My first book tried to develop the concept of a reflective solidarity, a universalist, communicative solidarity. I no longer find the theoretical edifice of that project (Habermasian discourse ethics) convincing. But, I still think of solidarity as an important matter. And, I think that my discussion of an abstracted solidarity that relies on the position of what I clumsily called situated hypothetical thirds might have some useful elements. At any rate, I'm thinking about solidarity and whether any such notion is compatible with Zizek's thought. On the one hand, it should be--he emphasizes the party. On the other hand, it seems as if the party and its members simply happen or are brought into being, magically, on the road to Damascus. So, I'm not sure.
My initial thinking suggest to me that as with Habermas, one might see Zizek's discussion of justice and solidarity as two sides of the same coin. But, rather than reconciled within a communicative universality, Zizek's two sides are those of the law and the revolutionary collective, the impersonal, abstract law that must suspend imagination and focus on principle, on the one side, and the revolutionary violence and hatred in the service of the work of love, that is, in the service of revolutionary justice, on the other. Each side involves an abstraction, a subjective destitution, a resolve to escape the 'vicious cycle of understanding.'
How, then, do we understand solidarity?
Solidarity is the one virtue specific to the political. We don't use solidarity to describe relations between friends, family members, congregants in a church, or soldiers in an army. It is not a relation of consumer to consumed, capital to labor, professor to student. It is not even properly understood as a relation between governors and the governed. Rather, solidarity is a category of the political understood in Schmitt's terms as rooted in the distinction between friend and enemy. The relation between political friends is that of solidarity.
Typically, this political friendship occurs in the form of the party. Thus, the virtue of members of a party is one of solidarity--a solidarity toward not each other as individuals nor to a specific message of platform, but to the party as the form of their political friendship, their alliance or affiliation.
Zizek's discussion of subjective destitution might be helpful here. First, solidarity with the party demands putting aside one's specificity, one's own convictions, one's identity, one's individuality. The problem of Bukharin was that he tried to assert a position beyond the party. Second, if the truth of the political party comes from its relation to that which is excluded under capital, to the remnant or symptomal knot of a social formation, and if adopting or assuming this position of exclusion necessarily requires subjective destitution then, again, solidarity with the truth formalized by the party involves subjective destitution. In his contribution to The Neighbor, Zizek discusses this with respect to Lacan's notion of suppleance as 'how a revolutionary collective functions," that is, such a collective is linked together through objet petit a as it 'renders palpable'--formalizes--the inconsistency of a formation.
In his exchange with Santner and Rheinhard, Zizek criticizes Levinas's subordination of the third to the primary face-to-face ethical relation. Zizek writes:
In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the One. Justice and love are thus structurally incompatible: justice, not love, has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I 'really understand.' What this means is that the Third is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship. the one in shadow, like the absent child of a love-couple. ...
Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it 'embedded' in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper.
How does the relation to the Third that grounds justice link to the relation that the party takes to the symptomal knot? Or is there a difference between this justice and revolutionary justice? One might say that the focus on the Third is precisely the focus of the collective, the principle of the party and the guiding truth that the party attempts to realize in law. The solidary relation is the gaze of the party toward the third, its awareness and attempt to focus on this background, to break through the attachment and ties to the present formation and present set of convictions, fantasies, identities.
To this extent, the freedom of the party, its ability to act freely, would be necessary for justice and thus there would be no difference between justice and revolutionary justice.Solidarity, then, would be the other side of justice.
Zizek writes that violence as such liberates, that it draws a line of separation, that it establishes a difference, discards. One might say that this freedom is necessary for the cut of universality proper.
And then I wonder: is it possible to cut through the friend/enemy distinction such that we have not friend and not not friend? And, would this then be the Third? Such a reading breaks through fetishistic reductions of the other to the one like me, to my neighbor, and to one that I should love. And, it adds the third category of indifference to the duality of love-hate, allowing for the love that emerges not in contrast to hate but out of a larger indifference to all others. Solidarity, then, would involve hatred toward one's enemies, love for one's comrades, and indifference toward those Thirds as objet a.
If this is right, then, the suppleance is a fundamental relation to objet a and suggests the possibility of a community not rooted in enjoyment, which may well be the proper notion of solidarity.
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