Author: logocentric

eagleton literary theory

Here is a link to Žižek: Slavoj Žižek and Srećko Horvat: What Does Europe Want?

Terry Eagleton Notes on Literary Theory

– literary theory has been indissociably bound up with political beliefs and ideological values
– literary theory has helped, wittingly or not, to sustain and reinforce capitalism

There are two familiar ways in which any theory can provide itself with a distinct purpose and identity. Either it can define itself in terms of its particular methods of enquiry; or it can define itself in terms of the particular object that is being enquired into.

Literary criticism is rather like a laboratory in which some of the staff are seated in white coats at control panels, while others are throwing sticks in the air or spinning coins. Genteel amateurs jostle with hard-nosed professionals, and after a century or so of ‘English’ they have still not decided to which camp the subject really belongs. 173

The impotence of liberal humanism is a symptom of its essentially contradictory relationship to modern capitalism. For although it forms part of the ‘official’ ideology of such society, and the ‘humanities’ exist to reproduce it, the social order within which it exists has in one sense very little time for it at all. Who is concerned with the uniqueness of the individual, the imperishable truths of the human condition or the sensuous textures of lived experience in the Foreign Office or the boardroom of Standard Oil?

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the ‘human’ that present bourgeois society can muster. The ‘unique individual’ is indeed important when it comes to defending the business entrepreneur’s right to make profit while throwing men and women out of work; the individual must at all costs have the ‘right to choose’, provided this means the right to buy one’s child an expensive private education while other children are deprived of their school meals, rather than the rights of women to decide whether to have children in the first place.

Departments of literature in higher education, then, are part of the ideological apparatus of the modern capitalist state. Literary theorists, critics and teachers, then, are not so much purveyors of doctrine as custodians of a discourse.

The power of critical discourse moves on several levels. It is the power of ‘policing’ language – of determining that certain statements must be excluded because they do not conform to what is acceptably sayable. It is the power of policing writing itself, classifying it into the ‘literary’ and ‘nonliterary’, the enduringly great and the ephemerally popular. It is the power of authority vis-a-vis others – the power-relations between those who define and preserve the discourse, and those who are selectively admitted to it. It is the power of certificating or non-certificating those who have been judged to speak the discourse better or worse. Finally, it is a question of the powerrelations between the literary-academic institution, where all of this occurs, and the ruling power-interests of society at large, whose ideological needs will be served and whose personnel will be reproduced by the preservation and controlled extension of the discourse in question.

literary theory, as I hope to have shown, is really no more than a branch of social ideologies, utterly without any unity or identity which would adequately distinguish it from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cultural and sociological thought; and secondly in the sense that the one hope it has of distinguishing itself – clinging to an object named literature – is misplaced. We must conclude, then, that this book is less an introduction than an obituary, and that we have ended by burying the object we sought to unearth.

I am countering the theories set out in this book not with a literary theory, but with a different kind of discourse – whether one calls it of ‘culture’, ‘signifying practices’ or whatever is not of first importance which would include the objects (‘literature’) with which these other theories deal, but which would transform them by setting them in a wider context.

The feminist critic is not studying representations of gender simply because she believes that this will further her political ends. She also believes  that gender and sexuality are central themes in literature and other sorts of discourse, and that aJ!.y critical account which suppresses them is seriously  defective. Similarly, the socialist critic does not see literature in terms of ideology or class-struggle because these happen to be his or her political  interests, arbitrarily projected on to literary works: He or she would hold that such matters are the very stuff of history, and that in so far as literature  is an historical phenomenon, they are the very stuff of literature too. What would be strange would be if the feminist or socialist critic thought analysing  questions of gender or class was merely a matter of academic interest merely a question of achieving a more satisfyingly complete account of  literature. For why should it be worth doing this? Liberal humanist critics are not merely out for a more complete account of literature: they wish to discuss literature in ways which will deepen, enrich and extend our lives.

Socialist and feminist critics are quite at one with them on this: it is just that they wish to point out that such deepening and enriching entails the transformation of a society divided by class and gender. They would like the liberal humanist to draw the full implications of his or her position. If the liberal humanist disagrees, then this is a political argument, not an argument about whether one is ‘using’ literature or not. 182-3

Briko Racing journal

At this present moment I’m looking at the Briko Racing black journal. My first entry is dated June 17, 1995 and its on Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women.”  And so almost to the day, 18 years later in June 2013 I would be defending a thesis that deals with this exact article. I’m absolutely amazed that the things I was thinking about and taking notes on close to 18 and a half years ago is what I’m still on today. Laclau/Lacan and split subjectivity, a recurring theme that I have never left.

I have even detailed the June 21 1996 trip to Hungary and December 15 1996 departure for Japan, I celebrated the arrival of 1997 in Totaro’s hometown.

I have the Lacanian Graphs of Desire, taking them from Žižek’s 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology.

swales disavowal

Swales, Stephanie S. Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject. Routledge, 2012.

The mechanism of disavowal should be understood as a defense, not against the lawgiving Other’s demand that the child sacrifice jouissance, but against the inadequacy of the lawgiving Other.

Disavowal is a creative attempt to prop up the Law and to set limits to the excess in jouissance experienced due to the child’s problematic relation to the first Other.

The disavowal of the lawgiving Other might be described in the following terms: “I know very well that my father [or father figure] hasn’t forced me to give up my mother and my corresponding jouissance, but I’m going to make believe that the force of Law exists with someone or something that represents my father.” 78

The mechanism ofdisavowal, as I have said, involves the maintenance of two contradictory pieces of knowledge together with a strongly held belief that one of the two pieces of knowledge is true. In matters of superstition — in which a belief is held despite evidence to the contrary—therefore, disavowal is often pertinent.

For example, “I know very well that if, in one breath, I blow out all the flames of the candles on my birthday cake, my wish won’t really come true, but nevertheless I believe it’s true. Consequently, I make a wish every year and try my best to blow out all the candles with one breath.”

swales pervert

Swales, S. (2012). Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject. New York: Routledge.

Encountering a patient who in the initial sessions does not see himself as lacking is by no means an uncommon event. Most often, this type of patient is obsessive, and his difficulty in seeing himself as lacking in relation to the therapist can be attributed to his structural reasons for negating the Other and attempting to neutralize the Other’s desire.

Correspondingly, the obsessive often fears seeing himself as dependent (even in terms of knowledge) upon the therapist Other.

The obsessive prefers not to see himself as desiring because it threatens him with aphanisis and reveals to him that he is a subject lacking in being.

The process of getting the obsessive to face his own lack in the process of analysis is referred to as hystericizing his desire, and this involves regularly reminding the obsessive of the Other’s presence and desire. 241

However, the perverse patient, as mentioned above, can have a sure answer to the question of identity at the level of jouissance while remaining perplexed at the level of desire. The therapist, then, should foster the perverse patient’s curiosity in himself. Why does he desire what and how he desires?

It is thus important for the therapist to highlight manifestations of the pervert’s putting himself into question, for instance by ending a session when a pervert says, “I don’t know why I …” The therapist’s task of inscribing lack into the pervert will be an ongoing one throughout the process of therapy. 242

For instance, a masochistic patient who has undergone several months of therapy might escalate the dangerous practices in which he engages in the (usually unconscious) hope that the therapist’s anxiety will peak and s/he will enunciate a prohibition of those activities.

In this example, the masochist’s actions put the therapist in somewhat of a bind: if the therapist enunciates a prohibition, s/he deviates from analytic neutrality and the therapy might suffer from the associated risks (e.g., that the pervert attribute to the therapist a lasting wish that he stop engaging in those especially dangerous masochistic practices such that the pervert will repeatedly demand via his actions that the therapist play the role of lawgiving Other and the treatment will become stuck at the levels of perverse enactment and of demand);

if, on the other hand, the therapist does not prohibit the masochist’s dangerous practices, at the most the masochist might end up getting a serious injury or even getting killed and the therapist might face malpractices charges. At the least, the therapist risks being put into the position (illustrated in Jiménez’s 1993 case of Matías) of impotent witness of the pervert’s dangerous and/or criminal activity. 244

swales perverse patient

Swales, Stephanie S. Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject. Routledge, 2012.

