Agamben’s double negativity
Our Badiou reading group has successfully managed the transformation into an Agamben reading group. We had a very interesting discussion about The coming community on Sunday, predominantly concentrating on the most frustrating thing about Agamben, namely what a political practice based on his philosophy would look like (I was, of course, doing my best to argue that the movement of movement’s subtractive diversity owes at least something to Agamben). We also discussed a chapter of the book I had forgotten, in which Agamben talks explicitly about what I thought was a clever interpretation of my own in my post below about Ashlee Simpson (on which see also Spurious’s excellent post on Abi Titmuss).
We also briefly mentioned Agamben’s very tricky distinction between potential and contingency: the potential is that which can not be, while the contingent is that which can not _not_ be. The negation of the negation makes me think of Hegel, although I don’t think that’s where Agamben wants to take the idea. Hence the title of this post, which I think would make a good name for a poncy MLA-style paper. Which makes me think, has any queer theorist yet had the chutzpah to base a paper around the obvious homo sacer gag? I’d like to bagsy ‘We will become more possible than you can powerfully imagine’ for potential future use as a title for something on Agamben’s discussion of potential/contingency, too.
revision
I have exams in a few weeks, and I’ve been doing more work than I ever have in my life before (mainly because last term I spent the whole time getting drunk, and got quite behind). Economics gets worse and worse. Macroeconomics started with the Keynesian multiplier (if consumption, government spending, or investment is increased, or taxes decrease, production will increase by a larger amount owing to the multiplier effect), and we have ended by learning about how if inflation is too high, you have to increase unemployment (by increasing the interest rate, and therefore decreasing money growth - i think this is right anyway, it is quite late now).
“There’s a deep moral seriousness to the work”
Of course Tom Paulin on Star Wars Episode 3. Not much moral seriousness in The Phantom Menace, meanwhile, which appears to be an attempt by George Lucas to see how many racial stereotypes he can get into a film by hiding them as ‘alien’ races. One character (Ja-Ja Binks) could be forgiven as coincidence or a mistake, but what’s with the trade federation (untrustworthy Japanese) or the scrap dealer (grasping Jew — a CGI alien with a prominent semitic nose)? Even if Lucas is just a massive racist, who unconsciously imagines characters in stereotypical terms, how did no-one else notice during the whole course of the film’s production?
Reactionary rockers
Obviously, the Kaiser Chiefs are shit. What I hadn’t realised till I saw them on Popworld is that their lead singer looks like Boris Johnson.
I’ve also remembered that my original intention in that long, mildly incoherent post about books below had been to briefly mention the books before moving onto the real meat of the subject, namely the CDs I bought from the library’s sale of withdrawn stock. Lisa Left Eye Lopes’s album, only £1.50! It’s not great, but worth the asking price. Indeed, the hidden track is worth £1.50 on its own.
Agamben forward not back
How old is Ashlee Simpson? Too young, some might think, to be singing about wanting to la la on the kitchen floor. But surely that’s wrong; it’s absurd to think there’s something wrong with 19-year olds (which is what the internet reveals she is) talking about sex. What I _can_ see people objecting to is a young woman singing about sex _in a commercial pop song_; the perceived problem is commodification. But this is still wrong; isn’t it what Foucault objects to in the History of sexuality, the idea that sexuality is a non-produced, personal ‘core’ that must be protected from the operations of power (see also this thread at LBO-talk)?
Arguably, a problem with Homo sacer is that it’s too depressing. Because he concentrates on the horrors that arise when biological life is entirely captured by politics, it’s easy to recoil and think that therefore we must liberate biological life. But of course this is a mistake, because, as Agamben emphasises, biological life is not a given that precedes politics, but is constructed by the political processes that ensure its capture within biopolitics.
In the light of this, we can see why it’s a mistake to construe the disagreement between Agamben and Negri on the progressive potential of biopower as being a simple pro/anti Spinoza dispute, with Negri arguing for a Spinozist mechanism of productive _potentia_ , while Agamben, expressing hostility to the mechanistic aspects of biopolitics, advocates something outside the machine, a spark of life that is protected from biopolitics. Agamben points to Spinoza, along with Nietzsche, as one of those who has come closest to finding a way of thinking beyond biopolitics (it would be interesting to consider how Deleuze’s emphasis on the virtual fits into this problematic). The challenge, then, is not to repudiate Spinoza, but rather to take his work _further_.
