Dean, Jodi. “Politics without Politics” Parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 3, 20\u201336.<\/p>\n
In this concrete sense, \u017di\u017eek is right to claim that attachment to democracy is the form our attachment to capital takes<\/strong>. In the consumption and entertainment-driven setting of the contemporary United States, one\u2019s commitments to capitalism are expressed as commitments to democracy. They are the same way of life, the same daily practices of \u2018aware-ing\u2019 oneself and expressing one\u2019s opinion, of choosing and voting and considering one\u2019s choice a vote and one\u2019s vote a choice.<\/p>\n … democracy names left castration (\u2018I know, but nevertheless\u2019). Because the left presents itself as appealing to and supporting democracy, it fails to take a stand, to name an enemy. Instead of drawing a line and saying what it is against, what it excludes, left political theory in the contemporary United States advocates inclusion, universality, multiplicity, the plurality of modes of becoming, and ethical responsiveness (Dean 21).<\/p>\n Insofar as left political theory adopts democracy as its primary aspiration, it disavows the fundamental antagonism<\/strong> conditioning politics as such. For the left (in the United States and in parts of the European Union), democracy thus takes the form of a fantasy of politics without politics (like fascism is a form of capitalism without capitalism): everyone and everything is included, respected, valued, and entitled. No one is made to feel uncomfortable. Everyone is heard and seen and recognized and has a place at the table (George Lakoff identifies Barak Obama as a key figure in the new politics, which is precisely this \u2018politics\u2019 of unity, empathy, and understanding) (Dean 21).<\/p>\n There are at least three sites a theory of democracy might a. democracy might designate a site of resistance, struggle or opposition;<\/p>\n b. democracy might designate a system of governance, order, or rule;<\/p>\n c. democracy might designate a society, culture, or spirit (ambient milieu).<\/p>\n Which of these three is correct? Derrideans would say the fourth one: democracy is always to come and hence necessarily exceeds the three aforementioned sites. But this answer is just another version of \u2018I know but nevertheless\u2019. Democracy remains an ideological fantasy covering the failures, excesses, and obscenities of real existing democracy. The Derridean response thus returns me back to where I started: democracy as the solution to the problems of democracy or the democratic capture of left aspirations to equitable and sustainable distributions of resources, labor, and its products.<\/p>\n Derridean democracy to come and the post-politics, post-democracy thesis are two sides of the same coin. They are two aspects of democratic time, past and future, but not now (\u017di\u017eek might say that their relation is that of a parallax; we can see democracy from each perspective but not from the two perspectives simultaneously). Consider a chant repeated at hundreds and thousands of protests over the last decade: What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Now! This chant works as a protest because it is clearly impossible. What would happen if the response were \u2018Okay, protestors, you\u2019ve got your democracy. Now what are you going to do?\u2019 Imagine the executive branch of the US government walking off the job, handing their codes and files and top-secret stamps to the throngs outside their gates, the protestors wondering what to do with their puppets, signs, and bongos as they fragment into affinity groups and try to decide what their goals and priorities are. The protestors are not really demanding democracy now. Their demand is not meant to be met. Democracy has already arrived \u2013 as language of right and left, governance and electoral politics, ambient milieu. This is what democracy looks like, real existing democracy. To avoid the trauma of the real, of getting what we wished for, leftists move from actuality to possibility (from what we have to what could be) … (Dean 25).<\/p>\n But this move from actual to possible democracy doesn\u2019t quite work. It misses its own movement or moving, the torsion that the shift from actual to possible entails. \u017di\u017eek\u2019s description of the temporal anamorphosis (distortion) of objet petit a is appropriate here:<\/p>\n Spatially, a is an object whose proper contours are discernible only if we glimpse it askance; it is forever indiscernible to the straightforward look. Temporally, it is an object which exists only qua anticipated or lost, only in the modality of not-yet or not-anymore, never in the This description applies to democracy. Democracy is anticipated or lost, but never present. When one looks at the present, all one sees is a gap, perhaps manifested by multiple attempts to fill it, as in the various definitions of democracy as resistance, governance, or ambient milieu.<\/p>\n There can be past democratic ideals \u2013 nostalgic fantasies of Athens, town meetings, our days in the resistance \u2013 or there can be hope for the future, justification of present acts in terms of this future, but there isn\u2019t responsibility now. So disavowing democracy\u2019s arrival, democracy now, contemporary left fantasies of democracy animate its diagnoses of post-politics and inspire its rejections of law, regulation, and the state.<\/p>\n In the account I\u2019ve offered thus far, democracy appears as an obscure object-cause of desire, something that can never be fully attained or reached without ending the desire for it. But this is only one aspect of objet a. The other is its status in drive, not as something lost but as a hole or gap, not as an impossible lost object but as loss itself.