logocentric – Page 38

deleuze queering

Colebrook, Claire. “Queer Vitalism.” New Formations, 68, Spring 2010. 77-92.

In contemporary discourses of the subject, such as Judith Butler’s, one must subject oneself to enabling and recognisable norms. To be recognised by, and with, others requires some determined personality. But those necessary norms and figures of personhood are at odds with the act, performance or event which brings them into being. On this account, personhood comes into being through moments or decisions which are perceived only after the event as the outcome of a performance that must be posited as having been. We do not see, live or intuit performativity itself, only its effects. A politics and vitalising imperative follows: do not be seduced by normativity. Recognise that the self who is performed and recognised is at odds with the less stable – one might say ‘queer’ – vital self who acts (who ‘acts but is not’).

This ‘man in general,’ according to Deleuze and Guattari is achieved historically and politically by unifying complex differences into some single figure.

The same applies to ‘woman,’ ‘lesbian,’ ‘trans-sexual’ or – in some cases – ‘queer.’ If the latter term denotes a group of bodies who seek recognition on the basis of their relation to, or difference from, other bodies then ‘queer’ forms a majoritarian mode of politics: a political force that reduces difference for the sake of creating a political subject group.

If, however, ‘queer’ were to operate vitally it would aim to signal the positive potentialities from which groups were formed: there could only be lesbian women because certain differences are possible (such as sexual difference, and difference in orientation), but that would then lead to further and further difference, not only to each individual but within each individual.

Minoritarian politics moves in the opposite direction from recognition and aims to maximise the circumstances for the proliferation and pulverisation of differences.

animal to subject

Žižek “Notes on a Debate ” Criticism. 46:4 (2004) 661-666.

On Badiou and Deleuze:

However, what unites them above this difference is that both perform the same paradoxical philosophical gesture of defending, as materialists, the autonomy of the “immaterial” order of the Event. As a materialist, and in order to be thoroughly materialist, Badiou focuses on the idealist topos par excellence: How can a human animal forsake its animality and put its life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the “transubstantiation” from the pleasure-oriented life of an individual to the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause occur?

In other words, how is a free act possible? How can one break (out of) the network of the causal connections of positive reality and conceive of an act that begins by and in itself?

In short, Badiou repeats within the materialist frame the elementary gesture of idealist anti-reductionism: human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth; and so on. Additionally, against the false appearance that this gesture is also aimed at psychoanalysis (is not the point of the notion of “sublimation” that the allegedly “higher” human activities are just a roundabout “sublimated” way to realize a “lower” goal?), therein resides already the significant achievement of psychoanalysis: its claim is that sexuality itself, sexual drives pertaining to the human animal, cannot be accounted for in evolutionary terms.

This makes clear the true stakes of Badiou’s gesture: in order for materialism to truly win over idealism, it is not enough to succeed in the “reductionist” approach and demonstrate how mind, consciousness, and so forth can nonetheless somehow be accounted for within the evolutionary-positivist frame of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist claim should be much stronger: it is only materialism that can accurately explain the very phenomena of mind, consciousness, and so forth; and, conversely, it is idealism that is “vulgar,” that always already “reifies” these phenomena. 665

hallward colebrook deleuze

Deleuzian Politics? (more excerpts click here)

Claire Colebrook: For me the most tortured situation I face as a white Australian is this: we have an indigenous people, and actually it would be an act of violence for them to form a collective body because it is only a fiction of the West that there is something like an ‘Aboriginal community’. It would be like them referring to Japan and the UK as ‘the West’: it has about as much individuation as that.

So on the one hand you have a body of people trying to enter the political debate, but the condition for them doing that at the movement is to remove all of their capacity for collective individuation, and I think this just goes back to one of the questions which was on the value of communication and consensus in politics. Either you say ‘this is great because there’s a differend‘, or you have to find a means of political communication that don’t rely on the formation of a ‘collective will’. I think that is the only way that it’s going to work because otherwise one is imposing a model of individuation that I think have as much political purchase and right as Rousseauist traditions of a general will.

Peter Hallward: My own country Canada has a roughly similar history, as you know, but still in some sense when you talk about something like the relationship between white Australia and the indigenous, however multiple and fragmented that term ‘indigenous’ is (and it’s equally so in Canada, perhaps even more so), you can still say, I think, that there is enough of a structured conflict between these two general groups to make sense of it as a conflict.

Claire Colebrook: You can’t remove the molar: that’s why for a certain point in the political debate, you’re always going to have a gathering together for a body, but that also has to remain completely provisional and completely open to the multiple forms of individuation which might constitute it.

Peter Hallward: Completely open and completely provisional — who has an interest in that? In my experience, if you talk to people who are engaged in labour struggles — for example trying to organise a group of immigrant workers in California — or to people who are fighting to strengthen the social movements in Haiti or Bolivia, what they constantly say is: “we are too weak and what we need is some form of continuity and strength, and our enemies are constantly trying to bust it up, to break it up, to fragment it, to divide us, to make it provisional, to reject any kind of consolidation of the instruments that we need to strengthen our hand.”

Nicholas Thoburn: But even then there are variable articulations. It’s complex isn’t it? Such collectivities don’t derive from a general notion of their specific coherence — they emerge in response to a particular problem or a particular event — so I don’t see how your examples are at all in opposition to a Deleuzian understanding of the formation of collectivity as imminent to its situation.

Ruda hegel’s rabble reviews

Smith, Jason E. “Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with a preface by Slavoj Žižek.”2011. Book Review in Radical Philosophy. 177. (2013) 43-45.

What the rabble names or marks in Hegel’s thought is, to the contrary, the irruption of what Ruda calls, in an emphatic and seemingly redundant formulation, a ‘peculiarly singular logic of politics’ into the field of philosophy (and, a fortiori, political philosophy).

The looming up of this figure does not simply mark an impasse for Hegel’s philosophy of right and its task of exhibiting the immanent rationality of the ethical order, or even for his philosophy as a whole. Rather, it deforms the relation between philosophy and politics more generally, a torsion that necessitates, in turn, what Ruda calls a ‘restructuring’ and ‘transformation’ of philosophy.

************

Whitt, Matt. “Indigence, Indignation, and the Limits of Hegel’s Political Philosophy – Ruda’s Hegel’s Rabble.” Theory & Event. 15:4 (2012)

Ruda is not alone in arguing that poverty and the rabble signal a failure of Hegel’s political philosophy. However, there are several aspects of his argument that make his book distinctly valuable. First, in addition to providing an exceptionally detailed account of the impoverished rabble, Ruda fully explores the possibility, briefly admitted by Hegel, that modern society also produces a rich rabble. This is the aggregate of financial “gamblers” who do not labor for their subsistence, exempting themselves from civil society’s primary relations of interdependence while nonetheless expecting to be provided with luxury (39–48). By elaborating this often overlooked aspect of Hegel’s thought, Ruda shows him to be a prescient diagnostician of modern capitalism, in spite of his apparent inability to come to terms with its central problem.

Second, Ruda helpfully connects the Philosophy of Right to important discussions of free will, habit, attitude, and language that occur in Hegel’s other texts. This results in an unusually rich and integrated view of Hegel’s political philosophy. Similarly, Ruda draws wide-ranging connections to other moments in the history of European thought. Not all of these are illuminating—for instance, the discussion of set theory in Chapter 12 is too long and too far afield for what it contributes to the overall argument. However, other connections are very instructive, such as the engagements with Luther and Rancière at the beginning and end of the book.

The discussions of contemporary post-Hegelian critical theory are especially welcome, although Ruda portrays this area as even more of a boys’ club than it actually is (perhaps illustratively, there are no female theorists listed in the short index, although Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, Susan Buck-Morss, and others have done important work in this area).

Most importantly, Ruda’s book goes beyond other studies by identifying the bases of an alternative, post-Hegelian politics latent in Hegel’s struggle with the rabble. Whereas other commentators are satisfied to interpret the unsolved problems of poverty and the rabble as the limits of Hegel’s political philosophy, Ruda argues that these limits inaugurate a moment when politics can no longer be led by philosophy. For Ruda, the rabble’s indignant and impossible demands motivate a materialist politics of equality that “bursts through” Hegel’s philosophy of freedom (168). To be clear, Ruda is not simply claiming that Hegel’s thought contains the groundwork for Marx’s dialectical materialism. Rather, Ruda makes the more controversial claim that Hegel’s own struggle with the problem of the rabble itself initiates the inversion of Hegelian philosophy that is normally attributed to Marx. According to Ruda, the materialist Aufhebung of Hegel’s theory of the state is already present in Part III of the Philosophy of Right.

