At risk of becoming a Jodi Dean metablog, a short comment on her post about a post made by Joseph Kugelmass. (How meta.) I should preface by saying I didn’t follow Joseph’s post all that closely – the comments went in what I found to be a rather uninteresting direction.
My comment isn’t so much a criticism as a point of departure. Jodi concludes her post with the following,
Third, politics is about division. It isn’t about people’s personal decisions and limits. A movement can only move if it is distinguishable from other movements or positions.
I both agree and disagree: politics is fundamentally about division and those divisions are not to be found at the level of the individual (“people’s personal decisions”). While the feminist slogan “the personal is political” was a great tactical move, as a theory of politics it doesn’t amount to much – indeed, it may have the first major step into “ethics” and “post-politics.” (On the topic of feminism, Armatya Sen points out that countries in which women have more power, few children starve; he compares the relative weakness of women and prevalence of starvation in India to that in Africa where fewer children starve and women have a greater degree of power.)
Playing off of Jodi’s post, I’d work through the relation between limit, decision and division at the collective (or group) rather than individual level. Earlier I suggested that what is most interesting about Schmitt’s maxim on sovereignty, isn’t the “exception” but the “decision.”
Without wanting to descend into Heideggerean linguistic mysticism, I’d point out that “decision” derives from the Latin meaning to “make a cut.” The “-cision” in “decision” is the same as the one found in “incision.” Playing a bit with words and out-dated uses, a decision is, so to speak, always a decision on an incision. Hence, the decision involves cutting into the flesh of the body politic (or social body or what have you). These words are most powerful when the religious resonance is preserved: the knife of the sacrificer cutting into the flesh of the sacrifice. Cutting in the wrong way displeases the gods, while cutting in the right way pleases the gods. Moving from the theological to the political, it very much matters where the cut is made. The cut is at the limit of two divided parts; the cut itself is the limit between divisions. The decision, then, involves cutting the political (or social) body into groups – cuts that may heal or fester or that amount to amputation. (While Foucault would have us cut off the king’s head in political theory, he wouldn’t have us do away with cutting as such – the process of making divisions is the content of Foucault’s contribution to political theory.)
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One note on this: “I should preface by saying I didn’t follow Joseph’s post all that closely – the comments went in what I found to be a rather uninteresting direction.”
I didn’t necessarily have economic questions uppermost in my mind as I wrote the original post; that was the result of negotiations with commenters.
It’s good to get your take, though I admit that I don’t see how each act of political affiliation and collective decision cuts into the body politic. The bodily metaphor appears problematic; a “healing” could mean the successful repression of a resistance movement. An amputation could mean an insurgency — perhaps the body we are looking for here is the body in Evil Dead 2, where the hand becomes possessed and goes for its own throat.
‘Healing’ could mean that… but if we want to push the metaphor, that is likely a immune system response. (I’m vaguely pointing to Derrida here.) I don’t think politics is limited to affiliation (you might not be suggesting this, however). Political identities are often retrospective whereas affiliations are pro-spective and, worse, it implies a reduction of politics to rationality and rationalization. If you move beyond affiliations and collective actions and look from a biopolitical perspective, you can easily find examples: for instance, laws that require HIV positive people to declare their status to potential sexual partners lest they be charged with assault. It isn’t as though the HIV positive got together and said, “Hey, you know what would be a good idea, if there were laws forcing us to tell people we were HIV positive!” The group of people marked by HIV are – quite literally – cut out of the body of the population and made into their own group. Sex offender registries present another example.
My etymology chops aren’t great, so maybe I’m off here – isn’t “de-” a negation? If so, then “de-cision” would be something like “un-cut” wouldn’t it?
Etymology aside, I like what I take to be the spirit of emphasizing division, but it seems to me that politics could just as much be said to be about uniting rather than dividing.You say that politics is about dividing, but at a level larger than the individual. Which means that politics is about some level above the individual at which at least two individuals are united with each other against other individuals.
Similar relationship between dividing and uniting in the line you quote from Jodi – one movement or position is only recogizable as itself if it differs from a second movement or position. Parallel to the disagreements over sovereignty at I Cite, if these movements or positions are to be recognizable as being movements or position then there must be some unifying quality to them qua movement/position. Also, to say “all politics is about division” is itself a type of unification.
take it easy,
Nate
Nate, a “unity” is constituted through its opposition to an “outside.” When the disparate branches of the working class “unite,” they unite against capitalism; against the bourgeoisie; against exploitation; etc. When women “unite” as feminists, they are united against patriarchy; against sexism; and so on. Your last paragraph is correct – I left that implicit (I hope).
The OED presents the following etymology for “decide”:
And the following is given for “decision”:
The etymology for “incision” is quite interesting:
The prefix “de-” has a rather complex etymology.
hi Craig,
I love the OED, should have checked that myself but I’ve got the end of term lazies something fierce and a mild case of the end of term stupids.
I stand corrected about the etymology of decide. I’ll have to think more about the -cision stuff and get back to you. I think there’s a related something here about negation vs positivity.
cheers,
Nate
Craig,
I’ve been thinking this over for a while now, and ultimately, I very much like what you have done by making the connection between sacrifice and law. It is clearly not equally applicable in every instance. HIV-positive persons and sex offenders are stigmatized people, and the laws that concern them bear the mark of that stigma. The founding of a library, or the establishment of a holiday, could only be compared to an incision through an act of strained rhetoricity. But so much is not required; your category helps us think through some of the commonest acts of politics.
Hi Craig–I just saw this. Your response to Nate regarding unity is spot on. There is no need to posit a wholeness that is then divided. The oppositional sides may well (and usually do) understand their conflict quite differently; this is part of antagonism means. So, the very recognition of a movement or position to which Nate points is not, of course, from a neutral, outside, or metaposition, but itself inscribed in a setting already antagonistically ruptured.
To say that politics is about division is a general statement. It may even be unifying. But it isn’t neutral and so it will be (and is) countered by statements that disagree.
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