Symbolic violence describes a type of non-physical violence manifested in the power differential between social groups. It is often unconsciously agreed upon by both parties and is manifested in an imposition of the norms of the group possessing greater social power on those of the subordinate group.
Wiki
Habermas
To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong.
So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.
Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction.
What had become banal – and astonishingly so – was the failure to think. Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be.
Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name.
Indeed, her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly "thinkable". The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations.
Indeed, that for which she faulted Eichmann was his failure to be critical of positive law, that is, a failure to take distance from the requirements that law and policy imposed upon him; in other words, she faults him for his obedience, his lack of critical distance, or his failure to think.
But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a sociality or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.
Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process or, indeed, something that can be properly described, or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice. If the "I" who thinks is part of a "we" and if the "I" who thinks is committed to sustaining that "we", how do we understand the relation between "I" and "we" and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?
Arendt's book on Eichmann is highly quarrelsome. But it is probably worth remarking that she is not only taking issue with the Israeli courts and with the way in which they arrived at the decision to punish Eichmann to death. She is also critical of Eichmann himself for formulating and obeying a noxious set of laws.
One rhetorical feature of her book on Eichmann is that she is, time and again, breaking out into a quarrel with the man himself. For the most part, she reports on the trial and the man in the third person, but there are moments in which she addresses him directly, not on the trial, but in her text. One such moment occurred when Eichmann claimed that in implementing the final solution, he was acting from obedience, and that he had derived this particular moral precept from his reading of Kant.
We can imagine how doubly scandalous such a moment was for Arendt. It was surely bad enough that he formulated and executed orders for the final solution, but to say, as he did, that his whole life was lived according to Kantian precepts, including his obedience to Nazi authority, was too much. He invoked "duty" in an effort to explain his own version of Kantianism. Arendt writes: "This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience."
Eichmann contradicts himself as he explains his Kantian commitments. On the one hand, he clarifies: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws." And yet, he also acknowledges that once he was charged with the task of carrying out the final solution, he ceased to live by Kantian principles. Arendt relays his self-description: "he no longer 'was master of his own deeds,' and … he 'was unable to change anything'."
When in the midst of his muddled explanation, Eichmann reformulates the categorical imperative such that one ought to act in such a way that the Führer would approve, or would himself so act, Arendt offers a swift rejoinder, as if she were delivering a direct vocal challenge to him: "Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of the sort; on the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment he started to act; by using his 'practical reason' man found the principles that could and should be the principles of law."
Judith Butler
"At two key junctures in his 1975 lectures Abnormal, Foucault turns his attention to the way in which the figure of the abnormal gives way, in the last years of the nineteenth century, to “the problem of heredity, racial purification, and the correction of the human instinctual system by purification of the race.” (Abnormal, p. 133; see also pp. 316-318). In those passages, Foucault begins to develop the hypothesis that psychiatry gave birth to a new form of racism, different than traditional ethnic racism, that he refers to as “racism against the abnormal.” (Abnormal, p. 316). Foucault proposes, provocatively, that this new form of racism ultimately would be combined with the more traditional form of racism to trigger some of the worst excesses of the twentieth century: “this neoracism as the internal means of defense of a society against its abnormal individuals, is the child of psychiatry, and Nazism did no more than graft this new racism onto the ethnic racism that was endemic in the nineteenth century,” he states (Abnormal, p. 317). These passages from Abnormal combine Foucault’s renewed interest in heredity and degeneration, and in racism, with his long-time fascination for theories of social defense and civil war.
It is to these exact themes that Foucault turns in 1976 in perhaps his most famous and well known lectures, “Society Must Be Defended.” Most well known because they were the first to be published in French, and also because, very early, they were (at least the first two lectures) translated into English and published in 1980 in Knowledge/Power. In fact, their integral publication in French in 1997 would inaugurate the series that we are studying this year in Foucault 13/13.
“Society Must Be Defended” announces key themes in Foucault’s work. Several of them would be published just a few months later, with the release on 17 November 1976 of his History of Sexuality—Volume 1 (La Volonté de savoir): the notions of biopolitics and security, of population, of race wars and racism. It is in these lectures and La Volonté de savoir that Foucault famously compared sovereign power to biopolitics through the lens of those two now-famous epigraphs, respectively, « faire mourir ou laisser vivre » (to cause death or let live) and « faire vivre et laisser mourir » (to make live and to let die).
