Future Futures: How to Write I

The question of how to write I, then. This time I will situate this question between two certain senses of the title given here, “Future futures.” First, the sense—and this will interrogate Heideggerian verbalizations of nouns—that future is something that “futures,” meaning that future itself is what gives more future, that future somehow is what gives itself—and present—and past. Its giving itself, and thereby its giving us our lives, is evident in the fact that there are innumerous presents and pasts; it can only further its giving-of-future if it precisely unavoidably must produce so called present and so called past; time has to make space for itself, and so it produces what is called present and past. Heidegger would say, for instance, that the world worlds (die Welt weltet), time times (die Zeit zeitet), language speaks (die Sprache spricht), or that the nothing nothings (das Nichts nichtet).

Here, right here, when I wrote this yesterday, my computerized pen immediately protested, and mark with red and green. My computer will mark, and simply do so till I take notice of it; still, luckily, I have the choice to either a) ignore the suggestion, but this possibility of ignoring which is built into the machine, is repeatedly restricted to ignoring once, or b) I can incorporate into the machine what it spit out, but so only to make of me a part of that machine, and certainly that machine a part of me. We see here a constellation vastly different from that of the singular pen and pencil. The machine machines and this means that the pen has to spit out, from me, and from the “machine,” or the “personal computer.”

Anyway, as for the second sense of the ‘future futures,’ namely, the sense that in our future, or in the future, there will be plural futures, I have written that in the future there will have to be futures in the plural: not the future, nor a future—akin to Deleuze’s “a life” perhaps—but futures, period…no, not period, but period without period, and without without without, as Derrida wrote somewheres. This would transpose supernumerary being to supernumerary future; supernumerary being can only be if there are supernumerary futures. Of course, future is always supernumerary, what is superfluous, extra, what always already is outside any present or presentist calculus, bursting into the calculus machine, always imploding that machine’s built-in possibilities, always already making any presencing machine the very locus of dysfunction. So there is a certain future that will always already implode any being, any life given, any given, any axiomatics.

I said ‘always already,’ and I was talking of future. How is that possible? It is not as difficult and scandalous to let the figure of ‘always’ flee the past, the radical, and the arche, as it is with regard to the figure of ‘already.’ Radicalists—seekers and discoverers of roots, be the preferred ones regular radicles, or wild, schizophrenic rhizomes—will have to write this fleeing as a scandal. Radicalists say that ‘already’ means ‘before, or by this time, or the time mentioned.’ And they will point to the fact that the term is composed of ‘all’ and ‘ready.’ In all ways, imaginable and unimaginable relative this or that human being, there it is, that which is all ready, also imaginable and unimaginable relative this or that empirical and contingent human being. Always already: one of the favorite figures of the root. Even the rhizome connects according to those ‘always already’s’—it just incorporates and supersedes the radicle’s ways of the ‘always already.’ But, for there is certainly a qualification involved here: would we not need to question the common self-assuredness of all those radicalists that all write their I’s as if cloned?

Some questions: what if future is what is always already? And what if what present is, what it appears like, is not to be pragmatically and morally judged upon by recourse to rules of application of past principles? What if such radicalist interpretations of the principles of the always already will be bound to institute an obstruction to the future, namely, according to mystical conceptions of what always already is, conceptions that seems to say that what makes existence, and future, is a past making sure that it is reproduced? I think that today the injunction to future is more palpable than ever, and that this injunction takes a conspicuous political turn. Capitalism—namely what seemingly relates its machine of investment and risk, relates its machine to the future and so discards any present and past needs and desires—is actually blocking our relation to future, and futurity, that is. And blocking more efficient than any other known political machine. But in so doing it also reveals the possibility and necessity of futurity more secure and clear than ever. This efficiency in obstructing futurity is perhaps what precisely gave it its globalization.

Always a tergo, then, always thought that what constitutes the force of existence, existants, is in the past, all ways and all ready, behind us, pushing our backs, pushing us toward the future, a future that is only, and always only, the application, or duplication, of that same root. A force that will have the necessary and sufficient sanctions to make all of us bend back and eventually break our backs. Is not also the conception of causality basically something a tergo? There is, of course, concepts suggesting ‘reversible time,’ but is not this rather a gesture so as to expand the hold of past upon present and future? The ball that gets hit by another ball: is it all past powers that act? How could it be? How could we be sure? Should we not rather be disturbed by the possibility that there is a certain futurity that at all allows what we call causality? Does the effect not, at least, also come from the future? This must be thought without its Aristotelian heritage, the heritage that says that there is a teleological and formal cause, as well, besides of the material and efficient. We must leave it there, unfortunately. But again, the ball that got hit, not to speak of the ball that hits: are these not events from the future?

We do need to put our backs to past and also to a present whose imminence is precisely to right away become past, irrelevant, non-work, inefficiency. Any present is in the imminence of being produced as past, what is left, what is no more, what can never be found anymore, because it is irreducibly lost, left, given up, what doesn’t work anymore. What always works is what is to come; we can be sure of this. It is not the case that a radical past is what pushes us and everything else forward; it is rather the case that we are pulled and offered into what always remains to come. This is no offer of grace handed down to us, as if we always might choose whether we will grant or not; it is inescapable, it is there whether we like it or not, know it or not, wants it or not. So even if you choose to die, to kill yourself, to put an end to this your life, you would always already have chosen to receive a future that at all will allow you to kill your self. All things there are, are of futurity. In this context we need to ask why it is that capitalism wins out, this political system that obstructs futurity more than ever before. What is this will? Why does our will seem to be anachronistic? Why does it seem that we build anachronicity into futurity? Making futurity come to halt.