Ruda limits himself to the important task of tracing the foundations of this post-Hegelian politics within Hegel’s own thought, so he does not articulate a full-blown post-Hegelian political theory. However, one aspect is particularly clear, and it makes a very valuable contribution to studies of the late Hegel and the early Marx. According to Ruda, the egalitarian counter-politics of the Hegelian rabble is more genuinely universal than the politics of the Hegelian state. This is because the state claims a universality (freedom for all) that masks a latent particularity (freedom for some, the non-rabble).

On the other hand, the condition of the impoverished rabble only appears limited to particular persons, but is in fact latently universal, because it can befall anyone in capitalist modernity. As Ruda puts it, “Anyone can sink into poverty and can consequently become rabble,” and thus “anyone at all is latently rabble” (55, 47). While the latent universalizability of indigence and indignation will be crucial to Marx’s theory of the proletariat, Ruda makes a convincing case that it originates with Hegel, whose theory of the state is motivated, at least in part, by this prescient insight into modern capitalism. However, the Hegelian state has no resources for effectively ameliorating poverty or assimilating the indignation of the very poor, and Ruda interprets this as a failure to effectively contain the universality of the rabble condition. For Ruda, this is sufficient evidence that Hegel’s political philosophy contains the engine of its own overcoming and an implicit “call for a sublation of the Hegelian state” (166).

While Ruda’s book undeniably shows that neither civil society nor the ethical state can eliminate poverty or the rabble, it is less convincing in its claim that this failure marks the site of the overcoming of Hegelian philosophy and the revolution of the Hegelian state.

This is because, although Ruda has definitively shown that Hegel does not ‘solve’ the problems of poverty and the rabble, he has not definitively shown that these problems are not in some way incorporated, as unsolved problems, by Hegel’s theory of the ethical state.

In other words, he shows us a disruption in the movement of the Philosophy of Right, but he has not yet shown this disruption to be fatal to a dialectic that normally proceeds by generating and subsuming its own disruptions. How are we to be convinced that the problem of the rabble cannot be incorporated, if not solved, by the dialectical development of the Hegelian state?

This is a crucial question because there is at least one moment in which Hegel clearly puts the unsolved problems of poverty and the rabble into the service of the ethical state, such that they contribute to its development rather than its dissolution.

In the Philosophy of Right and in his lectures, Hegel directly links poverty and colonization, attributing the need for colonial expansion to “the emergence of a mass of people who cannot gain satisfaction for their needs by their work when production exceeds the needs of consumers.” Ruda discusses colonization just long enough to show that it does not effectively eliminate poverty or the rabble, because it merely postpones their growth (20). This is correct, but Ruda does not fully appreciate what Hegel has done here.

For Hegel, colonization is not meant to solve the problems of poverty and the rabble. Rather, poverty and the rabble spur colonial expansion, through which the ethical state is eventually reproduced on foreign soil. In late modernity, it is not only foreign adventures of the military, but also the internal crisis of the rabble, that drives the Hegelian state across the globe.3 Regardless of Hegel’s dispositions toward colonialism, poverty, and the rabble, it is clear that he understands these social phenomena to work together in reproducing a particular form of the modern state.

Thus, instead of ‘solving’ the problems of poverty and the rabble, or being overwhelmed by them, Hegel’s theory incorporates them. It acknowledges that poverty and the rabble disrupt established society, but it turns this disruption itself into an engine of the state’s reproduction, rather than its dissolution.

This dialectical twist, by which the outstanding problems of Hegel’s theory are made to play a constructive role within it, suggests that the Hegelian state may not merely survive the rabble, but may actually thrive because of it. Elsewhere, I have argued that the rabble plays an even more deeply constructive role in Hegel’s account of the state’s organic constitution.4 On that reading, rather than eliminate the internally disruptive force of the rabble, the various elements of civil society and the state may unite in ongoing opposition to that force, securing the freedom of their members in much the same way that they might rally against an external enemy in the event of war. I cannot defend this interpretation here, but I suggest it in order to illustrate the kind of engagement that Ruda’s interpretation requires if it is to be finally convincing.

In order to claim the rabble as “an indeterminacy which decomposes the state,” it is not enough to show that its lack of freedom and indignant demands disrupt the development of the Hegelian social order, or even that civil society and the state cannot alleviate this disruption (164).

Rather, Ruda must also show that this disruption itself does not, through the cunning of reason, end up contributing to the social order it antagonizes—in other words, that the indeterminacy is not transformed into yet another determination. This will require more fully engaging those moments where Hegel’s theory does not deny the disruptive potential of the rabble, nor seek to eliminate it, but instead attempts to incorporate it into the dialectical development of the state.

In sum, Hegel’s Rabble is a valuable and impressive contribution to the scholarship on Hegel’s treatment of poverty, as well as his political philosophy at large. It also sheds light on Hegelian legacies within contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist theory. Ruda’s exegesis is always thorough, generally careful, and above all successful in its attempt to locate the problem of the rabble at the heart of Hegel’s theory of the state. However, in portraying this problem as the site where Hegel’s political philosophy can be overcome, Ruda downplays the ways that Hegel’s philosophy might incorporate the disruption of the rabble, making it instrumental to the very social order that denies its freedom. Like Marx’s proletariat, Hegel’s rabble is not only a limit, but also a constitutive component, of the social order that does violence to it. As such, the rabble’s presence—and even its antagonism—may contribute to either the conservation or the transformation of the society and state that Hegel theorizes. This theoretical ambivalence should be more acutely described, especially if, as Ruda seems to suggest, its resolution is a matter of political action rather than political theory.

See Whitt, “The Problem of Poverty and the Limits of Freedom in Hegel’s Theory of the Ethical State,” Political Theory, forthcoming in 2013. This article was developed and submitted for review prior to the publication of Ruda’s book. While my reading of Hegel would have benefitted much from consulting Ruda’s clear and detailed exegesis, my argument differs greatly from Ruda’s and would have remained unchanged.

Matt S. Whitt is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Warren Wilson College. He earned his doctorate in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 2010. His research interests include theories of sovereignty and authority, problems of political exclusion, and the philosophy of Hegel and Marx. His recent work is forthcoming in Political Theory and Constellations. Matt’s online dossier is available at www.mattswhitt.net, and he can be reached at mwhitt AT warren-wilson.edu

riha sumic Bartleby

Jelica šumič (2011): “Giorgio Agamben’s Godless Saints.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 16:3 (2011). 137-147.

Institute of Philosophy
Novi trg 2
1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
E-mail: jsumr AT zrc-sazu.si

It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality. Agamben The Coming Community 40

Put otherwise, instead of seeking to accomplish some definite task or goal, the subject must be nullified. Indeed, it is only through the destitution of the subject that man’s capacity to be pure potentiality can be restored.

Attributing all transformative force to sovereign power alone, Agamben’s solution, whose ultimate aim is to restore contingency at the heart of necessity, consists in directly valorising the ‘‘not happening’’ or rather the “nothing of happening” in order to consign change to a radical transformation in the subjective status, achieved by means of an operation of disidentification that aims, to use Agamben’s vocabulary, at revoking all vocations.

Agamben can recognise resistance only in terms of potentiality, which is to say, as passivity or inoperativeness, since, for him, ‘‘the potential welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, the fundamental passivity’’ (P 182). To the extent that the potentiality that characterises human beings is primarily the potentiality of not doing something, the subject, here, is conceived as a place where the ceaseless operation of declassification, disidentification, is effected – Bartleby being the model or paradigm of such a subjective stance in so far as the latter allows the subject to become nothing other than the pure potentiality to be or not to be.

The characterisations of the subjective stance in terms of inoperativeness can be seen as an attempt to move beyond the deadlocks of the end of time in so far as such a stance involves ‘‘a suspension of time’’ achieved through the only possible action at the disposal of contemporary subjectivity, an action à la Bartleby, an anticipatory figure: to opt for non-being, or more exactly, for the potentiality not to be.

His act (“I would prefer not to”…), in effect, consists in a mere taking place of the place. He turns himself into a place, an empty place, this being the only place which sovereign power cannot recapture.