Three key concepts structure the central argument of Society Must Be Defended: (1) race war; (2) biopolitics; and (3) modern racism. Together these three concepts lead to an analysis of what Foucault calls “State racism” that is best exemplified by colonization (p. 65, 103, and 257), Nazism (p. 259), and Soviet State racism (P. 83)
(1) The first concept, race war, Foucault identifies with the emergence of a new historiography in the 16th and 17th centuries that highlights the struggle between peoples, between races (p. 57-61). In contrast to an earlier political paradigm associated with Roman history, Foucault argues, there emerges during the late Middle Ages an understanding of politics as riven by race conflict–the struggles between the Frankish, Goths, Gauls, Celts, Saxons, etc. (p. 75) Politics becomes understood, during this period, as tribal clash. This new political history moves away from a universalist understanding, privileging a certain decentering of truth: the basis for truth becomes partiality, partisanship, interest, race interests. The birth of this historical-political discourse serves as a truth-weapon, where truth turns on local interests.
(2) At the same time that the discourse of race wars gets masked by a return to universalism during the time of the Revolution and, soon, the development of a discourse of perpetual peace (p. 239), biopower emerges in the second half of the 18th century as a counterpoint to disciplinary power. We witness here another way of governing, one that focuses not on correcting the individual, but on managing the population: on achieving optimal outcomes for the population as a whole, on reaching equilibrium for the nation. The target of governing becomes birth rates and mortality rates, the fertility of the population, reproduction (p. 243). We witness a shift from “man-as-body” to “man-as-species,” as power relations focus on “living man, man-as-living-being.” (p. 242)
(3) During the 19th century, there emerges as well what Foucault refers to as “modern racism”: a form of racism that, Foucault argues, is associated with the elimination of the abnormal, the cleansing of defectives. Racism, in this technical sense, is the racism against the abnormal, the strategy of cleansing a race of its inferior or defective instantiations. Modern racism becomes “primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.” (p. 254)
Putting these three concepts in conversation, Foucault argues that it is the linking of politics as race war (as between races) with modern racism against the abnormal (within races) that produces the worst excesses of the 19th and 20th centuries: the brutal, genocidal forms of colonization that seek to eliminate others and cleanses one’s own, as well as Nazism with its race war and internal cleansing as well. Foucault explains that “Racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger.” (p.258). The extreme murderousness of these regimes is a combination of all three of these concepts–race war, biopower, and modern racism''.
Bernard E. Harcourt
"In many passages of the New Testament, she tells us, ‘miracles are clearly not supernatural events but only what all miracles, those performed by men no less than those performed by a divine agent, always must be, namely, interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected’ (Arendt, 1968/1993: 168). This miraculous power of human action has a messianic quality to it as it ends one time and opens up another; it disrupts the time of the process and opens up the time of the interval. It brings the current time to a close insofar as it stops time’s race towards the future and breaks open a time span in the present, a time between limits.8 The element of messianism and the thought of redemption are alien to Foucault and it is with regard to this messianic perspective that Arendt’s and Foucault’s conceptions of temporality fundamentally diverge. Foucault’s considerations about time (see Michon, 2002) do not refer to the messianic idea of an end of time, whereas Arendt’s conception of human action as a messianic power that manifests itself in the public sphere bears strong affinities to what Gershom Scholem (1971) identifies as the messianic idea in Judaism: ‘Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. It is an occurence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearance’ (p. 1). Arendt, as well as Foucault, strictly rejects the ‘strong’ messianic idea that the world could be saved once and for all, which she, as well as Foucault, considers extremely dangerous. Nevertheless, she does convey a messianic message, only that the messianic powers, the human faculties of action and forgiving, are themselves temporal; they operate within time, their results are unstable and all they can do is open up time for a new beginning in this world. Hence, messianic time in Arendt has the structure of the interval, redemption means freedom, the exercise of which in Arendt is synonymous with power, and such power takes place, quite as Scholem (1971) put it, publicly, in the community. To Foucault, in contrast, freedom means the capacity to think differently and to conceive of ourselves differently, different from the requirements of subjectification, of becoming an ‘autonomous’ subject through confessing and truth telling and thereby producing knowledge required for the biopolitical management of the living. The liberty Foucault (1997) finally leaves us with consists of thought practices and self-practices; liberty to Foucault is ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life’ (p. 319), ‘a permanent critique of our historical era’ (p. 312), a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’, it is ‘work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves’ (p. 316). It is a liberty that remains preoccupied with the self, if not confined within the limits of the vita contemplativa. Foucault’s way of interrogating history and exposing allegedly universal, necessary, rational or emancipatory features of modernity as being not only historical but also inherently ambiguous provides us with a tremendously helpful prerequisite to analyse the logic of modern biopolitics. It is hard to see, however, how this self-centred, philosophical conception of liberty could point at an alternative conception of politics, one that enables us not only to analyse but also to overcome biopolitics. The concept of natality, I have argued, takes us a step further, offering an alternative understanding of politics, life, and temporality. Human life here is understood not as a moment in an endlessly racing process whose laws are to be executed on the individual, nor as a manageable entity but as the time span between birth and death. Time is not the medium for the execution of suprahuman processes but the interval that provides the chance to perform activities for their own sake. Politics, finally, would be understood not as the management of populations or the acceleration of economic or scientific progress but as acting in concert together with others, and the purpose of politics would not be to enhance the quality of some collective entity, to create a better species or to maintain the dynamics of the economy, but to make the world a home''.
