°The tempo of critique
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …
This declaration is many things, but it is above all the articulation of a seeming paradox that will preoccupy dialecticians of various shades for centuries.
The co-existence of the principle of hierarchy with that of equality – which is to say, the simultaneity of a transcendental endowment and the ostensibly concrete universality of “men” – undoubtedly lends itself to temporal schema of one kind or another.
One can press upon this paradox for obvious effect (inequality as scandal or stain), or insist, as a means of gaining a foothold in immanence (if not, more opportunistically, what is deemed to be a priveliged rhetoric of the political), that domination is parasitic upon the tendency toward equality or, as a twist upon the latter, that equality is instrumental to hierarchisation but not, for all that, itself suspect. In all this, equality remains more or less virtuous, implicit and implied, the condition of critique and horizon of what can be thought. That is, and as with all such dialectical renderings, equality – unlike hierarchy – is projected into an infinite future.
Yet critiques of hierarchy that are not also, at the same time, critiques of equality were already obsolete the moment the declaration of a simultaneity was announced between the hierarchy of monotheism and the generalisation of equality – in other words, in the deep collusion between money and theology that delineated the political from politics. That delineation, of course, turns around the question of difference (and indifference).
However, just as obsolescence in no way suggests the absence of production but, on the contrary, constitutes its spur and promise of interminability, the dialectical rendering of the paradox of hierarchy and equality inclines toward a hypothetically infinite temporality - or, what is much the same thing: what passes for politics (or critique) assumes an industrial tempo.
I’ll just add this for now:
Equality is what is offered as legal rights to colonized people. […] The world of equality is the world of legalized oppression and one-dimensionality. – Carla Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel (1971)
Much of this is a restatement or prior posts, in different form, the difference being that it signals a kind of tedium on my part, and maybe a need to go through something more comprehensively than I have. So, a collection of previous notes and things to re-read, as I move along:
Keechang Kim’s discussion of the coincidence of the equality of subjects and sovereignty in Aliens in Medieval Law. Arendt (and Cavarerro) on the figure of man and zoon politikon. Nunes’ “Nothing Is What Democracy Looks Like”. Linda Zerilli’s “Refiguring Rights through the Political Practice of Sexual Difference”. Nancy’s “Of the One, of Hierarchy”. Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations” and Marx (and, of course, Aristotle). Hamacher’s “Lingua Amissa”. And, the pieces on democracy and egalitarianism.
Any comprehensive critique of equality and hierarchy requires the elimination of all bats.
Jodi [December 20, 2007 @ 9:52 pm]
Allow me a quote from the Master:
s0metim3s [December 20, 2007 @ 10:28 pm]