owing-ship for everyone else. Extemporizing on Levinas, social life becomes one of infinite responsibility (debt) to the big Other of capital in the reproduction of the system as a whole.

Casino Capitalism Within the terms of the capitalist paradigm, what cannot be accounted for are the intrinsic symptoms of global privation and extreme exploitation. Capitalism cannot ingest the excesses upon which it relies for its constitution. This is where Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street 2 falls short. Some of the best scenes in the film concern the depiction of money as something that functions in a purely arbitrary and “fictitious” manner, driven by more and more speculations without any fidelity: “money is a bitch that never sleeps” and speculation is the “mother of all evil” which has led to a financial system that is “malignant and global— like cancer” (Gekko). Yet for Gekko the problem does not lie with capitalism as such— his upbeat message crucially is that “prices and profits work”— but rather with how it is operated (its “bankrupt business model”) and the way it gives rise to excessive greed. What the film finally gravitates toward is a view that behind the cold movement of global finance there is an enduring sense of human solidarity and responsibility: Gekko’s love “in the last instance” for his daughter and unborn grandson, his tacit support for the

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

64 C H AP TE R

3

environment and alternative energy projects and so on. The underlying message is something along the lines of, “ultimately capitalism is nothing, humanity is all.” Common sense and good conscience will always overcome greed and excess, and thus what Gekko stands for is a kind of anticapitalist capitalism— that is, a capitalism that is reconciled with itself in humanist terms. Yet it is clear that we are now entering a new phase of capitalism. The old forms of “capitalism with a human face”— regulation, universal welfare, social democracy, and so on— that tried to ideologically naturalize and (re-)balance capitalism are clearly in decline. In its virtual, globally immanent phase, capital is inexorably eroding the standard mechanisms of “conscious control.” The humanist mask has slipped and the new era is giving way to almost pantomime forms of populist machismo, of which Trump is but the latest incarnation, where there is a hardening of nationalist affirmation and an increasing externalization of problems as social evils, homeland threats, decadent or corrupt elitism, and so on. The new age is characterized by a combination of universal abstract capital and increasingly particularistic types of national-popular identity. A far better rendering of the (inherently oppositional) logic of capital can be found in Martin Scorsese’s film Casino. The film narrates the fortunes of two central characters— Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesce)— who play central roles in the early development of the modern American casino. As in Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation, Nicky may be said to reflect the primitive, or foundational, violence of capitalism; a violence that is integral to the construction of a casino system in the deserts of Los Vegas and to sustaining a power base for its operation (“pre-legal” reliance on violence, corruption, money-laundering, extortion, and so on). As time progresses, however, Nicky becomes an increasing liability as he constantly seeks to reinforce his position through crude acts of gangsterism. What Nicky fails to appreciate, and what the character of Ace is all too aware of, is that the power of the casino resides precisely in its being a self-reproducing autopoietic system. It naturalizes its own violence in a systemic way— in its economy of tilt— such that the house always wins. In this context, we might say that Nicky represents the excessive drive, the monstrous face, of capitalism, an ugly reminder of the casino system’s origins that must be disavowed and consigned to the periphery. And thus on mob orders he is taken to a remote cornfield, brutally beaten, and buried alive. From this viewpoint, Scorsese may be said to make an implicit connection with the constitutive tension between truth and the reality of capital.16 Truth here does not refer to anything intrinsic that is somehow discovered. It is rather the truth of capital itself, what is true in the very

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

65 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

distortion (or notional essence) of capital. It is this truth that Marx develops thematically when he makes such comments as: “capital’s purpose is not the satisfaction of needs but the production of profit.”17 Notwithstanding all its “mystical” and “occult” qualities, the truth of all capital functioning is the endless pursuit of profit in all its forms. The realization of this truth, however, depends on the constitutive reality of capital: namely, expropriation, displacement, exploitation, and so on. In other words, it reflects Hegel’s constitutive oppositional tension between the universal (truth) and the particular (reality). This tension is played out between the two central characters, where we might say that Ace embodies the truth of the casino system while Nicky embodies the underlying reality. The relationship between the two characters is essentially a dialectical one. Both negate each other, but they both reflect necessary aspects of the casino as a speculative totality. While Nicky’s violent measures helped to create the space for the casino, his excesses have to be disavowed or marginalized so that the casino can function as a legitimate (gentrified) institution. Reality, in this sense, becomes the first victim of the truth of (casino) capital. Equally, however, the reality of the casino system cannot be simply effaced. Reality is something that always bites back. And this is reflected in the personal cost to Ace: the breakdown of his relationships, his increasing withdrawal, and the fact that the very violence that he was complicit with is visited upon him when his car is bombed. Put in Lacanian terms, what is manifested is a series of indigestible symptoms that persist in disrupting the smooth running of the symbolic order. The truth of capital is the fiction of its free-floating and self-driving cycles, but its failure to absorb reality leads to a series of traumatic crises and disruptions (the return of the Real). As a totality, capitalism endeavors to gentrify and mystify itself through a disavowal of its crude reality of exploitation and privation by pushing its necessary measures of violent repression to the internal and external peripheries of the world. And these measures are quickly reactivated when reality bites back in the form of inherent (Real) symptoms. It is this dimension of the inherent Real of capital that democratic regulationists never fail to miss. While modernity may have become increasingly liquid (to use Zygmunt Bauman’s expression), this liquidity flows within, and is enabled by, a steel matrix of global capital. In a distortion of the Kantian perspective, the secret model of modern hospitality can be seen in terms of the casino itself. The casino is, in principle, open to all those who have money and are prepared to play by the rules. At the same time, there are significant categories of exclusion: those who win excessively— consistently successful gamblers tend to be banned for playing the game(s) too well; those who lose

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

66 C H AP TE R

3

excessively— gamblers who take the game(s) too seriously and risk all to beat the house system; and those who are too near— local people are typically banned from gambling in the casinos. This triadic structure of capitalist hospitality is reproduced globally along the following lines: (1) the constant reproduction of a demographic of debt— the endless invitations to take out loans to deal with existing loans (rather than “win” and escape the cycle of debt altogether); (2) the withdrawal of participatory credit from those who take it too literally— those who in a sense embody the very nature of fictitious capital; (3) the maintenance of a critical distance from the Other— the increasing reliance on immigrant labor (especially for large capital projects), the consignment of the poor to peripheral zones, and so on. This type of zonal development is lent cultural stabilization through what Marx would have recognized as an increasing occultization of capital. In an article for the New York Times, the economist Paul Krugman refers to the rise of “magical thinking” in the global endorsement of austerity as the only response to economic crisis— austerity is likened to a form of leechcraft where no matter what the problem is, you simply draw blood from the patient in the hope that he or she will recover.18 This reflects a paradigm shift that goes to the very heart of the economic imagination. Part of this shift concerns an inversion of Keynesian principles. In his General Theory of Employment, Keynes affirmed the need for a “comprehensive socialization of investment.”19 This view laid the foundations for a new (postwar) era based on regulation and a certain empowering of economic agency (Keynes’s savers and spenders, regulation, the role of government, etc.). A comprehensive de-socialization of investment and a basic disempowering of economic agency, by contrast, characterize the contemporary world. If Keynes was a modern interventionist, then today’s economic policy-makers reflect a kind of postmodern obscurantism. With advanced virtual capitalism, Marx’s view of the occult and mystical properties of capital is becoming literalized. Far from acting as a point of external intervention and control, it is as if Keynesianism itself has become caught up in the very cycle of capital itself: if there is a crisis, then the default position is that fiscal resources must be placed at the disposal of the very medium of capital circulation itself (i.e., the banking sector). The rise of magical thinking thus corresponds to the emergence of a new kind of economic fatalism and a generalized myth of the complete autonomy of the sphere of money: an arcane world subject to the capricious gods of finance who, when they are displeased, can only be assuaged through personal sacrifice and austerity. The Hegelian paradox here is that while capitalism is the driving force behind modernization, it simultaneously nurtures a kind of objective superstitiousness— it is not so

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

67 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

much the “enigma of capital,” as David Harvey puts it, but the capitalization of enigma. And this also provides the background to the ongoing expansion of the mega-casinos and in particular the recent development of online gambling, which has an annual turnover of $30 billion and rising, where more and more people pay homage to a cultural economy of fate.

Beware Greeks Long before Deleuze and Guattari, Lenin recognized not only the extraterritorial nature of finance capital, but also its deterritorializing/ reterritorializing character in reshaping the geography of the world through its global centers and networks of money exchange. In her book States and Markets, Susan Strange warned against what she saw as a dangerous gap emerging between nation-states and the global financial market. Continuing in this vein, she later argued that as a result of this gap the Westphalia system (of nation-state sovereignty) had now become the Westfailure system.20 And this is true in a quite literal sense. The increasingly extraterritorial nature of capital means that it is becoming more and more difficult to regulate from either a nation-state or indeed a state federation perspective. Whereas capital expanded through states during the twentieth century (Hilferding’s “organized capitalism”), in the twentyfirst century capital is generating its own corporate command economy that is effectively rezoning the global economic order in ways that seek to outmaneuver all forms of political regulation— the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, covering vast sectors from (the privatization of) public services to agriculture, banking, and employment, being but one example. In this emerging context, states are tending to turn inward (“America first,” Brexit, the rise of nationalist movements, and so on) in ways that try to accommodate global capital while simultaneously maintaining national-cultural identity. The abstract, unbound character of capital reaches its highest point with the development of digital, or virtual, capitalism in which “frictionfree” speculation has become the norm. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that this kind of abstraction is simply illusory and therefore considered secondary to “real” processes. The relationship between the virtual and the “real” economy is a reflexive one. The abstract flows of capital impact hugely on investment decisions (and investment flight) and have direct consequences for employment, the sustainability of corporate enterprises, and so on. Similarly, currency speculations can bring about huge devaluations of “real” money (and huge increases in other monies).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

68 C H AP TE R

3

The “magical” commodity here is belief. For example, the size of the national debt in countries like Japan and the United States (which has been in excess of 100 percent of GDP since 2012) has not proved to be a significant problem. On the other hand, in countries like Greece (and elsewhere in southern Europe), the excessive ratio of debt to GDP has resulted in a catastrophic downgrading of their credit rating to “junk bond” status. After the global financial collapse, Greece (and southern Europe generally) provided a convenient name for the failings and excesses of the economic system. Instead of being dealt with as an equal partner member in the Eurozone, there was a very quick distancing from Greece. To put it in the terms of Laclau and Mouffe, there was a splitting of the differential identities of the Eurozone into an equivalential division between the core northern European countries (“us”) and the marginalized/Other southern European countries (“them”). The financial crisis of Greece (and Cyprus) was not viewed as part of a more general set of systemic problems in the international financial system— something to be dealt with by the European Stability Mechanism— but as something deviant to be brought to book and punitively corrected through the external imposition of severe austerity measures.21 The discursive status of Greece switched from being a differential identity (one country among others) within the Eurozone to being an antagonistic equivalential identity that threatened the Eurozone as a whole and, in doing so, served to unify it. In northern European racist discourse, the case of Greece and elsewhere provided further fuel for the old antagonism between the image of Protestant capitalism (“thrift,” “hard work,” “moderation,” etc.) and that of Catholic/Mediterranean capitalism (“laziness,” “fecklessness,” “profligacy,” and so on). Walter Benjamin’s characterization of capitalism as a type of cult that is based on blame rather than repentance is pertinent here.22 It is at this level of reflexive ideological fantasy that global capitalism continues to refresh itself in the sacrificial bloodletting of its own marginalized sectors. In Greece itself, equivalential discourses have variously attributed the economic crisis to excessive financial greed, German authoritarianism, or, in the case of the populist right wing (Golden Dawn, etc.), the malevolent influence of the Turks, immigrants, and, of course, the conspiratorial Jews. But here we should develop a more Hegelian approach to differences and equivalences. For Laclau, equivalences and differences tend to confront each other as opposite yet mutually reliant poles that function as a certain kind of identity. A system of differences is something that is sustained ultimately through equivalences: that is, the determination of a limit where all the differential positions exist in equivalential opposi-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

69 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

tion to excluded negativity. A system of equivalences, on the other hand, is one that is sustained ultimately through a naturalization of difference stabilizing the opposition “us” and “them.” Nonetheless, this conception still tends to rely too much on a view of systemic opposition (the one being externally circumscribed by, or collapsing into, the other). In Hegelian terms, the gap that appears to open up between the dimension of difference and equivalence is one that already inheres within difference itself. Equivalence is not an external opposite of difference, but rather an externalization of the opposition that already exists within difference itself, a reflection of the intrinsic gap between the one and its own void, or what Hegel calls “inward unrest.” Correspondingly, what we see in the recent financial crisis and the marginalization of countries like Greece was precisely a projection of the structural incompleteness of the global network of capital as a system of differences. The very failure of capitalism to ingest its own excesses and inconsistencies was projected as a problem to be overcome by the financial system (equivalentially unified by a perceived common threat) as a way of avoiding inherent incompleteness. It is here that the interconnection between capital and ideology becomes apparent. In order to reproduce itself, the capitalist totality seeks to externalize its intrinsic incompleteness by transposing it into an antagonistic exclusion. The difference/equivalence relationship can thus be seen in speculative terms as an opposition in unity, or what might be called a double distortion: first there is the distortion that constitutes an ideal as a fully functioning network/differential system; and second is the distortion that externalizes the intrinsic blockage of that ideal. European socioeconomic crises are consequently backlit by a fantasmatic functioning where excesses are ideologically rechanneled into particular (pathological) projections as a way of shoring up inherent incompleteness. The same kind of pattern can be discerned in Trump’s America in regard to “the Mexicans” and is more and more a feature of populist capitalism everywhere in its dependency on some kind of externalized constitutive Other.

Class Struggle and Philanthrocapitalism This brings us to the contemporary social taboo of class struggle. The mere mention of class struggle tends to upset the postmodern party and to invite charges of being hopelessly old-fashioned. Class struggle is an object in this sense; it is a structural inconsistency that cannot be adequately placed or represented. But when a CNN reporter asked the billionaire

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

70 C H AP TE R

3

Warren Buffett whether he thought that his proposal for increasing taxes on the superrich was being used as a basis on which to wage class warfare, she received an unexpected answer: “There’s been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won.” Buffett works closely with Bill Gates, and together they have spearheaded the philanthrocapitalist movement. In 2010, Buffett and Gates established the Giving Pledge organization: a kind of club for billionaires who pledge publicly to donate the majority of their wealth to the organization in order to promote worthy causes (although the pledge is not legally binding). Buffett, in fact, has already promised much of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its central objective to “help the world’s poorest people lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.” While there can be no doubting the sincerity of this type of objective, the problem with philanthrocapitalism lies precisely with universalizing such normative injunctions as “help the poor.” Following Hegelian logic, helping the poor is ultimately self-defeating: it would mean either that there will be no poor left (in which case the injunction collapses) or that— in redistributing all wealth— there will be no rich (in which case there is no one left to help the poor). In other words, we end up in a situation that leads to the “annihilation of the specific through its adoption into infinity and universality”;23 the very process of universalizing something particular results in self-eradication. Property, for example, can only remain as such under particular circumstances. The moment it becomes identified with the universal (as part of the commons) it loses all specificity. This is something of which the character Buddy/Syndrome is all too aware in The Incredibles: “I’ll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. Everyone can be super. And when everyone’s super . . . no one will be.” Opposition arises in the very heart of the thing-itself. Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace” and a league of states forming a union runs into a similar problem. Hegel points out that this very “union, because it is an individuality, must create an opposition, and so beget an enemy.”24 The pursuit of universal peace through the imposition of world government (a “new world order”) would result in an opposing tendency: a deepening of the fissures of internal and external conflict. Indeed, we already see this type of logic being played out not only in places like northern Africa, but also in the heart of Europe and the continuing backlashes against the official demands for multiculturalist integration. The general paradox is that it is only “if the specific thing which is to be superseded [i.e., poverty] remains [that] the possibility of help remains.”25 Consequently, such help can only function as potential help and not as something fully realizable— the hidden clause here is precisely that it should not be fully realized. This exemplifies the very logic of ideology where there is a publicly stated

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

71 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

objective, but which simultaneously relies upon the very opposite of the objective— a kind of preservation through negation. The cycle of capital is supplemented by the cycle of global philanthropy — giving new meaning to the aphorism “the more you give the more you receive.” On this basis, we might say that global philanthropy functions at the level of Hegel’s cunning of reason. The capitalist system continues to refine its ecology, or spirit, as a politico-economic and ethical totality not despite the intentions of individuals or the apparent countercapitalist tendencies of international agencies, but precisely because of them. At one level, this can be seen in rather straightforward terms as a commodification of charity: sponsorship deals (corporate infrastructural developments in exchange for favorable government policies), the highly discounted provision of technology to tie in countries and their business and welfare sectors to particular corporations (a tactic often used by Microsoft to both eliminate competition and to control global markets), and so on. But at a deeper level, what is being created here is a basic (ideological) ethos in which philanthropy is sanctioned as the true and legitimate form of ethical response. There is nothing essentially wrong or inauthentic about philanthropy as such; people involved in philanthropic projects are typically deeply sincere. The problem rests not so much with the legitimacy of philanthropy as an ethical response, but with the way that it is organized as a matter of good intentions and volition within the terms of the existing system. In other words, it results in what Hegel calls a spurious infinity— “things are improving, but more [of the same] is needed”— that serves ultimately to perpetuate the system. Philanthropic sincerity thus has a tendency to obscure (and/or to be mystified by) the underlying institutionalized hypocrisy; sincerity thus becomes the very form of institutionalized hypocrisy. What the latter sustains is a kind of “beautiful soul” orientation in which solutions to the global system are earnestly sought precisely as a way to avoid addressing the problematic nature of that system as such and our implicit participation in it. In its institutionalized hypocrisy, capitalism generates marginalization on a global scale and then seeks to create an ethical enterprise economy from this. Philanthropy is integral to the reflexive functioning of capitalism as a totality and feeds into a discourse in which inherent structural problems are presented as accidental, temporary, and external to the capitalist system itself. Philanthropy, as Hegel would have pointed out, can only continue to be practiced as long as there remains in place a wealthy philanthropist class and a class of beneficiaries. In this sense, philanthropy may be said to rely on its opposite: the generation of a kind of fatalistic misanthropy or objective social exclusion. For Hegel, this has the formal structure of tragedy. In ethical tragedy social negativity is presented

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

72 C H AP TE R

3

as something external, a fate that can only be countered through righteous struggle as a form of good (philanthropy) versus evil (contingent external circumstances). In this way, global philanthropy is “reconciled with the Divine being as the unity of both,”26 and becomes effectively the religious hope of the world replete with its good news prophets (Gates and others) and festivals of giving (the various “aid” spectacles and so on). So when Warren Buffett stated that class warfare has been going on for years, he forgot to add that the very philanthropy that he has signed up to functions as one of the principal (soft power) weapons of that warfare.

Movements and Multitude The eco-capitalist author Paul Hawken gives the following account of his public lectures: As my talks began to mirror my deeper understanding, the hands offering business cards grew more diverse. I would get from five to thirty such cards per speech, and after being on the road for a week or two would return home with a few hundred of them stuffed into various pockets . . . I came back to one question: did anyone truly appreciate how many groups and organizations were engaged in progressive causes? . . . I soon realized that my initial estimate of 100,000 was way off by at least a factor of ten, and I now believe that there are over one— and maybe even two— million organizations working towards ecological sustainability and social justice.27

This manifests a variation of Lacan’s “a letter always arrives at its destination.” For Hawken, what all these cards represent is a basic appeal to, and connection with, a certain (quasi-spiritual) big Other that is reflected in such notions as “Pachamama,” of “the earth talking back,” of “humanity’s immune response,” of the “sentient testament of the living world,” and so on. According to Hawken, what is being revealed is a radically diverse movement that is nonideological and nonhierarchical and which is “global, classless, unquenchable and tireless.”28 This movement is so diverse that it does not define itself against anything in particular: “the movement doesn’t attempt to disprove capitalism, globalization, or religious fundamentalism,”29 and apparently it includes not only poverty action and welfare support groups but also “George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Gordon Moore and the Clinton Global Initiative.”30 In

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

73 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

reality, the phenomena that Hawken refers to are so disparate that the term “movement” is somewhat excessive. Moreover, the thematic content that he identifies for the movement (environment, social justice, and human rights) is of such a generalized character that any specificity is lost— what political organization today is opposed to such content? Yet there is a truth in Hawken’s position. There is indeed a huge appetite for change (a thirst for the Real) reflected in a global outpouring of social protest via numerous groups and organizations. The problem lies with configuring the latter into a coherent movement with a consistent political project. Hawken tries to finesse this problem by falling back on the all too familiar call to move beyond ideology and to develop “humanity’s immune response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection and ecological corruption caused by ideologies.”31 This, of course, serves only to deepen his entanglement with ideology. On the basis of his pseudo-scientism, the immune response of social resistance is seen as something that again always takes place within the eco-capitalist system; a system that in a profoundly ideological way is presented in depoliticized and naturalistic terms. For Hawken, there is no need for radical change, hence his opposition to Marx.32 Instead, what we need to do is to make use of local knowledge, accumulated cultural wisdom, and so on in order to improve and harmonize the existing system. So what we have is a kind of continuous activism without the act: that is, a set of piecemeal responses without the need to address structural imbalances, without the need to intervene in the political economy of the world order. Hawken’s position reflects a form of conservative immanentism in which the excesses and “foreign bodies” can be rooted out through immunizing self-correction. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri can be viewed as the symmetrical opposite of Hawken. For these authors, late capitalism is also characterized by the spontaneous emergence of new movements that are united around the “desire for democracy”33 and which comprise what they call the multitude. As capitalism develops, so too does the power and communistic potential of the multitude: that is, the capacity to realize the commons (the collective ownership and use of resources, technology, media, and so on). While in Hawken’s thinking, capitalism is triggering a global response that will restore balance, in Hardt and Negri, capitalism is unleashing its own potential in the form of the multitude and the rise of the commons— along the lines of Marx, capitalism is sowing the seeds of its own destruction and paving the way for a new social (communist) balance. Both perspectives are immanentist in nature and consequently eliminate the need for any kind of act or event— emancipation is viewed, for different reasons, as something that in some sense is already inscribed.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

74 C H AP TE R

3

Marx had already identified a central paradox running through the modern associative form of capitalism. As the functioning capitalist becomes a “mere manager” and workers “become their own capitalists” (incorporated into the system as partners, shareholders, and so on), then “the opposition between capital and labor is abolished.”34, 35 So what happens to the idea of class struggle? For Hardt and Negri, class struggle effectively reemerges in a transposed form as a growing antagonism between the multitudes and the elite. Laclau, on the other hand, rejects Hardt and Negri’s perspective because, he argues, there is no reason to suppose that multitudes will have a solidaristic class character. Political subjectivity cannot be decided in advance, so we cannot know what the orientation of a multitude might be or whether indeed it could cohere into any kind of identity at all; as he puts it, “multitudes are never spontaneously multitudinarious.”36 It is along these lines that Laclau also rejects the Marxist notion of class struggle itself. The problem for Laclau is that if the worker is reduced to the economic category of a “seller of labor power,” then there is nothing in this category that leads logically to a notion of resistance.37 There are two main points here. The first is that for Marx, the worker in capitalism is not simply someone who sells labor power as a commodity. The worker is also a producer who transforms material into commodities and adds value to them. The worker is a disavowed (but necessary) contradiction: someone who is both inside the circuit of commodification (selling labor power) and externally constitutive of it (producing the surplus value that is continuously recycled). In this sense, the worker occupies a central position of symptomal torsion for the capitalist system in which social negativity (the constitutive exteriority of workers or the impossibility of the class relationship) becomes the very source of dynamic production. At the same time, capitalism functions as an entire social mode that structurally generates more and more antagonisms (the exporting of poverty, a widening of sociocultural divisions, and so on) as a way of avoiding this inherent opposition at the level of its most basic economic (non-)relation. The second point concerns whether class struggle can be reduced simply to a relation of resistance. In his classic account of power, Steven Lukes,38 for example, pointed out that power (in its third aspect) is at its most efficient when there appears to be no conflict or resistance, when the political consciousness is already so constrained that alternatives cannot even be imagined. In this context, class struggle becomes submerged within the terms of what Fredric Jameson refers to as a form of “nonantagonistic antagonism.”39 The notion of class struggle in the Marxist canon is a complex one. At various points in his work, Marx identifies class struggle as ultimately a political struggle and as something that is sub-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

75 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

ject to the transformative effects of the drive of capital itself. In a similar vein, the influential Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding— a figure from the “orthodox” Second International— provides the following compelling analysis of the development of capital in its imperialist phase through nationalist discourse: Thus the ideology of imperialism arises on the ruin of the old liberal ideals, whose naïvete it derides . . . But imperialism only dissolves the faded ideals of the bourgeoisie in order to put in their place a new and greater illusion . . . The subordination of individual interests to a higher general interest, which is a prerequisite for every vital social ideology, is thus achieved; and the state alien to its people is bound together with the nation in unity, while the national idea becomes the driving force of politics. Class antagonisms have disappeared and been transcended in the service of the collectivity. The common action of the nation, united by a common goal of national greatness, has taken the place of the class struggle, so dangerous and fruitless for the possessing classes.40 (My emphasis.)

In Hegelian-Marxist terms, this is the negation of the class struggle within the class struggle itself. It is the class struggle as played out through its apparent disappearance and displacement into nationalist struggle in concert with the drive of capital. Far from being reduced to visible instances of external opposition, class struggle functions precisely as a process of resisting the emergence of such instances, as a systematic attempt to conceal the power-based nature of its own system. Where Foucault asserts that there is no power without resistance, what needs to be added is that power cannot reproduce itself effectively without resistance; power is something that resists itself as the naked imposition of force. Even where force is used, this is invariably justified in the name of some kind of higher ideal that is affirmed as the basis for identification. A successful power is one that does not simply aim at robotic obedience, but rather dependency in which subjects are encouraged to identify with the particular vision of the prevailing power, to accept it as a universal ideal rather than a particular imposition.41 This type of logic is reflected in the modern zeitgeist where not only should you endure austerity, but you should also endure it as a universal good, as something that holds the potential of salvation for all. In the contemporary world, power seeks to neutralize (systemic) resistance through the manipulation of (intra-systemic) resistance itself: political competition, elections, and the general promotion of (and identification with) the myth of democracy as something genuinely transformative. Along these lines, class struggle should be viewed rather in terms of its articulation with the development of capital as a

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

76 C H AP TE R

3

dynamic power structure and its relentless drive to overcome its own crises and limitations. Class struggle is an abiding symptom of the political “cut” of the oppositional determination where the genus of capitalism both encounters and constantly seeks to avoid itself as one of its own species; where its universality is shown to be a (pathological) particularity. In ideological terms, class struggle manifests itself in the multifarious points of discursive tension between the naturalization and de-naturalization of capitalism. Does this mean that class struggle loses all specificity? The problem here is that we are necessarily dealing with a structural excess that transcends any particular instance. When workers overtly resist the extraction of their surplus value— such as in a trade union strike— does this necessarily imply class struggle? The answer cannot be unambiguous. Workers who are concerned only to advance their particular demands within the terms of the capitalist system are tending to confirm the latter as a naturalistic horizon— that is, as a big Other to whom demands can be referred on the assumption that, at some level, they can be met. This type of resistance is contained within clearly defined parameters that are themselves determined by the sociopolitical outcomes of class struggle. Class struggle proper comes into being at those points where the horizonal/big Other status of the capitalist system itself begins to be challenged. So it is virtually the opposite of Laclau’s view. Class struggle— in the Marxist sense of becoming a struggle for itself— does not arise when workers make their demands against particular instances of surplus value extraction (insufficient pay raises, etc.), but rather when workers cease making such demands and seek instead the abolition of the system and the terms it sets out for making (only those) demands. Class struggle emerges through the resistance of resistance: that is, a rejection of the existing or expected terms of resistance, as a struggle against class struggle itself. To avoid misunderstanding, this is not to imply that a particular strike or confrontation cannot develop into a wider political project and challenge to the system— there is always the potential for this to happen (despite André Gorz’s tendency to view workers as overly institutionalized). The point is rather that class struggle functions as an excess that is inherent to every particular but which cannot be reduced to it. This is essentially what Rosa Luxemburg meant by her notion of spontaneism, which involves precisely this perspectival shift where workers in a social confrontation no longer continue to make demands as workers, but engage in a wider struggle that rejects their very status as workers. In the context of spontaneism, a point is reached where workers no longer play by the rules, but are effectively transformed into proletariat conceived as self-authorizing subjects of emancipation. Yet class struggle is also fully

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

77 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

operative even when there appears to be no resistance or antagonism in play. Indeed, corporations often go to some lengths to be inclusive with regard to the workforce (“inclusion inspires innovation,” as the Apple motto puts it). Along the lines of Rudolf Hilferding, this type of (limited) inclusivity can be seen as symptomatic of the ongoing attempts to absorb or neutralize class struggle within the very mode of class struggle; that is, the way in which the constitutive distortion of capitalism is reproduced as a working totality. For Laclau, class struggle is merely one type of identity politics and one that is becoming less relevant in the world of postmodern diversification.42 The point which Laclau overlooks, however, is that not only is class struggle a basic principle of distortion, but also that it is a principle to which the class struggle itself is subject. Put somewhat crudely, if under Hilferding’s “organized capitalism” class struggle is absorbed and redirected through nationalist discourse, under “disorganized capitalism” class struggle is similarly absorbed and redirected through postmodern multiculturalist discourse. Both types of discourse represent the working-through of the basic irresolvable character of the class struggle itself. So Laclau is in a way right, but for the wrong reasons. The problem that Laclau identifies is simultaneously the solution. Far from being a simple displacement, multiculturalism and identity politics should be seen rather as a reflection of the very process of neutralizing or absorbing class struggle within its own terms. Indeed, multiculturalism may be said to function as perhaps the highest politico-cultural expression of today’s depoliticization of the economy. In the proliferation of antagonisms around gender, sexuality, culture, religion, and so on the economy is barely visible as a political realm of contestation. In the vast majority of our institutions (including universities), political debate and passion are almost exclusively limited to questions of how best to accommodate differences and how to provide ways to deal with social problems through business and enterprise (the question as to whether the latter might actually be part of the problem does not even arise). Even where social struggles appear to be economic in character— say, in opposition to capitalist property development in a particular area— this is typically addressed through a multiculturalist agenda: ensuring respect for local traditions and cultural sensitivities, providing opportunities for local people (jobs, affordability of housing, etc.), observing environmental standards of sustainability, and so on. There is, in other words, no political economy or challenge to the principles of private property ownership itself. What Marx called the social form of capital extends to an ongoing engagement with sociocultural differences in ways that modify, yet preserve, the functioning pursuit of profit. Along these lines, capitalism reproduces

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

78 C H AP TE R

3

itself through its own negation so that every politicization (of particular identities and relations) becomes a way of further refining and deepening the depoliticization of the economy. Class struggle should thus not be thought of as a specific antagonism, but rather as the very logic through which antagonisms tend to emerge and to be addressed in the reflexive development of capitalism as a dialectical totality. It is precisely in the gaps and exclusions that are inscribed into the (distorted or incomplete) constitution of capitalist relations that class struggle continues to function as the backdrop (or perhaps gravity) of social reality.