BRAUN: BIOPOLITICS AND TEMPORALITY IN ARENDT AND FOUCAULT 19
Hannah Arendt on Loneliness as the Common Ground for Terror and How Tyrannical Regimes Use Isolation as a Weapon of Oppression
“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political,” Olivia Laing wrote in The Lonely City, one of the finest books of the year. Half a century earlier, Hannah Arendt...examined those peculiar parallel dimensions of loneliness as a profoundly personal anguish and an indispensable currency of our political life in her intellectual debut, the incisive and astonishingly timely 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (public library).
Arendt paints loneliness as “the common ground for terror” and explores its function as both the chief weapon and the chief damage of oppressive political regimes. Exactly twenty years before her piercing treatise on lying in politics, she writes:
Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men* as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
What perpetuates such tyrannical regimes, Arendt argues, is manipulation by isolation — something most effectively accomplished by the divisiveness of “us vs. them” narratives. She writes:
Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together…; isolated men are powerless by definition.
Although isolation is not necessarily the same as loneliness, Arendt notes that loneliness can become both the seedbed and the perilous consequence of the isolation effected by tyrannical regimes:
In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable… Isolation then becomes loneliness.
While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.
This is why our insistence on belonging, community, and human connection is one of the greatest acts of courage and resistance in the face of oppression — for, in the words of the beloved Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, “the ancient and eternal values of human life — truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love — are all statements of true belonging.”
MARIA POPOVA
"In Arendt’s critique of modernity the world created by homo faber is threatened with extinction by the aforementioned “rise of the social.” The activity of labor and the consumption of its fruits, which have come to dominate the public sphere, cannot furnish a common world within which humans might pursue their higher ends. Labor and its effects are inherently impermanent and perishable, exhausted as they are consumed, and so do not possess the qualities of quasi-permanence which are necessary for a shared environment and common heritage which endures between people and across time. In industrial modernity “all the values characteristic of the world of fabrication – permanence, stability, durability…are sacrificed in favor of the values of life, productivity and abundance.” The rise of animal laborans threatens the extinction of homo faber, and with it comes the passing of those worldly conditions which make a community’s collective and public life possible (what Arendt refers to as “world alienation”).
Majid Yar
https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/october-2022/verticality/organised-state-abandonment/
“Disappearance is marked by a devastating absence. It constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time. It offers no viable recovery and no meaningful justice. It provisions alibis to perpetrators, while denying the victims their very humanity. And for those who are left to live with its presence, the terror is unending.”
Chantal Meza
https://www.standing-together.org/en
The fight against the Occupation and for total equality for Palestinians in this country is paramount to any other struggle.
Standing Together seeks to promote the creation of a shared society built on true and equal partnership. This model speaks directly to my spiritual vision for this place. It is my belief that we, Palestinians and Jews, were put together on this land to fulfill a vision of partnership and peace. Our two narratives do not begin only in 1948; they begin back in our sacred texts, the Torah and the Quran, in the story of Isaac and Ishmael.
This movement brings building partnership to a new level. It is not just about community building – although that is a big part of it; it is also about activism, about tikkun olam, about trying to make this part of the world a better place. The idea is that we can only do this together, as equal partners. That is the tikkun, the corrective. Instead of one nation trying to rule over the other, we must work together. Neither Palestinians nor Jews are going anywhere. We are all here to stay (we hope and pray). So let’s find a way to live together in peace. If we can, the result will be better for us all.
Standing Together seeks to promote the creation of a shared society built on true and equal partnership between Palestinians and Jews.
Our mission, our reason for being here, is to find a way to make amends and to live together in true siblinghood (in the ideal vision of the word). After all, what is religion and spirituality for, if not to provide a redemptive vision – an alternative to conflict and supremacy — of peace and reconciliation?
"Wallace makes a bold claim: that in the daily grind of life, “there is no such thing as atheism; we all worship.” He suggests to the graduates that a compelling reason for us to worship some transcendent being or some other abstract ideal, instead of material goods, beauty, power, or personal intelligence, is that worshiping these things will “eat you alive.”
GM
By addressing the theme ‘Objectivist and subjectivist approaches to theoretical training in the social sciences’, first of all, Habermas classifies the generative theories of society that interest him, excluding behavioral models and rational choice, which reduce the logic of the situation to characteristics too limited and referable to already defined principles of social conduct or operational criteria. Considering, therefore, only the sociological theories that take the generation of meaningfully organized structures of life as a key concept, Habermas examined the four approaches: a) the phenomenological model of the knowing or judging subject that from Kant arrives to Alfred Schutz through Husserl, aimed at reconstructing the constitution of the objects of experience and the everyday world of lived experience (‘lifeworld’) in which we can have experiences, relate to objects and persons, and perform actions. The epistemological origins of this phenomenological theory of society are evident in the title of the well-known study by Schutz’s students Berger and Luckmann. They conceive of the generative process of society as producing an image of reality in relation to which subjects orient their behavior toward one another; b-c) The second and third models of generative theory, structuralist anthropology and systems theory, conceive society in a holistic mode, as a set of rules independent of the sense attributions of the actors. In the first case, these are the grammatical rules of a natural language and in the second case, these are the cybernetic rules of a self-regulating machine. The limit of these two models, according to Habermas, is that the constitutive model no more shows the way out of the monadic shell of the active subject than the systems model can incorporate speaking and acting subjects and, especially, their interrelations. For the system of grammatical rules requires competent speakers for its actualization, whereas the machine regulates itself and has no need of any subject at all. In neither case is the paradigm suited for giving an accurate account of how intersubjectively binding meaning structures are generated (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 16); d) The analysis of the subject meanings, of the social norms and of the cultural values is the object of the fourth approach that Habermas defines as the model of ‘ordinary language communication (speech and interaction)’. This is the generation of interpersonal situations of speaking and acting together, that is, the form of the intersubjectivity of possible understanding (Verstdndigung). In this model, the abstract systems of rules must explain two phenomena: ‘The first is the pragmatic generation of the common basis of intersubjectively shared meaning. The second is the more specifically linguistic generation of sentences that we use in speech acts for purposes of both cognition and action’ (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 17). The main examples are Mead’s social psychology of role-taking and the later Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, in which the generative rules include not only symbolic forms such as sentences and actions, but also the subjects of speech and action itself, which are formed through normal linguistic communication. For Habermas, these models are ‘communicative theories of society’ and prefigure the universal pragmatics that he takes to be the right kind of foundation for social theory and whose basic tenets he should like to develop. However, they are not appropriate for the logical reconstruction of the historical development of the active subject or the underlying rule systems (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 18). In the second lesson, ‘The Phenomenological Constitutive Theory of Society: The Fundamental Role of Claims to Validity and the Monadological Foundations of Intersubjectivity’, we find the second context in which Habermas uses Mead (and Wittgenstein) regarding the genesis of semantic conventions, that is the social construction of identical meanings that are the basis of shared intersubjective experiences: To account for the identity of semantic conventions, Wittgenstein proposed the model of a rule that at least two subjects must be able to follow. Mead recommends the model of a role that establishes reciprocally interchangeable expectations about behavior for at least two subjects. Concepts such as ‘rule’ or ‘role’ must be defined from the outset in terms of a relation between subjects. They circumvent the notion of anything like a private consciousness that only subsequently enters into contact with another conscious being […] Communicative theories enjoy the advantage of being able to take as their starting point the intersubjective relation that constitutive theories attempt in vain to derive from the activity of monadic consciousness (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 43-44). According to Habermas, Mead goes one step further. Wittgenstein reduces the uniformity of meaning to the intersubjective recognition of rules, but does not examine the mutual relationship between the two subjects who accept a rule. The fact that each partner must be able to anticipate the expectations of others is not obvious. Mead was the first to analyze this ‘foundation of intentional action’ (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 59).
Luca Corchia
'Habermas construes systems, in the light of Luhmann, as spheres of “norm free” sociality. “In capitalist societies the market is the most important example of a norm-free regulation of cooperative contexts” (1981 [1987: 150, 154]). This puts him on the side of those who see markets as destroying rather than nourishing the web of moral relations. His predominant way of thinking about subsystems is that they are “demoralized”. This is true of the market economy, bureaucracies and state administration, and the law, which in Theory of Communicative Action he treats as a subsystem. That said, even in this text, while he claims that law in the process of rationalization becomes “detached from the ethical motivations of the legal person” (1981 [1987: 174]), he nonetheless thinks of basic rights and the principle of popular sovereignty as sources of legitimation which act as
bridge between a de-moralized and externalized legal sphere and a deinstitutionalized and internalized morality. (1981 [1987: 178])
Systems, which facilitate integration and social order through “delinguistified steering media” like money and power, have great advantages for citizens of modern societies. They fulfil functions that are too complex or burdensome to be undertaken by communicative action, that is, by individuals acting consciously in concert. For example, markets distribute goods and resources to where they are most needed, using price signals and laws of supply and demand.
However, systems also have disadvantages. For one thing, systems, once in place, operate independently of human agents. There is, consequently, a gap between an actor’s agency, and their conscious intentions and aims, and the purpose that they serve in the system. This lack of transparency is evident in firms, for instance, where the agents fulfil their roles and tasks, whether using instrumental, communicative, or moral rationality, or a mix of all, while all the time behind their backs or “beyond their consciousness” at the macro-level they are making profit for the firm’s owners and shareholders. For another, Habermas claims, agents operating in spheres steered by delinguistified media are inclined to shift from communicative to instrumental and strategic action orientations with the result that
success-oriented action steered by egocentric calculations of utility loses its connection to action oriented by mutual understanding. (1981 [1987: 196])
Whether Habermas holds that agents’ actions in economic and bureaucratic domains are merely constrained by system imperatives of the relevant steering media, or reduced to instrumental and strategic actions is moot (Jütten 2013). But it is empirically false for reasons given by Honneth and Joas and others that the mediatization of a domain of social life would force agents to adopt only one type of action. As Joas puts it, every sphere of action contains “a wealth of different types of action” (Joas 1986 [1991: 104]). Systems, economic and bureaucratic, and the specific organisations they comprise, all involve numerous different kinds of action. This is not only an empirical claim but a conceptual one that follows from Habermas’s own theory that instrumental and strategic action is parasitic on communicative action. Habermas has also been criticized for being seduced by systems theory into merely accepting spheres of norm free sociality, and the uncoupling of system and lifeworld as a normal result of modernization and social differentiation (McCarthy 1991)'.
SEoP
For Moten, blackness is not only prior to the “new ontology” of modern slavery, but is in fact prior to all ontology: “blackness is prior to ontology … blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground.” In other words, blackness precedes anti-blackness, and must not be determined by any traditional “ontology” that is informed by the “intellectual prejudices” of anti-blackness. Because, in Moten’s view, to do so would effectively be formally subordinating blackness to the traditional ontological discourse of Being qua anti-blackness...Accordingly, we can see why Moten places much emphasis on the ontological priority of blackness/nothingness – an emphasis which finds much resemblance in Heidegger’s notion of nothingness or “the nothing” (das Nichts) in his 1929 Freiburg inaugural lecture What is Metaphysics?. As Heidegger (
1993, 97) notes in this much-debated lecture:
Is the nothing given only because the “not”, i.e. negation, is given? Or is it the other way around? Are negation and the “not” given only because the nothing is given? … We assert that the nothing is more original than the “not” and negation.
Following this insistence that nothingness is not conditioned or produced by negation or anything else (but is rather the ground which makes negation possible),8 Heidegger (1993) controversially proposes that nothingness is constituted by nothing other than its very own sui generis operation of “nihilation”:
[T]he action of the nothing … is the essence of the nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates [Das Nichts selbst nichtet]. (103)
Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings … For human existence, the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such. The nothing does not merely serve as the counterconcept of beings; rather, it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such. In the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs … The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings. (103–4, 108)
"What if there were something radically liberating in this experience? What if we were forced to grasp — through pain and illness, those sweeping levelers — the world as it might otherwise be or could have been? Boyer quotes Julien Teppe, founder of the pain-positive Dolorist movement, who wrote in 1935, “I consider extreme anguish, particularly that of somatic origin, as the perfect incitement for developing pure idealism.” She also quotes the German Socialist Patients’ Collective, who wrote in 1993, “Illness becomes the undeniable challenge to revolutionize everything — yes, everything! — for the first time really and in the right way.” She recounts the (failed) leper uprising of 1321, when lepers organized and planned to pollute water sources throughout France with “a mix of their urine and blood and four different herbs and a sanctified body,” which would render all the healthy sick; those who survived would emerge as natural leaders.
Marta Russell
"A number of crucial issues are at stake in the debate between Habermas and the postmodernists. These have to do not simply with the legitimacy of the modern age,3 but with questions of rationality, truth, subjectivity, power, justice, morality, and the role of the aesthetic. A fruitful way of addressing the contrast between Habermas and the postmodernists on these issues is by distinguishing two fundamental ethical orientations operating behind their respective positions. These are centred around two different senses of responsibility: a responsibility to act vs a responsibility to otherness.4 While Habermas privileges the responsibility to act in the world in a normatively justified way, the postmodernists celebrate the responsibility to otherness...These two senses of responsibility are linked, in turn, to two different understandings of the primary function of language: language can be understood primarily in terms of its capacity to coordinate action (Habermas), or primarily in terms of its capacity to disclose the world (Heidegger and Derrida). The conception of language as action-coordinating goes hand in hand with the priority given to the first sense of responsibility (the responsibility to act), while the view of language as world-disclosing corresponds closely to the priority given to the second sense of responsibility (the responsibility to otherness). While the two senses of responsibility, and their associated conceptions of language, should not be seen as mutually exclusive/ it is indeed the case that they represent the polarities around which the debate between Habermas and the postmodernists has been conducted''.
“The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us. The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.”
“Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Marxists would respond that capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor.
All over the world, community in the broader sense-the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship - is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to capitalism's implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe;' creating "a world after its own image." No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.”“Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade.
"For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent...It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions," writes Herbert Schiller.”
Habermas argues that, alongside the principle of democracy, what he calls a “logical genesis of rights” arises from the “interpenetration” of the legal form and the discourse principle (D) (1992b [1996b: 121]). The argument is hard to follow. It begins from the premises of (D) and the form of modern law, and assumes that the idea of legitimate law presupposes that of a legal subject qua bearer of rights, no matter what the content of those specific rights is. The conclusion to the argument is a system of rights, of five different kinds.
The first three rights are supposed to arise theoretically from the application of the discourse principle to the form of law. These are rights that citizens must grant to one another if they are “legitimately to regulate their living together by means of positive law” (1992b [1996b: 126; 82; 118]). The next two—political and social rights—are practical and material enabling conditions that ensure the effectiveness of the first three rights. The first three rights, Habermas claims, are not specific rights, but what he calls “unsaturated placeholders” for specific rights that have to “be interpreted and given concrete shape” by actual citizens in response to determinate historical conditions (1992b [1996b: 125–6]). This is crucial to Habermas’s theory, because it purports to reconstruct the ability of citizens, from their perspective, to reciprocally grant one another the rights necessary for their common existence as consociates under law. That’s why he claims that he, unlike Rawls, doesn’t design “the basic norms of a well-ordered society on the drafting table”, and then apply them to society (1990d [1994: 101]). In that sense, just as discourse ethics leaves the validation of moral norms to participants in discourse, the discourse theory of law and democracy has to leave the political process of establishing a system of rights up to citizens themselves as much as possible. This is the sense in which Habermas claims the discourse theory of democratic legitimacy is “strictly procedural” and more modest than “normative political theory” à la Rawls (Habermas 1995: 117 & 132; Rawls 1995: 175–177). For all that, unlike in discourse ethics where neither (U) nor (D) have the status of valid moral norms, Habermas nonetheless derives a system of rights that for all the world resembles T. H. Marshall’s account of civic, political, and social rights, in his classic work of political sociology (Marshall 1950).
