The Non-Politics of "The Politics Of": Politics and Economy

THE NON-POLITICS OF "THE POLITICS OF":

Politics and Economy / The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image
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Introduction - Methodological Preliminaries, the Analytic-Continental Division Again, Science and Politics

Levi has been making some interesting comments about the connection between politics, analysis and critique, which devolved in a few responses from my part that might be worthy to integrate into a blog-post of its own. The main comment that triggered the responses was the following one

"It's interesting that discussions about the analytic/continental divide almost never mention politics. Almost nothing can be understood about continental thought and debates without understanding the political horizon upon which it unfolds. The same is not true of analytic thought. You could say analytic thought is dominated by an epistemological telos (truth), whereas continental thought is dominated by an ethico-political telos. These are very different codes or operative distinctions." 

My response proceeded as follows: first, I agree in that politics is much more pervasive in Continental discussions, even where some of its canonical figures didn't write all that much on politics (Heidegger; Bergson...). A similar argument can be said about science in Continental theory. Much of the self-proclaimed 'materialisms' are correlationist hybrids, including Marxist conceptions. Even materiality, when it is accepted in the name of a "materialism", is relativized to 'relations of production', or whatnot. I think the ubiquity of the political is in a sense a consequence of the hegemony of anti-realisms: the contextualization of every philosophical valence transforms ontological-epistemological questions to questions about the ways in which discourse organizes human practice.

This also illuminates why the analytic tradition, when committed to metaphysical and epistemological programs, did not think it necessary to pass through the socio-discursive grinder. Even instrumentalisms and (neo) pragmatism were for the most part restricted to methodological questions about a specific practice, rather than inflating the ubiquity of the political in every affirmative gesture. There's obvious exceptions to both rules.

I think, for my part, that the lesson to be learnt is twofold. For the Continentals, the concept of materiality needs to be dislodged from its residual humanism, as made visible when reducing it to 'relations of production'. The materiality of practice is still too anthropomorphically sealed. Any contemporary Marxism that seeks to be truly materialist cannot be encumbered by such a parochial notion. Any stringent concept of revolution to follow cannot continue to avow the heroic revolutionary elan, while keeping economy, techno-scientific insight subordinate to the classical dynamics of class struggle. This kind of weakness leads to thinkers like Badiou being able to claim for example that economy is just the State, and that politics is rather where subjective decision takes place. I think Land is right to mock this romantic exuberance.

For analytics, I think it's clear that the purported realism of their metaphysical positions came at a price of political naivete, which undermined their pretences. Brassier shows this in Nihil Unbound apropos the Churchlands for example, and I think Graham and others show a similar result in Ladyman and Ross, where appeals to the authority of science subordinate realism to pragmatism, and therefore end up becoming victims of a tacit political prescription behind their alleged normative neutrality.

The interplay of the normative and the causal, or the rational and the natural, is what is at stake here. The irony is that each side appears infected by a excess of unquestioned commitment, or dogma. When the analytic naturalist endows science the authority before the real as a matter of principle, the Continentals patronizingly wave the 'positivist!' card, and with due cause. But when the so-called Marxist materialist retorts with such gnomic formulations like "there is no outside of capitalism!", the analytic rightfully scorns what appears to reduce even what telescopes allow us to see to our practice, and take it as an idealist excess. It's clear that both are victim to a kind of methodological naivete: the analytic elides the rationalist obligation to adjudicate metaphysical claims to the in-itself, and the Continental elides the ontological and epistemological levels of description in correlationism (because even science is a human practice, it is said that science cannot know of the in-itself). Pragmatism and correlationism; two sides of the same anti-realist predicament. 

a) Hegel and Marx

I think a beginning for those of us involved in 'Continental theory' is to be uncompromisingly critical with the purported materialism of Marxist philosophy. The whole Marxist 'materialist' reversal of Hegel grossly insufficient. It wants to subvert the idealism latent in Hegel's dialectics in sight of a truly materialist conception of change.  To do so, Marx naively transplants dialectical categories proper to the Concept to the material. Thus, Marx frames nature ubiquitously and historically as governed by the principle of contradiction and the law of negation. So he wants to inject negativity into the Natural to make it a dynamic force of material production and to avoid tethering it to the narrow confines Conceptual, and so to an exercise in theoretical-reason for subjective consciousness; the materiality of practice is instead set then describe how qualitative forms emerge in matter, leading to the commodity-form as a mixture of 'pure' Nature (matter) and labor, and where the latter transforms the former into the 'inorganic support' or body of man. 

This view, mostly to be found in the early Marx (1844, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), is still the most bluntly dialectical attempt to reconcile the becoming of the Concept with that of Matter, while not sacrificing their inextricability. But Marx's move doesn't quite work. Contradiction makes sense as a metaphysical principle to describe the dynamism of Nature if and only if one identifies logic and metaphysics, like Hegel did, because one can say that the principle of identity of indiscernibles leads to the conceptual equivalence of being and nothingness, and one can thus give blunt conceptual contradictions ontological content, from which the dialectical process takes off. One can equate conceptual indiscernibility with metaphysical identity through PII, because for idealism there is nothing in the order of being external to the identity issued by the rational Concept; the rational is what is actual. This makes sense for Hegel because you can begin with a pure abstract concept of being and have no predicative quality separate it from Nothing.

But when you want to begin from the multiplicity of Nature, before entwining with the Conceptual, it makes no sense to speak of negativity or contradiction. Marx is forced into saying ridiculous, proto-obscurantist things such as 'everything in nature has an opposite'. But what is the 'contradiction' or 'contrary' of a finger? Or of a planet? Or of a finger-part, for that matter? Marx wants the rationalist baby without the idealist bathwater, but instead ends up in methodological confusion, dislodging negativity from the Concept, where it is imbued and enveloped. Dialectical negativity cannot be transplanted into the material as an ontological motor without vitiating the rationalist coherence of the theory.

    In the end, the attempt to even say what Nature could be prior to the interplay of labor and matter becomes impossible, and the later Marx is much more bluntly descriptively empirical than 'philosophical' about Nature. The corollary of the incapacity, however, to dialectically disassociate the materiality of Nature from that of labor, the dyanmics of matter from that of production, is what allows Marxist orthodoxy to claim materialism means acknowledging that reality is determined by the dynamics of relations of production, rather than by blunt intellectual speculation. But in doing so it forgets its internal incapacity to theorize the mind-independent world of matter on which production is conditioned metaphysically. This is not going to change until the residual Hegelianism can be done away with and the theory given proper methodological footing. Otherwise, we get preposterously proto-correlationist or idealist claims like "there is no outside of capitalism!". No Marxism can survive the brutal reality of the contemporary without re-assessing its fundamental conceptual quandaries. It is clear the classical Hegelian dialectics won't do, and that negativity and contradiction/opposites are insufficient as metaphysical principles. The essential question remains: how to reconcile a rationalism with a materialism.