The Political and the Economic So how should the relationship between the political and the economic be understood? With Laclau, the answer is clear: “For me the political has a primary structuring role because social relations are ultimately contingent, and any prevailing articulation results from antagonistic confrontation whose outcome is not decided beforehand.”43 According to Laclau, we should assert the full “politicization of the economy” and avoid any drift toward an “economization of politics,” since this would result in a necessitarian totalization of the social space.44 Everything depends here on what is meant by an economization of politics. If economization is taken to mean a pre-given saturation of social space where the political cannot emerge, then clearly this has no purchase. But if we conceive economization as something not pre-given but rather as a process, one that is itself the result of political struggle, then a rather different picture emerges. Again, what is involved in this second case is a shift away from the positive functioning of politics (the democratic processes of elections, debates, protests, and so on) toward the historical depoliticization of entire sections of the social body that constitute its basic architecture; an architecture that is not simply there from the beginning but which becomes established (politically constituted) as the background composition, texture, and functioning of the everyday order. The economization of politics in this sense is a process of naturalizing economic power through the structuring and delimiting of the environment in which politics and political struggle tend to take place. Contemporary economic power is something that operates in terms of the effective circumscription of the possible, neutralizing potential antagonisms through the sedimentations of legalistic and technocratic measures and the imposed forms of protocol and grammatization. What is operative in the overwhelmingly dominant forms of austerity and neoliberal orthodoxy is an effective economization

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

79 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

of politics, a de facto necessitarian structuring of the social space. In this context, the economization of politics clearly names a modern reality: the increasing imposition of global economic power as a basic horizon of language and reality. While the danger of economism should certainly be avoided, there is an equal and opposite danger that should also be avoided: that of politicism. And here Laclau’s perspective can be seen to overlap with that of Meillasoux. Against any idea of economic necessity, Laclau affirms instead the necessity of contingency itself (the moment of undecidability, openness, and so on). As with Meillasoux, Laclau tends to draw far too strong a distinction between necessity and contingency. The problem with this distinction, which is operative throughout Laclau’s work, is that it overlooks the Lacanian dimension of the not-all that traverses both necessity and contingency. Laclau’s position is too one-sided in that he is essentially concerned to show how contingency arises because of the failure of the logic of necessity to fully constitute itself. But this should also be taken to apply to contingency. It is precisely because contingency is notall that necessity can arise. Necessity is possible because of the very contingency of contingency itself. Something similar can be said about politics and the economy. It is because economic necessity is not-all (fails to constitute itself as the economy) that the political (re-)emerges. But this does not mean that everything is political (fluid, instantly open to challenge, etc.), for this would also mean that nothing is political; it is rather that the dimension of not-all is political. With this shift in emphasis, the political is shown to be similarly incapable of constituting itself precisely because of its not-all character. This consequently creates the space for the emergence of economic necessity. Economic necessity arises because the political is itself subject to a political struggle— a political struggle to eliminate the political and thus to create a naturalistic economic order. In this regard, the economic is not merely a “particular location within a social topography,”45 it is simultaneously constitutive of the social topography as such; it is a constitutivity that is thoroughly political— that is, something that is refined and deepened over time (the Hegelian determination of spirit) but which nevertheless remains incomplete. There exists an underlying gap in the economic between the economy as the absent cause (the determination in the last instance for the sociopolitical field) and the economy in its oppositional determination (the structuring principle of the sociopolitical field). It is because this gap cannot be resolved that politics emerges. Politics is similarly marked by an inherent gap between politics as the “art of the possible” (the bottom line concerning what is achievable and not achievable in regard to political struggles) and politics as the “art of the impossible” (a

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

80 C H AP TE R

3

politics that challenges the existing mode of sociopolitical possibility and shows the particularity of that mode). These two gaps are, in turn, a reflection of a basic (constitutive) class struggle. The class struggle remains the traumatic sticking point (a kind of caput mortuum) that prevents the organicist integration of capitalism. The very diversity of struggles results from the fact that “there is no class relationship” (i.e., no unity), just as for Lacan there are different sexualities because there is no sexual relationship as such. What is missing in Laclau’s theory of hegemony, and which is potentially its most radical aspect, is the extent to which hegemonic processes are themselves subject to hegemonization: i.e., that hegemonic logics and practices reflect the very (hegemonic) distortion that is society. The American political scientist Charles Lindblom almost stumbled across this aspect in his Politics and Markets (1980). Exploring the influence of business over the policy environment, this book caused a major controversy at the time because it effectively shattered the whole myth of “polyarchy.” Indeed, the Mobil Corporation took the very unusual step of sponsoring a full-page advertisement in the New York Times (1978) in order to denounce the argument and findings of Lindblom’s work. Lindblom argued that, unlike other sociopolitical actors, business has a unique capacity to exercise its power in two ways: first, through the usual channels of democratic representation (lobbying and interest group activity, etc.); but second, and more importantly, through its structural presence in the economy and its consequent ability to silently shape the policy environment as such. Business is both a particular actor and a central structuring principle for the entire field of politico-economic interaction. As Marx pointed out, notwithstanding all their competition and infighting, “capitalists . . . are nevertheless united by a real freemasonry vis-à-vis the working class as a whole.”46 What Lindblom hits upon is the way in which what appears as neutral and universal— the democratic frame of polyarchy— is already overdetermined by the particularity of business (or system of capital) as such. More generally, this reflects Hegel’s point that form and content should not be regarded as independent of each other. Content is not formless (it has to show itself through some form of appearance) and form is not without content (form is expressed through content). The relationship between form and content, moreover, is a dynamic one.47 There is, as Hegel puts it, a “reciprocal overturning of one into the other so that the ‘content’ is nothing but the overturning of form into content, and ‘form’ is nothing but the overturning of content into form.”48 Form and content— although capable of being distinguished— are fundamentally intertwined. Moreover, in contrast to Kant, Hegel sees the gap between form and content as something that is reflected into con-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

81 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

tent itself. There is no primary content (or substance)— hence Hegel’s maxim that substance is also subject— and consequently the absolute, in its essence, is incompletion, unrest, and distortion. Form is not merely the expression of a given or underlying content, but is directly part of the constitution of content itself. This is also what Nietzsche most admired in Schopenhauer’s theory of music; that is, music is not the expression of any content preceding it, but rather speaks “the language of the will itself, straight out of the ‘abyss,’ as its most personal, original and direct manifestation.”49 While Laclau is right to affirm the primary structuring role of the political, this does not mean that the political is always operative in the manner he seems to suggest. In the first instance, the primary structuring role of the political also means the depoliticization of certain basic principles of social constitution (without this there can be no social cohesion). There exists no simple opposition or pre-givenness here. The distinction between the political and the nonpolitical (i.e., what is constitutively depoliticized) is itself internal to the political as such. In this sense, Laclau does not go far enough. The political foundation of any society takes place through an originary contingent violence (the seizure of land, conquest, the imposition of a state, etc.) whose traces are subsequently covered over (though never fully eliminated) through myth, governance, a widening system of law, and so on that legitimize the new social order: in short, the construction of a basic working matrix that seeks to naturalize its organizing principles and its (sociopolitical) exclusions. The political “cut” of a new order sets in motion the destiny of its idea: that is, the material realization of the effects of its organizing principle(s) in terms of its sociopolitical constitution. In the medieval conjuncture (which was undoubtedly diverse), political practices were mainly limited to church and court intrigue (beloved of historical dramas), military confrontation, the petitioning of favor or clemency, and so on. Such practices would never have included the demanding of universal rights or anything that directly challenged the principle of natural aristocratic-theocratic ascendancy and rule. In Badiouian terms, we get an entire multiplicity, but one that is constrained by the “one” of its cut. Through systematic depoliticization and demobilization, a political staking-out of a social imaginary (or historical idea) takes place that strives to establish a necessary self-referencing genealogy. This imaginary develops through a kind of phenomenological heuristic— a characteristic application of its constitutive logic— that gives shape and texture to sociopolitical life and to the very sense of possibility, potential, and subversion. So the real problem is not that too much primacy is given to the political, but not enough. What Laclau tends to overlook is the dialectical power of the political to

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

82 C H AP TE R

3

negate itself in the (over-)determination of the social space. It is here that the dangers of Laclau’s one-sided politicism become most visible. Politicism and economism are in fact reflections of each other. The exclusive emphasis on the vicissitudes of political subjectivity becomes a way of continuing not to address the structuring reality of economic power despite its “centrality” and despite the fact that “the material reproduction of society has more repercussions for social processes than do other instances.”50 In a strange dialectical warp, politicism is transformed into its opposite and becomes an insidious form of de facto economism. The post-Marxist perspective of radical democracy encounters the same kind of problem. What gets lost in the emphasis on the ongoing attempts to radicalize subjectivity in democratic terms is a consideration of how such radicalization is shaped and constrained by the historical composition (the very structurality) of the political; that is, the political in negation of itself. Despite the emphasis on historicization, it is as if political radicalization hovers above all like the figure of the blue man in Chagall’s painting. Through this tendency to overlook the working of the political in the field of the political (the historical hegemonization of the logic of hegemonization), there is an ontological flatness in Laclau in which radical democracy appears to continuously short-circuit itself in regard to its own neutralism. This is also reflected in the phenomenon of hyper-politicization in which identity only really comes into its own if it can achieve the status of disaffection— with the predominant emphasis on multiculturalism and difference differentiation as such becoming the prize. This can be seen not only in the ongoing affirmation of nonmainstream religious and cultural identities but also, and perhaps more especially, in the struggles to affirm new forms of sexual and cultural identity. The hyper-politicization of these identities— high media profile, staged debates, public and corporate agonism over cultural accommodation, sociolinguistic classification, and so on— is itself a reflection of the depoliticization of economic power. In this way, the naturalization of the capitalist horizon of reality is further reinforced through hyperpoliticization.

Dialectics and Difference The Hegelian view of the idea as a (contingently systematized) distortion is not addressed in post-Marxist thought. For Laclau, there exists an irretrievable immanentism to Hegelian dialectics that eliminates heterogeneity through a closed symmetry: “A space constructed around the opposi-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

83 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

tion A-not A is an entirely saturated space, which exhausts through that opposition all possible alternatives and does not tolerate interruption.”51 Laclau argues further that the “opposition A-B will never fully become A-not A. The ‘B-ness’ of the B will be ultimately non-dialectizable.”52 The problem here is that Laclau looks for (and finds) heterogeneity in the wrong place (he also tends to equate heterogeneity with particularism). In certain respects, Laclau’s position reflects the spurious form of infinity; that is, he conceives heterogeneity in independent terms such that the B-ness of B exists as an external kind of difference. Heterogeneity in this sense functions as an unfolding logic of B-ness, in which there is always something more ad infinitum. Yet for Hegel, this is not where true infinity (or heterogeneity) lies. In the Science of Logic, Hegel elaborates his notion of absolute difference in the following manner: “This difference is difference in and for itself, absolute difference, the difference of essence—It is difference in and for itself, not difference through something external, but self-referring, hence simple difference— It is essential that we grasp absolute difference as simple. In the absolute difference of A and not-A from each other, it is the simple ‘not’ which, as such, constitutes the difference.”53 Hegel derives all difference (and, extrapolating from here, all heterogeneity) from a basic simplicity: the “simple not” that is simultaneously the condition of possibility and impossibility for the constitution of A. A and not-A do not confront each other as external entities in a zero-sum game. As Hegel demonstrates, this type of external opposition (which is indeed saturating) is already part of the determination of A itself (for example, the credit/debit opposition in the determination of financial lending, the East/West opposition in the determination of navigation, and so on). But this is not where absolute difference lies. Absolute difference designates the not-ness of A within itself. Heterogeneity thus does not consist of any kind of external empirical wealth or multiplicity (as in an ongoing series of B-ness); rather, it is entirely inherent and results from the incompletable condition of A itself— the absolute difference between A and its own (constitutive) void. In this sense, heterogeneity is not something positive but flows from an indeterminate process, or negatory force, of distinguishing: “distinguishing is present as self-referring negativity, as a non-being which is the non-being of itself— a non-being which does not have its non-being in an other but has it within itself. What is present, therefore, is self-referring, reflected difference, or pure, absolute difference.”54 B-ness is not something independent of, or extra to, A as such. B-ness is rather a consequence of the inherent negativity of A itself. For Hegel, our world is one of intra-differentiation that is constitutively traversed by self-relating negativity. All independence and positivity (and, indeed, all saturation) fail because of the radical

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

84 C H AP TE R

3

inherence of negativity. The apparent gap between the particular and the universal is a reflection of the gap within the particular itself: the inability of the particular to affirm itself as A. In this context, universality can be seen as the highest expression of absolute difference (the restless other within the particular). This allows for two kinds of movement. In response to its failure or incompletion, A tries to universalize itself through supplementarity, a paradigmatic logic of constitution, that retroactively manufactures its own necessity— the variegated expansion of A-ness as a realization of itself at the level of the idea. At the same time, there is also the more radical possibility wherein A-ness itself becomes suspended in a push toward B, something other and/or the event. The two possibilities coexist as a speculative unity of opposites. The ambiguity here is also reflected in Laclau’s view of heterogeneity. On the one hand, heterogeneity is seen as something feral and (relatively) autonomous. But, on the other hand, it is also seen as something systematized: “heterogeneity belongs to the essence of capitalism, the partial stabilizations of which are hegemonic in nature.”55 This heterogeneity is not independent but part of the particularizing delimitation of the field of differences. Without such heterogeneity, this particularization cannot become a living movement or concrete universal. Here universality develops as a reiteration of particularized content in new (heterogeneous) ways; a reiteration that applies crucially to the negative content of the social structuring as well (e.g., the consistent depoliticization of the economy, the deliquescence over questions of power and inequality, and so on). Heterogeneity functions as a kind of fractalization, not as simple repetition but as a reflection of the logic of movement of the whole. This is where form also becomes its own content. Thus, for example, the standard (official) moral critique of capitalism is something that will always gravitate toward an ethics of philanthropy: that is, a reiteration of thematic content (“giving,” “opportunity,” “innovation,” “enterprise,” “regeneration,” and so forth) without challenging the basic form (the power grid) of global capitalism itself. The symbiotic character of form and content is something that gets lost in Laclau’s perspective on universality and hegemony. Emphasis needs to be given to the extent to which the contemporary form of the hegemonic game is already distorted by the particular content (the implicit priorities) of capital itself. Just as class struggle does not manifest itself simply in terms of visible resistance, this distortion is not, or at least not always, directly observable at the level of domination; in short, class struggle needs to be read in speculative terms. Like the elusive wood among the trees, the distortion of capital achieves invisibility precisely through its visibility; it becomes accepted as the very texture and/or medium of reality.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

85 C A P I TA L I S M

I N

T HE

T W E N T Y- F I R S T

CE NTURY

In Gilles Deleuze’s terms, “the economic is the social dialectic itself— in other words, the totality of the problems posed to a given society, or the synthetic and problematizing field of that society.”56 The economic should not be viewed as a delimited sphere among others but rather as a “differential virtuality”; an organizing principle of distortion that suffuses throughout the social spheres and draws them together as holistic movement: The famous phrase of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve,” does not mean that the problems are only apparent or that they are already solved, but, on the contrary, that the economic conditions of a problem determine or give rise to the manner in which it finds a solution within the framework of the real relations of the society.57

As the “absent Cause,” the economy tends not to assert itself directly, but is indirectly everywhere— it achieves its own macrocosmic unity through being microcosmic and multidimensional. This is why Deleuze, in a profoundly Hegelian way, refers to the functioning of capital as a social idea.58 In this context, Marx’s trinity of capital, land (property), and labor comprises a system of living abstraction that works to establish the “quantitability, qualitability and potentiality” of the social totality.59 Where Louis Althusser speaks of economic determination in the last instance, this instance should not be thought as something independent that can be discerned after peeling away all the other instances. The economic instance is precisely this principle of distortion that is set to work throughout the other instances, such that more and more aspects of social life are sublated (commodified, regulated, or taken into account) within the capitalist idea in its real abstraction. Determination in the last instance is something that refers to the entire mode of (over-)determination.60 It is in the reconfiguration of the form-content of the mode of overdetermination that the political event can be born. And here radical politics needs to give less emphasis to hegemonic subversion (with all its pitfalls of “playing the game”) and more emphasis to the political act, to the dissolution of the contemporary mode and its terms of reference. In this sense, politics proper may be said to begin where hegemony ends. The political act, or Badiouian event, can only emerge as a break with the regulatory power of the ideological imaginary.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:48:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

4

The Veil of Ideology

There exists an implicit solidarity between modern and postmodern thought in their opposition to the scandal of ideology. Following in the Enlightenment tradition, Habermas, for example, tends to view ideology as a basic anachronism that will eventually be swept away by the forces of modern communicative reason. This is further reflected in the accounts of people like Daniel Bell and Francis Fukuyama, who similarly regard ideology as withering (if it has not already withered) on the vine of history. Jean-François Lyotard, on the other hand, prefers not to speak about ideology at all. Our postmodern condition is defined by an increasing atomization of narratives and discourses, and thus any attempt to distinguish between ideological and nonideological discourses becomes meaningless; the ideological dissolves in an ocean of discourse characterized by pure differences. Reflected in both traditions is a certain excess, an overkill that amounts effectively to what Derrida identifies as an attempt to “declare the death only in order to put to death.”1 It is one of the great merits of Ernesto Laclau that he has sought to revive and reformulate the theory of ideology and to demonstrate its relevance and application. Laclau rejects Habermas’s view of a final overcoming of distortion through universal communicative reason. Reason cannot be derived from a positive or naturalistic ground but is itself the result of distortion (hegemonic constitution). Consequently, the idea of a definitive social transparency falls. At the same time, Laclau also rejects the Lyotardian view of an endless plane of relativist (and positivistic) discursivity where distortion cannot even arise. For Laclau, the ideological does not consist of the misrecognition or distortion of a positive essence but the opposite: “the non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity, of the impossibility of any ultimate suture.”2 Ideological illusion and distortion are very real from this viewpoint but in an entirely different, indeed opposite, sense to that of the traditional problematic. The ideological illusion does not subsist in the distortion of an underlying (extra-discursive) reality, but in “the very notion of an extra-discursive closure.”3 This closure is both necessary and impossible: necessary, for the purposes of establishing a (relatively) coherent framework of meaning; impossible, because any such framework relies upon constitutive distortion which, for structural reasons, cannot be overcome.4 86

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

87 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

While this reformulation undoubtedly represents a bold step forward, in some respects it may also be said to mark more of a beginning rather than an end. The notion of closure, for example, is not as straightforward as it might appear. In the premodern world, the power structures and the sense of the future tended to be stabilized and constrained within the terms of a remote cosmology of divine transformation within the frame of eternity (God’s will, etc.). Today’s cosmology of transformation, by contrast, appears far more immediate and reflexive. On this basis, ideological closure is something that tends to function more in the guise of its opposite; that is, non-closure as a continuous process of innovation and subversion within the basic parameters (closure) of capitalist development. This is precisely Francis Fukuyama’s end of history: time as a continuum of the power framework, time without the Real of temporal disruption. In this sense, the contemporary problem of ideology concerns not so much the impossibility of closure, but rather the opposite: the closure of impossibility; the way in which impossibility itself becomes embroiled within the power framework and begins to function as part of its very reproduction. The central question becomes: how does impossible closure come into being, how does it operate on the ground? Closure does not result from a straightforward negative exclusion establishing a positive inside. The inside/outside relationship is more subtle, complex, and dynamic. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the basic paradox is that what is excluded is always some form of excess (of the Real) that simultaneously persists as inherent. This is what Lacan is alluding to in his notion of extimacy (combining externality with intimacy): that is, “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me.”5 The sense of alien excess is resonant precisely because it speaks to an alienation within. This can be clarified in the context of antagonism. In their original formulation, Laclau and Mouffe characterized antagonism in terms of a relation wherein “the presence of the ‘Other’ prevents me from being totally myself.”6 Yet this idea of an external Other as a blockage to identity is from a Lacanian perspective already a fantasy in itself, a way of coping with the internal blockage of the subject-as-void ($). The fantasy here serves to project onto the Other the very excess-Real (the lack/surplus which prevents me from being myself) that is constitutively inscribed within: an inherent fault line which is precisely the subject initself. Antagonism in this sense should be regarded as secondary, as something that reflects the impossibility or inadequacy of representing the Real as such. Antagonism subsists as an attempt to externalize what is radically immanent. Ideological closure and stabilization are achieved through an economy of recycling and projecting excess in characteristically patterned ways. The

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

88 C H AP TE R

4

finitude of closure is thus simultaneously a gesture toward openness and eternity. Extemporizing on William Blake, ideological closure is something that seeks to hold infinity in the palm of its hand, to circumscribe the temporal as “evolution” (of the existing framework) and to fractalize the very forms of transformation. While closure strives to be an infinite horizon of objectivity, it is also subject to dissolution through the radical dimension of infinity as absolute (inherent) negation: that is, a (re-)historicization of the given closure as merely another potential “object” without ground as such. The positive development of an ideological closure depends on its ability to harness and manipulate the dimension of negativity. And here something further needs to be added to Laclau’s argument concerning the role of distortion in ideology. Laclau rightly points out that distortion is a constitutive universal— there can be no “reality” without (ideological) distortion. The distortion is a paradoxical one insofar as it lies in the concealment of a basic lack of any social substance that could be subjected to distortion. In other words, what is distorted in ideology is precisely the distortable nature of (discursive) reality as such. It is the idea of an extra-discursive closure/transparency that is the highest form of distortion.7 The distortive operation consists in creating the illusion of transparency by projecting onto a particular social arrangement the “impossible fullness of community”— for example, the belief that a specific program of state ownership (say, in a former colony) could be capable of delivering the generalities of freedom, national honor, social justice, and so on as an equivalential holism. While this argument is certainly a compelling one, it is also incomplete. What is overlooked is the extent to which the very distortion of which Laclau speaks simultaneously generates and is sustained by a further distortion: a constitutive distortion within the distortion. On the one hand, there is the explicit distortion in terms of an orientation toward a specific social arrangement promising completeness, but on the other hand, there is an implicit distortion that serves to regulate a critical proximity with any such arrangement, to ensure that we do not come too close to it. Along Hegelian lines, this can be characterized as a kind of realization through de-realization. The supreme example here would be capital itself. Capital is largely indifferent to any particular social arrangement. As Marx made clear, the key to its global success subsists in its ability to sweep away all fixed fast-frozen relations in the reproduction of its modal dynamic. Or to put it in Badiouian language, the very worldlessness of capital is its “world.” In this way, capital is able to create its own ground through de-grounding; its “ground” is precisely de-groundedness, a mobilization of the dimension of negativity within the very terms of its positive development.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

89 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

This ideological distortion in the distortion reveals a fantasmatic and paradoxical duality at play: a positing of a certain externalized ideal (an image fulfillment) and a simultaneous positing of an externalized blockage of that ideal. The externalized ideal reflects a logic of the big Other wherein the possibility of realizing that ideal is viewed as something infinitely deferred (realization exists only in the noumenal realm of the big Other). In its saturating empirical presence, capital, for example, appears as an abstract inscrutable entity that we can never fully live up to or coincide with— capital as a superegoic spectral power that demands more and more sacrifices, immersive subjugation, austerity observance, and so on. In Lacanian terms, we can only hope to appease the “dark God” of capital but we can never know it. At the same time, our (potential) connection with this dark God is viewed as something jeopardized by certain externalized figures of excess— immigrants, bankers, Muslims, Jews, Mexicans, the “southern” nations, and so on— that “explain” the blockage of the ideal (the sense of lack and/or failed unity) in more concrete terms. As abstract authority and/or as particular impediment, ideology maintains an image of externalized Otherness. The ideological illusion is a paradoxical one in that it presents its ideal as both infinitely deferred and as something finitely blocked by figures perceived as embodiments of excess, of the Real/jouissance.

Sphinx without a Secret: Genesis and Jouissance Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Sphinx without a Secret” concerns the narrator’s encounter with an old friend, Lord Murchison (Gerald), at the Café de la Paix in Paris. During their conversation, Gerald recounts a recent affair with a certain Lady Astor in London. Eventually he decides to propose marriage and arranges to meet Lady Astor one evening. Prior to their engagement, however, Gerald sees Lady Astor in the street by chance. She is wearing a dark veil, and so without her knowing he follows her to an unknown address where, having dropped her handkerchief, she opens the door with her key. Gerald picks up the handkerchief, and later at the arranged time he confronts her with it, accusing her of having a secret lover. Lady Astor strongly denies this, but Gerald is adamant and leaves to go abroad. A month goes by and when Gerald returns, he learns from the newspaper that Lady Astor has in fact died of consumption. The story ends with this final exchange between the narrator and Gerald:

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

90 C H AP TE R

4

“My dear Gerald,” I answered, “Lady Astor was simply a woman with a mania for mystery. She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.” “Do you really think so?” “I am sure of it,” I replied. He took out the morocco case, opened it, and looked at the photograph. “I wonder?” he said at last.

At one level, this sketch by Wilde can be read as a variation of the Lacanian view that truth has the structure of a fiction: Lady Astor succeeds only too well in creating the fiction of a mystery, the fiction explodes within Gerald, and she is then abandoned as the authentic heroine of her own tragedy; her non-secret was in fact the very secret she wished to conceal. One might even speculate that this was the outcome that Lady Astor secretly aimed at all along (perhaps she already knew she was dying of consumption). The subtlety of the story also subsists in the way it touches upon the ambiguity of veiling: the veil itself as its own secret. Whether or not there is a “real” secret behind the veil is not a decisive question; the real issue concerns the power of the veil and its capacity to conjure the phantasm of a dark secret, which persists right to the very end with the “I wonder?” of Gerald. The very act of veiling or screening itself creates the sense of a locus for fantasmatic excess (“nonetheless . . . what was she really hiding?”). This ability to generate the specter of a disturbing excess is also a feature of masks in general. Freud picked up on this indirectly in his account of his patient known as the Wolfman. The Wolfman recounts a dream he had about wolves sitting in a walnut tree outside his bedroom window. There were two especially strange qualities regarding the wolves’ appearance: “first, the utter calm of the wolves, their motionless stance, and, second, the tense attentiveness with which they all stared at him.”8 During the course of analysis, Freud establishes that the Wolfman’s dream recalls an actual memory from when he was around eighteen months old in which he awoke in the same bedroom as his mother and father to witness them engaged in a sexual act (coitus a tergo). What Freud discovers in the dream is a dialectical reversal: the very motionlessness of the wolves (the transposed appearance of his parents) as an indicator of the “violent movement” of sexual congress.9 This logic of dialectical reversal is similarly played out in the mask. In its very fixity of expression (the rictus of the killer clown, the characters of the Halloween and the Scream films, etc.), the mask reflects an unspeakable agitation, an unbearable excess, that threatens the symbolic order. Put in other terms, the inexplicable

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

91 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

blankness of the mask is something that evokes the (Lacanian) subject in all its horror of unfathomable desire: the horror of the gaze.10 This is what the character Ebenezer Scrooge finds most terrifying about the final specter, the ghost of Christmas future, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It was not any positive or particular feature about the figure, but rather a negative excess of impenetrable gaze that was beyond any form of mediation: “It thrilled him [Scrooge] with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.” The veil similarly reflects this power of symbolic disturbance, and in this way it continues to be at the center of global tensions between the Western and Eastern cultures. In very general terms, both can be seen as different modes of response to a troubling excess that inheres within humanity— the persistence of the subject— but which tends to be externalized or projected onto womanhood (the figure of woman as both muse and mystery). In Eastern (orthodox Islamic) discourse, the veil can be seen as performing this function of closing off, and thereby reproducing the sense of excess as seen to be embodied in womanhood (desire, deception, infidelity, and so on, threatening to explode the socio-moral order from within). Yet we should avoid the trap of viewing the veil as something that equates simply to female oppression (thereby lending tacit support to Western “freedom”). As Shirazi11 and others have pointed out, the veil has a nuanced history that reflects a range of meanings. In Algeria and Iran, for example, the switching from white to black veils and the wearing of the chador symbolized opposition to French and British or Western imperialism, respectively. And if we add to this more recent phenomena such as Pussy Riot, the Million Mask March, and the various Black Bloc movements, we can see a process in which masking and anonymity can become a way of symbolizing universal struggle and rage against the particularism of an existing social order or power formation. The veil in this sense does not have an essential or singular meaning, but depends rather on that fantasmatic economy which underpins and articulates it. Something similar can be said about Western (liberal) discourse. Unveiling can indeed be seen as a way of overcoming repression along the lines of a long-standing tradition of feminist resistance against such things as “tightlacing” (e.g., the Rational Dress Movement) and the restrictive female dress codes imposed by institutionalized culture. At the same time, we can also discern a process where projected female excess tends to be hidden in plain view. Through various media-generated idealizations, the feminine is subjected to all kinds of (explicit and implicit) regulation and manipulation through the socio-sexual imaginary, the

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

92 C H AP TE R

4

injunctions to enjoy female freedom (professional career, motherhood, consumption, etc.), along with the various forms of the “new woman” and so on. In both Western and Eastern discourses, there exist clear tendencies to reproduce idealizations of the feminine that women then become guilty of not matching up to. These modes of projected excess are part and parcel of the so-called clash of civilizations. Here we might say that Lady Astor stands for all women (and indeed for the subject-as-void) in her status as a sphinx without a secret. In other words, she can be seen as a reflection of Lacan’s assertion that woman as such does not exist; there is no secret feminine essence as the source of excess, but rather an empty locus of fantasmatic projection. And this opens the possibility of a further reading: Gerald’s own “mania for mystery,” his obsessional fantasy that there must be a secret that is being withheld from him. In this context, Gerald can be seen to stand for the patriarchal gaze as such; that is, the gaze that “knows” that there must be a cause behind, an explanation for, all the troubling excess that men experience in relation to women. In Hegelian terms, what this demonstrates is the way in which the extant acceptable set of socio-sexual norms and expectations is itself nothing more than routinized “abnormality” and/or pathological distortion, a function of ideology’s own veil; indeed, reality itself is impossible without what might be called the veiled-ness of ideological distortion. Looked at in this context, the veil appears as more ambiguous. The choice is not a straightforward binaristic one: either to wear the veil (e.g., to stand with Islamic resistance and dignity against Western imperialism and decadence) or to not wear the veil (e.g., to stand with Western emancipation and enlightenment against Islamic despotism and repression). There is a third option that effectively involves choosing the ambiguity itself beyond any cultural standpoint of interpretation: that is, to find ways of wearing, designing, or indeed refusing the veil in ways that seek to undermine and disrupt the fantasmatic economy of projected female excess in all cultures. This type of ambiguity is used to good effect in Star Wars and the contrasting figures of Darth Vader and Kylo Ren, who in a way function as opposing versions of Oedipus. In Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader turns toward the light side of the force by throwing down the Emperor and thereby saving Luke Skywalker. In the closing scenes of the film, Vader asks Luke to help him remove his mask so that he may look upon him with his own eyes. Although ravaged by age and a lifetime of commitment to the dark side, Vader’s face nonetheless appears as a warm and kindly one: father and son are thus reconciled in the light side of the force. In The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren is unmasked twice. In the first scene, Ren is interrogating Rey and trying to retrieve information from her regarding the missing piece of the map that shows the location of Luke Skywalker.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

93 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

Ren accuses Rey of still trying to kill him. She replies that it is hard not to want to kill a creature that is hunting her in a mask. Ren then removes his mask and they engage in a mind-force battle in which Rey eventually gets the better of Ren: “you are afraid that you are not as strong as Darth Vader.” Along the lines of the Vader/Skywalker scene, Ren is exposed as a vulnerable and essentially human figure who is prone to self-doubt and so on. The second unmasking, however, is more interesting. On planet K2, Han Solo confronts Kylo Ren (who is also his son, Ben Solo) and tells him that he does not need the mask. Ren removes the mask and Han Solo implores his son “to embrace the light within.” Ren again appears vulnerable and subject to self-doubt. He asks Han to help him overcome this doubt by offering him his light sabre. Yet instead of releasing the weapon, Ren hardens his gaze as the light fades from the sky and he activates the weapon, killing his father in an act of resolute patricide. As he dies, Han touches his son’s face in a paternal gesture of love as if once again to find his “real son,” Ben Solo, behind the public façade of Kylo Ren. This gives the mask a different aspect. It is not that behind the abstract horror of the mask there awaits a warm authentic self that needs to be liberated (by the enlightened); the true horror is rather this authentic self as such without any depth or hidden human dimension. Here the mask effectively functions in reverse: instead of making Kylo Ren more terrifying, the mask serves as a way of making the oedipal rage and subjective violence more acceptable, screening their intensity. The removal of the mask, and the resulting intimacy of the gaze, is something that renders the killing of Han Solo far more shocking. This familial intimacy is precisely the form of perverse trauma (with the Other) and becomes a way of affirming the unbridgeable abyss between father and son. The particularity of Ren’s face thus resolves into its own mask of evil. There is nothing substantial or authentic to be discovered behind the mask. As Deleuze puts it, “masks do not hide anything except other masks.”12 Approached from a different angle, we can say that what masks truly hide is that there is nothing but masks— this in a way is the final deception, the secret of the sphinx.

Saabs and Volvos: The Unbearable Sameness of Being Fredrik Backman’s Scandinavian bestseller A Man Called Ove narrates the story of an aging curmudgeon, Ove, and his various encounters with the modern world. Ove’s neighbor is the equally curmudgeonly Rune, with

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

94 C H AP TE R

4

whom he has a lifelong unresolved relationship: “Ove wouldn’t exactly call Rune his ‘enemy’ . . . or rather he would. Everything that went to pot in the Residents’ Association began with Rune.” After years of tormenting each other, the antagonism eventually appears to boil down to the fact that while Ove drives a Saab, Rune drives a Volvo. Yet this arbitrary empirical difference serves only to underscore the fact that this is not precisely the nature of their antagonistic relationship. The difference in driving preferences is merely something that becomes a way of organizing the antagonism. Ove and Rune are, in fact, extremely similar in their outlook and moral values, and the Saab/Volvo opposition serves as a way of maintaining an acceptable proximity and also, crucially, as a way of avoiding an encounter of unbearable excesses (obsessive compulsions, etc.) within themselves— their similarity is the very cause of their antagonistic divergence. It is only toward the end of the novel, when Rune has fallen into a state of decrepitude, that a sufficient distance opens up for Ove to acknowledge his deep affection for Rune. Looked at from this viewpoint, what we find in an antagonism is not so much one where the Other prevents me from being myself, but virtually the opposite: an over-confirmation of what is inside me, a repressed excess that is projected onto the Other; for example, the disturbed fascination with the sartorial choices of Muslim women (recently, the burkini), the obsessive resentment of so-called Islamic fundamentalists toward Western (decadent) culture, and so on. Antagonism possesses an extimate structure in this sense. It is something that is effectively “chosen” as a way of avoiding the Real of an encounter— perhaps the primary example here is the “battle of the sexes” as a way of avoiding the Real of human difference and the central impossibility or incompletion of humanness. The notion of an external Other as the cause of my incompleteness should thus be regarded as the very first gesture of the ideological; that is, as something that tries to conceal the traumatic knowledge that the subject is always already marked by its inherent incompleteness (the $ as void). For similar reasons, I would not go along with Laclau’s formulation of the particular-universal relationship where the particular (as a contingent content) seeks to occupy the “empty place” of the universal.13 Laclau conceives the particular as something that “can only fully realize itself if it constantly keeps open, and constantly re-defines, its relation to the universal.”14 Yet for Lacan (and Hegel), the particular is something that is always already “antagonized” by its inherent universal incompleteness as such. The universal is not an empty place that in some sense exists in a passive state apart from the particular; the universal is rather the inward unrest, the inherent movement of negativity, within the particular itself: in short, the dimension of becoming.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

95 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

In ideological terms, antagonism functions not as a denial of a given fullness, but rather as a way of organizing inherent excess. Antagonism is secondary to a more basic dimension of anxiety. Anxiety is experienced at a very basic level as a reaction to (and indeed a defense against) the unbearable presence of the Real. Lacan likens this experience of anxiety to that of a soldier advancing into hostile territory where the invisible enemy appears excessively present (lurking behind every rock and tree). Once the enemy is identified, the soldier can then start to marshal his resources, formulate a strategy, and so on. In providing a sense of focus, antagonism thus becomes a way of resolving anxiety into something more particularized. We can see this logic at play in typical racist discourses where there is almost a sense of relief when a particular event occurs that provides seeming justification for mobilization against ethnic groups. This happened recently in Cologne, when during the 2015 New Year’s Eve celebrations over 500 women reported to the police that gangs of North African men had subjected them to assault and robbery. The far right group Pegida was quick to organize a demonstration and to start sloganizing about a “sex jihad” against “blonde white women.” In this way, the assaults provided a focus for social anxiety over immigration in which the message was clear: “now you see what they are really like.” Yet notwithstanding the general tendency to overreport (and sensationalize) crimes by immigrants and to underreport crimes against them, the experiences of these women should not be trivialized or submerged within a “greater” antiracist cause. The gangs that perpetrated these crimes should be pursued with the full rigor of universal law. Almost exclusively, the gangs targeted and isolated women not only to steal from them, but also to sexually assault and humiliate them in an organized way. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, this level of orchestration is symptomatic of the way in which the sense of jouissance feeds into and directs antagonism. What can be discerned in these attacks is the projected figure of woman as an embodiment of exorbitant jouissance, a source of both fascination and anxiety who in extimate terms gives body to the very excess (of enjoyment) that inwardly thwarts homeostasis. Through this type of fantasmatic projection, the women were constructed as “fair game” and culpable provokers. At the same time, the mode of enjoyment here is an intersubjective one of theft and spoilage: what is enjoyed is the sense of taking away and/or ruining the enjoyment of the Other, the destruction of what is secretly envied and desired in the Other. The dynamics of fantasy are fully operative in such crimes. While there is nothing necessarily misogynistic about Islam (or any other religion) as such, there can be no doubt that the types of highly masculinized culture that have been developed in the name of Islam, and which systematically exclude women from public

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

96 C H AP TE R

4

life, have a direct bearing on the development of a collective political unconscious that identifies woman as an embodiment of culpable excess/ jouissance that needs to be socially regulated. We should not step back from a critical analysis of the tendencies in Islamic sociocultural discourse that foster this type of fantasmatic projection, provided, of course, that this is applied equally to the projections and subordinating practices of the Western world and above all to its hypocrisy in supporting socio-sexual liberty at home while exporting economic unfreedom globally. The liberal-left response was essentially one of confusion and guilt ranging from agonizing self-absorption (“the fault is ours”) to counteraggression against populist xenophobia. Stranger still was the “practical” suggestions by the mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, that women should stay in groups and always maintain “a certain distance of more than an arm’s length” in order to avoid sexual assault and harassment. Here we move from a xenophobic view of the immigrant or alien as a threat to a more Spielbergesque view of the immigrant or alien as someone who is basically benign and that with more understanding, cultural acclimatization, and a little behavioral accommodation and adaptation, all will be well. Clearly this type of response contains its own implicit fantasy in which the Other is viewed as someone who, in their very cultural difference, cannot (or should not) be held to account by the existing socio-moral criteria and who thus needs to be kept at a certain distance in order to avoid provoking their uncontrollable urges. In treating the Other as morally inferior, this kind of public antiracism becomes simultaneously a covert form of racism. The anxiety surrounding the idea that any criticism of the cultural practices and attitudes of the Other risks losing our sense of humanity turns into its opposite: a dehumanization that reflects an obscene grounding precisely in “our” sense of superiority.

