{"id":5054,"date":"2010-02-22T15:37:42","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T19:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5054"},"modified":"2010-02-22T15:45:17","modified_gmt":"2010-02-22T19:45:17","slug":"5054","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/02\/22\/5054\/","title":{"rendered":"hallward dialectical voluntarism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Hallward “The Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism”
\nOnline version here<\/a><\/p>\n

Structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, by and large, relegated volition and intention to the domain of deluded, imaginary or humanist-ideological miscognition. Rather than explore the ways in which political determination might depend on a collective subject\u2019s self-determination, recent philosophy and cultural theory have tended to privilege various forms of either indetermination (the interstitial, the hybrid, the ambivalent, the simulated, the undecidable, the chaotic\u2026) or hyper-determination (\u2018infinite\u2019 ethical obligation, divine transcendence, unconscious drive, traumatic repression, machinic automation\u2026). The allegedly obsolete notion of a pueblo unido has been displaced by a more differentiated and more deferential plurality of actors \u2013 flexible identities, negotiable histories, improvised organizations, dispersed networks, \u2018vital\u2019 multitudes, polyvalent assemblages, and so on.<\/p>\n

[Recent European theoretical contempt for any notion of ‘will’]<\/p>\n

For Adorno, rational will is an aspect of that Enlightenment pursuit of mastery and control which has left the earth \u2018radiant with triumphant calamity\u2019. Althusser devalues the will as an aspect of ideology, in favour of the scientific analysis of historical processes that proceed without a subject. Negri and Virno associate a will of the people with authoritarian state power. After Nietzsche, Deleuze privileges transformative sequences that require the suspension, shattering or paralysis of voluntary action. After Heidegger, Derrida associates the will with selfpresence and self-coincidence, a forever futile effort to appropriate the inappropriable (the unpresentable, the equivocal, the undecidable, the differential, the deferred, the discordant, the transcendent, the other). After these and others, Agamben summarizes much recent European thinking on political will when he effectively equates it with fascism pure and simple. … Much of Foucault\u2019s work might be read as an extended analysis, after Canguilhem, of the ways in which people are \u2018de-voluntarized\u2019 by the \u2018permanent coercions\u2019 at work in disciplinary power, coercions designed to establish \u2018not the general will but automatic docility\u2019.19 Foucault never compromised on his affirmation of \u2018voluntary insubordination\u2019 in the face of newly stifling forms of government and power, and in crucial lectures from the early 1970s he demonstrated how the development of modern psychiatric and carceral power, in the immediate wake of the French Revolution, was designed first and foremost to \u2018over-power\u2019 and break the will of people who had the folly literally to \u2018take themselves for a king\u2019;20 nevertheless, in his published work Foucault tends to see the will as complicit in forms of\u00a0 self-supervision, self-regulation and self-subjection. … Badiou\u2019s powerful revival of a militant theory of the subject is more easily reconciled with a voluntarist agenda (or at least with what Badiou calls a volont\u00e9 impure22), but suffers from some similar limitations. It\u2019s no accident that, like Agamben and \u017di\u017eek, when Badiou looks to the Christian tradition for a point of anticipation he turns not to Matthew (with his prescriptions of how to act in the world: spurn the rich, affirm the poor, \u2018sell all thou hast\u2019\u2026) but to Paul (with his contempt for the weakness of human will and his valorization of the abrupt and infinite transcendence of grace). Pending a more robust philosophical defence, contemporary critical theorists tend to dismiss the notion of will as a matter of delusion or deviation.<\/p>\n

The true innovators in the modern development of a voluntarist philosophy are Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and the general principles of such a philosophy are most easily recognized in the praxis of people like Robespierre, John Brown, Fanon, Che Guevara\u2026 It is to such people that we need to turn in order to remember or reconceive the true meaning of popular political will.<\/p>\n

