Hostis, Issue 2, Call for Papers: Beyond Recognition

Seeking recognition is always servile. We have little interest in visibility, consciousness raising, or populist pandering. Recognition always treats power as a give-and-take. On the one hand, the dispossessed use recognition as respite from exploitation; while on the other, the State expects its authority to be recognized as the first and final say. According to this logic: for the dispossessed to even get a step up, they must first acknowledge a higher power than themselves.

The particulars of our own time are even more obscene. Following the spread of economic rationality on a global scale, it is clear that the flow of forces has reversed. The State pornographically exposes its long-protected interior for others to abuse while lasciviously grooming what is beyond its regular reach. Recognition chastely reassures the State of its powers. All the while, the most banal State functions are farmed out to the highest bidder. So when their parking ticket is authored by a private corporation, those who seek recognition fall back on the State dictum that nothing good comes from the outside.

Dispute or Disrupt? Desire and Violence in Protests Against the Iraq War

In “Dispute or Disrupt? Desire and Violence in Protests Against the Iraq War,” xxx suggests ‘queering’ direct action in order to overcome the limits of rhetorical politics. xxx shows how the Bush Administration’s justifications for the Iraq War were incoherent discourses that drew rhetorical opposition into a politics of identification that made them easy to dismiss. An alternative, xxx claims, are “bodies that mutter” – subjects of desire whose bodily force continues where discourses fail, which he locates in the Code Pink disruption of John McCain’s speech at 2008 Republican National Convention, AIDS crisis-era queer activism, and radical clowning.

Introduction

The movement against the Iraq War was an exercise in failure. The February 15, 2003 global demonstration against the Iraq War was “the largest protest event in human history,” yet it did not prevent the war.[2] A year and half later, the movement was again unsuccessful when the Democratic presidential candidate promising to the end the war lost the general election despite wavering public support for the ongoing conflict.[3] Media attention gave rise to movement celebrities, such as Cindy Sheehan, who demanded that President Bush explain the ‘noble cause’ for which her son died in Iraq, but was unable to secure a meeting with the President. Even after the Democrats had enough political power to end the war, having gained control of Congress in 2006 and then the Presidency in 2008, they only completed full withdrawal in December 2011.[4] In addition to these many defeats, this paper focuses on another: the failure of rhetoric – its inability to dispute official discourses of state violence, and the politics of bodies that fail to achieve rhetoricality.[5] In the former, the paper identifies an impediment to the anti-war effort, and in the latter, the paper finds the constitutive lack of queer desire that overcomes political strategy’s rhetorical limits.

Conclusion

The incoherent discourses that justified the Iraq War were not politically ineffective; to the contrary, they trapped opponents in rhetorical disputes that failed to upset the war effort. The personalized ridicule of President Bush and the ‘I Told You So’ narrative behind Cindy Sheehan’s opposition to the Iraq War confirm that rhetorical challenges to state violence often fall into traps like those set for disputing homophobic discourse. Treating the Iraq War as the result of a personality problem, anti-war rhetoric created an economy of ridicule that failed to engage larger questions of geopolitical power and furthered a politics of identification that dismissed criticism before its claims could be evaluated. The ‘I Told You So’ narrative created an emotional politics of shared truths that helped produce large publics critical of the Bush Administration, yet they developed greater commonality through celebrity and amateur policy expertise rather than a political plan for ending the war.

Failed Rhetoricality: Bodies that Mutter

Soon before President Bush left office, he had a pair of shoes thrown at him during a press conference on his farewell journey to Iraq. The thrower was Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist upset with the American occupation of his country. In the middle of the press conference, al-Zaidi stood up, yelled, “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” and threw a shoe at Bush.62 Before security personnel were able to intervene, al-Zaidi launched another shoe, saying, “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq.” Showing just how unaffected he was by the whole ordeal, Bush later laughed it off by saying, “If you want the facts, it’s a size 10 shoe that he threw,” further shrugging of the protest with the comment, “I don’t know what the guy’s cause was. I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by it.”63 As a strategy of confrontation, al-Zaidi’s shoe-ing follows Voltairine de Cleyre’s classic definition of direct action as one of the “spontaneous retorts of those who feel oppressed by a situation.”64 Moreover, it matches the essential characteristics outlined by direct action advocates, being confrontational, public, disruptive, and illegal.65 Yet it was unable to affect Bush, probably because it was immediately contained by the politics of identification, which raises an important question: can other types of embodied protest disrupt power?

