Du contrat social and Badiou

I put Du contrat social down, and needed a little distance. For whatever reason, I turned to Badiou’s chapter on Rousseau in L’être et l’événement for a second understanding, a second voice. Badiou, it seems to me, is remarkably effective in re-reading Rousseau in his own language. Perhaps, though, the chapter is more about Badiou than Rousseau. It reminds me the extent to which Badiou’s project is to found politics (and philosophy) in a post-foundationalist environment. I wonder if Rousseau’s original problem was not formulated in the opposite context: that is, in an environment of over-many competing and plausible foundational claims. Still, the quick reformulation is worth reciting here. The decisive observation, which makes the rest possible, seems to me to be that Rousseau does indeed see the formation of the general will, of the people, as taking place at a particular moment, but curiously out of history, since the will cannot be represented, and cannot be changed or even, in a sense, destroyed. Badiou has three points to make to begin the movement of the little essay.

First, “Le pact”—that is, the contrat social—“est l’événement qui supplémente au hasard l’état de nature.” Now, Badiou is obviously correct to point to the temporal and yet a-historical dimension of the formation of a people. I am not so certain about the rest of this clause.

Second, “le corps politique, ou peuple, est l’ultra-un événementiel qui s’interpose entre le vide (car, pour la politique, la nature est le vide) et lui-même.” Du contrat social is the only book to date, so far as I can recall, that induced me to draw diagrams in an attempt to understand just what was being said. The Souverain ended up always on the outside of my diagrams, with arrows to and from (one arrow to, and a symbolic three from, actually). The sovereign general will has a number of odd properties, and is easy to understand as ‘next to the void’ in Badiou’s sense.

Third, “la volonté générale est l’opérateur de fidélité qui commande une procédure générique.”

Badiou says that the last point is the difficult one. In fact, given my understanding what all these technical terms mean here, I do not think there is any real problem. There are some striking resemblances between the way Rousseau discusses how to follow or know the general will and Badiou’s ethics of fidelity. If we could stage one of those inane intro-level ‘conversations’ between political thinkers, it seems to me that Rousseau would, within limits, agree with Badiou’s descriptions.

My problem is not with the third, but with the first ‘translation’ of Rousseau into Badiou. For Rousseau, I would say that the ‘event’ of the social contract has a historical beginning that is not open to later re-interpretation in the same way that I understand the Badiou-ian event to be. For Rousseau, the event is not “au hasard.” Badiou’s fidelities give us a way of understanding certain forms of human action that would otherwise appear groundless, but they are not, themselves, exactly a reason for these programs. Badiou, and it is understandable, is not so much interested in why we pursue politics, love, science, art. But Rousseau is; according to Rousseau, all individuals strive to preserve themselves. This is the nature of the individual, and it is replicated in the ‘moral individuals’ of the government on one level, and the state on a higher level. Indeed, Rousseau even suggests that it is important that the government have a limited drive to self-preservation qua government. So it seems to me that if the volonté générale can be an object of the practice of fidelity, the formation of people always takes the form of the creation of a self-preserving entity, which is not at all the same thing as Badiou’s politics. There is a broader objective structure—an anthropology, however peculiar—behind Rousseau’s instantiation of politics.

At any rate, Badiou helped me to think a bit about Rousseau. Next, perhaps, I will look at what Althusser has written. The pile of books is too large not to have a principle, and Marxian readings are more sensible at the moment than other ones.

Strauss and the American Dilemma

Richard H. King’s “Rights and Slavery, Race and Racism: Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Dilemma,” appears in a recent issue of Modern Intellectual History, and is very interesting and informative. It was provocative for me on several levels. For this very reason, I have some objections to make, and some comments to note.

First of all, and perhaps this is a bit unfair, it seems to me to replicate a ‘Straussian’ method. This is to say that it isolates a tradition of texts, and reasons based on careful reading of what the texts are trying to say. Context (the civil rights movement) comes in to the picture only as an opportunity for the development of this Straussian tradition in its continued consideration of basic, foundational issues. This limitation is not a problem, exactly, except in as much as the article makes, or gestures at, claims for the importance of Straussian thinking to conservatism in America in general—in particular the conservative occupation of the territory of color-blindness.