Go Set a Watchman In highlighting the issue of proximity, where the Other is acceptable only insofar as an appropriate distance is maintained, the Cologne mayor unconsciously hit upon a basic class truth in regard to the bourgeois (and perhaps especially the liberal-left bourgeois) gaze. In demographic terms, the subaltern classes are by definition screened off and consigned to the outskirts and low-rent areas of affluent cities, and where they do have a more mainstream presence, it is usually as background service workers. The point is that while the bourgeois classes are prepared to indulge their ruminations about how existing society needs to be more open to

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

97 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

other identities and so on, they tend to do so in the secret shared understanding that those identities should not come too close to cause any real social disruption to their day-to-day lives: i.e., that they should not transgress these implicit social (“more than an arm’s length”) boundaries that serve to support and reinforce the social order as it stands. In this way, we might say that the class struggle is effectively reproduced through the mode of its opposite: as a genteel agonism that continues to refine its letters and sensibilities of social conscience. Here we see the veil of ideology (or one of its veils) as something that serves not only to screen out the Other, but also to configure the dominant gaze in such a way that the Other is recognized in implicitly bounded or assigned terms. The Other is neither simply outside (as external threat) nor fully inside, but exists rather in suspended or zoned terms as part of the populace but not as people as such. Something of this appears to be reflected in the scandal surrounding the recent publication of Harper Lee’s lost manuscript, Go Set a Watchman. In her best-selling To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s white liberal lawyer Atticus Finch agrees to defend a black man (Tom Robinson) who has been charged with raping a white girl in a climate of increasing racial tensions in the 1930s. In this novel Atticus comes across as a model of liberal progressivism and as someone who is concerned above all with equality before the law. Yet in Go Set a Watchman, Atticus is an altogether more ambiguous figure; he has been involved, at some level, with an organization expressing racist views, and in a conversation with his daughter he argues that black people in the South are not ready to exercise full civil rights. While it was originally promoted as a sequel, Go Set a Watchman is now generally viewed as an earlier and far inferior draft of To Kill a Mockingbird— a tentative prototype and/or distortion of the authentic masterpiece. On the other hand, an opposing reading also presents itself; that Go Set a Watchman is precisely the truth of To Kill a Mockingbird, a genuine supplement to rather than a distortion of the latter that offers a rare insight into the underside of liberal humanism. On this reading, what the lost (suppressed?) manuscript renders visible is the extent to which Atticus simultaneously reflects the prevailing political unconscious of a white liberalism that secretly privileges the bourgeois stance. In short, it reveals the very source of Atticus’s activism in To Kill a Mockingbird: i.e., that he is prepared to act on behalf of black people, but not in common solidarity with them. In this way, the mode of antiracist struggle becomes a way of reinforcing the very foundations of racial (and racist) separateness. Black people may be defended by enlightened white liberals, but only on condition that they should not try to become autonomous (rights-holding) beings capable of advancing their own cause; they should remain subordinate

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

98 C H AP TE R

4

and not come too close to “us.” The interests of blacks should be represented, but only insofar as the basic system of sociocultural power remains undisturbed: in effect, accommodation without transformation. It is perhaps this type of implicit supplementary clause which is at play in the character of Atticus; a clause that is not so much a matter of personal pathology, but rather a manifestation of the bourgeois liberal unconscious as such. At stake here is what Hegel identifies as the logic of recognition in the unfolding of self-consciousness. The sense of self is something that develops as a process of negating intrinsic Otherness (the inconsistent alienated form of the “self”) through a kind of transposition of the latter onto other external selves. On this basis, a more consistent sense of self is achieved in intersubjective terms through being recognized (or perceiving to be recognized) by others. The master, for example, achieves his identity as an authoritative “for-itself” figure through a process of being (and/or perceiving to be) recognized as such by subordinates who, in turn, perceive themselves as dependent on the master. The independence of the master is sustained and reproduced through the sense of dependency inscribed within the subordinates (and vice versa). The subordinate aspires to and desires mastery as if it were an external thing of independence recognized through the fact of dependency, and which thereby reinforces the notion of naturalistic hierarchy. For Hegel, independence can only be truly achieved through a negation of the negation; through a negation of the very process of externalizing independence and dependence, as intrinsic qualities, onto the Other. In this second, deeper negation, the very idea of independent mastery (and indeed subordination) falls and is shown to be fully dependent on the recognition of the subordinated Other: an anamorphic relational construction or distortion. It is the precarious contingent nature of this relationalism— where the roles of master and subordinate are suddenly reversed— that is the subject of various comedies such as The Admirable Crichton, Trading Places, Freaky Friday, and so on. The John Boorman film Hell in the Pacific (1968) offers some insight here. An American soldier (Lee Marvin) and a Japanese soldier (Toshiro Mifune) find themselves washed up on the same desert island during World War II. They engage in a struggle, and through twists and turns both end up occupying the position of master and slave at various points. Eventually they find a way to work together to escape the island. Once they do so the antagonism resurfaces. The failure to reach a resolution is further reflected in the two endings of the film. In the original film both characters are killed by shelling and are thus saved from their own excess or antagonism. The American version, however, presents them as parting company in a resigned hostile manner.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

99 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

Both endings are worse in the sense that they could not overcome the sense of external recognition (the excess projected into the Other). The absence of any fixed or external identitarian content allows for a movement away from what might be called spurious recognition— where the gaze of the Other is mistaken for the thing (of identity/independence) itself— to an authentic recognition in which, for example, both master and subordinate come to “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other.”15 It is only through a sense of non-identity, the dimension of negativity within self-consciousness itself, that a path to emancipation and reconciliation is opened. Independence is nothing positive; rather, it persists as a negative power to break with dependency on the sense of externalized (substantial) Otherness. Reconciliation is thus achieved not through coming to terms with the Other “as they truly are,” but through the opposite: an understanding of the Other in their non-identity as pathetic entities that try to resolve inherent Otherness through an externalization of it. This logic of spurious recognition is key to understanding the latent racism of a progressive figure like Atticus. In rejecting full civil rights, Atticus expresses an implicit fear of losing his position of mastery as defined through black dependency. At play here is Hegel’s “loss of the loss.” What Atticus is afraid of is losing the very obstacle to social equality, of being deprived of social deprivation and cultural dependency. Atticus’s liberal humanism functions as a way of both eating and keeping the cake: (pre-) mourning the absence of a free society, while at the same time maintaining a position of power and privilege on the basis of what is currently “practical,” “reasonable,” “prudent,” and so on. Liberal social conscience becomes precisely the mode of reproducing exclusive social power. It is this logic of recognition that is the target of Frantz Fanon in his compelling Black Skins, White Masks. Drawing on Hegel, Fanon argues that the white/black antagonism is itself a kind of mask that seeks to conceal a deeper inherent antagonism, or more accurately, a lack or gap at the heart of all being (which is why for Fanon the idea of any kind of cultural authenticity is a deception). The way to escape servitude/domination is not by seeking to recognize the dignity of blackness as something equal to whiteness, but rather through the more radical gesture of dissolving the very logic that seeks to stabilize or naturalize such positions: “There is no Negro mission; there is no white burden . . . No, I do not have the right to go and cry out my hatred at the white man. I do not have the duty to murmur my gratitude to the white man . . . The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.”16 In expressing the view that blacks are not mature or developed enough to handle full civil rights (a view that was also common among

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

100 C H AP TE R

4

apologists for South African apartheid), Atticus reveals an opposing anxiety. For what would be even worse for Atticus would be the idea of American blacks adapting all too well to the culture of rights-holding and articulating their own rights in even more sophisticated and effective ways; his underlying anxiety is that black identity would break out of the very form of recognition that allows liberals to indulge in their fantasy of themselves (and of being looked upon) as universal humanists. We thus need to be alive to the ways in which the very attempts to identify or celebrate the cultural “specificity” and/or “dignity” of the Other can quickly become their own form of oppression (the recognition of the Other’s “way of life” as something preordained and circumscribed within an existing social order). What runs throughout the more generalized or institutionalized forms of social exclusion is precisely this deeper anxiety concerning the perceived (extimate) excess of the Other that would potentially overrun existing forms of recognition and thereby ruin existing fantasies about “us” in relation to “them.” This lies at the heart of fantasies about Otherness that are formulated in such paradoxical terms as “of course x is inferior, hopelessly inadequate, incapable . . . which is all the more reason that x should be highly regulated . . . that x needs to know his or her place.” Again, from a Hegelian viewpoint, antagonistic exclusion does not result from an external Other deforming full internal identity, but rather an over-confirmation of what is already inside: the projection of inherent deformation or excess onto the sense of the Other. Far from designating a straightforward relation of denial, what needs to be emphasized is the degree to which the subject is invested in and achieves a certain sense of fulfillment through the antagonism itself. It is in this context that we should read such antagonistic couplings as Hector and Achilles, Dracula and Van Helsing, Holmes and Moriarty, Neo and Agent Smith, Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, Bond and Blofeld, and so on right through to the racists who organize and demonstrate their sense of social solidarity through their shared hatred of the Other. In short, what needs to be emphasized is the extent to which antagonisms are also enjoyed. This extends to the contemporary fascination with the “clash of civilizations”; that is, the dimension of antagonism as a stabilizing identitarian force based on mutual (spurious) recognition where, as Kipling put it, “never the twain shall meet.” This is why for Hegel, a true project of emancipation is one that should “aim at the death of the other . . . for that other is to it of no more worth than itself; the other’s reality is presented to the former as an external other, as outside itself; it must cancel that externality.”17 And it is precisely this Hegelian insight that Kipling does connect with in the full version of his “Ballad of East and West”:

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

101 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! (My emphasis.)

Jouissance, Oedipus, and the Fear of Virginia Woolf A central question that arises in this context— but one which is not really explored by Hegel— is why the externality of Otherness is so difficult to cancel. In psychoanalytic terms, this externality not only proves to be stubbornly persistent, but is also something that is actively reproduced and sustained through ideological discourse and its manipulation of narratives concerning the loss and restoration of jouissance. Where ideology tends to succeed is in its ability to fantasmatically translate the sense of lost enjoyment into the theft of enjoyment.18 In racist discourse, for example, the immigrant is someone who is precisely recognized as a figure of perverse excess; that is, as too lazy (cheating and ruining the welfare system) and/or as too hard-working (taking jobs, working for low wages, etc.) and who thereby steals or corrupts our enjoyment and our “way of life.” The Other is recognized in his or her capacity as an external illegitimate holder of lost or stolen jouissance. In this way, ideology establishes a kind of twisted economy that not only sustains the myth of restoring full jouissance (taking it back from an identifiable Other), but also provides a way of experiencing smaller hits of jouissance where what is enjoyed is the violence toward and/or humiliation of the Other in his (projected) status as an external culpable target. While the Other is seen as denying us authentic enjoyment, it is paradoxically the sense of denial itself that is enjoyed. Enjoyment is strictly a by-product of repression: it does not exist in its own terms and thus cannot be restored. Enjoyment belongs to the Real in the sense that it reflects the destabilizing excess that is both constitutive of the socio-symbolic order and (implicitly) threatens to overrun it. An apple is simply an empirical object that one desires or not, but it becomes an object of jouissance purely in its status as forbidden fruit. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the biblical account of Eden is fully resonant in this regard. That is to say, the act of genesis here is precisely that of splitting and prohibition: the generation of Eden as a socio-symbolic order through the screening out of excess, the creation of a forbidden zone that holds the secret of the lost excess;

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

102 C H AP TE R

4

an excess that does not exist— it has no positivity or independence in itself— and is purely a spectral projection, an epiphenomenon, of the constitution or carving out of the symbolic order itself. And this is also why the apple from the tree of knowledge is often linked to sex. It is not that sex does not take place prior to the eating of the apple (God’s first command is “be fruitful and multiply”); it is rather that sex can only be properly enjoyed after eating it. Adam and Eve become aware that they are naked in relation to a third gaze (not simply God but God as a figure of prohibition: i.e., as a father), and their sense of shame simultaneously supports their enjoyment of it. Zupančič stresses that this shame should be properly considered ontological in character. The shame arises not because of anything positive that is exposed (i.e., the fact of nudity), but rather because of an absence: the lack of a signifier and the failure to “convey the sexual relation.”19 Here we might add that the Oedipus complex itself functions as a way of retroactively covering over this traumatic (unconscious) knowledge of lack. There is an experience of shame in the lack of the signifier, and God/the father in a way acts as a more acceptable stand-in for that lack: an authority figure who effectively circumscribes the trauma of this unconscious knowledge (of lack), transposing it into a forbidden zone. What is operative in Oedipus is a form of externalization: we would rather face the shaming gaze of the father than be confronted by inherent shame, the deeper sense of a metaphysical disturbance and/or exposure to the Real. Far from embodying any kind of prohibition of original sin, what is indicated in Oedipus is the primordial nature of prohibition itself as something that retroactively creates the sense of original sin (a lost or forbidden world of jouissance) as a way of screening over the basic lack of a signifier. Here the (abstract) father functions not only as a mythical filler, or perhaps mask, for absence and lack, but also as a shame-engendering gaze or voice that supports jouissance through prohibition and repression. In its dimension of cut or prohibition, the intercession of Oedipal logic may be said to establish a foundational gesture that enables ontological traction and the construction of a symbolic order. At the same time, this logic can also be seen as something that marks the human being as a point where the ontological incompleteness of the universe (the constitutive non-relation) is itself affirmed, repeated, and crucially enjoyed. Enjoyment is inherent to being in its dialectical relationship with excess— excess that must be repressed for being to emerge but which, in turn, engenders further excess as part of the cycles of becoming. In this regard, enjoyment may be said to overlap with the Hegelian notion of repulsion; that is, the excess (of negativity) that is part of the one but which cannot be counted or contained within it. Repulsion is repeated, and repetition

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

103 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

itself results from repulsion and so forth against a background of irreducible negativity (Hegel’s implicit version of the Real). What Lacan may be said to add to Hegel is an account of how, in the case of the subject, repulsion gets caught in certain kinds of loops that are repeatedly enjoyed. Here we might say that in enjoyment, repulsion becomes compulsion in which the negativity inherent to movement is continuously accessed and repeated by the subject in characteristic ways (the unique efficiencies of the various addictions, compulsive behaviors, and so on). Jouissance speaks to a fundamental asymmetry, an out-of-jointness that can never be fully resolved: for example, the couple who continue to cheat on each other but who never quite seem to achieve parity of enjoyment. In this situation, there is a lingering doubt that the other party might have enjoyed themselves more than you and/or a suspicion that your enjoyment was not fully authentic, not quite as intense; which is often why the parties involved in such a relationship seek to authenticate their own enjoyment, and sense of themselves, through attempting to make the Other jealous. This lies at the root of the constant mutual provocations of the couple George and Martha (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) in Mike Nichols’s film adaptation of Edward Albee’s dark melodrama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Set over an evening, the film explores the destructive emotional games of George and Martha, who have invited a younger (rather two-dimensional) couple over for drinks. As the evening unfolds, George and Martha continue to up the ante in trying to humiliate each other through accusations and counter-accusations regarding failure, the lack of fulfillment, and so on. Both aim at destroying the fantasmatic core of each other in ever more brutal ways in order to restore a sense of lost enjoyment. Finally George decides to “kill” their fictitious son, and with him the fiction of parenthood, in which both he and especially Martha have so deeply invested (“the one thing I tried to carry unscathed through the sewer of our marriage . . . the one light in all this hopeless darkness, our son!”). In an inversion of the Oedipus myth, it is the absent fictitious son that functions as a cover for the lack of the sexual relation. George takes the risk of destroying the fantasmatic edifice of the family structure and along with it the complex layers of dialectical interplay between prohibition and jouissance that has hitherto sustained his relationship with Martha. This should not be read as an emergence from fantasy into brutal reality. What George and Martha actually emerge into is fantasmatic excess (the fear of “Virginia Woolf”), the dimension of the Real within the fantasy itself; the very thing that has stabilized the antagonistic economy of their relationship becomes the source of its undoing, the fantasy as a way of screening the Real-impossibility of the relationship and of formulating a characteristic encounter with it. This is

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

104 C H AP TE R

4

the ambiguity of the fantasmatic, and what concerns Martha is how the relationship can be sustained on the basis of “just us.” Yet the final scene is surprisingly tender, with George reassuring Martha that their life will now be (potentially) better. In this way, what opens up for the couple is a Hegelian space for true reconciliation in which the inherent asymmetry of being can also be taken into account rather than antagonistically projected onto the Other as blockage to an impossible restitution. Ideology is an opposing force to such reconciliation, maintaining instead an externalization of the sense of the Other as a figure who is responsible for the loss or corruption of jouissance. To put it in the terms of the recent James Bond movie Spectre, ideology seeks to effect a certain corporeality for the spectre of excess (resulting from symbolic constitution/repression) by giving a name to the “author of all your pain.” According to time, place, and context this author has various names: “Jew,” “Arab,” “Islam,” “Western decadence,” “Immigrant,” “Gay,” and so on and so forth. Ideology trades in this currency of impossible jouissance— an economy of pure specular movement— on the fantasmatic basis that, at some level, it can be fully redeemed. By giving a name to the blockage of the Real, ideology is able to translate the impossibility of society into the theft or sabotage of society; thereby sustaining the image of a naturalistic (preexisting) unity that has been contaminated by independent Otherness, a foreign intruder. Yet it is precisely at the level of jouissance that we can discern a basic ambiguity in the relationship between ideology and the Real. Ideology effectively operates at two levels and makes two kinds of implicit promises. On the one hand, it can be said to promise to deliver us from the Real by sustaining the image of holistic unity in relation to a posited threat or figure of excess. But, on the other hand, ideology may also be said to promise the Real itself. Ideology functions by bribing the subject into accepting repression as a way of granting subliminal access to a surplus enjoyment, an extra enjoyment generated through repression itself, through the renunciation of everyday pleasures in the service of a “greater cause.”20 What is manifest in fascism, for example, is the way in which the subject derives surplus enjoyment through acts of sacrifice (renouncing personal enjoyment) in the name of doing one’s duty to the nation. Repression is something that anamorphically produces, structures, and recycles this dimension of jouissance as Real. It is not simply (or not only) that repression generates the sense of a promised land of jouissance, but that repression itself is directly enjoyed; it becomes a way of instilling a visceral consistency in the subject. This is also what is so unique about capitalism. In the ancient world, repression tended to be external. Slavery, for example, was something imposed by the dominant classes and reinforced through law. At the same

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

105 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

time, it was still possible for certain individuals to achieve a certain liberation as a result of exceptional service or through the will of the master— to become “freedmen” (or, under Roman law, to be manumitted). With capitalism, however, repression is essentially inherent. This occurs not only as a result of what Marx knew well— that is, the naturalization or neutralization of the repressive structure of production to which all are subject (there is no equivalent status of freedmen in capitalism)— but also in the sense that modern subjects are constantly pressured into internalizing and embracing the repression directly as their own, as if they were responsible for any shortcomings in the capitalist system. This resonates with Walter Benjamin’s view of capitalism as a generalized cult based on the continuous reproduction of guilt. In corporate capitalism, the job of management consists largely of regulating performance and of emphasizing those points where targets have not been met or where performance could or should be improved or exceeded— and if success is being achieved, then “the bar” is raised further, and so it continues in such a way that workers are always placed in a position of deficit, and insufficiency. Corporate capitalism is based on a culture of permanent failure. In psychoanalytic terms, it is a culture based on superegoic logic in which capital appears as a thing or abstract ideal that we can never live up to but which nevertheless demands more and more of us. From a Lacanian perspective, capital can be seen to stand here for the dark God of the (big) Other’s desire.21 As Lacan points out, desire is always “the desire of the Other”;22 not in the sense of trying to meet any kind of clear or specific demand, but precisely the opposite: the desire of the Other is so oppressive because we can never be quite sure as to its content or whether or not we have fulfilled it. This formative anxiety generates the sense of capital as a virtual (and even vengeful) God to which sacrifices must always be made in the (uncertain) hope of appeasement— in order to find favor (or at least avoid retribution), one should give more and more to corporate life. And thus, as Marx and Benjamin understood, secularism is something that simultaneously functions as the highest form of theism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the predominant response to (ongoing) economic crises: austerity. Austerity is something that accords with the contemporary mindset of a world dominated by a vengeful capitalGod presiding over a global cult of sacrificial jouissance; a cult where what tends to be enjoyed directly is subjective immersion within the very forms of obeisance and abjection. The power of this cult is so great that even when it makes perfect (tried-and-tested) economic sense to initiate antiausterity measures, these tend to be rejected dogmatically. This type of cultic logic dressed up as neutral reason is ideology at its purest.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

106 C H AP TE R

4

The Big Other and the Placebo of Belief The efficiency of the big Other relies upon a certain veiling; it functions effectively through being screened off and maintained at a critical distance. If the veil is removed, then the spell is broken. This famously occurs in the Wizard of Oz when the Wizard is revealed to be nothing more than a showman (Professor Marvel) manipulating an image from behind a screen. And even when a particular Other is unveiled, this does not necessarily mean that a more general sense of the big Other is dispelled or that the subject in question automatically becomes self-authorizing. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, for example, still require certain fetishized objects (a diploma, a testimonial, and a medal) in order to realize their specific goals: the ability to think, to feel, and to be courageous. Yet what is also rendered visible is a certain process of identification. By believing in Professor Marvel’s own belief in them, they are effectively “authorized” to develop their own potential. Dorothy is similarly authorized through Glinda (“you’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas,” but, as she explains, Dorothy “needed to learn it for herself”). This changes the status of the big Other and moves it away from the sense of an omnipotent external entity. What is simultaneously functioning is a process of subjective reconfiguration in which each of the characters is enabled to realize that at some level their capacity to achieve their goals lies within themselves. And what of the Wizard/Professor Marvel himself? Through being exposed, he finds in the expectation of the Other the capacity to perform “real magic,” not only enabling the characters to surmount the obstacles they have created for themselves, but also restoring their faith in him, giving him the confidence to leave Oz and abandon his deified existence. The power of belief is also reflected in the welldocumented placebo phenomenon, where patients who are fully aware that they have been prescribed inactive pills (or treated with “fake” procedures) nonetheless experience a real reduction and even elimination of particular symptoms. What is at work is not the “medicine” but rather the patient’s belief in the belief of the practitioner or authoritative figure that the medicine can have a tangible effect. The ambiguities of this economy of belief are also reflected in the recent Sylvester Stallone film Creed, which in some respects might be regarded as an updated version of the Wizard of Oz. The film tells the story of Adonis Creed (son of Apollo Creed) and his desire to live up to the family name (-of-the-father) and thus to find his “true” place in the symbolic order (the emancipation and enjoyment enabled under the sign of prohibition). In his struggle against the oppression of his name/father, he seeks out Rocky Balboa, the man who was finally able to defeat Apollo

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

107 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

Creed. However, what Creed finds in Rocky is not the mighty warrior (the unstoppable figure who embodies the “no!”) who can magically transform his life, but a rather worn-out and spiritless figure who wants to be left alone. Yet it is precisely through Creed’s acceptance of the “unmasked” warrior that Rocky begins to find a new faith in himself and, in turn, the capacity to believe in (and train) Creed as a boxer. The fantasmatic coordinates of both characters come into alignment as Creed is able to find in Rocky the good father and to claim his name and Rocky is able to find within himself, through Creed, a renewed paternal potency— he comes to realize that he needs the sense of a son that needs him. What sustains all the rage and drive (and also our interest in the film) is the Oedipal desire vis-à-vis the perceived gaze of the father. Indeed, the entire Rocky series may be regarded as an epic Oedipal opera— a kind of boxing Ring Cycle— in which Rocky appears in various orientations toward the figure of the father: the validation from his former trainer (Mickey) in the early films; reconciliation with his son in Rocky Balboa, and the making of the good father in Creed. More widely, the dimension of reflexive subjective investment allows for greater movement and opens up a wider sense of the possible. The question is not so much whether there is a big Other (“does God exist?” etc.), but rather, how is the big Other effect produced in concrete transformative ways? This is arguably the most subversive aspect of Christianity: that is, the potential for generating a big Other effect without the big Other as such; a distortion of the distortion, a recognition of the big Other as a placebo. For Christ, we are not passive in the face of the big Other (awaiting divine command, etc.). On the contrary, the big Other effect (the mobilization of collective spirit) is something that results from the very act of coming together in his name. The true political leader in this regard is someone who is able to engender this type of effect through authorizing and empowering among his followers a new sense of belief as to what is possible. In this way, the status of the big Other as something external or spectral is effectively dissolved through collective reabsorption and realization as part of what Hegel characterizes as a fully engaged spirit (which is precisely the opposite of obscurantist spiritualization). It is through this dissolution of the big Other, and a concomitant opening up of the space of the possible, that the dimension of politics proper is reached. What tends to be overlooked in the various recent texts predicting the emergence of a new dark age is that capitalism has always relied on (and continues to rely on) its own version of a medievalist big Other. This is even reflected in such mainstream comedies as Bruce Almighty. The central conceit in this movie is that the eponymous Bruce (Jim Carrey)

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

108 C H AP TE R

4

effectively becomes God, occupying the place of the big Other. Disaster inevitably ensues— Bruce’s personal life (including his relationship) falls apart— and it is only by returning the divine powers and restoring a proper distance with regard to the authority and standing of God (Morgan Freeman) that Bruce can save himself and adapt to a humbler, more mature existence. In this sense, Bruce can be seen as the antithesis of the biblical figure of Job. Žižek has argued that Job is possibly the first radical hero in the sense that he consistently rails against his circumstances (the loss of his family, wealth, and so on) and does not accept the explanations of his circumstances offered by his three pious friends: in short, he does not buy into the jouissance of his suffering vis-à-vis some greater cause.23 Bruce, by contrast, is a figure who while initially protesting his condition, eventually submits to the big Other and reconciles himself to the fate that has been laid out for him (accepting his lack of professional progress, counting his blessings, and so on). And in this regard, Bruce can be seen as the very model of contemporary subjectivity in regard to global economic fate and its implicit commands to knuckle down, keep working as before, and not disturb or tempt the big Other (the power of capital). Despite the fact that it has no independent existence, the Other as externality continues to persist through a basic form of fantasy: “I know very well that the (big) Other does not exist . . . but nonetheless.” This stubborn de facto fantasy lies at the heart of existing democracy. While democracy presents the possibility of political change and invention, it is simultaneously supplemented by an implicit injunction that we should not exercise that possibility for fear of disturbing the socioeconomic Other of capitalism, the names of which include “globalization,” “market forces,” “economic realities,” and so on. In this way, democracy functions today as its own form of ideology; what might be called democratism. Under the terms of democratism, subjects can exercise any political choice they wish as long as this is restricted to a choice between those who, in whatever measure, are seeking to drive the capitalist system and those who are seeking to stabilize the same system. Along the lines of Bruce Almighty, democratism pulls off the trick of combining the sense of absolute (potential) mastery with that of rationalized subjection within the constraints of (capitalist) reality; it seeks to naturalize the capitalist system as the effective working horizon (or big Other) of democracy. Here we might say that Rousseau needs to be read with Hobbes. Our democratic ethos tends to be publicly Rousseauian (we can bring about change through the exercise of general will) but privately Hobbesian (we risk nasty brutish chaos if we dare to disturb the basic functioning of capital). This is the implicit “social contract” that effectively defines the world today.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

109 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

Ideology and Impossibility How then does the ideological function? Laclau’s view that the ideological subsists in “the very notion of extra-discursive closure”24 is certainly not incorrect, but it does not appear to be the whole story. The real dialectical mystery of ideology concerns its ability to achieve a sense of openness through effective closure. Hegel already anticipates this type of operation in his notion of spurious infinity. In contrast to Kant, who makes a clear (and positive) distinction between finitude and the infinite, Hegel affirms the need to think both terms together. Far from being a separate realm, true infinity represents the nullification of finitude as such (the infinite as the inherent failure of the finite). Finitude is not simply finiteness (as in delimitation), but rather an attempt to colonize infinity, to cast infinity in its own image and to repress the dimension of infinity as pure negation: in short, to function as a spurious infinity. Something similar can be said about ideology. The primary gesture of ideology is not toward closure as such, but rather toward a dynamic form of openness that seeks to colonize the very sense of the possible and the potential for change. In a way, the strength of ideology lies in its ability to avoid its own “extra-discursive.” Capitalism, for example, does not project itself as directly “capitalist” (i.e., as the monopolization of production, the maximization of profit, and so on), but rather as a neutral constellation incorporating themes such as “economic opportunity,” “freedom,” “prosperity,” “progress,” “innovation,” “development,” “enterprise,” and so on. In contrast to the Hegelian view of spirit as the realization of (historical) reason, ideology can be seen as a kind of countermovement in which such realization is constantly deferred (which is also one of the reasons why ideology— especially capitalist ideology— works so well with the logic of desire). Approached in this way, the ideological illusion may be said to subsist rather in the very idea of the discursive viewpoint; that is, in the idea that endless discursive subversions and reconfigurations can take place independently of basic framing (in the modern era, the basic framing of capitalism). This is manifestly not to return to any positivistic notion of the extra-discursive. The point is rather to grasp the Hegelian supplement and to see how ideology effectively operationalizes the extradiscursive through the opposing register; that is, the (politico-historical) constitution of the extra-discursive precisely through the sense of discursive openness and possibility, disguising the extra-discursive as the purely discursive. Today’s central ideological mystification consists of the misrecognition of the extra-discursive, the way that capitalism is able to achieve de facto closure through its opposing naturalistic discursive forms.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

110 C H AP TE R

4

In other words, the point is to avoid both economism and politicism and to understand how a logic of necessity becomes operational through the recursive application of primary themes and principles that remain largely off-scene. From this perspective, the dimension of impossibility is also rendered more ambiguous. While at one level ideology can be seen to aim at impossible closure (Laclau), at another level it can be seen as an ongoing attempt to achieve closure through impossibility itself. This occurs precisely through a process of non-realizability where something is imbued with the quality of impossibility as a way of avoiding it.25 The conjuring trick of ideology is to produce an image of a certain outcome (social fulfillment, reconciliation, prosperity, etc.) while implicitly maintaining that such an outcome is currently and always impossible on the grounds of practicality, historical conditions, and so on. In turn, this mechanism of continuous deferral— keeping the image of fulfillment at a critical anamorphic distance— feeds in to an economy of sacrifice wherein the subject is promised access to sacrificial jouissance itself (the enjoyment gained through renunciation and reflected in “the one more push” disposition that effectively “situates” the subject within the social order). Yet here again, we should affirm the Hegelian orientation: impossibility as something achieved through possibility (activity foreclosing the act); possibility as achieved through impossibility (the structuring of what can be done within a determinate horizon). Along these lines, ideology can be seen as something that seeks to overcome impossibility through impossibility, or more precisely through spurious impossibility. In other words, ideology serves to develop and stabilize an order of possibility by casting impossibility in the very image of that order. Impossibility is viewed as something merely temporal (all obstacles can eventually be overcome: disease, longevity, travel, current biogenetic limitations, and so on) and as a positive driving force (“we can or must achieve the impossible”). Nothing is impossible except for the overcoming of the capitalist horizon itself— this is the de facto impossibility operating today. Radical or true impossibility (i.e., impossibility as an inherent ontological limit) is here projected into capital as the big Other. Ideologically speaking, this is how a social totality tends to succeed. While Laclau is right to point to the impossibility of Society, we should add that society as such is impossible without (spurious) impossibility, without taking impossibility into account as a functioning dimension of its order in some way. In respect of the impossibility of Society, then, ideology can be viewed as a paradoxical form of response: “yes, Society is impossible . . . which is all the more reason why impossibility needs to be socialized.” And here also we should treat the central claim of radical democracy— that democracy is a unique

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

111 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

configuration in terms of its capacity to take its own basic impossibility into account— with some suspicion. The problem is not that the emphasis on impossibility is too strong, but rather that it is not strong enough. What radical democracy fails to take into account is the impossibility of impossibility. It is in this context of a more radical impossibility that we can discern our basic existential condition as one of in media res where there can be no external point that would allow us to directly express impossibility or to adequately represent or spatialize it. In Lacanian terms, there exists a radical discontinuity between the Real and its conceptualization, where every reality (and every ontologization) is overflowed by an excess; where all existence remains a subject of not-all. The potency of ideology derives from its capacity to cope with radical impossibility by projecting it into a particular (spurious) figure of the Other conceived as an immediate form of blockage and/or as a more abstract horizon (capital) that sets the historical conditions for determinate possibility. The Hegelian countermeasure to this would be to place the emphasis on the speculative character of impossibility. Possibility and impossibility are not independent of each other, but function rather as dimensions of an entire mode of engagement and reality. Impossibility is reflected back into possibility in two main (and interconnected) ways. At one level, impossibility functions as a horizonal exclusion that is constitutive of the order of possibility. At a more insidious level, however, impossibility is transposed into a logic for overcoming impossibility within the order of possibility itself (“we can overcome the impossible in these ways . . .”). This is what might be called the possible impossible: that is, the possibilization of impossibility as an expansion or development of the given order of possibility— a process of fractalization or inertia through overcoming. Typifying modern democracy, the possible impossible functions as a constitutive circumscription in which innovation and subversion only take place through an implicit acceptance of the essential markers of impossibility as embodied in the unquestioned power of capital: that is, capital as both the basic texture of social reality and its de facto unsurpassable limit defining the very domain of possibility. In this context, capital requires less and less ideological justification; its power is simply asserted as an absolute necessity. Not only do official leftist political parties organize their “opposition” within the terms of this necessity, but capitalism globally is tending to move away from a liberal-democratic model and toward far more direct forms of authoritarian imposition. Here we might say that, rather like the banking system, contemporary ideology has become virtually too big to fail. In general, people do not believe directly in capitalism as an emancipatory vision of how humanity should live. This is not where its strength lies. Capitalism functions effectively as a system of

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

112 C H AP TE R

4

belief without believers, a system that believes in itself. The potency and reach of capitalist ideology relies upon a kind of globalized non-belief (functioning without direct belief): that is, an implicit acceptance that no matter what we do, the big Other of capital will not stop believing in itself. At the same time, Hegel’s speculative approach also renders the perspective of the impossible possible. Through this perspective, the existing mode of engagement (along with its nodal points or master signifiers of stability) is effectively put into parenthesis, shown as an historical object, and thrown into question in its very incompleteness and impossibility. In this way, a new space of possibility and/or contingent potential is opened against a backdrop of radical impossibility (i.e., the inherent negation of any order of possibility). Instead of silently deferring to the existing markers of impossibility, these markers are themselves dissolved through impossibility as such; they are deprived of the big Other and of any grounding within it. This is why Lacan characterizes Hegel as someone who represents a sharp turn toward the act; the act conceived as something un-derivable or irreducible in its connection with the Realimpossible. Put in other terms, Hegel’s speculative approach may be said to show the possibility of (political) faith over (ideological) fate, of the event beyond horizon.

