Long Sunday

'Another origin of the world'

As other "Theory"-literate and serious denizens of the blogosphere duly note, Specters of Marx is a book that continues to look better with each passing year.  Generous, intricate and faithful expositions of Derrida's later political thought, meanwhile, are so few and far between that a recent article by Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang (ProjectMuse) is most welcome, and also conveniently works as a rather natural continuation of our Spivak (and Europe, and technology, and democracy) discussions. 

Suffice to say that many familiar themes make an appearance.  I provide some brief excerpts and comment below the fold, as the authors are friends and were kind enough to share a copy.   (Those interested and without Muse access may I suppose ask very nicely via email.)   The excerpts are by no means generous enough, as indeed the article covers quite a lot of ground, including responsible forays into anonymous internationalism (composed of "no one" who is , nevertheless, "not just anyone" – cf. Thomas Keenan; recalling also Blanchot's communism), Spivak's (partly just) criticisms in Ghostwriting, Derrida's distinctly atheist transformation of Benjamin's 'weak messianism' and Roland Barthes' reflections on the photograph among other things.  The bold and truly excellent SUBSTANCE Magazine was once kind enough to grant us a generous "fair use" permission to quote from its "Counter-Obituaries" issue on Derrida from some time ago...so consider this too a first step, if you will, toward a more precise engagement there. 
    
From the key orienting and introductory 'graph (or rather, a bit of graft on my part, as the  framing, justifying work performed by introductions certainly is important to get right):

As admirable as [their] aims may be, Habermas and Derrida’s proclamation inevitably raises the question of their global bias.   Although their article closes by “renounc[ing] Eurocentrism,” it seems nonetheless to reassert a particular European obligation to act on behalf of the world.    American political philosopher Iris Marion Young objects to the publication’s premise in an essay for the web-based journal openDemocracy.  She asserts, “Europe needs not globalism but a provincialism that will enable a dialogue of equals with the rest of the world.”   Young points out that the anti-war rallies of February 15, 2003 were planned at a World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in January 2003 and, moreover, took place in hundreds of cities throughout the world.   Such a “coordination may signal the emergence of a global public sphere, of which European publics are wings, but whose heart may lie in the southern hemisphere.”   Though [Iris Marion] Young correctly calls into question their geopolitical assumptions, a closer evaluation of Derrida’s key statements makes clear that his position on Europe is distinct from the one Habermas sketches in their jointly signed text* [...]   

Contrary to his press, Derrida never made a secret of his allegiance to the European Enlightenment.    Our title, “the last European,” is meant as a tribute and a provocation, a corrective to the idée fixe that “deconstructionism” seeks to corrode Enlightenment ideals.   The allusion to Blanchot’s Le dernier homme notwithstanding, it is unlikely Derrida himself would have recognized the descriptive pertinence of the phrase or accepted its eschatological pathos.   We certainly do not wish to suggest that he clung to the Continent.   On the contrary, the globe-trotting itineraries of his teaching and lecturing – in particular his numerous visiting professorships in the US – imparted a decisively non-European competence and tonality to his numerous public stances.   The topic of European identity, he admitted, is predictably tired:  “Old Europe seems to have exhausted all the possibilities of discourse and counter-discourse about its own identification” (Other Heading 26).   And yet, paradoxically, European identity has never really been taken up in the promise that it holds for the future.   For Derrida, this at one and the same time old and young identity is a fine example of Hamlet’s famous declaration that “the time is out of joint.”   In the following, we argue that this temporal rift is precisely what compelled him to speak in the name of Europe.

  The authors proceed to engage first with Derrida-Valéry in a manner that deserves to be quoted at some length, though again I will limit myself:

Valéry’s texts figure in The Other Heading, then, as telling, modernist examples of the Eurocentric idealism that continues (in a somewhat threadbare mode) to animate the West’s cultural politics.   To Jameson’s account of Derrida’s strategic use of Valéry we would only add that Valéry does not simply function as the object of an ideology critique.   His outmoded Eurocentrism also serves, paradoxically, to advance Derrida’s deliberation on the future of Europe.  Valéry forcefully elucidates the expansive limits of a high cultural European self-understanding, and thereby, points a way out from within....

