{"id":9965,"date":"2012-11-23T03:56:43","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T08:56:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9965"},"modified":"2013-02-03T19:19:44","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T00:19:44","slug":"rabble-singular-universality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/23\/rabble-singular-universality\/","title":{"rendered":"rabble singular universality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek also talks here about rabble at Birkbeck March 26, 2011 <\/a><\/p>\n

What makes the notion of the rabble symptomatic is that it describes a necessarily produced “irrational” excess of modern rational state, a group of people for which there is no place within the organized totality of the modern state, although they formally belong to it \u2014 as such, they perfectly exemplify the category of singular universality<\/span> (a singular which directly gives body to a universality, bypassing the mediation through the particular)<\/strong>, of what Ranciere called the “part of no-part” of the social body.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hegel fails to take note how the rabble, in its very status of the destructive excess of social totality is the “reflexive determination” of the totality as such, the immediate embodiment of its universality<\/span>, the particular element in the guise of which the social totality encounters itself among its elements, and, as such, the key constituent of its identity.<\/p>\n

We can easily perceive here the link between the eminently political topic of the status of the rabble and Hegel’s basic ontological topic of the relationship between universality<\/span> and particularity, i.e., the problem of how to understand the Hegelian “concrete universality.”<\/span><\/p>\n

If we understand “concrete universality”<\/span> in the usual sense of the organic subdivision of the universal<\/span> into its particular moments, so that universality<\/span> is not an abstract feature in which individuals directly participate, and the participation of the individual<\/strong> in the<\/strong> universal<\/span> is always mediated through the particular network of determinations<\/strong>, then the corresponding notions of society is a corporate one: society as an organic Whole<\/strong> in which each individual has to find its particular place, i.e., in which I participate in the State by fulfilling my particular duty or obligation.<\/p>\n

There are no citizens as such, one has to be a member of a particular estate ( a farmer, a state official, mother in a family, teacher, artisan …) in order to contribute to the harmony of the Whole. This is the Bradleyian proto-Fascist<\/strong> Hegel who opposes atomistic liberalism (in which society is a mechanic unity of abstract individuals) on behalf of the State as a living organism in which each part has it function, and within this space, the rabble has to appear as the irrational excess<\/strong>, as the threat to social order and stability, as outcasts excluded and excluding themselves from the “rational” social totality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek also talks here about rabble at Birkbeck March 26, 2011 What makes the notion of the rabble symptomatic is that it describes a necessarily produced “irrational” excess of modern rational state, a group of people for which there is no place within the organized totality of the modern state, although they formally belong to … Continue reading “rabble singular universality”<\/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":[35,100,103,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concrete_universal","category-hegel","category-universal","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9965","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=9965"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10335,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9965\/revisions\/10335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}