November 18, 2008
the criticism begins
Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, the put aside our differences and achieve union. Obama’s politics is governed by a longing for unity, for community, for communion and the common good. The remedy to the widespread disillusion with Bush’s partisan politics is a reaffirmation of the founding act of the United States, the hope of the more perfect union expressed in the opening sentence of the US Constitution. It is a powerful moral strategy whose appeal to the common good attempts to draw a veil over the agonism and power relations constitutive of political life. The great lie of moralism in politics is that it attempts to deny the fact of power by concealing it under an anti-political veneer. At the same time, moralism engages in the most brutal and bruising political activity. But the reality of this activity is always disavowed along with any and all forms of partisanship. Moralistic politics is essentially hypocritical.Yet, what is most hypocritical, of course, is the talk of change. What are the elements of Obama’s strategy? Let me identify three. Firstly, we have a depoliticized moral discourse of the common good, backed up by a soft and inoffensive version of historically black Christianity. Obama inhabits the rhetorical space of prophetic, black Christianity, while adopting none of its critical radicalism, none of the audacity that one can find in the sermons of Pastor Jeremiah Wright.
more from AdBusters here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 11:49 AM | Permalink
Comments
"Moralistic politics is essentially hypocritical".
I'm sure Machiavelli would approve. It is nonsense, of course. Politics is about the use of power to implement moral choices. In the 1960s, Canadians made a choice that every citizen should have the right to health care by virtue of being a citizen of Canada. Funding would be provided out of general tax revenues. Americans have yet to accept that every American has a right to health care. This is a simple moral choice - you either believe that access to health care is a fundamental human right or you do not. Once the moral principle is settled, the implementation of a universal health care system is not difficult. Moral choices like this underlie most political decisions.
Posted by: Jared | Nov 18, 2008 12:51:10 PM
Better that it should come from the left though.... takers?
Later in the article, his point on two possible consequences is taken. I saw Amy Goodman make a similar point in a lecture a week or two ago. I /hope/ for the first.
Posted by: Chuk | Nov 19, 2008 1:40:08 AM
Barack Obama is a proponent of constitutional democracy? What!? And he's not going to dismantle global capitalism? No way!
Simon, please, drop more of these devastating truth bombs on us benighted people who voted for Obama under the impression he was a revolutionary socialist-anarchist. You might want to CC it to David Duke, he thought that too.
Obviously, if we'd known he was going to take action from within the system, rather than single-handedly destroying it, we would have stormed the barricades instead of dancing to Ghanian tribute songs upon his democratic election.
It's lucky, Critch, that you speak from a position of true radicalism, that of tenured professor in a university, where real change happens, not this democratic nonsense of closing Gitmo and instituting a carbon-trading market and ending eight years of anger, shame and misery for citizens of the U.S.A.
I am glad you mention that you have no idea how someone like Obama will be able to address "the disgusting fact of poverty." So true! I mean, community organizer on the South Side of Chicago? Nice try, Barack. Where are the essays on Gilles Delueze, pal?
Fight on, true believer! You keep carrying that banner of truly Significant change!
Posted by: Asad Raza | Nov 19, 2008 11:28:57 AM
Oh God, I hadn't noticed this was Critchley. How exhausting.
Quote: 'There is the potential for a political moment here, but it is a potential whose actualization is denied by the very representative process which is being celebrated.'
First, the thought that what happened on Nov. 4th wasn't a political moment, or at least a moment sufficiently political for Simon Critchley, should give one pause. My sense is that the TRULY political, for critch, has more to do with crystals, rhizomes, set theory, or brusselsprout fractals.
I always get the sense from Critch's personal brand of "Left" that he's consistently disappointed that 'we' haven't 'won' - whatever 'we' or 'won' might refer to. Hence the title of his book 'Infinitely Demanding.' It seems the truly political stance is one of stopless insatisfaction and demand. If you're not being demanding, you're doing something wrong.
It's like one of Freud's hysterical patients. She kept demanding more and more things from her husband, until one day she was complaining about how she wanted some caviar. As soon as the husband was going to go get her some, she stopped him and said: 'please, don't give me the caviar. Just let me want it.'
What I think must have been so unnerving for Critchley was the feeling of collective accomplishment. But, to be fair to him, this kind of cereal box recipe for political ethics was probably what he told himself in the morning to make it through the Bush era. Luckily for him, it's over.
Posted by: Alancito Peich | Nov 19, 2008 1:26:11 PM
Cereal box recipe: quite right, Señor Peich. And here, it would seem, is the recipe for being a prolific, productive and richly rewarded philosopher of the left:
1) State the obvious. Example: Barack Obama is a member of the U.S.A.'s Democratic Party.
2) Denigrate the very idea of pragmatic political action by making sweeping and contextless generalizations: "Moralistic politics is essentially hypocritical."
3) Having decried the limitations of any pragmatic, achievable course of action, you redefine true politics as "the creation of interstitial distance" from the state. This means that true politics must never be part of the state, must always remain oppositional to it. Thus the actual government can never be political.
4) Since governmental activity is never "true" politics, you have now justified philosophy, paradoxically, as the true political praxis. What Barack Obama has spent his life doing is some kind of capitulation.
The Brave Critchley. I can hear him now, Aladdin-like, singing "A Whole New World" from the rooftop of the New School, nestled in the interstitial spaces between water towers, waiting for the genie to grant him the power to wish away the mode of production.
Shall we call it caviar anarchism?
Posted by: Asad Raza | Nov 19, 2008 2:08:29 PM
A silver lining:
Perhaps there is the chance for a 'true political moment' if we all rally around our revulsion of Simon Critchley's infinite twaddle?
(for all those who love Simon Critchley's pearls, I apologize for making assumptions.)
Posted by: Alancito Peich | Nov 19, 2008 5:45:16 PM
“Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, to put aside our differences and achieve union. Obama’s politics is governed by a longing for unity, for community, for communion and the common good.”
Why is it anti-political to long for unity? And why is such longing a political fantasy? Political action may be rooted in a longing for any number of relationships between members of a state, from despotism to democracy. Despots long for despotism, the people long for liberty. Neither is any more fantastic than the other. Neither is any more improbable than the other. Community is no more fantastical than renegade capitalism.
Critchley says as much in his first consequence of Obama’s victory, but which he calls “unlikely”. Unlikely is not the same as fantastic.
But Critchley sees his second possibility as most likely and the one preferred by Obama’s campaign.
“...this possibility ,” he says, “is undoubtedly the one favoured by the Obama campaign itself, which explains the somber, slightly disappointed tone to Obama’s speech on the night of his victory: ‘The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term’. On this view, the rhetoric of change (‘Together we can change the country and change the world’) was simply what it took to get people mobilized. Once the victory is secure, there must be no further mobilizations at the popular level.”
I heard Obama say that and did not take any such meaning from his remarks. Critchley’s imagination is working overtime. He puts words in Obama's mouth. How does he know what the Obama campaign “undoubtedly favoures”?
My understanding of Obama’s words was that they were a cautionary note: we’ve accomplished this, but we’re not there yet, and may not be in even one term. The implied subsequent statement I heard was, but we can get there if we stay mobilized.
Is that fantastic? It’s no more fantastic than the futility Critchley seems to suggest is at the center of Obama’s victory.
Posted by: Jim | Nov 19, 2008 10:58:04 PM
Post a comment