UPDATE: ogg vorbis sound files of the ENTIRE conference are accessible here, thanks to Toni Prug.

Birkbeck College, London, 25-26th November 2005

A brief note about the conference: although Zizek was at pains to stress the 'closed' nature of the conference, in the sense of a shared ideological commitment (a mischievous conceit), the organisation of the event had serious democratic limitations. Expensive and sold out (with at least another sixty people allegedly on the waiting list), it was clear that it could easily have been held somewhere larger, with a less punitive entrance fee, and been more of a vrai événement (in a Victorian Exposition kind of way, of course). There certainly seem to be plans afoot to hold more conference with, erm, 'big names' in the near future. Perhaps giant video screens projecting the wisdom-seeping faces of infamous lefties in Hyde Park may be an option... Here I've concentrated on two of the 'smaller name' papers, not least because you've already heard various reports of Badiou/Zizek, but because in many ways (heresy!) more was said here...

DAY ONE:

Alberto Toscano: A Brief History of Fanaticism

Claim that there exists a relationship of politics to truth and everywhere you will be greeted with the accusation of fanaticism. We see it the reception of Badiou, rather predictably, the outrage of cynical realpolitikers mingling with the bemusement of Frankfurt schoolmen; quietists to posthistorical fellow-travellers united in their antipathy to the very idea of a relation between the two: 'voluntarism!', 'wishful thinking!', 'theological fervour...in this day and age!'. The denial of mediation, of representation, we are told, can only lead to Terror, political catastrophe and a thorough negation of all calm post-religious sensibilities. This much we know. But how does the accusation of fanaticism ground itself? What conceptual work goes on behind the sheen of righteous cynicism? In his dense and reference-heavy presentation, Alberto Toscano argued that rather than merely engaging in historico-political categorisation and condemnation, the notion of fanaticism aims to reveal the 'transcendental and epistemological errors' that underlie any attempt at an affirmative link between politics and truth.



One of the key features of the term is its cross-historical application. Although primarily associated with an older idea of excessive religious fervour spilling over into the world of social movements and uprisings, the reproach of 'fanaticism' has remained a key term in the recent history of Marxist and post-Marxist scuffles. Toscano argued that the path of fanaticism remains one through which a politics of truth 'must go', if only because its adversaries and detractors have set up their tribunals there long ago. In the age of revolution, Edmund Burke famously spoke of an 'epidemical fanaticism' blotting sane Europe's copybook...

Observing a fundamental continuity between the anti-communist denunciation of political fanaticism and the proponents of 'radical democracy', Toscano argued that we can see the origins of the crucial distinction between the 'mania of fanaticism' and 'the admissible madness' of enthusiasm in Kant's Critique of Judgment, and taken up to great extent in the work of Arendt and Lyotard. The 'acceptable' form of politics, that of enthusiasm, is always understood to be linked to the role of the spectator. Even if the French Revolution is admirable in certain respects for its universal and egalitarian thrust, one should not dirty one's hands by playing an active role...

What we need today, Toscano argued, are antidotes to the role of the concept of fanaticism as a kind of 'negative talisman'. In order to do justice to instances of uncompromising egalitarian politics, we need to leave behind the terms of the disagreement between the critique of representation and the 'critique of the critique of representation'. From a historical, and not just philosophical level, this means treating the political subject (who or whatever it is) not merely in terms of the blind affect of fanaticism, but in terms of its specific conditions of emergence and organisation.



Turning to the 'great, unprecedented upheaval of the Common Man throughout the German lands', the German Peasants' War of 1525, what Marx called 'the most radical fact of German history', and understood as the locus classicus of the discourse on fanaticism, Toscano discussed some of the major theoretical responses to it: was it a manifestation of what Alain Badiou, in D'un désastre obscur, called 'the eternity of communism', i.e., an affirmation of axiomatic equality (as encapsulated in the statement 'men think')? Arguing that Thomas Müntzer's statement Omnia sint communia (let everything be in common) is perhaps also the emblem of Badiou's communist invariance, various interpretations of the Peasants' War were presented: Lukács contra Bloch, in particular, where Bloch is accused of the wishful, fanatical sin of trying to see the truth of revolution without wielding the tools of change 'in the scientifically propitious moment'. If the German Peasants' War, as the revolution of the common man, is really the founding moment of modern politics, Toscano asked, what is the role of the trope or accusation of fanaticism in the assessment of contemporary political events?



Turning to Foucault's writings on Iran for Il Corriere della Sera (of which much has been made of late, for better or worse, usually the latter), Toscano traced the links between the reception of the Peasants' War and the 1979 revolution in terms of the continuity of terms used, namely 'the spiritualization of politics' (repeatedly used by Foucault), the figure of Müntzer (who Foucault mentions together with Savonarola and Cromwell in writing about Khomenei), the matter of the temporality proper to religious politics (Foucault spoke of the 'continuous impatience' which drove political Shi'ism) and, most critically, the accusation of abetting fanaticism (put to Foucault in the pages of Le Monde by an Iranian woman dissident). Foucault's attempt to resist what he saw as a typically smug Occidental dismissal of religious politics entailed thinking of the religious aspects as a crystallising force: 'a mode of social relations, a supple, and widely accepted, elementary organisation, a way of being together, a manner of speaking and listening, something which allows people to comprehend one another and will together'. Arguing that Foucault depicts in the Iranian revolution an insurgencies of the 'plebs' so dear to the anti-party, anti-Marxist, renegade Maoist rhetoric of the nouveaux philosophes, and that he affirms the theme of a religious mass against the State, Toscano claimed that Foucault seems to elide the idea that Iran manifested a form of embodied Rousseauianism with the provocative notion that this appearance of the popular will in a religiously articulated uprising was a general strike against politics as such.



Perhaps Foucault too fell prey to the lure of fanaticism, it was suggested, seeing in a revolt of people against power a certain 'suspension' of history, in the fantasy of a mass anti-systemic singularity, of a primal capacity for resistance against which revolution is a 'mere rationalist domestication'.

[The following conclusion to the paper is taken directly from the written version, thanks AT]:

'If a politics of truth is indeed to be thinkable we need to move beyond the Scylla of denunciation - fanaticism as the ideology of a failed or anachronistic politics, as anti-representation, as a way, following Lukács, of violently vaulting the hiatus between a humanistic idea and an unjust order - and the Charybdis of enthusiastic assumption of a politics of pure singularity or exodus. Moving beyond the trope of fanaticism, is, I believe, a condition sine qua non for the formulation of a politics of truth. Such a suspension of the denunciatory and mythological machine of fanaticism involves confronting three decisive issues:

A. The legacy of Kantianism
Inasmuch as the condemnation of fanaticism - as well as of the 'totalitarian' or 'terroristic' politics of truth that supposedly rest on the fanatical subreption, the delusion of pure presentation - achieves its modern canonical form in Kant, to what extent must we surpass the very transcendental parameters in which Kantianism poses the question of truth (or rather of truths - moral, scientific, political)? It is this question which organizes the differend staged at the end of The Ticklish Subject by Zizek between Lacan and Badiou. Is the non-totalization of being, which defuses the very problem of fanaticism, to be understood in terms of the 'specific mode of human finitude' (conceived, allegedly, in psychoanalytic and not merely anthropological terms), or is it rather to be grasped via what Badiou terms a mathematical secularization of the infinite - of an infinite which is not the delusional aim of political truth, but its starting point in the axiom of equality? My own sympathy for the second stance is in part driven by the limits of the Kantian opposition between a defensible political enthusiasm and a disastrous or terroristic fanaticism, as it features in the works of Lyotard and Arendt, among others. Part of this suspicion lies in the fundamental limitation of the category of enthusiasm to the figure of the political spectator - explicit in Kant's and Arendt's reading of the French revolution - and the impossibility within the Kantian horizon of thinking a political (rather than a moral) subject, and therefore a political (rather than a moral or scientific) truth, in terms other than a regulative notion of the human species.

B. The question of political versus historical time
Whether in the form of an immediate revelation of time in the fanatical vision of the future kingdom, a suspension of time in the intense act of revolt, or an outright denial of time, the vision of politics that shadows the notion of fanaticism seems unable to temporalise political truth. In this regard we could argue that Badiou's suggestion that we think a properly political time, the time of sequences, periodisations and 'historical modes of politics' might be a way out of the oscillation between the apocalyptic suspension of time, on the one hand, and the neutralisation of politics and truth within a dense, historical time, on the other. Whilst such a treatment of political time in interiority, as it were, might bypass the problems of political anachronism which have bedevilled much historical materialism, it always risks overcompensating by drawing a separation, at once stark and opaque, between politics and history, the truth of the subject and the profane density of the world. In brief, this is the problem of the relation to be entertained between a politics of truth and the entire tradition of dialectical thought, be it negative, messianic or materialist, for which the articulation of politics and history is of paramount concern. This distinction between politics and history in what concerns truth leads us to the final issue.



C. The problem of separation
Ever since Luther and Melanchton, the tradition of anti-fanatical thought, or what Colas calls the 'critique of the critique of representation', has rested on a defense of the separation between the city of men and the city of God. In more contemporary and secular writers such as Arendt, who have transformed the critique of fanaticism into a critique of totalitarianism, this immunising, demarcationist impulse is translated - still as a way to ward off the totalizing drive of a fanatical perception of truth - into a distinction between the social and the political, a distinction which in Arendt's case is the object of, if not fanatical, at the very least obsessive concern. To what extent must a politics of truth maintain such demarcations, even or especially, as in the case of Badiou, when it moves beyond the Kantian framework? In what sense do there remain traces within such a politics of truth of a preoccupation with the possibility of a terrorising, unlimited truth - of the possibility for truth to overstep its proper bounds and generate what Badiou has termed a political disaster? Perhaps we could end by saying, in a more affirmative vein, that in the face of the line of thought running from Luther to our Kantian contemporaries, a politics of truth needs to construct what we could call its own protocols of limitation, protocols which are not over-determined by the fear, or better, the terror of fanaticism.'


Peter Hallward: Where is a Political World?

Hallward's direct, schematic and mainly improvised paper concerned, for the most part, a discussion of the myriad uses of the term 'Front'. If Toscano's paper stressed the historical and theological centrality of time in any thinking of revolution, Hallward proposed a politics of 'where not when', a privileging of the spatial over the temporal. 'I am arguing against the politics of time, events, action, delay and deferral,' he began, turning instead to a logic of points of attack, territory and splitting. This attempt to spatialise militancy was based on an explicit critique of Rancière, Deleuze and Badiou for their various failures to think either the localisation of struggles, real change or the material details of 'tense situations'. Hardt and Negri, with their all-too-inclusive conception of political force, also lack, Hallward argued, the resources to think through the notion of a Front in its active, organised sense.

Coupled with this first main criticism was an attack on the idea of the 'new' - as he put it: 'why hold to the new line rather than the old one?' Hallward went on to define the term in five main ways, taking his cue from the main dictionary definitions.



1. 'Front' from the Latin for forehead: front as the most exposed part, the most forward-looking part of the body, expressing resolve and character. Hallward wanted to extract from this definition the idea of being oriented in a particular direction, and confronting the world head-on with a certain 'effrontry'.

2. 'Front' in the military sense, as frontline troops occupying the ground. The positive elements of this army-like conception, argued Hallward, concerned the fact that troops are always located, can push forward and advance, as opposed to 'elusive leftist' conceptions of Guerilla warfare and hiddeness. The problem with situations like those of Haiti and Palestine concern the lack of clear fronts in this sense.



3. 'Front' as in the metereological conception. Taking this kind of 'picture thinking' to its extreme, Hallward presented the audience with OHPs of the life-cycle of a cyclone, and proceeded, in the manner of Rancière's 'Ignorant Schoolmaster', to teach us, not without levity, about the varying ways in which cold and warm fronts 'antagonise' and react to one another...



Back on more familiar ground perhaps, the next conception of 'Front' as united and popular fronts took up the theme of leadership and resolution. Marx's description of communists in the Manifesto as a non-separate party formation, wokring as the resolute force that pushes everyone else forward was quoted here. Preferring the notion of a 'common' to a popular front, with the emphasis on a generic uniting force, Hallward again returned to the question of the need for a such a front in Palestine and Haiti, arguing that proposals for a single-state solution in the case of the former neglected the real divisions that lie at the heart of the struggle.

The final definition of 'Front' concerned the idea of acting as a cover for something else. Referring to the concept of 'generic humanity', the idea here was that of the impossibility of immediately expressing the universality of such a notion, that a front of some kind must be played out in order to 'smuggle' in what was really at stake behind the cover. In this way, the Proletariat can be seen as a front for universal humanity.