However, for this place to be preserved, maintained as a place, nothing should take place therein. His act, instead of constituting an event, in its subversive force, prevents all events from happening. Indeed, Agamben’s Bartleby can be seen as a guardian of the non-event. Ultimately, rather than risking the danger of falling prey to a bad infinity, Agamben seeks to think a final event.

Thus, in contrast to Badiou, who thinks events as time-breaking and/or inaugurating ruptures, Agamben’s main preoccupation is with the event of the end. In light of this, one can also understand why the politico-ethical solution advocated by Agamben essentially consists in saving the past: not something particularly worthy of being remembered, but the past in its whatever character, as it were.

The world can only be saved if its being-thus in the smallest details is preserved. What is saved, then, is not some break-inaugurating moment, a moment of “eternity,” as Badiou would have it, but the banality of the being-thus.

It is precisely for this reason that the world can only be “saved” as irreparable, which is to say, ultimately, as absolutely unsaveable. The salvation and therefore the change of the world consist, in the final analysis, only in assuming its radical contingency.

A true change consists simply in a parallax view, a shift of perception: to see the world as including its potentiality not to be. Yet this change, Agamben insists, minimal as it may appear, is nevertheless extremely difficult to accomplish. In some radical sense, humankind is incapable of achieving it; hence, in order to attain this perspective, the Messiah must come or, at least, Bartleby.

If Deleuze, as Agamben observes, is right in calling Bartleby “a new Christ,” this is not because his aim is to ‘‘abolish the old Law and to inaugurate a new mandate.’’ Rather, “if Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not” (P 270). If there is something Christ-like in Bartleby, if he can, despite everything, be compared to a saviour, this is because he descends to the deepest level of Leibniz’s ‘‘Palace of Destinies,’’ in order to reveal “the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where ‘nothing exists rather than something'” (P 270).

In Badiou’s vocabulary, we could say that Bartleby reveals the inconsistency of being-multiple, an impossible point of the real before Being is localised in any being-there whatsoever, before any world whatsoever can take shape.

Whereas this impossible-real, according to Badiou, can only irrupt to the surface of a world through a rare, unpredictable event, Agamben, on his part, presents it as a result of the subjective destitution. 144

It is precisely because it cannot be situated within a linear temporality of past, present, and future that this time of the now is, as such, the location in which action, the hollowing out of the assigned identities, functions, or symbolic mandates take place. This also explains why the messianic subject, Bartleby, is arrested, blocked, as it were, in the “time of the now,” i.e., at the point of the suspension of time, in order to be able to effect his act, that of the de-activation of identifications assigned to him by the socio-symbolic Other.

The result of the messianic act is not a new creation – it is rather a decreation.

From such a perspective, Bartleby can be seen as someone who turns himself into an utterly irreducible remnant, the sole guardian and guarantor of the empty place destined for ‘‘the experience of taking place in whatever singularity’’ (CC 24). But the price to be paid for this operation of exposure of every singularity to its being-thus, its being whatever, is that the subject himself remains blocked, suspended on the sole act he can effect: I would prefer not to, an act which, in so far as it must be repeated again and again, imprisons the subject in a kind of tense-less space created by this very act.

Hence, it could be said that it is only through a true act of decreation, a subtractive act, to be sure, that the mark of contingency in every creature is revealed. If decreation, as Agamben tells us, “takes place where Bartleby stands” (P 271), we must ask: what exactly is this place where “the actual world is led back to its right not to be; [where] all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence”?

Here, Lacan’s famous formula, “The word is the murder of the Thing,” can help us to illuminate this singular position of the subject: if the signifier “creates” by breaking the biunivocal correlation of the word and the thing, if the word does not represent the thing but can only attain a meaning by being articulated to another word, this means that the signifier already de-realises or un-realises the world.

The act of the signifier is precisely an act of decreation, rendering indistinguishable that which exists from that which does not exist. If the signifier itself empties all reference, what could then be Bartleby’s decreation?

Consider Bartleby’s formula: “I would prefer not to.” As Deleuze correctly observed in his reading of “Bartleby,” Bartleby may well use signifiers, yet he does it in a very peculiar way since his formula is destined primarily to cut the link between words and things, between S1 and S2, leaving S1 all alone, in sufferance, in eternal anticipation of the other signifier that would give it a meaning.

But this formula is itself possible because Bartleby occupies the place of an internal exclusion in relation to language. Put otherwise, only for a subject that is outside discourse, discourse, which for Lacan is precisely the social bond, is nothing but a fraud, a make-believe.

Bartleby’s decreation, in short, can only be effected from the autistic position of the subject who refuses to be caught in any social bond whatsoever, who wants nothing, yet prefers not to, who treats signifiers as fragmented bodies, without any reference whatsoever to a symbolic order.

It is here that we can see what is subversive, really revolutionary, in the act of decreation.

Accomplished by the subject for whom there is no distinction between the real and the symbolic, indeed, by a subject for whom the symbolic is, as such, the real, the act of decreation brings into question the Other, the guarantor of the link between words and their references.

If Deleuze is right in claiming that Bartleby, “even in his catatonic or anorexic state” is not the “sick man” but rather the “Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all,” this is because only from the position of the inexistence of the Other – this being, according to Deleuze, the position of the schizophrenic – the symbolic can appear, for other speaking beings, those who believe in the Other and live by its laws, and who use the symbolic as a defence against the real, as mere semblance.

From such a perspective, Bartleby’s act can be viewed less as an act that decreates the created (i.e., the symbolised universe) than as one that decreates the decreation, a decreation to the second power, as it were, because such an act of decreation aims at revealing the generalised semblantification at work in the symbolic order itself.

If the schizophrenic position, a position outside discourse, suits well the revolutionary who strives to unbind the existing social bond in order to postulate a different basis for a community, beyond identifications, beyond functions and places, this is because it embodies the liberating potential, as well as its risks.

For Lacan, as is well known, “not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.”

Indeed, it is only from such a position of extimacy in relation to the social link that “the law of our becoming” can be formulated: “The unsoundable decision of being in which human beings understand or fail to recognize their liberation, in the snare of fate that deceives them about a freedom they have not in the least conquered.”

Lacan. “Presentation on Psychical Causality” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink 145

commodity fetishism vanishing mediator anti-philosophy

Commodity Fetishism March 2013

Commodity Fetishism June 2010

Commodity Fetishism 2009

Commodity Fetishism 2005

Anti-Philosophy or the Post-Hegelian Break

The scene of philosophical ideas is perceived as secondary scene of representation, a screen, and then you assert some more substantial life process, to which Hegel’s idea is just an illusory reflection,

The first one to do this was Schelling who claimed there is irrational abyss of willing the life of will that is more substantial than ideas and that Hegel is cheating. Hegel’s Becoming, if it is to be actual becoming, presupposes some positive being.
Kierkargard: the individual, absolute decision, leap of faith. the intense actuality of subjective authenticity, that can’t be covered up by abstract Hegelian movement of notions etc. Marx: true science of life, Hegel is mystifying reality, pseudo self-movement. It’s not idea which is developing, its real people, Hegel confuses subject and predicate, its not individuals who are predicates of idea as it is developing it is idea predicate of real individuals. THIS IS ANTI-PHILOSOPHY

Return to Hegel: Basic Coordinates

– This is a ridiculous image of Hegel : Hegel is a so-called vanishing mediator between traditional metaphysics and the post-Hegelian turn to actual reality, Anti-Philosophy. Žižek DISS of Charles Taylor click here Hegel is not in-between still idealist but moments of historical description.

Something UNIQUE happened in Hegel: Unthinkable, the entire post-Hegelian anti-Philosophy is one desperate attempt to obliterate what Hegel did. They do this by constructing a ridiculous image of Hegel. He is a screen memory, a comfortable image used to cover over something much more traumatic. The post-Hegelian break misses something in Hegel.

What is a Vanishing Mediator or again in Berlin in 2011

If you are in-between you see something, which afterwards becomes invisible. For a brief moment those apparent reactionaries like Charlie Chaplin saw the ominous dimensions of VOICE, a spectral dimension of voice, voice as foreign body intruder that can haunt us. But this Chaplin moment became INVISIBLE.

Berlin 2011: Rabinovitch a Jew who wants to leave the Soviet Union

Hamster ideology symptom fetish anti semitism chicken joke

Žižek, Slavoj. “Slavoj Žïžek in Kosova — Ideology Between Symptom and Fetish.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29 May 2009. Web. 14 Feb. 2013.

