Polemos (2001)

185 Pages·2012·1.17 MB·English

a
U MBR
polemos
A JOURNAL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 2001
U MBR a
ISSN 1087-0830 ISBN 0-9666452-
EDITORS:
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Theresa Giron
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4 EDITORIAL: THE FIRST RULE OF POLEMOS...
The Universal
7 THEORY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE LEFT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ERNESTO LACLAU
carlos pessoa, marta hernández, seoungwon lee, lasse thomassen
29 STAGE LEFT: A REVIEW OF CONTINGENCY, HEGEMONY, UNIVERSALITY:
CONTEMPORARY DIALOGUES ON THE LEFT
juliet flower mac cannell
51 A PLEA FOR CIVILITY: AN ASIAN WOMAN’S REPLY TO
SUSAN MOLLER OKIN’S “IS MULTICULTURALISM BAD FOR WOMEN?”
sinkwan cheng
Hors Series
69 ANTIGONE’S FART
marc de kesel
Truth and The One
79 TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE IN HEIDEGGER, LACAN, AND BADIOU
kirsten hyldgaard
91 NEIGHBORHOOD OF INFINITY: ON BADIOU’S DELEUZE: THE CLAMOR OF BEING
sam gillespie
107 THE CONTRACTION OF BEING: DELEUZE AFTER BADIOU
adi ophir and ariella azoulay
Hors Series
123 THE ENJOYING MACHINE
mladen dolar
Sublimation &
Homosexuality
141 THE STRANGE DETOURS OF SUBLIMATION:
PSYCHOANALYSIS, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND ART
elizabeth grosz
155 PERVERSION, SUBLIMATION, AND AESTHETICS:
A RESPONSE TO ELIZABETH GROSZ
tim dean
166 BOOK REVIEWS
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL:
The First Rule
Of Polemos...
Polemos panton men pater esti,
panton de basileus, kai tous men
theous edeixe tous de anthropous,
tous men doulous epoiese tous de
eleutherous.
“War [polemos] is both father of In order for thought to exist, it must be
all and king of all: it reveals the d e-clared publicly and this declaration—if it
gods on the one hand and humans is truly thought that is declared—is always
on the other, makes slaves on the a matter of polemos, an act of war. Polemos
one hand, the free on the other.” does not divide a previously united group; for
—Heraclitus, Fragment 53 there is no group prior to polemos. The advent
of thought, then, does not force people who
were in agreement to choose sides and begin to
oppose one another. “Polemos is both the father
of all and king of all”: polemos does not divide
what was previously united, but rather unites
that which did not exist before polemos.
We must be precise about the status of this
union: thought does not bring about a unity on
the basis of compromise. Thought must never
be reduced to a “coming to terms” or a “set-
tling of accounts.” This assumes that thought
works in the terms and economy already
available within the field of discourse. In fact,
thought does not situate itself between two
positions as the comfortable middle ground
because thought is the opposite of this notion
of compromise insofar as it is necessarily u n-
situated. This idea of compromise, of coming
between two opposing positions in order to
bring them together, is the ultimate case of
“situatedness.” Everything about the “com-
promised” position must be carefully situated
with respect to what already exists, that is,
UMBR(a) 4
with respect to the two positions it seeks to “reveals the gods on the one hand and humans
unite. Thought must come as a break with what on the other, makes slaves on the one hand,
already exists, as something radically new and, the free on the other.” First and foremost,
thus, unsituated. Thus, the task of polemos as polemos reveals the immortal, or the gods, and
we have conceived it in this issue of Umbr(a) from there everything else becomes mortal,
is not compromise but thought, is not to bring human. The appearance of the immortal is the
together, but to think, to cut across the very emergence of this place beyond the debate: but
field of discourse. the immortal is not a new position from which
When thought succeeds in cutting across what one may engage in the debate (as the place of
exists in this way, it breaks with everything compromise is); it is rather the place at which
that was situated before it and, therefore, debate stops. Polemos, then, reveals this place
unites the field by appealing to it universally. from which one engages in the work of thought
Because polemical thought remains radically but which is nevertheless removed from the
unsit-uated with respect to any differences field of discourse, the level of debate. In this
or distinctions by which one might have ori- way, it becomes clear that only polemos reveals
ented oneself prior to the polemos, it does not thought as immortal and likewise—as the last
a ddress the field on the basis of these differ- words of Heraclitus’ fragment claim—only
ences but rather addresses everyone equally. polemos makes thinkers free.
