Balibar on antagonism

“I am tempted to say that we must at present reconceive antagonism, in all its inescapable reality, as a social relationship, but as a social relationship that harbors within itself, as one of its modalities of realization and development, the fact that social relationships produce different kinds of men or differentiations within human nature or the human condition. Philosophy provides all the resources you need to think about this kind of thing. What prevents Marx from consciously and deliberately going in this direction? We come back to the problem of universalism. I think it’s because Marx never abandoned the idea that the proletariat is a universal class—the proletariat, in other words, not as it really is, not as part of the human race, but as, in a sense, its own future. In this respect, there is a kind of tension in Marx’s thought between the anthropology of differences (and these differences, like those I mentioned earlier, cannot be situated, they are not fixed) and an eschatology of the future of humanity. Yet we again encounter the problem that I discuss somewhat hastily at the end of my book, which results from the fact that there is a certain way of realizing difference that makes the individual simultaneously the whole and the part.”

Balibar on human rights

Excellent interview with Étienne Balibar here.

“The heart of the problem is knowing how to grasp simultaneously the political and performative power of the discourse of human rights, which affirms, not for the very first time but for the first time from within a completely immanent framework, from within a purely political field, with no theological or cosmological reference points, the idea that every being that can be called “human” has equal dignity or equality or equivalence in principle. A friend and colleague of mine, who is, as he likes to put it, an historian of the constitutionalization of human rights, Gérald Sturtz, always refers to a line from Fichte, which itself comes from French revolutionary discourse, affirming that everything that wears a human face is in principle equal or of equal dignity. This is one side of the coin; the other side is the frenetic impulse to classify and hierarchize that is characteristic of what Foucault called knowledge-power disciplines, that is, the scientific and administrative disciplines of the so-called bourgeois age. In other words, they are obviously linked to the fact that human rights are the legal and political discourse of the bourgeois age. There is obviously a way out: the two easy solutions are [first,] to say that human rights discourse is simply a masquerade, a hypocritical veneer hiding the reality of a bourgeois age characterized more than ever by discrimination and exclusion; the other maintains that these discriminations and exclusions are of merely contingent significance. History’s sad reality contradicts these principles.”

“…I have indeed become furiously Hegelian: I told myself that one must not sever the terms of the contradiction, but try to grasp them together. This does not at all imply that a theology is at work in these ideas, nor that there is a predetermined end towards which we are heading, but simply that we must try to understand the discrepancy or the conflict as such. My view is not that exclusions or discriminations are more serious today than they have been in the past. I don’t know if they are. It’s the same as the debate over the perpetual question of whether bourgeois society is more violent than slave societies. That isn’t the problem; the problem is the way in which discrimination is inscribed within equality itself.“

“The idea that I have put forward, and which I obviously do not consider to be the final word on the matter, is that once this foundational correspondence between the universality of human rights on the one hand and political equality (or an equal amount of liberty for each citizen) on the other is established, there is essentially no other way to justify excluding people from citizenship than to exclude them from humanity itself, or in any case to disqualify particular individuals and groups on the grounds of their humanity.”

spinoza on the radio

CBC Radio.

back to work

This fall has been a sort of series of small calamities. I returned to Ohio from a wonderful summer in Finland only to come down with a pretty bad case of the Ohio flu/allergy I seem to catch every time I return to the state. A few weeks of getting some decent work done was then derailed by a rather ridiculous accident with a ceramic cereal bowl in my kitchen that resulted in a significant thumb injury.

I nicked an artery, ripped about 10% of a tendon, and scooped out 4cm of nerve from my left thumb. This resulted in a trip to the emergency room that was less than great. One of the doctors left me in a tourniquet for about 35 minutes, which was more excruciating pain than my actual injury. After being summoned to a hand/upper extremity specialist two days after the ER we scheduled a surgery to repair my thumb.

It’s amazing how much a small injury (literally small, affecting about 5cm of the area of my thumb) can be so big. I was completely sidelined for a week, either with a dead arm from the anesthetic nerve block for the surgery, or in too much pain to move out of a chair in my living room, which I also slept in for over a week. This was followed by about 3 weeks where any activity would just wipe me out, even just trying to read for a while. Add to this the fact that trying to type anything longer than a short email sends throbbing pain and spasms up my left arm, and I have been set back quite a bit. Again, I’m amazed at how interconnected the body and mind truly are, and how an injury to my thumb could actually set back my intellectual work quite a bit. I can only begin to imagine how an injury like this would affect anyone who works in any number of areas where labor requires the use of the hands and even a modicum of dexterity. It was a jarring reminder of how inadequate systems of workers’ compensation insurance and medical leave really are, if they even exist at all anymore for many workers.

Anyway, the nerve is slowly beginning to grow back towards reconnection, at least as best as anyone can tell at this point. The doctor tells me that the severed ends won’t actually rejoin for at least 40ish more days, and that I won’t be able to tell what kind of sensation I’ll have on the outside edge of my thumb for at least a year. Then, whatever feeling I have is probably what I’ll be left with for life.