A perverse patient will be especially likely to heed prohibitions if they are given by a trusted group psychotherapist whom the patient has put in the position of symbolic Other. In many cases, perverse patients are looking for ways to bolster their paternal functions, and a group therapist whom the pervert “elects” to the position of symbolic Other can have a good deal of influence on the patient as the subject-supposed-to-No!

This will only be possible, however, if the patient puts the therapist in the position of symbolic Other; if the patient relates to the therapist on the imaginary plane—as an other like himself—then the group therapist’s prohibitions will have no therapeutic effect. 236

Consequently, the therapist should look for signs that the patient is speaking to her or him as a symbolic Other before advising the patient to abstain from doing something. Such signs often include the patient’s admissions that there is some kind of knowledge—namely, unconscious knowledge — that is at work in her or him of which s/he her- or himself is ignorant, but about which the therapist is a knowledgeable authority. So too is symbolic transference evident when the patient thinks of the therapist as being the cause of her or his desire to be curious about himself and put his understandings of his life into question.

The necessary condition for true analytic or psychodynamic work is the patient’s having a question about himself that he addresses to an Other (the analyst or therapist) with the expectation that the Other (as subject-supposed-to-know) knows something about the answer that eludes the patient himself.

In my work with Ray, that question was “Why am I an exhibitionist, and how can I prevent committing future acts of exhibitionism?” Even though we understand the “constancy of [the pervert’s] jouissance as an answer, an answer which is already there” (Miller 1996b, p. 310) the pervert’s desire enables him to have a question that drives the progress of the analysis or therapy. 238

While the pervert may seem to want to get away with murder, what he really desires is to bolster the lawgiving Other’s existence. In his article, Clavreul made no mention of the pervert’s suffering due to the inadequacy of the paternal function. When the pervert’s subject position is seen as an attempt to prop up the paternal function, one can no longer maintain that the pervert cannot undergo traditional Lacanian analysis and that the only two positions available to the analyst of a pervert are those of moralizer and impotent voyeur. 239

Certainly, it is difficult to do analytic work with perverts. This is largely because the pervert prefers to play the role of object a (object cause of the Other’s jouissance) in relation to the therapist, causing her anxiety and jouissance. Analytic work with a pervert requires that the therapist maneuver the pervert into the role of split subject (as someone who sees himself as lacking at a certain level) so that the therapist can take up the role of object a as object cause of the patient’s desire to do therapeutic work. In working with a pervert, the therapist must be alert to ways to get the patient intrigued by his own unconscious manifestations when the pervert occasionally lapses back into the role of object a. 239

Situating the work at the symbolic level of desire means, for one thing, that the therapist should avoid responding to the patient’s requests for advice and interpretation.

Although it is common for a patient at the beginning stages of his psychotherapy to see his psychotherapist as a subject-supposed-to-know, the psychotherapist should not fall prey to the trap of believing that s/he holds privileged knowledge about the patient and what is good for him (or that if s/he does not give him advice, no one else in the patient’s life will do so; in the vast majority of cases, the patient gets plenty of advice from his PO, his group therapist and fellow participants, and his friends and family).

Interpreting from the position of subject-supposed-to-know incites an imaginary order relationship of rivalry with the patient in which the patient sooner or later tries to disprove the therapist’s theories and interpretations. Working at the level of demand means giving knowledge to the patient and fostering a relationship which is based on the patient’s dependency on that knowledge. In providing the patient with ready-made interpretations, the therapist puts words into the patient’s mouth and stymies the patient’s own curiosity about himself.

Working at the symbolic level of desire, however, involves the therapist’s expressions of desire that the patient do the work of psychotherapy.

Correspondingly, the therapist should aim to be positioned in the transference as the object-cause of the perverse patient’s desire to participate in psychotherapy and as the placeholder for the patient’s unconscious. This transferential position enables the patient to work through (via emotive speech) his issues with the Other.

Another way in which Lacan described the analytic progress of a subject is “the constant culmination of the subject’s assumption of his own mirages” (1953/2006a, p. 251).

One of the functions of the analytic method is to enable the subject to discover something about his unconscious, realizing that what he took to be his own individual thoughts and desires are actually ones he appropriated from the Other.

The subject calls who he thinks he is—the sum total of his ego misidentifications — radically into question.

The therapist aims to get the patient to speak about his experiences, fantasies, and dreams, to associate to them, and to be interested in possible Other, unconscious meanings of his utterances.

A difficult and delicate stage of the pervert’s treatment is the beginning stage. It is more difficult to get a perverse patient than a neurotic patient to question who he is and why he has become who he is. This is the question that psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to answer. This question, when unanswered, is what drives the patient to undergo psychotherapy. 241

Butler interview on Parting Ways

“Dissenting Over Diaspora: An Interview with Professor Judith Butler.” Judith Butler Interviewed by Adam Shapiro. Columbia Current 24 Dec. 2013.

C: In your book, you draw on Edward Said and a book of his in which he actually uses Moses as a figure who might be able to inspire peace and cooperation in Israel/ Palestine. Can you elaborate?

JB: First of all, I think there’s a difference between say, cooperation and cohabitation. Because cooperative ventures very often involve accepting inequality and I worry about cooperative Israeli/ Palestinian operations that don’t really call into question the occupation, second class citizenship or the colonial nature of Israel’s rule. And so, cooperation is a way of keeping the status quo in place.

Cohabitation is a word I try to use instead to try to talk about both forms of solidarity that would take aim at the colonial structure of power and forms of living together that might be positive in the context of a new political arrangement in which political equality is substantially realized.

Said, I think, was really interested in whether the diasporic situation of the Palestinian could be a source of understanding or resonance with the diasporic tradition in Jewish life. And he called upon Jews to recall their own history in exile as a way of establishing an understanding of what it meant to suffer radical dispossession.

For Said, the salient point about Moses was not only that he was a wanderer, but also an Egyptian so he has a mixed heritage and connects the Arab and the Jewish in his person. We might say that Moses was Mizrachi. As exilic, Moses stands for a certain kind of ethical sensibility of the exile, the one who seeks not just the return of his own people, but whose thinking about return expands to include all those who have been forcibly dispossessed.

We see this tension reflected, I think, in warring versions of the Haggadah– those that concern themselves with the return and emancipation of the Jews alone, or those that seek to make connections – not strict analogies – between all peoples searching for emancipation. I think for Said, what’s most important is that one group of people who have been radically dispossessed might not only find a way to chronicle and communicate their own dispossession but might also develop an ethical and political concern for the unjust political dispossession of others.

So, Moses is a hopeful figure, not only embodying the link between Jew and Arab, but prefiguring the link that might be made between peoples with very different histories of dispossession. Concretely, what that means for me is, when you start to develop a position about the rights of refugees, and consider that Israel was established, as you know, as a sanctuary for European refugees, one has to take into account the fact that the very founding of Israel produced a new refugee problem, and new demand for sanctuary.

This is one of the major contradictions that drew the critical attention of Hannah Arendt. What would it mean to develop a position on refugees such that whatever sanctuary is found for one group of refugees cannot justifiably expel another population and produce a new refugee class?

It can’t be that “oh, my refugee status needs sanctuary and global recognition even if it means that I push others out and produce a new refugee population”.

That means that we honor the rights of refugees only in the breach. A justifiable position has to be one in which we generalize, without contradiction, from the position of our own history to take into account the insufferable consequences of dispossession for others.

It doesn’t mean those histories are the exact same– they’re not the same, let us be clear. Let’s not get involved in false analogies. But still, I might be able to understand a very different kind of history than my own by virtue of having undergone a history of dispossession and my understanding of dispossession and of the refugee issue might be enlarged through that kind of thinking both through and beyond my own situation.