Of course, Strauss and his ‘heirs’ have been important. But it seems to me that linking Straussian thinking to the broader context of conservative (and otherwise) political thought and cultural commentary would give us a purchase on this shift King points to in from a support in the early 1960s for black nationalist movements—essentially for separatism—and the later endorsement (in the 80s and 90s?) of color-blind policies. Does, as King suggests, this shift in the Straussian camp simply mirror a broader shift among conservative commentators and intellectuals in this period? If so, why did it take place, and was the cause the same for the conservatives of principle as it was for those of tradition? This line of questioning might, I think, trouble the relatively clean tradition of principled conservatives (Straussians) King has constructed.

At a certain point in the article, King gives us a paragraph on the anti-psychological bent of the Straussians. As a result, he says, they are essentially unable to discuss the psychological effects of slavery and racism on individuals—this comes in the context of Herbert Storing’s essays on Frederic Douglass and Booker T. Washington. I am, myself, allergic to psychological discussions of this sort. In my experience they are either reductive or novelistic. In any case I don’t trust them. But I wonder if it would be possible to link, or at least seat next to one another at the dinner table, a Straussian history of political philosophy, and some sort of cultural studies-type discursive approach to race and racialization. It seems to me that the latter approach becomes absolutely necessary once mass media are introduced, and that, in fact, tectonic shifts in modes of representation could have significant explanatory power in the slow-democratic polity of the past half-century.

One of the fascinating problems that King discusses, and that I would love to hear more about, is how one conceptualizes the relationship between the founding and the Civil War. This opens an enormous and hoary debate about narrative, which I would like to leave mostly to the side. In this particular instance, I wonder how much contingency is permissible within a Straussian telos. More concretely: of course, in a very banal sense, it is impossible to deny that the Founding and the Civil War are related. But in what way, and with what necessity? Is this kind of narrative series a place in which Straussians might be pushed on the source of meaning of texts? It has always seemed ridiculous to me—especially ridiculous—to claim any kind of transcendental status for the original constitution (even, as is more pertinent here, for the Declaration of Independence). To honor the document is to forget the nation. Or, as I imagine Rousseau would say—I have been reading Du contral social, it’s amazing, perhaps more on it later—this is to put the law which made the government in the place which can only be occupied by the sovereign, which is to say the general will, the people. I’m sure Strauss would have a devastating answer to this objection, but it seems to me clear that you cannot pretend to read the Declaration of Independence as thought the Civil War had never happened, as though Lincoln’s Gettysburg address did not reach into the older text and changed it. It follows, I think, that contemporary political meanings of this and other texts must be highly historically conditioned. It is impractical beyond conservatism to refuse to see this.

Epistemology of the web

This article on collective, web-based intelligence, is jarring to read just after Barthes. Still, more interesting than most of what I've read on this sort of thing. What would a contemporary antimoderne have to say about these developments?

Barthes at the College de France

Earlier today, wandering about in a bookstore, I found an attractively slim Points Essais edition of Roland Barthes’s inaugural lesson at the Collège de France. It is titled, boldly, Leçon.

Leçon is interesting, for instance, in light of Micheal Behrent’s article on Foucault. In as much as it is admissible to read the text as argument, and I’m not sure such a reading would be the most nuanced or productive, it must be admitted that Barthes’s argument rests on a certain conception of insidious and all-pervading power. Barthes is in this text, and at this moment, linked especially closely to Foucault. Foucault brought Barthes to the Collège de France, and in a sense it is Foucault’s space. So given this, we can say that Barthes is inscribing a whole project of literary inquiry in a Foucauldian space.

The most painful thing about reading the Leçon, for me, is Barthes’s suggestion that an ever-renewed investigation, a continual assault on foundational assumptions, could be an effective counter to this kind of power (which is not capital, but is also not not-capital). Perhaps the least ‘modern’ sounding of Barthes’ opinions is that desire is somehow to be opposed to power. The opposition of elemental and natural desire (albeit conceived as multiplicity) to power (albeit also conceived as multiple), seems simply naïve. Perhaps I have not understood. Yet I can only cringe when I read, near the end, “Ce qui peut être oppressif dans un enseignement, ce n’est pas finalement le savoir ou la culture qu’il véhicule, ce sont les formes discursives à travers lesquelles on les propose” (pg 42). Although I understand that, at one time, Barthes was something of an adversary for certain professional historians, he was also deeply concerned with History. Perhaps this is the issue: History, not history. Surely both can be oppressive?