A Post-Truth World So where does ideology stand in today’s post-truth world? Does the idea of overcoming ideology and confronting power through truth and knowledge simply cease to have meaning? Two well-known books exemplify the problem: The Spirit Level 26 and 50 Facts That Should Change the World.27 Both provide startling information about inequality, disease, social deprivation, and so on, basically demonstrating in clear empirical terms that capitalism is dysfunctional on a global scale. And yet it is clear that knowledge of these facts and data continues not to change the world. This is because of the fantasmatic mediation “we know very well that capitalism doesn’t work . . . but nonetheless we continue as if we do not know”; or, in the terms of the 50 Facts book, “these are the facts which should change the world . . . but which nonetheless continue not to do so.” The facts are known, but they have no real symbolic efficiency. The knowledge exists, but it is placed into suspension, consigned to the background of “future problems.” This also reflects a key difference between, for example, the Western and Chinese media. In China, political discourse tends to have a much higher degree of symbolic efficiency and is therefore subject to

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

113 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

intense official scrutiny, regulation, and direct manipulation. In Western countries, the modern (liberal) political imaginary has been developed over a longer time so it relies less on state suppression (although this also takes place as well as, more commonly, corporate regulation of reporting) and more on a kind of symbolic enervation and/or cathectic deprivation. Things are reported but they lack any real force; their impact is broken up among the ideological earthworks of the social formation and deprived of cathectic momentum (issues not being taken up further by experts, moralists, media pundits, and so on) within the terms of the existing media and its implicit auto-correct filtering process. The problem is further exacerbated in regard to the development of so-called post-truth politics. The essential idea here is that whereas in traditional politics, assertion and opinion were held to account through the independent verification of facts by journalists, experts, and so on, facts are now either ignored or manipulated in such a way as to fit in with assertion and opinion— the archetypal example here being Kellyanne Conway’s notion of “alternative facts.” In a shift from democracy to what might be called doxacracy, truth and facts have now become the handmaidens of political opinion. Yet things are not quite so simple. In the first place, the notion of post-truth appears almost inevitably as part of a wider sequential trend in contemporary reality— the names of which include postmodernism, post-ideology, the post-political, and so on— within which the very idea of universal truth is being increasingly undermined. With the diversification of social, or perhaps one should say privatized, media there exists today a kind of Hobbesian condition of information wars in which there is no higher regulating authority. The age of information has simultaneously become the age of misinformation, disinformation, and distortion; openness and transparency bring forth their own forms of opaqueness and obfuscation. What exists today is a widespread incredulity toward any kind of narrative, a new reign of Babel. But is this especially new? Psychoanalysis is all too familiar with the problem of the subject’s babble and the ways in which knowledge and information can also function as a way of obscuring the truth; in particular, the truth of the gaze. This is what Lacan pointed out in regard to his example of the figure of the paranoid husband obsessively searching for knowledge or evidence of his wife’s infidelity. The fact of whether or not the wife has been unfaithful is not the real issue, it does not get at the truth. The real issue concerns the obsessive gaze of the husband and his inability to cope with the (imagined) jouissance of the Other. For psychoanalysis, truth is to be found in the register of excess; not only the excess of the gaze, but also the voice. As Mladen Dolar points out, the voice is not simply the medium for the message, but an excess that is indicative

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

114 C H AP TE R

4

of an operative truth— there is always a surplus (a too little or too much) that comes out in the voice.28 This is why psychoanalysts attend not only to the spoken words but to voice as such: intonation, rhythm, gaps and silences, and so on. The problem becomes even more apparent when we ask a question like “What is the truth about immigration?” People draw on all kinds of (alternative) facts to support their particular gaze and give voice to it. So it is not as if there is some missing piece of the (positive) truth that we simply need to gain access to through factual discourse. There is no external point from which truth might be accessed as a unity. Truth cannot be directly translated because it is always part of a mode of mediation that overflows it. This also points to the radical interiority of the Real. Without the warp of the Real, the constitution of a (relatively stable) mode of mediation, it would not be possible to generate any form of truth. In telling the truth, we also reveal a deeper (surplus) truth about this mode of mediation. The paranoid husband, for example, might be quite open about his anxiety and cite various evidential instances to justify this anxiety, but precisely in so doing he reveals more about his obsessive mediation. Thus, what always needs to be taken into account is the very inscription of the subject’s excess, his gaze and voice, in relation to truth. In this sense, the world has always been a post-truth world wherein political ideology serves as a way of fantasmatically organizing excess. At the same time there is also something new and far-reaching here, and that concerns the way in which corporations are openly attempting to stage the gaze, and return the voice, of customers through social algorithms. It is well known that Facebook, for example, uses networked algorithms to establish not only the consumer profile of its users (so that tailored advertisements pursue us across the internet), but also their politico-cultural profiles. By logging the interests of its users, Facebook is able to create a “feedback loop” or “filter bubble” so that stories with content that match users’ profiles continuously emerge in their newsfeed— their gaze or voice is effectively returned to them. News and information are being increasingly curated in ways that reflexively support personalized psychosocial configurations that can be calculated and crucially predicted. This opens up a whole new area of direct manipulation. Through demographic profiling, users can be exposed to “spontaneous” (dis-) information that is designed to influence social and political behavior. Depending on one’s political profile, either a left- or right-wing narrative could be deployed to support or discredit a particular candidate or proposal. According to the BBC documentary Panorama,29 this is precisely what happened in the cases of Brexit and the U.S. presidential election of 2016. In the longer term, the use of such algorithms may well have even more insidious effects in closing down public discourse, undermining

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

115 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

journalistic authority and its potential to hold the powerful to account (a cornerstone of liberal democracy), and more widely undermining the possibilities for critical thought and engagement.

The Trump Identity: Fake News and Fake Antagonism With Donald Trump, the turn toward post-truth politics has been even more explicit. This is especially reflected in his relationship with the established media. By making direct appeal to “the people” through Twitter, political rallies, highly regulated television appearances, press conferences, and so on, Trump has proved extremely effective in manipulating the way people identify with information. At the same time, he regularly targets the “dishonest media.” By shifting the ground from knowledge to belief— repeatedly stating the injunction “believe me” and/or posing the question “who do you trust?”— Trump has consistently outmaneuvered the media. The success of Trump largely derives from his ability to engage and (re-)stage the popular gaze and to mobilize a new kind of discourse that challenges the authority and integrity of the media along the following lines: “yes, you (the media) may have all kinds of facts and information but nonetheless . . . where is your commitment to the truth?” In this way, Trump is able to identify the media with the establishment or the old regime and to place himself firmly on the side of “ordinary Americans.” So what does Trump represent? A common view is that there is no real consistency to Trump, that he is an unashamed opportunist and/or an assemblage of incompatible and even conflicting politico-ideological elements. While there is undoubtedly some truth in this view, there are nonetheless some basic themes that are beginning to take shape. At one level, Trump can be seen as a symptom of the deepening crises of capitalism. In Trump’s discourse, the endemic problems of structural poverty and unemployment, for example, are presented as imperatives to free up the corporate sector and to combine this with a program of de-welfarization: an emphasis on austerity, the naturalization of individual culpability, and so on (the system in breakdown requiring even more commitment to the system). Environmental and ecological issues tend to be downplayed and/or outsourced to the industrializing world and future generations. Widening social division and disorder is confronted as a problem of externalization: anti-immigrant measures, the downgrading of universal human rights, the building of more walls and remote detention centers, an increasing emphasis on securitization and

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

116 C H AP TE R

4

the para-militarization of policing. And this is a pattern that is being repeated globally, from Brexit and the rise of the populist Right in Europe through to the political leadership of figures such as Putin, Erdogan, Duterte, Kim Jong-Un, and Modi. The Cold War landscapes are now giving way to a new era of superpower pragmatism that is thoroughly integrated into global capitalism and which is shaping and intensifying a world of radical exclusions on a hitherto unknown scale. Yet there is also something deeply suspicious about the nature of some of the mainstream opposition to Trump. From the barrage of television satire to public denunciations by leading media figures to the recent case of the comedienne Kathy Griffin (who held up a model of the severed bloody head of Trump for a promotional video), the moral outrage of the liberal establishment reflects an obscene enjoyment in which the execration of Trump has become an almost standard trope of cultural engagement. The solidifying effect of this unity-through-denunciation produces two further results for the liberal establishment: first, it becomes a way of avoiding any critical self-reflection; and second, it gives implicit license to vilify “unenlightened” Trump supporters. To some extent this has only provided fodder for Trump’s populism, allowing it to draw an even clearer distinction between the perception of a comfortable elite world of self-congratulatory liberalism and the harsh realities of Americain-struggle. At the same time, the very excess of the liberal response to Trump is also indicative of the nature of the political threat that he does pose for the existing power matrix. What Trump has effectively disturbed is a Real, a silently functioning violence at the heart of liberal culture: fear of and antagonism toward any kind of real social change. This was clearly evident in the Democratic Party’s instrumental marginalization of Bernie Sanders and his politics (despite strong popular support for his program). But it was also reflected in Hillary Clinton’s contemptuous characterization of Trump supporters as “the deplorables,” and more widely in the type of liberal corporate-media orientation that routinely affirms its solidarity with sexual and cultural identity political campaigns, but which tends to remain silent with regard to the 43 million-plus Americans living in poverty. What Trump has exposed and manipulated to his own advantage is precisely this violence of silence. Žižek makes two important observations apropos Trump: (1) Trump is not a fascist threat (American civil society is too developed and diverse to be prone to this); and (2) the real danger for emancipatory politics lies with continuing to support the liberal consensus against the (unifying) figure of Trump-as-villain.30 I would add a couple of points here. Trumpism is certainly not fascism, but (post-)modern capitalism no longer needs fascism to resolve its crises— the organizing power of the state

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

117 T H E

V EI L

OF

I DE OLOGY

in the global age has been considerably reduced, and is limited mainly to infrastructural and welfare provisions of some kind and to making legal adjustments to monopoly markets to prevent them from imploding. On the other hand, we should not underestimate the type of threat that Trump does represent. This needs to be looked at in the context of the way in which capitalism is driving forms of exclusion and displacement on a global scale. The breakdown of traditional forms of (culturalgeographical) social cohesion becomes the very breeding ground for reactive forms of ethno-identitarian politics. In this way, the dislocatory effects of globalization give rise to an opposing populist response in such terms that capitalism can reproduce itself as a totality. The type of threat that Trump and the populist transformations taking place today represent can consequently be seen as a reflection of an emerging form of authoritarian capitalism. Right-wing populism thus becomes part of the social reproduction of economic power; that is, a way of purging and misdirecting surplus political rage and energies, steadily eroding democracy from within (governance without public accountability, the transfer of power from the state to the corporate sector, the attack on human rights, and so on), while simultaneously enabling a global corporate plutocracy. So in this context, we should perhaps view Trump as a kind of relatively acceptable mask for the likes of Ted Cruz and the type of fanatical capitalism that he represents. In the context of superego capitalism (austerity, obeisance, infinite debt, and so on), Trump can be seen as a figure of the id: an embodiment of freedom and transgression who is unrestrained by social convention and/or political correctness. He is an anti-Oedipus in this sense of shamelessly flouting the rules, mocking disabled people, openly flirting with his daughter, and so on. And this is increasingly the pattern today: a globalized superego capitalism that gives rise to, and is sustained through, id forms of leadership as reflected in Trump and Trump-like figures. Increasingly, what we have today is the spectacle of change as id outbursts that are then quietly reabsorbed back into the system. In operating beyond the strictures of the liberal consensus and the perceived hypocrisy of its politico-ethical agonizing over problems concerning only the privileged, Trump divides the establishment and confronts the liberal obscenity of class and poverty silence with his own racist and sexist obscenities. This confrontation is ultimately one of shadows, because at a deeper level Trump can also be seen as the truth of the liberal consensus. Trump is effectively the spoilt child of a world of (liberal) wealth and privilege who is unashamed, ostentatious even, in giving expression to that world: open in his contempt of immigrants (rather than consigning them to the periphery), transparent in his support for corporate America

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

118 C H AP TE R

4

(rather than paying lip service to liberal good conscience), directly opposed to ecological concerns (rather than trying to balance the latter with “the needs of the economy”), and so on. This is illustrative of how ideology, as part of its overall reproduction, is able to oppose itself and violate its own rules. Trump says the unsayable and enacts what from the liberal perspective is impossible. But the contrivance is that in enacting the impossible, he precisely maintains and reinforces the idea of what is regarded as truly impossible; that is, the impossibility of overcoming capitalism as the basic horizon of reality. The politico-ideological furor and the “battle for the soul of America” continue precisely so that the underlying imaginary of capitalism can remain undisturbed.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:50:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

5

A Question of Two Ethics and Event

In his conclusion to Logics of Worlds (“What Is It to Live?”), Badiou writes: “The infinite of worlds is what saves us from every finite dis-grace.”1 Badiou rightly points to the modern obsession with finitude and the “constant harping on our mortal being”2— a problem exemplified in Freud’s figure of the poet who is immersed in the jouissance of melancholy. On the other hand, there is the equal and opposite problem (again found in Freud’s poet) of what Hegel refers to as an “infinite longing that yearns beyond body and world.”3 It is in this context that Hegel identifies a fake reconciliation in the form of what he calls the “doctrine of happiness”: because the absolute and eternal are beyond our grasp, we should seek instead to maximize our earthly “empirical” pleasures. And thus our condition is one that is rooted in a strange dialectic in which melancholia and happiness continue to fuel (and feed off) each other. At the same time, it is a condition in which knowledge tends to “take refuge in faith.”4 Human engagement is generally devoted to the finite, while questions of the infinite and absolute are offered up to faith (the various spiritualisms, cults, ideologies, and so on). As Hegel points out, the problem is not simply one of finitude versus infinitude (as if one could place oneself on one side or the other), but rather with the type of perspective that separates them in this manner. In answer to his question (what is it to live?), Badiou argues that it is crucial to understand that we are “open to the infinity of worlds.”5 On this basis, it becomes possible to engage in “continuous creation” and in establishing the conditions for “new birth beyond all the facts and markers of time.”6 Above all, this involves a central injunction wherein one “must incorporate oneself into what the trace [of an event] authorizes in terms of consequences.”7 But the question that arises here is not only how one can incorporate oneself into an evental trace, but also what happens to this “oneself” when this occurs. Or, to put it in Deleuzean terms, how can one will the event and what does it mean to do so? It is here that we can detect an implicit tendency toward holism in Badiou’s thought. Notwithstanding his (problematic) tendency to counterpose being to event, Badiou 119

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

120 C H AP TE R

5

simultaneously affirms that event is “nothing but a fragment of being,”8 which renders his ontology curiously horizontal. And this extends to his view of the subject. For Badiou, strictly speaking, there is no subject as such. Rather, the subject should be understood as “the mode according to which a body enters into a subjective formalism with regard to the production of a present.”9 In this context, Badiou’s notion of the subject is closer to an Althusserian conception in which the subject is put together (interpellated) as a finite positive composition. In Badiou’s schema, it is the notion of the body that is primary. If the subject is a finite composition, then the body is something that is already open to the infinite as a transcendental “multiple being.”10 The subject is merely “a formal synthesis between the statics of the body and its dynamics.”11 Through the multiplicity of the body, the event, in a way, already shows itself as part of being. The event is something that happens to the subject rather than the body. The event represents a kind of perspectival-subjective opening toward the infinite that, at some level, is already inscribed in the body. There is a sense in which “we” are connected to (immersed in) an infinitude— the multifold skein of being— that exists independently. Consequently, Badiou’s view of identity and subjectivity tends to be a rather passive one— a matter of recognition and/or enlargement rather than (political/traumatic) reconfiguration. Drawing on Nietzsche’s aphorism, “become what you are,” Badiou takes the hypothetical example of a Moroccan worker living in Paris: “The Moroccan worker does not abandon that which constitutes his individual identity, whether socially or in the family; but he will gradually adapt all this, in a creative fashion, to the place in which he finds himself. He will thus invent what he is— a Moroccan worker in Paris— not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity.”12 Of course, Badiou’s target here is Nicolas Sarkozy’s simplistic and racist (“you are either with us or against us”) ideas about what it means to be French. On the other hand, Badiou’s idea of “an expansion of identity” is also rather straightforward and sidesteps manifest divisions over questions of religious authority, gender roles, attitudes over sexuality, and so on. Badiou’s view of consolidating “what is universal in identities”13 further overlooks the Hegelian “concrete universal”; that is, the universal not as a simple expansion but rather as an (incomplete) particularization, a politico-historical cut that marks a qualitative shift. In his critique of Hegel, Badiou writes: “it is of the essence of the world not to be the totality of existence, and to endure the existence of an infinity of other worlds outside of itself.”14 This comes unintentionally close to Hegel’s own position: that a world fails to achieve (closed) totality because of the dimension of infinity. But this is not Badiou’s reading of Hegel or of

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

121 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

the Hegelian infinite. For Badiou, infinity is something that is reflected in the traces of inexistence or inappearance, and although it cannot be accessed directly, it is nonetheless signposted in the evental traces of the past/present and in a kind of mathematical sensibility. Infinity contains a certain tangibility even if it cannot be immediately expressed or empirically embodied. We achieve a grace of life by reconnecting with the infinite by “hope in what inappears” and by developing a “mathematical heroism” that is devoted to creating life in and through the infinite.15 Badiou appears here as a kind of anti-Kantian Kant. That is to say, he reproduces a similar distinction between finitude and the infinite, but he puts the central emphasis on engaging with the infinite in terms of the continuous (re-)production of the “obscure subject” through the rejection of “every living thought, every transparent language and every uncertain becoming.”16 There is consequently a sense in which infinity can be gained upon in positive terms. Things stand rather differently with Hegel. While the finite and infinite can certainly be distinguished, Hegel argues that they are not separate— the infinite does not exist as a definable “beyond” of finitude. With Badiou, there exists an irreducible multiplicity whose ultimate reference is not one but zero, or the void as “the proper name of being”17— there is a pure multiplicity because “the One is not.”18 This multiplicity is an ontological apriori. Finitude appears as something that breaks, or undergoes eventalization, toward a basic infinity of multiples and multiplyingness. Following Hegelian logic, Badiou’s perspective should be rejected not only because it reproduces the same kind of (Kantian) finitude/ infinitude distinction, but also because it too falls into the trap of an implicit sense of primordial givenness. For Hegel, the infinite subsists not in given multiplicity but in nullification: the pure disruption of being as such (not disruption-toward-multiplicity). This is reflected in the distinction Hegel draws between difference in-itself and heterogeneity as a form of mere complexity. In Hegel’s way of thinking, absolute difference posits the interior division between something and its own negation: “the simple ‘not’ which, as such, constitutes the difference.”19 Badiou is drawn toward a view of an originary multiplicity— an overflowing surplus of the void— that (presently) prevents the one from constituting itself. By contrast, in Hegel it is the simple not-ness of A within itself that is the decisive issue. Multiplicity is not (an external/given) multiple-ness in Hegel, but rather something that results from a self-relating lack in the one: the failure of the one (and indeed of nothing) to be itself. If Badiou begins with multiplicity, then Hegel begins with movement— the inherent unrest of the “one” itself. There is in this sense a radical anti-holism in Hegel. The Hegelian infinite is “experienced” as a breakdown of finitude itself and

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

122 C H AP TE R

5

its inability to generate a consistent phenomenal order of being. Heterogeneity does not result from preexisting multiplicity but from basic failure. Far from being constituted against infinity, finitude is something that contains, and generates, infinity within itself. As Zupančič argues, before any multiplicity there is always-already a two: the noncoincidence of the One, the split between something and its own void.20 The failure of the one is not simply a return to zero, or a point of rest or absence, but rather the kinesis of undecidability itself; what Hegel identifies as an infinity of repulsion and attraction in the one itself. Badiou’s universe of being tends to come across as a horizon-less manifold that in some sense is already there. In Hegel, by contrast, not only is the field of being something that has to be phenomenologically generated (as a historical order), but also the very possibility of its generation is something that results from its own impossibility or incompletion, or the “pure night of infinity.”21 What is reflected in “us” is not primordial multiplicity but incompletion and incompleteability. This is why Hegel tends to reject the thinking of the Enlightenment, because in its very “discovery” of negativity it consigns it to a beyond of the knowable finite world22— this is the interplay of faith and knowledge. With the Enlightenment, knowledge became a kind of ersatz infinity transfixed by its own sense of linearity (a tendency which sometimes appears in Badiou too). Hegel breaks with this idea of linearity, or continuum, and shows that what the Enlightenment perceived as a problem of epistemology is ultimately a problem of ontology. What knowledge is inexorably drawn toward is the limit or failure of knowledge itself: the realization of the ontological incompleteness or irresolvability of the field of being as such. It is at this point that knowledge is overrun by the Hegelian absolute of substance = subject. In this sense, Hegel may be regarded as the first quantum philosopher (a herald of later quantum physics). As identified by Karen Barad,23 one of the key differences between Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bohr’s quantum perspective concerns the position of the observer and the observed. Unlike Einstein, who “presumes the separately determinate nature of objects and observers,” Bohr argues that the very determination of “objects” and “observers” itself gets caught up in “the relational nature of the measurement process.”24 In Bohr’s perspective, epistemology and ontology are rendered ultimately inseparable (both are traversed by limitation and indeterminacy in regard to each other). Consequently, all that exists are phenomena as an entanglement of epistemology and ontology, observer and observed, subject and object, and so on.25 Yet what Hegel would add here is that this entanglement itself results from an absolute disentanglement. The field of phenomenal entanglement is something that subsists in relation to a basic non-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

123 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

phenomenal: the dimension of failure within all phenomenality that is the subject (the withdrawal of substance into subject). The phenomenal field into which we are thrown can find no point of external measure because it results from a cut whose reference is negativity (a negation of the negation/non-phenomenal)— the night of infinity from which all finitude is born. In a way, Badiou and Hegel present two different types of “destiny” for being. For Badiou, being is something that in its potential for emancipatory life depends on an opening up toward multiple-ness. For Hegel, it is more or less the opposite: being achieves emancipation through a basic contraction and annulment (the fall into negativity) that is not part of being. It is not the call of multiplicity but the inward unrest (drive) that lies at the root of the evental. With Badiou, the emancipatory subject is effectively derived from “the mathematical heroism of the one who creates life, point by point.”26 What is missing here is precisely this Hegelian dimension of cut or nullification: the eruption of the Freudian-Lacanian Real, or indeed the divine spark. Emancipatory subjectivity is not simply a point-by-point process; ultimately it emerges through divestment, upheaval, and displacement against a background of inherent negativity, the turbulent domain of negative excess. The failing of the Enlightenment was for Hegel its philosophical withdrawal from the absolute, thereby opening up the space for melancholy and mysticism. On the other hand, it is not simply a question of passively accepting the absolute as incompleteness (substance-as-subject). The point is rather to engage with the absolute and to make incompleteness the very currency of our being.

The One, the Many, and the Two There is an old joke about two mystics competing with each other. The first mystic declares that he is completely at one with the universe. Not to be outdone, the second replies, “Well, I am at two with it!” What the second mystic exemplifies is a kind of Hegelian infinite judgment in which its very emptiness (or indeed excess) functions as its inner truth. This is also the nature of the two in Hegel. The two is not a positivity of terms, nor is it a symmetrical opposition (x/anti-x). The two is rather the nonrelationship of the one to itself, the noncoincidence of something and its intrinsic void. So, in a way, the second mystic is the more authentic in that through the very absurdity of his statement, he unwittingly reveals the true mystery of the universe and his “place” within it: that of universal noncoincidence which persists in the two of, or split between, something

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

124 C H AP TE R

5

and its own void. Two is already infinite precisely because it symbolizes this irresolvable split within the one. What then of the classical philosophical problem of the one and the many? In Being and Event, Badiou summarizes his ontology in terms of two basic propositions: 1. The multiple from which ontology makes up its situation is composed solely of multiplicities. There is no one. In other words, every multiple is a multiple of multiples. 2. The count-as-one is no more than the system of conditions through which the multiple can be recognized as multiple.27

For Badiou, the one is fully absorbed into the multiple (or multiple of multiples) and functions as a secondary expression of the latter. Yet this already raises the Hegelian problem of one-sidedness: that is, an independent multiplicity that in some sense exists as its own primordial one (as something definitive outside the one). This again conjures up the specter of the Kantian spurious infinite. Commenting on a passage from Plato’s Gorgias, Badiou writes: “Why is the infinite multiplicity of the multiple like the image of a dream . . . Simply because the inconsistent multiple is actually unthinkable as such. All thought supposes a situation of the thinkable, which is to say a structure, a count-as-one. Consequently, the inconsistent multiple is solely— before the one-effect in which it is structured— an ungraspable horizon of being.”28 Here Badiou may be said to remain at the level of what Hegel calls the understanding where the infinite (or inconsistent multiplicity) is conceived as something ungraspable, beyond the finitude (the count-as-one) of all thought. At the same time, and despite its ungraspable nature, Badiou writes that the “essence of the multiple is to multiply itself in an imminent manner.”29 But if this is the case, where does the push toward further multiplication come from? One way of approaching this problem would be to take the very inconsistency of multiplication itself as a form of one: multiplication as simultaneously an effect of a basic inconsistency or indeed failure, so what we have is an ongoing multiplication of the one of inconsistency. This is indicative of the approach of Hegel, who begins with the equivocal nature of the one: the one simultaneously is and is not. The one is something that emerges in Hegel as an existent immediacy or being-for-itself. It achieves a determinateness that distinguishes it from general indeterminateness, or the void. This determinateness is not the result of anything positive or independent but precisely the opposite: “as the self-reference of the negative, the one is determining— and, as self-reference, it is infinite self-referring.”30 For Hegel, the one comprises the simple immediacy of being-for-itself, as something unalterable, inca-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

125 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

pable of becoming anything other. Does this mean that multiplicity can be reduced to the one, an unfolding of something that is already holistically present? The answer is negative, precisely because of the speculative determination of the one. The one already consists of two opposing moments: the immediacy of the one as a something (or manifold holism) and the mediation of the one as a pure abstraction of self-reference, a basic nothing or void. The one is consequently an oppositional unity: “The one is the void as the abstract self-reference of negation. But the void, as nothing, is absolutely diverse from the simple immediacy of the one, from the being of the latter which is also affirmative, and because the two stand in one single reference, namely to the one, their diversity is posited.”31 The one (as immediacy) and the void reciprocally determine each other: the one as a negation of the void in the determination of being; and the void as a negation of the one in the determination of nonbeing. The one is already marked as a two. What we find in the one is an intrinsic restlessness in which the void functions as “the ground of movement only as the negative reference of the one to its negative.”32 Multiplicity arises as a consequence of this movement. Far from being before or beyond the one, multiplicity develops precisely as a diversification of the one into many ones (as oppositional unities). This is the basis of what Hegel calls repulsion. The one distinguishes its being as a negation of the nonbeing of the void. Yet because the void is already part of the self-reference of the one, the negative reference to the negativity within itself in turn causes a repulsion (a negation of the negation). This repulsion is the “positing of many ones through the one itself”; it is “the one’s own coming-forthfrom-itself.”33 The one, consequently, does not change or become anything other— it remains itself precisely in its non-identification. What we have is a redoubling of the encounter with the void, a kind of coding paradox of self-reference in which the one effectively reaffirms itself through an inherent repulsion toward many ones, where each new one encounters the same paradox of self-reference vis-à-vis the void. As part of the one itself, the excess of the void coexists with the ongoing division, or repulsion, of the one into a multiplicity of ones. And in the same speculative terms, this multiplicity is both an expression of what the one implicitly is in-itself and is something external to the one as its other. What is contained in the one is the infinity of movement itself: an eternal process of attraction (the positing of the one) and repulsion (the positing of the many ones). Put in paradoxical terms, the very being of the one is becoming. The Hegelian event is implied in the opening of the gap within the one, a point of suspension where infinity shows itself as the moment of indeterminateness (void) before the possibility of a new determinateness.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

126 C H AP TE R

5

It is the persistence of the (noncoincidental) two that Badiou overlooks in his reading of Hegel. In Badiou’s account, Hegel’s perspective is one of total closure and as such is unable to conceptualize any kind of outside. For Badiou, the world cannot be a closure because it is something that, in its essence, has to “endure the existence of infinity of worlds outside of itself.”34 But what Badiou misses here is precisely the speculative dimension of Hegel’s philosophy; that is, the paradoxical logic whereby the outside is already part of the inside, an outside that is nothing but the failure or void of the inside. The unraveling of worlds, in this regard, has nothing to do with any externality, but results from the outside (or void) that is constitutively at play within. From this viewpoint, the general tendency in Badiou to separate the inside from the outside and the finite from the infinite amounts to what Hegel refers to as a certain kind of dogmatism that consists in adhering to one-sided determinations of the understanding whilst excluding their opposites. This is just the strict “either-or,” according to which (for instance) the world is either finite or infinite, but not both. On the contrary, what is genuine and speculative is precisely what does not have any such one-sided determination in it, and is therefore not exhausted by it; on the contrary, being a totality, it contains the determinations that dogmatism holds to be fixed and true in a state of separation from one another united within itself.35

The totality to which Hegel refers is not anything closed or positive, but rather a totality-through-failure. A speculative totality is one that is traversed by a basic negativity. The subject is lacking and strives for purchase or identification in reality, but reality also has no independent consistency and consequently requires a subjective frame of reference. There exists a Mobius-like continuum in which the two impossibilities (subject and substance) are held in dynamic tension so that a specific mode of appearance can emerge. Hegel’s speculative totality is not any kind of resolution, but rather a necessary impossibility: necessary for appearance to be achieved as a (relative) consistency, impossible in that a final consistency can never be achieved. In Lacanian terms, this is the emptied $-a that explodes all binaristic approaches from within. And this is also why, as Lacan puts it, there is no sexual relationship. There is no sexual symmetry or “coupling” as such. Sex is inherently divided, which is why it always needs to be mediated through fantasy. It is not that everything is reducible to sex (a common charge against psychoanalytic theory), but that sex itself is a reflection of a more basic two of noncoincidence.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

127 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

Terrible Twins Hegel’s two, or noncoincidental one, finds strange echoes in the mythology of twins who typically are either directly opposed (indicating a divided universe in ancient myth) or who indicate the working-through of an inherent traumatic fissure (from Romulus and Remus to the characters of Schwarzenegger and DeVito in Twins). It is this latter aspect that, at the very beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Marx identifies in his view of human history as the playing out of inherent struggles (both hidden and open) between “freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman . . . oppressor and oppressed.” The tensions between the patrician and plebeian traditions of an increasingly divided Europe surfaced unexpectedly in recent British politics and the “Plebgate” scandal. In September 2012 the Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell (then chief whip for the government) attended an evening meeting at Number 10 Downing Street. After the meeting had concluded, Mitchell tried to exit Downing Street by riding his bicycle through the main gate, but was prevented by the police from doing so and was told to exit through the side pedestrian exit. Mitchell is then alleged to have sworn at the police and to have called them “fucking plebs.” Mitchell denied using the term “plebs” and was in two libel actions— one against News Group Newspapers and the other against the police— both of which he lost. In summing up, Mr. Justice Mitting stated: “I am satisfied at least on the balance of probabilities that Mr. Mitchell did speak the words alleged or something so close to them as to amount to the same, including the politically toxic word pleb.” Why did such a relatively trivial incident cause such a furor? At stake here was a far broader struggle between patrician privilege and the plebeian demand for law and accountability. It was not so much that Mitchell was lying, but rather that he hit upon a deeper truth: that, at its most radical, the idea of universal law and police does reflect a profoundly plebeian tradition. Both Badiou and Foucault, who tend to identify policing with a repressive conservatism, overlook this aspect. Based upon a system of patronage and the privatized enforcement of authority and will, patrician rule functions perfectly well without law. The system of Roman law, which has been central to the development of European law in particular and the European tradition in general, was in itself a reflection of the plebeian demand for legal representation and for restricting the arbitrary imposition of power by the magistrates and the patrician classes. Indeed, this gesture has been repeated throughout the history of modernity. Among other events, we should note the rise of the commons in England (including Magna Carta, Carta de Foresta, and institutions of

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

128 C H AP TE R

5

formal protection against aristocratic power), the revolutions in France and America, anticolonial and antiapartheid resistance, and the ongoing struggle to construct and enshrine a new sense of the global commons. In each of these instances, there is an attempt to develop a meaningful expansion of a public sphere of rights that is properly supported in law and enforced through policing. This is not in any way to suggest that the law is a neutral form (law under capitalism continues to be based on individual and property rights). The point is rather that the law also has this other tradition that links it directly to the universal in the sense that it is capable of sundering all forms of particularity and organicist principle, including those of patrician privilege and naturalistic hierarchy. It is not simply a matter of prosecuting the odd corporate executive, banker, media mogul, or politician, but (as Lenin knew well) one of taking control of the state and the legislature in order to develop the universalizing power of the law in more radical ways. And perhaps this is what Justice Mitting intuitively perceived in his summing up of the “Plebgate” case. What was “politically toxic” about Mitchell’s tirade against the police was not so much its offensive content, but the way he implicitly identified the police (as representatives of the law) with a plebeian tradition. The toxicity here is precisely the (re-)politicization of the law itself and its potential ability to bring power and privilege to book. A revitalization of radical politics will depend substantially on its ability to develop the power of this toxicity: to demonstrate, engage with, and enact the politicization of the law. What it has to connect with is a new sense of the universal as one of ongoing struggle and engagement with a social vision that has no other ground than political will. In Hegel’s idea of the negation of the negation, law itself is revealed as the ultimate transgression. Roman law, for example, was derived from a situation of lawlessness. Rome itself was originally established as a collective of outcasts who seized land by the Tiber River and retroactively legitimized their social organization through the institution of law. The Roman laws of marriage were also retroactively established as a consequence of the original abduction (sometimes translated as rape) of women from the neighboring Sabine tribe. Once a system of law is established, violations of that system are experienced as external negations or crime. But Hegel’s point is that what is concealed (or repressed) here is the fact of a deeper second negation wherein the law itself is shown to be founded on the lawlessness of violence, seizure, abduction, and so on. In this sense, too, we might say that the constitutive background of (social) memory is amnesia. Once the mythology of a society has been established, then this becomes the measure of memory (dates, places, characters, culture, religion, and so on)— history becomes a positive continuity against which

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

129 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

recall is set. But what is repressed here is the fact that national-mythological memory is already a function of systematic amnesia (the forgetting of founding violence, exclusion, chance, and so on). The overcoming of amnesia in this regard is vital for opening up a sense of possibility, as opposed to the current political seizure around the idea of (economic) fate. The renewal of the radical imagination will depend on its ability to connect with this double negation of Hegel. Only in this way can it break out of its cycles of participatory subversion; that is, subversion which itself feeds into the reproduction of the existing social totality as a dynamic heuristic form. Radical politics needs to get back to the future, back to the idea of negation itself as the principle of foundation. In short, the Hegelian two must become part of the Left’s mythology.

