Theoria

I have been interested in the question of reading – how to read; the politics (as it were) of reading; why some texts conjure certain sorts of readings. The texts that bring the strangest readings are the texts that produce high degrees of affect in their readers – Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, etc. There are, of course, texts that are widely commented upon, but that fail generate a highly affectively charged reading – Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls are, to my mind, examples of this. With this category (texts that fail to generate affect), the result is that people either devote their entire life to them (Jodi speaks of “Habermasochism”) and consequently get lost, as it were, in the minute technical details of the texts. Not only do people end up writing on Rawls or Habermas, but they also end up writing on people who end up writing on Habermas or Rawls. To me it is all highly boring.

What is more interesting are the texts that bring a lot of strange readings to them: after years I still don’t understand the attraction of reading Hobbes with game theory! What could be weirder? What could be more anachronistic? (Incidentally, this is how I approach – or I’d like to pretend to approach – that whole “Theory” debate: the “anti-Theory-ists” are engaged, from my perspective, in a rather boring and an equally strange reading of what they call “Theory” – unfortunately, they apply that label to much of what I read.)
And, as mentioned in an earlier post, why is that people get hung up on the distinction between friend and enemy (that seems rather uncontroversial to me) instead of on the more interesting question: what conditions must prevail such that the political field can be (over)-determined by that distinction itself? how is it that politics works through the work of divisions of distinctions?

I’d therefore propose – and, by ‘propose’ I mean something I’ll be doing passively over the next while – that consideration be given to this question of reading: Lefort’s book on Machiavelli, Strauss’ Persecution and the Art of Writing, Althusser’s contribution to Reading Capital, and so on.

In other news, my proposal for a paper as of yet unwritten on Hobbes and Montesquieu (I think that’s what I wrote it about!) has been accepted for that “Human Condition: Empire” conference in May. Speaking of Hobbes, from Part I Of Man, Chapter VIII Of the Virtues Commonly Called Intellectual and Their Contrary Defects found in Leviathan: “to have no desire is to be dead.” The four part structure (life/death, desire/power – and the solution of all in sovereignty) is, I think, the guiding thread of the book. In fact, I think it is the case that mid-seventeenth to early-eighteenth century political theory is largely determined by the problem of desire.