Hypostatic Void

A striking example of this relapse is the purely antirepressive conception of the politics of the people. People are 'mobilized' because they suffer too much mistreatment. Brutalized by what turns out to be, fundamentally, the only active force of the political field: the State, the boss, the cop. These wicked entities, suddenly, exaggerate their evil designs. The great battle cry 'Down with repression!' can be heard. The petit bourgeois is boiling with indignation.

In the early 1920s, Lenin proposed that Marxist philosophers should form a "society of the materialist friends of Hegel" -today, perhaps, the time has come for radical philosophers to form a "society of the materialist friends of Plato:' Plato is the first in a series of philosophers (Descartes and Hegel being the two main others) who fell out of favor in the twentieth century, being blamed for all our misfortunes. Badiou has enumerated six main (and partially intertwined) forms of twentieth-century anti-Platonism:

And the same goes for love-that is to say, what is it to find oneself passionately in love? Is it not a kind of permanent state of exception? All the proper balances of our daily life are disturbed, everything we do is colored by the underlying thought of "that.' The situation is properly "beyond Good and Evil": we feel a weird indifference towards our moral obligations with regard to our parents, children, friends-even if we continue to meet them, we do so in a mechanical way, in a mode of "as if"; everything pales into insignificance compared to our passionate attachment. In this sense, falling in love is like the blinding light that hit Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus: a kind of religious suspension of the Ethical, to use Kierkegaard's terms. An Absolute intervenes and derails the normal run of our affairs: it is not so much that the standard hierarchy of values is inverted, but, more radically, that another dimension enters the scene, a different level of being

The question that I ask and attempt to answer in this chapter is this: how can phenomenology as a philosophical method of investigation account for gender? Although many feminists have expressed reservations about the possibility that the master's tools could ever dismantle the master's house, phenomenology as a philosophical method seems to have provided exceptionally useful tools for feminist inquiry. From Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex to recent studies on feminine corporeality, it has formed a significant part of the growing corpus of feminist philosophy. Yet it is in no way obvious how it could account for the question of gender. To what extent is it possible to study gender within the paradigm of a philosophy of a subject or of consciousness?

[Deleuze and Guattari] trace a short history of debt that encourages a non-economistic reading of the economy, a reading not based on exchange but rather on an asymmetrical creditor-debtor power relation. A non-economistic interpretation of the economy means, on the one hand, that economic production is inseparable from the production and control of subjectivity and its forms of existence, on the other hand, that money, before fulfilling the economic functions of measure, means of exchange, payment, and accumulation, manifests the power to command and distribute the places and tasks assigned to the governed. [...] Capital is above all a power to command and prescribe exercised through the power of destruction/creation of money. [...] Anti-Oedipus and the university courses, conceived and written well before the institution of neoliberal policies, help us to understand why debt and finance, far from being pathologies of capitalism, far from expressions of certain people's greed, constitute strategic mechanisms orienting investments and, thereby, determining the forms of "destruction" of the old and the "creation" of a new world capitalist order. The financial and banking systems are at the center of a politics of destruction/creation in which economics and politics have become inextricable. If we want to understand how powers are reconfigured by the debt economy, we must first of all establish the links between economics and politics. [...] Capitalism objectively conceals the fact that money functions in two fundamentally different ways, as revenue and as capital. In the first case, money is a means of payment (wages and revenue). It buys a quantity of already-existing goods imposed by capitalist production. It is limited to reproducing the established power relations and forms of subjection necessary for that production. In the second, money functions as a financing structure (credit money and the quasi-money of finance). In other words, it has the possibility of choosing and deciding on future production and commodities and, therefore, on the relations of power and subjection underlying them. Money as capital preempts the future.

One may drink from a glass, but may also hurl it a [sic] somebody or use it as a paper-weight and even keep in it a butterfly. But while objects of nature are, so to say, “neutral” in regard to the mode of their use, the products of human labour as objectifications are not: in the real context of social life they have a normal, a “proper” use which cannot be systematically violated without invoking some kind of social sanction. A glass is intended for drinking and, roughly speaking, something is a glass when it is systematically and commonly used in this function. Human products exist in a network of norms, of social rules of use (generally having the character of “customs”) through which they acquire their identity, their “meaning”, and which circumscribed the proper aim and mode of their employment. And since the object is effectively created for this use and materially adapted to it and only to it, the norm is, as it were, embodied in its physical frame. It is in this sense that man-made objects are objectifications of human abilities: they materially represent modes and ways of action which each individual must “appropriate” (in the sense of interiorizing the corresponding rules of use), at least in respect of the most common elements of his environment, to be able to lead a (for his society) normal human life. So, as against nature, social life, even in its most elementary forms, appears as patterned by norms, and the products of labour function as material vehicles of these norms: they are not simply objects of use, but use values.

But there isn’t only what there is.

–Exactly. Now let’s turn from description to prescription, from structure to rules. What will we tell writers they’re allowed, from a political standpoint? Total freedom to imitate whatever they want, in the name of realism? Or a total ban on imitation, in the name of idealism and the authority of the glorious future? Or imitation only of models that are instructive, heroic, useful. . .

Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds, out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the glue-pot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven – an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.)

Thrasymachus then came forward, stood up very straight, and closed his eyes like the Pythia at Delphi, meditating. On the shade-filled patio the silence was deafening.

A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word - 'Everything' - and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.

It is as if, for Plato (or rather his textual stand-in, Socrates), it were impossible to begin to think affirmatively without having first refuted the sophist. The word ‘refute,’ moreover, is not really accurate. Rather, it is a question of defeating him, which means: reducing him to silence. The violence of that moment, which also involves a dark comedy of sorts, derives from the fact that all means are fair, once it’s not so much a matter of being right as it is of winning. What is involved here, in a way, is a sort of struggle to the death, in the sense it takes on in Hegel, when the Master and the Slave confront each another in order to determine how thinking will continue. Here, too, the issue is one of determining how philosophy can become established, and in order for that to happen, the sophist – the man who places language at the service of personal interest and the established powers – must leave the public stage. The fact that this moment is a negative one is also owing to one key point: rhetoric, of which the sophist is the master, accompanies a thinking in which negation holds sway. Why should this be so? Because the sophist defends a thesis (an opinion) only insofar as he knows that he could also defend the opposite thesis. This is the inevitable consequence of a thinking – actually an intellectual and verbal dexterity – that is made to serve not the invariance of a principle but rather the variability of opinions, which reflect power relations, localized desires and interests. The battle between Socrates and Thrasymachus is ultimately a battle between philosophy, the handmaiden of the eternity of truths, and rhetoric, the handmaiden of the opportunism of interests. Ontologically, it affords a potent version of the battle between two orientations in thought. One of them gives credit to Being for being thinkable as being what it is. The paradigm is therefore mathematics. The other makes Being no more than the momentary display of language’s ability to orchestrate the cutting up of Being and, as the need arises, to induce its negation. Therefore what counts is linguistic flexibility, which also exploits non-sense or contradiction. Poetry, we sense, is not far off. As far as Socrates is concerned, Thrasymachus is diabolical, albeit with no grandeur other than his sheer brutality. He is diabolical in Goethe’s sense: the Spirit that always negates.

–Dogs now! Good grief, we’re looking for justice in a zoo!

[I]t is certainly legitimate to read the 1843 Critique - with the help of the Feuerbachian categories and the parallel between democracy and Christianity - as a work guided by Marx's strong will to effect through Hegel (but this passage is not just any kind of passage) and against him a transition from the dogmatic essence of politics to its ethical or anthropological essence.

Everything hinges on the interpretation of the monos of monarchy: either the essence of politics is domination and by monos is meant the domination of a single master - in which case monarchy is the apotheosis of politics as a paradigm of domination and democracy is a spurious form of politics, a shameful transaction. Or the aim of politics is the institution of a community among human beings, the institution of a monadology, and by monos is meant unity. In this case - and Marx's whole movement in the 1843 Critique is in truth right here - the point is to play out the transformative method on the model of permutation of the subject and the predicate: "God is love," whence "Love is god." And applied to the political field: "The King is unity," whence "Unity is king" - to which should be added that the real subject demos replaces monos, since constitutional monarchy as Hegel conceives it is an inconsistency that bears fruit on the condition that it is overcome. In this case, democracy, as the perfect self-attainment of the essence of politics, is raised to the summit of the hierarchy of political regimes, with monarchy falling back to the rank of an imperfect form.