The Arrow and the Compass more

‘Waiting for the Political Moment’ International Conference, Erasmus University, Rotterdam (17-19 June 2010) The Arrow and The Compass: Orientation, Actuality, Abstraction Benjamin Noys (2010) The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth – one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (77) Frequently the only possible answer is a critique of the question and the only solution is to negate the question. Marx, Grundrisse (127) The philosophical or theoretical conjuncture characterisation is dominated of by the the contemporary political commonplace that we live in a moment of radical disorientation. We can track this trope across the political spectrum, from the ultra-left Tiqqun’s metaphoric invocation of the ‘deepening of the desert’1 to the neo-Schimittian discourse of the ‘neutralisation’ of politics on the right, via a series of diagnoses of ‘ global nihilism’, the ‘postTiqqun, ‘Call’. 1 1 political’, and permanent ‘states of emergency’. Concomitantly we find repeated calls for ‘[o]rientation tools’,2 as Tiqqun put it, new political names, or master signifiers, new compasses, to align a concrete politics that would resist what they call ‘the desert of fake abundance’,3 and re-instate or re-inject politics into this denuded moment. The pathos of this trope lies not simply in the attention it draws to our time as a desert of frozen abstractions and social abandonment, intensified by the free fall of global financial crisis coupled to an entropic drift into a grey capitalism and an insolvent political order.4 Instead, a more radical claim is made that this is not a crisis of politics, but one in the political itself. Pathos is augmented by a diagnostic mixing of the local or empirical – the end of the Cold War ‘order’, the rise of Islamisist and other forms of ‘religious’ politics, the globalised dominance of capitalism, the mediatisation of politics, etc. – with the epochal and metaphysical – such as Nietzsche’s diagnosis of ‘European nihilism’ or Heideggerean tropes of the ‘end’ or ‘closure’ of Western metaphysics. It would be foolish to deny a certain truth to this refrain, conjuncturally founded on the collapse, post-1989, of substantial state-based antagonism within the political order from the ‘left’. For thinkers of the left the accent usually falls on the collapse of antagonism, which obviously does not necessarily have to be state-based per se (although we might 2 3 4 Tiqqun, ‘How is it to be done?’, p.13. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, p.87. Balakrishnan, ‘On the Stationary State’. 2 recall Mao’s remark that if one wishes to practise socialism it is wise to have a country to practice it in). For those on the right the accent falls on the collapse of state-based or national forms of antagonism, which, in line with Carl Schmitt’s anxiety concerning the disruptive para-state function of the partisan, results in a fractured political space of ‘absolute enmity’. At the same time the motif of disorientation can easily become a self-serving one. Is our moment of disorientation really worse than any other? Can the metaphysical interpretations of such a crisis really grasp the present, or simply lend it an air of unwanted pathos? What particular political desire does the demand for a ‘return of the political’ serve, especially as such a demand is so politically ambiguous? As usual with such rhetorical questions the implication of my own answers, and my own scepticism, is selfevident. The ‘disorientation-orientation’ doublet all too often serves a dubious political nostalgia. The desire to return to a secure and stabilising figuration, to put matters in Schmittian terms, which are often explicitly or implicitly at work, is predicated on the need to produce a new ‘friend-enemy’ distinction to give the political its existential ‘weight’ (and this is one way we could interpret the popularity of the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis). In fact Schmitt is the thinker of our moment for the precise reason that he tries to establish and re-establish a concrete space for the political, separate from the philosophical and other disciplines, with its own internal coherence and concretion. 3 I wish to take a step back from the motif of orientation and the desire for a concrete politics. To do this I want to revisit some instances of the emergence of ‘orientation’ within philosophy and, in particular, to note the pressure that such moments mark of politics and the political moment on the philosophical text. If philosophy still seems to desire to legislate or comment upon or bemoan the lack of politics and the dispersion or evaporation of the political, the irony might be that this signifies a certain ‘moment’, a ‘political moment’ perhaps, of the intrusion of the political within the philosophical text. The further irony is that, to use Badiou’s terminology, the treatment of the political or politics as a condition of philosophy, with its own autonomy, is not necessarily to grant politics or the political autonomy from philosophy. Instead, and I will return to this, the very autonomy of politics is a mechanism of policing and orientation that resists the imbrications of the philosophical and the political in this contemporary moment; trying to orient ourselves through a ‘concrete’ politics signifies a resistance or disavowal