Saturday, May 08, 2004
(1:40 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Subject
First, I must second à Gauche on the salutary effects of reading Simon Critchley's recent lecture.
Second, I must express alarm at the fact that Foucault was a Republican. Postmodernism means a lot of things, but a big part of it is a radical critique of subjectivity, even to the point of wanting to discard the very notion. There are good reasons to want to discard the idea of subject, first among them being the idea of subject as the eternal, unchaning kernel of "self" -- an idea that simply does not comport with reality. (An analogue of this critique, a strictly homologous move: the orthodox critique of modalism.) Yet we need some concept of subject, because strangely enough, together with the unchanging kernel, we get the idea of agency, specifically of a kind of reasoned agency. Without agency, we are left with a kind of faux-naive vitalism (see, for example, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri when they're critiquing the state rather than capital) -- an attempt to get back behind something like "modernity," or in other words, the right-wing move.
A productive critique of subjectivity would admit the new potentials opened up by the emergence of modern subjectivity and attempt to harness them for their liberatory potential (see, for example, Lacan, Zizek, Hardt and Negri when they're critiquing capital rather than the state). My scriptural warrant for this idea is the parable of the dishonest manager (see Luke 16). The moral of this immoral story: "I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings." Capital, the state, language in the strong sense -- all of these are horrible parasites that our draining us of our very life, but the potential they open up is precisely the ability to gain friends. The left wing move is the move of the dishonest manager.
All of this stems from a lengthy conversation last night with Fred Ecenrode and from reflections that will culminate in a brief essay to be presented in the final session of Ted Jennings' seminar on Empire: Then and Now. Please forgive the elliptical nature of these comments, which are likely not of much use to anyone.
