Ranciere, The Hatred of Democracy

If I had more intellectual energy, I would somehow synthesize the Jacques Rancière book I’ve just put down. Here’s a half-hearted effort.

For him, democracy is the absolute principle of egalitarianism, which founds even inegalitarian systems. Democracy is the foundational meaninglessness of things, it seems. It is the essence of relativism and the blank space at the foundation of every power-structure. Equality, radical and contentless, is the transcendentally deduced starting-point for Rancière’s thought. He draws a number of consequences and makes a number of observations that I won’t discuss here. I will point to the interesting comparison with Badiou, who, we might say, puts the ontological relation of belonging in the same place as Rancière does equality.

He also, incidentally, has some interesting things to say about the Third Republic in this light. Jules Ferry is a hero, for instance, of genuine equality, whose vision was corrupted by the pressure for social reproduction.

I’m sympathetic with Rancière’s whole project, though there are points of interpretation on which I’d like to challenge him. In this particular book, there were two issues, both historico-theoretical.

The first one has to do with his discussion of J.-C. Milner’s book, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique. Rancière seems to accept uncritically the idea that Europe’s ‘peace’ in the post 1945 world was somehow founded on the elimination of the cosmopolitain humanism that somehow inheres to the essence of Jewishness. I’m not at all familiar with Milner’s work, though I remember a bit of Zizek’s discussion. So I’m not sure quite what he’s up to. The argument, interspersed with Rancière’s additions, seems to be a) that the postwar ‘unification’ of Europe under abstract law is possible because the imaginary presence of ‘the Jew’ has, in fact, been successfully erased by Hitler; and so b) it is in this light that we must see European demands for ‘peace now’ in the middle east. Such demands obviously mean the end of Israel, and therefore the extension of the democratic/totalitarian project that is liberal/capitalist Europe onto a global scale. That is: European support for the Palestinians really is a new form of Nazi anti-Semitism. I won’t even begin to argue against this here—but I will point out that there is surely some theoretical interest to the empirical truth that Europe’s peace was, as Tony Judt points out, built not so much on the destruction of the Jews as on the massive scale of wartime and immediate postwar population transfers and border re-drawings, everything tamped down by Soviet control in the east.

More importantly, and in a completely different directly, it seems to me that Rancière grants capital the same transcendental status as equality (in his sense of the word, democracy). He says,

“In order for it [liberalism, which is really to say: capitalism] to function, it has no need that any constitutional order be declared for ‘deregulated competition’, that is, the free and limitless circulation of capital. It requires only that the latter be permitted to function. The mystical honeymoon between capital and the common good are needless for capital. It serves only the ends pursued by oligarchs of State: the constitution of interstate spaces liberated from the need for popular and national legitimacy.” 82

It is important that capitalism, just like everything else, is at least in part a social practice. There is an ample body of literature on the development, and lack of development, of capitalism. Capital is not a subject, though it may be useful to think of it that way. Capital is not a transcendental category. The development of something that we now call capitalism, either in the 16^th or 18^th centuries, did not in itself constitute a radical or epistemic break in world history. Capitalism may not need, as Rancière says, “any constitutional order” to support it, but it needs some kind of order. The proper institutions and infrastructure is necessary even for it to malfunction. Globalization is witness to this. Some economists say that the problem of globalization is that there isn’t enough of it—the poor states are the ones for one reason or another unconnected to the global economy. This doesn’t take the whole state of things into account, but it is none the less simply true that the system has gaps, and is sustained as a system by a huge amount of labor (and not just the sweating kind) and energy.

I’ll have to read more Rancière and see what he really thinks. This book has the feel of an occasional piece, dashed off in a hurry (again, that might be the translation). Certainly, he is in real conversation with Laclau, even Badiou, Zizek, and has some nasty (i think correct) things to say about Agamben. There will certainly be more about Rancière here later.

Bush is a Jacobin

This is the first time I've noticed Bush and the neocons (ahh...and just moments ago I mentioned neo-Kantians) compared to the Jacobins. A most-emailed-oped from the NYT. From the pen of François Furstenberg, "a professor of history at the University of Montreal."