of the necessarily abstract form of thought in this moment. Actuality and Orientation To begin, and to offer us an initial moment of orientation, I want to turn to Kant’s essay ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ (1786) which, following Foucault, can be seen as belonging to the ‘Kantian moment’ in which philosophy reflects on its own present and on an 4 ‘exit’ (Ausgang) from that present.5 For Foucault, Kant inaugurates a ‘sagittal’ relation between philosophy and actuality, a figure of orientation Foucault frequently recurs to,6 and one which indicates a penetration of the present (‘sagittal’ is derived from the Latin ‘sagitta’, meaning arrow), or a planar ‘cut’ into the present, if we take its usual medical sense of a plane that divides the body. This penetration of the present is evident in the movement of ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ from seemingly abstract questions of the nature of reason to deeply political questions of the actual exercise of reason. The implication of Kant’s text is that the penetration of philosophy into the present also involves a reciprocal penetration of politics and the actuality of the present into philosophy. Borrowing Althusser’s formulation, from his analysis of Machiavelli, we can say that philosophy becomes conjunctural, with philosophical or theoretical propositions undergoing a ‘strange vacillation’ as they are undermined by the instance of political practice.7 Kant begins from a philosophical insistence that all concepts, no matter how abstract or exalted, must ‘be associated with figurative notions.’8 The necessity of the figure is that it makes it possible to put concepts to use in the world of experience by attaching them to an intuition (Anschauung). In this ‘attachment’, which indicates the link of the figural to orientation, we find already the implication of a penetration of philosophy into the present. Kant Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’. For example, Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, p.34. 7 Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, p.20. 8 Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, in Political Writings, pp.235-249, p.237; further page references given in the text. 5 6 5 concedes the extraneous nature of figuration to philosophy proper, but insists on the ineliminable necessity of figuration to constructing orienting maxims for reason, giving it something of the status of a Derridean supplément. This abstract starting-point develops into a more focused inquiry into a particular philosophical problem: the ‘pantheism controversy’ between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, which began with Jacobi’s disclosure of Lessing’s ‘Spinozism’ and turned on the slippage into atheism that resulted, according to Jacobi, to the untrammelled use of reason.9 Despite hopes by both sides in the dispute that Kant would join with them, instead he prefers to problematise both Mendlessohn’s rationalist ‘dogmatism’ and Jacobi’s ‘irrationalism’ of a salto mortale into faith. To do so, Kant returns to the question of figuration and orientation, implied by Mendelssohn’s insistence on the necessity of orientation in the speculative use of reason. Kant’s argument, predictably, is that the neuralgic point is ‘speculation’; while agreeing with Mendlessohn’s insistence on reason alone as the means for orientation Kant is concerned that the invocation of ‘speculative powers’ leads reason astray into the pathological ‘risk [of] becoming the basic principle of zealotry [Schwärmerei]’ (238).10 ‘Healthy’ orientation requires that reason not depend on an ‘a supposed sense of truth of a mysterious kind or an effusive intuition in the name of faith’ (238). To achieve this we must re-work the concept of ‘orientation’. Kant argues we must begin from our experience, and for the subject 9 10 Beiser, The Fate of Reason, pp.44-108. On Kant’s thinking of fanaticism, see Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism, pp.120-138. 6 this lies in our own feeling of difference between our right and left hands. It is precisely the lack of perceptible external difference that makes this an inner felt difference necessary to any act of orientation, which takes place through ‘a subjective distinction’ (239). When we navigate in a darkened room we begin from a familiar object, but we orientate ourselves by using the subjective distinction of left and right. Kant notes that this distinction is subjective because it would not operate if we were the victim of a particularly cruel philosophical practical joke: ‘if, for a joke, someone had shifted all the objects round in such a way that their relative positions remained the same but what was previously on the right was now on the left, I would be quite unable to find my way about a room whose walls were in other respects identical.’ (239) It is this ability to orient ourselves that we can extend into thought, as when we extend beyond the frontiers of experience into a metaphorical darkened room. Orientation and figuration are a subjective matter, but one that must be in conformity with reason. This orientation requires, for Kant, a further ‘figural’ supplement: the supposition of a supreme being to make intelligible the condition of the world, without which the world might well ‘disintegrate’ into the ‘hyper-Chaos’ of Quentin Meillassoux,11 and to provide the highest good, without which we could not make moral judgements. To avoid the uncanny congruence of Mendlessohn’s ‘rational insight’ and Jacobi’s ‘rational inspiration’, which both 11 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p.64. 