Aphorisms II: Immanent Critique and Peculiarity Production

1. Theory for theory's sake, when critical, is nothing but the faith that theory will, if only in the end, emerge, as in a dialectical unfolding, for its other, that is, for political practice.

2. The totality is the infinity of determinate negation, which infinity is the expressive self-containment of the finite--in its own expressive curtailment it penetrates the truth of its own inner void.

3. A concept is immanent to the extent that it is objectively there. This translation is one that typically cannot avoid creating a metalanguage between object and concept, and therefore a metalanguage on thin air--but air is needed to breathe.

4. The self-abstraction of the capitalist system is the hidden truth of bourgeois masochistic wish-fulfillment: to confront the reality of market functioning is enough to invite claims of exception, thereby proving the rule, that reality is indeed a Freudian dream.

5. The immanent critique of capitalist society needs no conscious material on which to work; rather, it is enough that a self-understanding be allowed to emerge from the social unconscious. The concepts contained therein--and surely they are there--are already universals, carrying out their abstractions under the cover of apathy. This is where practice enters the picture.

6. Not particularity, but peculiarity is the mark of the potential for liberation today. The tragedy is that nostalgia has usurped that apparatus which is the infinite machine of peculiarity production, the dream-logic of the inattentive mind. This is capitalism's well-known basis in the ideology of nostalgic progress.

The Saturated Character of Despair

I was thinking today about the problems or ideas that just seize a group/generation/class and lead them onward into uncharted territory. Typically these are present in the history of philosophy as insoluble aporias which must be neutralized by a shifting of philosophical perspective. New concepts must be developed, and new ways of thinking employed. For Hegel's generation the aporia was that between radical Kantian freedom and the embodied expressivist theory of the subject (see Taylor's "Hegel"). For Marx and the Young Hegelians it was rather the refutation by political and social reality of Hegel's Geist, which was disguised by the latter as the "cunning of reason". But what is this problem now, for us? Do we have an animating idea for our age?

It appears we are still stuck in the radical negativity of the Frankfurt School, as far as intellectual consciousness is concerned. Sure, Zizek and Badiou and whoever else have dazzling new philosophies, but I think they have not yet penetrated the age's consciousness. Perhaps in time they will. But for now it still remains: Where do we go from here? Where does thought (and with it radical politics) go? Where can it go, based on the political, social, and economic "parameters"?

I suppose it would be pertinent to ask: Where do I want it to go? What a question! As interested as I am in philosophy, I don't really know. Perhaps in this sense I am a good example of what I think our aporia is. We are directionless. This lack of direction manifests itself not just as an empty field, wherein one could go wherever one so pleases, but as a radical reification, as a chaining to directionlessness itself. If one wants to go somewhere else, one is "a dreamer! An idealist! You can't just change things--it's irresponsible!"

To use Badiou's concept, I think that the current discourse is "saturated". Something must "happen". But how to make that happening a determinate negation? It must begin here, and nowhere else. We live in an age of ideological contradiction, and a major one of these is that between the naive liberal optimism of consciousness and the profound subjectivist pessimism of the sub-/unconscious. The problem is this, that when that deeper level is broken into, when the most egregious theses of bourgeois ideology are abandoned (insofar as these can be), what is there to do but feel despair?