Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 20:43:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: RE: More on Fascism (and Flows) (Agamben - Benjamin - Schmitt) (Deleuze& Guattari )


Lowe,
 
First of all, thanks for replying and sorry about the length... I get carried away once I start writing stuff...
 
"I'm not sure how you're defining fascism here. Is it fascist to act in an arbitrary ungroundedness? I think that that can be a characteristic, but not essential to it."
 
No - I think of fascism in terms of the unconditional imposition of reactive apparatuses of control, and/or unconditional state power (at least when this arises in a typically capitalist configuration).  Fascism is all about taking shackles off the state and the powerful without doing anything to undermine hierarchy.  But I think this kind of gesture has a special relationship with theories of ungroundedness of a certain kind.  c.f. "microfascism" in Deleuze and Guattari - lines of flight/deterritorialisation which break down striated conceptions but do not form a plane of consistency and continue into pure destructiveness (though I think I'm sort of fusing this with Barthes on Poujade and Reich on the Nazis).  Hence the need for caution.
 
I've definitely met people who play the game I'm on about with "transcendentalism", but you're obviously not one of them so I'll shut up about it.
 
I think you're probably understanding "the political" in a different way to how I've come across the concept; I've not read "Politics of Friendship" and I was assuming you were referring to the Laclau-Mouffe tradition.  I was assuming "the political" is taken to mean the need for a decisive resolution to issues - for a "decision" on a social scale - which of course is also a way of saying, a need for a State which makes this decision and imposes its will - hence my critique.  I think you're right about what you're saying, I was just misunderstanding your use of the concept.
 
"I've not seen that essay by Derrida in quite some time so am unfamiliar with its message. Where is the Spivak essay from? If I know Derrida well enough however I think that he would say that it is "justice" that comes before "law" -- in that law is of course continually interpreted as an act of the present. So its not quite so much a condoning of law's regression or repression. But maybe I shouldn't say this because there are positions stated by Derrida recently that I am unfamiliar with."
 
The Spivak piece was published in the journal "Boundary 2", vol. 21 no. 3 (1994), pp. 16-64.  It's divided into two parts - the second is an excellent contextual analysis of a "development" project, and the first is the exegesis of Derrida I'm on about here.  I often get the impression Derrida is drawing on a whole tradition of Jewish messianism in which the utopian/messianic dimension operates precisely through its own unrealisability, so that the incompletion of the realisation of justice in law is constitutive and is not, therefore, a critique of law itself.  I would contrast, for instance, Benjamin and Deleuze as people whose awareness of the limits of law (in both narrow and broad senses) go further and open onto a flight from law and not simply its ethical "supplementation".
 
I hope this isn't the end of the matter, not least because I want to know how you're conceiving immanence and how it differs from contigency.  You're coming from a slightly different angle on issues I've been considering for a while, and I'm interested to know how this works out, especially if I've been using the idea of contingency inappropriately or too hastily.
 
Andy
 

		
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