* [Sadly and rather inexcusably, the actual Habermas statement co-signed by Derrida appears to be unavailable online...or at least eluding my night's efforts.]

Hear the Kossacks Call

What's funniest about all of this "Path to 9/11" humbug:  the 9/11 Commission Report was itself politically white-washed crock of shit.    Sorry to spoil the party (and sign the petition, please*) but still someone had to say it.

*particularly if–like most LS lurkers–you are a centrist with any cred.

Update 9/10:  Oh wouldn't you know it, "The Path to 9/11" is linked directly to David Horowitz (where does that man get all his money?):

Liberalism as an Auto Immune Disease

I came across a radio show about a month ago which was quite shocking to me.  Some might think me quite naive but I really didn't expect what I heard.  The talk show host, Michael Savage, was in the middle of his usual rant against the American liberal establishment, when he introduced the (almost) Derridean metaphor of autoimmunity:

SAVAGE: How do I relate the rise of radical Islam, with its restrictions, with its throwback mentality, and with its hatred and its murderous nature, with the progressive movement in the West? It's quite simple. You have to think about biology to understand it. You have to think of the AIDS virus, which is symptomatic, actually symbolic rather, of what I'm talking about.

The AIDS virus is actually quite symbolic. It's a retrovirus and it invades the body but it doesn't really cause infection for awhile. It lays in wait. And while it lays in wait, the retrovirus, the HIV virus, it starts to attack the immune system itself. And only after the immune system itself is weakened can infections arise within the human being that has been infected with the HIV virus.

This is what liberalism is. Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet.

Europe, religion and philosophy

Étienne Balibar has surely written some fine and interesting things.

Just a quick follow-up to the post below.  In poking around for Martti Koskenniemi's review of Borradori's book, I came across a fascinating talk he later gave:  Martti Koskenniemi:  International Law in Europe:  Between Tradition and Renewal [pdf].  (Koskenniemi is also the editor of this.)  An excerpt from the talk:

Before I continue, let me state my conclusion.  The fact that international law is a European language does not even slightly stand in the way of its being capable of expressing something universal.  For the universal has no voice, no authentic representative of its own.  It can only appear through something particular;  only a particular can make the universal known.  A danger and a hope are involved.   The danger is that of mistaking one's preferences and interests as one's tradition–and then thinking these a universal, a mistake we Europeans have often made.  Therefore, I will suggest that we should take much more seriously the critiques of international law that point to its role as a hegemonic  technique.  Once that critique has been internalised, however, I want to point to its limits.  If the universal has no representative of its own, then particularity itself is no scandal.  The question would then be, under what conditions might a particular be able to transcend itself?  What particular politics might we have good reason to imagine as a politics of universal law?

Elsewhere, in response to the supplement, Ben Wolfson points to a fascinating essay in this book by Jonathan Z. Smith entitled, "Religion, Religions, Religious," most of which you may find by searching within for, say, "any house of worship," beginning on page 269.

And in other (unsuprising) news, Pussy "President" in Chief gets severely rattled by a little old lady and stays rattled, practically foaming at the mouth.  For the billionth time, God help us.  Bush has quite obviously met his "philosophy" equal in fundamentalist Islam, and he is losing.  Favorite line, from the waxing "philosophical" part:  "And history has proven that democracies don't go to war!"  "What kind of mindset is it... that questions?...uh, Democracy is...is based upon, um...is a universal...is a belief."  And et cetera.

Why should we care when Bush, being pressed for actual thought, blows bubbles out his ass?  Because it proves the world's only military superpower is in the hands of only an ass with no thoughts and only beyond-facile "beliefs", that's why.