Luckily, I’m getting back on track. I’m basically giving myself physical therapy, stretching the thumb every day and trying to get it to bend beyond the 45 degrees it seems stuck at for weeks now. Typing is getting just a little easier every day, which means I’ll be posting again somewhat regularly.

j

Golden Dawn and Antifascist Response

The situation in Greece is deteriorating, and the EU community refuses to respond to emergent fascism.

“Golden Dawn and the Deafening Silence of Europe“

antonio negri: a revolt that never ends

vigilantes burn roma camp in marseille

The BBC reports that vigilantes burned a Roma camp and expelled the residents from the neighborhood yesterday (Thursday 9/27/12). Inexplicably they report that there was “no evidence of any violence” only a few lines after reporting that “Furniture and other items were set on fire at the camp, which was erected on wasteland at the beginning of the week.”

Apparently vigilantes burning down homes (even temporary ones) and forcing residents to leave because they are not welcome aren’t forms of violence…

just because…

…this is amazing. Ben Folds Five and Fraggle Rock!

foucault – the mesh of power

Link to new Foucault at Viewpoint.

Link to Jason Read on the new Foucault.

Excerpts, including an engagement with Marx:

“We will attempt to proceed towards an analysis of the concept of power.¹ I am not the first, far from it, to attempt to skirt around the Freudian schema that pits instinct against suppression [répression], instinct against culture.² Many decades ago, an entire school of psychoanalysts tried to modify and develop this Freudian schema of instinct versus culture, and of instinct versus suppression – I am referring to psychoanalysts in the English as well as the French language, like Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan, who have tried to show that suppression, far from being a secondary, ulterior, or later mechanism, which would attempt to control a given or natural play of instinct, constitutes a part of the mechanism of instinct, or, more or less, of the process through which the sexual instinct [l’instinct sexuel] is developed, unfolded and constituted as drive [pulsion].”

“How may we attempt to analyze power in its positive mechanisms? It appears to me that we may find, in a certain number of texts, the fundamental elements for an analysis of this type. We may perhaps find them in Bentham, an English philosopher from the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, who was basically the great theoretician of bourgeois power, and we may of course also find these elements in Marx, essentially in the second volume of Capital. It’s here, I think, that we may find some elements that I will use for the analysis of power in its positive mechanisms.”

“First, what we may find in the second volume of Capital is that one power does not exist, but many powers.⁶ Powers, this means forms of domination, forms of subjugation that function locally, for example in the workshop, in the army, on a slave plantation or where there are subservient relations. These are all local and regional forms of power, which have their own mode of functioning, their own procedure and technique. All these forms of power are heterogeneous. We may not, therefore, speak of power if we wish to construct an analysis of power, but we must speak of powers and attempt to localize them in their historic and geographic specificity.”

“A society is not a unitary body, in which one and only one power is exercised. Society is in reality the juxtaposition, the link, the coordination and also the hierarchy of different powers that nevertheless remain in their specificity. Marx places great emphasis, for example, on the simultaneously specific and relatively autonomous – in some sense impervious – character of the de facto power the boss exercises in a workshop, compared to the juridical kind of power that exists in the rest of society. Thus, the existence of regions of power. Society is an archipelago of different powers.”

“Second, it appears that these powers cannot and must not simply be understood as the derivation, the consequence of some kind of overriding power that would be primary. The schema of the jurists, whether those of Grotius, Pufendorf, or Rousseau, amounts to saying: “In the beginning, there was no society, and then society appeared when a central point of sovereignty appeared to organize the social body, which then permitted a whole series of local and regional powers”; implicitly, Marx does not recognize this schema. He shows, on the contrary, how, starting from the initial and primitive existence of these small regions of power – like property, slavery, workshop, and also the army – little by little, the great State apparatuses were able to form. State unity is basically secondary in relation to these regional and specific powers; these latter come first.”

“Third, these specific regional powers have absolutely no ancient [primordial] function of prohibiting, preventing, saying “you must not.” The original, essential and permanent function of these local and regional powers is, in reality, being producers of the efficiency and skill of the producers of a product. Marx, for example, has superb analyses of the problem of discipline in the army and workshops. The analysis I’m about to make of discipline in the army is not in Marx, but no matter: What happened in the army from the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century practically right up to the end of the 18th century? An enormous transformation in an army that had hitherto been essentially constituted of small units of relatively interchangeable individuals, organized around one commander. These small units were replaced by a great pyramidal unit, with a whole series of intermediate commanding officers, of non-commissioned officers and technicians too, essentially because a technical discovery had been made: the gun with comparatively rapid and calibrated fire.”

john protevi’s intro to reading deleuze

John Protevi has a post up over at New APPS on “How to Begin Reading Deleuze.” The whole post is worth reading, but he suggests the following:

1. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
2. Protevi’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Deleuze
3. Dan Smith’s intro to Essays Critical and Clinical
4. Michael Hardt’s Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy
5. Kant’s Critical Philosophy
6. Jeff Bell’s Deleuze’s Hume
7. introductory books by Todd May and Claire Colebrook

After that it breaks down into a “what are you looking for” discussion. Overall, great suggestions, and I think I might take him up on this trajectory.

*tip of the hat to Stuart Elden for pointing me to the Protevi post.