Of course, much Marxism has moved away and beyond the early conceptual frame that Marx inherited vis a vis Hegel (Althusser being maybe the most rigorous example). But much work still is left here; I don't think structuralism will do the trick just like that. But that is a discussion for another time.


b) Politics and Economy / Reason and Nature

Levi also mentioned, in a more recent comment:

"There are two very different types of political theory. On the one hand, there is the sort of political theory you find in thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari who hold that the most effective way to engage is by mapping the field of power, how it functions, its mechanisms so that people can engage better, more logistically, more strategically, more effectively. These theoristsgenerally say little about what is to be done. Their contribution is to uncover the problem.

There's another type of political theory that thinks what's important is declaring what you're against, establishing what a subject is, establishing that we have freedom or agency, and denouncing. This doesn't seem to contribute much as it seldom understands the concrete problems, how the field is organized, or how to engage. But it's fun, at least."

In response to this insightful passage, I mentioned the following points:

     I am generally suspicious of political theories that divorce diagnosis or critique from strategy. These are separate tasks, of course, but part of what probably reeks on both ends as ultimately impotent when thinking of a new possible societal organization is the saturation of descriptive-prescriptive discourse by insufficiently nuanced conceptual categories, following from an insufficient appreciation for the binding between politics and economics.

 This I find for instance in Foucault's strict historicist outlook, which is ultimately humanly sealed to the point of demoting the empirical reality of market economy. He has nothing to say about the concrete movement of economy, but plenty to say about agency, institutions, and power. I think there is some untapped 'structuralist' potential here, when dislodged from the residual humanism, however stringently Foucault's denouncing might have been against everything claiming itself to be 'human'.

I insist in that as long as theorists routinely disavow economics when doing political investigation they're repeating in a variation the nefarious move that post-Heideggerean phenomenologists-hemeneutic historicists did when routinely subordinating science to the subject, to the point of patronizing it as 'derivative abstractions' (even Habermas does this). All this to say: the patronizing of the intricacies of economy is the corollary of the correlationist reification of subjectivity, agency and "power". 

Now, does this mean that we must go the 'reductionist' route, and attempt to describe a political process in terms purely immanent to the material 'primacy processes'? Not quite. Recent Deleuzian-inspired accounts which follow this route face something of the opposite problem than the historicists, in that the category of agency becomes either impossible or extremely problematic, which leads into an equally impotent, and even more alienating, fetishizing of 'material process' (Nick Land anyone?). In the name of ontological univocity, and waging war against the logos of every representationalism and humanism (Deleuze included), thinkers like Land deflate the empirical-transcendental distinction to the point of effectively destroying the rational kernel in which political categories are articulated: decision, agency, obligation, all fall out the window.

These are normative categories, and as such operate within the space of reasons in which man conceives of itself through obligations and responsibilities. In destroying the autonomy of the normative, Landianism procures not just a pragmatic contradiction where all agency is dissolved, and at which point the only possible imperative is to 'intensify' the native process into which you're invariably embedded. But more fundamentally, one elides the capacity to adjudicate one's claims in rational terms, vitiating the theoretical status of one's enterprise, by destroying the logical basis of argumentation, thereby eliding the possibility of a real basis to adjudicate normative claims. It's your sci-fi counterpart to the classical romanticism of the historicists.

The resulting deficiency explains also what I take to be the brutal flaccidity of contemporary positive political visions. Without having the capacity to envision a new form of economical organization, political 'theory' is doomed to remain confined to vituperations against the State, the endless celebration of subjective and collective freedom, and the glorification of the moments of riot and demonstration. Not to demean the valence of the latter, of course. But it is clear that something like what Marx did, that is, to have a political vision sufficiently attentive to the intricacies of political economy to envelop the global scope, will need to get a grip into the concrete dynamics of the contemporary market. Without that, talk of 'relations of production' can never get off the academic conceptual commerce, which results in a placebo more than anything, encouraging the next parade of books with titles such as "The Politics of Lamentation". Romanticized historicist genealogies can do as fascinating history, and are absolutely necessary. This is not to simply identify politics with economy, but to insist that discontinuities in politics, global or local, cannot be excised from a dialectical interplay with the economic, insofar as the latter is the material support of collective organization and life. Critique of political economy is essential, and cannot be done away with.

So what is the alternative? Here I would timidly suggest that the necessary articulation between the normative and the natural is somewhat analogous to the articulation between the political and the economic. This would need some reconstructive surgery of course, but the idea, would be roughly along the following lines. We can't agree with Badiou in claiming that economy is something like the bare normality of the State, because this delivers the complex dynamics of market and the possibility of an economy to the 'fixity' of a structure, while reserving political action for the supplementary category of subjective decision, still beholden to romanticist voluntarism. It plainly divorces political subjectivation from its necessary intrication within the structural dynamics not only of a societal-state apparatus, but to a social-link determining the relations of material exchange, production and labor. Zizek criticizes the residual voluntaraism in Badiou thus as the Kantian supplement in the revolutionary's thought, somewhat justifiably. However, we must agree with Badiou and every apologist of the "free revolutionary subject", in that the economic stratum of abstract transactions and processes, or the Market, does not by itself produce wholesale structural changes, if by the latter we understand the sublation of its axiomatic efficiency.

One cannot fully dislodge the impersonal potency of market-forces from the interest of agents, and their complex social envelopment. Reducing individual and collective will to a facile moralistic Manichean distinction between the 'revolutionary elan' and the reactive capitalist 'greed', one fails to secure the proper integration of will into the pragmatics of political and economic decision, and how they make the latter not only axiomatically operational but structurally contingent. The twofold axis of rational subjective/collective decision/deliberation and the automatism of impersonal causal/axiomatic processes saturates the political and the economical in their mutual inextricability. Here, the function of critique of ideology overlaps with the making explicit of implicit norms which, inculcated by the State apparatus and the ruling class, articulate the logical nexus of the social space across a field of material inferences relaying concepts and practice,  organizing at the highest level the operational circuits of market dynamics. Ideological critique becomes of a piece with the exposing of implicit rules, challenging their normative valence. Economics here overlaps with the political, insofar as the mechanisms of deliberation proper to the latter can, once wrested from the blind efficacy of implicit norms through the use of logical and critical vocabulary, interrupt the axiomatic efficacy of the market by placing a burden of proof on the agencies that support it, and issues a challenge to its internal mechanics.

Political becoming cannot be counterposed to economic being. Being and becoming are native to economy through politics, once it is understood that the axiomatics of economy dynamize themselves by integrating decisional processes at the level of the normative. It is possible to understand discontinuities in economy without relapsing into haecceitism, while also avoiding glorifying the 'subjective revolutionary' elan at the expense of understanding the dynamics of local change. Thus, economics needs to be understood so as to explain how the dynamic processes of the market are  mobilized in interaction with the dynamics of agential processes proper to deliberation in  individuals, institutions, and so on (it is this intersection wherein certain concepts acquire concrete valence: share-value, risk analysis, probabilistic enveloping of financial speculation...). So what of politics then?