Joshua Cohen objects that the principle of discourse does not amount to a requirement of equal liberty, and that nothing so rich as Habermas’s scheme of individual liberties follows solely from the application of the discourse principle to the legal form (Cohen 1999: 393, 398). He objects even while acknowledging that the various rights are not yet saturated: they are not yet specific, historically and socially determinate rights. But contra Cohen, on Habermas’s account, legal form, or modern “form of law” is a richer idea than the mere rule of law, and refers to a complex of features that law has in a modern constitutional democratic state. As Baynes and Zurn point out, Habermas’s theory reconstructs the way that, via the discourse principle, the form of law in modern—that is, post-traditional and post-conventional—societies functions to compensate for the loss of shared traditions, and relieves the burden on citizens to reach reasoned agreement with one another and thereby coordinate their actions (Baynes 2016: 166: Zurn 2011).
"In his 1978-79 lectures, concluding just weeks before Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister of Great Britain, Foucault offered a strikingly prescient analysis of neoliberalism that was yet to emerge. In this analysis, he excavates the fundamental concepts which structure what has, forty years later, become the dominant reality. What is striking is that he treats neoliberalism not as an economic theory, but as a mode of governing — “governing” in the sense of constituting a particular form of subject. Foucault is adamant that neoliberalism is not simply a return to earlier forms of economic organisation such as laissez faire. Rather than simply having a limited role in the market economy, the state must now model itself on the economy. Neoliberalism seeks to redraw the boundary between the economy and politics by generalising the economic form throughout society. As the market becomes experienced as part of a natural order, government’s task is to attend closely to discern its complex and subtle mechanisms and avoid interference which would distort them.
According to Friedrich Hayek, economic processes are a “spontaneous order” which, like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, we cannot fully comprehend. Since he rules out political intervention in the processes of this spontaneous order as dangerous interference, he thinks we have no alternative but to simply submit to the imperatives of the market. Hayek’s work, which many regard as a founding theoretical underpinning of neoliberalism, purports to eschew the conflict of politics in favour of what he saw as the harmonious and mutually beneficial social relations of the market. The influential Chicago School economist, Milton Friedman, developed Hayek’s free market ideas into what he regarded as an objective and value-free science.
While avoiding state governance, neoliberalism uses it to extend competition throughout social life, by opening up areas regulated by non-market forms of social governance to market imperatives. In this vein, Gary Becker, who succeeded Friedman at Chicago, argued that it was possible to generalise the economic form of the market throughout society to include relationships not usually subject to monetary exchange. Becker’s most striking example is the mother/child relationship. Here Becker treats the time the mother spends with the child, as well as the quality of care, as an investment that constitutes human capital. Investment in the child’s human capital produces a return when the child grows to maturity and receives wages. Economic rationality eventually becomes the rationality of all human action.
With some important differences, Foucault’s account of neoliberalism dovetails into Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the “colonisation of the lifeworld”. Habermas relies on a distinction between the “lifeworld” which co-ordinates actions and integrates society by “communicative action” where reasons can be demanded and given, and “systems” like the market economy which co-ordinate societies by a chain of consequences “behind our backs”. Habermas’s claim is that systems have broken loose of the legitimation we once gave them and have turned back to “colonise” or restructure our communicative competencies. We could say that as a form of social reality, the reality of the market economy has become so dominant that we have forgotten that, unlike the natural processes climate science describes, it is our invention.
The extension of the rationality of the market throughout society forges a new type of subject. Making competition the dominant principle for guiding human behaviour means that subjects lose guarantees of protection by the state. With labour transformed into human capital and workers into entrepreneurs competing with other entrepreneurs, neoliberal governance entails the production of a particular type of subject. By slotting into already provided social roles that set social subjects against each other, subjects are constituted as self-interested and atomistic, continually calculating to avoid risk and maximise individual gain. By the sort of circular causation described by Gunnar Myrdal, the habits and inclinations of these subjects are produced while, at the same time, they maintain and extend the system that produces them. As Foucault says, “modern power fashions, observes, knows and multiplies itself on the basis of its own effects.”
If power and knowledge can only be understood together, it is surely the science of economics that provides the knowledge component of neoliberal governmentality. In an endless looping between description and prescription, neoliberal economics, aspiring to the status of a science, constructs the subject that it, at the same time, claims to discover. This subject supposedly negotiates the social realm by constantly making rational choices based on economic knowledge and strict calculation. Society becomes a game in which self-interested, atomised individuals compete for maximal economic returns".
John McIntyre
