Joining tracks with the world: The impossibility of politics in China. Intro: "Shortly before the October Revolution, Lenin challenged his comrades: 'I don't know how radical you are or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.' A large part of Lenin's challenge was to defamiliarize reality so as to find the possibility of transforming it. Indeed, in the 1920s, Lukács identified Lenin’s particular genius as his explicit focus on revolution as 'an everyday issue', the recalling of radical philosophy to its ostensible vocation of finding a possibility for politics. This possibility entailed, as Lukács put it, 'that the recognition of a fact or tendency as actually existing by no means implies that it must be accepted as a reality constituting a norm for our own actions.' For, he added, 'there is always a reality more real and therefore more important than isolated facts and tendencies – namely, the reality of the total process, the totality of social development.' In this light, today one could well ask how to be as radical as reality, when contemporary analysis becomes ever more resistant to radical totalization, as leftist radicalisms slip into endless particularisms or into quotidian totalisms that appeal more to nominalism than to historicity, while rightist radicalism roots itself ever more firmly in some version of theocracy. Indeed, it seems that analyses of contemporary life increasingly can only configure our current moment through that totalization identified by Hegel's eternal present, or that symptom of history that presented itself as a defining moment of the historical itself and that was thence the occasion for an immanent philosophy of a global unfolding and a return. As in Hegel's moment, today eternality has become enshrined as the end of politics. This is quite clear from the vantage of contemporary China, where the Hegelian eternal present that renarrated global contingency and historical disjuncture in the early nineteenth century into historicist inevitability has been adduced, perhaps paradoxically, to the endless standstill of Hegel's enabling Oriental nightmare."
Link
posted by johannes,
Friday, June 24, 2005
[The Archives]
.
.
.
.
.
|
.
.
.
|