7 threaten to privatise reason and judgement and lead to a terminal ‘confusion of tongues’ (248), what is required is ‘rational belief’. Such a belief neither presumes to demonstrate the existence of God, nor to claim his (or her) inspiration, instead it rests on a rational subjective adequacy coupled to an objective inadequacy. Kant concludes that: a purely rational belief is the signpost or compass by means of which the speculative thinker can orientate himself on his rational wanderings in the field of suprasensory objects, while the man of ordinary but (morally) healthy reason can use it to plan his course, for both theoretical and practical purposes, in complete conformity with the whole end of his destiny (245). The point of orientation through rational belief is also a point of regulation for our public use of reason, as Kant argued in ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795): ‘All actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public.’12 With this orientation in mind Kant can now ‘historicise’ the dispute between Mendlessohn and Jacobi in a political reading attentive to the historical forms and emergence of reason. The civil coercion and moral constraint of despotism chain reason externally, and in the moment of its eruption from these bonds, the moment of enlightenment, 12 reason recovers its powers in a necessarily Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Political Writings, pp.93-130, p.126. 8 transgressive fashion. The sudden release of reason leads to ‘daring flights’ and the eventual abandonment of the ponderous slowness of reason for the accelerative delights of illumination and zealotry, which then is frozen, in a dialectical reversal, by the reliance of such illumination for confirmation by external facts. The continued striving of reason for freedom from this ‘objective’ superstition leads to another ‘error’, that of rational unbelief, in which reason erects itself into the sole judge on objective grounds: ‘an undesirable state of mind which first deprives the moral laws of all their power to motivate the heart, and eventually deprives them of all authority, so giving rise to the attitude known as libertinism.‘ (249) Kant’s solution is the eventual self-restraint of reason to negotiate the choppy waters of this political moment, neither Müntzer nor Sade, we might say. Stathis Kouvelakis, taking-up Foucault’s point about Kant’s ‘sagittal’ relation to the present, has insisted on the modernity of Kant’s text in its opening to the ‘force of events’ and, not least, to the actuality of revolution.13 We could say that ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ is haunted retroactively by the spectre of the French revolution. This is, as Kouvelakis insists, a double haunting. Kant at once requires revolutions to ensure freedom and resolve the antinomies of enlightened absolutism, but is also forever trying to exorcise the spectre of ‘absolute transgression’, whether libertine or fanatic, the revolution incarnates. In the penetration of actuality 13 Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution, p.19ff. 9 Kant’s orientation to the present is shot through itself, divided, and, simultaneously, oriented and disoriented by revolution. His work, to use the language of Badiou, opens a sequence of thought, which Kouvelakis traces through German Idealism and on to Marx, that marks a politicisation of philosophy – the moment of ‘reason and revolution’. The End of Orientation If Kant introduced a fraught and difficult relation between philosophy and actuality, apotheosised by Hegel and re-worked by Marx, Heidegger is both witness to, and inducer of, a certain crisis in the orientation, figuration, and relation, of philosophy, and notably the philosophical or metaphysical subject, to actuality. Heidegger offers the self-styled moment of a closure of the relation to actuality for philosophy, a closure also evident in the contrary ‘tradition’ of the Frankfurt School.14 After Heidegger it is the trope of disorientation that becomes central, both philosophically and politically. To trace this self-styled closure of the metaphysics of subjectivity we can register it most easily in the reversal of the valence of Ge-Stell in Heidegger’s writing. This is indexed in the shift between Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935-6) and the later ‘Addendum’, added in 1956, although it can also be tracked through the various revisions of the art work essay itself. In the original essay Ge-Stell is 14 Losurdo ref. 10 given a positive value as the act of framing, of figuration, essential to the work of art. Ge-Stell is coordinated with Gestalt, as a kind of fixing, or founding, that composes the artwork as the unveiling of truth: The strife that is brought into the rift and thus set back into the earth and thus fixed in place is figure, shape, Gestalt. Createdness of the work means: truth’s being fixed in place in the figure. Figure is the structure in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself. The composed rift is the fitting or joining of the shining of truth. What is here called