Anthony Paul Smith has written a post on a debate that has cropped up within his forthcoming edited volume, After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. The debate, therein represented by Michael Burns and Alex Andrews, is over whether political primacy should be afforded (respectively) to the ideal of justice or the insurance of survival. I haven’t read either paper yet, but I have had many conversations with Michael about it. The debate is apparently a consequence of the challenge introduced into political philosophy by Martin Hägglund. To oversimplify a bit, Hägglund’s work claims not that survival should be an ideal that takes precedence over all others, but that it is the latent end of all actual human activity, whatever the stated aim or ideal might be. Survival is simply what it sounds like: the desire to continue living, to persist in some form after death. This desire is primary, and results from life’s definitive ongoing struggle with its mortal finitude, such that every goal life sets for itself is intended to cope with this condition, to struggle against disappearance.
According to Hägglund (who derives his position from Derrida), notions of God, immortality, glory, and even more secular ideals like national pride, justice, etc, are ultimately disguises for the desire to live on, to persist. This is obvious in the case of God, but in the secular case it would involve the desire that one’s memory and one’s loved ones persist, ultimately culminating in a utopian ideal of indefinite perpetuation of a prosperous society. Hägglund claims that all such ideas, be they secular or theistic, become entangled in contradiction because they involve a desire to finally overcome finitude, to insulate oneself against mortality, and thus to destroy the very condition that made them possible in the first place. The argument is too complex to repeat here, but his basic claim is that we must no longer undermine the de facto struggle for survival by misperceiving it in terms of ideals that deny its primary status, ideals that strive for something beyond finitude even though finitude is the necessary condition for all human activity.
The problem with this argument, at least superficially, is that it neglects the necessarily qualified character of life, and the sense in which the political status of life is always a matter of the kinds of life worth living. The question of in what the political body consists is not simply a matter of life, but of whom determines the worthiness of qualified forms of life. Now in traditional liberalism, it is taken for granted that oneself alone can legitimately determine the worthiness of one’s way of living, so long as this form of life does not impede upon the same liberty of others. This has logically culminated in a politics in which no form of life is specifically championed, where the object of political concern is not the form of life but of life itself, abstracted from the form it has taken: biopolitics. (It is strange that, while Agamben’s work is often derided for its oversimplifying distinction between bios and zoe, his point is precisely that this blunt distinction is a problem in reality, not an analytic tool to be adopted. The Greek distinction is only an imprecise precursor or prefiguration of the biopolitical subtraction of a pure, formal condition for living. The goal of his research is precisely to think a way out of this distinction.)
While the ostensible intent of this shift is commendable, seeking to protect individual liberty from heteronomous determination as far as possible, the protection of the formal condition for individual liberty dissimulates an equal, if not more fundamental, political concern: equality. While all may enjoy the formal equality of individual liberty to determine their own forms of life, they by no means share a materially equal means of doing so. Some are more equal than others, more capable of leading a life the deem worthy than others. Freedom is, for the majority, only an abstract freedom, a freedom to determine what they value in thought, but not necessarily to obtain what they value in actuality.
Beyond mere survival as condition for individual liberty, the concern would be for a just distribution of the means of living. Yet this brings us to the same series of problems Anthony identifies: doesn’t this account restrict itself to human life alone, neglecting not only other animal and vegetal forms of life, but also the ecological, extra-human conditions of human life in the first place? Isn’t the critique of a politics of mere survival guilty of restricting itself to human survival at the expense of ecosystemic survival?
Yet I think we still need a certain form of humanism here. (My reasoning is, as far as I can tell, very close to Pete’s Brandomian account of the ethical status of animals.) To an extent, it would be absurd to bemoan non-human creatures being deprived of an equal share in the means of living, not because animal life is somehow intrinsically unequal to human life, but because we have no way of knowing whether, and if so, how animals evaluate the worthiness of possible forms of living. This is not to exclude the likelihood that animals do prefer certain ways of life to others. (Indeed, its seems equally certain that living things struggle to survive, and that they strive for certain forms of survival over others.) Yet such an inward determination is not a political concern. One’s commitment to a certain evaluation only becomes a political concern when it can be articulated to others, and hence when one becomes committed not only to this evaluation, but to others insofar as a bond of trust has been established. What is at stake is no longer the evaluation itself, but the social bond that makes the collective recognition of this evaluation possible.
Now, in a Derridean sense, we can allow that no living thing is excluded a priori from the possibility of committing oneself to others through a statement; but if such commitments are not articulated, then the status of possible evaluations on the part of non-human life is wholly derivative of the community of rational (mutually committed) agents. We can only imagine, hypothesize, or speculate about what forms of life an animal might value, and while these hypotheses might be appropriate in broad strokes, they can only go so far. Because of this limitation, non-human life-forms are in fact excluded from being political agents, insofar as they cannot be said to determine what forms of life they find worthy without this claim being made by human beings. This does not mean they should not be of concern, but only that they are incapable of voicing their own concerns, and hence of being counted as a political agent in the strict sense.
So while there may be a broader sense of justice tied to a kind of ecosystemic survival, it wouldn’t be of the same kind as the political sense of justice. Again, this is not to lessen the importance of former, which very well may be a necessary condition of the latter (I tend to think so, and I believe Anthony does as well). But political justice is not reducible to the intra-political status of survival (biopolitics), nor to the meta-political status of survival (ecology).
