Myriam Revault d'Allonnes is the author of "Pourquoi nous n'aimons pas la démocratie" (Why we don't love democracy; my translation), a book published in February 2010 by Seuil:
www.seuil.com/fiche-ouvrage.php?EAN=9782020986687
Publisher's description: "We remember Churchill's saying: 'Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. Obviously, we do not 'love' democracy. And yet we are all democrats ... This strange process of disenchantment is as virulent as it is old: already in ancient Athens, there was no shortage of critics of democracy. Myriam Revault d'Allonnes interrogates not only the criticisms or sarcasms levelled at democracy, but also the nature of the democratic experience, with its uncertainty, conflicts, incompleteness, inextricably linked to what opposes and threatens it. How should democratic man, confronted with this always problematic existence, not fall prey to dissatisfaction and permanent disappointment? Nevertheless, if we do not 'love' democracy, can we not desire to? Because it is the democratic experience that makes us ethical and political subjects, citizens who do not just want to be governed, 'not like that, not for this, not by them'." (my rough translation)
Myriam Revault d'Allonnes is Professor of Philosophy at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), Paris.
Showing posts with label desire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label desire. Show all posts
24 September 2010
22 May 2010
Article: Democracy vs Desire: Beyond the Politics of Measure
Andy Robinson's article "Democracy vs Desire: Beyond the Politics of Measure" was published in "Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed"
(issue 60, 23 [2], fall/winter 2005-06: page numbers not given).
The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:
www.theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Andy_Robinson__Democracy_vs_Desire__Beyond_the_Politics_of_Measure.html
Excerpts: "My contention in this article is that anarchy and democracy are incompatible, because anarchy is based on an active politics of desire whereas democracy is necessarily reactive and thus plays into the repressive logics of industrial society and especially, of contemporary capitalism. [...] Democracy and the politics of desire may seem complementary, but in fact they run contrary to each other. [...] That minorities be prevented from expressing themselves with wildness and immediacy – that they remain always the 'loyal opposition' within the confines of a system in which the majority gets its way – is a necessary part of the idea of democracy. For this reason, democracy goes against the emancipation of desire, operating simply as a particularly powerful ideology of recuperation with especially effective, and therefore insidious, ways of excusing social repression. [...] [D]emocracy is a specific instance of state power – and not, as implied by some anarchists, a critique of state power or a form of anarchy. [...]
"The people – the 'decent' or 'law-abiding' or 'hard-working' ordinary folk or 'citizens' invoked to justify crackdowns and repression – are the agent of repression, while the excluded, the new barbarians, defined as criminal, indecent, and 'anti-social,' are the object. It is thus 'rule by the people' at its most brutal – a violent tyranny by those who define themselves as the authentic people, over those who are excluded from it. It is also, of course, a self-policing of capitalism and industrial society – but this is unsurprising, since the 'people', after all, are not defined externally to this society but rather are constructed by it. [...] Reactive psychology, which expresses itself in the ethics of self-deadening 'shoulds,' transmutes the internal repression of desire (itself necessary for one to subordinate oneself to the majority) into a hostility against the expression of active desires by others, thus drawing social repression as the consequence of psychological repression. Where the majority have such character-structures, democracy can be nothing more than a dictatorship by bigots. Where they do not, democracy is unstable, undermined in its calculative finality by desires that overflow it. [...]
"Is it a coincidence that the same self-styled anarchists who identify anarchism with democracy are also often insufficiently rigorous in opposing the new form of capitalist control expressed through the crackdown culture? [...] Everywhere, 'class struggle' anarchists rally behind the calls to oppose 'anti-social' activities, even to the point of critically supporting crackdowns (always, of course, with the usual supplements, denouncing the existing state even while forming the working-class itself into a parallel state with its own repressive force and its own conformity-imposing closures). One thus finds these would-be anarchists cast as the last defenders of the state. For the state, in its last instance, is not the macro-social aggregate; it is the logic of control and policing of life from above, which is epitomised locally in policing agencies (whether those of the official state police or of vigilantes, snoops, and busybodies), and psychologically in repressively formulated ethics (whether those of a liberal or aristocratic elite, or those of a self-righteous 'decent people' fixated on its own decency). Without a rejection of the fixed identities and categories that operate as cops in our heads, there can be no destruction of the state – only its transmutation, fragmentation, and ultimate revival ih [sic] new, and maybe stronger, forms.