figure, Gestalt, is always to be thought in terms of the particular placing (Stellen) and framing or framework (Ge-Stell) as which the work occurs when it sets itself up and sets itself forth. (OWA, 64) Of course we are speaking here of the work of art and not of politics. But the essay is dedicated to refusing any regional discourse of ‘aesthetics’ as the site of the work of art, and the opening to the unveiling of truth coordinated with the work of art also has a deliberate political resonance (and not only the local one of Heidegger’s Nazism).15 In the ‘Addendum’ this valence is reversed when Heidegger notes that this ‘fixing in place of truth’ seems to concede to a philosophy of will that, as he details elsewhere, is congruent with This accounts for Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s charge of ‘national aestheticism’ in the Heidegger of the 1930s, more problematic is his claim that Heidegger ‘deconstructs’ this relation in his later work, as we will see. 15 11 metaphysics and functions as its fulfilment (notably in Nietzsche). For Heidegger this ‘activist’ reading of ‘fixing’ or the Gestalt, which obviously casts light on his complicity with Nazi ‘voluntarism’, is not to be taken at face value. Instead, of a rigid ‘fixing’ or securing, it is rather a ‘placing’ that is a ‘letting happen’ and ‘bringing forth’. Again, however, this is not, according to Heidegger, an essential passivity ‘but a doing in the highest degree’ (83). Of course this retroactively brings the essay into line with his post-war thinking of Ge-Stell, which now functions as the key form of modern technology. To say the valence of Ge-Stell is reversed from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ is, as always with Heidegger, too simplistic. Ge-Stell (usually translated into English as ‘En-framing’) is the modern mode of the presencing of Being. Writing in the ‘Addendum’ Heidegger notes that when we hear ‘Ge-Stell’ in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ we must both put out of mind the modern meaning of placing or framing and note that Being as framing is the modern form and result of Western thought. Of course this self ‘deconstruction’ of the Heidegger’s previous ‘voluntarism of the will’, or the possibility of such a reading, is hard not to read as a deliberate obfuscation of Heidegger’s own embrace of the moment of the Nazi figuration and orientation of the German national project, which he notoriously read ‘the inner truth and greatness of this movement [National Socialism]’ in terms of ‘the encounter between global technology and modern man [die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten 12 Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen]’.16 This context certainly has to be borne in mind and I certainly do not wish to decide to exonerate Heidegger on the grounds of this re-inscription. Instead I do want to focus on Heidegger’s own ‘internal’ solution to the problem of orientation and, for him, its ‘metaphysical’ character. Briefly we can turn to another text from the period of the ‘Addendum’, ‘On the Question of Being’ (1955), a text published in a collection in honour of Ernst Jünger, to further probe this ‘political moment’.17 Heidegger’s text is concerned primarily with Jünger’s essay The Worker (1932), which Heidegger reports he discussed in a seminar of university teachers in 1939-40. Heidegger casts this reading as a form of resistance: ‘we were not surprised, either, that an attempt to elucidate The Worker was kept under surveillance and eventually prohibited. For it belongs to the essence of the will to power not to let the actual that it gains power over appear in that actuality which prevails as the will to power itself.’ (295) Again retrospectively we know see ‘the inner truth and greatness’ at once accepted and problematised in epochal terms as the completion of metaphysics qua metaphysics of the will to power. Confirming Heidegger’s reasoning that this is an ‘act of resistance’ through revealing the stakes of political metaphysics, Philippe LacoueLabarthe has argued this text is Heidegger’s deconstruction of the essential figuration that supports the aesthtico-political project of Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p.199. Heidegger, ‘On the Question of Being’ (1955), in Pathmarks, pp.291-322. Further page references in text. 16 17 13 metaphysics as the instantiation of the political.18 Again, I would be wary about taking this self-exculpating line as given, but rather want to trace this ‘intrusion’ of politics into the text and the warding off of this politics in the name of a deconstruction of the ‘political’ as figuration and orientation. What Heidegger probes is Jünger’s deployment of the ‘figure’ of the worker as the figure of active nihilism, and Heidegger admits his debt to The Worker for the descriptions of planetary technology in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. On the other hand, Heidegger also wants to problematise the manner in which such descriptions remain within the moment of nihilism ‘oriented toward an overcoming.’ (296) This again turns on, and returns to, the Gestalt. For Heidegger Jünger’s deployment of this word still risks remaining bound to ‘representation’ and a metaphysics of subjectivity. The use of Gestalt as ‘forming’ and conferring meaning and sense (and we might think here again of orientation via the French ‘sens’), ‘remains housed within metaphysics.’ (299) Jünger’s ‘Gestalt’ and his figure of the worker become diagnostic tools, indicating the triumph of this metaphysics of subjectivity, rather than a potential exit. In this way Jünger grasps ‘the actuality of the actual’ in the figuration of the human as worker (which also connects to Heidegger’s reading of Marx). The implication is that Jünger has confused Gestalt with the function of Ge-Stell, Jünger remains too much bound to actuality and is unable to accede to the 18 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Oedipus as Figure’. 14 requisite thinking of Being that would delimit and exceed this moment of orientation and figuration. This takes place through the thinking of Ge-Stell, in which the setting in place of everything that presences does not mean the disappearance of Being, but rather that ‘[i]t irrupts in a singular uncanniness’ (313). Therefore, despite its many appearances as such, Heidegger’s thinking of Ge-Stell is not a return to a utopian past but, in his terms, requires a return to the origin of metaphysics, as Ge-Stell is not simply a ‘new’ moment, but the unfolding of the destiny of Being. Compared to this thinking everything else is merely ‘local’ and regional. Actuality, as in the condescending remarks about Jünger’s The Worker, can be indexed or described, but is nothing really compared to this unfolding of Being. Commenting on Nietzsche’s announcement of an erupting struggle for domination, a ‘polemos’ (Πόλεμος), Heidegger argues that: ‘Compared to this encounter, world wars remain superficial. They are less and less capable of deciding anything the more technological their armaments.’ (321) Reading Heidegger is, as Derrida remarks, an experience that is ‘always horribly dangerous and wildly funny’.19 The ‘political moment’ of Heidegger’s text is one that is always epochal. The reading of ‘Heidegger and Nazism’ then, that political moment, is always at once necessary and can never truly connect definitively because of this detachment from actuality. In 19 Derrida, Of Spirit, p.68. 15 fact another political moment also operates here, obviously in some continuity with Nazism, and that is the Cold War and capitalism. Heidegger’s epochal view at once flattens the Cold War, as in his notorious remark ‘[f]rom a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organisation of the average man’,20 and as a result opens a thinking of global capitalism that he, no doubt, would regard as regional to Ge-Stell and the planetary domination of technology. In the essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ Heidegger notes that: ‘The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks in the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profitmaking in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not.’21 Heidegger’s sensitivity to the dominance of Ge-Stell puts him in the unlikely company of those Marxists tracing out the consequences of the movement from the ‘formal subsumption’ of existing forms of labour under the market also turns towards the ‘real subsumption’ that includes and re-organises this process in the despotism of capital. In fact, it would be possible to read the whole of the essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ through a substitution of technology for capitalism or, if we wished, also through the inscription of Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’, with its remarks 20 21 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p.37. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p.18. 16 concerning the emergence of science and technology as a force of production.22 Of course, for a Heideggerean this is utterly ridiculous. Heidegger’s analysis cannot be reduced to an analysis of capitalism but, rather, capitalism must be understood as a sub-set or ‘regional ontology’ of the completion of Western metaphysics as the global reign of technology as the En-framing of Being as will. The political moment of his text, which thoroughly problematises orientation and figuration, can never determine that text but only read off from it. What I am suggesting is a vulgar reading that would place Heidegger’s ‘post-metaphysical’ thinking in contact with its own political moment – not solely, although including, the ‘Nazi moment’ – as a means of thinking a certain exhaustion of actuality, revolution, and the inscription of a potential rationality, and so orientation, within the historical process. Instead ‘Ge-Stell’ inscribes the exhaustion of orientation qua figure and, for Heidegger, the necessity to turn within and through metaphysics to the ‘orientation’ of the event (Ereignis). This then, is the validation of the detachment from actuality and radicalised disorientation, and ‘only a god can save us’.23 Reason has been definitively split from revolution. The Partisan Moment 22 23 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. Heidegger, ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”’. 17 A re-attachment to actuality would seem to condition the possibility of any political moment. We could read another turn in the spiral of orientation-disorientation through Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan (1963). Originally delivered as two lectures in 1962, one in Pamplona on March 15 at the General de Navarra College, and the other on March 17 at the University of Saragossa, in the General Palafox School, the subtitle of the text is ‘Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political’, and it returns to the distinction that Schmitt had proposed in his 1932 work The Concept of the Political between the friend and the enemy. The partisan problematises the distinction that Schmitt wants to draw between the friend and the enemy as distinctive of the concept of the political. His commentary is devoted to trying to clarify the status of the partisan, who at once incarnates a new form of the enemy, but also threatens to slip outside of that category towards being the absolute enemy or foe. In this way the partisan must be historically mastered because, as Rodolphe Gasché, he or she ‘jeopardizes all political distinctions by precisely making distinction absolute.’24 To ward off this threat Schmitt, as Gasché goes on to note, ‘construes the partisan as the new, and possibly last, figure of the political.’25 The problem is simple enough. The partisan, as an irregular fighter, potentially lacks the national, cultural, or regional identity to Gasché, ‘The Partisan and the Philosopher’, p.10. Gil Anidjar, in his article ‘Terror Right’, notes that Schmitt’s historical schema of a relatively stable friendenemy distinction is problematised by Schmitt’s pairing of the tyrant and the pirate as simultaneous enemies. For further discussion of the pirate as political figure of the enemy see Anidjar’s article and Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Schmittianinspired The Enemy of All (2009). 25 Ibid. 24 18 form the figure of the real enemy that can provide the figuration necessary for the existential definition of the friend: ‘Der Feind is unsre eigene Frage als Gestalt’.26 The real enemy gives concrete (in concreto) definition to the friend, and so to the political itself. The slippage is that the partisan can become the absolute enemy, or, in English, the ‘foe’, who falls outside this distinction and can be subject to extermination. To save this distinction, to save the partisan for the political as defined in terms of the friend-enemy distinction, Schmitt tries to identify a way to give the partisan the necessary figurative consistency. His solution is the telluric; the partisan is one who ‘defends a piece of land with which he has an autochthonous relation.’ (92) We have, however, a splitting in the figure of the partisan, between ‘defensive autochthonous defenders of the homeland and globally aggressive revolutionary activists’ (30). On the one hand, the ‘good’ partisan who remains within (just) the friend-enemy couplet, and is identified by Schmitt with an unsurprising series of figures, considering his own politics and the Francoist context of the lecture: the Spanish resistance to Napoleon and General Raoul Salan. This is the partisan as the ‘new’ figure of the political. On the other hand, the ‘bad’ partisan, detached from the nomos of the earth and figuring the absolute enemy or foe, is equally unsurprisingly identified by Schmitt with Lenin, Mao, and Guevara. In the second case we have, for Schmitt, a fatal move from the 26 Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, p.85 n89. Further page references in text. 19 concrete telluric to the abstract and philosophical: a ‘lack of concrete thinking culminated in the destructive work of professional revolutionaries.’ (90) This is the partisan as the ‘last’ figure of the political. Gasché makes clear the strange imbrications that Schmitt traces between the partisan and the philosopher. The partisan, in both forms, calls to philosophy and receives legitimation from philosophy, as in the Prussian theorisation of the Spanish guerrilla warfare against Napoleon. Consecrated by Clausewitz and, especially, by Fichte, the result is that the partisan forms a philosophical, as well as a political figure, but also a philosophical figure that threatens the integrity of the political order founded on the friend-enemy distinction. This is brought to fruition by Lenin, in which the telluric elements of Fichte’s formulations are displaced by a proletarian internationalism that has no respect for the ‘nomos of the earth’. In this case the orienting function of the partisan, even as the last figure of the political, comes under immense pressure. Remaining in the orbit of the Cold War for Schmitt the primary threat of abstraction to the ‘nomos of the Earth’ comes in the form of the ‘absolute enemy’ of the abstract, and therefore philosophical, communist guerrilla.27 For Schmitt this dangerous abstraction can still be resisted either through reference to a third party, as when a It is somewhat surprising, and no doubt unintentional, that this trope should find an echo in Simon Critchley’s recent invocation of the dangers of the radical politics of the 1960s as ‘politics of abstraction ... attached to an idea at the expense of a frontal denial of reality.’ (‘Mystical Anarchism’, p.300) Although in the case of Critchley this ‘threat’ is to be warded off by a new quasi-mystical selfabnegating ‘politics of love’ (304), and not any re-invention of the ‘friend-enemy’ distinction. 