Fresh Light

...to supplement a post at The Weblog (and encourage readers toward David's, on Badiou's Hölderlin below it)

None of the parties involved in the struggle against terrorism can afford to refrain from talking about it, but the more they do so the more they help the terrorist cause, by giving it status, visibility, and a sense of purpose...victims of a traumatic experience need to endlessly play the trauma back for themselves in order to feel reassured that they have withstood it.  This self-destructive tendency becomes a destructive weapon in the hands of the media and the political leadership.  Imagine, said Derrida, if we told the American public and the world that what has happened is no doubt an unspeakable crime, but it's over.  Everyone would then begin their own period of mourning, the preliminary step to turning the page.  All responsible parties need to facilitate this turning of the page and stop hindering it.  This is an urgent responsibility, the evasion of which transforms the enemies of terrorism into its allies.  (Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 153-154; image via remue.net)

I may not share the proclivity (or mixed fascination) for sterilized images of the zeitgeist's self-appointed spokesmen, but I do appreciate the impetus of Alain's post.   And I suspect he would agree that discussions of Fukuyama and B-Henri, while revealing things by falling rather decisively short, don't really do the subject at hand much of any justice. Which is the way I prefer to read his concluding remarks, in any case.  That subject being, broadly, the social and political role of philosophers, and even more broadly their relation to the question of Europe.

As to the former, Alain cites those two repellents attempting to  distinguish strictly between "government" and "private life", and "realistic" and "idealistic" intellectual labor, respectively.  But as Alain himself, and one savvy commenter do not fail to note, neither of these sets of bins are very helpful, or even all that relevant.

Rather, and in a manner that overlaps a great deal with John Emerson's recent forays into questions of global citizenship and intellectual responsibility in "analytic" vs. "continental" frameworks, one might more usefully distinguish, following Giovanna Borradori, between models of social and political commitment aligned with either a "liberal" or "Hegelian" lineage.

is about, madness, graphomania, 'civilization of the book', techne, ear, Aye me!

This thread could use a soundtrack.   Now it has one.   Question:  would counting the logical fallacies, the superficial, or choreographed leaps in the following amount in the end to much the same?   Or would it amount to something less?  How might the concept of 'auto-critique' ap-ply.

...that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?  I can't even go into it, you see that's what I have to go into before all my work is misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon because it is a cartoon, whole stupified mob out there waiting to be entertained, turning the creative artist into a performer, into a celebrity like Byron, the man in the place of his work when probability cam in and threw that whole safe predictable Newtonian world into chaos, into disorder wherever you turn, discontinuity, disparity, difference, discord, contradiction, what they're calling aporia they took from the Greeks, the academics took the word from the Greeks for this swamp of ambiguity, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy the clock without the clockmaker and the desperate comedy of Kierkegaard's insane Knight of Belief and even Pascal's famous wager in a world where everyone is "so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness" where the artist is today, the artist and real artist, Plato warned us about, the threat to society and the, read Huizinga on Plato and music and the artist as dangerous and art as dangerous and music in this mode and that mode, the Phrygian mode to quiet you down and the tenor and bass Lydian to make you sad and the soft and drinking harmonies, the Lydian and the Ionian where the art the, the artist having trouble breathing here I, coming out of the anaesthesia down in the recovery room tried to raise my leg and it suddenly jumped up by itself like a, like the pain avoiding pain that's what all this is about isn't it?  Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, beyond the pleasure principle?  My golden Sigi his mother always called him, if Emerson was right and we are what our mothers made us?  "Pleasure and pain I maintain to be the first perceptions of children," the first forms virtue and vice take for them, not my golden Sigi no, he lifted if from Plato's Laws Book II, talking about his own high ethical standards....The quantity of pleasure not the quality the whole point of it and these digital machines come in, the all-or-none machine Norbert Wiener called it, machine that counts brings in the binary system and the computer with it, so Wiener tells us about a brilliant American engineer who's gone out and bought an expensive player piano.  Pushpin or Pushkin, does care a damn for the music but he's fascinated by the complicated mechanism that produces it that's what America was all about, what mechanization was all about, what democracy was all about and the deification of democracy a hundred years ago all this technology at the service of entertaining Sigi's stupefied pleasure seeking trash out there playing the piano with its feet where it all come from isn't it?