°Knots
The first paragraph of - provisionally titled and still in draft form - “Cutting Democracy’s Knot: Nancy and Tronti between the Present and the Not-Now”, co-written with Brett.
In his first extended speech in the midst of the rebellions of the banlieues and an officially declared state of emergency, President Jacques Chirac announced that the problem confronting France was ‘a crisis of meaning, a crisis of reference points and an identity crisis.’ Some time before this, Jean-Luc Nancy had remarked that ‘the “crisis of sense” is, first of all and most visibly, a “crisis of democracy”’ (1997:90). If, in the events of November 2005 in France as in so many others, it is possible to discern the connections between Chirac’s crisis of meaning, foundation and identity and that of democracy which Nancy alluded to, it is no less the case, we would argue, that such crises have become as constant as the emergencies that shadow them. Indeed, given that these crises proliferate with an unrelenting—not to mention increasingly militarised—assurance, their routine characterisation as the anachronistic re-appearance of totalitarianism (or sovereignty or fascism) in or against democracy seems incapable of offering more than platitudinous demands for a postponement of responsibility. Whatever else democracy might imply—which is to say, however emptied of meaning it and its formal correlate of citizenship might be—it neither finds nor seeks repose at one pole of the oscillation between a juridico-commercial emptiness and a totalitarian plenitude, between, in other words, the citizen and the subject, by turns more or less empty or more or less absolute. On the contrary, democracy is this very oscillation and, hence, this very ‘crisis’. […]
According to Tronti, democracy is now, as it has always been, what the doctrine says it is: the kratos of the demos. It posits an identity between sovereign and people, both of which are, however diversified or diffused, fundamentally univocal notions, undivided and indivisible. At the heart of democracy, writes Tronti, lies an enigma: he argues that democracy, as both Schmitt and Kelsen—those two great political theorists of the 20th century who otherwise disagree on everything—recognised, gives rise to an imperium based not on the will of individuals as such, but on a collective will, a more or less anonymous state persona that is, simultaneously, auto-representative and mystical. It is not simply that democracy operates as an empty signifier, as both Žižek (1996) and Laclau (1997) have noted. Nancy writes that ‘our entire history’ seems to show that the empty figure of the citizen is persistently turned over to the identifications of the subject. And, he adds, ‘democracy without identification’ would ‘be without any demos or kratein of its own’ (1997:108). Subject and citizen represent—as Nancy will insist in the second fragment on ‘politics’ (1997)—‘two postures of the claim to sovereignty and the institution of community.’ The citizen folds into the ‘politics of the modern subject’, as the ‘laicised theology, or if one prefers, a romanticised theology, of the “people”, “history”, and “humanity”.’ Nancy emphasises that it is ‘the word people’ which marks the turn of the citizen—who otherwise circulates as ‘a mobile complex of rights’—toward the theological ground of the subject. He asks, and goes on to answer in the affirmative, whether the citizen and subject ‘are not in an intimate solidarity or connivance.’
For Tronti, what is at stake is the univocal and mystical melding of kratos and demos—the state and the people—in the creation of a single body that would replace the doubled body of the king, forever shadowed by sacralisation. And, it is this identity that has remained unassailable by the class conflicts that, from the 19th to the late 20th centuries, would struggle to reveal the ideological basis of this nexus. […]
A note: Some computers don’t like talking to my computer, so if you feel like reading over the draft, drop a comment in, but I might have to jump on another computer to actually get the file through.
“their routine characterisation as the anachronistic re-appearance of totalitarianism (or sovereignty or fascism) in or against democracy seems incapable of offering more than platitudinous demands for a postponement of responsibility”
i was sort of getting it up to this point, then there was a wooshing sound over my head. any possibility of making this more accessible, or in a plainer speak so i can get it?
i know it is probably for a specialist audience. but what about the plebs like me, we want to know too :(
C [December 7, 2005 @ 3:03 pm]
Eg: racist policies introduced by governments are often characterised as a return to The Past, not of this time. In that sense, there is a kind of ‘If we get back on track with democracy, it will all be ok.’
Btw, IP: 129.78.64.106 www-cacheC.usyd.edu.au, questions are fine. Bullshit performances are not. That wooshing sound you heard was likely planes flying overhead - there is a flight path over Sydney University, after all. Hardly as plebian as your defensive populist rhetorics would suggest.
Speaking of your home town, the Sydney chattering class are renowned for their recourse to populism - from right-wing radio jocks to leftoid journalists, they all seem to justify their idiocy by asserting that it brings them closer to the people.
s0metim3s [December 7, 2005 @ 5:18 pm]
oh i get it. is this that clifford, student-journalist guy?
jen [December 7, 2005 @ 7:53 pm]
Could you send me a copy of the finished version? Is this different from ‘Exceptional Times’?(If so, could I get a copy of the latter?)
Deliberate harassment by ALP Left/NOLS types at work is about to put me on Workcover, by the way. Under the new IR regime they may be able to sack me, but intentionally creating a hostile work environment with the intent of forcing my resignation is still improper, I am pretty sure. Anyway, so my doctor, counsellor, union and (I hope) lawyer tell me.
Hope you’re well,
Benjamin
benjamin rosenzweig [February 4, 2006 @ 6:18 pm]
This is very interesting. If possible, I, too would love to see a finished version.
John [February 27, 2006 @ 11:52 am]
Oh, Ben, I just saw this comment. They are two different essays, the ‘Exceptional Times’ one is in Vacarme, and an English-language version is heading off to Zone soon - so, I’ll send when finished.
The democracy (Nancy/Tronti) piece should be up on CultureMachine within the next week or thereabouts.
s0metim3s [February 27, 2006 @ 12:08 pm]