Radical Sociality

On Disobedience, Violence and Belonging

M. Palacios

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349434350, 9781137003683
• eBook ISBN: 9781137003690
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

A philosophical and psychoanalytic investigation of relations to otherness, violence, disobedience and belonging, Radical Sociality explores the possibilities and vicissitudes of contemporary forms of belonging and the limits and challenges of democracy.

1

Hermeneutics and the Art of Disobedience

Margarita Palacios

Introduction

One of the main shortcomings of social theory has been its incapacity to theorize the paradox inherent in the simultaneous experience of power and separation from power that characterizes social life. It is for this reason that most theories either account for power formations (i.e., post-structuralism) or only give account of the process of ‘giving meaning’ (Weberian cultural sociology). While the first one is unable to theorize subjectivity and reduces meaning formation to semantic displacements, the latter reduces social formations to subjective interpretations. Although within the tradition of sociology symbolic interactionism is seen as capable of overcoming such difficulty (as it theorizes that middle ground where intersubjective negotiation takes place), from the perspective of my research, such an approach ultimately fails to capture the radicality of this paradox as it simply reduces it to the realm of those experiences which can actually be ‘negotiated’.¹

One way of surmounting this problem is to introduce the language of hermeneutics and theorize the existential ‘incompleteness’, or void, that characterizes the process of meaning formation and the irreducible openness and indeterminateness of social life. In what follows, I will do so by theorizing this opening as the small gesture of ‘disobedience’, the moment of interruption, or reinterpretation of consolidated meanings.

I will argue that this openness or void confronts us with an undecidable moment which is characterized by being both a failure – of unfulfilled symbolic mandates – and an accomplishment. A failure, insofar as some type of displacement, erasure or dislocation takes place, and thus previously constituted hegemonies are interrupted or challenged. An accomplishment, because out of this moment of separation (of being and language), new interpretations emerge, new metaphors, and also ‘new subjectivities’: although thrown and opaque, and always behind themselves and non-whole, some sort of displaced subjects – together with new forms of sociality and belonging – emerge out of this metaphoric activity. Effectively, processes of meaning formation are never individual, but always social processes, and therefore it is not only the subject that changes through the ‘disobedient act’, but also symbolic spaces are affected and transformed simultaneously. As it is possible already to perceive in these introductory remarks, the notion of disobedience I am after in this chapter while differing from commonly ‘politically charged’ definitions (i.e., Marxist notions of emancipation and other accounts of disobedience as acts of resistance or transgression), it also distances itself from purely linguistic conceptions of disobedience which reduce the process of meaning formation to the logics of signifiers and signifieds.

My approach is inspired by two elements that spring from Heidegger’s early philosophy: historicity (or ‘thrownness’) and ‘meaning giving’ (or interpretation), which are summarized in the expression geworfener Entwurf (thrown projection) (Heidegger, 1962). These two elements allow us, in my view, to theorize in all its complexity a displaced subjectivity without reducing the disobedient subject either to the rational-conscious subject of emancipation, or to purely discursive positions. The notion of ‘thrown projection’ indeed seems to capture the physical experience of the ‘being there’ – as finite, historical products of consolidated meaning formations – but at the same time it alludes to the ‘not being there’; that is, to the failure of those symbolic mandates which never seem to entirely succeed in their power operations. Moreover, Heidegger’s ‘anxious’ subject, who out of fear of death hides behind apparent simplicity and shallowness, and is caught in its own historicity without ever being able to fully grasp or ‘entirely act’ upon it, also addresses this existential and physical dimension of what one could call the ‘impossible’ experience of the social. This ‘disobedient experience’ of disjuncture, while guaranteeing historicity, makes meaning making all the more relevant, although inevitably incomplete.

In particular, and mostly through the reading of Ricoeur and Derrida, I will focus then on the ‘undecidable’ terrain of the not-yet of the process of meaning formation, as it is precisely that not-yet which best captures the almost imperceptible moment of separation/distantiation of being from discourse. According to my reading of these authors, I would say that they have not only critically engaged with Heidegger, but they seem to have built their own philosophical accounts, one could say, in a dialogue with Heidegger. As it will be shown in what follows, historicity – or permanent openness of the social – is conceptualized by both Ricoeur and Derrida as the consequence of a certain ‘transcendental emptiness’ – blank space or absence which grants the condition of possibility of meaning formation. Although both Derrida and Ricoeur offer versions of this transcendentality in order to theorize historicity, this transcendentality plays quite a different function in each of these authors. Put differently, although both of them embrace Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrownness’ (the idea of Dasein as being-in-the-world and as being-towards-Death), they also embrace what accompanies this thrownness. In the case of Ricoeur, this is the idea of becoming the ownmost possibility of the subject as linked to some project of reflexivity and selfhood: ‘Recall how Heidegger conjoins understanding to the notion of the “projection of my ownmost possibilities”; this signifies that the mode of being of the world opened up by the text is the mode of the possible, or better of the power-to-be: therein resides the subversive force of the imaginary’ (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 93). On the other hand, Derrida embraces not Heidegger’s Dasein in search of authenticity, but the idea of Death, a death that secures erasure before writing begins, an archi-trace that inaugurates the subject and inaugurates the text: ‘Life must be thought of as trace before Being may be determined as presence. This is the only condition on which we can say that life is death, that repetition and the beyond of the pleasure principle are native and congenital to what which they transgress (Derrida, 1978, p. 255). Derrida tirelessly states that, unlike Heidegger, he does not want to theorize Being as presence, but absence, death, as the starting point of meaning.²