And I think that’s what Said was trying to do, and he makes this view explicit on several occasions. He was trying to say: “what might bring these people together? They both suffered dispossession”. At that moment he wasn’t simply laying blame: “and you! you’re the ones who dispossessed us!”. He was wondering rather what ethical resources might emerge from dispossession.

And what political policy toward the rights of refugees and the need for sanctuary that all people have? And if we were to start with that more generalizable claim, what kind of political organization of life might be possible? I believe it is this perspective that provides a set of diasporic principles for thinking about a new kind of polity in Palestine.

C: The diasporic is clearly a very important theme for you. But galut (exile) in traditional Judaism generally has to end in some form of geula (redemption). So if, for you, galut is the preferable Jewish status, what does redemption look like?

JB: Here I rely a great deal on the scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin who has written on sovereignty and exile. His work has only been published in article form in English, but he has a book in French and he’s an extraordinary scholar of these matters.

I think that there are ways of understanding redemption that do not involve gathering all the scattered lives back into the same homeland. In a certain Kabbalistic tradition, one that clearly informed the early Walter Benjamin, redemption was a feature of scattered life, found in all dimensions of the world.

So there are theological debates we might have about Benjamin and Gershom Scholem that would feature different ways of understanding redemption – the former decidedly less nationalistic than the latter. But it seems clear that both diasporic Jews, and diasporic Jewish communities, are not well-served by the idea that they are living in a “fallen” condition. The tradition of Jews living with non-Jews in the diaspora might well serve as a model for thinking about possibilities of co-habitation in Israel/Palestine, as I tried to suggest in relation to the founding contradiction at the heart of the refugee issue in Israel/Palestine.

C: You write in the book that using the Holocaust to justify Zionism is not ethically sound. But without a sovereign Jewish state, how can the security of Jewish people be assured?

JB: First of all, my guess is that living on the condition of equality and reciprocal acknowledgement with its Arab neighbors would do more for security of the Jewish people in that area than the militarism of the current state does.

So I actually think political equality works in the service of security, works in the service of cohabitation. I think that the source of the anti-Semitism we see today can be found in Greece where they actively, openly elected Golden Dawn people who are Nazi fascists and even in the National Party in Germany where Nazi insignias, which were once really rigorously banned, are now being openly worn again.

So there’s a lot that needs to be done politically to combat anti-Semitism that does not have to do with the Israeli state but does have to do with forms of anti-Semitism that are emerging within fascist currents in Europe. And I think that’s where our critical attention should be at this particular moment.

My own sense is that one has to oppose all forms of state racism, as we see exemplified in Israel, but all forms of anti-Semitism as well. And this means that the opposition to Israel cannot justifiably participate in anti-Semitism. That said, it is important not to discount an anti-colonial struggle as “definitionally” anti-Semitic. We have to develop a large enough framework to oppose all forms of racism.

C: Some of the concerns about BDS rest in claims that the movement is anti-Semitic. While you have done much to argue that this is not in fact the case, certain statements by BDS leaders, such as Omar Barghouti, have provided cause for concern. What would you respond to Barghouti’s statement that he “could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel’s much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prison,” when in your book you reject comparisons and therefore trivializations of the Holocaust?

JB: I do not think that strict analogies can be made between the Nazi genocide and the Occupation, it is true. I do not think that they serve either the ethical imperative to understand the history of that genocide or the contemporary political imperative to oppose the Occupation.

I myself do not accept the analogy. But perhaps most importantly, the arguments in favor of BDS do not rely on that analogy, even if some people who support BDS also engage in some of those analogies.

The argument for BDS is based on the fact that international laws have been abrogated and continue to be, and existing nation-states do not press the state of Israel to comply with those laws.

So on that ground, the boycott emerges as a non-violent effort to pressure a state to comply with international laws and norms that would secure the equal rights of Palestinians within Israel, the rights of self-determination for Palestinians on the West Bank which were promised and suspended by the Oslo accords, and the rights of dispossessed Palestinians to some form of return. None of these claims depend on that analogy.

C: Can you describe the ideal binational state and how it could function practically?

JB: It is not for me to describe or to prescribe. It seems that for political equality to become substantial, all the rightful inhabitants of that land would have to decide it. And that leaves us with the question of who rightfully inhabits those lands. So that would be the most important point of departure.

I believe, as I have said, that there are political risks with both the one state and the two state solution, and that it is up to those who have been denied rights of self-determination to enter that political process that decides what form of government would work best.

As you know, the two state solution founders very often on the problem of establishing borders. And the one-state proposal founders on the question of who is entitled to full citizenship.

If the one-state solution builds a greater Israel, it fulfills the expansionist aims of the settlers. But if it guarantees equal rights before the law without discriminating on the basis of religion, race, or national origin, then we might see something much more promising.

Similarly, if a two state solution leaves Palestine with only 10% of its former lands, and still living under siege or occupation, then that would not really work at all.

But if the green line is honored and de-colonization is complete, it might be a chance for all inhabitants to exercise legitimates rights of self-determination. So, as you can see, one cannot really say what should happen from the outside, but only help a bit to track the possibilities. My own task is to try to rethink the possible, but not tell others what to do.

C: And a question we ask all our interviewees: do you have a favorite Woody Allen film?

JB: The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Žižek books online

Žižek books online

Only Communism Can Save Us From Liberal Democracy 3 Oct. 2011.

1989 marked not only the defeat of the Communist State-Socialism, but also the defeat of the Western Social Democracy.

Nowhere is the misery of today’s Left more palpable than in its “principled” defence of the Social-Democratic Welfare State: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the Welfare State, knowing well that the State will not be able to deliver.

This necessary disappointment serves as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social-democratic Left and thus push the people towards a new radical revolutionary Left.

Needless to say, such a politics of cynical “pedagogy” is destined to fail, since it fights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the Welfare State to deliver will be Rightist populism. In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the Social-Democratic Welfare State.

This is why it is totally erroneous to pin our hopes on strong Nation-States, which can defend the acquisitions of the Welfare State, against trans-national bodies like the European Union, which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of the global capital to dismantle whatever remained of the Welfare State. From here, it is only a short step to accept the “strategic alliance” with the nationalist Right worried about the dilution of national identity in trans-national Europe.

(One of the crazy consequences of this stance is that some Leftists support the Czech liberal-conservative President Vaclav Klaus, a staunch Euro-sceptic: his ferocious anti-Communism and opposition to the “totalitarian” Welfare State is dismissed as a cunning strategy to render acceptable his anti-Europeanism …)

So where does the Left stand today? Alain Badiou wonderfully characterized the post-Socialist situation as “this troubled situation, in which we see Evil dancing on the ruins of Evil”: there is no question of any nostalgia, the Communist regimes were “evil” – the problem is that what replaced them is also “evil,” albeit in a different way.

In what way?

Back in 1991, Badiou gave a more theoretical formulation to the old quip from the times of Really Existing Socialism about the difference between the democratic West and the Communist East.

In the East, the public word of intellectuals is eagerly awaited and has a great resonance, but they are prohibited to speak and write freely; while in the West, they can say and write whatever they want, but their word is ignored by the wide public.

Badiou opposes the West and the East with regard to the different way the (rule of the) Law is located between the two extremes of State and philosophy (thinking).

In the East, philosophy is asserted in its importance, but as a State-philosophy, directly subordinated to the State, so that there is no rule of Law: the reference to philosophy justifies the State as working directly on behalf of the Truth of History, and this higher Truth allows it to dispense with the rule of Law and its formal freedom.

In the West, the State is not legitimized by the higher Truth of History, but by democratic elections guaranteed by the rule of Law, and the consequence is that the State as well as the public are indifferent to philosophy:

“The submission of politics to the theme of Law in parliamentary societies… leads to the impossibility of discerning the philosopher from the sophist… Inversely, in bureaucratic societies it is impossible to distinguish the philosopher from the functionary or the policeman. In the last instance, philosophy is generally nothing other than the word of the tyrant.”

In both cases, philosophy is denied its truth and autonomy because:

“the inherent adversaries of the identity of philosophy, the sophist and the tyrant, or even the journalist and the policeman, declare themselves philosophers.”

