re: AUT: Statist thinking

[andrew robinson <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx>]

See, it makes a lot more sense when you join the dots!

And I think my little kick up the butt may have done
Harald some good, since he now seems to have filled in
the enormous gaps in his original claims, and
explained (for instance) exactly what political
representation has to do with the negative.  And of
course, if he'd done this in the first place, he could
have saved himself the kick up the butt.  Oh well...

Actually, Harald, you have a good point about
political representation being downplayed in
"critiques of representation", and that
poststructuralism tends to be linked to an
unprincipled political pragmatism.  Though I would
link this to "the negative" slightly differently from
you - often it is linked to the way "the negative"
returns in poststructuralism in ways which lead to the
political suspension of the effectivity of critique
(Derrida's justice which always remains on the
horizon, Zizek's "necessary" reinscription of the Act
in the framework of a symbolic Order, Laclau and
Mouffe's insistence that the "empty space" must at
least be contingently filled...).  Negativity as
constitutive lack, which condemns "utopia" and
principled politics and which instead produces a sad
pragmatism.

And instead of "difference in itself", perhaps it
would make more sense to say to Harald:  can you
conceive of difference, without reducing it to
sameness?  Because in my view, your politics, Harald,
fall back on sameness of various kinds (shared
interests, an identity as "working-class", etc.), and
you resist valuing difference;  and this in turn means
you *are* engaged in "political representation",
however much you deny it, because the concepts you use
to motivate your politics (shared interests, the
working class as molar totality, humanity, the self,
etc.), are themselves representations/spooks, hence
allowing the political representative manoeuvre of
someone claiming to represent the essence of the spook
(e.g. the real interests of the class) over and
against the actually-existing entities/events subsumed
in the category.


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page.
www.yahoo.com




     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---