Pfaller, Robert. “Where is Your Hamster The Concept of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek’s Cultural Theory.” Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek. Eds. Geoff Boucher , and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, 2005.

Hamster This is the famous hamster story

Interpassivity Not only inter-activity, where others can be active for us, what about inter-passivity, others who could be passive for us.

Fascist Populism Fetish: The lie is at the surface. the cause of this antagonism is the Jew.

In the first case is from appearance to what is hidden behind it. On the other hand, JEWS are responisble, you tell me but don’t you see that when you are attacking jews, you are really attacking financial exploitation, and you are targeting the wrong guy.

Although one thought it would be easy to UNDERMINE the anti-semite, don’t you see you are just projecting on the JEWS for all that is wrong for society. It seems evident for those who are not in it. BUT IT ISN’T THIS EASY.

A naive liberal, but can’t you see universal rights are a problem, then he might say a more social liberal, we should include woman. or cynicsm, “I know but we can’t afford true equality, that’s life.”

Fetishist Ironic disavowal: Kung Fu Panda, oriental mythology, at the same time the film makes fun of its own orientalist mythology. Even though it makes fun of it, it still functions. Our beliefs still function even if we don’t believe in it. Niels Bohr again.

open fundamentalist disavowal: anti-semitism

The moment you accept the debate at the level of facts. The true question are Jews really like that: Why does Nazi needs this figure of the Jew to sustain its ideological edifice. Even if a husband is jealous, with a suspicion of his wife, even if his wife is sleeping around, his jealousy is pathological fact. Why did he need this pathological to sustain his psychic stability.

Here is the moment when Žižek distinguishes between being simply racist against Jews and true anti-semitism Jews is blah blah. This is racist. They are blah blah because they are jewish Being a jew is the mysterious X, that explains all of it. THE LOGIC OF FETISHISM AT ITS PUREST.

Here is the chicken joke Maybe Yugoslavia disappeared because Tito was not allowed to know. 1972 the economic situation had to be done, something big. But they didn’t tell Tito. The top nomenklatura decided if we make this public then Tito who is old will die unhappy. Let’s postpone the crisis, throughout the 1970s the economy was artificially sustained, and by the 1990s it all exploded. Yugoslavia had nothing to do with nationalist passions. It was the structure of this joke, Tito was a chicken who should not know. From everyday life: let’s say I have cancer, of course I would be strong enough, I would try not to tell this to my children, to NOT let them know. Maintain appearance, the chicken should not know. This chicken should not know logic, you find in Ptomekin villages, when it was know Tito would visit a village, in the end of the 1950s in China, when Mao ..

johnston adrian meillassoux anti-kantianism

Johnston, Adrian. “The World before Worlds: Quentin Meillassoux and Alain Badiou’s Anti-Kantian Transcendentalism” Contemporary French Civilization. 33.1 (2009): 73-99. Print.

idealist dogma according to which objects are phenomenal appearances dependent, for their existence, on a conscious individual human animal or sentient mind to whom they appear. Badiou and Meillassoux both identify Kant’s critical-transcendental framework as an exemplary instance of the idealist faith of what Meillassoux christens “correlationism,” a belief-system insisting upon the primacy of finite epistemological subjectivity as the ubiquitous mediating milieu for all actual and possible knowledge of objects (each and every object supposedly being constituted exclusively in and through this same milieu)

Post-Kantian variants of “correlationism,” share in common an anti-realist, de-ontologized epistemology denying that subjects can and do, as Jacques Lacan would put it, touch the Real (i.e., gain direct, unmediated access to the ontological domain of being in and of itself). 75

In particular, he has in mind such natural scientific disciplines as paleotology, geology, and astrophysics, sciences seemingly able to speak of the earth and the universe as they were and are apart from the mediating experience of microcosmic human minds.

Badiou desires to preserve a distinction between l’être en tant qu’être — i.e., noumenal being an sich knowable through set theory — and être-là — i.e., appearing as phenomenal objects-in-worlds delineable through category/topos theory — without positing a transcendental subject as co-extensive with the latter field/stratum — i.e., the regions of appearances.

But this leads Badiou to talk incomprehensibly about appearances without a who/what to which they appear — with this incomprehensible talk being what purportedly legitimates the idea of a transcendental decoupled from any transcendental subject.

Meillassoux, in contrast, actually provides no support what-soever for this decoupling,given his avoidance of characterizing the material beings-in-themselves referred to by the ancestral utterances of the natural sciences as paradoxical non-manifest manifestations — i.e., appearances appearing to/for nobody and nothing.

For the archi-fossil argument to buttress Badiou’s hypothesis regarding worlds-without-subjects — this hypothesis expresses the essence of his attempt at conceiving a non/anti-Kantian transcendental — the archi-fossil would have to belong to a world.

But although M’s archi-fossil belongs to an asubjective earth-on-its-own, it is not part of a world;

in other (Badiouian) words, this ancestral being is part of a world-less earth, a world, as it were, before worlds. in the absence of this support he claims to find in M’s thought, B is faced with the unappetizing prospects of the collapse of his distinction between being (as l’être en tant qu’être [being qua being]) and appearing as (être-là [being-there]) and/or a failure thoroughly to cleanse a retained transcendentalism of its associated idealism. 80

adrian johnston meillassoux badiou

Johnston, Adrian. “Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian Transcendental Idealism.” Continental Philosophy Review. 41 (2008): 345–366.

There are three fundamental reasons why Kant functions as one of the main nemeses for Badiouian philosophy.

First, Badiou blames him for having invented the motif of finitude, a motif present nowadays in various guises. Badiou’s tirades against this motif recur throughout his writings in the form of attacks upon not only epistemologies of finite subjective knowledge, but also upon promotions of mortality, of death-bound being, as philosophically foundational and ultimate.

Second, Badiou balks at Kant’s invocation of the ostensible ‘‘limits of possible experience’’ insofar as this boundary-line partitioning noumena from phenomena entails the prohibition of constructing a rational ontology. The Kantian critical-transcendental apparatus insists that only a de-ontologized epistemology is philosophically valid and defensible, which, in light of Badiou’s post-Heideggerian ontological ambitions, is a position that must be eradicated.

Third, for Badiou as a committed materialist, the idealism of Kantian transcendental idealism is simply unacceptable. Badiou’s transcendental is both asubjective and (materially) immanent to the world of which it is, at one and the same time, both a structuring scaffolding as well as an internal component. 348

With implicit reference to the Kantian gesture of enclosing subjects within the prison-houses and shadow-theaters of their own cognition, Badiou sneeringly dubs Kant ‘‘our first professor,’’ the initiator of a sterile academic orientation in philosophy whose very theoretical content reflects the alleged practical fact of its lack of substantial connections to any sort of (so to speak) real world.

What accounts for the genesis of the relative coherence and organization of “worlds” (i.e., structured domains of relations between presentable entities) out of the incoherence and disorganization of pure being an sich?

One might anticipate that it is in response to precisely this query that Badiou re-deploys the notion of the transcendental. However, such is not the case. Badiou’s transcendental is co-extensive with what he calls “worlds”.

More specifically, each Badiouian world, as a regional sphere within which multiple-being is made to appear in the form of localized/situated existences according to the relational logic of this same sphere, is ordered by its own “transcendental regime”.

Additionally, he contends that there are indefinite numbers of worlds both possible and actual. Hence, the Badiouian transcendental isn’t a concept-term denoting delineable (pre)conditions for the emergence of phenomenal being-there (i.e., the appearances and presentations of transcendentally structured worlds) out of ontological being qua being (as distinct from any and every phenomenology).

To the extent that Badiou’s transcendental is internal to and entirely entangled with the circumscribed domain of être-la it cannot simultaneously operate in a mediating transitional role between this domain and l’être en tant qu’être.

Badiou seems to be left with the unanswered questions of how and why being(s) give rise to worlds (the latter involving the transcendental as each world’s organizing state/regime). In isolation from Kant’s idealism, the broadest sense of his notion of the transcendental has to do with conditions of possibility. In this sense, Badiou’s transcendental begs the question of the conditions of possibility for its own surfacing out of the Real of being.

Who or what catalyzes the coming into existence of the being-there of appearances? Badiouian transcendentalism, if there is such a thing, would thus require supplementation by a meta-transcendentalism, an explanation of that which makes possible this very catalyzing.

