Ik vervolg
de kleine reeks blogs over Balibar met het opnemen van een tekst van hem. Ik
kies daarvoor een gedeelte uit zijn Preface in Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas. Studies on Politics
and Philosophy Before and After Marx. Transl. James Swenson. New York &
London: Routledge,
1994; reprint 2013, te weten uit de pagina’s 10 – 13.
In
the first part, called "Dilemmas of Classical Politics: Insurrection vs
Constitution," I give readings of three major texts, or groups of texts,
of the classical tradition: Spinoza's philosophy (in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the Ethics, and the Political
Treatise) inasmuch as it represents the most lucid example we have of a
combination of politics and ontology; the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen inasmuch as it
founds the potential identity of "man" and "citizen" (or
the universal right and access to politics) on a revolutionary principle of
"equaliberty"; finally, the enigmatic notion of the "internal
(or inner, or interior) border" lying at the core of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, which
were to become a model for much of the subsequent "nationalist"
literature. Thus there is one seventeenth century, one eighteenth century, and
one nineteenth century text. But also there is one text in which the
"political subject" submitted to discussion is the multitude, one in which it is proclaimed
to be the nation made up of free and equal citizens, and one in which it is
identified with the people, as a
transcendent and incarnate unity.
"Spinoza,
the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses" is the earliest of these essays.
It was undertaken in an attempt to clarify what I thought were the reasons for
the unique theoretical and political importance attributed by Spinoza to the
concept of "the masses," but also to clarify the high degree of
ambivalence in his attitude toward what he himself considers to be the basic
problem of politics—namely, the "popular" or "mass"
movements as real phenomena in the
field of the imaginary (hence his
largely aporetic propositions intended to provide democracy, which he
designated himself as the "most natural" and "most
absolute" regime, with a juridical foundation, and the possibility of
drawing from him both revolutionary and conservative arguments). My conclusion
is that the importance of Spinoza's philosophy for democratic thinking (even
today) does not arise in spite of, but rather because of these very aporias. It
is precisely these aporias that allow him to frame a realistic concept of
freedom, which is inseparable from the originary "transindividal"
character of human nature, and a concept of community immediately associated
with a dialectics of affective "fusion" and rational
"communication." This latter concept is, I think, well ahead, not
only of his time, but also of many of our contemporary debates on this issue.
Spinoza
had a radically democratic view of the complementary functions of individual
liberties and collective freedom, and also of the formidable difficulties which
arise from this complementarity in practice. But he certainly had a very
negative view of "revolutions," which he still considered in the
"ancient" way, as mere changes in the form of a regime or in the
identity of the rulers, accompanied by mass movements. This may explain his
inability (or our inability inasmuch as we follow him) to express and valorize
another dialectical aspect of politics, which is precisely the negative import,
or negativity, of the principle on which a democratic revolution is founded
(and which is best exemplified by the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen—namely, the fact that any effective
democratic constitution remains dependent on the idea of insurrection, which itself must always take a negative logical
form. By means of a deliberate play on words, I call it the "proposition
of equaliberty," meaning that equality and liberty are
"identical" in practice, because neither
can true liberty go without equality nor
can true equality go without liberty, and I try to show that it is literally
contained in the articles of the Declaration,
being a logical prerequisite for its new universalistic (or
"infinite") definition of the citizen.
But this leads me to emphasize the inner tensions of "equaliberty,"
which make it anything but a stable or "axiomatic" principle, and
account (at least at the conceptual level) for the contradictory forms of its
realization. Having been once "declared" in history (and in fact this
"declaration" or "utterance" was repeated several times, in
basically equivalent forms), the proposition of equaliberty could no longer be
ignored, but it could also not be implemented (particularly as a Grundnorm or a principle of the
juridical order) without mediations and conflicts.
