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Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 10(2), August 2009, 16379
Acumen Publishing Ltd. 2009
164 ROBERT SINNERBRINK
3. Michel Foucault, Preface, in G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, R. Hurley, M. Seem &
H. Lane (trans.) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii.
4. Simon Critchley, Whats Left After Obama?, Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters, 12 November
2008, www.adbusters.org/print/1652 (accessed May 2009).
5. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 67.
6. Ibid., 7.
7. Ibid., 7.
as a moral failing: there is something rotten in the state of democracy, a felt inade-
quacy in ocial democratic culture, a discontent demanding a moral response.
Critchleys wager is that we must acknowledge the extent and pernicious
eects of the motivational decit of democracy, the massive political disap-
pointment marking our time, while also rejecting both passive and active forms
of nihilism.8 Indeed, both consumer hedonism and fundamentalist violence are
nihilistic responses to the motivational decits aicting contemporary democra-
cies, a combination strikingly thematized, I note in passing, in recent novels by
Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, and Michel Houellebecq.9 As Critchley insists,
however, we should not succumb to the temptations of passive indierence,
self-interested hedonism, or revolutionary nihilism. Rather, his wager is that
we should construct a motivating ethics capable of empowering individuals and
groups; one that motivates them to face and face down the drift of the present,
an ethics that is able to respond to and resist the political situation in which we
nd ourselves.10 Critchley clearly means here we denizens of auent, lib-
eral-capitalist democracies, whose situation obviously cannot be compared, for
example, to that of oppressed youth in the Gaza Strip, slum-dwellers in Rio or
occupied communities in Iraq. The situated character of Critchleys analysis needs
to be borne in mind, however, the better to understand the kinds of justications
for, and limitations of, his ethical anarchism.
What kind of ethically based political action would be sucient to respond to
our historical and political situation? Here Critchley weds, in audacious fashion,
a Levinasian ethics of innite responsibility with neo-anarchist forms of political
resistance. Political action is grounded in an ethical commitment to respond to
and resist the experiences of injustice within the interstices of global capitalism.
It is worth noting that global capitalism plays the role of assumed background in
Critchleys diagnosis; yet it is not clear to what extent it is to be taken as causally
responsible for generating the kinds of disaection, disappointment and dissen-
sus concerning norms and institutions that would motivate the kind of political
resistance Critchley advocates.11 Such resistance would come, rather, from the
ethical experience that fundamentally shapes the core structure of moral self-
hood; the experience of ethical demand and obligation that motivates a subject
to pledge itself to some conception of the good.12
8. Ibid., 8.
9. See Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992), Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama (London: Picador,
1998), Michel Houellebecq, Platform, Frank Wynne (trans.) (London: William Heinemann,
2002).
10. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 8.
11. As I discuss below, Critchley acknowledges the dislocatory power of capitalism (ibid., 99 .) but
without suggesting that it can necessarily be overcome.
12. Ibid., 9.
In any event, such resistance against the state, and indirectly against global
capitalism, nds expression, for Critchley, in non-state-based forms of political
action. In this sense, it is an ethical and political anarchism that draws on Levinas
as much as the early Marx, for whom the free association of individuals would
constitute a true democracy, or what Marx would later baptize as commu-
nism. Far from a utopian demand for the impossible, however, such anarchistic
political practice can be found, Critchley argues, in post-Colonial indigenous
movements (in Mexico and Australia, for example), but also in the loose coa-
litional associations constituting the anti-globalization movement. Unlike its
libertarian predecessor, this anarchist resistance would be one of responsibility
rather than of liberation. Critchley thus advocates responsible forms of activism,
a non-violent warfare: peaceful actions that can be undertaken at a distance
from the state, in what Critchley calls the interstitial spaces between the anarchic
self-organizing networks of activists and the restrictive apparatuses of the state.
For all Critchleys emphasis on ethics, responsibility and commitment, how-
ever, this is no austere political asceticism. It is more a kind of political aes-
theticism; a carnivalesque, satirical form of politics that mocks and questions
authority through humour, theatricality and spontaneous action. Here one could
cite the kinds of colourful and media-savvy forms of activism familiar from anti-
globalization protests. Groups such as Billionaires for Bush, sporting tuxedos
and ball gowns while carrying placards praising Bushs pro-wealth policies; the
Rebel Clown Army, whose comic antics at G8 summits and the like always add
a note of humour and absurdity to the heavy-handed security presence; and
Pink Bloc, a queer activist group that, as the name suggests, stages colourful
and humorous protest actions celebrating sexual diversity.13 This is not to say
that such anarchic politics always avoids dealing with the state, with law or with
rights; these can be strategically deployed depending on the forces making up
a situation and the resources that actors have at their disposal (as is clearly the
case with the indigenous rights movements). All the same, it remains an ethical
form of anarchism that strives to avoid the extremes of libertarian irresponsibility,
vanguardist violence or empty symbolic play. Under conditions of globalized neo-
liberalism, it is the subversive, satirical protests of the anti-globalization move-
ment, for Critchley, that best exemplify this kind of ethico-political anarchism.
To paraphrase Foucault again, Critchley (like Deleuze and Guattari before him)
reminds us that we do not have to be sad in order to be militant, and that we need
to rout the fascist within us as much as the forces of domination outside us.14
13. See the following websites for more information on these groups: http://billionairesforbush.com/
index.php (Billionaires for Bush); http://www.clownarmy.org/ (Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown
Army (CIRCA); http://anityproject.org/practices/blocking.html (Pink Bloc and the Blocking
movement more generally).
14. Foucault, Preface, Anti-Oedipus, xiv.
There is much more one could say about Critchleys original and welcome con-
tribution to contemporary philosophical debate concerning the nexus between
ethics, politics and resistance. The fact that this is not primarily a theoretical
debate is well worth noting. Critchley is clearly committed to the idea that theory
should be able to motivate or orient practice, even comprehend it; but it must
do so in such as way as to avoid either the pretensions of the universal intel-
lectual, pretending to speak on behalf of, or theoretically comprehend, those
protesting or resisting the state, or to simply use existing movements as empirical
fodder for constructing philosophical arguments. In this respect, he could well be
described as engaging in a kind of critical theory, taken in a broad and generous
sense that encompasses a diversity of philosophical traditions but also remains
committed to engaging with practically engaged subjects and movements. And
at a time when academic political philosophy threatens to become an entirely
professional aair, a battle of technical arguments and analytical refutations
rather than of transformative paradigms or practical interventions, this is very
much to his credit.
In what follows, I would like to highlight three related political themes in
my response to Critchleys ne book, a work replete with many philosophical
riches. These are (i) the adequacy of ethico-political neo-anarchism as a response
to global capitalism; (ii) the question of ideology in Critchleys account of ethical
subjectivity; and (iii) the role of global capitalism in Critchleys account of the
political disappointment and motivational decit aicting liberal democracies.
Neo-anarchism or neo-liberalism?
Let me elaborate the rst question in more detail. Critchley argues for an ethically
responsible form of political neo-anarchism: a non-violent politics of resistance
grounded in an experience of ethical responsibility. Critchleys neo-anarchism cul-
tivates a distance from the state; it is a politics of interstitial resistances to power
grounded in an ethical responsibility for the injustice suered by the Other.
Such a politics is not so much concerned with transforming state institutions as
with resisting state-based power. It accepts that the liberal democratic state and
global capitalism are here to stay, hence it engages in ethico-political forms of
resistance that remain at a remove from state power, questioning, challenging,
subverting it from an independent distance. This is an ethics and politics that
strives to face and face down the drift of the present15 by inventing new politi-
cal subjectivities capable of disturbing the political status quo. Critchleys ethi-
cally motivated subjects engage in and invent new practices of civil disobedience
which are not meant to be met.21 It remains parasitic on the state-based power
that it resists, nding its ethical self-understanding through the questioning,
demanding and resisting character of its ethico-political withdrawal from the
state, its invention of new forms of non-violent warfare that would challenge
hegemonic forms of state power. For these reasons, iek remarks, Critchleys
Innitely Demanding is an almost perfect embodiment of the position to which
my work is absolutely opposed.22
For all Critchleys insistence on the ethical basis for engaged subjectivity and
anarchist political resistance, there is an important question raised here about the
relationship between ethics, politics and violence. As Critchley remarks, it is true
that history is usually written by those wielding guns and sticks, and that one can-
not hope to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters.23 Nonetheless,
the history of ultra-Leftist political vanguardism and here Critchley, contro-
versially, yokes together Leninism, Maoism, Situationism, and radical Islamism
as political forms of active nihilism24 shows one is lost the moment one picks
up guns and sticks.25 Indeed, according to Critchley, one should approach al-
Qaeda with the words and actions of bin Laden resonating against those of Lenin,
Blanqui, Mao, Baader-Meinhof, and Durruti.26 Is it legitimate, however, to yoke
together all of these ideologically clashing, politically disparate, situationally spe-
cic gures and movements? iek, for example, criticizes Critchleys claim that all
such forms of revolutionary vanguardism assuming these can be equated are to
be equally rejected as forms of active nihilism. Indeed, by blurring the dierence
between the distinct political logics of radical egalitarian violence (what Alain
Badiou calls the eternal Idea of revolutionary justice) and anti-modernist fun-
damentalist violence (dening radical Islamism), Critchley lapses, iek argues,
into the purest ideological formalism, echoing the identication, both by liber-
als and conservatives, of so-called Left and Right forms of totalitarianism.27
While it is true, as Critchley points out, that Sayyid Qutb, intellectual pro-
genitor of radical Jihadist Islamism, appropriated Western revolutionary political
theory, in particular Marxist-Leninism, this does not mean that his particular
brand of political ideology is necessarily Western, or that it can therefore be
assimilated to more classical forms of extreme revolutionary vanguardism.28
For the same reason, the fact that al-Qaeda deploys Western media and commu-
nications technology (or beneted from American training during the Russian
invasion of Afghanistan) does not mean that it is therefore to be understood an
essentially Western phenomenon. To make this claim the frequently voiced
Leftist critique that Islamist terrorism is a case of the violence of the West itself
coming home to roost is to ignore the specicity of radical Islamism and its
own ideological-political strategic agenda.29 It would be to say that, because they
are forms of political vanguardism that can be equated as expressions of active
nihilism, there is no essential dierence between, say, the Situationist protests
in 1968, Aldo Moros murder and the Bali bombings. To do so, however, would
be to overlook the important dierences between the ideological motivations,
social experiences and political circumstances behind each of these historically
specic instances of political violence.
In any event, ethical anarchism, Critchley argues, must therefore choose the
pacist path of non-violent resistance (the Quakers, Ghandi or Martin Luther
King), and reject the revolutionary path that inadvertently mirrors the violent
sovereign power it opposes (Bakunin, the Black Panthers, or the Red Brigades).
ieks criticism here is to argue that the question of violent versus non-violent
resistance guns and sticks versus mocking satire and feather dusters surely
depends on the situation and the forces one is confronting. From a historical and
strategic point of view, it is important to note that terrorism involving suicide
bombing, for example, is fundamentally a political response typically enacted by
a weaker force facing intractable occupation or overwhelming imperial power. It
arises, historically and sociologically, under conditions in which all other political
options are experienced as futile or counter-productive. It has specically secular
aims and objectives (forcing a democratic power to withdraw military forces from
occupied homelands), though it is also legitimated by powerful religious and
ideological discourses; and it is typically deployed to eect a maximal strategic
impact from co-ordinated individual or small group actions.30 More generally,
there are surely historical and political situations (iek mentions Hitler) where
violence can and should be used to confront the state, whereas there are clearly
others where all one can and should do is use mocking satire and feather dust-
ers.31 Critchley criticizes iek on just this point, however, arguing that his
political thought is vitiated by a regressive and nostalgic yearning for outmoded
forms of state-based political power, and the exercise of ruthless revolutionary
29. See, for example, Noam Chomsky, September 11 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001).
30. See, for example, Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York:
Random House, 2005). See also Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror
(Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2002), 5484; and Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of Al-
Qaida (London: Abacus, 2007), 83114.
31. iek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 348.
be obsessed with the image, whether the image of the collapsing Twin Towers
or the shock and awe Baghdad bombing campaign.49 Critchley even remarks
that politics is more than ever concerned with the spectacle and control of the
image, which is what makes the Situationism of Guy Debord more relevant than
ever as a diagnostic tool in political analysis.50 Why, then, is this recommended
critical analysis of the ideological character of the politics of fear the hegemonic
control of political spectacle and ideological fantasy to generate a manipulable
collective fear lacking in Critchleys developed account of the demotivation of
ethical subjectivity and need for an ethically grounded resistance?
The early generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists were also confronted
by the problem of a motivational decit during the 1920s and 1930s (faced with
historical and social conditions that might have precipitated revolution, why did
the masses choose fascism?). Their response was to turn to psychoanalysis and
sociology in order to theorize the ideological forces in particular, the ubiquity
of the culture industry that contributed to the destruction of autonomy and
the embrace of authoritarianism. As Critchley puts it, in our own time too we
are desperately in need of a political psychology or political psychoanalysis;
a theory of ideology and subjectivity that could explain the motivational decit
aicting Western democracies.51
We should note, however, that such a motivational decit is hardly evident
on the populist Right, which has brilliantly harnessed the anger, disaection and
alienation with liberal democracy particularly among the marginalized work-
ing classes for its own political ends (usually through anti-progressivist moral
protests, and divisive scapegoating of stigmatized cultural or racial groups). Why,
then, is this more robust conception of the ideological dimensions of contempor-
ary subjectivity an account, in other words, of precisely the motivational decit
with which Critchleys account of ethico-political resistance begins lacking in
his broader theorization of subjectivity, ethics and politics?
ment, arguing that it is the response to a situated injustice or wrong that pro-
vokes the need for an ethics.52 What Critchley calls the passage from an ethics
of innitely demanding commitment to a politics of resistance, however, must
explain the role of global capitalism in generating this disappointment or sense
of injustice that would motivate ethico-political action.
To mark this passage from ethics to politics, Critchley turns to none other
than Marx. The truth of Marxs work, for Critchley, lies in its description of the
nature of capitalism, that is to say, the hegemony of the bourgeoisie and the
reduction of socio-economic life to the circulation of commodities through the
universal equivalent of money.53 What Critchley rejects, however, is the politi-
cal corollary of Marxs socioeconomic analysis, namely the reduction of class
struggle to one basic antagonism (bourgeois/proletariat), and the emergence
of the proletariat as the revolutionary class that would serve as the historical
agent for the emancipation of humanity.54 While Marx was right about the
deracinating eects of capitalism, Critchley claims, this accelerating dislocatory
power leads not to class struggle but rather to the multiplication of social actors
dened by dierences of locality, language, ethnicity, sexuality and so on.55 In
other words, the dening character of class antagonism gives way to a multiplicity
of social agents engaged in local and specic political struggles over moral values
and cultural and social norms, rather than particular material, class or economic
interests. Instead of culture being the shadow play of the economy, the economy
becomes the shadowy backdrop for cultural-political forms of struggle.
Critchley borrows for this analysis Gramscis concept of hegemony, which he
denes as the formation of collective will and political associations out of the
multiplicity of divergent groupings constituting civil society, groupings that are
based in local and situated forms of commonality.56 The challenge, Critchley
argues, becomes one of articulating new political subjectivities born of diverse
social struggles and competing antagonisms; the problem of political subjectivity,
moreover, becomes one of naming a political subject as a focal point for politi-
cal organization.57 Following Laclau, Critchley argues that the logic of political
nomination involves the process of identifying a determinate particularity in
society be it a stigmatized social grouping or form of cultural or social identity
and then hegemonically constructing that particularity into a generality that
exerts a universal claim.58 It involves, in short, the task of identifying that part
They [the government] have never tried to hush up these scandals. And
theyre right not to. That way people can let o steam, get angry, shudder
at the thought of it Who do these politicians think they are? Scumbag
generals! Murderers! And they get more and more angry, and then, burp!
A little liberatory burp to relieve their social indigestion.65
References
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iek, S. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London & New York: Verso.
iek, S. 2007. Resistance is Surrender. London Review of Books (15 November), www.lrb.co.uk/v29/
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iek, S. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.