Again and again, Badiou opposes the crucial move at the heart of the Kantian critical “Copernican revolution,” namely, the insistence that knowable reality conforms to the mediating templates of subjective cognition (rather than this cognition directly apprehending real being in and of itself).

As regards the former (i.e., a direct knowledge of l’être en tant qu’être), he claims, against Kant’s maintenance of the limits of possible experience, that cognition indeed can transgress these purported limits so as to seize being qua being in an unmediated fashion.

For Badiou, being-in-itself, unlike das Ding an sich, is “entirely knowable” (for this same reason, he disagrees with readings of Lacan in which the register of the Real is treated as akin or equivalent to Kant’s realm of noumena. In Logiques des mondes, he speaks of thought’s ability to operate “beyond the limits of sensibility” so as to “synthetically think the noumenal and the phenomenal” (Hegel’s post-Kantian aspirations are mentioned here too)

Compter pour Un Counting For One

One of the core concepts entangled with the ontology elaborated inBeing and Event is that of ‘‘counting-for-one’’ (compter-pour-un).

This unifying operation, as an operation, isn’t itself a being in the strict ontological sense (i.e., something inhering within l’être en tant qu’être).

Instead, Badiou defines this ‘‘count’’ as distinct from being, although (supposedly) always-already having acted upon it so as to render being-in-itself presentable (as Fabien Tarby explains, “the unity of something is operational and not substantial”, and, “Unity is transitory, evanescent, operational”).

Any “situation,” as a locality within which unified entities can and do appear, is structured by a situation-specific operation of counting-for-one. Furthermore, from within any situation arising as an outcome of such a count, one can, after-the-fact of this operation, infer something (i.e., being qua being as pure multiplicities-without-one) retroactively presupposed as prior to this process of counting.

This leads Badiou to propose a distinction between “inconsistent multiplicity” and “consistent multiplicity”; the former is what presumably precedes the consistency-producing intervention of counting-for-one and the latter is what is created as a result of this unifying operation.

A situation structured by a count contains many ones (i.e., consistent multiplicities), while being as such, posited as anterior to this situational structuring and organization, “in-consists” of multiplicities without one-ness or unity (hence, “being qua being, strictly speaking, is neither one nor multiple” — with “multiple” here meaning many unified ones).

With respect to this matter, Badiou oscillates between two incompatible stances: On the one hand, when railing against Kantian epistemological finitude with its limits of possible experience denying direct access to noumena, he claims that the noumenal realm of Real being an sich indeed can be grasped cognitively in ways forbidden by Kant’s de-ontologizing epistemology;

On the other hand, he sometimes seems to reinstate essential features of the Kantian divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal when speaking of unsayble being-in-itself as inconsistent multiplicities-without-one inaccessible to all discourse and thought (even that of pure mathematics). 353

The phenomenal appearances of being-there (i.e., existence at the phenomenological level) are said to be constituted by virtue of the transcendental regime” of a “world” (monde) configuring given multiplicities (i.e., being at the ontological level). Real beings appear in a world, a domain of organized, inter-related phenomena, thanks to the structuring intervention of a transcendental architecture responsible for distributing varying degrees of “visibility” across the multiplicities of which a particular situation consists. (W)

The “logics of worlds” spoken of by the title of this 2006 book are none other than the ordering networks and webs allegedly making possible the localized appearings that compose the tableaus of varying phenomenological regions of situated, differentially co-determining manifestations. (W)

butler academic freedom bds

Judith Butler: text of remarks at Brooklyn College February 7, 2013

Usually one starts by saying that one is glad to be here, but I cannot say that it has been a pleasure anticipating this event. What a Megillah! I am, of course, glad that the event was not cancelled, and I understand that it took a great deal of courage and a steadfast embrace of principle for this event to happen at all. I would like personally to thank all those who took this opportunity to reaffirm the fundamental principles of academic freedom, including the following organizations: the Modern Language Association, the National Lawyers Guild, the New York ACLU, the American Association of University Professors, the Professional Staff Congress (the union for faculty and staff in the CUNY system), the New York Times editorial team, the offices of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Brooklyn College President Karen Gould whose principled stand on academic freedom has been exemplary.

The principle of academic freedom is designed to make sure that powers outside the university, including government and corporations, are not able to control the curriculum or intervene in extra-mural speech. It not only bars such interventions, but it also protects those platforms in which we might be able to reflect together on the most difficult problems. You can judge for yourself whether or not my reasons for lending my support to this movement are good ones. That is, after all, what academic debate is about. It is also what democratic debate is about, which suggests that open debate about difficult topics functions as a meeting point between democracy and the academy. Instead of asking right away whether we are for or against this movement, perhaps we can pause just long enough to find out what exactly this is, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and why it is so difficult to speak about this.

I am not asking anyone to join a movement this evening. I am not even a leader of this movement or part of any of its governing committee, even though the New York Times tried to anoint me the other day—I appreciated their subsequent retraction, and I apologize to my Palestinian colleagues for their error. The movement, in fact, has been organized and led by Palestinians seeking rights of political self-determination, including Omar Barghouti, who was invited first by the Students for Justice in Palestine, after which I was invited to join him. At the time I thought it would be very much like other events I have attended, a conversation with a few dozen student activists in the basement of a student center. So, as you can see, I am surprised and ill-prepared for what has happened.

Omar will speak in a moment about what the BDS movement is, its successes and its aspirations. But I would like briefly to continue with the question, what precisely are we doing here this evening? I presume that you came to hear what there is to be said, and so to test your preconceptions against what some people have to say, to see whether your objections can be met and your questions answered. In other words, you come here to exercise critical judgment, and if the arguments you hear are not convincing, you will be able to cite them, to develop your opposing view and to communicate that as you wish. In this way, your being here this evening confirms your right to form and communicate an autonomous judgment, to demonstrate why you think something is true or not, and you should be free to do this without coercion and fear. These are your rights of free expression, but they are, perhaps even more importantly, your rights to education, which involves the freedom to hear, to read and to consider any number of viewpoints as part of an ongoing public deliberation on this issue. Your presence here, even your support for the event, does not assume agreement among us. There is no unanimity of opinion here; indeed, achieving unanimity is not the goal.

The arguments made against this very meeting took several forms, and they were not always easy for me to parse. One argument was that BDS is a form of hate speech, and it spawned a set of variations: it is hate speech directed against either the State of Israel or Israeli Jews, or all Jewish people. If BDS is hate speech, then it is surely not protected speech, and it would surely not be appropriate for any institution of higher learning to sponsor or make room for such speech. Yet another objection, sometimes uttered by the same people who made the first, is that BDS does qualify as a viewpoint, but as such, ought to be presented only in a context in which the opposing viewpoint can be heard as well. There was yet a qualification to this last position, namely, that no one can have a conversation on this issue in the US that does not include a certain Harvard professor, but that spectacular argument was so self-inflationary and self-indicting, that I could only respond with astonishment.

So in the first case, it is not a viewpoint (and so not protected as extra-mural speech), but in the second instance, it is a viewpoint, presumably singular, but cannot be allowed to be heard without an immediate refutation. The contradiction is clear, but when people engage in a quick succession of contradictory claims such as these, it is usually because they are looking for whatever artillery they have at their disposal to stop something from happening. They don’t much care about consistency or plausibility. They fear that if the speech is sponsored by an institution such as Brooklyn College, it will not only be heard, but become hearable, admitted into the audible world. The fear is that viewpoint will become legitimate, which means only that someone can publicly hold such a view and that it becomes eligible for contestation. A legitimate view is not necessarily right, but it is not ruled out in advance as hate speech or injurious conduct. Those who did not want any of these words to become sayable and audible imagined that the world they know and value will come to an end if such words are uttered, as if the words themselves will rise off the page or fly out of the mouth as weapons that will injure, maim or even kill, leading to irreversibly catastrophic consequences. This is why some people claimed that if this event were held, the two-state solution would be imperiled—they attributed great efficacy to these words. And yet others said it would lead to the coming of a second Holocaust—an unimaginable remark to which I will nevertheless return. One might say that all of these claims were obvious hyperbole and should be dismissed as such. But it is important to understand that they are wielded for the purpose of intimidation, animating the spectre of traumatic identification with the Nazi oppressor: if you let these people speak, you yourself will be responsible for heinous crimes or for the destruction of a state, or the Jewish people. If you listen to the words, you will become complicit in war crimes.

