Читать книгу Unexceptional Politics - Emily Apter - Страница 8

Part of the difficulty, but also part of the interest, of trying to give definition to unexceptional politics derives from the opposition between the distinction in French between “le” and “la” politique: the Political versus politics, or polity versus policy. In his entry on “le” and “la” politique in the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon), Philippe Reynaud observes that la politique in its most conventional translation to English, covers both “politics” and “policy.”¹ Politics is commonly keyed to American pluralism—electoral politics, political participation, party formation, the recruitment of governing elites, and regime competition—whereas policy is taken to refer to strategies of state power. Reynaud stresses that the duality of politics and policy in English tends to get lost in French, where distinctions between state power (commandement) and deliberation, or between civic relations and strategic action, are more stringently maintained by the le/la divide.

Oliver Marchart reminds us that

although the theoretical differentiation between “politics” and “the political” occurs for the first time in German political thought with Carl Schmitt, the habit of differentiating between these two concepts started in French thought as early as 1957, with the publication of Paul Ricoeur’s essay “The Political Paradox.”²

For Ricoeur, polity (le politique) denotes ideal political organization and historical rationality, whereas politics (la politique) refers to the empirical and concrete manifestations of this ideal sphere. Ricoeur factors temporality into the equation:

Polity takes on meaning after the fact, in reflection, in “retrospection.” Politics is pursued step by step, in “prospection,” in projects; that is to say both in an uncertain deciphering of contemporary events, and in the steadfastness of resolutions … From polity to politics, we move from advent to events, from sovereignty to the sovereign, from the State to government, from historical Reason to Power.³

In addition to foregrounding paradoxes embedded in political thought, Ricoeur underlines the familiar opposition between Machiavelli and Marx. “The Prince, he notes, showcases “the logic of means, the pure and simple techniques of acquiring and preserving power.” It is on the basis of “this essential untruth, of this discordance between the pretension of the State and the true state of affairs, that Marx meets with the problem of violence.” At stake is “a political mode of existence that combines the Marxist critique of alienation with the Machiavellian, Platonic and Biblical critique of power.”⁴ Here, Ricoeur would have us extend “polity” into politics by bracing together subjection and calculated maneuvers. This move runs parallel to Balibar’s much later use of the term politique (devoid of any definite article) when glossing Schmitt’s Leviathan. Political, taken both substantively and adjectivally, names the process by which the state of nature—essentially an anti-political force—becomes the state, straddling the rule of law (polity) and the police (politics).⁵

Though Ricoeur and Balibar reveal the fungibility of the distinctions among polity, politics, and the Political, it is clear that the theoretical gulf between politics and the Political widened considerably in the wake of bitter post-‘68 schisms on the global left. Chantal Mouffe, for example, lays claim to the Political as a means of cutting loose discourses of the liberal subject from American-style pluralism. In On the Political, she defines the Political as “a space of power, conflict and antagonism” in contradistinction to Heidegger’s “ontological essence of politics,” or Hannah Arendt’s “space of freedom and public deliberation.”⁶ Mouffe is interested in showing “how the rationalist approach dominant in democratic theory prevents us from posing the questions which are crucial for democratic politics.” “My aim,” she states, “is to bring to the fore liberalism’s central deficiency in the political field: its negation of the ineradicable character of antagonism.”⁷ “In The Concept of the Political [1932],” Mouffe notes, “Schmitt declares bluntly that the pure and rigorous principle of liberalism could not give birth to a specifically political conception. Every consistent individualism must, in his view, negate the political since it requires the individual to remain the ultimate point of reference.” What she proposes (following the examples of Arendt, Agamben, Derrida, Hardt, Negri and many others), “is to think ‘with Schmitt against Schmitt,’ using his critique of liberal individualism and rationalism to propose a new understanding of politics.”⁸ For Mouffe, to become operative “the Political” must recur to new social movements, political identities, and mobilizations of antagonism. The latter is more fully drawn out as “agonistics,” to emphasize the discursive force of antagonism: the demotic, colloquially articulated expressions of dissensus that serve to undercut consensus-driven interests, claims of inalienable right, and market values of competition.⁹