The main difference in orientation between the two papers, namely the concern with time in the first half, and the concern with space came up frequently in questions, Hallward defending his claim that you have to 'fight from the territory you are in'. The question of the danger of charisma and possible vanguardism was put to Hallward's positive presentation of fronts, but he made clear that such tendencies are to be rejected (in much the same way that Badiou would continue on Saturday to speak of the impossibility of returning to forms of classical revolutionary politics).

Whilst the question of fronts is no doubt central to any thinking of political struggle, I think the one thing that Hallward perhaps neglected to discuss is the idea of a front as that which excludes. The new Europe-wide security force to protect the borders of Fortress Europe from immigrants is also called Frontex...

DAY TWO:

Lorenzo Chiesa: Remarks Priori to any Possible Treatment of Lacanian Truth as Marxian Materialism

In a blistering point-by-point presentation, Lorenzo Chiesa attempted to provide the groundwork for any possible thinking of the role of truth in Lacan in relation to Marx and Marxism via a thorough analysis of Lacan's 1965 article "La science et la vérité", a piece overlooked, he claimed, by both Marxians and Lacanians.

The main part of the presentation concerned the question of the relationship between truth and knowledge. Psychoanalysis, according to Lacan, should become the materialistic science of a subject divided between knowledge and truth, the divided subject of the Cartesian cogito, the doubting yet grounding moment that constitutes the modern 'subject of science'. Classical Marxism's attack on psychoanalysis in practice fails to realise the importance of the divided, anti-substantialist subject for psychoanalysis, assuming that it works instead with a substantial, humanist, politically-neutral (and therefore reactionary) conception of man.



Chiesa argued that the subject of psychoanalysis, that is the subject of the unconscious, and the subject of science are both the consequence of a historically definable Spaltung (division) between knowledge and truth: they are the two sides of the same coin. Modern and contemporary science forclose truth, but truth returns in the complex constructions that psychoanalysis finds in symptoms and the other formations of the unconscious.

The question, "is the science of psychoanalysis really a science?" is a simplistic and badly posed. We should rather ask ourselves, "given that psychoanalysis descends from and operates with an impasse of the subject of science, what can it tell us about him that he cannot tell us about himself?". The separation of "the real truth" (la vrai vérité) from "the truth of truth" (le vrai sur le vrai) is the task of the analyst: Only the former is able to show the analysand qua subject of science that his very identity relies on a repressed division between knowledge and truth, one which works to the detriment of truth. However, although the unconscious tells the truth, and this is the fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis, it is at the same time a defence against truth as an unspeakable lack: as such, the unconscious is itself a form of symbolic knowledge.



This division of (unconscious) truth and (conscious) knowledge in the subject is, according to Chiesa's reading of Lacan, is the same idea as that to which Freud directs us with his Wo es war, soll Ich werden. Lacan famously reinterprets this motto in ethical terms and renders it as "there where it [ca] was, I have to take place [advenir] as a subject". The place where it was is the primordial place that caused me as a being of language and I have to assume it.

Moving to a more explicit discussion of Lacan's statements about Marx and Marxism, it seemed clear that Lacan's separation of Marx's 'truth' and the 'knowledge' of Lenin's 'economic science' and the establishment of Really Existing Socialism was in many ways quite orthodox. The main argument here was that if Descartes' revolution of thought successfully gave rise to a new collectivity of subjects shaped by modern science, then why was there not a similar invention with Marx? Bluntly put, as Chiesa pointed out, Lacan believes that Engels, Lenin and Stalin were not up to the level of Galileo, Kepler and Newton. Really Existing Socialism's betrayal of Marx's doctrine by raising a 'whole-knowledge' to the "dominant position" of the discourse of the master, by imposing the "tyrannical" injunction: "Knowledge is true because it is totalisable!"



Chiesa finished with a technical discussion of the way in which psychoanalysis conceives of truth as a material cause and of man's being a dis-adapted animal: the symbolic order is un-natural and not super-natural, the contingent product of man's successful dis-adaptation to nature. Two fundamental open questions should be asked, he argued: In what precise sense should Marx's materialism be regarded as a doctrine that conceives of truth as a material cause? And, most importantly, can Marx still be, in spite of marxism, the man of truth whose revolution of thought psychoanalysis should escort until a new political paradigm is formed?

Slavoj Zizek: Against the Populist Temptation

K-punk has pretty much done the work here (plus you can hear all of it here),so I'm not going to say anything, apart from to note the entirely welcome and repeated use of the mis-phrase 'heart-bleeding intellectuals'.



