Deleuze & Guattari, Zizek on Arendt (More from Brennan)

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Jan 8 20:13:09 PST 2003


Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
>
>
> do you (or yoshie) really seriously believe that deleuze, guattari,
> hardt, and negri are counter-revolutionaries?

I have _no_ opinion on Deleuze & Guatari because I haven't read them. (Brennan obviously has.) My opinion of Zizek has been improving lately from reading some of his things, and I've just ordered his book on Totalitarianism (which Brennan quotes in the passage I posted). At one time (in the year before I became politically active) I knew several of Arendt's books almost by heart, and so I still have mixed feelings about her work. I think Zizek is probably correct about her books, but their effect can be double-edged, because their 'objective' impact on me was to prepare me to be influenced by Marxism. Perhaps _Empire_'s effect will be similarly double-edged. One effect was to get a pretty good condensed damnation of the u.s. into the pages of _critical inquiry_ :-)

"Counter-revolutionary" is your word, not mine. Brennan shows them more respect than I have for them, because I have from the beginning put _Empire_ in the same category with other pop works such as Korzybski's _Science and Sanity_ or Phillip Wylie's _Generation of Vipers_: they make a big flash, _everyone_ is reading and bubbling about them, and then they sink into obscurity.

I do think that, during its 15 minutes of fame, _Empire_ is helping some people to feel that they can afterall get to heaven in a rocking chair. That's my e-mail rhetoric: Brennan develops that essential point in more sober prose with detailed analysis. Read him and see what you think.


> if not, then what? cynical intellectual opportunists (because we all

I really have no opinion about them as persons. I don't know them. There's a poem by Hardy in which a soldier reflects on the man he killed: in peacetime he probably would have had a drink with him. I've had good personal relations with people whose ideas I detested, just as my favorite poets are all poets whose ideas I detest.


> know that being a successful pseudo-leftist intellectual is such great
> business)? if that's the case,

That's not the case. My remarks are strictly on the book. The passages I've posted from Brennan are focused on the book. Brennan tries to be, and is, quite generous to the men themselves.

The ideas of the book, if taken seriously and acted upon by many political activists, would be destructive. Here is another paragraph from Brennan:

**** Against the backdrop of a vast manual system of interlocking, armed work farms in the clothing industry, the prison-labor system, massive new infrastructural projects (in the laying of fiber optic cable, for example), and new arctic drilling ventures, the world economy is for Hardt and Negri resolutely "post-industrial." Even as Brussels vetoes U.S. corporate mergers, George W. Bush raises steel tariffs, and Chile indicts Henry Kissinger as a material witness in the trial of General Augusto Pinochet, the nation-state, we are told, has lost all sovereignty. In what can only be called a bracero economy of controlled "illegal" immigration and the reinstitution of slavery (in the Chinese tenement halls of the United States as well as in rural Sudan and Myanmar), we are told that knowledge rather than brute physicality is the constituent element of new labor. Consequently, the supersession of manual by mental or immaterial labor turns out to be a matter of faith rather than anything resembling an analysis of the record.*****

You can't build political coalitions with this sort of attitude towards the state. I quote from Brennan again:

**** Historians of the labor movement recognize all too well the paradoxes of anarchism. The all or nothing of noncompliance resolves itself into the normality of power because the all is always too much. This position (it used to be called ultraism) is doomed to collapse, against its will, into conservatism. The new Italians' implicit guardianship of Gramsci nevertheless prevents them from understanding that for him such ultraism reactively staked out positions so extreme they were inoperative and, finally, arrested. Confronting the prominent south Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, Gramsci had, among other things, dedicated himself to reclaiming ownership for the communist movement of the "ethical-political state." He rejected Croce's accusation that communism had splintered its ethical ship on the reef of the means/ends dilemma. This is an important moment in the anticapitalist past to which Hardt and Negri allude, and yet to recover it historically as distinct from recapturing it in a Deleuzian sense is to see how Empire naively reverts to the position of Gramsci's antagonists from the 1930s. For it turns out that Empire's effort to bring politics more in line with ethics resembles nothing so much as the political hermaphroditism of the German youth movements, whose "revolutionary" rhetoric Gramsci excoriated in the 1920s. Their polemics against authority were, in his opinion, right wing. We might benefit from recalling the deep irony with which he characterized their attitude of self-styled dissidence:****


> then wouldn't that be more an interest
> in personalities than ideas or politics?
>
> j
>
> ps -- when did you become a zizek fan?

I'm weakening. I've seen a couple of good things from him lately. As I said yesterday in a post referring to a past squabble between Justin & me, theory and practice never quite agree -- and moreover no one's theory is wholly coherent. I still think Lacan a fraud (as Doug used to at least), but apparently it is not impossible to be influenced by Lacan and have some shrewd things to say.

Carrol



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