Justifications for the Iraq War as Incoherent Discourses

This is the beginning to an academic article I’ll be submitting later this weekend.

Queer theorist David Halperin argues that disputing the lies of homophobia is pointless. His argument is not that homophobic discourses are irrefutable, but on the contrary, that they are endlessly disputable because they are based on series’ of mutually contradictory double binds. Halperin uses the legal debate over homosexuality as an “immutable characteristic” to illustrate such a double bind whereby if homosexuality is inborn, it justifies medical and legal discrimination on the basis of biological difference, or alternately, if homosexuality is a choice, then medical practitioners and politicians can restrict and punish homosexual behavior as a matter of volition.[1] Theoretically describing this discursive problematic, Halperin draws on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet” to argue that since “homophobic discourses contain no fixed propositional content,” they “operate strategically by means of logical contradictions” whose infinite substitutability empowers those discourses while simultaneously incapacitating queers through incoherence.[2] For Halperin, following Sedgwick, the consequence is that homophobic lies are easily falsifiable when taken one at a time, but refuting them one by one “does nothing the strategic function of discourses that operate precisely by deploying a series of mutually contradictory premises in such a way that anyone of them can be substituted for any other as different circumstances may require, without changing the final outcome of the argument.”[3]

The Bush Administration’s case for the Iraq War, with its many divergent justifications, expresses a discursive incoherence similar to homophobia. President Bush’s ex post facto justification for the war was quite vague, “that the Iraqi people are much better off without Saddam,” yet as policy analysts Daalder and Lindsey argue, the wide berth of this justification relies on the “basic but highly salient fact that there would not have been a war without his argument that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction posed an unacceptable threat that was both immediate and serious.”[4] Restoring clarity to the Bush Administration’s initial claims about WMDs seems hardly probable, however, given the incoherence of the discourse through which the justifications for war were presented. As public policy professor James P Pfiffner points out, administration officials made WMDs a moving target, with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz claiming that the verifiable presence of WMDs was not the paramount issue for policymakers while Secretary of Defense Collin Powell was asserting its centrality.[5] Pfiffner concludes that even while President Bush made “few untrue statements” and accepted some widely shared claims, his statements were also systematically misleading, gave false impressions, and defied the better judgment of others.[6]

I don’t wanna be anyone. I don’t wanna be anything.

This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.

Vein 3: Resisting Spectacular Time, Finitude & Dislocation (part 3)

This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.

Deleuze & The Meaning of Life: Fichte!?

Deleuze’s search for a metaphysical grounding for his theory on the meaning of life as “becoming-?”, understood as becoming-different or queer vitalism, as Claire Colebrook explains in her article in New Formations no 68, ends with an unlikely philosopher: Fichte. The payoff is a form of Aufheben that, while still in the German Idealist tradition, looks different than that proposed by Hegel. Here is Keith Ansell-Pearson’s explanation:

In a short piece entitled ‘Immanence: A Life…’, written in 1993, Deleuze argue that the transcendental field needs to be mapped out as a ‘life’ the involves neither subject nor object but rather ‘an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers back to a being but ceaselessly posits itself in a life’ (4). This, says, Deleuze, is the immanence of the late Fichte (the text Deleuze [sic] of Fichte’s referred to is Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre 1806, appearing in French as Initiation a la vie beinheruese [(Eng trans of Fr: ‘Initiation Into the Life Well-Lived’), English trans of German The Way Towards the Blessed Life; or, the Doctrine of Religion]. It is the impersonal but singular life of the individuating haecceity [taken from Duns Scotus] (the ‘beatitude’ in the title of Fichte’s work). This is a germinal life since it is not positing life in a ‘simple moment’ confronting a ‘universal death’ but rather a life that is ‘everywhere’, contained ‘in all the moments’ that a ‘living subject passes through’, a life of virtualities, events, and singularities (5).

