The Actuality of Communism

Bruno Bosteels

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781687673
• eBook ISBN: 9781781687680
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

One of the rising stars of contemporary critical theory, Bruno Bosteels discusses the new currents of thought generated by figures such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranci?re and Slavoj Zizek, who are spearheading the revival of interest in Communism. Bosteels examines this resurgence of Communist thought through the prism of "speculative leftism" - an incapacity to move beyond lofty abstractions and thoroughly rethink the categories of masses, classes and state. Debating those questions with writers including Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras, Bosteels also provides a vital account of the work of the Bolivian Vice President and thinker ?lvaro Garc?a Linera.

1

The Ontological Turn

Which imbecile spoke of an ontology of the revolt? The revolt is less in need of a metaphysics than metaphysicians are in need of a revolt.

— Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

Being in Need

Faced with the ubiquitous return of the question of being in the field of political thought today, put into relief most eloquently by the recent collection of essays A Leftist Ontology, I am tempted to repeat Adorno’s gesture from the first part of his Negative Dialectics, when he explains, “ontology is understood and immanently criticized out of the need for it, which is a problem of its own.”¹ In keeping with this model, I too want to ask in what way the answers arising out of the recent ontological turn in self-anointed leftist circles may be “the recoil of the unfolded, transparent question,” and to what extent these answers also “meet an emphatic need, a sign of something missed,” even if that no longer corresponds to what Adorno sees as “a longing that Kant’s verdict on a knowledge of the Absolute should not be the end of the matter.”² We need not stoop to the level of Adorno’s blunt and for this reason often ill-understood attacks on the then new fundamental ontologies in Germany (Heidegger’s in particular) to raise again the question about the need for a leftist ontology today. This would mean asking not only: what are the uses and disadvantages of ontology for politics, and a leftist or communist one to boot? But also: where does this politico-ontological need stem from in the first place?

The initial task would consist in outlining the general form in which the ontological question of being is presented to us today in the context of political thought. As opposed to Adorno’s claim, the way this happens is in my view no longer—if ever it was—through an appeal to a supposed substantiality, or to some version or other of the Absolute, surreptitiously brought back to life behind Kant’s back. In fact, if there is a common presupposition shared by all present-day political ontologies, it is that ontology is not, cannot be, or must not be a question of substance or of the Absolute. It presupposes neither the presence of being nor the identity of being and thinking as a guide for acting. On the contrary, ontology nowadays, in a well-nigh uniform fashion, tends to be qualified as spectral, nonidentical, and postfoundational. It tries to come to terms not with present beings, but with ghosts and phantasms; not with entities or things, but with events—whether with events in the plural, or, alternatively, with the singular event of the presencing of being as such, which should never be confounded with a given present, albeit a past or future one. Consequently, there can be no determinate politics, not even a democratic or radical-democratic one, not to mention communism, that would simply derive from ontology as a thoroughly desubstantialized field of investigation into being and/as event—even though most commentators are quick to add that democracy, often in the guise of direct democracy, radical democracy, or a democracy-to-come, rather than in any of its historical shapes, would be the only political formation or regime of power attuned to the horizon of ontology at the close of the metaphysical era. “This, then, is the argument: in the answers that they have traditionally brought to bear on the ‘special’ question ‘What is to be done?’ philosophers have relied, in one way or another, on some standard-setting first whose grounding function was assured by a ‘general’ doctrine, be it called ontology or something else. From this doctrine, theories of action received their patterns of thought as well as a great many of their answers,” writes Reiner Schürmann, in one of the very first attempts at outlining the practical and political implications of a postfoundational, or properly an-archic, ontology, that is, an ontology without arkhè, without ground or first standard-setting principle. He continues: “Now, the deconstruction of metaphysics situates historically what has been deemed to be a foundation. It thus closes the era of derivations between general and special metaphysics, between first philosophy and practical philosophy.”³ The specifically leftist nature of such an antifoundational proposal, however, is not always clear, except insofar as some prior criteria are assumed to be at our disposal by which to judge what is leftist and what is not.

Between Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Heidegger and Lacan, often in bold rereadings or creative misreadings, no doubt represent the two dominant strands in this revival of the ontological question in a practical or political key, with added inflections taken from the work of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. Heidegger’s centrality in this context goes without saying, even as the political consequences of his ontology remain a topic of hot dispute, to say the least: “Our epoch can be said to have been stamped and signed, in philosophy, by the return of the question of being. This is why it is dominated by Heidegger. He drew up the diagnosis and explicitly took as his subject the realignment, after a century of criticism and the phenomenological interlude, of thought with its primordial interrogation: what is to be understood by the being of beings?”⁴ But even Lacan’s psychoanalytical work is concerned with ontology, as his son-in-law and soon-to-become official executor of his intellectual legacy, Jacques-Alain Miller, perceived as early as 1964, when he asked Lacan about his ontology and the latter responded rather coyly: “I ought to have obtained from him [Miller] to begin with a more specific definition of what he means by the term ontology,” only to go on to stress “that all too often forgotten characteristic—forgotten in a way that is not without significance—of the first emergence of the unconscious, namely, that it does not lend itself to ontology.” And yet, just a few weeks later in the same seminar, Lacan would seemingly go on to contradict himself: “Precisely this gives me an opportunity to reply to someone that, of course, I have my ontology—why not?—like everyone else, however naïve or elaborate it may be.”⁵ Regardless of this ambiguous self-evaluation, we might conclude with one of Lacan’s most astute contemporary readers that, “Ontology or not, psychoanalysis according to Lacan imposes a general rectification on philosophy, which touches upon nothing less than the way in which truth leans up against the real.”⁶