Landy on Proust

I’ve been going through Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust [2004]. He’s a good reader, and has more interesting things to say about the Proustian sentence than anyone else I have read (impressive). He also takes seriously the simple fact that books have readers, and that it is in the reading, not the writing, that meaning is created. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that the whole project is misguided. I’ll summarize (with prejudice):

If we read Proust really carefully, and with great charity, then we discover that he puts forward a serious philosophy. He was a perspectivalist quite a bit like Nietzsche, but without any of the distasteful parts. His novel is supposed to make you a better person, or anyway a person more aware and therefore “ultimately able to pull off the act of deliberate and lucid self-delusion required to see our inner volume as a coherent whole” (143). That is, better at being a self.

There are plenty of little quibbles one can have, but mostly I just don’t agree with the project. Many critics, it is true, simply dismiss the possibility of ‘philosophical’ coherence in Proust. Landy says, more or less, that they should read and think harder. Fair enough. But Landy’s method reminds me of an old scholastic adage: when you encounter a difficulty, make a distinction (actually, some of it is very reminiscent of Iserian phenomenology of reading). He proceeds to ‘make sense’ out of Proust by making a series of distinctions (the five narrative voices, for instance), which aren’t on their own terms meaningless, but then at the end he more or less declares unilaterally that the distinctions themselves are the ‘point’ of the novel.

He certainly makes some very good critical points in the process of doing this. I’m just unconvinced that it’s the kind of exercise I am interested in. Unsurprisingly, I want him to be more historical about the philosophy Proust is putting forward. Landy takes Proust’s word that Bergson wasn’t the whole point (and we must, I think, agree), but surely there’s more interesting things to do with the connection? He asserts that Proust didn’t know Nietzsche at all—I suppose this must be the case, I’ll have to look up what Tadié says about it. If so, it’s surprising, because Proust was close, I think, to Daniel Halévy who certainly did know Nietzsche and, anyway, the syphilitic genius was hardly unknown in the decade before WWI. Landy mentions Kant a few times—his discussion would be more interesting if it wasn’t of Kant so much as of the neo-Kantianism Proust would have learned in school—ditto with Leibniz, who I think is probably more poetically than philosophically interesting for Proust. That, of course, would have been a different book.

The coda on sentences and style could usefully be put on a syllabus. I haven't read Pippin's chapter on Proust yet, but the two are in conversation, and I think could usefully be juxtaposed.

bon mot

“At its best the late nineteenth century reminds one of a sentimental farce, at its worst of a heartless joke.”

I've been typing up my notes from Art (from which comes the above, pg 181). Clive Bell is quite insufferable. Raymond Williams is too gentle by half to the whole Bloomsbury crowd, unless we assume they allowed him to hand around out of good manners. The fellow can occasionally turn a phrase, though. (unless he stole this line, which is quite possible).

Gary Wilder and "Freedom Time"

Today I went to a wonderful talk given by Gary Wilder. His book The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars [the capitalization there seems odd] was already on one of my lists. Now I’m genuinely excited about it.

He was introducing a new project, which he says will be called “Freedom Time,” and for which he’s already attended a year of law school—this, I think, is probably the best way to do legal history, if you can get someone to pay for it.

He started off with a longish quotation from an unspecified Kant text, and then a little summary of French Imperial Nation-State. His summary made the book sound quite different from what I would have imagined given the title. His point, as he explains it, is to see Negritude as more than just a nativism. It is, rather, a critical theory of modernity (that is, a Critical Theory)—attempting to revise bankrupt positivist and instrumental reason through an appeal to poetic reason. It is a working-through, dialectical overcoming, rather than simple rejection, of modernity. In this project it is hardly alone during the 1930s. I don’t know a great deal about the ideas or figures here—mostly Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor—but from what little I do know, it seems a sensible move.

The payoff for Wilder is that once we think of Negritude as committed to the dialectical overcoming of empire and the colonial situation, rather than a simplistic rejection, we are able to make sense of the political moves made by Césaire and Senghor in the postwar world. Departmentalization and then subsequent attempts to form other supra-national organizations, are not false-consciousness, not (simply) anachronistic. These policies are rather an attempt to preserve certain aspects of the imperial project and reject others. So, for instance, the departmentalization of Martinique was not supposed to be its submission to France, but was rather understood as the first step of a radical re-visioning of Frenchness. Il faut assimiler et pas être assimiler. Wilder makes this argument in large measure by pointing to the self-conscious way in which Césaire mobilized and positioned himself in terms of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher (who was behind the French 1848 abolition of slavery). The largest, and in some sense very obvious structuring observation here is that we, as historians, shouldn’t assume that just because, in the post-1945 world, anti-colonial and Third World movements tended to be nationalist, that means that anti-imperialism anti-racism had to be articulated in terms of national projects. It isn’t so. Negritude, then, shouldn’t be seen as a nativism, or an anti-racism, or anything of the sort, it is rather both genuinely anti-nationalist and anti-colonialist. Again, given what I know about the immediate postwar, it seems to me to be (oh blessed conjunction) both true and a major historiographical trend to say that this period is more radically ‘open’ and undetermined than it has often been presented as having been—this especially in reference to what the shape of Europe ended up being, the viability (meaning) of communism.

