Logics of Critical Explanation

keeping it simple

read the essay
edit it to something that can be read in 20 min
highlight issues of death drive
conclude

Reminder to myself, I can kill 2 birds 1 stone. Edit this piece, afterall it can also be submitted to AG, whom I believe is not stringing me along, but this book is going to come out and I think he believes that my piece can make the final cut. But a lot of this is still way up in the air.

Ok. So the essay. I like the beginning, I’m willing now to equate ‘subjective destitution’ to the ‘death drive.’ Will it work? Why not? Yes the death drive is about the ‘unraveling of the subject’ the scrambling of subjective coordinates. It is, when all is said and done, becoming monstrous.

But of course the central point is: subjective destitution is not easy. There isn’t any manual. Z may give the impression it is about traversing the fantasy and engaging in a political Act, but of course, easier said than done.

And Butler speaks of ‘losing intelligibility’ of distressing any comfortable identity place setting. I seek to understand not only how one goes about disrupting these identity markers, but in sustaining an existence as monstrous as an ethical determination.

Undoneness is one adjective Butler uses to describe this state of being, “If I possess myself too firmly I cannot be in an ethical relation.” Holding on too firmly to the ego.

But nevertheless Ž thinks Butler is too caught up in symbolic reconfigurations. And here is where I lay down the Ž quote that takes Butler to task for simply defining the subject as limited, finite, incomplete etc “is the status of the subject always limited, dispossessed, exposed, or is the subject itself a name for/of this dispossession?”

And then, it is here, from Žižek that I will take the theme of the paper/talk: the subject before subjectivization is the death drive. This subject that precedes interpellation/subjectivization, is a positive force in itself, it is the infinite force of self-relating negativity, of loss and desire etc.

Now should I mention Bartleby as subject of death drive? The ethical subject prompts hysterical outbursts from others. I argue that Bartleby is an ethical subject of the death drive.

“Will I act in conformity to that which disjointed the coordinates of my very being?”

I still am liking this paper. I want to include the Ž story of the plane crash but that might be tasteless, hmm, and then there is my take on the algorithm in Groundhog Day. Bill Murray hopes to seduce (that forgettable actress I forget her name), but fails because, as I argue, he doesn’t include but tries to circumvent the death drive.

The death drive is the failed interpellation, the subject is this failure of interpellation. This out of jointness of the subject with itself, the self-relating negativity is the death drive, and this death drive is constitutive of subjectivity.

I’m on page 20 of my paper. I just finished the introduction to objet a. Now McGowan simply calls this the ‘lost object’ or ‘object of loss’. I kinda think in his last book that he could have theoretically laid out in a more rigorous fashion the correlation between the object of loss and objet a. Anyway, I like this section. I’m going to have trouble in my talk squeezing what I want to say into 20 mins, plus making sound like a coherent whole, or that I have an underlying thesis. I have to look into this further.

There’s a good Daly quote near the end that reenforces my argument that the death drive is the way in which the subject refuses all claims of identity, refuses and thus re-writes his own coordinates in the symbolic. This is a personal event yes, but it can precipitate something bigger.

bosteels logic of capital

Traversing the Heresies: Interview with Bruno Bosteels

On October 14, 2012, Alec Niedenthal and Ross Wolfe interviewed Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University

The events of 1968 were definitely pivotal globally for the Left. The reason why 1968 in France was a key moment was because the so-called theories, what people now call “French theory” and the philosophical elaborations and politics stemming from it, all share this interest in “the event.”

Whereas Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, and Deleuze were once read as philosophers of “difference,” now it is common to read them as philosophers of the event—that is, 1968. So, we might ask, “Why is it an important moment or event in the history of France or Mexico or other places where, in the same year, there were riots, uprisings, popular movements, rebellions, and so on?” But also, “What does it mean to think about ‘the event’ philosophically?”

The theoretical traditions that led to this pivotal moment have a longer history in France than in other places where one must search obscure sources to get to the same theoretical problem.

Within the French context, for institutional, historical, and genealogical reasons we have a well-defined debate that can be summed up, as what Badiou himself called “The last great philosophical battle”: the battle between Althusser and Sartre, between structuralism and humanism, or between structure and subject.

Ross Wolfe: Much of this French theory centers on a struggle between structure and subject and the idea that events do not necessarily happen autonomously. The question you seem to be asking is,

How do we understand the given circumstances that are not of our own making, but in which historical action takes place? Is it possible for a political subject to intervene in history?

In a recent, highly philosophical book on Marx, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval propose that there are two major logics in Marx that are at loggerheads: There is the logic of capital, which is a logic of systematic constraints and turnover, and there is the logic of struggle. [Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Marx, prénom Karl 2012]

They apply Hegelian logic to the way that capitalism posits its own presuppositions, claiming that something that enables capitalism is in fact already the product of capitalism, logically if not historically. There is this kind of spiraling movement in which it seems the logic of capital is unbreakable and that human subjects are only bearers of these functions coming out of the immanent logic of capital’s own self-positing.

On the other hand, there is what Dardot and Laval call the historical logic or a logic of class struggle that is contingent, working upon the gaps or moments of breakdown within the economic logic of capital itself. They claim that it all comes down to the question of whether Marx himself (they deal far less with Marxism) was able to reconcile the logic of struggle and the logic of capitalism.

They believe that “communism” is almost like an imaginary kind of glue that (even though it is impossible) pretends that these two things can be held together.

One of the interesting things about Dardot and Laval’s philosophical reconstruction of the French debate over the competing logics in Marx is their return to the legacy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. They see two major paths: there is either a more idealist, Fichtean approach or a more materialist, Feuerbachian approach.

One path, which is the path of someone like Bruno Bauer or Max Stirner, is to insist upon the subject’s capacity for self-positing. The subject can, in a sense, almost posit itself into existence; it can posit its own presuppositions almost boundlessly. On the other hand there is the more materialist school, which insists on the givenness of external factors that are not the result of the subject’s own positing, but instead precede the subject. Marx, in their account, tries to hold these things together. It is in that particular moment, when Marx seeks to articulate and overcome the idealist and materialist readings of the Hegelian notion of positing the presuppositions, that a certain logic and a certain history is productively combined.