Between Heidegger’s destruction of the metaphysics of being as presence and Lacan’s subversion of the ideology of the subject as ego, there lies a general framework in which we can situate those authors whose writings dominate most discussions arising out of the “ontological turn” in political thought today, namely, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. Aside from the overarching legacy of Marxism, the principal exception to this Heideggerian–Lacanian framework that immediately comes to mind would be the neo-Spinozist or Deleuzian ontology of substance as pure immanence, or of being as life itself, which Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, among others, offer as their contribution to the communist Left in their three-volume masterpiece, Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. However, this vitalist ontology, which likewise claims to be an ontology of the event as well, is not only underrepresented in collections such as A Leftist Ontology, it also paradoxically comes under serious attack both for being dangerously idealist, insofar as it would eschew the dimension of raw bodily materiality, and, at the same time, for being too confidently materialist, insofar as it would seek to exorcize the indeterminacy of ghosts whose uncanny smile turns out to be irreducible, all good intentions notwithstanding, to any pre-established political program, be it communist or otherwise. Thus, one critic argues that “Although Hardt and Negri, citing Paul of Tarsus, argue for the ‘power of the flesh’ within the political economy of the present, this flesh appears to have a peculiarly ghostly existence”; while for others, by contrast, this existence is precisely not ghostly enough, or is so in too dependable and predictable a fashion: “The political has so far been entirely on the side of the specter, believing the specter to be dependable, predictable, trustworthy. Ghosts, meanwhile, seem out of place, lingering in a no-man’s-land betwixt and between places and times.”⁷ This is why melancholia, or a melancholic stance of fidelity haunted by anxiety-producing ghosts, rather than the familiar exorcism of communist specters, may be needed to subtract the plan for a leftist ontology from all illusions of mastery, movement, and militantism: “As opposed to Negri’s vision of a robust, virile political agent enveloping the new in his embrace, the haunted subject is held in place, petrified, by the decision to hesitate, by a declaration of fidelity to the undead, the discarded, the unremembered—to all of those as yet unlisted in the account books of monumental history.”⁸ A communist political ontology, too, would have to be able to heed the call from these ghostly and hesitant beings. It would have to be able to do without alibis and reassurances, without the certainties of fulfillment and the guarantees of authenticity that supposedly tie the entire tradition of militant politics, from Marx to Negri, to the history of a certain metaphysics.

Leftism in the Closure of Metaphysics

Today, in other words, ontology by and large is supposed to be postmetaphysical, if by metaphysics we understand the age-old discourse for which the principle holds that “the same, indeed, is thinking and being.”⁹ The problem with this characterization of metaphysics, which otherwise seems to me no worse than any other and which in any case has the virtue of concision, is that it ignores the extent to which not only Heidegger but also someone like Badiou—both of whom are widely perceived to be models of so-called postfoundational thought—might ultimately subscribe to this Parmenidean principle, even though Heidegger does so by displacing metaphysics in the name of thinking, whereas Badiou (like Deleuze and Negri, for that matter) openly embraces the notion that his ontology and theory of the subject signal a new metaphysics, bypassing as an utter nonissue the whole debate regarding the end or closure of metaphysics. Even so, it is hard to ignore the fact that today, with very few exceptions, most radical ontological investigations would seem to start from the nonidentity of being and thinking—we might even say from their alterity, in the Levinasian sense according to which an ethics of the other must disrupt the metaphysics of the same, or from their subalternity, in the sense in which Gayatri Spivak argues that “the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic.”¹⁰ Being and thinking, but also history and logic, thus become delinked or unhinged in ways that perhaps are no longer even dialectical in the older sense of the term. This has profound consequences for politics precisely insofar as what disappears is any necessary linkage connecting the paradigm for thinking of being to practical forms of acting. Instead, it is to the very delinking or unbinding of the social that a leftist ontology would have to attune itself. Whence also the stubborn, not to say hackneyed, insistence on motifs—here we can forego the mention of proper names—such as the indivisible remainder or reserve, the constitutive outside, the real that resists symbolization absolutely, the dialectic of lack and excess, or the necessary gap separating representation from presentation pure and simple.

It is not, then, ontology as such that is either leftist or rightist, either communist or reactionary, unless of course we were to ascribe a moral value—whether good or bad—to being qua being in a fashion that could more properly be called religious or theological, but rather the specific orientation given to the impasse or aporia that keeps the discourse of being qua being from ever achieving full closure. Badiou’s distinction, explored in much of Being and Event, between three fundamental ontological orientations—constructivist, transcendent, and generic—should be helpful in this regard, especially insofar as it does not correspond neatly to a leftist, rightist, or centrist tripartite division, or to the distinction, also common in current debates on political ontology, between immanence, transcendence, and failed or incomplete transcendence-within-immanence (although in this case the similarities and overlaps are rather striking indeed). Briefly put, the constructivist orientation seeks to reduce the impasse by bringing it back into the fold of a well-formulated language; the transcendent orientation raises the impasse to the level of a quasi-mystical beyond; and the generic orientation postulates the existence of an indiscernible with which to interpret the impasse of being as the effect of an event within the situation at hand—thus neither collapsing the event into the sum total of its constructible preconditions nor elevating the impasse to the level of a miraculous or monstrous-sublime Thing taking the place once occupied by God.

Following Marx and Freud, whose doctrines take us beyond ontology in the strict sense and possibly open up a fourth, antiphilosophical option, we could furthermore argue that the generic or indiscernible orientation shows the extent to which the science of being, through its inherent deadlock or impasse, presupposes the retroactive clarification of an intervening subject without which the ontological impasse would not even be apparent to begin with. “Its hypothesis consists in saying that one can only render justice to injustice from the angle of the event and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Ontological Turn
• 2 Politics, Infrapolitics, and the Impolitical
• 3 Leftism and Its Discontents
• 4 In Search of the Act
• 5 The Actuality of Communism
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments