[Marxism-Thaxis] Agamben - Coming Community vs. Negri Hardt - (Coming?) Commonwealth
What makes me think these two jokers (Negri and Hardt) went back to 1993 in order to find sufficient inspiration to finish off their 3-book contract with Harvard Univ. Press? Their sustained line of thought and argument is now FINISHED. Onwards to the commonwealth. Pres. Obama is the messiah. The commonwealth utopia is in sight, even if we can not grasp its essence yet, since that essence is an essence of not becoming, whatsoever it is not, not yet. When I first read 'Empire' I thought it was a silly response to Deleuze and Guattari (who had written a bestseller in Europe--one of those books everyone bought but no one read) and to Lyotard and Baurdrillard (who were anything but utopists but got a lot more press than Negri). Only now do I grasp the overall Agambenian arch here. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/biography/ In The Coming Community (1993) Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben's exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Coming Community tries to designate a community beyond any conception available under this name; not a community of essence, a being-together of existences; that is to say: precisely what political as well as religious identities can no longer grasp. Nothing less. Jean-Luc Nancy http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HARCOM.html Commonwealth Michael Hardt Antonio Negri When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth. Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.” Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri’s thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization. -- CJ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ ELT in Japan http://eltinjapan.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Agamben - Coming Community vs. Negri Hardt - (Coming?) Commonwealth
And Zizek is in the midst of all this too. I don't think the Z man answers the question about 'deterritorialization', but it seems to me to be a concept borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari. I do agree with him on some points, and then find him maddeningly reactionary on others. But the dude is popular, and in this postmo post-cap world of winners and losers, we adore the celebrity of the winners. http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php ST: But when Negri and Hardt use the term deterritorialization, don’t they mean something very specific, namely that the difference between productive and unproductive labor has become increasingly unclear, and therefore that the site of exploitation is no longer localized, but disseminated across the social surface—the entire space of society is politicized, and no longer simply the factory? Let’s start with Negri and Hardt. Somewhere in the middle of Multitude, there is an intermezzo on Bakhtin and carnival. I violently disagree with this carnivalesque vision of liberation. Carnival is a very ambiguous term, more often than not used by reactionaries. My God, if you need a carnival, today’s capitalism is a carnival. A KKK lynching is a carnival. A cultural critic, a friend of mine, Boris Groys, told me that he did some research on Bakhtin and that it became clear that when Bakhtin was producing his theory of carnival in the 1930s, it was the Stalinist purges that were his model: today you are on the Central Committee, tomorrow . . . With the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, the opposition between rigid State control and carnivalesque liberation is no longer functional. Here I agree with what Badiou said in the recent interview with you published in Il Manifesto: those who have nothing have only their discipline. This is why I like to mockingly designate myself Left-fascist or whatever! Today, the language of transgression is the ruling ideology. We have to reappropriate the language of discipline, of mass discipline, even the spirit of sacrifice, and so on. We have to do away with the liberal fear of discipline, which they characterize—without knowing what they’re talking about—as proto-fascist. But back to Negri. You know, the Left produces a new model every ten years or so. Why was Ernesto Laclau’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy so popular twenty years ago? It suited a moment when the priority of class struggle gave way to the linking of particular struggles (feminist, etc.) in a chain of struggles. Now, Laclau is trying to dust off the theory to fit the new Latin American populism of Chavez, Morales and so on. Negri, I’m afraid, did capture a certain moment, that of Porto Alegre and the antiglobalization movement—that was, de facto, his base. But what is problematic for me is his theory that if today the very object of production is the production of social relations themselves, then the way is open to what he calls absolute democracy. I totally reject this logic. It is pure, ideological dreaming. In the final twenty pages of Multitude, the position is more or less theological—the tropes of ligne de fuite and resistance and so on are all founded on the fantasy of a collapse