What I ask myself is, does the above quote suggest that Barthes thinks something like what Behrent says Foucault thinks about the new configuration of power—biopower as opposed to discipline? This, or something like this, seems plausible to me partly because Barthes engages in a certain amount of self-historicisation of the sort I always find fascinating. For him, there was a coupure with the Liberation, but again with or around Mai ’68. I wonder if it would be possible to track his opinions of the changing shape of French society over these decades in the something of the same way that Behrent does with Foucault. In the end, I think it is a mistake to take Barthes seriously as a thinker of political or social issues. As a writer, yes; as a literary critic, yes; but not as a thinker of the social. And I think he would agree with this. The Leçon suggests as much. It is too bad that he is read as ‘political’ by so many Anglophone critics.

As far as this particular text is concerned, it seems to me that it is best to heed the warnings Barthes gives at the beginning, that he only ever writes essays, “genre ambigu où l’écriture le dispute à l’analyse” (7). More plainly, I think we should take everything Barthes says here (I would go so far as to say, ever) as essentially a first person statement. It is about pleasure, about his own pleasure—we are invited to participate, and to get what we can from it, but the basic principle is always, as he says, “cette disposition qui me porte souvent à sortir d’un embarras intellectuel par une interrogation portée à mon plaisir” (8). He is a writer, and he is engaged in “un combat assez solitaire contre le pouvoir de la langue” (25). The thing of it is, I always enjoy reading him. I find that, while I often disagree with what he says, I agree profoundly with what I understand his project to be. I think next, perhaps when I run across it in a bookstore, since I have no professional excuse at the moment, I will take up La chambre claire.

pessimism

« Le monde est arrivé à une impasse, et nous nous consumons probablement en vain à chercher une issue par de profondes combinaisons théoriques. »

These are Edgar Quinet's words, written in the early 1850s. I found them quoted on page 161 of Christophe Charle's Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siecle. Charle himself is quoting them from another secondary source. Since a precise day is given (December 22nd, 1853), I assume that they are from a letter or a journal. The strong assumption is that they refer somehow to the aftermath of Louis Napoleon's coup, and the likely course of his government. Perhaps I will hunt it down.

Le choc Bergson

Henri Bergson is not a philosopher who, like Agamben, I have consciously avoided. None the less, it is the case that I have often heard his name come from the mouth of someone who was, I am certain, interested in this philosopher only because Deleuze wrote about him. Yet for a variety of reasons, I have started to read Bergson. I began at what is more or less the beginning, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. I can say with honesty that I experienced what I imagine the publishers must have had in mind when they printed, on the front of the otherwise quietly ugly standard PUF design, “LE CHOC BERGSON.” Bergson is a remarkable writer, but also one that I am concerned I may have trapped in my person web of reference.

What do I mean by this? I mean that reading the Essai, I thought of Proust and Sartre. I thought a little of William James (who, since he is cited, cannot be avoided). And then, in what is probably the most historically useful association, springing less from conscious thought than what might be called aesthetic association, I thought of George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty. This last seems to me somehow similar in its tone and its construction. There are, I think, reasons for this on several levels. First, the two books were written only about a decade apart (1886-96, give or take some months), and were both ‘first’ books. That is, both were written for presentation to a jury of senior academics, and in what was essentially the same intellectual field. After all, Santayan was writing for James, and James and Bergson were already, by this point, in communication. On a higher level of abstraction, but books are attempts to maintain what I would, quite un-technically, call transcendental reasoning in the face of a respected, powerful, and aggressive materialist science. James is in something of the same boat. The next generation of philosophers, Sartre and Heidegger, say, seem to have felt no need at all to engage with ‘psychophysique’ and the like.

The Essai is rich and complex—though I would not say, exactly, that it is ‘difficult.’ Part way through the book I began to think about memory, and how a philosopher of durée would deal with this. Of course the next book is Matière et mémoire, so I image I’ll find out. It was hard to read the example of the musical phrase, which turns up several times, without thinking of Proust and Vinteuil. Yet it seems to me that Vinteuil means something quite different for Swann, and even for Proust, than the musical phrase does in the Essai. I want to know a great deal more, for instance, about what Bergson does with language in his later work. No doubt much has been written here, and I will soon know. Suffice it to say for the moment that after reading the Essai with Proust and Sartre in my head, both as ‘readers’ of Bergson, Proust seems, oddly enough, more (philosophically???) interesting than Sartre. Perhaps this is because I know more about him than I do about Sartre.

I am going to continue to avoid saying anything substantive about Bergson’s ideas. I have never been able to be interested in the philosophical ‘problem’ of human freedom—perhaps Bergson more or less tabled the issue, except for the odd twist of the postwar existentialists? Rather than discuss the issues, I’ll finish by saying only that I am sorry it is not yet possible to buy Frédéric Worms’ critical edition of Matière et mémoire (it apparently comes out in 2009)—the notes in the Essai are helpful and, despite the somewhat didactic tone, not obtrusive.