27 20 partisan carries on a struggle in relation to some other territorialised state, or in the potential telluric grounding of the Marxist revolutionary struggle evident in the ‘national’ resistance of Russian partisans under Stalin or, more ambiguously, in the case of the peasant revolution of Mao. The difficulty remains that the internationalism of the communist guerrilla, figured in the form of the Party, opens the possibility of the partisan as ‘bearer of absolute enmity.’ (93) The partisan is the divided figure of the political and the divided figure of orientation, at once absolutely concrete and absolutely abstract, saving the friend-enemy distinction in a time of potential nuclear annihilation, but also, in turn, threatening to annihilate the boundaries of the political order. The exemplary status of Schmitt lies in his trying to save the political through the inscription of a figure – the partisan – which incarnates orientation and disorientation at the same time. If we coordinate although the still deliberate engaged localisation a of Schmitt’s to discourse, qua with reference philosophy abstraction, with Heidegger’s epochal discourse we can grasp the coordinates of a contemporary thinking of the political moment as one of disorientation-orientation. What Schmitt provides is the necessary moment of division, antagonism, and the concrete to supplement, and correct, Heidegger’s epochal diagnosis of disorientation at the hands of ‘planetary technology’. That is, in the potential moment of its evaporation or disappearance, Schmitt gives 21 us means to delimit the moment of the political. It is this matrix I wish to problematise. Orientation and Abstraction Schmitt’s discourse provides a certain shaping and figuration for our political moment, as well as extending what Alberto Toscano calls ‘philosophy’s long Cold War’.28 Of course this shift lies in that the ‘threat’ of abstraction is no longer incarnated in the Cold War partisan. Instead, post-1989, we exist in a capitalist monoculture in which, to quote Marx, ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions’.29 This is a very different situation to that incarnated by the agency of the communist guerrilla, a political figure through and through. Although the capitalist separation of the economic and the political has often been over-stated, as any glance at contemporary attempts to cope with the financial crisis makes evident, we cannot doubt the pernicious effects on political agency of ‘blind’ or ‘invisible’ capitalist economic forms. We can envisage and map a certain number of responses to this insistence on concrete orientation always threatened by being overcome with abstract disorientation, precisely along the division traced by Schmitt between the partisan as ‘new’ figure of the political, and ‘last’ figure of the political. In the first case the identification of new forms and figures of the partisan offers the ability to re-charge and concretise our political moment by re28 29 Toscano, Fanaticism, p.250. Marx, Grundrisse, p.164. 22 inventing the ‘friend-enemy’ distinction, against the ‘desert’ of abstractions. The retention of the figure of enmity by the linkage of the partisan to the ‘terrorist’, not the abstract communist partisan, but the Takfirist or Salafist militant, with telluric localisation fluctuating around the attempt to constrain and link such militancy, through war and occupation, to particular ‘territories’ (Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, with Iran and, perhaps, Pakistan the next ‘candidates’), empowers an imperial biopower. Alberto Toscano’s recent study Fanaticism demonstrates the lengthy philosophical and historical provenance of the linkage between communism and Islam on the grounds of abstraction.30 Obviously, this is the strategy of the dominant powers, but what of critical alternatives? We can note how often such alternatives remain, although at a distance, within this matrix. In terms of the ‘new’ partisan, we can note attempts to return to and sharpen the friend-enemy distinction from the left. Again, a number of project might fall under this description, but in explicitly Schmittian terms Joel Olson’s rehabilitation of fanaticism tries, rather uncomfortably considering the fanatic would seem to remain the ‘absolute enemy’ or foe, to re-engender a true enmity as necessary to the political.31 We could also include here Badiou’s attempts to rehabilitate ‘the figure of the worker’,32 although he does not cast this in Schmittian terms it performs the function of 30 31 32 Toscano, Fanaticism, pp. Olson, ‘Friend and Enemies, Slaves and Masters’. Badiou, Michel, Lazarus, ‘What is to be Thought? What is to be Done?’. 23 orientation.33 Even Peter Hallward’s radical rejection of Schmitt as ‘beyond salvage’, deploys a discourse of subtraction that would ‘dissolve every form of telluric pathos and [which] heralds the indifference of a truly dis-oriented space as the only pertinent space of prescription.’34 The difficulty here is that this ‘option’ seems to me to remain within the trope of disorientation, but now indexed to a prescriptive and partisan will that produces a division that orients our politics in terms of a true egalitarian abstraction. Remaining within Schmitt’s matrix we can also create the ‘last’ figure of the political – the figure of disorientation. Here the search lies on a radicalised version of the partisan which liquefies and dissolves the telluric. Giorgio Agamben’s prescient work Homo Sacer (1999), which as I have previously remarked seem to have been taken as something of a manual for contemporary exercises of sovereign power, uses the concept of ‘bare life’ to deliberately pluralise the figure of the disorientation of the political, from der Muselmann to the neomort. 