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Overview
Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake.
The book shares the philosophical interest in rethinking politics that has recently surfaced at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. Fradinger takes seriously the responsibility to think through and give names to the political uses of violence and to provoke useful reflection on the problem of violence as it relates to politics and on literature as it relates to its times.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804774659 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/03/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 622 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
BINDING VIOLENCE
Literary Visions of Political OriginsBy MOIRA FRADINGER
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6330-1
Chapter One
Literature, Violence, and Politics
"Binding violence": at once a name for a violence that sutures frayed political borders, and a crisp formulation of the premise of this book.
The literary visions under review here represent violence as binding a political community together when its borders are in crisis; violence, rather than political reason, is woven into and bound to the fragile determinations of political membership. The texts I examine offer us insights into the violent fabric of autonomous political life and its inextricable relation to the travails of imagination; imagination, in its turn, bears the imprint of violence. Benjamin's concern about the possibility of a nonviolent regulation of conflict in his 1921 "Critique of Violence" challenges us to ask whether we can summon the power of imagination for the task of reducing violence in human social interaction. The ways in which violence is inter-tissued into society speak to how we envision its possibility; any configuration of society depends on the successful avoidance of absolute violence-that is, the violence of extermination. Politics is one form of praxis that binds and is bound by violence; the literary imagination is another. I do not wish to make a metaphysical claim about violence as a constant of that elusive entity "human nature"-an entity that nonetheless underlies most intellectual efforts to imagine the possibility of human change. Rather, my reflections in this book are prompted by literary visions of the centrality of violence for determining the texture of politics and literature. As we inhabit a world permanently threatened by self-destruction, my interpretations are guided by the imperative of expanding our capacity to conceptualize the problem of violence, and to read politically not only literary texts but also the fictions that give meaning to violence in social life. I examine literary works as both embedded within and struggling against the political imagination of their times-a political imagination that both shapes and is shaped by political action.
Literary imagination, violence, and political life are the three axes that organize my readings of Sophocles' Antigone (ca. 442 B.C.E.), D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom (Cent vingt journées de Sodome, 1785), and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo, 2000). The readings in this book propose that the political imagination of these texts grants violence the role of instantiating a new political membership when the borders of a given political constituency have been thrown into crisis. Thus I call these texts fictions of political origins: they do not effect critiques of existing societies, as, for instance, the genre of political satire would do, but rather offer literary imaginings of the inauguration of political worlds out of a background of civic dissolution. In the texts I review, membership, which is probably the most properly political question for an autonomous polity, is not represented as predicated upon figures of reason, agreement, contract, or kinship. Nor is it predicated, in accord with the Freudian model, upon the task of mourning the murder of an all-powerful father, a mourning that would establish the law that binds a new community of brothers by prohibiting violence. Rather, a specific kind of violence, which I have chosen to name binding violence, clarifies the new borders of the autonomous collective. This violence does not subdue an enemy but exterminates it. It targets not the external invader or the enemy that belongs to a social category-a group already defined along the lines of gender, class, race, or ethnicity, for instance. It is a violence that targets an internal enemy carved out of a previous community of friends: it transforms the brother, the citizen, the daughter, the ancestor, into an enemy. As such, this enemy signifies a crisis of limits: as the figure of an interior transformed into an exterior, it preserves its interiority at the same time that it becomes foreign, assuming a liminal position that comes to define the outside and the inside. The creation and elimination of this enemy figures the temporary fantasy of a binding of the community.
This book argues that the particular representation of the link between violence and membership in these fictions of political origins is a literary symptom of a formal foundational problem constitutive of an autonomous sphere of the political. Implicit in this argument is the notion that such literary symptoms may appear when political autonomy becomes the dominant imagination of a given era. In an autonomous political sphere, membership is not given, but it must be defined. If "we" give ourselves our own rules, who are "we"? While any given resolution of this question occurs within a specific historical situation, its internal formal paradox remains an enigma: if "we" govern, who would want to be excluded from this "we" on the basis of consensus? In democratic theory, a democratic solution for the definition of the demos has yet to be found. In the texts under review, violence determines membership at the hour of political refoundation. I have read this representation of violence as an invitation to take seriously the call for a democratic imagination so as to face the paradoxes involved in all attempts to fix the limits of the autonomous demos.
I argue that this "literary knowledge" can expand the range of names we use to account for violence. To a certain extent, my interpretative gesture methodologically hinges upon a political allegory. Nonetheless, I see the link between violence and membership as echoing the conflict that drives allegorical representation as such. If allegory is the tension between a desire for the closure of the gap between sign and reality and the realization that this gap is impossible to close, binding violence represents the desire for, and failure of, a similar closure in terms of the system we identify as an autonomous political community, which we can rephrase as the desire and impossibility to close the gap between the universal abstract ideal of equality (universal political membership) and its concrete determinations. Ultimately, these questions are bound to lead us to yet another problem, which will be directly raised in my reading of Antigone's politics: if the borders of the demos were to be eliminated, and universal equality realized, would this mean the end of politics? Without claiming that these questions entirely account for the texts' construction, this book argues that they speak to our political life and its ways of thinking through violence.
Politics
The political life to which I refer is primarily a theoretical sphere, whose basic meaning is a vision of the collective; it stands in contrast to images of isolated human existence-for instance, hermetic life, or what at several stages in modern political theory is envisioned as a state of nature. Whether the collective is considered to be a fact of human existence or a relational fiction, it is determined, though not exhausted, by the imaginative articulation of the contingency of human interaction and its violent forms. All communal life entails such imaginative articulations; political life is a specific configuration of a collective's relation to violence, to the most extreme expression of power.