The possibility of structural change, in various degrees, or what I propose to call politics, concerns a possible way in which these two registers are entwined; it is not the emergence of subjectivity when the 'evental decision' disowns itself from all economic reality, breaking the latter's stasis. The Political Event cannot be dislodged from economy; we must be more Hegelian than Kantian here. Which means also, of course, more Marxist. By this I mean that in politics change is thought of in the articulation between the agential-institutional and the processual-causal at the pivotal joints, rather than in the sublation or elision of the economic in the name of the political.

But we must be more Badiouean or Sellarsian when accepting that the articulation between relations of production and the dynamics of class struggle cannot be construed in terms of a precarious concept of matter that introduces dialectical negation into it. The trick is to preserve the autonomy of political process with the natural efficacity of natural process in methodological terms, so as to avoid enveloping materiality with the conceptual (Idealism), but so as to avoid their indistinction (Land). Economy is dynamic in relating into its axiomatic aspect the agency of individuals and institutions, and subjectivity is structural in formally conditioning the dynamics of economy by virtue of being integrated into the latter's axiomatic process by the functional relaying of norms within the social space.

       The political natively related to economy is to be found at the moment not just when the former outstrips the regularity of the latter, but when it composes a dynamics of production sufficient to a set of needs, new possibilities and demands, and re-articulates the integral dynamism between the three in the form of labor and production dynamics. Demands cannot be understood outside the mediation of language and practice that informs the manifest image of man in the world, any more than it can be understood irrespective from the formal reality of value-form that inserts it into the field of commerce. But the incapacity to move outside the commodity-form which governs exchange value in capital dynamics is contingent on the present ubiquity of market-economy. Which means: any new articulation between the kernel of normativity and economics must depart from the contemporary situation. This is the only sense in which there being no outside of capitalism makes any sort of sense.

Thus, the question would be, how is it possible to have an organization of the formal reality of the economic and the materiality it supports, outside the form of the commodity? That is ultimately the task, but it cannot be resolved right away. How to have a conception of use-value adequate to the exigencies of our world outside the dynamism of generating surplus-value through the commodity form? What could such a conception of need or demand constitute, and under which practice?

Provisionally, we can muse: needs and demands are not fixed, but are partly empirically fixed by material constraints on the agents normatively articulating the social space (for example: food, health, housing...). This requires that the normative binding set the space of production-labor by developing an economic alternative to certain tasks (agriculture, medicine, construction...); or to propose the latter's axiomatization in an alternative model to market. Yet these spaces of economic reality cannot be reduced to wills that organize 'the greed of capitalist consumerism' any more than we can inflate collective action by deflating organization to 'Riot! No State!'. The latter is as powerless before Wall Street as it is when devising an effective means to organize labor so as to grow crops and distribute them across a population. We're still going to have to sink our teeth into the dynamics of market, and have the conceptual tools to devise new forms of articulation. If not, then 'bourgeois epistemology' flinging pebbles against the capitalist Iron Wall is all we have.

The Installation as Description Without Place

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-viUxnlbQ4&feature=PlayList&p=736EBCFFCDC67E0D&index=0

Badiou proposes in this extraordinary exposition that an installation is an example of what Wallace's Stevens calls "description without place": a presentation which does not find itself placed, and where objects are presented outside their normal appearing in a world. I want to elaborate on this idea, roaming a bit in some general considerations.

Does the description without place proper to the installation to which Badiou testifies displace the objects and the relations which constitute its contents, or does the installation rather displace what is outside the installation-set with its objects and relations? What is actually displaced in the insertion of an installation into a space for its exhibition, and what relation does it obtain therefore by its subtraction from its integration into their worldly placement?

Which is the splace (space of placement) and which is outplace: installation, its outside, the world?

First, I think the installation's primary function is related to how it introduces the spectator's gaze into the ambiguity of the space between the objective organization of the artwork-set and the worldly-set. This is an extension of what Lacan calls anamorphosis; the subjective distortion which, in synthesizing the presentation of a being, blurs what is outside it; the negative alienating function of the subject's agency which Hegel famously condensed in a single statement: 'the spirit is a bone').

But how is this concrete anamorphosis effected in the case of the installation with regards to the ambiguity between the installation and world, inside and outside, splace and outplace? This is a question as old as art: wherein lies the limits of the artwork, and where does the limit lie? Needless to say, the last century has been the century of the deconstruction and experimentation of displacements of the margins of the work, from the function of the frame in urban/site intervention (Buren, Goldsworthy), to the conception of audience qua observer in performance art, where the subject actively participates in the becoming of the work itself. Likewise, Malevich's simplicity strikes in its haunting ambiguity: where does the subject's gaze end and the objectivity of the work properly begin? In this last case with Malevich the ambiguity is taken to its ontological limit: the black aquare can either appear as the density of the object alienating the sterile whiteness of its background, or this whiteness can itself appear as the pierced space, haunted by the central void of an simple blackness lurking at its center. The subject's constitutive gaze is thereby inscribed on the work; the relation presented in the artwork is not so much representational as much as perspectival, not directly constituting reality as much as introducing an irresolvable split into it. So when Lacan had to cross the signifier of the subject, this means to testify the agency of the subject as that of introducing a constitutive split in Reality, the anamorphosis which for Hegel defined subjective negativity.

But let us return to the installation.

Concerning the arrangement of objects and relations, the installation clearly presents a novel effect with respect to painting, drawing or theater performance. The difference is clearly one between the idea of representation and the inscription of scission or to the subject of lack as participating in the work. One doesn't think of a painting depicting a living room as being 'taken away from its organic placing' just because it is in a museum or enframed; the frame clearly excludes such organic 'place of dwelling' from the ideal placing of the idea in the work. As Gadamer put; the artwork ( is not a mere copy, since in its representation it does not mean to signal the spectator away from the work itself, but is itself the work as presented which retroactively renders the original an Idea in which representation of the artwork participates: “The picture then has an autonomy that also affects the original. For strictly speaking, it is only through the picture (Bild) that the original (Urbild) becomes the original.” [Truth and Method: Pg. 136]

The installation of the living room on the other hand, does not clearly delimit a qualitative difference between outside and inside; the question is one of placement: how does the installation appear in this space, concretely, and what does it say about the relations it exhibits in relation to the gap it introduces in the world? Allowing our free transit from the installation-set to the world, the artist thereby inscribes the mediational void of the spectator between the two places:

First, the world as splace and the installation as cut or fragment (outplace).
Second, the world as limit (outplace) to the splace of the abstracted relations of the installation.

It is this scission which I propose to watch more closely now.

