Zapatista movement(p,338) (organs without bodies, 217)
As the Zapatistas create autonomous zones, establish their own farming communities,
instill certain values, and so on (which is argued to be a response to the evils of
neoliberalism), they are wholly dependent on neoliberal superstructures to form
these spaces. Zizek, commenting on the Zapatista movement, notes: “It
is clear that such a structure can function only as the ethico-poetic shadowy double
of the existing positive state power structure” (“Blows against the Empire?”).
The slogan “Another World is Possible” always express the idea that we do not want
to name the world we are struggling; that we just know that we don’t want the same
old world, that we know what we oppose. As the Zapatista encuentros declared
earlier, we are organizing “against neo-liberalism and global capitalism.” We are
anti-capitalist, anti-militarist, anti-globalization, anti-WTO, anti-IMF, anti-racist,
anti-sexist, anti-hierarchical, anti-statist, anti-sweatshop, anti-x. The most antigeneration in modern political history is in the streets...
Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding
The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for
a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone
seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today,
their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating
new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the
triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising
supplement to a Third Way Left.
Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect
embodiment of this position.[*] For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to
stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics
has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations,
groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local
self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the
state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms.
The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the
state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no
state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its
own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc).
These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream
of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual
parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of
running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a
superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state
tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with
this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on
the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own
professed principles.
motivational deficit
As he states, ‘it might be claimed that there is a motivational deficit at the heart of
liberal democratic life, where citizens experience the governmental norms that rule
contemporary society as externally binding but not internally compelling’[x].
Identifies a “motivational deficit” in secular democracy and proposes an alternative
theory of anarchism as ethical practice
He says a "moral deficit" and a "motivational deficit" make meaningful political life
and action impossible (7, 8). He calls this crisis of belief and action a bad case of
Nietzschean nihilism. To begin changing this situation, Critchley insists that the
ethical experience remains the best means for achieving selfhood and subjectivity.
Even after decades of political failure, he argues that ethics and politics each
constitute the condition of possibility for the other.
SC: The main claim I make is that there is a motivational deficit in secular liberal
democracy, in its institutions, its habits. This is the problem or crisis in normal politics:
a demotivation in multi-party politics and parliamen-tary politics. On the other hand,
there is a remotivation at the level of non-governmental or non-parliamentary
politics. New forms of politics have emerged - forms that I call ‘neo-anarchist’ - and
that are successfully mobilizing political anger that no longer resonates with classical
forms of politics.
Critchley (philosophy, Univ. of Essex, Colchester; Things Merely Are) argues that
philosophy begins not from a sense of wonder but from disappointment. What
concerns him especially is political disappointment, the common belief that
something is radically amiss with the world. One response to disappointment is
nihilism, the denial that the world has value. Passive nihilists, e.g., political theorist
John Gray, whose Straw Dogsis a counterpoint to Critchley's book, accept the loss of
value with resignation. Active nihilists, by contrast, wish to destroy the present world
through revolutionary violence, hoping that something better will emerge. Critchley
rejects both kinds of nihilism. Instead, he favors an ethics in which the ethical subject
is split "between itself and a demand it cannot meet." Critchley has been influenced
in this view by French philosophers Alain Badiou and Emmanuel Levinas and Danish
thinker Knud Logstrup, and he gives a clear exposition of their ideas. In political
practice, his ethical perspective leads to a form of anarchism: he calls for resistance
to the "ideological moralism" of current American foreign policy. A stimulating
analysis; highly recommended for philosophy and political theory collections.