In On the Shores of Politics (Aux bords du politique), Jacques Rancière similarly targets neoliberal ideologues who trumpet “the end of political divisions and social antagonisms” under market capitalism, or who bemoan the “exhaustion of egalitarian and communal (mis)adventures.”¹⁰ Rancière is committed to identifying “a few paradoxes which may prompt us to reexamine not just philosophy’s political role, but also the status of the peculiar activity which we call politics.”¹¹ “Politics” here is “empirical politics,” and traces back, via Plato’s Gorgias, to maritime sovereignty and the sailor’s ethical code of “profit and survival.”¹² After maritime imperialism makes it to shore, it swells in scale, eventually occupying the cartographic and temporal expanse of infinitude. For Rancière, equality is the only countervailing force, qualified as the “Two of division”; that is, “a One that is no longer that of collective incorporation but rather that of the equality of any One to any other One.”¹³ Against empirical politics, against what he calls “the new ‘liberal’ dream of the weights and counter-weights of a pluralist society guided by its elites,” Rancière endorses the old class struggle and the new “humanizing power of division.”¹⁴ They alone seem to have the capacity to make any politics (in terms that Rancière would be willing to call politics) visible. They alone seem up to the task of stripping democratic pluralism of its depoliticizing foils.

For Alain Badiou, the Political lives on in an emancipatory sequence most readily apprehended in the form of its retreat from “politics.” In his 1984 broadside Peut-on penser la politique? (Can Politics Be Thought?) Badiou distinguishes the “evental” form of the Political from an easily dismissed politics of whatever happens to be “on the agenda—elections, parliament, presidency, trade unions, televised speeches, diplomatic visits and so on”:

Everyone knows that this is a disaffected scene, one that certainly sends out many signals of such a uniform nature that only an automated subject can be linked to them, a subject unencumbered by any desire … It is totally exact that the political finds itself in retreat and becomes absent, whence the interrogation as to its essence.¹⁵

The thinkability of the Political worthy of the name is positioned outside representative government and its institutions: “Politics will be thinkable only if it is delivered from the tyranny of number,” oriented towards the hypothetical of “a proletarian capacity—of a politics that is not a politics of representation.”¹⁶ Rancière and Badiou have in common their rejection of ordinary democracy, understood to have euthanized political truths through the opinion system, the institutionalized manipulation of soft power, and the narcotic effect of consensus. As Badiou writes, “Democracy is never anything but a form of the State.”¹⁷ The grounds of their critique seem irrefutable, irreproachable. And yet, their republic remains for the most part elusive, invisible from within the situation, conceivable only from a possible-worlds perspective. In his Second Manifesto of Philosophy (a distillate of positions elaborated in Logics of Worlds), Badiou cycles through the four major truth procedures—experimental formal logics in mathematics and science, art, love, and emancipatory politics—allowing that, under present conditions, they are blurred beyond recognition. The incursion of neuroscience, culturally relativist post-medium art, the boxing-in of love between familialism and libertinism, and incoherent political admixtures of economics, management, and police control have taken their toll.¹⁸ Though the outlines of a new clarity of truths may be grasped—category theory with respect to the matheme, affirmation of the sensible with respect to art, an anti-statist International with respect to politics, non-heteronormative sexuality with respect to love (all of which renew the possibility of a “Platonism of the Multiple” and “a communism of the Idea)”—Badiou’s truths are ultimately more “thinkable” as autonomous art, as poetry. The poem, he affirms

is an exercise in intransigence. It is without mediation and thus also without mediatization. The poem remains rebellious—defeated in advance—to the democracy of audience ratings and polls … The poem has no nothing to communicate. It is only a saying, a declaration, which draws its authority only from itself.¹⁹

Nick Hewlett, criticizing the rare, exceptional status of the Badiouvian “event” or concept of change, raises the important issue of the extent to which Badiou’s philosophical politics entails a distancing of the subject from material conditions, from the state of affairs that exists, from the status quo. He asks:

Could we not in fact one day be faithful, in theory at least to a (far more egalitarian and socially just) status quo, rather than to a dramatic point of change? Why must fidelity necessarily be to a perhaps disputed and/or somewhat arbitrarily defined point of departure for what might become the status quo?²⁰