RW: Marx captures the differences between the more Fichtean Hegelians and the Feuerbachian Hegelians inThe Eighteenth Brumaire, where he writes, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past

These two logics, which are still at play in trying to think about the event, go back to this legacy of German Idealism. I am interested in seeing what happens when this encounter occurs (or again, in a sense, when this encounter fails to occur) between the logic of capital and the logic of political struggle. They clash precisely at the point where the logic of capital is inconsistent, in the sense that it cannot, strictly speaking, claim to have posited all its own presuppositions. Nor is the logic of the subject here one of spontaneous freedom or autonomy.

But, it is precisely just as the structure shows inherent moments of breakdown, where the subject reveals itself to be structurally dependent on what Sartre called “the practico-inert.”

What came out of 1968 was, especially in the Althusserian and Lacanian schools, an attempt to formalize the inconsistencies of the structure. That is what we call post-structuralism. This is then tied to a new theory of subjectivity. So all these ex-Althusserians—Rancière, Žižek, and also Laclau—are, in fact, trying to hold these two logics together.

mouffe art agonistic

Mouffe, Chantal. Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces Art & Research Summer 2007

Can artistic practices still play a critical role in a society where the difference between art and advertizing have become blurred and where artists and cultural workers have become a necessary part of capitalist production? Scrutinizing the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello [1] have shown how the demands for autonomy of the new movements of the 1960’s had been harnessed in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transformed in new forms of control. The aesthetic strategies of the counter-culture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical exigency, are now used in order to promote the conditions required by the current mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. Nowadays artistic and cultural production play a central role in the process of capital valorization and, through ‘neo-management’, artistic critique has become an important element of capitalist productivity.

This has led some people to claim that art had lost its critical power because any form of critique is automatically recuperated and neutralized by capitalism. Others, however, offer a different view and see the new situation as opening the way for different strategies of opposition. Such a view can be supported by insights from Andre Gorz for whom ‘When self-exploitation acquires a central role in the process of valorization, the production of subjectivity becomes a terrain of the central conflict… Social relations that elude the grasp of value, competitive individualism and market exchange make the latter appear by contrast in their political dimension, as extensions of the power of capital. A front of total resistance to this power is made possible. It necessarily overflows the terrain of production of knowledge towards new practices of living, consuming and collective appropriation of common spaces and everyday culture.’ [2]

To be sure the modernist idea of the avant-garde has to be abandoned, but that does not mean that any form of critique has become impossible. What is needed is widening the field of artistic intervention, by intervening directly in a multiplicity of social spaces in order to oppose the program of total social mobilization of capitalism. The objective should be to undermine the imaginary environment necessary for its reproduction. As Brian Holmes puts it, ‘Art can offer a chance for society to collectively reflect on the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency, its self-understanding.’ [3]

I agree that artistic practices could contribute to the struggle against capitalist domination but this requires a proper understanding of the dynamics of democratic politics; an understanding which I contend can only be obtained by acknowledging the political in its antagonistic dimension as well as the contingent nature of any type of social order. It is only within such a perspective that one can grasp the hegemonic struggle which characterizes democratic politics, hegemonic struggle in which artistic practices can play a crucial role.

The political as antagonism
The point of departure of the theoretical reflections that I will propose in this piece is the difficulty that we currently have for envisaging the problems facing our societies in a political way. Contrary to what neo-liberal ideologists would like us to believe, political questions are not mere technical issues to be solved by experts. Properly political questions always involve decisions which require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives. This incapacity to think politically, is to a great extent due to the uncontested hegemony of liberalism. ‘Liberalism’, in the way I use the term in the present context, refers to a philosophical discourse with many variants, united not by a common essence but by a multiplicity of what Wittgenstein calls ‘family resemblances’. There are to be sure many liberalisms, some more progressive than others but, save a few exceptions, the dominant tendency in liberal thought is characterized by a rationalist and individualist approach which is unable to grasp adequately the pluralistic nature of the social world, with the conflicts that pluralism entails; conflicts for which no rational solution could ever exist, hence the dimension of antagonism that characterizes human societies. The typical liberal understanding of pluralism is that we live in a world in which there are indeed many perspectives and values and that, due to empirical limitations, we will never be able to adopt them all, but that, when put together, they constitute an harmonious ensemble. This is why this type of liberalism must negate the political in its antagonistic dimension. Indeed, one of the main tenets of this liberalism is the rationalist belief in the availability of a universal consensus based on reason. No wonder that the political constitutes its blind spot. Liberalism has to negate antagonism since, by bringing to the fore the inescapable moment of decision – in the strong sense of having to decide in an undecidable terrain – antagonism reveals the very limit of any rational consensus.

Politics as Hegemony
Next to antagonism, the concept of hegemony is, in my approach, the other key notion for addressing the question of ‘the political’. To acknowledge the dimension of the political as the ever present possibility of antagonism requires coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability which pervades every order. It requires in other words recognizing the hegemonic nature of every kind of social order and the fact that every society is the product of a series of practices attempting at establishing order in a context of contingency. The political is linked to the acts of hegemonic institution. It is in this sense that one has to differentiate the social from the political. The social is the realm of sedimented practices, that is, practices that conceal the originary acts of their contingent political institution and which are taken for granted, as if they were self-grounded. Sedimented social practices are a constitutive part of any possible society; not all social bonds are put into question at the same time. The social and the political have thus the status of what Heidegger called existentials, i.e. necessary dimensions of any societal life. If the political – understood in its hegemonic sense- involves the visibility of the acts of social institution, it is impossible to determine a priori what is social and what is political independently of any contextual reference. Society is not to be seen as the unfolding of a logic exterior to itself, whatever the source of this logic could be: forces of production, development of the Spirit, laws of history, etc. Every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. The frontier between the social and the political is essentially unstable and requires constant displacements and renegotiations between social agents. Things could always be otherwise and therefore every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. It is in that sense that it can be called ‘political’ since it is the expression of a particular structure of power relations. Power is constitutive of the social because the social could not exist without the power relations through which it is given shape. What is at a given moment considered as the ‘natural’ order – jointly with the ‘common sense’ which accompanies it – is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior to the practices that bring it into being.

Every order is therefore political and based on some form of exclusion. There are always other possibilities that have been repressed and that can be reactivated. The articulatory practices through which a certain order is established and the meaning of social institutions is fixed are ‘hegemonic practices’. Every hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices, i.e. practices which will attempt to disarticulate the existing order so as to install another form of hegemony.

What is at stake in what I call the ‘agonistic’ struggle,[4] which I see as the core of a vibrant democracy, is the very configuration of power relations around which a given society is structured. It is a struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be reconciled rationally. An agonistic conception of democracy acknowledges the contingent character of the hegemonic politico-economic articulations which determine the specific configuration of a society at a given moment. They are precarious and pragmatic constructions which can be disarticulated and transformed as a result of the agonistic struggle among the adversaries. Contrary to the various liberal models, the agonistic approach that I am advocating recognizes that society is always politically instituted and never forgets that the terrain in which hegemonic interventions take place is always the outcome of previous hegemonic practices and that it is never an neutral one. This is why it denies the possibility of a non-adversarial democratic politics and criticizes those who, by ignoring the dimension of ‘the political’, reduce politics to a set of supposedly technical moves and neutral procedures.

The Public Space
What are the consequences of the agonistic model of democratic politics that I have just delineated for visualizing the public space? The most important consequence is that it challenges the widespread conception that, albeit in different ways, informs most visions of the public space conceived as the terrain where consensus can emerge. For the agonistic model, on the contrary, the public space is the battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation. I have spoken so far of the public space, but I need to specify straight away that, we are not dealing here with one single space. According to the agonistic approach, public spaces are always plural and the agonistic confrontation takes place in a multiplicity of discursive surfaces. I also want to insist on a second important point. While there is no underlying principle of unity, no predetermined centre to this diversity of spaces, there always exist diverse forms of articulation among them and we are not faced with the kind of dispersion envisaged by some postmodernist thinkers. Nor are we dealing with the kind of ’smooth’ space found in Deleuze and his followers. Public spaces are always striated and hegemonically structured. A given hegemony results from a specific articulation of a diversity of spaces and this means that the hegemonic struggle also consist in the attempt to create a different form of articulation among public spaces.

My approach is therefore clearly very different from the one defended by Jürgen Habermas, who when he envisages the political public space (which he calls the ‘public sphere’) presents it as the place where deliberation aiming at a rational consensus takes place. To be sure Habermas now accepts that it is improbable, given the limitations of social life, that such a consensus could effectively be reached and he sees his ideal situation of communication as a ‘regulative idea’. However, according to the perspective that I am advocating, the impediments to the Habermasian ideal speech situation are not empirical but ontological and the rational consensus that he presents as a regulative idea is in fact a conceptual impossibility. Indeed it would require the availability of a consensus without exclusion which is precisely what the agonistic approach reveals to be impossible.

I also want to indicate that, despite the similar terminology, my conception of the agonistic public space also differs from the one of Hannah Arendt which has become so popular recently. In my view the main problem with the Arendtian understanding of ‘agonism’, is that to put it in a nutshell, it is an ‘agonism without antagonism’. What I mean is that, while Arendt puts great emphasis on human plurality and insists that politics deals with the community and reciprocity of human beings which are different, she never acknowledges that this plurality is at the origin of antagonistic conflicts. According to Arendt, to think politically is to develop the ability to see things from a multiplicity of perspectives. As her reference to Kant and his idea of ‘enlarged thought’ testifies her pluralism is not fundamentally different from the liberal one because it is inscribed in the horizon of an intersubjective agreement. Indeed what she looks for in Kant’s doctrine of the aesthetic judgment is a procedure for ascertaining intersubjective agreement in the public space. Despite significant differences between their respective approaches, Arendt, like Habermas, ends up envisaging the public space in a consensual way. To be sure, as Linda Zerilli has pointed out,[5] in her case the consensus results from the exchange of voices and opinions (in the greek sense of doxa) not from a rational ‘Diskurs’ like in Habermas. While for Habermas consensus emerges through what Kant calls ‘disputieren’, an exchange of arguments constrained by logical rules, for Arendt is a question of ‘streiten’, where agreement is produced through persuasion, not irrefutable proofs. However neither of them is able to acknowledge the hegemonic nature of every form of consensus and the ineradicability of antagonism, the moment of ‘Wiederstreit’, what Lyotard refers to as ‘the differend’. It is symptomatic that, despites finding their inspiration in different aspects of Kant’s philosophy, both Arendt and Habermas privilege the aspect of the beautiful in Kant’s aesthetic and ignore his reflection on the sublime. This is no doubt related to their avoidance of ‘the differend’.

Critical artistic practices and hegemony
What kind of link can we establish between this theoretical discussion and the field of artistic practices? Before addressing this question I want to stress that I do not see the relation between art and politics in terms of two separately constituted fields, art on one side and politics on the other, between which a relation would need to be established. There is an aesthetic dimension in the political and there is a political dimension in art. This is why I consider that it is not useful to make a distinction between political and non-political art. From the point of view of the theory of hegemony, artistic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order or in its challenging and this is why they necessarily have a political dimension. The political, for its part, concerns the symbolic ordering of social relations, what Claude Lefort calls ‘the mise en scène’, ‘the mise en forme’ of human coexistence and this is where lies its aesthetic dimension.

The real issue concerns the possible forms of critical art, the different ways in which artistic practices can contribute to questioning the dominant hegemony. Once we accept that identities are never pre-given but that they are always the result of processes of identification, that they are discursively constructed, the question that arises is the type of identity that critical artistic practices should aim at fostering. Clearly those who advocate the creation of agonistic public spaces, where the objective is to unveil all that is repressed by the dominant consensus are going to envisage the relation between artistic practices and their public in a very different way than those whose objective is the creation of consensus, even if this consensus is seen as a critical one. According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony.

In my view this agonistic approach is particularly suited to grasp the nature of the new forms of artistic activism that have emerged recently and that, in a great variety of ways, aim at challenging the existing consensus. Those artistico-activist practices are of very different types, from a variety of new urban struggles like ‘Reclaim the streets’ in Britain or the ‘Tute Bianche’ in Italy to the ‘Stop advertizing’ campaigns in France and the ‘Nike Ground-Rethinking Space’ in Austria. We can find another example in the strategy of ‘identity correction’ of the Yes Men who appearing under different identities – for instance as representatives of the World Trade Organization develop a very effective satire of neo-liberal ideology.[6] Their aim is to target institutions fostering neo-liberalism at the expense of people’s well-being and to assume their identities in order to offer correctives. For instance the following text appeared in 1999 in a parody of the WTO website: ‘The World Trade Organization is a giant international bureaucracy whose goal is to help businesses by enforcing “free trade”: the freedom of transnationals to do business however they see fit. The WTO places this freedom above all other freedoms, including the freedom to eat, drink water, not eat certain things, treat the sick, protect the environment, grow your own crops, organize a trade union, maintain social services, govern, have a foreign policy. All those freedoms are under attack by huge corporations working under the veil of free trade, that mysterious right that we are told must trump all others.’[7] Some people mistook this false website for the real one and the Yes Men even managed to appear as WTO representatives in several international conferences where one of their satirical interventions consisted for instance in proposing a telematic worker-surveillance device in the shape of a yard-long golden phallus.

I submit that to grasp the political character of those varieties of artistic activism we need to see them as counter-hegemonic interventions whose objective is to occupy the public space in order to disrupt the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to spread, bringing to the fore its repressive character. Acknowledging the political dimension of such interventions supposes relinquishing the idea that to be political requires making a total break with the existing state of affairs in order to create something absolutely new. Today artists cannot pretend any more to constitute an avant-garde offering a radical critique, but this is not a reason to proclaim that their political role has ended. They still can play an important role in the hegemonic struggle by subverting the dominant hegemony and by contributing to the construction of new subjectivities. In fact this has always been their role and it is only the modernist illusion of the privileged position of the artist that has made us believe otherwise. Once this illusion is abandoned, jointly with the revolutionary conception of politics accompanying it, we can see that critical artistic practices represent an important dimension of democratic politics. This does not mean, though, as some seem to believe, that they could alone realize the transformations needed for the establishment of a new hegemony. As we argued in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy [8] a radical democratic politics calls for the articulation of different levels of struggles so as to create a chain of equivalence among them. For the ‘war of position’ to be successful, linkage with traditional forms of political intervention like parties and trade-unions cannot be avoided. It would be a serious mistake to believe that artistic activism could, on its own, bring about the end of neo-liberal hegemony.

[1] Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso , London 2005

[2] Interview with André Gorz, Multitudes, No. 15, 2004, p. 209.

[3] Brian Holmes, ‘Artistic Autonomy’, www.u-tangente.org

[4] For a development of this ‘agonistic’ approach, see Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, (London: Verso, 2000), chapter 4.

[5] Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, chapter 4.

[6] See for instance their book The Yes Men. The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization published by The Disinformation Company Ltd, 2004

[7] The yesmen Group website

[8] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985, second edition 2001).

trieb death drive post-Hegel radical evil condition of goodness jean dupuy

An Interview with Slavoj Žižek “On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 ” Joshua Delpech-Ramey

And here is Ž man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009 at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates.

But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely. Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality. Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Death Drive insists beyond life and death: Immortality

Undead [From Berlin lecture March 2009]

Negative Judgements –> Negate a predicate: He is not dead. He is alive.

Infinite Judgements –> Assert a non-predicate: He is undead (doesn’t mean alive). He’s alive as dead, living dead, a 3rd domain, an endless undead, an immortal domain emerges. This is the domain of drive.

The object of drive is not getting rid of tension but the reproduction of tension as such. What brings you satisfaction is not getting rid of tension but endless repetition of tension. A strange bad infinity.

The post-Hegelian moment: is this weird repetition for which in a way there is no place in Hegel. It is not the progressive circularity or bad spurious infinity. Kierkargard and Freud meet at the topic of repetition. Repetition that generates precisely NO AUFHEBUNG.

On the one hand Mature Marx refers to Hegel. in Grundrisse, is a postive one, Marx claims Hegel process is mystefied, but a formulation of emancipatory revolutionary process.

But later in Capital something changes, it’s more Capital itself that is formulated in terms of subject itself. With “capital” money passes from substance to subject. it becomes self-reproducing. It is endlessly repetitive as a drive. The whole goal of circulation is the reproduction/expansion of circulation itself. Marx says “capital works as an automatic subject.” It is a Hegelian subject but caught in this endlessly reproductive repetition. Thus Marx might have moved beyond Hegel here.

Another line of thought: Elevate Todestrieb into a key to understand German idealist “self-relating negativity”. Todestrieb has to be elevated to this kind of transcedental principle.

Hegel’s dialectics: The dialectic of necessity and contingency. The way Hegel is usually read according to usual doxa, Hegel admits of contingency but only as a moment of necessity, it externalizes itself in nature but then this contingency is aufhebung into necessity. Negative and contingency are allowed but as a tactical retreat. The Absolute is playing a game with itself. Ž says the reversal, it is not only necessity of contingency, global necessity realizes itself through multiple contingencies, but there is also Contingency of Necessity.

There is a contingent process of how necessity emerges out of contingency. The French, rational-choice theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Drew attention to “something contingently becomes necessary”. It’s contingent whether a thing happens or not, but once it happens, it happens necessarily.

A new event retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. An impossible event takes place, once it happens it is instantly domesticated and retroactively appears as possible and is naturalized.

First I saw the film, Billy Bathgate I was disappointed by the film. After I saw the film, I saw how the film missed the novel, the film was a bad copy. Then I read the novel, the novel was even worse. The very repetition creates the 3rd point of reference. 1+1=3. First you have a shitty novel, then a shitty film, the bad copy of the novel retroactively creates the possibility of how it could have been a good film or novel.

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition: Deleuze gives the best explanation to death drive that Žižek has ever read. Paradox of Freud: the renunciation of enjoyment generates enjoyment in the very act of renunciation. You renounce desire, but then you get libidinally attached to the very rituals of renouncing desire.

