Against the Space Hijackers

In the insipid spirit of the sixties, and slavish genuflection before poorly understood metaphysics, since 1999 the London anarchist group the Space Hijackers have been involving themselves in a series of self-consciously anti-capitalist actions, whilst all the while spouting pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, and bad poetics of transgression.



In mock heroic terms both of distance and irony, they proclaim, “Our group is dedicated to battling the constant oppressive encroachment onto public spaces of institutions, corporations and urban planners. We oppose the way that public space is being eroded and replaced by corporate profit making space.”

The utter poverty of ambition this statement evinces is simply staggering - here is a group smugly declaring that they are dedicated to battling, and then saying no more. Not only does this conception lack even the very notion of victory, but moreover the radical thrust here in fact expresses a fundamental hostility to the even the very possibility of such an outcome. This group expressly declare that they dedicated to battling, if victory was attained than battle would have to cease, thus insofar insofar as this group truly is dedicated to battling, it logically follows that they must also be dedicated to somehow preventing victory at any cost – whether by hook or by crook, finally no distinction is necessary.

This point is not just clever rhetorics, and this same kind of sad, self-defeating structure – democracy, contingency, blahblahblah - is by no means unique to the Space Hijackers alone. We encounter it again in the work of Simon Critchley, and in fact Critchley himself is just the most intelligent exemplification of a much more widespread tendency – namely, the sweetly sick undead Derridean brood, still indefinitely deferring their slouching towards Bethelehem to be born as we speak.

In the Ethics of Deconstruction, Critchley puts it like this, “within the suspension of choice, within the undecidability of a double reading, a certain decision or event announces itself, a heteronomous moment of alterity that interrupts the text of philosophy and maintains itself as an interruption or blind spot within philosophical or critical discourse. This event is the ethics of deconstructive reading.”

To put it briefly, the problem with this is not that it is wrong. The problem is – to paraphrase Pauli – is that it is not even wrong. Unwilling to committ to anything beyond a certain specious fidelity to his master, what Critchley is saying here effectively amounts to nothing at all - it cannot even be criticized, since it carefully avoids making anything even close to a statement.



We are hereby invited to consider the ethics of deconstructive reading in terms of an interruption of radical alterity into a hithereto more or less homogenous philosophical text – an interruption that, we are told, maintains itself as a blindspot. The problem here is – how exactly can this be an ethics? It is heteronmous, it seems to issue no demands, it appears as entirely circular in both content and form, it explicitly positions itself as precisely leading nowhere, and it seems to come and go more or less mystically - essentially beyond the scope of any conscious thinking - according entirely to its own devices. Clearly, there is a certain vital reality to this picture – but that is entirely the problem, since the point of ethics is not to get back to brute reality, but rather to escape from it, while at the same time still remaining inside it – this is to say (and I am not afraid of this phrase) take a transcendental position upon it.

In the name of alterity, Critchley evades this demand, and from here we are only one short step away from the axiom of sophism par excellance – namely, that such an evasion itself constitutes truth. Smiling vacantly, blinking their big stupid eyes, the Space Hijackers blandly put it thusly, “We are not attempting to produce some kind of revolutionary other, which is almost destined to fail.”



This basic squint-eyed, mean-streak of principled conservativism makes for an especially ugly sight when it is combined with self-serving rhetorical radicalism – in cases like these, it goes beyond just a bad smell: one can almost already taste the rotting undead flesh, as it comes lurching idiotically towards you.