>>Or, is it
>>because you assume that language is a universal human attribute and
>>therefore incomprehension would be synonymous with a slight against one's
>>'humanity'?
You wrote
>Well -- derision of one's own intellect has its uses. I haven't been here
>long enough to speak to this instance of it, but there's a kind of aw
>shucks guilelessness that (1) - can make hard-hitting assertions without
>alienating the opposition, (2) - has a hedge to hide behind when necessary,
>and (3) - plays the clown to make it easier for the audience to examine
>their own convictions, which is like 2 only different.
Yes, perhaps all of the above at different times, and not always in the same measure. But Rob and I have done this dance between humanism and antihumanism many a time, which seemed to me to lead to the second question. I think Rob, too, understood the reference on this occassion, since he replied with:
>Language is a universal human attribute for me, yeah. I reckon a human
>agent is one with the potential to participate in a speech community, such
>that said human might join in the business of negotiating the truth and/or
>falsity of statements of concern to the community as a whole. I reckon
>(agreeing with ol' Jurgen the whole way) we essentially must presuppose the
>'ideal speech situation' in our practice - thus we must open ourselves to
>questions concerning the truth and acceptability in and of our speech acts.
>This ideal, and our implicit commitment to it, seems inescapably 'there' in
>any social organisation aspiring to democratic legitimacy, I reckon.
You also wrote:
>Your second question I find completely puzzling. If lack of understanding
>is "inhuman" (because language is a universal human attribute), then those
>who deride their own intellect are also calling themselves less than human.
> Or? I must be missing something.
I think Rob more or less answers 'yes', but in the sense that he approaches moments of opacity as obstacles to the 'ideal speech situation' he assumes to be _predicated_ by "humanity" and "human agent", whose predication is not to be rendered problematic -- or politicised -- by those moments of opacity or regarded as anything other than A Bad Thing (in this case, the perception of a slight). Rob regards antihumanism as the end of politics, I regard it as a beginning -- we disagree.
In order for that to be more than a wholly opaque statement all on its own, I'll reference it to recent and ongoing discussions and debates on this list, which included a fairly crude recourse to a stark distinction between mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa) which function as placeholders for the possibility of freedom and the force of necessity respectively (see debates on biology, sex and gender, instincts, for instance).
But, to return briefly to the question at hand, that of "language as a universal human attribute", a couple of remarks on singularity and 'common language'.
I've no problem at all with an exploration of the ways in which language and commonality presuppose and work on eachother. After all, if we speak then what's spoken is first and foremost 'we' -- which is why, pace Ken, the downgrading of 'rhetoric' to something not-quite-real and without 'content' is I would have said something quite strange to be doing, especially here where 'content' is palpably inseperable from 'rhetoric'. But, perhaps coming from a class composition background, I can't see why anyone might want to distinguish 'rhetoric' from the composition (as well as decomposition and recomposition) of communities, 'we leftists', or whathaveyou. I do, however, have a problem with the presumption that language is an "attribute", the possession of which serves to mark out what is "human".
I tried, in the reply to Rob, to avoid a discussion of Derrida and Habermas as figures, and instead to indicate, by way of a discussion of west german and australian politics, something of Derrida's sense of the irreducibilty of the other to the self. Clearly, that didn't work as a conversation, so perhaps I should be more direct. Either self and other are contained within a version of representational dialectics, where nothing is held in reserve or escapes the dialectical embrace; or self and other are indistinguishable and hence not even the propulsion to the ethico-political. It's not surprising, then, that various writers (as various as Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze) look toward Spinoza, Nietzsche and others outside the dialectical traditions, and hence why the term 'singularity' has been raised as a way of working through the irreducibility of other to self -- not so much, then, a problem of Habermas' 'generalisation of the other', but I would say a problem of the generalisation of self.
Spinoza (and I should add, Nietzsche) give a joyous and affirmative response to what in another range of philsophies is regarded as traumatic, and whose attempts to foreclose (usually epistemologically, ie, through the iteration of transcendant laws of communication) signal the end of politics -- as Agamben has hyperbolically but nonetheless quite seriously noted, the seeking out of 'final solutions'.
It's also not surprising why the discussion on desire(s) had to turn to Foucault in order to find a conception of desire that's not a definition of lack, which does bear a resemblance to notions of scarcity. I doubt, however, that those resorting to Foucault in this instance would go along with his suppositions (ie., an antidialectical position), but that's their problem. For those who might think that Justin sounds right about 'those pomos' who talk about (abstract) desire as scarcity, a brief reading of Deleuze and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_ might be of help -- hell, just read the title.
If the problem with Freud is his ahistoricism, then why not historicise Freud? Certainly D&G do this to a large extent; as I think does Zizek. Why not, for instance, regard the connection between desire and scarcity as a contingent one, one which does seem to me to characterise, as Zizek often remarks on, the fear of immgrants as 'those who steal our jobs', 'our way of life', 'our enjoyment'.
If Malthus appears on the scene as the formalisation of the idea of scarcity as bonded to the idea of populations, where populations are defined in familial (perhaps even oedipal terms: eg, the connection between birth, national sovereignty and rights codified by the Declaration of the Rights of Man -- or as D&G would say 'mama, papa, me'), then is it possible to shrug off these ideas, this idea of Desire, as an abstraction?
Of course it's an abstraction, but so is capital, and here we don't seem to think of willing it away with assertions that this is 'just' an abstraction but instead by looking at the ways in which it becomes abstraction.
Otoh, Marx does not have much of a theory of needs or desires. At best, he's a social constructionist when it comes to capitalism, and, when it comes to communism, he makes the promise of an individual figuration of needs ("to each according to his needs"). Question is, though, is the gap between the two going to be filled -- as it has often enough been -- by the adjudication and licencing of needs through the bedrock axiomatics of Biology, functioning as official state thinking on needs, the institution of which did constitute an outside called 'desires' very much in order to set about disgracing those demands as boojwah and (heh) individualistic? Then again, Marx's very comments opened up the field in which a multitude of struggles in the USSR and eastern europe took place precisely on and over the terrain of 'needs'.
It looked to me, anyways, like there were about five different discussions taking place in the thread on 'desire and scarcity'. Couldn't perhaps be otherwise.
Angela