Concerned about the devastation currently being inflicted on the people of Lebanon and Palestine by the Israeli Military Forces and with the verylimited and biased reporting on these conflicts presented by most American media networks, we have organized a teach-in on the UC Berkeley campus in order to give students, faculty, and the Bay Area community at large achance to gain a greater understanding of these events and to participate in an open discussion on their significance for both Americans and the people of the Middle East. During the first hour of this two-hour event, four scholars with expertise in the Middle East will present short analyses of the historical and political dimensions of this conflict, focusing on the following themes: 1. The role US foreign policy has played in enabling and authorizing the Israeli bombardment; 2. The origins and historical development of Hezbollah, and the role of this movement within Lebanese social and political arenas; 3. The shifting political alignments within Israel, and their relation to the current war on Lebanon and to Israel?s role in the region more broadly; 4. The impact of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank on the lives of Palestinians and the political landscape of the Palestinian society. The second hour of the teach-in will be reserved for audience questions and comments. Confirmed speakers are UC Berkeley Professors Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature), Beshara Doumani (History), Charles Hirschkind (Anthropology), Saba Mahmood (Anthropology), as well as Zeina Zaatari, Program Officer for the Middle East and North Africa, The Global Fund for Women The teach-in took place in 145 Dwinelle on September 7th.
Author: logocentric
mutual recognition 1/2
By placing struggle at the heart of social interaction (even though he believes it can be overcome), Kojève in my view paves the way (perhaps along with Nietzsche) for Sartre’s bleak claim that “the essence of the relations between consciousnesses is . . . conflict.” It is on the basis of this claim that Sartre then accuses Hegel of “optimism” for believing that genuinely mutual recognition is possible. Hegel is praised for his “brilliant intuition” that I “depend on the Other in my being”; but he is castigated for thinking “that an objective agreement can be realized between consciousnesses – by authority of the Other’s recognition of me and of my recognition of the Other.”
Sartre’s emphasis in Being and Nothingness on the inevitability of social conflict is notoriously uncompromising, but he is not alone in challenging what Jay Bernstein calls Hegel’s “worrying ‘reconciliations’.”
Many post-Hegelians balk at Hegel’s suggestion that mutual recognition is a real possibility in modern society (or perhaps even already achieved), and prefer to follow Kant in regarding recognition and respect as at most moral ideals in an essentially imperfect world.
Some have even argued that the very idea of successful mutual recognition is unsustainable. Recently, for example, Alexander García Düttmann has claimed that “recognition is always embedded in a destabilizing tension . . . [and] is always an improper, dissimilar, one-sided recognition.” Indeed, if one follows Hegel, Düttmann maintains, “recognition can become what is meant by its concept only in a struggle for life and death.” As we have seen, Kojève would not endorse such a definitive judgment. There is little doubt, however, that he opens the door to such judgments by claiming that the life and death struggle arises directly from the very nature of social interaction between self-consciousnesses.
In contrast to Kojève, Hegel argues that what is made necessary by the interaction between self-consciousnesses is mutual recognition rather than conflict.
This does not mean that social and historical existence will in fact always be characterized by respect and love for one’s fellow human beings; Hegel is not that naïve. It means that logically, when all that it entails has been rendered fully explicit,
genuine social interaction turns out to require mutual recognition. Hegel does not deny that social conflict constantly arises. His claim, however, is that it arises not because we are social beings as such, but because we fail to understand properly what social interaction demands.
For Hegel, self-consciousness must be desire; but we achieve a fully objective sense of ourselves only by relating to something irreducibly independent in which we find our own identity reflected. Such a thing can only be another self-consciousness that recognizes us. Logically, therefore, concrete self-consciousness must be social and intersubjective. But why should the fact that I require recognition from another mean that our relation must be one of mutual recognition? Hegel’s answer is to be found in §§178–84 of the Phenomenology.
Genuine self-consciousness, Hegel writes, is faced by another self-consciousness by which it finds itself recognized. It has thus “come out of itself”: it is not just enclosed within its own interiority, but sees its identity located, as it were, “over there.” In such a relation, self-consciousness certainly gains a sense of self through being recognized. Yet at the same time, Hegel maintains, it feels that it has “lost itself,” precisely because it finds its own identity over there in the eyes of the other.
Equally, however, self-consciousness lacks any real sense that the other is genuinely other than it, since it sees in the other nothing but its own self. Insofar as self-consciousness does no more than find itself recognized by another, therefore, its consciousness of both itself and the other actually remains deficient.
To remedy this situation, Hegel argues, self-consciousness must “proceed to supersede (aufheben) the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being.” Self-consciousness does so by withdrawing itself from the other, locating its true identity within itself (as it were, “over here”), and thereby overcoming its previous sense of being what it is only in and through the other. In making this move, however, self-consciousness loses what has been shown to be a crucial ingredient of any concrete sense of self, and thus, as Hegel puts it, “proceeds to supersede its own self”: for by insisting that its own identity resides wholly within itself, it abandons the idea that its identity is to be found reflected in another and so is something objective. Yet all is not lost: for, as Hegel immediately points out, this withdrawal of self-consciousness out of the other into itself is in fact ambiguous. In withdrawing into itself, consciousness does indeed recover the certainty that it is what it is in itself. In Hegel’s own words, “it receives back its own self . . . [and] again becomes equal to itself.” At the same time, however, self-consciousness restores the other self-consciousness to its own proper otherness.
It no longer sees the other merely as a mirror reflecting it, but “equally gives the other self-consciousness back again to itself . . . and thus lets the other again go free (entläßt also das Andere wieder frei).” That is to say, self-consciousness recognizes the other as another free and independent self-consciousness.
The action of self-consciousness is ambiguous for this reason: by withdrawing out of the other wholly into itself, self-consciousness lets the other go free, and thereby unwittingly affords itself for the first time the opportunity to be recognized by, and to find itself in, another that it knows to be genuinely other than it.
To begin with, self-consciousness did not “see the other as an essential being,” because in the other it saw only itself. Yet it did not enjoy an unalloyed sense of self either, since it found itself “over there” in another (that it did not properly recognize). Now, by contrast, self-consciousness has a clear sense of its own identity and recognizes that the other is something wholly other than and independent of itself. Consequently, it can at last fulfill the condition required for concrete self-consciousness: for it can find itself recognized by and reflected in another that is known to be truly other.
houlgate desire and recognition
Desire fails to secure pure self-certainty because it always has to seek out new objects that are other than consciousness. In negating such objects, desire does find satisfaction and enjoys itself; but it ceases to be certain of itself as soon as it encounters the otherness and independence of things once again.
A more secure self-consciousness would be achieved, however, if consciousness were able to preserve its certainty of itself in its very awareness of the independence of things. How might it do this?
Hegel’s answer is clear: by turning its attention specifically toward things that in their very independence negate themselves and thereby allow consciousness to be certain only of itself. Simply eliminating all consciousness of other things is not an option for self-consciousness. Hegel has shown that self-consciousness first arises in our consciousness of other things, and that such consciousness of otherness remains an integral part of the consciousness that is explicitly concerned with itself. That is why self-consciousness must be desire. If consciousness is not to be restricted to being perennially renewed desire, therefore, the only logical alternative is for it to relate to something independent that negates itself for the sake of self-consciousness: “on account of the independence of the object, . . . it can achieve satisfaction only when the object itself effects the negation within itself.”
What kinds of objects perform such an independent negation of themselves? One possible candidate is the living object, or organism. In his account of understanding, Hegel argued that the objects of understanding include not just those that are law-governed but also those that are alive. Living beings thus belong among the objects that desire seeks to consume. Furthermore, as Hegel construes it, life is the explicit process of self-negation: death does not just descend on living organisms from the outside, but is immanent in life from the start, because “the simple substance of Life is the splitting up of itself into shapes and at the same time the dissolution of these existent differences.”14
So, do living things afford us the opportunity of being conscious only of ourselves in being conscious of that which is independent of us? Almost, but not quite. The problem is that living things do not preserve their independence when they negate themselves: when they die, they simply cease to be. As Hegel puts it, “the differentiated, merely living, shape does indeed also supersede its independence in the process of Life, but it ceases with its distinctive difference to be what it is.” (The same is true of inorganic objects: insofar as they “negate themselves,” they do so only by ceasing to be what they are.)
The logic of self-consciousness demands, however, that we achieve self-certainty in relating to objects that retain their independence from us. We can satisfy this demand only by relating to an object that negates itself but that is “equally independent in this negativity of itself.” Such an object, Hegel maintains, cannot merely be a living thing (or an inorganic object), but must be another consciousness or self-consciousness. Consequently, “self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.”
At this point Hegel appears no longer to be just a critic of Descartes, but to draw a positive lesson from the latter’s meditations (though Hegel does not mention him by name). We do not learn from Descartes what it is to be concretely self-conscious; only phenomenology can teach us that. Nevertheless, in his cogito argument Descartes proves that consciousness retains an abstract awareness of its own independent identity and existence even when it calls into question and abstracts from every particular aspect of itself. The logic of self-consciousness demands that we achieve concrete self-certainty in relating to another thing that negates itself for our sake and that retains its independent identity in so doing. As Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, “only consciousness is able to . . . cancel itself in such a fashion that it does not cease to exist.” This fact, I would suggest, we learn from Descartes (as well, of course, as from Fichte).
