The idea that communication and meaning can be brought into balance by means of transparently organised procedures is perhaps the core of bourgeois ideology. The use of language as if it were a uniform and purely communicative instrument is a highly effective instrument of power for distorting communication and producing utter nonsense. Supposedly ideal communication situations – the famous »unforced force of the better argument« - are abstracted to such an extent from the complex social locations in which linguistic codes and physical realities interact, overlap and threaten each other that it can be seen as a political act par excellence to reveal their inner entanglement with force. Between Jacques Lacan’s and Louis Althusser’s structuralism, Michel Foucault’s microphysics of power, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western phallogocentrism and Judith Butler’s de-essentialisation of the gender system there is – despite all the theoretical differences – an inner connection that is articulated in the rejection of certain notions of identity, sovereignty and transparency.

From the seventies up into the nineties, theoretical and political conflicts, at least in the West, have taken place among other things within this confrontation, and have thus not only shifted the borderline between the political positions of left and right, but also made it extremely complicated. Up into the seventies, »left« seemed inevitably allied with various versions of Marxism and »right« with a kind of humanist liberalism. The dilemma of those who at a certain point felt compelled to break out from this corset was formulated by Michel Foucault in 1980 in a talk with Ducio Trombadori: »In France, the war in Algeria marked the end of a long period in which people on the left had naively believed that the Communist Party, just struggle and just cause were one and the same thing. [...] After Algeria, this kind of unconditional loyalty started to crumble. Of course, it was not easy to formulate this new critical position, because there was no suitable vocabulary, if you did not want to use the one the categories on the right were offering. We are still facing this problem. And that is one reason why so many questions became muddled up and the theoretical debate was carried out in a manner that was as heated as it was confused.«1

When he speaks of heated and diffuse theoretical debates, Foucault also has in mind the polemics that had been aroused against him from the left and the right since the publication of »Madness and Civilisation« (1961). Sartre’s famous dictum that Foucault was »the last ideological bulwark of the bourgeoisie« fairly exactly marks the contradictory transition to a »different vocabulary« that no longer clothed itself in Marxist theorems, but was about to undertake a redefinition of political conflicts with reference not only to Nietzsche and Heidegger, but also to structuralism. The fact that the anti-colonial liberation movement in Algeria and the hesitant stance of the Communist Party towards this issue became triggers for processes of erosion within the left also highlights another fact: that new terms to define the situation of world politics were establishing themselves that also became synonyms for a large number of different theoretical fields. Post-modernity, post-structuralism and post-colonialism are words that are intended to express a changed reality as well as to name and summarise different forms of theory that are situated at a greater or lesser distance from dogmatic Marxism.

Even if one disregards the fact that these terms were often used in a very misleading and vague fashion and that there is barely anyone who feels that they adequately represent her/his theoretical project, these catchwords conceal a concrete turning towards what could be generally called minority or particular problems and struggles. Concepts like superstructure and foundation, class struggle etc. had to be reformulated or even abandoned under the pressure of political events, because they proved to be too imprecise as instruments. The political events that are usually summarised as »May 68« are particularly important here, because they articulated a Marxist form of politics and its fragmentation at the same time. Félix Guattari, who, together with Gilles Deleuze, wrote »Anti-Oedipus«, the book that reflected the tension of the new situation in perhaps the most radical way (its authors call the »failure« of May 68 one of the sources of inspiration for their collaboration), formulates the inner contradiction as follows: »May 68 may have released militant forms of behaviour, but it did not liberate the minds, which remained completely hidden and needed much more time to open up to these questions about madness, about homosexuality, drugs, criminality, prostitution, women’s liberation.«2 When assessing the apparent success of »Anti-Oedipus« in introducing schizoanalysis into discourse and social practice, however, Guattari arrived at a very sobering conclusion: »>Anti-Oedipus< barely made any inroads. [...] No, the most tangible result of >Anti-Oedipus< is that it made the connection between psychoanalysis and the left.«3

The criticism levelled at schizoanalysis, and also at Foucault and Derrida, by Marxists and liberals has continued to this day. Basically, it is the accusation of irrationalism or even of a latent fascistoid vitalism. In the book that he has written about Deleuze,4 Alain Badiou, who sees himself as a radical leftist, recounts how, in his Maoist phase, he, too, qualified Deleuze’s ideas as fascist against the background of the »red years« and during the time when the left was falling apart. Later, Badiou and Deleuze drew closer in a very complicated way, because they discovered a common political interest in their radical rejection of the »New Philosophers« associated with Bernard-Henri Lévy. From Foucault’s perspective, it was logical to see »an introduction to non-fascist life« in »Anti-Oedipus«, because he himself saw the necessity to leave the well-worn theoretical paths influenced by Freudo-Marxism and to move towards a microphysics of power – even at the risk of being classified as a rightist. But even Deleuze and Foucault, who display great affinities to one another and worked together with the GIP (Groupe d’information sur les prisons) against the prison regime during the seventies, fell out in the face of the complicated situation brought about by issues of terrorism and – as Edward Said wrote in his short text »My Encounter with Sartre«5 – their different assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Germany, the lines of conflict ran directly between critical theory and militancy. Adorno’s rejection of the activism of the student movement and Jürgen Habermas’ verdict of »leftist fascism« bear witness to a radical unwillingness to set political theory and minority practice in relation to each other. The harshest conflict probably took place in Italy between the state authorities and the autonomous left. Among other things, it led in the seventies to the arrest of Antonio Negri and ended only a few years ago with his release.