The mediational void which is the spectator marks itself in the irreconcilable duality: either the installation is organically displaced from the world, or it is the world which is excluded by this placeless fragment. The installation is either objectivized as a non continuous, thereby displaced, element in the worldly organization (splace), or limit to a dys-functional space of objective relations which excludes what is outside itself as a whole. What are these dysfunctional relations in the installation?

The installation deals with the insertion of the spectator into the determination of the ontological consistency of the work as object, and the world in which it appears. From the spectator's position outside the installation, the world as the place of relations finds an abrupt interruption of the normal sequence of objective relations in it. This limit appears localized, there where another sequence of objects-relations begins, a second description which, although identifiable as being part of the world, is inserted separately to what it 'mundanely' to a consistent totality, to a fully constituted functional space.

For example, in Hirst's pharmacy, even if one assumes the medicinal pills presented in the installation are recognizable as actual pills, and even if they could in fact be sold in a pharmacy for the treatment of illnesses, they do not appear in their installation within the nexus of this finality. The pills, and their presentation in the installation, are isolated, there to be perceived only within the enclosed set of the relations they have with the objects inside of its contours, severed from their missing complement, a lack guarded by the indifferent world at its uncertain margins. The imaginary supplement which would grant the installation its completeness is equivalent to its imaginary recognition as a displaced part of the world, either as an obstacle in the open path of what continues the continuity of the stability of the world (as outplace), or being itself alienated by the surrounding world (as splace), in the scission palpable through the uncertain imaginary body from which it is subtracted . The relations exhibited in the installation are thereby merely fragmentary and incomplete at all ends; the imaginary sets to work either to project the displaced installation as obstacle to the preceding harmony of the world as place, or the installation is the place which appears in claustrophic alienation, like a child desperately looking for her lost mother in the tumult of a flocking crowd.

This displaced objectivity in the installation, defined by Stevens as 'description without place' and cherished by Badiou, finally does present identifiable relations between objects in the world; negatively in relation to the extent that they appear as organs, wrested from their organic integration to the world's stipulated functional homeostasis. But the scission of the artwork from its integration into a normal network allows us see the installation as objectivized precisely insofar as it is a de-functionalized exhibition of functions (relations between sets of objects), wrested from their mundane finality. In their rearrangement they thus present a sort of material abstraction, a scission of the intermediary links which leads to specific destinations in a world. This material abstraction, engraved in the constitutive split between outside and inside, splace and outplace, finally calls into question the missing element just as much as what it presents. From the outside, the installation is what is in excess of the world (the world would be regular without this exception); from the inside it is what can only acquire completeness by integration to a missing totality, as lacking alinated from the turmoil of the world, a child wrested from the mother, and in fundamental excess or interruption. This integration into the artwork in which it spaces itself in the claustrophobic alienation from the world is, of course, not the clear 'white paper protected by its whiteness' announced by Stevens and which demarcates the forms of drawing, but rather a confusing darkness, the indifferent march of the void of the world.

This is the objective outplace which, with carrying intensity, describes the void of subjective life in the anamorphosis of the Real; the cut which places the installation at an unforeseen split relative to the subject's position, exactly like Zizek attributes to Lynch and his revolution in cinema, and which Badiou reminds us apropos Stevens.

There is finally something of an ironic distantiation in the installation: its relations are merely quotes, marginal organs, exposed in their structural dependence to an absent sphere (the white void of the real which Mallarme named the 'anti-paper'). But at the same time the work immanently doubts the structural coherency of what it opens, what it interrupts when we, outside the space of the installation can identify as an abrupt suspension, a reminder of another place making palpable its fragmentary and incomplete instantiation.

If the surrealists introduced ontological relativity to the object as subjective constitution (idealist anamorphosis, Kant), and if Malevich introduced ontological anamorphosis to designate the purely positional distinction between the Same and the Other in which the activity of the subject is located (dialectical anamorphosis, Hegel), then we can propose that in the installation serves to introduce anamorphosis into the distinction of artwork/world itself, blurring their very separation (Real anamorphosis, Lacan).

Perhaps Badiou's greatest contribution is to locate the proper emergence of the subject beyond this placed purely formal and differential blind spot in reality, while recognizing in it the evental subtraction from the representational placings: the generic excess to the stability of the natural ontological order which distributes the multiple in a world. It is this subjective constitution which sustains the empty perspectival placement which dichotomizes the scission between the place and the outplace, the cut inside and the untamed force which lays as background.

Against Historicist Hermeneutics

Our epoch’s ethical orientation can be best summarized as that of an avowal of a hermeneutic understanding of human nature, and of a restriction of the notion of politics to the sphere of cultural conflicts. This hermeneutic understanding begins by opposing itself to the modern univocal conception of human reason and nature by which we could safely judge different propositions, cultures, historical periods and forms of life. Thus, in a somewhat post-modern fashion, the hermeneutic orientation begins by pairing the Nietzschean suspicion against universal truths with the hermeneutic historicism proper to Heidegger or Gadamer, in order to delimit the methodological principles prior to ethics or politics. Since reason and truth are context-sensitive, it follows that an ethical questioning seeking to incorporate multiple cultures must avoid reductionisms to any one particular conception of reason, and must rather be receptive to understanding the plurality of discourses and forms of life in their dignified difference. What we have all in common is that we are all in fact different, unique individuals, in a world sharing various cultures, customs and idioms. In this sense the hermeneutic vision accepts reason as the democratic tribunal for the pacified exchange between distinct cultures in the common project of mutual understanding and of an effective politics. We may thus speak, following Badiou, of an equation between philosophy qua the discourse of the being of truth and democracy. The democratic principle tells us that all individuals and cultures are free to participate in the dialog of ethics or politics, and present their own views and opinions. Furthermore, it asserts that no subject is in principle excluded from the opportunity to participate in the dialog of reason, and so (in Badiou's language) the axiom of 'equality of minds' proposes a tribunal of practical reason which welcomes the alterity of Otherness in its fullness, and escapes the dark destiny of metaphysics once and for all.

A forgetfulness of this democratic principle, or so the hermeneutic story goes, follows to the barbarities of violence, discrimination, struggle, and war. Evil is seen as a continuation of the metaphysical violence of an ethnocentric conception of reason and is thus equated to non-democracy. If we fail to obtain a hermeneutic understanding of truth, we fold back into the metaphysical violence of onto-theology, the elevation of an entity or being into the rank of God, or supreme guarantor of knowledge, and thus to the horrors proper to totalitarian terror and the non-democratic excesses of power. Against a representationalist conception of truth which sees the intellect as mirroring the world and the task of reason as proving a singular unifying discourse about the real, a hermeneutic conception sees truth as the structural worldview proper to a peculiar culture and historical time. Against the metaphysical understanding of ethics which sees practical reason as the transparent tribunal to the universality of the Law, the hermeneutic version anthropologizes ethics in favor of a contextualism of tolerance, admitting the plurality of cultures and ways of life in their own dignity. In sum, whereas the old metaphysics identifies reason with similarity and the supression of alterity by seeking foundations, the hermeneutic worldview sees alterity as foundational for identity. It rests on accepting alterity by first accepting the radical finitude of our being and the openness of truth for human thought. By historicizing truth, the task of reason becomes fusion (in Gadamer’s sense) rather than reduction, multitude rather than foundation, the openness of contingency as opposed to the closed spectrum of universality or necessity.