It is important not to lose sight of the point at issue here. Descartes himself fails to see that concrete self-consciousness is to be gained in a relation to what is irreducibly other than consciousness. Yet he helps us to see that that very other cannot just take the form of an inanimate or animate thing, but must also take the form of another self-consciousness, for he shows that self-consciousness alone is able to negate every aspect of itself and preserve itself in so doing. Of course, to be genuinely and concretely self-conscious, that other self-consciousness must in turn be related to what is other than it, and so must itself be desire and relate to another self-consciousness. The specific point that Hegel is making here, however, is that the other, to which any concrete self-consciousness relates, must at least be capable of abstract self-consciousness: for only in this way can it thoroughly negate itself and at the same time retain its identity.
The desire to be certain of ourselves in our very relation to others is fulfilled not by consuming things, but by interacting with another self-consciousness – one that is not only capable of abstract self-awareness, but also takes the form of desire and relates to a self-consciousness other than itself. Self-consciousness is thus necessarily social or “spiritual”: it is “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’.” In this social relation, Hegel remarks, I find my own identity out there in an objective form: “just as much ‘I’ as ‘object’.” This is because I find my identity recognized by something other than and independent of me. This moment of recognition is built into the act of independent self-negation performed by the other self-consciousness: for by negating itself the other declares itself to be nothing in and for itself – it “posits its otherness . . . as a nothingness” – and so makes way for me. The other thus allows me to relate wholly to myself in relating to another, because all I see in the other is his or her recognition of my identity.
If we are to enjoy full self-consciousness, the hermit’s existence cannot be an option for us, for we can become properly self-conscious only in the society of others who recognize us. Of course, we could try to turn our backs on self-consciousness. Hegel would point out, however, that self-consciousness is logically entailed by consciousness itself. Insofar as we are conscious at all, we must therefore seek to become fully self-conscious. The hermit, it seems, lives at odds with the logic inherent in consciousness itself.
Hegel’s own account shows not how desire seeks to become pure desire, freed from determination by independent objects, but how self-certainty is attained by a consciousness that considers independent otherness to be irreducible. Unlike Kojèvian desire, Hegelian desire learns that we are always conscious of what is other than and independent of us, and that we can never fulfill the desire to be purely free. For Hegel, if I am to be conscious of myself alone, I can thus do so only in relation to what is and remains independent of me. But how is this possible? Only if the other, in its very independence, negates itself and puts itself at my disposal. This in turn is possible only when another self-consciousness thinks of itself as nothing, recognizes me alone, and thereby enables me to find nothing but myself reflected in it. Gadamer puts the point perfectly: “if self-consciousness is to become true self-consciousness, then it must . . . find another self-consciousness that is willing to be ‘for it’.”
To recapitulate: for Kojève, what drives self-consciousness to become social is its desire to assimilate (as well as be desired by) another’s desire; for Hegel, by contrast, what renders self-consciousness social is its acceptance of the other as an independent source of recognition for itself. This significant difference between Kojève and Hegel leads them to very different views of what is implicit in and made necessary by social life.
houlgate hegel
Houlgate, S. Phenomenology of Spirit
This is not to deny that, like Descartes in the Meditations, I can “shut my eyes, stop my ears, withdraw all my senses” and “converse with myself” in total separation from things. What can be reached through Cartesian doubt, however, is no more than abstract self-consciousness, because such doubt abstracts from the conditions under which alone concrete, all-embracing self-consciousness is possible: namely, consciousness of an external world in relation to which we find ourselves. … true self-consciousness itself does not merely abstract from but (to borrow Kant’s term) “accompanies” our consciousness of objects.
From Hegel’s point of view, Descartes overlooks the moment of other-relatedness that is essential to true consciousness of oneself. Yet there is nevertheless something to be learned from Descartes about true self-consciousness: for in remaining conscious of real, external objects, self-consciousness must also seek to negate those
objects.
Consciousness finds itself in what is other than it; but the very otherness of the objects I encounter inevitably prevents me from relating wholly to myself. In order to achieve unalloyed self-consciousness, therefore, I must regard the object before me as something that is not essentially other than or independent of me after all, but there merely for me. I continue to consider the object to be real, and (unlike Descartes) do not declare it to be a figment of my imagination; but I deem it to offer no resistance to me and to yield to my ability to negate or consume it for my own satisfaction and self-enjoyment.
Insofar as self-consciousness relates to itself through negating objects around it, it is, in Hegel’s word, desire (Begierde).
Self-consciousness necessarily takes the form of desire, therefore, because Descartes is halfright: consciousness does enhance its sense of itself by negating the objects around it, but it directs its activity of negation at a realm of objects whose reality is not in doubt and that, consequently, forever remains to be negated.
Concrete self-consciousness is not immediate self-awareness, but self-awareness mediated by and inseparable from the awareness of what is other. Self-consciousness is interested in itself above all, and yet, as a complex form of consciousness, it is necessarily related to external things. If it is to attain an undiluted consciousness of itself, it must thus negate and destroy the other things it encounters.
As this activity of negating what is other than itself, self-consciousness is desire. In Hegel’s own words, the origin of desire is thus the fact that “self-consciousness is . . . essentially the return from otherness.” Note that what we desire, in Hegel’s view, is not the object as such, but rather, as Jean Hyppolite puts it, “the unity of the I with itself.” If Hegel is right, in seeking to enjoy the object, we are in fact seeking to enjoy ourselves.
This is not to deny that, like Descartes in the Meditations, I can “shut my eyes,
stop my ears, withdraw all my senses” and “converse with myself” in total separation from things.7 What can be reached through Cartesian doubt, however, is no more than abstract self-consciousness, because such doubt abstracts from the conditions under which alone concrete, all-embracing self-consciousness is possible: namely, consciousness of an external world in relation to which we find ourselves. As we shall
see below, Hegel acknowledges that such abstract self-consciousness is possible and is an important moment of true, concrete self-consciousness. He claims, however, that true self-consciousness itself does not merely abstract from but (to borrow Kant’s term) “accompanies” our consciousness of objects.
From Hegel’s point of view, Descartes overlooks the moment of other-relatedness that is essential to true consciousness of oneself. Yet there is nevertheless something to be learned from Descartes about true self-consciousness: for in remaining conscious of real, external objects, self-consciousness must also seek to negate those objects. Consciousness finds itself in what is other than it; but the very otherness of
the objects I encounter inevitably prevents me from relating wholly to myself. In order to achieve unalloyed self-consciousness, therefore, I must regard the object before me as something that is not essentially other than or independent of me after all, but there merely for me. I continue to consider the object to be real, and (unlike Descartes) do not declare it to be a figment of my imagination; but I deem it to offer
no resistance to me and to yield to my ability to negate or consume it for my own satisfaction and self-enjoyment. Insofar as self-consciousness relates to itself through negating objects around it, it is, in Hegel’s word, desire (Begierde). Selfconsciousness necessarily takes the form of desire, therefore, because Descartes is halfright: consciousness does enhance its sense of itself by negating the objects around
it, but it directs its activity of negation at a realm of objects whose reality is not in doubt and that, consequently, forever remains to be negated.
stop my ears, withdraw all my senses” and “converse with myself” in total separation from things.7 What can be reached through Cartesian doubt, however, is no more than abstract self-consciousness, because such doubt abstracts from the conditions under which alone concrete, all-embracing self-consciousness is possible: namely, consciousness of an external world in relation to which we find ourselves. As we shall
see below, Hegel acknowledges that such abstract self-consciousness is possible and is an important moment of true, concrete self-consciousness. He claims, however, that true self-consciousness itself does not merely abstract from but (to borrow Kant’s term) “accompanies” our consciousness of objects.
From Hegel’s point of view, Descartes overlooks the moment of other-relatedness that is essential to true consciousness of oneself. Yet there is nevertheless something to be learned from Descartes about true self-consciousness: for in remaining conscious of real, external objects, self-consciousness must also seek to negate those objects. Consciousness finds itself in what is other than it; but the very otherness of
the objects I encounter inevitably prevents me from relating wholly to myself. In order to achieve unalloyed self-consciousness, therefore, I must regard the object before me as something that is not essentially other than or independent of me after all, but there merely for me. I continue to consider the object to be real, and (unlike Descartes) do not declare it to be a figment of my imagination; but I deem it to offer
no resistance to me and to yield to my ability to negate or consume it for my own satisfaction and self-enjoyment. Insofar as self-consciousness relates to itself through negating objects around it, it is, in Hegel’s word, desire (Begierde). Selfconsciousness necessarily takes the form of desire, therefore, because Descartes is halfright: consciousness does enhance its sense of itself by negating the objects around
it, but it directs its activity of negation at a realm of objects whose reality is not in doubt and that, consequently, forever remains to be negated.
houlgate on hegel’s phenomenology
Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Thinking Philosophically without Begging the Question.” Gracia, J.E. Jorge. Reichberg, Gregory M. and Bernard N. Schumacher, The Classics of Western Philosophy, Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 364-382. Print.
truth of being to be immanent within thought, rather than something that is just “out there.” the latter is the viewpoint of ordinary consciousness. So Hegel says fine, we’ll take your standpoint, start from there, and show you how it’ll lead to the Absolute.
For Hegel, being has a logical or conceptual structure, and we discern that structure within that of thought and its categories. (365)
“Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.”
the common
By Michael Hardt and another interesting interview
Monday, July 06, 2009
These actions will likely involve a confluence — with conflicts and challenges, of course — of ecological activists with anti-capitalist movements and other social movements, which have traditionally pursued separate and sometimes even divergent courses. The success of the event will depend on understanding and negotiating the differences and potentials of the domains of the common that are the primary objects of each of these movements. This event by no means exhausts the relevance of this theoretical discussion but it does highlight its practical importance.