One should add here that Badiou in no way secretly or openly prefers the police party-State to the State of Law: he states that it is fully legitimate to prefer the State of Law to the police party-State; he draws here another key distinction:

“The trap would be to imagine that this preference, which concerns the objective history of the State, is really a subjective political decision.”

What he means by “subjective political decision” is the authentic collective engagement along the Communist lines: such an engagement is not “opposed” to parliamentary democracy, it simply moves at a radically different level – that is, in it political engagement is not limited to the singular act of voting, but implies a much more radical continuous “fidelity” to a Cause, a patient collective “work of love.”

Today, when the democratic honeymoon is definitely over, this lesson is more actual than ever: what Badiou put in theoretical terms is confirmed by daily experience of the majority of ordinary people: the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989 was no Event in the sense of a historical break, of giving birth to something New in the history of emancipation.

After this supposed break, things just returned to their capitalist normality, so that we have the same passage from the enthusiasm of freedom to the rule of profit and egotism described already by Marx in his analysis of the French Revolution.

Exemplary here is the case of Vaclav Havel: his followers were shocked to learn that this highly ethical fighter for “living in truth” later engaged in shady business deals with suspicious real estate companies dominated by the ex-members of the Communist secret police.

And so, how naive did Timothy Garton Ash appear on his visit to Poland in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism: blind to the vulgar grey reality around him, he tried to convince the Poles that they should feel glorious, as if their land is still the noble land of Solidarity.

The ruling ideology is, of course, well aware of this gap, and its reply is “maturity”: one should get rid of utopian hopes which can only end up in totalitarianism and accept the new capitalist reality. The tragedy is that some Leftists subscribe to this judgment.

Alain Badiou described three distinct ways for a revolutionary – or radical emancipatory – movements to fail.

First, there is, of course, a direct defeat: one is simply crushed by the enemy forces.

Second, there is defeat in the victory itself: one wins over the enemy (temporarily, at least) by way of taking over the main power-agenda of the enemy (the goal is simply to seize state power, either in the parliamentary-democratic way or in a direct identification of the Party with the State).

On the top of these two versions, there is a third, perhaps most authentic, but also most terrifying, form of failure: guided by the correct instinct that every attempt to consolidate the revolution into a form of State power represents a betrayal of the revolution, but unable to invent and impose on social reality a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its purity by the “ultra-leftist” resort to destructive terror.

Badiou aptly calls this last version the “sacrificial temptation of the void”:

“One of the great Maoist slogans from the red years was ‘Dare to fight, dare to win’. But we know that, if it is not easy to follow this slogan, if subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it to a simple failure (the attack didn’t succeed), while victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restauration. That a revolution is never more than a between-two-States. It is from here that the sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not the repression by the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void.”

What Badiou is effectively saying here is the exact opposite of Mao’s “Dare to win!” – one should be afraid to win (to take power, to establish a new socio-political reality), because the lesson of the twentieth century is that victory either ends in restoration (return to the logic of State power) or gets caught in the infernal cycle of self-destructive purification.

This is why Badiou proposes to replace purification with subtraction: instead of “winning” (taking over power) one maintains a distance towards state power, one creates spaces subtracted from State. But does this not represent a kind of division of labour between the radical and the pragmatic Left?

Subtracting itself from State politics, the radical Left limits itself to assuming principled positions and bombarding the State with impossible demands, while the pragmatic Left makes a pact with the devil in the sense of Peter Mandelson’s admission that, when it comes to the economy, we are all Thatcherites.

Is Communism then simply “impossible” in the sense that it cannot be stabilized into a new order? Even Badiou presents the eternal “Idea of Communism” as something which returns again and again, from Spartacus and Thomas Munzer to Rosa Luxemburg and the Maoist Cultural Revolution – in other words, as something that fails again and again.

The term “impossible” should make us stop and think. Today, impossible and possible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess.

On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible.” We can enjoy sex in all its perverse variations, entire archives of music, films and TV series are available for download. There is even now the prospect of enhancing our physical and mental abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into genome, up to the tech-gnostic dream achieving immortality by way of fully transforming our identity into a software which can be downloaded from one to another hardware …

On the other hand, especially in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of Communist states, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality (namely, the capitalist socio-economic reality) with all its impossibilities.

And so, today we cannot engage in large collective acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), isolate yourself from the global market, and so on, and so on.

It is crucial clearly to distinguish here between two impossibilities: the impossibility of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Impossibility is here re-doubled, it serves as a mask of itself: the ideological function of the second impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first impossibility.

Today, the ruling ideology endeavours to make us accept the “impossibility” of a radical change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not constrained to parliamentary game, in order to render invisible the impossible/real of the antagonism which cuts across capitalist societies.

This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order – which, however, in no way implies that this real/impossible cannot be directly dealt with and radically transformed in a “crazy” act which changes the basic “transcendental” coordinates of a social field, an act which changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

This is why Communism concerns the Real: to act as a Communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism which underlies today’s global capitalism.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion – to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts.

In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite. So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, fraternity? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them against the fundamentalist onslaught.

Fundamentalism is a reaction – a false, mystifying, reaction, of course – against a real flaw of liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself – the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left.

In Western and Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term re-arrangement of the political space. Until recently, the political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body: a Right-of-centre party (Christian-Democrat, or liberal-conservative) and a Left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic), with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate (greens, liberals, etc.).

Now, there is progressively emerging one party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities; opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist neo-Fascist groups.

The exemplary case is here Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-Communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centrist liberal party of the Prime Minister Donald Dusk, and the conservative Christian party of Kaczynski brothers.

Silvio Berlusconi in Italy is a proof that even this ultimate opposition is not insurmountable: the same party, his Forza Italia, can be both the global-capitalist-party and integrate the populist anti-immigrant tendency.

In the de-politicized sphere of post-ideological administration, the only way to mobilize people is to awaken fear (from immigrants – that is, from the neighbour). To quote Gaspar Tamas, we are thus again slowly approaching the situation in which “there is no one between Tsar and Lenin” – in which the complex situation will be reduced to a simple basic choice: community or collective, Socialism or Communism.

To put it in the well-known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical Left.

The task is thus to remain faithful to what Badiou calls the eternal Idea of Communism: the egalitarian spirit alive for thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Muntzer up to some religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalists versus Confucianism, and so on).

The problem is how to avoid the alternative of radical social explosions which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, or of equality, but displaced to a domain outside social reality (in Buddhism we are all equal in nirvana).

It is here that the originality of the Western thought enters, in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy breaking with the mythic universe; Christianity breaking with the pagan universe; modern democracy breaking with traditional authority.

In all these cases, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a – limited, but nonetheless actual – new positive order.

In short, the wager of the Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal; on the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itself in a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life.

This is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on “terror” indicated by Christ’s words that he brings sword, not peace, that whoever doesn’t hate his father and mother is not his true follower – the content of this terror is the rejection of all traditional hierarchic community ties, with the wager that another collective link is possible based on this terror, an egalitarian link of believers connected by agape as political love.

Another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. One should follow Claude Lefort’s description of democracy here: the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one who is directly qualified for this post either by tradition, charisma, or his expert and leadership properties.

This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained at any cost.

But we can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being its limitation, the fact that the elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation – which is why, as it was clear already to the Ancient Greeks, the most democratic form of selecting who will rule us is by a lot.

That is to say, as Lefort has demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its greatest crisis, the moment of transition from one to another master when, for a moment, “the throne is empty,” which causes panic, into the very resort of its strength: democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero-point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted.

The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links, is thus re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order. Hegel is thus perhaps wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic vote (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831): it is precisely democracy which accomplishes the “magic” trick of converting the negativity (the self-destructive absolute freedom which coincides with the reign of terror) into a stable new political order: in democracy.

Once upon a time, we called this Communism. Why is its re-actualization so difficult to imagine today? Because we live in an era of naturalization: political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity. For instance, when austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done.