of Empire. In a way, it is the optimistic mirror image of the model you find in someone like Agamben, who presents not so much a pessimism but a negative teleology, in which the entire Western tradition is approaching its own disastrous end, the only solution to which is to await some divine violence. But what is Benjamin talking about? Revolution—that is, a moment when you take the sovereign (this is Benjamin’s word) responsibility for killing someone. What does violence mean for Agamben? He responds with playing with the law and so on. Forgive me for being a vulgar empiricist, but I don’t know what that means in the concrete sense. ST: You mentioned liberated territories—isn’t the first example that comes to mind the southern zone of Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut? Isn’t it possible to conceive of a phenomenon like Hezbollah not simply as a theologico-political form of communitarian organization but as a phenomenon of resistance irreducible to its theological support? Isn’t this the theoretical task for us, rather than characterizing this phenomenon, as is common on both the Left and the Right, as simply obscurantist? This is really a matter of concrete judgment. I’ll ask you, quite naively: where do you see this dimension? I would like to be convinced. It’s quite fashionable to speak of self-organization, to say of Hamas or Hezbollah that it’s not only rockets, there’s the social services, etc. But, look, every fascist regime does such things. It’s not enough. I think the Iranian revolution, for example, was a true event. There it’s clear. Of course, what you see today in Iran is a conservative populist regime buying off the poor with oil money. I have nothing against Islam as such, and in the Iranian revolution it is quite clear that it played a crucial role, but it
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Agamben - Coming Community vs. Negri Hardt - (Coming?) Commonwealth
Deterritorialization The concept appears to have been deterritorialized! But even without proper reference, I believe Negri and Hardt were using the terms as derived from DG's concept. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization Deterritorialization is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972), which, in accordance to Deleuze's desire and philosophy, quickly became used by others, for example in anthropology, and transformed in this reappropriation. Deleuze and Guattari encouraged this use of their concepts in other senses than that they were originally created for, since they didn't believe in this conception of an original sense, which could be more or less related with phenomenology. Deleuze said, for example, that the people who had best understood the Anti-Oedipus were persons that were neither (university) philosophers nor psychoanalysts. He particularly liked a letter sent to him by an origami-maker, who had seen new inspiration in the book Le Pli (The Fold). Deleuze Guattari's use of the concept Deleuze and Guattari use deterritorialization to designate the freeing of labor-power from specific means of production. For example, English peasants were banished by the Enclosure Acts (1709-1869) from common land when it was enclosed for private landlords. They distinguished in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) a relative deterritorialisation and an absolute one (Earth). Relative deterritorialisation is always accompanied by reterritorialisation, while positive absolute deterritorialisation is more alike to the construction of a plane of immanence, akin to Spinoza's ontological constitution of the world [1]. There is also a negative sort of absolute deterritorialisation, for example in the subjectivation process (the face). ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Agamben - Coming Community vs. Negri Hardt - (Coming?) Commonwealth
As trivial as I find all this stuff, I find that sometimes Zizek hits the mark, though his specific insights never add up to a comprehensive picture. The only thing I really dislike in this extract is his charitable remarks about Islam. He is, though, quite correct about this: With the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, the opposition between rigid State control and carnivalesque liberation is no longer functional. -Original Message- From: CeJ jann...@gmail.com Sent: Mar 15, 2010 6:03 AM To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Agamben - Coming Community vs. Negri Hardt - (Coming?) Commonwealth And Zizek is in the midst of all this too. I don't think the Z man answers the question about 'deterritorialization', but it seems to me to be a concept borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari. I do agree with him on some points, and then find him maddeningly reactionary on others. But the dude is popular, and in this postmo post-cap world of winners and losers, we adore the celebrity of the winners. http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php ST: But when Negri and Hardt use the term deterritorialization, don’t they mean something very specific, namely that the difference between productive and unproductive labor has