The Evental Two In the Logic of Sense, Deleuze raises the question of what it means to will the event and thereby to become its offspring.36 Yet for Hegel, the point would be that we are already the offspring of our events. The real question is, how do we come to terms with this fact? Every event is both a rupture and a kind of return, a reaffirmation of the two as the impossibility of the one coinciding with itself. The Fall is originary in this sense and serves as an existential for the evental as such. Our condition is one of existential exile such that the very functioning of the human being is simultaneously a malfunctioning, an expression of a basic asymmetry vis-à-vis the world. Engagement with the world is not one of discovery or mastery, but one that is always mediated through the notional and which, in turn, affects that engagement reflexively. The world is necessarily idealist in character precisely because of its materialist incompleteness— the notional or perspectival is a necessary dimension for the constitution of every (relative) world consistency— which, in turn, means that the world is structurally open to the possibility of the event. In this way, Hegel may be said to affirm both the dissolution of any externality and the radical interiorization of the Real. Yet perhaps what Hegel underestimated here is the extent to which the overcoming of externality itself produces its own kind of externality. As in Freud’s Oedipal logic where the killing of the father serves only to reinforce the authority of the paternal gaze, the attempt to dissolve externality itself raises the specter of the big Other. This is a variation of Lacan’s view that God is unconscious— the paradoxical logic whereby the debunking of God leads to a deeper inscription of mystical authority in

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

130 C H AP TE R

5

the reproduction of reality. Marx was deeply aware of this logic at work in the development of capitalism as both the highest expression of both materialist secularization and of religious mysticism (capital as enchantment, a pure virtualism sustained through faith and its ritualized forms of worship). Put in other terms, what Hegel’s perspective may be said to render visible is the gap between knowledge and fantasy (we know very well that there is no externality and yet . . .). This is the problem with contemporary democracy and the attempts to radicalize it. What is overlooked is the dimension of objective disbelief, the specter of the big Other that constrains and immobilizes democracy in regard to the economy. We know very well that democracy gives us the potential to regulate or modify all aspects of our lives, but we do not quite believe it; there is infinite possibility as long as we do not offend against the gods of finance capitalism. What we have today is democracy without any real animus; a kind of necrocracy that is rooted in finitude as a living death and which, along the lines of Benjamin, resides over capital’s cult of death (drive). This again appears to be reflected in our seemingly endless fascination with zombies: we secretly know that our world is already dead. This can also be seen as symptomatic of what Hegel identifies as the modern predisposition toward melancholia as premised on a basic antithesis between finitude (implicit absolute) and infinity (spiritualized longing). As Hegel puts it, while the infinite of transience and ephemerality is preached from the pulpit, there is nonetheless a basic desire in people to “retain [their] own stock and store.”37 This reflects a kind of collectivized addiction to loss, a yearning for something out there in the nebulous realm of the infinite; an infinite that, in its very perception as embodying something barred to finitude, is thought to possess a certain positive content of its own. Against this endemic position, Hegel argues that loss or privation is not something that should be externalized or projected into the mysteries of infinity. On the contrary, privation should be understood as “an essential part and an absolute In-itself.”38 Hegel’s central project is to negate this loss or privation and to transform it into a positive feature wherein the finite and the infinite can be thought together. What Hegel effectively brings about is a movement away from the idea of epistemological lack (something is lacking in our knowledge which must be surrendered to faith) toward lack itself as the ontological horizon of being. Hegel’s philosophico-ethical project may be said to consist in the attempt to render palpable the work of infinity within finitude itself, to develop an ethics of two in which to frame human endeavor. It is not a question of trying to reach beyond finitude (as in Meillasoux), but of understanding how infinity is opened up toward finitude from within. This is what Hegel means by the Idea: that is, a process wherein finitude becomes

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

131 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

aware of its own infinity (its limit or failure) and thereby overcomes the opposition between them (the negation of finitude by infinity is in turn negated). In the Idea, the multiplicity of its determinations are shown to be necessarily part of a whole that cannot appeal to anything outside of itself— it is based purely on the notional and necessary determinations of itself in the context of abyss.

The Psychoanalytic Two: Drive and Desire This is similar to the psychoanalytical dynamic wherein the analyst is someone who bears witness to a change that is brought about by the analysand herself. As Lacan points out, what happens at the end of analysis is not a straightforward matter of transferring knowledge (from the analyst-supposed-to-know to the analysand). The passage to the act is not something that can be marked by a simple change in terms of what we know, or as some kind of positive gain. Rather, the possibility of the act is opened through a process of subtraction in which the subject (analysand) is able to come to terms with the constitutive dimensions of “I am not” and of “not being there”; something that, as Lacan makes clear, is “characteristic of the unconscious itself.”39 Put in other terms, the subject becomes capable of identifying with, and taking into account, his or her own non-essence or void. The aim of psychoanalysis in this sense is to put the analysand in touch with his or her own functioning (I am/I am not) two. What the analysand ends up “knowing” is nothing concrete, but rather the empty principle of fantasmatic structuring as such: the contingent stupidity of the unconscious economy in its attempts to deal with the inconsistencies of being. As Lacan puts it, psychoanalysis does not seek to unveil a substantial truth behind (contingent) stupidity, but rather to reaffirm “the stupidity of the truth.”40 This also underpins the Lacanian idea of “traversing the fantasy.” Far from any transcendence, traversing the fantasy effectively demonstrates that there is no “beyond” of fantasy; there is no big Other or Truth. Lacan makes clear that the process of traversal is something that has to be undertaken several times, and it is in the repeating of it that the subject (analysand) can approach the “true” in terms of an understanding of his or her (unconscious) economy of psychical motion. The overcoming of particular fantasies is possible only to the extent that the fantasmatic as such persists. What is gained as a result of traversing the fantasy is nothing substantial, but rather an understanding of the emancipatory potential of movement within the field of the fantasmatic as such. It is in this context

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

132 C H AP TE R

5

that we can also understand Lacan’s view of two distinct types of wo es war (where it was). On the one hand, there is the wo es war of the alienated subject (the “I do not think”) that denotes the specific (symptomatic) inconsistencies or lack that the subject must assume and come to terms with. But on the other hand, there is also a corresponding wo es war of the unconscious (the “I am not”). This second, more radical dimension of wo es war denotes loss itself as an object (effectively demonstrating that there is nothing to come to terms with). Every particular object of loss is merely a holographic projection of loss itself as object. It is this lossas-object that is the source of the act. The subject of the act, which, as Lacan makes clear, cannot be in the act (it is a subject of pure movement or rupture), is precisely the Hegelian subject: the subject of an essential fidelity with infinity. Movement is central to the Lacanian dialectic of drive and desire. Lacan begins by problematizing the idea of satisfaction.41 Based on lack, desire is a fluid metonymical movement that is continuously in search of an impossible fulfillment and which, by definition, is always unsatisfied. Drive, on the other hand, satisfies itself through a certain stuck-ness: the repetitive cyclical movement of itself. As Lacan puts it in regard to the oral drive, there is no food that can satisfy this drive; satisfaction is achieved rather through “circumventing the eternally lacking object.”42 At the same time, both drive and desire are held in tension: desire seeks to sustain itself through the permanent deferral of satisfaction (a multiplicity of “this is not it”); drive satisfies itself through its very sustaining, through its short-circuiting around a partial object (a multiplicity of “this is it”). The distinction is blurred further by the fact that the logic of desire is similar to that of the drive in the sense that desire’s ultimate aim is to sustain itself (the compulsive internet shopper who immediately wants a particular object but who actually desires the continuous deferral of satisfaction, the metonymic movement of “next!”). Drive, on the other hand, refers to the Other of desire. It is the very sticking point of desire that effectively (over-)determines what all the fuss/metonymy is about, the necessary point of inertia that anchors the movement of desire. Drive is inherent to the economy of desire and is situated in the space where desire encounters itself and for which there can be no further substitution. The drive designates the “absolute condition” for which one is prepared to sacrifice everything (every substitutive desire), even one’s sense of being.43 Lacan insists that desire is always “the desire of the Other.”44 The desire of the Other is not any kind of independent or concrete demand; rather, it marks the site of an opaque encounter with the enigmatic desire of the Other. This is the “Che vuoi?” or “What does the Other want/expect

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

133 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

of me?” And in this regard, it also marks the site of an encounter with the Real (and our continuous interaction with it); that is, something not fully symbolizable (always in surplus to the symbolic order), and which returns oppressively in the form of a superegoic logic (“is that the best you can do?”). Herein lies the ambiguity of the fantasy. On the one hand, fantasy serves as a way of mitigating the effects of (the Real of) the Other’s desire, but on the other hand, it also functions as a way of formulating or reifying the very abyss of the Other’s desire that holds such horror-fascination for the subject. Understanding one’s desire means to take this abyss into account, to fully identify with it. This can be seen as another dimension of wo es war where the subject is drawn into identification with the “I am not” (or perhaps “I have not [being]”). Through experiencing her entire economy of being as a contingent “object” (traversing the fantasy), the subject may be said to arrive at a Lacanian interpretation of the Lutheran motto: namely, “this is where I stand . . . in regard to the Real.” And what persists beyond this economy of being— once it has been historicized or (re-)objectivized— is a basic residue of the Real, a pulse of the drive, which renders such an economy non-all. This is the central meaning of Lacan’s ethical injunction to act “in conformity with the desire that is in you” and to not give “ground relative to one’s desire.”45 Thus, while Lacan speaks to an ethics of desire (or an ethics of fantasy), this is an ethics of desire in its mode of drive. What is embodied in such an ethics is not the metonymy of desire, but precisely its realization, precisely the suspension of metonymy. With an ethics of the realization of desire, the subject no longer yearns for the lost object but instead “makes herself an object.”46 In other words, through realization subjects come to identify with their fundamental fantasies in such a way that they can make sense of themselves in holistic terms as a specific kind of object (“I am this”— for example, to fully identify with a disavowed or repressed form of sexuality). This is where the drive and wo es war are fundamentally linked: the subject becomes what he or she is (“become what you are”). As with Luhmann’s perspective— where a system is able to systematize more and more phenomena to its own logic except for its own constitutive principles, which it can only repeat— the drive marks the place where the subject consistently returns to, and repeats, his or her cycles of enjoyment. This is why for Zupančič, an ethics of the realization of desire (through drive) is an ethics of the Real. The Real of the drive identifies the subject in her dimension of jouissance/the Real (that which the subject is compelled to return to). Modern ethics typifies Hegel’s “doctrine of happiness” (maximizing the pleasures of existing finitude) and effectively functions as an avoidance or repression of an ethics of the realization of desire. Again,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

134 C H AP TE R

5

what is at stake here is the mode of infinity. With this doctrine of happiness (“have a good life,” etc.), infinity functions as eternal metonymy where we are caught up in the endless cycles of self-reproducing desire. This is what Hegel refers to as fake infinity: a continuum without change or negation (or in Heideggerian terms, mere time without the temporal). With the ethics of realizing desire, on the other hand, infinity emerges precisely as a negation of eternal metonymy (a true infinity) and an unconditional commitment to the absolute. The ethics of hedonism and metonymic desire generally reflect the contemporary (Western) norm— people should pursue private ideas of pleasure and new objects of desire and should not strive to make any Real changes (and certainly not in any systemic or collective sense)— while the ethics of realizing desire is typically identified as deviant, extremist, terroristic, and so on. The modes of desire and drive can also be differentiated in terms of their respective orientation toward the Other. While desire is something that always addresses itself to, and seeks approval from, the symbolic big Other (to match up with the Other’s desire or expectation— e.g., a parent or figure of authority), drive is something that is addressed “to the silence in the Other.”47 In desire there is always a kind of metonymy of anxiety; a multiplicity of Che vuoi? so that one can never be sure of reaching a true fulfillment and/or homeostasis with regard to the Other’s infinite or impenetrable desire (this would be a variation of Groucho Marx’s famous quip, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member”). Drive, by contrast, is self-affirming and derives its satisfaction in its own terms from the very absence or silence of any Other, through the echo of itself. The sinner and the Levinasian subject, for example, may be said to achieve a certain identity in the context of desire. For Levinas, ethics derives its force from being open toward “the imponderable mystery of the Other’s desire”;48 a kind of positive embracing of the anxiety of Che vuoi? The (self-declared) sinner is similarly situated in that he or she is someone who in a way requires the disapproval (if only silent or perceived disapproval) of the big Other in order to experience pleasurein-transgression. The position of the saint, on the other hand, is more or less the opposite of this. The saint is not so much someone who does not sin, but rather someone for whom sin loses its meaning. The saint is someone “who is no longer bothered by the Other’s desire as its decentered cause.”49 In this way, the saint functions effectively in the register of drive. Psychoanalysis similarly aims to place the subject in this register. The psychoanalytic cure is reached when, through his or her own destitution, the subject is transformed into a subject of drive, a subject whose cause is one of auto-referral. In the cure, the subject undergoes subjective

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

135 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

destitution precisely in the sense that she is able to identify with the very excess (what is in her more than her) that cannot be subjectivized— there is, in the Hegelian sense, a reconciliation with excess. This is what Lacan means when he speaks of the subject as having to come to terms with this un-subjectivizable dimension of the “I am not.”50 In this sense, the cure is simultaneously a non-cure. In the cure, the subject comes to accept herself as a certain kind of object— an object of truth (“I am this and not anything else”)— for which there is no further interpretation, no further cure.51 In Freudian-Althusserian terms, the cure represents a kind of subtraction of overdetermination into determination; a determination that is thoroughly contingent (devoid of “sufficient reason”). Put differently, the psychoanalytic process moves to its conclusion at the point where the analysand realizes that there is no Other to which desire (the need for love, approval, enlightenment, etc.) can be addressed— least of all the analyst himself who, as Lacan makes clear, is only an analyst by virtue of being able to tolerate the fact he is essentially nothing more than this excess or remainder (or o-object) of drive.52 There is consequently no big Other from which a final explanation or recompense can be sought. The capacity of the subject to identify with his or her excess is effectively what Hegel means by reconciliation, not as an overcoming of excess but as an acceptance of its intrinsicality. This provides an opening, a clearing of subjectivized space where the event is rendered possible. By becoming a subject of the (death) drive, new life can emerge. This is what Žižek is alluding to when he writes that “human life is never ‘just life,’ it is always sustained by an excess of life which, phenomenally, appears as the paradoxical wound that makes us ‘undead,’ which prevents us from dying.”53 Yet here we encounter an ambiguity. Life relies upon a certain excess, the undead drive, but it does not form a simple identity with it. True life is something more, an excess of the excess. A zombie, for example, is a creature of the undead, but it has no real life or animus; it is a functioning machine that cannot engage with new purpose or desire. This is a central theme in George Romero’s excellent film Dawn of the Dead, where zombies endlessly patrol a shopping mall in a parody of consumption. At one level the zombies hunger for human flesh, but at another level they can also be seen as beings that are hungry for life as such; paradoxically, what they hunger for is hunger itself, the capacity for stimulating new desire. The zombie is forever barred from achieving life in this aspect of the excess of excess, this surplus dimension or divine spark that transcends what is undead in its mere repetition. True life is a negation of the undead, a negation of the negation or a positive affirmation of the “yes” toward something new. The drive is necessary but not sufficient; what is also required is drive in the mode of desire.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

136 C H AP TE R

5

Traversing the fantasy (i.e., the end of psychoanalysis) does not refer to any transcendence or authoritative conclusion. Traversal refers rather to a process in which desire is effectively exhausted, or perhaps refined to the point of essence. It involves a process in which the big Other (the figure of appeal and/or responsibility) is shown to be nothing more than a projection, or autopoietic functioning, of the subject’s basic fantasy. The task of the analyst is to de-mesmerize the analysand and to show the purely contingent nature of the relationship between his un-subjectivizable excess or drive and object-a (between subjectivity and void). The classic cult television series from the late 1960s, Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, is illustrative. Having resigned from the British Secret Service, an unnamed British agent (played by McGoohan) is abducted and taken to “the village” where he is referred to only as “number six” and from which he continually tries to escape. Controlling the village, “number two” (a position filled on a rotating basis) devises more and more ingenious and bizarre plans to try and extract information from the ever-resistant number six. Here we might say that number six is caught in a Kafkean web of paranoia or impenetrable desire for which number two appears to hold the answer. Yet number two appears in a range of different (even contradictory) guises for number six: parental, threatening, seductive, and so on; a figure of authority who must be variously appeased, outwitted, and/or neutralized. It is only at the end— having traversed the various stages of his basic fantasy of freedom— when “number six” perceives that he is his own persecutor (he is in fact “number one”)— that he can identify with his own cause/excess and thereby dissolve the specter of an independent mysterious Other. In this sense, what he is confronted with is that there is no number two as an external figure from whom recompense or explanation might be sought. The very assumption of his position as a number one is a coming to terms or reconciliation with the fact he is his own two; the two that signifies his inherent void. Lacan’s distinction between drive and desire might be said to introduce a kind of absolute undecidability. Lack is not foundational because drive itself is not based on lack. At the same time, drive can only be reached through the logic of desire that is based on lack. Neither drive nor desire can be regarded as primordial conditions. Desire and drive should be seen rather as two modes of response to a more basic negativity or impossibility that precedes their distinction. In desire, negativity functions as (metonymic) movement in regard to the lost or lacking object, while in drive, negativity is directly the movement itself. Desire is movement in relation to the fixity of lack returning to its place (“that’s not it!”). Drive is the fixity itself as repeated motion, as empty self-feeding pulsation (“again!” or “encore!”). In this sense, both drive and desire

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

137 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

can be seen to further underscore Hegel’s view of an existential two of noncoincidence.

Not Evil Enough! In Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Scot confronts his father, Dr. Evil, on the Jerry Springer Show demanding to know why he abandoned him. Dr. Evil explains that it is because he (Scot) is lacking when it comes to evil: “you’re quasi-evil, you’re semi-evil, you’re the margarine of evil, you’re the Diet Coke of evil, just one calorie . . . not evil enough!” In a way, this is the situation in which we find ourselves today; that is, one that it is not evil enough. Contemporary (Western) culture can be seen to embody this Diet Coke form of evil. In a recent article for The Guardian, Phil Hoad asks: “Whatever happened to Hollywood’s really evil villains?”54 From Darth Vader to T. Rex ( Jurassic Park) to Felonius Gru (Despicable Me) to Maleficent and the recent Suicide Squad, the villainous and the monstrous are presented as ultimately redeemable and effectively on the side of Good. And even where this may not be quite the case, there is typically an attempt to explain and/or contextualize villainy: for example, Kylo Ren (absent parenting), Loki (sibling envy), Bane (devotion), the various enemies of Spiderman (social marginalization), and so on. The truly unrepentant villains are few and far between and, more often than not, are portrayed as psychopaths: Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs), John Doe (Seven), Patrick Bateman (American Psycho), and, of course, Norman Bates. Modern culture reflects a certain Kantianism in the sense that we cannot imagine anyone deliberately choosing evil (i.e., the possibility of diabolical evil that Kant rules out). On the other hand, Kantian ethics clearly stands opposed to the moral sentiment. What Kant understood was the unsparing and even brutal nature of authentic ethics, subjecting everyone (including oneself) to its law. As the Preacher puts it in Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune: “the most dangerous of all creations is a rigid code of ethics. It will turn upon you and drive you into exile!” The ethical figure of Kant stands in complete contrast to the celebrated figure of moral sentiment. A classic case of the latter is Charles Dickens’s famous character Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. While Scrooge initially shuns the cloying sentiment of Christmas, he is eventually claimed by it and becomes a “good” Scrooge after visitations from four ghosts over the course of Christmas Eve night (the ghosts of Jacob Marley and those of Christmas past, present, and future). Succumbing to the Christmas message, Dickens’s Scrooge lacks the courage of his own

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

138 C H AP TE R

5

convictions and is thus the antithesis of the Kantian ethical figure. In an updated version of Dickens’s tale, Richard Donner’s film Scrooged (1988) casts a television executive producer, Frank Cross, in the title role. What remains so appealing about this film is the depiction of Cross (Bill Murray) as a character who delights in his own “evil”— when Cross learns that an eighty-year-old woman died of shock after watching the trailer for his Christmas show, he exclaims “This is terrific . . . you can’t buy publicity like this!” Moreover, his ruthless manipulations and his open acceptance of the excessively materialist nature of Christmas lend him a far greater ethical credibility before his transformation, precisely before he is “scrooged” into becoming a standard philanthropist. Hegel makes it clear that there can be no good without evil. Both good and evil are located in the will,55 and consequently a pure act of will cannot be judged as good or evil (it is both and neither) until after the event. What we call good is a retroactive institutionalization of what initially appears as evil (e.g., the violent founding of a state that is subsequently legitimized). Yet Hegel goes further than this and argues that the distinction between good and evil is, in fact, inherent to evil itself: “Man creates his purposes from himself, and it is from himself that he draws the material of his action. Inasmuch as he takes these purposes to their ultimate limits, knows only himself, and wills in his particularity without reference to the universal, he is evil, and this evil is his subjectivity.” 56 There are in effect two (related) modes of evil: conscious and existential. Conscious evil is both self-regarding and negative in that it is opposed to any sense of universal will.57 But this type of evil is merely a semblance of a deeper form of inward negativity that reflects a more basic form of existential evil or schism wherein the human is itself shown in its aspect of severance: that is, in its state of being radically separate from any order of nature. What defines human nature is its ongoing confrontation with existential uncertainty: namely, the problem of subjectivity. In this sense of being cut off from any universality, man is born to evil in his fundamental status of disjunction: that is, as a pure subject. Evil is thus the primary condition of the human being— there is no original sin (as in transgression), but there is original evil in this sense. Evil comes first and is effectively constitutive of both good and evil— the choice between good (willing the universal) and evil (willing the particular) is made possible as a result of this existential evil. This is emblematic of Hegel’s speculative approach; it is only by reading good and evil together (as located in the contingency of negativity) that it becomes possible to properly distinguish them. The relationship between good and evil is a dynamic and irresolvable one. Good is not the straightforward elimination of evil, and likewise evil is not the elimination of good. Good emerges as a fun-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

139 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

damental gesture toward the universal, but which is itself only rendered possible against a basic background of negativity or evil. Evil, on the other hand, persists as an essential excess or negativity vis-à-vis all universality and thereby enables new configurations of the good. The paradoxical result of this is that ethical action contains its own dimension of evil. In its effect of challenge to and disruption of the existing socio-moral order, such action can only appear as evil. Yet this same evil simultaneously has the effect of opening up new spaces of possibility for the reconfiguration and reinvigoration of the universal. The death of evil would consequently mean the death of ethics. What is missed or perhaps repressed in the prevailing turn against evil is this aspect of good that in the mode of drive functions as an excess of the excess: that is, as something that transcends the particular as an unaccountable surplus or madness that can be configured as a universal. It is thus figures like the James Bond villains and so on who are not evil enough— they simply want more (wealth and power) from the existing social order. The true ethical madmen and madwomen are those whose disruptions and commitments are based on a refusal of the social order as it stands. This is one of the things that fascinated Lacan about the figure of Sygne de Coûfontaine in Paul Claudel’s The Hostage (2009 [1898]). In this play, Sygne (who is in love with George) is offered a marriage proposal from a man, Turelure, who is her archenemy and who has engineered the downfall of her family. She is thus placed in the impossible position of having to choose between maintaining her honor by refusing marriage and thereby losing the family estate (and also surrendering the life of the Pope who has taken refuge there), or accepting the marriage and thereby losing her sense of honor. Father Badilon, who is aware of her situation and of the need to protect the Pope, spells out the extent of her potential sacrifice: “So you, to save the Father of all men, according to the call that has come to you, May you renounce your love, your name, your cause and your honor in this world, Embracing your executioner and accepting him as husband, even as Christ allowed Judas to partake of his body.” And yet Badilon makes it clear that she will not be condemned by the church or refused salvation if she chooses not to take up the proposal: “It is for you alone to act of your own free will.” Effectively, Badilon offers her two choices: to refuse marriage with a clear conscience or to enter into marriage, but in a sincere way (“Give thought to this great sacrament of marriage and take heed lest it be profaned. That which God has created He consummates in us. That which we sacrifice to Him He consecrates. He transforms the bread and the wine”). In the denouement of the play, George attempts to assassinate Turelure but is saved by Sygne, who throws herself in front of Turelure and takes the fatal shot (George

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

140 C H AP TE R

5

is immediately killed by return fire). In the final scenes, Sygne is on her deathbed and is visited by Father Badilon, who takes her sacrifice as a sign that she has finally forgiven her husband (“what greater love is there than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s enemies?”). Sygne, however, communicates that death is in fact too good for her husband. Badilon then appeals to divine authority and demands that she forgive her husband in order that she receive salvation and that her soul be delivered to God. In this way, Badilon tries desperately to reintegrate the dying Sygne into the discourse of the master. But Sygne continues to sign in the negative. In the alternative ending to the play (the “acting version” of scene four), it is Sygne’s husband, Turelure, who effectively plays this role of representing external authority. He similarly demands that Sygne forgive him because “it is the necessary condition of your salvation” and that, above all, she must fulfill her duty to him and their marriage and to their family (a son). But again she refuses. He finally draws upon the family motto “Coûfontaine, adsum!” imploring her to declare herself present before God, and then he repeats the motto in a more fearful register as if in realization of a different possible meaning; i.e., that the adsum (“present” or “I am present”) is defined or authorized solely by herself and that it precisely underpins her refusal. Sygne does not seek salvation in an external authority, but rather in herself. What becomes clear is that she has entered into marriage not as an act of surrender (to God’s will, patriarchal authority, etc.), but precisely as an act of defiance—she effectively makes a third choice beyond the two presented to her by Badilon. By refusing harmonious reconciliation and naturalistic reintegration into the social order, Sygne not only scandalizes her witnesses, but also comes across as the very embodiment of social evil beyond the imagination of either the manipulative Badilon or the merely villainous Turelure. Both husband and priest are rendered impotent before the horrifying abyss of Sygne as subject, the absolute evil of her subjectivity as a subject of the act. Along these lines, Zupančič demonstrates how Sygne is able to realize her desire in the mode of drive, not through a logic of having, but rather one of not-having; she does not have her cake and eats it.58 Sygne’s basic Cause— the animating principle of her fundamental fantasy— is honor: something that she does not “have,” but which functions as her basic reason for being. In order to be faithful to her sense of honor, Sygne is obliged to make an “object” of this honor and to sacrifice it to a man she detests. Thus, it is only through the nothaving of honor that she is able to realize her desire: to preserve her sense of honor and family on her terms alone. So what is the nature of Sygne’s sacrifice? Marc De Kesel argues that the type of sacrifice that Sygne makes is of the same type that is required

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

141 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

by a totalitarian regime. If someone were accused of betraying such a regime, then, whether true or not, he is expected to identify with his guilt, since to protest one’s innocence would already be “considered as a proof of guilt”— one can only truly express one’s love for the regime by sacrificing everything to it.59 However, I do not think that this argument quite hits the mark, at least when considered from a Lacanian viewpoint. What tends to be overlooked here is the distinction between the logic of sacrifice in the register of desire and that of drive. In desire, sacrifice functions precisely as a form of appeasement (or resolution) in regard to the big Other (in Kesel’s example, the state). And this logic of sacrifice is by no means restricted to totalitarian regimes. On the contrary, it is thoroughly inscribed in the culture and practices of modern capitalism, where the subject is expected to sacrifice more and more time and energy to the corporate cause. In order to succeed, employees of every kind have to adopt the language, demeanor, and stylistic content of their management hierarchies and to immerse themselves in the relevant rituals of power. In a way that is far more effective than any externally imposed state mechanism, corporate culture inscribes this logic of sacrifice in the voluntarism of the everyday. This is at the root of the phenomenon of what the Japanese have identified as karōshi, or death caused by overwork (in China this is known as guolaosi), which is symptomatic of a paradigmatic form of corporate subjectivity in which the expectation is that employees should immerse their entire being in the economy of sacrificial (and ultimately fatal) jouissance. The significance of Sygne’s ethical gesture, however, is that she precisely breaks out of this economy of sacrifice; in short, her ethics are situated at the level of the Real or drive. Instead of simply sacrificing everything in order to preserve honor (as imagined with regard to the gaze of the Other), Sygne may be said to sacrifice the very economy of this sacrifice itself. She sacrifices the exception (her sense of honor— the very thing that drives or makes sense of her sacrifices) by pathologizing or de-absolutizing it and by making of it another object that can be sacrificed as well. In this way, Sygne may be said to reach the infinity of the Real/cut, by identifying with the very horror or trauma of the gap around which her being has been constituted in response to (and as a defense against). This is not simply an ethics of the Real, but also an ethics with the Real. It is not the infinite of a shadowy (not-yet-known) realm “out there,” but the infinity of the cut itself; a cut that renders every formation as non-all, as an expression of the two (the divide between something and its void). Claudel’s Sygne and Kesel’s subject of totalitarianism are consequently situated very differently in regard to the big Other. In Kesel’s example, the subject is expected to sacrifice everything to the big Other (the state), thereby resolving the enigma of

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

142 C H AP TE R

5

its desire (what the state wants or expects from the subject). With Sygne, on the other hand, it is the big Other that is sacrificed, suspended, placed into parenthesis. Sygne becomes a figure of the drive precisely at the point where the big Other is emptied of any real purchase on her being.

