{"id":3708,"date":"2009-08-30T14:59:48","date_gmt":"2009-08-30T19:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=3708"},"modified":"2012-09-26T00:11:30","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T05:11:30","slug":"daly-on-zizek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/08\/30\/daly-on-zizek\/","title":{"rendered":"daly on \u017di\u017eek"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daly, Glyn. “The Materialism of Spirit – \u017di\u017eek and the Logics of the Political” International Journal of \u017di\u017eek Studies<\/span>. Vol1.4<\/p>\n

Class has little\/no analytical content and will not play the role that classical Marxism intended for it. Laclau and Mouffe consequently reject the Marxist view of class because it presents a closed and necessitarian picture of identity that does not reflect the true nature of contingent undecidable identities and their basic materialism.<\/p>\n

But it is precisely this distinction that is under question. To affirm the authenticityof contingent-plural identities against the falsity of class necessity is perhaps already to adopt a certain infra-political gaze and to stand inside the reflexive economy of modern spirit (\u017di\u017eek in Butler et al<\/em>, 2000: 319-320; \u017di\u017eek, 2004: 99-102; \u017di\u017eek, 2006: 55-56).<\/p>\n

Viewed from the negative, class does not appear as a positive position (endowed with a historic destiny etc.) but rather as a non-position: the impoverished, the destitute, the ‘wretched of the earth’ and all those who do not ‘count’ \u2014 a vanishing-point of value in order for the system of socio-economic valuation to function. Along the lines of Badiou, class stands for the void that is constitutive of multiplicity. It is the alchemical caput mortuum <\/em>(death’s head) of Lacan: i.e. something which is itself empty of value but which, like a catalyst, is essential for the substance of value to be produced.<\/p>\n

So while postmarxism is right to critique the positivistic status of class, what it overlooks is a view of class as an inherent and fundamental symptom of a systemic process in which capitalism tries to realize itself as a necessity – a kind of underlying dark matter that supports and stabilizes the positive forms of the capitalist universe. And it is precisely in its condition of symptom, of necessary anomaly, that the contingent nature of capitalist necessity is shown.<\/p>\n

This also indicates a central problem with the idea of radical democracy: that is, it does not provide any real or systematic account of today’s symptoms or of those who are in a position to hold up the mirror to, to show the truth of, today’s cosmopolitan capitalism. In arguing for equivalences to be established between all disaffected groups within <\/em>the terms of the democratic imaginary, the propensity exists for radical democracy to become removed from the more basic and constitutive forms of exclusion and to become increasingly entangled in endless cycles of infra-political networking<\/span>. Political subjectivity would consequently become hyper-active – endlessly fascinated by its own positions, continually refining itself and so forth – but incapable of acting as such. So the danger exists that radical democracy could devolve into a rather empty proceduralism: regulating the provisional character of all political engagement, repeatedly marking the empty place of the universal, always reinforcing its own prohibition concerning the privileging of one democratic struggle over another and so on<\/span>. It is on this basis that Norval (2004) draws direct, and rather uncomfortable, parallels between radical democracy and a Habermasian deliberative democracy (7-8).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daly, Glyn. “The Materialism of Spirit – \u017di\u017eek and the Logics of the Political” International Journal of \u017di\u017eek Studies. Vol1.4 Class has little\/no analytical content and will not play the role that classical Marxism intended for it. Laclau and Mouffe consequently reject the Marxist view of class because it presents a closed and necessitarian picture … Continue reading “daly on \u017di\u017eek”<\/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":[83,77,66,39,24,69,18,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-class","category-hegemony","category-ideology","category-lacan","category-laclau","category-political","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708","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=3708"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9343,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708\/revisions\/9343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}