The multiplicity of cultures and forms of life is accepted and protected under the banner of democratic freedom. To the axiom of equality of minds we may thus supplement that the anthropologization of ethics in our times proposes an axiom of equality of cultures. Not only are individuals free and ends in themselves qua individuals, like Kant proposed, but all cultures and traditions share this integrity as well. The fascination of our contemporary notion of human rights, for example, seeks both to secure the liberties of the individual as well as those of the forms of life he/she integrates; the individual is to be protected as the one who harbours the historical truth of his time and of his freedom to participate in a distinctive way in a world. We can thus summarize this principle along Badiou in saying that for today's political ideology there are only bodies and languages, only individuals and cultures.

Since the hermeneutic orientation of thought assigns no ontotheological privilege to any one conception of reason or truth, there are no available procedures to disavow an ethical position in principle. Ethical truth can only attain the rank of universality, paradoxically, by accepting the possibility that the objectivity it claims for itself is not transitive to other situations. So in this view the ultimate horizon for ethical truth is in fact the democratic openness to dialog and discourse, always relative to culture and history. More than a plain relativism in which all judgments or opinions are equivalent, the axioms of equality of minds and cultures value the recognition of plurality and thus equate evil to the denouncement of Otherness, or what amounts to the same here, to non-democracy.

I would claim that this democratic fetishism found in the hermeneutic understanding of ethics goes even further in its dialectics. Not only are individuals and cultures equal in principle, but it is precisely because the ultimate horizon for the understanding of intersubjectivity is found in the historicizing of truth that an individual ought to be free to live in the way he chooses. The universality of freedom of choice supervenes on the ethical neutrality of the choices one is free to choose from. The individual must be protected because he harbors in his life the truth of his own freedom. Since the hermeneutic view opens its tribunal to all cultures and forms of life, to all debates and questions, then freedom of choice and expression can be safeguarded under the banner of democratic legitimacy and protected from the tyranny of totalitarian terror.

The consequences of this view are far reaching and obviously complicated for these purposes. I will try to summarize what I take to be four of the most important results of the hermeneutic vision of the world, drawing from the works of Badiou, Zizek and Agamben:

1) Procedures of constructive politics are expected to not exceed their situational dimension. This is to say that a local project in politics should not be construed in such a way that by its criteria and formulation, its effects are transposed to other situations in which such criteria might not be assumed, validated or wanted. The universality of human rights will safeguard the independence of nations and cultures, and thus condemn traditional revolutionary politics as acts of barbarism and all acts of violence as in principle reprehensible. The localization of truth within a democratic framework neutralizes all revolutionary attempts to oppose this democratization as acts of irrational violence against the sovereignty of freedom, democracy and human rights. As Badiou puts it "The return of the old doctrine of the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolutionary Marxism."

2) Since within the historicist dimension reason cannot exceed the admission of the multitude of ways of life, political procedures are assigned to culture as the cornerstone for ethico-political debate. Politics and ethics are seen as tantamount to questions about cultural/ethico/religious/political freedoms, rights of cultural minorities, ethnic groups, and so on. The inability to exceed local situations entails politics must remain intra-situational, and thus confined to expert-knowledge and specialization. There are no longer truly political questions to overlap with ethics, since there is no longer the aspiration for a new common body of politics beyond the fusion of distinct horizons in cultural dialog. Cultural difference takes the place of the political by becoming the body of a human ethics, an ethics of cultural democracy.

Democracy in this way substantializes cultures as the objective bodies which participate in the political process of politics. Thus the preservation of multiculturalism entails that whoever opposes the democratic vision of the rights of man (Muslims, fundamentalists, communists, terrorists) is excluded, criminal or tyranical. To assert as a principle the fundamental opposition to another form of life, to be intolerant to the Other is to err, to sin, to violate. Tolerance only for those who tolerate democracy. (This entire procedure of human rights can be read in the succession of wars in the name of democracy which took place during the 20^th Century as part of the crusade for ‘freedom’).

3) Individuality or particularity is more important for politics than equality or universality. The imperative to respect and conserve alterity qua the plurality of ways of life and cultures, as well as the rights of the individual to freely act, compete and develop him or herself within the democratic framework exceeds the consideration of whether there is in fact equality in the situation admitted by assigning politics to culture. The priority of freedom over equality is equivalent to the priority of enjoyment over justice. The emerging result can be viewed, as Badiou has pointed out, as that of a monstrous inequality within our Western countries and especially outside them, suggesting that “…maybe this absence of justice is the price we have to pay for freedom.”

4) As Slavoj Zizek has remarked, the old Aristotelian logic of the right measure is replaced by the injunction to enjoy as part of the constitution of the free subject. We obtain the equation identity equals freedom and freedom equals the freedom to enjoy. The freedom to affirm one’s roles and identity presupposes the availability of cultural elements and identities as something one can legitimately purchase or claim for one’s own. The objectification of culture into the object of politics is adjacent to the objectification of cultural symbols as the currency of the economy in which subjects effectively participate and in which they are constituted as such. Within capitalist market dynamics this takes the form of the radical purchase of traits, products and symbols, i.e. from fashion statements, to medical implants, to the new-age obscurantist search for trans-cultural experiences, ‘food-court’ ideology, and so on. By the same token, the exclusion of an individual from the socio-political process is tantamount to the limited access to the resources of this identification; the excluded are in fact those who are not free to enjoy and to define themselves through the assimilation of a unique identity. It thus becomes a case, to run once more along Badiou’s terminology, of a nihilistic democratic materialism, i.e. the radical purchase and disposal of all bodies. The nihilistic disavowal of meaning in the world is supplemented by the injunction of the emancipation of the individual, the call of self-creation and freedom through the elevation of the living body and the aspiration to enjoyment. It is thus both a biopolitcs of life adjacent to the hedonist creed; the excess of enjoyment is but the obverse supplement of the denial of meaning, or hedonism is the obverse of nihilism.

Once our metaphysical shackles have been loosened, the individual can in fact participate in respectful democratic dialog: he no longer seeks reductions but admitts plurality, he asserts his own position but is equally tolerant to the Other. Within the dialectics of democratic materialism, the ethical neutrality of the roles one assumes allows the constant production of roles and symbols to remain in circulation to guarantee the possibility of genuine subjects. On the other hand, the hermeneutic promise for an impartial world in which horizons are fused and in which tolerance abolishes violence easily becomes suspect once the long succession of wars under the banner of democratic freedom and human rights is put to the test. The dialectic of multicultural understanding proposes a dialog between different cultures in which the integral limits of each agent are effectively ‘fused’ or ‘expanded’ through some diplomatic procedure. To review, the obscenity of this lax logic of understanding can be roughly sketched argumentatively as follows:

a) Truth and reason is context-dependent, and not univocal or subsumable under a singular ideal of reason (anti-metaphysical foundation).

b) An ethical program that seeks to fairly consider the views and opinions of other cultures and individuals cannot begin by imposing/transposing the conceptual structures of one culture to the other, since this amounts to ignoring the uniqueness and distinctiveness of each culture.
c) Ethics thus amounts to a process of dialog in which each identity affirms itself in its radical uniqueness, the prospect of a reduction betrays context-dependency; one can at best hope for a genealogical anthropology in which the views and language of the Other are respected in their uniqueness.

And yet the promise of a democratic sphere of dialog is substantiated amidst the violence of the Western world through the very unclear notion of a ‘fusion of horizons’. We claim respect for the Other does not amount to the suppression of difference, but the admission of his radical alterity. And yet this alterity remains entrapped in regurgitating the old anti-Metaphysical slogan that reverberated in Nietzsche’s thought, announcing the death of God; or through Heidegger as the death of metaphysics. The slogans of tolerance and multicultural dialog effectively dismiss how it is to one standard that the freedom to enjoy grants respect and bows to: the democratic one. To Zizek’s challenge “Would we say Hitler was perceived as an enemy of humanity because we didn’t hear his own side of the story?” the democratic trend of thought reiterates “No! precisely because Hitler represented a totalitarian power we can say that only through dialog and democracy we can reach ethical truth for which the name is justice.” But if it is this sort of justice we take as the destiny of thought and life then we can go along with Badiou to the end and plainly state: no democracy for the enemies of democracy, no freedom for those who oppose freedom. The freedom of culture or choice thus becomes reducible to the following paradoxical qualification to the commandment of freedom: “you are free to do what you want, on the condition that you do the right thing”. The justice is tantamount to opposing the non-democratic world is perhaps too visceral a claim to consider, reason for which the slogans of tolerance and dialog can effectively coat the violence of our times behind the ideologicalfacade of humanitarian nobility.

With this prospect in mind, we can clearly demarcate the democratic project as propagating a culture without believers, a decaffeinated culture. Muslims yes, without fundamentalism, without violence. Freedom of choice, yes, as long as the choice agrees with the democratic principle and its rule. One is free to choose the cultural symbols and roles one desires freely as long as these roles are already deprived of that which effectively separates them from democracy. The objectification of culture is in this way dissolved within the prospect of a globalized world in which horizons are fused; only that those who must pay for our freedom are those whose freedom is unknowingly stepped over.

What is then the role that philosophy plays in this infinitely open dimension for dialog? If hermeneutics wants to go beyond the trivial relativist claim that different situations exist, it must rely in the proposal of an operator of consensus; the 'fusion of horizons' cannot be concentrated in the patronizing gesture of acknowledging alterity. The formal requirement that philosophy imposes is that of a criterion for objective consequences, criteria for the rational discussion to emerge. The problem then does not come in the inoffensive plea to recognize the Other, but in determining the conditions under which reason must be capable of disagreeing. Put somewhat differently, one can say the task is proposing constructive criteria which restrict what can be legitimately accepted as a respectable position. Instead of avowing an all-embracing prospect of tolerance unconsciously submitted to the rule of democratic freedom we must be ready to contest the democratic fetish. Along with Zizek, we can agree in that tolerance functions de facto as its opposite; the rule of tolerance is not the abolishing of rules, but precisely making the protection of individual liberties from harassment the priority for the State. And it is indeed only within the liberal equation of happiness to the purchase of identities within a cultural idiom that we can fundamentally oppose the non-democratic vision of the world. This obsession for a 'respect for the Other' can perhaps then be exemplified in the Anglo-Saxon qualification preceding any affirmative proposal: 'in my opinion...'.

We can safely dispense of whatever completes such claims inside a purely relativistic framework; but hermeneutics seeks more than that. The 'fusion of horizons' seeks the democratic agreement and expansion of views through a peaceful exchange in dialog. And yet beyond the fascination of alterity, the democratic world restricts the free exercise of the views which it neutrally considers. No democracy for the enemies of democracy. No freedom for the enemies of freedom. The barbarity of this circular logic should appear less compelling now than it did to vulgar skepticism. The problem seems thus that once we go beyond the 'deconstruction' of the ethnocentric modern conception of reason, and the genealogical reconstruction of Otherness through the hermeneutic method, we still lack the means to construct a new logical framework for the construction of a prescriptive new politics. Until then, the 'fusion of horizons' might appear as the helpless obscurantist chant of philosophers, extending the historicist romanticism which readily unveils but does not confront. The obsession with enjoyment and the terror of violence can thus safely continue its course without any threat from the theoreticians. At least not for now.

Foucault vs. Chomsky or the Impasse of Ontological Indeterminism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Ai5WPHqWA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawGakdNoT0

The debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky from 1971 serves as a wonderful example which concentrates some of the crucial philosophical knots proper to post-structuralism and its critics. Foucault, well in accord to the post-modern, Heideggerean tendencies of historicism and 'hermeneutics of suspicion', follows to the gap of Gelassenheit, the point of an impasse at the moment of prescription. He remains at the neutral point of anti-essentialist recognition: all facts are culture-bred and thus intra-situational, and thus any positive programme based on borrowed concepts is but an indulgence on ideological supports for a present system of power.

The same struggle was already put before Heidegger in the famous section on authenticity in Sein und Zeit, and its prescriptive impasse: the clash between Dasein's solitude and its ontological being as Mitdasein (being-with), of authentic resoluteness existence against the inauthentic idle talk of Das Man, and ultimately the short-circuit for decision making in facing the gap between being and beings. Familiar story, told in an unfairly synthesized version, but you get the point. Foucault's suspicion is, in effect, the distribution of the ontological gap across the entirety of the state of the historical situation. The key is to 'unmask the reigning mechanisms of power' which articulate the structure of our contemporary class society.

Here we see the standard view which produces the standard criticisms against post-structuralism: the ontological neutrality entailed by the hermeneutic approach leads to an impasse at the level of action; bridging the gap between the subject and an ontology results in the twofold constriction: the identity of the subjects and objects becomes the partially determined concept of a particular structure of power, and this indeterminacy serves to guarantee immobility at the point of agency. The results of both the standard procedures of a hermeneutics of suspicion is decidedly post-Cartesian in that the category of the subject becomes part of the situation, rather than the separate point to which we can withdraw to gain an apodictic foundation for knowledge (the theme which runs from Descartes to Husserl, even Sartre). The question of an ontology takes the place of the question of an epistemology: there is no minimum definition of the subject as a substantial ground for thought; ontology itself precludes the substantializing of the subject.