Thought that comes in the form of polemos is In this time of cultural relativism in which
completely impartial not because it considers freedom of thought is misrecognized as the
all possible sides and positions (as in com- multiplication of positions, only psychoanal-
promise), but because it comes as a break with ysis seems to preserve the place beyond the
all sides and positions. Although compromise terms of debate, from which a different idea
tries to account for all points of view and to of freedom is guaranteed. While this thought-
regard all disagreements, something is bound as-polemos undoubtedly traverses other
to slip through the cracks out of which a new disciplines, it is precisely because the very
opposition can form. Thus, thought does not emergence of psychoanalysis corresponds
regard all positions equally but rather dis- to the naming of this place beyond — the
regards them equally. Polemos, then, the unconscious — that it cannot but continue to
declaration of thought, levels the ground; it remain faithful to the demands of thought.
is indeed “the father and king of all” not be- The articles in this issue attest to this fidelity
cause it gathers everything together through in that they do not merely attempt to stake
a balancing of opposites but because it marks out another position on a number of ongoing
a reconfiguration of the very space of the de- d ebates— multiculturalism, sexual difference,
bate in which previous oppositions are entirely and so forth—but show that the impact of
disregarded. psychoanalysis on both the thinkers and the
As a result, polemos is the introduction of debates is nothing but the reconfiguration of
something new beyond the debate and not the very fields themselves.
simply the introduction of something new to the
debate itself. Thus, as Heraclitus says, polemos
UMBR(a) 5
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Marxism is in shambles. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has become
the most conspicuous political sign of Marxism’s profound political
and theoretical crisis. Many intellectuals have responded to this by
turning their backs on politics altogether. Their arguments either too
easily assume the impossibility of theorizing the postmodern condition,
or postulate the radical defeat of Marxism by emphasizing the ineluc-
tability of political particularisms. Others choose instead to support
center-related ideologies such as the ones represented by the so-called
European Third Way. In our opinion, however, the choices of all these
intellectuals are indeed symptomatic of the same lack. They represent
a yearning for the lost object of desire. Political mourning is indeed the
affliction of our time, and it is also its danger, for mourning creates a
hiatus in our actions, and the suspension of desire only leaves room for
the Other’s desire to dominate. In our current political situation the
d esire of the Other is called neoliberalism, and with our mourning and
our refusal to break the Marxist myth, we are indeed allowing the Other
to shape our desire.
There are nevertheless many other intellectuals who have chosen to
reformulate that object of desire called Marxism, and Ernesto Laclau is
one of them. Deeply influenced by the semiotic mapping of social reality
in discursive terms on the one hand, and by the postructuralist vision
of metaphysics on the other, Laclau’s endeavor has been to articulate
a progressive political project adjusted to our present socio-economic
c onditions. His theory of hegemony, first articulated in H egemony and
Socialist Strategy, a seminal book co-written with Chantal Mouffe in
1985, is both a descriptive and a normative articulation of such a project.
It is also an attempt to reconceptualize the notion of universalism by
emancipating the particular from the traditional logic of the universal.
This is made possible by positing a non-essentialist rendering of sub-
jectivity whose conditions of existence are derived from the constitutive
impossibility of its full realization.
UMBR(a) 7
THEORY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE LEFT:
AN INTERVIEW WITH ERNESTO LACLAU
carlos pessoa, marta hernández, seoungwon lee, lasse thomassen
We have tried to examine some aspects of Laclau’s theory by applying them to the new swiftly
changing socio-economic conditions of the three main areas in which we work: Asia, Europe, and
Latin America. Our examination of Laclau’s work aims at interrogating the political crisis of the
two signifiers “left” and “democracy” in our contemporary world. In our view, Laclau’s theory
of hegemony is the most lucid and intellectually challenging articulation of a viable progressive
political project.
THEORY
Question: Contingency is a key notion in your work. The term was quite popular in the 1960s
on the Left, for instance in Sartre’s La Nausée, but it can be traced all the way back to Georges
Sorel’s La décomposition du marxisme (1908). One can understand contingency as opposing
the idea of a necessary logic within the boundaries of the social and/or as opposing the notion
of a unique essence defining identity. How exactly do you use the notion of contingency in your
work, and what fundamental role does it play in the logic of hegemony?