Kvond: In Spinoza, of course, there is no contradiction: justice or will to surive. The will to survive is simply the conatus, and justice is that which promotes the conatus, so when you say…
Reid: “Yet I think we still need a certain form of humanism here. (My reasoning is, as far as I can tell, very close to Pete’s Brandomian account of the ethical status of animals.) To an extent, it would be absurd to bemoan non-human creatures being deprived of an equal share in the means of living, not because animal life is somehow intrinsically unequal to human life, but because we have no way of knowing whether, and if so, how animals evaluate the worthiness of possible forms of living.”
Kvond…you touch on the very problem of their nexus. The way that Spinoza solves this is that he qualifies as “joy” (and surely we can extend this down the animal chain), anything that increases the number of ways a body can affect or be affected. It is an increase in the value of complexity of relations. Now to weigh such a numerical increae is a tricky thing, and must incorporate historical patterns and capacties, but given this analytic: there is NO contradiction between justice and conatus.
The fine thing about this solution, at least in my view, is that it does not step very deeply into the absolute quicksand binaries of self/others.
I don’t find this very convincing. You seem to foreground the move to justice in communicability. I think that is problematic on a number of levels, not least because you can’t do things with feral children (admittedly not a huge part of the population), but because it isn’t entirely clear to me how this avoids a kind of imperialism. They cannot communicate, so we will communicate for them. It also, as Hägglund discusses in a pretty subtle analysis, continues to set up the political and justice as a site of exclusion.
Nevermind ‘feral children’ (not an interesting political proble), what are you going to do with unborn children and fetus’s of every kind (I mean this seriously). See Sloterdijk’s contraversial comments on abortion as an “immigration” issue.
You’re right about Hagglund, this is clearly a quick and dirty gloss. I meant to put up a disclaimer along with this that its a very sketchy response.
I tend to agree with the the way Pete deals with issues of communicative competence in the post I linked to, and in his comment here: http://drjon.typepad.com/jon_cogburns_blog/2010/04/questions-about-chapter-3-of-brandoms-saying-and-doing.html
As he says, details need to be fleshed out, but the fundaments of it are solid.
“it isn’t entirely clear to me how this avoids a kind of imperialism. They cannot communicate, so we will communicate for them.”
I’m saying the exact opposite of what you suggest here. The point is not that because they cannot communicate, we must communicate for them, but on the contrary, that because we are incapable of establishing communication, we must absolutely not communicate for them, or incorporate them into the political body through an effacing representation. Its really a straight-up Derridean approach, I think. We obviously have to, to a degree, attempt to understand them (be they animals, or people with whom we for whatever reason cannot communicate) and prevent doing them harm, precisely because of the possibility of communication (this is Pete’s point). We have to treat them as if communication will be established, despite there not yet being any. We cannot act as if there is no possibility, because this would basically admit that there is nothing to communicate…and we cannot act as if we can do so for them, because this would be imperialistic and violent in the most standard sense.
Nonetheless, the ‘institution of rationality’ has an essential relation to those whom have even the slightest chance of belonging to it, and this relation is not one of incorporation, assimilation, or false representation. (As an aside, it also has an essential relation to its material conditions of possibility – including ecological conditions – as Pete is trying to work out with his modified categorical imperative.) There is a special kind of care, respect, and responsibility involved, and it is certainly a political concern, but it is derivative of justice in the sense of the internal consistency of the rational community, without which I don’t see what justification there would be for treating such potential members of the community with such status. If the political body cannot recognize a rigorously universal and egalitarian (and hence just) criterion for membership within it, I can’t see how it could extend its concern to its outside in a just way – it seems this is precisely how both cultural and ecological imperialism came about in the first place.
Sorry, I shouldn’t have really responded as I don’t really have the time for a conversation about it. I’d want to ask very foundational questions concerning the status of reason and, well, that just isn’t going to get us anywhere as I suspect, like most of these debates, it comes down to a differend.
Fair enough
Reid: “We have to treat them as if communication will be established, despite there not yet being any.”
Kvond: I just am wondering why there is a categorical denial of communication – but the insistance that there is something, some x, which is very much like communication but does not qualify. To me this falls to Wittgenstein’s so-called Private Language argument, which I take all the way down. The assumption that there is no “communication” when I and my dog go to the door to answer a knock and both of us are wary, is silliness to me.
Read Pete’s post, he’s better at this than I am. The point, to be brief, is not that you are not communicating with your dog, but there is no norm of rationality to which your dog thereby commits itself.
Will read it, thanks.
I’m only using the vague word ‘communication’ here because Anthony was using it. Something like ‘discourse’ or ‘rational communication’ would probably be more appropriate.
I think to be honest you’ve set up a bit of a false problem here, related to ones distaste for particular terminology. For Hagglund survival can never be ‘mere’ survival like Agamben’s notion of bare life. Rather, it is something like life as opposed to death, were one could see merely abstract freedom as a privation of life, since it reduces a human to basic machinery etc.
Hey Reid, I know you are deferring mostly to Pete’s post, but I did want to note that in the field of Disability Studies one of the main approaches of crossing the communication divide is through a newish method called “intensive interaction.” The goal here is basically to bracket preconceived communicative notions and establish communication with those who are comatose or otherwise unable to engage in what might be called “rational communication.” The findings are quite interesting. In fact, there is a Deleuzian sociologist who argues that by curtailing humanism entirely the “able-bodied” community is able to “communicate” with those who are shunned as “disabled” through intuition of impersonal Life… Of course, there is also a sense in which impairments vary by degree, so many of those in Disability Studies are themselves impaired (the sociologist mentioned has cerebral palsy) and suggest that their proximity to other disable persons allows for them a unique position in establishing communicative discourse (albeit at a different level of sapience than Pets/Brandom note).
Pingback: Politics of Survival | Planomenology | leaflettering