In May 2010 and again in June 2011, large demonstrations exploded in Greece after the government announced the austerity measures it has to adopt in order to meet the conditions of the European Union for the bailout money to avoid the state’s financial collapse.

One often hears that the true message of the Greek crisis is that not only Euro, but the project of the united Europe itself is dead. But before endorsing this general statement, one should add a Leninist twist to it: Europe is dead, OK, but – which Europe?

The answer is: the post-political Europe of accomodation to world market, the Europe which was repeatedly rejected at referendums, the Brussels technocratic-expert Europe. The Europe which presents itself as standing for the cold European reason against Greek passion and corruption, for mathematics against pathetics.

But, utopian as it may appear, the space is still open for another Europe, a re-politicized Europe, a Europe founded on a shared emancipatory project, a Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, to French and October revolutions.

This is why one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy preys of the freely-floating international capital which can play one state against the other.

More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be even more internationalist and universalist than the universality of global capital. The idea of resisting global capital on behalf of the defense of particular ethnic identities is more suicidal than ever, with the spectre of the North Korean juche idea lurking behind.

Slavoj spoke at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on Sunday, 2 October 2011.

chiesa chapter 2

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. MIT Press. 2007

Lacan relates the notions of full and empty speech to his well-known dictum according to which “The sender receives his own message back from the receiver in an inverted form.”

Here I intend to demonstrate, through a close reading of this formula, that for Lacan what is really at stake in its varying significations is the gradual passage from an individual conception of the unconscious revolving around the notion of speech to a transindividual one revolving around the notion of language.

It would, however, be wrong to equate Lacan’s transindividual unconscious with any sort of quasi-Jungian archetypal unconscious—“collective” by definition. The former corresponds to a symbolic signifying structure; the latter coincides with the pregiven significationof a set of primordial images. For Lacan, the unconscious as signifying structure produces conscious signification. Jungian psychoanalysis reverses this Freudian principle: it is the unconscious as primordial signification that produces the linguistic structure.

In the final part of this section, I intend to argue that the emergence of the notion of a transindividual unconscious—as universal structure of language — renders explicit the covert paradox on which Lacan’s conception of the aim of analysis as the individual subject’s realization of his own true, unconscious desire through full speech was implicitly based.

In fact, if on the one hand Lacan repeatedly warns us against misinterpreting the unconscious as a subjective hidden substance, on the other, at this stage of his production, he does not seem to realize that the full realization of the subject’s substanceless unconscious would inevitably correspond to its utter desubjectivization into a substantial structure.

Adopting Lacan’s own contemporaneous definition of psychosis, we could argue that this would inevitably correspond to a “being passively spoken by language,” language to be understood as the transindividual locus of the unconscious.

In other words, Lacan’s notion of an individual unconscious that would be equated with full speech seems to give rise to a vicious circle: the aim of analysis is to overcome empty speech and the imaginary wall of language, but, in parallel, the more one’s individual speech is symbolized, the more it is integrated into the transindividual symbolic dimension of language.

Language is never imaginary per se: the wall is erected solely by the individual subject’s own imaginary identifications. Once these are fully revoked, the subject is absorbed by language, the transindividual unconscious.

I do not believe it is possible to reconcile this dis-identifying de-subjectivization with the optimism evoked by the pseudo-Hegelian “humanist” leitmotiv of dis-alienation as presented by Lacan in “Function and Field.” 44

The second part of Seminar III—and, above all, the article “The Agency of the Letter”—suggests that by 1956 Lacan’s return to the Freudian discovery of the unconscious no longer revolved primarily around the pseudo-Hegelian dialectical function of speech, but instead became increasingly dependent on the structuralist notion of language as initially formulated by Saussure. As Lacan states: “Firstly there is a synchronic whole, which is language as a simultaneous system of structured groups of opposition, then there is what occurs diachronically, over time, and which is discourse.” 46-47

chiesa I think where I am not

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. MIT Press. 2007

The fact that the conscious subject is subjected to the unconscious can initially be explained by answering the following naïve question: why does psychoanalysis take the trouble to think about the unconscious in the first place?

The answer is to say that an unconscious topos separated from consciousness must exist because something which is not conscious tangibly manifests itself within consciousness.

What is more, these manifestations, the so-called “formations of the unconscious,” are far from “irrational”: they can be seen to follow certain regular patterns, which Freud had already considered to be fundamentally linguistic. 35

The key reference for Lacan here is Hegel’s dialectics as mediated by Kojève. On the other hand, a few years later, in his article “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957) — as well as in Seminars IV and V — Lacan appears to assume that alienation in language cannot be overcome. In other words, the subject’s individual speech is irremediably subjected to the universal field of language, and to its laws. Lacan’s key reference for this second phase … is Saussure’s structural linguistics, largely in the form of Jakobson’s reelaboration. 37

As we have already noted, Lacan believes that the subject is necessarily alienated in language insofar as language already exists before his birth and insofar as his relations with other human beings are necessarily mediated by language. But how is the fact that language precedes the subject — and, above all, imposes itself as an irreducible mediator of the subject’s relation with other subjects — automatically linked to the fact that he is alienated in language? 37

(1) Lacan begins from a very clear-cut empirical observation. First of all, the subject is alienated in language because he never manages to say exactly what he really wants to say. His interlocutor is unable to grasp fully what the subject actually means to tell him: words do not suffice to convey the subject’s desire appropriately, and consequently fully to satisfy it. At the same time, the subject’s individual speech — his perpetually addressing a counterpart in discourse — also always says more than the subject wants to say. The counterpart can read in the subject’s words something that he did not intend to tell him. (Furthermore, the counterpart is usually unaware of his interpreting beyond the subject’s conscious intention.)

Lacan believes it is precisely the thematization of such a surplus of speech with respect to conscious intention that led Freud to discover the efficaciousness of the “talking cure,” psychoanalytic treatment. Before Freud, Lacan argues, “intention was confused with the dimension of consciousness, since it seemed that consciousness was inherent to what the subject had to say qua signification [signification].” In simple terms: before Freud, it was assumed that the subject could consciously say what he wanted to say.

The mistaken equation between intentionality and consciousness (the fact that the unconscious was overlooked) relied precisely on the unquestioned equation between consciousness and signification. 38

(2) From the same empirical recognition of the misunderstandings caused by language in speech, Lacan comes to the conclusion that linguistics is correct in distinguishing a subject of the statement (roughly attributable to language) from a subject of the enunciation (roughly attributable to full speech). To put it bluntly, the “I” which functions as the grammatical subject of a given statement may not be identified with the “I” which carries out this act of speech. The former is nothing but the linguistic correspondent of the ego. … “the personal pronoun ‘I’ designates the person who identifies his or herself with a specific ideal image. Thus the ego is what is represented by the subject of the statement.”Lacan defines the speech of such an I as empty speech: consequently, empty speech is nothing but speech alienated in language, subjugated to its imaginary deformation. In everyday life, human beings communicate through empty speech.

(3) Lacan extends to every subject the Freudian concept of the Ich-Spaltung (confined by Freud to the pathological sphere of fetishism and the psychoses) precisely by referring to the linguistic distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. The subject undergoes a split (Spaltung) “by virtue of being a subject only insofar as he speaks.”

In speech and because of speech, the subject is never fully present to himself.

That which is not present in the statement but is presupposed and evoked by it (the enunciation) indicates the locus of “another scene” in the subject: the subject of the unconscious which, as I have already indicated, depends on specific linguistic laws, and sustains a particular “thought.”

(4) The discovery of a structural split in/of the subject subverts the Cartesian cogito while, at the same time, revealing its intimate relation to psychoanalysis. As Lacan repeatedly states, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”

This is to say that the unconscious I, the subject of the enunciation, really thinks at the unconscious level: it (ça) thinks where the I qua ego and qua subject of the statement is not (conscious).

Conversely, the I qua linguistic ego is (conscious) where it,the unconscious subject, does not think.

Most importantly, the subversion of the Cartesian ego shows that its illusion of unity is possible only because of its strict interdependence with the Spaltung. There is no self-consciousness without the unconscious, and vice versa.

Descartes’s formulation of a fundamental principle of self-consciousness could be said contemporaneously to decree, at the level of the history of thought, the formal birth of the unconscious (although this birth will remain implicit until Freud).

Consequently, it is strictly speaking senseless to speak of a pre-Cartesian notion of the unconscious.

(5) The strong interdependence between the Cartesian ego and the Freudian unconscious indicates, for Lacan, that the subject of the unconscious is not simply an alternative ego, concealed by repression. Neither does the subject of the unconscious correspond to any sort of “unknowable substance” that would represent the buried core of one’s repressed desires, and would simply be awaiting liberation from the constraints of Cartesian self-consciousness.

In “Function and Field,” Lacan affirms that the subject’s alienation in language — empty speech as delineated above — can be superseded by full speech. The latter’s emergence coincides with the subject’s assumption of his unconscious desire. It is also clear that, in this article, Lacan superimposes truth upon unconscious desire.

How can this realization of the unconscious be achieved? Lacan opposes the specular dialectic of a desire based on the ego’s imaginary alienation to the symbolic dialectic of a desire conveyed by the function of full speech. 39-40

To cut a long story short, full speech is able to offer the subject a different, non-narcissistic satisfaction of his desire. Beyond the emptiness of speech that accompanies ego-logical imaginary objectifications, the subject is constantly speaking with his unconscious, even if he is unaware of it.

One should then ask the following naïve question: what does the unconscious subject say, and what does he want? He (unconsciously) addresses the Other (subject) so that the truth about his speech — the specificity of his unconscious, repressed desire—may be recognized by the Other.

This is what full speech fundamentally is: more precisely, it corresponds to the subject’s full assumption of a speech which he normally utters without being aware of it. Consequently, full speech is inextricable from symbolic intersubjectivity, which is indeed in turn—as I have already outlined in Chapter 1—inseparable from mutual recognition of one’s desire and the related dimension of pact as the instauration of the Law.

To quote Lacan: (a) “[Full] speech is the founding medium of the inter-subjective relation”; (b) “We must start off with a radical intersubjectivity, with the subject’s total acceptance by the other subject”; (c) there exists a common “function of recognition, of pact, of interhuman symbol.”

It is therefore clear that, in the early 1950s, Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic is profoundly indebted to the Hegelian-Kojèvian principle for which human desire corresponds to the desire to be recognized by the Other. It should equally be clear by now why, according to Lacan, an actual return to Freud’s original discoveries entails a resumption of the often underestimated practical importance of speech in psychoanalytic treatment, in contrast to the importance bestowed on the subject’s physical reactions during the course of treatment by many psychoanalytic schools. Psychoanalysis aims to symbolize through full speech the imaginary identifications that objectify the subject in his ego.

More precisely, in the specificity of the analytic setting, the general, apparently unspecified symbolic desire for recognition — which implicitly underlies all everyday intersubjective interactions insofar as they presuppose the symbolic dimension — is transformed by the analyst into a recognition of the analysand’s particular imaginary alienating identifications that ensnare his individual unconscious desire. Psychoanalysis should therefore dis-identify the subject from his imaginary identifications.

Dis-alienation can be attained only through dis-identification. Dis-alienation — from imaginary identifications and, therefore, also from the imaginary “wall of language”— will ultimately coincide with an integration of the individual’s desire (for symbolic recognition of his unconscious desire) into the universal Symbolic.

At this stage, Lacan appears to believe that unconscious desire can be fully realized: it is enough for it to be recognized by the Other (subject). 40

A calibrated orthopedics of (mutual) recognition is thought to suffice to dis-alienate desire. As I shall soon attempt to show, such an optimistic solution seems, at least partially, to contradict Lacan’s continual warnings against ingenuously conceiving of the unconscious as a “true” substance which should be substituted for the ego. 41

review of johnston

2013.12.13
Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy Northwestern University Press, 2013, 257pp., $45.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780810129122.

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University

In this first of a projected three-volume Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Adrian Johnston places his materialist philosophy into the lineage of contemporary French philosophy. The French philosophers Johnston has most in mind are Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Quentin Meillassoux, and each of them fails, on Johnston’s reading, despite professed intentions to the contrary, to develop a thoroughly materialist philosophy. In one way or another, each ultimately “backslides” into a form of religious thinking that is also coupled with an under-appreciation of, if not outright hostility to, the life sciences. It is precisely by developing the philosophical implications of recent developments in the life sciences, and in particular the neurosciences (on this point Johnston follows Catherine Malabou), that a proper materialist philosophy can be established without backsliding into quasi-religious explanations.

Johnston’s focus upon the work of Lacan and his disciples is not simply to lay out a critical exegesis but rather to fulfill the promise of a materialist philosophy that can only be accomplished, Johnston argues, if one properly harnesses Lacan’s central insight — namely, the idea that the real entails an irreducible gap or rupture. By contrast, a common metaphysical assumption that is shared by both naïve scientific materialism and religious theism, Johnston argues, is the notion that Nature/God is an inviolable “One-All.” As he puts it, “It is not much of a leap to propose that the scientism accompanying modern natural science as a whole . . . tends to be inclined to embrace the nonempirical supposition of the ultimate cohesion of the material universe as a self-consistent One-All.” (16) From here Johnston seconds Lacan’s “assertion that science, even in the current era, relies upon ‘the idea of God’”. (16).

If one aligns one’s metaphysical views of materialism with contemporary life sciences, however, Johnston claims that we no longer have the “big Other,” the “self-consistent One-All” that provides the metaphysical foundation for science; to the contrary, “what remains,” Johnston argues, “lacks any guarantee of consistency right down to the bedrock of ontological fundaments.” (23).

Instead of a material being that is a consistent One-All and a continuation of the “idea of God,” we have “antagonisms and oppositions at the very heart of material being.” (24). It is only by way of such “antagonisms and oppositions,” Johnston claims, that we are able to offer a nonreductive yet materialist account of the emergence of conscious subjectivity.

Key to this effort is the development of the concept of weak nature, a concept that Johnston derives from Hume’s project (of which more below) and which will become the central topic of the second volume of Johnston’s Prolegomena, titled Weak Nature.

To set the stage for the necessity of formulating the concept of weak nature, Johnston first lays out the inadequacies of Lacan’s, Badiou’s, and Meillassoux’s efforts to follow through on their intention to establish a materialist philosophy. Due to the constraints of space, I will simply sketch the problems Johnston has with these efforts, highlighting along the way some potential problems and oversights with Johnston’s own approach.

Despite what Johnston takes to be Lacan’s correct insight regarding the common metaphysical assumptions regarding the “One-All” in both science and religion, Lacan’s thought itself, Johnston argues, is “clouded by occasional bouts of backsliding into dangerous flirtations with Catholicism and a virulent hostility to the life sciences.” (4).

There are two places where this clouding becomes especially evident. The first occurs with respect to what Johnston sees as Lacan’s outdated view of science. He claims that Lacan’s understanding of science relies upon an “odd materialism” that rules out on principle any account of how the natural body may be “exogenously impacted and subjectified by the denaturalizing signifiers of the sociosymbolic orders.” (50)

This then leads to Lacan’s claim that “language is there before man . . . Not only is man born in language, exactly as he is born into the world, but he is born by language,” (63) and as a result Lacan admits to having no interest in “prehistory” (63), for such a history would entail moving beyond the symbolic order, a move that would have to occur by way of the symbolic order.

This is the second place where Lacan encounters difficulties according to Johnston, for he falls into what Meillassoux will call the correlational circle — namely, the circle whereby the real is always the real as correlated with a subject for whom it is given, and hence we are never given the real as it is in itself.

In the case of Lacan we have what Johnston calls “a structural linguistic correlationist for whom the pre-Symbolic . . . Real exists solely in and through a (co)constituting correlation with the Symbolic.” (69). It is here where the “One-All” and the “idea of God” resurfaces in Lacan’s thought, for the “One-All” is the Symbolic order of language itself.

