Wednesday, March 09, 2005
You too can be saved!! posted by Richard Seymour
A meme bouncing around the philosophically inclined part of the blogosphere is the triad of Althusser's notion of 'interpellation', or how the subject is convoked by ideology into filling the blank space of a superstructural function; Badiou's Truth-Event, in which the subject is convoked by a miraculous event; and Heidegger's 'Call of Conscience', which issues from within me, yet is somehow beyond me. It's a dirty job, and someone has to do it - but who? Ideology designates the subject, interpellating him, transforming a "Mr Anderson" into "Neo". Ideology, like Morphius, makes a mysterious, urgent call, the one Mr Anderson knows he has been waiting for.Althusser has it in his Three Notes on the Theory of Discourse:
Ideology interpellates individuals by constituting them as subjects (ideological subjects, and therefore subjects of its discourse) and providing them with reasons-of-a-subject (interpellated as a subject) for assuming the functions defined by the structure as functions-of-a-Trager [support].
Trager is an intimidating word, but it comes from Marx in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The Trager is the executor of the structural process, the necessary support. For instance, in commodity-exchange, the individual appears as a conscious representative of the exchange process inasmuch as she is a commodity owner. Who will fulfill the roles opened up by imperialism but he who has been interpellated by the call of 'God, Country and College Money', or the opposing call of 'Allah, national independence and jobs'?
In what circumstances, then, is one likely to be interpellated, to receive the call "Hey, you!"? Precisely, the Truth-Event, the Second Coming, the revolutionary irruption that puts the brakes on history's locomotive. (I'm thinking of that sweet anecdote from Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History in which the revolutionaries smash all the clocks in the town as a literal expression of the Event's arrival, in which Time is rudely interrupted by Eternity). Badiou's paradigm is the Christ-event, the resurrection that suspends the Law (you know, natural Law, like how if you die you stay dead), as advertised by St Paul. The illegality of Christ's return produces a multiplicity in excess of itself, one that allows the overcoming of finitude. The Law (you die, you don't come back) is a cipher of finitude (biological limitation), and the Event reproves the Law, showing that infinity is possible.
So, there you are. Being a Christian, you're saved, you now know that bodies come back from the dead. The Law needn't be all that is. You become a proselytiser, a titanic shit-stirrer, informing all and sundry that Caesar is a nobody, a nothing, you could take him easy if he didn't have all those guards. You are an insurgent, a revolutionary, a proletarian, a class warrior. Just as St Paul obliterated the difference between Greek and Jew, so you insist that there is no war but the class war, and no race but the human race. This homology is viewed askance by liberal leftists and Tory sceptics like Bertrand Russel and John Gray. It is obscene, dangerous, a threat to the modus vivendi, upsetting the coordinates by which both hope to achieve their political goals. More ominously, they fear that in such an Event, it is they who would be cruciform.
That's enough for now. I got nothing to say about Heidegger. Don't like him, don't understand him, don't even give a fuck. Sorry. Here's some links for you: Charlotte Street , I Cite , CPRobes and Alphonse .