Mere dissolution

We might think of radical politics in terms of three responses to the age old Marxist question, why don't the workers revolt?

1.  Hardt and Negri! They do revolt! They're revolting! Action is all around us! Yippee!!

2.  Gramsci:  hegemony. (Or, location. location. location.) So, struggle is something you can always bank on being long and hard. And, radical politics requires continued engagement, a long process of ideological struggle to produce new subjects. Differently put, what's the use of having a revolution if no one buys it?

3.  Zizek (and, today at least, I add to this Benjamin, Brecht, Lenin):  dissolve the people and elect a new one.  Or produce a new one radically and suddenly--whatever it takes. Go to the limit. With a radical act, all judgments will be through and by these new people. (Don't be like Trotsky who whined, "But Lenin, this is the only working class we have.")

What might be interesting is the way that 1 and 2 can be thought of two visions of the same thing: continued struggle for hegemony. Only 3 breaks out of the impasse.  It requires that we resist the notion that what we have (1-2) should be accepted no matter what the cost. More strongly, it resists the idea that mere life, merely persisting as we are, is enough.

Is mere life not merely life? Is it the point that cannot be passed? I don't think so. But something about the move from 'there is more to life than existence' to 'dissolve the people,' or 'pure violence,' seems too fast, too quick. There must be more in between.

Comments

[Jon]

Jodi, I really don't follow the steps you take here. Perhaps the caricatures don't help.

[Jodi]

Jon--I'm reflecting on radical change, revolution. There seems an ultimate incompatibility between, say, Gramsci and Zizek. For me, the comparisons weren't meant to be caricatures, just markers of incommensurable approaches, a sort of demarcation. I've been thinking a lot about Benjamin and Agamben.

[Edie]

Hmm. And then there is Trotsky.

[Jared Woodard]

I really appreciate (and agree with) this summary; and brevity is always refreshing.

I also share the desire for a more expansive description of the transition that takes place in #3, a discussion of exactly how innovation occurs (where 'innovation' refers to these ruptural moments rather than the long march of peer-reviewed aggregation).

I wonder if The Parallax View will speak to this. Also, for me Badiou is extremely interesting insofar as his entire corpus is a long attempt to understand this question.

[Jodi]

Edie--in his writing on Lenin Zizek writes that "perhaps the signifier Trotsky is the most appropriate designation for what is worth redeeming in the Leninist legacy."

[Jodi]

Thanks, Jared. I agree that there needs to be a much fuller account of 3. I've not read Badiou systematically myself (although I've benefitted from the few of his books I have read). Long Sunday is doing a symposium on "Critique of Violence" so I've been thinking alot about divine violence (a rather nasty piece of work with lots of smiting and smoting and atoning and really showing very little patience with disagreement). Zizek says in Iraq the Borrowed Kettle that we need to accomplish the move from pure life to pure violence. I don't know what this means, but to me it will be important for understanding 3.

[petar milat]

Jodi, i guess you refer here to the famous quotation from Brecht's poem "The Solution":

But wouldn't it be / Simpler if the Government /
Simply dissolved the People / And elected another?

In that specific Brechtian [or East German] case it is the goverment or the State which dissolves the people. If then you would equate Zizek's gesture with the Brechtian one - you would finally have the problem to mix Zizek with Agamben, who is explicitly an anti- or non-statist thinker [i rely here mostly on those essays from "Means without Ends"].

I would say that Zizek's reflections about the State and even his own specific political interventions in Slovenia are not that dichotomic [statist vs. anti-statist] as Agamben's - which maybe makes Slavoj's case an more interesting one.

[Farhang]

Jodi,

First time commenter (though have been enjoying your blog for a few weeks now). In one of your responses you mentioned that you have been reading Benjamin and Agamben. That's where my question comes from.

In his review of Hardt and Negri (http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm) Zizek says that Hardt/Negri; Agamben; Laclau/Mouffe make up three sides of a political triangle.

I tend to read Zizek to be closer to Laclau than you do, I think. But would you agree with Zizek on agamben?

Thanks

[Amish Lovelock]

This was the article I was referring to in the earlier post.

"The difference between Agamben and Negri and Hardt could be best apprehended by means of the good old Hegelian distinction between abstract and determinate negation: although Negri and Hardt are even more anti-Hegelian than Agamben, their revolutionary LEAP remains an act of "determinate negation," the gesture of formal reversal, of merely setting free the potentials developed in global capitalism which already is a kind of "Communism-in-itself"; in contrast to them, Agamben - and, again, paradoxically, in spite of his animosity to Adorno - outlines the contours of something which is much closer to the utopian longing for the ganz Andere (wholly Other) in late Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, to a redemptive leap into a non-mediated Otherness."

Has Zizek discussed Benjamin/pure violence at any great length?