Lacan, in other words, did not remain true to his initial insight regarding the need for discontinuities, gaps, and ruptures at the heart of the real. Johnston then turns to Lacan’s disciples to see if they fare any better in developing a materialist philosophy.

Before turning to Badiou a brief comment is in order. It is certainly natural to see Badiou, Meillassoux, and others (most notably, Žižek) as Lacan’s primary disciples carrying forward the master’s central insights, and yet Johnston pays little attention to the work of Gilles Deleuze in his book. As Daniel Smith reminds us in his essay on Lacan, when Deleuze recounted a meeting he had with Lacan not long after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, he claimed that after having gone through “a list of all his disciples,” whom Lacan said were all “worthless,” Lacan concluded that when it came to disciples he needed “someone like you [Deleuze].”[1]

In particular, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari explicitly wonder “How many interpretations of Lacanianism [are] overtly or secretly pious, [and] have in this manner invoked . . . a gap in the Symbolic? . . .

Despite some fine books by certain disciples of Lacan, we wonder if Lacan’s thought really goes in this direction.”[2]

The reason for Lacan’s hesitation to move in this direction, as Deleuze and Guattari put it in What is Philosophy?, is precisely Lacan’s effort to develop an immanent materialism and avoid a transcendence of the gap or rupture whereby “immanence is [taken to be] a prison from which the Transcendent [breach or rupture] will save us.”[3] In other words, remaining true to Lacan’s efforts to avoid a return of the “secretly pious” and theological would entail avoiding this form of transcendence.

I will return to this theme below, but for Žižek and Badiou, at least, developing Lacan’s thought does entail affirming the breach or rupture and a rejection of Deleuze, who is mistakenly assumed to be continuing with the very metaphysics of the One-All that has been a hindrance to developing a proper materialism.

Johnston’s view, however, is more sophisticated, and one of the great strengths of his book is the attention he draws to the premise that motivates Badiou’s turn to formal mathematics in developing an ontology of events.

As Johnston puts it, “Badiou depicts naturalism-organicism-vitalism, on the one hand, and formalism-mathematicism, on the other hand, as mutually exclusive ontological options.” (85)

Badiou adopts the latter approach and rejects the former; and since Deleuze is associated with the former approach, his thought is rejected as well. Johnston, however, will call into question Badiou’s “reasons for rejecting the naturalism-organicism-vitalism option.” (85)

Put briefly, for Johnston the choice is not between formalism and vitalism but rather “between spiritualist obscurantism and scientific clarity,” (98) and Johnston argues that, unfortunately for Badiou’s project, Badiou falls decidedly on the side of “spiritualist obscurantism.”

Badiou’s slip into “spiritualist obscurantism” occurs when he attempts to account for the process whereby an “inconsistent multiplicity” becomes a “consistent multiplicity.”

An inconsistent multiplicity is a consequence of Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, which entails, as Johnston puts it, an uncountable, nondenumerable “infinite infinities of inconsistent multiplicities-without-oneness.” (111)

The “counting-for-one” operation “imposes certain constraints and limitations on thought’s relation to (inconsistent) multiplicities of being per se,” (115) and renders them into countable, consistent multiplicities.

The problem for Badiou, however, is to account for this operation itself. Who or what performs the operation? Johnston claims that ultimately this “counting-for-one” remains unaccounted for, and is “a unity-producing synthesizing function or process as an ephemeral non-being arising from God-knows-where.” (128) Despite his efforts to avoid Kantian idealism, it “remains just around the corner” (128) in Badiou’s own thought.

Johnston next turns to Meillassoux, a move that is crucial, for not only was Meillassoux Badiou’s student, but Badiou himself calls upon Meillassoux’s book, After Finitude, to do the heavy lifting in decoupling a transcendental philosophy from Kantian transcendental idealism. Since Badiou was unsuccessful in carrying out this decoupling, the turn to Meillassoux becomes all the more important, or as Johnston argues, “whether Badiou succeeds in entirely stepping out from under Kant’s long shadow arguably depends on whether Meillassoux succeeds in thoroughly debunking Kantian and post-Kantian correlationism.” (132)

Central to Meillassoux’s effort to establish what he calls a speculative materialism is an appropriation and transformation of Hume’s philosophy, or more precisely the “core maneuver,” Johnston argues, “lying at the very heart of Meillassoux’s project is an ontologization of Hume’s epistemology.” (150).

Johnston argues quite convincingly that this maneuver fails. In particular, he disputes Meillassoux’s use of the chance/contingency distinction. Chance refers to the calculation of probabilities relative to a One-All set of possibilities, and thus for instance the chance a flipped coin will show up heads approaches 50% as the number of throws approaches infinity, the infinite One-All set of throws.

Contingency, on the other hand, is what one has when one adopts Cantor’s “unbounded infinite of multiplicities-without-limits”, for then one undoes the very One-All totality “upon which the probabilistic aleatory reasoning of chance allegedly depends, namely, the presumed existence of a totality of possible outcomes.” (163).

The problem for this view, however, is to account for stability at all, a stability Meillassoux himself relies upon when he calls upon the findings of science (e.g., carbon dating) to argue for what he calls arche-facts, or the fact that there were realities that pre-date being given to any consciousness (and hence a reality beyond and irreducible to any form of correlationism).

If anything, Johnston argues, the ontology Meillassoux draws from Cantor, what Meillassoux calls “hyper-chaos,” makes it less rather than more likely that stability would emerge at all.

“Why,” Johnston asks, “should the detotalization of the totality posited in connection with chance . . . make the flux of inconstancy less rather than more likely?” (163)

If there are infinite infinities of hyper-chaos, and if anything can emerge at any time without any reason or explanation (for such a reason or explanation depends upon a stability of relationships), then Meillassoux himself ultimately ends up falling into “spiritualist obscurantism” rather than offering, as Johnston seeks to do, a position grounded in “scientific clarity.”

For instance, Johnston points out that Meillassoux simply accepts without explanation or reasons a conscious subjectivity. In other words, Meillassoux is completely immune to the “hard problem” as has been formulated in the work of David Chalmers. This immunity is not a virtue, however, but rather a crippling vice that infects Meillassoux’s entire project. If anything can emerge at any time without reason or explanation, then what Meillassoux leaves us with, Johnston claims, “amounts to an antiscientific sophistical sleight-of-hand that places Meillassoux in undeniable proximity to the same Christian creationists he mocks in After Finitude.” (152-3).

In the final section, the Postface, Johnston sets the stage for the two volumes that will follow through on the promise to offer a materialism that does not reproduce the “idea of God” in any form. As with Meillassoux, Hume looms large in Johnston’s efforts. Instead of offering an ontologization of Hume’s epistemology that leads to a Cantorian metaphysics of hyper-chaos, Johnston offers an ontologization of Hume’s skepticism that lays the basis for the concept of weak nature. With this concept in hand, Johnston believes he will be able to offer, in subsequent volumes, a proper materialist philosophy, what he calls “transcendental materialism” and takes to be the position that “affirms the immanence to material nature of subjects nonetheless irreducible to such natural materialities.” (178)

Integral to transcendental materialism is the idea that “splits [are] real and ineliminable.” (180) Transcendental materialism is to be contrasted with “Hegelian-Marxian dialectical materialism” in that whereas the former sees splits as “real and ineliminable,” dialectical materialism “favors emphasizing eventual unifying syntheses of such apparent splits as that between, simply put, mind and matter.” (180).

The concept of weak nature provides a way of incorporating the ineliminability of splits in that it assumes Hume’s skeptical arguments have successfully weakened “the appearance of humans as free, as capriciously spontaneous” and weakened “the appearance of nature as determined, as ruled without exception.” (207)

What this “ontological weakening of nature” leaves us with, Johnston concludes, is an “opening within being qua being an sich [of] the possibility of a gap,” a gap that makes possible “a subjectivity fully within but nonetheless free at certain levels from material nature.” (209)

In closing I return to my earlier point regarding Deleuze’s claim that a proper Lacanian metaphysics would not embrace ineliminable splits, for in doing so one ineluctably brings the transcendent in through the back door, and this in turn threatens to undermine the transcendental materialism Johnston hopes to establish.

