Citable Moments

[citablemoments]

On Ex-Lovers

And yet others who like this last scene understand that queer kinship has always been wrought from ties between ex-lovers, and that though Strella and Yiorgos have lost each other as lovers, they have remained family, not so much as father and son but as ex-lovers. Indeed, psychoanalytically, one might say that the parent is the very first ex-lover, and that we have to include among "ex-lovers" those with whom we never had sex, but with whom we were bound together from the start by inchoate passions. If family members are the first love objects we are compelled to give up, then families of origin are by definition ex-lovers.

Judith Butler in Dispossession: The Performative In The Political, also written with Athena Athanasiou

[citablemoments]

On Anachronisms

Dipesh Chakrabarty writes in Provincializing Europe:

I do not meant to suggest that reason as such is elitist. Reason becomes elitist whenever we allow unreason and superstition to stand in for backwardness, that is to say, when reason colludes with the logic of historicist thought. For then we see our "superstitious" contemporaries as examples of an "earlier type," as human embodiments of the principle of anachronism. In the awakening of this sense of anachronism lies the beginning of modern historical consciousness. Indeed, anachronism is regarded as the hallmark of such a consciousness. Historical evidence (the archive) is produced by our capacity to see something that is contemporaneous with us - ranging from practices, humans, institutions, and stone-inscriptions to documents - as a relic of another time or place. The person gifted with historical consciousness sees these objects as things that once belonged to their historical context and now exist in the observer's time as a "bit" of that past. A particular past thus becomes objectified in the observer's time. If such an object continues to have effects on the present, then the historically minded person sees that as the effect of the past. It is through such objectification - predicated on the principle of anachronism - that the eye of the participant is converted into the eye of the witness. This is how a participant in an historical "event" becomes an "eyewitness" for the historian, affirming the "rule of evidence" of historiography.

He goes on to write:

What is invested in the practice of anachronism that allows us to reify the past into an object of study? Let me offer a very general answer. If the rise of the modern historical consciousness speaks of the coming of a certain modern and political way of inhabiting the world, I suggest that it also speaks of a very particular relation to the past. This is the desire on the part of the subject of political modernity both to create the past as amenable to objectification and to be at the same time free of this object called "history." In fact, one can argue that the attempt to objectify the past is an expression of the desire to be free of the past, the desire to create what Paul de Man once called the "true present"...The true present is what is produced when we act as if we could reduce the past to a nullity. It is a kind of a zero point in history - the pastless time, for example, of a tabula rasa, the terra nullius, or the blueprint. It reflects the desire of the modern political subject to practice, in pursuit of the goal of social justice, a certain degree of freedom with respect to the past.

For an example of this we only need to look at the Western view of countries like India and China. In the Western imagination these countries lack history, in the sense of a progressive march towards proper liberal institutions and Bourgeoisie subjectivity, while at the same time are encumbered by too much of the wrong history. India has its many gods and "superstitions" (only their religion is superstitious, not ours) while China is either beholden to its Confucian past or suffers from being too disconnected from it. In these starkly dichotomous and often paranoid views we see how the question of history and modernity has hardly been solved in the West either, even if it is meant to be the privileged subject of that history.

[citablemoments]

On Two Models of Translation

Dipesh Chakrabarty writes in Provincializing Europe:

To allow for plurality, signified by the plurality of gods, is to think in terms of singularities. To think in terms of singularities, however - and this I must make clear since so many scholars these days are prone to see parochialism, essentialism, or cultural relativism in every claim of non-Western difference - is not to make a claim against the demonstrable and documentable permeability of cultures and languages. It is, in fact, to appeal to models of cross-cultural and cross-categorical translations that do not take a universal middle term for granted. The Hindi pani may be translated into the English "water" without having to go through the superior positivity of H2O...The interesting point, for our purpose and in our language, is how the translations in these passages take for their model of exchange barter rather than the generalized exchange of commodities, which always needs the mediation of a universal, homogenizing middle term (such as, in Marxism, abstract labor). The translations here are based on very local, particular, one-for-for exchanges...There are surely rules in these exchanges, but the point is that even if I cannot decipher them all - and even if they are not all decipherable, that is to say, even if the processes of translation contain a degree of opacity - it can be safely asserted that these rules cannot and would not claim to have the "universal" character of the rules that sustain conversations between social scientists working on disparate sites of the world.