My readings in this book concern a historically bound imagining, widely shared in the "modern West," of what political life should aim to achieve, or should rely on, in order to cope with the contingency of human interaction: autonomy. The normative space of politics for the modern West-if not its definition proper-is a self-governed collective, whose members control their destiny in communal processes of negotiation. This ideal of an autonomous society-one of the meanings of modern sovereignty-is to be contrasted with that of a heteronomous society, in which communal decisions are imagined as being made by external or extrahuman agents, such as divine entities. I thus relate the texts that I examine in this book to a tradition whose ideal is popular sovereignty. This involves both popular decision-making and the setting of limits to the ever questioning self-instituting activity resulting from universal participation, a participation that radicalizes the contingency of political life. Modernity's critics have shown us, however, how the setting of limits relates to a competing image of modern political sovereignty-namely, autonomy's ghostly other, domination: both control over others and the setting of limits upon the influence of others.
I wish to clarify my reference to the "West," since I do not aim to establish any factual specificity of its geohistorical limits, so much as the operational extent of its "fiction," strictly linked to the image of political autonomy and its dual conceptions of sovereignty. To identify the actual borders of the "West" is futile after five hundred years of European colonialism and amid the current globalizing phenomena. The "West" has always had porous borders, though culturally construed as having an identity on the basis of establishing its "other"-a Eurocentrism that has been thoroughly deconstructed throughout the twentieth century. I use the term "West" throughout the book for its practical convenience as it situates the texts under review in a political tradition of thought that became dominant within the geopolitical space of the European capitalist colonial powers born after the fall of feudalism. Within this tradition, the tension between autonomy and domination was displayed on a global scale, as "the West" was exported in response to capitalism's increasing need for a universalism that could facilitate its expansion. Especially relevant for my overview is the fact that after the Renaissance, and particularly after 1789, this tradition constructs its ancestry by recovering what it can and what it wants of ancient Greek democracy (the period between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C.E.), as the cornerstone of Western modernity's political self-understanding. In this book, ancient democracy, particularly as discussed in my reading of Antigone, appears as the birth of politics according to the Western fiction. While I strongly agree with the argument that the fabrication of ancient Greece as ancestor to the West served European cultural and economic interests, I do not engage in discussion about whether democracy actually started in Greece or whether the West comes indeed from Greece. Instead, I use this fictional political ancestry as a "generative grammar" that yields the images of autonomy and domination that articulate modernity's political action, violence, and literary representation.
In terms of its vision of community, the political imagination of autonomy most radically entails the principle of equality (whether in its ancient, or modern liberal and radical formulations) as the basis of a new political binding, and thus, of society's unlimited capacity to judge its own foundational premises critically. Once bloodlines, kinship, or religious and aristocratic privilege cease to be legitimate binding principles, establishing differential participation in decision-making, the crucial question of how to articulate difference must be radically reimagined in a society of "equal and free rivals," as the members of the newly inaugurated Greek democracy in ancient times considered themselves. One can say that the fundamental gesture of the Greek "invention of politics" was a movement of inclusion: an expansion of the sphere of public decision-making to all propertied male members of the demes. I follow Christoph Menke in identifying the signature of political modernity in the appropriation of the idea of equality. This meant then, as it does now, "the dissolution of all markers of certainty [generating] a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and [...] of relations between self and other," as Claude Lefort puts it (Democracy and Political Theory: 19). For lack of a "natural" order, this kind of politics deals with contingency by way of structuring conflict. The violence of such structuring conflict is often seen as the struggle between constituted and constituting powers; its famous modern theoretical formulations range from the classic Marxist class-conflict to Walter Benjamin's law-making and law-preserving violence, to Laclau's and Mouffe's "political antagonism," to Rancière's "disagreement," to name but a few. Underlying all formulations lies the concept of a society that has granted itself the capacity to undo its institutions; thus some famous pronouncements about the "suicidal nature" of democracy, ranging from John Quincy Adams's "there was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide," to Jacques Derrida's "democracy has always been suicidal." A tragic predicament, one could say: to protect democracy against its others is to suspend its self-questioning, so that in preventing its suicide, we may assassinate it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BINDING VIOLENCE by MOIRA FRADINGER Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixIntroduction Literature, Violence, and Politics....................3
Antigone and the Polis....................33
The Most Modern of Tragedies: The Politics of Burial....................46
Creon's Edict: The Barbarians at Home....................54
Dying Democratically: Antigone's Ritual....................68
Interlude Modern Tempo-Democratic Overture, State Finale....................87
Sade's Text and Sade's Times....................105
The Libertine Alliance: No Ordinary Pact in Times of War....................118
Necrophiliac Cannibals: Dismembering "Nonpeople," Membering "The People"....................127
Domestic Consistency: Not Laws, but Order....................137
Frame within the Frame: Riveting Voices and Gazes....................148
Interlude Modern Sovereignty: Perversion of Democracy?....................161
Vargas Llosa's Appeal to History: Within and Beyond Latin America....................185
Necropolitics I: From an "African Horde" to a Modern Country: Trujillo's Body Politic and the Haitian Enemy....................202
Necropolitics II: Rebonding the Nation: Trujillo's Body Natural and the Specularity of Enmity....................225
Epilogue The Force of Imagination....................241
Notes....................253
Index....................323