It is necessary to take Derrida’s motifs surrounding that of iterability serious. The possibility of iterating is what makes the mark, for instance the mark of this very mark, right here, or there, or this very sound, here, or there. This possibility is not reducible to the mark itself; its structure involves a certain futurity of the mark. This may very well apply not only to linguistic marks, but to all kinds of marks—which Derrida suggests more than one time. The structure of iterability is something offered from future; where it not for this abyssal resource there would be no mark, and certainly no language. The mark in itself, this on, for instance, harbors none of these forces. The ball hitting the other ball may involve iterability no less than this word hitting this word. A ball also complies with its iterability, no less than the word ‘ball.’ In this sense there is nothing outside of the text—if I may say so, even knowing that this was not what Derrida meant to say, even knowing how much controversy that little sentence made around the world. And even if Derrida may be said, which I don’t think, to interpret iterability and trace in terms of past workings, more in terms of radicalism than in terms of irradicalism and futurity, then I think still we should reinterpret his own interpretations—make of them ‘performative interpretations’—as is another motif of his. This is what could constitute an affirmative reading and writing of Derrida, an affirmation that is af-formative, that is to say, and affirmation that has no form precisely form is what only dreams of radicalism can make. Iterability and trace is afformativity, we could say.

In “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Walter Benjamin will make this interpretation of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus”: the angel’s face is turned toward the past, and where we will see a chain of events, the angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” Benjamin continues: “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” This is Benjamin’s Angel of History.

Giorgio Agamben will interpret this as a particularly felicitous image to describe what happens when we lose our link with our past and are therefore no longer able to find ourselves in history, when—and I quote—“suspended in the void between old an new, past and future, man is projected into time as into something alien that incessantly eludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it.” So much is Agamben’s thought berooted that he closes his thought by saying that “According to the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time, art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project.”

This principle of the burning house needs be rethought. It seems to make good sense. But Agamben wants this to tell something more, something other. The original project, what was thrown out, projected to us to be our dwelling place, our house—it is urgent to see this, again, to have it visible. There is a pro-jectile, a throwing before, that seemingly is directed, somehow, toward us, precisely us, and any of us—present, or to come, or those even that will be the most distant of the ones to come—we the subjectiles: the burning house is the house of us all. Is not this archeological principle a call for power? And a power that again is rooted? Is not the mightiest power the one that enables itself and that is enabled to ground itself the deepest? The deeper the distance from past to present, the more potential for a growing power—or so radicalism thinks: it thinks this distancing, and it thinks this powering and growing. And it throws us before it. Rhizomism thinks in horizontals, not only in horizontals though, but in horizontals too. I am saying this because I am not convinced that rhizomatic thought is capable of being the other that it promises to be. At least not so when it comes to radicalism as at least I would like to articulate it—at least for the time being.

If future futures, and if there are only supernumerary futures in the future—if there is to be future, and this is an acute question today, and Derrida even says that there must be a possibility of no future for there to be a future, just as the promise to be a promise must be able to not be a promise, a broken promise—if so, then, we can see the possibility of total destruction both as promising a futurity, still, and very materially, this promising issuing from our construction of those bombs, and as instantiating a planetary symbol for our failure to face the gift of this future that futures and does so supernumerary: if this is so, we may understand Derrida’s question concerning pure desire, the nothing of the name, as desire of death (Lacan’s Ethics), as total atomic war, when he asks: “Who can swear that our unconscious is not expecting this? dreaming of it? desiring it?” (No Apocalypse, Not Now, “Seven missiles, Seven Missions”) And Elisabeth Weber writes that this is an explosive desire “whose interpretations decide on the mere possibility of the future.” She continues: “If the “massive destruction” that our century has witnessed “seems to us to be an inexplicable accident, a resurgence of savagery” [Lacan says this in his Ethics, 235] we should remind ourselves with Benjamin that the “astonishment that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless, it is the knowledge that the view of history that gives rise to it is untenable.” [Illuminations, p. 257.] There is, again, the question of the progressivist metaphysics—“toward a better future” is its formula. We may think of that Big Bang that drives, propels everything forward whether they will or not, or that God that in the past created Man and his Descents, that political cause that everybody is on the verge to be, precisely, eradicated, under the pressure of capitalist desires, etc., etc., and we saw the sad picture depicted by Benjamin in his interpretation of Klee’s “Angelus Novus.” We don’t have our past in our backs anymore. And so we can neither see, nor eat, nor act. We are without ground as we no longer have the means of transmission between past and future, and so our desires are inclined toward pursuing in the real what is foreclosured (not repressed) in the symbolical, namely the desire of nothing. This is what is said. Maybe one should use Benjamin’s performative interpretation of Klee, and his formulations on progressivism against himself, or Agamben?—and Weber?, which says that Derrida is about remembrance, a remembrance that may help prevent the total catastrophe. And we could have mentioned many other great, contemporaneous, writers that share their vital stocks in this respect, in this nostalgic fire of something lost. “We must ground ourselves in the present, or there is no reality nor revolution!,” it is claimed, in choir.