Tragedy and Comedy As a new type of ethical subject, Sygne embodies a qualitative shift in knowledge and, in particular, in the way in which knowledge relates to the infinite. In its conventional functioning— knowledge in service of the master/power-institutions— knowledge is situated within a bound, or what Hegel would call spurious, infinity: that is, knowledge as based on quantitative expansion within a systemic framework. Sygne breaks out of her systemic framework and refuses to play the victim of the subordinate role that has been prescribed for her. Put in other terms, she moves from the understanding to the speculative and, by this measure, becomes a subject of the act. At the level of the act, knowledge is shown in its speculative form; that is, it shows the true nature of infinity as an absolute inherent limit or negation of finite knowledge. The field of knowledge no longer appears as something that continues to gain (infinitely) on the One of objectivity, but rather as something that is itself historical, delimited, as a certain type of object (an object intrinsically split between itself and void). This speculative form of knowledge grasps the sense of a more radical possibility that is both beyond and inherent to the existing frame of the possible. The repression of this speculative form is at the root of today’s increasingly authoritarian attempts to regulate and discipline knowledge through the various (master) discourses of the “bottom line”: “books have to be balanced,” “targets must be met,” “research and knowledge must serve business,” “universities must address social problems,” and so on. What we have effectively is a culture of knowledge without thought: that is, a culture in which thinking does not reflect on the field of knowledge itself (the frame in which thinking takes place). In this way, thought is deprived of its critical or antagonistic potential and is steered instead toward making the system work in practical terms— an implicit colonization of the imagination. Yet speculative ethics or knowledge is not essentially rooted in the tragic. Comedy can also make a central contribution to this qualitative shift in ethics or knowledge and to what Lacan refers as traversing the fantasy. Through rendering palpable the ludicrous objectivity (or objectness) of particular fantasies, comedy is capable of overcoming the gap

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

143 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

or separateness in the spurious infinite (the infinite as premised upon some big Other). This logic of objectivization runs throughout the comedy of films like Borat. In the rodeo scene, for example, Borat makes a speech that over-identifies with the American cause in the Iraq War: “We support your war of terror . . . May you destroy their country [Iraq] so that for the next thousand years not even a single lizard will survive in their desert.” This is immediately followed by Borat’s version of the Kazakhstani “national anthem” to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner” (“Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world. All other countries are run by little girls”). What Borat transgresses here is the critical distance between the subject and the lofty sense of an abstract universal or infinite: America as witness-bearer to a higher purpose. Here we might say that the signifier “America” is effectively deflowered or desublimated. “America” loses its efficiency as a pure signifier in evoking the sense of an ideal beyond, and is instead cast in all its materiality as a concrete universality in itself; as a fully embodied historical object defined in terms of its particularistic (nonmetaphorical or despiritualized) substance. Along these lines, we could also imagine a Greek Borat who would address the Eurogroup/European parliament along the following lines: “We support your austerity measures . . . May you destroy our country so that for the next thousand years not even a single life can flourish.” Perhaps, more precisely, this is where the tragicomic comes to life: the point where tragedy flips over to reveal a comic dimension in regard to suspending the efficiency of existing universality. In the current context, this would be reflected in a hard-edged political (and politicizing) comedy that would seek to confront Europe with the full horror of its actual existence as an exclusivist concrete universality. Even the figure of Sygne can be seen to mark a certain turn toward comedy. Having encouraged Sygne to sacrifice everything (name, honor, and even the cause of her being), Father Badilon then tries to reconcile her to the cosmic order of divine authority (“And do you pretend to know your intentions better than God?”). But Sygne will have none of it. So effectively, the joke is on Badilon in that he succeeds too well. He is the accidental psychoanalyst insofar as his success is simultaneously a complete failure. In pursuing the logic of sacrifice, Sygne goes to the very end and sacrifices (dissolves) the economy of sacrifice itself; she refuses the salvation that would give external purpose or authorization to her sacrifice. Sygne takes Badilon’s challenge (“It is for you alone to act of your own will”) as absolute and in so doing becomes a subject of the act; a self-authorizing subject of free defiance impelled beyond the parameters of her own subjectivity. In the sense of Hegel’s notion of comedy, she effectively comes “down on the side of absence of fate.”60

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

144 C H AP TE R

5

Here also we find the central difference between conservative and more radical forms of comedy. Following Hegel, Zupančič argues that conservative comedies are those “where the abstract-universal and the concrete do not change places and do not produce a short-circuit between them.”61 A standard figure of comedy is that of the pompous aristocrat who despite his status is nonetheless prone to various errors and weaknesses that bring him down to earth. Yet what continues to remain untouched and even to be reinforced is the abstract notion of aristocracy as such; we laugh at the contingent bearer of aristocratic-ness while preserving the latter as a universal idea. In the Western world, the ubiquitous talk show performs a deeply ideological role from this viewpoint. The typical talk show host engages in the humanization of public figures: drawing out their eccentricities, vulnerabilities, idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, and so on; making them recognizable as one of, but also more than, “us” (“even he or she has a weakness for chocolate / a passion for sport / suffers from self-doubt / depression,” and so forth). In contrast to the Frankfurt school, it’s not so much that light entertainment is simply two-dimensional, obscuring the deeper issues at stake; it is rather that the attempt to provide a more rounded view of public figures obscures their two-dimensional capacity to exercise power in ruthless ways— depth is the deception, the “true self” is the mask. This (tragicomic) dark side of light entertainment is wonderfully realized by Stanley Tucci’s Hunger Games host, Caesar Flickerman, who manages to be extravagantly upbeat, empathizing with and engaging toward his guests (the tributes) in the face of the horror they are about to endure.62 Conservative comedy is also fully operative at the level of nationhood. Generally speaking, the most popular comedians— including those situated within the field of “satire”— are those who are able to gently mock the sensibilities and predilections of their particular national culture, but only to the extent that they are able to preserve the agalma, that special x-ness, of nationhood as located in an external and inviolable realm of abstract universality or noumenality: that is, “the nation” as an entity which, despite all its particular quirks and shortcomings (“made weak by time and fate,” as Tennyson put it), nonetheless does bear witness or have privileged access to an ennobled universality. Radical comedy, by contrast, seeks to dissolve this economy of separateness between the concrete and the abstract, between the particular and the universal. Borat, for example, is not concerned with the ways in which a universal or divine superpower like the United States is prone to characteristic (empiricalfinite) failings and inconsistencies. The target of his comedy is rather the very idea that the United States is a universal or divine superpower. Through his various subversions, Borat rudely particularizes the univer-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

145 A

Q UE ST I O N

O F

T WO:

E T HI CS

AND

E V ENT

salism of America— he violates precisely what should remain inviolable. This type of logic reflects a long tradition of revolutionary resistance. In his history of the Haitian revolution (1791– 1803), Madison Bell recounts the siege of La Crête à Pierrot, where 1,200 former slaves held off more than 12,000 French troops. In the same conflict, Bell describes how the black soldiers would loudly sing the revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise, back at the Napoleonic soldiers.63 This had the effect not only of confusing and dispiriting the French, but it also drew into sharp (tragicomic?) relief the lived reality of French and European universality (liberty and equality for all) as something particularized within the power-formation of slavery and colonial domination; that is, the latter is revealed as not merely an error or distortion, but as the very crystallization of the delimited historical form of the existing universality.64 In Hegelian terms, what is revealed is the functioning of oppositional determination that characterizes the concrete universality. Thus what appears as exceptional or anomalous in regard to an existing universality, is shown to be the necessary delimitation of its functioning as a reality— its universality is operational as the result of a particular that negates or opposes it. The poignancy of this event lies with its ambiguity. It is not simply that the Haitians sought to reject French ideals in the name of an authentic cultural alternative (e.g., Haiti as the true community of God, etc.)— their response was very different from groups such as Boko Haram and Al-Shabab in this respect. True comedy involves the suspension of all semblances of authenticity, and what the Haitian rebels rejected was both the view that the French soldiers represented European superiority and the view that they represented straightforward economic opportunism. What was so shaming about the rebels’ strategy was not only that they confronted the French soldiers with their very limitation in regard to their own universal ideals, but also that they sought to preserve the authenticity of these ideals through a kind of de-authentication: to show that these ideals are only meaningful as a matter of identification rather than Identity, to demonstrate their essential rootlessness. As reflected in Dante’s Divine Comedy, universality is not something that can be circumscribed in a final sense: “As the geometrician, who endeavors / To square the circle, and discovers not / By taking thought, the principle he wants.” Conservative and radical comedy can also be distinguished from each other in terms of their characteristic orientation with regard to subjectivity. Conservative comedy tends to leave untouched our relationship with the universal, maintaining instead a kind of “beautiful soul” perspectivism in regard to the subject-interpreter (we laugh at things or mishaps from a safe distance, in an external way, without our subject-position being disturbed). With Comic Relief and its annual fund-raising events,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

146 C H AP TE R

5

the comedy remains separated from, and floats above, the issues at stake. We are encouraged to participate in various ways, to laugh at ourselves (put on red noses, etc.), while taking absolutely seriously our role as global benefactors committed to a “vision of a just world, free from poverty”; this aloof form of subjectivity is retained as an abstract universal. In radical comedy mode, it would be precisely this role of beautiful benefactor (and its sense of being apart from the interdependent power-network that reproduces global poverty) that would be the object of comedy— one could imagine, for example, an alternative sketch where instead of fundraising, the participants would be involved in consciousness-raising (the prize being the removal of the red nose). Radical comedy here takes us out of our comfort zone and presents a direct challenge to our subjectivity by showing how the latter is too often secretly complicit with the oppositional determination at work in a concrete universality. In this regard, and in contrast to conservative comedy, radical comedy is something that can be seen as touching a Real. This is reflected in the fact that such comedy is often embarrassing (e.g., the cringe-worthy dinner party scene in Borat), confusing, and even threatening. From this viewpoint, the response of the Russian state to the punk group Pussy Riot— charging them with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”— was, at one level, understandable. The shocking political comedy of Pussy Riot— the singing of the “Punk Prayer: Hail Mary, Expel Putin” in Moscow’s cathedral— resides in the fact that it so rudely particularized the reality of the universal spiritual authority of the Russian Orthodox Church as a mere organ in the reproduction of Putinist power (under Patriarch Kirill, the church fully endorses Putin’s authority along with Russian expansionism). Both officially and culturally, what was so threatening here was Pussy Riot’s targeting and undermining of the material belief in patriarchal infallibility on which both the church and the Russian state heavily rely. The dislocatory or disturbing character of comedy also draws into focus what might be called the addiction to finitude (i.e., the predominant view of finitude in its standing as separated from the universal). This is reflected in the numerous ways in which the secular imagination is implicitly constrained by strict taboos: ritualistic compliance and pious identification with corporate hierarchies, along with the routine proscription of such terms as “power,” “exploitation,” “class struggle,” and, above all, “communism.” In tearing up existing protocols and violating accepted codes of identification and behavior, comedy is something that also shows universality to be a living Real force. Such comedy is effectively on the side of the infinite: that is, the infinite as failure or transgression of the existing finitude (the absence of fate). If liberal utopia is defined by irony, then radical utopia is surely defined by comedy.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

6

Speculative Utopia

Lacan points out that desire is a certain kind of response: “desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance.”1 Desire offers protection against the disturbing dimension of drive-jouissance (the “pure desire”) that animates it and thereby serves to obscure its inherent Real. This is reflected in the nature of capital itself. At one level, capital is a force of the drive: it simply wants more of itself; as Marx says, it wants nothing more than to “go on, go on!” in its self-reproducing cycles. Yet in order to function, capital relies upon a logic of desire in regard to the big Other. Marx was the first to identify a central paradox running through capitalism: the more it secularizes the world, the more it tends to mystify it— it is a de facto monotheism in this sense. Walter Benjamin, on the other hand, speaks of capitalism in terms of a cult that constantly generates guilt. In more Lacanian terms, capitalism is reproduced as a cult of sacrifice that exists to serve its dark God of desire. The spell of this dark God of the (big) Other’s desire is very hard to resist, for the signs and portents of its (autopoietic) power are seen to be everywhere in evidence.2 We are obliged to interpret these signs and deal with the consequences. Thus, rumors about good investments and corresponding anxieties about debt become self-fulfilling. Regardless of what is “known,” it is the behavior of the economic actors already in-worship, so to speak, that has to be taken into account. But it is only in retrospect that one can be judged either to have made a “sound investment” or to have been “reckless.” This uncertainty, the fact that we can never be sure as to what capital wants from us, generates the specter of an eternal or external presence— capital as a God of obscure (metonymic) desires— in whose hands rest the forces of fate and chance.

Inside the Maze The logic of the cult of sacrifice also finds expression in the popular Maze Runner series by James Dashner. The narrative here is structured around a familiar dystopian plotline: devastated by a global virus (following environmental changes), humanity has to find a way to live. The twist is that 147

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

148 C H AP TE R

6

the emergency government deliberately unleashed an artificial virus in order to cull the population and thereby optimize the remaining natural resources. The virus mutates, and instead of immediately causing death, it turns people into psychopathic zombie-like creatures— thereby creating an even greater threat to the remnants of the social order. A government agency is then set up to try and find a cure for the “flare” virus. The agency finds young people who are naturally resistant to the virus and, after they have wiped their memories, it places them in a self-enclosed micro-world that is also a maze in order to subject them to various tests (to identify the source of their resistance). As “Gladers,” the teenagers send out runners into the maze to find a way out and to solve the mystery of why they have been placed there. Dashner’s series could be described as a kind of Kafka-on-speed wherein the Gladers are constantly engaged in trying to decode messages or variables and to determine precisely what the maze controllers want of them. In these terms, the maze resonates with the increasingly regulated nature of contemporary working life (often by remote agencies) through such things as ongoing personal development reviews, smart objectives, the testing of core competencies, key behaviors, psychometrics, and so on. At one level, this can be seen as a form of obsessive neurosis in which work becomes so heavily regulated and categorized that real change cannot take place; transparency becomes the very form of opacity, reflexivity the very form of remoteness, hyperactivity the very form of inertia in which corporate logic and hierarchy are sustained or ontologized as an infinity of the same. At another level, this can also be seen as a manifestation of the superegoic principle in which corporate organizational life continues to be reproduced through an ethos of guilt and sacrifice: “Are you really doing enough?” “How can you improve from here?” and so on. The more that is given (to an organization), the more it produces the sense that more can be given which, in turn, feeds into an institutionalized suspicion that employees are merely going through the motions, ticking boxes, and so forth. So what we have is a kind of fantasmatic arms race in which human resources are charged with continually trying to overcome perceived inherent resistance (to eliminate “slack,” maximize “human capital,” improve “performance,” and so forth) through increasing regulation. Yet such regulation is self-fueling and becomes its own form of mystification; a fixation with the stubborn x of resistance. The same kind of paradoxical logic can also be discerned in cognitivism, which tends implicitly to declare the death of the void (of subjectivity) as a way of putting it to death: for example, scientistic forms of manipulating subjectivity as a way of continuing to be vigilant against the return of the void/subject. This is perhaps one of the reasons why cognitive psychology works so well with the existing corporate milieu.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

149 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

Every cruel measure taken against the Gladers— from enforced amnesia to misinformation, being terrorized by the fearsome “Grievers,” and even murder— is justified by the government on the grounds of addressing the threat of the flare virus. More and more sacrifices are required of the Gladers, culminating in the demand that the central character, Thomas, willingly submit to the live vivisection of his own brain. Along Hegelian lines, what Thomas comes to realize is that the real threat lies not so much with the virus, but with the very gaze or perspective of the government itself in seeking a solution to the virus in this way. All of the official justification of the measures taken against the Gladers serves to conceal the inherent threat of governmental and systemic violence. The same kind of logic is at play in the modern political economy of austerity, welfare cuts, and authoritarian regulation where social exclusion is rationalized in the name of addressing the global malaise of economic insecurity and crisis. Such measures become precisely a way of avoiding the fact that the malaise is structural and inherent, inscribed in the very gaze that perceives the nature of the problems (and the types of solutions sought) in these characteristic terms. At the same time, the relatively benign initiatives of “Just Capital,” “Social Enterprise,” “Corporate Social Entrepreneurship,” and so on serve only to reinforce the idea that the existing system is essentially neutral and that more elements or variables have to be factored in to ensure its proper functioning.3 This reflects the logic of spurious infinity; that is, an infinity of continuous adjustment or factoring-in within the existing system. With this implicit sense of infinity, the cult of capital is articulated through themes of fate and sacrifice. The oracular sites of this cult are to be found in the global stock markets and corporate banks where information may be said to notionally coincide with capital; where information is mapped on to the very movements, the self-generating (virtual) reality, of capital itself. This information is effective only insofar as it is invested with belief, which in turn raises the question of proximity in regard to the Thing of capital. Debt, for example, functions only insofar as it is accepted as legitimate. Beyond a certain point, the debt becomes so exorbitant that legitimacy is suspended (thereby triggering calls for debt cancellation, a moratorium, and so on). In the case of Ponzi, the true “crime” was that, in a way, the Thing of capital was approached too directly: he transgressed the proper distance as mediated through desire and directly enacted the drive of capital in its empty repetitions and cycles of credit and debt. In contrast to the position of the debt-defaulter, Ponzi’s transgression was an internal one: a direct manipulation, and demonstration, of the empty (or virtual) logic of capital. Something of this also appears to be at the root of the moral outrage over the perceived excesses of bankers;

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

150 C H AP TE R

6

that is, they are guilty of overstepping the boundary of desire into a realm of obscene jouissance.

The European Imp of the Perverse As with the Saw film series, the Hunger Games picks up on the pervert’s identification with the jouissance of the victims-participants who are forced into situations where they have to make impossible or traumatic choices (a central feature of contemporary humiliation television and media entertainment). In this context, we might say that a living version of the Hunger Games is today being played out in countries like Greece. The gaze of (patrician) Europe is becoming increasingly perverse insofar as it identifies with the jouissance of Greek turmoil and guilt as a global spectacle of sacrifice: the Greeks must suffer for their own good; indeed, the collective good depends on their suffering. Nor is there any clear economic outcome. According to documents drawn up by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, even if Greece adopts all of the austerity measures, the level of debt will continue to be unsustainable (well past 2030) without significant debt relief.4 In terms of Lacan’s example of “your money or your life”— where both choices are worse (sudden death or prolonged death without money)— the Greeks have been placed in a similar situation of the impossible choice: either leave the Eurozone and suffer the immediate consequences, or remain part of the Eurozone and suffer long-term mortification, consigned to the widening dead zone of the Euro-spurned. This is the depravity of contemporary Europe: the creation of entire “permadebt” regions (especially, though not exclusively, southern Europe) and indeed across the globe, where sacrifice is effectively outsourced on a mass scale. Along the lines of the Elizabethan dramatist Fulke Greville, and his view of the paradoxical condition of humanity as one in which “we are created sick [and] commanded to be sound,” today’s world is one in which we are effectively born into debt and commanded to try and escape it. Deeply inscribed in the logic of the superego, indebtedness functions as the basic form of social regulation wherein austerity is freely assumed as a kind of existential guilt for systemic failure. Writing in The Times, Daniel Finkelstein argued that the rather bullish approach of Yanis Varoufakis (the ex-finance minister for Greece) in regard to his dealings with the Eurogroup was a form of gaming strategy where the objective is to convince your opponents that you are so irrational and volatile that you would be prepared to risk everything,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

151 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

even if that would mean total crisis, if your demands are not met. As Finkelstein put it, “persuading your adversary that you are mad is a classic game theory gambit.”5 The point of interest here is that Finkelstein cannot even imagine the possibility that Varoufakis was sincere in trying to change the criteria regarding debt and its management. And this speaks to a more general ethos wherein anyone who seeks to change (or even question) the rules of existing economic organization is regarded at best as feigning madness in pursuit of a particular outcome, or at worst as genuinely mad. This is how the de facto economization of politics functions today: that is, as a political delimitation of the imagination in regard to ostensibly external standards of normalcy. It is in this context that we can also understand the submission of the Syriza government in Greece to the (even more severe) austerity strictures imposed by the Eurogroup. Despite its democratic mandate, the Syriza government, like every other European government, has been unable to escape the totalitarian grip of capital-as-big Other. But this is not a particular failing of Syriza. Every political party and/or government eventually comes up against the same basic problem of either having to adjust to the existing system or to face the consequences of systemic exclusion. As Lacan points out, all power is effectively reproduced through the same kind of moral injunction to continue with business as usual, to continue in the service of goods, and thereby to prevent any movement toward the realization of desire.6 In an interview reproduced in the New Statesman (July 13, 2015), Varoufakis revealed that whenever he tried to advance a reasoned economic argument for Greek recovery in the Eurogroup meetings, he was met with silence: “there was no engagement at all. It was not even annoyance, it was as if one had not spoken.”7 At one level this can be seen as evidence of the Lyotardian différend: that is, a point of absolute discontinuity where there is no common ground between language games that might support the conditions for resolution and/or understanding. But if we look more closely, the problem is not so much a lack of understanding but a kind of fullness, or perhaps exhaustion of, understanding. As Varoufakis points out, there was indeed an understanding that “we are on the same page analytically,” and yet when speaking on an individual basis, “powerful figures [would] look at you in the eye and say ‘you’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway.’”8 In other words, what we have here is the basic structure of fantasy: “I know very well (that your argument is reasonable), but anyway . . .” Indeed, we might say that what Varoufakis came up against was the Real in the fantasy, that which always returns to its place: a reflex conformity to the absolute of recapitalizing, and reaffirming, the divine rule of the banks of Europe. To try and regulate the financial flows through mere reason would be to risk the jealous

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

152 C H AP TE R

6

wrath of capital itself. In the same interview, Varoufakis recounts an episode when the Eurogroup president informed him that Greece was about to be excluded from the Eurozone. When Varoufakis challenged the legality of the Eurogroup’s authority to move unilaterally to exclude a member state from the Eurozone (without establishing unanimity among the rest of the member states), he was advised that the Eurogroup is not bound by convention or legal restraint because “it does not exist in law”: “So what we have is a non-existent group that has the greatest power to determine the lives of Europeans. It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. So no citizen ever knows what is said within. . . . These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.”9 As established in the constitution for Europe (the Lisbon Treaty), the founding values of the European Union include not only human dignity and freedom but also democracy, equality and, crucially, the rule of law. And yet in the Eurogroup we have an esoteric organization at the very center of real European power that is situated beyond the reach of democratic accountability and is beyond the law. In Hegelian language, the Eurogroup reflects a condition in which the “abstract good is etherealized into something wholly devoid of power”;10 that is, a condition where the very values that define the European Union remain an abstraction rather than an actualization. In effect, the Greeks (and European people in general) find themselves in the same kind of position as the plebeians struggling against patrician power. What is at stake here is the status of the law itself. On the one hand, there is the dominant technocratic law that systematically applies the rules of the existing power framework of Europe, ensuring the undisturbed rhythm of capital and imposing austerity through “restriction implied in menace” (i.e., the very opposite of right and justice).11 But on the other hand, there is a more radical possibility for law as a living embodiment (and ongoing realization) of the stated values and principles of the European constitution. Put in other terms, this is a struggle between law in the register of desire and law in the register of drive. And here we also see two modes of Hegel’s oppositional determination. With the Eurogroup, the law is used precisely to achieve a state of lawlessness (to situate itself beyond the law), while the Greek position essentially reflects the lawless (not-yet-codified) commitment to European ideals in order to inform and drive the law. Each has a distinctive orientation with regard to the Real and the big Other. For the Eurogroup (and the capitalist power structure generally), the law is mobilized as a barrier against traumatic (Real) disruption that would inevitably result from an authentic commitment to reifying the European Union’s founding values. This is a law of desire (a law of non-realization)

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

153 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

that not only permits, but also encourages, the vicarious sacrifice of a nation with a smile and/or shrug of necessity vis-à-vis the big Other of capital. In the register of drive, the law suspends (mobilizes against) the authority of the big Other and moves toward a (Real) realization of desire. In this sense, the law of the drive authorizes itself through its very making and enactment. The Greek crisis throws into stark relief the ongoing reproduction of capitalism through cycles of debt-dependency in which the implicit message from the centers of capital is the following: “We will relieve your symptoms of debt as long as you commit yourselves to remaining in debt; as long as you sacrifice yourselves in the continuance of the existing good.” In this respect, the struggle of Syriza is the struggle for the renewal of the political imagination everywhere. Such an imagination cannot retreat into any form of organicism or nationalism (this, as Varoufakis points out, would simply open the door to neofascism), nor should it drift into pragmatic compromise— the zombie politics of capitulating social democracy. This is where organizations like Syriza can potentially find a more resonant purchase. Unlike the official social democratic Left of Europe, Syriza (certainly in its early political surge) has demonstrated a refusal to accept the system of economic power as a naturalistic horizon, and also a refusal to smooth out the current crisis through a fatalistic language of “necessary adjustments,” “sharing the national burden,” “hard decisions,” over welfare, and so on. A political struggle begins with the bracketing, or re-objectification, of such a horizon and with the naming of it in its particularity. In terms of the Greek referendum and the resounding “no” to austerity measures, the point is not to disavow the result or to sidestep any inconsistency, but rather to give emphasis to this inconsistency: to maintain the orientation of the “no” by showing that this authoritarian imposition of debt is first and foremost an impoverishment of European democracy and legitimacy and of the very idea of Europe itself, and to demonstrate that Europe is more than ever a site of political struggle. Along the lines of Claudel’s Sygne, Syriza’s ethical gesture has been to identify with the very horror of its national condition. By refusing to play along with the obscene rituals of sacrifice, the ongoing radical potential in Syriza continues to lie with its passive-aggressive political resistance: observing existing European economic policy, but only to the extent of underscoring its emptiness and irrelevance for the future. The danger is that in constantly having to conduct rearguard actions over austerity Syriza will turn in on itself, devolve into more factions, and thereby lose political momentum and direction. One possibility is that Syriza could become part of a new International with an alternative constitution for Europe and a program for transforming the European Union in immediate concrete terms.12

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

154 C H AP TE R

6

For the European Left, revitalization will depend largely on its ability to reinvent the idea of Europe itself: to develop a radical universalism that connects positively with the (negative) excess of Europe; in Lacanese, to connect with what is in Europe more than Europe. And this means actively moving toward a condition of reconciliation. Hegelian reconciliation does not imply any straightforward overcoming or resolution of negative excess, but rather the recognition that such excess is inherent and constitutive of being— it is “the recognition that that toward which the negative relating is directed is rather its essence.”13 In seeking to expel excess-negativity we are really struggling against our own demons, our inherent excess-negativity.14 In finding greed and corruption in the Other, we are venting our own secret fantasies about how the Other is able to transgress and amass jouissance in ways that are already part of our imagination; we seek to externalize and punish precisely what lies within ourselves. In other words, it reflects the structure of extimacy: “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me.”15 In contrast, a politics of reconciliation would be based on what might be called a process of intimalization: that is, a recognition that what is projected as external is in fact entirely intimate and intrinsic. Europe remains divided over its sense of authenticity: who or what speaks for Europe? Who or what is authorized to enact, prosecute (and make exceptions to) European laws? For northwestern Europe, there is a widespread (if implicit) tendency to view the European legacy in terms of a Protestant Germanic/Nordic tradition that must be preserved and advanced (e.g., the European Alliance for Freedom). In the southern Mediterranean region, by contrast, this same (populist) legacy is oriented more toward the idea of a classical Greco-Roman tradition that should or will be revived in its cultural superiority (e.g., Golden Dawn). Notwithstanding any tensions that might exist here, both perspectives try to situate Europe in a deep sense of organic rootedness. And yet in the founding myth of Europe, we also find a more radical image; one that resonates with the dimension of inherent excess and which alludes to restless universality beyond any particularism. As the myth is typically recounted, Europa was a Phoenician princess (the daughter of King Agenor) who is believed to have lived somewhere in the region now known as Lebanon. Having been seduced by Zeus, she was then carried by him (in the form of a bull) over the sea to the island of Crete to found a new social order— thereby signaling a departure from the ancient world to the modern world of a new European civilization. What is not so well known about the myth is that prior to her transition, Europa had a dream in which two continents, personified as women, visited her. Asia argued that because Europa had been born in Asia, she therefore belonged to her. The other woman-continent,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

155 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

who was nameless, replied that her origin was unimportant and that no claims upon her could be made. So what resides within this myth is not only the theme of migration— Europa as the archetypal migrant seeking new choices— but also the constitutive principle of excess (vis-à-vis the contemporaneous Asiatic tradition) and the idea that Europe should be grounded in no other principle than its own notionality; the pure madness of being realized in its own terms as self-authenticating without reference to any preexisting order or authority: in short, without reference to any big Other. In psychosocial terms, we might say that what is alluded to in the figures of Europa’s dream is the radical potential of a continental movement from desire to drive.

Universality Badiou raises a fundamental question for contemporary ethico-political action. Given that “every event is a surprise . . . how can we prepare ourselves for such surprises?”16 Put another way, is there a way to engage with the event and, if there is, in what terms might we formulate the sense of “agency”? This type of question is often leveled at Lacanian theory too: if the Real consists in the negation of the symbolic order, then what can be done about it; how can we engage (symbolically) with it? The answer to these types of questions cannot be unambiguous. Badiou, for example, states categorically that “there is no hero of the event.”17 At the same time, toward the end of Logics of Worlds, Badiou argues for the development of a new kind of heroism.18 Effectively, this would be a heroism without a hero (in any substantialist sense); a kind of obstinate predisposition that at least allows for the possibility of an event (precisely an unraveling of substantialism). Lacan similarly affirms that the subject is “not in the act”;19 the subject cannot simply control or command the act like a Hollywood action hero (this hero is effectively a figure of the anti-act). The Lacanian act is something that presupposes a basic uprooting and/ or liquefaction of subjectivity— or as Lacan puts it, “I must become the waste product of what I am introducing as a new order into the world.”20 In this sense, the central aim of psychoanalysis can be seen as one of trying to bring the subject into proximity with the act. In Lacan, the true act marks a rupture of some kind and is simultaneously something that “establishes the beginning.”21 Indeed, Lacan explicitly links the notion of the act to a revolutionary process that aims at “stimulating a new desire.”22 This is also what Lacan finds so significant in the character of Sygne de Coûfontaine. What makes Sygne a new type

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

156 C H AP TE R

6

of ethical figure is the way her intervention connects with the register of knowledge. Sygne stands in stark contrast to, for example, the figures of Oedipus and Hamlet: Oedipus essentially blunders and suffers because of what he does not (initially) know; Hamlet is incapable of acting because he remains, so to speak, caught in the headlights of the Other’s knowledge.23 Sygne, on the other hand, acts freely and in such a way as to take on the very thing that from the perspective of her own knowledge is rendered impossible or unthinkable. Sygne goes to the very end, circumscribes her agalma, and then in the terms of Lacan, offers this up as the waste product of her (new) being. It is along these lines that Lacan argues that there is no civilization without sewerization.24 Through this circumscription, Sygne is able to realize her desire by making an object of the economy of her being and thereby transcending its immanent limitations— placing herself in the frame as a way of overcoming that frame. This new form of (pure) desire— generated through the dissolution of organicism— is paradoxical in the sense in that it opens toward the drive that is reflected in the not-having of being in its orientation toward (and sacrifice to) the desire of the Other. This is a form of desire that effectively learns to live with the infinity of the cut. It is in this context that we can also approach universality as a process of (unstable) enframing. Comedy, Zupančič argues, is something that reflects “the universal at work.”25 What comes across as unsettling and discordant in comedy is the very movement of the universal itself, revealing existing (concrete) universality as nothing but stabilized discordancy and distortion. In comedy (though not only comedy), the universal is manifested as the movement of what Hegel refers to as inward fracturing: the tensional breakdown of the particular, the inability of the particular to be itself. In paradoxical terms, it is universality that is the vital force (the movement of the negative) that overcomes the (partial) stasis of every delimited organicism. As with Lacan’s view of the sexual nexus, the particular-universal relationship is an impossible one. Every particular is exceeded by a restless incompletion that is the universal. It is not the particular that animates the empty or dead space of the universal; it is rather the universal itself that functions as a living movement that overruns every particularity. Universality is the dimension of excess or dynamic negativity within every particular. This is what Marx picks up on in his view of capital as a universal force that is capable of dissolving all that is solid into air. In Hegelian terms, universality springs from the absolute of incompleteability (the animating intersection of substance = subject) in which all particularity is undermined by a vital negativity from within. The gap is not between the particular and the universal,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

157 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

but between the particular and itself (between the particular and its inherent void). Universality is effectively a symptom, grounded in failure (of the particular). Even consciousness itself can be regarded as a kind of universalized result of cosmic error. And there are reverberations of this error throughout human life: from the early specular dislocation of the Lacanian mirror stage (the ongoing mismatch between the unified image of self— reflection, image, representation, etc.— and the failure to realize or act out that self in the given world) to the various impacts of the Real (trauma, discontinuity, disintegration, and so on) that effectively defibrillate the subject into new forms of consciousness. Like the volcanic eruptions that shattered the frozen stability of the ancient ice age (the period of “snowball earth”), we might say that consciousness arises because of the failure of dormancy to be itself. In contrast to harmonism— that is, the view that there is some kind of pre-given harmonious One that must be recognized (groups like ISIS, Pegida, and the Identitarian movement are fully harmonist in this sense)— universality is a symptom of the constitutive turbulence that renders every particularity incomplete. Far from there being a “universal consciousness,” consciousness is rather the universal result of the discontinuous nature of the field of being— the one in its failure to be one (the one as always two). The process of concretizing universality perhaps reaches its most sublime and spontaneous form in comedy, but it is by no means limited to it. Art, journalism, science, and so on are all capable of contributing to this process (and are necessarily affected by it at some level). Insofar as all human endeavor is capable of rendering obsolete or ludicrous existing universality, and dissolving its power of imaginary, then we can speak of a comedic dimension that points to an absence of fate. Likewise, where the theme of fate continues to be reinforced or sacralized, we can speak of a tragic dimension. In this sense, the modern world can be seen to be thoroughly in the grip of an economics of tragedy. This brings us back to the position of the Left and, along the lines of Badiou, its potential (paradoxical) ability to prepare itself for evental surprises. Here the question of infinity takes on a singular resonance. What is at stake is not so much this or that policy or personality (although these are not without importance), but rather— and as unlikely as it might seem— a more general politico-philosophical predisposition regarding the idea of infinity. In this regard, the political imagination of today’s Left (and especially the official Left) is almost entirely dominated by an implicit Kantianism. That is to say, it operates effectively as if capitalism were an infinity above and beyond the reach of finitude, a basic form of fate against which we can only make practical mitigating adjustments.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

158 C H AP TE R

6

A meaningful revitalization of the Left will depend on breaking its own addiction to finitude and on (re-)integrating, at some level, a speculative understanding of infinity within the terms of its political subjectivity and engagement. This is not merely an abstract matter or something that can and should be consigned to the seminar. To make a virtue of simply “getting on with the job of politics” and/or embracing “pragmatism” is already to be claimed by a silently functioning Kantianism. Such Kantianism is clearly evident in the increasingly desperate attempts by the official Left (e.g., European social democratic parties) to occupy the “center ground,” to “avoid extremes,” to demonstrate “economic competence/ credibility,” and so on. In psychoanalytic terms, this Left reflects a living mortification that identifies with the (dead) master’s discourse— a kind of Gothic politics— in order to avoid any confrontation with the Real. As a remote (spurious) infinity, economic necessity serves to stabilize existing finitude as a fatalistic cycle: an end of history that can only be reaffirmed in various ways. In short, it is a politics based on an infinity of repetition rather than a speculative infinity of the negation or disruption of finitude itself. Yet the question remains as to how the Left can incorporate this sense of infinity into its practical forms of finite engagement.