"The 'people' who rule must after all be a determinate entity, and in order to be conceived as such, the 'people' must be given fixity as what Max Stirner terms a spook – an ideological construction to which actual people subordinate themselves, and of which one is a part only to the extent that one conforms. [...] 'Rule by the people' thus turns out not to be self-determination by actual people at all, but rather, to be the tyrannical imposition of a normative conception of an essence of peoplehood by those whose own identity is constructed around this category. What is excluded is the 'un-people' to misquote Stirner – the flows of desire and activity which exceed and overflow the fixed category, which are unspeakable in terms of its representations. [...] The adherents of anarchy, the opponents of despotic gestures of this kind, must necessarily be on the side of the excluded, indeed, among the excluded, and thus, against the imposition of conformity, and radically exterior to the imagined 'community' their fixed categories construct. [...]
"Democracy is not an inclusion of all those who vote; it is a means of silencing those who are left in the minority. [...] Active desire is not capable of accepting the a priori insistence that it conform to the result of a majority decision. [...] Thus, desire is minoritarian not simply in that it can often end up in the minority when a vote is taken; it is minoritarian in that it is non-denumerable, it cannot be reduced to something to be counted and weighed on a scale with other desires or with other entities of whatever kind. To reject the aspiration to be the majority – not only in the numerical sense but in the ideological sense, to reject the aspiration for one's own desires and contingencies to be classified as decent and normal to the exclusion of others – is a logical extension of active desire. Active desire, wildness, is unconditional and irreducible. It cannot, therefore, find expression in a system which reduces it to its representation, as one among many elements to be counted."
Andy Robinson is a Leverhulme Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, from which he holds a PhD in Political Theory.
(issue 60, 23 [2], fall/winter 2005-06: page numbers not given).
The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:
www.theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Andy_Robinson__Democracy_vs_Desire__Beyond_the_Politics_of_Measure.html
Excerpts: "My contention in this article is that anarchy and democracy are incompatible, because anarchy is based on an active politics of desire whereas democracy is necessarily reactive and thus plays into the repressive logics of industrial society and especially, of contemporary capitalism. [...] Democracy and the politics of desire may seem complementary, but in fact they run contrary to each other. [...] That minorities be prevented from expressing themselves with wildness and immediacy – that they remain always the 'loyal opposition' within the confines of a system in which the majority gets its way – is a necessary part of the idea of democracy. For this reason, democracy goes against the emancipation of desire, operating simply as a particularly powerful ideology of recuperation with especially effective, and therefore insidious, ways of excusing social repression. [...] [D]emocracy is a specific instance of state power – and not, as implied by some anarchists, a critique of state power or a form of anarchy. [...]
"The people – the 'decent' or 'law-abiding' or 'hard-working' ordinary folk or 'citizens' invoked to justify crackdowns and repression – are the agent of repression, while the excluded, the new barbarians, defined as criminal, indecent, and 'anti-social,' are the object. It is thus 'rule by the people' at its most brutal – a violent tyranny by those who define themselves as the authentic people, over those who are excluded from it. It is also, of course, a self-policing of capitalism and industrial society – but this is unsurprising, since the 'people', after all, are not defined externally to this society but rather are constructed by it. [...] Reactive psychology, which expresses itself in the ethics of self-deadening 'shoulds,' transmutes the internal repression of desire (itself necessary for one to subordinate oneself to the majority) into a hostility against the expression of active desires by others, thus drawing social repression as the consequence of psychological repression. Where the majority have such character-structures, democracy can be nothing more than a dictatorship by bigots. Where they do not, democracy is unstable, undermined in its calculative finality by desires that overflow it. [...]
"Is it a coincidence that the same self-styled anarchists who identify anarchism with democracy are also often insufficiently rigorous in opposing the new form of capitalist control expressed through the crackdown culture? [...] Everywhere, 'class struggle' anarchists rally behind the calls to oppose 'anti-social' activities, even to the point of critically supporting crackdowns (always, of course, with the usual supplements, denouncing the existing state even while forming the working-class itself into a parallel state with its own repressive force and its own conformity-imposing closures). One thus finds these would-be anarchists cast as the last defenders of the state. For the state, in its last instance, is not the macro-social aggregate; it is the logic of control and policing of life from above, which is epitomised locally in policing agencies (whether those of the official state police or of vigilantes, snoops, and busybodies), and psychologically in repressively formulated ethics (whether those of a liberal or aristocratic elite, or those of a self-righteous 'decent people' fixated on its own decency). Without a rejection of the fixed identities and categories that operate as cops in our heads, there can be no destruction of the state – only its transmutation, fragmentation, and ultimate revival ih [sic] new, and maybe stronger, forms.