[old]

1. is unfair to Negri (though I am not without criticisms of his project, I've set forth some of these objections at various times at the weblog). Negri doesn't accept things as they are at all cost. The interview on French riots, for instance, spoke in terms of Exodus. Discard the name is pulling a Negrian move on Negri in reading two Negri's ...

Also, no one is going to through Zizek in jail for Lenin-as-academic-theatre.

[old]

through, throw, whatever the hell I meant.

[Jon]

Yup, to echo old, when I spoke of "caricature" I was referring mainly to the description of Hardt and Negri (though I'm not sure that "location, location, location" is a particularly helpful gloss on Gramsci, either.)

And, of course I would ask this, but in what ways do you see Hardt and Negri arguing for "continued struggle for hegemony"?

Not that I don't think that there are continuities or similarities between H&N and Gramsci, though interestingly (as I'm argued elsewhere) the link is probably Leninism. Which also, I hardly need say, brings us round to your proposed alternative, Zizek.

[RIPope]

It's a question of the definition of the act, of how one goes from one state to the next. It's not about simply revolting, claiming the big Other doesn't exist, for this would simply imply the violent passage a l'acte. Of course it involves a bit of that, and Zizek at times says yes, just go with that, then after we can figure out just what the hell happened, etc. But most of the time he's trying to work from within the Other to the realization that `the Other doesn't exist'. That is, one first has to acknowledge one's place within the Symbolic before one can step outside of it, before one can withdraw and seperate.

[RIPope]

And if I may just make a mini-comment, one should not be expecting full treatises on the subjects we raise through the blog medium. We should, at some point, begin to understand the nature of the medium itself. It's a bit easy - and somewhat lacking - to critique bloggers for not fully explaining their terms of argument. What impossible demands!

Instead, enjoy the short-circuits!

[old]

RIPope, limitations on the medium are granted, but we should still be able to challenge brief summaries if they are off target. So perhaps we can't say, you need to explain more of your statement on Negri, it's too sloppy, but Jon and I are suggesting that the gloss or caricature is unfair or off target.

A fairer short take on Negri (not above criticism, again) would be: the last round of worker revolt pushed us to a new stage in the history of materialism. Thematizing and promoting the now scattered and ineffective revolt of the multitude could help to push globalized capitalism past the breaking point.

Now comparing that to Zizek's radical act would be interesting (and I think the two could be quite amenable).

[az]

Wow, this is really the bones of philosophy lecture, isn't it?

I don't really take issue with dismissing Hardt and Negri, but I do think they belong in #3 rather than #1. What, the multitude isn't a dream of a new revolutionary subject? Sure it's happening all around us, but they also think it has to be born.

I'm trying to get over my shock at seeing Benjamin lumped in together with Lenin and Zizek. This, er, calumny would be solved by creating another category, #4, in which dissolving the people is not followed by anything, and especially not creating another 'one' -- or many, or whatever. Benjamin and Agamben plus a few others could fit in there quite happily, methinks.

[Jodi]

Farhang, thanks for posting. The difference between Zizek and Laclau is that Zizek thinks that the struggle for hegemony unfolds within a terrain produced by class struggle , so that class struggle is more than one possible 'identity' or movement among various struggles. There are other differences (in particular how they read Hegel), but that seems the most important one. Laclau is quite critical in the conclusion of his new book on populism and Zizek quite critical of Laclau in his book on Iraq.

On Hardt and Negri: I say them together because I have in mind Empire. In particular, there claims regarding struggles everywhere, already existing struggles that do not need to be represented or articulated because they each, like a snake, strike at the heart of Empire.

The link I'm making between H&N and Gramsci is not textual or anything like that. Rather, the link is one of a kind of identity of opposites, namely, these views that seem so different (struggle for hegemony, war of position on a complex terrain, ideological struggle, long march through institutions, on the one side, and non-articulation, emergence of new, non-disciplinary identities, battle in and through language, postmodernization and digitalization of the economy, are in fact two sides of the same coin: neither involves or calls for the complete transformation of the entire framework, neither works through something like an Act.

Petar--thanks for posting. Excellent point. I agree fully that Zizek is not as non-statist as Agamben at all. And, that, I think, is his strength: Zizek's Lenin is the Lenin of revolution and Lenin the technocrat; even Zizek's Stalin is the Stalin of terror and the Stalin of the constitution of 1935; Zizek's big issue with Ranciere and Badiou, it seems to me, is precisely their unwillingness to accept responsibility for governing, for what happens after the revolution.

The underlying premise of number 3 might be thought in terms of my attempt to see what pure violence, subjective destitution, and bare life share.

Amish--the last chapter of the book on Iraq has some brief reflections on Benjamin and violence.