Empire of the Gaze In addressing the question of “how to change the world,” Badiou argues that the true measure of change lies not so much with the achievement of a particular result but with the change itself, with the emergence of a new form of subject.26 For Badiou, this effectively means making a choice between happiness and satisfaction; in order to change the world, we need to embrace happiness. In contrast to Aristotle’s view of a balanced and harmonious eudaimonia, Badiou’s happiness refers to a process of struggle that is prepared to forego satisfaction. From a psychoanalytical viewpoint, the distinction that Badiou draws between satisfaction and happiness can be seen to broadly overlap with the distinction between desire and drive— Badiou, in fact, makes an explicit link between his notion of happiness and the Lacanian view of ethical drive, of not giving up one’s desire.27 But the Lacanian insight is that the one cannot be simply chosen over the other; both desire and drive (and satisfaction and happiness) are parts of the same asymmetrical malfunctioning that is the human being. We are inscribed in the same restlessness of existential movement, the inward fracturing, of which Hegel speaks. And the psychoanalytic insight is that, at some level, we enjoy this malfunction-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

159 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

ing: suffering as its own satisfaction (i.e., the substance of jouissance on which being feeds). The problem here rests not so much with the content, but with the formulation. This comes into view with Badiou’s tendency to characterize capitalism almost exclusively in terms of what he sees as the conservative norm of satisfaction (the consumption of commodities to keep the economic system going). Yet, as a holistic system, capitalism is something that is able to draw on, and to reproduce itself through, the capacity for jouissance and the satisfying-dissatisfaction embodied in its rituals and practices of sacrifice. It is not so much a question of an existing conservative stability (capitalist satisfaction) versus the industry of movement (radical happiness); it is more a question of addressing the movement of being itself and how it becomes caught up in particular kinds of cycles. In contrast, Badiou’s approach reflects what can be seen as a characteristic form of spatialism: there exists a certain stability of space (or situation of being) that is then dislocated by the motions of an event. Indeed, Badiou affirms that the event itself is already part of a spatialized (as in non-exceptional) order of being. This is at the root of a characteristic tendency to view the state (and state power) as a fully saturated space, regulated through policing mechanisms and so on. Genuine radical politics should consequently seek to organize itself outside this space in permanent exile (or subtraction). On this basis, Badiou is rather dismissive of Syriza and sees in it the latest example of a rather standard “capitaloparliamentarianism.”28 For Badiou, Syriza is effectively a disappointing sideshow that highlights the dangers of seeking to engage in state power only to be overwhelmed and incorporated by its underlying capitalist determinants. Yet the real problem is not so much that this is unduly pessimistic but that, in a way, it is not pessimistic enough. The position of the Left today is undoubtedly desperate. The collapse of twentieth-century communism has precipitated the steady erosion of the rights and political power of workers, hugely undermining their capacity for collective action. More than this, the very authoritarian mechanisms of the previous communist regimes are feeding into the new forms of a powerful antidemocratic capitalism that is being spearheaded by countries like China and Russia and which is spreading rapidly across the globe. This combines with the emergence of a postmodern and globalized medievalism (already identified by Hedley Bull) in which nation-states are becoming increasingly subject to corporate power. The highly secretive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), for example, is something that aims at the privatization of all global services and would mean that, along with banking, commerce, transport, and so on, things like health, education,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

160 C H AP TE R

6

and the water supply would not have local accountability and could not be regulated by national governments. Under the terms of the TTIP (to which Trump, following Obama, is fully committed), corporations will be able to deploy migrant workers as they wish and to withhold “employee” status from them (thereby disqualifying migrant workers in regard to employment and/or citizenship rights).29 In this way, the global expansion of capital develops hand-in-hand with the marginalization of social rights. In this context, the Left’s defense of a social democratic politics— with its tradition of redistributive social justice and collective welfare— is, I would argue, both legitimate and even necessary. But it cannot be restricted to this. Badiou is right to point to the danger of capitulating to neoliberal-capitalist forces, but equally there is also the danger of the Left embracing a splendid isolationism that never risks the act. Badiou here presents a false choice between state power and a “genuine” universality. And this appears to be symptomatic of a certain tendency in Badiou to separate the universal from the particular and to conceive universality in rather abstract independent terms, reflected in his idea of “one world” and of an underlying (positive) commonality that is in some sense already there. Hegel’s insight is to show that universality is not anything external but is rather a living force of negation within, preventing the particular from becoming a Particularity. Universality is neither an empty place nor an unfolding within the chain of being, but is effectively movement— the very condition of politics. There is nothing inauthentic about universality. This is why Marx does not simply counterpose communism to capitalism. Communism is not conceived as a simple displacement of capitalism, but rather as a further development of the vitality of the universal within capitalism. A Lacanian version of this might be that symptoms never lie. Symptoms mark both a crisis and a path to the reconciliation. One cannot ignore one’s symptoms in the hope of finding an alternative, more authentic subjectivity; they have to be addressed and worked through. And it is in this context that Žižek rightly insists on developing a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism as a system, rather than critiquing mere elements of it in a moralistic way (e.g., “bankers’ greed” and so on). Yet here I would add two further points of qualification. First, while there is undoubtedly a danger of moralism, there is also a corresponding danger of lapsing into a rather detached perspective in which one simply puts all the blame on the system. This is what was so interesting about Iceland. After the 2008 financial crash, the Icelandic government refused to bail out its banks (thereby refusing austerity), allowed banks to fail, and supported the prosecution of individual bankers. In contrast to the standard position of the vast majority of Western governments (that the banks are too big to fail), the Icelandic government took the view that the

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

161 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

banks are not above the law and that they should not be treated as “the holy churches of the modern economy” (President Olafur Grimmson, 2013). Less than a decade since the crash, Iceland has surpassed its precrisis economic output and paid off the bulk of its debts while maintaining its commitment to a welfare social model. It might very well be argued that the success here consists of little more than a restoration of Icelandic capitalism. While this does have some truth, we should not buy into the old leftist piety that crises are to be embraced in the hope of an authentic backlash at some indeterminate point in the future. Iceland’s practical and effective resistance against a global tide of austerity should be considered as a significant political achievement. More than this, it demonstrates the potential of the law as a living, creative abstraction against the seemingly inexorable power of economic forces. While opposition to austerity is not necessarily anticapitalist in itself, the opposition to fatalism nevertheless underscores a capacity for deepening a culture of the commons (in this instance, the economic commons) and for opening the political imagination with regard to the possibilities of a collective state. So while straightforward moralism should certainly be rejected, this does not preclude the possibility of more radical forms of ethico-political intervention that seek to engage strategically in particular struggles and more widely in critiquing the naturalistic pretensions of economic power. In this regard, the Left needs to be more than a harbinger of crisis; it needs to become an effective force of bureaucratic management and organization. The Left should assume the mechanisms for saving capitalism as the very means for opening the political space in which to think and create the movement beyond the reign of capital. The second point is that worldlessness as a sociopolitical force is not the exclusive preserve of a capitalist dynamic and/or something that can only be acted upon subsequently. We are already part of the process of worldlessness and can contribute to its shape, development, and transformation through every form of human endeavor that is actively pushing to create evental space and movement. In this context, a revival of the sense of an “international” will be central to the left-wing imagination. Part of this revival must also involve a qualitative shift in the meaning and dimensioning of internationalization itself. Above all, it will involve identifying with the principle of worldlessness (i.e., that there is no “world” other than the one we choose to make and are directly responsible for). This is an important foil against, for example, the more familiar populist responses to globalization (of both left and right varieties) that rely ultimately on some sense of an exclusive “substance” that needs to be preserved against various forms of constitutive “threat.” Neither populism nor social democracy is a viable option for the future of the Left.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

162 C H AP TE R

6

At various levels, left-wing politics should seek instead to develop what might be called an aesthetics of worldlessness that actively fosters a sense of the future beyond that of the current world matrix; changing the very parameters and norms of the existing patterns of change. It has to become engaged as an entire social movement— encompassing science, art, education, virtual technologies, and so on— in order to re-possibilize the impossible against the prevailing economic fatalism and re-politicize the de facto economization of politics. As part of a vibrant commons of open creative encounter, the Left needs a far more reflexive culture with a view to re-democratizing its democracy, re-collectivizing its collectivism, overcoming its reliance on formal political and technocratic elites, galvanizing intellectual resources through open network and internet forums, seeking practical alternatives, and finding effective ways to equip and enable genuine forms of freedom and autonomy. Such a Left must be post-global in the sense of utilizing the forces of globalization against existing globalization and its power forms of systemic exclusion and precariatisization. Extemporizing on the old environmentalist motto, it must think systemically in acting locally. Above all, it must forge a political imagination that presupposes the logic(s) of the evental as such. This has become even more urgent in the light of the breakup of the old power blocs across North Africa and the Middle East, with its resulting displacement of huge numbers of people and their desperate struggles to reach the shores of Europe. The impact of the refugee and immigrant crisis poses not merely a logistical or resources problem, but political questions concerning the idea of Europe itself. The response of the populist right wing is, of course, a predictable one: refugees and migrants should be excluded on the grounds of sociocultural content (“they do not share our values,” etc.) or, at the very least, they should be strictly controlled through legalistic forms of pre-marginalization (reduced rights, low employment status, limited access to welfare resources, and so on). The fact is, however, that this type of discourse not only reflects the real concerns of working-class people, but it also hits upon a basic truth: it will indeed be the working classes that are affected most with regard to employment, housing, welfare resources, and social disruption while the other end of town will remain shielded, benefiting from cultural diversification, service provision, and so on. The typical liberal-left view (that we should avoid taking parochial or racist positions and that the current refugee/migrant situation is a humanitarian crisis) is consequently misguided and overlooks basic political economy. The European Union, for example, is something that is based on an economic system that integrates through marginalization. The European power realities of violence, exploitation, and expropriation have been transferred to both the

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC6 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

163 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

internal and external peripheries, especially the former colonies and dependent regions. It is this process of transference that lies at the root of the mass displacements taking place today. This is also the problem with the radical-democratic focus on deepening and expanding the principles of freedom and equality within the liberal-democratic framework; that is, without linking it to a critique of the political economy that is constitutive of this framework. In this context, the antagonism is not so much between the hegemonic forces supporting European/Western principles and the counter-hegemonic forces opposed to such principles, but rather it is inherent to the very process of trying to develop the principles (of freedom and equality) in a way that disavows the political economy of systematic oppression on which this process is based. With Islamic fundamentalist forces (ISIS, Boko Haram, Al-Shabab, and so on), there is a similar disavowal of political economy, with the basic idea being that all will be well if total religious conformity is established and maintained through the (continued) eradication of the excesses of infidels and blasphemers. Effectively, what we have is a clash of two perceived modes of excessive enjoyment that are, in fact, reflections of each other within the same logic of disavowal. On the Islamic fundamentalist side, there is the sense of an infinite European/Western capacity for permissive gratification through institutionalized forms of exclusion and cruelty (against Islam). On the European/Western racist side, there is the sense of an infinite Islamic capacity for judgmental stricture through permissive cruelty and punishment (against nonbelievers). The Left needs to change the terms of debate, develop mobilizations against the economic system that are not merely within it, and show that any meaningful deepening and expansion of the principles of freedom and equality will depend on confronting the system as such. Only in this way can the Left reengage with the sense of a future linked to the possibilities of the event. When David Cameron was Britain’s prime minister, he stated that the problems of North Africa need to be addressed locally and that they cannot be solved by Europe simply taking in more and more refugees and migrants, and he was, in a way, right: symptoms should not be confused with causes. But, of course, Cameron precisely did not want to engage with the causes. For him, addressing the problems locally effectively meant absolving the United Kingdom, and Europe generally, of any responsibility and instead keeping the problems at a manageable distance— something that, in populist right-wing discourse, usefully reinforces the notion of a European ideal through the very reference to an external threat. At the same time, refugees and migrants are being sold (and, in many instances, are buying into) an equally idealized version of Europe as a truly humane civilization where all can be accommodated

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

164 C H AP TE R

6

and provided with opportunities . . . as long as they have the money to pay. With all its revolutionary history, the irony is that today Europe is being sold as an elite world as a way of generating vast amounts of capital for human traffickers and private security corporations such as European Security Fencing, which appear to be intent on enclosing Europe in razor wire. The task is to develop a far more ambitious politics of social transformation that engages people in an active critique of a global economic system with a view to denaturalizing it and showing its form and content as the functioning of a particular power framework. The problem for the Left is not one of establishing a collective independently of the state,30 but rather one of developing a collective that is capable of (re-)affirming and developing the principles of freedom and equality in meaningful practico-legal terms as an extension and radicalization of the plebeian tradition, and to do this through the state itself: that is, as a Rousseauiantype collective capable of transforming the state by becoming the state. Against the idea of an authentic symptom-free universality, the Left has to engage with precisely the internal inconsistencies, fractures, openings, and possibilities of existing (liberal-democratic) universality. In the case of Syriza and the European Left, this means working toward the development of Europe as a living abstraction of universality, grounded in notional law and applied in every particularity (“save one life and you save the world entire,” as the Talmudic aphorism puts it). A collective of this kind might be characterized as a solidarity of rootlessness. Yet rootlessness and rootedness should not be separated in any absolute sense. In its contemporary form, rootlessness is something that tends to function on behalf of, and is entirely rooted in, the dominant paradigm. For example, the typical modern aspiration is to rise above the existing world order through capitalist endeavor (to become part of the privileged cosmopolitan elite, etc.) and/or through spiritualized distancing. This is why so much of today’s political opposition comes in the form of national-popular affirmation against the steady absorption of sociocultural identities into a rootless world. What is intuitively grasped in these types of opposition is the way in which global capitalism persists in trying to interpellate humanity as the uprooted subjects of universal address (as abstract consumers and/or producers within a market framework). As with J. R. R. Tolkien’s potent conception of dark power as an unsleeping eye (the eye of Sauron)— one that is opposed by the various cultural groupings of Middle Earth— capital is seeking to construct a merciless empire of the gaze that subjects all to the horror of its exposure and the prevailing sense of guilt that is engendered by such exposure. It is we who have no clothes rather than the king (capital). Transparency today

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

165 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

means absolute subjugation to this tyranny of the gaze and its unceasing inculcation of original sin. In this way, capital is transforming the world in which everyone is integrated as a universal subject who internalizes the systemic failures and structural debt of global capitalism (assuming them as guilt) as part of an implacable order of fate. The way to confront this capitalist mapping of the world is not in the typical national-popular way of falling back on organic notions of community and identity, but precisely through developing what is most radical in global capitalism: namely, its logic of rootlessness. The question then becomes, what type of rootlessness? Here we should return to the dream of Europa. When the disembodied voice states that Europa’s origins are of no consequence, this does not mean that she is simply cut off from all sense of culture and tradition. The message is rather one of both freedom and duty. Europa is not bound by Asian culture but is free to choose. This, of course, means that she is also free to choose Asian culture— there is no necessity here. The space that the voice opens up— and one might call it a revolutionary space— is one of reflection and responsibility. In a sense, what the voice imposes on Europa is the Kantian-Hegelian duty of thought itself; that is, the duty to both enact thought (to translate and embody ideas in a living, working manner) and to take responsibility for that enactment. The deepest freedom (of open thought) is thus one of deepest obligation. And here we might say that the voice which Europa encounters is effectively a psychoanalytic one. It is a voice that opens up the possibility of acting without the big Other of tradition, cultural expectation, or indeed divine authority. The myth of Europa continues to pose a basic question for Europe: is Europe capable of acting beyond the big Other; can it dethrone the dark God of capital and dispel its imputative gaze? National-popular discourse feeds off the specter of the big Other: “our special x-ness as a people will be recognized and rewarded by the power that is.” Yet in its very assertion of an unassailable x-ness (the nation as “first,” “great,” and so on), this discourse shows its weakness: in seeking to protect and preserve national identity as unique and transcendental, it simultaneously underscores the latter as something threatened, prone to corruption and loss. In the very defense of the national essence, the subject is brought into proximity with a traumatic lack: nationhood as founded on nothing more than tautology: “we are great because we are great,” “we are proud to be proud,” and so on. This unbearable proximity is typically “resolved” through externalization and antagonistic projection into the figure of the intruder or enemy as responsible for this lack (the ideological figure of the immigrant). The way out of this paradox is to affirm directly the very weakness that is the basis of all identity. A

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

166 C H AP TE R

6

rootless solidarity begins from a position which recognizes that social identity is the result of contingent development. The most radical potential lesson of Europa is that far from requiring any external measure or big Other, a European solidarity can be developed in apriori rootless terms as something limited only by notional identification; an identification rooted in universal principles and law forging Europe as a living abstraction bound by nothing other than the gaze of its own invention. Badiou’s idea of one world is possible, but the Hegelian point is that it is possible only through worldlessness; that is, through being concretely realized against a background of pure abstraction.

Jameson’s Utopia and the Speculative Good Friday One of the great advances of Fredric Jameson’s recent essay “An American Utopia”31 is his view of the notion of utopia in relation to reason. For Jameson, the utopian vision is not rooted in lofty idealism or in the vain hope that somehow reason would at some (indefinite) point make the vision possible, but in precisely the opposite: utopia is something driven by modest rational proposals that by their very achievability threaten the entire edifice of existing power. Jameson’s new world would “look exactly like the old one, with but a few minor modifications.”32 Against the populist (and largely ineffectual) demagoguery of the traditional forms of leftism, Jameson argues that a new collective transformation of society is something that will depend on an organization capable of deploying a vast network of resources, technocrats, intelligence, hardware and software, specialist skills, labor, and plain know-how: the army, or more accurately, a thoroughly transformed universal army grounded in collectivist principles. The universal army would be concerned with practical provision: medicine, welfare, education, engineering solutions . . . and above all food. In the absence of a privatized market economy underpinning a large and complex society, the universal army would step in to seize control of the infrastructure and to reconfigure it along profoundly collectivist lines: “the base is what the universal army is also all about— your three or four hours in the morning. After that, change your clothes and, as they used to say in Rabelais’s old monastic Utopia, do what you like.”33 In contrast to Plato’s ideal state, Jameson’s utopia would effectively combine the three main social strata— the rulers, the military, and the producers and distributors— into one overall body to which all would belong in some form or another. A further major contrast concerns Jameson’s

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

167 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

absolute insistence on the need for subjective freedom, the indulgence of individual passions of every kind and so on. The collectivization of the base by the army is the crucial step that needs to be taken in order to effectively de-totalize the superstructure; that is, to liberate it beyond the existing constraints of a monolithic conception of economic reality as regulated by political pragmatism (austerity). As well as security and infrastructural provision, the universal army would also absorb the role of government in the development of an extensive hi-tech “Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau” coordinating the interaction between basal and superstructural issues. What Jameson proposes, in fact, is what might be called a new dialectical army. Peace is not the absence of war, and militarization, crucially, is not the absence of peace. Consequently, the question is not whether we have militarization or not, but rather what kind of militarization. In the contemporary world, social peace (or perhaps stability) is something that increasingly relies on (para-)military forces and a growing privatization of security; disturbia is becoming the very form of today’s securitopia. Militarization is a basic reality functioning on behalf of the global capitalist complex and powerful private interests (both internally and externally). Instead of piously rejecting militarization or keeping it at a distance (on the wall), Jameson’s point is that we should rather directly embrace, engage with, and participate in it. In other words, we should aim at peace and social justice precisely through universal militarization, bringing it fully into the public domain (in the Kantian sense). Thus what appears as a common-sense obstacle to peace becomes the very key to unlocking it. Or to put it in the terms of the Roman philosopher-general Marcus Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” The mobilization of a universal army thus serves as a way of demobilizing militarism as such; that is, an antagonistic posture toward the Other that is conceived as imminent threat, responsible for social failure, and so on. And yet this does not mean that such an army would be incapable of mobilizing against an enemy. A contrast can be drawn here between Jameson’s army and the multinational trans-regional army of ISIS. Reflecting a long-standing historical tradition, ISIS seeks to sustain its sense of belief in itself through the annihilation of the Other: the extermination of people whose religious orientation is deemed to be at variance with theirs, the destruction of cultural sites (along with the cynical sale of looted antiquities), and so on in the name of an absolute monotheistic universalism (Tawhid)— something similar can be said about the antiIslamic traditions of the European far right. With the universal army, the object of annihilation would be rather different. At one level, it would target the system of capital itself as a way of opening up a space for radical

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

168 C H AP TE R

6

change and subsequent reorganization.34 But at a more general level, the target would also be the paradigmatic externalization of the Other of which Hegel speaks (and of those who embody such externalization). The universal army would effectively embody a negation of the negation in this sense (an annihilation of annihilation vis-à-vis the externalized Other). Universality cannot be achieved through the elimination of particularity (which, as Hegel points out, is the limit of Plato’s conception of the Republic); rather, it is something that has to be created through an emphasis on (the freedom of) the particular itself: “the particular has to raise itself to the form of universality.”35 The universal becomes the guarantor of the particular, and the particular functions as a free commitment (duty) to the universal. Jameson similarly identifies an implicit dialectical interplay between liberty and totalitarianism. With all its rhetoric concerning individual freedom, the reality of global capitalism is one of increasing exclusions on a mass scale: the building of more and more razor-wired border fences, detention centers, labor camps of every kind, and so on in the context of a growing corporate command economy. So again the point is not to ignore totalitarianism or simply wish it away, but to engage with it directly and to transform it. Instead of a modern liberal-capitalist freedom that opposes totalitarian power at a formal-political level but which effectively embraces it in economic terms, a transformed totalitarianism (in the sense of collective duties and the observance of the laws of the people’s army) would be used to advance individual freedom in a universal and meaningful way: that is, in terms of the time and resources that the universal army allows for individual expression, lifestyle choices, and so on, after changing one’s clothes. This, of course, resonates with Oscar Wilde’s view that it is only by abolishing private property that people can overcome the “sordid necessity of living for others” and achieve the possibility of real individual liberty. The choice between the individual and society is thus a false one. What is overlooked in liberalism is the way in which global socioeconomic power is already reproduced through the discourse of individualism. In effect, what Jameson is aiming at is a form of Hegelian ethical identity where the individual and society are brought together in “an inextricable dialectic of identity and difference.” 36 In other words, he aims at overcoming the dualism of individual/society through an affirmation, and recognition, of the duality as such. Jameson’s radicalism is further distinguished by its emphasis on the logic of depoliticization. What Jameson’s perspective is alive to is the way in which today’s forms of febrile politicization, especially of the nationalpopular kind (the European new right, Trumpism, and so on), function precisely as a way of depoliticizing the capitalist economy, giving it the

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

169 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

appearance of a natural horizon. It is thus not a question of displacing depoliticization with constant politicization and/or revolutionary fervor, but rather one of addressing depoliticization politically. Instead of the standard ping-pong politics of populist government— masking the quiet functioning of private interests and the capitalist economy— the priority needs to be one of advancing a far more extensive, and far more effective, administration devoted to the creative development of collectivist principles under the aegis of the universal army (perhaps with provision for open courts, genuinely public forums, and so on). A full-blooded collectivism capable of supporting individual potential is one that would indeed require a strong iron architecture (Britain’s National Health System, for example, still provides a sense of what is possible in terms of building a creative, technologically advanced, and resilient architecture of this kind). And perhaps this above all is where the utopian sensibility lies: in the desire to reclaim the sense of durable progress and movement toward a concrete social vision. In this context, however, there appears a certain inconsistency in regard to Jameson’s view of the state. While the universal army would arguably perform state-like functions, Jameson is clear in his rejection of the state as such; under his utopian conditions, it would effectively wither away into an “enormous group therapy.”37 As with Badiou’s approach to the state, Jameson is perhaps also too one-sided. In an increasingly globalizing world, the generic response of right-wing populism is everywhere to be seen: “we must take back our country,” “we must control our borders,” “we need to make our country great again,” and so forth. While at the politico-cultural level there is a strong emphasis on nation-state integrity, at the economic level there is an implicit “nonetheless” at play: “nonetheless we remain open for business,” “nonetheless we intend to be world economic leaders,” “nonetheless we must create the best environment for international capital investment,” and so on. In other words, the very emphasis on (national-popular) statism becomes a way of reinforcing a global neoliberal anti-statism. This again is what was so fake about the Brexit campaign. With all the rhetoric on national independence and control, the reality of Brexit will be one of increasing deregulation and a decreasing capacity of the nation-state to manage (exercise sovereignty over) its own economy, let alone the global forces of capital. In Hegelian language, it creates a condition in which freedom dies through the very fear of it dying.38 Rejecting the state in the manner suggested by Jameson (and Badiou) would effectively amount to surrendering it to the cynical games of right-wing populist discourse. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel draws an important distinction between duty and servitude. Servitude is something imposed externally,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

170 C H AP TE R

6

usually with an implied threat of some kind. The dominant form of today’s servitude is austerity— failure to observe imposed austerity measures will result in the withdrawal of capital, economic catastrophe, and so on. Duty, on the other hand, is a condition in which “the individual freely enters upon a liberty that is substantive.”39 It is only through duty that subjective freedom can be actualized in an objective form: precisely the form of the state. In duty, both recognition (political obligation) and freedom flow between people and state. In the context of European (austerity) servitude, this flow consistently breaks down not because there is too much state (the neoliberal argument), but because there is too little state (an absence or malfunctioning of duty). The European elites are united in their opposition to the creation of a European state and a polity rooted in the soil of duty. The Eurogroup (representing corporate and banking interests) functions as an extra-state power that is able to enforce its power beyond all politico-legal accountability and/or sense of duty. This dimension of duty as freedom (and vice versa) tends to be missing in Jameson’s “non-state” view of a nebulous “network or exoskeleton of the social needs and functions.”40 The real task is to move beyond the standard forms of national-popular delimitation and to develop and transform the state as a concrete proactive process of “willing the universal,” where freedom is expressed through duty. It is in this context that we can understand Hegel’s observation that a “bad state is . . . purely finite, but the rational state is in itself infinite.”41 An infinite or ethical state constitutes an actualization of the freedom of reason and is not bound by the finitude or pragmatic concerns of the existing system. At the same time, it is not a lofty form of state, but rather one that reflects a concrete process of “realizing the interest of the whole in particular ends” in which it functions as “the divine will as a present spirit, which unfolds in the actual shape of an organized world.”42 In other words, its infinity is derived from the speculative movement of reason (including right and justice) and its realization within finitude itself. The bad state is the opposite of this. Here the state consists in the infinite reaffirmation of existing finitude, as in the modern world where everything is possible within the basic horizon of capitalism, where capitalist fate remains in place irrespective of reasoned argument. Hegel’s central point is that we cannot step outside the finite/infinite dialectic or its inevitable forms of realization as state. Jameson’s attempt to dissolve the state is consequently misplaced. In its de facto state role, Jameson’s Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau could very well take on a rather Olympian and autocratic character, lacking in any real vitality. Abandoning the state as such would effectively mean giving free rein to the bad state model of finitude in which the state appears as something remote, sepa-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

171 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

rated from social life. In other words, it would continue to render the idea of infinity as something external and not part of existing possibility. Hegel is radically opposed to any such externalization. Instead, the state should be regarded as the very site for overcoming the artificial distinction between the universal and the particular: “The universal must be actively furthered, but, on the other side, subjectivity must be wholly and vitally developed. Only when both elements are present in force is the state to be regarded as articulate and truly organized.”43 While on the one hand, the state does perform the function of a higher authority, on the other hand it is also the “indwelling end of these things, and is strong in its union of the universal end with the particular interests of individuals.”44 In dimensional terms, the polity is thus both external and internal. This is what lies behind Hegel’s affirmation of the idea of a (transformed) constitutional monarchy where the universality of the polity is capable of being embodied in a particular individual (the monarch). Hegel’s point is that in an advanced state (in its realization of infinity as a living rational force of organization), anyone can in principle perform the function of a figurehead. This is where true majesty lies; not in any particular substance (birthright, divine command, will, etc.), but in the overcoming of externalization, as an outcome of speculative reason. In contrast to the standard forms of political mobilization and hegemonic proselytizing, Jameson proposes instead a radical social psychotherapy that is focused on the fear of utopia and/or anti-utopianism.45 Along the lines of Lacan, he affirms the need to identify with our symptoms, bringing our “sad passions” to light, in order to clear the space for something new to emerge (the act/event). This reflects what Hegel refers to as the loss of the loss; that is, the loss of the capitalist world as a fantasmatic holism that is itself based on loss (i.e., the essentially empty belief that the capitalist Other can somehow sustain itself on its own terms). In this sense, we might say that what Jameson is aiming at is a fundamental break with today’s secularized religion of fate. With all its dogma about “market forces,” “competitiveness,” “incentives,” and so on, social reality is more and more structured through a global system of belief centered on economic necessity. At the same time, modernization is driving loose and rather dispassionate forms of religiosity generally. Because of the threat posed by its inherent worldlessness, modern capitalism seeks to supplement itself with different forms of privatized spirituality: combinations of new age themes, Buddhism, Confucianism, Kabbalah, and so on that are aimed at the individual in regard to inner peace and fulfillment. On these grounds, I would also question Jameson’s view that religion should be strictly confined to the realm of culture.46

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

172 C H AP TE R

6

Hegel makes the point that the finite cannot subsist by itself and ultimately needs validation in regard to the infinite (the sense that the finite is in accord with God and with what is natural, just, true, and so on). In general, this validating role tends to fall to religion. From the “inner condition of feeling” that religion evokes, the state derives its force as an outwardly facing worldly power.47 Yet Hegel is fully alive to the ways in which this inner condition of feeling can be manipulated as an implicit form of servitude: “Thus the doctrine that the state should be founded on religion is perverted, when it is interpreted to mean that individuals must have religion in order that their spirit, enchained by it, may be the more readily oppressed by the state.”48 And this is everywhere in evidence today. From new-ageism to the God-fearing politics of the United States (where both Democrats and Republicans seek to mobilize religious sentiment in order to appeal to vast marginalized sectors), the open manipulations of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the pacifying forms of state-sponsored Confucianism in China, the paradox of the modern world is that it increasingly relies on religious forms of acquiescence and spiritual sedation in order to displace and neutralize any collective and/or active sense of spirit. Such spiritual passivity is fueled directly by economic uncertainty where exclusive wealth and abundance is reproduced through global privation over which the dark god of capitalist fate presides.49 Religious logic here plays a direct role in the development of the form and content of worldliness. The classical historian Edith Hamilton draws a useful distinction between faith and belief: “Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.”50 Contemporary (Western) culture is characterized largely by passive belief; the general view that belief is a matter of individual preferences and which in turn is silently accepting of the existing order of belief: that is, the belief in capitalism as a reflection of human nature, an end of history, and so on. Such belief has become increasingly ossified into an overwhelming sense of fate. Yet fatalistic belief can only be overcome through belief itself, through the radical excess of belief that can be properly called faith. In other words, the struggle is a dialectical one between belief and itself (its inherent excess). The increasingly authoritarian turn in capitalism can be seen as an attempt to intensify the order of fate against the excessive dimension of faith. As well as the more familiar combinations of “hard” and “soft” power, capitalism is seeking to manipulate such excess through neutralization (privatized spirituality), isolation (George Gerbner’s “mean world syndrome,” etc.), and more immediate forms of intervention (narrative reprogramming, neuroscience, biotechnological regulation, and so on). Unlike fate, the power of true faith does not derive from an independent authority (God, the laws of history, economic

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

173 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

necessity) but precisely from the void. What exists here is a real (dialectical) struggle with no inevitability of outcome. Capitalism itself is the result of a long history of dialectical engagement that has proved to be remarkably adaptable in learning to live with, and indeed to reproduce itself through, its own (partial) negations. The danger is that capitalism may succeed in suspending reality within its logics of fuzzy negation that continuously recycle its de facto (spurious) infinity through the finitude of its order— reason itself may become fatalized, held hostage to the demands of finite rationalization. Without collapsing the distinction between state and religion, Hegel argues that the state must achieve a certain kind of religious orientation. An ethical state is one that strives to overcome the finite/infinite division (reflected in the separation of the practical from the abstract universal) and to generate the dimension of the infinite within itself. Only in this way can the state function as the “divine on earth.”51 This state does not seek verification outside itself, nor does it rely on any externalized conception of the big Other; rather, it is explicitly self-grounding in the very process of embodying its abstract principles in concrete terms. Just as the sense of external nature is overcome through the movement of the idea (the historical system of determinations), so too, political abstraction has to be overcome by being made real through infinite application to the particularities of lived reality. The state draws its reverence not from (external) religious sanction, but from the practical operation of its idea in a substantial form. It is through the state that what Hegel calls spirit overturns its abstraction and becomes a living force that is reconciled with objectivity.52 A state that is transformed in this way becomes a reflection of the spirit in motion, of spirit that is for itself. Strictly speaking, the state in Hegel only becomes state through an overcoming of itself as an independent entity. The state is transformed into a speculative moment in union with both religion and science. This union echoes the Lacanian triadic structure of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the Real. The state would function as the actualization of reason in symbolic law; religion would comprise the aesthetics and sensuousness of the vision of reason at the level of the imaginary; and science would advance knowledge as based on rational necessity or the cut of the Real (i.e., knowledge as a self-relating field of mediatedness). The social whole is thus simplified into three basic overlapping and mutually reinforcing dimensions. What Hegel aims at here is not so much a final transparency, but rather a reconciliation that derives from speculative reason. This reconciliation consists of an overcoming of externalization: state— the overcoming of the infinitely imposed strictures of finitude (e.g., economic necessity); religion— the overcoming of infinity conceived as a

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

174 C H AP TE R

6

separate (spiritual) realm; and science— the overcoming of the idea of an independent substance that can be grasped (epistemologically) beyond mediatedness. In reconciliation, what one is reconciled with is not anything positive, but precisely the ineradicable negativity that undermines all attempts at ideality and externalization from within. In other words, it is a reconciliation with the interiorized nature of the Real as the very basis of all being. The paradox of such reconciliation is that by drawing these elements together and showing their necessity as integral to its articulating idea, it simultaneously dissolves (or exhausts) the necessity of that idea as such— thereby opening a path toward new possibility. The standard view that, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel proposes an idealized form of constitutional monarchy is thus mistaken. Hegel does not advocate constitutional monarchy as the ideal outcome of history. His point is rather that such a formation represents a working through, or historical showing, of the particular logic(s) of reconciliation— the various movements involved in the process of overcoming the dimensions of externality toward its own basic idea— within the context of modernity: “The perfecting of the state into a constitutional monarchy is the work of the modern world, in which the substantive idea has attained the infinite form.”53 Yet it is precisely in reaching its infinite state, where all becomes iteration of the basic idea, that this form loses its vitality and is “emptied out into Time”54— its function as horizon is transformed into a determinate limit that needs to be surpassed. In this way, the epoch in question may be said to find its own contingency, historicizing its history and thereby placing itself in parenthesis. Just as in art where a genre moves from being the very means of expressing the new to a specific mode of (historical) expression, an epoch refines itself into a static object where every play becomes a replay of itself: the fall of empires into decadence, stultification, and so on. This confrontation with an epoch’s organizational code in turn stimulates a voracious appetite for the new. And this is also where a new kind of smart Left can make significant inroads. Through the development of global north and south organizations, cyberculture, computerized simulations, and so on, the Left needs to show capitalism in its mode of degenerate repetition, as something that can only further refine and delineate its basic framework of power and exclusion. Hegel characterizes the objectification of an epoch, into the reflexive moments of its idea, as spirit. History unfolds as a process of one spirit exhausting itself before being replaced by a new formation of spirit. Yet the spirit of the preceding epoch is not simply eradicated but becomes part of a living memory that helps to give shape to, and to define the terms of, the spirit of the new epochal movement:

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

175 S PE C UL AT IV E

UT OP I A

In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of earlier Spirits. But recollection, the inwardizing, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although this Spirit starts afresh and apparently from its own resources to bring itself to maturity, it is nonetheless on a higher level that it starts. The realm of Spirits which is formed in this way in the outer world constitutes a succession in Time in which one Spirit relieved another of its charge and each took over the empire of the world from its predecessor. Their goal is the revelation of the depth of Spirit, and this is the absolute notion.55

The absolute notion does not reflect any kind of end of history or final mastery. The absolute notion consists rather in the understanding that not only is history a self-mediating succession of the objectification of the forms of (empty) spirit as its substance, but also that such objectification is itself a process that reaffirms the delimited character of the field of reflexive mediation as such: namely, as subject. In other words, the ultimate object of objectification is one of self-referral itself, of absolute limit. This is again where we find the dimension of infinity in Hegel and an implicit sense of the event. In Badiou, the event tends to be seen as something that unfolds toward an extrinsic form of infinity; events occur as a kind of creasing out of the kinks in the multiplicitous skein of being that in some sense is already there. Yet in Hegelian mode, the gesture is effectively the opposite: the event is not a push toward anything external, but rather an opening of the potential of the infinite, of excess negativity, within finitude itself (indeed, within the one). True infinity has no meaning outside of finitude. Infinity is the movement of noncoincidence within the finite; it is that which both nullifies and constitutes finitude as its “eternal spring”56 and which in turn is contained within the absolute of substance = subject. Hegel’s wager is that through apprehending that we are part of this absolute— in other words, through adopting the approach of speculative reason— a way is opened up toward new forms of engagement for the development of the social whole as a self-relating Idea. In this sense, Hegel effectively presents the possibility of a new type of speculative utopia where reason and faith come together within the terms of reconciliation, where utopian hope is combined with evental resolve. The speculative idea of utopia is based on an ethics of the two (of oppositional unity) in which the immediacy of the social whole and its mediation can be brought together in living terms. This is what lies behind Hegel’s plea for the development of a new tradition premised on

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

176 C H AP TE R

6

the idea of what he calls a “speculative Good Friday.” Such a tradition, which is not essentially limited to that of Christianity, is one that would ground its very sense of reason, passion, and freedom in the absence of the big Other (in “God-forsakenness”) and would internalize the idea that “the highest totality can and must achieve its resurrection solely from this harsh consciousness of loss.”57 The resurrection of a social imagination beyond fate will depend on assuming this harsh consciousness of loss and on nurturing the creative power of the speculative within itself.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Notes

Preface 1. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010), 255. 2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences with the Zustze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1991), 132. 3. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 126. 4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 18. 5. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 130. 6. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 129. 7. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 130. 8. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 54. 9. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 56. 10. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 62. 11. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 276– 77. 12. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 173. 13. It is important to point out that while the notions of incompleteness and inconsistency can certainly be distinguished, there is also the speculative sense in which they can be read together. Gödel famously applied the incompleteness/ inconsistency distinction to the problem of proof in arithmetic systems. For Gödel, an arithmetic system is either consistent at the expense of being incomplete (there are always more statements that might be true but which have yet to be proved), or complete at the expense of being inconsistent (anything can be proved/disproved— a complete system is over-complete in this sense). The central point is that a system cannot be both complete and consistent. In a recent work, Paul Livingston (2012) extends Gödelian logic to refer to the entire social order and argues that such an order cannot be both incomplete and inconsistent— there is either incompleteness with consistency or completeness with inconsistency. Along Hegelian lines, what this tends to overlook is the paradox of excess: excess that is both a too much and a too little. In Gödel, these two aspects are in fact present: incompleteness as lack (always falling short) and inconsistency as impossible surplus (over-completion). In this sense, they are aspects of the same problem of excess— completeness cannot coincide with itself, or become consistent. Following 177

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

178 NO TE S

T O

PAGE S

X V I –5

Hegel, incompleteness is not the absence of something positive (this would be to frame it in terms of the understanding, that is, as a problem of spurious infinity). Incompleteness results rather from an inherent negative excess that cannot be ingested or resolved. In other words, incompleteness should be viewed in terms of the logic of becoming, or indeed speculative infinity. This inherent excess renders all discourse (and all substance) not only incomplete, but also inconsistent in the (more literal) sense that it deforms the social order through failure, instability, antagonism, and so on. It is in these more speculative terms that I would suggest a certain overlap between the problem of incompleteness and inconsistency. Using Lacanian imagery, the problem of excess can appear as either incompleteness or inconsistency in regard to the Möbius-strip form of continuum. 14. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25. 15. Hegel, Science of Logic, 29. 16. Hegel, Science of Logic, 69. 17. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (New York: Prometheus Books, 1996), xxvii. 18. Hegel, Science of Logic, 66. 19. Hegel, Science of Logic, 66. 20. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 31. 21. Hegel, Science of Logic, 105. 22. Hegel, Science of Logic, 109. 23. Hegel, Science of Logic, 114. 24. Hegel, Science of Logic, 117. 25. Hegel, Science of Logic, 122. 26. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 67. 27. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 190. 28. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 261.