<\/p>\n DRIVE<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Drawing from Lacan, \u017di\u017eek construes drive as fixation, not as the thing onto which one is fixated. In drive, enjoyment comes from missing one\u2019s goal, from the repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach it that start to become satisfying on their own. Drive circulates around an object, generating satisfaction through this very circulation. Perhaps paradoxically, then, drive is at the same time disruptive. Fixation cuts into and derails the regular course of things, what is taken for the conventional patterns of everyday life, assessments of benefit and risk, pragmatic realism, and the organic attempts to secure the conditions of life. It\u2019s a traumatic kernel in the reality of the symbolic order itself.<\/p>\n This drive dimension better describes democracy for the left; it is our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing<\/strong>. It accounts for the attachments and repetitions to which we are stuck, even as this very stuckness undermines our possibilities for political efficacy. Democratic drive, then, is another way of conceiving democracy as ambient milieu, a way that highlights the circulation we can\u2019t avoid, but which at the same time can\u2019t be understood as giving us what we want even as it gives us something else instead, some kick of enjoyment. We protest. We talk.We complain.We undercut our every assertion, criticizing its exclusivity, partiality, and fallibility in advance as if some kind of purity were possible, as if we could avoid getting our hands dirty. We sign petitions and forward them to everyone in our mailbox, fetishizing communication technologies as the solution to our problems. We worry about conservatives even as we revel in our superiority \u2013 how can anyone be so stupid? We enjoy (Dean 26).<\/p>\n I\u2019ve presented post-politics and democracy-to-come as two sides of the same coin. I\u2019ve suggested that the gap separating and connecting them be thought in terms of the closed circuit of drive rather than the openness of desire. So understood, democracy is not what we seek but never reach, not a name for political desire as such, but instead a term for the capture of political aspiration in the circuit of drive. Democracy is a remnant from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we have yet to escape. Differently put, if democracy names a political desire that is never fulfilled, My argument is that gaps<\/strong> emerge; they are political, and contemporary democracy organizes enjoyment as an effect of circling around these gaps<\/strong>. Rancie` re\u2019s narrativization, then, is better understood an image of the capture of politics in the circuits of democratic drive. The contemporary setting is not one of simple opposition between post-political consensus and the eruption of irrational violence (and eruption Rancie`re views as a return of the archaic). Rather, it involves the satisfaction of the democratic drive as its aims remain inhibited<\/strong> (Dean 35).<\/p>\n Rather than achieving the goal of equality, then, disagreement produces satisfaction; I\u2019ll call it a political satisfaction, by staging the lack of equality. Although it might seem paradoxical that one\u2019s aim is not agreement to one\u2019s demand \u2013 the demand for equality \u2013 the paradox occurs only in the register of desire. Understood in terms of drive, the bending or distortion or change in the aim such that the failure to reach it provides enjoyment<\/strong> makes sense. The aim of equality is sublimated in the drive to make one\u2019s disagreement with inequality appear. One gets satisfaction by appearing in one\u2019s disagreement. This provides its own partial enjoyment and in fact can only continue to provide it so long as there is inequality, so long as the ostensible aim in staging the disagreement isn\u2019t reached<\/strong> (Dean 35).<\/p>\n Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s account of the staging of disagreement, rather than figuring the political as such (the political confrontation between politics and the police) exemplifies the sublimation of politics in democratic drive<\/strong>. As drive, democracy organizes enjoyment via a multiplicity of stagings, of making oneself visible in one\u2019s lack. Contemporary protests in the United States, whether as marches, vigils, Facebook pages, or internet petitions aim at visibility, awareness, being seen. They don\u2019t aim at taking power. Our politics is one of endless attempts to make ourselves seen<\/strong>. It\u2019s as if instead of looking at our opponents and working out ways to defeat them, we get off on imagining them looking at us. And since, as Lacan reminds us in Seminar XI, the object of the drive is of total indifference,46 the disagreement one imagines oneself being seen as staging is irrelevant. Egalitarian or elite, anarchist or communist, any political gap will provide a charge sublimated as it is within the democratic drive. We want to make ourselves seen as political without actually taking the risk of politics (Dean 35).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dean, Jodi. “Politics without Politics” Parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 3, 20\u201336. In this concrete sense, \u017di\u017eek is right to claim that attachment to democracy is the form our attachment to capital takes. In the consumption and entertainment-driven setting of the contemporary United States, one\u2019s commitments to capitalism are expressed as commitments to democracy. They … Continue reading “jodi dean politics without politics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,8,12,24,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class","category-discourse","category-fantasy","category-lacan","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3600"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3602,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3600\/revisions\/3602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ndesignate:<\/p>\n
\n\u2018now\u2019 of a pure, undivided present.18<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nthen it is accompanied by a political drive wherein democracy is what we fail to escape. In this dimension of drive, democracy designates our political stuckness (Dean 28).<\/p>\n