35 Schmitt’s ‘nomos of the earth’ is replaced by the ‘nomos of the camp’. Daniel Heller-Roazen’s recent work The Enemy of All (2009) extends both Agamben and Schmitt by taking-up the figure of the pirate as the figure of political disorientation, the figure that liquefies the territorial distinctions on which Schmitt’s analysis depends. 36 33 34 35 36 Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, pp. Ibid., p.244. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp.181-188. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All, see also my review ‘Liquid Paths’. 24 Here we seem condemned forming, to borrow from Foucault, a kind of inverse of the spiral of power. Resistance here is left unformed and unformatted, an unlikely unseen or invisible surplus to the relentless process of political figuration and de-figuration conducted by sovereign power. We can, it seems, either accept the potential for some global redemption or transfiguration of the figure of ‘bare life’ into a new counter- or anti-political order, or seem to court a cynicism of merely reflecting, and reflecting on, the mutable and ever-shifting reticular forms of hyper-power. Conclusion: ‘The actuality of the abstract’ To conclude I want to continue to problematise this matrix. Badiou, in The Century, has usefully pointed out the 20th century provenance of the antagonistic figure of the ‘anti-dialectical Two’.37 Contrary to attempts to substantialise the figure of antagonism Badiou prefers a subtractive approach that de-formats the opposition. What is missing here, and I think in Hallward’s taking up of this position, is a ‘sagittal’ relation to the actuality of abstraction. The desire to achieve the concrete political moment is predicated on taking a leap over the real or practical abstractions of capital to some new figure. While this leap, perhaps best seen in Badiou’s thinking of Marxism as a discourse of politics detached from the economic, proffers a ‘political moment’ it is at the expense of actuality. 37 Badiou, The Century, p.109. 25 The difficulty is in any penetration of the present, on the mediations of the value-form that compose these real or practical abstractions as the ‘ontology of capital’. An emblematic case is Fredric Jameson. Jameson has a salutary insistence on Marxism as an economic discourse. Here the difficulty lies in the acceptance of real abstraction leads to political impotence. This is evident in Jameson’s coy attempt to treat the distribution system of Wal-Mart as a potentially recuperable instance of the ‘bad new’. While this might offer an engagement with actual abstractions Jameson withdraws his reversal of the ‘valence’ of Wal-Mart as mere thought experiment, or attempt to release some spectral and nebulous ‘utopian’ impulse or charge.38 Once again, the actuality of abstraction proves surprisingly intractable to thought, and, again, seems to require some orientational supplement – in this case the utopian. The reference to Marx is essential here, in terms more of his thinking of ‘real’ or ‘practical’ abstractions, as the domain of our current ‘mediations’, as well as his methodological stress on the necessity for thinking through abstraction to the concrete, rather than invoking some immediate concrete as the moment of resistance to these abstractions.39 Of course, the difficulty here is that this seems to condemn us to an abandonment of the political, hence the regular charge against Marx, especially the ‘mature Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, p.433-4. See the complex remarks on the concrete and the abstract in the Grundrisse, pp. 38 39 26 Marx’, of a lack of any thinking of politics and agency. While I do not have time to deal with that debate we can see how our ‘moment’ id drawn out around this tension, in which what still remains stubbornly missing is a consideration of the ‘sagittal’ in terms of the actuality of abstraction, except as presupposed ‘background’. Displacing the Heideggerean-Schmittian frame of disorientation-orientation is not, obviously, a magical solution. The probing of real abstraction produces its own antinomies, which are, of course, real antinomies, and would seem to collapse the political back into the economic. I have, unfortunately, no easy solution, but I would suggest the necessity to continually probe these forms of abstraction and, as Balibar remarks of Marx, to think a method that ‘constructed a rationality’ that does not presume the exhaustion or saturation of the actuality of the actual, but rather constructs a rationality from the irreducible ‘daily antagonism’ of labour-power within the labour process.40 This is a ‘deflationary’ discourse: one that deflates the pretentions of philosophy to order and provide ‘metaphysical’ justification for the political, on the one hand, and on the other one that deflates the ‘political’ from its security as a separate field, all the better, in both cases, to trace the imbrications and actualities of abstraction, philosophy, and politics. Of course there is no means to avoid the irony that this is another discourse of orientation, and one coupled to disorientation for good measure. 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