As an example of translation that follows the model of barter instead of commodity exchange Chakrabarty notes the translation of Hindu gods into the terms of Islam without being mediated by universals like "God" or "religion."

These instances of translation do not necessarily suggest peace and harmony between Hindus and Muslims, but they are translations in which codes are switched locally, without going through a universal set of rules. There are no overarching censoring/limiting/defining systems of thought that neutralize and relegate differences to the margins, nothing like an overarching category of "religion" that is supposed to remain unaffected by differences between the entities it seeks to name and thereby contain. The very obscurity of the translation process allows the incorporation of that which remains untranslatable.

[citablemoments]

On Subaltern Histories

Dipesh Chakrabarty writes in Provincializing Europe:

Subaltern histories, thus conceived in relationship to the question of difference, will have a split running through them. One the one hand, they are "histories" in that they are constructed within the master code of secular history and use the accepted academic codes of history writing (and thereby perforce subordinate to themselves all other forms of memory). On the other hand, they cannot ever afford to grant this master code its claim of being a mode of thought that comes to all human beings naturally, or even to be treated as something that exists in nature itself. Subaltern histories are therefore constructed within a particular kind of historicized memory, one that remembers history itself as an imperious code that accompanied the civilizing process that the European Enlightenment inaugurated in the eighteenth century as a world-historical task...The point is to ask how this seemingly imperious, all-pervasive code might be deployed or thought about so that we have at least a glimpse of its own finitude, a glimpse of what might constitute an outside to it.

[citablemoments]

On the Philosophy of Pleasure

Roland Barthes writes in The Pleasure of the Text:

No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to jump on you: the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman: futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion. An old, a very old tradition: hedonism has been repressed by nearly every philosophy; we find it defended only by marginal figures, Sade, Fourier; for Nietzsche, hedonism is a pessimism. Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure; Desire has an epistemic dignity, Pleasure does not. It seems that (our) society refuses (and ends up by ignoring) bliss to such a point that it can produce only epistemologies of the law (and of its contestation), never of its absence, or better still: of its nullity. Odd, this philosophical permanence of Desire (insofar as it is never satisfied): doesn't the word itself denote a "class notion"? (A rather crude presumption of proof, and yet noteworthy: the "populace" does not know Desire - only pleasures.)

[citablemoments]

On the Necessity of Pleasure

Roland Barthes writes in The Pleasure of the Text:

One out of every two Frenchmen, it appears, does not read; half of France is deprived - deprives itself of the pleasure of the text. Now this national disgrace is never deplored except from a humanistic point of view, as though by ignoring books the French were merely forgoing some moral good, some noble value. It would be better to write the grim, stupid, tragic, history of all the pleasures which societies object to or renounce: there is an obscurantism of pleasure.

Even if we shift the pleasure of the text into the field of its theory and not into the field of its sociology (which here entails a particular discourse, apparently void of any national or social meaning), it is still a political alienation which is in question: the foreclosure of pleasure (and even more of bliss) in a society ridden by two moralities: the prevailing one, of platitude; the minority one, of rigor (political and/or scientific). As if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone. Our society appears to be both staid and violent; in any event: frigid.

[citablemoments]

On Positions

Susan Sontag writes in her review of Walter Benjamin's work, Under the Sign of Saturn:

Passionately, but also ironically, Benjamin placed himself at the crossroads. It was important for him to keep his many "positions" open: the theological, the Surrealist/aesthetic, the communist. One position corrects another; he needed them all. Decisions, of course, tended to spoil the balance of these positions, vacillation kept everything in place. The reason he gave for his delay in leaving France, when he last saw Adorno in early 1938, was that "there are still positions here to defend."

"there are still positions here to defend." How heroic and yet that did not stop the tragic end of Benjamin's life. He killed himself in 1940 in the Pyrenees, certain that he would be deported the next day to the Nazi's.