"The 'people' who rule must after all be a determinate entity, and in order to be conceived as such, the 'people' must be given fixity as what Max Stirner terms a spook – an ideological construction to which actual people subordinate themselves, and of which one is a part only to the extent that one conforms. [...] 'Rule by the people' thus turns out not to be self-determination by actual people at all, but rather, to be the tyrannical imposition of a normative conception of an essence of peoplehood by those whose own identity is constructed around this category. What is excluded is the 'un-people' to misquote Stirner – the flows of desire and activity which exceed and overflow the fixed category, which are unspeakable in terms of its representations. [...] The adherents of anarchy, the opponents of despotic gestures of this kind, must necessarily be on the side of the excluded, indeed, among the excluded, and thus, against the imposition of conformity, and radically exterior to the imagined 'community' their fixed categories construct. [...]
"Democracy is not an inclusion of all those who vote; it is a means of silencing those who are left in the minority. [...] Active desire is not capable of accepting the a priori insistence that it conform to the result of a majority decision. [...] Thus, desire is minoritarian not simply in that it can often end up in the minority when a vote is taken; it is minoritarian in that it is non-denumerable, it cannot be reduced to something to be counted and weighed on a scale with other desires or with other entities of whatever kind. To reject the aspiration to be the majority – not only in the numerical sense but in the ideological sense, to reject the aspiration for one's own desires and contingencies to be classified as decent and normal to the exclusion of others – is a logical extension of active desire. Active desire, wildness, is unconditional and irreducible. It cannot, therefore, find expression in a system which reduces it to its representation, as one among many elements to be counted."
Andy Robinson is a Leverhulme Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, from which he holds a PhD in Political Theory.
22 February 2010
Book chapter: The Criticism of Democracy and the Illustration of Its Reality
"The Criticism of Democracy and the Illustration of Its Reality" is an Islamist booklet circulating on the Internet. It appears to be the English translation of a section of a book written in Arabic by Abdul Qadir bin Abdul Aziz ("Al-Jame'a Fi Talab El-Ilm-Esh-Sharif", 1994; volume 1, pp. 146-55).
Abdul Qadir bin Abdul Aziz (also spelled Abd-el-Qadir Ibn-'Abdel-'Aziz or Abd Al-Qader Bin 'Abd Al-'Aziz) is the pen name of one "Dr Fadl", born as Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif/Sayyid Imam 'Abdel-Aziz el-Sherif, an Egyptian currently serving a life prison sentence in his native country. He is the author of three books, among them the above (alternatively spelled al-Jami' fi Talab al-'Ilm al-Sharif' and translated as "A Compendium for the Search of Noble Knowledge"/"The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge") and a one-time close confidant of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, like him a surgeon by training and his successor as Emir (commander) of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement (now merged with al-Qaeda). Dr Fadl, who is reported to have been one of the earliest members of al-Qaeda's top Shura Council and whose works are used as training manuals in terrorist camps, is thought to be "perhaps the most important modern thinker responsible for shaping the violent Islamic Jihadi movement" (although his latest book, written in prison, possibly under government pressure calls for an end to jihadist violence both in the West and at home).
The booklet thus can be taken to present an authoritative statement on democracy from a radical Islamist perspective. Currently, it is available at this link:
http://mujahidblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/the_criticism_of_democracy.pdf
As is in the nature of Islamist websites, that blog (started only in December 2009) – and thus the booklet – may get taken down at some point. Should the link above not work anymore, please let me know. I can also send you a PDF copy of the booklet.
Excerpts: "We conclude from this that democracy ascribes the attribute of Uluhia (Godhead) to man, by granting him the absolute right to legislate. Owing to this, it has made him an Ilah (God) beside Allah and a partner to him concerning the right of legislating for the creation. This is no doubt a Kufr Akbar (i.e. a Kufr [disbelief] that takes a person outside the fold of Islam). To put it more precisely, the new God in democracy is the desire of man, who legislates what he fancies and desires, without being restricted by anything. [...] This makes democracy a self-established religion in which the mastership is for the people. In contrast, in the religion of Islam the mastership belongs to Allah [....]