In this way, the notion of a subject qua agent is put in unstable grounds. The introduction to Badiou's 'Infinite Thought' by Feltham and Justin Clemens provides a nice synthesis of the dilemma between poststructuralists and its critics, citing the impasse of historical determinacy against the possibility of independent agency in Foucault:

"For example in his middle period, Foucault argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects. However, Foucault also said that power produces resistance. His problem then became accounting for the source of such resistance. If the subject - right down to its most intimate desires, actions and thoughts - is constituted by power, then how can it be the source of independent resistance? For such a point of agency to exist, Foucault needs some space which has not been completely constituted by power, or a complex doctrine on the relationship between resistance and independence. However, he has neither."

Following the necessity to constrict the conception of the subject, post-structuralism (most notably post-Lacanian) reduces the subject to being the suture of its situation; it is precisely a-substantial; it lacks a proper place of inscription, decentered, or to use Derrida's catchy phrase, it remains 'outside the text'. This is also grounds for the Lacanian gap between the Real and language. But Foucault does not yet consider the identification of subject with the gap; if anything he remains within the negative procedure of denying foundation. This way, The 'anthropological' point of departure thus consists, paradoxically, in denying an identifiable set of traits of the anthropos to be distributed within the field of knowledge, as foundational for univocal interpretation; the subject belongs to the situation and cannot be displaced outside of it without reproducing the structures which constitute the situation as such. Thus, power becomes reiterated over and again through appeal to the substantiality of the subject, which must be escaped.

In this way, Foucault begins by calling into question Chomsky's proposal of a 'human nature' and a standard for common values departing from the very general platitudes (love, justice, freedom...) since these concepts must themselves be understood as the ideological situation in which the mechanisms of power operate. But since Foucault has neither a theory of how positive ethico/political action can occur on the part of agents, nor an ontology to give which could be used for such projections, he runs against the pragmatic accusation that post structuralism "leads down a slippery slope to apoliticism". (1)

Here Foucault assumes too much about Chomsky's understanding of the concept of 'class', and for that the latter was not capable of understanding the extent to which Foucault's argument may lead us to locate to locate the knot of the problem. The crucial misunderstanding occurs when Chomsky reduces Foucault’s notion of class as that of economic classes within capitalist societies. But one cannot understand class as that assigned to any particular historical social order, and certainly not any particular economic or political notion of class. To say the transmission of power occurs just or primordially at the level of economic classes is certainly an excess. Furthermore, Foucault is well aware that classes are always in operation in the form of concrete economical and political processes and mechanisms, within concrete situations. But what must be understood is precisely that there is no singular notion of a class which underlies uniformly human life throughout historically, ontologies are determined from within and not transcendentally. Certainly the notion of class which is structured by the operation of Marxism is different from the feudal state, just as the notion of a 'deity' is not homogenous for medieval Christian ontology as that of other cultures, and so on. Of course, we should also be prepared to go beyond Foucault and acknowledge that the process of hermeneutic interpretation does not pose an exception to the indeterminacy of this process, but that it itself becomes subject to the negative process which would expose it as operating on a certain exclusion, an absent center.

The result is clear: one cannot propose an ontology on these terms, but must operate as if the hermeneutic text was exhibiting the systematic conformity of the situation to the interpretative text. Put more simply, the hermeneutic interpretation Foucault proposes can only serve to exhibit intrinsically the structures of power if it becomes at the same time part of the interpretative text being proposed itself, the analysis of the situation is not just another edifice with its distinct classes, but an entirely independent, indeterminate system for the interpretation of situations intrinsically. Of course, one must question whether Foucault's interpretative framework, guided by the operation of power and manifested as classes does not consist itself in just another text itself including the possibility for a deconstructive reading. One may simply recall the Derrida /Gadamer fiasco on the hermeneutic ideal to get a grasp on how easily the problem of interpretation turns muddy on anti-essentialist grounds. We can thus say that, for Foucault, the category of class as circumscribed to economic class would constitute a paradigmatic example of what Kant would have called a private use of reason: recurrence to a concept which is contingent and contained within the situation where power is applied directly; class is never the class of individuals, but of the universal which allows a set of individuals to be included in the situation, i.e. to be a subset.

In any case, for our purposes it is sufficient to note that Foucault wishes to produce as a concept of class itself divorced from specific vocabularies or historical presentations. That the terms belonging to the interpretative text he proposes may itself be exhibited as groundless, contradictory or resting on its own system of classes must not deviate us from the essential direction of his thought. For what is precisely at stake is precisely how the reduction of one system to a more general one, while necessarily operating within a situation and from its own terms, may nonetheless result in a possibility for change, and thus a space for individual and collective agency to emerge.

Foucault thus uses 'class' as an absolutely general concept with respect to social, political and economic standards. Indeed, the very conceptual divisions we sketch out to begin our analysis become themselves to be questioned hermeneutically as integral parts of a particular discourse. We can say that Foucault's notion of class is effectively post-Marxist, in that the state becomes understood essentially as the establishment of a relationship to classes, or to use Badiou's helpful jargon, subsets or parts. Here we can follow Badiou's clear exposition of the Marxist concept of a class to elucidate Foucault's own usage of the term:

"Marxist thought related the State directly to sub-multiples [universal, ideological, prescriptive] rather than to terms of the situation [individual, empirical, passive]. It posits that the count-as-one ensured by the State is not originally that of individuals, but that of the multiple classes of individuals. Even if one abandons the terminology of classes, the formal idea that the State- which is the state of the historico-social situation- deals with collective subsets and not with individuals remains essential. This idea must be understood: the essence of the State is that of not being obliged to recognize individuals- when it is obliged to recognize them, in concrete cases, it is always according to a principle of counting which does not concern individuals as such... This is the underlying meaning that must be conferred upon the vulgar Marxist idea that 'the State is always the State of the ruling class'. The interpretation I propose of this idea is that the State solely exercises its domination according to a law destined to form-one out of the parts of the situation..." [B&E, Meditation 9, Pg. 105]

It is clear that Foucault is operating by the same logic here. The appeal to 'human nature', 'justice', 'freedom' and so on, cannot be understood as anything but as reintroducing oneself to the parts of the situation which the state (the representation of the historico-social situation) legitimates to be counted; there is no relation to individuals in the situation apart from what the State legitimates to be counted. Which is why Chomsky’s reply that power is not necessarily manifested in the form of classes fundamentally fails; all societies have a particular system of classes, and power is nothing but the effective human exchange which sustain the structure of these classes. So we are left, it seems, with a twofold result: a gap between the subject and justification, and the gap between negation (in the sense of unmasking/challenging the structures of power) and affirmation (in the sense of determining the space for an ontology which allows for decision without relapsing into the structures of domination).