III
\nOn this basis we might enumerate, along broadly neo- Jacobin lines, some of the characteristic features of a will of the people:
\n1. The will of the people commands, by definition, voluntary and autonomous action. Unlike involuntary or reflex-like responses, if it exists then will initiates action through free, rational deliberation. As Rousseau puts it, the fundamental \u2018principle of any action lies in the will of a free being; there is no higher or deeper source \u2026. Without will there is no freedom, no selfdetermination, no \u201cmoral causality\u201d.\u2019\u00a0 Robespierre soon drew the most basic political implication when he realized that when people will or \u2018want to be free they will be\u2019. Siey\u00e8s anticipated the point, on the eve of 1789: \u2018every man has an inherent right to deliberate and will for himself\u2019, and \u2018either one wills freely or one is forced to will, there cannot be any middle position\u2019.
\nOutside voluntary self-legislation \u2018there cannot be anything other than the empire of the strong over the weak and its odious consequences.\u2019<\/p>\n

An intentional freedom is not reducible to the mere faculty of free choice or liberum arbitrium.25 If we are to speak of the \u2018will of the people\u2019 we cannot restrict it (as Machiavelli and his successors do) to the passive expression of approval or consent.26 It is the process of actively willing or choosing that renders a particular course of action preferable to another. \u2018Always engaged\u2019, argues Sartre, freedom never \u2018pre-exists its choice: we shall never apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making.<\/p>\n

\u2018To will\u2019, as Badiou puts it, is \u2018to force a point of impossibility, so as to make it possible.\u201933 The guiding strategic maxim here, adopted in situations ranging from Lenin\u2019s Russia in 1917 to Aristide\u2019s Haiti in 1990, was most succinctly stated by Napoleon: on s\u2019engage puis on voit.<\/em> Those sceptical of political will, by contrast, assume that apparently voluntary commitments mask a more profound ignorance or devaluation of appetite (Hobbes), causality (Spinoza), context (Montesquieu), habit (Hume), tradition (Burke), history (Tocqueville), power (Nietzsche), the unconscious (Freud), convention (Wittgenstein), writing (Derrida), desire (Deleuze), drive (\u017di\u017eek)\u2026<\/p>\n

The actively general will distinguishes itself from the mere \u2018will of all\u2019 (which is \u2018nothing but a sum of particular wills\u2019) on account of its mediation through the collective mobilization of the people. The people who sustain the \u2018will of the people\u2019 are not defined by a particular social status or place, but by their active identification of and with the emergent general interest. Sovereignty is an attribute of such action. Conceived in these terms as a general willing, the power of the people transcends the powers of privilege or government, and entitles the people to overpower the powers that oppose or neglect them. If such powers resist, the Jacobins argue, the only solution is to \u2018arm the people\u2019, in whatever way is required to overcome this resistance.<\/p>\n

Of all the concerns that link Rousseau and Marx, few run as deep as the critique of conventional parliamentary representation<\/strong>. Since \u2018a will cannot be represented\u2019, so then \u2018sovereignty, being nothing more than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated [and] can only be represented by itself; power can indeed be transferred but not will.\u2019\u00a0 The people can (and must) delegate \u2018agents\u2019 to execute their will, but they cannot delegate their willing as such.\u00a0 Marx follows Rousseau, against Hobbes, when he criticizes modern bourgeois politics as essentially representative \u2013 that is, as an expropriation of popular power by the state. The bourgeois \u2018state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings\u2019. Popular emancipation will require the interruption of such a state, and its replacement, through \u2018the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class\u2019, of a political form capable of overseeing \u2018the economic emancipation of labour\u2019.\u00a0 In the wake of Marx\u2019s critique of the Commune, Lenin\u2019s State and Revolution<\/em> takes this argument to its logical conclusion.<\/p>\n

A will, individual or collective, cannot begin in full possession of its purpose or power; it precisely wills rather than receives its clarification.60 A voluntarist prescription must anticipate effects which enable their cause. Rousseau recognizes this necessity: \u2018In order for a nascent people to appreciate sound political maxims and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause \u2026; before the creation of the laws, people would have to be what they should become by means of those same laws.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Hallward “The Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism” Online version here Structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, by and large, relegated volition and intention to the domain of deluded, imaginary or humanist-ideological miscognition. Rather than explore the ways in which political determination might depend on a collective subject\u2019s self-determination, recent philosophy and cultural … Continue reading “hallward dialectical voluntarism”<\/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":[83,100,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-hegel","category-political"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5054","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=5054"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5057,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5054\/revisions\/5057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}