butler – Page 3 – objet (a)

Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

Following Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, Derrida underscores the toxic intimacy between crime and its legal remedy.

The law distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of the death penalty, establishing the procedures by which that distinction is made.

It also establishes the grounds on which the state can inflict deadly violence either in war or through such legal instruments as the death penalty.

The death penalty, for Derrida, considered as a form of legal violence, closes down the distinction between justice and vengeance: justice becomes the moralised form that vengeance assumes. Continue reading “Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)”

Butler Freud aggression love thy neighbour (2)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

Beyond the Pleasure Principle calls into question the exclusive operation of the pleasure principle as the organising principle of psychic life. Are there modes of destructiveness that can’t be explained by the pleasure principle?

The death drive emerges as a way of explaining repetition compulsions that fail to establish any kind of sustainable mastery. Continue reading “Butler Freud aggression love thy neighbour (2)”

Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

‘Whence comes this bizarre, bizarre idea,’ Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘this ancient, archaic idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps indestructible idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain? Continue reading “Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)”

dolar 1 into 2 (pt2)

Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.

What, if anything, is the Other? What is the Other the name for?

The first answer proposed by Lacan develops in the direction of the Other as the Other of the symbolic order, the Other of language, the Other upholding the very realm of the symbolic, functioning as its guarantee, its necessary supposition, that which enables it to signify.

And if this claim is to be placed within the general thrust of structuralism, which was then dominant, the name of the Other, in this view, would be the structure.

The Other is the Other of structure, and one can nostalgically recall its Saussurean and Levi-Straussian underpinnings.

What follows from there, in the same general thrust, is the notorious formula The unconscious is structured like a language — The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
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Footnote: What if anything, is the Other? But asking “What?” already precludes another way of asking, namely, “Who is the other?” For the question of the other is first dramatically posed in relation to another person, this alter ego next to me, the same as me and for that very reason all the more the Other.

This is where the whole drama of what Lacan famously called the mirror stage comes in, the mirror stage “as formative of the function of the ego,” as the title of his first paper runs.

In this drama, the “alter ego” is constitutive of the ego, precisely insofar as it is the agent of alterity, opacity, the foreignness of the Other, under the auspices of “the same,” and it is only by this other and through it that one can assume the self of the ego as “my own,”

The foreignness of the other intersects with the own-ness of the self; the other is on the one hand homogenized, so that I can recognize myself in it, but only at the price of alienating myself in this image of the other — the other is the same as me, my double, and precisely because of that my competitor, my opponent, an intimate enemy who threatens my life and integrity.

And one can, in another quick aside, point to the fact that Levinas took his cue from this same constellation, from the question of “Who is the other?” from the alterity of the other, epitomized strikingly and immediately by his or her face, in a way that cannot be circumvented and that circumscribes the very notion of the self so his whole enterprise hinges massively on the question of the two and how to conceive it, and on the ethics that follows, taking the Other as its guideline. This is his particular way of taking up the question of the two.

******

There are two perspectives on this structure.

1.) The first, stemming from Saussure, treats language as a system in which all entities
are differential and oppositive, made of differences. No element has an identity or substance of its own; it is defined only through its difference from others, its whole being is exhausted by its difference, and hence they hang together, they are bound together with an iron necessity of tight interdependence. The symbolic is made of differences, and only of differences — and since it has no firm, substantial hold it can equally and with equanimity be applied to language, kinship, food, myth, clothing — the whole of culture.

2.) But the second perspective, the one that Freud opens up with the unconscious, presents the slide of contingency within this well-ordered system.

The words contingently and erratically sound alike; not ruled by grammar or semantics, they
contaminate each other, they slip, and this is where the unconscious takes the chance of appearing in cracks and loopholes.

The first perspective hinges on necessity, ruled by differentiality, which is what makes linguistics possible.

The second perspective hinges on contingent similarities and cracks and is the nightmare of linguistics, because its logic is quirky and unpredictable; it pertains to what Lacan called linguisterie and lalangue.

So if we have on one hand the Other of the Saussurean structure, or system, then the unconscious represents a bug in the system, the fact that it can never quite work without a bug.

With the unconscious the structure slips.

What was supposed to work as the Other, the bearer of rule and necessity, the guarantee of meaning, shows its other face, which is whimsical and ephemeral and makes meaning slide. The Other is the Other with the bug.

And what is more, it is only the bug that ultimately makes the Other other — the Other is the Other not on account of structure, but because of the bug that keeps derailing it.

The bug is the anomaly of the Other, its face of inconsistency, that which defies regularity and law.

Inside the Other of language, which enables speech, <strong>there emerges another Other that derails speech and makes us say something else than we intended</strong>, derailing the intention of meaning.

Yet the second Other cannot be seized and maintained independently of the first as another Other, the Other within the Other — the Other cannot be duplicated and counted, the bug makes it uncountable.

The alterity of the unconscious is not cut of the stuff of symbolic differences, it opens a difference that is not merely a symbolic difference, but that is, so to speak, “the difference within the difference,” another kind of difference within the symbolic one, a difference recalcitrant to integration into the symbolic, and yet only emerging in its bosom, with no separate realm of its own.

And the very notion of subjectivity pertains precisely to the impossibility of reducing the second difference to the first one.

In other words, the subject that emerges there is premised on a “two,”on the relation to a kernel within the symbolic order that cannot be symbolically sublimated.

So the bottom line would be: there is an irreducible two, an irreducible gap between the One and the Other, and the unconscious, at its minimal, presents the figure of two that are not merged into one.

The problem that remains is that, well, the Other doesn’t exist.

zupančič sexual difference pt 4

e-flux journal #32 February 2012 Alenka Zupančič. Sexual Difference and Ontology

Continued from part 3

The fact that “sexual difference” is not a differential difference (which might explain why Lacan actually never uses the term “sexual difference”) can explain why Lacan’s famous formulas of sexuation are not differential in any common sense: They don’t imply a difference between two kinds of being(s) — there is no contradiction (antagonism) that exists between M and F positions.

On the contrary, contradiction, or antagonism, is what the two positions have in common. It is what they share, the very thing that binds them. It is the very point that accounts for speaking about “men” and “women” under the same heading.

Succinctly put, the indivisible that binds them, their irreducible sameness, is not that of being, but that of contradiction or out-of-beingness of being. Continue reading “zupančič sexual difference pt 4”

butler open letter on Israel

Full text of Judith Butler and Rashid Khalidi’s open letter condemning censorship of Israel critics

Whether one is for or against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a means to change the current situation in Palestine-Israel, it is important to recognize that boycotts are internationally affirmed and constitutionally protected forms of political expression. As non-violent instruments to effect political change, boycotts cannot be outlawed without trampling on a constitutionally protected right to political speech. Those who support boycotts ought not to become subject to retaliation, surveillance, or censorship when they choose to express their political viewpoint, no matter how offensive that may be to those who disagree.

We are now witnessing accelerating efforts to curtail speech, to exercise censorship, and to carry out retaliatory action against individuals on the basis of their political views or associations, notably support for BDS. We ask cultural and educational institutions to have the courage and the principle to stand for, and safeguard, the very principles of free expression and the free exchange of ideas that make those institutions possible. This means refusing to accede to bullying, intimidation, and threats aimed at silencing speakers because of their actual or perceived political views. It also means refusing to impose a political litmus test on speakers and artists when they are invited to speak or show their work. We ask that educational and cultural institutions recommit themselves to upholding principles of open debate, and to remain venues for staging expressions of an array of views, including controversial ones. Only by refusing to become vehicles for censorship and slander, and rejecting blacklisting, intimidation, and discrimination against certain viewpoints, can these institutions live up to their purpose as centers of learning and culture.

Judith Butler
Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

Rashid Khalidi
Edward Said Professor in Modern Arab Studies, Columbia University

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Etienne Balibar, Emeritus Professor, Paris-Nanterre
Wendy Brown, UC Berkeley
Susan Buck-Morss Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center
Eduardo Cadava, Princeton University
Lisa Duggan, Professor, New York University
Kathy E. Ferguson, Professor, Departments of Political Science and Women’s Studies, University of Hawai’i
Paul Gilroy, London
Naomi Klein, Author and Journalist
Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English, Queen Mary University of London
Joan W Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
Professor Lynne Segal, University of London
Wallace Shawn, Writer
Marianne Hirsch, Professor, Columbia University
Udi Aloni, Filmmaker and writer
Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania
Saba Mahmood, UC Berkeley, Associate Professor
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University
David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Stanford
Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

Butler interview on Parting Ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB: The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Antigone

Žižek, Dolar. Opera’s Second Death. 2001

This domain of the double provides the answer to the question: what is so unsettling about the possibility that a computer might “really think”? It’s not simply that the original (me) will become indistinguishable from the copy, but that my “mechanical” double will usurp my identity and become the “original” (a substantial object), while I will remain a subject.

It is thus absolutely crucial to insist on the asymmetry in the relationship of the subject to his double: they are never interchangeable – my double is not my shadow, its very existence on the contrary reduces ME to a shadow. In short, a double deprives me of my being: me and my double are not two subjects, we are I as a (barred) subject plus myself as a (non-barred) object.

For this reason, when literature deals the theme of the double, it is always from the subjective standpoint of the “original” subject persecuted by the double – the double itself is reduced to an evil entity which cannot ever be properly subjectivized.

This is what the fashionable critique of the “binary logic” gets wrong: it is only in the guise of the double that one encounters the Real – the moment indefinite multitude sets in, the moment we let ourselves go to the rhizomatic poetry of the “simulacra of simulacra endlessly mirroring themselves, with no original and no copy,” the dimension of the Real gets lost.

This Real is discernible only in the doubling, in the unique experience of a subject encountering his double, which can be defined in precise Lacanian terms, as myself PLUS that “something in me more than myself” which I forever lack, the real kernel of my being.

The point is thus not that, if we are only two, I can still maintain the “non-deconstructed” difference between the original and its simulacra/copy – in a way, this is true, but in the OBVERSE way: what is so terrifying in encountering my double is that its existence makes ME a copy and IT the “original.”

Is this lesson not best encapsulated in the famous scene from Duck Soup, in which one of the brothers (the house-breaker) tries to convince the other (Groucho, the President of Freedonia) that he is just his mirror-image, i.e. that the door frame into the next room is really a mirror: since they are both dressed in the same way (the same white nightgown with a nightcap), the intruder imitates in a mirror-like way Groucho’s gestures, with the standard Marx brothers’ radicalization of this logic ad absurdum (the two figures change sides through the mirror-frame; when the double forgets to follow closely one of Groucho’s gestures, Groucho is for a brief moment perplexed, but when, after a delay, he repeats the gesture, as if to test the fidelity of the mirror-image, and, this time, the double copies it correctly, so Groucho is again convinced of the truth of his mirror image). The game is only ruined when the THIRD Marx brother arrives, dressed in exactly the same way…

Back to the Greek tragedy: the other series, opposite to this line of self-sacrificing women, is that of the excessively destructive women who engage in a horrifying act of revenge: Hekabe, Medea, Phaedra. Although they are first portrayed with sympathy and compassion, since their predicament is terrible (Hekabe sees her entire family destroyed and herself reduced to a slave; Medea, who sacrificed all – her country – for the love of Jason, a Greek foreigner, is informed by him that, due to dynastic reasons, he will marry another young princess; Phaedra is unable to resist her all-consumming passion for Hippolytus, her stepson), the terrible act of revenge these women concoct and execute (killing their enemies or their own children, etc.) is considered pathologically excessive and thus turns them into repulsive monsters.

That is to say, in both series, we begin with the portrayal of a normal, sympathetic woman, caught in a difficult predicament and bemoaning her sad fate (Iphigenia begins with professing her love of life, etc.); however, the transformation which befalls them is thoroughly different: the women of the first series find themselves “interpellated into subjects,” i.e. abandon their love of life and freely assume their death, thus fully identifying with the paternal Law which demanded this sacrifice, while the women of the second series turn into inhuman avenging monsters undermining the very foundations of the paternal Law. In short, they both transcend the status of normal mortal suffering women, prone to human pleasures and weaknesses, and turn into something no-longer-human; however, in one case, it is the heroic free acceptance of one’s own death in the service of community, while, in the other case, it is the excessive Evil of monstrous revenge.

There are, however, two significant exceptions to this series: Antigone and Electra. Antigone clearly belongs to the first series of the women who accept their sacrifice on behalf of their fidelity to the Law; however, the nature of her act is such that it doesn’t fit the existing public Law and Order scheme, so her no-longer-human insistence does not change her into a hero to be worshipped in public memory.

On the other side, Electra is a destructive avenger, compelling her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her new husband; however, she does this on behalf of her fidelity to her betrayed father’s memory. The destructive fury is thus here in the service of the very paternal Law, while in the case of Antigone, the self-sacrificing sublime gesture is accomplished in resistance to the Law of the City.

We thus get an uncanny confusion which disturbs the clear division: a repulsive avenger for the right Cause; a sublime self-sacrificial agent for the wrong Cause. – The further interesting point is the “psychological” opposition between Antigone’s inner certainty and calm, and Electra’s obvious hysterical theater:

Electra indulges in exaggerated theatrical self-pity, and thereby confirms that this indulgence is her one luxury in life, the deepest source of her libidinal satisfaction. She displays here inner pain with neurotic affectation, offering herself as a public spectacle. After complaining all the time about Orestes’ delay in returning and avenging their father’s death, she is late in recognizing him when he does return, obviously fearing that his arrival will deprive her of the satisfaction of her grievance. Furthermore, after forcing Orestes to perform the avenging act, she breaks down and is unable to assist him.

In the case of Antigone and Medea, the “radical” act of the heroine is opposed to a feminine partner who “compromises her desire” and remains caught in the “ethics of the Good”: Antigone is contrasted to gentle Ismene, a creature of human compassion unable to follow her sister in her obstinate pursuit (as Antigone herself puts it in her answer to Ismene: “life was your choice, when mine was death”);

Medea is contrasted to Jason’s young new bride (or even herself in the role of a mother). In the case of Iphigenia, her calm dignity, her willing acceptance of the forced choice of self-sacrifice on behalf of her father’s desire, is contrasted to the furious outbursts of her sister Electra, hysterically calling for revenge, yet fully enjoying her grief as her symptom, fearing its end.

Why, in this triad of the “radical” heroines (Iphigenia, Antigone, Medea), do we tend to prefer Antigone, elevating her to the sublime status of the ultimate ethical hero(ine)? Is it because she opposes the public Law not in the gesture of a simple criminal transgression, but on behalf of ANOTHER Law?

Therein resides the gist of Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone: “the limit for which she stands, a limit for which no standing, no translatable representation is possible, is /…/ the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public sphere as its scandalous future.”(Butler 2000, p. 40)

Antigone formulates her claim on behalf of all those who, like the sans-papiers in today’s France, are without a full and definite socio-ontological status: as Butler emphasizes through a passing reference to Giorgio Agamben (Butler 2000, p. 81), in our era of self-proclaimed globalization, they – the non-identified – stand for the true universality.

Which is why one should pin down neither the position from which (on behalf of which) Antigone is speaking, neither the object of her claim: in spite of her emphasis of the unique position of the brother, this object is not as unambiguous as it may appear (is Oedipus himself also not her (half)brother?); her position is not simply feminine, because she enters the male domain of public affairs – in addressing Creon, the head of state, she speaks like him, appropriating his authority in a perverse/displaced way; and neither does she speak on behalf of kinship, as Hegel claimed, since her very family stands for the ultimate (incestuous) corruption of the proper order of kinship. Her claim thus displaces the fundamental contours of the Law, what the Law excludes and includes.

Butler develops her reading in contrast to two main opponents, not only Hegel but also Lacan. In Hegel, the conflict is conceived as internal to the socio-symbolic order, as the tragic split of the ethical substance: Creon and Antigone stand for its two components, state and family, Day and Night, the human legal order and the divine subterranean order.

Lacan, on the contrary, emphasizes how Antigone, far from standing for kinship, assumes the limit-position of the very instituting gesture of the symbolic order, of the impossible zero-level of symbolization, which is why she stands for death drive: while still alive, she is already dead with regard to the symbolic order, excluded from the socio-symbolic coordinates.

In what one is almost tempted to call a dialectical synthesis, Butler rejects both extremes (Hegel’s location of the conflict WITHIN the socio-symbolic order; Lacan’s notion of Antigone as standing for the going-to-the-limit, for reaching the OUTSIDE of this order): Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order not simply from its radical outside, but from a utopian standpoint of aiming at its radical rearticulation.

Antigone is a “living dead” not in the sense (which Butler attributes to Lacan) of entering the mysterious domain of ate, of going to the limit of the Law; she is a “living dead” in the sense of publicly assuming an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space – not a priori, but only with regard to the way this space is structured now, in the historically contingent and specific conditions.

This, then, is Butler’s central point against Lacan: Lacan’s very radicality (the notion that Antigone locates herself in the suicidal outside of the symbolic order), reasserts this order, the order of the established kinship relations, silently assuming that the ultimate alternative is the one between the symbolic Law of (fixed patriarchal) kinship relations and its suicidal ecstatic transgression.

What about the third option: that of rearticulating these kinship relations themselves, i.e., of reconsidering the symbolic Law as the set of contingent social arrangements open to change? And does the same not hold also for Wagner: is the obliteration of the Law of the Day in Tristan not the obverse of the inability to envision its radical rearticulation?

Is then Lacan – in his celebration of Antigone’s suicidal choice of ecstatic death – the ultimate Wagnerian, the “last Wagnerite,” if not the perfect one, as G.B.Shaw would have put it? It is here that we encounter the crucial dilemma: can that what Lacan calls ate really be historicized, as the shadowy spectral space of those to whom the contingent public discourse denies the right to full public speech, or is it the other way round, so that we can REARTICULATE the symbolic space precisely insofar as we can, in an authentic ACT, take the risk of passing through this liminal zone of ate, which only allows us to acquire the minimum of distance towards the symbolic order?

Another way to formulate this dilemma is with regard to the question of purity: according to Butler, Antigone speaks for all the subversive “pathological” claims which crave to be admitted into the public space, while for Lacan, she is precisely the PURE one in the Kantian sense, bereft of any “pathological” motivations – it is only by entering the domain of ate that we can attend the pure desire. This is why Antigone is, for Lacan, the very antipode of Hegel’s notorious notion of womankind as “the everlasting irony of the community”(Hegel, 1977,p. 288).

Butler was right to emphasize the strange passage from the (unique) individual to the universal which takes place at this point of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Butler 2000, p. 38): after celebrating the sublime beauty of Antigone, her unique “naive” identification with the ethical substance, the way her ethical stance is part of her spontaneous nature itself, not something won through the hard struggle against the egotistic and other evil propensities (as is the case with the Kantian moral subject), Hegel all of a sudden passes into GENERAL considerations about the role of “womankind” in society and history, and, with this passage, the pendulum swings into the opposite extreme: woman stands for the pathological, criminal even, perversion of the public law.

We can see how, far from bearing witness to an inconsistency in Hegel’s argumentation, this reversal obeys an inexorable logic: the very fact that a woman is formally excluded from the public affairs, allows her to embody the family ethics as opposed to the domain of public affairs, i.e., to serve as a reminder of the inherent limitation of the domain of “public affairs.” (Today, when we are fully aware of how the very frontier that separates the public from the private hinges on political rapport of forces, one can easily perceive women as the privileged agents of the repoliticization of “private” domains: not only of discerning and articulating the traces of political relations of domination in what appears to be an “apolitical” domain, but also of denouncing the very “depoliticization” of this domain, its exclusion from the political, as a political gesture par excellence.)

Is this, however, the ultimate scope of the feminine political intervention? It is here that one should consider the break which separates modernity from Antiquity: already in the late Medieval time, with Joan of Arc, a new figure of the feminine political intervention appeared which was not taken into account by Hegel: on behalf of her very universal exclusion from the domain of politics, a woman can, exceptionally, assume the role of the direct embodiment of the political AS SUCH.

Precisely as Woman, Joan stands for the political gesture at its purest, for the Community (universal Nation) as such against the particular interests of the warring factions. Her male attire, her assumption of male authority, is not to be misread as the sign of unstable sexual identity: it is crucial that she does it AS A WOMAN. Only as such, as a woman, can she stand for the Political Cause in its pure universality. In the very gesture of renouncing the determinate attributes of femininity (a virgin, no children, etc.), she stood for Woman as such. This, however, was simultaneously the reason she HAD to be betrayed and ONLY THEN canonized: such a pure position, standing directly for the national interest as such, cannot translate its universal request into a determinate social order. It is crucial not to confound this Joan’s feminine excess (a woman who, by way of renouncing feminine attributes, directly stands for the universal political mission) with the reactionary figure of “Mother-Nation” or a “Mother-Earth” figure, the patient and suffering mother who stands for the substance of her community, and who, far from renouncing feminine attributes, gives body to the worst male ideological fantasy of the noble woman.

The charge against Joan at her trial can be summed up in three points: in order to regain mercy and be readmitted into the Catholic community, she should (1) disavow the authenticity of her voice, (2) renounce her male dress, and (3) fully submit herself to the authority of the Church (as the actual terrestrial institution). These three points, of course, are interconnected: Joan did not submit to the authority of the Church, because she gave priority to the divine voices through which God addressed her directly, bypassing the Church as institution, and this exceptional status of her as the warrior directly obeying God, bypassing the customs of ordinary people, was signalled by her crossdressing.

Do we not encounter hear, yet again, the Lacanian triad of the Real-

butler lecture sept 15 2013

Watch Professor Judith Butler’s lecture, ‘Freedom of Assembly, or Who are the People?‘ held on September 15, 2013 in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University.

The freedom of assembly is a basic right, but how is it to be understood? How is the freedom of assembly related to the freedom of expression? The right of assembly cannot be asserted by a single person, so how do we understand the plurality that makes that claim? It seems that “the people” assert the right of assembly, but who decides who “the people” are?

And how do actual assemblies change our idea of what it means to assert a right? Rights are not only asserted vocally, but also enacted with movement, stillness, gesture, and silence.

Indeed, there can be no freedom of assembly without bodily enactments, including speech. Consequently, we have to rethink the bodily forms in which this right is enacted.

And though modes of assembly and solidarity are at once embodied and virtual, the very idea of assembly presupposes that bodies act together. What kind of right is that which is enacted bodily, and who are the people who enact this right? Are these “the people”?

🙂 Butler is describing the collection of peoples in the square.

8:50 The Assembly is already speaking before it utters its declarative speech act.

The ‘we’ voice is already enacted by the assembly of bodies, their gestures their movements. Actions where people come together who enact their convergence is irreducible to a single claim. Plurality of embodied actors who enact their claims sometimes through words sometimes not.

Freedom of Assembly

a collection of people associated in a demonstration May be spoken or enacted in another way
such acts as plural action, who enact their convergent purposes can’t be reduced to one collective we
13:00 Does FOA depend on being protected by government? or from government?

Freedom of Association independent of every government. When the legitimacy of a gov’t or power of state is being contested by such an association.

power of state to protect rights and power of state to withdraw that protection – arbitrary and legitimate power.

What is being opposed, is that FOA can be lost as a right when State opposes such assembly. Financial institutions transforming public entitlements into goods and market services.
Legitimacy of a gov’t that has assumed authoritarian powers, no one is say free markets and democracy work together.
Privatization and authoritarianism are being opposed, the state moves in to suppress FOA to censor those viewpoints and confine those who hold them.

FOA can’t be a specific right protected by state.

FOA must precede and exceed any gov’t. not to condone mob rule, but FOA is a precondition of politics itself, bodies can move and gather in unregulated ways, redefine public by virtue of these enactments.

They don’t speak in 1 voice or 1 language.
popular sovereignty distinct from state sovereignty.
FOA and idea of popular sovereignty.

20:00 Sovereignty is not bad word, think of indigenous peoples struggle for sovereignty

The meaning of PS has never been exhausted by the act of voting, the exercise of S. neither begins or ends with the act of voting. something of PS remains untransferable marking the outside of the electoral process.

S of the People: critical, resistance, revolution. PS translates into electoral power when people vote, but doesn’t exhaust it, untranslatable

PS runs counter to and exceeds, outruns every parliamentary form that it institutes and grounds. PS is a condition of an Parliamentary character, it threatens every Parl with dysfunction, dissolution an “anarchist interval” one that shows up at moments of founding and moments of dissolution

Who are the People?

24:00

We can’t simply point to the people, aerial photographs, (not demographic forensics) because there is a FRAME. limited perspective but which its object is selectively crafted.

Editing/Selecting what and who will count. Who the people are — technology that establishes and disestablishes who counts as people.

Some people are outside purview of street and camera i.e., prison …

Arrive together in some space and time and photographed in some exclusive way. Speaking in unison is a fantasy. “we the people” always misses, some fail to represent, doing something else, texting, blogging some not speaking at all, so THE PEOPLE never arrives and speaks in unity

28:00 We the People is NOT A UNITY

Butler totally dismantles any notion of unity. We have to re-think who the people are, some people don’t want what others want. Fragility and ferocity that marks hegemonic struggle over name the PEOPLE are signs of its democratic operation.

The PLURAL WE: I don’t describe who the we is, but I POSIT A WE

30:30 Something NON-Electoral is at work the ANARCHIST INTERVAL. The people who speak the WE constitute themselves as the people, standing silent together in the face of the police.

People

pre-existing collection, can’t adequately rep. collectivity because it is in process of being made.

WE: needs desires demands not fully known, practices of Self-determinination not same as self-representation.

Brings people into being who it names = PERFORMATIVE

33:00 Popular Sovereignty as distinct from State Sovereignty

PS only makes sense in this act of separating itself from SS

34:00 The Enactment of political Self-Determination (it is not always just verbal)

1:14 She speaks on splits and disharmony.

1:18 She says that Michael Hardt’s recent work on love is problematic and she disagrees with his view.

1:19 When a group of people do come together to claim rights etc. they do so that indexes the people or the populace

1:22 opposition to entire scheme of values, and other values must be brought to fore and that’s about solicitation, and persuasion, a hegemonic contest of who the people can be. The people as a term is a hegemonic struggle.

1:25 How does the relationship to police power have to be cultivated to expand the life of a solidarity/democratic movement so it isn’t condemned to be ephemeral. It requires an elaborate network including lawyers and media people willing to take risks.

1:34 Reply to second last question. “Citizen” can be used by state to bring them, appropriate them, instrumentalize them and interpellate them
1:37 Reply to last question: study and practice of social movements more broadly

paternal metaphor

Below is an extended extract from Oedipus and the Paternal Metaphor by Ana Žerjav in the philosophy journal called Filozofski vestnik

This article was published in 2010

It begins:

In Freud’s theory the Oedipus complex is the core of human sexual development.

It arises in early childhood and, ideally speaking (that was Freud’s idea), comes to its end in puberty as a passage from the autoerotic sexual drive to a choice of the sexual object and the primacy of genital sexuality.

In this sense the Oedipus complex has a structural role for human sexuality, since its decline coincides with adulthood and the identification of a human being either as a man or a woman, which also coincides with a certain object choice, a choice of sexual partner.

For Freud, there is no third sex. Which is the thesis that Lacan reaffirms as well. There are only, contrary to Freud’s idealized theory, the leftovers, something that can not be inscribed into this genetic scheme.

But two of Freud’s discoveries already directly contradict this supposedly ideal development of human sexuality: first, the problem of female sexuality: how does a girl pass from the clitoris, i.e. a phallus dominated sexuality, to the vagina as the proper female sexual organ, and how does she pass from the father to another object choice (there is, in Freud’s theory, a necessary fantasmatic left-over in female sexuality: she wants to give birth to her father’s children); and second, the problem of partial drives in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which, more or less, contradicts everything about linear sexual development.

In other words: every phase in this development can go wrong, becomes inversed, or the subject just can not overcome it. So that in the end the picture that we get is a proposal of a certain path that has so many branches and offshoots that one just loses the general and normative idea of the aim of genital sexuality. If there is a genitality, it is always overwhelmed by a paradoxical mixture of different libidinal fluxes.

[…] in short, a boy is first confronted with the Oedipus complex, he has tender feelings for his mother and aggressive, rivalrous, and competitive feelings towards his father. It is nevertheless a bit more complicated, since the boy is fond of his father at the same time, but the general idea is nevertheless that a boy, being in this Oedipal disposition, is confronted with a castration complex: the boy renounces the Oedipus complex in order to keep his sex. What follows is an identification with his father as the holder of the phallus, and, simultaneously, a renouncement of the incestuous object, the mother.

It is the father, and not the son, who has a phallus for the mother, who lacks one, so that the son renounces his seductions towards the mother and identifies with the subject of the same sex, i.e. the father. This is also the birth of the superego. We can see here that the phallus has to be lost if it is to be re-found, which is a trace that Lacan will insist on.

On the contrary, for the girl, the castration complex introduces the Oedipus complex, she accepts her castration as an accomplished fact (and because of that she is not subjected to the superego), and turns towards the father as the holder of the phallus.

This is the so called Penisneid, which has, in Freud, a biological basis and can very rarely be overcome. The solution that remains for a woman is to pass from this love for her father to the desire to give birth to his children. This is the well-known unconscious equation of the phallus and child.

The same obstacle holds true for the submission of the son to his father as the holder of the phallus, which implies a certain feminisation of the son towards the father. This is also where Freud encounters the biological rock of castration that presents a final obstacle to the end of analysis: an embittered woman (the castration is effectuated) and a frustrated man (the castration as a threat). Even if psychoanalysis provides the subject with the possibility of a different answer, it remains difficult to overcome this biological scale. On the contrary, for Lacan it is evident that this impasse remains addressed to the Other, that it is a certain form of demand that can be overcome in analysis.

Let us turn now to Lacan and see how he reinterprets the Freudian Oedipus, which, by the way, also has crucial consequences for the conceptualization of the end of analysis, although I will not go into this further here. Lacan, from the very beginning, clearly distinguishes between the father as a person, as an individual in the family context, and the symbolic function that he incarnates. From the very beginning, i.e. since 1953, he speaks of three fathers: the real father, the symbolic father, and the imaginary father.

For now, let us just say that this tripartition allows Lacan to separate the father as a signifier from the father as a meaning and as a concrete human being. These three aspects of the father in Lacan never overlap, they might, but it is no pre-condition that what he usually refers to as the father implies all three aspects. What he calls the paternal metaphor is a symbolic operation that he started to develop in the seminar on Psychosis, in 1955–56, and extended subsequently in the seminar The Object Relation, from 1956–57, where he addresses the case of little Hans and his forging of the signifier “horse” as a substitute for a failed paternal metaphor that takes place in his phobia.

Then follow some basic developments in the seminar The Formations of the Unconscious from 1957–58, and he finally sums up his developments, basically from the seminar on Psychosis, in his paper On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis, written in December 1957/January 1958 and published in 1959. In the fifties Lacan was concerned with the question of the father from a symbolic perspective. His paternal metaphor is an attempt to show how the Freudian Oedipus complex works in terms of structure, not as an imaginary and affects-based relation between a child and his parents, but as a symbolic structure which has an ontological value, since it is a metaphor that produces a field of reality for the speaking being:

In the paternal metaphor Lacan combined the linguistic procedure with what Freud called the Oedipus complex, which is for Lacan a symbolic operation of the substitution of two signifiers: the signifier of the mother (the basic pair of her presence and absence in front of a child), and the Name-of-the-Father as a signifier that replaces this initial maternal signifier in the symbolic.

Fort Da

This actually relates to Freud’s description that he gave of the observation of his grandson, who was playing with a reel of cotton on a thread, pronouncing Fort (away) when he threw it into the unseen, and Da (here) when he pulled it back into the field of the visible. This phonemic pair (Fort-Da) is a minimal symbolic difference, a first signifier that takes place in an attempt to symbolically inscribe the absence of the real object, namely the mother.

Lacan, in his paternal metaphor, inscribes the cause of this capricious appearance and disappearance of the mother as an x, something unknown for the child, or, as he also puts it, “the signified for the subject”. And it is precisely that signified for the subject which is an enigma that has to be named by the Name-of-the-Father. In other words, the father, by naming the desire of the mother, names exactly the cause of her desire, as far as this anonymous cause makes her appear and disappear without specific reason.

The Name-of-the-Father is thus not a signifier father as such, one amongst all the other signifiers, but the signifier that makes possible the symbolic order itself, it redoubles the symbolic as a first encounter of the subject with the mother’s desire (this is what is at stake in Lacan’s scheme R, in his paper On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis). It is thus the signifier that separates the child from the capricious desire of the mother and restores a symbolic pact with the father. The phallus in the paternal metaphor is a signified of the totality of the effects of what can be signified.

In the seminar The Formations of the Unconscious he describes three phases of Oedipus:

First phase where the child, no matter what sex, wants to be a phallus to capture the desire of the mother (the cause of her come-and-go). To want to be the mother’s phallus is a common trait for both biological sexes, it is a symbolic position that a child occupies in the mother’s desire and often also a common feature in the male perversion, as well as in neurosis.
Second phase is characterised by the prohibition of incest, during which the child has to be removed from that ideal position of the phallus that the mother is lacking. This prohibition results from the intervention of the symbolic father, which does not refer only to a child, but to the mother as well, which means that a child apprehends the father as castrating himself and the mother.
Third phase, finally, the real father intervenes, the father as the holder of the phallus, as the one who has it (which means the one that the child supposes has it), the one who uses it and is, for this reason, preferred by the mother.

In short, we could say that the paternal metaphor plays the role of the third factor that intervenes in the dual mother-child relationship and makes it clear to the child that he or she is not everything that the mother lacks. It introduces a fundamental gap (the original repression) that can only be pursued by means of a signifier. The enjoyment is now the fact of speech itself and the objects of satisfaction must pass through language, if they are to be capable of bringing satisfaction. This is why Lacan later on stated that phallic enjoyment is outside-the-body (hors-corps), it is framed by a fantasy that provides a way to gain satisfaction by means of the object of desire.

ethics other relationality

Alterity, Intersubjectivity, Ethics

Workshop Abstract:

The ‘ethical turn’ across the arts and humanities has taken its place in social and cultural anthropology primarily as a way to address long-standing questions of human agency within cultural and political systems. Anthropologists have been developing their own take on questions of ethics and morality in ways drawing largely from neo-Aristotelian and Foucauldian theorisations. Building on this emerging literature, but cautious of some of its ontological assumptions, the premise behind this workshop questions the prioritisation of certain notions of the ‘self’ over inquiries into the nature of the ethical ‘subject’.

The workshop will approach questions of ethics from different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, which have thus far remained marginal in the emerging anthropology of ethics and morality. Anthropology has traditionally sought to understand the socially or relationally constituted nature of persons and the historical processes within which they are embedded, and yet literature on ethical agency has often foregrounded voluntaristic notions of self-cultivation. We ask what contributions theories concerned with the relational or intersubjective nature of subject formation framed as responsibility for the other can make to our conceptualisation of ethics and ethical agency.

Theories of subjectivity, gendered or sexual difference, affect, and the ‘post-human’ have become prominent in investigations that question the bounds of the self/subject, and the ways in which we can conceptualise it as socially or politically emplaced. We ask what such theories, and different disciplines’ elaborations and critiques of them, can usefully lend our conceptualisations of ethics and morality.
We hope to open up avenues for further research and collaboration amongst those attending the workshop, in the form of publication and/or a broader conference at a later date.

Workshop format:

The aim of the workshop is primarily to exchange ideas across disciplines and with different theoretical and ethnographic references. The day therefore will be structured so as to promote as much discussion as possible, rather than presenting polished research results. The workshop will be divided into four thematic sessions, with a keynote lecture delivered by Associate Professor Jarrett Zigon of the University of Amsterdam.

The four sessions will address the themes of:

• Feminism and the question of the other
• Ethics, violence and politics
• Post-humanism and animal/human relations
• Affect and the ethics of noise

Each of the four sessions will be structured around a research paper, to be pre-circulated to all workshop participants, which will form the starting point for the discussion. The discussions will be co-facilitated by the paper authors and workshop organisers. In the abstract and in the suggested questions for discussion below, we have started to shape and open the discussions in particular directions. However these questions are both preliminary and open-ended, and we welcome different perspectives and challenges that are relevant to the workshop’s themes and concerns.

Workshop preparation

After registering each participant will receive the research papers in advance for each of the four sessions and you are strongly encouraged to read these prior to attending the workshop. The workshop welcomes participants across academic disciplines keen to engage in lively discussions and raise questions and ideas during the day.

Questions to initiate discussion:

• What analysis of attachments and detachments across sameness and difference do concepts such as affect enable or disable?

• What are the challenges to more recent feminist theories that attempt to show how ethics is suggested and solicited by an ontology of interdependency between people?

• How do lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex subjectivities complicate ethical and political responses to deeply ingrained normative practices?

• In light of the central place of ‘the Other’ in anthropological concerns, how can feminist and other theories of alterity inflect anthropological theories of ethics?

• How do questions of politics enter into, impact upon, or undermine our theorisations of the ethical?

• Can claims of relationality and acknowledgment of difference be shown to be fundamentally non-violent? How do we continue to address violence within ethics?

• How can psychoanalytic theories addressing subject/object, or self/other, relations, help us to theorise the space in which ethical subjectivity is formed?

• Do contemporary theories of affect push us beyond concepts of ‘relationality’ or ‘intersubjectivity’ in theorisations of ethics?

• Can Levinasian theories of ethics as the pre-subjective relation to the Other inform ethnographic inquiries into ethical relationality?

• What other approaches from philosophy or other disciplines can inform the study of ethics and morality?

• Do these theoretical approaches invite us to question the idea of intersubjectivity as the place of ethical relationality?

butler parting ways interview

A good interview by Ray Filar in July 2013.

Judith Butler on the Israel/Palestine conflict and her recent book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

RF: So is Parting Ways a call for transformation?

Establish a firm constitutional basis for equality for all citizens, regardless of what their religion might be, or their ethnicity or race.

End the occupation, which is illegal and an extension of a colonial project. I consider both the West Bank and Gaza to be colonised, even though Gaza is not occupied in the same way that the West Bank is. The Israeli government and military control all goods that pass in or out of that area, and they have restricted employment and building material that would allow Palestinians to rebuild homes and structures that were destroyed by bombardment.

The third call is probably the most controversial, but I do think that a lot of thought has to be given to how the right of return might be conceptualised, and how that right might be honoured, whether it’s via resettlement or compensation. Some plans involve a return to areas where people have lived, not necessarily to the exact homes they lived in.

But people who have been made stateless by military occupation are entitled to repatriation, and then the question is to which state, or to what polity or area? Those who have had their goods taken away are entitled to compensation of some kind. These are basic international laws.

RF: In your final chapter you cite a Mahmoud Darwish poem that says “a possible life is one that wills the impossible.” You describe this as a paradox – could you explain it?

JB: Well, there are people who believe in realpolitik and who say: “There’s never going to be one state, there’s never going to be equality, there’s never going to be peace…don’t fool yourself. If you want to be political, get concrete and see what adjustments you can make in the current regime”.

Then I just think, ok, what would it mean if we lived in a world in which no one held out for the possibility of substantial political equality, or for a full cessation of colonial practices – if no one held out for those things because they were impossible? People do scoff when you say right of return. I was at a meeting with Palestinians and Israelis where people said: “That will never happen.” So I said, “well it will not be taken off the table.”

In fact in politics, sometimes the thing that will never happen actually starts to happen. And there have to be people who hold out for that, and who accept that they are idealists and that they are operating on principle as opposed to realpolitik. If there were no such ideals then our entire political sensibility would be corrupted by this process.

And maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they’ll ever be realised. But that’s ok, it’s a service.

What would happen if we lived in a world where there were no people who did that? It would be an impoverished world.