"[P]arliaments are based on the disbelief in the verses of Allah, because their prime task is to legislate beside Him, Praise and Glory be to Him. Therefore, whoever sits with them is like them in Kufr. [...] [A]ll the kufr which the government practises – such as ruling by manmade laws and following the secularist method – the non-religious one – in both external and internal politics, in education, media, economy, or else – is decided upon by the MPs [members of parliament], who grant license to the governments to implement them. [...] As for those amongst the people who vote for them (MPs), they are committing kufr as well, because according to the parliamentary democracy, the voters are in reality delegating them so as to practice the mastership of shirk [idolatry/polytheism] – legislating beside Allah – on their behalf. Thus the voters give the MPs the right to implement shirk, and set them up – through their voting – as legislating lords beside Allah. [...]
"The result of the parliamentary elections are nothing but falsities and delusions, [...] democracy, with its parliaments and elections, is nothing but a deception [....] Therefore, it is not permissible to enter into the Houses (of Parliaments) [as MP] or participate in electing their members." (Originally bold text here italicized)
Abdul Qadir bin Abdul Aziz (also spelled Abd-el-Qadir Ibn-'Abdel-'Aziz or Abd Al-Qader Bin 'Abd Al-'Aziz) is the pen name of one "Dr Fadl", born as Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif/Sayyid Imam 'Abdel-Aziz el-Sherif, an Egyptian currently serving a life prison sentence in his native country. He is the author of three books, among them the above (alternatively spelled al-Jami' fi Talab al-'Ilm al-Sharif' and translated as "A Compendium for the Search of Noble Knowledge"/"The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge") and a one-time close confidant of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, like him a surgeon by training and his successor as Emir (commander) of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement (now merged with al-Qaeda). Dr Fadl, who is reported to have been one of the earliest members of al-Qaeda's top Shura Council and whose works are used as training manuals in terrorist camps, is thought to be "perhaps the most important modern thinker responsible for shaping the violent Islamic Jihadi movement" (although his latest book, written in prison, possibly under government pressure calls for an end to jihadist violence both in the West and at home).
The booklet thus can be taken to present an authoritative statement on democracy from a radical Islamist perspective. Currently, it is available at this link:
http://mujahidblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/the_criticism_of_democracy.pdf
As is in the nature of Islamist websites, that blog (started only in December 2009) – and thus the booklet – may get taken down at some point. Should the link above not work anymore, please let me know. I can also send you a PDF copy of the booklet.
Excerpts: "We conclude from this that democracy ascribes the attribute of Uluhia (Godhead) to man, by granting him the absolute right to legislate. Owing to this, it has made him an Ilah (God) beside Allah and a partner to him concerning the right of legislating for the creation. This is no doubt a Kufr Akbar (i.e. a Kufr [disbelief] that takes a person outside the fold of Islam). To put it more precisely, the new God in democracy is the desire of man, who legislates what he fancies and desires, without being restricted by anything. [...] This makes democracy a self-established religion in which the mastership is for the people. In contrast, in the religion of Islam the mastership belongs to Allah [....]
"[P]arliaments are based on the disbelief in the verses of Allah, because their prime task is to legislate beside Him, Praise and Glory be to Him. Therefore, whoever sits with them is like them in Kufr. [...] [A]ll the kufr which the government practises – such as ruling by manmade laws and following the secularist method – the non-religious one – in both external and internal politics, in education, media, economy, or else – is decided upon by the MPs [members of parliament], who grant license to the governments to implement them. [...] As for those amongst the people who vote for them (MPs), they are committing kufr as well, because according to the parliamentary democracy, the voters are in reality delegating them so as to practice the mastership of shirk [idolatry/polytheism] – legislating beside Allah – on their behalf. Thus the voters give the MPs the right to implement shirk, and set them up – through their voting – as legislating lords beside Allah. [...]
"The result of the parliamentary elections are nothing but falsities and delusions, [...] democracy, with its parliaments and elections, is nothing but a deception [....] Therefore, it is not permissible to enter into the Houses (of Parliaments) [as MP] or participate in electing their members." (Originally bold text here italicized)
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