Death drive in Deleuze’s reading is not a specific drive, it does this self-sabotaging thing. The space of desire is curved. You don’t go directly at it. Death drive is nothing but the transcendental principle of “lust principe” What is human sexuality formally? It is not simple pleasure. But pleasure got in the postponement and return and repetition … for example if I keep repeating the shaking of your hand I don’t let go, the very repetition eroticizes it in an obscene way. Death drive doesn’t have an autonomous reality, it is not, “I want pleasure but secretly I want to torture,” Death drive is this transcendental distortion which complicates my access to pleasure.

Ž disagrees strongly with Freud here on eros/thanatos and says Freud really backed away from his discovery. Žižek says this good constructive Eros versus bad destructive death drive (Todestrieb) is total bunk. Love is a catastrophe, it’s totally destructive. One point of obsession and everything is ruined, literally out of joint. Love is totally paradoxical focusing all of your life, the whole world is thrown out of balance, love is radically destabilizing. I’m passionately in love and ready to risk everything for it. Insistence on a particularity, you are ready to go to the end.

Antigone is pure death drive: I insist on this particular point I am ready to put at stake everything for it. Death drive is the ethics at its zero level. It resides in this paradoxical domain where good coincides with radical evil. A detailed reading of Kant and Schelling later work on religion. Kant proposes there the notion of radical evil. He steps back though. First he proposes to read radical evil as diabolical evil. If for Kant you can be good out of principle. Then why cannot you be evil out of principle? Not just good, but evil as well. But then the whole distinction between good and evil falls apart. You are evil without any pathological possibility, you are just evil.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Commandatore, tells Giovanni, repent. Giovanni knows he will die, Commandatore tries to save Giovanni, if yo urepent you will be saved in after life. From standpoint of rational calculus Giovanni should agree. But Giovanni says no. He acts out of pure fidelity to Evil. It’s not pathological, no personal gain. This is the greatness of Kant, he goes very far in this direction.

Death drive is the radical non-pathological evil, which is transcendental apriori of every possible form of goodness.

Kant withdraws, says we don’t have diabolical evil only radical evil which is simply a tendency of human nature which is not fulfilling your duty. But Lacan reads Kant with Sade. The point of Lacan, Sade is a Kantian. The Sadian imperative of unconditional jouissance, it goes beyond the pleasure principle. It’s non-pathological.

Sade proposes purely Kantian idea of ‘radical crime’ that doesn’t simply follow natural impulses, but a crime which breaks with the chain of natural causality, a crime literally against nature itself. Freedom that breaks the phenomenal chain of natural causality. The paradox that Kant and Schelling struggle with is this obscure domain where radical evil is apriori condition of goodness.

Antigone: you must have this radical excess of evil if you want to go to the end. From the sympathetic human point it is Ismene who is human warm, Antigone is an aggressive bitch. Creon is right, he basically says, if we publicly do the funeral old hatreds will explode again, we’ll fall into civil war. Antigone’s counter-argument is so what? It is pure insistance. It is just pure insistence, “I want, I want“.

Žižek wants to present another Antigone, where she succeeds and Creon lets her bury her brother, the whole city is ruined, the last scene Antigone “I was created for love not for hatred” where blood and death is now all around her.

Stalinist version: Antigone and Creon are fighting and Chorus intervenes like a committee for public safety and proclaims a popular dictatorship.

Death Drive as radical evil as a condition of goodness.

Shraing Illusions: We make fun of soemthing, denounce illusions as illusions, but nonetheless they work.

Ž mentions Logic of Capital School at beginning of part II.

******

Point two: The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.

[But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don’t know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.

But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls “forcing the event,” which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.

But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.

[…] there is a certain dimension of Christianity which … is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don’t identify Heidegger’s being-toward death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.

glynos 2

Glynos, Jason. in Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) Lacan and Organization London: MayFlyBooks, 2010

There is a general consensus in the literature that the mode of engagement associated with an ethics of ‘openness’ is to be preferred, especially when thinking critically about the political economy and about the transformation of the organization of work more specifically. What receives much less attention in this literature, however, are questions about

(1) what these alternative modes of engagement actually look like in practice; and (2) the conditions under which a transition is made from one to another mode of engagement.

There is of course considerable theoretical reflection on the concept of ethics in Lacan, which for many has become synonymous with the idea of ‘traversing the fantasy’. But there is a need to add to these ontological discussions a more robust ontical base by, for example, building up a corpus of empirical examples, exemplars, or paradigms of different sorts of ethical engagement associated with the ‘dissolution’ of the logic of fantasy. This would entail supplementing existing studies that furnish negative critiques of modes of engagement characterized by ‘closure’ with rich phenomenological accounts of what appears on the ‘other side’ of posited fantasmatic traversals.

What conditions and devices, for example, might promote a specifically democratic ethos in organizations akin to a Lacanian ‘ethics of the real’?

For a call to explore the relation between a radical democratic ethos and an ‘ethics of the real’, see Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox,(conclusion); on this, see also Glynos, J. (2003) ‘Radical democratic ethos, or, what is an authentic political act?’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2(2): 187-208.

fantasy glynos

Glynos, Jason. ” ” Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) Lacan and Organization London: MayFlyBooks, 2010 free download

The tendency of many poststructuralist approaches to highlight the importance of the political dimension of workplace practices signals a desire to eschew the idea that the economy is an extra-discursive force outside of, and acting upon, politics, culture, and society. On the contrary, such a poststructuralist perspective seeks to make explicit the idea that the economy is discursively constructed and thus contestable. The political dimension of workplace practices is thus theorized in a way that diverges from the way politics and power are often understood. The concept of the political is theorized not as a function of the way that power is distributed in the organization, where power is understood in terms of identifiable sovereign authority, capacities, resources, interests, structures, or a dispersed micro-physics of power. From the point of view of poststructuralist theory, the political dimension of a practice is understood in relation to a negative ontology, where to subscribe to a negative ontology means simply to affirm the absence of any positive ontological foundations for the subject (or, to put it differently, to affirm the radical contingency of social relations). Far from leading to a kind of free fall into relativism, such a perspective expands the scope and relevance of critical analysis because it emphasizes the situated, precarious, and thus potentially political, character of interests and structures themselves.

logic of fantasy

In a first approach we could say that the logic of fantasy names a narrative structure involving some reference to an idealized scenario promising an imaginary fullness or wholeness (the beatific side of fantasy) and, by implication, a disaster scenario (the horrific side of fantasy). This narrative structure will have a range of features, which will vary from context to context, of course, but one crucial element is the obstacle preventing the realization of one’s fantasmatic desire. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, realizing one’s fantasy is impossible because the subject (as a subject of desire) survives only insofar as its desire remains unsatisfied.

But the obstacle, which often comes in the form of a prohibition or a threatening Other, transforms this impossibility into a ‘mere difficulty’, thus creating the impression that its realization is at least potentially possible.

This gives rise to another important feature of fantasy, namely, its transgressive aspect: the subject secures a modicum of enjoyment by actively transgressing the ideals it officially affirms (see also Glynos, 2003a; 2008b), for example by trying to eliminate the identified obstacle through illicit means. In this view, there is a kind of complicity animating the relation between the official ideal and its transgressive enjoyment, since they rely on each other to sustain themselves. Fantasy, therefore, is not merely a narrative with its potentially infinite variations at the level of content, although it is of course this too. It also has a certain logic in which the subject’s very being is implicated: the disruption or dissolution of the logic leads to what Lacan calls the aphanisis, or vanishing, of the subject (as a subject of desire). In sum, the logic of a fantasmatic narrative is such that it structures the subject’s desire by presenting it with
an ideal,
an impediment to the realization of an ideal,
as well as the enjoyment linked to the transgression of an ideal.

This conception of fantasy can be readily linked to the literature in organizational studies. Several studies on employee cynicism, for example, suggest how transgressive acts can sometimes serve to stabilize an exploitative social practice, which they appear to subvert. Taking their cue from Michael Burawoy’s study of factory workers in Manufacturing Consent (1979), they draw the conclusion that informal games and cynical distance toward the control systems and company rules imposed by management often have the effect of sustaining the oppressive system which they ostensibly transgress. In a related vein, and referring to Gideon Kunda’s study of cynical workers in Engineering Culture (1992), Fleming and Spicer emphasise how ‘employees performed their roles flawlessly and were highly productive’
despite their recourse to ‘humour, the mocking of pompous official rituals and sneering cynicism’. They suggest how cynicism could help sustain employees’ belief that they are not mere cogs in a company machine, thereby allowing them to indulge in the fantasy that they are ‘special’ or ‘unique’ individuals (Fleming and Spicer, 2003: 164).

That such cynical-transgressive acts sustain the social practice being transgressed appears to be corroborated by studies, which show how personnel officers of many companies actually advise workers not to identify with corporate culture ideals too strongly, and to retain a healthy distance from the company script. These studies point to the normative and political significance of workplace fantasies. In fact recent developments in political discourse
theory bring into focus the critical potential of a Lacanian conception of fantasy by situating fantasmatic logics in relation to what have been called, following the work of Ernesto Laclau, social and political logics (Glynos and Howarth, 2007; see also Stavrakakis, 2007).

My claim here is that appeal to these logics helps make clearer the normative and ethical implications of the category of fantasy (see also Glynos, 2008a).

In general terms, the category of ‘logics’ seeks to capture the purposes, rules and self-understandings of a practice in a way that is sensitive to
the radical contingency of social relations, or what in Lacanian parlance is called ‘lack in the Other’. Logics thus furnish a language with which to characterize and critically explain the existence, maintenance, and transformation of practices, thus making the approach flexible enough to deal with the porous and shifting boundary of ‘work’ in a wide range of contemporary organizational practices. A practice is here understood in broad terms to comprise a network of activities and intersubjective relations, which is sufficiently individuated to allow us to talk about it meaningfully and which thus appears to cohere around a set of rules and/or other conditions of existence. In this view, a practice is always a discursive practice, which is meaningful and collectively sustained through the operation of three logics: social, political, and fantasmatic logics.

If social logics assist in the task of directly characterizing a practice along a synchronic axis, then political logics can be said to focus more on the
diachronic aspects of a practice, accounting for the way it has emerged or the way it is contested and/or transformed. And if political logics furnish us with the means to show how social practices come into being or are transformed, then fantasmatic logics disclose the way specific practices and regimes grip subjects ideologically (Glynos, 2001).

In the remainder of this section I continue to focus on the way the logic of fantasy sustains particular work relations and patterns. Fantasies supported by the prospect of big profits, generous pay packets, career advancement, consumption of prize commodities, and hobbies, are an obvious way to think about how patterns of work are affected and sustained by fantasies. But such fantasmatically-structured desires shape the nature and content of demands made by workers and by management, as well as the way they are responded to.

But in what way, more specifically, does fantasy sustain the existing political economy of work? One way of thinking about this is in relation to the political dimension of social relations. Insofar as fantasies prevent or make difficult the politicization of existing social relations, relations of subordination inclusive, one can say that fantasy helps reinforce the status quo. The logic of fantasy, then, can be construed as a narrative affirmed by workers, often unconsciously, preventing the contestation of suspect social norms, and making less visible possible counter-logics.

The claim here is that the more subjects are invested in fantasies, the more likely they are to read all aspects of their practice in terms of that fantasmatic narrative, and the less likely they are to ‘read for difference’. Counter-logics are precisely those potential alternative discursive patterns that inhere in the interstices of workplace practices that would provide a counterpoint to a dominant social logic. The subject tends to use fantasy as a way to protect itself from ambiguities, uncertainties, and other features which evoke intimations of anxiety. But it is precisely those ambiguities that open up possibilities for critical distance and alternative ‘becomings’. It thus becomes important to make explicit the normative framework that the researcher brings to the analysis and, through a process of articulation, to actively bring it into contact with those concrete alternatives residing in the practices themselves (Glynos and Howarth, 2007: 177-97).

