Category: ethics

Negativity in the ontological sense

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Re-Activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of Transformation Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism.” Parallax, 2003, vol. 9, no. 2, 56-71.

Negativity in the ontological sense as that which, by dislocating our sedimented positivities, ‘shows the limits of the constitution of objectivity’ … negativity refers to the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability that punctuates the life of linguistic creatures, this does not mean, however, that it should be understood as a mere destructive force.  By inscribing a lack in our dislocated positivities it fuels the desire for new social and political constructions.  Negativity … indicates the dimension of ‘becoming, a productivity that engenders and ruins every distinct form as a creative destructive restlessness’.  It is neither an object nor its negation: it is the condition of possibility/impossibility of the constitution of objects. 56

post-fantasmatic radical democratic ethos

[T]he following question posed by Badiou strikes me as extremely important:

There is always one question in the ethic of truths: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?  How will I link the things I know, in a consistent fashion, via the effects of being seized by the not-known?

Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, p. 50.

From the point of a radical democratic ethics it is not enough to encourage fidelity to an event (in practice, any event), but to cultivate an openness towards event-ness.  Such an openness, premised on a Lacanian negative ontology and alert to the ever-present play of negativity and disaster, will be more adequately equipped to allow and encourage the pursuit of a better future within a political framework founded on the awareness of the dangers of absolutization.  In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutization only within the framework of another fidelity, fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social; within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other.  This fidelity is not a one-off, a rare occurrence, it is not tied to a great politics of nostalgia, but implies a permanent democratic revolution in our political ethos, a skeptical passion that will have to be re-inscribed in every political act: it cannot be reduced to a fidelity to particular acts, not even those associated with the democratic revolution, but extends its scope to an acknowledgment of the post-fantasmatic political potential opened by them in the direction of a continuous radicalization of democracy.  Badiou is right that today ‘democracy’ is one of the central organizers of consensus.  And this is clearly the consensus of post-democracy.  It is obviously necessary to question and interrogate this anti-political normalization of democracy.  The only consistent way of doing that, the only way of making democracy relevant again, without reoccupying the dangerous ground of utopian absolutizations, is by re-activating the radical potential of the democratic revolution, by acknowledging event-ness and negativity as the conditions of possibility/impossibility of all transformative political action: “It is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are assigned — that something else is possible, but not that everyting is possible.” * (68-69)

4 dimensions of socio-political reality

The irreducible presence of negativity means that any social edifice suffers from an inherent flaw or crack which may become visible in moments of dislocation.  In such situations, new possibilities become available, enabling a subject to identify differently. Indeed there are a number of ways in which human beings can fill in the gap between experiencing dislocation and responding to it.

How dislocation of social relations can provoke political practices –>

political practices: struggles that seek to challenge and transform the existing norms, institutions and practices — perhaps even the regime itself — in the name of an ideal or principle.  This entails the construction of political frontiers which divide the social space into opposed camps.105

But political practices also involve efforts on the part of the power bloc to disrupt the construction of antagonistic frontiers by breaking down the connections that are being forged between different demands.

… insofar as political movements are successful in challenging norms and institutions in the name of something new, political practices bring about a transformative effect on existing social practices. 105

dislocation is a concept we need in order to understand better the dimensions of the ideological and ethical.

dislocation: a moment when the subject’s mode of being is experienced as disrupted. Dislocations are those occasions when a subject is called upon to confront the contingency of social relations more directly than at other times 110.

There are 2 ways the subject can respond to a dislocation, either authentically or inauthentically. An authentic response is ethical, and an inauthentic response is ideological.

Political dimension

Ideological dimension  Ethical dimension

Social dimension

The Social: forgetting the acts or decisions of ‘originary institution’ (which involved the rejection of those options which were actually attempted), … Reactivation (consists) of rediscovering, through the emergence of new antagonisms, the contingent nature of the so-called “objectivity” …

The Political:is about taking decisions in a contingent and ‘undecidable’ terrain, which involves radical acts of power and institution.  The political is an ontological category distinct from the social, rather than an ontical or regional category.

The political starts with a demand that cannot be satisfied, if the demand publicly challenges the norm(s) of an institution

That is to say, a demand is political to the extent that it publicly contests the norms of a particular practice or system of practices in the name of a principle or ideal 115

… any political construction takes place against the background of a range of sedimented practices’, in which ‘the boundary of what is social and what is political in society is constantly displaced’ 116.

The moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature of the alternatives and their resolution through power relations becomes fully visible constitutes the field of the “political”‘ Laclau cited 117.

The character of the political consists is one of contesting sedimented social relations in the name of new ones in situations where undecidability and power have been brought to the fore 117.

Both the political and the social presuppose a connection with the ‘radical contingency of social relations’, for both are understood “in relation to a particular ontical manifestation of this radical contingency, namely, the public contestation of a social norm. Insofar as public contestation does not arise or is eschewed, we say that the social dimension is foregrounded.  Insofar as this public contestation is initiated or affirmed through action, we say that the political dimension comes to the fore. The two dimensions are always present in social reality … the boundary between the social and political is not fixed, but ina state of constant flux 117.

The Ideological

A dislocatory experience in the field of social relations can provoke a political response. However it can also provoke an ideological response which:

aims to repair and cover over the dislocatory event before it becomes the source of a new political construction … the ideological dimension signals the way in which the subject becomes complicit in covering over the radical contingency of social relations by identifying with a particular discourse.  In this sense, ideology involves the way a subject misrecognizesits real conditions of existence.  Indeed the hold of this misrecognition inures or insulates the subject from vagaries of the structural dislocation that always threatens to disrupt it (117).

What we term the ‘grip’ of ideology’thus comprises a myriad of practices through which individuals are sustaind and reproduced.  The ideological can thereby induce the ‘forgetting of political origins’ and it can enable subjects to live as if their practices were natural.

The Ethical

In our view, the space of the ethical — like the political, social, and ideological — is understood in relation to the radical contingency of social relations and the way in which the subject ‘responds’ to this ‘ontological lack’.  But we reserve the concepts of the ethical and the ideological to speak about the different ‘ways‘ in which a subject engages in practices, be they social or political …  This means that the concept of ethics in our approach is not reducible or equivalent to questions about normativity … with questions of right conduct … or dispositions (on how) to live the good life …

Instead, in our view, questions of ethics (and ideology) centre on the subject’s particular mode of enjoyment  They address issues that arise from the different modalities of subjectivity in relation to the ultimate contingency of social existence.   How does a subject relate to the contingency of social life that is disclosed in dislocatory events?  How does it identify anew?  How does it translate its ‘radical investments’ into social and political practices?  How does a subject relate to its identifications and consequently to its own contingency?  … modes of enjoyment are always embodied in material practices, and thus not completely reducible to conscious apprehension.   (119)