I.
Negri and determinate negation (of capitalism)
A)Negri against Bartleby’s 的 “abstract negation ” of capitalism (“I prefer not
to”) (353) c.f. Frankurt School and Agamben’s “abstract negation” of
capitalism (utopian longing for “wholly Other,” “unmediated Outside” )
(337)-B) The crisis of Hegel’s “determinate negation”: Different modes of the
avoidance of politics as a traumatic Real or negativity; Capitalism is here to
stay
1) Critchley’s extra-statal anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego,
comfortably bombarding the state with demands---“ethical commitment to a
Good,”“the notion of politics as resistance to state power on behalf of this
ethical Call” (340) The superego as the carnival of totalitarianism, as
ethical betrayal, as the obfuscation of the constitutive negativity or death
drive (342-43)
2) Negri’s escaping from fighting state power to practicing nomadic resistance
(339)---“immaterial and cognitive labor (informational revolution) become
immediately productive” (350-51)---the radical transformation of “fixed
capital”(355) so that “capital can no longer exploit the worker”
(356)—“immaterial labor opens up the possibility of ‘absolute
democracy’(356)---to follow Marx’s logic of the self-overcoming of
capitalism (354) and to take the multitude as “in itself” (353)---“ ‘biopolitics’
means that human life itself is the direct topic and product of collective
labor”
(356) (In immaterial production, the products are no longer material objects, but
new social (interpersonal) relations themselves - in short, immaterial production
is directly biopolitical, the production of social life)The duality of capitalism
is neglected by Negri (359)--- Marx posits a radical gap, the exclusion of the
worker from the production process (358)---Negri’s logic of expression
(anti-representation) is a fantasy and perspective illusion, a disavowal of the
gap or duality (365-66)
3) “The role of nation-state is irreducible and crucial” so that the excessive role of
a nation-state in the Empire is the rule (360)---Lenin as the vanishing mediator
between the revolutions in the developed countries and those in the Third
World (360)---Lenin was against the narrative of linear development and
created a space for an act (360-61)--- Hegle’s “determinate negation” of the
State: “Hegel’s point, rather, is that the deficiency of actually existing, positive
states within regard to their notion is grounded in an inherent deficiency of the
very notion of the State; thus the split is inherent to the notion of the State” (The
Ticklish Subject, 177)--Negri’s one-side appropriation of Deleuze
1) Negri leaves out the radical duality of Deleuze’s thought : there is “an
irreducible gap between material productivity and the virtual flow of Sense”
(365).
2) Alienation is constitutive of social life; Self-transparent society is a utopia
with totalitarian potential; no movements without governing (377); a split is
constitutive of the represented “people” (378)
Deleuze’s ontological duality and ambiguity:
The duality of the virtual and the actual (366)(De Landa)
The logic of pure becoming as sterile effect versus the logic of pure becoming as
productive process (Organ without Bodies, 32)
The logic of the radical gap between the generative process and its immaterial
sense-effect (367) ----Cinematic image is inherently sterile and impassive, the
pure effect of corporeal causes (367)--- Is the Deleuzian quasi-cause not the
exact equivalent of Lacan's objet petit a, this pure, immaterial, spectral entity
which serves as the object-cause of desire? (Organs without Bodies, 27)
Deleuze’s “flat resolution” of his ontological duality---“the virtual field is
(re)interpreted as that of generative, productive forces, opposed to the space of
representations (366)
Ambiguity of Deleuze’s “virtual”--- Either the infinite field of virtuality is an
immaterial effect of interacting bodies, or the bodies themselves emerge,
actualize themselves, from this field of virtuality (368)---- Is this opposition of
the virtual as the site of productive Becoming and the virtual as the site of the
sterile Sense-Event not, at the same time, the opposition of the “body without
organs” and “organs without a bodies”? (368)
Two different kinds of politics derivable from Deleuze’s ambiguity (369)
1) The ontology of productive Becoming—the self-organization of the
multitude of molecular groups-multitude is a perspective illusion or a
fantastic staging (365)
2) Base/superstructure, a shadow theater, pseudo causes which are crucial in
transforming reality (relative autonomy of the sense-event) (370)
Zizek’s (Hegel’s) determinate negation (as negation of negation) (c.f. p.409)
1) What, however, if the infamous ‘Hegelian determinate negation’ aims
precisely at the fact that every particular formation involves a gap between the
Universal and the Particular – or, in Hegelese, that a particular formation never
coincides with its (universal) notion – and that it is this very gap that brings
about its dialectical dissolution. (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 60)
2) “Negation of negation”: instead of directly negating-destroying the ruling
power, remaining within its field, it undermines this very field, opening up a
new positive space (409)
3) A split which always-already cuts from the represented “people” (378)
4) The focus should be shifted from the utopian goal of full reign of productive
expressivity that no longer needs representation, state order, capital, and so
forth, to the question, “What kind of representation should replace the existing
liberal-democratic representative state?”(375), to the status of “totalitarian
excess” (378)
5) Dictatorship of the proletariat (379)---the totalitarian excess as part of no
part---to twist the very space of state representation in their direction
6) Leader—the external figure of the analyst (378)---radical change of identity
(378)
7) Examples in real politics:
A. Integration of national assembly and council assembly (Kautsky)
B. Interplay between class-organization and political leadership of the
revolutionary vanguard party (Trotsky)(376)
C. The Party(not democratic party) (377)----movement transubstantiated into
the form of political universality (377)
D. Chavez and Morales (379)—links with the disposed of the favelas (the
poor)
Determinate negation: radical duality(p.365-7) and deadlock (367)----to liberate gaze
from the object 中解放(Deleuze, cinema)(366)—parallax view--objet a
and politics---parallax view of objet a (distinction between desired object
and object cause as the object of drive, as a hole or gap) (from the lost
object to loss itself as object)(328)