Chapter 1 1. Nick Srnicek, “Capitalism and the Non-Philosophical Subject,” in The Speculative Turn, ed. Levi Bryant et al. (Melbourne: re-press, 2011), 167. 2. Quentin Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” in Collapse III, ed. R. J. Mackay and D. McWherter (Falmouth, U.K.: Urbanomic, 2007), 420. 3. Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” 420 4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4. 5. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2011), 6. 6. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5. 7. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 7. 8. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 8. 9. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 27– 28.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

179 NO TE S

TO

PAGE S

5 –1 4

10. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 52. 11. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53. 12. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 60. 13. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53. 14. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 64 15. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53. 16. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 67. 17. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 65. 18. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 2001). 19. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 52. 20. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 26. 21. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 21 and 27. 22. Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 37– 43. 23. Stephen Jay Gould, Adam’s Navel (London: Penguin, 1995), 12. 24. Gould, Adam’s Navel, 12. 25. Quentin Meillassoux cited in Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 167– 68. 26. Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” 435. 27. Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” 435. 28. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 63. 29. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 49. 30. Meillassoux cited in Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 189. 31. Meillassoux cited in Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 231. 32. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 26. 33. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 24– 26. 34. Alain Badiou, The Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 30. 35. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 117. 36. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 149. 37. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 149. 38. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 152. 39. Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 20: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. Bruce Fink (London: Norton, 1999), 131. 40. Lacan, Encore, 128. 41. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 3: The Psychoses, 1955– 1956, trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993), 63. 42. Lacan, Encore, 128. 43. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 187. 44. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 273. 45. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 273. 46. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 304. 47. Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 683. 48. Robert C. Solomon, “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in The Age of German Idealism, ed. R.C. Solomon and K. M. Higgins (London: Routledge, 2003), 193– 94.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

180 NO TE S

T O

PAGE S

1 5 –2 7

49. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 27. 50. There is no objectivity or subjectivity in this sense. The Lacanian universe is made up of the irreducible (and irresolvable) field of tension between (the non-subjective) $ and the (non-objective) object-a. Reality has no meaning or substance outside of this field. 51. Graham Harman, Immaterialism (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 97. 52. Hegel, Science of Logic, 67. 53. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 127– 28. 54. Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 30. 55. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21. 56. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 22. 57. Henry S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder I: The Pilgrimage of Reason (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1997), 88. 58. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 250. 59. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 250. 60. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 10. 61. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder I, 87. 62. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 187. 63. Max Planck, Where Is Science Going? (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow, 1981), 217. 64. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). 65. Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (London: Penguin, 2006). 66. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 43; Meillassoux, After Finitude, 103. 67. Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 93– 96. 68. Kaku, Parallel Worlds, 85. 69. Kaku, Parallel Worlds, 94. 70. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London: Penguin, 2005), 260. 71. Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 260. 72. Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 265– 66. 73. Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 260. 74. Glyn Daly, “The Materialism of Spirit,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 1, no. 4 (2007): 10. 75. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 141. 76. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 493. 77. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 28. 78. Roy Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 239. 79. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 235. 80. Freud cited in Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 235.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

181 NO TE S

TO

PAGE S

2 7 –3 9

81. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 235– 36. 82. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 239. 83. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 1960, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 212. 84. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 493. 85. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 60. 86. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 945. 87. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Greek Philosophy to Plato, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 305.

Chapter 2 1. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 257– 63. 2. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Chantal Mouffe, Return of the Political, trans. Paul Holdengraber (London: Verso, 2005); and Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007). 3. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). 4. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory. 5. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2006), 16– 25. 6. Judith Butler, “Competing Universalities,” in Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000), 178– 79. 7. Butler, “Competing Universalities,” 178. 8. Butler, “Competing Universalities,” 179. 9. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 27. 10. Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 11. Aletta Norval, “Democratic Decisions and the Question of Universality: Rethinking Recent Approaches,” in Laclau: A Critical Reader, ed. S. Critchley and O. Marchart (London: Routledge, 2004). 12. Ernesto Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” in Critchley and Marchart, eds., Laclau, 297. 13. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, trans. Jon Barnes et al. (London: Verso, 1990), 18. 14. Laclau, New Reflections, 18. 15. Paul Hawken, “Natural Capitalism,” Mother Jones, March/April 1997, 15; see also Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999). 16. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (New York: Viking, 2007), 142.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

182 NO TE S

T O

PAGE S

3 9 –5 2

17. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 141. 18. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 181. 19. With an obsessive gambler, for example, the immediate goal is the “big win,” but the overall aim is precisely the continuation of the gambling itself. This is why, even after a big win, addicted gamblers typically fail to leave the gaming tables until they have sacrificed their winnings in pursuit of their aim. This is alluded to in a sequence from Martin Scorsese’s film Casino where a gambler has achieved his goal (the big win) but, through various ruses and ploys, is “unavoidably detained” at the casino until his drive-aim is once again reignited and he returns to the tables with inevitable consequences. Drive and desire may be said to perform an eternal tango. Desire relies on partial drives in the sense that it is in constant motion and sustains itself through not being satisfied. Drive, on the other hand, “catches up” with the objects of desire and gratifies itself precisely in the acts of eating/drinking/seducing them. Drive is embroiled further in the desire to be desired by the Other— in this case, the gambler who desires to be desired as the heroic and/or tragic figure of the Other’s gaze. 20. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 2001), 112. 21. WorldVision, www. worldvision.org. 22. Ernesto Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology,” Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 3 (1996): 206. 23. See Glyn Daly, “Ideology and Its Paradoxes: Dimensions of Fantasy and Enjoyment,” Journal of Political Ideologies 4, no. 2 (1999): 219– 38. 24. Jason Glynos, “The Grip of Ideology: A Lacanian Approach to the Theory of Ideology,” Journal of Political Ideologies 6, no. 2 (2001): 191– 214. 25. Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology,” 206. 26. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 114. 27. Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (London: Verso, 2014), 201– 2. 28. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 363– 80. 29. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 17: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (London: Norton, 2007), 105. 30. Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 201. 31. Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 135– 36. 32. Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow, 136. 33. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 58. 34. Interview with Rancière in the French magazine L’obs, April 4, 2015. 35. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Response to Rancière,” Lacanian Ink, April 2015. 36. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 282. 37. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 282. 38. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 90.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

183 NO TE S

TO

PAGE S

5 4 –6 8

Chapter 3 1. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1991), 953. 2. Other examples of this type of mapping include the practice of “pinging” stock (fake bids to test demand) and internet purchases of things like airline tickets, package holidays, and so on where a price is stated on the website, and then when you revisit the site the price has increased significantly. 3. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 953. 4. Marx, Capital: Volume 3, 139. 5. Marx, Capital: Volume 3, 139. 6. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society 6 (London: Sage, 2010), 221. 7. George Ritzer, Globalization of Nothing (London: Sage, 2007). 8. Baudrillard’s simulacrum (a copy without an original) is fully operative here. I had a personal experience of this when I once asked a student about his tattoo and its meaning. He replied matter-of-factly that it was tribal. When I asked which particular tribe it represented, I was met with an incredulous (“how can you be such an idiot?”) look. 9. In Lacanian terms, what is shown more and more in the commodification of nothing is object-a: i.e., that which is in the object more than object; the indefinable surplus “x” that transcends any immediate properties, however (in)substantial they might be (e.g., Coca Cola as “the real thing”). 10. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Penguin, 1969), 209. 11. http://www.eldis.org/organisation/A7634. 12. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Harvard University Press, 2014), 515– 39. 13. David Harvey, “Afterthoughts on Thomas Piketty’s Capital,” 2014, www .davidharvey.org. 14. Colin Hay and Anthony Payne, Civic Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 13. 15. Alain Badiou, “Prefazione all’ edizione italiana,” in Metapolitica (Naples: Cronopio, 2002), 14. 16. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 252. 17. Marx, Capital: Volume 3, 365. 18. Paul Krugman, “The Amnesiac Economy,” 2011, New York Times, https:// krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/the-amnesiac-economy/. 19. John M. Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), 378– 79. 20. Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Continuum, 1998). 21. In Cyprus, this was reflected not only in the unprecedented levying of personal bank deposits (as a condition of European financial support), but also in the fact that the establishment of an anti-money laundering framework was also made a requirement by the European Union troika. This conveniently side-

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

184 NO TE S

T O

PAGE S

6 8 –8 0

stepped the fact that money laundering is endemic in global finance— according to IMF estimates, money laundering accounts for somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the world’s GDP; that is, between $600 billion and $1.5 trillion (http:// www.fatf-gafi.org/pages/faq/moneylaundering/)— and takes place through numerous “offshore” banking networks, including, of course, Switzerland: the European heart of mystified “gnomic” speculative finance. 22. Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913– 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 259. 23. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Natural Law, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: State University of New York Press, 1975), 79. 24. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 322. 25. Hegel, Natural Law, 80. 26. Hegel, Natural Law, 105. 27. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 2. 28. Paul Hawken presentation, “Blessed Unrest,” YouTube. 29. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 141. 30. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 149. 31. Paul Hawken presentation, “Blessed Unrest,” YouTube. 32. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 162. 33. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin, 2005), xvi. 34. Marx, Capital: Volume 3, 571. 35. Although, as Marx makes clear, the net result of the new cooperative corporate enterprises is that they simply reproduce “all the defects of the existing system” within themselves (Marx, Capital: Volume 3, 571). 36. Ernesto Laclau, “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?” Diacritics 31, no. 4 (2001): 9. 37. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2007), 149. 38. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 39. Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia,” in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016), 66. 40. Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London: Routledge, 2006), 336. 41. This has been well observed in abusive relationships where the abused is pressured into identifying with a certain ideal up to which she can never live. 42. Laclau, “Structure, Identity, and the Political,” in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 203. 43. Ernesto Laclau, “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (summer 2006): 664. 44. Laclau, “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” 664 and 666. 45. Laclau, “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” 660. 46. Marx, Capital: Volume 3, 300.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

185 NO TE S

TO

PAGE S

8 0 –9 1

47. The retelling of a particular story, for example, through an artistic form, can transform the content. Likewise, the content (e.g., a thematic dimension, budget, resources, etc.) can also influence the form. 48. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 202. 49. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Michael A. Scarpitti (London: Penguin, 2013), 89. 50. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 237. 51. Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 168. 52. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 152. 53. Hegel, Science of Logic, 361. 54. Hegel, Science of Logic, 357. 55. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 230. 56. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul R. Patton (London: Continuum, 2010), 235. 57. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 235. 58. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 234. 59. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 234. 60. It should be remembered that Freud’s notion of overdetermination is one that also presupposes this last instance: that is, the organizing principle (trauma, etc.) that thematically structures or distorts the entire (psychic) economy.

Chapter 4 1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 48. 2. Laclau, New Reflections, 92. 3. Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology,” 203. 4. Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology,” 205. 5. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 71. 6. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 125. 7. Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology,” 205– 6. 8. Sigmund Freud, The Wolfman and Other Cases, trans. Louise Adey Huish (London: Penguin, 2002), 231. 9. Freud, The Wolfman and Other Cases, 233. 10. This is why masks are such a common motif in both the horror and sex genres. In horror, the indirectness and stillness of the mask are used to good effect in conveying the dark motivations of the wearer. In sex dramas (roleplaying, etc.), masks allow the wearers to act out their fantasies at one remove as anonymous beings of desire . . . and in this way to give expression to their innermost aspects of sexual being. In cyberspace, avatars can be seen to perform a similar function. Through the avatar, the operator is enabled to act out scenarios at a safe distance from his or her fantasmatic core. 11. Faegheh Shirazi, The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2003).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

186 NO TE S

T O

PAGE S

9 3 –1 2 0

12. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 19. 13. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 60. 14. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 65. 15. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 112. 16. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 2008), 178 and 180. 17. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 114. 18. See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité,” unpublished lecture, 1985. 19. Zupančič, What Is Sex? 18. 20. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 308– 9. 21. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1994), 275. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2002), 345. 23. Slavoj Žižek, “Miracles do Happen: Globalization(s) and Politics,” in Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 161– 62. 24. Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology,” 203. 25. Žižek, “The Madness of Reason: Encounters of the Real Kind,” in Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 70– 71. 26. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2010). 27. Jessica Williams, 50 Facts That Should Change the World (Cambridge: Icon, 2004). 28. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 147– 48. 29. “What Facebook Knows about You” (May 8, 2017), Panorama, BBC. 30. Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness (London: Verso, 2017), 261 and 268.

Chapter 5 1. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 514. 2. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 514. 3. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 58. 4. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 56. 5. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 514. 6. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 508. 7. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 508. 8. Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2005), 101. 9. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 594. 10. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 594. 11. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 79. 12. Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review, vol. 49 (January/February 2008): 40. 13. Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” 40.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

187 NO TE S

TO

PAGE S

1 2 0 –1 3 7

14. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 146– 47. 15. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 507 and 514. 16. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 61. 17. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 52– 59. 18. Badiou, Being and Event, 514. 19. Hegel, Science of Logic, 361. 20. Alenka Zupančič, “The Fifth Condition,” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Halward (London: Continuum, 2004), 200. 21. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 190. 22. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 56. 23. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 24. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 437. 25. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 139. 26. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 514. 27. Badiou, Being and Event, 29. 28. Badiou, Being and Event, 34. 29. Badiou, Being and Event, 33. 30. Hegel, Science of Logic, 132. 31. Hegel, Science of Logic, 133. 32. Hegel, Science of Logic, 135. 33. Hegel, Science of Logic, 136. 34. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 146– 47. 35. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 70. 36. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 170. 37. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 332. 38. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 66. 39. Jacques Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV” (unpublished, trans. C. Gallagher), V 12. 40. Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV,” II 14. 41. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 166. 42. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 180. 43. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000), 243– 44. 44. Lacan, Écrits, 345. 45. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314 and 319. 46. Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 85. 47. Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom, 81. 48. Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom, 84. 49. Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom, 79. 50. Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV,” V 9. 51. See Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV,” V 11– 12. 52. Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV,” V 11. 53. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 104. 54. Philip Hoad, “Whatever Happened to Hollywood’s Really Evil Villains?” The Guardian, July 28, 2016.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

188 NO TE S

T O

PAGE S

1 3 8 –1 5 2

55. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 136. 56. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I, 63. 57. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 135. 58. Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, 258– 59. 59. M. Kesel (2013), Sygne du Coûfontaine, http://theologicalanthropology .com/alphabet-of-love/. 60. Hegel, Natural Law, 105. 61. Alenka Zupančič, “The ‘Concrete Universal,’ and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2006), 182. 62. And yet Tucci’s outrageous study pales in comparison to the real-world talk show hostess of Dialog on Indonesian National Television. Filmed as part of Joshua Oppenheimer’s excellent documentary The Act of Killing (2012), the hostess interviews the notorious “theatergoer-gangsters” led by Anwar Congo, who were responsible for countless rapes, beatings, tortures, and killings during the 1965– 66 purge of “communists” (anyone suspected of political opposition or dissent). Gushingly, she introduces her audience to “Anwar and his friends” and asks, “And was your method of killing inspired by gangster films? / . . . / Amazing, he was inspired by films!” She goes on, “They developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating communists. It was more humane, less sadistic, and avoided excessive violence. But you also just wiped them out!” 63. Madison Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 481. 64. The success of the former slaves is also a good example of what Hegel means by the “taking of one’s place in a universal cause” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 334). For Hegel, this also accounts for the unlikely victory of 500 men (some British soldiers and a majority of Dalit “untouchable” fighters) against a 30,000-strong Peshwa army at the Battle of Koregaon in 1818.

Chapter 6 1. Lacan, Écrits, 356. 2. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 275. 3. As Stephen Foley put it in the Financial Times, the economic vision of organizations like Just Capital, based on “financial incentives and positive social returns,” is one where “everyone’s a winner” (Foley, “Capitalism for Employees,” Financial Times, October 2015). 4. Alberto Nordelli, “IMF: Austerity Measures Would Still Leave Greece with Unsustainable Debt,” The Guardian, June 30, 2015. 5. Daniel Finkelstein, “As Greece Shows, Threats Will Get You Nowhere,” The Times, July 15, 2015. 6. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 315. 7. Yannis Varoufakis, “Interview with Varoufakis,” New Statesman, July 13, 2015. 8. Varoufakis, “Interview with Varoufakis,” 2015. 9. Varoufakis, “Interview with Varoufakis,” 2015.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

189 NO TE S

TO

PAGE S

1 5 2 –1 6 6

10. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 154. 11. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 96. 12. This is, in part, what Varoufakis is trying to do with his transnational Democracy in Europe Movement 2025. 13. Hegel, Science of Logic, 140. 14. Hegelian reconciliation is thus opposed to the type of account that we find in authors such as Paul Livingston: “Hegel must be considered conceptually prior to this great twentieth-century articulation in that, whatever his use or development of paradoxes and contradiction, he too sees them as ultimately capable of reconciliation in a complete and (ultimately) consistent system” (Livingston, The Politics of Logic [New York: Routledge, 2014], 253– 54). For Hegel, while particular contradictions may be resolved (historically), contradiction as such cannot. A system, or Idea, can never be fully complete or consistent, precisely because of the dimension of excess negativity. Reconciliation is not about overcoming contradiction or excess, but rather about coming to terms with their existential functioning. 15. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 71. 16. Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” 255. 17. Badiou, Being and Event, 207. 18. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 514. 19. Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV,” V 12. 20. Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV,” VI 12. 21. Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV,” V 7. 22. Lacan, “The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967– 68, Book XV,” V 5. 23. See Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, 256. 24. Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2008), 64– 66. 25. Zupančič, in Žižek, ed., Lacan: The Silent Partners, 180. 26. Alain Badiou, “How to Change the World?” paper presented at the Nexus Conference, December 2012, Amsterdam. 27. Alain Badiou, “Badiou’s Happiness Lesson,” 2015, http://www.versobooks .com/blogs/2192-badiou-s-happiness-lesson. 28. A. Badiou, “Eleven Melancholic Points Regarding the Future of the Greek Situation,” 2015, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2216-eleven-melancholic -points-regarding-the-future-of-the-greek-situation. 29. While the TTIP has yet to be fully ratified, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which is a smaller version of the TTIP, has in fact already been signed by the European Commission and the Canadian government. Under the terms of CETA, Canadian corporations have a similar right to sue European governments over “unfairness” (i.e., profit losses over national regulations regarding the environment, health and safety, working practices, and so on). 30. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 145. 31. Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia,” in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016). 32. Jameson, “An American Utopia,” 84.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

190 NO TE S

T O

PAGE S

1 6 6 –1 7 6

33. Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia: Epilogue,” in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016), 310. 34. Jameson, “An American Utopia,” 85– 86. 35. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 189– 90. 36. Jameson, “An American Utopia,” 75. 37. Jameson, “An American Utopia,” 82. 38. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 332. 39. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 158. 40. Jameson, “An American Utopia,” 82. 41. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 271. 42. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 270 and 260. 43. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 249. 44. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 249. 45. Jameson, “An American Utopia,” 54. 46. Jameson, “An American Utopia,” 18. 47. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 272. 48. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 272. 49. What Hegel could not have foreseen here is the extent to which, apropos Benjamin, the modern economy has become its own form of religious cult where the sense of the infinite (the preordination of capital) becomes internalized directly as part of the worldly reproduction of capitalism. 50. Edith Hamilton, Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (New York: Norton, 1948), 204. 51. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 276. 52. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 346. 53. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 278. 54. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 492. 55. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 492. 56. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 190. 57. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 191.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Index

Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 103–4 algorithmization of power, 57–58 Alter, Adam, 60 Althusser, Louis, 60, 61, 85, 120, 135 Anaxagoras, xvi Anaximander, 24 Anspach, Ralph: Anti-Monopoly, 62–63 antagonism, 68–69, 74, 78, 87, 94–95, 98–100, 116, 163, 165 Arab Spring, 43 Aurelius, Marcus, 167 Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, 137 Backman, Fedrik: A Man Called Ove, 93–94 Badiou, Alain, xii. On: capitalism, 159; democracy, 62; the event, 46, 120, 155, 157, 159, 175; happiness, 158; infinity, 121; political philosophy, 31; the state, 159, 160, 169; the subject, 120, 123; the universal and particular, 160. works: Being and Event, 124; Logics of Worlds, 119, 155 Barad, Karen, 122 Barrie, J. M.: Admirable Crichton, The, 98 Baudrillard, Jean, 183n8 Bauman, Zygmunt, 65 Beck, Ulrich, xvii Bell, Daniel, 86 Bell, Madison, 145 Benjamin, Walter, 68, 105, 130, 147 Berkeley, George, 7 Blake, William, 88 Blumenberg, Hans, 30 Bohr, Niels, 19, 122 Bond, James, 104, 139 Boorman, John: Hell in the Pacific, 98–99

Brassier, Ray, 3, 27 Brexit, 67, 114, 116, 169 Bruce Almighty, 107–8 Buffet, Warren, 70, 72 Butler, Judith, 32 Cameron, David, 163 Charlie Hebdo, 50 China, xi, 112–13, 159 Churchill, Winston, 44 class struggle, 34–36, 74–78, 84 Claudel, Paul: The Hostage, 139–41 Clinton, Hillary, 116 Cruz, Ted, 117 Cohen, Sacha Baron: Borat, 34, 37, 143, 144–45, 146 comedy, 142–46, 156 Confucianism, xi contingency and necessity, 13 Conway, Kelly-Anne, 113 corporate culture, 43, 105, 141, 146, 148 cryptocurrencies, 57 Dante Alighieri, 145 Dashner, James: Maze Runner, 147–49 De Kesel, Marc, 140–42 Deleuze, Gilles, 85, 93, 129; and Félix Guattari, 67 democracy, 25, 32–33, 36, 44–45, 49–50, 51–52, 62, 75, 82, 108, 110–11, 113, 130, 162, 163 Democritus: den, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 86 determination in the last instance, 79, 85, 185n60 Dickens, Charles, 91, 137–38 Dolar, Mladen, 113–14 Donner, Richard: Scrooged, 138

191

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

192 I N DE X

Einstein, Albert, 47, 122 epistemology, xv, 19, 122, 130 Europa myth, 154–55, 165 event, the, xxi, 46–51, 85, 112, 119–20, 129, 155, 159, 175 evil, xv, 48, 72, 137–39, 140 extra-discursive, the, 43, 44, 88, 109 Facebook, 114 Fanon, Frantz, 99 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, xiii finitude, 12, 29 Fink, Bruce, 15, 35 Finkelstein, Daniel, 150–51 flash trading, 56 Foley, Stephen, 188n3 Foucault, Michel, 75 Frankfurt School, 38, 144 Freaky Friday, 98 Freud, Sigmund, 90, 129 Fukuyama, Francis, 49, 86, 87 gambling, 26, 65–66, 67, 182n19 Gates, Bill, 70 Gerbner, George, 172 global capitalism, 165 Glynos, Jason, 44 Gödel, Kurt, 177–78n13 Goffman, Erving, 58 Gorz, André, 76 Gosse, Philip, 7 Gould, Stephen Jay, 7–8 Greene, Brian, 25 Greville, Fulke, 150 Griffin, Kathy, 116 Grimmson, Olafur (president of Iceland), 161 Guattari, Félix: and Gilles Deleuze, 67 Habermas, Jürgen, 36, 86 Hamilton, Edith, 172 Hardt, Michael: and Antonio Negri, 73, 74 Harman, Graham, 3, 7, 9, 17 Harris, Henry, 22 Harvey, David, 61, 67 Hawken, Paul, 38–39, 72–73 Hay, Colin, and Anthony Payne, 62 Hegel, G. W. F., on: the absolute, 123, 156, 175; absolute difference, 83–84; absolute knowing, 14; absolute notion,

175; anti-ontology, 18; the bad (finite) state, 170; bad infinity, xix, 11, 71, 109, 134, 158, 170; becoming, xviii; the concrete universal, 121; cunning of reason, 71; deconstruction (implicit critique of), xv; dialectics, xii, xiii, xiv, xvii, xviii, 24; doctrine of happiness, 119, 133–34; the Enlightenment, xii, xvii; essence, xxii, xv, xvi, 20, 22, 81, 83, 130, 139, 154; ethical (infinite) state, 170, 171, 173–74; evil, 138–39; finite thought, xx–xxi, 17; form and content, 80–81; ground of being, 26, 125; “help the poor,” 70; the Idea , 13, 130–31; infinite-finite relationship, xiii, xviii–xix, 121–22, 123, 172; infinite judgment, 21, 123; infinite thought, xx–xxii; infinity, xviii, xviii–xxii, 10–11, 15, 24, 83, 122, 125, 130, 134, 142, 158, 170, 175; knowledge, 122, 130; loss of the loss, 43, 99; Master, 98–99; materialism, 15, 18; nature, 12–13; necessity, xiv, 12, 14, 39, 84, 123, 126; negation of the negation, 128–29; night of infinity, 122; the one, 124–25, 127; oppositional determination, 56, 76, 79, 145, 146, 152; oppositional unity, xxi, 27, 125, 175; the Other, 100; reality, 18; reason, xii, xiii, xiv, xvii, xxii, 22, 170, 171, 175; reconciliation, 48, 99, 104, 135, 154, 173–75, 184n; representationalism, xvi, 13; repulsion, 102–3, 125; speculation and speculative reason, xii–xv, 22, 126, 170; spirit, xiv, 174–75; the state, 31; subject and substance, xv, 18, 20–22, 26; subjectivity-objectivity relationship, xvi, 13; thought, xvi; the two, 123–24, 127; understanding, xii–xv, 9; universal-particular relationship, 50–51, 70, 156–57, 168; vacuum and plenum, 28–29 Heraclitus, 24 Herbert, Frank Children of Dune, 137 Higgs model, 26 Hilferding, Rudolf, 67, 75, 77 Hoad, Phil, 137 Hobbes, Thomas, 108, 113 Hunger Games, 144, 150

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

193 I N DE X

Husserl, Edmund, 4 hyper-politicization, 82 Iceland, 160–61 ideology, 43–44 impossibility, 87, 104, 110–12 Incredibles, The, 70 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, xiii Jameson, Fredric, 74, 166–71 Jesus Christ, 48, 107 Jong-Un, Kim, 42–43 Joon-Ho, Boong: Snowpiercer, 45 jouissance (enjoyment), 40, 41, 52, 89, 95–96, 101–3, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 113, 116, 119, 133, 141, 147, 150, 154, 158, 159, 163 Joyce, James, 11 Kant, Immanuel, xi, xiii, 4, 9, 19–20, 22, 32, 70, 109, 137 Keynes, John Maynard, 66 Kipling, Rudyard, 100–101 knowledge, xii, xv, 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 47, 102, 113, 115, 119, 122, 130–31, 142, 147, 155–56, 173 Krugman, Paul, 66 Lacan, Jacques, on: the Act, 155; big Other, 58, 152–53, 165; caput mortuum, 35, 80; the cure, 135; dark God, 58, 89, 105, 147, 165; death drive, 27, 40; desire, 105, 132–33, 134–35, 136, 152–53, 156, 158; drive, 132–33, 134–35, 136, 158; essence, 135, 136; extimacy, 16, 38, 87, 95, 154; fantasy, 41–42; the gaze, 41; God as unconscious, 129–30; the infinite, 11; jouissance, 40, 147; knowledge, 47, 131; master, 47; master signifier, 40–41; mathematics; mirror stage, 157; object-a, 18, 40–41; the Real, 11, 19, 87; sexual relationship (impossibility of) 6, 80, 126, 156; the subject, 18, 87, 95; suture, 40–41; symptoms, 160, 171; traversing the fantasy, 52–53, 131–32, 136; the unconscious, 35–36; the universal, 94; woman as not existing, 92; “your money or your life?” 150

Laclau, Ernesto, 32–33, 36–37, 43, 46, 49–50, 74, 77, 78–84 passim, 86, 109, 110; and Chantal Mouffe, 34, 36, 45, 68, 87 Laruelle, Françoise, 3–4, 14–15 Lee, Harper, 97–98 Lefort, Claude, 30–31 Lenin, Vladimir, 67 Levinas, Emmanuel, 63, 134 Lindblom, Charles, 80 Livingston, Paul, 177n13, 189n14 Luhmann, Niklas, 37, 133 Lukes, Steven, 74 Luxemburg, Rosa, 76 Lyotard, Jean-François, 86, 151 Magie, Elizabeth: Landlord’s Game, 63 Marx, Karl, 54, 58, 59, 66, 74, 77, 88, 127, 147, 156, 160 masks, 90–91, 92–93, 144, 185n10 McGoohan, Patrick: The Prisoner, 136 Meillassoux, Quentin, xii, 3, 4, 7, 16, 17, 23, 24, 27. On: the absolute, 19; contingency, 12; correlationism, 4, 5, 15, 16; “Divine Inexistence,” 9; factiality, 6; facticity, 5, 19; hyperchaos, 6, 29; Laruelle and non-philosophy, 3–4; mathematics, 8, 9, 10; the Real and realism, 8–9; science, 6–10, 12, 20; the thing itself, 5; virtual God, 6, 9 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 50, 51 Mitchell, Andrew (MP), 127 Mobil Corporation, 80 Mouffe, Chantal: and Ernesto Laclau, 34, 36, 45, 68, 87 M-theory, 23 nature, xvii, 12–13, 19, 22, 26 necessity, 6, 10, 13, 29, 33, 37, 40, 43, 45, 79, 86, 110, 111, 158, 171, 174 Negri, Antonio: and Michael Hardt, 73, 74 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49, 81, 120 Norval, Aletta, 36 Obama, Barack, 160 object-a, 18 Oedipus complex, 92, 93, 102, 103, 107, 129 ontology, 6, 7, 8, 13–14, 17, 18, 19, 102, 111, 122, 124, 130

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

194 I N DE X

overdetermination, 80, 82, 85, 132, 135, 185n60 Parker Brothers: Monopoly, 63 Payne, Anthony: and Colin Hay, 62 Peter, Saint, 49 philanthropy, 71–72, 84 Piketty, Thomas, 61 Planck, Max, 22 Plato, 124, 166, 168 “Plebgate,” 127–28 Ponzi, Charles, 55–56, 149 pre-ontology, 27–28 psychoanalysis -19, 113–14, 131 Pussy Riot, 146 quantum physics, 19, 22, 24–26, 122 Rancière, Jacques, 50, 51 Randall, Lisa, 23 reason, 5, 6, 8, 9, 19, 20, 22, 46, 48, 86, 105, 166, 173, 176 Reker, Henriette (mayor of Cologne), 96 Rice, Condoleeza, 38 Ritzer, George, 58–59 Romero, George: Dawn of the Dead, 135 Rorty, Richard, 4, 5, 41, 49 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 108 Sade, Marquis de, 37–38 Sanders, Bernie, 56, 116 science, 22–23 Scorsese, Martin: Casino, 64–65, 182n19 sex, 19, 102, 126, 185n10 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, xiii Shirazi, Faegheh, 91 Srnicek, Nick, 3 Stallone, Sylvester: Rocky series, 106–7 Star Wars films, 92–93

Stavrakakis, Yannis, 36 Stone, Oliver: Wall Street, 2, 63 Strange, Susan, 67 subject, the, 18 subversion, 31, 33, 37, 38–39, 42, 45–46, 81, 85, 87, 109, 111 Sygne de Coûfontaine (Paul Claudel), 139–40, 141–43, 153, 155–56 Syriza, 151, 153, 159, 164 Tolkien, J. R. R., 164 totality, 38–39 Trading Places, 98 tragedy, 71–72143, 157 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 67, 159–60, 189n29 true and false vacuum, 24- 26 Trump, Donald, 50, 64, 115–18, 160 truth, xxi, xv, 4, 20, 47, 49, 57, 64–65, 90, 112–13, 115, 123, 131, 135 Tucci, Stanley, 144 Twins, 127 universities, 47, 77, 142 utopia, xxi, xxii, 166, 169, 171, 175 Varoufakis, Yannis, 150–53 passim, 189n12 veiling, 90, 91–92, 97, 106 Wilde, Oscar, 89–90, 168 Wizard of Oz, 106 Wolin, Sheldon, 30 woman, 91, 92, 95–96 worldlessness, 161–62, 166 Žižek, Slavoj, 32–33, 108, 116, 135, 160 Zupančič, Alenka, 49, 102, 122, 133, 140, 144, 156

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 04 Aug 2020 18:52:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms