normative – objet (a)

santner taxes

Eric L. Santner, the University of Chicago The New Idolatry: Religious Thinking in the Un-Commonwealth of America September 6, 2011

At a recent debate among Republican presidential candidates in Iowa, all participants raised their hand when asked whether they would oppose a deficit-reduction agreement that featured 10 dollars in budget cuts for every dollar in increased tax revenue. I think one misses something important if one dismisses this moment as a bit of cynical political theater. But it is equally insufficient to see in it a display of genuine political commitments and principles. Rather, this peculiar pledge of allegiance is symptomatic of the ways in which the Republican side of current debates has infused questions about economic policy with religious meanings and values. And as is often the case when religious energies come to be displaced into profane spheres of life, the results are bad—not only for those spheres of life but for religion as well.

For example, one might think about the similarities between the attitude of Republicans to taxes and that of anorexics to food. For both, less is always better, and nothing would be best of all. Republicans have a “taxation disorder” just as anorexics have an eating disorder. Both groups treat what is essentially a practical matter—how much money is needed by the state given the current needs of the country and its people; how much food is needed given the demands of the body—as a matter of a quasi-sacred ethical stance concerning the purity of the body. In both cases, we find a demand for “starving the beast,” a personal or collective body felt to be disgustingly fleshy, to be always too much, to be in need of ever greater reduction, thinning, cutting, fasting. In both disorders we find a deeply pathological form of what Max Weber characterized as the “spirit of capitalism,” a fundamentally this-worldly asceticism fueled by a religious sense of duty and obligation aimed at assuring our place among the divinely elected. (There is surely much to say here about the meaning in all of this of debt, indebtedness, being in default, being in a state of guilt—the German word Schuld means both “debt” and “guilt”—but that is for another discussion.)

What is most bizarre in the current situation is the way in which the Republicans have fused this “Protestant ethic,” as Weber called it, with a sort of polytheistic worship of wealth and the wealthy—in short, with a rather blatant form of idolatry. Why does the beast need to be starved? Why does the “flesh” of the body politic need to be reduced, reduced, reduced? The answer we hear over and over again is: for the sake of the “Job Creators.” The one Creator God has effectively been dispersed into the pantheon of new idols, those to whom we must all sacrifice so that they may show favor on us and create new worlds of economic possibility. Job creation has become the new form of grace or gratuitousness otherwise reserved for divinity. Our duty is to make sacrifices and above all to be vigilant about not calling forth the wrath of the Job Creators lest they abandon us and elect others as their chosen people (other nations who make bigger and better sacrifices).

The old culture wars concerning hot-button social issues have simply assumed a new guise. Tax increases have come to be regarded as a sort of job abortion, the killing of unborn economic life. Republicans have, in a word, invested wealth with the same religious aura that radical anti-abortion groups have always invested in the cells of the fetus. Yesterday’s baby killer is today’s job killer: both are essentially infidels, non-believers. What is clear is that there is no room for debate here. If wealth has come to be regarded as sacred, if its movement into the bank accounts of individuals and corporations represents the moment of conception of (still unborn) economic life, then surely there can be no compromise.

If there is any truth to this analysis, then the real problem we face is not just the impossibility of engaging in real debates about our economic life but the impossibility of engaging with the demands and complexities of religious life as well. For by infusing money with the halo of the sacred, by transfiguring high earners into Job Creators to whom the rest of us owe pledges of covenantal allegiance, what we lose is not only the capacity to think about economic issues in a relatively rational way; we also lose our capacity to live lives informed by the values of our religious traditions. That is certainly one of the lessons of the biblical ban on idolatry.

A similar dynamic is at work on another front in the culture wars, the debate over creationism and so-called “intelligent design.” What is ultimately so disturbing about the case made for these alternatives to the theory of evolution is not that it represents bad science but rather that it demeans and degrades religion by essentially turning the Bible into a kind of science textbook competing with other science textbooks. Creationism is not bad science—it is not science at all—but rather a kind of blasphemy. It reduces the status of the holy books of the Judeo-Christian tradition to that of first-year biology textbooks. The ones who should be enraged are not scientists, but rather priests, pastors, rabbis, and all who care deeply about the moral and spiritual values at the heart of the biblical traditions.

As with evolutionary theory so with economic theory and policy: the infusion of religious values and meanings into debates about deficits, budgets, and taxes do not simply inhibit our capacity to steer our way toward a better economic future; it also represents a threat to the integrity of the life of faith and its difficult demands, demands that always, in the end, pertain to the urgent and needful presence of our neighbor. The hands raised by those Republican candidates at the Iowa debates some weeks ago do not signal strong principles about economic policy but rather a perverse infusion of religious attitudes into the sphere of economic life, a form of idolatry that does damage both to the economy and to religion.

wendy brown interview 2010

Interview Wendy Brown conducted around April 2010

CPS: You have argued … that neoliberalism does not simply promote economic policies but to quote you “disseminates market values into every sphere of human activity.” What distinguishes your perspective here from the despair found in someone like Adorno? What would it require to translate the despair that many people experience in very personal and de-politicized ways into a form of political mobilization?

Wendy Brown: That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair. I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does. I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism. By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world.

Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides.

It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction.

In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity. Again, I am talking mainly about the Euro-Atlantic world: without providing meaning, it provides direction. So I think it is quite a different order of things from the one that Adorno was describing.

CPS: [re.] the crisis within the humanities. You were arguing against the way that there is such a specialization and jargonization of what we do – where it becomes hard to explain what we do to people outside of academia. Do you think this kind of insulation within academia helps feed political ignorance and this divide?

Wendy Brown: Sure, we’ve really lost the ability – and I am not blaming us as individuals – it is really part of a creation of niche industries everywhere in capitalism today. But, we’ve really lost the ability as social and cultural scholars – I want to say humanists but I am trying to get social scientists in there too – we’ve lost the ability to be able to talk about what we do and promulgate the knowledge we have in an everyday fashion. I think that happens in the classroom and it is not even just a question of what is outside. More and more, for example, political science educates its undergraduates in the profession of political science, rather than in the study of politics. That means we are cranking out students who may know how to behave like professional political scientists but they don’t really know how to analyze political problems.

[…] I’ve been working for a couple of years on something I hope to finish in the next year, which is a rethinking of Marx’s critique of religion. What I am trying to do there is think about what is often treated as an early and relatively unimportant concern of Marx, one that he is presumed to have dropped once he moves on to full-blown materialism and study of political economy. What I am doing is tracing the ways in which his engagement with Feuerbach and his critique of religion extends all the way through his work right up into Das Kapital. One of the things that has allowed me to see is the ways in which Marx can contribute to understanding a contemporary problem of ours, which is this: why is it that at the very moment that capitalism seems finally to have painted all the colors of the globe and really has ascended as a global power – why is that moment coterminous with the resurgence of world religions?

Marx is often thought to not be able to help us think that problem at all because Marx is usually thought to be saying that capitalism secularizes and even abolishes religion and that religion is one of the casualties – in his sense, good casualties – of capitalism’s desacralization of the world. I think that is a wrong reading. I actually think Marx has a deep understanding of just how religious capital is and how much it requires and entails religion. That is what the re-reading of Marx is for, and I hope that book will be done in another year, but we’ll see.

ethics pluth

Tutt, Daniel. The Object of Proximity: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Žižek and Santner via Lacan. American University Also available here danielp.tutt(at)gmail.com

In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan develops the neighbor as “das Ding”, (the Thing) a pre-symbolic object characterized primarily by affect and appearing in the symbolic realm prior to any and all representation.[5]

Das Ding is a substanceless void, and in structure it is equivalent to the neighbor, or the Other.

The Other[6] takes on a “thing-like” character based on an excess materiality that always resists symbolization in the register of the real. This Other as object is filled in by a certain distance, what Lacan refers to as proximity, a proximity that is identical to the neighbor. As Lacan comments, “the neighbor is identical to the subject, in the same way that one can say the Nebenmensch that Freud speaks of as the foundation of das Ding as his neighbor.”[8] Lacan’s theory of the neighbor-as-das-Ding is rooted in Freud’s conception of das Ding: “and so the complex of the neighbor divides into two constituent parts the first of which impresses through the constancy of its compos[i]tion, its persistence as a Thing, while the other is understood by means of memory-work…”[9]

Lacan characterizes das Ding as “a primordial function located at the level of the unconscious Vorstellungen.”[10] Das Ding ultimately indicates that there is no sovereign good; and thus no possibility to constitute the good in the realm of the subject. “There is good and bad and then there is das Ding” – the Thing remains unfathomable, an excess, outside of the moral relationship.

Lacan’s Ethics: A Matter of Form and Freedom

… Lacanian ethics, as Zupancic correctly points out,… it is something that happens to us, it throws us out of joint, because it always inscribes itself in a given continuity as a rupture, a break or interruption. This is when ethics comes into play; i.e. will I act in conformity to what threw me out of joint? For Lacan, emphasis is placed on desire, “have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you?” for after all, it is desire that aims at the real.[17]

Das Ding, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis … [is] that which manifests desire for the real. Thus, the real, in ethical terms is an extra moral matter, similar to what we find in Kant’s moral system.

“If a man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a good man… this cannot be brought about by gradual reformation so long as the basis of the maxims remain impure, but must be affected through a revolution in the man’s disposition… He can become a new man only by a kind of rebirth, as it were through a new creation.”[Kant, Immanuel Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Pg. 42 – 43]

Kant and Lacan are both placing ethics, and ethical change ex nihilo, and both develop their ethical systems out of a material excess, for Kant the excess is pathology, and for Lacan it is objet petite a. [21] Both systems are seeking to manage the “excess of the real,” and Zupancic argues, Lacan’s passage a la act is identical to Kant’s allegiance on form in his development of the Groundwork. For Lacan, the faculty of desire does not point to any particular act of desiring but to the frame of desiring as such, similar to how Kantian form points to duty.

The surplus in relation to legality and to the ethical is what is dealt with by form – the main point being that for Kant it is incumbent to follow the form of duty. Kantian ethics demands that an action not only conform to duty, but it mandates this conformity be the only content or motive of that action. Form itself must be appropriated as a material surplus, in order for it to determine the will, and Kantian form is the same as Lacan’s conception of objet petite a, the thing that persists beyond surplus enjoyment. The metaphysical question to both systems of ethics is virtually the same, how can form become matter?

Yet, both Lacanian and Kantian ethics seek to solve the problem of form, or how if Kantian form and Lacanian objet petite a force the subject to follow a sort of second nature, then ethics functions as a drive and isn’t ethics at all. As Zupancic argues, how Lacan dealt with objet petite a, or the surplus enjoyment left over in the domain of the real that persists for the sake of enjoyment is similar to how Kant dealt with the excess of pathology. Since the Kantian object drive is nothing but the drive of the will, and the Lacanain subject’s separation from the pathological objet petite a produces a certain remainder, a remainder that constitutes the drive of the ethical subject, both systems of thought construct ethics from very similar conceptual problems.

We are beginning to see the contours of a Lacanian subject forming that is not rooted in a nightmarish ontological rut as many have criticized Lacan, particularly those that argue his subjectivity is purely a subject constructed from language.

To the contrary, as Ed Pluth has noted in Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject, Lacan’s ethics are rooted in a view of freedom of the subject. Importantly, the Lacanian subject can change the destiny of an unconscious desire to the point of “being verbal to the second power” – since “every act of speaking involves an act of addressing an other – always implying a search for recognition from a third party other,” a true ethical act is one that does not address the big Other.

As Pluth observes, “an act does not receive recognition for its identity from an other… it is thus not the subject that acts, an ‘act subjects.’” Thus, the Lacanain subject can never locate the good in the subject, but the subject is able to overturn their lack of capacity to assume their own symbolic identity. The capacity of the subject to overturn their symbolic situation will be examined via Slavoj Žižek and Eric Santner’s reading of the ethics of psychoanalysis.

calum on Ž the act derrida part 3

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

Knowledge, for Derrida, is an indispensable prerequisite for the decision and, subsequently, for the assumption of responsibility but the decision cannot itself be reduced to knowledge without this rendering it ‘less’ than decisive, rendering it, that is, in the realm of pure calculation. On the other hand, without knowledge, there remains no possibility of responsibility insofar as responsibility would entail a context, a conception of that for and towards which one would be responsible and how.

Responsibility thus figures and can only arise between the closed automaticity of the system of knowledge and the ‘meaninglessness’ that would be beyond any systematisation.

Without exceeding knowledge, the decision is but a part of knowledge and thus not of the subject. Without returning to knowledge, the decision has no sense; it is purely arbitrary.

Is not this notion of the decision commensurate with the notion of the ethical in Lacan, with the notion of the ethical act as that which can appeal to no guarantor in the Other, as that which by definition takes place at the limits of the Symbolic order, as that which cannot be reduced to the law and yet, at the same time, must be inscribed in the Symbolic order? Is this not commensurate with the notion of the ethical as a pulsational moment which emerges from but must also assume a place in the Symbolic?

Neill’s Argument

Contra Žižek’s notion of the act which must be located absolutely beyond the Symbolic order, both Derrida’s ‘decision’ and Lacan’s ‘act’ are such that, in order to be understood as ethical, they must entail a moment of (re)inscription in the order of the comprehensible, or, for Derrida, knowledge, and for Lacan, the Symbolic.

That is to say, in insisting on the exclusivity of what he terms identification with the ‘Other-Thing’ as the defining moment of the act, Žižek might be understood to precisely
occlude the ethical potential from the act.

Returning to Antigone, if, in Žižek’s terms, her act is possible because of ‘the direct identification of her particular/determinate decision with the Other’s (Thing’s) injunction/call’, 26 then it is difficult to see in what sense such an act might be considered ethical.

It is, however, for Žižek, precisely this exclusivity, the radical suspension of the Other without recourse to a further moment of reinscription which does render the act ethical.

Antigone figures here, as we have noted, as the paramount example of the act as a moment of absolute suspension. Antigone, for Žižek, ‘does not merely relate to the Other-Thing, she – for a brief, passing moment of, precisely, decision – directly is the Thing, thus excluding herself from the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations’.27

It is in so excluding herself from the community, in situating herself beyond the regulations of the Symbolic order, that Antigone can be understood, for Žižek, to have engaged in a proper act, precisely because the act, for Žižek, is not simply ‘beyond the reality principle’ in the sense that it would be the engagement of a performative reconfiguration of reality, of, that is, the Symbolic.

Rather, the act is that which would ‘change the very co-ordinates of the “reality principle’’. This is not to suggest that for Žižek the act entails performing the impossible.

Žižek’s point concerns the very structuration of what would be considered (im)possible in the first place. The radical character of the act lies in the fact that it would be that which alters the very contours of what would be considered possible.

Or in moral terms, it would not be that which would challenge the received notion of the good but rather it would be that which would redefine what might be considered as good.

Loizidou norms

Loizidou, Elena. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.

Hegel, Lacan, Irigaray: Antigone for them is not a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implication but rather … one who articulates a pre-political opposition to politics representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it” (81-81 Loizidou citing JB in Antigone’s Claim 3)

Butler’s subject is one that comes into being through norms and language that pre-exist it. Though, let’s not forget that the subject becomes agentic through its resistance to these norms. This very constellation of the subject puts the subject within the sphere of the public. Language or norms are public. For Butler, in this sense there is no pre-political or private, our coming into the world establishes us as public and therefore political figures. 83

Let’s not forget that Antigone thought that her life was worthless if she was unable to provide her brother with the appropriate burial rites. Antigone, who comes into being through the norms that she does not possess, through a language that is not her own, a human walking towards death, offers, as Butler writes, a catachrestic reading of the human, in the sense that she has been stolen of her humanity. however, in re-appropriating and risking the truth, she turns her inhumanity, her zoe into a possibility for the future.

When Heidegger criticizes metaphysical philosophers for forgetting, in their attempt to find what it means to be human and their preoccupation with the meaning of human, he points out that the human is thrown into the world, is ek-static and through ek-stasy moves towards a future of death. … (For Butler) The human is thrown into the world, it comes into the world through language norms that are represented as culturally intelligible, but at the same time this human is always inhuman, it always resists or deliberates these norms that bring it into being.85

If we are to rethink how we can have livable and viable lives, despite how different and irreconcilable each life is to each other, we need to think of the subject within the parameters that Butler proposes: a subject that deliberates before it acts in the face of absolute difference and moves towards the Other despite this difference. 85

fichte schelling

Williams, Robert R. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Fichte says that Kant’s theory presupposes a wider inter-subjective human community

According to Fichte, the self cannot give itself the consciousness of freedom; rather the consciousness of freedom is intersubjectively mediated. Schelling qualifies the latent solipsism of transcendental idealism when maintains that the ground of free self-determination must lie partly “within” the subject and partly “outside” of the subject. Schelling’s point in affirming that the ground of freedom is divided is that freedom is social and intersubjective. Hence the ground of freedom cannot be identified with subjectivity alone; the grounds of freedom must be both “in” the subject and yet transcend the subject. Freedom and consciousness of freedom must obviously be the subject’s own doing, yet the subject is incapable of making itself and its freedom into an object and so it cannot be autonomously self-conscious in the crucial sense. Something irreducibly other is required to make the subject available to itself and to arouse the subject to freedom and responsibility.

For this reason self-consciousness and freedom require reciprocal interaction between self and other. Neither self nor other is, by itself, sufficient; consequently, the ground of freedom must be twofold, and yet correlative.

Yet the correlation of the internal and external grounds of freedom, or self and other, is not simply a positive empirical one. Schelling shares Fichte’s tendency to conceive the other in terms of negation. The other is not-I, and I am not-other. Both the other and the self mutually condition each other, but such conditioning is negative. There is no direct presence of the other to the self, or vice versa. The important concept of a doubled ground of freedom makes central the issue of coordinating and ordering the dual grounds of freedom: each self, in its independence, depends on an other that it is not. In spite of its claims to freedom and independence, each seeks security and legitimation from an other whose recognition is contingent and not guaranteed.

Since the parochial self, as self-repulsive negativity, is hidden from itself, it depends on the other for its own critical self-consciousness. that is why self-knowledge for Hegel take the form of Self-recognition in other. The road to interiority passes through the other. The self is for itself only by being for an other, and the self is for an other only by being for itself. The ‘for itself’ formulates not the beginning but the result and telos of the process of recognition.

The natural “solipsism” of desire is a condition that must be transformed and sublimated if the self is to become capable of enduring relationships with others. Hegel’s account of the process of recognition is at the same time an account of the sublimation of desire. In this process desire is fundamentally a desire for the other.

The point to be underscored here is that the other, or the confrontation with the other, both shatters the natural solipsism of the self, and “pulls” it out of its natural solipsism. The analysis of recognition therefore is also and at the same time a story of self-overcoming, through which a enlarged ethical-social mentality or Geist, is attained. (50)

Hegel conceives the individual self in its desires not as a simple, stable, quiescent self-identity but as a complex, restless, self-repulsive, negative identity. This self-repulsing negativity means that the self is not initially present to itself, much less transparent to itself. The immediate self does not yet know what it is. What it is, is still implicit and must become explicit to it.

It can become explicit to itself, that is, discover what it is, only through the mediation of an other. Self-consciousness requires an other to confirm and transform its own self-understanding. The self’s presence to itself is mediated by an other that is likewise a self-repulsing negative identity. But this does not mean tha the relation to the other is inherently or essentially negative.

Rather only the other is capable of satisfying the desire for recognition, which is at the same time a desire for an other. “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” … Believing at first that it has no need of the other, the self makes the discovery that it needs and depends on the very other that it originally deemed “unessential.”

As immediate, each self operates with the presumption of being absolute. According to Hegel, desire signifies a condition of natural egoism in which the self’s satisfaction is the end to which everything else is regarded as merely instrumental and subordinate. Natural egoism is immediate, parochial, and abstract; it excludes the other, difference, and relation. For this reason, the confrontation with the other is experienced as an abrupt self-transcendence, that is, a plunge into a relation that “others” or alters the self. In Hegel’s words: “Self-consciousness is confronted by an other self-consciousness. It has come out of itself. This has a double [equivocal] significance: first it has lost itself, because it finds itself as an other being. Second, it has thereby canceled [aufgehoben] the other, because it does not look upon the other as essential, but rather sees only itself in other.

The presence of the other precipitates a crisis in abstract parochial self-identity. The “shock” or upsurge of the other is immediate and underivable. The encounter with an other calls into question the immediate natural solipsism or naive self-identity. the encounter with the other reveals that naive or parochial self-identity is exclusive. The self achieves its identity by excluding the other. the other constitutes a shock to this naive parochial identity, which works an immediate change. The self now finds itself as other, or as “othered.” The presence of the other signifies a loss of the original naive certitude, and this may be experienced as a loss of self.

The starting point of the process of recognition is the apparent loss of self before the other, or conversely, an apparent loss of the other owing to the inability to see anything but oneself in the other. The second phase is the attempt to cancel the self-othering, which can take two forms: elimination and/or domination of the other, or finding some accommodation with the other. The former involves eliminating the other, or compelling the other to recognize. Either form of violence is self-subverting in Hegel’s view. Hegel believes that the concept of recognition must take the second path. This means that the self may “return” to itself out of its “othered” state, but it can do so only if it abandons mastery and domination. the recognition that is needed cannot be coerced or controlled.

Mutual-reciprocal recognition is possible only if coercion is renounced. The authentic “cancellation” of other-being means that the other is not eliminated but allowed to go free and affirmed. But if the other is allowed to go free, this means that is affirmed, not simply in its identity, but also in its difference. Without the release and allowing of the other to be as other, in its difference, the ‘We’ would be merely an abstract, parochial identity. The release and affirmation of the other is constitutive of the determinately universal identity of the ‘We’. The ‘We’ is not a return to abstract, parochial self-identity of the original self-certain I. It is a determinate universal that reflects both the common identity and individual differences. Releasement of the other is the condition for the other’s release of the self and the self’s “return to itself” from “being-other,” both of which constitute the We qua determinate universal.

The self’s return to itself out of self-othering is not simply a restoration of the original parochial and abstract self-identity. It is not a simple satisfaction of desire, a filling of the lack by consumption of the object. Rather the original absolute self-identity of desire is decentered and relativeized by relation to other, while being enlarged and legitimated by the other’s recognition. This return to self in freedom is intersubjectively mediated. The condition under which the self can pass through the other and the other’s freedom and return to itself affirmatively is that coercion and mastery must be given up.

response to asad and mahmood 1/4

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.

The point is not simply to expand our capacities for description or to assert the plurality of frameworks, although it is doubtless a “good” to know the cultural range of moral discourses on such questions if we are to be thoughtful and knowledgeable about the world in which we live. Nor is the point to embrace a cultural relativism that would attribute equivalence to all moral claims and position oneself as an outsider to the normative issues at hand. Rather, it seems most important to ask,

what would judgment look like that took place not “within” one framework or another but which emerged at the very site of conflict, clash, divergence, overlapping?

It would seem a practice of cultural translation would be a condition of such judgment, and that what is being judged is not only the question of whether a given action is injurious but also whether, if it is, legal remedies are the best way to approach the issue, and what other ways of acknowledging and repairing injury are available.

In my view, the point is to achieve a complex and comparative understanding of various moral discourses, not only to see why we evaluate (and value) certain norms as we do, but also to evaluate those very modes of evaluation. We do not merely shift from an evaluative position to a descriptive one (though I can see why taking a descriptive tone might work to defuse polemics on all sides), but rather seek to show that every description is already committed to an evaluative framework, prior to the question of any explicit or posterior judgment. We may think that we first describe a phenomenon and then later subject it to judgment, but if the very phenomenon at issue only “exists” within certain evaluative frameworks, then norms precede description—as is surely the case when we think about the presumptive cultural and moral frameworks brought to bear on the discussions of blasphemy against Muhammad as well as those frameworks, mainly Muslim, that were not brought to bear. … secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized).

… the point is to try to clarify why so many Muslims were outraged, and why something other than an attack on free speech by religious populations was at issue.

… secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized). This last is a strong normative claim, and I want to suggest that it becomes possible to consider the injustice of this situation of hegemonic secularism only when we pass through a certain displacement of taken-for-granted modes of moral evaluation, including certain established juridical frameworks. A certain critical perspective emerges as a consequence of comparative work. An inquiry that understands that competing and converging moral discourses require a mode of cultural analysis, perhaps anthropological, affirms cultural difference as a constant point of reference in the effort to “parochialize” certain absolutist and monolithic conceptions of normativity that serve, implicitly or explicitly, forms of cultural ignorance, racism, conquest, and domination— or, as Asad puts it, the “European revulsion against Muslim immigrants and Islam.”
Asad effectively poses the question,

why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the art of killing in the name of the secular nation, or democracy, does not?

He points out that this kind of discrepancy or schism may well constitute a “tension” at the heart of the modern subject. And this is a useful and persuasive argument, in my view. But clearly something more is at stake. We would not be alarmed by the kinds of comparisons made explicit in Asad’s questions if we did not ourselves undergo some moral horror or shock at the obvious inequalities demonstrated by the comparison. Asad’s questions derive their rhetorical force from a sense that it is unacceptable to respond with righteous outrage to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of religion and with moral complacency to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of the nation-state. There are many reasons why one might oppose various forms of death dealing, but it is only on the condition that we do, in fact, oppose violence and the differential ways it is justified that we can come to understand the normative importance of the comparative judgment that Asad’s work makes available to us.

Asad’s work not only provides new modes of description and understanding but also makes an intervention into evaluative frameworks and norms of evaluation themselves. By showing how normative dispositions (mainly secular and liberal) enter into stipulative claims (concerning objectionable violence and grievable death) that circumscribe the domain of “understanding” contemporary cultural and military conflict, Asad facilitates a critique of this parochial and consequential circumscription of operative evaluative frameworks.

Through a certain kind of comparative interrogation, one framework is interrupted by another, and thus opens up a new horizon for judgment. On the On the basis of this comparative and interruptive work, we can conclude that there is no reason to assume that justified violence, when it happens, is the sole prerogative of states, and that unjustified violence, when it happens, is the exercise of illegitimate states and insurgency movements. Such a conclusion not only has consequences for how we proceed normatively but also constitutes itself as a strong normative claim.

If Asad’s comparative questions upset us, as I think they do, that is because we become aware of the contingent conditions under which we feel shock, outrage, and moral revulsion. And since we can only make sense of why we would feel so much more horror in the face of one mode of death dealing than in the face of another through recourse to implicitly racist and civilizational schemes organizing and sustaining affect differentially, we end up feeling shocked and outraged by our lack of shock.

The posing of the comparative question, under the right conditions, induces new moral sentiments that are bound up with new moral judgments. We realize that we have already judged or evaluated the worth of certain lives over others, certain modes of death dealing over others, and that realization is at the same time a judgment, an evaluation, namely, that such differential judgments are unjustified and wrong.

For Benjamin, the principles of homogeneity, substitutability, and continuity that come to structure temporality and matter under conditions of capitalism have to be actively interrupted by the way in which the premodern erupts into the modern. Would this notion of critique not be useful to those who seek to show how the progressive conceits of secularization are confounded by animated anachronisms, fragments from the premodern that disrupt the claims of modernity, and prove central—and potentially fatal—to its operation?

As a mode of living and even a mode of subject constitution, critique is understood as a “practice” that incorporates norms into the very formation of the subject. The subject does not own itself, but is always dispossessed by the norms by which it is formed. Is this conception of no use to the critique of secular presumptions?

Even in Kant, it is important to note that critique is not precisely a judgment, but an inquiry into the conditions of possibility that make judgment possible. That inquiry is, and must be, separate from judgment itself. The Kantian position is that our ways of knowing are structured prior to the possibility of our judgment, and that these form conditions of possibility for any judgment. Kant, of course, sought to understand the universal and timeless features of cognition in his effort to articulate the preconditions of judgment, but it is surely possible to transpose a Kantian procedure onto a historical scheme, as Foucault sought to do. When that happens we can ask, how is our knowledge organized by specific historical schemes prior to any possibility of judgment, and how do our judgments rely upon those prior organizations of knowledge? If this is right, and if this constitutes a certain historical transposition of the Kantian project of “critique,” then

critique would be an inquiry into the ways that knowledge is organized prior to the specific acts of knowledge we perform, including the kinds of judgments we make. In this sense, following Kant, critique is prior to judgment and perhaps closer to Asad’s project than would at first appear.

When we ask what historically formed schemes of evaluation condition and inform our shock and outrage over suicide bombing and our righteous coldness in the face of statesponsored violence, it seems to me that we are trying to delimit the historical conditions of possibility for affective and evaluative response. Asad and Mahmood both have tried to show how secularism functions tacitly to structure and organize our moral responses within a dominant Euro-Atlantic context, and in so doing they seem to be asking us to call into question the taken-forgranted ways that such schemes inform and move us.

Comparative work, perhaps anthropology itself, seeks to displace us from that taken-for-granted set of presumptions, ones that assume a certain process of secularization as yielding universal truths, and that therefore parochialize a very specific, sometimes lethal, tradition within the West.

It seems to me that critique designates the process of trying to delimit knowledge, indicating not so much a completed or successful action as an ongoing task to fathom and describe the various ways of organizing knowledge that are tacitly operating as the preconditions of various “acts” of knowledge. This incomplete effort to delimit and name the conditions of possibility is not itself a judgment; it is an effort to fathom, collect, and identify that upon which we depend when we claim to know anything at all. The ways to do this are various:

through tracing internal contradictions, through comparing and contrasting alternative cultural lexicons for similar concepts, through offering a historical account of how a set of culturally specific assumptions became recast as universal and postcultural.

If this is one set of critical practices, how different is “critique” from Asad’s own critical procedure, finally?

udi aloni judith butler interview

Judith Butler Interview with Udi Aloni February 2010

Online version 1 and another version

Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation below, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel.

In Israel, people know you well. Your name was even in the popular film Ha-Buah [The Bubble – the tragic tale of a gay relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim].

[laughs] Although I disagreed with the use of my name in that context. I mean, it was very funny to say, “don’t Judith Butler me,” but “to Judith Butler someone” meant to say something very negative about men and to identify with a form of feminism that was against men. And I’ve never been identified with that form of feminism. That?s not my mode. I’m not known for that. So it seems like it was confusing me with a radical feminist view that one would associate with Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, a completely different feminist modality. I’m not always calling into question who’s a man and who’s not, and am I a man? Maybe I’m a man. [laughs] Call me a man. I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women’s safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.

A beautiful Israeli poem asks, “How does one become Avot Yeshurun?” Avot Yeshurun was a poet who caused turmoil in Israeli poetry. I want to ask, how does one become Judith Butler -especially with the issue of Gender Trouble, the book that so troubled the discourse on gender?

You know, I’m not sure that I know how to give an account of it, and I think it troubles gender differently depending on how it is received and translated. For instance, one of the first receptions [of the book] was in Germany, and there, it seemed very clear that young people wanted a politics that emphasized agency, or something affirmative that they could create or produce. The idea of performativity – which involved bringing categories into being or bringing new social realities about – was very exciting, especially for younger people who were tired with old models of oppression – indeed, the very model men oppress women, or straights oppress gays.

It seemed that if you were subjugated, there were also forms of agency that were available to you, and you were not just a victim, or you were not only oppressed, but oppression could become the condition of your agency. Certain kinds of unexpected results can emerge from the situation of oppression if you have the resources and if you have collective support. It’s not an automatic response; it’s not a necessary response. But it’s possible. I think I also probably spoke to something that was already happening in the movement. I put into theoretical language what was already being impressed upon me from elsewhere. So I didn’t bring it into being single-handedly. I received it from several cultural resources and put it into another language.

Once you became “Judith Butler,” we began to hear more about Jews and Jewish texts. People came to hear you speak about gender and suddenly they were faced with Gaza, divine violence. It almost felt like you had some closure on the previous matter. Is there a connection, a continuum, or is this a new phase?

Let’s go back further. I’m sure I’ve told you that I began to be interested in philosophy when I was 14, and I was in trouble in the synagogue. The rabbi said, “You are too talkative in class. You talk back, you are not well behaved. You have to come and have a tutorial with me.” I said “OK, great!” I was thrilled.

He said: “What do you want to study in the tutorial? This is your punishment. Now you have to study something seriously.” I think he thought of me as unserious. I explained that I wanted to read existential theology focusing on Martin Buber. (I’ve never left Martin Buber.) I wanted look at the question of whether German idealism could be linked with National Socialism. Was the tradition of Kant and Hegel responsible in some way for the origins of National Socialism? My third question was why Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue. I wanted to know what happened and whether the synagogue was justified.

Now I must go Jewish: what was your parents’ relation to Judaism?

My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.

My mother’s uncles and aunts were all killed in Hungary [during the Holocaust]. My grandmother lost all of her relatives, except for the two nephews who came with them in the car when my grandmother went back in 1938 to see who she could rescue. It was important for me. I went to Hebrew school. But I also went after school to special classes on Jewish ethics because I was interested in the debates. So I didn’t do just the minimum. Through high school, I suppose, I continued Jewish studies alongside my public school education.

And you showed me the photos of the bar mitzvah of your son as a good proud Jewish Mother…

So it’s been there from the start, it’s not as if I arrived at some place that I haven’t always been in. I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth. I mean, I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn’t trust anybody outside. You’d bring someone home and the first question was “Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?” Then I entered into a lesbian community in college, late college, graduate school, and the first thing they asked was, “Are you a feminist, are you not a feminist?” “Are you a lesbian, are you not a lesbian?” and I thought “Enough with the separatism!”

It felt like the same kind of policing of the community. You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity. Is that person really Jewish, maybe they’re not so Jewish. I don’t know if they’re really Jewish. Maybe they’re self-hating. Is that person lesbian? I think maybe they had a relationship with a man. What does that say about how true their identity was? I thought I can’t live in a world in which identity is being policed in this way.

But if I go back to your other question… In Gender Trouble, there is a whole discussion of melancholy. What is the condition under which we fail to grieve others? I presumed, throughout my childhood, that this was a question the Jewish community was asking itself. It was also a question that I was interested in when I went to study in Germany. The famous Mitscherlich book on the incapacity to mourn, which was a criticism of German post-war culture, was very, very interesting to me.

In the 70s and 80s, in the gay and lesbian community, it became clear to me that very often, when a relationship would break up, a gay person wouldn’t be able to tell their parents, his or her parents. So here, people were going through all kinds of emotional losses that were publicly unacknowledged and that became very acute during the AIDS crisis. In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, “I have just lost the love of my life.”

This was extremely important to my thinking throughout the 80s and 90s. But it also became important to me as I started to think about war.

After 9/11, I was shocked by the fact that there was public mourning for many of the people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, less public mourning for those who died in the attack on the Pentagon, no public mourning for the illegal workers of the WTC, and, for a very long time, no public acknowledgment of the gay and lesbian families and relationships that had been destroyed by the loss of one of the partners in the bombings.

Then we went to war very quickly, Bush having decided that the time for grieving is over. I think he said that after ten days, that the time for grieving is over and now is time for action. At which point we started killing populations abroad with no clear rationale. And the populations we targeted for violence were ones that never appeared to us in pictures. We never got little obituaries for them. We never heard anything about what lives had been destroyed. And we still don’t.

I then moved towards a different kind of theory, asking under what conditions certain lives are grievable and certain lives not grievable or ungrievable.

It’s clear to me that in Israel-Palestine and in the violent conflicts that have taken place over the years, there is differential grieving. Certain lives become grievable within the Israeli press, for instance – highly grievable and highly valuable – and others are understood as ungrievable because they are understood as instruments of war, or they are understood as outside the nation, outside religion, or outside that sense of belonging which makes for a grievable life. The question of grievability has linked my work on queer politics, especially the AIDS crisis, with my more contemporary work on war and violence, including the work on Israel-Palestine.

It’s interesting because when the war on Gaza started, I couldn’t stay in Tel Aviv anymore. I visited the Galilee a lot. And suddenly I realized that many of the Palestinians who died in Gaza have families there, relatives who are citizens of Israel. What people didn’t know is that there was a massed grief in Israel. Grief for families who died in Gaza, a grief within Israel, of citizens of Israel. And nobody in the country spoke about it, about the grief within Israel. It was shocking.

The Israeli government and the media started to say that everyone who was killed or injured in Gaza was a member of Hamas; or that they were all being used as part of the war effort; that even the children were instruments of the war effort; that the Palestinians put them out there, in the targets, to show that Israelis would kill children, and this was actually part of a war effort. At this point, every single living being who is Palestinian becomes a war instrument. They are all, in their being, or by virtue of being Palestinian, declaring war on Israel or seeking the destruction of the Israel.

So any and all Palestinian lives that are killed or injured are understood no longer to be lives, no longer understood to be living, no longer understood even to be human in a recognizable sense, but they are artillery. The bodies themselves are artillery. And of course, the extreme instance of that is the suicide bomber, who has become unpopular in recent years. That is the instance in which a body becomes artillery, or becomes part of a violent act. If that figure gets extended to the entire Palestinian population, then there is no living human population anymore, and no one who is killed there can be grieved. Because everyone who is a living Palestinian is, in their being, a declaration of war, or a threat to the existence of Israel, or pure military artillery, materiel. They have been transformed, in the Israeli war imaginary, into pure war instruments.

So when a people who believes that another people is out to destroy them sees all the means of destruction killed, or some extraordinary number of the means of destruction destroyed, they are thrilled, because they think their safety and well-being and happiness are being purchased, are being achieved through this destruction.

And what happened with the perspective from the outside, the outside media, was extremely interesting to me. The European press, the U.S. press, the South American press, the East Asian press all raised questions about the excessive violence of the Gaza assault. It was very strange to see how the Israeli media made the claim that people on the outside do not understand; that people on the outside are anti-Semitic; that people on the outside are blaming Israel for defending themselves when they themselves, if attacked, would do the exact same thing.

Why Israel-Palestine? Is this directly connected to your Jewishness?

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps. There were those who would and could speak out against state racism and state violence, and it was imperative that we be able to speak out. Not just for Jews, but for any number of people. There was an entire idea of social justice that emerged for me from the consideration of the Nazi genocide.

I would also say that what became really hard for me is that if one wanted to criticize Israeli state violence – precisely because that as a Jew one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state racism – then one is in a bind, because one is told that one is either self-hating as a Jew or engaging anti-Semitism. And yet for me, it comes out of a certain Jewish value of social justice. So how can I fulfill my obligation as a Jew to speak out against an injustice when, in speaking out against Israeli state and military injustice, I am accused of not being a good enough Jew or of being a self-hating Jew? This is the bind of my current situation.

Let me say one other thing about Jewish values. There are two things I took from Jewish philosophy and my Jewish formation that were really important for me… well there are many. There are many.

Sitting shiva, for instance, explicit grieving. I thought it was the one of the most beautiful rituals of my youth. There were several people who died in my youth, and there were several moments when whole communities gathered in order to make sure that those who had suffered terrible losses were taken up and brought back into the community and given a way to affirm life again. The other idea was that life is transient, and because of that, because there is no after world, because we don’t have any hopes in a final redemption, we have to take especially good care of life in the here and now. Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.

I realized something, through your way of thinking. A classic mistake that people made with Gender Trouble was the notion that body and language are static. But everything is in dynamic and in constant movement; the original never exists. In a way I felt the same with the Diaspora and the emancipation. Neither are static. No one came before the other. The Diaspora, when it was static, became separatist, became the shtetl. And when the emancipation was realized, it became an ethnocratic state; it also became separatist, a re-construction of the ghetto. So maybe the tension between the two, emancipation and Diaspora, without choosing a one or the other, is the only way to keep us out of ethnocentrism. I suppose my idea is not yet fully formulated. It relates to the way I felt that my grandfather was open to the language of exile while being connected to the land at the same time. By being open to both, emancipation and Diaspora, we might avoid falling into ethnocentrism.

You have a tension between Diaspora and emancipation. But what I am thinking of is perhaps something a little different. I have to say, first of all, that I do not think that there can be emancipation with and through the establishment of state that restricts citizenship in the way that it does, on the basis of religion? So in my view, any effort to retain the idea of emancipation when you don’t have a state that extends equal rights of citizenship to Jews and non-Jews alike is, for me, bankrupt. It’s bankrupt.

That’s why I would say that there should be bi-nationalism from the beginning.

Or even multi-nationalism. Maybe even a kind of citizenship without regard to religion, race, ethnicity, etc. In any case, the more important point here is that there are those who clearly believe that Jews who are not in Israel, who are in the Galut, are actually either in need of return ? they have not yet returned, or they are not and cannot be representative of the Jewish people. So the question is: what does it mean to transform the idea of Galut into Diaspora? In other words, Diaspora is another tradition, one that involves the scattering without return. I am very critical of this idea of return, and I think “Galut” very often demeans the Diasporic traditions within Judaism.

I thought that if we make a film about bi-nationalism, the opening scene should be a meeting of “The First Jewish Congress for Bi-Nationalism.” It could be a secret meeting in which we all discuss who we would like to be our first president, and the others there send me to choose you? because we need to have a woman, and she has to be queer. But not only queer, and not only woman. She has to be the most important Jewish philosopher today.

But seriously, you know, it would be astonishing to think about what forms of political participation would still be possible on a model of federal government. Like a federated authority for Palestine-Israel that was actually governed by a strong constitution that guaranteed rights regardless of cultural background, religion, ethnicity, race, and the rest. In a way, bi-nationalism goes part of the way towards explaining what has to happen. And I completely agree with you that there has to be a cultural movement that overcomes hatred and paranoia and that actually draws on questions of cohabitation. Living in mixity and in diversity, accepting your neighbor, finding modes of living together. And no political solution, at a purely procedural level, is going to be successful if there is no bilingual education, if there are no ways of reorganizing neighborhoods, if there are no ways of reorganizing territory, bringing down the wall, accepting the neighbors you have, and accepting that there are profound obligations that emerge from being adjacent to another people in this way.

So I agree with you. But I think we have to get over the idea that a state has to express a nation. And if we have a bi-national state, it’s expressing two nations. Only when bi-nationalism deconstructs the idea of a nation can we hope to think about what a state, what a polity might look like that would actually extend equality. It is no longer the question of “two peoples,” as Martin Buber put it. There is extraordinary complexity and intermixing among both the Jewish and the Palestinian populations. There will be those who say, “Ok, a state that expresses two cultural identities.” No. State should not be in the business of expressing cultural identity.

Why do we use term “bi-nationalism?” For me it is the beginning of a process, not the end. We could say “multi-nationalism,” or “one-state solution.” Why do we prefer to use the term “bi-nationalism” rather than “one state” now?

I believe that people have reasonable fears that a one-state solution would ratify the existing marginalization and impoverishment of the Palestinian people. That Palestine would be forced to accept a kind of Bantustan existence.

Or vice versa, for the Jews.

Well, the Jews would be afraid of losing demographic majority if voting rights were extended to Palestinians. I do think that there is the fundamental question of “Who is this ‘we’?” Who are we? The question of bi-nationalism raises the question of who is the “we” who decides what kind of polity is best for this land. The “we” has to be heterogeneous; it has to be mixed. Everyone who is there and has a claim – and the claims are various. They come from traditional and legal grounds of belonging that are quite complicated. So one has to be open to that complication.

Now I want to move to the last part of the conversation. It was over three years ago, at the beginning of the Second Lebanon war, that Slavoj Žižek came to Israel to give a speech on my film Forgiveness. The Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asked him not to come to the Jerusalem Film Festival. They said that I should show my film – as Israelis shouldn’t boycott Israel, but they asked international figures to boycott the festival.

Žižek, who was the subject of one of the films in the festival, said he would not speak about that film. But he asked: why not support the opposition in Israel by speaking about Forgiveness? They answered that he could support the opposition, but not in an official venue. He did not know what to do.

Žižek chose to ask for your advice. Your position then, if I recall correctly, was that it was most important to exercise, solidarity with colleagues who chose nonviolent means of resistance and that it was a mistake to take money from Israeli cultural institutions. Your suggestion to Žižek was that he speak about the film without being a guest of the festival. He gave back the money and announced that he was not a guest. There was no decision about endorsing or not endorsing a boycott. For me, at the time, the concept of cultural boycott was kind of shocking, a strange concept. The movement has since grown a lot, and I know that you’ve done a lot of thinking about it. I wonder what do you think about this movement now, the full Boycott, Diversion and Sanction movement (BDS), three years after that confusing event?

I think that the BDS movement has taken several forms, and it is probably important to distinguish among them. I would say that around six or seven years ago, there was a real confusion about what was being boycotted, what goes under the name of “boycott.” There were some initiatives that seemed to be directed against Israeli academics, or Israeli filmmakers, cultural producers, or artists that did not distinguish between their citizenship and their participation, active or passive, in occupation politics. We must keep in mind that the BDS movement has always been focused on the occupation. It is not a referendum on Zionism, and it does not take an explicit position on the one-state or two-state solution. And then there were those who sought to distinguish boycotting individual Israelis from boycotting the Israeli institutions. But it is not always easy to know how to make the distinction between who is an individual and who is an institution. And I think a lot of people within the U.S. and Europe just backed away, thinking that it was potentially discriminatory to boycott individuals or, indeed, institutions on the basis of citizenship, even though many of those who were reluctant very much wanted to find a way to support a non-violent resistance to the occupation.

But now I feel that it has become more possible, more urgent to reconsider the politics of the BDS. It is not that the principles of the BDS have changed: they have not. But there are now ways to think about implementing the BDS that keep in mind the central focus: any event, practice, or institution that seeks to normalize the occupation, or presupposes that “ordinary” cultural life can continue without an explicit opposition to the occupation is itself complicit with the occupation.

We can think of this as passive complicity, if you like. But the main point is to challenge those institutions that seek to separate the occupation from other cultural activities. The idea is that we cannot participate in cultural institutions that act as if there is no occupation or that refuse to take a clear and strong stand against the occupation and dedicate their activities to its undoing. So, with this in mind, we can ask, what does it mean to engage in boycott? It means that, for those of us on the outside, we can only go to an Israeli institution, or an Israeli cultural event, in order to use the occasion to call attention to the brutality and injustice of the occupation and to articulate an opposition to it.

I think that’s what Naomi Klein did, and I think it actually opened up another route for interpreting the BDS principles. It is no longer possible for me to come to Tel Aviv and talk about gender, Jewish philosophy, or Foucault, as interesting as that might be for me; it is certainly not possible to take money from an organization or university or a cultural organization that is not explicitly and actively anti-occupation, acting as if the cultural event within Israeli borders was not happening against the background of occupation? Against the background of the assault on, and continuing siege of, Gaza? It is this unspoken and violent background of “ordinary” cultural life that needs to become the explicit object of cultural and political production and criticism. Historically, I see no other choice, since affirming the status quo means affirming the occupation. One cannot “set aside” the radical impoverishment, the malnutrition, the limits on mobility, the intimidation and harassment at the borders, and the exercise of state violence in both Gaza and the West Bank and talk about other matters in public? If one were to talk about other matters, then one is actively engaged in producing a limited public sphere of discourse which has the repression and, hence, continuation of violence as its aim.

Let us remember that the politics of boycott are not just matters of “conscience” for left intellectuals within Israel or outside. The point of the boycott is to produce and enact an international consensus that calls for the state of Israel to comply with international law. The point is to insist on the rights of self-determination for Palestinians, to end the occupation and colonization of Arab lands, to dismantle the Wall that continues the illegal seizure of Palestinian land, and to honor several UN resolutions that have been consistently defied by the Israeli state, including UN resolution 194, which insists upon the rights of refugees from 1948.

So, an approach to the cultural boycott in particular would have to be one that opposes the normalization of the occupation in order to bring into public discourse the basic principles of injustice at stake. There are many ways to articulate those principles, and this is where intellectuals are doubtless under a political obligation to become innovative, to use the cultural means at our disposal to make whatever interventions we can.

The point is not simply to refuse contact and forms of cultural and monetary exchange – although sometimes these are most important – but rather, affirmatively, to lend one’s support to the strongest anti-violent movement against the occupation that not only affirms international law, but establishing exchanges with Palestinian cultural and academic workers, cultivating international consensus on the rights of the Palestinian people, but also altering that hegemonic presumption within the global media that any critique of Israel is implicitly anti-democratic or anti-Semitic.

Surely it has always been the best part of the Jewish intellectual tradition to insist upon the ethical relation to the non-Jew, the extension of equality and justice, and the refusal to keep silent in the face of egregrious wrongs.

I want to share with you what Riham Barghouti, from BDS New York, told me. She said that, for her, BDS is a movement for everyone who supports the end of the occupation, equal rights for the Palestinians of 1948, and the moral and legal demand of the Palestinians’ right of return. She suggested that each person who is interested, decide how much of the BDS spectrum he or she is ready to accept. In other words, endorsement of the boycott movement is a continuous decision, not a categorical one. Just don’t tell us what our guidelines are. You can agree with our principles, join the movement, and decide on the details on your own.

Yes, well, one can imagine a bumper sticker: “what part of ‘justice’ do you fail to understand?” It is surely important that many prominent Israelis have begun to accept part of the BDS principles, and this may well be an incremental way to make the boycott effort more understandable. But it may also be important to ask,

why is it that so many left [wing] Israelis have trouble entering into collaborative politics with Palestinians on the issue of the boycott, and why is it that the Palestinian formulations of the boycott do not form the basis for that joint effort? After all, the BDS call has been in place since 2005; it is an established and growing movement, and the basic principles have been worked out.

Any Israeli can join that movement, and they would doubtless fine that they would immediately be in greater contact with Palestinians than they otherwise would be. The BDS provides the most powerful rubric for Israeli-Palestinian cooperative actions. This is doubtless surprising and paradoxical for some, but it strikes me as historically true.

It’s interesting to me that very often Israelis I speak to say, “We cannot enter into collaboration with the Palestinians because they don’t want to collaborate with us, and we don’t blame them.” Or: “We would put them in a bad position if we were to invite them to our conferences.” Both of these positions presume the occupation as background, but they do not address it directly. Indeed, these kinds of positions are biding time when there is no time but now to make one’s opposition known. Very often, such utterances take on a position of self-paralyzing guilt which actually keeps them from taking active and productive responsibility for opposing the occupation even more remote.

Sometimes it seems to me that they make boycott politics into a question of moral conscience, which is different from a political commitment. If it is a moral issue, then “I” as an Israeli have a responsibility to speak out or against, to sink into self-beratement or become self-flagellating in public and become a moral icon. But these kinds of moral solutions are, I think, besides the point. They continue to make “Israeli” identity into the basis of the political position, which is a kind of tacit nationalism. Perhaps the point is to oppose the manifest injustice in the name of broader principles of international law and the opposition to state violence, the disenfranchisement politically and economically of the Palestinian people. If you happen to be Israeli, then unwittingly your position shows that Israelis can and do take positions in favor of justice, and that should not be surprising. But it does not make it an “Israeli” position.

But let me return to the question of whether boycott politics undermines collaborative ventures, or opens them up. My wager is that the minute you come out in favor of some boycott, divestment or sanctions strategy, Udi, you will have many collaborators among Palestinians. I think many people fear that the boycott is against collaboration, but in fact Israelis have the power to produce enormous collaborative networks if they agree that they will use their public power, their cultural power, to oppose the occupation through the most powerful non-violent means available. Things change the minute you say, “We cannot continue to act as normal.”

Of course, I myself really want to be able to talk about novels, film, and philosophy, sometimes quite apart from politics. Unfortunately, I cannot do that in Israel now. I cannot do it until the occupation has been successfully and actively challenged. The fact is that there is no possibility of going to Israel without being used either as an example of boycott or as an example of anti-boycott. So when I went, many years ago, and the rector of Tel Aviv University said, “Look how lucky we are. Judith Butler has come to Tel Aviv University, a sign that she does not accept the boycott,” I was instrumentalized against my will. And I realized I cannot function in that public space without already being defined in the boycott debate. So there is no escape from it. One can stay quiet and accept the status quo, or one can take a position that seeks to challenge the status quo.

I hope one day there will be a different political condition where I might go there and talk about Hegel, but that is not possible now. I am very much looking forward to teaching at Bir Zeit in February. It has a strong gender and women’s studies faculty, and I understand that the students are interested in discussing questions of war and cultural analysis. I also clearly stand to learn. The boycott is not just about saying “no” – it is also a way to give shape to one’s work, to make alliances, and to insist on international norms of justice. To work to the side of the problem of the occupation is to participate in its normalization. And the way that normalization works is to efface or distort that reality within public discourse. As a result, neutrality is not an option.

So we’re boycotting normalization.

That’s what we’re boycotting. We are against normalization. And you know what, there are going to be many tactics for disrupting the normalization of the occupation. Some of us will be well-equipped to intervene with images and words, and others will continue demonstrations and other forms of cultural and political statements. The question is not what your passport says (if you have a passport), but what you do. We are talking about what happens in the activity itself. Does it disrupt and contest the normalization of the occupation?

You remember that in Toronto declaration against the spotlight on Tel Aviv at the film festival, it was very clear that we do not boycott individuals, but the Israeli foreign minister tried to argue that we were boycotting individuals. Yet the question is about institutions. On that note, I want to clarify: You will not speak in Tel Aviv University… forever? Well, not forever…

When it’s a fabulous bi-national university [laughter]

Udi Aloni is an Israeli-American filmmaker and writer

butler insurrection at the level of ontology

I am referring not only to humans not regarded as human, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion. It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. (Precarious Life, Verso 2004, 33.)

butler desire recognition

The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine (35).

To revise recognition as an ethical project, we will need to see it as, in principle, unsatisfiable (43).

🙂 Butler maintains that going back to some of her earliest debates over the perils of seeking to come establish common principles on the identity of political subjects in order to engage in political action. At that time Butler discouraged attempts to discipline the feminist subject around a core set of features. But the debate has matured greatly since those early days. Now the political salience of fluid identities has been displaced by Butler who rejects the ontological moorings that would even lay claim to any claim of an ‘identity’ as an ontology of ‘identity’ is rejected. For Butler, it isn’t that identities are bad, or not useful, of course we have identities to a certain degree to function every day, however, in the realm of politics, of being addressed, of having to give an account in various state and other social institutional frames, immigration hearing, marriage ceremony, citizenship hearing, child adoption, job application, and other social arrangements and institutional settings that require one to give an account and stand in judgement of that account. Butler’s ethico-political project is to overturn and open up the the normative frames within which these institution function. The formation of the subject relies on a social ontology and for Butler this means that she underscores the importance of relations that humans depend upon in order for a human life to flourish. Relations with primary caregivers at the start of life, relations with other sentient life forms and the environment, all figure in to Butler’s project of a non-anthropocentric conception of the human

even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness. (interview in 2009 Theory and Event)

… desire sets the limits and the conditions for the operation of recognition itself. Indeed, a certain desire to persist, we might say, following Spinoza, underwrites recognition, so that forms of recognition or, indeed, forms of judgment that seek to relinquish or destroy the desire to persist, the desire for life itself, undercut the very preconditions of recognition (44).

This failure to narrate fully may well indicate the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others. Although some would say that to be a split subject, or a subject whose access to itself is forever opaque, incapable of self-grounding, is precisely not to have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, the way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives. The purpose here is not to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence, but only to point out that our “incoherence” establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustaind by a social world that is beyond us and before us (64).

butler frames of war

Judith Butler, Frames of War. New York: Verso, 2009.

The point, however will be to ask how such norms operate to produce certain subjects as “recognizable” persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize. The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially. What new norms are possible, and how are they wrought? What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability? What might be done, in other words, to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to produce more radically democratic results? 6

Indeed, every normative instance is shadowed by its own failure, and very often that failure assumes a figural form. The figure lays claim to no certain ontological status, and though it can be apprehended as “living,” it is not always recognized as a life.

What one is pressing for, calling for, is not a sudden break with the entirety of a past in the name of a radically new future. The “break” is nothing other than a series of significant shifts that follow from the iterable structure of the norm. 169.

aboriginal women in canada

That hundreds of aboriginal women can disappear without any popular concern or consternation is proof they lack recognition as properly human. For Canada to take conscious note of the plight of aboriginal woman requires a mutation in the modality of the liberal subject. To this extent, Antigone is not the thousands of Aboriginal women who remain nameless, faceless, less than human, Antigone has yet to arrive. Antigone will emerge simultaneous with a new field of the human, that is when a properly political act succeeds in rupturing the facade of the symbolic, when an aboriginal woman emerges so as to appear monstrous, psychotic, a true ‘terrorist’ of theCanadian way of life.

News article here Sept 4 2009