Pope--I agree on the importance of the difference between the Act and acting out. And what I've been struck by is the homology between the subjective destiution of the Muselmann, the victim of the show trial, and the object of the Act.

[Farhang]

Jodi,

Many thanks for your reply. I have not yet read Zizek's iraq book (it's on my list). And I know the kind of jabs they have been exchanging in their latest books. Quite frankly, I am still not convinced.

The problem is that I know more Laclau than I know Zizek. So I cannot speak as much on him. (Knowing one requires some knowledge of the other, no doubt.) But I unfortunately cannot see the difference that you mentioned. The way you describe Zizek's hegemony is very much how I would have described Laclau on hegemony. I agree with you on Hegel though.

Thanks for your reply again

Farhang

[petar milat]

Jodi,

refering to your question what pure violence, subjective destitution, and bare life share I would introduce 2 additional links:

1. It is altogether an Agambenian assumption that the fabrication of death inside the camps has been just an administrative one. Even there, as I think Gil Anidjar has convincingly shown in his "The Arab, the Jew" [the chapter on figures of absolute submission], bare life is more than Agamben says. Anidjar's point starts from the seemingly naive question: How it comes that inside the camp Jews "turn"/"convert" to Muslims/Musulmans? Anidjar will conclude in saying that bare life (of KZs) is incribed into a web of references that are more than just administrative, that is to say, theologico-political. [ie. Jewish messianism of Sabbatai Zvi]

2. Agamben in his book on Auschwitz takes up the dichotomy that Foucault has introduced in his lectures in 76/77: old vs. new kind of racism. But this again, as an Swiss Foucault-scholar [Philipp Sarasin] has shown, is more a wishful thinking. New racism [=pure and governmental one] has still to be supplanted by the phantasm of the classic racism, which is dirty and sovereign. [little of Sarasin's writings has been translated to English, so I guess that also this essay from a volume "Biopolitik und Rassismus" is available only in German]

It seems for me that those 2 adjectives (pure & bare) mean more than they say.

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
Interesting discussion here, though I don't share your taste either for Lenin or for governing after the revolution. To follow on Az's comment I think you need a 4th category for those who don't have any interest in governing. All three of the positions you outline include that impulse, including Hardt/Negri.
Negri refers in a number of places to representing the exploited and to constituting new governmental and juridical forms (in the book 'Guide' he even talks somewhere about a new electoral college). I think this orientation toward governance is built into his concept of constituent power, and to echo Jon, this makes a great deal of sense given a mutating Leninism running throughout the entirety of Negri's carreer.
His "it's already happening!" tendency that you caricature is in part a claim that the material foundations for post-revolutionary governance pre-exist the revolution. This tendency is also linked, at least it was earlier in his carreer, to attempts to jockey for position in the organizational politics of the Italian far left.
take care,
Nate

[Jodi]

Nate, thanks--yep, my little list definitely reflects my statist tendencies. I'm pro-governance. That said, it doesn't excuse omission of the analytical category 4.

[Amish Lovelock]

Thanks. I'll check the borrowed kettle.

Just a thought - what should the workers revolt against?

[Nate]

hi Jodi, Not a big deal. I suspect (sadly) it will quite a long time before either of us has to worry about that kind of difference amounting to a whole lot between us. Thanks for the Zizek reference on that other post as well - I'll have to chase that up when I get a chance.
take care,
Nate

[sumith]

To Farhang,

Difference between Laclau and zizek is very obvious now. Laclau needs to develop a politics of hope that is an anti-capitalist hegemonic project. In that project, he believes that many struggles for emancipation(s) could be articulated. Among participants of this equvantial chain, a new common sense should be constructed. In Lacanian sense, this means that they should have symbolically shared normative values among them selves.It is this dimension of politics that Zizek seems to totally reject or under-estimate.He redicules all actually existing political struggles in the name of impossible universal.

But, what kind of strategy does he have other than politics of hegemony proposed by Laclau and Mouffe? Zizek has identified him self with Lacanian radical act which is in the boundry between inside and out side. He proposes traversing of fantasy that which is comparable with the moment of decision in Laclavian post-marxism. But for Laclau, contingent moment of the political is possible only if we have symbolically constructed discursive formations. Zizek is trying to appear for a most radical political act but with out having any strategical alternative for bourgeis hegemony.If you do not have any collective bond among fighters which is a symbolic product, ethical act for you would be merely a personal one. The revolutionary stretegy would be merelly a replacement of political vanguard with a Lacanian ethical vanguard.We have some dissapointed concrete experiences of who tried to go through this way with large failures. Zizek as well as Laclau is a philosopher who develops theory for theory's sake.But Laclau's theory is rather convincing in practical organizing attempts in concrete politics, I think.Take care, Best wishes,
-sumi