Maybe, the way out is in part _through_ biopolitics. Wendy Brown points out that part of the mechanism of sovereignty in Agamben is a remorseless blurring of boundaries, a creation of the zones of indistinction that allow the force of law to operate. It’s no coincidence that the full horror of biopolitics is unleashed when sovereignty has finally developed to the point where there are no boundaries left to erode. The state of exception is the operation of law after its suspension, a law evacuated of any limit or purpose. This leads to the terrible consequences that occupy Agamben in Homo sacer; but the law’s suspension is also just a hair’s breadth from the law’s _deactivation_ — as Agamben says:
> If the connection between pure violence and juridical violence, between state of exception
> and revolutionary violence, is thus made so tight that the two players facing each other
> across the chessboard of history seem always to be moving a single pawn — force of
> law or
> pure means — what is nevertheless decisive is that in each case the criterion of their
> distinciton lies in the dissolution of the relation between violence and law.
>
>
— State of exception, p. 62f.
(Note: I don’t think that the propriety or otherwise of Ashlee Simpson dressing as a French maid is the most significant issue raised by this post).
Good and bad, good and evil
I’m been reading some terrifyingly bad books recently. First up was Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which is really hilariously rubbish. The argument proceeds via vague resemblances between theorists, like one of my terrible undergraduate essays, except it goes on for about a million pages or something. High-minded, wooden-headed discussions of Hegel and Nietzsche, all directed to the most banal of conclusions. In a similar ‘reactionary bollocks’ vein, I also read a paper that attempted the audacious task of combining Samuel P. Huntington and Jean-Luc Nancy, with predictably hilarious consequences. Still, it did suggest that Nancy’s The inoperative community might be worth reading. Nancy also has a couple of books on Hegel I’d like to read, one of which only because its title is One of Hegel’s Bon Mots.
And I have also been reading some good books — Agamben’s State of exception, which I read in a hurry (a tip: don’t try reading in a Camridge college library when students are doing exams, unless you like overhearing overwrought discussions about the difficulty of neoclassical economics), but which I’m reasonably sure is very good. The chapter on Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of emergency, sovereignty and revolutionary violence is certainly bloody brilliant. Also Badiou’s book on Deleuze, which features anecdotes about Badiou sending a Maoist brigade to disrupt Deleuze’s classes in 1968, and interesting material on what precisely is at stake for Badiou in his rejection of totality. I may post more on that, if I get round to it.
I’ve also just finished re-reading Ken MacLeod’s Engines of light series, which is better than I thought (and I already liked it a lot when I first read it). I prefer the first two books to the last, as the final book seems to rush to cover too many events; in places it felt like the _Foundation_ books, in which Asimov has to deal with a thousand years of history via the medium ten-thousand word short stories. But this acceleration of pace may well be intentional, given that one of the themes of the series is the time-dilating effects of travelling at the speed of light, which makes years of history pass instantaneously, rendering the history of class struggle an obvious empirical truth. Also:
> “No matter what the gods do that should make people angry, it only makes them more
> afraid. Cringing bastards… No offence.”
>
> “None taken,” said Salasso. “I despise them myself. Even millions of years after
> something much worse than genocide was comitted against my people, they still regard
> the gods as good and theicide as the ultimate sin.”
>
>
Ken Macleod, Engine city.
And:
> We who are summoned by the void, we who intervene so as to decide the undecidible,
> we who are sustained by the indiscernible truth, we who are finite fragments of that
> infinity which will come to establish that there is nothing more true than the indifferent
> and the generic, we who dwell in the vicinity of that indistinction in which all reality
> dissolves, we, throws of the dice for a nameless star — we are greater than the sacred,
> we are greater than all gods, and we are so here and now, already and forever.
>
>
Alain Badiou, Une soirée philosophique.
What are Gareth Stedman Jones’s politics these days?
I’ve just read an article about him which makes him out to be an enormous reactionary. Not so much for his Marxism Today embrace of the free market, but for this account of his experiences in Paris in the ’60s:
> “What I discovered in the 60s was that they were much squarer than we were,” he laughs.
> “They had all these books and films but their idea of what to do on a Saturday night was
> playing bridge, listening to Louis Armstrong and wearing suits! So I did feel that culturally
> we were more emancipated.”
Who would want to be emancipated from listening to Louis Armstrong and wearing suits?
“It’s the Estonian Girls Aloud”
A judgement that the video for the Estonian Eurovision entry reveals to be true, although obviously they’re not as _good_ as Girls Aloud. The song does sound a bit like ‘Rhythm of the night’, which, now I think about it, I’d like to see GA cover.
Cheering me up on my way to work this week
Unexpected proof of Eliot’s historicism
It’s impossible to now listen to the Super Furry Animals without thinking of Goldie Looking Chain, no?