The theoretical discussion must begin by establishing the centrality of the common. Thinking the centrality of the common is much more advanced and widespread in ecological thought than in other domains. Not only do we generally share the benefits of interaction with the earth, the sun, and the oceans but also we are all affected by their degradation. Air and water pollution are not confined to the location where they are produced, of course, and they are not limited by national boundaries; climate change similarly affects the entire planet. This is not the say that such changes affect everyone in the same way: rising ocean levels, for example, will have a more immediate impact on those living in Bangladesh than those in Bolivia. The common, though, is the basic foundation of ecological thought against which the singularities of specific locations stand out.
In social and economic thought, however, the centrality of the common is not widely recognized. The claim for its centrality relies on the hypothesis that we are in the midst of an epochal shift from a capitalist economy centered on industrial production to one centered on what can be called immaterial or biopolitical production. Toni Negri and I have argued this hypothesis over the course of three books — Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. I give only a brief synthesis here.
The first part of the claim is easy: for much of the last two centuries the capitalist economy has been centered on industrial production. That does not mean that most of the workers throughout this period have been in factories — in fact, they have not. Indeed who works in industry rather than the fields or the home has been a central determinant in the geographical, racial, and gender divisions of labor. Industrial production has been central, rather, in the sense that the qualities of industry — its forms of mechanization, its working day, its wage relations, its regimes of time discipline and precision, and so forth — have progressively been imposed over other sectors of production and social life as a whole, creating not only an industrial economy but also an industrial society.
The second part of the claim is also relatively uncontroversial: industrial production no longer holds the central position in the capitalist economy. This does not mean that fewer people are working in factories today but rather that industry no longer marks the hierarchical position in the various divisions of labor and, more significantly, that the qualities of industry are no longer being imposed over other sectors and society as a whole.
The final element of the hypothesis, however, is more complex and requires extended argument and qualification. In short, the claim is that there is emerging today in the central position that industry once occupied the production of immaterial goods or goods with a significant immaterial component, such as ideas, knowledges, languages, images, code, and affects. Occupations involved in immaterial production range from the high to the low end of the economy, from health care workers and educators to fast food workers, call center workers, and flight attendants. Once again, this is not a quantitative claim but a claim about the qualities that are progressively being imposed over other sectors of the economy and society as a whole. In other words, the cognitive and affective tools of immaterial production, the precarious, non-guaranteed nature of its wage relations, the temporality of immaterial production (which tends to destroy the structures of the working day and blur the traditional divisions between work-time and nonwork-time), as well as its other qualities are becoming generalized.
This form of production should be understood as biopolitical insofar as what is being produced is ultimately social relations and forms of life. In this context traditional economic divisions between production and reproduction tend to fade away. Forms of life are simultaneously produced and reproduced. Here we can begin to see the proximity between this notion of biopolitical production and ecological thought since both are focused on the production/reproduction of forms of life, with the important difference being that the ecological perspective extends the notion of forms of life well beyond the limits of the human or the animal (but more on that later).
One can also approach the hypothesis of the emerging dominant position of immaterial or biopolitical production in terms of the historical changes in the hierarchy of forms of property. Before industry occupied the central position in the economy, up to the early 19th century, immobile property, such as land, held a dominant position with respect to other forms of property. In the long era of the centrality of industry, however, mobile property, such as commodities, came to dominate over immobile property. Today we are in the midst of a similar transition, one in which immaterial property is taking the dominant position over material property. Indeed patents, copyrights, and other methods to regulate and maintain exclusive control over immaterial property are subject of the most active debates in the field of property law. The rising importance of immaterial property can serve as evidence for or at least indication of the emerging centrality of immaterial production.
Whereas in the earlier period of transition the contest between dominant forms of property turned on the question of mobility (immobile land versus mobile commodities), today the contest focuses attention on exclusivity and reproducibility. Private property in the form of steel beams, automobiles, and television sets obey the logic of scarcity: if you are using them, I cannot. Immaterial property such as ideas, languages, knowledges, codes, music, and affects, in contrast, can be reproduced in an unlimited way. In fact, many such immaterial products only function to their full potential when they are shared in an open way. The usefulness to you of an idea or an affect is not diminished by your sharing it with me. On the contrary, they become useful only by being shared in common.
This is what I meant when I said at the outset that the common is becoming central in today’s capitalist economy. First, the form of production emerging in the dominant position results generally in immaterial or biopolitical goods that tend to be common. Their nature is social and reproducible such that it is increasingly difficult to maintain exclusive control over them. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the productivity of such goods in future economic development depends on their being common. Keeping ideas and knowledges private hinders the production of new ideas and knowledges, just as private languages and private affects are sterile and useless. If our hypothesis is correct, then, capital paradoxically increasingly relies on the common.
This brings me to the first logical characteristic shared by the common in both the ecological and social domains: they both defy and are deteriorated by property relations. In the social and economic domain, not only is it difficult to police exclusive rights over immaterial forms of property, as I said, making biopolitical goods private also diminishes their future productivity. There is emerging a powerful contradiction, in other words, at the heart of capitalist production between the need for the common in the interest of productivity and the need for the private in the interest of capitalist accumulation. This contradiction can be conceived as a new version of the classic opposition, often cited in Marxist and communist thought, between the socialization of production and the private nature of accumulation. The struggles over so-called bio-piracy in Brazil and elsewhere is one contemporary theater of this clash. Indigenous knowledges and the medicinal properties of certain Amazonian plants, for example, are patented by transnational corporations and made private property, the results of which are not only unjust but also destructive. (I object to calling this piracy, by the way, because pirates at least have the dignity to steal property. These corporations steal the common and transform it into private property.)
In the ecological domain it is equally clear that the common both defies and is deteriorated by property relations. It defies property relations simply in the sense that the beneficial and detrimental effects of the environment always exceed the limits of property just as they do national borders. Just as your land shares with the neighboring land the benefits of rain and sunshine it will share too the destructive effects of pollution and climate change. Although the strategies of neoliberalism have been most visibly aimed at the privatization of the public, in terms of transport, services, or industries, it has equally involved the privatization of the common, such as oil in Uganda, diamonds in Sierra Leone, Lithium in Bolivia, and even the genetic information of the population of Iceland. The deterioration of the common by private property here also suggests a contradictory relation: the private nature of accumulation (through the profits of a polluting industry, for example) conflicts with the social nature of the resulting damages. By putting together the two formulae, then, we can see the contradiction with the common on both sides, so to speak, of private property: the increasingly common nature of production clashes with the private nature of capitalist accumulation and that private accumulation, in turn, clashes with the common, social nature of its detrimental effects.
Numerous powerful struggles have arisen in recent decades to combat neoliberal privatization of the common. A successful struggle that illustrates part of my argument here is the war over water that centered in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2000, which, together with the war over gas that peaked in 2003 in El Alto, contributed to the 2005 election of Evo Morales. The events were precipitated by a classic neoliberal script. The IMF pressured the Bolivian government to privatize the water system because it cost more to deliver clean water than the recipients paid for it. The government sold the water system to a consortium of foreign corporations, which immediately “rationalized” the price of water by raising it several fold. The subsequent protests to de-privatize the water intersected with a variety of other efforts to maintain control over the common, in terms of natural resources, the forms of life of indigenous communities, and the social practices of the peasants and the poor. Today, with the disasters of neoliberal privatization becoming ever more evident, the task of discovering alternative means to manage and promote the common has become essential and urgent.
A second logical characteristic shared by the common in both domains, which is more abstract but not for that reason any less significant, is that it constantly disrupts and exceeds the dominant measures of value. Contemporary economists go through extraordinary gymnastic to measure the values of biopolitical goods, such as ideas or affects. Often they cast these as “externalities” that escape the standard schema of measurement. Accountants struggle similarly with “intangible assets,” the value of which seems to be esoteric. In fact, the value of an idea, a social relation, or a form of life always exceeds the value that capitalist rationality can stamp on it, not in the sense that it is always a greater quantity but in that defies the entire system of measure. (Finance, of course, plays a central role in the valuation of biopolitical goods and production and the current financial and economic crisis derives in large part, I would argue, from the inability of capitalist measurement to grasp the newly dominant forms of production. This is a complex discusion, however, that I have to leave to another occasion.) A central character in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is a factory owner, Thomas Gradgrind, who believes he can rationalize life by submitting to economic measure all aspects of it, including “affairs of the heart” such as his relationships to his children, but, as the reader quickly guesses, Gradgrind will learn that life exceeds the bounds of any such measure. Today even the value of economic goods and activity, since the common is increasingly central to capitalist production, exceeds and escapes the traditional measures.
In the ecological domain too the value of the common is immeasureable or, at least, does not obey the traditional capitalist measures of economic value. This is not to say that scientific measurement, such as the proportion of carbon dioxide or methane gases in the atmosphere, is not central and essential. Of course, it is. My point is rather that the value of the common defies measurement. Consider, as a counterexample, the much-publicized arguments of Bjørn Lomborg against taking action to limit global warming. Like Mr. Gradgrind, Lomborg’s strategy is to rationalize the question by calculating the values involved in order to set priorities. The estimated value of the destruction expected by global warming, he concludes with impeccable logic, does not merit the costs to combat it. The problem is that one cannot measure the value of forms of life that are destroyed. What dollar amount should we assign to the submersion of half of Bangladesh under water, permanent drought in Ethiopia, or the destruction of traditional Inuit ways of life? Even contemplating such questions elicits the kind of nausea and indignation you feel when reading those insurance company schedules that calculate how much money you will be reimbursed for losing a finger and how much for an eye or an arm.