[citablemoments]

On Monsters

Georges Bataille writes in Theory of Religion:

You are not anymore different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is the SLEEP OF REASON - WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.

[citablemoments]

On Whiteness

George Lipsitz writes in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness:

This book argues that both public policy and private prejudice have created a "possessive investment in whiteness" that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. I use the term "possessive investment" both literally and figuratively. Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educations allocated to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the relatives and friends of those who have profited most from present and past racial discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. I argue that white Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and opportunity. This whiteness is, of course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all racial identities has no valid foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity

The term "investment" denotes time spent on a given end, and this book also attempts to explore how social and cultural forces encourage white people to expend time and energy on the creation and re-creation of whiteness. Despite intense and frequent disavowal that whiteness means anything at all to those so designated, recent surveys have shown repeatedly that nearly every social choice that white people make about where they live, what schools their children attend, what careers they pursue, and what policies they endorse is shaped by considerations involving race. I use the adjective "possessive" to stress the relationship between whiteness and asset accumulation in our society, to connect attitudes to interests, to demonstrate that white supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility. Whiteness is invested in like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others. While one can possess one's investments, one can also be possessed by them. I contend that the artificial construction of whiteness almost always comes to possess white people themselves unless they develop antiracist identities, unless they disinvest and divest themselves of their investment in white supremacy.

[citablemoments]

On the Descriptive Use of "Women"

Judith Butler writers in Bodies That Matter:

To understand "women" as a permanent site of contest, or as a feminist site of agonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no closure on the category and that, for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy. In this sense, what is lamented as disunity and factionalization from the perspective informed by the descriptivist ideal is affirmed by the anti-descriptivist perspective as the open and democratizing potential of the category.

Here the numerous refusals on the part of "women" to accept the descriptions offered in the name of "women" not only attest to the specific violences that a partial concept enforces, but to the constitutive impossibility of an impartial or comprehensive concept or category. The claim to have achieved such an impartial concept or description shores itself up by foreclosing the very political field that it claims to have exhausted. This violence is at once performed and erased by a description that claims finality and all-inclusiveness. To ameliorate and rework this violence, it is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the term is questionable does not mean that we ought not to use it, but neither does the necessity to use it mean that we ought not perpetually to interrogate the exclusions by which it proceeds, and to do this precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of the political signifier in a culture of democratic contestation.

[citablemoments]

On Sharing in Community

Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Inoperative Community, a commentary on the idea of community in the thought of Georges Bataille and others:

That is to say [Bataille] gave up thinking the sharing of community and the sovereignty in the sharing or shared sovereignty, shared between Daseins, between singular existences that are not subjects and whose relation-the sharing itself-is not a communion, nor the appropriation of an object, nor a self-recognition, nor even a communication as this is understood to exist between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others: other for one another, and other, infinitely other for the Subject of their fusion, which is engulfed in the sharing, in the ecstasy of the sharing: "communicating" by not "communing." These "places of communication" are no longer places of fusion, even though in them one passes from one to the other; they are defined and exposed by their dislocation. Thus, the communication of sharing would be this very dis-location.

[citablemoments]

On the Origins of Liberalism

Or at least one of them as posited by Michel Foucault in The History of Madness

Assistance to the poor was in need of a new meaning. In the form that it took at the time, the eighteenth century recognised that it was complicitous with poverty and contributed to its spread. The only form of assistance that would not be contradictory would be a mechanism for giving value, in a poor population, to the only potential wealth that it possessed - which was the simple fact that it was a population. Confining this population was a complete misunderstanding of what was required: it needed to be granted full liberty in the social space; providing it played its role as provider of cheap labour, other problems would gradually disappear. In places where overpopulation or poverty were the norm, the population would ensure that industry and commerce developed most rapidly. The only form of assistance of any value was freedom...the social space therefore needed to be entirely empty of obstacles and barriers.

Thus did one of the many meanings of freedom begin to develop: the freedom to be poor for the benefit of others.