And yet all of us here have to distinguish between the right to listen to a point of view and the right to concur or dissent from that point of view; otherwise, public discourse is destroyed by censorship. I wonder, what is the fantasy of speech nursed by the censor? There must be enormous fear behind the drive to censorship, but also enormous aggression, as if we were all in a war where speech has suddenly become artillery. Is there another way to approach language and speech as we think about this issue? Is it possible that some other use of words might forestall violence, bring about a general ethos of non-violence, and so enact, and open onto, the conditions for a public discourse that welcomes and shelters disagreement, even disarray?

The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is, in fact, a non-violent movement; it seeks to use established legal means to achieve its goals; and it is, interestingly enough, the largest Palestinian civic movement at this time. That means that the largest Palestinian civic movement is a non-violent one that justifies its actions through recourse to international law. Further, I want to underscore that this is also a movement whose stated core principles include the opposition to every form of racism, including both state-sponsored racism and anti-Semitism. Of course, we can debate what anti-Semitism is, in what social and political forms it is found. I myself am sure that the election of self-identified national socialists to the Greek parliament is a clear sign of anti-Semitism; I am sure that the recirculation of Nazi insignia and rhetoric by the National Party of Germany is a clear sign of anti-Semitism. I am also sure that the rhetoric and actions of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are often explicitly anti-Semitic, and that some forms of Palestinian opposition to Israel do rely on anti-Semitic slogans, falsehoods and threats. All of these forms of anti-Semitism are to be unconditionally opposed. And I would add, they have to be opposed in the same way and with the same tenacity that any form of racism has to be opposed, including state racism.

But still, it is left to us to ask, why would a non-violent movement to achieve basic political rights for Palestinians be understood as anti-Semitic? Surely, there is nothing about the basic rights themselves that constitute a problem. They include equal rights of citizenship for current inhabitants; the end to the occupation, and the rights of unlawfully displaced persons to return to their lands and gain restitution for their losses. We will surely speak about each of these three principles this evening. But for now, I want to ask, why would a collective struggle to use economic and cultural forms of power to compel the enforcement of international laws be considered anti-Semitic? It would be odd to say that they are anti-Semitic to honor internationally recognized rights to equality, to be free of occupation and to have unlawfully appropriated land and property restored. I know that this last principle makes many people uneasy, but there are several ways of conceptualizing how the right of return might be exercised lawfully such that it does not entail further dispossession (and we will return to this issue).

For those who say that exercising internationally recognized rights is anti-Semitic, or becomes anti-Semitic in this context, they must mean either that a) its motivation is anti-Semitic or b) its effects are anti-Semitic. I take it that no one is actually saying that the rights themselves are anti-Semitic, since they have been invoked by many populations in the last decades, including Jewish people dispossessed and displaced in the aftermath of the second world war. Is there really any reason we should not assume that Jews, just like any other people, would prefer to live in a world where such internationally recognized rights are honored? It will not do to say that international law is the enemy of the Jewish people, since the Jewish people surely did not as a whole oppose the Nuremburg trials, or the development of human rights law. In fact, there have always been Jews working alongside non-Jews—not only to establish the courts and codes of international law, but in the struggle to dismantle colonial regimes, opposing any and all legal and military powers that seek systematically to undermine the conditions of political self-determination for any population.

Only if we accept the proposition that the state of Israel is the exclusive and legitimate representative of the Jewish people would a movement calling for divestment, sanctions and boycott against that state be understood as directed against the Jewish people as a whole. Israel would then be understood as co-extensive with the Jewish people.

There are two major problems with this view. First, the state of Israel does not represent all Jews, and not all Jews understand themselves as represented by the state of Israel. Secondly, the state of Israel should be representing all of its population equally, regardless of whether or not they are Jewish, regardless of race, religion or ethnicity.

So the first critical and normative claim that follows is that the state of Israel should be representing the diversity of its own population. Indeed, nearly 25 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish, and most of those are Palestinian, although some of them are Bedouins and Druze. If Israel is to be considered a democracy, the non-Jewish population deserves equal rights under the law, as do the Mizrachim (Arab Jews) who represent over 30 percent of the population. Presently, there are at least twenty laws that privilege Jews over Arabs within the Israeli legal system. The 1950 Law of Return grants automatic citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the world upon request, while denying that same right to Palestinians who were forcibly dispossessed of their homes in 1948 or subsequently as the result of illegal settlements and redrawn borders. Human Rights Watch has compiled an extensive study of Israel’s policy of “separate, not equal” schools for Palestinian children. Moreover, as many as 100 Palestinian villages in Israel are still not recognized by the Israeli government, lacking basic services (water, electricity, sanitation, roads, etc.) from the government. Palestinians are barred from military service, and yet access to housing and education still largely depends on military status. Families are divided by the separation wall between the West Bank and Israel, with few forms of legal recourse to rights of visitation and reunification. The Knesset debates the “transfer” of the Palestinian population to the West Bank, and the new loyalty oath requires that anyone who wishes to become a citizen pledge allegiance to Israel as Jewish and democratic, thus eliding once again the non-Jewish population and binding the full population to a specific and controversial, if not contradictory, version of democracy.

The second point, to repeat, is that the Jewish people extend beyond the state of Israel and the ideology of political Zionism. The two cannot be equated. Honestly, what can really be said about “the Jewish people” as a whole? Is it not a lamentable sterotype to make large generalizations about all Jews, and to presume they all share the same political commitments? They—or, rather, we—occupy a vast spectrum of political views, some of which are unconditionally supportive of the state of Israel, some of which are conditionally supportive, some are skeptical, some are exceedingly critical, and an increasing number, if we are to believe the polls in this country, are indifferent. In my view, we have to remain critical of anyone who posits a single norm that decides rights of entry into the social or cultural category determining as well who will be excluded. Most categories of identity are fraught with conflicts and ambiguities; the effort to suppress the complexity of the category of “Jewish” is thus a political move that seeks to yoke a cultural identity to a specific Zionist position. If the Jew who struggles for justice for Palestine is considered to be anti-Semitic, if any number of internationals who have joined thus struggle from various parts of the world are also considered anti-Semitic and if Palestinians seeking rights of political self-determination are so accused as well, then it would appear that no oppositional move that can take place without risking the accusation of anti-Semitism. That accusation becomes a way of discrediting a bid for self-determination, at which point we have to ask what political purpose the radical mis-use of that accusation has assumed in the stifling of a movement for political self-determination.

When Zionism becomes co-extensive with Jewishness, Jewishness is pitted against the diversity that defines democracy, and if I may say so, betrays one of the most important ethical dimensions of the diasporic Jewish tradition, namely, the obligation of co-habitation with those different from ourselves. Indeed, such a conflation denies the Jewish role in broad alliances in the historical struggle for social and political justice in unions, political demands for free speech, in socialist communities, in the resistance movement in World War II, in peace activism, the Civil Rights movement and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It also demeans the important struggles in which Jews and Palestinians work together to stop the wall, to rebuild homes, to document indefinite detention, to oppose military harassment at the borders and to oppose the occupation and to imagine the plausible scenarios for the Palestinian right to return.

The point of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is to withdraw funds and support from major financial and cultural institutions that support the operations of the Israeli state and its military. The withdrawal of investments from companies that actively support the military or that build on occupied lands, the refusal to buy products that are made by companies on occupied lands, the withdrawal of funds from investment accounts that support any of these activities, a message that a growing number of people in the international community will not be complicit with the occupation. For this goal to be realized, it matters that there is a difference between those who carry Israeli passports and the state of Israel, since the boycott is directed only toward the latter. BDS focuses on state agencies and corporations that build machinery designed to destroy homes, that build military materiel that targets populations, that profit from the occupation, that are situated illegally on Palestinian lands, to name a few.

BDS does not discriminate against individuals on the basis of their national citizenship. I concede that not all versions of BDS have been consistent on this point in the past, but the present policy confirms this principle. I myself oppose any form of BDS that discriminates against individuals on the basis of their citizenship. Others may interpret the boycott differently, but I have no problem collaborating with Israeli scholars and artists as long as we do not participate in any Israeli institution or have Israeli state monies support our collaborative work. The reason, of course, is that the academic and cultural boycott seeks to put pressure on all those cultural institutions that have failed to oppose the occupation and struggle for equal rights and the rights of the dispossessed, all those cultural institutions that think it is not their place to criticize their government for these practices, all of them that understand themselves to be above or beyond this intractable political condition. In this sense, they do contribute to an unacceptable status quo. And those institutions should know why international artists and scholars refuse to come when they do, just as they also need to know the conditions under which people will come. When those cultural institutions (universities, art centers, festivals) were to take such a stand, that would be the beginning of the end of the boycott (let’s remember that the goal of any boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is to become obsolete and unnecessary; once conditions of equality and justice are achieved, the rationale for BDS falls away, and in this sense achieving the just conditions for the dissolution of the movement is its very aim).