However,
it seems to me that these contradictions (in the broad sense) are of two very
different kinds. One group of contradictions emerged when eualiberty was
combined with the antagonistic principles of property and community,
or better said, with opposite, conflictual forms of these principles (the
national community versus the proletarian community, capitalist properly versus
property as a result of personal labor). Those are openly displayed in
political discourse throughout the modern era, and in particular they provide
the discourse of "class struggle" with its essential ideological
references. On the contrary, another group of contradictions were mainly
repressed in political discourse: which does not mean that they found no
expression at all, but rather that they were institutionally marginalized and,
with few exceptions, could hardly be recognized as contradictions in their own
right. I suggest that this other group is underpinned by two great
anthropological divisions or "differences": sexual difference, and
intellectual difference, inasmuch as they are also immediately political. Not
by chance, they are precisely the contradictions whose importance seems today
either to relativize or to "overdetermine" the more classical forms
of social conflict. This leads me to suggest that what is sometimes described
with more or less clarity as a "postmodern" turn in the history of
politics does not, in fact, so much refer to a new stage in a linear periodization as to a superimposition of layers of the "political,"
which can be hierarchized differently according to the conjunctures. I return
later to these questions when confronting the more practical question of a
"politics of the rights of man" as it can be defined today (see
chapter 9).
Third,
I include in this first part of the book my essay on Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (which I
also wrote in the mid-eighties, at the time when I was working with Immanuel
Wallerstein on our book Race, Nation,
Class)6, both because it brings in a reference to the currently
more and more crucial question of nationalism (to which I return in the third
part), and because in my opinion it adds an essential example to the discussion
of the notion of community. I was
amazed to realize that the real meaning (and therefore the real reasons for the
ambivalent effects) of the philosophy displayed in the Addresses remains so completely distorted and
misunderstood. The reasons could be that the text is more often symbolically
mentioned than actually read. But even authors who go into detail, with a good
knowledge of "German Idealism," keep picturing it as an intermediary
link between what they present as "Herder's cultural particularism"
or "historicism") and nineteenth century racial theories, not to
speak of Hitler’s National Socialism. Behind these amazing errors, I think that
we can identify on the one hand lasting prejudices (themselves nationalist,
especially in France) concerning "German ideology," but also on the
other hand a complete misunderstanding of the role of universalism, and
especially moral universalism (of which Fichte is a brilliant representative)
in politics and history. The fact that some radical expressions of nationalism
(and probably every symbolic institutional foundation of a national community,
as a crystallization of nationalist ideology) are rooted in universalistic, not
particularistic, categories and principles, will remain a mystery for anybody
who believes in the absolute character of such alternatives as
"individualism versus holism" or "rationalism versus
irrationalism." Conversely the categories elaborated by such a consistent
idealism as Fichte's philosophy of history (particularly those categories which
identify subjectivity with activity) are perhaps more illuminating for our
understanding of nationalism and the construction of a national "identity"
than any empirical sociological explanation. At least they should be integrated
into such an explanation, and this is what I try to demonstrate.
Finally,
this first series of critical readings leaves us with some questions. One
question has to do with the Janus face of "universalism" in politics
and political discourse. It is not certain that Spinoza could be considered an
advocate of universalism (he certainly is not anti-universalistic, as some
quick comparisons with Nietzsche would suggest), since his analysis of
transindividuality as an actually existing network of all individuals in nature
refers to a deeper concept of singularity.
But on the other side, the undoubtedly universalistic proposition of equaliberty,
as an expression of the conquest of personal and civic rights, and the no less
universalistic notion of the national community in Fichte, can (and perhaps
must) enter into sharp conflict, although they have a clear historical
connection. It would be attractive to refer the first to a "formal,"
"negative" notion of the universal (a "universal of the
void," so to speak), and the second to a "substantial" universal
(which could also be labeled, in another language, an ideological notion of the universal). However, the way (unexpected,
in many respects) in which the question of the universal and universalism
presents itself in today's "unified" world suggests to us that we
abandon these kinds of traditional symmetries and leave the discussion provisionally
open (I return to it in the third part).
* * *
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