Peter Hallward

When they want to discredit the political relevance of Deleuze’s thought, Hallward considers counter-effectuation as a ‘redemptive gesture’, and Rancière describes Deleuze’s history of cinema as a ‘history of redemption’. Each time, redemption refers pejoratively to a break ‘out of this world’ and a form of apolitical passivity, in an attempt to reduce Deleuze to be a mere ‘spiritual’ thinker, simply renewing ‘that “Oriental intuition” which Hegel found at work in Spinoza’s philosophy’ (Hallward 2006: 6). But is it all that simple? How should we envisage the relationship between creativity and redemption, politics
and passivity in Deleuze’s work? And in what way does that concern Deleuze’s philosophy connection to the Non-West, and namely China?

"‘On the Idea of Communism’, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, 13–15 March 2009

This conference’s political conditions had been staked out in advance, on behalf of all the speakers, by Alain Badiou’s essay ‘The Communist Hypothesis’. These were the collapse of the Old Left of the Communist Party and state, and the demise of the social-democratic project. The financial crisis that has since intervened featured as an additional element and a frequent point of reference for speakers and audience. But if, as a result of the apparent ideological capitulation of free-market capitalism, ‘we are [supposedly] all socialists now’, then the imperative for communism to further distance itself from the Party, the generalities of the Left, and even from socialism itself as a continuation of the capitalist project, marks the latest high-water mark of a pessimistic position.

In this respect, the current situation is resolutely modern and represents not the stalling of capitalism but the obverse face of a triumphant capitalist Third Way over an already outdated model of free-market economics. Those participants of the conference who urged the speakers to find something optimistic in re-nationalization or government-backed co-operative schemes were offered little other than sympathetic platitudes. At one point Slavoj Žižek invoked Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine thesis with reference to the Cultural Revolution, but the current crisis has already proved to be an opportunity for further consolidations of the newest forms of capitalist organization and power.

These actual political conditions imposed certain rhetorical constraints upon Badiou and the other participants, a collection of predominantly European thinkers whose combined celebrity status had ensured the event was both well publicized and extremely well attended. (The location had to be changed twice to accommodate the audience of nine hundred.) It also imposed specific constraints upon the possibility of what they continued to identify as ‘the Communist Hypothesis’, even as the elasticity of the concept was tested to its limit. It was not merely the rejection of the state, in both its capitalist and socialist forms, that was demanded by many, but even the assumption that, as Žižek remarked, history is on our side. As a number of speakers emphasized, Marx’s theorization of history as the history of class struggle is not itself a communist or even necessarily a radical proposition. Badiou’s summation that our political problems are closer to those of the nineteenth century than to the twentieth reflected the philosophical retreat of some of the speakers back to the emancipatory humanism of the early 1840s. Here they sought to find a solid ground from which to think alternative trajectories for the ‘Communist Hypothesis’ than that of twentieth-century ‘Marxism’ with its supposed attendant ‘Hegelianism’. For the socialism that Marx diagnosed in the Paris Manuscripts as ‘crude communism’ can no longer even be regarded as a stage of transition towards the true communist end. In Žižek’s case this necessitated distinguishing the ‘Haitian Hegel’ (as invoked in Susan Buck-Morss’s recent work) from the ‘Japanese Hegel’ identified with ‘capitalism with Asian values’. However, none of the other speakers dared, as Terry Eagleton remarked, to do anything so embarrassing as to talk about Hegel.

The trajectories opened up for a nominalist concept of communism by these retreats may be schematized as follows: (1) a focus on voluntarism and self-organization in the emergence of new political subjectivities; (2) a rethinking of proletarianization in accordance with new analysis of class contradictions; (3) a call for philosophical critique as a political orientation in response to depoliticization. The questions and concerns raised by such positions are well rehearsed, but worth repeating. At stake is the capacity to theorize socio-political change without resorting to a bourgeois concept of freedom."

This is an introduction to Chiasma: A Site for Thought Issue 6, "±Disenchantment." Alongside introducing the issue's theme and contributions, it attempts to problematize the relationship between the distinctly modern affect of disenchantment and the construction of forms of life in contemporary capitalist societies.

Interrogando-se sobre o lugar da filosofia de Theodor W. Adorno no âmbito do pensamento crítico contemporâneo, o presente artigo procura dar conta dos revezes da recepção político-filosófica da dialéctica negativa (das posturas críticas de Habermas, Lyotard ou Agamben às mais favoráveis de Jameson e Holloway) e discutir a sua relevância actual. Defender-se-á que a politização do pensamento adorniano é possível, muito embora as suas valências críticas não se restrinjam a essa possibilidade. Hoje, a dialéctica negativa funcionaria também como antídoto contra os atalhos tomados pelas correntes " voluntarista " (Peter Hallward), " messiânica " (Agamben) e " ontológica " (realismo especulativo) da filosofia, à entrada do século XXI. Contudo, atendendo a que a relação entre teoria e prática é complexa em Adorno, a sua relevância actual ressaltaria em relação com as reacções críticas que o movimento do " realismo especulativo " tem suscitado. Em diálogo com alguns dos seus interlocutores (Markus Gabriel e Adrian Johnston), sugere-se que o desenvolvimento de uma " dialéctica constelar " depende da introdução de um elemento destotalizador no seio do diagnóstico radical – a um só tempo materialista e transcendental – da dialéctica negativa.

The philosopher Peter Hallward has explained that Frantz Fanon’s diagnosis of colonialism is “first and foremost an immense project to break the will of the colonised people” (2011, p.109). In other words, colonialism according to Fanon, was and attempt to dehumanise anyone who was outside the preview of ‘the European’ – as defined both culturally and racially. This being a physical and mental process of subjugation that can be understood as “daily death...a death in life” (Fanon 1967, p.13). From this perspective, political theorist, psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon believed that the only way out of such an all-encompassing world of racism and dehumanisation, is to confront and overthrow this order. Confrontation (and this implies a certain type of violence) is a
necessary prerequisite for decolonisation.

This encounter can take place in one’s personal relationships such as Fanon’s stormy confrontation with his future editor Francis Jeanson. Commenting on this, Lewis Gordon remarks, “There is no reciprocal respect without confrontation...Fanon forced a situation in which the values of the two men came face to face, and through that encounter respect enabled the production of great work”
(2015, p.91). Beyond personal relationships, this confrontation is also necessary with regards to society as a whole – it is only through this process which the colonised is able to emancipate themselves both physically and mentally (Fanon 2004, pp.1–62).