I’m ‘Warrening’ You! (The Situation in America Today)
Duane Rousselle, PhD
Sanders Gets a Warrening
W e should isolate from within the recent American presidential democratic debate the most important moment: the tense post-debate exchange between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
For those who have not yet seen it, here is a play by play:
The debate reaches its conclusion and the camera begins to pan out from the stage as the candidates shake hands with one another. Elizabeth Warren briskly walks the length of the stage toward Bernie Sanders, and, with an aggressive posture, rejects Sanders’ outstretched hand. Sanders shoots a concerned and confused look to Warren. And then Warren attacks: “I think you just called me a liar on national television.” Sanders responds firmly: “Let’s not do it right now,” Sanders responded. “You called me a liar.” Tom Steyer revealed his position within the wider debate when he cluelessly stated: “I don’t want to get in the middle […] I just wanted to say hi, Bernie.”
The attack came after Warren accused Sanders of sexist comments in a private conversation. Her claim was that Sanders stated that a woman could not win the presidential election. Sanders completely denied the allegation, though the moderators nonetheless presumed it to be true:
Moderator: Sanders, I want to be clear here, you’re saying that you never told senator Warren that a woman could not win the election.
Moderator: Senator Warren, what did you think when senator Sanders told you that a woman could not win the election?
After this question there was some laughter. It is clear that from the perspective of objective neutrality, that is, from the perspective of the moderator’s desk, there was revealed a presumed truth in Warren’s statements. Put another way: the moderators believed her.
All of this brings us to the issues that were placed on the periphery of the debate — indeed on the periphery of the stage — , those that are nonetheless at the center of political discourse today: we are dealing with the limits of ‘identity politics,’ the limits of the paradigm of ‘situated knowledge,’ the limits of a politics of ‘moral accusation.’ In other words, we are dealing with the limits of the position of the ‘beautiful soul’ who positions him/herself as a victim in order to maintain or assert discursive superiority.
It is about time that this paradigm cracks.
The End of “Beautiful Soul” Politics
I use the phrase “beautiful soul politics” to signify a particular modality of discourse, one which does not challenge hegemonic discourse — and so does not truly perform a political act — but rather reaffirms the hegemony through affirmative passivity. This passivity is performed openly under the pretence of activity and engagement. It is a type of passivity that seeks engagement through moral assertions (cloaked as courageous rebellion). The beautiful soul is blind to the general form of politics and to the mechanisms by which it might be fundamentally challenged. There is an insistence on maintaining a posture of radicalism through the endless tightening of one’s own conviction: the beautiful soul always operates through an attitude of conviction by asserting the categories, concepts, and knowledges that were already constructed by the existing political world.
The beautiful soul secures the system against its hole. The perpetuation of the general form of American politics depends essentially upon political actors who present themselves as revolutionary ‘change makers’ but who operate within the contours of a prevailing body of knowledge. This knowledge perpetuates concepts and identities whose purpose is to solicit and challenge political enjoyment. Today’s politicians invite us to enjoy our identities and our critical knowledges as a means of avoiding the hole within all of political discourse. It is by enjoying (or, what is the same thing, renouncing) our various identities that we can provisionally convince ourselves that there does not exist a domain to politics which fundamentally eradicates all existing knowledge and identities.
From Prohibition to Enjoyment
How are religious, gender, class, etc, identities used as a means for capitalizing upon the enjoyment of a population, or as a means for perpetuating systems of submission? Take the Indian political uprisings against Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the culture which keeps the BJP in power. It is here that we witness the emergence of a fundamentally new political logic of enjoyment.
There has been a shift — not just in India, but around the world; and most especially within the United States — from a political logic that made use of the universal prohibitive function of the law. This was also the political logic associated with the biblical narrative of Moses, since the tablets of the law inscribed the following form of law upon the social bond: “you shall not, under any circumstance, …” Lacanian theorists have referred to this function of the law as “symbolic” or “paternal authority.” Yet, we have witnessed the transformation of this political logic toward one based upon a politics of enjoyment.
The neoliberal state gains ascendency by working through the politics of enjoyment and constructing systems of law that secure pockets of enjoyment for particularistic identities. We can witness a shift from a logic of universal prohibition (e.g., “you shall not, under any circumstances, …”) toward a logic of particular affirmative enjoyments. The latter form of law is best expressed according to the following formula: “for each X and Y, we shall affirm particular qualities/enjoyments, …” Unlike the Nazi position which maintained submission and destruction through the universal prohibition of explicit particularist identities (e.g., Jews, Homosexuals, Freemasons, etc), the new political logic secures enjoyments for a series of particular identities.
