Tuesday, February 14, 2006
(10:37 AM) | Matt Christie:
More Groovy Street Theater
(Please relax dear Kotskodians, the Tuesday Love is right below. Indeed, there is love aplenty floating about. So forgive then, if you will, a few mild and mannered digressions.
(For the best commentary on these images you need only click here, here, here, and here.)
The title I got from Scott of course, and it references a blogfight that continues to rage on elsewhere. Sorry, Anthony.)
Following on from last week's post, and persisting, indirectly you might say, in an effort to connect the dots, I'd like to offer--oddly enough, die-hard Derridian (though hardly deconstructionista) that I am, and as the left-wing blogosphere currently gears up to capitalize fully on the latest metaphor and ridicule campaign--a rather apposite quote from Badiou. It comes in the preface to the very recently translated Metapolitics. Badiou has just outlined a certain, seemingly rather crucial "political trajectory" in France, one that he says "may be unfamiliar to an English, American or Australian reader." This trajectory is divided into four periods as follows: prior to 1965; the "red decade" from 1966-1976; the counter-revolutionary period 1976-1995; and then from 1995 up until today. It is from the description of this last period that I quote (from my own copy, and not Google's, though you may also find it there if you search within for any phrase from the following):
One of the singularities that I share with my friends from the UCFML (1970-85), is to have yielded nothing to the current of counter-revolutionary betrayal. Certainly, we have modified the intellectual framework of our political commitment from top to bottom. But we have done so by accepting the revolutionary past, and at a time when opinion is almost unanimous in considering it a deadly illusion.From 1995 (which saw the great strike and protest movement of December) to today, a slow and tortuous evolution has taken shape, which intersects dramatic reactionary phenomena (racism, hostility towards the Arab world, violent defense of Western consumer comforts, unchained Zionism...) with a progressive recovery, perceptible among youth (a renewed interest in the experiences of the 1960s, massive hostility toward American hegemony...). Of course, this progressivism is sacrificed by the disastrous alliance of economic reformism and the vain adventurism of 'movements', an alliance whose strange name is 'Other-worldism' [altermondialisme]. I hope this book will help to make sense of the impasse towards which the inhabitants of the immanent 'multitudes' of 'Empire' lead their followers. That being said, the fact that politcal recoveries are always weak and confused to begin with is the law of history. What counts is the future juncture--although for the illegal immigrant workers [ouvriers sans papiers] this is already a reality--between a new political thought and organised popular detachments. After twenty years of sombre reaction and fierce counter-currents, when merely standing firm was a difficult enough virtue, we find ourselves amid the vicissitudes of reconstruction. (xxxv, my emphasis)
Now, I'm not sure whether Badiou would place this preface among his explicitly "polemical essays" or not, but the stakes of his larger project do seem to emerge early on, and clearly, and yes quite seductively, in this book. I suppose my central question at this point would be simply: where does Badiou's conception of 'metapolitics' place him vis. a vis. Schmitt? (And is Badiou not also vulnerable in his certain fidelity to Althusser? Would I furthermore be correct in suspecting there will not be any serious engagement with either Specters of Marx or Politics of Friendship immediately forthcoming...?)
According to (the translator) Jason Barker's introduction, the concept of 'metapolitics' is necessary in order to gain crucial distance from both political philosophy and from direct, mundane confrontations with the State, to articulate that which is "...beyond the accepted limits of political theory, philosophical practice:"
The inspiration here is clearly Lenin, although Badiou is at pains to qualify any such attachment. Not only has metapolitics no interest in the ways and means of parliamentary democracy, its militant thoguht-praxis cannot take the form of a party. (Barker, xii)
Badiou's own definition is given from the very beginning:
By 'metapolitics' I mean whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which claims that since no such politics exists, it falls to philosophers to think 'the' political.
-April 1998 [first published in English by Verso, winter of 2005--way to be on the ball, translating industry]
In any case, it seems clear that Badiou is setting up an argument for a very specific sense of 'politics,' to wit:
The central operation of political philosophy thus conceived...is, first and foremost, to restore politics, not to the subjective reality of organised and militant processes--which, it must be said, are the only ones worthy of this name--but to the exercise of 'free judgement' in a public sphere where, ultimately, only opinions count. (page 11, my emphasis)
And:
It is clear, then, that what politics is the name of concerns [for Arendt and for Revault d'Allonnes], and only concerns, public opinion. What is overtly eradicated here is the militant identification of politics (which, for me, is nevertheless the only identification which can ally politics and thought).
As soon as 'politics' finds its sole rightful place in public opinion it goes without saying that the theme of truth is excluded from it. For Hannah Arendt, reader of Kant, as for Revault d'Allonnes, reader of both Kant and Arendt, politics is anything but a truth procedure. (page 13)
But perhaps we are now fast approaching the limits of blogability, not least of all as I am not the one to ask (not by a long shot, yet) about what Badiou's 'truth procedure' exactly entails. Hopefully this will have been a useful provocation or stage-setting post, regardless. And so something to be continued...