Ricoeur’s and Derrida’s different views, as I see them, privilege one-sidedly either meaning-giving (interpretation) or historicity (openness of meaning), leaning the former (Ricoeur) towards phenomenology and the latter (Derrida) towards post-structuralism. This ‘splitting’ of Heideggerian philosophy, I will argue at the end of the chapter, dismantles the anxious subject, caught between its own finitude and the language to express it, and converts it either into a ‘faithful’ subject of critical hermeneutics or into a discursive position. Through a detailed and critical account of the texts that deal with this moment of interruption of meaning formation, my aim is to set up the standard for a psychosocially inspired version of the paradoxical experience of power and separation of power which, in my view, should stress the undecidability of the social and the vicissitudes of the subject.

Limits of knowledge and the hermeneutical field

Certainly, the questions about knowledge and about processes of signification are old ones. They were already the concern of the Greeks, in particular of Aristotle who in his Hermeneia already defined interpretation as meaning giving, according to which every sentence was a form of interpretation. The question that was asked by him was if the meaning being given (to the thing) was true or false; that is, his was a question of knowledge. However, Aristotle, in his quest for truth, confided signification or meaning to ‘univocity’; that is, ‘at the definition of the principle of identity, in its logical and ontological sense’ (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 23). In Artistotle’s words, ‘Not to have one meaning is to have no meaning’ (quoted by Ricoeur, 1970, p. 23).

Although the tradition of what came to be called ‘hermeneutics’ followed quite a different path (through biblical exegesis), the question about knowledge (i.e. the reduction of meaning to authenticity or falsity) not only became a discipline of its own (i.e., logics) but continues to permeate philosophical debates between what receives the name of objectivism (expressed in ideas of epistemology) and relativism (those positions that followed a closer path to hermeneutics as the interpretation of multiplicity of meaning).³ The tradition of hermeneutics later became understood as a ‘particular interpretation of the text’, where the idea closest to hermeneutics is the one of ‘analogy’. This concept of ‘analogy’ is one that becomes central in current philosophical debates, and is a notion that feeds a major conceptual dispute between Ricoeur and Derrida.⁴ The notion of analogy, it is being argued, keeps metaphoric activity linked to metaphysics; that is, to the belief that things have ‘essences’ which can be represented through language as a form of exteriorization of an interior. Furthermore, the question that is raised by Derrida is whether metaphors can ever leave the realm of metaphysics as they suppose a certain presence which is represented by language.⁵ In Derrida’s words: ‘Like mimesis, metaphor comes back to physis, to its truth and its presence’ (Derrida, 1974, p. 45).

But as Ricoeur argues, it is not until Nietzsche that the whole of philosophy becomes ‘interpretation’. So it is no longer the idea of adequatio (i.e., no longer the Kantian question of how to assign objective validity to a subjective representation). In Ricoeur’s terms, ‘the use of interpretation is a tactic of suspicion and as a battle against masks; this use calls for a very specific philosophy which subordinates the entire problem of truth and error to the expression of the will to power’ (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 26).

It is worth mentioning here how metaphorical activity, for Nietzsche, is ‘always already forgotten, is secondarily repressed by being deliberately abandoned in favour of the concept, of logic and science. It is as if there is an anti-cathexis of the originary forgetting by the creation of a “social memory” which goes hand in hand with the creation of responsibility, self-consciousness, and moral consciousness’ (Kofman, 1994, p. 43).⁶ Certainly the notion of truth is the most direct consequence of the forgetting of the metaphor.⁷

Most of these ideas we have received through the ‘French Nietzscheans’, in particular Foucault, whose different genealogies of power attempted, in a way, to show the becoming of our beings and norms, and how our bodies and desires were shattered in the process. But Nietzsche was not alone in this task of searching for hidden meanings. Freud and Marx, with their respective theories of the unconscious and of alienated ‘species beings’, provided a whole new vocabulary to interpret ‘the real’ of social life. Although these philosophers of the hermeneutics of suspicion inaugurate critical thinking, they are seen as having closed the ‘interpretative field’ while offering notions of truth associated with the unveiling of hidden forms of power. However, in her Nietzsche and Metaphor, Sarah Kofman (1994) shows convincingly how Nietzsche is loyal throughout his writings to the idea of the impossibility of capturing the real through language, and what we have instead are ‘texts’ and ‘metaphors’. This is quite significant as it is not, she argues, that Nietzsche was proposing a new metaphysical language to capture being. In her words:

When Nietzsche writes that one must reconstitute behind every text the original text homo natura, that does not mean finding a text cut off from all interpretation, a ‘being in itself’, an ontological truth. On the contrary, it means he is going against a metaphysical reading which conceals the text as interpretation behind the rags it has woven. (Kofman, 1994, p. 92)

The concept of the metaphor seeks to show that all concepts – all symbolic languages – fail to grasp what remains always enigmatic. Our knowledge is always an interpretation, our concepts are always metaphors.

