A Stranding in Strange Places

disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Judith Butler adroitly frames the kind of dilemma that Tariq encounters when he tries to defend himself against the stigmatizing effects of such stereotypes, which “stop speech with an unspeakable allegation.” Her example is speech critical of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, but the dynamic is the same: “If you speak, you are in an unspeakable place, have become a Nazi or its moral equivalent” (such as wife or child abuser). Butler further sees in this tactic a broader “linguistic permutation of state terrorism, an assault that stops one in one's tracks, and secures the continuing operation of the regime and its monopoly on politically intelligible speech” (Butler n. pag.).2 For Jameson's parsing out of the relations between high, late, and postmodernism see 148–60 passim.3 See Malabou's The New Wounded for her case in this regard. Its scope covers a whole philosophical tradition, centered above all on Hegel's idealism as its best summation, and under which she places psychoanalysis, the “talking cure,” as one instance. In the new dispensation emerging today, this tradition meets an absolute limit in the authority of cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology – however specious the “promethean” claims of these fields might be for an understanding of human life and consciousness.4 Where Foucault found a neoliberal “art of government” operating on a “principle of [ ... ] organization in the application to society of a schema of rationality specific to nature” (Birth of Biopolitics 115). This “art” adds a new function to state power: instead of simply limiting (or restraining) a market freedom, it also now looks for its own limitation in it (102). This is not simply to stress state disengagement or a turn to deregulation and privatization; in addition, it suggests for Foucault that market freedom delimits power, becoming the field of its exercise and the justification for a new prerogative over people's habits, feelings, intuitions, beliefs, and values. If this prerogative entails power's identification with those it now subjects to a technocratic authority, it also works the other way around: people come to a sense of themselves, mutatis mutandis, in the identification with that technocratic authority, internalizing the latter's evaluative “gaze” and embracing the “personal responsibility” it commands.5 Or the expert's evaluative gaze, which we might also understand in a Lacanian idiom as that of the “Big Other,” whose “desire” is simultaneously an object and a cause of the subject's desire and which can lead from stabilizing sublimations of desire to a “breakdown by means of which a certain psychic function, the superego, seems to find in itself its own exacerbation, as a result of a kind of malfunctioning of the brakes which should limit its proper authority” (Seminar VII 143).6 Lacan associates the malfunctioning superego with a drive that, in homeostatic “isolation from reality,” seeks an hallucinatory satisfaction of its aim and object in a “return to nature” that also, for him, alludes to an “archaic form of the pastoral” (Seminar VII 88–89).7 It is significant, in this context, that Zoé is also of Maghrebine descent and that Tariq's paranoia extends as well to her father – hence to a familial matrix in which he feels enmeshed as much in France as in Tunisia. Here he touches, distantly at least, on the same fears and justifications animating today's “war on terror” for so many people in Western societies. Terry Eagleton provides a useful heuristic for the paradoxical consensus in these societies, observing a propos the phenomenon of terrorism today that [a] surfeit of belief is what agnostic, late-capitalist civilization itself has helped to spawn. This is not only because it has helped to create the conditions for fundamentalism. It is also because when reason becomes too dominative, calculative, and instrumental, it ends up as too shallow a soil for a reasonable kind of faith to flourish. As a result, faith lapses into the kind of irrationalism which theologians call fideism, turning its back on reason altogether. From there, it is an easy enough step to fanaticism. Rationalism and fideism are each other's mirror image. (148

Epistemology · Hegelianism · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology · Law · Philosophy

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