Yesterday afternoon, when I was at the Dark Horsey bookshop at the EAF in Adelaide, I picked up a copy of Alain Badiou's text, Infinite Thought: truth and the return to philosophy.
In it there is a chapter on philosophy and politics, a subject about which there is much confusion, judging by the eternal recycling of the debate on Heidegger and politics that never seems to go anywhere. Much of the noise and chatter created in response to revelations of Heidegger's Nazi involvements avoids the cause of a serious discussion of the contribution philosophy might make either to politics or to the political.
What does Badiou say? He says that the philosopher's concern about politics is about justice. Can there be a just politics? Justice is then linked to truth. He then adds:
"The vast majority of empirical political orientations have nothing to do with truth, We know this. They organize a repulsive mixture of power and opinions. The subjectivity that animates them is that of the tribe and the lobby, of electoral nihilism and the blind confrontation of communities. Philosophy has nothing to say about such politics; for philosophy thinks thought alone, whereas these orientations present themselves explicitly as unthinking, or as non-thought. The only subjective element which is important to such orientations is that of interest."
There is nothing there about democratic deliberation, argument, democracy, federalism, nation, state, civil society, family biopolitics, the camp--the categories that shape the "non-thinking" of the tribe and lobby as they defend their interest.
I am reminded here of Agamben's thesis that the camp is the 'biopolitical paradigm of the modern'. Even if Agamben's reformulation of the concept of biopolitics is only partially convincing, his thesis of the central political significance of the camp indicates the way that philosophy can work on the terrain of the opinions of everyday political life.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 12, 2005 04:17 PM | TrackBack