It is odd, however, that Deleuze should locate in the later Fichte a renaissance of ‘Spinozism’ given Fichte’s own declared hostility towards Spinoza and his influence (see Fichte 1994: 98-99, where he argues that Spinoza could not have believed in his own philosophy, but could only have ‘thought’ it). Nevertheless, in this series of popular lectures Fichte does present Being in terms akin to Spinoza’s immanent substance as that ‘which is absolutely through itself, by itself, and from itself…a self-comprehensive, self-sufficient, and absolutely unchangeable Unity (Einerleiheit)’ (1962: 53; 1848: 48-9). This is Being that ‘ex-ists’ outside of Time and outside of Becoming. The spiritual life of blessedness is the life filled with consciousness, love, and self-enjoyment. It is through the laws of reflection which govern its operations that consciousness creates a system of separate and independent individuals and so confronts itself with numerous paradoxes concerning the reality of time and change. It should be noted that Fichte’s text is bound up in the moves it makes with classical metaphysics, notably the distinction between a ‘true world’ (life/blessedness) and an ‘apparent world’ (death/unblessedness). This is a distinction that Fichte presents as one between the merely sensuous world and the higher suprasensuous world that is available to, and attainable only by, Thought. It is lecture VIII that is the most philosophically serious and which is [sic] would be the decisive one for staging and encounter between Fichte and Deleuze (ibid.: 122ff.; 144 ff.). See also Fichte 1987: 91ff., where beatitude is related to the achievement of supersensible death ‘in life and through life…’, which speaks of the praxis of a relational self as its peculiar ‘sublime vocation’. The self-expressive life of the spiritual is one in which the universe can no longer be thought in terms of the circle ‘returning to itself, that endlessly repeating game, that monster which devours itself so as to give birth to itself again as it already way’; rather, there is ‘constant progress to greater perfection in a straight line which goes on to infinity’. This is because ‘All death is nature is birth…in dying does the augmentation of life visibility appear…It is not death which kills, but rather a more living life which, hidden behind the old life, begins and develops’ (ibid.: 122). My death can only be a festive passing. it is not, therefore, for Fichte a question of living ‘according to nature’ simply because this is not even what nature does. The only ‘law of life’ is, in Nietzsche’s almost Fichtean language, ‘self-overcoming’. On the world as a ‘monster of energy’, ‘without beginning or end’ but as ceaseless transformation, a world of repetition and difference (the ‘joy of the circle’ as the only goal), compare Nietzsche 1968: 1067 (in German, Nietzsche 1987, volume 11, pp 610).

On beatitude see also Deleuze’s ‘big’ book on Spinoza (Deleuze 1968: 282ff.; 1990: 208ff.). Clement Rosset argued that beatitude constitutes the central and constant theme of Nietzsche’s thought – ‘I would willingly say the only theme’ (Rosset 1993: 26). Nietzsche’s expression of a beat-philosophy informs the entire endeavour of ‘gay science’ (Nietzsche 1974: sections 276-7), with its commitment, in the enternal engagement with/to life (especially its gloom and doom), to the ‘art of cheerfulness’ (Heiterkeit). It would be instructive to determine the difference between types and expressions of beatitude, whether Spinozist, Fischtean, Nietzschean, or Stoic. Clearly Nietzsche’s challenge resides in the attempt to think theodicy without God, a challenge most evident in his reading of Leibniz (see Nietzsche 1968: sections 411, 419, 1019) (this is a move which, according to Rosset, makes Nietzsche more Leibnizian – more cheerful – than Leibniz).

–“Living the Eternal Return as the Event: Nietzsche with Deleuze,” Keith Ansell Pearson, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 14, Eternal Recurrence (Autumn 1997), pp. 64-97 Published by: Penn State University Press Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20717678

The question of a Nietzsche-Fichte ‘self-overcoming’ is raised differently in Colebrook’s recent book Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, in terms of a sort of Hegelian ‘higher deterritorialization.’ For us, as political theorists, is to find the way to translate this argument, locked deep within the history of philosophy, into a weapon. Thoughts from the more philosophically inclined?

epistemology of the closet

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HOMOPHOBIC discourses contain no fixed propositional content. They are composed of a potentially infinite number of different but functionally interchangeable assertions, such that whenever any one assertion is falsified or disqualified another one-even one with a content exactly contrary to the original one-can be neatly and effectively substituted for it. A good example of the opportunistic and propositionally indeterminate nature of homophobic discourses is provided by the history of legal disputes over whether homosexuality constitutes an “immutable characteristic.” The story begins in the nineteenth century,