Where Hewlett points out that the event in Badiou’s system is insufficiently inoculated against lapsing into the status quo, one could extract from this point another: the very fact that the event is susceptible to becoming another status quo suggests that we should think of it neither in terms of temporal exception, discrete break, hiatus, caesura, or revolution, nor as a subtraction from the situation, but as myriad micropolitical effects that might or might not induce the advent of an emancipatory truth that historically rearranges worlds. We know that advental truths—slaves are humans, all people are created equal, women have rights, the proletariat exists, colonialism is unjust—have been known to happen and to transform politics but they are not, I would insist, detached from worlds of compromised materialities

While Hewlett asserts that Badiou “is in search of the highest possible level of purity, which is as removed as possible from the material,” and that for him “this level of abstraction is achieved by multiplicity as articulated by set theory,” I would tend not to agree that he is “removed from the material,” but would argue that his engagement with political materialities is of a selective order.²¹ Badiou’s fidelity to the Idea, and to a position of militant resistance to politics as theorized by classical political theory or political science, leads him, on the one hand, to philosophy (from Being and Event to Logics of Worlds), and, on the other hand, to polemical interventions, as in his analysis of the Arab Spring (The Rebirth of History) or of the excrescences of the Sarkozy regime (The Meaning of Sarkozy, a treatise on “depressive” politics”).²² In neither case are political materialities extended to the fields of “small p” politics, which is to say, to applied ethics, rational choice, pluralism, constitutionalism, distributive justice, political realism or the kinds of quantitative sociological positivism predominant in political science. Badiou of course has his reasons for hewing to theories of the event, generic truths, and the rejection of consensus politics, but this hardly disqualifies questioning in his work that element of what Raymond Geuss (in reference to the Kantian ideal of rational agency) calls “empirical abstemiousness.”²³ It is this abstemiousness that leaves one wondering how to breach the firewall between philosophy and so-called real politics, which, at least for Geuss, accounts for the failure of purely philosophical politics to deal with so-called real motivations and what actually happens.

“Big P” Politics implies, even if it does not prescribe, a refusal to accept the terms of homogenized opinion and engineered consent on offer in the mediocracy. Consistently “le” politique is summoned to delegitimate plurality of opinion, called on to effect the “possibility of a rupture with what exists.”²⁴ Writing post-Maastricht, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy formulated this position as “le retrait du politique.” To “retreat the political” means calling for politics to be cognized otherwise—regrounded in an alternative semantics of equality, partitive being, singular community, distributive and social justice, deprivatization and the creative commons.²⁵ It is a concept of the Political as yet unthought: of a “time to come” (Negri’s l’avvenire, constituted by a “phenomenology of revolutionary praxis”)²⁶; of “the coming community” (Agamben’s coming being of the quodlibet, or “‘whatever’ being”)²⁷; of the communist hypothesis or a “communism to come”; of democracy relieved of applied ethics; of inarticulable or impossible subjects of politics.²⁸

Geoffrey Bennington develops a conceptually refined reworking of this “politics to come” in Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida. Bennington uses the tautology “politics of politics” to refer to something “persistently political” embedded in “rhetorico-political gestures which resist the suicidal tendency of exceptionalist political philosophy to end politics, or to end itself, by means of a redemptive moment or “decision to end all decisions.”²⁹ He prepares this argument by emphasizing the untenability of any distinction between essential and inessential politics:

I use the phrase “politics of politics” to try to capture the way in which politics is from the first doubled up in a way that the dogmatists and moralists denounce in proportion to their inability to understand it. Idioms beginning “the politics of …” are often used to describe a dimension of other activities thought to be nonessential to those activities … Like other activities, politics is thought to have an essential part (however it be defined—participating in the life of the polis; discussing, militating, deliberating, voting, enacting, and mandating the application of appropriate legislation, protesting, demonstrating, organizing) and an inessential “politics” or “politicking” (what in Washington is called “playing politics” and in Paris “la politique politicienne”). On this construal, everyone, including those most energetically and enthusiastically involved in it, eagerly denounces the politics of politics as a kind of corruption of what politics essentially is or should be, and everyone deplores the fact that politics seems increasingly bound up in its own politics in this way. On the other hand, “the politics of …” idiom often goes along with a more or less obscure sense that something political is in fact intrinsic to the activity being described and can have behind it the obscure conviction (which can range across the entire political spectrum from extreme left to extreme right) that in some significant sense “everything is political.”³⁰