A ‘new’ ontology should thus be both conscientious of the ontological indeterminacy of the situation while at the same time challenging the structures of power presented in the situation by unmasking their operation. At the same time, Foucault offers nothing which suggests the possibility of an ontology. We thus remain, with Foucault, entrapped in the all-too familiar anthropological, anti-essentialist theses which have become themselves another economy of power, the preservation of a certain status quo through the deployment of intra-situational platitudes. These are all well-known to most of us in their many versions: universal truths are impossible, there are only different perspectives, we are all human after all, one must be anthropologically aware and not impose our concepts onto other cultures, the attempts to elevate reason in order to justify everything misses on the dynamism of change, etc. But the equally familiar point follows that when we demand a homogeneous ethico-political project for mankind by evoking concepts such as 'freedom of choice, privacy...' and deploy a particular conceptual framework for the articulation and justification of these claims, we are relapsing into universalist metaphysics; a blindness which leads to thinking humans can be judged under one standard. As Paul would have put it, from the viewpoint of universal reason "...there are no Jews or Greeks". In order for recognition to avoid identification, one cannot operate axiomatically through the concepts which are proper to the situation as such. The question is thus the question of the gap between the different positions, or as Zizek puts it apropos of Paul: "The struggle which truly engages him is not simply "more universal" than that of one ethnic group against another; it is a struggle which obeys an entirely different logic; no longer the logic of one self-identical substantial group fighting another group, but an antagonism that, in a diagonal way, cuts across all particular groups."

This perpetual oscillation between conceptual indeterminacy and the urge for positive political action cannot be resolved within the dialectic that Foucault deploys; it is merely constrained to repeat the deconstructive process of identifying the points of suture within the present state of the situation to expose them as structures of power. The 'danger' Foucault speaks off is indeed certain, but one that ultimately must be confronted. It is the danger to be found, as recognized by Lacoue-Labarthe, of repetition as such; of the inherent mimesis intrinsic to the dialectical process which follows from the assertion universality. This immediate tension, or danger, has ran its familiar course through the post-modern tendencies of discourse, ever since Heidegger demarcated Das Man and idle talk (Garede) as the (inauthentic) danger of a withdrawal of being; a deferral of the gap between the ontic and the ontological. Similarly, Derrida's notion of differance concentrates this necessary moment of deference at the point of tension between the repetition of the concept and its inherent universality:

"To put old names to work, or even just to leave them in circulation, will always, of course, involve some risk: the risk of settling down or regressing into the system that has been, or is in the process of being deconstructed. To deny this risk would be to confirm it: it would be to see the signifier- in this case the name- as a merely circumstantial, conventional occurrence of the concept of as a concession without any specific effect. It would be an affirmation of the autonomy of meaning, of the ideal purity of the abstract, theoretical history of the concept. Inversely, to claim to do away immediately with previous marks and to cross over, by decree, by a simple leap, into the outside of classical oppositions is, apart from the risk of engaging in an interminable "negative theology", to forget that these oppositions have never constituted a given system, a sort of ahistorical, thoroughly homogenous table, but rather a dissymmetric, hierarchically ordered space whose closure is constantly being traversed by the forces and worked by the exteriority, that it represses: that is, expels and, which amounts to the same, internalizes as one of its moments. This is why deconstruction involves an indispensable phase of reversal. To remain content with reversal is of course to operate within the immanence of the system to de destroyed. But to sit back, in order to go further, in order to be more radical and daring, and take an attitude of neutralizing indifference with respect to the classical oppositions would be to give free reign to the existing forces that effectively and historically dominate the field. It would be, for not having seized the means to intervene, to confirm the established equilibrium." (Dissemination)

This passage condenses the very impasse which happens between Foucault and Chomsky: the double danger. Whereas Foucault is steadfast to point out that it is necessary to elucidate how the present class system is upheld by a certain economy of power, this remains an essentially negative task, it speaks as if the elucidation of the oppositions which structure the situation could be shown as having belonged to particular framework of interpretation, external to the situation itself. In the case of Foucault, this is where an ontology of power seems to transpire: since by the hermeneutic procedure of exposing the power structures of the situation one sublates them under the mark of the general system of 'power struggle' that constitutes and allows the interpretative text to operate. On the other hand, Chomsky's position succumbs to the second danger: by neutralizing the indifference given to the classical oppositions in order to go further (i.e to show how the concepts of justice and freedom have been assumed in a particular form by the organisms of power to seek a correction on the basis of these concepts) is to relapse into the situation's terms. Here I think we have a lot to learn from Badiou and his notion of subtraction, and how for an event to happen from the situation, there must be a point of absolute (axiomatic) decision. The radicality required exceeds by far that required by opposing the empirical, circumstantial shortcomings of the state of the situation, and thus much more than Chomsky's somewhat depressing conception of 'human nature' as the foundation for a new ethics or politics.

Which is why Chomsky appears (finally) as the obvious conservative: his recognition of the brooding conceptual indeterminateness is sufficient, and ultimately folds back to some very general platitudes which appear inoffensive and trivially true, but turn out to be 'Eurocentric' or worse. Of course, it seems quite cynical to deny that human beings want goodness, love, and so on; the intuitiveness of these seems immediate. But the meaning of these concepts, and how they operate inside a concrete order where power is enforced, is the impasse of such a dialectic course. What is needed is a radical reworking of our conceptual possibilities to arrive at novel possibilities for thought which exceed that allowed by the state of the situation. And this is something neither Chomsky nor Foucault have been ever prepared to give; even if the both have militantly reacted against the present organisms of-power.

Chomsky is thus finally trapped in a rather innocent ethical ontology using very broad concepts of- 'human nature', 'kindness', 'love', and reiterating the necessity of decision in light of the gap. The state of the situation is thus condensed in the following, apparently silly dilemma: if universality fails at the realm of justification (since justification itself fails to be universal), how do we resist a posture of Gelassenheit and propose an effective reworking of our social world. Of course, for Chomsky, this occurs within the organisms of society by denouncing acts of injustice and proposing improvement at the level of economical, political states by constantly referring to the abovementioned platitudes as the standards which must be preserved.

Foucault here is right in pointing out that Chomsky's optimism in founding society using as justification certain concepts runs the danger of preserving the status quo, or trivially modify it. But Chomsky is right in that the formal indeterminateness of concrete possibilities cannot perpetuate inertia with respect to our socio political acting. Then again, Foucault is also correct in that the conceptual work must be ready to denounce commitment to fundamental notions which support the order. Finally, the task seems to require to locate the possibility of a new conceptualization of the situation so we may produce, through a sufficient theory and the will to action, a new possibility to represent the situation or, to use Badiou's term, opening the possibility for an event, the possibility of producing a novelty by announcing that which has been thus far excluded by the organisms of power and affirming new ones through axiomatic decisions. This is where Badiou, Zizek, and the like, are cooperating towards a new possibility of understanding our present historical situation.