These questions may be addressed in the second volume, Weak Nature, and Johnston may well take on some of the Deleuzian questions raised here. To do so would make sense, for in many ways Deleuze and Johnston are fellow travelers in that their interest in Hume was motivated precisely by the problematic that leads Johnston to propose the concept of weak nature — that is, it provides for an account of a subjectivity that is “fully within but nonetheless free at certain levels from material nature.” (209)

As Deleuze states the Humean problematic in Empiricism and Subjectivity, it is, as for Johnston, to show how a “subject transcending the given [can] be constituted in the given?”[4] Much of the rest of Empiricism and Subjectivity, and much of Deleuze’s subsequent work, can be understood in the light of this problematic. Whether or not Johnston addresses these questions in the next volume, he has certainly shown that a Humean metaphysics of weak nature offers a promising way forward in establishing a materialist philosophy. Johnston’s subsequent volumes promise to offer a significant contribution to debates in contemporary philosophy and will be eagerly anticipated.

[1] Daniel Smith, “The Inverse Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan,” in Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 312.

[2] Ibid. p. 317.

[3] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 47.

[4] Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, translated by Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 83.

graeber morality of debt and work

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
David Graeber
[from The Baffler No. 22, 2013]

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.

Already by the time of the French Revolution, Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. As a result, the storming of the Bastille in Paris could well end up having effects on Denmark, or even Egypt, just as profound as on France itself—in some cases, even more so. Hence he speaks of the “world revolution of 1789,” followed by the “world revolution of 1848,” which saw revolutions break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries, from Wallachia to Brazil. In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a world revolution ultimately responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states as much as for Soviet communism. The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything. This was a revolution against state bureaucracies, and for the inseparability of personal and political liberation, whose most lasting legacy will likely be the birth of modern feminism.

A quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor”—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line.

Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called “the people” were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafés. A generation later, even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas. Before long, we had reached the situation we are in today: that it’s necessary to lay out the terms for anyone to even notice they are there. They’ve become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion.

Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements: an expanded franchise, universal primary education, the welfare state. The world revolution of 1968, in contrast—whether it took the form it did in China, of a revolt by students and young cadres supporting Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution; or in Berkeley and New York, where it marked an alliance of students, dropouts, and cultural rebels; or even in Paris, where it was an alliance of students and workers—was a rebellion against bureaucracy, conformity, or anything that fettered the human imagination, a project for the revolutionizing of not just political or economic life, but every aspect of human existence. As a result, in most cases, the rebels didn’t even try to take over the apparatus of state; they saw that apparatus as itself the problem.

It’s fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late sixties as an embarrassing failure. A case can be made for that view. It’s certainly true that in the political sphere, the immediate beneficiary of any widespread change in political common sense—a prioritizing of ideals of individual liberty, imagination, and desire; a hatred of bureaucracy; and suspicions about the role of government—was the political Right. Above all, the movements of the sixties allowed for the mass revival of free market doctrines that had largely been abandoned since the nineteenth century. It’s no coincidence that the same generation who, as teenagers, made the Cultural Revolution in China was the one who, as forty-year-olds, presided over the introduction of capitalism. Since the eighties, “freedom” has come to mean “the market,” and “the market” has come to be seen as identical with capitalism—even, ironically, in places like China, which had known sophisticated markets for thousands of years, but rarely anything that could be described as capitalism.

The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and opened the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms. It only made sense that the first attempt to recreate a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.

Future Stop

In retrospect, though, I think that later historians will conclude that the legacy of the sixties revolution was deeper than we now imagine, and that the triumph of capitalist markets and their various planetary administrators and enforcers—which seemed so epochal and permanent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—was, in fact, far shallower.

I’ll take an obvious example. One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest—and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was genuinely falling apart by the early seventies—that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years. It took 9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof. Propaganda was incessant, the media was brought on board, experts provided exact calculations on body bag counts (how many U.S. casualties it would take to stir mass opposition), and the rules of engagement were carefully written to keep the count below that.

The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives. And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didn’t matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.

Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?

The thought first occurred to me when participating in the IMF actions in Washington, D.C., in 2002. Coming on the heels of 9/11, we were relatively few and ineffective, the number of police overwhelming. There was no sense that we could succeed in shutting down the meetings. Most of us left feeling vaguely depressed. It was only a few days later, when I talked to someone who had friends attending the meetings, that I learned we had in fact shut them down: the police had introduced such stringent security measures, canceling half the events, that most of the actual meetings had been carried out online. In other words, the government had decided it was more important for protesters to walk away feeling like failures than for the IMF meetings to take place. If you think about it, they afforded protesters extraordinary importance.

Is it possible that this preemptive attitude toward social movements, the designing of wars and trade summits in such a way that preventing effective opposition is considered more of a priority than the success of the war or summit itself, really reflects a more general principle? What if those currently running the system, most of whom witnessed the unrest of the sixties firsthand as impressionable youngsters, are—consciously or unconsciously (and I suspect it’s more conscious than not)—obsessed by the prospect of revolutionary social movements once again challenging prevailing common sense?

It would explain a lot. In most of the world, the last thirty years has come to be known as the age of neoliberalism—one dominated by a revival of the long-since-abandoned nineteenth-century creed that held that free markets and human freedom in general were ultimately the same thing. Neoliberalism has always been wracked by a central paradox. It declares that economic imperatives are to take priority over all others. Politics itself is just a matter of creating the conditions for growing the economy by allowing the magic of the marketplace to do its work. All other hopes and dreams—of equality, of security—are to be sacrificed for the primary goal of economic productivity. But global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which significantly ignored most neoliberal prescriptions), growth rates have been far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned, state-directed, welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. By its own standards, then, the project was already a colossal failure even before the 2008 collapse.

If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.

Debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.

How did they pull it off? The preemptive attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security systems” of one sort or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.

In fact, most of the economic innovations of the last thirty years make more sense politically than economically. Eliminating guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No one has much time for political activity if they’re working sixty-hour weeks.

It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

Work It Out, Slow It Down

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.

This is not to say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place. The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis. I think this is an important achievement—not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable. Still, such models can be only thought experiments. We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.

The most obvious is technology. This is the reason it’s so absurd to imagine activists in Renaissance Italy coming up with a model for a stock exchange and factories—what happened was based on all sorts of technologies that they couldn’t have anticipated, but which in part only emerged because society began to move in the direction that it did. This might explain, for instance, why so many of the more compelling visions of an anarchist society have been produced by science fiction writers (Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk, Kim Stanley Robinson). In fiction, you are at least admitting the technological aspect is guesswork.

Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves. What might a revolution in common sense actually look like? I don’t know, but I can think of any number of pieces of conventional wisdom that surely need challenging if we are to create any sort of viable free society. I’ve already explored one—the nature of money and debt—in some detail in a recent book. I even suggested a debt jubilee, a general cancellation, in part just to bring home that money is really just a human product, a set of promises, that by its nature can always be renegotiated.

Labor, similarly, should be renegotiated. Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse. To undergo it is a misfortune that at best is sometimes necessary. Yet it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others. A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely.

What would remain is the kind of work only human beings will ever be able to do: those forms of caring and helping labor that are at the very center of the crisis that brought about Occupy Wall Street to begin with. What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t even exist three hundred years ago), but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation.

It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.

At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.

Even those running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is inevitable. The real political struggle is going to be over the form that it takes. Well, isn’t the obvious thing to address both problems simultaneously? Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be.

Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I were to have to formulate one, that would be it. After all, this would be an attack on the dominant ideology at its very strongest points. The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.

All this might still seem very distant. At the moment, the planet might seem poised more for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to such a world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes, we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.

This article is an excerpt from The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber. Copyright © 2013 by David Graeber. Published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

David Graeber is a contributing editor of the magazine and the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. His new book is The Democracy Project.