Alenka Zupančič: The Case of the Leaking Finitude: Remarks on Hegel and Comedy

Zupančič's incredibly scholarly discussion of comedy seemed on the face of it to have little direct connection to the theme of the conference - she admitted as much herself, though hoped the audience would make connections between her discussion of Hegel and comedy and the politics of truth and its thinkability (or otherwise).

In a detailed exposition of Hegel's claims in the Phenomenology that comedy is the most accomplished form of art, Zupančič argued against the idea that comedy was a direct revelation of human fallibility, and that it served primarily to deflate. On the contrary, comedy for Hegel is precisely not a matter of finitude but the way in which finitude is traversed by infinity. Finitude 'leaks' into infinity. Describing 'our contemporary mode' as that of the 'metaphysics of finitude', that itself seeks to try and use comedy to reassure and placate our world-weary misery.



Against this 'psycho-theology' of everyday life, there is instead a 'resistance' of comedy itself, the fact that its exploration of finitude is always of a 'failed finitude' that touches on a 'physics of the infinite'. An extremely interesting point concerned the titles of comedies and tragedies. Whereas tragedies often take the proper name of the ambiguous hero/heroine (Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth), comedies tend towards a more objective description, something to which all spectators can relate (A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Winter's Tale, All's Well that Ends Well). Zupančič is currently expanding her work on comedy into a book - on the basis of her talk it should be pretty definitive.

Alain Badiou: Politics: a Non-Expressive Dialectics

[Transcription here]

Wearing a splendidly green outfit, Badiou's slow, stately, über -pedagogical talk attempted to address the question of 'what to do' in the era after classical revolutionary politics. His answer seemed (at least to me) surprisingly literary compared to earlier presentations. Politics, he stressed, should not be conceived of as a singular expression of 'reality', but rather as a constructive act of separation. The mere opposition of reactionary politics (the law) to a logic of collective desire isn't enough: new fictions must be created. We all know in some sense that the major opposition isn't really one of law against desire - the current law is precisely that of 'the dictatorship of normal desires' (but this is not, after all, Badiou added, as open as all that: we are certainly not allowed to have 'illegal' desires, e.g. new compositions of generic politics).



Moments of revolt as singular expressions of fundamental general conditions belong to a past era. Political tendencies of the last centuries tended to bear proper names: Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc. What we need instead is a non-expressive conception of political dialectics without these proper names standing in for the masses.



Taking as a teacherly 'logical joke' an example of a fruit bowl (much desired, Badiou said, after his lunch of fish and chips). One day the fruit bowl appears to also contain stones, snails, dried mud, dead frogs and pickles. The problem here is one of sets and elements. How do we classify the part which contains, for example, apples, pickles, mud, dead frogs, strawberries? That's not a thing! If we accept only the part with clear names, sets [pears], [frogs], or subsets [all strawberries], [all fruit], then we declare what is permitted and what is forbidden to think - the law, Badiou argued, is always a decision about existence (the law is always a matter of ontology).



Desire, on the other hand is always the search for something that doesn't exist - an apple which is also a pickle, a pure singularity across and beyond normality (the woman who desires only you but also remains somehow mysterious, perhaps). The axiom of constructibility, which states that 'all sets are constructible' is this decision about existence; the desire for the monster (the desire of both mathematicians and classical theology, Badiou claimed) is a Pauline trope: sin is the dimension of desire after the prescription of the law - to find the object without name. another Paul helps out: Cohen's work in the 60s carried out a different project, pitching desire against law in the field of law (mathematics) itself, namely, how to identify a set which is not constructible. This 'elegant solution' is the invention of generic sets - just as 'generic humanity' is the true (proper) movement of emancipation. The Proletariat is the name of a possible generic humanity in a positive way: Marx and Cohen share the same idea, thinks Badiou, that against clear description (the law), they expose the truth of sets as generic...not law against desire, but generic will against normal desires. But this generic will is not at all 'expressive'; it too needs to be constructed - 'the final belief must be in a fiction', to quote Wallace Stevens, as Badiou did.



When the world is dull and confusing, Badiou concluded, we need new political fictions. Not those circling around proper names, and not those following the classical revolutionary structure masses/classes/parties, but rather to construct an entirely new composition of the political field.