The inability to grasp the value of the common with traditional capitalist measures provides one means for evaluating proposals for carbon trading schemes such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Waxman-Markey bill now being discussed in the United States. Carbon trading schemes generally involve a cap to the production of carbon dioxide gases and other greenhouse gases so as to create a limited market in which the production of such gases can be given determinate economic values and traded. Such schemes, then, do not pretend directly to measure the value of the common, but instead claim to do so indirectly, by assigning monetary values to the production of gases that harm or corrupt the common. I don’t mean to discount the fact that in some cases carbon trading schemes can have positive effects in controlling harmful emissions. (Strategic support or opposition to such carbon trading schemes has to be determined through a different kind of argumentation than this and through analysis of the specific situation.) One should certainly keep in mind, though, that assigning determinate values to immeasurable commodities and assuming that market rationality will create a stable and beneficial system has in many cases led to disaster — see, for example, the current financial crisis. And one should also explore the ways that such property logics and market schemes will not diminish but probably exacerbate the global social hierarchies marked by poverty and exclusion. It should be clear, in any case, that proposals that rely on the capitalist measurement of value and the market rationality that presumably accompanies it cannot grasp the value of the common and address the problem of climate change at the fundamental level, even through such indirect means. Forms of life are not measureable or, perhaps, they obey a radically different scale based on the value of life, which it seems to me we have not yet invented (or perhaps we have lost).
My primary point here is that just as the different forms of the common both rebel against property relations so too they defy the traditional measures of capitalist rationality. These two shared logics are a significant basis, it seems to me, for understanding both guises of the common and struggling together to preserve and further them. The shared qualities of the common in these two domains, which I have analyzed so far, should constitute a foundation for linking the forms of political activism aimed at the autonomy and the democratic management of the common.
I recognize two important respects, however, in which the struggles for the common operate according to opposing logics in these two domains. The first has to do with scarcity and limits. Ecological thought necessarily focuses on the finitude of the earth and its life systems. The common can only sustain so many people, for instance, and still be successfully reproduced. The earth, especially its spaces of wilderness, must be defended against the damages of industrial development and other human activities. A politics of the common in the economic and social realm, in contrast, generally emphasizes the unlimited character of production. The production of forms of life, including ideas, affects, and so forth, has no fixed limits. That does not mean, of course, that more ideas are necessarily better, but rather that they do not operate under a logic of scarcity. Ideas are not necessarily degraded by their proliferation and by sharing them with other people — on the contrary. There is the tendency, then, for discussions in the one domain to be dominated by calls for preservation and limits, while the other is characterized by celebrations of limitless creative potential.
In simplistic terms, indeed too simplistic, one might say that whereas ecological thought is against development or for curbs on economic development, advocates in the social and economic domain of the common are resolutely pro-development. This is too simplistic because the development in question in the two cases is fundamentally different. The kinds of development involved in the social production of the common departs significantly from industrial development. In fact, once we recognize, as I mentioned earlier, that in the biopolitical context the traditional divisions between production and reproduction break down, it is easier to see that calls for preservation in the one case and creation in the other are not really opposed but complementary. Both perspectives refer fundamentally to the production/reproduction of forms of life.
A second basic conflict between struggles for the common in these two domains has to do with the extent to which the interests of humanity serve as the frame of reference. Struggles for the common in the social and economic domain generally do focus on humanity and indeed one of the most important tasks is to extend our politics successfully to all of humanity, that is, to overcome the hierarchies and the exclusions of class and property, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and others. Struggles for the common in the ecological realm are much more likely, in contrast, to extend their frames of reference beyond humanity. In most ecological discourses human life is viewed in its interaction with and care for other life forms and eco-systems, even in cases when priority is still accorded to the interests of humanity. And in many radical ecological frameworks the interests of non-human life forms are given equal or even greater priority to those of humanity.
This is a real and important difference, it seems to me, between the perspectives on the common in these two realms but not an insuperable or even a destructive difference. My view is that it is beneficial for those primarily focused on the environment to learn more about and be forced to confront the nature of social hierarchies and the means to combat them, at the level of activism and that of theory, just as it is beneficial for those focused on social struggles to learn more about and be forced to confront the limitations of the earth and other life forms both insofar as they interact with humanity and as they exist on their own terms.
What I hope to have articulated in the course of this essay is how the concept of the common serves to name some of the central issues facing politics today by focuses on two of its domains or guises. (I leave to other occasions to explore the nature of the common in other domains, including that of identity and identity politics, for instance, or in the context of social institutions such as the family and the nation.) Struggling over the common and inventing alternative means to manage it are fundamental for any project to reimagine society today. The divergences between struggles oriented toward different guises of the common need to be articulated and negotiated, but these differences are healthy in my view and engaging them can only carry us forward. That is one reason I want follow the preparatory discussions and the organizational efforts for the actions at the UN Climate Summit I mentioned earlier, which will bring together environmental activists with anti-capitalist movements and other social movements. Discussions on issues such as these are often most productive and advanced furthest, after all, through the practical and theoretical forms of co-research conducted among activists in movements. I’m anxious to learn what they come up with.
mourning melancholia
[This is a partial transcript of an intervention by Butler who was taking part on a panel speaking on Arendt]
Arendt’s thinking can take place with oneself or with one other … inside other and outside other … reworking in Mourning and Melancholia that he provides in Ego and the Id that it is only through the incorporation of lost others that I enter into certain kinds of relations with myself, a certain kind of splitting of the voice takes place where “I” and “me” are actually separated. What are the conditions by which the “I” and the “me” separate from one another, or I can address myself.
I start to address myself through melacholic self-beratement that seeks to preserve the lost other internally. Who is berating me? It’s the way of keeping the lost other alive through a splitting of the psyche into “I” and “me” where the voice of the other becomes my voice of self-beratement. And that’s my way of preserving that other internally and the same time splitting from myself.
universal part of no part
Some concluding notes on violence, ideology and communist culture
Slavoj Žižek
Subjectivity (2010) 3, 101–116.
Here, Hegel himself commits a failure with regard to his own standards: he only deploys how, in the process of culture, the natural substance of sexuality is cultivated, sublated, mediated – we, humans, no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the spiritual bond between a man and a woman and so on. However, what Hegel misses is how, once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly meta-physical, passion. The becoming cultural of sexuality is thus not the becoming cultural of nature, but the attempt to domesticate a properly unnatural excess of the meta-physical sexual passion.
THIS is the properly dialectical reversal of substance: the moment when the immediate substantial (‘natural’) starting point is not only acted-upon, transformed, mediated/cultivated, but changed in its very substance.
[ … ]
The logic of this reproach seems impeccable:
radical emancipatory activity aims to abolish unjust suffering, and what we experience as unjust suffering is always determined by the coordinates of the symbolic order within which we move (that is, we have to formulate our complaint, and the only means at our disposal is the existing symbolic order); if, then, the ‘divine violence’ of the radical emancipatory act remakes the entire symbolic order, does this not imply that the revolutionary activity loses any sense, as the disintegration of the symbolic order that justified the revolutionary activity deprives it of its raison d’etre?
Impeccable as it may appear, I reject this reasoning: the logic of a radical emancipatory process is more complex. We, of course, start by formulating a complaint (or formulating our suffering and injustice) in the terms of the hegemonic ideology; however, what we experience in the course of our activity is that the very normative frame through which we perceived the situation is part of the situation, complicit in it, so that, in the course of the radical emancipatory (‘revolutionary’) activity, its agents do not only change society, they also change themselves, the way they perceive and evaluate society, the standards they use to judge society. This reproach is grounded in the critical point that my theoretical edifice is inconsistent, trying to bring together the purely symbolic notion of universal rights (on which emancipatory egalitarian politics is based) and the ‘irrational’ explosion of the real (‘divine violence’); this is why there is a fetishistic disavowal at the heart of Žižek’s own position – a simultaneous desire to claim that, despite its origins, the formal language of universal rights has ushered in a series of genuinely emancipatory developments and to see all our ways of thinking about egalitarian politics as so impoverished as to necessitate the accumulated wrath of pure resentment enacted by a coming, but obscured, revolutionary Subject’.
However, for me as a Hegelian there is no inconsistency here that would have called for a fetishist disavowal to obfuscate it: as I repeat again and again, the universality I am referring to is not the ‘abstract’ universality of the same rights, and so on, but the universality that only appears from the position of those who, within the social edifice, directly embody it – the ‘part of no part’,
those who, although they are formally part of society, lack a proper place within it and are thus, on account of their very marginality, universal subjects (it is in a similar sense that Marx speaks of proletariat as the ‘universal class’).
And as this agent can only assert itself by way of subverting the innermost logic that sustains the entire social edifice, its self-assertion is unavoidably (experienced as) violent. Violence is the only way for the universality to assert itself against the particular content that constrains it.
the ‘personality structure’ of a subject engaged in a radical emancipatory struggle, a subject who subscribes without any qualms to the motto ‘Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride’, and yet remains engaged in a radical egalitarian emancipatory struggle. What a liberal can do apropos such a subject is either to dismiss it as another version of the ‘authoritarian personality’, or to claim that this subject displays a ‘contradiction’ between the goals of its struggle (equality and freedom) and the means employed (collective discipline, and so on) – in both cases, the specificity of the subject of the radical emancipatory struggle is obliterated, this subject remains ‘unseen’, there is no place for him in the liberal’s ‘cognitive mapping’.
On Rammstein
This, then, is what Rammstein does to totalitarian ideology: it desemanticizes it and brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality. Does the Rammstein music not exemplify perfectly the distinction between sense and presence, the tension in a work of art between the hermeneutic dimension and the dimension of presence ‘this side of hermeneutics’, a dimension that Lacan indicated by the term sinthom (formula-knot of jouissance) as opposed to symptom (bearer of meaning)? What Lacan conceptualizes is the non-semantic dimensions in the symbolic itself.
The direct identification with Rammstein is a direct over-identification with sinthoms, which undermines ideological identification.We should not fear this direct over-identification, but rather the articulation of this chaotic field of energy into a (Fascist) universe of meaning. No wonder Rammstein music is violent, materially present, invading, intrusive with its loud volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it. One should therefore resist the Susan Sontag temptation to reject as ideologically suspect the music of Rammstein with its extensive use of ‘Nazi’ images and motifs – what Rammstein does is the exact opposite:
by pushing the listeners into direct identification with the sinthoms used by the Nazis, bypassing their articulation into the Nazi ideology, they render palpable a gap where ideology imposes the illusion of seamless organic unity. In short, Rammstein liberates these sinthoms from their Nazi-articulation: they are offered to be enjoyed in their pre-ideological status of ‘knots’ of libidinal investment.
One should thus not be afraid to draw a radical conclusion: enjoying Riefenstahl’s pre-Nazi films or the music of bands like Rammstein is not ideology, while the struggle against racist intolerance in the terms of tolerance is. So when, while watching a Rammstein video clip depicting a blonde girl in a cage, with people in dark uniforms evoking Nordic warriors and so on, some Leftist liberals fear that the uneducated public will miss the irony (if there is any) and directly identify with the proto-Fascist sensibility displayed here, one should counter it with the good old motto: the only thing we have to fear here is fear itself.
Rammstein undermines totalitarian ideology not by the ironic distance towards the rituals it imitates, but by directly confronting us with its obscene materiality and thereby suspending its efficiency.
… More precisely, what such passionate immersion suspends is not primarily the ‘rational Self’ but the reign of the instinct for survival (self-preservation) on which, as Adorno knew well, the functioning of our ‘normal’ rational egos is based:
Speculations on the consequences of just such a general removal of the need for a survival instinct (such a removal being then in general what we call Utopia itself) leads us well beyond the bounds of Adorno’s social life world and class style (or our own), and into a Utopia of misfits and oddballs, in which the constraints for uniformization and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like plants in a state of nature/y/no longer fettered by the constraints of a now oppressive sociality,/they/blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives, paranoids and schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a world of true freedom, may make up the flora and fauna of ‘human nature’ itself. (Jameson, 1994, p. 99)
Johnston Adrian review of Parallax View
“Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to The Parallax View (PV)”
Adrian Johnston
diacritics / spring 2007
37.1: 3–20
Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek’s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and body. Žižek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parlêtre (speaking being).
whereas Kantian transcendental idealism treats the subjectively mediated structures (including various dichotomous splits found therein) which it analyzes as inexplicable givens, Žižek’s Hegel-inspired ontology purports to be able to get back behind these structures so as to explain their very emergence in the first place, both historically and materially. Before delving deeper into the essential features of Žižek’s Hegelian dialectical materialism, it should be asked: Why is exhuming the corpus of an allegedly materialist Hegel important, especially today? Žižek depicts the current intellectual situation as one in which a false forced choice between either “mechanical materialism” (that is, a reductive approach in which material being is treated as nothing more than an aggregate of physical bodies bumping and grinding against each other) or “idealist obscurantism” (that is, a reaction against mechanical materialism that insists upon the existence of a sharp dehiscence between the physical and the metaphysical) is repeatedly presented in diverse forms of packaging [PV 4]. Despite cutting-edge work in the contemporary sciences appearing to vindicate after-the-fact the intuitions contained in the philosophies of nature elaborated by the early nineteenth-century German idealists, these sciences and the majority of those who claim to represent them have tended to turn a blind eye to the theoretical resources contained in the writings of, among others, Schelling and Hegel (this is unsurprising, given that twentieth-century Anglo-American Analytic philosophy arose, in part, as a reaction against nineteenth-century British Hegelianism). Throughout The Parallax View, Žižek, departing from the work of others engaged with the natural sciences (especially cognitive neuroscience) who either gesture in the direction of or strive to develop more sophisticated materialist theoretical frameworks (such as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Joseph LeDoux, Catherine Malabou, Thomas Metzinger, and Francisco Varela), aims to show not only that today’s sciences would be better able to express their insights if equipped with the concepts and terminology of a dialectical materialism formulated in dialogue with German idealism. Žižek’s thesis goes one step further: the natural sciences cannot even properly come to recognize and realize their true results if their fashions of self-understanding continue to remain mired in the ill-framed debates staged between, on the one hand, varieties of materialism whose notions of matter are no more sophisticated than seventeenth-century conceptions of “corporeal substance” moved solely by the
sinnerbrink on Žižek on Hegel
International Journal of Žižek Studies. Volume Two, Number Two “The Hegelian “Night of the World”: Žižek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality” Robert Sinnerbrink – Macquarie University (Australia)
Hegel’s 1805- 6 Jenaer Realphilosophie manuscripts, the enigmatic “night of the world” passage:
The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head — there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful (Hegel 1974: 204; quoted in Verene 1985: 7-8).
Žižek goes on to link the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ with Schelling’s conception of the subject as “pure night of the Self”, “infinite lack of Being”; the “violent gesture of contraction” that also forms the basis of Hegel’s account of madness as the cutting of all links with external reality, which Hegel then construes as the subject’s regression to the level of the “animal soul” still unreflectively immersed in its immediate natural environment (Žižek 1997: 8; 1999: 34-35).
Where Žižek differs from Hegel, however, is in arguing that this withdrawal from the world, the subject’s contraction and severing of all links with the Umwelt, [Umwelt German, ‘environment’] is rather the founding gesture of ‘humanization’, indeed the emergence of subjectivity itself (1997: 8).
The passage through madness is thus an ontological necessity; there is no subjectivity without this experience of radical negativity, this cutting of links with the Umwelt, which is then followed by the construction of a symbolic universe of meaning (1997: 9; 1996: 78).
The question, psychoanalytically, is not so much how the fall into madness is possible, but rather how the subject is able to attain “normalcy” by climbing out of madness — for Hegel, this radical withdrawal from the world—in order to reconstitute social reality through symbolic mediation.
Indeed, rather than a metaphysical tract on the ‘totalising’ Subject of absolute idealism, Hegel’s famous passage can be read as an account of the radical finitude of the Subject; the constitutive negativity that both makes possible and delimits autonomous subjectivity. To quote Hegel:
Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject … (Hegel 1977: 19).
What is striking in this celebrated passage is the way that experiences of finitude—of death, negativity, absence, loss—are all presented as constitutive of the power of the self-conscious Subject as Geist.
Subjectivity is thus constituted through a negative self-relation: a relation to itself that is necessarily a relation to the Other; a mediated self-relation in which the self finds itself precisely in and through its relation to the Other. At the same time, this self-relation through the Other is made possible only because of a violent rending of the immediate self-feeling and immersion of this seemingly isolated proto-subject within its natural environment. The subject is not only negative self-relation, a relation to the Other, it is also a self-relating negativity: that which wins its truth (its self-identity in otherness) only through the experience of radical negativity or the freedom to negate itself, to say ‘no!’ to everything, even itself; or as Hegel puts it, through the experience of finding itself in and through “utter dismemberment”.
Once again, for Hegel this negativity is constitutive, ontological rather than ontic, as Heidegger would say. Self-conscious Spirit is this power of self-relating negativity, which is to say free subjectivity, only through “tarrying with the negative”. Indeed, this fundamental moment of negativity, we should note, is a decisive feature of every key experience in the phenomenological journey of consciousness and self-consciousness (the most famous example being the life-and-death struggle and experience of mastery and servitude, not to mention the alienated ‘freedom’ of self-consciousness in stoicism, scepticism, and the unhappy consciousness, or the radical affirmation of freedom in the French revolution and subsequent negative moment of Terror as the ‘violence’ of abstract universality). This power of radical negativity, this “abyss of freedom,” is precisely what for Hegel defines and determines “the Subject” (8).
In The Ticklish Subject as well as elsewhere, Žižek’s analysis of the Hegelian “night of the world”is explicitly linked with the question of abstract negativity and its relationship with concrete universal. In an argument charged with political resonances, Žižek shows how the radical negativity of subjectivity—the capacity to negate all our finite, particular determinations—enables the dialectical passage from abstract to concrete universality. In practical terms, this means there is a dimension of violence, conflict, or antagonism that cannot be eliminated in historical and socio-political experience. Far from rehearsing the cliché of Hegel’s reconciliationist stance towards the state, Žižek claims that the radical negativity of the subject—the ‘night of the world’ — means that there can be no concrete universal without the historico-political passage through madness, violence, even revolutionary terror (as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the post-revolutionary Jacobin Terror, an abstract negativity that ushered in the modern bourgeois state (Hegel 1977: 355-363)). This Hegelian argument concerning abstract negativity and concrete universality provides an essential backdrop, frequently misunderstood, to Žižek’s critique of various contemporary forms of ‘post-political’ ethical resistance to the state (most recently, Simon Critchley’s ethically grounded neo-anarchism (see Critchley 2007; Žižek 2006: 332-334; Žižek 2008: 339-350).
Žižek returns again and again to the Hegelian distinction between abstract and concrete universality. What does it mean? Against the prevailing stereotype of Hegel’s subordinating of particularity to universality, Žižek points out that universality in its concrete dimension is realised through individualisation; that is, the concrete universal is embodied in the individual. As Žižek observes, Hegel was the first thinker to argue that the “properly modern notion of individualisation” occurs through secondary identification (1999: 90). The individual is initially immersed in its immediate milieu, the particular life-form into which he or she is born (family, local community).
It is only once one’s primary identifications with one’s ‘organic’ community are broken that one becomes an “individual,” namely by asserting one’s autonomy through identification with a secondary community that is also universal and ‘artificial’; that is, mediated and sustained through the free activity of independent subjects (profession, nation, independent peer-group versus traditional apprenticeship, organic community, prescribed social role, and so on) (Žižek 1999: 90).
The abstract opposition between primary and secondary identifications (where primary identifications are rejected in favour of secondary identifications) is suspended once the primary identifications are reintegrated and experienced as the “modes of appearance” of my secondary identifications (Žižek 1999: 90).
Žižek then further complicates this account of concrete universality, ‘crossbreeding’ it with Hegel’s distinction between neutral “positive” Universality and differentiated “actual”Universality (1999: 90). The former refers to the “impassive/neutral medium of the coexistence of its particular content”; the latter to the actual existence of Universality, “which is individuality, the assertion of the subject as unique and irreducible to the particular concrete totality into which he is inserted” (Žižek 1999: 91). The Universal as neutral ‘container’ that is indifferent towards the particulars it subsumes is contrasted with the Universal as “the power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular constellation” (Žižek 1999: 91). The latter is the Universality of the individuated subject as power of the negative; the power to oppose and negate all particular determinate content.
Indeed the passage from abstract to concrete universal, Žižek argues, proceeds thanks to the power of abstract negativity; phenomenologically speaking, this power of the negative “comes into existence in the guise of the individual’s absolute egotist self-contraction” (Žižek 1999: 91)—via what the Phenomenology will later describe, with reference to the discursive understanding, as the subject’s power to “tarry with the negative”.
The striking conclusion Žižek draws from this analysis is that the only way to make the passage from abstract to concrete universality is via “the full assertion” of this power of radical negativity, the negation of all particular content (1999: 92). At one level this would seem to be an instance of the famous Hegelian Aufhebung; we must lose immediate reality in the self contraction of the “night of the world” in order to regain it as social reality, symbolically mediated by the subject; or we must renounce the immediate organic whole, submitting ourselves to the activity of the understanding, in order to regain it at a higher, mediated level as the “totality of Reason” (Žižek 1999: 92).
Here the standard objection to the Hegelian Aufhebung looms, much rehearsed by poststructuralist readers of Hegel (see Žižek 1991: 31-38); namely that Hegel allows the moment of radical negativity, recognises “the horror of the psychotic self-contraction,” the radical dismemberment in which Spirit finds itself, but only in order to dialectically recuperate this negativity in the name of the “reconstituted organic whole” (Žižek 1999: 92-3).
From Abstract to Concrete Universality
Žižek’s radical reading of Hegel challenges this orthodoxy: the passage through negativity, from abstract to concrete universality, is not about avoiding the moment of radical negativity in favour of the rational totality. Rather, it claims that this passage is unavoidable; the passage to the high passes through the low, the direct choice of the higher is precisely the way to miss it (Žižek 1999: 93).
Citing another favourite speculative passage from the Phenomenology, Žižek refers to the peculiar conjunction of opposites that Hegel observes in the case of the penis, a conjunction which Nature “naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination” (Hegel 1977: 210).
It is not a matter of choosing insemination rather than urination (as though these comprise an abstract opposition, as representational consciousness would have it).
Rather, we have to pass through the ‘wrong choice’ (biological excretion, urination) in order to attain the ‘right choice’ (biological conception, insemination, the reproduction of life): the speculative meaning — the Hegelian infinite judgment that articulates the co-existence of excretion/elimination and conception/reproduction, indeed the shift from biological conception to rational comprehension —emerges only as an after-effect of the first, ‘wrong’ reading, which is contained within, indeed constitutive of, the speculative meaning (Žižek 1999: 93).
Žižek’s point here is to show that the movement from abstract to concrete universality requires this passage through radical negativity, that is to say the ‘wrong’ choice of the abstract negativity of conflict and violence is the only way to arrive historically at the ‘right’ choice of a stable, rational, democratic state.
At the level of social and political life, the attempt to bypass the negative and directly choose “the ‘concrete universality’ of a particular ethical life-world” results in the even greater violence of a “regression to premodern organic society”; a denial of the “infinite right of subjectivity” that, for Hegel, is the principle of modernity itself (Žižek 1999: 93).
The modern subject-citizen cannot accept being immersed within a particular determinate social role prescribed within an organic social Whole; rather, as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the French revolution, it is only by passing through the “horror of revolutionary Terror” that the constraints of the premodern organic ‘concrete universality’ are destroyed and the “infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity” can thus be asserted (Žižek 1999: 93).
Again, Žižek questions the standard reading of Hegel’s famous analysis in the Phenomenology of abstract freedom and Terror, according to which the revolutionary project, with its “direct assertion of abstract Universal reason,” perishes in “self-destructive fury” because it fails to organise its revolutionary energy into a stable and differentiated social order (1999: 93).
Hegel’s point, rather, as Žižek argues, is to show how the revolutionary Terror, despite being an historical deadlock, is nonetheless necessary in order to effect the historical passage towards the modern rational state (1999: 93). The historical situation that opposes “a premodern organic body and the revolutionary Terror which unleashes the destructive force of abstract negativity” always involves an Hegelian forced choice:
“one has to choose Terror” (the ‘wrong’ choice) against premodern organic community, in order to create the terrain for the ‘right’ choice; namely to create the conditions “for the new post-revolutionary reconciliation between the demands of social Order and the abstract freedom of the individual” (Žižek 1999: 94).
The destruction of organic community, the subject’s ‘irrational’ insistence on some ‘abstract’ feature of the whole that disrupts its harmonious unity, is the very movement by which the subject is historically actualised — or to put it in Hegelese, the manner in which substance also becomes subject.
As Žižek argues, the unity that emerges from this passage through negativity is thus no longer a substantial organic unity; rather it is a “substantially different Unity,” a Unity grounded in negativity, one in which this movement of negativity assumes a positive existence (1999: 96)—precisely in the modern political state, the formalised ‘embodiment’ of negativity that nonetheless retains the trace of this violent power to expose the life of its citizens. Hegel thus anticipates the Foucaultian-Agambenian theme of biopolitics, the ‘negative’ power of the state to both expose and administer the biological life of its citizens. 14
Revolutionary violence disrupts social reality through the exercise of abstract negativity, temporarily returning the subject to the elemental level of proto-subjectivity, the dismembering violence of the ‘night of the world’. Here one cannot help but make the comparison between Hegel’s brutal observation concerning the guillotine—the post-revolutionary reduction of death to a mechanical cut, “a meaningless chopping off of a cabbage head” (Hegel 1977: 360; Žižek 2006: 43)—and the archaic revival of ‘sacrificial’ beheadings practised by Islamist terrorists. Such beheadings occur through knife-wielding executioner rather than the impersonal operation of the guillotine; and while performed in secret they are video recorded in order to be disseminated via Jihadist propaganda websites for a globally dispersed audience.
In the latter case, however, this abstract negativity or political violence is not in the service of “Absolute Freedom,” as was the case, from Hegel’s perspective, with the post-French revolutionary Terror.7 Rather, Islamist terrorism is more akin to a violent abstract negation of the modern ‘right of individual subjectivity’: a simultaneously ‘pre- and post-modern’, technologically primitive (knives, boxcutters) and sophisticated (internet and communicational media), attempt to negate the ‘morally decadent’ liberal democratic capitalist order that makes this right of subjectivity possible.
The point of Hegel’s analysis, it must be said, is to show that this revolutionary Terror is fundamentally self-undermining; that it cannot reconcile the drive towards (abstractly conceived) Absolute Freedom with the historically achieved norms of freedom and subjectivity that define the institutions of modernity. Žižek’s claim is that such violence is nonetheless historically unavoidable as the way in which the transition from abstract to concrete universality is effected.
Here I return to my earlier question concerning the relationship between imagination and understanding: the contrast between the ‘romantic’ reading of Hegel that gives priority to the ‘pre-synthetic’ imagination of the ‘night of the world’ (abstract negation) versus the ‘idealist’ reading that emphasises the “power of the negative” articulated through the discursive understanding (determinate negation).
Žižek combines the two forms of negativity (abstract and determinate) in a Schellingian manner, arguing that they are two aspects of the same power of negativity. This move, however, exposes him to the criticism that his account of revolutionary Terror flirts with a political romanticism that valorises the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggle over the determinate negation that results in the rational social and political institutions of the modern state.
For Hegel, the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben in the rational organisation of the self-reforming social and political institutions of modernity. We only revert to the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence when these norms and institutions have utterly broken down, lost all legitimacy and normative authority, that is, when the (violent) historical transition to a new configuration of Spirit is already well underway.
Must we say, however, with Žižek that abstract negation is the only way that concrete universality — the freedom of subjectivity— can be historically realised?
Global Capitalism: ‘End of History’ or ‘History of Violence’?
The question for us today, then, is to ask what happens when this rational totality (Western neoliberal democracy) becomes disturbed by the contradictory dynamics of global capitalism. There are at least two distinct Hegelian responses: one is to point to the role of the self-reforming institutions of modernity, those of capitalist liberal democracy, to effectively pacify, manage, or control these contradictory dynamics without entirely eliminating them. This line of thought — given popular expression in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) — tends to the conclusion that liberal democratic capitalist modernity is here to stay; we have effectively reached the ‘end of history’ in which radical revolutionary political transformations are no longer likely or even possible.
This ‘Fukuyamaian’ line then cleaves into at least two opposing positions: the moral or religious conservative position arguing for a return to traditional values to offset the deracinating effects of neoliberalism, a desperate attempt to refound the disturbed Sittlichkeit of multicultural liberal democracies; and the libertarian-postmodernist position that displaces political radicalism to the contested sphere of culture, arguing for a cultural politics of difference, utopian multiculturalism, radical affirmation of the Other, and so on, as ways of affirming ethical forms of freedom and plural modes of subjectivity made possible by capitalist liberal democracy.
The point, for Žižek, is that both moral-religious conservative and libertarian-postmodernist positions share the ‘Fukuyamaian’ thesis: that capitalist liberal democracy is here to stay, hence needs to be either resisted or reformed. “The dominant ethos today,” as Žižek remarks, “is ‘Fukuyamaian’: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society, all one can do is render it more just, tolerant, and so forth” (2008: 421).
On the other hand, there is the romantic, revolutionary position, which argues for a retrieval of the abstract negativity of the revolutionary tradition in order to perform a destructive negation that would disrupt the capitalist economico-political system. This is the line of thought — Hegelian but also Marxist-Leninist in inspiration— that Žižek argues for in his most recent tome, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008).
For Žižek, we must first of all question and theoretically reject the ‘Fukuyamaian’ liberal democratic consensus: capitalist liberal democracy is not necessarily the ‘universal and homogeneous’ form of the state, as Kojève put it, in which the atomised post-historical animals of the species homo sapiens will privately enjoy their narcissistic consumer pleasures (Kojève 1969: 157-162).
Rather, the contradictory dynamics of contemporary global capitalism— we need only mention global credit, fuel, oil, and Third World food crises, and the stark reality of ecological and environmental limits to growth—suggest that it is possible that Western societies may be entering a period of instability, uncertainty, even decline.
Žižek cites four key antagonisms that are relevant here:
1. the ecological crisis (global warming, ‘peak oil’);
2. the challenge to concepts of private property posed by new forms of ‘intellectual property’;
3. the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (biogenetics); and
4. new forms of apartheid, particularly the proliferation of slums, separated communities, non-state governed zones of disorder (2008: 421-427).
In light of these intersecting antagonisms confronting global capitalism, the historical question of whether it is possible to redeem the failed revolutionary attempts of the past (Benjamin) may not yet be entirely closed.
Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist wager is directed primarily against contemporary liberal democratic but also ‘postmodernist’ politics that depoliticise the economy—‘naturalising’ it as the unquestioned background of society, culture, and politics—and thereby displace political conflict to the sphere of culture and subjectivity. One could argue that the displacement of political radicalism to the cultural sphere—our contemporary‘aestheticisation of politics’—is an ideological disavowal of the real source of the antagonisms afflicting modern liberal democracies.
It represents a politically debilitating attempt to transpose the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggles to the ‘sublimated’ sphere of culture (as in the familiar ‘culture wars’ that pit social and religious conservatives against secular liberals and libertarian ‘postmodernists’ in symbolic struggles over moral and cultural questions of subjectivity, identity, and values). The problem with this pseudo-Hegelian sublimation of politics into culture, however, is that it leaves untouched what Marx correctly identified as the ‘base’ of these morally driven forms of sociocultural struggle: the economic dynamics of global capitalism.
This is why Žižek’s has recently argued—notably in In Defense of Lost Causes—for a refusal of the liberal democratic ‘moral blackmail’ that condemns in advance any form of radical politics as ‘totalitarian’ or ‘terroristic,’ and why he now advocates an active reclaiming of the historical and political revolutionary heritage of the Left.
Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist proposal would entail acknowledging the power of negativity defining modern subjectivity, a recognition of the suppressed ‘night of the world’ or abstract negativity that continues to haunt the precarious ‘imaginary community’ of liberal democracy. The question, however, is whether this can be done without relapsing into the nightmarish violence of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’.
Are there more determinate forms of negation —of social and political struggle against the normative orders of capitalism— that might disturb the liberal democratic ‘moral consensus’ that has so strikingly paralysed the Left? Does reclaiming the history of revolutionary activism also imply the risk of embracing forms of violence that have marred twentieth-century political history? Or can the revolutionary spirit —the spectre of Marx, if one will— be reanimated without repeating this history of violence? Žižek’s Hegelianism and his Marxist-Leninism pull in different directions precisely on this issue.
The Hegelian answer would be that the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben through the formation of rational social and political institutions capable of reconciling the deracinating effects of capitalism with the principle of individual subjectivity. The Marxist-Leninist response, on the other hand, would argue that such liberal-capitalist institutions themselves be subjected to revolutionary violence—a ‘negation of the negation’—that would create the historical conditions for future (communist) emancipation. We should note, though, that the Hegelian response is retrospective and descriptive; a conceptual comprehension of the underlying logic of the dynamics of modernity that would reconcile us to the vicissitudes of modern freedom.
The Marxist-Leninist response, by contrast, is prospective and prescriptive; a demand to translate theory into practice, overcoming this alienating opposition by means of revolutionary action. Žižek appears to argue for a synthesis of these distinct, seemingly incompatible, responses, which raises the following difficulty: how is the Hegelian account of the negativity involved in the transition from abstract to concrete universality to be reconciled with the Marxist-Leninist demand for revolutionary action that would negate all such merely ‘ideological’ comprehension?
One response would be to suggest that Žižek is simply pointing to the unavoidability of the moment of negativity in any theorisation —and political practice— of the historical realisation of free subjectivity. He reminds us that the Left forgets this Hegelian lesson at its peril.
For in that case it either assents to the ‘Fukuyamaist’ consensus that there is ‘nothing to be done’ since we’ve already arrived at the (liberal-capitalist democratic) ‘end of history’; or else it naively asserts the need for a renewed romantic-revolutionary response that demands a violent (abstract) negation of the status quo.
The Hegelian response, by contrast, would be to argue for the possibility of a retrieval of the revolutionary tradition that has also become historically reflective and socio-politically determinate: not simply an abstract ‘violent’ negation of modern liberal-democratic institutions but rather a determinate negation of the normative consensus — the implicit background of economic neo-liberalism — that sustains them; a productive negation that would both preserve their emancipatory potentials while also negating their alienating sociocultural effects. Such a task, of course, is easier said than done.
Žižek’s bold engagement with the relationship between the negativity of the (Hegelian) subject and the antagonisms defining global capitalism thus throws down the philosophico-political gauntlet. All the more so if one believes that social and political movements today should reclaim that seemingly most ‘lost’ of causes — the Leftist revolutionary tradition committed to the concrete universality of freedom.
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Žižek, S. (1994). The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality,
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Žižek, S/F. W. J. von Schelling (1997). The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World.
An Essay by Slavoj Žižek with the text of Schelling’s Die Weltalter (second draft, 1813), in English translation by Judith Norman, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Žižek, S. (1999). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology,
Žižek, S. (2006). The Parallax View,
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butler interview 2010 march
Nathan Schneider interviews Judith Butler, March 2010
Her latest book, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), reflects on the past decade’s saga of needless war, photographed—even fetishized—torture, and routine horror. It treats these practices as issuing from a philosophical choice, one which considers certain human beings expendable and unworthy of being grieved. The concluding chapter confronts the paradoxical nature of any call for nonviolent resistance—paradoxical because the very identities that we claim and resist on behalf of were themselves formed by violence in the past. Butler does not mistake nonviolence for passivity, as so many critics do. At its best, she writes, nonviolent resistance becomes a “carefully crafted ‘fuck you,’” tougher to answer than a Howitzer.
We had this exchange over a series of emails, during which she traveled to the West Bank and back on a research trip.
Nathan Schneider for Guernica
Guernica: This book, you write, is a response to the policies under the Bush administration. How different would a book about the Obama administration be? Have we learned at all how to expand our circle of grief? Have we adjusted our frames?
Judith Butler: The fact is that the war in Afghanistan has escalated under the Obama administration, and though it seems as if there is a firmer policy against torture, and a clear condemnation of torture on the part of the administration, we still are responsible for an extraordinary number of brutal deaths by war. This administration was fully silent during the massacre on Gaza. And Obama himself has agreed not to disclose the full narrative and visual archive on U.S. torture—we have to ask why. I think we have to learn how to separate our impressions of Obama the man as both thoughtful and inspiring from the policies of the Obama administration. Perhaps then we can begin to see that the politics of the administration are very separate from the impression of the man. This is a painful lesson to learn, and I wonder whether the U.S. public and its European allies will actually learn it.
Perhaps we should cease to ask the question of what kind of person he really is and focus on what he does.
Guernica: That kind of distinction between the man—well, as you say, impressions of him—and the administration is something one hears disappointed progressives making a lot lately. But many still feel that, in Obama, they have an ally on the inside who is doing the best he can against political inertia. Can one afford to trust him? Not doing so could undermine his ability to undo that inertia.
Judith Butler: Those explanations that try to locate all the inertia outside of Obama don’t take into account his own unwillingness to speak and act in face of certain urgent issues. His inability to condemn the onslaught against Gaza was not a matter of some external constraint upon him. No one coerced him into escalating the war in Afghanistan, nor was it a matter of externally situated inertia when he abandoned stronger versions of universal healthcare. Perhaps we should cease to ask the question of what kind of person he really is and focus on what he does. He speaks, he acts, and he fails to act; he is explicitly thwarted by entrenched relations. But let us not make excuses for the man or his administration when his actions are weak or, indeed, when he fails to act at all.
Guernica: Obama has performed his presidency as a thinker, a reflecting person, perhaps most ironically when deciding how many tens of thousands more troops to send to Afghanistan. Do you find this heartening?