We have to ask what is untenable. Is it not being rooted in past or present, that is to say, in actuality? Being rooted in actuality is only another way of saying that one keeps ones tracks with the past. Or, is it to be unable to see that the gift of life comes, always already, from supernumerary futures? We have to ask, with Derrida, what it is to eat well. He writes his “Eating Well” with Jean-Luc Nancy as interlocutor, a little nice essay. Whatever we do, we always eat, takes, injects things in, in the real or symbolically; all life do. So how does one eat future well? That is a question that I’d like to be addressed, since future is what gives itself to eating, to be eaten, and since we cannot but eat, and since eating is something we shares. Its obverse is the thinking—we may perhaps name it ‘radicalist’—that rather than eating afresh, sharing and well, fills their mouths with excrements, and in this respect is carnivorous, virile, and anthropophagous—universal values for those in power nowadays. For such thought future is always the same, the same shit, the same good-tasting shit, but in the end so auto-anthropophagous that it no longer has any taste—as we know happens in regular food production, where animals are fed with their own shit, remnants of slaughtered siblings, industrial slam, etc. No more style or content—but this is not the man without content that Agamben writes about. I am not without content because I am uprooted from what is claimed to be my past, my shared past with you, that past that so to speak roots us together, or, because I am a futurist, or something like that. I cannot ever learn how to write I, if I am not enabled and able to eat future fresh, what is to be done well if there is to be any future, what is in each case what is given to me, to us, to all the I’s that are shattered around the planet. Paraphrasing Nancy’s “Shattered Love” we may say “Shattered Shitting,” I think this as our imperative of our own time, the time that threatens with real anachronicity by the fact of the mass destruction arsenals, but also by the sneaking fact that we pollute and destroy, irreversibly, everything from climate, to soil, air, and water, to genes. Therefore I end these little remarks with quoting Blanchot’s L’amitié: “And when we ask the question: ‘Who has been the subject of this experience?’ this question is perhaps already an answer, if, for the one who introduced it, it was affirmed through him in this interrogative form, substituting for the closed and unique ‘I’ the openness of a ‘Who?’ without answer. Not that this means that he simply had to ask himself: ‘What is this me that I am?’ but much more radically he had to seize hold of himself and not let go, no longer as an ‘I?’ but as a ‘Who?,’ the unknown and sliding being of an indefinite ‘Who?’” Derrida comments that this is why the determination of the singular “Who?” remains forever problematic, and that it should remain so, since the obligation to protect the other’s otherness is not merely a theoretical imperative. So in this way I would love to learn how to write, and eat, the I that I am, the I that am me, as an indeterminate who, and yes, not as in the abstention of an emptiness, as if this imperative were something that I needed to abstain from, refrain from filling and re-filling, but rather as an openness without answer, an openness even no longer traced by the question, and therefore no longer by the answer and the non-answer. The otherness of the other, in the other or in the other of me, or of the me of the other of the other, etc., is ir-radical: not without roots, because we have this history of the root, not simply negation or denegation, not a simple opposition, neither formal or empty nor determinate, but leaving the roots of oppositions and the oppositions of roots.

ROOT POLITICS

♥ I will have proposed to undertake an analysis of prominent radicalist motifs in contemporary political thinking. Let me start with a long parenthesis: (Let me first try to embroider some high-speed interpretative threads so as to just have the “wrider╫reater” triggered, from an assemblage I as of now think would facilitate the most, and from an assemblage I believe I am in fact somewhat capable of reproducing. I hope this the most. But as hope is marked by a structural impossibility, the always imminent possibility that what happens may not come forth as I hoped, it may not be up to me, here, or there, to determine whether I succeeded. And perhaps even the reader must ask hermself this same question there, or here. (Only a “tere” can determine this.)
♠ First thread, terminological: ‘Radicalism’ is to be understood as an assemblage of modes of thought whose ism consists of constituting a ‘radix’ as its sole orientating factor, whose operations allow for, on the one hand, what is expected and claimed to grow out from this or that radix—constituting the programmed law, reality, actuality, etc.—but also, on the other hand, what for this thought necessarily appears as deviation, failure, perversion, etc., namely what somehow does not seem to follow the rules of this or that radix—“para-programs.” Therefore, ‘radicalism’ is used as a general technical term denoting ways of thought and action devoted to the quest for, and the discovery, maintenance, and growth of a radix that is, to use other familiar terms, an archeologically constituted monarchy and a monarchically constituted archeology. I use ‘radicalism’ to steer the conceptions of monarchy and archeology—but we could have mentioned other neighboring conceptions—into the realms of the living and life, what is firmly terrestrial, or rather sub-terrestrial since radicalism involves what is hidden beneath or behind or past.
♣ Second thread, terminological: The ‘radix’ is understood either in spatial metaphors or in temporal, or in both at once. First embroidering of second thread: In the spatial metaphor, there are variations of a radicalism that posits a hierarchy of stratified planes, planes that will have to be assigned strict differences in dignity, force, and right. This form of spatial-botanical political thought will have to assign most dignity, force, and right, to what is envisaged to be the root, the principle that everything rests upon, then certain measures to what envisaged to be the stem, then least to the petals, those things that witness to the full presence of the root. In fact, as radicalism is strictly bound by the figure of the program, we could even say that the totality of dignity, force, and right is assigned the root alone, and that what follows simply witnesses to the glorious truth of the root. For, the root programs what will follow: there is the arche, the root, the principle as the beginning, that is to say, the proper beginning, and there is the stem, the painful and gradual actualization through work, to break through the dark soil, then there is the flower in its sun-beamed beauty, where history all at once may be acclaimed to be whole, firmly resting on and in the root in the ground. Second embroidering of second thread: In temporal terms, there are variations of a radicalism that posits yet again a hierarchy of temporal modalities, modalities that yet again will have to be assigned differences in dignity, force, and right. This temporal form will follow the same scheme as that of the spatial. Past is assigned the principal dignity, force, and right, of course; presence is what flows from this past, and future is an empty receptacle of the continuation of that present flowing from that past. And, thirdly, there are those ways that combine the two metaphorics.
♦ Third thread, historical, mythical: The programmatic nature of these two forms reveals, the now well known fact, that still writing is easily condemnable; the gramma is something of an eventuality, a secondary deviation, a subject to various moralisms, hostilities, ostracisms, etc., a subject that need be eradicated by all means, it seems. In Western thought this condemnation and degradation has a long history, at least from Plato’s pharmakon on—with roots in the Egyptian mythology of the figure of Thoth: whether it prominently is in spatial or temporal metaphorics, memory is at stake, and its substratum, its substance, and the thereafter wisdom gained. Now, as Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedrus, Thoth says to his king Thamus: “This discipline, my King, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories: my invention is a recipe [pharmakon] for both memory and wisdom.”[1] Besides of other types of indications, even a quick glance at our linguistic operations and figures indicate that our thought is still heavily informed by a vast variety of radicalist wishes; how many words, and how many vital words, are not bent back in radicalist fetishisms! And how is the repression of new forms of language not felt!
♥ Fourth thread, territorial: The “territorialization”[2] of language, to make use of one of Rancière’s terms from The Names of History—and perhaps a terminology in solidarity with Deleuze and Guattari’s writings—, seems always immense, and where it discovers and haunts down be it lucky or unlucky de-territorializations, it makes use of its long omphalic cords—not necessarily to be identified solely with those definable as of a state apparatus—to re-territorialize. These omphalic cords will surely not understand the workings of what Derrida’s Glas reminds us of the mourceau: a bit, piece, morsel, fragment, but also a musical composition, snack, or mouthful, that is, writes Derrida, always detached with the teeth. Ulmer writes that these teeth refer to “quotation marks, brackets, parentheses: when language is cited (put between quotation marks), the effect is that of releasing the grasp or the hold of a controlling context.”[3] The mourceau bites and chews and shits out every territory and will always cut the root of the omphalos, and so surely in other terms than those pragmatic ones of Freud’s Analysis Terminable/Interminable, where the in principle interminable analysis at some point just has to be cut, terminated. This is so with the mourceau because it is always a matter of shitting well, besides of eating well: when the mourceau cuts off the omphalos, indefinitely regenerating its own tissues and threads leaving the cutting trace behind as it traces anew, it eats and shits well at the same time and at the same place. Moralisms, hostilities, ostracisms, etc., are the very weapons of radicalist re-territorialization.
♠ Fifth thread, re-territorial: But what happens when one re-territorializes? Derrida’s Dissemination writes like this:

There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the “object,” without risking—which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught—the addition of some new thread. Adding, here, is nothing other than giving to read. One must manage to think this out: that it is not a question of embroidering upon a text, unless one considers that to know how to embroider still means to have the ability to follow the given thread. That is, if you follow me, the hidden thread. If reading and writing are one, as is easily thought these days, if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest: the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart.[4]

I am here making a perhaps strange use of this mouthful of text from Derrida’s hand. Really not, since I cannot not have a few of my fingers caught. There is no need here of postulating a certain sex the sole holder of such threads, even as much my use here of the metaphors of the omphalos and the root might seem to invite so. One can easily imagine other, less simplistic, ways: to live, all life gets cut off from their roots, and this is one of the joys of playing the game of creating more and more threads. Derrida wrote about this, in the figure of the ‘assemblage,’ already early in his writing, as for instance in Speech and Phenomena,[5] or somewhat later, as in “Signature,
Event, Context.”[6]
♣ Sixth thread, (opening the) ending: I also want (in parenthesis) to put forth the hypothesis that radicalism is not restricted to the West, as it is not restricted to the political; it makes its presence felt all over the world. There are, however, differences in implementing radicalist political thought, more or les effective, according to this or that set of criteria. In this study, then, I will only analyze a few exemplary politically affectative texts written in the contemporaneity of what is still called the “West”—another radicalism, to be sure, or, to borrow another of Rancière’s terms from the same book, “geographicization.”[7]
♦ Seventh thread, (ending the) opening: Before I end the long parenthesis, I would like to sew the seven threads so as to let your reading not be assured by some self-organized root, but let it open itself for a tremendous violence, and a chance, for a causality of futurity that, hopefully, with the quietest conscience shits out, for instance, Gods, Big Bangs, Irreversible Times, Logics, Transcendentalisms, Immanentisms and Radicalisms alike. First two threads were simple ‘terminological’ ones, explaining the way I would hope two of the terms could be read, the one— which in fact were number two, namely that of the radix and the root—nested in the other—which in fact were number one, namely that of radicalism. What is a root if not an ism? In fact, this makes the term ‘radicalism’ superfluous, so to speak. The third thread, the ‘historical, mythical’ one, nested a conception of the program into that of the root, by way of a speedy backward referral to mnemotechnicalized thoughts by, presumably, Plato. His dislike, if not immediate ostracizing, of course, of grammas seems to be well established, if we shall believe Derrida and others. The Thoth—which is not the same as the those singular tooth, tooth, tooth, tooth, that makes up the quotation jaws of the mourceau—delivers the recipe, or was it the poison? (not surprisingly, perhaps, the different translations of ‘pharmakon’ render different words for the term) of memory and wisdom. Wisdom must come from a root, a memory of what lies behind, beneath, in the most archaic of our grand humankind footsteps; so it is thought, from at least Thoth on, be he (I am not sure for my part if Thoth had clear and distinct sexual attributes) an imaginary, mythical entity or not. The fourth thread, the ‘terrestrial,’ nested all of the ones before it inside itself, on safe terra, in the safe ferry of the root of omphalos, the compulsive urge to bring all things back to its proper origin, re-territorialize, but to an origin that—luckily for some, whatever the reason, not so for others, whatever the reason—simply is no more, nor traceable except as a general cut that is repeated through all living history, which is what makes (differential) repetition (and de-territorialization) essential to life. This omphalos is then nested into the question of shitting well. The fifth thread, the ‘re-territorial,’ was in a sense meant to allude to the bitter fact that the ‘again’ of the re-territorializing will split its wish to eat its own shit with just more shit, shit that will make its urge even more urgent to it. It nested all the former threads into a certain concept of shitting well, a concept that must be seen in analogy with Derrida’s “Eating Well,” for instance. Sixth thread, that of the ‘(opening of the) ending,’ was put there just to let it have been said that I do not believe in that other radicalism that says that Evil, in this case radicalism, is White, European, or Caucasian. Radicalism is anyway nothing of evil, as the very conception of ‘evil’—be it in its popular form ‘radical evil’ or not—itself pertains to one of radicalisms favorite exercises. Radicalism is just an auto-aggrandizing complex of unlucky circumstances that happened to the earth we all inhabit. As Haver writes, a concept such as ‘evil’ presupposes that history gives meaning, that it is on the side of meaning, which, he writes is today all too unsure, problematical:

[h]ope and despair, like good and evil, are not historical or political concepts, because they necessarily assume the possibility of making sense; they are predicated on the assumption that the world can make sense. But that possibility, today, is not self-evident, and to the extent we might assume that self-evidence, we are not yet thinking.[8]

I would just add that the concept of ‘meaning’ itself, too, often is radicalist, as is, needless to say, the concept of ‘concept.’ Reference is tainted with radicalist figures, tropes, inflections, modulations, etc., and all it does, its sole inquisitory mission, is to make sure a movement of identification by way of a perfectly circular return; whether the root is transcendental or immanent is strictly irrelevant since there is a motivational force involved that unites both camps by a certain “sensus communalis.” It is this common sense, common source, “common radicalicity” that makes the distinction into transcendent and immanent possible, of course. Therefore we will ask, “rhetorically,” what happens with thought when it hides from dangers that always and everywhere threats to jump at it? What happens with thought when it refuses risks, the horror of being completely sollicitated? Such a thought is no longer a thought; it has other names. Or could it even be said that it might be that it does not have a name at all, essentially? Anyway, I am not sure whether this makes us “not yet thinking,” as Haver puts it. At least, I want to ward off every “thought”—the thing that never lets itself be caught by surprise—in thought that re-marks and re-territorializes it—living on values of sheltering, proximity, tradition, living presence, remembrance, “history,” concreteness, etc.—as of the root; how can ‘yet’ not be of the root, a thing behind, lurking? Now, why could it not just as well be that what happens, in the “presence,” what at a given time is presencing, is not the pushing forward, making space for it, into a supposed always uncritical welcoming future that welcomes anything, absolutely anything that a past dictates it a tergo, but comes by way of what is to come, by way of what may be called ‘futurity,’ for which what we call past is what is pushed back, out, shit out, as new things—to speak with two of Derrida’s terms—“spaces” and “temporizes”—two terms that are reducible neither to the spatial nor the temporal? Why not? How could one ever know? What happens, really, to the billiard ball? Is it hit a tergo by an anterior force? Or is it pulled, offered by a posterior force? To ward off a central objection, that of saying that this way of speaking of things actually only affirm the reversible time of which classical physics speaks, I will say that it certainly plays a role if things is conceptualized as of a Big Pull instead of as of a Big Bang. I have to leave this quite insane, and ridiculous, speculation here, for the time being; something else is opening itself around me. What is striking, anyway, is that the manifold uses of the prefix ‘re-,’ which is used to signal and help the radicalist maneuver, is in itself, even in its linguistic construct, a witness of the reality of futurity more than of a past that lives on by its re-’s. [End and enough of this long parenthesis].) The prominent motifs of radicalism in contemporary political thought will be analyzed by way of examples given. I will extract, by way of a mourceau, quoting-cutting teeth, examples from texts of a couple of prominent writers, frequently quoted and discussed, referred to and criticized, elaborated and celebrated. Among those I have read in this study I will here refer to texts of Jacques Rancière, Alain Badieu, Jean-Luc Nancy, Georgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze. In this study I have read these writers, and others, with a view to what I call radicalist motifs and motivations. I will restrict myself to give examples of politico-radicalist themes surfacing, and so I will not render themes and thoughts of which would seem to fly the line of what I will call ‘irradicalism,’ the active uprooting, politically or otherwise, of everything that bends back and down, behind and beneath. I will assemble them into a sheaf. Let me start with Jacques Rancière. In his On the Shores of Politics, in the chapter ‘Democracy Corrected,’ he states:

There is politics, the art and science of politics, because there is democracy. Politics is encountered as already present in the factuality of democracy, in the very strangeness of the combination of words which joins the unassignable quantity of the demos to the indefinable action of kratein. […] Language bears witness to this: there can be no arche corresponding to the demos as subject, no way of ruling according to some inaugurating principle; there is only a –cracy—a manner of prevailing. Prevailing because one is the best, says Pericles’ admirers Thucydides and Callicles; prevailing because one prevails, retorts his detractor Plato.[9]

Democracy is what accounts for the fact of politics, the fact that is encountered, there, already present, factual, already in factuality, in the factuality of democracy, that is. Politics is in democracy, in fact in the word democracy, the word that is made of the combination of a demos whose quantity can never be assigned and a kratein whose action can never be defined, never so because of a certain inability. Inability: on the part of whom or what? One is certain, however, that one is able to combine words to make words like ‘unassignable’ and ‘indefinable.’ With the concept ‘indefinable’ one is able to define that there is something that one is not able to define, the ‘indefinable,’ in this case the kratein. One is so able to define that this or that manner of prevailing is not definable, and especially so, perhaps, as when assembled with a demos for whose subject there can be no corresponding arche, “no way of ruling according to some inaugurate principle.” No root, no radicalism, it seems. Democracy has no root, it says; it is just there, as manner of prevailing, of which some takes the risk to say that the one politics prevailing is prevailing because of it being the best, while others take the risk to say that it prevails because it prevails. It is, anyway, the definability of the indefinable action of the-there-is of a prevailing of an unassignable mass. And this would perhaps do work on radicalist principles, irradicalize them. Rancière then goes on to mock that view that says that:

The –cracy of the best—of the kreitton—is no quality, no definable expertise, but rather the sheer extra weight born by the one best able to submit to the dictates of his own desire, who prevails among the people.[10]

Here, he writes, “[t]he ‘one-too-many’ of democracy allows itself to be reduced to the ‘more, always more’ of unsatisfied desire, of the economic imperialism that turns democracy into the child of oligarchy and the mother of tyranny.”[11] But if kratein is defined as the indefinable action of a given prevailing that in itself gives force and meaning to the concept of politics, how can one then talk of ‘reductions’ and ‘turnings into’? Would not these just be prevailings just about to happen, at the threshold, a sheer extra, that makes, or “ducts,” one attractor forceless and anther forcefull? How can politics thrive on such soils? We see therefore that Rancière’s conception of democracy is not as loose and anarchistic as we perhaps first thought, and that he reduces it: democracy is a thing, however indefinable its action, which can be reduced, to tyranny, or imperialism, for example. He needs to immediately reduce his own semantic play on demos-kratein to make room for a conception that allows for distinctions and reductions, definable and assignable, within democracy. Critical distinctions! There will be a proper democracy, and a distorted one. It is clearly desirable to make such distinctions, and to spit out all forms of imperialisms or tyrannies. No doubt. But this is here not the point. The point is to see how Rancière soon will dig himself down to certain roots to justify this operation of distinction and evaluation and definition. In the chapters before the ‘Democracy Corrected’ Rancière has dealt with the difficult history of democracy, its very difficult birth, the hostile and misconceived receptions it has had, from Plato on, to contemporary events in French politics, and elsewhere, where the end—its telos—of politics is conceived to be the end—the death, the superfluousness—of politics: its shore, then, as if the old Athenian myth of the anti-political Maritimes, drunk and wild, always disturbing the soil of peace of the polis, finally had managed to drag politics back, away from the blue sea, back home, safe, at the shore. Let us therefore return to the last chapter where he is about to correct this fatal circumstance. Rancière seeks to restore philosophy to politics, having it retain its original and necessary meaning, namely the harmonious organization of dissent with itself. How are we to understand this? Has a certain conception of politics been lost in the course of history and political history? And is it something we should try to restore? As I here have tried to outline ‘a new conception of radicalism,’ an operation that perhaps might be seen as exemplifying Rancière’s conception of the changing of the poetics of knowledge,[12] we would therefore ask: would this overall strategic move of a return to an original and necessary meaning of the political constitute an example of radicalism in Rancière, a certain poetics of knowledge on Rancière’s behalf that runs the radicalist machine into another twist? The chapter “Democracy Corrected” opens thus, with a quotation of Thucydides: “So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen.”[13] The chapter is explicitly devoted “[m]erely to give resonance to the singularity of Thucydides’ words in the faintly anxious satisfaction of our present time, which simultaneously rejoices in the triumph of democracies and wonders whether they are in fact governable. The presumably cynicism of the ancient historian, a friend of the Sophists, would doubtless prompt an amused reaction to the gravity of our queries.” (OSP, 93-4) Is Thucydides the root of politics properly understood? Do we have to dig down and stand under Thucydides to understand politics, to have it corrected? Now, immediately after quoting Thucydides he writes: “In politics, everything depends on certain founding utterances.” (OSP, 93) This utterance reflects Thucydides’. And it reflects his conception of the ‘poetics of knowledge.’ Now, if there are different poetics of knowledge, affecting not only historiography but also the art of politics, then we would perhaps be justified in reconstructing this Rancièrean argument: there are different poetics; different poetics institute different politics; poetics institute different politics by way of utterances; these utterances are capable of founding; there are misconceived politico-poetics; misconceived politico-poetics may be corrected; there may be less misconceived politico-poetics in the past, locatable in historical documents—we could fill this argument with various other premises, construct an architectonically impressive edifice, but I think the ones stated solid enough to see, for our purposes here, some of the most decisive implications involved in the somewhat tight and quick reconstruction of this little argument. For instance, I think it would be difficult not to acknowledge that Rancière a) believes in a type of applicability of past poetics, past models, that is efficient enough to the purpose of correcting an existing politico-poetics with a past one; b) therefore that he thinks that past politico-poetics are sufficiently familiar to us, here, to make sense; c) that the very concept of ‘correction,’ at least in its ordinary use—and we see no qualifications to the concept from Rancière’s hand—necessarily implies an ideology of fall, of perversion, that what needs correction so is always the present; d) that Rancière’s overall strategy is conservatist in the sense that it strives to, thinks it necessary and possible to ensure the conservation of a certain past. For example. But let me not be too hasty. Let me read further, and try to locate other threads of embroidering that shows forth the same piece of weaving. And he goes on: “We still have to decide how such utterances are to be understood.” (OSP, 93) To understand how we are to read “Democracy Corrected” we will have to accept that there indeed are utterances capable of founding politics, founding utterances, utterances that form the web of poetics of this or that politics, or kratein, manner of previling, but that there are different ways of understanding such utterances, making it necessary to lay out an explication to properly understand what is meant by correcting democracy, and the corrected democracy, even if democracy is defined as it is by Rancière. He goes on, back to Thucydides: “Here, we shall proceed on the hypothesis that Thucydides’ famous characterization of the government of Pericles is not ‘political’ in the sense of reflecting the disillusioned wisdom of one who is used to commanding men and who observes the contradiction between showy phrases and solid realities. The gap between names and things, whose perversions Thucydides well knew, is precisely what defines the space of political rationality.” (OSP, 93) Again he states that Thucydides well knew a poetics of politics that since got lost, got substituted by a poetics of politics that whether it laments or enjoys the need of the commanding wise politician, refers to a poetics of knowledge where the gap between names and realities is understood as the condition of impossibility of a political rationality of democracy. And not as its condition of possibility, as Thucydides is said to have understood. Democracy lives on perversion, on “pervertability,” so to speak. And so it is said that democracy is not about serving communality, not “the management of the interests of the community.” So what is it—how are we to understand the founding performance of founding utterances? “It [politics] is the apparatus whereby people are kept within the visible sphere that the people’s name rules over: as the subject that occupies the gap between the fiction of community on the one hand and the surfeit of reality of the populace on the other, the people serve both to link and to separate the two, themselves alternately taking on and losing definition as the features of the two intermingle.” (OSP, 93) The gap again, the perverse gain, the fruitful but perverted gap that defines the very space of the political, but this time not in simple forms of names/things, no: there is, as a defining characteristic of political space as such, a gap between fictions of communality and surfeit realities of populaces. This gap is populated by the people, and the people both links and separates the perverted two of fiction and reality. The political is a people, people as a subject, in living, visible tension, living in the gap. And as the intermingling swings back and forth according to this or that manner of prevailing, either the fictional or the real will take on or lose definition, alternately. As has been stated already, these alternating tensions of the people-subject are not governable, never were, and so no people-subject is—and so all worried concerns, whether in past, present, or future, are misconceived, founded on false presuppositions, and so not only with a view to names and utterances in general, but also with founding utterances in particular. Which makes the fears in modern politic so hollow. Now let us see what further use he makes of Thucydides: “Thucydides was well aware that the question of politics was indivisible from that of whether democracies were governable. But he also knew that this question is invariably already settled, that democracies are always both governed and governable—indeed governed inasmuch as they are ungovernable. There is politics, the art and science of politics, because there is democracy.” (OSP, 94) We recognize the last sentence. But it must be read, also, up against those sentences that such culminates in the proposition that says that if there is democracy—and there is always a manner of prevailing and a demos qua “divergence from itself”—then there is politics. So there is always democracy, and always politics, then. Alternately, we could now say that if there is an ungovernable then there is a governed, always. And this governing is, as we now know, encountered as an already presence in the factuality of the ungovernable of democracy, the ungovernable of this or that manner of prevailing.

The concept of politics originated in a choice concerning democracy: whether to declare democracy unworkable as the regime of the dissimilar and entrust the welfare of the city to the philosophical use of speech and the mathematical use of numbers, or, alternatively, to run democracy on the basis of its very dissimilarities, its very ungovernability, using its constitutive self-division for and/or against it: to institute the constitutional rules and customs of government that would allow the people to enjoy the visibility of their power through the dispersal and even delegation of their qualities and prerogatives. The latter approach is exemplified practically in the arrangements (sophismata) that are Aristotle’s response to the Platonic denunciation of democratic sophistry.
This is the hypothesis of democracy corrected—democracy governed by the judicious use of its own ungovernability. […] It is a matter of accomplishing the goal of politics, of leading the community harmoniously through discord itself, of the impossibility of people being equal to themselves. The triumph of solid facts over showy phrases is also the triumph of the political logos over democratic factuality.[14]
Why would Rancière be interested in the origin of the concept of politics, for the sake of origin itself, for so as to help our understanding of certain politically founding utterances? There is first the Platonic choice, then the Aristotelian. “It is tempting to try and frame the encounter with factuality here in terms of a clearly defined dialectic in which the essence of politics is realized through its own negation.” First Plato, “a community founded on the specifically human power of the logos, the power of making manifest the expedient and the harmful, and hence the just and the unjust” second Aristotle, “the pure factuality of the city divided into rich and poor, split not just by fortune but also by the desire for power,” third the third and the end, “the system of forms and arrangements whereby the political logos is realized through its capacity to overcome the twofold division of the people—its difference from itself and its division into classes.” (OSP, 95) Now, although it is “tempting,” this is not Rancière’s position; it is the position of the dialectical communitarian reason. And, so he writes, this reason “misses the core of politics—its true ‘origin’.” Already Aristotle knew that the manifestation of the expedient, the to sumpheron—that which converges, which brings together in a useful way, which serves to bring together—does not in itself “entail the manifestation of the just, of the justice as political principle.” “The fact is that the sun in sumpheron does not suffice to differentiate the human city from communities of ants and bees.” (OSP, 96) He takes off from Aristotle’s demonstration that Plato’s line from the expedient to the just necessarily must “go by way of opposites, by way of blaberon/adikon: ‘the harmful and the unjust,’ as the translators often phrase it. But this is to obliterate the very heart of the matter, which is the asymmetry of the sumpheron and the blaberon. The blaberon is not just the harmful or inexpedient: it is that which wrongs or injures.” When there therefore are useful convergences these will affect the political realm only insofar as it is part of that grievance, “that wrong needing righting,” that is antithetical to the useful but never symmetrical to it. It seems that the origin that the communitarian reason misses is that of the factuality of the blaberon. This blaberon is not something beyond which the political should establish itself; it is rather the “substance” of “the grievance thanks to which the register of the just becomes accessible to the register of the useful.” Now we are approaching a grip on the quotation that starts the engine of the chapter, as well as on what he means by the expression “founding utterances.” Politics is defined as a “function of the fact of democracy,” and a function of, not that it is useful to assemble or communalize, but of the fact that a wrong exists, “an injustice that needs to be addressed.” (OSP, 97) And once more we see the gap: “The gap between people as community and the people as division is the site of fundamental grievance.” And this political wrong is “not a wrong […] like any other,” since 1) it is irreducible to what a court of law can manage to “address on the basis of laws or regulations,” this being linked to the fact that, according to Rancière, “the irreconcilability of the parties antedates any specific dispute,” and since 2) the irreconcilability is not that of “inexpiable war or infinite debt.” The evolution of the blaberon/adikon, which produces the difference between an ordered animal society and a human political community, “takes place against the backdrop of that radical otherness which Aristotle exemplified in the figure of the stranger to any city […], a monster committed to total war or a divinity beyond the reach of all reciprocity.” Somewhere between law and religion, he writes, there is a political grievance that because it is irreconcilable is and remains addressable. What here manifests ability remains bound to the ir- of irreconciliation, the total limit of ability, a limit that, as it is antithetical to the useful but never symmetrical, as it antedates any specificity, as it instantiates a factuality that is always beneath our apprehensive abilities, as it may take the figure of a radical otherness, a radical allergen, will function all fine as an absolutely antedating radix—in spatial as well as in temporal terms—out of which everything comes: omni-creation ex radix.[15] So, continuing his thesis of democracy corrected, targeting current correction of democracy, he claims that our ongoing “correction which thinks of itself as the end of politics” should rather be called “post-democracy.” (SOP, 98) But would not, according to Rancière’s own conceptual tools, even this current correction—which he in the name of an ur-wrong is in the process of correcting—be just an instance of the fundamental pervertability of the relation between names and things that he otherwise speaks univocally affirmative about? In any case, Rancière does never speak of a distinction in perversion; the perversion (of the “radically other”) is the common out of reach resource. Anyway, post-democracy is characterized by a climate where the appearance of the people is christened exhibition, exhaustive counting is christened imparity, and grievance consensus. This makes irresistible that radicalist temptation which simply must discover false layers that betray the root of truth and the truth of the root. All exercises in keeping the root pure: protect it against all those kinds of irrelating weeds spreading all over the space of the political, sucking the life force out of the root, making necessary those heroic measures. This kind of Olympic Game is structurally bound to reinstall itself, anyspace, anytime, giving itself eternity and resurrection by way of saving the root from evils; grievances cannot be foreseen and regulated, however the growing pile of laws and articles introduces itself. They will only be ever more prone to be “stopped dead in its tracks by the sudden emergence of new avatars of the monster and of a merciless divinity.” At page 98, starting up the infolded chapter “Modern Metapolitics,” Rancière will reciprocally support On the Shores of Politics and The Names of History—one of those other books by Rancière we would need to read close here to make more plausible our hyper-thesis here—by giving this advice for a re-modeled politics, a refreshed, true politico-poetics: “So far as politics proper is concerned, however, it is reborn when the sphere of appearance of the people begins regaining ground from the prestige of royal majesty and the trappings of the divine vicarship; when the people reappear as the locus of a division and when this division once again demonstrates, at the heart of the legend of community, the asymmetry between the sumpheron and the blaberon.” First, notice all those radicalist modulations and phrases and tropes of Rancière’s language here in this bit. It is a bit, a bite, and a bit(e) bitten, teethed out, but still radicalism is there in all its weight, gravity. One is tempted to ask: for what reason is the thought of Rancière here and there—mouthfuls—branching roots? And: what would happen to the oeuvre of Rancière if those roots were irradicalized? He talks for all: “It is now that new names are proposed for the people and that new subjects come forward well fitted to exhibit and address the wrong that has been done the people: republicans, democrats and revolutionaries—but also workers or proletarians.” (OSP, 99) How come that speaking in the name of the people, irrespective of people having this or that name, he instantiates a certain radicalism in addressing “the wrong that has been done people”? What would happen if his thought were irradicalized, then? It would try to irradicalized the wrongs not of what has been done, not of past and irreversible events, but what may, or may not, come into being, but also what by its very coming, or not coming, obstructs comings of other others. It would open allocracy, that manner of prevailing that is always open, strange, alien, monstrous.
[1] Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnsen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 75. (Hereafter abbreviated as D.)
[2] Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 66. (Hereafter abbreviated as NH.)
[3] Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology : Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 58.
[4] Op.cit., pp.63-4.
[5] Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), ff. 131.
[6] Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” Glyph 1: John Hopkins Textual Studies (Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press, 1977) ff. 185.
[7] Op.cit., ibid.
[8] William Haver, “The Ontological Priority of Violence : On Some Really Smart Things About Violence in Jean Genet’s Work,” XXX (YYY), p. (Hereafter abbreviated as OPV.)
[9] Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 94. (Hereafter abbreviated as OSP.)
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., p. 95.
[12] See NH, especially first chapter “A Secular Battle,” and the last “A Heretical History?”, for a somewhat clear cut definition of what ‘poetics’ means in Rancière. He will, for instance, try to demonstrate that the transitions from Hobbesian “royal-empirical” school of historiography to the Lucien Febvre initiated Annales school, and further from this to the mode of historiography opened by Jules Michelet, is best understood in terms of revolutions in the “poetics of knowledge.”
[13] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, revised edition (Harmondsworth, 1972, II), p. 65. Quoted in OSP, p. 93.
[14] Op.cit., p. 95.
[15] Here it would be easy to set in with an analysis of ‘radical otherness,’ showing that what that “Aristotelian figure”—another root—shows is not what it thinks it shows. How would a figure be other if also radical? An other with a definable, locatable, knowable root is definitely not other, but comprehensive in all its rootedness. The allocratic is surely not radicalist; it is rather, if I may say so, irradical.

irradical grammachines future you

In the futurity that is still left --- presuming for the time being that we can know such a state in general, and that we know it, now, in particular --- humankind will irradicalize many of its acknowledged and practised ways of doings and writings.

Radicalists in politics, philosophy, religion, science, and art: these backward, reactionary, fecivorous beings will be shit out from futurity.

Too long a time we have been eating excrements.