As Nietzsche put it:

Essence, the ‘essential nature’, is something perspective and already presupposes a multiplicity. At the bottom of it there always lies ‘What is that for me?’ […] A thing would be defined once all creatures had asked ‘What is that?’ and had answered their question. Supposing one single creature, with its own relationships and perspective for all things, were missing, then the thing would not yet be ‘defined’. In short: the essence of a thing is only an opinion about the ‘thing’. Or rather: ‘it is considered’ is the real ‘it is’, the sole ‘this is’. (Quoted by Kofman, 1994, p. 84)

Now, as Ricoeur states, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud opposed most straightforwardly the idea of ‘phenomenology of the sacred’: ‘as they all contest the primacy of an object in our representation of the sacred, as well as the fulfilling of the intention of the sacred by a type of analogy of being that would engraft us onto being through the power of an assimilating intention’ (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 32). So to delineate an introductory conceptual map in the hermeneutical field, one could state that on one side we find ‘hermeneutics of suspicion – or perspective nihilism in the case of Nietzsche’, and on the other side we find ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’ (as inspired by Husserl and Dilthey) and currently represented by Paul Ricoeur.

A wider conceptual picture would be different, however. Although radical historicism (à la Nietzsche) in many ways differs and even opposes transcendental phenomenology, it would be a mistake, for the purpose of this chapter, to forget the other extreme of these two positions; that is, the answer that structuralism gave to the question about the emergence of meaning. This means that hermeneutics – in its different versions – stands in opposition to structuralism. In ‘Force and Signification’, the first chapter of Derrida’s Writing and Difference (Derrida, 1978), Derrida makes a compelling argument against structuralism. He criticizes firstly structuralism’s attempts to find the existing ‘truth’ of a text, and secondly, structuralism’s attempts to find this ‘truth’ within a structure, defined by Derrida as the ‘unity of a form and a meaning’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 15). The Nietzschean tone of his critique is evident: structuralism assumes that writing is governed by a unified principle – ‘meaning is meaningful only within a totality’ (ibid., p. 31) – and by the assumption of a ‘presence’ which could be revealed through a structuralist method of analysis. Derrida wrote:

The structuralist solicitude and solicitation give themselves only the illusion of technical liberty when they become methodical. In truth, they reproduce, in the register of method, a solicitude and solicitation of Being, a historic-metaphysical threatening of foundations. It is during the epochs of historical dislocation, when we are expelled from the site, that this structuralist passion, which is simultaneously a frenzy of experimentation and a proliferation of schematizations, develops for itself. (Derrida, 1978, p. 5)

The interpretative closure of structuralism is evident. The question that emerges then is how not to close either language, or being (subjectivity). In Derrida’s words, ‘Meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 11). The proposal here is to theorize radical becoming, radical historicity. Quoting Merlau-Ponty, Derrida states, ‘My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think’ (ibid., p. 11).

In Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981), Ricoeur explains how the tradition of hermeneutics – which had occupied itself mostly with epistemological questions – went through an ‘ontological turn’ with Heidegger. That is, his question would no longer be ‘how do we know?’, but ‘what is the mode of being of that being who exists only in understanding?’ (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 54).

Even if Being and Time, more than Heidegger’s later work, places the emphasis on Dasein, the being-there that we are, this Dasein is not a subject for which there is an object, but is rather a being within a being. Dasein designates the place where the question of being arises, the place of manifestation; the centrality of Dasein is simply that of a being which understands being. It is part of its structure as being to have an ontological pre-understanding of being. (ibid., p. 54)

In Heidegger’s own words:

Being-there in the manner of be-ing means: not and never, to be there primarily as an object of intuition and definition on the basis of intuition, as an object of which we rarely take cognizance and have knowledge. Rather Dasein is there for itself in the ‘how’ of its ownmost being. (Heidegger, 1988, p. 5)

And he goes on:

The ownmost possibility of be-ing itself which Dasein (facti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Hermeneutics and the Art of Disobedience
• 2 Death, Anxiety and the Vicissitudes of Action
• 3 Fantasy, Otherness and Violence
• 4 From Narcissism to Melancholia
• 5 Rethinking Melancholia: Inclusion without Recognition?
• 6 Decolonizing Trauma and the Ethics of Anxious Witnessing
• 7 On Infinite Criticality
• Notes
• References
• Index