Judith Butler: With Obama, there is thinking. But it seems to me mainly strategic, if not wholly technical. He has surrounded himself with technocrats, especially on his economic team. So how do we understand the disconnect between the domain of principle and that of policy? What is the relation between the moral vision and principles he espouses and the kind of policy he implements?
All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable.
Guernica: Let me turn that question back at you. In a world ever more specialized, should articulating a moral vision still be expected of politicians? Might mere bureaucratic competence at the service of their constituent’s interests be enough?
Judith Butler: A president is part of a team, and he chooses those with whom he will act in concert. Summers and Geithner were choices, and they were ones that clearly put technocratic free market thinking above questions of social justice and the kind of political thinking it would take to implement norms of justice. One has to be competent at implementing one policy or another. But there is always the question of which policy, and this is a matter of principle.
Guernica: In the book’s introduction, you set out a principled vision for how we might go about defining life—
Judith Butler: I am not at all sure that I define life, since I think that life tends to exceed the definitions of it we may offer. It always seems to have that characteristic, so the approach to life cannot be altogether successful if we start with definitions. All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable. A life that is in some sense socially dead or already “lost” cannot be grieved when it is actually destroyed. And I think we can see that entire populations are regarded as negligible life by warring powers, and so when they are destroyed, there is no great sense that a heinous act and egregious loss have taken place.
My question is: how do we understand this nefarious distinction that gets set up between grievable and ungrievable lives?
Guernica: How does your understanding of life differ, for example, from that of the pro-life movement?
Judith Butler: I distinguish my position from the so-called “pro-life” movement since they do not care about whether or not life is sustainable. For me, the argument in favor of a sustainable life can be made just as easily for a woman or girl who requires an abortion in order to live her life and maintain her livelihood. So my argument about life does not favor one side of that debate or another; indeed, I think that debate should be settled on separate grounds. The left needs to reclaim life, especially given how many urgent bio-political issues face us now.
I am trying to contest the notion that we can only value, shelter, and grieve lives that share a common language or cultural sameness with ourselves.
Guernica: What do you mean by “separate grounds”? Must we draw a line between death by abortion and death by war? As opposed, for example, to the “seamless garment” of life in Catholic social teaching?
Judith Butler: We cannot decide questions of reproductive technology or abortion by deciding in advance where life begins and ends. Technologies are already re-deciding those basic issues. We have to ask what kinds of choices are made possible by social configurations of life, and to locate our choices socially and politically. There is no way around the question, “What makes a life livable?” This is different from the question of what constitutes life. At what point in any life process does the question of rights emerge? We differ over how to answer that question.
Guernica: Your account of life depends on being intertwined with other lives; does it really then call on us to be more concerned for the lives of others in distant places and conflicts?
Judith Butler: Along with many other people, I am trying to contest the notion that we can only value, shelter, and grieve those lives that share a common language or cultural sameness with ourselves.
The point is not so much to extend our capacity for compassion, but to understand that ethical relations have to cross both cultural and geographical distance. Given that there is global interdependency in relation to the environment, food supply and distribution, and war, do we not need to understand the bonds that we have to those we do not know or have never chosen? This takes us beyond communitarianism and nationalism alike. Or so I hope.
Guernica: Yes, but surely the lines of interdependency are much deeper and immediate between me and my friends, family, and local community than between me and the average Iraqi in Iraq. Can’t I be excused for at least grieving the Iraqi less, proportionate to my dependence?
Judith Butler: It is not a question of how much you or I feel—it is rather a question of whether a life is worth grieving, and no life is worth grieving unless it is regarded as grievable. In other words, when we subscribe to ideas such as, “no innocent life should be slaughtered,” we have to be able to include all kinds of populations within the notion of “innocent life”—and that means subscribing to an egalitarianism that would contest prevailing schemes of racism.
Guernica: What does the grief you call for consist of? How does it act upon us?
Judith Butler: If we were to start to grieve those against whom we wage war, we would have to stop. One saw this I think very keenly last year when Israel attacked Gaza. The population was considered in explicitly racist ways, and every life was considered an instrument of war. Thus, a unilateral attack on a trapped population became interpreted by those who waged war as an extended act of self-defense. It is clear that most people in the world rejected that construal of the situation, especially when they saw how many women and children were killed.
The vast majority of feminists oppose these contemporary wars, and object to the false construction of Muslim women “in need of being saved.”
Guernica: On your recent trip to the West Bank, did you observe any instances of grief at work?
Judith Butler: I certainly saw many commemorations on the walls of Nablus and Jenin. The question is whether the mainstream Israeli press and public can accept the fact that their army committed widespread slaughter in Gaza. I heard private confirmation of that among Israelis, but less in public. Some brave journalists and writers say it. The organization, Zochrot, that commemorates the deaths and expulsions of Palestinians in 1948—the Naqba—does some of this work, but so much of it remains partially muted within public discourse. There is now a resolution under consideration in Israel attempting to ban public funding for educational and arts projects that represent the Naqba—this is surely a state effort to regulate grieving.
Guernica: Forms of grief are deployed, through certain deplorable exemplars, to justify a military regime—the Holocaust, for example, and now 9/11. Why, then, can’t grief just as easily be used to justify more war?
Judith Butler: Well, I do worry about those instances in which public mourning is explicitly proscribed, and that invariably happens in the context of war. I think there were ways, for instance, of producing icons of those who were killed in the 9/11 attacks in such a way that the desire for revenge and vindication was stoked. So we have to distinguish between modes of mourning that actually extend our ideas about equality, and those that produce differentials, such as “this population is worth protecting” and “this population deserves to die.”
Guernica: The hawkish wing in the “war on terror” has quite effectively claimed the banner of feminism. Is feminism as it has been articulated in part to blame for this?
Judith Butler: No, I think that we have seen quite cynical uses of feminism for the waging of war. The vast majority of feminists oppose these contemporary wars, and object to the false construction of Muslim women “in need of being saved” as a cynical use of feminist concerns with equality. There are some very strong and interesting Muslim feminist movements, and casting Islam as anti-feminist not only disregards those movements, but displaces many of the persisting inequalities in the first world onto an imaginary elsewhere.
Guernica: After millions of protesters around the world could do nothing to prevent the Iraq War, what do you think is the most effective form of protest? Disobedience? Or even thinking?
Judith Butler: Let us remember that Marx thought of thinking as a kind of practice. Thinking can take place in and as embodied action. It is not necessarily a quiet or passive activity. Civil disobedience can be an act of thinking, of mindfully opposing police force, for instance. I continue to believe in demonstrations, but I think they have to be sustained. We see the continuing power of this in Iran right now. The real question is why people thought with the election of Obama that there was no reason to still be on the street? It is true that many people on the left will never have the animus against Obama that they have against Bush. But maybe we need to protest policies instead of individuals. After all, it takes many people and institutions to sustain a war.
Guernica: Anyone who went to an anti-war protest during the Bush administration surely saw the violence of the anger directed personally against the president. People have a need to personalize. It seems to me the strength of your book, though, is that it counter-personalizes, turning our focus not so much to policies or policy-makers as to victims and potential victims.
Judith Butler: It is personal, but it asks what our obligations are to those we do not know. So in this sense, it is about the bonds we must honor even when we do not know the others to whom we are bound.
Guernica: Your account of nonviolence revolves around recognizing sociality and interconnection as well. Does it also rely on the kind of inner spiritual work that was so important, for instance, to Gandhi?
Judith Butler: I am not sure that the work is “inner” in the way that Gandhi described. But I do think that one has to remain vigilant in relation to one’s own aggression, to craft and direct it in ways that are effective. This work on the self, though, takes place through certain practices, and by noticing where one is, how angry one is, and even comporting oneself differently over time. I think this has to be a social practice, one that we undertake with others. That support and solidarity are crucial to maintaining it. Otherwise, we think we should become heroic individuals, and that takes us away from effective collective action.
Guernica: What can philosophy, which so often looks like a kind of solitary heroism, offer against the military-industrial complexes and the cowboy self-image that keep driving us into wars? At what register can philosophy make a difference?
Judith Butler: Let’s remember that the so-called military-industrial complex has a philosophy, even if it is not readily published in journals. The contemporary cowboy also has, or exemplifies, a certain philosophical vision of power, masculinity, impermeability, and domination. So the question is how philosophy takes form as an embodied practice. Any action that is driven by principles, norms, or ideals is philosophically informed. So we might consider: what practices embody interdependency and equality in ways that might mitigate the practice of war waging? My wager is that there are many.
Guernica: Last year, for one, the Mellon Foundation awarded you $1.5 million which you are using to found a critical theory center devoted to scholarship about war. How is it progressing? What are your goals?
Judith Butler: I am trying to bring together people to think about new forms of war and war waging, the place of media in the waging of war, and ways of thinking about violence that can take account of new forms of conflict that do not comply with conventional definitions of war. This will involve considering traditional definitions of war in political science and international law, but also new forms of conflict, theories of violence, and humanistic inquiries into why people wage war as they do. I’m also interested in linking this with studies of ecology, toxic soil, and damaged life.
Guernica: Do you mean to say that the concept of war might be recovered, as William James proposes, for instance, in “The Moral Equivalent of War”? Is war’s ferocity of commitment possible without the bloodlust and the bloody victims?
Judith Butler: Perhaps the issue is to become less ferocious in our commitments, to question certain forms of blind enthusiasm, and to find forms of steadfastness that include reflective thought. Nonviolence is not so much about the suppression of feeling, but its transformation into forceful intelligence.