Ernesto Laclau: I use the notion of contingency in its strict philosophical sense, as formulated
within the Christian tradition. Contingent is that being whose essence does not involve its exis-
tence. Finitude is, in that sense, one of its defining dimensions. It is for that reason that I have
tried to differentiate contingency from the category of the accident, which in Aristotle refers to
an internal division in the being of an entity. In contemporary philosophy Richard Rorty has
used the term “contingency” as more or less synonymous with “accidentality,” but for me the
two categories have to be strictly differentiated.
The notion of contingency is, for me, crucially linked to the discursive structuration of social
spaces and to the impossibility of operating a final closure around an ultimate transcendental
signified. The result of that impossibility is the non-fixity of the signifier/signified relation, and
the constitutive role of tropological displacements in the structuration of society. As for the
hegemonic logics, it is clear that if the sedimentation of social relations prevailed to the point
of making invisible the contingency of the acts of originary institution, no hegemonic displace-
ment would be possible. To constantly reactivate the visibility of that originary contingency is a
constitutive dimension of all hegemonic operation.
Q: You claim that hegemony is constituted by a paradox, where what is achieved is the repre-
sentation of the irrepresentable. You are probably familiar with the rhetorics of silence as a
strand within postmodernist poetics, which are in fact based on the same principle. We could
mention Paul Celan or José Ángel Valente as examples of the rhetorics of silence. Yet, in this
poetic movement, which works very much like mysticism itself, the signifier signifies nothing
UMBR(a) 8
1
and communicates nothing, but makes something transparent that is beyond all expression.
If it is the case that silence is the discursive kernel of a given subject, how can the citizen hold-
ing a representative political role be aware of the meaning of the silences of the subjects that
he represents? How can he interpret those silences? Would it not be a mistake to consider the
possibility of a silence beyond knowledge itself?
EL: My approach is different from the kind of intellectual currents to which you refer. The
representation of the unrepresentable, in the sense that I have used that expression, makes al-
lusion to an object — the fullness of society — that is both necessary and impossible. So, we are
not dealing with silence but with lack, with something that is very much present as that which
is absent. The primary form of the presence of such a lack is, as I have tried to argue, through
empty signifiers, and the hegemonic operation consists in discursively articulating those signi-
fiers to wider discursive totalities. For that reason, I do not see the relation of representation as
one in which the representative engages himself in a hermeneutic operation v is-à-vis those he
repre-sents, but as a performative intervention in which, through the process of representation,
the identity of the represented is constituted. The irrepresentable is represented: this means
that, as it has no content of its own, it can only exist through representation — that is, through a
substitution that is strictly constitutive, for that which is being substituted does not exist. This is,
I think, the catachresis inherent to all representation— the substitution is certainly figural, but
there is no literal term that could replace the tropos. And, because of that, hegemonic operations
can be reversed, as the signifiers representing the fullness of society are not the necessary form
of that fullness, but only its contingent incarnations.
Q: The Lumpenproletariat — the group that represented the abject subject for Marx — has
been and remains a historical residue. Today, in an era of flexible accumulation, where neo-
l iberalism has a strong hegemonic presence as a world power, the Lumpenproletariat is still
largely present. The Lumpenproletariat is also the subject that a sector of academic knowledge
in the U.S. has chosen to call the “subaltern.” Following Alberto Moreiras’ characterization of
subalternity, one might say that the subaltern is neither excluded nor included, while suppos-
ing, as Chantal Mouffe does, that democratic politics imply a double movement of inclusion
and exclusion. For example, in the Schmittian pair of friend and enemy, the subaltern would
be neither enemy nor friend. The subaltern is, on the contrary, the residue, that which remains
in the originary locus of the inclusion/exclusion pair. Following this, the subaltern would still
be a historical residue. According to this definition of subalternity, how could the theory of
hegemony articulate this category into its logics?
EL: I think that your question touches a very important point. Let me say, to start with, that
I largely agree with Moreiras’ thesis that you have just mentioned. The subaltern is, precisely,
UMBR(a) 9