For example, the Citizenship Amendment’s Act secures rights for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, and Parsis. This logic is consistent with the transforming culture of enjoyment because it refuses to explicitly prohibit a given identity (but rather sustains the prevailing hegemony through an awful affirmation of particular segments of society). Whereas the logic of universal prohibition explicitly attacked a particular series of identities, the new logic of particular affirmatives implicitly attacks them precisely by not at all naming them (but by naming other surrounding identities).
Right-ing Out versus Nothing Left Out
We should not be afraid to find what within our own political discourse lends itself to this new logic. For example, the particular affirmative logic is found also in some discourses of the Left, that is, within LGBTQ+ discourses. This is something that I explored at length in my forthcoming book with Routledge, Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity: A Lacanian Perspective on Identity, Language and Queer Theory (2020). Nonetheless, I argue that in the debate between Trans* and LGBTQ+/Queer Theory, we can find some new, inventive, truths.
The Modi government is an obvious case of the new logic of the Right. Their recent efforts are best expressed by the phrase “Righting Out.” When the Modi government secures enjoyments for particular identities but implicitly write out or ignore important other identities, they demonstrate that there is a missing universal dimension capable of counteracting their particularist assertions. Such a move opens up a space of possible universality among the Left among the various identities and knowledges written out of the apparent hegemonic discourse. On the other hand, when some LGBTQ+ discourses perpetuate a logic of the “+,” that is, of the “wild card,” they demonstrate a desire to be hegemonic precisely by saying it all, or, leaving nothing out. In this way they demonstrate a desire for mastery over language and over the hole that sustains language. Thus, the logic of the Right today is to write out particular identities and render them more universal, while the logic of the Left today seems to be, increasingly, to leave nothing unsaid, and to say it all — even, and especially, when this move is absolutely impossible. In each cases, whether Right or Left, the hole of politics is avoided.
In the same way, Elizabeth Warren, who in her response to John Delaney (who accused her of running on a platform of “impossible promises”), famously stated: “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all of the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.” At this precise moment Warren positioned herself within the American political discourse as a pragmatic voice of reason. In other words, she placed herself as the ‘measured alternative’ to the more impossible discourse of Bernie Sanders. What we could not have realized was that the so-called impossible position is also the genuinely political position.
The Impossible Hole of Politics
Freud famously claimed that there are three “impossible” professions: psychoanalysis, teaching, and politics. By “impossible,” he meant that one cannot be sure of the results, and, indeed, it is unclear as to whether or not the intended result (e.g., a “cure,” an “enlightening” student, or a “revolution”) could occur at all. It seems to me that politics itself consists of an impossible hole around which the entire endeavour of political discourse is secured. It is in relation to the hole of politics that we can mark a distinction between “politicians” and (for lack of a better term) “revolutionaries.”
The politician is the one who attempts to broaden the scope of political knowledge rather than operating upon the hole of politics itself. It is the hole which defines the general form of politics in the sense that it separates the subject from the intensity of unrestrained economic drives. Jacques Lacan even went so far as to claim that philosophy and metaphysics — both of which are systems of knowledge — ‘plug the hole’ of politics. We should go a bit further by claiming that political secularism is the name for politics as such, in as much as the secular state has as its main function the separation ofreligion from the jouissance of economic liberty.
No wonder the French consider their secular political system to be more pure than the rest. The fanaticism of French secularists propels its politicians to defend the contours of their political discourse at all costs: a similar fundamentalist secular movement has been emerging within the United States under the Trump administration, since, in the final instance, the wall is meant to secure not only against intruders but also, and more essentially, against threats to its distinctive secular foundation. The structures of fascism today are therefore distinctively secular since what defines the neo- in neo-fascism is an attempt to take advantage of the fundamental logic of secularism for the purposes of absolute discursive hegemony.
Pelosi’s False Choice
When Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the American House of Representatives) gave an exclusive interview to Stephen Colbert about the articles of impeachment for president Donald Trump, she demonstrated that the Left today is regressing into a blind and dogmatic defence of the American constitution. What Pelosi demonstrates is that she desires to return to the coherence of a ‘golden age’ of political discourse. Pelosi intervenes as a means of rejecting the fact of there being a political hole, her Clinton-esque position replaces that hole with the constitution, appeals to the founders, and the celebration of legal-bureaucratic rationality. For old democrats and leftists, this would sound like a classical republican position, but today it is increasingly the position of the left itself.
After the collapse of the foundation of Western legal-rational discourse — the belief, for example, that the burden of proof is on (s)he who makes the accusation — there is a desire to return to a sort of Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation.’ Without anything to anchor our discourse any longer, we are grasping for rationality and bureaucratic processes to fill the hole. This pragmatic political gesture will only hold up for a while…