[citablemoments]

On Revolutionary Mentality

Georges Bataille writes in the essay "The 'Old Mole' and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist"

For it is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all men (except for this police and the friends of the police), that alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms...But there is no possibility for any class until bourgeois principles have become altogether and for everyone principles of derision and general disgust - including Icarian subterfuge, even if this subterfuge will be regarded someday as a kind of dawn of mental liberation, just as bourgeois revolutions represent the dawn of proletarian revolution. By excavating the fetid ditch of bourgeois culture, perhaps we will see open up in the depths of the earth immense and even sinister caves where force and human liberty will establish themselves, sheltered from the call to order of a heaven that today demands the most imbecilic elevation of any man's spirit.

[citablemoments]

On the Purpose of Criticism

Maurice Blanchot writes in the preface to Lautreamont and Sade:

We complain about criticism no longer knowing how to judge. But why? It is not criticism that lazily refuses to evaluate, it is the novel or the poem that shirks evaluation because it seeks affirmation outside every value system. And, insofar as criticism belongs more intimately to the life of the literary work, it turns what is not able to be evaluated into the experience of the work, it grasps it as the depth, and also the absence of depth, which eludes every system of value, being on the side of what is of value and challenging in advance every affirmation that would like to get its hands on it to validate it. In this sense, criticism - literature - seems to me to be associated with one of the most difficult, but important, tasks of our time, played out in a necessarily vague movement: the task of preserving and of liberating thought from the notion of value, consequently also of opening history up to what all these forms of value have already released into it and to what is taking shape as an entirely different - still unforeseeable - kind of affirmation.

[citablemoments]

On the Love of Freedom

Alexis de Tocqueville writes in his last work The Old Regime and the French Revolution:

Some nations have freedom in the blood and are ready to face the greatest perils and hardships in its defense. It is not for what it offers on the material plane that they love it; they regard freedom itself as something so precious, so needful to their happiness that no other boon could compensate for its loss, and its enjoyment consoles them even in their darkest hours. Other nations, once they have grown prosperous, lose interest in freedom and let it be snatched from them without lifting a hand to defend it, lest they should endanger thus the comforts that, in fact, they owe to it alone. It is easy to see that what is lacking in such nations is a genuine love of freedom, that lofty aspiration which (I confess) defies analysis. For it is something one must feel and logic has no part in it. It is a privilege of noble minds which God has fitted to receive it, and it inspires them with a generous fervor. Bu to meaner souls, untouched by the sacred flame, it may well seem incomprehensible.

The practice of freedom within community is, in the end, its own pleasure.

[citablemoments]

On Community

Maurice Blanchot writes in his book The Unavowable Community:

The unavowable community: does that mean that it does not acknowledge itself or that it is such that no avowal may reveal it, given that each time we have talked about its way of being, one has had the feeling that one grasped only what makes it exist by default? So, would it have been better to have remained silent? Would it be better, without extolling its paradoxical traits, to live it in what makes it contemporary to a past which it has never been possible to live? Wittgenstein's all too famous and all to often repeated precept, "Whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent" - given that by enunciating it he has not been able to impose silence on himself - does indicate that in the final analysis one has to talk in order to remain silent. But with what kinds of words? That is one of the questions this little book entrusts to others, not that they may answer it, rather that they may choose to carry it with them, and, perhaps, to extend it. Thus one will discover that it also carries an exacting political meaning and that it does not permit us to lose interest in the present time which, by opening unknown spaces of freedom, makes us responsible for new relationships, always threatened, always hoped for, between what we call work and what we call unworking.

At this moment, when the community we have hoped for appears hauntingly before us, will we even recognize it before it is gone?

[citablemoments]

On the Origin of the Law

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Second Discourse on Inequality, writes up a hypothetical history of the foundation of inequality in civil society. He locates this origin in the moment where the strong instigated private property and then secured it through the establishment of political institutions and laws. Rousseau writes:

All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom, for although they had enough reason to feel the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers...Such was, or must have been, the origin of society and laws, which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race to work, servitude, and misery.

Such a situation leads to a rather radical prescription on Rousseau's part:

...the despot is master only as long as he is the strongest, and as soon as he can be driven out, he cannot protest against violence. The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him.