In some ways, the argument between BDS and its opponents centers on the status of international law. Which international laws are to be honored, and how can they be enforced. International law cannot solve every political conflict, but political conflicts that fully disregard international law usually only get worse as a result. We know that the government of the state of Israel has voiced its skepticism about international law, repeatedly criticizing the United Nations as a biased institution, even bombing its offices in Gaza. Israel also became the first country to withhold cooperation from a UN review of its human rights practices scheduled last week in Geneva (New York Times, 1/29/13). I think it is fair to call this a boycott of the UN on the part of the state of Israel. Indeed, one hears criticism of the ineffectiveness of the UN on both sides, but is that a reason to give up on the global human rights process altogether? There are good reasons to criticize the human rights paradigm, to be sure, but for now, I am only seeking to make the case that BDS is not a destructive or hateful movement. It appeals to international law precisely under conditions in which the international community, the United Nations included, neighboring Arab states, human rights courts, the European Union, The United States and the UK, have all failed effectively to rectify the manifest injustices in Palestine. Boycott, divestment and the call for sanctions are popular demands that emerge precisely when the international community has failed to compel a state to abide by its own norms.

Let us consider, then, go back to the right of return, which constitutes the controversial third prong of the BDS platform. The law of return is extended to all of us who are Jewish who live in the diaspora, which means that were it not for my politics, I too would be eligible to become a citizen of that state. At the same time, Palestinians in need of the right of return are denied the same rights? If someone answers that “Jewish demographic advantage” must be maintained, one can query whether Jewish demographic advantage is policy that can ever be reconciled with democratic principles. If one responds to that with “the Jews will only be safe if they retain their majority status,” the response has to be that any state will surely engender an opposition movement when it seeks to maintain a permanent and disenfranchised minority within its borders, fails to offer reparation or return to a population driven from their lands and homes, keeps over four million people under occupation without rights of mobility, due process and political self-determination, and another 1.6 million under siege in Gaza, rationing of food, administering unemployment, blocking building materials to restore bombed homes and institutions, intensifying vulnerability to military bombardment resulting in widespread injury and death.

If we conclude that those who participate in such an opposition movement do so because they hate the Jews, we have surely failed to recognize that this is an opposition to oppression, to the multi-faceted dimensions of a militarized form of settler colonialism that has entailed subordination, occupation and dispossession. Any group would oppose that condition, and the state that maintains it, regardless of whether that state is identified as a Jewish state or any other kind. Resistance movements do not discriminate against oppressors, though sometimes the language of the movement can use discriminatory language, and that has to be opposed. However, it is surely cynical to claim that the only reason a group organizes to oppose its own oppression is that it bears an inexplicable prejudice or racist hatred against those who oppress them. We can see the torque of this argument and the absurd conclusions to which it leads: if the Palestinians did not hate the Jews, they would accept their oppression by the state of Israel! If they resist, it is a sign of anti-Semitism!

This kind of logic takes us to one of the traumatic and affective regions of this conflict. There are reasons why much of the global media and prevailing political discourses cannot accept that a legitimate opposition to inequality, occupation, and dispossession is very different from anti-Semitism. After all, we cannot rightly argue that if a state claiming to represent the Jewish people engages in these manifestly illegal activities, it is therefore justified on the grounds that the Jews have suffered atrociously and therefore have special needs to be exempt from international norms. Such illegal acts are never justified, no matter who is practicing them.

At the same time, one must object to some of the language used by Hamas to refer to the state of Israel, where very often the state of Israel is itself conflated with the Jews, and where the actions of the state reflect on the nature of the Jews. This is clearly anti-Semitism and must be opposed. But BDS is not the same as Hamas, and it is simply ignorant to argue that all Palestinian organizations are the same. In the same vein, those who wrote to me recently to say that BDS is the same as Hamas is the same as the Nazis are involved in fearful and aggressive forms of association that assume that any effort to make distinctions is naïve and foolish. And so we see how the conflations such as these lead to bitter and destructive consequences. What if we slowed down enough to think and to distinguish—what political possibilities might then open?

And it brings us to yet another outcry that we heard in advance of our discussion here this evening. That was BDS is the coming of a second holocaust. I believe we have to be very careful when anyone makes use of the Holocaust in this way and for this purpose, since if the term becomes a weapon by which we seek to stigmatize those with opposing political viewpoints, then we have first of all dishonored the slaughter of over 6 million Jewish people, and another 4 million gypsies, gay people, disabled, the communists and the physically and mentally ill. All of us, Jewish or not Jewish, must keep that historical memory intact and alive, and refuse forms of revisionism and political exploitation of that history. We may not exploit and re-ignite the traumatic dimension of Hitler’s atrocities for the purposes of accusing and silencing those with opposing political viewpoints, including legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel. Such a tactic not only demeans and instrumentalizes the memory of the Nazi genocide, but produces a general cynicism about both accusations of anti-Semitism and predictions of new genocidal possibilities. After all, if those terms are bandied about as so much artillery in a war, then they are used as blunt instruments for the purposes of censorship and self-legitimation, and they no longer name and describe the very hideous political realities to which they belong. The more such accusations and invocations are tactically deployed, the more skeptical and cynical the public becomes about their actual meaning and use. This is a violation of that history, an insult to the surviving generation, and a cynical and excited recirculation of traumatic material—a kind of sadistic spree, to put it bluntly—that seeks to defend and legitimate a very highly militarized and repressive state regime. Of the use of the Holocaust to legitimate Israeli military destructiveness, Primo Levi wrote in 1982, “I deny any validity to [the use of the Holocaust for] this defence.”

We have heard in recent days as well that BDS threatens the attempt to establish a two-state solution. Although many people who support BDS are in favor of a one-state solution, the BDS movement has not taken a stand on this explicitly, and includes signatories who differ from one another on this issue. In fact, the BDS committee, formed in 2005 with the support of over 170 organizations in Palestine, does not take any stand on the one state or two state solution. It describes itself as an “anti-normalization” politics that seeks to force a wide range of political institutions and states to stop compliance with the occupation, unequal treatment and dispossession. For the BDS National Committee, it is not the fundamental structure of the state of Israel that is called into question, but the occupation, its denial of basic human rights, its abrogation of international law (including its failure to honor the rights of refugees), and the brutality of its continuing conditions—harassment, humiliation, destruction and confiscation of property, bombardment, and killing. Indeed, one finds an array of opinions on one-state and two-state, especially now that one-state can turn into Greater Israel with separated Bantustans of Palestinian life. The two-state solution brings its own problems, given that the recent proposals tend to suspend the rights of refugees, accept curtailed borders and fail to show whether the establishment of an independent state will bring to an end the ongoing practices and institutions of occupation, or simply incorporate them into its structure. How can a state be built with so many settlements, all illegal, which are expected to bring the Israeli population in Palestine to nearly one million of its four million inhabitants. Many have argued that it is the rapidly increasing settler population in the West Bank, not BDS, that is forcing the one-state solution.

Some people accept divestment without sanctions, or divestment and sanctions without the boycott. There are an array of views. In my view, the reason to hold together all three terms is simply that it is not possible to restrict the problem of Palestinian subjugation to the occupation alone. It is significant in itself, since four million people are living without rights of mobility, sovereignty, control over their borders, trade and political self-determination, subjected to military raids, indefinite detention, extended imprisonment and harassment. However, if we fail to make the link between occupation, inequality and dispossession, we agree to forget the claims of 1948, bury the right to return. We overlook the structural link between the Israeli demand for demographic advantage and the multivalent forms of dispossession that affect Palestinians who have been forced to become diasporic, those who live with partial rights within the borders, and those who live under occupation in the West Bank or in the open air prison of Gaza (with high unemployment and rationed foods) or other refugee camps in the region.