The insights generated by such a Lacanian-inflected discursive approach to work and the organization may offer us a way to overcome some of the problems identified in approaches inspired by other psychoanalytic schools, and to generate a research programme intended to explore the links between ethics, fantasy, and normative critique in the study of organizations.17 Such a research programme would address
some fairly basic questions, which are important from the point of view of analysis and critique. For example: … how do the identified fantasies operate in such a way as to make less visible to the subjects themselves both the potential grievances and potential alternative ways of structuring workplace practice?

A specifically Lacanian critical political economy, then, would begin with the assumption that economic life is embedded in social and political relations, highlighting the complex and overdetermined character of economic relations and identities.

Here subjects are not only consumers, but ‘also citizens, students, workers, lovers, and parents, and the lives they live in each of these roles affects their involvement in the others’ (Best and Connolly, 1982: 39).

Noting that subjects are multiply affiliated is not uncommon in the literature of course. The observation, however, raises a question about how best to understand the ways in which multiple subject positions combine, separate, or dissolve. From this point of view it is possible to draw on the hermeneutical, post-marxist, post-structuralist work of Best and Connolly (1982), Resnick and Wolff (1987, 2005), Gibson-Graham (2006), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Laclau (1990) and others, to articulate a connection to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (see also Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Ozselcuk, 2006; Madra, 2006; Ozselcuk and Madra, 2005).

Such an exercise would help make a specifically Lacanian contribution to the critical political economy of work – a field which seeks to politicize dominant socio-economic arrangements, justifications of wealth and income inequality, as well as the various structures of accountability to stakeholders and the public at large (which secure and bolster the allegiance of those subject to such arrangements and structures).

[A] Lacanian-inflected political theory of discourse challenges the idea that such interests have a motivating force which is independent of the way they pass through the self-interpretations of subjects, thereby pointing to the fantasmatic and potentially political aspects of those interests.

Such an approach, therefore, shares an important affinity with those cultural economists who argue that ‘[t]he economy does not exist, out there, but is enacted and constituted through the practices, decisions, and conversations of everyday life’ (Deetz and Hegbloom)

Noting the central role that work plays in social life … A Lacanian-inflected approach would clearly focus on aspects of those practices that exhibit the presence of split subjectivity, the unconscious, and fantasy,

Laclau subject formation

if the subject were a mere subject position within the structure, the latter would be fully closed and there would be no contingency at all … [Radical contingency is possible only] if the structure is not fully reconciled with itself, if it is inhabited by an original lack, by a radical undecidability that needs to be constantly superseded by acts of decision. There acts are, precisely, what constitute the subject, who can only exist as a will transcending the structure. Because this will has no place of constitution external to the structure but is the result of the failure of the structure to constitute itself, it can be formed only through acts of identification. If I need to identify with something it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place. These acts of identification are thinkable only as a result of the lack within the structure and have the permanent trace of the latter. Contingency is shown in this way: as the inherent distance of the structure from itself.

Laclau, Emancipation(s) 1996: 92.

Taken from: Jason Glynos and David Howarth,
Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory.

Routledge, 2007 pp. 128-129.

chantal mouffe

New Statesman Published 19 November 2009

You argue that politicians should seek to create a “vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere”. What do you mean by that?

What I have in mind is not simply a space for the expression of any kind of disagreement, but a confrontation between conflicting notions about how to organise society. This does not exist in Britain at the moment, because no political party clearly challenges the hegemony of neoliberalism. There are, of course, disagreements about a variety of issues, but what is lacking is a debate about possible alternatives to the current neoliberal model of globalisation. We have been told by advocates of New Labour that politics now takes place at the centre and that the categories of right and left have become obsolete.

Did the BBC contribute towards the creation of such a public sphere by putting the BNP’s Nick Griffin on Question Time?

In such a situation, which I designate as “post-political”, an agonistic debate cannot exist, and it is not by inviting Nick Griffin on Question Time that things are going to change. That does not mean that he should not have been invited. Indeed, if the BNP is allowed to present candidates at elections, there is no reason to ban its representatives from taking part in public debates. To criticise the BBC for inviting him is typical of themoralistic attitude that has replaced the political confrontation between left and right. Instead of trumpeting their moral condemnation, Labour politicians should be inspired to examine why some of their supporters are being attracted by the BNP. But moral indignation is easier and more self-gratifying than auto-critique.

What concrete changes in British politics would get us closer to your ideal of agonistic democracy?

My agonistic model of democracy acknowledges the existence in social life of antagonistic conflicts, conflicts that concern the configuration of power relations and the way society should be organised. Those conflicts cannot be solved by deliberation, and they will never be eliminated. The aim of a pluralist democracy is to provide the institutions that will allow them to take an agonistic form, in which opponents will treat each other not as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries who will fight for the victory of their position while recognising the right of their opponents to fight for theirs. An agonistic democracy requires the availability of a choice between real alternatives and that is precisely what is missing in Britain today. What would be needed to foster an agonistic democracy is a significant break from Third Way politics by Labour or the development of a new party with a clear left identity, like Die Linke in Germany.

You talk about a “post-political” era. What do you mean by this?

When I speak of the post-political, I am not agreeing with Third Way theorists on the need to think “beyond left and right” and the demise of the adversarial model of politics. We have no doubt been witnessing a blurring of the frontiers between left and right in recent decades, but this is not something that I celebrate. In my view, such a post-political situation represents a danger for democracy. I have tried in my recent work to show that our inability to envisage the problems with which we are confronted in a properly political way is the origin of a widespread disaffection with democratic institutions. This is a disaffection that, in several European countries, has led to the growing success of right-wing populist parties.

How has the global economic crisis influenced your thinking?

There was a moment at the beginning of the financial crisis when it seemed that the hegemony of neoliberalism had received a serious blow. After decades of being demonised, the state was suddenly called to the rescue. However, instead of implementing redistributive policies, the intervention of the state has been limited to rescuing the banks. There is, though, a positive aspect. I think there is an increasing awareness that the current model of development is unsustainable.