become increasingly unclear, and therefore that the site of exploitation is no longer localized, but disseminated across the social surface—the entire space of society is politicized, and no longer simply the factory? Let’s start with Negri and Hardt. Somewhere in the middle of Multitude, there is an intermezzo on Bakhtin and carnival. I violently disagree with this carnivalesque vision of liberation. Carnival is a very ambiguous term, more often than not used by reactionaries. My God, if you need a carnival, today’s capitalism is a carnival. A KKK lynching is a carnival. A cultural critic, a friend of mine, Boris Groys, told me that he did some research on Bakhtin and that it became clear that when Bakhtin was producing his theory of carnival in the 1930s, it was the Stalinist purges that were his model: today you are on the Central Committee, tomorrow . . . With the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, the opposition between rigid State control and carnivalesque liberation is no longer functional. Here I agree with what Badiou said in the recent interview with you published in Il Manifesto: those who have nothing have only their discipline. This is why I like to mockingly designate myself Left-fascist or whatever! Today, the language of transgression is the ruling ideology. We have to reappropriate the language of discipline, of mass discipline, even the spirit of sacrifice, and so on. We have to do away with the liberal fear of discipline, which they characterize—without knowing what they’re talking about—as proto-fascist. But back to Negri. You know, the Left produces a new model every ten years or so. Why was Ernesto Laclau’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy so popular twenty years ago? It suited a moment when the priority of class struggle gave way to the linking of particular struggles (feminist, etc.) in a chain of struggles. Now, Laclau is trying to dust off the theory to fit the new Latin American populism of Chavez, Morales and so on. Negri, I’m afraid, did capture a certain moment, that of Porto Alegre and the antiglobalization movement—that was, de facto, his base. But what is problematic for me is his theory that if today the very object of production is the production of social relations themselves, then the way is open to what he calls absolute democracy. I totally reject this logic. It is pure, ideological dreaming. In the final twenty pages of Multitude, the position is more or less theological—the tropes of ligne de fuite and resistance and so on are all founded on the fantasy of a collapse of Empire. In a way, it is the optimistic mirror image of the model you find in someone like Agamben, who presents not so much a pessimism but a negative teleology, in which the entire Western tradition is approaching its own disastrous end, the only solution to which is to await some divine violence. But what is Benjamin talking about? Revolution—that is, a moment when you take the sovereign (this is Benjamin’s word) responsibility for killing someone. What does violence mean for Agamben? He responds with playing with the law and so on. Forgive me for being a vulgar empiricist, but I don’t know what that means in the concrete sense. ST: You mentioned liberated territories—isn’t the first example that comes to mind the southern zone of Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut? Isn’t it possible to conceive of a phenomenon like Hezbollah not simply as a theologico-political form of communitarian organization but as a phenomenon of resistance irreducible to its theological support? Isn’t this the theoretical task for us, rather than characterizing this phenomenon, as is common on both the Left and the Right, as simply obscurantist? This is
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fwd: Fwd: Important campaign of so lidarity with the comrades tried in Barcelona // Importante c ampaña de solidaridad con los camaradas juzgados en Barelo na
Original Message Subject:Fwd: Important campaign of solidarity with the comrades tried in Barcelona // Importante campaña de solidaridad con los camaradas juzgados en Barelona Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:44:47 +0530 (IST) From: editor_rev...@indiatimes.com Reply-To: For the reaffirmation of Marxism-Leninism marxist-leninist-l...@lists.econ.utah.edu To: marxist-leninist-l...@lists.econ.utah.edu marxist-leninist-l...@lists.econ.utah.edu - Forwarded Message - From: Quim Boix To: 'SolidNet' Sent: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:58:06 +0530 (IST) Subject: Important campaign of solidarity with the comrades tried in Barcelona // Importante campaña de solidaridad con los camaradas juzgados en Barelona Important campaign of solidarity with the comrades tried in Barcelona // Importante campaña de solidaridad con los camaradas juzgados en Barelona Sintesis in english. Sintesis en español. Quim Boix i LLuch Responsable Relaciones Internacionales Comité Central PCPE (Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España) C/ Carretas 14, 6-G-1 28002 Madrid tel+fax 0034 915329187 www.pcpe.es móvil internacional 0034 609547814 --- Important campaign of solidarity with the comrades tried in Barcelona The PCPE launches an international campaign to collect signatures in solidarity with three comrades from the PCPE and the CJC-JCPC and called for the three years and ten months in prison following a false police report after the demonstration in Barcelona to protest the death of young antifascist Carlos Palomino. Our comrades are facing an intolerable mounting police which is clearly aimed to pressure and intimidate our organizations, something which we will not allow. We have created a website in Spanish and English, which provides more information on the subject and where the support is collected which also may be sent to the address internacio...@pcpe.es We ask for the greater international awareness and commitment of all those colleagues and comrades who are members or holding positions in political organizations, unions, neighborhood organizations, cultural, student, professional organizations , in order to support our comrades. Link here: http://pcpe.es/formulario2010/index-en.php --- Importante campaña de solidaridad con los camaradas juzgados en Barelona El PCPE inicia una campaña internacional de recogida de firmas en solidaridad con tres camaradas del PCPE y los CJC-JCPC a los que se solicitan tres años y diez meses de cárcel, a consecuencia de una denuncia policial falsa tras la manifestación en Barcelona en protesta por la muerte del joven antifascista Carlos Palomino. Nuestros camaradas se enfrentan a un montaje policial intolerable y claramente tendente a presionar y amedrentar a nuestras organizaciones, extremo que no vamos a permitir. Hemos creado una web, en español e inglés, donde se facilita más información sobre el tema y se recogen todas las adhesiones, que también se pueden hacer llegar a la dirección internacio...@pcpe.es Rogamos la mayor difusión internacional y la adhesión de todos aquellos compañeros y camaradas que sean miembros u ocupen puestos de responsabilidad en organizaciones políticas, sindicales, vecinales, culturales, estudiantiles, profesionales, con el fin de apoyar a nuestros camaradas. Enlace aquí: http://www.pcpe.es/formulario2010/index.php -- Click for exclusive coverage on the New Bajaj Pulsar 220 the fastest Indian bike http://www.zigwheels.com/Features/Bajaj-Pulsar-220-DTSi-Special-Coverage/Pulsar_20090623-1-1 ___ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list marxist-leninist-l...@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Agamben - Coming Community vs. Negri Hardt - (Coming?) Commonwealth
I'm not sure how generous Zizek is with Islam--or how deep his understanding. The Islam, Christianity and Judaism that we have to deal with in this world all developed in the Middle Ages. C and J largely 'deterritorialized' to Europe--C. to both W. and E. Europe. J. largely to E. Europe, in terms of the 'demographics' of Yiddish-speaking/-using Jews. In the case of Islam, it too largely deterritorialized to the Ottoman Empire (and to S. and SE Asia), at least in terms of Islam having a political entity reigning over it (in the 20th century, Indian Muslims mourned the fall of the Ottoman Empire because it also marked the end of the caliphate--a role, believe it or not, the mostly secular Saddam Hussein tried to fulfill in providing aid to Muslims in India, Palestine and N. Africa). European Zionism and Islamism (whether Shia Hezbollah or Sunni Hamas) are fairly recent innovations that have little or nothing to do with the traditional religions they are associated with. Religious Jews will ultimately have to deal with the fact that Zionism is really a religion of the modern state imposed on Palestine. And most Muslims (now 1.5 billion and growing) do not live in the sort of conditions that make Hezbollah or Hamas exigently viable. But look where Z. says this: The big question for me—and here I am an unashamed Eurocentrist—is the political solution in Palestine, namely the necessity of a single, secular state. But this 'secular' (by secular we simply mean, no longer believes in a transcendental God) belief in the state is as much a fundamentalism as the sort of Islam he complains about. The fundamentalist foundations of countries as different as the USA or Israel are at their core as irrational as anything we might attribute to non-state groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. I would argue even more so. The same goes for Zizek's EU. Now if Zizek is supporting here the idea that the only solution to Palestine is to turn Israel and what little remains of Palestine into a single, secular state, I would say, well, that seems better than a fake 'two-state' solution that denies the Palestinians any hope of a viable state (we already see what Israel has in mind when we look at Gaza). But Zizek seems as flawed as Agamben is said to be by Zizek or Negri--where is the 'praxis' going to come from? If you get paid to theorize, it's actually rather easy to start to think you are doing and living theory as practice, practice that is living theory. But all this seems rather delusional when we look at current events. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