From difference theory to politics of democracy

It is obvious that, after the end of the Cold War and during the transition to a political space that is now called »globalisation« or »Empire«, and after the recent death of the last prominent philosopher of this generation, Derrida, much of that which had taken place in the preceding decades in the way of theoretical debates and conflicts has retained its relevance and still forms the matrix of leftist discourses. However, the status that »difference theory « has in the form of theorists like Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault has changed in many regards. What these directions of thought have in common is the enormous influence that they have had on very different theoretical fields over the past decades and the forms of criticism used against them. One still encounters styles of language, both in the Marxist and the liberal camp, that elude the hegemonic conventions of a rational discourse in very different ways by calling these conventions themselves into question. In a certain sense, the conflictual configurations of that time have been preserved throughout the diversification and spread of so-called post-structuralism or deconstruction and are re-emerging under changed political conditions. In the case of Derrida, this led in the last years to an unceasing, nearly stagnant theoretical conflict during which he often followed up a new book with another in which he reacted to the criticisms levelled at him with a detailed defence of deconstruction. The increased attention paid to questions of the theory of democracy, as expressed in »The Other Cape«, »Force of Law«, »The Spectres of Marx«, »Politics of Friendship« and »Rogues«, however, gave these conflicts an interesting twist, because it can clearly be seen here how complicated it is to carry on a leftist political discourse that, on the one hand, does not abandon its radically academic tone and, on the other, tries to react directly to socio-political events. The fact that, in the process, new alliances can form that were never thought possible is shown by the strange cooperation between Derrida and Habermas in the form of a newspaper article that tries to define the political function of Europe in opposition to the increasingly hegemonic world power of the USA.6 However, this text, symptomatically written by Habermas and only signed by Derrida, very clearly shows the limits imposed on the attempt to unite completely incompatible discourses in a political statement. Even if Derrida and Habermas went apparently similar ways with regard to their recently increased interest in religion, the basic difference remains.

Derrida, on the other hand, has expounded once more in his book »Rogues«7 how political thought begins where it leaves normative ground and enters the complicated labyrinth of language to collect heterogeneous material for a possible form of politics. In the capital »The rogue that I am«, Derrida insists in a somewhat coquettish manner on the idea that a construction like »rogue state« cannot be adequately analysed or criticised if one does not at the same time put oneself on the line. The state aggression towards the outside manifested in the talk of »rogue states« or the »axis of evil« has its forerunner in the production and exclusion of countless »small rogues« inside democracy itself. All the procedures of marginalisation and discrimination that are made to disappear behind a word like »freedom« must, if the critique is really to be substantial, re-emerge in the language itself and be allowed to speak. In this sense, deconstruction is their arena. But it can only be this if it itself mutates into a sort of friendly rogue. The difficulty is to give these procedures of language an effectiveness that goes beyond their academic location and enters the political space.

But theoretical cooperation also has its pitfalls. After Ernesto Laclau entered a controversial discussion writing a joint 280-page book, »Contingency, Hegemony, Universality«, together with Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler, he wrote, surprised: »[N]o stable frontier separating our overall position has emerged. This is because neither disagreements nor coincidences have added up consistently, making possible some sort of permanent alliance between some of us.«8 The exchange about theoretical positions between three people keeps disintegrating into short alliances based on certain agreements between two of them, which are jointly defended against the third. The differences in thought block the intention of entering into a discussion about a possible basis for a currently relevant leftist form of politics. As a result, Laclau asks himself towards the end of the book whether it makes any sense at all to work with Zizek on a joint political perspective. If not even the place of the political can be located, the question does indeed arise of whether cooperation has any point. In Zizek’s case, the obsession with reproducing his own theoretical edifice really does produce strange effects that sometimes make him completely blind to what nonsense he is writing. His latest attempt, »Bodiless Organs. Building Blocks for an Encounter between Deleuze and Lacan«9, which, as always, is amusing to read and contains some really good moments, is at the same time an example of a type of theoretical radicality that, in the final analysis, cancels itself out. Zizek finds peace only when the ideas of Deleuze have been fitted into his Hegel-Lacan universe and neutralised, and that can be done only by his expounding, in a virtuosic analysis, the cliché of Deleuze as the ideologist of late capitalism, thus wilfully preventing a possible encounter.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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