Interview by Nina Power

logics of critical explanation

Course: Applying Discourse Theory

Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory
Published October 1, 2007 by Routledge, New York
Authors: Jason Glynos and David Howarth

Jason Glynos and David Howarth’s (hereafter: GH) have written a comprehensive theoretical tract outlining how one would go about investigating concrete empirical phenomena using a poststructuralist discourse analytical framework. Heavily influenced by a Lacanian inspired discourse analysis that emerged out of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist intervention Hegemony and Socialist Strategy back in 1985, GH’s intention is to illustrate how a robust, empirically grounded political analysis can be conducted using a combination of three different ‘logics’ of investigation. These three logics are, in order of application: a social logic which characterizes relevant social practices and clusters of practices or regimes. The social logic sets out to answer the query, what is the object of investigation? Next is a political logic which is a genealogical investigation that reveals why a social practice or regime became institutionalized (sedimented) in the social fabric and, alternatively, the possibility it can become ‘dislocated’ through counter-hegemonic struggles. Thirdly and to this reviewer most interestingly, there are fantasmatic logics that locate how subjects are ‘gripped’ by ideology and thus seemingly are attached to social practices that seem to work against their own interests.

So instead of prioritizing totalised and determining social structures on the one hand, or fully constituted subjects on the other, we begin by accepting that social agents always find themselves ‘thrown’ into a system of meaningful practices. However, we also add the critical rider that these structures are ontologically incomplete. Indeed, it is in the ‘space’ or ‘gap’ of social strucures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’. Morevover, as these identification are understood to take place across a range of possible ideologies or discourses — some of which are excluded or repressed — and as these are always incomplete, then any form of identification is doomed to fall short of its promise (79).

In short, following Heidegger, subjects are ‘thrown’ into a world not of their choosing, but have the capacity under certain conditions to act differently. But more than this we need also to be able to explain the constitution and reproduction of the social relations into which they have been thrown, and we need also to account for the way in which subjects are gripped by certain discourses and ideologies. Our poststructuralist approach strives to unfold a social ontology adequate to these tasks.

Glynos, Howarth 2007: 79

We must develop a style of research that builds contingency into its very modus operandi, and which is open and attentive to possibilities disclosed by the research itself

Glynos, Howarth 2007: 155

zizek rejects logic of equivalence

On should not forget that in spite of some occasional ‘objectivist’ formulations, the reduction of individuals to embodied economic categories (terms of the relation of production) is for Marx not a simple fact, but the result of the process of ‘reification’, that is, an aspect of the ideological ‘mystification’ inherent to capitalism. As for Laclau’s second point about class struggle being ‘just one species of identity politics, one which is becoming less and less important in the world in which we live’, one should counter it by the already-mentioned paradox of ‘oppositional determination’, of the part of the chain that sustains its horizon itself; class antagonism certainly appears as one in the series of social antagonisms, but it is simultaneously the specific antagonism which ‘predominates over the rest whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity‘.

[M]y point of contention with Laclau here is that I do not accept that all elements which enter into hegemonic struggle are in principle equal: in the series of struggles (economic, political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.) there is always ONE which, while it is part of the chain, secretly overdetermines its very horizon (320).

laclau on laclau articulating logics

I have dealt extensively with the rhetorical and discursive devices through which contingently articulated social relations become ‘naturalilzed’ in order to legitimize relations of power (288).

If I have called the general equivalent unifying an undisturbed equivalential chain the empty signifier, I will call the one whose emptiness results from the unfixity introduced by a plurality of discourses interupting each other the floating signifier. In practice, both processes overdetermine each other, but it is important to keep the analytical distinction between them.
(305).

Butler’s question

Is the incompleteness of subject-formation that hegemony requires one in which the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted through exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static or foundational? And if this distinction is wrong-headed, how are we to think those constituting exclusions that are structural and foundational together with those we take to be politically salient to the movement of hegemony? … Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formation and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition? (JB. BuLaZi. 12-13)

Laclau’s response

I have just said that the sleight of hand on which Butler’s argument is based consists in a hypostasis by which a purely negative condition is turned into a positive one — only at that price can one assert the non-historicity of the structural limit (184).

First, Butler introduces her usual war machines — the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’— without the slightest attempt at defining their meanings, so it is impossible to understand what she is talking about except through some conjecture. My own guess is that if she is opposing the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’ to something which is on the one hand ‘universal’ and on the other ‘structural’, one has to conclude that structural determinations are universal, and that they are incommensurable with social and culture specificity. From this it is not difficult to conclude that Butler is advocating, form the point of view of theoretical analysis, some sort of sociological nihilism. Taken at face value, her assertions would mean that the use of ANY social category describing forms of structural effectivity would be a betrayal of cultural and social specificity. If that were so, the only game in town would be journalistic descriptivism. Of course, she can say that this was not her intention, and that she wanted only to speak out against essentialist, aprioristic notions of structural determination. In that case case however, she would have to answer two questions:

1. where is her own approach to a more differentiated analysis of levels of structural limitation and determination to be found.

2. where does she find that I have EVER advocated in my work a theory of ahistorical aprioristic structural determination?

On the second point there can be NO ANSWER.

Tada: my comment: I like this, Laclau’s point is that Butler has no theory of structural determination. She hates anything structural. Because remember Derrida, what constitutes the structurality of the sturucture, where does the structure get its beating heart? From an essentialst centre no doubt? But no. Laclau does not believe structural determination means essentialism. Nor does JB. She just doesn’t like how LaZi bring in this notion of the Real, and the Symbolic. The Symbolic is overwritten by the law of the Father. Uh uh, like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

On the first point the answer is more nuanced — in fact, there COULD be an answer if Butler managed to go beyond her rigid opposition structural determination /cultural specificity. Any social theory worth the name tries to isolate forms of structural determination which are context-specific in their variations and relative weight, but tries also, however, to build its concepts in such a way that they make social, and historical comparisons possible. Butler’s own approach to society at it best moments — her innovative and insightful approach to performativity, where (and I agree with her) there are several points of coincidence with the theory of hegemony — proceeds in that way. I only have to add, in this respect, that one finds it difficult not to turn Butler’s weapons against herself, and ask the insidious question: is performativity an empty place to be variously filled in different contexts, or is it context-dependent, so that there were societies where there were not performative actions? (188-189).