Some people have said that they value co-existence over boycott, and wish to engage in smaller forms of binational cultural communities in which Israeli Jews and Palestinians live and work together. This is a view that holds to the promise that small organic communities have a way of expanding into ever widening circles of solidarity, modeling the conditions for peaceable co-existence. The only question is whether those small communities continue to accept the oppressive structure of the state, or whether in their small and effective way oppose the various dimensions of continuing subjugation and disenfranchisement. If they do the latter, they become solidarity struggles. So co-existence becomes solidarity when it joins the movement that seeks to undo the structural conditions of inequality, containment and dispossession. So perhaps the conditions of BDS solidarity are precisely what prefigure that form of living and working together that might one day become a just and peaceable form of co-existence.

One could be for the BDS movement as the only credible non-violent mode of resisting the injustices committed by the state of Israel without falling into the football lingo of being “pro” Palestine and “anti” Israel. This language is reductive, if not embarrassing. One might reasonably and passionately be concerned for all the inhabitants of that land, and simply maintain that the future for any peaceful, democratic solution for that region will become thinkable through the dismantling of the occupation, through enacting the equal rights of Palestinian minorities and finding just and plausible ways for the rights of refugees to be honored. If one holds out for these three aims in political life, then one is not simply living within the logic of the “pro” and the “anti”, but trying to fathom the conditions for a “we”, a plural existence grounded in equality. What does one do with one’s words but reach for a place beyond war, ask for a new constellation of political life in which the relations of colonial subjugation are brought to a halt. My wager, my hope, is that everyone’s chance to live with greater freedom from fear and aggression will be increased as those conditions of justice, freedom, and equality are realized. We can or, rather, must start with how we speak, and how we listen, with the right to education, and to dwell critically, fractiously, and freely in political discourse together. Perhaps the word “justice” will assume new meanings as we speak it, such that we can venture that what will be just for the Jews will also be just for the Palestinians, and for all the other people living there, since justice, when just, fails to discriminate, and we savor that failure.
Judith Butler
February 7, 2013

on badiou being and event

Set Theory 55 minute tutorial on Utube

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number 6: multiplicity and the One, consistency
number 7: inconsistent multiplicity, presentation of presentation
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number 11: Cantor set theory
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bosteels event

Bosteels, Bruno.”What is an Event?” Lecture 02 Jul 2012
Bruno Bosteels “Event,” Encyclopedia of Political Theory. ed. Mark Bevir, vol. 2, Routledge (2010), 878-880.
Event
Follow-up discussion here

The event is arguably the core concept in contemporary European philosophy. While there is no shortage of references to the event in the Anglo-American tradition, from Alfred North Whitehead to Donald Davidson, the concept serves above all to define the principal stake of so-called Continental thought, from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida to Catherine Malabou and from Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze to Alain Badiou.

Genealogically, the event emerges with particular force toward the late sixties, marking a possible crossover point between structuralist and subject-centered approaches. Among the features that are relatively invariant in the use of its concept, we can mention the event’s contingent, unpredictable, singular, and radically transformative nature. Beyond these basic invariant traits, however, each individual thinker also gives the event a specific inflection. Major polemics thus concern the unicity or plurality of events, their ontological or nonontological inscription, their immanence or transcendence to the world as is, and their susceptibility to a hermeneutical or a dialectical understanding. Finally, the primacy attributed to the event in contemporary philosophy is not immune to criticisms and attacks from a political point of view, insofar as eventfulness, contingency, and difference in the context of late capitalism can be seen as descriptive of the current functioning of the global market, instead of promising its revolutionary transformation.

Genealogically speaking, we might say that the event becomes the central topic of theoretical and philosophical reflection precisely in the wake of the worldwide “events” of 1968. To think this revolutionary sequence, then, entails not only investigating what happened but also asking the underlying question of how to think the happening of that which happens. In French, this is often called the événementialité of the event, awkwardly translated as the “eventality” of the event, with the task of thinking, whether in history, in political theory, or in philosophy, being described as événementialisation, “eventalization.” Of course, we can also enumerate many conceptual precursors for this notion, such as Aristotle’s tuchè or “chance” as opposed to “automatism” or automaton; the role of clinamen, “deviation” or “swerve,” for ancient atomists after Lucretius; Machiavelli’s fortuna, “fortune” or “chance” in relation to virtù as “capacity” or “power” for intervention; Mallarmé’s coup de dés or “dice throw” as the attempt to “abolish” chance; Nietzsche’s “destiny” of breaking in two the history of humanity; or Heidegger’s Ereignis as “enowning.” These concepts have been variously retrieved among contemporary thinkers of the event, but they appear as precursors only in retrospect and as a result of such retrievals, which do not begin to give shape to a common doctrine until the late sixties in what is then frequently called post-metaphysical or anti-foundational thinking.

More specifically, the concept of the event bridges two traditions that otherwise are at loggerheads: a humanist, subject-centered approach and an anti-humanist focus on the action of the structure. An event is neither the expression of free human action nor the causal effect of structural determinisms.

Instead, an event occurs precisely when and where a certain dysfunction or systematic deadlock becomes visible through the intervention of a subject who, by gaining a foothold in this gap in the structure, at the same time profoundly reshuffles the coordinates that otherwise continue to be determining in the last instance.

The event, in other words, transversally cuts across the traditional oppositions of freedom and necessity, action and system, spontaneity and organization, movement and the State.

Among the event’s defining features we should list its contingency, its unpredictability, its singularity, and its transformative capacity. Beyond this basic consensus, however, we find a wide range of divergent and often polemical orientations.

In the Heideggerian tradition, for example, there is good reason to speak of the event only in the singular, as the event of being itself—being which “is” not but “happens” or “occurs.” This then raises the difficult question, which thinkers as diverse as Derrida and Deleuze grapple with in much of their work, of defining the relation between the unique event of being qua being and the occurrence of plural events in the everyday sense of the term.

For Badiou, on the contrary, the event is that which is not being qua being. In this orientation, therefore, ontology, as the science of being, can literally say nothing of the event, which rather calls for an intervening doctrine of the subject as operative in various fields or conditions, such as art, politics, or science.

A related polemic concerns the immanent or transcendent nature of the event with regard to the situation at hand. Here a Deleuzian orientation, which involves a reevaluation of virtuality outside the traditional binary of the real and the possible, will insist on the presence of the unique event of being as if folded into particular accidents. To this image of the event as fold, by contrast, we can oppose to notion of a radical break, which Badiou, for example, finds at work in Nietzsche and Mallarmé. Neither immanent nor transcendent, in fact, the event crosses out this very opposition for Badiou.

The method for thinking the event also changes depending on which of these basic orientations we adopt. Thus, if in everything that happens the virtuality of the one and only event of being is always already present, then our approach will ultimately take the form of a hermeneutic interpretation in which each item or entity (this or that occurrence) can also simultaneously be read as the expression of the immanence of being (the happening of all that occurs).

Conversely, if an event is inscribed in a specific situation by way of this situation’s deadlock and yet depends on a break with (existing representations of) being, then our approach will most likely take the guise of a dialectical articulation (not in the orthodox terms of negation and the negation of negation but as a logic of scission and of the exception).

The proliferation of theories of the random, multiple, contingent, and radically transformative event, however, can also be seen as the product of late capitalism, rather than as a counteracting force. Marx was after all quite enthusiastic about the power of capitalism to break down old feudal, patriarchal, or idyllic bonds and hierarchies.

But, if it is indeed capitalism itself that reveals all presence to be a mere semblance covering over random multiplicity, then the event as the core concern of post- metaphysical thought might turn out to be little more than descriptive of, if not complicitous with, the status quo.

Difference, multiplicity, or the primacy of events and becomings over subjects and objects, far from giving us critical leverage, thus would define our given state of affairs under late capitalism and its attendant cultural logic.

Further Readings

Badiou, A. (2005). Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum.

Casati, R., and Varzi, A. C., eds. (1996). Events. Aldershot-Dartmouth: International Research Library of Philosophy. Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. New York: Oxford University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida, J. (1982). “Signature Event Context,” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 309-330.

Foucault, M. (2003). “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle.” The Essential Foucault. Ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: The New Press. 392-404.

Heidegger, M. (1999). Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lyotard, J.F. (1990). Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. (2004). The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Trans. Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge.

Rajchman, J. 1991. Philosophical Events. Essays on the Eighties. New York: Columbia University Press.

Whitehead, Alfred North. (1978). Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press.