Bennington forges a third way that lines up neither with the position that “only this is essentially political,” nor with the position that “everything is political,” but with the proposition that “politics is always already the politics of politics.”³¹ This “always already” (retrospectively proleptic, nachträglich) politics is deconstructive and christened “scatter.” Scatter subsumes what is “secretly at work from the start, from the ancient materialists to Plato and Aristotle and on through Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau to Kant and Hegel and beyond.”³² It disqualifies the possibility of any political philosophy setting itself apart from the fray of sophistics, legislative deliberation, or for that matter, politicking or political chatter (what Heidegger in Being and Time called Gerede [idle talk]).³³ And yet, insofar as politics speaks in specific idioms, or remains distinguishable as praxis, it stops short of being assimilated (as contamination or common property) into “everything.” Instead, it “scatters” through the recursive effect of “distortion and deceit,” moving from the logos into political sophistry, rhetoric, the noble lie, the expressive order of pseudos, possible error, dissimulation.³⁴ In its arrival at spurious truths and anacolutha (disrupted incoherence), “the politics of politics” harks back to Hannah Arendt’s essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” published in 1971, though newly resonant in the context of the 2016 election in the United States. During this period, fact-checking and trial-by-YouTube (and by Google) emerged as the political techne du jour, the informal court of appeals relied on in the face of spectacularly flagrant, exponentially elevated instances of public lying in political discourse and insidious infiltrations of fake news (not its Trumpist appropriational travesty: “fake news”), into mainstream media reportage.³⁵ Noting how the Pentagon Papers turned the political credibility gap into an “abyss,” illuminating the fragility of facts and the proliferating modalities of “deception, image-making, ideologizing, and defactualizing,” Arendt wrote:

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case. This active, aggressive capability is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.³⁶

Bennington extends Arendt’s politics of lying to the “politics of politics,” suturing deception to “the autoimmunity of the political, in a nonmoralistic way.”³⁷

In Derrida’s ascription, autoimmunity is a variant of aporia (in Greek, literally “impasse,” “puzzlement,” “doubt”), identified by him in Force of Law not only with something “mystical” (related to Pascal’s “mystical foundation of authority”)³⁸, but also with the figuration of the impossible: the crossroads leading in mutually exclusive directions, the double bind, non-passage, the blocked transverse.³⁹ Derrida distinguishes among three types of aporia in Force of Law: First is the “the epokhe of the rule,” aligned with a restitutive “fresh judgement” in the application of the law to the decision, such that the decision singularly reinvents the law in each iteration.⁴⁰ Second is “the haunting of the undecidable,” in which “the decision to calculate is not of the order of the calculable.” In this type, the deconstruction of “a determining certainty of a present justice” operates by virtue of an “‘idea of justice’ that is infinite, infinite because irreducible, irreducible because owed to the other—owed to the other, before any contract, because it has come, it is a coming [parce qu’elle est venue].”⁴¹ Third is the aporia of obstruction, tied to a kind of madness brought on by a decision taken “in the night of nonknowledge and nonrule. Not of the absence of rules and knowledge but of a restitution of rules that by definition is not preceded by any knowledge or by any guarantee as such.”⁴² The pure performative of decision opens out to the à-venir, a space of “to come” that non-messianically harbors the emanicipatory ideal (which Derrida, in direct tribute to the Enlightenment, insists will never be outmoded). This a-venir is carefully distinguished from the future, which in Derrida’s view is simply another temporality of the present, where there can be no justice.

The aporia upholds what Bennington refers to as “sovereign” concepts (the concept digne de ce nom, “worthy of the name”), but it is also what defenestrates them:

If they are to be worthy of their name (if we are to take them at all seriously as putatively sovereign, with all the solemn dignitas that sovereignty implies), [they will] always fall foul of aporias and paradoxes, succeed only in failing or in falling … their ‘dignity’ is therefore a little overblown in the metaphysical construal of them.⁴³

Such phrases leave one to ponder the exceptionalism of “a space of ‘to come’” and by extension of aporetic politics. Does the à-venir reside in a decision that is aporetic insofar as it is calculatedly incalculable? Impossibly possible? Determinately indeterminate? Conditionally unconditional? Bennington indirectly responds to such queries when, after noting Derrida’s admission (in Rogues) that the definition of “démocratie à venir” is coyly withheld, he refers it to the negative theology of the unnameable (“As if I had given in to the apophatic virtue of some negative theology that does not reveal its name”).⁴⁴ Left with what he calls the “promissory dimension” of a deconstructive “democracy to come,” Bennington gestures “abyssally” towards “the possibility of a complex kind of ‘second-level’ reinscription of dignity itself in its relation to its name, or in the ‘worthy’ relation anything whatsoever might have to its name,” a possibility ascertainable in the “intimate” yet “potentially conflictual relation between the ‘digne du nom’ structure and the regulative Idea.”⁴⁵ Immediately though, Bennington abandons the “regulative Idea” on Derrida’s behalf, suggesting that too much “rule” lurks in the word “regulative,” along with more of an “architectonic of Kantian critique” than Derrida would have allowed.⁴⁶ In the place, then, of a relation between scattered politics and the law, we have deconstructed regulation and a notion of the event that disrupts (courtesy of the indignity of the anacolutha) the fulfillment of sovereign teleology:

An event worthy of the name would explode and scatter the name of which it is worthy, in being worthy of it. This eventness in general (in its singularity), openness to the coming of which seems in Derrida to be the only truly unconditional good, the “non-ethical opening of ethics,” the very thing that will pry unconditionality away from sovereignty, is what affects the “digne de ce nom” structure in general with the structures of interruption and always-necessarily-possible indignity.⁴⁷

“Scatter” ostensibly undoes the unconditionality of the sovereign name to create the conditions for an “unconditional good.” Bennington sets great store by a “demi-” qualification that supposedly modifies all of Derrida’s “‘unconditional’ terms, including democracy.” But, like other qualifications that “open up a space” or dissolve an impacted substantive or universal abstraction (truth, reason, ethics, metaphysics, theology, sovereign authority …), the half-unconditional condition subsides all too easily into another aporia, into a promissory à-venir that, if not exactly futural or messianic, returns us to states of suspension, or the long wait. Prospectivity becomes the condition of “a politics of politics,” consigning us to wait for the “unconditional riposte to sovereignty in its narrower political sense,” in a volume to come of Scatter.⁴⁸ We are left wondering how the aporetic structure of à-venir will actually perform politically, and whether, in the meantime, it might not be prudent to focus on how impasse and obstruction condition the political unconditionals of sovereign decision, states of emergency, exceptional power, or the stakes of an empty structure that Agamben, in reference to the state of exception from law, qualified as “a force of law without law.”⁴⁹

Though it might seem like an odd swerve to follow on a condensed lexicon of “politics” and “The Political” (passing through Arendt, Ricoeur, Balibar, Mouffe, Badiou, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Rancière, Derrida and Bennington), by cycling back to Bruno Latour, his commentary on Schmitt in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence warrants reference at this juncture because of the way it unexceptionalizes transcendent modes of the Political. Latour introduces the geometric figure of the curve or circle along which “little transcendences” are distributed, thereby circumventing the need for a Schmittian “exceptional man” charged with instituting sovereign decision above the law.⁵⁰ Latour’s circle is “exceptional at all points,” and represents the collective as it coalesces around specific issues in real time.⁵¹ Plotted on the curve is a “small p” politics that speaks in its own language, that defines distinct modes of acting or articulating politically that evolve and mutate. One could even say that Latour gives us something on the order of a plastic politics: an ontogenetics of political DNA comparable to what Arne de Boever, building on Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity as an explosive/reparative capacity, calls “plastic sovereignty”; forms that retain “sovereignty’s positive accomplishments.” These include the skills of the professional organizer; non-vertical axes of agency; autopoeic transformation over and against “neoliberal flexibility”; and a “new experience of language.”⁵² A “plastic” approach to politics, from this perspective, might entail taking up anew elements of its DNA: terms that codify a concept of politics as professional métier (as in Cicero’s On Government), or vocabulary that has fallen into desuetude (civility, civic virtue, the citizen subject).⁵³ It initiates and promotes thinking pragmatically and philosophically about the links between effective sophistical praxis and micropolitics.