politics subordinated to the law, version number 3.

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Tue Feb 8 08:59:07 PST 2000


Yoshie wrote:


>Peter Dews says Zizek is a Right-Hegelian (in _The Limits of
>Disenchantment_). Does that sound better?

ok. Let's see where this takes us.

Dews remarks that Zizek is a right-hegelian. That's true. But Yoshie does not tell us why. I'm not at all surprised.

Why does Dews think Zizek is a right-hegelian?

Because he thinks that Zizek is not enough of a Lacanian!

Dews writes: "It is important to note that Lacan speaks of a signification of love 'outside the limits of the law'. For there is a tendency in the work of Zizek and his school to view love as merely a compensatory mirage generated by law."

Right-hegelianism, for Dews, consists of an embrace of Hegel's _Philosophy of Right_ , which Dews (following Hosle) regards as a reversal of Hegel's usual procedure.

That's another discussion; however, suffice to say that right-hegelianism poses the final resolution of politics in the monarchy or, in another register, the end of the ethical question in the law, the reduction of love, ethics, etc to the law.

In short, legislation subsumes (or attempts to subsume and be done with) ethics, politics. Where politics and ethics is undecidable, the monarchy steps in with self-assured, ungrounded will to decide once and for all to end those troublesome questions.

Which is what Yoshie does:


>epistemic fallacy

Instead of the monarchy (Hegel's _Philosophy of Right_), Yoshie's summit is occupied by the intellect and a series of epistemological rules of validity (neokantian rules to be exact) -- in short, the academy.

The epistemological legislature has the last word, and that last word, much like sovereignty consists in deciding the exceptions to the law, amongst which is that the sovereign is above the law (as Schmitt, eminent right-hegelian and nazi once remarked), sovereignty is ungrounded. (see also Marx's _Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right'_ for another discussion of the ungrounding of the sovereign.)

So too, epistemology is ungrounded in epistemology: there is no way to verify rules of verification. It rules because we -- or rather, Yoshie -- says (hopes) it can and should.

Angela



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