archive : s0metim3s

Here’s the pre-print version of the oikopolitics piece, slated for Global South. Apparently I’m supposed to remove the link when it appears in print. I think this is the fragment I like the most:

If the modern financial system is premised on the historical emergence of national debt, the late twentieth witnessed the democratisation of its risks through the household. And yet, as it turns out, the dispersal of risk opened the door to the cascading effects of subprime instability and default. The idealised household had not taken hold in any generalised sense, much as it imposed itself as norm, and beyond any attempt to assume that all of those who defaulted could not pay rather than had decided not to or, more broadly put, did not budget and toil as they ought.

Here’s the abstract for the oikopolitics piece:

In his 2009 Inaugural speech, US President Obama spoke of America’s future by not only invoking We the People’s faith in founding ideals and documents, but he did so – by this time, as his signature rhetoricity – by evoking storms. Every “so often,” he remarked, “the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.” He also spoke of an immeasurable “sapping of confidence” in America’s futurity, alongside “indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics,” such as foreclosures, rising unemployment, and a costly health care. The essay that follows was written just prior to that speech, but it nevertheless attempts to understand how the measurable acquaints itself with the immeasurable (desire and the future) through a meshing of gender, race, sex, labour and desire in the accounting of the household – and the oikos, in all its etymological tightening. The question, in one sense, is how the coincidence of crises financial and climatic might unfold and recompose an oikopolitics. The concept of an oikopolitics is offered here as something far more explanatory of the genealogical and familial than understandings of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens have admitted, and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to. It does not simply point to a blurring of the classical distinction between the public realm of politics and the private domain of the household in the trammeling of arousal to labouring, and a socio-political horizon whose possible forms of relation are those of the national state conceived as home. It is also explanatory of the ways politics assumes the task of securing an intimately normative disposition, the raising of a properly political subject on the grounds of the at once familial and national. It is, in another sense then, a post-autonomist contribution to discussions that, thankfully, remain turbulent.

Erik M. Vogt, in “Schmittian Traces in Žižek’s Political Theology (and Some Derridean Specters)” (diacritics 36.1), writes:

the (Christian) miracle of incarnation functions, for Žižek, as the elementary matrix for the act out of which a politics of true universality is to be generated. However, does the mutilated body of Christ really suffice as a bearer for a universalist position of defense against globalized cyberspace, against the mediatization of the miracle? As far as I can tell, Žižek never considers the possibility and actual ubiquity of a mediatized incarnation. Could it be because this would require the admission of “a certain artificiality and technicity, rendering the miracle as what de Vries calls “special effect” [“In Media Res” 25]? And if one grants the possibility of this interface between Christianity on the one hand, and the medium and mediatic on the other hand, would one not have to reposition Christianity — no longer along the lines of a politicizing logic of universality, but rather along the lines of a depoliticizing logic of globalization or “globalatinization,” that is, in terms of a “strange treaty between Christianity as experience of the death of god and the tele-techno-scientific capitalism”?

Discussions of Schmitt’s concept of the political (das politische) prompted a whole series of explorations that turned around the difference between politics and the political or, as rendered in French and Italian, respectively: le politique and la politique, il politico and la politica. I’ll add πολιτικον, πολιτικa - though I’m not sure of how or whether this has traveled or might be read back (and wonder whether I have the tenacity required) through Plato and Aristotle.

Whether the concept of the political can be ascribed to Arendt as well as Schmitt has been a matter of debate, but it’s become more or less accepted that Arendt did indeed write of the political. ( Contrariwise, see eg, Though, if anyone has access to John Ely’s “The Polis and ‘the Political’,” Thesis 11, 46, 1996, I’d be glad of a read.)

Following on from the often interesting, but sometimes bewilderingly conservative, discussion on Carl Schmitt at Long Sunday, four things I would like to archive – or, if not quite archive and certainly not summarise, then perhaps simply four things about Schmitt I would like to return to, think on.

The final paragraph of Alberto Moreiras’ “A God Without Sovereignty - Political Jouissance - The Passive Decision”, CR, 4.3, 2004:

What follows are fragments, with some modification, pulled from notes for a longer study on Lucretius, which explains the Latin turns and preoccupations – they barely amount to a reading of Schmitt’s “The Theory of the Partisan”, from which my attention kept veering. Xposted to the Long Sunday symposium, which continues for the rest of the week, and likely to have more sustained engagements with Schmitt than offered here.

Carl Schmitt is not, I think, the 20th century’s most persistent philosopher of the political but of the mos maiorum – which is to say, politics conceived as the inheritance, codification and preservation of a ‘way of life’. In Schmitt’s writings, as in Lucretius’s time, the mos maiorum ascends to conceptual reverence in the midst of and as a symptom of its crisis.