Last of all, I admit that I bought Deleuze's little 1966 manual on Bergson. It was only 5 Euros from the box outside of the librarie Vrin. Maybe after MandM I will read it.

Bourgeois solidarity

Léon Bourgeois’ pamphlet, Solidarité, first published in 1896, belongs to a genre of political pseudo-philosophy with which, for whatever reason, I feel well acquainted. I am reading the 1906 edition from gallica. Bourgeois and the political position that he embodies are enjoying something of a renaissance. See for instance the treatment on La vie des idées. Although I know some things about Bourgeois’ context and the intellectual/cultural resources on which he drew, this is the first time I’ve read him specifically. Here, mostly for my own benefit, I want to outline not so much the argument, as some of the assumptions and the formal structure of the text.

Bourgeois is, as I have read, absolutely positioning himself as the genuinely republican third way not so much between, but above the alternative of socialist collectivism and liberal individualism. Solidarité as an idea is a synthesis, an overcoming, of the dichotomy of socialism and liberalism. It is also a scientific description of the nature of reality, empirically tested and found correct. Republicanism itself does not come up very often in the text, but it is mentioned, I think significantly, at the very beginning and very end—the parts that a busy Parisian was most likely to read.

Solidarité can be said to mean the moral and legal consequences of the scientific fact that all progress and survival is the result of collective, rather than individual, effort. Individuals rely on other individuals, and therefore are indebted to them. Not only to other people in the present, but also to the past.

One of the most rhetorically striking things about this little pamphlet, for me, is that there are basically two metaphors—and they are barely that—at work in it, which I find odd next to one another. The first is organic. All organisms function only as a result of the cooperation of their individual parts. It is true that Bourgeois, caught up in the moment, goes so far as to say that gravity is essentially the solidarity of all objects with all other objects—but the central point of reference is the organism. And of course, it is obvious to him that species work in the same way as individuals. The currency of this belief (that a group of people may be treated psychologically or behaviorally as one large person) amazes me. I wonder if Vico’s suggestion (no doubt not only his) may have some value: that people in general, when faced with something they don’t understand, tend to assume that it acts like they themselves do. Although there is much that is reprehensible about the organic metaphor (though—what exactly is the organism? The nation? The race? Oddly, ‘race’ is used more often than ‘nation’ or ‘patrie’), it is unsurprising for this period. But more or less at the midpoint of the pamphlet, I think when Bourgeois is beginning to move on to law, the metaphor changes. Now, rather than an organism, society (to which, by the by, Bourgeois denies any existence other than as the sum of its parts) becomes like a business firm. We, however, are not so much laborers in the employ of the firm as stockholders. Debts are owed in all directions. All we have to do is decide by what rules we will work.

For Bourgeois, the only difference between society in general and a business is that the stockholders of a business are able to decide in advance, before they invest, the terms of their investment. We are all already here. Solidarité, however, helps us to think about how, if we were all freely able to make such a judgment, we would rationally agree to arrange things. There is a surprising similarity to the Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’ here, but I think that for Bourgeois science can tell us more or less what we should agree to.

It would be interesting to map out the triads and binaries that are always at the bottom of Bourgeois’ thinking. For instance, solidarité shows us that there is no contradiction between science and morality—but they remain a binary, and one that maps onto liberalism (science) and socialism (morality). As in so much other political thinking, we have the assertion that beyond human difference, there is an essential human equality. The point here is that juridical equality is absolute, even a law of nature, while physical equality (or equality of outcome) is a dangerous delusion. But what is the human? « c’est...d’être à la fois vivant, pensant et conscient. » (110) He even admits that there might, on other planets, be other beings that meet these criteria. But then we do have sharp internal differentiation—which, interestingly, is measured both chronologically and in terms of social space. So that a humble laborer today is as much advanced (thanks to his accumulated cultural capital) over the cave-man as the genius is over the laborer: “Le plus modeste travailleur de notre temps l’emporte sur le sauvage de l’âge de pierre d’une distance égale à celle qui le sépare lui-même de l’homme de génie » 117-118. I want, at any rate, to know more about the 'republican anthropology' behind all this.

There is much more to say about this little text—for instance, Leibniz, was he being taught aggressively in this period?—but the above are my sharpest impressions.