This argument is set out with copious reference above all to Walter Benjamin. Adorno, Reinhart Koselleck, Ernst Bloch and others are also mobilized, but Benjamin is the major reference. I won’t try to explain exactly what Wilder is doing, but it has to do with multiple temporalities, and ways of thinking that which didn’t happen, that which did happen (but was impossible), the concept of concrete utopia, and others.

During the talk, all kinds of parallels with what I’ve been reading of Zizek, Badiou and, to a lesser extent, Laclau, were going through my head. A major issue is that of retroaction. This seems to me to be somehow Lacanian in origin (or at least inspiration), but I’m not sure about that. Similarly, the idea that the way, the only way, to move beyond the empire (in this case, the French Empire, rather than simply ‘Empire’) is to push it to its conclusion, or to a particular conclusion, has many echoes in what I’ve been reading.

Similarly, there is clearly a place for Sorel in this discussion of the imbrications, for the thinkers of Negritude, of politics and philosophy. I don’t think Wilder has quite figured out the best way of talking about this yet. He points to the utopian socialists—especially Proudhon—as an inspiration for Senghor and Césaire, but as has been pointed out in another context, a citation isn’t an explanation.

I’m not convinced that Benjaminian temporalities are the right way to talk about what’s happening here. I guess I don’t understand how they advance the discussion beyond the terms of past(s), appropriation and re-writing of them. It is likely, though, that if I read Koselleck (as I should), and more Benjamin, I could be convinced that this terminology is useful.

At any rate, it was a good talk, with some good questions. I’m very glad to have been there.

[also, i just noticed, it should be Négritude throughout. Dunno how that accent got away.]

inside Badiou

Meditation Nine of Being and Event breaks sharply from the mathematical/ontological (and philosophical) elaboration that takes up the previous eight meditations. We turn from the state—as metastructure of situation, as, in fact, a set-theoretical notation—to the State, historically, as Marxist theory has understood it. The ontological categories normality, singularity, excrescence, are used to analyze Engel’s analysis of the State. The bourgeoisie is singular [i meant: normal], because it is presented (to step out of Badiou’s vocabulary, ‘really there’) and also re-presented by the State. The proletariat is singular, because it is presented (again, an objectively existing social group), but not re-presented in the State. The state itself, Badiou says that Engels says, is excrescence. This is wrong, though “formally correct”—I’m not sure how this works out yet. Perhaps Meditation Ten will bring enlightenment.

At the moment, it just sounds like Badiou is applying these ontological categories willy-nilly to historical situations. There has not always been a State, bourgeois or otherwise, and there isn’t one everyplace at the moment. What can he possibly mean? Surely ontology isn’t supposed to work differently if the means of production change?

outside Badiou

Having once posted about the cover of a book, rather than the inside, it is hard not to continue doing so. In this case, the next book I’m reading for the theory class: the 2005 English translation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (since it’s a nice indication of a book’s popularity: it is currently priced to sell at just under $15 on Amazon.com). I’m only 60 pages through this thing, so there’s not even that space to judge yet. I find Badiou’s tone in the new preface incredibly self-important and off-putting at best. Still, I’m already a bit in awe. We’ll see if it lasts.

The back cover, then. It is full of ‘significance.’ The word is used three times. Badiou is described in the 4-line bio as “one of France’s most important contemporary philosophers.” From the four blurbs, it is “most significant,” or “a significant book” which speaks to “philosophical and political debates that matter most to us.” Everywhere, it is important, significant, “tackling the whole.”

Is the insistence on significance and ‘mattering to us’ symptomatic? At the least, of extreme uncertainty on the part of the design folks over at continuum press? (which, from a brief perusal of their catalog, looks pretty interesting)